The issue of whether Julian Assange is a rapist or not would have been settled years ago if he had not skipped bail. He would have been taken to Sweden and interviewed about the accusations. Maybe as a result of that, there would have been a trial and hopefully he would have been found guilty if and only if he did rape somebody.

Right now, he's a fugitive from justice, which makes me think that he is not confident that he would be acquitted of the rape allegations. You can talk about the danger of extradition to the USA, but he was in the UK for a while before he ran away and the USA made no move to extradite him. I don't think that is a real danger.

No they're not.

Uh, me, right now, and pretty much always...

Viewing the world through the letter slot of widescreen displays is simply horrid - HDTV set the computer graphics world back by well over a decade, and we're only just now beginning to release ourselves from its slimy clutches...

The inspector would write up faults, they would fix them, he would write up new faults...eventually he lost patience and let it be known that the real problem was that he hadn't yet found a blank envelope filled with cash.

This is Texas after all - a call to the Texas Rangers might well have ended that kind of corruption for good - most inspectors are state-licensed, and it's hard to make a living if you've lost your license. I'm not saying we're corruption-free here, but in my experience, the level of common ethical business standards is still much higher in Texas than in some other states I've done business in. (Cough, *California*, cough *Illinois*, cough, *New Jersey*...)

Really, if Tesla gets their way, then GM (or Toyota, VW, etc) can force you to get your GM car serviced only through "authorized" GM service centers, under pain of voiding your warranty. Especially in today's world of telematics, they will control your car more than you do. Is that what consumers want? I damn sure don't...

Tesla's model is hideously proprietary and abusive of its customers. The silly thing is that Tesla's customers are such fanboys that they cheer Tesla on in their subjugation of their rights as customers.

I'm no fan of dealers, but at least at a dealer there's a *chance* someone cares about me, if they're locally owned and not part of one of the increasing number of megachain dealerships. That chance is near-zero if my only choice is to deal directly with the manufacturer.

I said it before, Tesla is evil, and no amount of greenwashing can change that...

Remember that the dealership layer was inserted by the states to PROTECT consumers from the crushing power of the auto manufacturers, and add some local accountability through choice. (Choice that has vanished lately as we've allowed huge dealer networks to replace that local ownership, more or less defeating the original purpose.)

There are certainly significant problems with the current model, but remember that the current dealership model was created to address problems that resulted from exactly what Tesla is asking for - direct control of the customer relationship by the manufacturer, especially during the rapid consolidation of brands in the first three decades of the 20th century. That means we should at least THINK about what we're doing here before we make reactionary policy changes either for or against what Tesla's asking for. I'm no big fan of the dealership model, but I am skeptical that if Tesla gets what they want, that it won't be a huge win for the big manufacturers at the expense of local power and control, and ultimately, at the expense of buyers. (Dealers who regard customer service as a possibly necessary evil aren't exactly helping themselves here, of course...)

State government policy should first serve both the people and the corporations (which are just legally "embodied/corporeal" groups of people empowered to act as a single person) of the state. The best ironclad principle of true libertarian conservatism is that government power and control must be kept as local (at as low a level) as possible, as the higher it rises, the more corrupt and evil it will eventually become. Neither big government nor big business is a good thing, but the two of them "working together" is pretty much always a very bad thing...

There is a difference between an array and a pointer.

char a[100];
char* b;

b = a; // Fine
a = b; // Not fine.

If you read the standard, the language used is that, in an expression, an array "decays" to a pointer with the rule being that you get a pointer to the array's first element. The "array is not a pointer" rule is further demonstrated by passing an array to sizeof (as viol8 points out).

This is just errant bigotry against Texas. If you actually knew anything about he state that's creating 75% of the new jobs in the entire US, you'd realize that there is a *very* competitive labor market here.

I definitely have to pay more for talented or skilled software people here (especially in Austin) than in other parts of the country. Hell, if you've got a CDL and can pass a drug test, you can make $100K+ driving an oilfield truck - all due to the economic miracle called fracking - no thanks to the US Government, which has tried its best to kill the strongest economic engine still running in the US... That said, there are a LOT of programmers who aren't worth what they're getting paid, and when the next bubble burst in the mobile/social software space, there are going to be many people out of work and with suddenly unmarketable skills.

BTW, it's not like the laws here are hurting Tesla any - Here in Austin, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting one of the things. I know one thing - I'd sure hate to own a Mercedes or BMW dealership, since that demographic has made the Tesla the currently trendy car for show-off poseurs.

Don't be silly, they'd talk about One point twenty one jiggawatts. Then there would be a flamewar on the correct pronunciation of "giga" and whether a lightning strike can deliver 1.21Gw.

Actually, you could quite easily bring custom operators to Objective-C by adopting the Smalltalk approach. Simply allow symbols to be messages e.g.

        [@"foo" stringByAppendingString: @"bar];

could be written as

        [@"foo" +: @"bar];

Smalltalk allows you to drop the colon with binary operators so you could even have

      [@"foo" + @"bar];

Oh nonsense.

to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent.

Back here in the real world, this is how this sounds:

"Ben decided that someone was making changes to the codebase that had no technical purpose, which served solely to push someone's weird social agenda and desperation to modify the language to suit them, as well as to refer to anything which went otherwise as sexist. Since this is pointless, and since Ben has been in communities where this created unnecessary shitstorms, Ben rejected the PR in the hope of preventing a bunch of drama-driven developers from wasting a year complaining about unimportant things. When Isaac decided to merge the PR, Ben felt slighted: he had been given the authority to make these decisions, and Isaac decided to make a social point that Ben would get trampled no matter what."

That's all fine and good. One developer is being a neckbeard about not wanting to hear a cry of oppression in something that has nothing to do with social justice. The other developer is being a neckbeard about being all inclusive no matter the tone.

Then you get to the point that adults are angry about.

and if he had been, he wouldn't be as of this morning: to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent.

That says "we value Ben so little that our disagreement over the nature of an unimportant, purely social justice related, non-technical PR would have caused us to fire him on the spot, instead of to have a discussion."

That's *ridiculous*. Employers have an obligation to their employees to create safety and stability. There is no legitimate cause on God's green earth for that to be a fireable offense. Joyent's management are PR-oriented children, and that you're standing up for them is an embarrassment to the 'movement' you're trying to rationalize.

I am a gay and trans ally.

But nobody should get anything sterner over something like that than a stern talking to. That's *obscene*.

Target and K-Mart understand consumers far better than you ever will. Target's the company that knows people are pregnant before they do themselves.

Despite that you disagree with this, your extremely superficial read is probably self serving.

It is very likely that protestor revenue loss simply outweighs game loss after the high sales launch. I expect that they know exactly what they're doing.

The worst thing I can think of in The Bible is the Great Flood.

If you think that's ten times worse than anything that happens in video games, I think you might need to play some more video games. That doesn't even cover Final Fantasy materia.

Sephiroth will straight up destroy Saturn like five separate times per fight while trying to kill you.

I agree, pretending that a company choosing to not sell an item in its stores is a form of censorship is likely to get you karma on Slashdot, despite being critically incorrect.

Hopefully nobody notices that they still sell Lifetime specials and so forth in their TV section.

Maybe Romper Stomper and Mad Max got through on local cultural relevance.

Money going into my account? No, never noticed any... ... what's that you say? Yes, it is a nice new car. We're off to the Seychelles next week too. It's paid for by a bequest from Aunt Mildred's goldfish.