I keep a chrome laptop around for this. It's enough for most people, and after logout everything's clean.

There is no criminal organization Anonymous.

You are as much anonymous as anyone else is. If you don't understand how that can be then *shut the fuck up* about it until you do.

I imagine I am wasting my metaphorical breath, but I'll try to explain it as much as it can be explained.

Think pranks. Think prank phone calls and pizzas you didn't order, then imagine this done in a way designed to make you feel bad, then imagine that everyone who pranked you can see your face when you feel bad and laugh at you. That's about the limit of what anonymous will organize to do. All this breaking and entering shit is largely hacktivism done by people who aren't acting as anonymous when they do it, even if they may call on anonymous for help from time to time. And LOICers... they're just idiotic hangers-on. Angry and about as effective as egging someone's house. The effective DDoS attacks come from individuals (armed with botnets) and not some imaginary criminal conspiracy.

I am not an anonymous apologist, I am anonymous (and you can too). Wherever a little kid cries because someone told him he was fat, I will be there along with the baser parts of all mankind and we will be laughing at his misery. When those baser instincts band together to laugh at everything and nothing, there you have anonymous. Anonymous aren't criminals, anonymous is the internet hate machine. It's not good, it's not evil, it's simply humans being human--including the part of being human that we are all obliged to hide from society for fear of persecution. Anonymous exists so that you can be a jerk, a deviant, a racist and make jokes in bad taste knowing that **it's okay, we understand**, we both accept and revile you, too. Unless you're furry (DIAF, plzkthxbai).

There may be a global internet-based criminal organization out there which does bad things, harms people and needs to be busted by the authorities; in fact, I'm pretty sure there are several, but none of them are called Anonymous.

I'm not confusing them, I'm well aware. Lots of normal people keep rolling with the 6 month releases for freshness and run afoul of all manner of problems. The LTS users get the moderately tested and bugfixed version, but it's no better engineered.

No.

The problem with Debian is that Debian has a non-free repository and documents this fact. Whether the user will be confused about whether or not he is installing non-free software is not the issue at all.

RMS maintains that documenting the existence of non-free software, even if the repo is not enabled by default and requires manual intervention to enable, is "suggesting" that it be used and this suggestion is tantamount to a recommendation to use non-free software, which RMS thinks is a thing that a fully freedom-loving distribution should not do.

Can a distro fully respect your freedoms and still document the existence of non-free software? I think so, but since the FSF is in the business of promoting Free software to the exclusion of all else they cannot endorse a distribution which fully respects your freedoms but mentions that non-free software exists. This is an entirely reasonable stance for the FSF; they can choose who they endorse based on any arbitrary criteria, and I respect that.

The Debian folks must necessarily take a more pragmatic view since their primary mission is not to promote Free software to the exclusion of all else. This does not mean that they are behaving in an unethical manner or in a manner which is inconsistent with the FSF principles and ideals, it's just at odds with some of their policies.

Hah. I'll contain my laughter.

Canonical releases are rarely what I would call *stable*. They're full of issues both small and large and mixing packages from outside of their main repo can quickly destabilize what you do have.

Debian sid sometimes has *package dependency issues* or regressions, but that's where its "unstable" moniker stops applying. Debian policy leads to Debian stability and which archive you pull from doesn't matter much. To get something that might be broken in Debian, other than install-time difficulty due to mismatched dependency information, you usually need to go to experimental. If you're not familiar with it that's *good*, because it's not for you.

Ubuntu is poorly put together and less reliable than Debian. Anyone who's familiar with Debian from a sysadmin point of view will probably be able to confirm this for you. The only reasons Ubuntu gets away with it are (1) its users don't do much with their computers, and (2) after 6 months you dist-upgrade, so problems from the last release go away and get replaced by problems from the new release. It's all terribly slipshod and amateurish.

You must not live in the USA. I recommend you reserve judgement.

Standardized tests just cause schools to focus on scoring well and ignore actually educating students. If your school does not do well on standardized tests they take money away from you, period. If your school does well you can employ more teachers at better salaries, build more schools, have more programs like music and sports, etc.. The frenzy to "win" at tests is incredible. I've seen teachers all but GIVE students the answers ahead of time in a so-called "prep" test in the hopes that woefully undereducated students will pass muster on test day. Nothing else in a public school is more critical than getting a good score (which means good percentages and good averages across the student body) on test day. NOTHING. Not student welfare, not knowledge, nothing.

The answer to this is a philosophical one. We can say pretty definitively that rote memorization is a very poor method, but there is no generally accepted "best" method.

You don't. Progress is life; are they still alive? You can only encourage and hope, measurement is pointless.

Easy. I understand lots of things that I can't remember if asked. Memorization is a very different thing than understanding.

I'll try to contrive an example: I understand English, for example, and can use it with precise correctness (and with a vast vocabulary) upon request, but if you ask me to define parts of speech or diagram a sentence I'll fail 99% of the time. I tend to score quite poorly on English exams that are not purely prose. A lot of things are like that, although less so in the discrete sciences. Do you understand recursion? Good. Can you tell me what year it was invented and by whom? You fail the programming exam! This is the way testing fails.

80% of the spec perhaps, now we're closer to 90% of the implementation. You can use almost all of it right now.

I do not disagree that for this example there are superior name choices that could have been used. I preferred not to dig through real code to find an example of a case where there was no better choice than to use the same basic name with different sigils; it does happen and it's not unclear.

And my point is sigils are part of the name, which makes each name distinct.

You could say the same thing about case-sensitive variables. The fact that you can use COLUMNS and columns in C and they mean different things is confusing, especially for neophytes! The VB solution of case insensitive names is obviously less confusing and thus superior, right? Why should anyone have to master this syntax quirk?

The sigil is part of the variable name and makes the names different (and this is very clear). Most of the time you will also alter the variable names in other ways, because it's usually a good idea, but there is no problem with leaving the non-sigil part the same from a confusion point of view *when the code is clearer as a result*. Just as COLUMNS in C is *obviously* a constant to anyone familiar with C, and just as having a COLUMNS constant should not preclude me from having a local int columns; variable.

It's not as if there's been no progress. It's much more around the corner now than it was 10 years ago, it's quite close to done now.

Yes, also thanks to you for missing the point. I was not demonstrating best Perl practices, either in naming or code style or efficiency. Yes, all of the cool things you mentioned about Python work in Perl, too! I am not doing a feature comparison chart. Congratulations, you can write a better function to read a file! You know what? So can I. Now we're *all* special, together.

Yes, thanks for missing the point. I *deliberately* chose an example where the with-sigil variables *allow* you to name different things the same way without it being confusing. Of course you *can* choose names, as I said in my post, which are not the same. Would you care to choose another example of *using variables with different sigils but otherwise the same names*? Because, you know, *that was the whole point of the example*.

It rather depends on what you call a "big feature" - syntactically not much is likely to change, that's true. On the other hand if you look at the list of changes from the latest stable release it's clear that many things continue to be improved, even more so if you look at the sum of all changes from 5.12 forward (aka the modern perl5 era).

PHP may be more actively hacked on than perl5, though I doubt it, but it cannot be called better. All the flaws of perl5, and many flaws from perl4, are present in PHP, along with a bunch of other problems.

Perl5 OO is not so much "bolted on" as "Nonexistent"--instead it has a mechanism for designing your own OO system, which is great except that most people just want to get things done and don't care about being an architect at that level. These days it's a bit better in that you can tell any new person "Don't read perltoot, just use Moose" and they'll be a lot less frustrated and get more things done.