It was actually Adam de Boor who discussed JavaScript.

And while JavaScript has its warts, all in all, it's a pretty nice language. If gmail is 400k+ lines of code in JavaScript, it would have been well over a million (if not four million) in Java.

Oh, so he's pushing a competing product and denigrating his competition?

"Product" is a pretty poor word choice for something that's given away in the way Go is. Pike doesn't really have much more to gain than *you* do from the adoption of Go and reduced use of C++ and Java.

Nothing to see here, I think.

Only if the substance of his criticism doesn't hold up. My experience suggests his objections are apt, and I might add that a casual dismissal of work by Rob Pike and Ken Thompson reflects more on you than them.

They hate it for the same reason that the music industry hates the Internet, they lose control of the marketplace and are unable to charge a premium for intangibles.

It's not "a premium for intangibles." It's the opportunity to get get paid for your time vs the expectation that you'll work for free unless your work is utilized.

What do you do? You an IT worker like most of the site? Let's say you troubleshoot systems -- how about we say that you don't get anything old fashioned like a salary or an hourly wage anymore: instead, you'll compete with others to see who can find/fix the problem first. The person who does that gets paid a flat rate. Everyone else gets nothing. Or, let's say you write code. You and one hundred other coders provide to spec. First one gets something, everyone else doesn't. No messy employee-employer relationship -- that stuff is for communists and music industry racketeers, right? Just pure market transactions. Beautiful, right? Certainly nothing you could have any complaint against -- in fact, if you really believe in your comment, truly and deeply, back it up: suggest that arrangement to your employer tomorrow.

After all, you wouldn't want to be like a music industry dinosaur, and frankly, if you're drawing either a salary or hourly wage off of it, you're exactly as much like the music industry as a graphic designer.

Does a government agency examine...

How about the other entities mentioned in the summary (let alone TFA) -- patients and, more importantly, *doctors*? If not them -- who should review them?

After all, nothing can possibly be safe until it is certified as such by the government. Just ask hundreds of thousands of people who died while the drugs that could have saved them were waiting for the FDA approval. They are pretty safe now.

FDA approval works roughly about as well as "self-regulation" works, since the FDA more or less reviews studies provided by the industry.

Though it's worth noting this is probably at the upper bound of effectiveness of self-regulation, since under the FDA they're actually required to submit something that can convincingly pass for a study in order to receive approval.

You've more or less just forwarded the theory that popularity is the primary indicator of value, and oddly, most people understand that it's a problematic one (if at no other time than when their viewpoint is unpopular).

But, if no one actually wants to read it, in what sense is it "important"?

The vast majority of people don't want to read about the physics of electromagnetism, the architecture of microprocessors, and the details of TCP/IP networking.

In what sense are these things important?

The thing is, in this arena, we're lucky: *this* stuff is something you can farm out to the subpopulation of society who is interested or sees other value in reading about these things, and with that information and the right paycheck, by and large they'll produce products and services that everyone else can use without having to understand more than marginal details about what's going on.

Not every arena works that way. Particularly in a democracy. And/or when there are people who have a vested interest in making sure things are misunderstood.

... of the story, since Hypercard came from Apple, and was arguably significant as one of the first widely used RAD tools.

ASK THE COAST GUARD FOR PERMISSION BEFORE POTENTIALLY INTERFERING WITH A CRITICAL OPERATION.

Interference doesn't and shouldn't include presence within 65 feet of booming that's essentially being put along every damn mile of gulf shoreline. Don't touch the booming? OK. Don't get within 10 feet of the booming? Sure, I can understand that, a little buffer zone is fine. Don't get within 20 feet? Sorry, once you're past 10 times most people's actual reach, you're going to have to come up with a very specific and watertight explanation about how getting that close constitutes "interference" for me to believe that it's really about that instead of a photography blackout.

If they deny requests from 95% of "photographers", half of whom are from the "mom picked up an SLR and now she's starting a photography business with it despite no knowledge of shutter speed and aperture", I'm still all for it.

While we're at it, let's also make sure that there's a minimum bar for commenting on the internet. Could help us cut down on noise from would-be fascists and BP shills.

LOL, tool.

Exactly what are you laughing at? A year ago, the common wisdom -- particularly on towards the right side of the political spectrum -- was that environmental concerns are just handwringing by whacko liberal moonbats, that increased offshore drilling is a necessary part of a comprehensive energy plan, that it would help reduce our dependency on foreign oil (somehow, magically, despite the fact that in free market system it all goes on the global market anyway), and that The Industry can be trusted to self-regulate.

Hell, if you read this thread, you'll *still* see people saying the industry can be trusted to self-regulate... it'll all take care of itself, don't you worry now.

You know what's behind this? You know that meme that probably more than half of slashdot FIRMLY believes -- that the private sector is always more competent than the public? That the public sector can't do anything right, can't regulate correctly, can't do anything other than act as a net negative drag on the private sector?

Yeah. Obama the radical socialist that he is? He partially believed that too. He believe what he was told by the executive apparatus and the oil companies -- that the oil companies had top expertise, that they knew exactly what they were doing, that they had safety dialed in and had right incentives to behave without further regulation. And, of course, that there wasn't massive regulatory capture during a presidential administration headed up by two guys who've been Oil guys for a long time.

What would be funny if it weren't so utterly pathetic and gravely consequential for the future of our society is that even though Obama has apparently learned his lessons, there's millions who won't.

Funny how it's playing out that way in financial regulation, too. We're all going to be asked to believe that cosmetic choices that won't cause any real pain for Wall Street are the best way to go -- and after all, the bankers and finance guys are the industry experts, so who better to advise us? We certainly wouldn't want meddling outsider officeholders drafting legislation about an industry they know little about without heavily consulting the industry about the best path, right? We wouldn't want heavy government involvement, anyway. That's a drag on The Market at best... and Socialism at worst.

You're going to hear this stuff. Again. And Again. Lots of times between now and the election. Some of you with fiscal conservative tendencies are going to fall for it. Some of you with libertarian tendencies are going to fall for it hook, line, and sinker. If enough of you fall for it, we're going to be here again in 5-10 years, same people saying loudly that the real problem was government meddling, socialism, we should have just let the private sector work. And the same actors in the private system will be racing their yachts and walking away with billions while socialized environmental and financial cleanup costs mount, one way or another.

Well, that's what you'll hear from some commentators. From others, you'll hear "LOL, tool."

Except I can find redeeming content on various parts of other websites that provide actual information. I don't with twitter, or facebook.

Then you're not trying. It's that simple.

I'm not even following 20 people and I see interesting technical stuff come through on average at least once a day. Sometimes a lot of interesting stuff. For instance, recently I found out about pandoc via Twitter. Maybe you already knew about it. Maybe I would have found out soon about it anyway. Maybe not.

(Facebook's different -- it really is a near-pure "social" media, unlike Twitter, which is really more of a massively distributed broadcast medium than it is social per se. What is see there is sometimes "interesting" from an intellectual or professional or creative standpoint, but most of the time it's just bog standard personal news which isn't particularly special. Good for keeping track of people you care about.)

But somehow the media has bought into Twitter as some kind of technological marvel. "ZOMG! People are tweeting about the World Cup! Let's put those tweets on our show, so we can pretend to be technologically savvy and relevant!"'

I think there's more too it than a desperate attempt to appear relevant -- the features of Twitter tend to fall in a certain sweet spot of interest for traditional broadcasters. For one thing, tweets are just about the right length for soundbite-driven short-cycle media. For another, it's really easy to search and in theory at least get a feel for zeitgeist by looking at trending topics in aggregate -- and profit-driven broadcast media is all about "eyeballs," so they're naturally interested in what people are (in theory) interested in.

Twitter isn't just the status update part of Facebook. It's not a symmetric social media. You can follow someone who doesn't follow you, and vice versa. So you're not limited to your friends.

Some people use that to follow celebrities, but you can use it to follow John Resig or Guido Van Rossum. Or if you feel weird following geek celebrities, someone like CS professor Phil Windley.

Or if you still don't like Twitter, follow Linus, who feels the same way about Twitter that you do. ;)

Part of the problem the US is having currently as ~46% (and growing rapidly) of US citizens pay no federal income taxes

This figure (which also seems to change) is always thrown around without anyone explaining *why* they don't pay federal income taxes. Is it because they're retired? Is it because they're kids? Is it because they're a non-working parent as part of a household? Is it because they have good tax accountants who get them enough credits and write-offs that they don't pay anything? Is it because they're unemployed?

It matters because depending on the case, we might be talking about someone who's made significant contributions to society through their labor and the tax system, or will once they're part of the labor pool, or does right now through home economics and child rearing.... or we might be talking about someone who's simply gaming the system.

so voting for more/larger entitlements doesn't cost them anything.

While social programs could certainly be managed better, "entitlements" have certainly not been the largest cause of recent increases in public spending. Overly aggressive projection of military force, over-reliance on expensive private contractors, and last but not least, expensive bailouts as post hoc solutions instead of sensible regulation. Which, in turn, are less consequences of a lazy population trying to vote itself free stuff than they are of an intellectually lazy population who puts their trust in "reeking tube and iron shard" and worships mammon.

$150 to $450 on EBay, but still your point is valid.

Even if it is $700, his point still doesn't invalidate the researcher's point: technology which the conventional wisdom holds is only available to organizations with large budgets is actually available at what are essentially middle-class consumer prices.

The point isn't that you can do it for precisely $500 or $700 or $1200 or $2000 or $5000. The point is if you know someone with reasonable engineering skills and you can raise a few thousand bucks, you can build this stuff.

If nothing else, this has significant ramifications for asymmetric military conflicts...

An Exercise in WordPress Integration: Or, Why WordPress Sucks.

just implement simple threading

Sure, and they could just learn to fly too, instead of relying on some convenient form of transportation that solves the problem for them.

Threads are the famed "simple, clean and wrong" general solution to parallel programming tasks. The *concept* and *implementation* of threads can be simple, sure, but if you're working on anything other than simple problems, the trouble of keeping track of everything that's going on can become very challenging very quickly.

a whole other language just for one problem.

It's a big problem. Learning another language is generally a smaller problem. Particularly if you're the kind of Real Programmer(TM) that we're probably going to hear can manage with threads just fine.