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rob05con Why You Should Try a Tiling Window Manager

Eventually, you probably will stop relying on these things and do everything with the keyboard

I read so much about why Tiling is Great because the Mouse is Awful.

I think the mouse has its place. For writing code and text I have my hands on the keyboard—which means I also want to create and move windows with the keyboard.

But when I'm in a web browser, or a game, or any number of other GUI-centric applications, my hand is already on the mouse. Which means I want a visual dropdown for launching applications, and I want to drag and resize windows with the mouse.

I love my Tiling because it doesn't waste space. To me, Windowing is just silly; why would I ever want large swathes of my desktop empty, and applications overlapping each other?

But I don't understand the mouse-versus-keyboard argument. I want both to control my WM with both, because I use applications with both.

rob05con USDA is down

Does anyone know who designates essential personnel? (5 mins of Google didn't return an answer)

Could the President designate all federal employees as "essential," to circumvent the budget requirement? (Yes, this would be a power grab by the Executive branch)

rob05con USDA is down

Just speculating, but perhaps the IT person(s) responsible for maintaining the site are nonessential, and considered a simple placeholder safer than leaving the full site online and unattended?

rob05con Federal Government Begins First Shutdown In 17 Years

I stand corrected. I've updated my post to note more common federal positions.

rob05con Federal Government Begins First Shutdown In 17 Years

The broken window fallacy is only applicable in an economic environment where there is sufficient labor demand and insufficient product supply. America produces more than enough goods for everyone, but there aren't enough jobs.

Besides, which services do you believe are "unwanted?" I agree there are many unnecessary "paper pushers" and managers, but the shutdown affects entire departments. One can't simply stop paying the redundant middle managers, and continue paying prison guards and air traffic controllers.

rob05con Merchants of Meth: How Big Pharma Keeps the Cooks in Business

There are too many legal plants anyway؟

rob05con Merchants of Meth: How Big Pharma Keeps the Cooks in Business

Holy mother duck! If I were roughly the size of a barge, I still wouldn't take meth to lose weight. I think you'd be trading your mind for your body.

rob05con Merchants of Meth: How Big Pharma Keeps the Cooks in Business

Right. But many people have neither the time nor money for prescriptions. Especially when OTC medicines claim to work. Especially in lower income states like Mississippi.

I grew up in rural blue-collar America. My father had health insurance through his work, but we seldom had the money for the co-pay to see a doctor. (anecdotal, I know)

rob05con Merchants of Meth: How Big Pharma Keeps the Cooks in Business

Better yet, legalize or prescriptionize less destructive amphetamines, so people have no reason to use meth.

(yes, I just coined a neologism. You can thank me later.)

rob05con Merchants of Meth: How Big Pharma Keeps the Cooks in Business

Pseudoephedrine is the most effective chemical we have to alleviate flu-like symptoms. The alternatives such as phenylephrine simply don't work.

I believe in cognitive liberty, but meth will mess you up. If I believed any drug should be illegal, meth would be at the top of the list. But illegalizing something for which we have no reasonable alternative is absurd.

Of course, making less destructive amphetamines legal so people don't feel the need for meth, that's just crazy talk.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenylephrine#Questions_about_e...

rob05con The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer

In my experience, Managers often mistake Cowboy Coders for Rockstars.

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CowboyCoder

rob05con McCutcheon: Unlimited Bribery

A great idea, but the biggest kickstarters have only raised a small fraction of what the wealthy and corporations spend on lobbying and elections.

Unfortunately, the money simply isn't there.

http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/campaign-finance

http://graphics.latimes.com/2012-election-superpac-spending/

http://www.kickstarter.com/discover/most-funded

rob05con McCutcheon: Unlimited Bribery

SCOTUS takes their existing prejudices and filters them through the Constitution like a sieve, refusing to consider consequences in a mad form of Rule Deontology.

I don't care what the Constitution says. The constitutional provisions for petitioning and free speech have turned into bribery. Bribery is wrong. If the Constitution says otherwise, the Constitution is wrong.

rob05con Chilling legal memo from Obama DOJ justifies assassination of US citizens

> as bad as

>> you need to look at motivations and intent

Sorry to wax philosophical, but that's only true if you're a Deontologist. I am not. :)

rob05con Chilling legal memo from Obama DOJ justifies assassination of US citizens

> matters of state election law

Yep. There are actually a very few cities which use Instant-runoff voting

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting_in_the_Un...

Unfortunately, the people who have to pass laws for non-FPTP voting, are the people it would displace :(

rob05con Chilling legal memo from Obama DOJ justifies assassination of US citizens

I don't think the Executive Branch is overly powerful. Hear me out! Anything significant has to be approved by both houses of Congress, and our Judicial system can overrule all three of them (Something that should never go away).

Winston Churchill reputedly said "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else." Our system of "checks and balances" makes it extremely slow and difficult to accomplish anything. Consider the current defunding issue. The Republican party has been taking the US to the brink of shutdown every few months—despite the American people voting against them in the last election. I'm not trying to bash the Republican party. My point is, I think the Executive branch actually has fairly limited power. I think it might actually be better for accomplishing things if it had a bit more.

I think the real issue is legitimacy. One way to improve legitimacy is to elect the person Everyone Hates The Least, rather than who Everyone Loves The Most. Hence my ranked voting suggestion.

I definitely agree we should approach it from many angles. But as you say: accountability. I think the real problem is Legitimacy, not Power.

rob05con Chilling legal memo from Obama DOJ justifies assassination of US citizens

I wasn't really trying to suggest Rank Voting is the best system. Just that First Past the Post is the worst.

rob05con Chilling legal memo from Obama DOJ justifies assassination of US citizens

IMO the real problem is America's Electoral system. Because there is no rank voting, the choices are the warmongering party, the slightly-less-warmongering party, or wasting your vote.

Even if the President had more power than it does now, it couldn't get away with these things if citizens had the ability to relevantly vote for another person/party. They would simply vote for whoever else was closest to their beliefs but not e.g. killing Americans without due process.

rob05con Chilling legal memo from Obama DOJ justifies assassination of US citizens

Well said. When atrocities are occurring, the question isn't "why now?" the question is "Why haven't we done anything about this?"

rob05con How To Drink Gatorade (2011)

I used to do distance running. I figured out that both apple and grape juice have approximately double the calcium, potassium, magnesium (electrolytes), and calories as Gatorade.

So I started drinking juice diluted with 50% water. Way more natural, and fructose is much healthier than sucrose. It worked pretty well for me; YMMV.

rob05con Edward C++Hands

You would, but the person shaking Edward's hand would not.

To stretch the analogy, scissors are dangerous, but they're also very useful.

I prefer a language that lets me put away the scissors when I don't need them, so I don't cut someone's hand off. For example, Python with C bindings. The problem with C++, IMO, is that it doesn't let you put the scissors away.

rob05con Edward C++Hands

C++: an octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog. — Steve Taylor

http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/

rob05con How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think (2003)

> the disjointed ramblings of a mad man.

"keeping a map of all your thoughts has a freezing effect on the mind."

"you will be IMMOBILIZED for the duration of your commitment"

Sounds like he went mad in the attempt.

rob05con Will Americans trust Al Jazeera America? It depends how they browse the web

I concur. When I read Al Jazeera or China Daily, I don't do it because I trust them, or by any means think they're objective. I read them to get an idea of how other parts of the world perceive events. You could say I read them because they're not objective.

rob05con Statement of Condemnation of U.S. Mass-Surveillance Programs [pdf]

I completely agree, about the codes of conduct bit. Any software developer who's taken part in any of this, who's an ACM member, should be ousted for gross violations of the ACM Code of Ethics

http://www.acm.org/about/code-of-ethics

rob05con TechCrunch: Journalists Or Startup Shills? You Decide

I agree. I'd rather not use a service at all which I find morally objectionable, than just deny them revenue and keep using it. Adblock does kind of feel like stealing to me.

rob05con TechCrunch: Journalists Or Startup Shills? You Decide

I quit reading TechCrunch/CrunchGear after they published an article about how human rights violations in China were a good thing. I forget what their argument was. I used to check their site multiple times a day. I decided not to give them ad revenue after that.

rob05con Did NSA Put a Secret Backdoor in New Encryption Standard? (2007)

That's why my projects use RIPEMD rather than SHA. I prefer my encryption algorithms to not be developed by an organization that has a vested interested in them being broken.

rob05con Go style Channels for Lua

Ah, I misunderstood your project page.

Lua doesn't use multiple OS threads.

I didn't know that. That's really disappointing. Parallelism really is important. It sounds like it's possible, just really awkward: http://kotisivu.dnainternet.net/askok/bin/lanes/

Kudos on making a nice CSP library for Lua though. In my opinion, CSP is a good paradigm for high-level concurrent and parallel processing. Hopefully one day Lua will add reasonable parallelism.

rob05con Go style Channels for Lua

His implementation uses libtask, which says it schedules coroutines with "a single kernel thread." Looking at his code, he doesn't appear to extend this.

Go provides microthreads, which are both concurrent and parallel, and extremely lightweight.

Libtask provides concurrency. It does not provide parallelism. Parallelism is important.