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Comment They're only pretending to have changed anything (Score 3, Interesting) 194

because of Snowden. They didn't stop collecting bulk data, they just changed the legal ownership of that data which has no effect on anyone's rights. It's all technical changes.

Also, if I were Snowden I'd consider staying away no matter what he's offered. Corrupt Russian intelligence doesn't have the MOTIVE to off him that American leaders do.

Comment I have experience with people whose minds not (Score 3, Insightful) 288

strong. I don't want to say "failing" just very poor memory and the like caused by very poor health. One case is a man who was in the tech industry years ago, but that doesn't mean that as his mind was harmed by the effects of illness he could continue to make sense of Google's ever changing interface. He didn't have a problem with mail so much (he used thunderbird, so that interface wasn't changing), but he couldn't navigate Google's changing phone service interfaces. Combine that with poor eyesite and problems with phone drivers that occasionally have to reload ... and there would be days when he had no phone service until someone came by and fixed his computer.

Keep in mind that there are people (once again the same man) who at times find simply dialing a phone too hard. Maybe they're too slow for hospital phone that gives you 20 seconds of dial tone then gives up, or worse gives you 20 seconds but no audio cue like a dialtone.

For such people you need interfaces designed differently than ones for average customers. You need interfaces that NEVER change. You need interfaces that have no time-outs. You need interfaces that force modal interactions rather than assuming that the user will NOTICE something.

Comment Re: Terrifying. (Score 1) 68

Pure functional programming is pretty horrible too.

Take the classic book, "numerical recipes in Fortran"
( http://apps.nrbook.com/fortran... ) and try to convert all of the routines in there to pure functional style with no mutable variables, structures, arrays and no non-recursive loops.

Big step backwards. It will be horrible, it will obscure the code and it will run slowly.

It's funny that computer science doesn't build on old successes. They had good computer languages for doing math going back to the 50s but the latest and greatest bullshit being pushed in academia can't even do what they did in the 50's well.

Comment Re:Difference between programming and metaprogramm (Score 1) 68

I don't see why you can't have multistage compiling so that you can use the full power of (whatever language) at "compile" time.

You should be able to have mutable data structures at compile time.

You should be able to have tables and arrays.

And custom file and network io.

Security hole? Like running a bash script isn't a security hole.

Comment One sad thing (Score 1) 68

someone was asking for the luajit implementer, Mike Pall, to add copying data structures as something optimized by the compiler and he was told that not sharing structures was a "code smell"

Oh God. The implementer is so out of touch and focused on low level efficiency that he doesn't recognize the basics of reliable programming.

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