Indeed.

Interestingly one of my favorite Canadian programs ("Made in Canada") spoofed the TV/media industry and regularly made fun of how sub-par Canadian content was.

The CRTC is fighting an un-winnable battle using stupid means. Through population and economy, the US can produce more and better (or at least more popular) content than we can. This is just a reality. We've produced some good stuff, but we simply don't have the mass to compete and probably never will. Requiring broadcasters to dedicate certain amounts of time to content that no one will watch and that can't even pay for itself isn't going to fix this problem. Trying to make competing content less accessible in the hopes that people will break down and stop ignoring Canadian content is just gonna piss people off.

I love Canada, but sometimes you have to accept reality.

This is actually a major benefit of gentoo, and one of the reasons I run it on my servers (they are all hobby-ish, I get that gentoo in production is probably a bad idea).

Trying to run a Debian or similar server, you inevitable end up with a bunch of X packages because some random tool comes with a built in GUI and no one bothered to package a non-X version.

It extends even beyond X or no-X. You find yourself with database drivers for all the major (and some minor) databases regardless if you use any of them, and loads of other cruft.

This is obviously part of the tradeoff for a system that just works, but it's annoying when some gnome library breaks the update on a _server_.

As a side note, it's becoming increasingly frustrating to be a non-systemd user. I've had to re-arrange a tonne of packages as stuff switches. I know systemd is inevitable, but I'd like to hold out just a little longer :(

It is certainly immoral to use war and its tools to gain wealth and power, but is it idiotic? I'd say they're sick. Most of our leaders are, certainly the heads of finance are.

I seldom comment in the stories any more, I just come to read journals. Too much noise, too little signal. I've been posting on Soylent News more lately, it's a little like slashdot used to be.

What about how the computers store information for their own use (example: evercookies)? I know it's not the "mind" of the computer doing what it wants but it's certainly not the user either.

Duh, it's the mind of the programmer who had the script drop the cookie. But your comment tells me you know that already.

First, I agree completely with your comment. Secondly, I don't even have to RTFA to see that TFA rides the short bus.

As a cyborg, I find this entire topic offensive. A cyborg is part animal and part machine, and guess what? There are a hell of a lot of us. I have a CrystaLens implant in my left eye, making glasses unnecessary for me (I see better than you do). It is a device that uses the eye's muscles to focus. I'm 62 and need no corrective lenses whatever.

Do you know someone with a cochlear implant? Artificial hip or knee? Heart pacemaker? They, like me, are all cyborgs by dictionary definition.

The former vice president of the US was a cyborg, now he's a chimera.

The question "should cyborgs have rights" is stupid and insulting. Shame on the article's author.

I generally agree that comments shouldn't be required to explain language mechanics unless they are obscure (which the bitset stuff isn't, I mean if you've never run into them they might be, but that would be the same for any language construct and as you said, you generally assume a developer is going to know the language they are working with).

What I personally would generally include would be a comment along the lines of "this struct represents the KillAllHumans message body as per <some specification;>" where the struct is defined, and then a comment along the lines of "overlay our message structure over the buffer to extract our data". This way even if someone wasn't familiar with the bitset notation, they could probably infer it.

Perl... easy to read... ok back to your room now ;p

I'll grant you that perl is very organic, probably the best "code as you think" language that I know of, but the vast collection of syntax and the functional density one can achieve (and some seem compelled to do so) makes it a pain to read if you didn't write it.

I've read the camel book cover to cover, and at one point I was fairly good with it, but after a few years of neglect that skillset has completely dissolved. I have a feeling if I tried to do anything with it now, I'd be hitting up google for things like "how do you iterate through an array of hashmap references".

In general I found it difficult to twist my brain into doing things the lua way.

It seems to go out of it's way to be slightly different.

* itworld (reading another post where they messed it up, so I messed it up!)

I don't even bother with infoworld links any more. It'll be a bunch of slides with a sentence of text, an unrelated image, and ads everywhere (ads on the slides, ads before the slides, an add in the middle of the slideshow, and an ad at the end). Content wise, usually they find one or two interesting things, then fill the rest of the slots with stupid shit everyone already knows.

So, uh, the basic business plan would be:

- Create small upstart service
- Grow it to be wildly popular with a huge user base
- Gradually figure out how to turn that into money
- Say "screw that shit", give up control and get rid of users as fast as possible
- Go into the soft drink industry instead?

Agree.

Even as a long time Linux user, I still enjoy his blog (and even bought a copy of his book). It's interesting, easily digestible, and well presented tidbits from someone who actually works with the stuff.

Probably doesn't belong on slashdot any more than his other posts though as you said, however I would have been ok with it if they'd linked directly to his post rather than linking to the dice article which is pretty much just a mirror of it.

Even as a long term Linux user who hasn't done much windows related since XP SP2 was news, I do still read and actually enjoy Raymond Chen's blog, and even bought his book.

The dice article is pretty pointless though as it just mirrors Raymond Chen's post.