It's cool how in a few short years the internet has gone from "information wants to be free, man!" to reinventing copyright from scratch except now it kills the planet with a pointless blockchain at the same time.

Yep. I like functional programming, but it's a tool. But then OO is just a tool as well. It's not suitable for everything, and attempting to apply OO principles to problems that don't really need them is just a waste of everyone's time, just as being forced into a functional pattern when it's not necessary is useless.

I'm mostly familiar with functional programming in R, where it's an extremely useful part of the language, but you don't have to use it. But once you get used to it, loops end up looking like ugly, clunky constructions when you could just apply a function of a vector. Once you're in this mind-space, going back to language that actually require you to nest loops to get anything done feels annoying as hell.

So here's a of income inequality in the United States over the last few decades. The "progressive taxation" that you seem to think is killing the country, by definition, takes more money away from rich people than poor people. Yet rich people are getting richer, and poor people are getting poorer. The economic conditions you seem to be so worried about, the taxation regime you're complaining about, is one that's making the rich richer and the poor poorer, so clearly progressive taxation isn't doing shit.

That graph shows, simply, that the rich are earning more and contributing less. Seriously, how the fuck can you look at a graph like that and say, yes we need to vote for the bankrupt orange fascist rapist and tax the rich less! That will solve all our problems! It beggars belief. Good luck.

Yes, I have noticed this. I've got an iPhone 5. And I've installed the Swype keyboard, which is pretty fantastic, but yep, it does feel a bit clunky. It takes a noticable amount of time for the keyboard to display on screen, and the visuals as display elements move around and adjust is definately a weird thing to see on iOS. I've noticed, for example, when turning the phone sideways, weird stretched graphics for a fraction of a second. And in other apps I've noticed some curious typographical anomalies - fonts in the app sitting just a little too close to the fonts in the status bar.

However, the extra features in iOS 8 do make up for this weirdness. It's stil usable, it just seems *slightly* imperfect, but I think that's to be expected for such a major change in the OS, particularly when it comes to the keyboard feature. I'm just going to have to assume that iOS 8.1 will iron out some of these kinks.

Heh, it's not even "customers" they're denying a download to - if you follow the nomenclature of Kickstarter, then it's *investors*! Evidence, if you needed it, that you're not really an investor when you get involved in Kickstarter, you're just paying a premium to pre-order something, and praying you won't get screwed over.

It is a bit disingenuous to state that "web monitoring of all Australians appears to be inevitable". I, for one, am tunneling my web traffic via SSH to a server overseas, so they won't be monitoring my URLs ;)

I agree that there are probably higher priorities, but I think it's fair to say that this is necessary infrastructure for the 21st century.

Think of what it might enable for example - want to cut greenhouse gas emissions? How about installing the infrastructure that will make it much much easier for a significant proportion of the population to "telecommute" and work from home. And once people no-longer have to live near their workplaces, and with high-speed internet access being ubiquitous, they might move to regional centers, improving rural economies and taking pressure off the resources in our cities.

Okay, that might be a bit of wishful thinking, but it's certainly the direction we need to be heading in.

As for what you have...luxury. I live in a suburb of Hobart - 15 minutes drive from the CBD. I have no cable in the area, no ADSL since I'm too far from the exchange - my bloody dial-up modem would only connect at 28.8k because of the shitty phoneline - the ONLY solution for "broadband" (in the loosest possible sense of the word) is wireless 3G, which I pay Virgin $50 a month for 5GB, which sometimes gets whopping download speeds of 400kbps, but is usually closer to 120kbps. I could have paid much more to go with Telstra's NextG, but I generally don't like being raped by them.

Some places in Australia do have usable broadband. A lot of places still don't. And I measure "usable broadband" by the criteria of being able to watch a video on YouTube without having to press pause first and let the whole thing buffer...

He's right, you know. Wii is for kids.

Section 319, Public incitement of hatred:

(2) Every one who, by communicating statements, other than in private conversation, wilfully promotes hatred against any identifiable group is guilty of

(a) an indictable offence and is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years; or

(b) an offence punishable on summary conviction.

I actually logged in to post that, that's how completely stupid your post was. It was stupid enough for me to break a year of no slashdot commenting to prove to others you're just plain friggin' wrong. Your advice can lead people to spend time in jail, it is that wrong.

In Canada it is illegal to:

  - Say "I hate all $GROUP" in public, for example, on a webforum that doesn't require a login to access, or a webforum that will give anyone a login. (s319)
  - Say "I want to kill $GROUP" (s318)

In Canada it is NOT illegal to:

  - Have a group of Nazis meet privately at their whites-only compound to discuss how the holocaust did not happen
  - Have a pair of Nazis work out a scheme to convince new recruits how they are "correct"

So, of course, these laws work really well to prevent hate groups from expanding and hating. Really, really, really well! And they never, ever punish the people who want to publicize their views so that people can comment on them and perhaps even educate them and others on how stupid said people are! Never, ever, ever! Why would any of us ever want to know what racists are thinking? There's absolutely no benefit in being able to recognize a racist on a dime! We wouldn't ever need to know words like "A reserved hotel" are, in fact, pointing to a set of racist owners. Better to keep that crap where it belongs! DEEP DEEP DEEP underground. That way people who don't hate can keep patronizing his business and ensure he's not shunned and broke!

ARGH!