danssig

Or you can use AirVideo. It converts while it streams or you can have it just do the conversion and dump it in iTunes so it will sync to the ipad automatically for offline usage.

Well, that's the thing: even in the US, as bad as it has become, saying vile racist comments on the internet wouldn't get you put in jail.

Is the guy a scumbag? Obviously. Should people go to jail for speaking their mind? That's probably where we diverge and think each other are crazy, but the key is: if you can be put in jail for, say, racism then a corrupt government need only make disagreement be framed as racist, for example. It's safer to just allow anyone to say what they want (with obvious exceptions like yelling "FIRE!") and point out why their argument is stupid.

Don't forget; the UK also put someone in jail for tweeting.

Seems like a proper time for civil disobedience.

I would be good with getting rid of prisons entirely. If someone is violent and dangerous then they're probably insane and should be treated, not "punished".

As far as your example, I find it bizarre that you find a person threatening to kill you with a weapon in your face is on the same level as someone who empties your bank account behind the scenes. The latter is more financially devastating but the first is more terrifying to be on the receiving end of and could result in you dying or being crippled.

Further, I didn't really have in mind some guy doing a hold up. I was thinking more about murders and people who will do violence to others if not contained.

And finally, it's not about "evil" and it's not about what someone "deserves". Throwing someone in prison doesn't fix anything. It doesn't make them stop committing crimes, in fact it usually means they'll commit more when they get out. It might make some people feel better about themselves to know that someone is suffering, but I would question the mental health of that point of view as well.

It depends on what we're talking about. If a person stole money then they should have to pay that back with reasonable interest. So that wouldn't be tied to how much money the person has, they're basically giving back what they took.

If it is some other crime that can't be handled by simply giving the money back you could just scale up the costs, for example. E.g. if you make $1m/yr, then the penalty is 90% of your earnings. If you make $10m/yr, it's 99%.

Just brainstorming. I don't know what the proper solution is, but looking people in a cage seems crazy to me.

There are many options. Charge them money (and ensure you can force them to pay it back, e.g. wage garnishing), public service was suggested, etc. Looking them away from their life seems incredibly excessive.

Or in Common Lisp you would be able to "signal" a condition and then handle the situation. Signal will just do nothing unless some higher level code has an explicit handler for it [1].

[1] I remember reading a MIME encoding library years ago. There was a point where the code would detect an error but if the error was at the end it would just drop that part and write in the last couple of bytes. In this situation, most clients won't care that this is happening but what about those that do? Since this code signalled error by returning NULL there was no way to signal "saw an error, but fixed it". In Common Lisp, signal could have been used for clients that would want to report on this.

Or drive prices down. You would be cutting out a lot of middle men going this route.

I find locking people away from their life for more than a day or two absolutely barbaric. I'm surprised a country often rated most democratic in the world locks people away for non-violent offenses.

Wtf? Why hasn't this post blended into the background already? US healthcare inexpensive? Pretty much everyone who's ever looked into this disagrees.

Worrying about about health insurance is silly? What a moronic attitude. Health care is a reverse lottery and there's practically no top end if you end up with "winning" genetics/car crash/whatever. "Not worrying" about healthcare insurance is irresponsible and wreckless. If you end up needing expensive emergency care the rest of us have to foot that bill because you were so arrogant as to think it couldn't happen to you.

Unbelievable.

8??? The company I'm at is still on 6!

Oh I agree with that. If Vista didn't kill them (or even hurt them, really) I can't imagine this will either.

I have a MBP and I can install what ever I want. What are you talking about?

That's not strictly true. People generally skip every other version of windows because somehow every other version sucks.

We'll have to agree to disagree on that. Right now I'm a cog in a big company and I know what I do isn't as valuable as what entrepreneurs do. I came in to a team who had a horrible software system, replaced everything and brought running costs way down by decreasing code size while increasing features and maintainability. But in the end, it's all for nothing. As soon as I'm gone the team will either be decommissioned entirely, handed over to some other team who will have no use for what I've done or outsourced somewhere that will rewrite everything again.

Big companies are just a game of musical chairs for managers. They just need to show something on their 360 reports so they can get a promotion and they couldn't care less what happens to their previous team once they get that. They don't even care about the company itself, only climbing the ladder. If the company fails then they can just move somewhere else with their new higher rung experience and start the climb again. If you're a developer in such a place either you're trying to play the game yourself or you're literally whoring out your mind and fingers for cash. The job itself is utterly meaningless and can never be made meaningful because what you produce is irrelevant. The only part that matters is the politics.

It's true that many of us end up here because we have no other choices, but it's important to keep in mind what you're actually doing. Don't romanticize being an intellectual prostitute. Save up as much as you can so you can get out. If you're happy to stay in such a place, then yea I do have less respect for you.

You think so? I think Gambling irresponsibly is considered bad, but Gambling if you can afford it is pretty fun.

I don't know. But when choosing a system I wouldn't chose SVN for svn:externals. Git has submodules which I find nicer.

I think you and the parent may be talking past each other. When most people talk about "un-ambitious" people they're talking about "cogs". People working in some generic job in a big company.

Your dad sounds like he probably effectively has his own business which I admire and aspire to.

Personally what I hate is this attitude that think if you didn't become google/facebook you failed. There was a reddit post a while back about some guy who opened a cleaning service that replaced his "cog" salary and allowed him to quit his day job. One of the first comments was "this won't scale!". He was able to quit his job! How much more scale does he need?

>Unlike the poster below thinks though I don't have 40 free hours a week these days. I am working to build the next big thing because this is in my blood,

I suspect this is what the poster below meant by having 40 free hours a week. If someone handed me a billion dollars I would probably take a bit more vacation than now, but quite working? No way! I have a million ideas. I'd like to do as many as possible in the time I have.

>I would not want to work for Facebook for any amount of money.

For any amount? I'd even work for the Koch brothers for, say, $10m/yr. Of course I'll be gone from their company and the entire rat race after a year, but still.

I disagree completely. I would say everyone should start with Smalltalk. Start with something beautiful and clean and then learn the messy stuff that makes it possible later.

What about going onto, say, Linux and making your own graphical toolkit from the ground up?

Ack, Darcs had a problem so you went with SVN? I hope you've at least switched to using git as your SVN client by now.

The concept is quite awkward in any single dispatch language. The biggest WTF ever is Racket adding single dispatch OO! You actually have to say (send object 'message).

It's a good, if fairly old [1] insight. The fact is, there are two kinds of patterns: architectural patterns (e.g. "message bus", "web service", etc.) and there are language deficiency patterns (e.g. factory, double dispatch/visitor, etc.). A good way to gauge the power of a language is to see how many of these patterns you need.

For example, when I was exposed to Smalltalk I fell in love with it. So many of the patterns I was used to needing were not necessarily there. That's because Smalltalk is more expressively powerful than, say, Java. You see this directly in the GoF patterns book as several of the patterns only provide C++ code and say "Smalltalk doesn't need this as it does X".

Eventually, though, I begin to see that pg was right and single dispatch is a subset (in this case; inferior) of generic functions. The issue was double dispatch. Smalltalk needs it, Lisp doesn't. I never have to write boring double dispatch wiring in Lisp because of how generic functions work.

So I don't think it's OO itself that is flawed (though it's not as a big a deal as it's made out to be. It's a form of code organization, specifically global variable demarcation and code reuse), but rather many OO languages that are weak enough to require programmers to hand-code out these common patterns instead of either providing it in the language or providing a powerful enough language to let us solve it once.

[1] http://blog.plover.com/2006/09/11/

Not really because people were paying for this. They don't have to pay to play scamville.

I don't know, things actually seem to be trending the opposite. Who would have thought that people would spend so much time in facebook playing games that have seemingly no point.

I also disagree that HTML5 is any easier. After over 20 years of trying, it seems unlikely that browsers are ever going to converge on any kind of standard and even if they did there will probably always be people on a bad version.

Personally, I'm betting on a world with native front ends to REST web applications.

I think it very likely is the case. They can't put ads on the iOS app without giving Apple a cut so they are very likely making the App subtly worse as time goes by.

Someone winning the lottery is more likely than someone getting hit by a bus while being struck by lightening. You specifically winning the lottery is probably less likely than you specifically getting hit by a bus at the same time as being struck by lightening.