saljam

This sounds good. But how is it better than just installing Tor?

I see this request very frequently, but I wonder how feasible it really is. The Android API is very Javasque, a 1:1 mapping to Go would just be unnatural.

Or are you suggesting they rewrite the API for Go? My knowledge of the internals of the Java parts of Android is limited, so I could be wrong, but that feels like a huge task.

A few years ago I applied with my sister, she got hers straight away, while I (Arab, early 20s, with a rather pathetic beard) got a letter telling me to wait and not ask them about its status. About half a year later I got another letter asking me to apply again if I still want to go.

I thanked them and said I didn't.

ah, so you can! brilliant. thanks for that!

I feel I should mention Plan 9's pipeline branching. Not named pipes, but something which I guess served a significant subset of named pipes' use cases. The Plan 9 shell, rc, had a feature where when a subprocess was invoked with the syntax:

  <{ls}

that string would get replaced by a filename, which when opened would be hooked up to the stdout (or stdin for >) of the invoked command.

Used as an argument, this allowed you to essentially do none-linear piping in a mostly transparent way. I say mostly because I don't think you could seek.

Every once in a while I find myself wishing there was something like this in bash. Maybe there is...

I find Neil deGrasse Tyson's case is particularly amusing, where he himself corrected it multiple times only to find it changed back to "atheist" (from "agnostic").

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzSMC5rWvos around 1:31.

You are correct, I overlooked that detail. You can cross Nepal from that list, and my point still stands though.

Way to go on creating an completely irrelevant religious flamewar. As others have said, Islam has nothing to do with this.

This, as others have pointed out, is a case of rich-exploits-poor. Unsurprisingly, with the full support of the law. Exit visa laws, for example, aren't exclusive to the Middle East. (Actually, of the Middle East, only Qatar and Saudi Arabia have it.) The Soviet Union had them, Uzbekistan still has them, even Nepal has them. And for a short while, both Germany and Italy had similar laws.

That's incorrect. The word kafalah roughly translates to sponsorship. Migrant worker sponsorship and adoption have nothing to do with each other.

I guess it's also worth mentioning Mirah, a JVM language heavily inspired by Ruby. Unlike JRuby, it compiles down to byte code ahead of time and needs not support libraries.

http://www.mirah.org

> But some of the narratives into which he frames that material seem questionable.

Mostly this. I think it's because he's essentially making entertainment out of history, which is pretty much impossible to do without missing part of the picture. Otherwise it would be too boring (like real history).

While I normally dislike Adam Curtis's work, I totally agree with you about the ending on that article. That's certainly the sentiment I sense, as an Arab currently in the UK.

My grandmother (a Muslim) used to put some on my cuts when I was a kid. I started experimenting more recently. (Conveniently as I picked up mountain biking—no shortage of cuts!) It certainly seems like the cuts on which I apply some honey heal faster and scar less than the ones I leave as "control".

Am I the only one who thinks fake bars are an awful idea? If you don't know how long the operation is going to take, why not just use a throbber or an oscillating bar or something? A fake bar just messes up the conceptual model that people build while using the app. Especially when the thing is broken for some reason.

Not quite what the article was talking about, but what worries me about modern democracies is where the responsibility of government decisions lies. In theory the voters should bear it, since they chose the government. But in practice they just shrug "rotten politicians" and move on with their lives as their country wages war on millions of innocents. The politicians themselves rarely get their comeuppance, because hey, the people chose them!

Democracy only works with a politically active population. And frankly, most people don't give a shit.

I grew up in a country with mandatory web filtering. ("For pornography", but naturally, dissent forums always end up in that list.) Virtually every kid I knew was comfortable using Tor, Bittorrent, or a plain old web proxy (in the early days) to get around it.

These filters are just an inconvenience, and if your child is too stupid to work around them then you've got worse problems.

Brilliant! I had always hoped CoffeeScript or somehow a JS library would add blocking channels like this. Writing JavaScript is a pain after being spoilt by Go.

I'm quite curious about what the compiled code looks like. (On a mobile now, I'll have a look when I can.)

I've been thinking about this (and the more general keychain problem) recently. Wouldn't it make sense to have your keychain stored on your smartphone, and allow applications access over a standard protocol using NFC/USB/Bluetooth?

Better still, let the phone do the public key cryptography (as in plan9's factotum), so that your private keys never leave your phone.

Furthermore, Java is quite happy to let you do COLS[1] = "Green". All that is constant about that array is the reference.

People often underestimate the power of ed. It's very useful when terminals are misbehaving and curses editors no longer work, or in shell scripts which modify files. (Ed commands in here documents.)

Ed anecdote: A friend of mine once wanted to make an inverted version of sed, which takes commands on stdin and applies them to a file named in the arguments. I think he called it fsed. I facepalmed and gave him my copy of The UNIX Programming Environment.

Forth is brilliant, but my favourite concatenative language is PostScript. Most view PostScript as nothing more than a dated binary format for vector graphics. However, writing plots and diagrams in pure PS is incredibly flexible and pretty easy once you build up or find enough libraries to do what you want. Postscriptbarcode[0] is an example of a good library. [1] is a good guide to writing PS by hand.

What is PS does lack, however, is a modern debugger (or interpreter with decent error reporting) and package management.

[0] http://code.google.com/p/postscriptbarcode/ [1] http://www.math.ubc.ca/~cass/graphics/manual/

Wow, I remember reading about foaf+ssl years ago. Glad to see it's still alive!

I agree. To me, Webfinger+OpenID seems like a more sensible solution. At least in principle. The only downside is that OpenID lacks BrowserID's privacy bits.

http://code.google.com/p/webfinger/

You should also count for the people who switched to an RSS reader that isn't Feedly. I, for one, started using The Old Reader.

Well, you can sort of already have that with a bit of JS and NoVNC.

http://kanaka.github.com/noVNC/

I hacked together an open source VNC viewer which can run on the ARM Chromebooks[0] earlier this year. Source code at [1]. It't far from perfect but it did what I needed it to do.

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vnc-viewer/ekheahf...

[1] https://bitbucket.org/saljam/vnc

I think the OP meant automatic inlining. I.e. by a compiler.

More or less related; one of the nicest paradigms I've used for handling UI was concurrent lightweight processes with synchronous channel-based communication. That's a mouthful! But it's essentially the model languages like Go use. In fact, Rob Pike has written one of the conceptual ancestors to Go, Newsqueak, specifically to deal with UI.

In that model, each 'thing' on the screen runs as a concurrent process, but it's written as a simple loop which blocks on reading from the input channels (mouse, keyboard events, etc.). This makes the behaviour of each element clearer to read, and possibly easier to compose. Compare that to the callback spaghetti of event driven systems like JS in browsers and you'll see a clear winner.

http://swtch.com/~rsc/thread/newsqueak.pdf

OK, I stand corrected! I should've done my homework...

Why don't distributions provide an image that can be dd'd onto a USB stick? I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds USB mass storage infinitely more convenient than CDs nowadays. Sure, they provide a USB image creator, but you have to have a fairly standard (and graphical, last time I checked) Linux installation first. And sure, you can extract the files and make one yourself, but is that really necessary?

This goes for both Ubuntu and Fedora.