PythonicAlpha

The trouble is not that inequality exists -- I think, that some form is necessary in our world -- but that the inequality is increasing in a rapid rate and that in the current state of our society, not achievements where the society benefits are rewarded by the system, but rather achievements where society looses (e.g. speculations, pure possession of wealth, investing -- whatever frivolous it might be, omitting taxes by using legal holes and off-shore trickery, ....)

Even Buffett spoke out, that his class wins, but it should not (for the good of society). And he said, that something is wrong, when his secretary has to pay a much higher tax-rate as himself.

Yes, I do. But most people just do not use the IIS. Also there are some other WebServers out there in existence.

Ok, thanks for the clarification!

> Companies are jerks

I fully agree with that!

Also with your assertion, that using paid services will automatically help is totally correct, of course.

I thought, HTTP/2 is something that the browser must support. Did you recognize, that there are some different browsers out there?

The line is crossed. When we don't stop it now, this will be the end of privacy for every computer user -- at least of commercial OSs.

Even with the possibility to deactivate all this, the user consented to the "privacy terms" -- so the OS can even collect data "by error" -- and they will come away with it.

To trust such a company again, there would be a second set of privacy terms needed, that would be used for everybody that rejects the data collection. But I don't think, that there will be a second set of terms at all (for that to happen, a majority of people must start to think about their privacy).

Even when you disable it, you never can be sure, because it is in the Privacy Terms you have accepted. So you can never be sure, that your data is collected even with different settings, even because of error or because somehow the switch was reverted e.g. by an update.

Even when other companies are doing it also, does it make it better?

At least until now, you could use a computer and OS without being sold (just don't use some free services and avoid paid products where your data is also sold). But when the OS is also selling your data, you just have no hiding place any more!

Yes. Even here, when you tell the truth, you are just downvoted. That is the reason, I deleted the post.

I am sorry about that, but in our society, the truth is not suffered. I should not waste my time, telling it.

SQLite is one of the rare examples of very elaborate implemented software that is very good maintained, too.

One of the best pieces of free software around.

Where else do you find software, that was very good implemented from the beginning and is so carefully enhanced and optimized? (And not only for new "features") -- I remember no official available example.

You can always find examples for all sides.

But it is just a statistical fact, that moving up from being really poor today has become much more difficult than it was decades before, maybe with the exemption of being a computer scientists (but also there it is not so easy for a normally gifted person to finish studies and so on without help from the parents).

> People who make bad decisions often end up poor. Giving them money will not help them make better decisions, and may make them worse off.

But there are also many people who started poor and stayed poor, because they did not have the possibilities of the rich.

Or is your argument, that somebody whose parents where rich, will stay rich, because he made all the good decisions himself? There are so many rich, that make bad decisions and stay rich, because they have so much, they always will stay afloat.

> Sometimes cliches are cliches because they're accurate.

And sometimes they are cliches, because they match into politics of some people. It is always much better to have an argument, why you do better than others, than to admit, that you are lucky.

But I guess, you are the one, who knows which ones are "accurate", because you know best.

> And who cares if you think my argument should automatically be "disqualified" because it doesn't match your politics.

Right. It is better, that your politics matches the politics of the rich and mighty.

> And logically, if the poor as a group were good with money, they wouldn't be poor.

I am sorry, just this statement alone, disqualifies your whole argumentation. It is just a barroom cliche of the rich.

The income of people has diverted more and more in the last decades.

It is a fact, that countries really flourished (USA, Germany, other countries) with a bigger part of the society in the middle class and having a better living and education, when those countries managed to bring better income also to working-class people.

Today's wealth in the US is for a big part because of the flourishing middle-class of the country shortly after the 2nd World-war. The same holds for Germany and other countries.

Today, all over the world, the income diverts and education already is going down for normal people in many countries. Middle classes are melting away.

Wealth of a society is not only to be measured by the wealthiest people in the society, but by the wealth of the middle class (and worker) people.

Today, we waste the wealth created after the war and give it away to the <1% of people.

Everybody should see this film: Inequality for All [1] that shows, the connections, that many are just ignoring today.

To my opinion, to help poor people, raise wages of workers in all the world (thus making an end with a Globalization that just helps the rich).

By raising the wages, you will not have people that just live on welfare, but that can be proud again for their work they do.

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2215151/

Good, that somebody tries to document that stuff better!

I am also very unhappy with the current documentation of this.

The new Python format is great and you can do so many things with it, but it also just costs to much time to read the documentation and find some relevant examples.

It is similar as in C:

When C come out, it did not include a bool type, since it could be easily implemented as integer or char. The result was, that every bigger project had its own standard of the boolean type. This lead to the situation that bringing together different libraries or projects in the same company, you very soon had four or more different (and potential incompatible) boolean types with different constants for TRUE, FALSE, true, false and UNDEFINED. The programmers where happy to deal with those ...

It would be best (and fastest) to include something like default parameters into the language much sooner ...

But at least in this case, I see much less trouble as with the C type and I do not agree with the author that there is mental overhead involved with the OR operator, since you normally get used to it fast.

The whole idea, that you can save costs, by have a "fit-it-all" design, is flawed!

Take multiple different customers for a car, one wants to have a sports-car, one a pick-up and the third, something that can dive ... What does not work in car-design, does even less in jet-design.

Ugly, ugly, ugly.

Just to copy anything, because it comes from the US. Monopolies help only one: The monopolist. We already have a de-facto monopoly in Germany.

And, yes, I hate Mrs. Merkel, because she makes anything, the big bosses want! She is our Walker Bush and is the leader of the Lemmings.

I think, you mean the OP, not jand. Since jand did describe the situation rather well.

> But I guess since most of their customers would be satisfied of using a disk dial phone and usage is kept low by fines to torrent users and half of Youtube being censored by GEMA they have little incentive to change.

I see, that you don't know the German internet customers.

Internet usage is also rising in Germany and things like Netflix, cloud and other (legal!) broadband services are also known in "good old Germany".

There are also Germans, that own no disk dial phone any more ...

The commentator "jand" already explained very good, how the Telekom is acting in Germany ...

As a German myself, I must admit that this is the case.

The current attitude of Mrs. Merkel is popular in Germany and also other EU countries are mad about Greece, because they improved their finances with much effort and did not get that much care as Greece did.

And yes, it is right, that Greece carries a lot of fault in this problem, since they forged their financial data. And I even think, that it was a big mistake, to take Greece into the Euro, because the country was and is not ready for it.

But, I fear, that now dropping Greece, after five years of endurance -- and Greece took really a heavy load (eg. many pensions where cut 45% or more) -- will revert, what people thought, the Euro will bring: To unite Europe and prevent further wars.

The financial crisis already has brought many new bad feelings between countries. When kicking out Greece now, because we insist in our own financial thinking (Greece has to privatize that, do that, do that, cut spending, cut, cut ... cut), we risk that next maybe Italy or Spain could fall and more and more bad feelings between countries. And we risk to loose the Euro in the long run.

We should focus on a solution now, that last for a longer time and does not bring new problems in the future (as was done five years ago --- everybody knew, that the load was to much for Greece to carry, but nobody dared to look for a long-time solution).

Of course, a new haircut (as everybody knows, will be necessary now) will cost more money -- but without a haircut, Greece will leave the Euro and all the money that was guaranteed from other EU countries will be lost. So even the short-time cost will be much higher -- the cost of bitter feelings and financial dogma. For Merkel it can also be the cost of votes (because she always looks for the voters -- but in this case, stupid looking for votes can be horrific for Europe as whole!)

The long term costs can be even higher: Loose what was thought to be won by the European idea and it even can be, that we loose the Euro in the long run.

I fear, by thinking, we must kick out Greece now, to limit the costs, we even have higher costs in the long run. We add another error on a long run of errors made in the Euro case.

I don't know, if the statement is true, since I did not work with Ruby really till now.

But I definitively would support this statement:

> Programming languages cannot be considered separately from their ecosystems

I think, one of the main reasons for the success of the C system was not the language itself, but the standard C library. Standard Pascal did not have such a thing (Borland Pascal had and was more successful as any other Pascal), Modula 2 -- a superior language at its time, did not have it (the library that was standard for Modula 2, was just to clunky for wide usage) and also other languages did not have it.

C, when it started, had not only the library, but also a -- for that time -- superior development environment: Unix.

From this, I would strongly agree, that the ecosystem is decisive -- and the bar has risen since the times of C. Today, you need top compilers or interpreters, top of the notch libraries -- best to have a framework (like Rails) for a good use-case to use the language and tools around that support your programming.

With all those good languages around today, any new language must have an appeal and the ecosystem and if possible the community, to be successful.

I don't agree.

I agree, that naming is hard, of course.

But I don't agree, that you should avoid it at all costs!

Sometimes, the costs are just to high. When by avoiding naming things, you make the program more difficult to understand, you loose much. This could cost you nearly as much, as a bad name and very likely much more than a half-good name.

I am not aware, that it was the "biggest ever in history" -- I even doubt that since, the Greek economy is not so big. I would like to compare that with the haircut Germany got after the war ... but in inflation-adjusted numbers (many haircuts can be the biggest, when you don't care about inflation).

The question is, when the banks "lost 75% of their loans". To my knowledge, this happened much later, when the banks that initially where in danger already got rid of the most toxic loans. Those loans either went to the EU "Rescue Umbrella" or where sold (with discounts).

When those sold loans later where haircut, than the lost value of 75% was on papers, but the value that those holders really lost very likely much smaller (if any), because they bought the loans with huge discounts.

After 5 years of "rescuing" that did lead the country into ruins, no wonder!

It is a widespread knowledge (at least the US has it), that forceful saving in a crisis, will deepen the crisis.

As a German, I know that Germany got a dept-cut after the second World war, that the German nation could rise from misery. We should have allowed the Greek the same luxury.

Instead, the governments cared only for the banks.

Basing the compensation of CEOs on the stock price is a real problem.

I also see a link to politics. In politics we have a similar situation: Most politicians (at least in our country) are planning for one or two terms of office. After that, they are eligible for a pension big enough for them. And when this is not enough, they also can get money from corporations just by being a consultant after their time in office. So, the plan is just short term: Get into the parliament, get a big seat as secretary if possible or other good job and after just a few years you don't have any trouble in live any more, money-wise. This can be best reached, by short-term thinking. Be helpful to the right people, be a "party soldier" (as it is called in Germany) that does what the party top wants from you.

Own thinking, or long-term success or even thinking, what is best for the people, is counter-productive in this scheme.

So what we more and more get, are short-term solutions, that only make you popular for a short-term but does not help with the long-term problems. Troublesome decisions are shifted into the future, when you are out of office, even when the troubles will increase meanwhile.

The same short-term thinking is produced in CEOs today. A CEO just has to get the job and be there, for 4-8 years to earn enough money, most people don't have in a lifetime. So what does he do? Make troublesome decisions, or decisions, that cost money for the next 3-5 years and will pay maybe in 6 years, maybe later??

You know the answer.

I think, this short-term thinking and the greed, that is injected in many of us today, are the reason of the most problems we face today.

I just don't agree.

One of the best features I found in Golang was the statically linkage concept. There is just to much trouble with tools that come either in dozens of versions for different OS versions (Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, CentOS .... all Linux, but no Linux is the same Linux ..., it goes on: Ubuntu 12.04, 12.10, 14.x, ..., Debian Sid, Debian with and without systemd ...)

While statically linking might add some bloat, I don't see, that the real bloat-factor is because of this. The real bloat-factor for example comes from programs that rely to much on template libraries (yes, I mean C++), that just unroll everything into new statements and because many even simple tasks have a multitude of solutions in the code ... each aside each other. When hundreds of developers are developing on one application, many of them invent the wheel again ...

I am not so optimistic.

Might be, that part of it was because of the will to unite Europe, but it was from the beginning at least "well meant, but very badly executed".

What we have seen in the last five years, was growing resentment between Southern- and Middle-Europe because of the Euro. The "unity" of Europe is more endangered by the Euro, than rescued, as much I see now.

Idealistic goals can not make up for lies (about the security of the Euro, where no measures where really taken serious) and extreme poor execution. Some countries where taken in the Euro, just because some countries wanted to counter the influence of Germany. That is not idealistic, but purely old, dirty power politics.

In the case of Greece: As much I remember, one big German bank held many debts of this country in 2010, but the CEO of that bank also was the adviser of the German chancellor. No wonder, the so called rescue-umbrella did also rescue this banks money.