ant512

I'd suggest that, if a variable with an undefined value is a valid state for the program, the declaration is in the wrong place. How about this alternative?

   int dec(int a, int condition) {
       if (condition) {
           int temp = 0;

           //compute something here in a loop
           while (temp < a) {
               a -= (temp++);
           }
       }

       return a;
   }

It's a contrived analogy, mainly because - as Simon points out in the article:

> Their eyes glaze...It's too much. Too much to contemplate the idea that the whole country might be actually connected.

It seems to me that people struggle to deal with this issue when scaled out to a population beyond their immediate social circle. That's one of the problems.

The other is, as soon as you scale it back to a comprehensible size, people shout "straw man!" and the debate goes nowhere.

> Few people are saying saying "let's not do this" for some value of "this", they're saying "let's not force everyone to do this".

There are four guys in a crippled spaceship. They have 7 hours of oxygen left if they continue to breathe normally. If they all make a concerted effort to breathe slowly they could extend the oxygen to 8 hours. The rescue ship arrives in 8 hours.

They are all in it together. There's nothing that can be done about that.

Now the libertarian astronaut insists that he won't be forced to change his breathing pattern. No way is he going to be forced to do anything different. He's not going to be forced to be in it with the other guys. No amount of cajoling, threatening or reasoning will get this guy to give up his "one-man island" philosophy.

But he is in it with the other guys. Sticking his head in the space-sand doesn't change the hard facts of 7 hours of oxygen and rescue in 8.

You trust the NSA with your private communications, though. Or is there another explanation for the apathetic response by the American public to widespread government surveillance?

> Consumers have no acess to bid on the incremental value of features.

They could have kept buying Nokia 3310s instead of iPhones if they thought that a replaceable battery was more important than everything else they got with the Apple product. People made the same argument about physical keyboards, and look at what happened to RIM.

I've got a couple of pairs of fingerless gloves...

There's that whole pesky touch screen, too!

Whenever anyone says this, I wish I could draw.

I have this cartoon in my head in which one caveman is stood at a stall selling round wheels, surrounded by eager punters desperate to buy them for their stone age carts, whilst a bunch of other cavemen stand around with square wheels that no-one wants to buy complaining that they invented the wheel first and that they can't see why the round wheel is so much of an improvement.

"As for Bing - it's still losing billions of dollars a year last I checked."

Allowing the successful divisions to survive and the leeches to die seems like a win for MS. Why is throwing away billions on products that produce no return a good thing?

I think that's one of Microsoft's main failings.

"Google are making baked beans? Why aren't we in the baked bean market? Let's make beans!"

"What? Now Facebook are making Facebook Soda? We need to make Microsoft Soda!"

Every time a tech company produces something new MS have to muscle in on the market, despite having a) no prior experience, b) no aptitude, c) existing products that could use their attention.

Just the engineers?

Did you ever work on a project where you said to your boss, "We need to do X or this won't work," and your boss said, "X is too [expensive | time consuming | difficult], we won't do that."

Or a project where your boss hired a bunch of incompetents at the last minute because the project was running late, and the new hires made endless mistakes that you then had to fix?

Do you want to seppuku because your nuclear plant blew up because your boss was an idiot and wouldn't listen to the engineers?

And don't suggest that the engineers become whistleblowers. We all know how that turns out.

Think I've got access to everything but the bug tracker, which I reported to Apple.

Check out https://bitbucket.org/ant512/gobble

It's a lot like the blogging engine described in the article, but it includes comments/Aksimet/reCAPTCHA and tagging.

It's interesting that the response to a lunatic with a semiautomatic is to mount massive internet surveillance rather than, for example, outlaw semiautomatics or provide free mental healthcare.

That's only true until Apple produce an official spec [1] for iOS controllers.

[1] http://kotaku.com/also-touched-on-during-todays-wwdc-keynote...

I found his full-length novel on the same topic, "The Windup Girl"[1], to be particularly insightful and disturbing.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Windup_Girl

Monopoly was first published in 1935 and the prices haven't increased since. That makes the cost of a stay at the most expensive hotel $34,000 in today's money, which is far more than I'd ever pay to stay at a real hotel...

Ignoring inflation, you can compare the price of staying at that hotel with buying the land it's built on for a relative estimation of the cost.

I mentioned abortion, etc, simply because they are currently contentious in US society.

For a history lesson, consider how unfortunate it would have been to have had this technology back when England kept switching its official religion from Catholic to Protestant and believers in the wrong one were murdered by the state. It would have made the whole slaughter much easier if they could run a quick SQL query to determine who was in Father Jack's parish and where their cell phone said they were hiding out.

It spins the story around in such a way that Americans can relate to the dangers of a surveillance state.

You're suggesting that the NSA is just looking for bad guys and that they should be able to capture evil muslim extremists.

But now the US government decides to bring back alcohol prohibition. Drinking, they say, is immoral, and so are the people who drink. Do you still have nothing to fear?

Abortion gets outlawed, and its supporters are branded as immoral. Still got nothing to fear?

Creationism gets accepted as a viable, scientific alternative to evolution and gets taught in all schools, and people who believe otherwise are dangerous subversives.

Are you now one of the bad guys? Are the NSA now interested in you?

I find it interesting that Americans can believe that the right to bear arms will protect them from the world's largest military, should it ever be run by tyrants, but at the same time believe that the government will always share the same moral code that they themselves hold.

Over the years I've learned in the region of 40 programming languages and am fluent in about a dozen. I spent 9 years as a web developer and switched to iOS using ObjC a couple of years ago.

Objective-C is by far my favorite language. I can code up an ObjC solution to a problem far faster than I could with JavaScript, C, C++, C#, Java, Python or anything else I've used. I adore ObjC's meta programming capabilities, its simplicity, its fixes for issues I encountered in C++, the way it gives high-level abstractions if I want them but allows me to drop to low-level C if I need to, and its encouragement of self-documenting code.

More importantly than any of that, I have more fun with Objective-C than any other language.

I've got a production app I switched from nibs to storyboards. It's got a storyboard for the iPhone and a separate storyboard for the iPad. 58 views on each. I'm using segues for pretty much all navigation. It's working amazingly well for me.

"some kind of scene abstraction":

http://simianzombie.com/files/javascript/canvasui4.html