Rent Seeking
Just did a search for 'rent seeking' in this thread, and found none. Privacy is a major issue, but to me Microsoft's extraction of rent for its products is equally big
231 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Mar 2008
Indeed: a person crueller than I might consider the whole piece innumerate tosh. Thoughts do of course have "physical weight" (what other sort is there? Spiritual, literary I guess). The firing of a neuron occurs through passage of many neurotransmitter molecules across a synaptic gap, and they have a finite molecular weight.
Good article, both parts. As for this this half, about defending individual rights against the "plantations" of Google and Facebook, I'd say that we already have the perfect model in the public road network. A neutral state builds and maintains the infrastructure, paid for by taxation, which individuals are then more or less free (within certain safety regs) to use their cars, cycles, motorbikes, lorries, busses on. The railways, since privatisation show the pitfalls of the other model, where private interests monopolise sections of the infrastructure.
I'm in the habit of using "Bollox!" instead of "Hello World!" as my first program example when reviewing a new system (blame my upbringing). Back in PCW days, around 1983, was given Tandy's Model 100, an early handheld computer to review, and time being short had to take it straight to the photographer's studio. Regrettable it still showed "Bollox!" clearly on its small LCD screen, but no-one noticed till after it was printed. Reprinting is surprisingly expensive.
Camel-case makes for more readable naming conventions in large programs - eg. significant lower-case prefixes like eFoo, eBar, eZot, sFoo, sBar, sZot. That's a separate issue from whether or not to enforce such distinctions with case-sensitive compilation: there are strong arguments for and against. Either way, a smart IDE ought to warn about variable accesses that differ only in case.
Seconded. Who wants to wait a day and spend a fortune developing rolls of film that only have one worthwhile pic on them, again? Just take your digital SLR (or probably buy an old Sony Alpha as cheap as a film camera), set its P mode to Black & White, then like Novatone says, think about your composition as if you only have three tries.
All the smartphone companies are losing it - I just had the famous Lollipop problem with a Nexus 7 2012, and Apple had a similar debacle a few years back. The complexity of the hardware is running ahead of ability of QR to keep up and breaking the previously friendly remote update model. Only real solution is to provide equally friendly roll-back to stable version (on Android it's a techies-only image download and manual install).
None of them want to do it, because secretly they don't mind these bork-fests, which scare people into buying next gen hardware and thus prevent Windows XP-style log-jams.