Phineas and Ferb.
I can't stand the rest of Disney's lineup, but that show is one of my favorite pieces of television ever. A light and pleasantly self-aware show where the protagonists build fantastic things to enjoy and play with? All the fun of Family Guy without the grossness and empty cynicism? Yes, more please.
Man, none of you guys have a clue. Have you read Rand or are you just regurgitating what you read on Wikipedia?
I've read The Fountainhead, Anthem, and a number of Rand's essays, as well as Wikipedia and other biographic articles. I also, of course, know who John Galt is. I think some of her work has some depth it's not given credit for (unfortunately, as much by her apparent followers as her critics).
But I don't think her critics here have no clue. They might be ignoring how noble the protagonists in her fiction are, but they're not incorrect that her philosophy as policy would lead to as many (if not more) James Taggarts and Ellsworth Tooheys as Reardens and Roarks (not to mention the problems with Roark, however romantic a character he is -- sure, he had a contract with Keating that enabled him to blow up the building, but did Keating have a contract with the land owners/developers/ect that gave him property rights that he could transfer to Roark?). And as has been pointed out, when it's come to practical recognition of real-world individuals, Rand has endorsed some individuals and behavior that resembles psychopathy.
On the other hand, the Karl Marx philosophy is about theft. Those who need take precedent over those who produce.
So, speaking of "Have you even read _____" criticisms.... how much Marx have you read? Because while needs are part of the philosophy (and the fact that this is a target of criticism says something about the critics, I'd say), there's a hell of a lot more to Marx than that -- it is, in fact highly concerned with "a fair reward for [the] inspiration and sweat" of laborers and craftsmen. I'd recommend, for starters, this slashdot comment about the implications of a competitive market for labor-as-commodity.
This isn't about PCs disappearing. This is about the bulk of personal "computing" moving onto devices other than PCs*. And even if it's overstated in the article, it's essentially sound as a trend. For people who aren't authoring (and even some who are), PCs are more or less overkill.
None of this means PCs won't be produced or used. They'll just likely become a minority in a larger sea of devices. Or, as his Steveness says, PCs will be like trucks. That's the end of the PC-centric Era, and it's not a particularly controversial idea.
* Where PC means the desktop/workstation form factor that terms has come to signify. Yes, I know, technically it means "personal computer" and you could grandfather anything with a CPU into that; doesn't change the fact the term PC has come to mean something more specific and it's this usage the article is running with.
The author went to prison, but you asked him (as he's been asked in interviews) he'd tell you he's not the only person who's ever, ahem, skirted the law.
I know people who take the same approach to natural language. After all, Spanish and Italian are very very similar, aren't they? The reality with natural languages is that "all languages are the same" thinking enables you to abuse several cultures without actually understanding any of them.
Having seen a fluent southern brazilian portuguese speaker effectively navigate the baja peninsula, I know you're overstating your case. Sure, if you only know one romance language, you'll have vast gaps in your knowledge of another. If you're fluent in one, though, and particularly if you understand its mechanics well on a descriptive/meta level, you can pick up another one much more quickly than if you're learning one for the first time. And in some cases, fluent speakers of one can understand and be understood by speakers of another.
Even if this weren't the case, your objection would have a big problem: programming languages are orders of magnitude more compact and less complex than natural languages. There is, quite simply, a lot less to learn.
And I think that to a large extent the same thing goes for programming languages. For example, if one of your "paradigms" is "object-oriented", does learning Smalltalk really prepare you for making best use of OO in Java or C++? Or vice versa? The inventor of Smalltalk and OO certainly doesn't think so.
SmallTalk would absolutely prepare you to work in Java or C++ in some ways. Maybe not as well as it'd prepare you to work in Ruby or Objective C. Perhaps not as well as C# might prepare you. Definitely better than Pascal would. Paradigms might be a bit more fine grained than "object-oriented", but that doesn't mean that working in one language and (more importantly) understanding the descripting mechanics of it won't dramatically help you with another.
I spent some time a while back trying to explain Scala to a Java programmer. His response was "It's just like Java." Well, Scala *is* just like Java, as long as you ignore the huge and central features that are not like Java. When I started to show him those features, generally in a "replace a page of code with one line" sense, his response was "I don't like it", and that was the end of the conversation. That, in practice, is what "learn 7 languages in 7 weeks" looks like.
No, it's what dislike of the unfamiliar and intellectual incuriosity looks like. The GP posited someone who knew a few paradigms, not someone who didn't like learning new things.
If you want to understand what "learn 7 languages in 7 weeks" looks like, consider part of Daniel Friedman's The Role of the Study of Programming Languagesin the Education of a Programmer ([original postscript] [Google HTML]):
"When I was just starting out in computer science in the Spring of 1964,one of my goals as an undergraduate was to learn at least one new language per semester.
Free speech allows him to write his own website, it doesn't allow him to break theirs.
Couldn't you argue his packets are simply speech? He's merely broadcasting a specific message to the network.
What's the difference between this and getting a million of your like-minded peers to call/fax complaints to a specific number?
(I'm playing a little bit of devil's advocate, but I'm given to understand there are cases that blur this line...)
New Hampshire Senate Election Phone Jamming Scandal. There's a book by the perp.
If it were a NON-POLITICAL DOS/bot attack, would anyone on Slashdot give a rat's ass if he went down for MORE than thirty months?
Yeah, since manslaughter doesn't get you more than two years these days.* And a hit and run might not even be something a DA wants to pursue vigorously. **
But you wanna see the system freak out? Show the people with money and clout that the system has holes, that there are people who can do things with technology that they don't understand.
OK, it's really not just a tech thing. Both our statutory punishments and our sentencing is messed up in this country. Unfortunately, it's in no small part because we're quite simply very very stupid about the issue politically: we like to vote for people who are "tough on crime," so I don't expect a lot of change.
* May not apply if you're not a police officer.
** May not apply if you're not wealthy.
... than "I don't like it."
HTTP has been repurposed far more than it should have been. Its lack of statefulness has resulted in horrible hacks like cookies and AJAX
AJAX? I can understand the cookie criticism, which TFA did a pretty good overview of, but AJAX's place is pretty much orthogonal to the issue of state. People resort to hacks *with* AJAX because browsers don't have a protocol with sessions, but even if we did, AJAX-like APIs and idioms would exist and continue to be used.
layout is still a huge hassle. CSS tries to bring in concepts from the publishing world, but they're not at all what we need for web layout
Layout -- even cross-platform layout -- is actually pretty easy if you use a subset of CSS positioning for the problems it's good at and tables for cases where it isn't.
A lot of people will claim otherwise, and they're wrong,
I predict a lot of the people who claim otherwise will do something you manage to neglect in their comment: provide justification for their statements. Perhaps you can try that your second time around instead of merely pounding your fist on the table about your personal opinion.
but JavaScript is a fucking horrible scripting language. It's even worse for writing anything significant.
Worse than what? How?
And no, it's absolutely nothing like Scheme (some JavaScript advocate always makes this stupid claim whenever the topic of JavaScript's horrid nature comes up).
It's enough like Scheme on at least two important fronts (functions as first class values, scoping rules) that it's false to say it's "nothing" like Scheme, and the related idioms that grow up around those common parts of the language are important to using it that it's a reasonable comparison, even with all the syntactic weight that JavaScript has and the missing features like macros and tail-call optimization.
the NoSQL movement, which arose solely because there are a lot of web "developers" who don't know how to use relational databases properly. I've seriously dealt with such "developers" and many of them didn't even know what indexes are!
A lack of programmer familiarity with the setup and querying of RDBMSs is a problem, and yes, set up properly, they can be pretty darn effective for a lot of situations some devs are using NoSQL solutions for, but saying the later are there "solely" for this reason is just as ignorant.
It's not as if most carriers have a reputation for really caring about customer privacy...
Welcome to the real world, where economics is not a zero-sum game. Just because somebody has more doesn't mean somebody else has less. Peddle your Marxism elsewhere.
To explain why your invocation of the term "Marxism" is incorrectly connected to the idea that economics is a zero-sum game, I refer you to one of the finer comments on economics (and, specifically, Marx) that Slashdot has seen.
"There is nothing in Marxism implying that transactions are zero-sum. Marx himself, in his sections on economics, is practically orthodox Adam Smith..."
(Of course, like the term "Socialism", when most people use it in current political discourse, it may be that the poster doesn't mean anything particularly well-defined by it, it's just a convenient term for something Those Other People Who Are Wrong And Ruining Things believe).
Anyone with any reasonable intelligence is going to question the computer models moving forward, and ask you "how is this any different than global cooling in the 70s?"
Anyone with reading comprehension, the ability to use Google, and some cognitive skills that enable them to avoid certain intellectual event horizons is going to already be familiar with and likely satisfied by a number of available answers to "how is this any different than global cooling in the 70s?"
The only way to accomplish your goals is with term limits, public funding
It's actually easier and harder than restructuring campaign finance and service terms. Which is to say, while I completely agree with your statement that there are systemic problems, what you're talking is neither necessary nor sufficient to change.
Only one thing will really change this: the general population of the united states is going to have to take a different attitude towards law enforcement and terrorism than we have now.
Right now we're a country largely full of people who firmly believe that they'll never be unfairly accused of a crime, that FBI and the police are always good guys, that abuses of power are rare, but that the world is a thicket of bad people who are just waiting to get them, and that we're just too soft on criminals, and if we didn't have all these pesky legal technicalities in place, by God, we could get some *real* justice meted out and finally be safe.
Count on it: this very election cycle, there's going to be people running as "tough on crime" and "protecting America against terrorists." Opposing candidates who actually care about due process and understand the principles behind why we have it are going to be characterized as "soft." And you know what? It. Will. Work.
We have people in power who compromise civil liberties because we not only don't kick up a storm when they happen, but because we have have an electorate that actively wants them eroded.
Right. Because that's worked so well. Keep in mind that these refer to apps that made it through the vetting process.
Knees jerking much? The parent mentioned Mozilla's add-ons, not Apple's App Store.
Also, you should note that the stories you're linking to are about the hacking of iTMS accounts for the abuse of a community rating system, rather than rogue spyware apps stealing personal data.
I personally don't know whether Apple's approval process or Mozilla's add-on review process has a better or worse record or screening out such things, but if you're going to go all "linky! looky! Apple has apps with these problems too!" you should make sure that you're talking about the same thing as the article. Or the parent comment you're responding to.
Work without a vision is slavery, Vision without work is a pipe dream, But vision with work is the hope of the world.
