tallpapab

Interesting article. One can easily notice that most folks seem to treat the speed limit as a minimum speed rather than a maximum speed. It's not just designers designing for speed. They do so because of market demand. That demand is boosted by advertising - both overt and culturally pervasive imagery. Buckle up folks. Try not to speed. You're really not saving much, if any, time. Also minimize left turns and lane changes. When you do turn (or change lanes) always use your turn indicator. When cars are robots they can do these things. The worry it that freedom loving consumers will still choose thrills over safety and this may stunt the adoption of robocars.

I feel for your brother and understand your fatherly fears. I have three sons. They are all fine now, but ... One got hit by a drunken driver, one broke his neck, and the other fell onto a wrought iron fence which stabbed through his skull and into his brain. All three are healthy and active. Each came so close to death. As you say, many of the largest changes are quite beyond our control. I frequently find myself having to choke back the terror to keep focus and keep moving.

I still have one of these from the 1964 World's Fair. I figure it's worth at least - oh - ten cents.

So I had this clever little comment worked out. I was going to say that a formula for designing a unique building - and, hence, gaining a star reputation - would be to pick a design that everyone else knows has a fatal flaw. That way no others like it would have been built. But, reading the comments I see that this exact mistake has been made more than once. So much for theory.

Ha! Great story. My favorite line: "It's hard nowadays to find an honest man who stays bought."

Strong position? Do you mean the Post Office thing? Or the "Balderdash" comment warning about getting distracted by generalizing people? Or did you mean the joke about getting ads for stuff I already bought? Sorry if I came on too strong. The boomer bashing is getting old (get it?). It's in no way helpful.

The original article seemed to be a bit political and so I bailed on it. Perhaps I'm getting lazy in my old age.

Thanks for confirming my understanding about asymmetric keys. I forget how the pass phrase fits into this. Is it required in order to use the private key? Also the article and you use the term "master key". What is that? Is that just another term for private key?

Thanks. Now stop being distracted.

This is all very interesting. So far it seems to be used to show me adverts for stuff I have already bought.

Balderdash! How many people are in the baby boom generation? And you paint them all with one bush? Do you do the same for people of a particular race? Upon closer inspection you will find that few boomers are responsible for your woes. Your parents maybe, but most of us are as powerless as you. "Industrial mindset"? Poppycock! I look around and I see many young people serving up enormous amounts of their private information on public forums. Boomers have nothing to do with this. Quit obsessing about "boomers". It's such a useless distraction.

All this increased digital surveillance comes at a time when the US Post Office is under artificial financial pressure. Just last night the news reported a plan to eliminate direct delivery to the door in favor of some sort of community mail box facilities. Interesting coincidence that physical letters (whose contents are still protected by federal statute) are being discouraged while unprotected content is being collected.

Please forgive my rudimentary (and possible erroneous understanding. There are three things important to public-key encryption. The public key, the private key (together called the key pair) and a certificate. If I understand it the cert is just to give confidence that you have the correct public key. So the NSA having access to the cert is a non issue as everyone has access to same. That's its purpose in life. Also the public key is publicly available or the system wouldn't work. The only sensitive things are the private keys. Is this right so far? If I want to encrypt a message to someone I need to use that person's public key. I use the cert to make sure I have the right one. Now the message can only be decrypted with the private key. So how can the NSA decrypt such a message? They would need the private key. The ISP doesn't have it. Even if they have the private key don't they need a pass phrase to use it?

Not sure how the above applies to https or to ssh. Still, in both cases I don't think access to the cert breaks things. Indeed access to it and the public keys are essential to it working at all. (I guess one can operate without the cert too if you trust the source.)

What I'd like to see (Monty Python Gumby) is some dates on his web page. Maybe a GitHub page. I got Incosolata a few years ago and have been using it since, but he says he's working on it. When was the last update?

For my 86 year old mother Facebook has been a boon and a great confusion. She keeps asking me about how people send her messages. There's email. There's Facebook Messages. There's her Facebook "wall". Then other people's statuses show up on her news feed or whatever you call her "home" page. She thinks those are also messages sent to her. It's a bit much. We think we have this straight because we work with all these things. But, Great Grunt, it can be hard for the uninitiated to figure out. Thankfully, no one has talked her into having a Twitter account or a smart phone with SMS and a few dozen social apps.

Thanks. I didn't know that and wondered where they went.

"Fix the problem, not the blame." - I first heard this in the movie Red October, I think. The other one that come to mind is John Wooden, the famous basketball coach, claiming that he liked players who made mistakes because those were the ones trying to make things happen.

How does ctags do when a variable name is repeated in a different scope? I do rather wish for a really good vim type replacement for the editor in NetBeans though. I keep inadvertently entering vim motion commands in my java text - sigh.

As quickly as you can turn your back on Visual Studio. (Sorry, just kidding ... sort of.) Eclipse and NetBeans are a couple IDEs (there are others) that use a module system to build what can appear to be a monolith. Look into OSGi which is an attempt to standardize modularizing GUIs. Of course, I haven't run these tools on 500k lines of C++ just half that of java code. P.S. I used "find . -name \*.java | xargs cat | wc -l" to count the lines of java code. I did not use the IDE for that, giggle.

Uh oh. After a few decades of Unix I _still_ have a poor understanding, sniff. I have in years past used sed and awk and perl -e and other such to rename as well other things. However, the regular expressions to ensure you're not including things you don't want involves a bit of effort. I'm in the Unix choir, but I still like the shiny new IDEs which save me time (especially with Java as noted elsewhere).

Thanks for the reply. ctags is a great tool, but it is not as easy as an IDE. IDEs keep track without my having to explicitly rebuild the tag data base. IDEs have plugins for different languages. The dynamic flagging of errors and warnings without having to explicitly compile is a time saver. Refactoring tools can also save quite a bit of time. Renaming a function becomes trivial in an IDE.

Of course, there are many things for which vim and bash (":%! sort -n" anyone?) are far superior to an IDE. I tend to use both.

I agree that many underestimate the power of bash for development. Make, in particular, is much more widely usable. However, there are some things that I find very convenient in an IDE that are harder to do at the command line. Finding usages of a name (variable or function); finding the definition of same. Renaming same throughout the code base. Yes, I know about "find | xargs grep", but it's a bit more convoluted than IDE usage. Maybe I just don't know enough. Can anyone point to command line or vim tools to accomplish these tasks? Code analysis and warnings are another thing IDEs seem to do better.

You sound angry. Not sure why. Some feel that his tax evasion efforts are unseemly. Not sure why you're focused on his lucky strike.

Et toi! Laissez les bon temps rouler!

I've had a better time learning German than other languages just because my grandparents were German speakers. So as a small child I heard sounds which help my accent today. So just another of the many things to consider when making this choice. If you want to _speak_ as opposed to just read then you might look to a language others spoke around you when you were little. Even if they just had an accent.

Let's see, Eduardo invested $30,000 in Facebook? And he's perceived (so he can borrow) to be worth over three billion now. So he can afford to invest $30,000 again about 100,000 times. Maybe he'll hit again. I'm not sure his investment is something to brag about though. He doesn't look good right now. Many folks might avoid his investments because they think he is disrespectful and immoral.

tl;dr; Unpolished speaker is right.

Sorry. That was one of the worst things I've read this week. The jumping to conclusions, the unstated assumptions. The gross misuse of statistics. I love the one about 44% of pedestrian accidents happen at traffic lights. I think it was Willie Sutton, the famous bank robber, who said he robbed banks because that's where the money was. If pedestrians cross in crosswalks that's where you're likely to hit them. Because that's where the pedestrians are. Oy! Don't get me started. It was seriously put forth a few years ago in Berkeley that all crosswalks in the city should be erased on the theory that pedestrians become "overconfident" in the crosswalks. The evidence given was that cars hit pedestrians mostly in the crosswalks. Luckily the traffic engineer who proposed this took a job in the suburbs.

I think of myself as a computer programmer. I try to be a software writer. I market myself as a Consulting Software Engineer.

Ironic that you refer to an RFC. CC was used in correspondence long before internets and RFCs (as was BCC). It meant "carbon copy" just as you said originally. This is a bit like updating an icon. The icon (actually acronym) was left unchanged and someone thought to call it "courtesy copy" because they must have thought carbon copies obsolete and confusing. Actually, I don't know the genesis of the term "courtesy copy", but I'm pretty sure it was an update.

Sorry this whole rambling note is further evidence that old people (and their icons) don't make sense anymore.

Yes, carbon copy. I used them and still have some from ancient correspondence. I think "Courtesy Copy" was an attempt to update the acronym which is amusing and much in line with folks wanting to update icons. Not necessarily a bad thing, just kind of fun to know about.

Wow! This really should be known more widely.