Pitarou

In the UK, they used to use the volume of Wembley Stadium (a well-known sports ground), but then it was demolished and rebuilt.

River of fire comes out of the ground. Hmm. Where did it come from?

they estimated that Kuwae’s eruption had released vast quantities of magma, enough to fill the Empire State Building 37 million times over

This is a unit of journalistic measurement I have never come across before.

Regardless of what the law says, in practice, breaking TSA equipment, interfering with TSA duties and, above all else, pissing off a TSA officer are all arrestable offences.

If there’s any question about culpability, all they have to do is ask you, “Is there anything in your baggage you think we should know about?” and if you don’t disclose it then, you’re screwed.

What? You say you were never asked such a question? You say you even tried to warn them? Well I have sworn testimony from a TSA officer that says they ALWAYS ask that question, and you’re the guy who was caught carrying a piece of equipment designed for trickery and vandalism. Case dismissed.

Way to make friends with the TSA. ;-)

No, he’s doing both.

Wow, you killed Tails!

I tried visiting the payload site with Tails OS (a Linux distro for privacy minded) and the whole OS is frozen.

There’s a way: it’s pointless and nobody will use it.

It’s very much a solution looking for a problem. If there was some advantage to using cryptocurrency for sex services, they’d already be doing it, just like they do for illegal items distributed by mail.

THESE PEOPLE HAVE TO MEET! So why do thy need cryptocoin? Cryptocoin just makes life harder, because you have to convert that coin into cash you can spend, which is troublesome and leaves an e-paper trail.

And the market for erotic services that don’t involve meetings gets by just fine without the need for crypto. If it didn’t, it would have moved to the Silk Road and its successors long ago.

Just curious:

If I was an Australian citizen and I wanted access to my full medical records, would it be cheaper / easier to go through legal or illegal channels?

So a disruptive technology is one that disrupts the marketplace, but markets are impossible to predict, so disruptive technologies can only be identified in hindsight. Have I got that right?

TL;DR Business theory based on cherry-picked case studies, post hoc rationalization and survivorship bias fails to make a compelling case, but nobody cares, because it tells an appealing story.

Is there an easy way to do represent something like this in Cell:

    <p>I will say this <em>emphatically</em></p>

    <p><span>I will say this </span><em>emphatically</em></p>

    $text: "Buy now!!".

    $components: ["Buy now!!"],

    $components: [
      {$type: "span", $text: "Buy "},
      {$type: "em", $text: "now!!},
    ],

    $components: [
      "Buy ",
      {$type: "em", $text: "now!!},
    ],

I don’t know why they call it “stateless” either. It clearly isn’t. Are they confused about what the word means?

Simple and useful. What a shame there’s no easy way to integrate Cell into pre-existing code.

Well ... actually ... there IS a way, but this feature is only mentioned one-third of the way into the tutorial – a tutorial that begins with the words “you don't even need to read this tutorial”. So, to someone evaluating Cell, it might as well not exist.

That’s a hint, by the way. :-)

My apologies to all you tab lovers, but I suspect that preferring spaces is a proxy for experience.

What a great idea for an analysis, but I can’t see ANY patterns in the data.

I thought the expressiveness of the language might be a factor. A line of Haskell does more than a line of Java, so it there is more room for bugs. Clearly not.

I thought the age of the language might a factor. We would hope that language designers learn from what has gone before, and make better languages. But Erlang, one of the oldest in the sample, is also one of the least bug-prone.

The one that really shocked me is Ruby vs Python. The two are similar in so many ways, and on the points where they differ, I would have expected that Python’s “one way to do it” philosophy would have made it less bug-prone. That’s clearly not how it works.

After SICP and a little study of functional programming, I started learning about design patterns, and my immediate reaction was, “What’s all the fuss about? I mean ... c’mon ... how else would you solve that problem?”

It took me a while to understand that, if you’ve been raised on Java or C, these things are not obvious at all.

Have you tried using LyX? Or does LyX not really support the kind of things you want to do?

Take a class C.

Alice extends class C with class A, which implements function a.

Bob extends class C with class B, which implements function b.

I have both Alice’s and Bob’s code, and I want to use both a and b. How can I do it?

Of course, there are ways to do it – notably multiple inheritance, if your language supports it – but the point is, in a functional language, this question never even arises. You just import the function definitions and use them, without ever having to think about the mechanics of it.

By the way, I’m not saying that this necessarily makes functional languages better (although I do tend to prefer them). I’m just pointing out that the difference is real.

I don’t wholly disagree with the article, but I think it overstates its case. In particular:

Is there really so much difference between f(o), o.f(), and (f o)?

Yes, there is!

In the case of o.f(), o needs to know about f.

In the case of f(o), f needs to know about o.

Because it’s much easier for the court to reach a judgement about a contract if both parties are clear about what they were expecting to gain from it.

Also, you have to ask why someone chose to sign a one-sided contract. Was it signed under duress? The court shouldn’t enforce that. Was it a gift? The court would rather not get involved with enforcing every casual promise!

I was talking about ignorance among the consumers, not the producers. The farmers certainly know which side their bread is buttered on!

Not for lettuce, no. It has a short shelf life and doesn’t travel well.

Nobody that I know of complains about about the agricultural system here (granted, I live in a farming community :-) ).

I did (granted, I have a background in Economics).

Tell a Japanese how much a tin of tomatoes costs in Japan compared to the US or the EU, or a mango, or even a packet of generic acetaminophen (paracetamol) for that matter.

Now ask them why. Nine times out of ten, they’ll say something about the Japanese culture of quality and attention to detail. To be fair, Japan often does demand higher standards, but that’s not nearly enough to explain the full price discrepancy.

They don‘t complain because they don‘t know what’s going on.

I‘m not sure what you mean by that.

In Japan, a farmer’s vote has roughly twice the weight of an urbanite’s.

Is this more to your liking then:

Japan is peculiarly vulnerable to potato shortages because it restricts imports, even when its own potato crop fails.

Why do you assume that the primary purpose of the regulatory regime is to maintain high standards?

It‘s not as simple as that.

Japan‘s agricultural system was intended to be a temporary prop, to help agriculture recover after the War. The people would experience inflated prices and erratic supplies, but that was thought a price worth paying.

The system has been kept in place for decades longer than its stated purpose required. The forces that keep it in place are powerful, and democratic only in the loosest sense of the word.

Rawls’ is an odd case. If the reports are accurate, he seems to have believed that a strong password on his hard drive gave him legal immunity, and didn’t really try to conceal what he was doing.

Nonetheless, a line has been crossed, and cyber-libertarians have been predicting this breach for as long as I can remember. There’s nothing cyber-libertarians love more than a technical solution to state oppression.