PythonicAlpha

Good, that the usage of antibiotics is rising in cattle-breeding.

The blind usage of the fruits of progress is one of our biggest problems in a world, where many problems of human beings have relieved by the same.

The problem is, in a world, where profits are the most important thing and everything else is secondary, human life does not count -- even when human health is destroyed, it can be good -- to increase the profit margins of some corporations.

I did not say, that cf is an atomic bomb. I just wanted to use a picture to make it more clear, that the end does not justify all means.

I don't know, if cf can be reformed, so that it stays useful and has not such by-effects. The usefulness of cf is largely drawn from the aspect of being arbitrary.

The side effect of a constitutional state is, that some times the bad guys can use it to protect their bad ways. But the alternative would be bad for all.

cf does not only make innocent people to victims, but does change those to crooks, that should protect the innocent -- and thus an even bigger harm is done to the whole society -- with very bad consequences in the long run!

Even when it was successful for some things ... when it hurts innocent people, the state has to find other tools to hunt down criminals.

You can't simply drop an atomic bomb on NYC -- and justify it, by saying you killed at least 100,000 criminals ...

And still, Ronald Reagan is one of the most popular presidents of the US in the last 100 years.

The Prohibition of the state grabbing the possession of innocent people dates back to the Magna Carta and thus to the foundations of the legal systems of our civilization.

This practice simply is breaking the civil pact that holds together our countries.

When all the academics say the same, than maybe some should start listening. But it is of course easier to denunciate other opinions.

<Irony>Also many academics in Europe say, that climate change is happening -- shame on Europe! What academics from Europe say, must be wrong!

And of course "leftist views" are also wrong all the time. Don't listen to those that are called leftist or similar in Fox News or other trustworthy channels. </Irony>

To denunciate researchers as having a "political agenda", because their opinion does not fit into the own political agenda, does not sound very honest to me.

This should be normal routine -- it is called "defensive programming".

TPP, TTIP and the others are just and plainly the fairgrounds of the big corporations. They are those that shape the rules -- and the result is a global eroding of democracies and of peoples rights.

They are bad for environments, for health and many things that are second to the one thing that counts in this game: profits.

Sounds really a bit weird to me.

I hope, that they really think hard, which modules really must be removed.

I would only consider security reasons to really remove a library module. Or at least mark it deprecated for a long while until it is used only really rarely.

The reason, I still did not port to Python 3:

(and yes, Unicode in Py2 is a mess ...)

They just broke to many things (unnecessarily!) internally. Particularly they changed many C APIs for enhancement modules, so that all of them had to be ported, before they could be used with Python 3. They did not even consider a portability layer ... why not??

Some (not all) of the bad decisions (like the u"..." strings) they did change afterwards, but than it was a little late.

So many modules are still not ported to Python 3 -- so the hurdle is a little to high -- for small to nil benefits!

So, the problem (from my side) is not Unicode at all ... just the lack of reasonable support from the deciders side.

---

Maybe, some time later, when I have to much spare time.

Or based on the existence of positive research papers ;)

I used to program C++ a lot, several years ago.

My way, today, to avoid complexity in C++: Avoid C++!

C++ is at least three languages and the complexity is at least that of three languages. If you really want to be faster at programming and don't need to have the last 5% of performance, do you a favor and use an other language.

Correct. My observation is: The good people that come into politics either stay small numbers in the back-row ... or they get corrupted by the system and the money and maybe end up as top politician, some even as president -- but they are no good people anymore.

That is the requirement for becoming somebody in politics.

While a cashless society might reduce crime (for a little while), it will definitively bring an Orwellian system onto us.

Also, we have seen, that there are enough corrupt banks and bankers around, so crime will go on ... (money laundering also does work today in company with banks).

They are already planning it (I think, I heard it already from Sweden). But to ban cash will be much more difficult than Bitcoin, since so many people will shout up -- with Bitcoin, who cares, when a few hackers who are probably already involved in illegal activities (drug, sex, copyright violations, .... you name it) will be mad.

Problem only is, that many today only believe (and follow) in Mammon and not in God any more!

You can believe in God or not, but what is better to believe in, when it comes to build and uphold communities?

To argue, that forfeiture does not harm your defense, since in theory, the wealth of a person should not change your chances at court (where in practice it is!), is absolutely not helpful. To defend an unjust system by a theory that is not holding in practical life, is really dismissive.

First fix the problems of the US juristic system, before trying to crush the ordinary citizen with further ordeals.

Even the Magna Carta defended the possessions of a free person from the access of the state without court trial. What the US started here, is a slap in the face of the base of our civilizations.

Some day, everything will belong to only a few people and the rest of us will be their slaves. But maybe at this time or some day before, some might recognize, that living on profits alone is not possible.

I think, that having (idealistic) principles and regard them as being above of money, is very important.

Today, it seems, that many people just have one principle that holds above anything else: Money. I think, this way, we ultimately sell out humanity.

> Agile doesn't mean "every engineer working on whatever they wanted."

I totally agree. In my experience, it is very dependent on the group. When you are unlucky, you are in a group where for example one person always grabs the interesting parts. Because the group decides, it is very much about group pressure and clashing interests. A bad agile group can be similar harmful as a bad project manager.

One of the worst project managers, I experienced, insisted to divide the work "evenly" to the people in the group -- totally disregarding experience and abilities of the people. In a bad agile group, similar effects can happen.

In non-agile projects, there are dysfunctional groups and in agile projects there can be -- but in the later case, the problems can be worsened.

As I experienced Scrum in practice, it is said that people should be "empowered". In reality, something totally different is happening: People are not empowered, but the management just delegates the responsibilities for the project to the developers and lays back, assured that they just have to wait for the "agile fruits" to be reaped. They have done everything, they could do, now the "empowered" employees have to see ...

Those poor employees might feel "empowered", but in reality, they are "impoverished". They are now responsible for the project, but often without amble resources needed. For example, when they need additional hardware or rooms or .... they are not empowered to get it. They are still beggars. Instead, they are empowered to work longer hours to reach the project goals they have set themselves. Why did they such a stupid thing? Because they wanted to look bright or because of group pressure or because they want a raise ...

And after they set their goals themselves, they are on their own.

This is not "empowerment", it is not about people -- it is just a good excuse for the management to get rid of the responsibilities and to "motivate" people to work longer hours. It is the newest "silver bullet" process of a project management that already lost control.

I think, the freemium model works best, when the resources needed for one additional customer (including computing-power, storage and support) are relatively negligible.

Many companies operate the freemium model with much less than 11% conversion rate -- but the additional customers they have to carry with the others are not so a heavy burden.

The advantage of the freemium model is faster scaling and adoption of the service -- but with the cost of an additional burden ... and you have to know, if your business can carry the weight or has to do differently.

There is enough prove around, that these treaties with the US all contain the same bullshit again and again.

Great! Than the distributor that finds a descendant of Hammurabi can earn a ton of money from all existing countries.

Thanks to you and all others!

Unfortunately, the computer I am about to buy has only one bank (smaller size computer). I also was thinking about using the dual channel mode -- but as the speedup would not be that great, I could do without. But I guess too, usage of different modules on the same bank might be a crapshot.

Yes, I would have expected the same.

One question on behalf of this: Has anybody experiences with mixing RAM types today? My problem is, that new computers most of the time come with 4GB pre-installed (1 module), but I want to have 8GB. Get the same RAM (DDR3) is rather unlikely -- so, would you add a different RAM module to the preexisting memory module or is it better to replace it with a pair of new RAM modules?

Any experiences, opinions?

Not to mention, when you manage to get a "BadUSB" -- in this case you might be doomed ... you might even don't recognize, that a strange force have taken control of your computer and internet connect.