Say that again a few times.

But they'd also run out of money to buy shitty politicians to fuck us all over constantly, so it'd still be a win.

They do when they get the chance to run. The problem, as you just pointed out, is that of the 2 major parties that we seem to be stuck with under first-past-the-post voting, the one that people see as a progressive party is actually the status quo party.

I had fooled around with C a bit because my dad was always writing little [incomplete] games in it. All the tools I had were his.

For some reason I was running Windows NT on my computer. It came in the box with Visual Studio and I thought it sounded cool. Even got it to play Half-Life after horsing with video drivers long enough.

One day I was "cleaning up" the hard drive by deleting files that I didn't recognize or care about. Apparently on that version of NTFS there was a file in the file system that you could delete that was...vital to the filesystem itself. Lost all my data because I sucked at backups back then. "Enough of this Microsoft garbage, I want to try Linux!" I said. And since I had no idea what I was doing, my dad also picked me up a copy of 'Using Red Hat Linux'. Something like the second half of the book was just to introduce you to shell and Perl scripting, and I was like "holy crap this is so much easier than C". And then I discovered Ruby (via Slashdot), and it just made so much sense to me, and programming was actually kind of fun.

This was late 90s or early 2000s. I was about 16 at the time. I got a kick out of finding ways to run Doom on school computers. The librarians always thought I was "hacking" and got all upset. Bahahaha stupid librarians.

Learning new programming languages is always kind of cool. Maybe because I suck so bad at foreign human languages.

In our world, cruelty to animals is applied on a scale that completely dwarfs cruelty to people. So even if you think the suffering of a cow or pig matters 1/10th the suffering of a person, the total amount of suffering among farm animals is still daunting and horrible.

That said, cruelty to anyone is bad and it's reasonable to be upset about any and all of it. I hate the way farm animals are treated, and I also hate it when police harass/abuse/execute innocent people. I won't fault anyone for focusing their outrage a different way than I do.

Are you able to get networking to work well under Wine? When I try it the cursor moves around at about half a frame per second and makes it completely unplayable. This is the only reason I have left for keeping Windows machines around (though I am hoping Planetary Annihilation can take its place, and that will supposedly be designed to run on Linux).

I'm assuming the updater does this to make sure it's getting a newer version than what's already installed. How would you handle it? A single 64-bit number? A history graph à la Git?

I would submit that this is somewhat sensible and that the switch from 1.5 to 5.0 back in the Sun days was far more confusing.

It makes me a bit sad that Java in the browser never really took off to the extent that JavaScript did. These days we have people coming up with monstrosities like asm.js to make it possible to write fast, cross-platform applications, whereas the JVM is a compiler target that's been much better suited to the task for a decade and a half. I suppose its downfall was in its proprietary nature, lack of integration with the DOM, and slow start-up time. If the browsers had included an easily sandboxed subset of the JRE (simply leaving out any classes that could possibly interact with the rest of your system, for starters) in place of JavaScript I think frontend web development would be a lot nicer today. At the time, though, I doubt that Sun would have allowed such a thing. :(

Hindsight FTW.

Same here. I would always pour myself an especially large bowl of cereal and then turn on Wii World News. It had nice music for relaxing in the morning.

If you're going to go to all that trouble, you may as well switch to a numeral system with a base that's evenly divisible by more than just 2 and 5. 12 would be a good choice. Try 30 if you *really* like being able to easily divide by 5 as well as 2 and 3.

I once had this argument with my (at the time) girlfriend. It didn't end well.

Some things you didn't mention that I am used. Pro:

• Easily rename methods, move classes around, and otherwise refactor code.

Con:

• Eats up all resources on my computer (though this may be specific to Eclipse, but Eclipse also has the best refactoring tools of any IDE I've tried, so meh).

Code I've written using Eclipse is *much* easier to follow than code I wrote in Emacs* because refactoring is so much faster. Yeah, you can search-replace and hope you didn't get any unintended matches and use unit tests and the compiler's error messages to help you out, but it's a pain compared to {<select name>, F2, <type new name>, enter}, so I find myself avoiding it until I'm at a machine with Eclipse.

*for all I know, there's scripts for Emacs that would help with refactoring, but they're not as obvious to me.

Except back then we used long rolls of paper, and we didn't fill in the solid parts because that would've used too much ink. So this is pretty cool, but not groundbreaking. From the way the entire Internet's in an uproar you'd think something important happened today, sheesh.

When all the ridiculous CP laws were passed. i.e. the whole point of the article.

This. Sorry no mod points today.