BugBrother

Phone/email/etc are too easy to use -- and to crack when all the resources of freelancers, states and police forces get involved. "All discussions are shallow"? :-)

One problem is an increase in the ability to convincingly create faked photos and phone recordings?

Here, it is obviously parts of a state against other parts. Informative insight.

Is this the future of political "argumentation" in [half authoritarian/corrupt] regimes? And in how business deals will be done -- blackmail? Or, if fakes get impossible to detect, the end of trustworthy recorded history?

brucefancher, your comments are "dead", i.e. you're "hellbanned".

Send an email to the admins, since it doesn't seem you should be.

(This is my own new account since I was hellbanned and don't have energy enough to send email. I got angry at an idealist idiot that might not have been a spammer/troll.)

If there were no socialism some other form of ideology would be used. Political or religious. Look up "the resource curse" on Wikipedia, it is just too lucrative to control an oil country and steal the money...

Also, as I understand it, things like this is especially common in South/Latin America with much populist aristocratic history.

This is covered in Europe, at least by my Swedish media.

Not so much by the left winger sources. Those are too busy attacking Israel than bother with the millions of deaths, rapes etc in Sudan/Congo...

(I usually get the motivation: "You should have higher standards for democracies." Then I ask: "How many thousand times different standards is reasonable without being a hypocrite?" Never got that answered.. :-) )

Are there really other oil countries that have a hard time to even get credit?

And then there are the large social problems? A command economy that kills local business might be common, but the size must be worse in Venezuela? Etc.

To close the opposition media and using the TV is quite standard in places like that. But as much as in Venezuela?

(Libya and possibly Iraq has problems from violence and Iran has sanctions. They are a bit special cases.)

Well, any US conspiracies seems like a waste of money, since the Venezuelan government seems to do the impossible -- running an oil country into the ground.

(But lots of people will be certain that all of that comes from more conspiracies from the US. :-) )

Ah, right you are. Everyone I know that did games are programmers, but they are a minority on the teams. :-)

No.

You're factually correct that it is like premature optimizing code, but it is a hobby for quite a few people to optimize their lives. Others collect money. Some friends do board games. Or sport. (Personally, I spend a lot of time learning about some odd interests.)

>>If they do get a job in the game industry, it's often as tester - bottom of the ladder.

Uh, is it really that bad to start your career at a junior job?

Besides, graphics/game developers in my experience know a lot about math, algorithms and fast implementation. They should be able to get jobs somewhere else?

Nice to see code. :-)

Perl 5.10 from 2007 supports named captures. (Google confirmed that.)

Edit: nikic in the parallel comment is correct, named captures are affected the same way in Perl's regexp engine with ?|. (Google perlre and search for ?|.)

Yeah, at a minimum they should have been able to lower the price by threatening to make the exact WhatsApp functionality a subset of Facebook.

(A page out of Microsoft's play book.)

Edit: The Facebook Messenger has the features of WhatsApp already?! News to me, so you have a point re FB advertisement. :-)

OK ok, but it is economical insanity.

On the moon, an electric rail launcher with 5-10G only needs to be a few km long.

(Iirc, 1G acceleration of four minutes is the launch velocity of the moon? ~ 2.4 km/s.)

Edit: This assumes local materials for the electric launcher. If everything is skipped from Earth, it might be different. But, consider -- if you need to launch so much stuff from the moon, you must already have the infrastructure to build things there.

Thanks. He, a bit after I stopped doing "real" work and went scripting. :-) :-(

Sometimes I regret that, but then I think of the repeated reading of the Effective C++ books. Not to mention the writing of C for a week which I could throw together in hours in Lisp or Perl.

My point was that with dynamic libraries at fixed memory addresses, dynamic linking information can be cached (as long as no binaries are updated). That would imply similar efficiency as for static libraries.

Sorry if I wasn't clear.

From what I've read of carbon tube based cables, most of the length would burn up in the atmosphere before reaching the ground.

Edit: VLM does have a point in that a falling cable might be a problem on Mars. The moon doesn't have enough rotation for a fixed skyhook (space elevator) anyway. :-) More advanced rotating elevators in a moon orbit, maybe. But it might be hard because of the moon mascons (the moon is lumpy internally with different density, which results in gravitational anomalies).

>>the linking process is a complex task, especially if it's to be performed with any efficiency.

I'm no kernel hacker, but doesn't that make the GP argument better?

It would be almost like static linking?

If code is compiled against a shared lib which always will be at the same address in virtual memory, a linking setup could be cached. (And redone if there is a new version of the library, of course.)

(I realize that caching this symbol table won't be a totally trivial change.)

Yes, but I wrote:

What if you use the land price increase at the other end of a (quite) fast train to finance building the commute link?

Skip the present business model, make a product out of your hiring model. To reach that predictability is worth a lot to most any company.

I always wondered if you couldn't finance a high speed train (Or Elon Musk's "strange loop") in areas like California by buying cheap real estate and selling it to future commuters.

Edit: It ought to be enough with 50-150 km distance to get low land prices around that part of California? Assume a train at 250 km/hour, the commute will be short and there won't be a need for "exotics" (maglev, Musk's tube, etc).

Ah, yes. It seems this plague might be spread more by EU membership than it is cured. Not a positive future for Europe... :-(

Uhm, are you really claiming those two countries weren't corrupt before the EU?! Afaik, both are classic cases of the Mediterranean client-patron culture? (At least the south of Italy.)

My original point was that to make a country a nice place today is not rocket science, the failures either seems to be an ongoing conflict -- or corruption.

Afaik the methods to stop corruption isn't that hard to design, the hard part is to get a political class to implement them. To do it from outside is impossible without an invasion, you have to get the population to pressure the criminal thieves (a.k.a. politicians).

(I guess 'fulafel' is a naive Swede who grew up believing his own media, like I did. That is why I bother with this.)

Disclaimer: No political science education, just a hobby to read to try to understand the world,

>>and then you discuss

Starting with "For examples of this".

>>Supernational institutions like the EU and UN can do great things like this.

Well, give me some examples where corruption of a political system was solved by external organisations?

(And NOT in a military way.)

(The main benefit East Europe got was a pressure to conform with EU criteria to get into the trade union. That solved quite a lot, by paying the political leadership to solve their problems... This can only be done once. But Romania and Bulgaria got into EU without fulfilling those criteria, probably by bribing for the EU votes (as I understand it, a few large companies were sold cheap to French, Belgian etc companies). So corruption worked for them... not even here, with a big carrot, was it solved by the EU!)

Edit: I might add that the UN is infamously corrupt and many functions are taken over by dictators, working for their combined interests. (If you're Swedish, you won't read about that in your local media.) Hardly able to help anyone with corruption...

Afaik, Swedish police don't take bribes and generally don't commit criminal acts. At least not if compared with most other countries.

The main problem with Sweden is that the police is trusted to drink coffee instead of working. :-)

(That was a simplification, the Swedish police seems to mainly have organisational issues. The Finnish police is one of the most trusted societal functions there. I have never understood why a Swedish government won't head hunt top level Finnish police and fire the locals... Just the threat ought to be enough.)

>> [ capitalism's] current income inequality problems

I will assume you talk about the income inequality between nations. That is, in most cases, not solvable by other countries.

To make a country (without military conflicts) better is not rocket science. You get infrastructure and education to work well in addition to limiting corruption. The corruption part is probably enough, since non-corrupt politicians will fix the rest.

After that, a generation or two later you have a South Korea. Estonia is getting there.

For examples of this, see East Europe inside the EU after 1991. The main failures with corruption are Romania and Bulgaria, which also have horrible economic inequality. The politicians even steal the money for roads!

The point is, income inequality is not a problem of economics. The problem is that packs of thieves have stolen a country/government and sucks the lifeblood out of it.

That would destroy the effects life video-logging will have on social interaction.

I look forward to what happens to cultures when it is impossible to be an asshole without ending up on Youtube -- especially violent crime will be impossible, when a large portion (10%+) of the population have logging of what they see.

(It would also need fast uploads, preferably triggered by e.g. pulse increase if not exercising, so criminals can't just destroy the logging mechanism.)

Disclaimer: I don't know if I will like or approve of the effects, just that it is an interesting thought experiment. There are lots of benefits/disadvantages. For positive ones, think Russian car cameras and meteorites; catching one-in-a-billion events. For negative ones, consider when someone is very stressed out because of a loved one's death.

Edit: Thanks eterm, but effects on culture are certainly way too complex to predict.

Uh, you don't think it is relevant when you compare that Turkey is the world champion in imprisoning journalists? (Just to take one data point.)

There are no absolute black/white situations, but that doesn't mean there aren't lots of very different gray levels...

It would be funny if Google copied Microsoft's monopolist strategies to avoid Windows cloning (APIs are ever changing and complex, especially regarding bug compatibility, no protocol docs+obfuscation, etc)... :-)

I don't get why this censoring, which stop US businesses like Google, doesn't lead to a trade war? The Americans are usually not shy about those?

Edit: fidotron, to me it seemed China tried to get rid of Google (internal hacking attacks, etc). That level of aggression is normal for China?

Thanks, you wrote a couple of interesting comments.

As a Swede, I think you shouldn't try to apply logic to Sweden's position. Most [foreign] policy are decided because of economic interests and/or internal Swedish (politically correct) politics.

And about changing a society -- it takes a few generations to modernize. But it has to come. Sure, it might be harder for muslim countries (e.g. there is no real demand to execute people leaving the religion in Christianity!). Since a liberal and open society seems to be needed to e.g. get rid of corruption. With rampant corruption you just have, well, a pile of shit (see Romania and Bulgaria, which you mentioned; I work in Romania right now).

The previous paragraph is, I believe, the thinking in West Europe. I tend to agree. China is the obvious counter argument to this position, we'll see where they end up when the Chinese GNP/capita gets closer to a rich country.

>>Javascript is by no means a good language

My point was that you have to compare the practical use cases, that is "the good parts" of a language/framework -- not the bad cruft you can avoid. A few hours investment is nothing. (JS still has problems, many are being solved.)

This is trivial of course, but strangely ignored by many on HN with an IQ that probably is the sum of our two's...

>>If you avoid languages that're used by idiots

I wrote that I am suspicious of environments used by language war cultists, intelligence is orthogonal.

(A typical example is someone that starts recommending his favorite environment even when it isn't discussed, as suitable for everything just by its std use cases... Like you :-) )

Edit: Absolutely agree, mercurial.