deadbadger

Hi - thanks for responding. My deploy's gone through now, but I'm curious how I ended up contacting a mirror - I was running the default bundler capistrano task, so (approx):

  $ cd <deploy-path> && bundle install --gemfile Gemfile --path <shared-path>/bundle --without development test

For the time being I've rolled back the gem changes and applied the suggested hotfix (removing XML from the default params parsers). I've been trying for a solid hour to get a deploy out with the updated rails version, and it's just not having any of it.

Edit: finally got it out. This deploy model is completely screwed, though. It just shouldn't be normal to have a service like rubygems.org in the daily deploy loop. This is absolutely not a knock on the fantastic volunteers that run it - they simply shouldn't be dealing with this sort of load spike.

Getting continuous errors on deploy during the bundle stage like so:

  /usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/remote_fetcher.rb:215:in `fetch_http': bad response Not Found 404 (http://bb-m.rubygems.org/quick/Marshal.4.8/activesupport-3.2.11.gemspec.rz)

Registration is not a necessary condition for enforcement of trademark rights (although it obviously helps). In some jurisdictions, of which the USA is one, an established history of use can be sufficient to establish rights to a given mark.

So while iCloud Communications do not appear to have a registration for the marks, that doesn't mean they have no rights to them.

http://www.uspto.gov/faq/trademarks.jsp#_Toc275426680

The government pays the train companies to run a transport service; departure times are an essential part of that, in a way that crisps quite plainly (or quite saltedly, ha ha ha* ) are not.

I agree that large-scale API provision is added value, and I have no objection to a private company making a profit from that. What I object to is a private company being handed a monopoly on that private data, with no effective oversight being given to the terms under which they provide access to it.

ATOC, by dint of the exclusive licence granted to them by Network Rail, have complete control of the market for this publically-funded data. They are adding value by serving it as a reliable API, certainly; however the price they are able to command has little relation to that value, because they have no competitors.

* sorry

Maximise the value for whom? The data is being monopolistically exploited by a private entity, for private profit. Where is the value for the taxpayer there?

I think most people would agree that taxpayer value for public expenditure should be maximised, and were the money from the licences going directly into the public coffers then we could certainly have a discussion about whether taxpayer value is maximised by selling the data or giving it away for free.

That, however, is not what is happening here. As so frequently happens in the UK, the data is publically funded, and the profits are privately realised.

But then don't you have to make your choice about whether no-value is an error when you return the value, rather than when you make the call?

With #try et al it's made obvious at the point the message is sent whether it'll be swallowed by nil (and that you're fine with this). To me this seems safer than having two classes of entities knocking round, one swallowing messages and one not, and no way to tell at a glance which is which.

(I've not used Smalltalk btw, so apologies if I've misunderstood...)

On the subject of try() chaining, there's always Ick, which implements (among other things) a kind of Maybe monad for Ruby. This acts as a self-propagating nil guard, so you're able to write things like:

  maybe(Person.find("geoff")) { |person| person.manager.authority_level.permissions }

http://ick.rubyforge.org/

Well, possibly - but the point is that while ubiquitous safe seats are obviously detrimental, so is their elimination at all costs. The problem with safe seats isn't that popular politicians are consistently elected; it's that minority voices in those constituencies are marginalised. You can certainly address the latter by preventing the former, but it's a far from ideal way of doing so.

(Edited for ghastly sentence construction, sorry)

A related effect, of course, is that it becomes practically impossible for politicians to plan for any sort of career, or parties to make personnel plans with more than a single-parliament horizon. Even a candidate with a hefty 60% support can expect only a single term at more than even odds.

Not only would this rob the legislature of experience, it would also mean politicians towards the end of each term would be focused on securing their next job, rather than performing their current one.

I see from your profile you're based in Canada - here in the UK, I've found it's the regional redirects that are breaking things (because the regional sites aren't on the new setup yet). Assuming the same thing is affecting Canadian users, if you delete either the "ca." from the hostname or the #! from the path string, the link should work.

I only wish I could up-vote this more. See also this earlier Language Log essay (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003366.h...), in which Pullum points out that passives occur in "Politics and the English Language" at a considerably higher rate than was typical in contemporary periodicals - Orwell couldn't follow his own advice, even as he was dispensing it.

The same goes for Strunk and White, who in the very passage instructing writers to abjure the passive, say:

"Many a tame sentence of description or exposition can _be made_ lively and emphatic by substituting a transitive in the active voice for some such perfunctory expression as /there is/ or /could be heard/."

Still, at least the guide linked in the OP has picked actual examples of the passive voice as illustrations, and concedes that there are times when it can be reasonably used (sorry, "writers can reasonably use it"). This makes it something of a rarity, even if the advice is still poor.

Certainly not when you're trying to judge energy payback horizons for a device incorporating silicon, nickel and cobalt, all of which come with significant costs of production. What if the degradation isn't linear, as seems very likely? Obviously it's a significant improvement, but 45 hours' operation tells us virtually nothing about the device's likely practicality.

The real problem here is that, as usual, we're forced to speculate about what should be straightforward facts, because the story in the OP is based on a dumbed-down press release relating to a talk we can't see, describing research we can't freely access (http://web.mit.edu/chemistry/dgn/www/pubs/publications_2011....), and as a result contains almost no actual information. So it's grandiose claims "we could power the third world!" without any means of assessing whether they're even plausible.

None of this is to say the new cell isn't really interesting, of course. But it's just so typical of science churnalism.

It is indeed. Now if only Google Accounts would integrate with Google Accounts, everything would be spiffing.

</cheapshot>

If you check out the relevant paragraph of the Directive itself (quoted below) you'll see that's just the BBC's rather odd interpretation. The Directive doesn't mention shopping cart cookies at all, but rather carves out an area of potential exemptions for information that is essential to the service the user is accessing.

The BBC's technology reporting veers wildly between the patronising, the embarrassing, and the just plain wrong. I think this is a stab at the former.

From para 66 of the Directive ( http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2... ):

"Exceptions to the obligation to provide information and offer the right to refuse should be limited to those situations where the technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user."

I would take this to mean that session cookies, shopping cart cookies and wotnot are exempted. But I'm a coder, not a lawyer, so pinch of salt 'n all that.

Edit: in fact reading it more closely, it would appear that this statement merely places a restriction on exemptions that individual nations implementing the Directive might carve out. If they make exceptions, they must be limited to the situations described, but they don't have to exempt all such uses. Which is a less-than-comforting thought.