Basically your post demonstrates a failed understanding that there are many marriage laws at the federal level. To say "Good! The US should stay out of it." makes about as much sense as saying "We should have no federal laws regarding marriage." This includes laws like federal tax laws being applied to married couples.

To recap, the federal government had to weigh in one way or another because they had a large amount of legislation that refers to "marriage." And the opposing sides in this issue actually view either ruling as the federal government sticking its nose in people's personal business. The anti-gay marriage crowd saw DOMA as the status quo and will likely view this overturning of DOMA as the federal government getting involved with dictating what is and isn't a marriage. Conversely the status quo was unacceptable to a small group.

Ethically this is a black and white issue and DOMA should have been overturned. But saying the federal government should butt out is not so cut and dried. Your post seemed to say it's just a marriage certificate and "News flash: gay couples live as married couples whether you like it or not." This is completely the wrong way to look at this, they were not receiving the same benefits as heterosexual married couples and saying "gay couples live as married couples" shows you don't understand the significance of DOMA being overturned. Now surviving spouse benefits will apply to one member of a gay couple same as it would to a member of a heterosexual couple. And that's just one of many things that heterosexual couples were enjoying that homosexual couples could not.

You clearly have not been following this issue. This wasn't just about a marriage certificate. This was also about the thousand or so federal laws that applied only to heterosexual couples now also applying to homosexual couples that are married.

Now they can truly be viewed as equal couples in the eyes of the federal government and, most importantly, receive the same exact treatment -- good or bad -- in the federal legislation for married couples.

What rock have you been living under for the past decade?

First I praise you for your work and your goals -- they are refreshing compared to "please investors." But one of the keywords in your goals statements for Project Cauã is "capitalistic" as in "do all of this in a capitalistic, sustainable way, with little or no money coming from government." This mildly confuses me. I don't see FOSS as directly contradictory to capitalism but your goal of "triple or quadruple the number of FOSS developers in the world" seems, well, a little more public domain oriented than private industry, ownership and other tenants of capitalism. To put my question bluntly, why even pay petty lip service to capitalism when your goals of reducing electronic landfills, free-of-charge wireless and increasing user security are just not monetarily rewarded by the free market? These goals are about empowering people and protecting our future environment, how precisely does that align with capitalism? I understand how your job creation might benefit the economy but I don't understand how you're going to actually create these jobs. What companies are you talking to that have positions for these jobs? Most countries can't even pay to create jobs -- I'm sure several leaders would gladly put down billions of dollars if it meant magically creating productive and sustainable jobs, what is Project Cauã doing differently?

I'm very pro-open source but it appears that the fear from the Internal Revenue Service was that companies were figuring out ways to dodge taxes by moving developers to 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(6) organizations and then paying them in "donations" after the software was released thereby avoiding some federal and state income taxes to what normally would be their regular employees. Basically you would be setting up an educational or scientific group of your own developers, you would be able to pay them less due to 501(c) income tax leveraging and at the end of the day you'd still get your commercial software designed for you under an Open Source license. This, of course, by and large does not happen nor is there any evidence of it (I'd imagine very few open source developers even get paid for it) but was it really so wrong for the IRS to watch out for it? Even if they're not engaging of what the IRS would call "non-linear compensation" you might still be able to pay developers as employees of the 501(c) their regular wages with far less tax.

I mean, are we going to sit here and bitch and moan about corporate tax avoidance in our country and then freak out when the IRS investigates if Open Source groups are being abused in the same manner?

Is it really that wrong for the IRS to identify points of abuse and to look out for them? My gut says they should be able to identify and investigate but perhaps I just can't imagine how they would abuse that ability if they present a legitimate reason. Seems like they had a legitimate reason to watch for unlawful activity, unless I'm missing something?

What I heard on NPR this morning is that Snowden's rumored travel involves Moscow to Cuba and then Cuba to Caracas, Venezuela according to an unidentified Aeroflot official.

That, of course, could all be misdirection.

The Chinese can't even effectively fine polluters and now there's talk of capital punishment for polluting? What next? Decimate school children when their class average isn't up to par because the instructor's scolding has no effect?

There are several key problems here that are the real underlying problems: 1) the Chinese government is not unified in their vision of the environment and I'm talking differences spanning across provincial & federal levels as well as between federal ministries. 2) they collectively refuse to accept that their abuse of natural resources is part of their winning equation against other capitalist nation states and, as a consequence, no one can talk about how this will hurt their bottom line even though several parts of the government realize it (we pay them to import our pollution). 3) there is widespread corruption at all levels which is why fining is ineffective -- it's so bad that I'm sure if capital punishment is meted out, it will be given to the fork lift operator who dumped those pig carcasses in the river after his supervisor told him to "make them disappear or you'll disappear." No one up the chain will be held accountable and if they are, they need only grease some local wheels and they can consider themselves shielded.

It's disgusting and it's why I tell people where they can shove it when they complain that the EPA is destroying jobs. It's not perfect but we have to cling to things that kind of work when so many other "solutions" are abysmal failures.

The Chinese government is threatening to kill polluters but they can't see that they're part of and dependent on and benefiting from a system of habitual polluting. Increasing the impact of the punishment is a poor and maybe even more detrimental substitution for actually bringing to justice the true criminals up and down their ranks.

(Disclaimer: I'm going to use the term 'bandwidth' universally instead of the more correct 'latency' or 'throughput' so normal people can hopefully understand this post) The biggest problem I have with every alternative I have tried is that they are built with the most annoying design flaws. They are so painful to me that I am certain these flaws will be look back upon as the geocities of our modern day web development.

When I fire up an alternative, the responsiveness that was in Google Reader just isn't there. And it always seems like the alternatives require you to hit "refresh" on their interface and then what happens? It apparently makes a call out to every single RSS feed to get updates. On the surface this may seem like standard HTTP way of thinking about things. But it makes for a shit user experience. I have thousands of RSS feeds. Thousands. And if I hit refresh in this paradigm, my browser makes 1,000+ HTTP GET requests. It's not a lot of data but if even one of those requests is slow, it's usually blocking on ceding control back to me.

So let's iterate improvements on here that will get us back to Google Reader style responsiveness, shall we? Well, one of the simplest improvements I can see is to do these requests asynchronously with nonblocking web workers. You can attach each of them to the div or construct that each feed is displayed in and only have them work when that feed is visible (for instance if I am collapsing/expanding folders of feeds). You can grey out the feed until the request comes back but if another request returns first, it is parsed and inserted and activated to my vision. That way if cnn.com comes back faster than NASA's Photograph of the Day, I can read while waiting for my images.

But the core problem is that I'm on my home computer on a residential cable modem and, let's face it, Cox sucks. So what I think Google was doing was sacrificing their bandwidth to actually "reverse" the request from client to server. And, in doing so, they could package up all your updates and ship them out in one request (probably compressed). So, this is how I would approach that. Instead of doing a heart beat HTTP GET to check for RSS updates, I'd build a WebSocket and instead of requesting information, the client (browser) would be listening for information. The event/listener paradigm here would save both the user and the RSS host a lot of bandwidth but it would cost the host of the feed reader service some of that bandwidth (although much less). So basically the client JavaScript would load the page just like normal but instead of continually sending HTTP GET requests, a WebSocket would merely inform the server which feeds are active and listen for updates coming in from the server.

On the downside, this greatly complicates the server side. You need to have one be-all end-all "cache" or storage of all incoming feeds that any user is subscribed to. And for each of these feeds, you need to have a list of the users subscribed to it. And now your server will need to maintain the HTTP GET requests to cnn.com and NASA in order to get updates. When it gets an update, there's two ways you could handle it (user queues are complicated so I won't suggest that) but the most basic way is to send it right out to everyone on that subscription list who has an active WebSocket session established with their account. If a new WebSocket session is established, they simply get the last N stories from their subscriptions (Google included pagination backwards binned by time). To alleviate even more bandwidth from you, you could store it on the client side with HTML5 Web Storage and then the first thing the Web Socket does is find the last date on the last stored element and send that across to the server to establish the session. The server responds with any updates past that time. And from there your WebSocket is merely listening and inserting elements into the page when they arrive.

Of course, after you valiantly save your RSS providers from death by a thousand cuts, you yourself face that same fate. And now you know why Google scheduled a turn off of Reader ...

It's time for people to stop with this pretending to write computer games nonsense.

C/C++ is not a suitable development environment. VI is not a suitable development environment. Emacs is not a suitable development environment. C++14 is vaporware. C++ is designed to focus on OBJECTS, not GAMES.

Please re-read those sentences until you get it through your head. If you want to write a computer game, start with a real instruction set:

1. ARM (ARMv7 not ARMv8)
2. x86-64

I recommend ARM so you don't get distracted by all the horse**** bloat around CISC.

If you need a punch card reader, fine. Get one. Then code the game on a real ENIAC (not a fiddly PC) in the vacuum tubes. It will be hard, but the results will be worth it. If you can't bring yourself to do this, then you have no business programming or writing computer games.

P.S. I'm not interested in C++ OOP or whatever "Stroustrup's latest fly-by-night language" is, and I've been programming computers for 1,337 years, so I'm not interested in your tech credentials either. Either code the game or don't code the game, but knock it off with this artificial C/C++ development nonsense.

That is all.

I'm pretty sure The Onion hit the nail on the head (as well as their actual review of it).

But this is coming from someone who's probably going to see Frances Ha tonight and is still trying to get his hands on a copy of Incendies so if you want to laugh and don't want to have to think ... watch it make millions.

The verdict is: it's important.

I have two resumes in front of me. I need someone who can write some fairly complicated software. Are they writing the kernel to an operating system? No. But they'll be making complexity decisions between a server and a client. Not exactly new or novel but important to me and my clients.

So I look at one resume and the guy has suffered through integration by parts, linear algebra, differential equations and maybe even abstract algebra. The other guy went to a programming trade school where those are not taught. The trade school likely taught inheritance, pointers, typecasting, and all that good stuff just like the Bachelor's of Science degree would.

Now do my solutions need integration by parts, linear algebra and differential equations? Absolutely not. But if I'm going to pick between the two, I'm going to take the applicant that solved more difficult problems in order to make it to a class. Few people actually care about those concepts deep in their hearts -- and I'm sure neither of my prospective employees did. But in that same vein, no rational developer is going to care at all that my client likes to be able to drag and drop files instead of doing file navigation to find the files he wants. But I want the applicant who's going to do the inane stuff that he doesn't personally view as important.

Challenge yourself. Take the math courses. Take the logic courses. Take the statistics and combinatorics courses. Take the finite automata courses. Prove to yourself that there are no obstacles in your way. They are a great expense of time now but they are a huge investment in yourself -- no matter how pointless they appear to you.

You should attack this problem two different ways: 1) increase the amount of time you allot to your own personal enrichment in these topics/courses (three hours is very little time if you are approaching new concepts in math) and 2) seek outside instruction as it's also possible you have a professor who doesn't understand what they're doing either (the teaching, not the subject matter).

Perhaps one of the few non-English speaking sci-fi authors but a pillar in paperbacks nonetheless.

I agree they are not the good guys. But I also think it's important to mete out justice based on who was doing what. I hope in street protests when windows are smashed that the vandals are correctly identified and brought to justice. Similarly, I hope they find who are responsible for the credit card thefts but it appears Hammond is not and there are reports he did not benefit personally from this intrusion:

More here.

It's not about productivity, it's about economic impact. The article is kind of tongue in cheek poking fun of BSA's erroneous numbers manipulation to show that "properly licensed software" contributes oh so much to the economy. For clear reasons, your switch to GIMP from (presumably) a proprietary software alternative wouldn't move you from one column to the other unless you were to somehow pirate GIMP. While pirating GIMP is possible, you'd like just install it legally by downloading it with references to the GPLv3 license. Whether or not you believe it, GIMP with a copy of the GPLv3 is actually properly licensed software -- putting it in the column of the nebulous cloud of software that the BSA claims inflates our world economy to staggering heights.

To try to quantify the "productivity" of GIMP versus something else like photoshop would likely be subjective, nebulous and not 1 to 1. This isn't about productivity, it's about piracy. The author is pointing out how much of the mad moneys comes from open source software and all but accuses the BSA of co-opting that figure to appear to be their own work.