muuh-gnu

How is he supposed to know in advance that they will not try to kill him if that legal option is on the table and they are known to be willing to make examples out of previous whistleblowers like Bradley Manning?

And even if he is not threatened with outright execution, even slightly less radical but more likely punishments, like that of Manning, are sufficiently radical to justify defecting to the Soviet Union. Even a simple life in some far away Siberian village will be more endurable than a US 24/7 waterboarding & force-feeding facility.

It was R6's goal also. But it didnt accomplish the stated goal but just introduced more incompatibility into the overall Scheme ecosystem. But instead letting all implementations at least get up to R6, they now have R7 on the horizon. They afre churning standards out more quickly as implementors can implement them.

And frankly, I dont see what the point will be: R7 small is not much differrent than R5, so it is kind of pointless. R7 big is as big as common lisp, and very few implementations will have the resources and the willingness to implement it and discard their current non-standard APIs they had for years. And even if the majority of them manages to implement R7, they will finally reach the point where Common LIsp was 1994, with no added value over Common Lisp, provided of course they dont decide to obsolete R7 also and get to R8 before that.

It is the Scmeme way: You'll quickly see half a dozen of different and incompatible implementations, but not a single newsworthy project on top of them. And soon after that, they will get bored and start yet another cycle of speciation.

> We call this a "democracy"

The German Democratic Republic called itself a democracy. Its president Walter Ulbricht at one occasion even said "It must look like democracy, but we must keep control in our hands".

We also merely call outselves a democracy, but in prectice we arent one. The game, the rules of which we didnt write, cant change and still have to abide by, is engineered to, like the GDR, merely give the people a semblance of democracy to keep em busy and calm. We wouldnt go voting for nothing, so it has to be a democracy, otherwise we wouldnt do it, right? Right. In practice, it is not a democracy, but a prisoners dilemma on a country level. In pure theory, we could win the game but only if we achieved levels of organisation and cooperation which in practice are near impossible to achieve. And in this game, we woud actualy play _against_ our politicians, not with them.

Considering the massive immigration of Muslims and their continuing radicalization instead of assimilation, the whole of western Europe including Germany is going to turn into an "enemy" 20-30 years down the road.

Europe is an US ally today not because of the geography, but because of the Europeans. But the Europeans have mostly given up making babies and will in 1-2 generations be mostly replaced by more fertile Muslims hostile to the US.

For example the English population in the capital of the UK, has fallen below 50%. The English are already a ethnic minority in their own capital. It is just a matter of time when the people making decision about the UK nuke arsenal and military infrastructure are Muslims loyal not to the Queen but to Pakistan, Somalia or some other Jihadi US hating shithole.

It would be silly to declare a quickly dying/changing continent an perpetual ally and stop monitoring them just because they have been allies 20 years ago.

> the position you're arguing for is literally the opposite of innovation.

So what? I dont see any innovation here. It is haute couture like change for changes sake masqueraded as innovation.

Computers have become too important tools to allow a few key players to enforce a crazy planned obsolescence cycle.

> Imagine if, after Apple unveiled the iPhone

I was not talking about toys.

> But pushing citizens to use Linux is NOT government business

Why not? The goverment standardizes everything else, from screws to seat belts to yogurts, why not stop the crazy update-planned-obsolescence cycle pushed by commercial entities and agree on a "standard UI" for normal people?

The amount of unnecessary changes in UIs has become unbearably crazy. And since those changes are forced from all sides, there is no way to vote with your wallet.

Whoever wants to constantly relearn the same stuff over and over and over, and today relearn the Ribbon, tomorrow Metro, and so on, is free to do it. But normal, everyday folks should not have to deal with this shit. Computers are supposed to be boring, everyday tools to accomplish everyday tasks, not fashion statements.

If the commercial world is not willing or able to keep computers useful tools, the goverment has to step in and slow down the amount of changes and prevent the giant waste of tediously gathered know-how.

Tablets, like mobiles generally sufferer from planned obsolescence. They are not meant to be used and receive updates for years and years, like people used XP.

I want my grandma to not have to relearn to yet another UI every two years. Canonical has commited to support the LTS releases for half a decade, which, while not coparable to XP, is for older folks still a better bet than anything the mobile world has to offer.

Well, I know a number of economically liberal Pirates and Pirate voters who gave up simply because of the basic income and other leftist policies.

While this clearly is just anecdotal, it might explain the bigger pattern why the Party had more success 3 years ago while it was clearly economically liberal, and while it is stagnating today where it is clearly turning more and more to the left. Younger Germans, who initially grew the Pirates, neither wished nor need yet another leftist utopia lying to voters about things they cant finance.

It was a widely debated topic inside the Pirate Party during their heyday 1-2 years ago. They declared basic income as one of their core goals, which rendered them unelectable for many people and accelerated their downfall.

If he open sources it, and the company goes bankrupt without that income source, it will bitrot and cease to be important for humanity.

The system has to self sustain somehow.

If you want a similar system that is completely free and GPL, look at Maxima. It originates in DOE Macsyma and is Mathematica's direct predecessor. Since the company went bankrupt, the development went on at a glacial pace. Mathematicas commercial develompent model overtook it several times.

It is not just like Land of Lisp, it seems to be just Land of Lisp ported to Racket by a group of students supervised by Conrad Barski and Matthias Felleisen. Barski and Felleisen arent even credited as the primary authors of the book.

You dont do SICP to "learn Lisp", you do SICP to learn fundamental programming principles. SICP just happens to use Scheme because one of the authors of SICP was also one of the authors of Scheme. The difference between Scheme and Lisp is big enough to justify them having different names and Scheme not being "just another dialect of Lisp".

The problem with Scheme is not the language, the problem is that the ecosystem is so hopelessly balkanized, that it is useless for practical purposes and nobody uses it for anything interesting except for teaching of SICP. You have tiny standards covering only base language constructs, and everything else is left to implementations of which 1001 different one exists and each implements the same stuff in a different, incompatible way, so there is no code portability. So an large number of Scheme users, instead of developing interesting and useful _new_ libraries, instead rewrite 1001 different implementations and 1001 different manuals covering the same area. If you write something and tell me you wrote it in Scheme, the first thing I'd have to ask is "Which one?" because your code will not run on the 1000 remaining ones. The scheme ecosystem is the prime example of code non-reuse, of the NIH syndrome and waste of man-decades of effort, so while the language itself is nice for teaching, the existing worst-practices are examples of what _not_ to do.

Lisp became a "language internally used by Google" when Google purchased ITA with a Lisp code-base so large and Lisp-only staff so large, that it is unlikely that it will ever be rewritten or that the staff will be retrained to use Java.

> and I'm left to wonder why they wouldn't leave it as a choice.

Because choice in UI configuration leads to UI diversity and UI diversity leads to the dilution of the UI brand.

They want all machines to look the same.

When are you going to give up the capitalized acronym LISP? It has the same archaic vibe and makes you want to code in it as much as in FORTRAN. Just call it Lisp.

> Why 140 characters?

Historical. Twitter started out as a web-sms gateway.

> I still don't get the value of twitter

The value is in social capital. Important people post there exclusively.

> How is [1] better then [2]?!

It isnt. But [2] came to the scene after [1] so [1] has a bigger momentum. Being slightly better does not mean everybody suddenly will switch. The perceived improvement has to be bigger than the cost of switching.

> Or is there something else that worries you about FTP?

You know what his objection likely is. Computing is a fashion industry now, so if you want to sound modern, you have to use something "new" solely because it is new, and stop using "old" stuff because it doesnt run on Rails and isnt agile or whatever.

Because 1001 different Schemes exist and the code between them is not portable because the Scheme standard is so tiny.

Scheme code is so hopelessly unportable,that you can not even talk about "writing Scheme". You are either writing Gauche, or Chicken, or Racket, and once you write it, your code stays in that tiny little ecosystem with not more than 10 different users each.

The ecosystem didnt come into existence by magic. The early adopters did have a choice into which language to invest their time. Obviously the R syntax alone was enough of an incentive to starts building useful libraries in it, instead of lisp, python, etc.

Not only bias, but obviously pure ignorance too, at least with respect to Lisp. In his table, Lisp seems to be unsuitable both for meta programming and multiple dispatch, which always have been touted as Lisp's major features.

> I find multiple dispatch to be a great match for writing mathematical algorithms, especially because of the ad-hoc specialization that it allows based on all parameter types. OO approaches always seemed weird

This _is_ an OO approach, just not the common Java-type OO approach. Common Lisp's Object System (CLOS) has had multiple dispatch for decades.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_dispatch

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Lwayers are not the problem. The law makers and the law making and decision making process is the problem.

> LibreOffice doesn't even come close.

Your post was very, very light on details.

> Here is a video of KDE's

KDE commited suicide with 4.0. After that, whatever they produced was basically irrelevant, because nobody could take them seriously any more. Nobody is going to bet anything on KDE because of the fear that they could pull another "lets throw away a perfectly working 3.5 and rewrite everything from scratch" again. The same applies to Gnome also. Gnome could have avoided the fate by learning from KDE's mistakes, but they screwed up even worse, unimaginably worse.

Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, and so on. They are the picture-perfect example of the saying in effect. For all practical intents and purposes, KDE and Gnome are dead now.

> scientists want to spend their time doing science, not improving free software.

Wasnt the whole point of science to build their own chain of verifiable tools to rely on, instead of having to trust secret, unverified commercial black boxes?

This is a rather superficial reason to start such a project.

Mathematica is non popular because of its syntax, it is popular because of its extensive library, graphics capabilities and documentation.

If you want to make free software packages more competitive compared to mathematica, the best way would be to work on extending their libraries, documentation and graphical capabilities, not increase the fragmentation by starting yet another package from scratch doing the same thing just using a slightly different syntax.

For all intents and purposes, from an user's point of view, this project is as a waste of time as writing yet another scheme interpreter.

Maxima [1] is both a predecessor and alternative to both Mathematica and Maple.

It is an descendant of DOE Macsyma, which ran only on expensive Lisp machines, and porting it to PCs was slow enough to give Mathematica and Maple a headstart.

It is kind of a shame that all the math and physics departments all over the world keep using closed source black box solvers instead of working on improving free and inspectable alternatives like Maxima, Octave, Sage, etc.

[1] http://maxima.sourceforge.net/

> how these studies control for confounding factors like that

The answer is: they simply do not at all.

[1] http://www.salem-news.com/fms/pdf/2011-12_JLM-Boyle-Hill.pdf

[2] http://www.circumstitions.com/HIV-SA.html