Double sigh. That's a terrible argument, you're basically saying that people who are "learner" programmers who have not used Python enough to see its limitations wonder why C++ uses braces. Duh!

Python is actually full of limitations imposed by the indentation nonsense. Those limitations show up when a programmer goes beyond simple programs and wants to do more advanced things in the language. For example, lambdas are limited to one expression in Python. There's literally no reason other than because the indentation rules would cause problems otherwise.

So someone who wonders about C++ braces is someone who doesn't appreciate what advantage they provide. Such people don't appreciate the advantages because they haven't needed them in Python. They haven't needed them because they don't exercise the language fully. In other words, they are novice programmers.

I don't think we should care what novice programmers have to say. How about they just shut up and learn?

As usual, Google "engineers" decide to create something that sounds good on paper, but utterly fails to do the job correctly in practice. I've had chromecast (both versions) for almost two years, in that time it has never just worked. I turn on the TV, the chromecast starts automatically. Ok, seems good? No, because you need to have a chrome browser to send your media, and guess what? The chrome browser doesn't go looking for the newly available chromecast when it's available. I've had to disable and reenable the extension, THEN it goes looking and finds it. Great.

Except now the extension doesn't exist any more. Real dumb, as chrome STILL doesn't see the chromecast when it joins and now there's no way to force a refresh. So what else works? Disconnect from Wifi. Reconnect to Wifi. That's what works.

Like I said, sounds good on paper, fails in reality. For a company that claims to have a lot of PhDs in computer science, the number of buggy to unusable products they bring out is mindboggling. "Engineers" indeed. Mmmmm, mmmm!

And every time it does not happen, expect the UK political class to lose further ground to the far right loonies like BNP and UKIP, until enough of them are in power to run the country and take it out of the EU anyway. Meanwhile, the uncertainty in the markets will punish the country even more than it is going to (the skirmish on Friday was just the foreplay).

The UK has a choice between leaving the EU and having a responsible set of people negotiating the exit, or leaving the EU with Nigel Farage negotiating the exit. If I was british, I know what I would want.

Wow. Just wow. I guess you're gonna be really pissed off when machines take most of the human jobs away.

You're in Denial (first stage of 5). The brexit vote shows that around half of the public doesn't want anything to do with the EU. Fine. What do you think will happen if a new ref gets brexit repealed? You'll STILL have around half the population who don't want anything to do with the EU, and now they're also pissed off at the likes of you. The only thing a second ref can do is polarize the population further, and that's not what you want, trust me. You already have racist attacks increasing by 500% in the last week, it would just get worse.

If you want to be an EU citizen, your best bet is to get an EU passport and emigrate. Let the little britainers play their experiment, it's the best of all worlds.

Don't waste your time with Linux/systemd, I was a debian user/fan for literally 15 years, it was great and I was really happy with it. Then PulseAudio was added, my sound became consistently flaky - I said, fine, I'm a competent developer I'll just force the system to use alsa again. A bit of maintenance, but well worth it. Then systemd was added, my *network* became consistently flaky. I looked at how to remove it, and decided the cancer has spread too far to be salvageable. Very unhappy. Switched to FreeBSD, which is the best decision I've made. The system is clean and consistent, and just works. No regrets.

If you think a computer is fair and makes decisions using bugfree logic, you must be one of those humans who have never seen a line of code in their life.

Look, I get that driverless cars are all the rage these days, and nonprogrammers like you think that computers are some kind of intelligent living beings, but it's really not so at all.

A computer program is an inflexible, dumb piece of logic that is incomplete and crashes all the time when unexpected inputs are introduced. Read Kafka if you want to know what a world directed by computers is like.

Geoblocking is clearly a method for protecting digital distribution rights. Netflix pays money to receive limited rights to show movies to some of its customers, but not all, ie not Australians in Australia.

Due to the DMCA, in America, any method, no matter how flimsy, to protect the content from being seen by Australians in Australia is good enough. So because the method (aka geoblocking) now exists, the bad guys (aka Australians living in Australia) have been prevented and all is good in the world. But wait, some of the evil Australians living in Australia are going out of their way to bypass a perfectly fine method that is stopping the bad guys from accessing the content. Those evil Australians living in Australia are breaking the American Law against breaking perfectly fine methods for stopping bad guys from seeing content (aka geoblocking). They are doing this knowing full well that they are not supposed to do it, since they have to sign up for special evil helping VPNs and pay good money to those VPN providers. Those evil Australians are breaking the Law (aka DMCA) in America.

I suspect that an Australian DMCA equivalent lawsuit would have to be brought by Netflix to users in Australia, which would be interesting, ridiculous, and outright daft on the part of Netflix.

Sure you are committing a crime. It's exactly the same principle as when you stand inside the USA near the Mexican border. You spy a Mexican trying to enter the country illegally, and you shoot him while he's on the other side. You've committed murder, even if technically all you did was shoot a gun in the air on US soil, even if technically you've been in the US during all this time, and even if nobody died or got injured inside the US. It's not true that the Mexican was simply killed in his country by a bullet that just appeared and randomly hit the guy in the head. It is true that this was murder.

If you like, one could say that your purpose in using a VPN to access Netflix was to explicitly and fraudulently bypass the trivially stupid digital rights protection measure consisting of checking if the client requests are originating from some subset of the Australian IP address range. You bypassed a braindead digital rights protection measure knowing full well that Netflix didn't want you to do so, and that makes you a baaad person who should probably go to jail the next time you step foot in the US, mmkay?

I don't think that what the Australian Government thinks matters here. Any customer who circumvents a protection method, no matter how stupid the method is, commits a crime under the DMCA. That's an American Law, and it applies to Aussies who do business in the US, even if technically their PCs are operating in Australia.

It's a stupid law, it needs to be repealed, etc. etc. But Australians are doing it wrong if they argue they're morally or legally right in Australia. The only thing that matters is what happens in the US.

That said, the beauty of breaking the law from within a foreign country is that it's a lot harder for the wronged company to get relief. Especially if the foreign government disagrees with the US. By hurting American companies economically, the trickle down effect *may* be that the stupid law will get revisited. So rock on Aussies ;-)

This is significant for what they do not say: they do not say that they want to allow those poorer countries to manufacture, *and then export* the generic versions of these drugs. In fact, many of these countries already ignore dodgy pharmaceutical patents, so it's actually cheaper for GSK to not file for protection there, as it is less money wasted.

What matters to GSK is that rich countries, and especially America, have a very high legal barrier to prevent their citizens from importing cheap drugs. GSK want to sell drugs in America for as much as the market will bear, and this easily makes up for the loss of income from poor countries. Remember, half of the Earth's population lives on approx $2 per day. None of these people will ever be able to pay $750 for a single pill of Daraprim, or even any drug that just costs $10 per pill.

But if these countries manufacture generic drugs and if free trade allows those drugs to be purchased in America, then the millions of retirees in America who live in relative poverty and spend the large part of their assets on overpriced drugs and medical treatment will see a direct improvement to their lives. *That* would be social progress.

Nothing happened. You, like everyone, have a set of personal biases. When Anonymous attacks a political candidate in a foreign country you approve because it aligns with your values, when they attack a political candidate in your neighbourhood you disaprove and think they've changed.

They haven't. A lot of people OUTSIDE OF AMERICA completely approve of Anonymous disrupting Trump's candidacy today, it's actually a good thing to do globally. But Americans are directly affected, so they feel offended and talk about destroying democracy and other such hyperbole. Next time Anonymous will target another country and the people in that country will feel offended that they need outside help.

Look, many of us already know that religion is a mental disease. It's a kind of addiction to wishful thinking that rots your logical thinking skills and causes you to be susceptible to commands phrased as wishes from the godhead and priests. But it's a dangerous view because there are too many infected IN AMERICA who deny that they have a problem (kind of like alcohol addiction etc). The majority of infected in America will actively prevent the deployment of scientific methods addressing religious delusions because it also means accepting that what they have is a mental health problem too, and they bear some responsibility for keeping the infection alive in America. And the reality is that nobody in America can gain democratic power without pandering to these infected, or being one of them in the first place. Either way, that means combatting religion at the source is off the table.

The upshot is: nice idea, won't work, don't waste your time.

You're not qualified to talk about traffic if you don't realize that putting pedestrian crossings at intersections is the most efficient way to let pedestrians navigate the cities. People don't know how to walk through walls you know.

That's not efficient. Right now pedestrians don't have to press a button, so for example they might arrive at the crossing halfway while the crossing light is green, and they can just cross without slowing down. With your system, *every* pedestrian has to press the button and wait, which just causes delays for pedestrians. I argue that, especially in cities, pedestrians are more important than cars, and should get priority. Your system takes away convenience for pedestrians in favour of drivers. FAIL.