sailormoon

Actually, I wrote that with the intention of disagreement, but now I think about it ...

I'd like to see a ranking of countries by external public debt.

I think the slang term "dyke" is a bit out of date anyway?

That doesn't sound like any Chinese I know. The Chinese I know are completely apathetic about politics, anyone's politics. They are concerned with their day to day lives and making money. As long as the government isn't too bad, they ignore it.

I think this piece is wishful thinking; the author is projecting his deep feelings about politics and democracy onto the Chinese public and I just don't see that as reflecting any kind of reality I've observed there.

  >> name = 'http://super.com/'
  => "http://super.com/"
  >> name.gsub!(/\W/, '')
  => "httpsupercom"
  >> name.gsub!(/^http(s)?/i, '')
  => "upercom"

yep.

Watch this: http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=16717

The highest-paid person I know makes about $700k/yr and to listen to him you'd think that making only seven tenths of a million dollars every year was the most miserable burden any man ever had to carry. My kind offers to relieve the load, needless to say, go yet untaken ..

It's more like 2 different web browsers. IE, and everything else.

My favourites are Neal Stephenson and Iain Banks. I always feel like I gained far more from their books than I put into them. Everyone's different of course but they're two authors I can wholeheartedly recommend.

Paying for generalist press-release AP-cut-and-pasting junk like the WSJ, though? Give me a break. I see no reason for most of the generalist news services to exist at all. I am not sure why we require all these different "brands" to republish the same damn AP story 20,000 times.

Investment in public transport is expensive, sure, but it's better than the other option - forcing the costs to the individual level, where everything is far less efficient, not least in lost time.

1.9.2 release plan, for those who missed it:

  - 31 Mar.  freeze the spec
  - 30 Apr.  freeze the code
  - 31 May.  release 1.9.2-preview2
  - 30 Jun.  release 1.9.2-rc
  - 31 Jul.  release 1.9.2-p0

Why not? And anyway, they could at least try to do it in semi-privacy - maybe behind a building, or in the bushes, or something. No, it seems almost deliberate to me, or alternatively so zonked out on drugs/malice that they just couldn't give a damn. Either way it's not just a lack of facilities. We've all been in a strange part of the city we don't know well, no toilets anywhere and busting to go. We all somehow found some kind of semi-acceptable solution that didn't involve shitting on someone's fence.

I have no idea why it's different in SF but these things just don't happen elsewhere, so there must be some reason for it.

What is it about American homeless that they lack even the basic human dignity to find a toilet to take a dump in? Or hell, at least a drain or somewhere their shit will wash away? Are they that disconnected from society? Or is it a calculated thing, like vandalism, revenge against a society they hate? It's nuts.

Sure, I've seen people shit in public. Once a friend had severe stomach cramps while walking through a park in central Sydney; she rushed into the bushes to relieve the pain. And while I was living around there I regularly saw women (it always seems to be women) crouching over drains in the street outside my apartment. Hey, I understand, when you gotta go, you gotta go, and severe diarrhoea makes people desperate. That's fine. But never with this total lack of dignity and respect that SF residents seem to experience.

That said, I agree with you, it's strange. But I do think it's good they're pushing so hard for 1.9.2.

Then, of course, people would put their feet up in socks, and Zed would have to come up with another token justification for why he doesn't like people relaxing too ostentatiously in front of him.

To my surprise, though, some people just don't "get it". Where I see elegant, intuitive behaviour, they see incomprehensible magic. Where I delight in "objects all the way down", they find OO to be at odds with their conceptualisation and an unnecessary, unwelcome complexifying factor.

Depends on the person. I hate to say it but in many cases a less "opinionated about OO" language, like (gasp!) PHP, might be a better fit.

Argh! There's nothing I hate more than seemingly cool open source software being saddled from birth with ridiculous names! Gwibber!? What was the author thinking!?

Well, I think you're underestimating the pace of technological progress. Yes, I might not personally live to see the day, but I don't think it will be that far away. There are a lot of rapidly aging rich people. Research is increasing in pace, not decreasing, and efforts like SENS are only just getting started.

Those billions of data points are largely irrelevant on a timeline where technology only increases in potency. Historical death rates offer almost no guidance to a future where the causes of those billions of deaths are being isolated and eliminated faster than ever. You do know that according to Moore's law, computers will overtake the human brain in the 2020s, right? Where's the historical precedent for that?

You might have a point that immortality boosters are motivated somewhat by hope and self-interest, but you seem to be biased in the other direction, for no reason I can discern.

It is rational for any living being to seek to extend their life. Admitting it is possible and desirable is merely the first step. Why not considering taking it? There's still space in the 300. http://www.mfoundation.org/index.php?pagename=mj_donations_t...

your brain still can only hold so much and you still be you

Well by that logic I've died several times already. I'm very far from the same person I was at age 5 or even 15. I don't mind changing and evolving, even if you want to call that a kind of death. It's so gradual that I doubt I'd even notice.

on to step 2, where you start critically thinking about the odds of you personally living forever

I do not pretend that the odds are favourable, but that is orthogonal to all this justification about why dying is good and healthy. Dying sucks, man, no matter how much you try to dress it up as a good, socially beneficial natural part of life.

the real trade-offs with not dying. Which is Jacques point.

Well, I guess my point is that I could not care less what the trade-off is, anything is better than dying, because any problem can be solved, but you can never come back from death.