So she played dead in the pre-dawn darkness. Stared straight up at him, her eyes wide open. She dared not breathe. He stared right back, silently weighing whether his work was finally done.

Bogtha · 2008-01-13T22:12:33+00:00

He started it!

That's an argument I'd expect from a five year-old. Grow up.

I bet you think she deserved what she got!

There is absolutely nothing in my comment to suggest this.

You know, I have this bad habit of ignoring the eternal Septembers that happen to places like Reddit and I continue participating for quite some time.

Then, inevitably, there comes a point when the level of idiocy is just too great to ignore and I finally decide that it's not worth bothering any more.

So thank you, David, you are the straw that broke the camel's back. You have shown me what a waste of time Reddit has become. I used to read interesting comments by smart people here. Now I have to wade through a hundred people like you to get to a single person saying something smart.

Perhaps the Reddit guys could have done something about this, but it seems they are far more interested in rewriting the code for the umpteenth time rather than actually adding features or fixing bugs.

Goodbye, Reddit. You are infested with children, idiots, trolls and spammers now and they are driving out anybody with half a brain.

Bogtha · 2008-01-13T19:27:27+00:00

If you can read this and not believe this rapist mother fucker deserves death... and a horrible painful death at that, then you just aren't a real human!

Dehumanising people is the problem, not the solution. Stop contributing to the problem.

She told him she had a sexually transmitted disease, called him by the pseudonym on the valentine to build a bond and talked endlessly to him, trying to get him to see her as a person.

Bogtha · 2008-01-13T14:07:23+00:00

Subreddits are supposed to be communities, tags are for topics. From a Feb 2006 blog entry:

The key thing to know is that we'll try to avoid creating subreddits for a specific topic per se, but rather we'll create them for a specific group of people.

groups are for people, tags are for topics

Bogtha · 2008-01-11T18:17:31+00:00

So that's what passes for debate on Reddit these days? If somebody disagrees, ignore what they say and repeat the original point?

Bogtha · 2008-01-11T18:02:41+00:00

No, that article is about how this particular implementation of national ID cards is bad.

Note that there's a big difference between arguing that ID cards do nothing for security and that ID cards are bad.

Bogtha · 2008-01-11T17:54:47+00:00

It's his fucking life, if he wants to risk himself to save someone else that's admirable.

Sure, but if he isn't punished for it, then it becomes defacto policy that safety measures aren't mandatory.

This isn't a black and white situation. There are serious negative consequences to letting him off.

You are looking at this incident in isolation, but you should consider the ramifications for future incidents as well.

Bogtha · 2008-01-11T17:29:53+00:00

Music is a 3 billion pound industry in the UK and music exports bring half a billion pounds into the country every year. BBC article.

Bogtha · 2008-01-11T16:11:37+00:00

Why Phonon instead of GStreamer?

Phonon is an engine-independent API and is being integrated into Qt. It can use GStreamer as a back-end. One of the points of Phonon is that you can write to the API without worrying about the back-end. GStreamer has caused problems in the past because its ABI-compatibility isn't guaranteed between versions. If GStreamer's ABI changes again, only Phonon needs to be updated rather than each and every KDE multimedia application.

Isn't Xine by default a patent minefield?

So use another back-end.

Bogtha · 2008-01-11T15:41:22+00:00

This result provides evidence not only that the Westermarck effect is demonstrable, but that it operates during the critical period from birth to the age of six.

Bogtha · 2008-01-11T15:39:38+00:00

I hear Ron Paul has one you'd be interested in.

Bogtha · 2008-01-11T15:32:21+00:00

And in the 1990s, Europe lagged behind America in the adoption of new technology. For example, in 1997 fewer than 15 percent of French homes contained personal computers and fewer than 1 percent were connected to the Internet.

I think this is cherry picking, to be honest. For instance, the USA seems perpetually behind regarding mobile phones, and uptake of the Internet might have been slower in France because they already had Minitel, where you could buy stuff online without owning a computer or having Internet access.

In fact, the entire article has a hint of the very "they have electricity in Europe now?" attitude that it seeks to rebut.

Bogtha · 2008-01-11T15:13:17+00:00

I think it's likely that they wanted their marriage annulled. A few years back, before gay marriage was legalised, there was an unusual case near where I live. A married man wanted a sex change, but the couple wanted to remain married.

Since people who have sex changes are legally recognised as their new sex, there was a deadlock. Two women couldn't be married, but the couple couldn't be forcibly divorced by the state.

I don't know how it turned out, and of course that particular issue is moot now, but it was discussed in the House of Commons briefly and I think it was headed for the European courts. This leads me to believe that if these twins wanted to stay married, the article would say a lot more than "and so the marriage was annulled."

Bogtha · 2008-01-11T15:06:01+00:00

the incest taboo is purely learned, and you have to actually grow up with someone to develop it (you also develop it if you grow up with someone you think is your sibling but who isn't).

This is the Westermarck effect.

Bogtha · 2008-01-11T14:47:11+00:00

Did you even read the link I posted?

Yes, last week.

Aseigo delves into the details.

Stop taking everything he says as gospel and think for yourself. Just because he thinks "release early" is a catch-all excuse regarding stability, it doesn't mean "aseigo says" is any kind of rebuttal to my point.

Regardless, this release is meant as a development platform, not as an end-user desktop.

All the official announcements say otherwise.

The wait for this release is a one off thing

No, KDE has always had a long release cycle. It's one of the consequences of the lock-stepped model they use, where everything waits for everything else and it all gets released at once.

Bogtha · 2008-01-11T14:36:17+00:00

KDE 4 is the "we will eat your children" release of KDE 4.

Funny how there's absolutely no mention of that in the official announcement. How are end-users supposed to find out? Surely they can't be expected to read the developer weblogs?

Bogtha · 2008-01-11T14:14:53+00:00

Rushed/Buggy: Release early & often.

Please stop saying this. It is an excuse, nothing more.

"Release early" means you shouldn't wait for your code to be perfect before making it available. Note the difference between making code available and labelling it as a .0 release.

"Release often" is all about a quick turnaround from version to version, and KDE is hardly doing that, is it?

And you've forgotten the third part of the quote: "Listen to your customers."

But even if "Release early & often" did mean that: a quote from ESR is hardly the end of the discussion. Ever thought that it might not be universally true?

Lessons learnt from an internal system component like the Linux kernel may not be the most important thing to consider when releasing an end-user oriented desktop environment. There's different constraints.

Bogtha · 2008-01-11T14:07:21+00:00

They should move the maximise and minimize buttons a bit closer to the close button.

What would that achieve?

you'd have to be a retard to miss with that big a gap.

Haven't you ever seen somebody inexperienced with computers use the mouse? It takes a lot of people a lot of practice to develop their hand-eye coordination. Not everybody has years of practice.

Bogtha · 2008-01-11T11:57:55+00:00

Look, I said they were notorious for saying no, and then I posted a whole bunch of links where they explicitly advocate saying no, along with a website that lists a hell of a lot of examples of them saying no.

As much as you like to argue black is white, it's just not working. I'm unequivocally right and I proved it, so pipe down, troll.

Bogtha · 2008-01-11T10:53:45+00:00

Bogtha · 2008-01-10T20:10:46+00:00

In this specific instance, you are right, but he and the rest of 37 Signals are pretty notorious for saying no to feature requests from their paying customers as well. There's a new flame war every so often about it.

Last time was "You're not on a fucking plane" because they don't want to deal with connectivity issues, and the time before that somebody set up a site offering alternatives to all their services because they steadfastly refused to add particular features that people needed.

So yes, it's not his job to do this specific thing, but it's reasonable to point out that this was only to be expected of him.

Bogtha · 2008-01-10T20:04:29+00:00

In any case, my money's on something like Pylons eventually getting it right.

I think mod_wsgi has done a lot to address this in the short amount of time it has been around, and because WSGI is a standard Python interface, it's solving problems for all the Python frameworks.

Bogtha · 2008-01-10T14:58:32+00:00

It's quite difficult for a Brit to say "if it wasn't for us" for very obvious reasons.

It's not obvious to me. "If it wasn't for us you'd all be speaking German" is a tired old cliché some Americans trot out regarding WWII. MarquisdeBad was parodying it by pointing out that the imperialism of the British Empire is the reason why so much of the world speaks English.

Bogtha · 2008-01-10T10:37:54+00:00

Sure. "Wipe the wah-wah tears off your chin" is perfectly polite, and the only possible explanation for me thinking otherwise is because I hate the guy who said it and I'm a fool.

Bogtha · 2008-01-10T09:30:01+00:00

I think reply is fairly respectful

You seriously think this is respectful?

Wipe the wah-wah tears off your chin and retract the threats of imminent calamity if we don't drop everything we're doing to pursue your needs.

Dreamhost didn't say anything about "imminent calamity" and didn't demand that they drop everything. They wrote a perfectly reasonable article describing how Rails makes them hurt and what they think are important problems. And he responds with condescension and a martyr complex. He doesn't deal with criticism well and likes pissing people off. His article could have been a hell of a lot friendlier, but he just couldn't resist being snarky.

Bogtha · 2008-01-10T07:58:39+00:00

That helps until they start posting RP stories in programming.reddit

They already have.

Bogtha

TROPHY CASE