chton

Aha I must have missed that news. I'll update my comment. Can't say I'm sad to see them go, they were useful but turn a complicated class into a clusterfuck.

thanks!

A getter-only property can only be set on initialization of the class, so either with a fixed value or one from a constructor. That does make it the equivalent of a read-only field, but it's a lot easier to keep byte-level parity with future versions.

In its simplest form, it means you can do this:

    public property Foo { get; } = 5;

Your class now has a Foo property that nobody can set, not even methods in the class itself, but that can be publicly read.

These become a lot more useful with primary constructors (also a new C# 6 feature):

    public class MyImmutableClass(int usersFoo) {

        public property Foo { get; } = usersFoo;

    }

This will create a constructor on the class that takes the usersFoo argument, and immediately assign the value of that argument to your read-only automatic property. It makes immutable classes a lot easier to create, and guarantees that they'll stay immutable.

edit: Permit made it clear that primary contructors have been dropped from the C# 6 spec. You'll just have to assign your readonly properties from regular constructors then :)

Internally, .Net automatic properties are compiled with a backing field and a getter and setter method. In the case of a read-only auto property, they will omit the setter, so there is no public artifact that could be abused.

A bit messy, but an overview with code samples can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dn683793.aspx

This may be a stupid question, but is it possible the blog author was given a refurbished device? These all sound like exactly the kind of problems you'd expect from a device that was pre-owned and sloppily reinstalled.

Either way, the proper course of action would be to return it to the store right away, especially when it refuses touch input.

For what it's worth: people with those kinds of issues are rare. Not rare enough, of course, but it's not as if everybody has them. In a way, chamakits's problems demonstrate why Microsoft is still selling them: even if they show serious issues, the rest of the tablet is so good that people will still love it.

As an aside, my own Surface displayed a very minor issue with the pen tap location being off by about a millimeter at the top edge of the screen when I first got it. Windows Update fixed it right away. It hasn't shown any issues since then, at all. From what I hear from people I know that also own one, this is more typical than situations with serious problems.

It's true that orbit is more challenging, but you have no hope of getting there if you can't do a suborbital jump first. Aiming for suborbital first might see them get a lot more funding if they succeed. You need to learn to crawl before you can run.

That is amazing, thank you so much for linking it. I did not know about them, and it does indeed seem like they have made a lot of progress. I'll be following them from now :)

We're still very early in the development of spaceflight. If you compare with the car industry, we're at the early industrialized phase, where large companies carefully start to develop the necessary technology. Now, 100 years later, a lot is standardized and the knowledge is so common that everybody has the basics, and people can build cars in their back yards. It's the same development that happened with airplanes.

At its core, a rocket isn't more complicated than a car. The challenges are just different. My dearest hope is that eventually rocket components will be as commoditized as car parts, so people can build and maintain their own spacecraft. I want to see rockets held together with duck tape and spit, because that's the point where spaceflight is available to everybody and gravity stops becoming a hurdle.

A quick disclaimer: I have the greatest respect for rocket engineers. They are taking the first steps, the most difficult ones, and I don't believe for a second that they their work is easy. I just believe that eventually, they'll become obsolete to the majority of spacetravel :)

It is much like a conversation in a chat system, but the etiquette on twitter means your conversation partner usually won't wait for you to finish a string of messages.

It's true that it's easy for people to interject and annoy, and it happens more and more the bigger your celebrity status. However, unlike the interview example, it's also easy to ignore them. Twitter's reply helped a lot for that. Replying to anybody is optional, you don't even have to read their tweets if you don't want to. It's not perfect by any means, I don't think any platform will ever be. But it isn't bad.

It can be. This conversation is a multi-person one too. That's still different than, say, hangouts because everybody is free to reply, not just people you invited. Maybe somebody neither of us know will read this next month and come up with an interesting counterpoint.

In any case, using some form of video calling is too intrusive. I can type this reply, do something else for 10 minutes, then check back. But then I was always one for text mediums rather than video or audio calls :)

Terse also means short, clearly explained. Yes, 'terse' has an extra meaning, but in a technical context, and especially when contrasted with 'verbose', it should be completely clear which meaning I meant.

And for the record: I don't train myself to limit my thoughts, I train myself to use a form for expressing them appropriate to the medium I'm doing it in. Expressing something shorter and in steps is not inferior to long-winded explanations. If you must blame something for a fine nuance I failed to grasp, blame the fact that English is not my first language. I doubt I would have caught it in Dutch either, but at least that could be a valid reason.

As far as I know, the two are synonyms in common parlance. I chose 'terse' because it's the usual converse of 'verbose'.

I agree, use the best tools. But if you email or text them, there is no way for other people to join the conversation. Think of a twitter conversation as one at a party where you know people. Anybody can come join in, and can add value. It's more akin to conversing on IRC than over email.

I would agree that iteration through thought is not necessarily a useful constraint on a medium by itself. In the case of twitter, however, it is merely a product of the 140-character limit for each message. If, during a stand-up debate, your opponent was allowed to interject after every sentence, you would get much the same. That sounds incredibly annoying and counter-productive at first, but the form of the debate would adapt over time.

The advantage of developing a thought in tandem with somebody is that the compromise happens more naturally. You rarely need to 'concede' a point or prove somebody wrong, since you can influence the way the point is made in the first place, pointing out flaws in their reasoning or facts as they happen. Conversely, the other can do that for your reasoning. The result is that, rather than adjust your thinking in a few big steps, you adjust it in minor ways with every sentence. It takes time and practice to get used to this, but it can be very productive and enlightening.

On the other hand, I would never avoid long-form debate either. Both have advantages and disadvantages, just as both have mediums where they work and mediums where they don't. Twitter isn't conducive to classical debate, just as hackernews isn't conducive to the iterative thought development style.

No pejorative was meant at all. My point about 'thinking too far' was about the singular thought you're trying to express. It's easy to want to say too much, 'walking the chain too far' if you will. Twitter is a far more iterative medium than most, and expressing a complicated thought isn't a case of writing it out in whole. Usually, you will develop the thought together with the other party. Conversations are closer to a form of collective thinking than a long-form debate. Thought patterns are more on display.

Aside: this conversation would have taken a very different form if we had had it on twitter. The medium defines the form. So I don't mind being verbose here :)

Terseness is a learned skill. Verbosity is too. They're not mutually exclusive, you can apply them where they work. And they're both useful.

(That's exactly 140 characters for you :) )

There's more than one way to Twitter. If you know some people on it personally, you're more likely to engage in conversations.

It depends a lot on how you use it. For me, it's a firehose of information (I follow around 2000 accounts). You drink from it when you feel like. If the fire hose is big enough, there's always something interesting to read. It could be the latest news, and it often is, or it could be someone just tweeting something they learned or how they think about things. Twitter enables that with the 140 character limit per tweet, it means the information is very condensed and you can ingest an enormous amount in a short time.

There are conversations that work on twitter, and ones that don't. In general, twitter conversations are quick back-and-forth affairs. If you need more than 2 tweets to express your thought, you're either using the wrong medium or thinking too far. If that conversation model doesn't fit you, that's perfectly fine, but that's not the fault of twitter. It's just a bad match-up. In that case, it's perfectly fine to respond to a tweet with a link to a medium that does support your model better.

If you do get roped into a conversation where you need more tweets to explain, here's a few simple guidelines:

- Don't split sentences over tweets. People will only read one part.

- If you really must, use "(cont.)" on both tweets (end of the first and start of the second), so it's obvious there was another part. I know that reduces your character limit, but it's worth it to be less ambiguous

- Make each continued tweet a reply to its predecessor. You can reply to your own tweets. It facilitates following the conversation on most clients.

- If it's more than 2 tweets, consider using twitlonger. In general, that should be a last resort, though.

Without trying to make it sound high-handed, there's something of an art to smooth twitter conversations. Terseness is the key. I find them rewarding because, when done right, they have an enormous density of information in a short time.

Passing the hat is very much in character for them, unfortunately. It still happens in church every single time. As long as people keep giving, they'll keep doing it.

that's an interesting point. I didn't consider excises. Those are usually levied on products that harm the user or the environment in some way, though. I doubt you can argue that internet data harms the planet :p

Carbon credits are a sale of "carbon capacity" for money, again here the money is taxed, not the credits themselves.

But information isn't a taxable item, since it's not a monetary amount. It would be like taxing electricity. You can tax the money you pay for it, but not the information itself.

You're not using your education to generate data. Most of the data is made by other people's education and then multiplied many times. Even for cases where you do create information, like in your comment, many magnitudes more data was sent over your line to get it before my eyes. If they wanted to tax new information, they wouldn't do it through a flat fee per GB.

Sales tax is a tax on a monetary exchange. You tax the price you pay for your shoes, you don't tax "$3 per shoe". The point of that is taxing value rather than quantity. How you use the tax money it is irrelevant to how you acquire it.

And last but not least: we're already drowning in 'pointless data'. A lot of the internet's capacity is used to transfer scripts and styles rather than real information. Whether you consider that pointless is a different matter, but it's not up to the government to say what you should consider pointless data and what you shouldn't.

Now that their kickstarter is up, people are already streaming in to back it. I bet most of them will completely gloss over this gem of a sentence: "Currently, this surface needs to be a non-ferromagnetic conductor."

While it does have some applications even with that limitation, it's far from a practical hoverboard, and it's very misleading to be talking about other uses of the technology as if it already exists. They seem to be getting ahead of themselves by extolling their "design focus" when they don't have the product people expect from them yet, and possibly (probably) never will.

I'd use for people who claim X years of experience, but haven't made any progress in ability in those X years. You can spend 30 years evolving, or you can spend it standing still and only moving when you have no other option. This kind of phrase is for the latter kind, doesn't matter if they're serial contractors or have been working on the same project for 30 years.

Oh I would never use that kind of language to somebody's face. It's blunt, and usable when describing (for example) why you wouldn't hire a candidate after a job interview, but not as a form of criticism. There are better ways to bring up the intention to the people themselves.

"one year's experience 30 times, not 30 years experience." is a fantastic sentence and I'm stealing it. I've seen too many developers to whom it applies, and it's a great way to express that.

That is a very good point, but I don't think corporate influences like the MIC are necessarily limiting the president's power. It's an influence, and a very strong one at that, but they can go against it. It's just one of the many datapoints that a president has to manage.

"Limited in ways that the public doesn't understand" is undoubtedly correct, but I disagree more on the extent. The author seems to think the president has no real control over the policies he sets, at least in some areas. I believe he does have real control, but he is limited by reality being far more complex than in an ideal world.

You're allowed to break your promise if it turns out it would do more harm than good. If you're unwilling to change your views based on new information, you would be a zealot and unfit for government. I don't know what information Obama does base his policy on, but you bet there's a million factors we (and he in his campaign) don't consider that he now must.

He has enacted positive policy changes too. He did pull troops out of Iraq, he did bring gay marriage equality forward by decades. Whatever you think of the man, saying he broke all his promises and essentially acted like a tyrant is unfair. The same can be said of Bush and others before them. On a related note, getting reelected isn't a measure of delusion. It depends on a lot of things, such as quality of the opponent, general approval, party approval, desire for stability, etc. People also reelected Bush, who had some of the same policies as Obama, and whose approval rating was even worse.

That also requires serious dishonesty on Obama's part, something which doesn't seem supported by people's accounts before his campaign. Unless you believe he kept up the pretense even years before holding a public office, the evidence is more in line with his viewpoints having changed than with constant dishonesty.

I'll have to save that paper for later and see if he has some decent sources. If he does have proper evidence, maybe the theory has merit. On the other hand, if there was a 'smoking gun', it would be mentioned on the first page and in every article about it.