claudius

> However, it is something relatively new and not what the EU started out to be when a lot of members joined up. [2]

This is a lie. The Treaty of Rome of 1957(!) establishing the European Economic Community already contained the phrase "ever-closer union" in its preamble (though admittedly only in French, German, Dutch and Italian).

> If the EU had said from the beginning, "we want to create a United States of Europe" and the people in each new member country had democratically voted for that we wouldn't be having a lot of the problems we have right now.

This is exactly what the British voted to join after de Gaulle died and couldn’t keep up the resistance any longer.

> It makes the affronts even more egregious when you realize EU citizens have little democratic control over the the European Commission and European Council which accounts for 2/3 of the European legislative body.

This is another lie. The commission has to be accepted by the European Parliament, which directly represents the people and the council is made up of the governments of the member countries. If the people in your country have "little democratic control" over your government, there’s your problem. Hint: blaming the EU won’t help.

We really don’t need the whole concept of ‘alternative facts’ over here now, too, do we?

I have tried to look at CMake a couple time and always found it very...inflexible? Currently I have a hand-written Makefile which:

- automatically collects executables to build from the .cpp files in two distinct directories

- uses the CPP preprocessor to only link in the object files in the rest of the project associated to headers used directly or indirectly by the executable .cpp files

- allows me to select the compiler using an environment variable

- allows me to pre-define some common options for the three supported compilers (e.g. to disable specific warnings with ICPC and increase the template instantiation depth for Clang)

- allows me to specify whether I want to rebuild everything or just a single executable and whether this should be copied into the external directory contained in my $PATH

Yes, putting this together was a bit of work (208 lines for the Makefile, 34 for the dependency generator and 15 for the script which puts the current output of `git diff` into a CPP #define), but now it only rebuilds the things needed, only links in the object files needed and allows me to quickly test multiple compilers. Getting all this with CMake seemed extremely difficult when I last looked at it.

Addendum: I should add that my only external dependency is Boost and LAPACK and I essentially ask the user to point me at their Boost base directory and plug in their LAPACK link line -- this works well for the target audience (fellow physicists who are used to all sorts of horrible toolkit installation processes), but I understand it may be annoying to the more general public (or if you have more external dependencies).

> Is the CEO reponsible if the manager cheated and deliberately hid facts from the upper management, just to please them and make himself look better?

Morally, certainly yes, that’s why they’re the CEO. Their only defence against responsibility is incapacity to fulfil their duties, in which case they should resign immediately.

> but the leadership responsible still needs to face a judge

There’s your problem, assuming that there is a way for leadership in a company not be responsible. Managers being ‘responsible’ is the only argument for them being paid disproportionally more than the average worker. In turn, a manager should always be responsible for the actions of their underlings all the way to the top, regardless of personal involvement in or knowledge of those actions.

The idea that the management of a company could not be responsible for something done by that company (which, e.g. could have resulted in considerable savings for the company and its shareholders) is simply ludicrous.

Last time I checked, Boost uBLAS was horribly slow and one should not use it. Use Eigen or Blitz++ (or just call BLAS directly) instead.

Though note that the NHS to some extend does incorporate that idea, namely that doctors are paid by the state and not by individual sick patients. Hence, doctors don’t have an incentive to ‘keep their patients sick, but alive’, which could be argued to be the case in systems such as Germany or the US, where doctors are paid for each individual visit by each individual patient.

> Well, at least you're honest about being a dictatorship. :) OTOH, just saying doesn't make it so. Hostile forks are a thing, license changes without copyright assignment are not a thing, etc.

Hostile forks do not change the project, they create a new one. License changes are of course restricted by law, as are all other ‘decisional powers’ (as any reasonable person would assume).

> Congratulations, you're biased in favor of people with more outgoing and assertive personalities. ;)

Not my problem, a technical project is not a therapeutical session for people who can’t speak their mind.

> Proportional requires that contributions be quantifiable. I'm not aware of any accurate, objective way to do that. (If there was, it would also be a solution to the "how to measure productivity" problem.)

You only need a good enough comparison to differentiate two people if there is a dispute. This is often a very clear-cut case. If it isn’t, let the rest of the project decide in whatever way is appropriate.

> What does "technical advantage" include? Switching costs imposed on users? The level of skill required from contributors? IDE-computable code metrics?

I don’t see why different projects could not have different metrics there, to be decided upon by the project/core team? If it’s a fun-in-your-free-time project, you can expect as much as you want from future contributors and don’t give a shit about your users, conversely, if you try to sell it, you may need to take switching costs into account.

> Wow, working only on clearly-defined problems must be nice. What happens when the ambiguity is part of the problem space?

If your problem space is not well defined you have bigger problems than a code of merit you may or may not like. Do more research first until the problem space is defined. Apart from this trivial tidbit, the sentence obviously aims at ambiguity in communication, where there is never any place for it. Not using words ill-defined words or ambiguous constructs seems like a decent idea in general.

Road-building is also not profitable unless you capture the increase in land value around roads. Curiously, most people are okay with tax-funded roads and streets but strongly oppose spending public funds on trains.

Of course, ideally both would be run exactly at cost via user fees (i.e. train tickets, tolls etc.), but this is not an often-shared opinion.

As a rule of thumb, one should replace the chain every 1000 to 5000 km, depending on the force you exert when cycling. Since the chain otherwise tends to stretch, it will eventually be misaligned with the chain wheels and start to wear those down. As the latter are more expensive to replace, it’s a good idea to replace the chain first.

Personally, I am really looking forward to constexpr if, i.e. if branches which are discarded at compile time and only have to be syntactically but not semantically correct. This should help a lot in avoiding enable_if magic to select the correct template.

FWIW, Firefox lets you view the stored passwords directly (about:preferences#security → Saved Logins → Show Passwords). Very useful feature :)

This is absolutely the fault of the publisher, not of anyone else. If the people running that site wanted to offer a slim and fast experience, they could absolutely do so without including additional Javascript from god-knows-where and whatever other “features” AMP requires.

The publisher can trivially create a light website which loads just as quickly as the AMP version.

AMP offers no more or less speed than standard HTML. Even on a slow connection, the majority of that slowness is due to the last mile, not because it takes a long time to get data from Europe to Australia.

It really is only about getting yet another way to collect data on users and push ads down their throats.

If your website costs so much that you need income to support it and provides so little value that people are unwilling to pay for those costs, then, yes, you should probably shut it down.

Just don’t have ads on your website. Easy as pie.

> But the whole attitude that this is some sort of tyrannical thing is a little over the top.

This is the exact sort of thing anti-monopoly laws are intended to work against: that a major market force in one market uses that power to intrude or support itself in another market. Since Google Chrome undoubtedly has a sufficiently large market share that this may be a concern and the removal of this extension certainly affects the advertisement market, this seems like a very dangerous move for Google.

Yes, it may be considered “self-defense” but is the cost incurred really so large that they want to risk another lawsuit?

Note that this is for diesel trains. While likely most of the length of the track won’t be electrified soon, essentially all tracks in western Europe (France, Germany, possibly Poland) are already electrified. This means that using nuclear or renewable energy generation, the trains can run emission-free there, in particular avoiding the strongly localised particle emissions by ships in and around harbours.

The problem here is that of course it is only the retailers that are being sued, i.e. the company itself. If the salesperson who bought the stuff and everyone up from there to the CEO was on the line plus all shareholders of the company, those people would very quickly make very sure that they don’t defraud their customers.

Couldn’t you import the Mbox archive in Thunderbird/Claws-Mail/something and then copy the mails to whatever cloud provider you wish to use?

Really?! Is this among the elderly who already have lots of little aches here and there or the general population? When I broke my arm I took 400mg about six or seven times over three days and for a cold I tend to take one or two paracetamol, but taking pain killers regularly sounds very absurd to me and I don’t know of anyone who takes anything stronger than coffee regularly and more than once a month.

I would make a distinction between “scientific software” and “system software”. The latter is commonly used for all sorts of things and could in principle easily be replaced. The former is specifically adapted to produce the results at hand and the results (and only the results, not for example the typesetting of the paper) depend crucially on this software and its correctness.

Examples of the latter are e.g. Linux, libc, systemd etc.: All things used during production of the results, but not aimed at producing such results. The former are e.g. Matlab, the Intel MKL, ALPS, TensorFlow or similar tools and suites. A bug in the MKL may make your results wrong, while a but in the kernel will most likely just crash everything. In my experience, scientific results depend on a handful of software packets in such a way, and adding five-or-so citations to a paper is certainly no big deal and would make reproducing the results much easier.

I have no idea where GNU parallel sits there, it probably depends on how you use it – do you schedule your Monte Carlo runs with it or just rescale pictures for the website? Admittedly, it is a very grey area, but I don’t consider a request for citation unreasonable.

I read this, but I honestly don’t understand it. Isn’t a license essentially a contract between the licensor and the licensee? And shouldn’t it hence be possible to write such a clause into a license? After all, lots of things are put into licenses which do not cover derivative works (e.g. conditional patent grants)?

I understand that I cannot add this to the GPL (due to the specific clauses of the GPL) and that RMS might not consider the resulting software free (though it would probably pass all of Debian’s freedom guidelines, for example), but it should be possible to have such a license in general?

Meh. The website says "Please cite", not "you must cite". To derail this a bit further, I would actually be very interested in an academic version of the AGPL - that is, a proper license that defines "publication of data produced by the work" as "distribution of the work", meaning that if someone uses the software to produce some data and then publishes said data, they also must publish (or make available on request) all changes made to the software. Unfortunately, the very strict definition in the AGPL and the interlinking between it and the GPL make this difficult to add-on later.

And thus we are stuck with "please cite this so I can justify working on it, please?" instead of "You must cite this if you want to use it".

Honestly, I also don’t see how this request isn’t scalable, could you expand on that?

And the counterpoint is? ‘People should give Google/Apple root access on their devices to run this new secure messenger’?

Let me put it like this – if OpenWhisperSystems had an explicit toggle in their protocol which, after flipping it, would allow them to access all future communications and where the user was unable to tell whether it had or had not been flipped, nobody would call the protocol "secure" or write a "Trust It" headline about it.

However, if OWS only supports systems on which such a toggle exists via a third-party provider, that somehow makes them secure?

I find this hard to understand. Yes, of course an app which encrypts data against some adversaries is nice, but it should definitely be called "secure-against-some-people", not "secure", and people shouldn’t write "Trust It" but rather "Trust It if you also trust X and Y and Z".

Rather pointless to have a "trusted" application on an operating system you cannot trust – and not even the possibility to run the application on an even remotely trusted and private system, in particular without giving unaccountable root access to Google.

Up until very recently, fossil fuel was cheap and there was little incentive to invest in other resources such as wind or solar. Furthermore, there was relatively little political incentive to avoid fossil fuels.

Both of these things have changed and large amounts of money have subsequently been invested in renewable energy sources, making them cheaper (mass-produced) and more reliable (better technology).

If you were to re-build the town today, wind farms and battery storage may well be the most economic choice, but to switch to wind, it not only has to be cheaper (and more environmentally friendly) but also so much cheaper that the initial investment costs are returned in a reasonably timeframe.

It’s a generic feature of X available in all desktop environments (essentially there’s two copy-paste mechanism which you can use independently). Much easier to use than manual C-c C-v, especially if you have a third mouse button also on your laptop.

Meh. I was issued a Macbook with some version of Mac OS X by my employer as well. Shitty screen, no trackpoint. Very very sharp edge on the front making it very difficult to rest your hands nicely. Chaotic GUI, outdated software (esp. Bash etc.), weird keyboard with missing keys. No proper package manager, no proper development software (Intel Compiler?) and not even a compiler at all if I don’t sign up with an Apple account.

Honestly if you put together fancy slides in Keynote, it might work (though Beamer is still nicer). I even managed to set up the email client and read emails occasionally when my workstation was rebooting. After two years I asked for a laptop with Linux and nicer keyboards and I couldn’t be happier.