twwl

The the people downvoting this thinking they're cute: totalitarianism is no joke, and your apathy infringes on my rights. You flat out do not get to be this lame.

Get rid of your toys before your toys get rid of you.

Is there anyone marketing cigaretts able to claim they're unaware? Aren't those also adults?

There's irony in this: Do you think not judging other people for X or Y makes you better than people who judge other people? :P

> I disagree, I believe it is properly using abstractions to write simpler, more straight-forward code.

Straightforward for some readers, or more straightforward for the CPU/GPU?

Actually, it's written exactly as often as the original construct.

The idea that writing more than 5 letters, or a for loop here and there, is this giant cesspool source of errors is totally alien to me. Of all the ways in which my programming sucks, this was never among them. So thanks for you permission, I'll use it wisely :P

Sure, but when programinng, what the machine does and how long it takes, sometimes does matter. I have to think of all those jQuery examples floating about out there that just do $('#foo') in several places -- sure, it looks simpler than putting it once into a variable, but from the viewpoint of what the computer ends up doing it's utterly ass-backwards.

> I mean from one perspective a conditional in high level code doesn't describe "what is actually happening, either."

Sure, and from another perspective even the most efficient code does nothing to stop the heat death of the universe and is therefore functionally equivalent to doing anything else or nothing at all. However, that's just splitting hairs. It's not really an argument anyway, but rather a preference.

It's not simplifying it though, it's just hiding the complexity in syntactic sugar. I prefer the first way of doing things vastly over the second. Yeah, it's more code, but it's also more or less "what is actually happening", instead of an euphemism which has to be unpacked.

> It comes from Greek words "demos" meaning "the people" and "kratia" meaning power or authority. A democracy doesn't specify which people

Of course it does -- the people. Demos, not anthropos.

> But none of these things mean that the US does not have a democracy.

And here too, the words "least democratic", rather than e.g. "not democratic at all, in any sense, ever", were likely chosen for a reason.

> I think its odd that the OP simply saying he applauds the Ecuadorians efforts to distance themselves from Wikileaks elicited such a total condemnation from you.

I consider it obedience signalling in the face of totalitarianism. I'm fine with "total condemnation" of that. I actually expect it from anyone I wouldn't pity and fight.

If you have to be forced in order to act moral, you're immoral. People can call corporations "amoral" all day long, but they're made of people, and their decision to not be moral also implies the decision to be immoral.

> facts and data are objective

Sure -- it's just a pity neither you or me or anyone will ever come in contact with them. Everything we think/write/read is based on assumptions/axioms. You don't even have to "dig" to realize that, you just have to scratch the surface.