FlemishBeeCycle · HackerTrans

FlemishBeeCycle

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Confirmed: The NSA is Spying on Millions of Americans

eff.org

1,227 pointsby FlemishBeeCycle13 jaar geleden444 comments

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FlemishBeeCycle

13 jaar geledendiscuss

Exactly. Being offended in and of itself is worthless (I'm sure we can find that Stephen Fry quote somewhere in this thread), it is not a motivator for a behavioral change, at least for me, unless I care about the person being offended.

When I do offend people, I often like to probe as to _why_ they're offended. In my experience, most people seem to be incapable of defining any concrete reasons as to why a given statement is offensive other than circular, "it's offensive because it's offensive" reasoning.

FlemishBeeCycle

14 jaar geledendiscuss

You're placing entirely too much importance on particular categorizations, "comfort" has much more to do with "what you're used to", than the idea that people are constantly fretting about how population densities in their environment match up to their own self-identification.

As a bi-racial male of the darker persuasion (which in America is basically "not-white"), I find myself much more comfortable around predominantly "white" groups because that has been the most common environment for myself throughout my life.

FlemishBeeCycle

14 jaar geledendiscuss

Why do you believe the github style guide to be the authoritative source for JavaScript style? There is no benefit for avoiding use of semicolons other than not writing semicolons, whereas there are several detriments for their omission.

> It gives Twitter, or whatever other start up, an opportunity to replace an outdated piece of software by a nut case!

I don't know where this ad-hominem is coming from, but Douglas Crockford is hardly a nutcase.

FlemishBeeCycle

14 jaar geledendiscuss

My guess is that rather than give an exhaustive list, the author wanted to give an example of a familiar language _without_ static typing. As Haxe is more similar to ECMAScript than Python, Ruby, Lua etc. - it's the most appropriate comparison.

As a person who likes (the good parts of) JavaScript, I read it as trying to appeal to me with promises of less debug time.

FlemishBeeCycle

14 jaar geledendiscuss

While I disproportionally use Ruby and JavaScript on a daily basis, this statement is referring to a specific type of (common) error, which is largely alleviated by the use of static typing, and therefore not exactly untrue.

I didn't take it as a disparaging of dynamic typing.

FlemishBeeCycle

14 jaar geledendiscuss

That's been one of my concerns, the best way to circumvent that issue is to do something like the following:

   <script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
   <script>window.jQuery || document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='/path/to/jquery.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));</script>

This way it will fallback to a local copy if Google's goes down.

[Edit: simonsarris replied with something similar as I was replying, however, the advantage of using unescape is that you don't get invalid markup warnings]

FlemishBeeCycle

14 jaar geledendiscuss

And what if you both sit in a life drawing class drawing the same model? What if for some odd reason you decide to sit behind one of the participants and draw a portrait based off their drawing?

I certainly understand what you're getting at, but everything that we do today is based off of some idea that came before us. Is a certain level of indirection required for an expression to be considered appropriately unique?

From the article, "..there is a line between copying ideas and copying the original expression of ideas...", I would consider that opinion to be both myopic and absurd. We stand on the shoulders of giants - nothing created today can ever be considered to be truly "original".

FlemishBeeCycle

15 jaar geledendiscuss

As individuals, we don't act the same way around our peers, our friends or our family. While we certainly present ourselves differently in different contexts, I wouldn't call these different "identities", rather the same identity applying the rules of the given context to their behavior.

Where it becomes tricky is when one is strips away the context isolation. For example, at your friend's bachelor party, some behavior might perfectly normative within context and participants, but the next day when people outside of that context can watch a video of your behavior - you might feel a little shame/embarrassment/regret/etc.

The internet, for better or worse, allows a complete breakdown of context isolation. While the rules of posting on 4chan or HN greatly differ, a person adhering to rules of a given context, will still be judged across both contexts by outside viewers.

The solution here is to create context isolation - which is very easy to do with anonymity.

FlemishBeeCycle

15 jaar geledendiscuss

Unless you have a specific example, merely omitting mention of both genders hardly qualifies as "sexism" to me? There are plenty of gender-specific magazines for females that do the same thing all the time. I don't see why everyone must now pepper their prose with "he or she" and use an exact 50/50 proportion of examples using both male and female names (actually, you wouldn't need an equal proportion, as it seems that sexism only applies to men) lest they be labeled sexist?

Secondly, just because it's popular today to think of men differently than the "old-fashioned way" doesn't mean that modern thought is "more correct" as to what defines a man, nor does it mean that people who disagree with the modern idea are "wrong" (I'm not suggesting that the "old-fashioned way" is in anyway correct either, but still people have different opinions - and the popular modern idea is just one more).

But I digress, the blog is quite self-aware and I've always read it with a sort of tongue-in-cheek sense of humor; the "gratuitously" throwing in of "man" and "manliness" is part of the writing style.

FlemishBeeCycle

15 jaar geledendiscuss

I'd recommend Mirah (https://github.com/mirah/mirah) and Pindah (https://github.com/mirah/pindah) as an almost Ruby over Ruboto for Android due to slow startup times from the poor performance of Reflection on Dalvik.

FlemishBeeCycle

15 jaar geledendiscuss

I understand your position, and perhaps I should have better clarified my own. I did not mean to imply that photography was not a technical or creative field, rather by "mechanical process", I meant the physical act of creation.

I put a brush to canvas, or a pencil to paper. My gestures are effected by micro muscle movements, the interplay between the grain of the canvas and the camelhair in my brush, the way I personally perceive my subject. No two lines drawn by my hand, no two drops of ink flecked from my pen will ever be the same. My emotional state at the time will felt in my brush strokes.

All your points I agree with, but ultimately photography (by its process) has less potential for a physically variable and personal experience (for example the connectedness that a sculptor feels with the work physically formed by their hands) specifically in the dimension that I am talking about.

Also, your points on composition (perspective, framing,focus,exposure) are present in other visual mediums (although focus and exposure aren't generally terms that I hear a lot of painters use, it's still there), and arguably more under your creative control.

Finally, with photography you are limited to that which exists already in this world (once you start getting heavily into post-processing, it's hard to call keep calling it "photography").

FlemishBeeCycle

15 jaar geledendiscuss

> Merely reproducing something is not art, it's direct reproduction. Introducing unique style would be art.

One could then argue that photographs are merely reproduction of reality, and therefore not art. I fail to see why you think photographs introduce unique style but pixel art does not.

> The photo in question was beautifully captured, and the flippant way it's being treated is rather sad.

I apologize for suggesting that you dislike pixel art, but that's how I this sentence reads to me.

FlemishBeeCycle

15 jaar geledendiscuss

The burden of proof would be on the photographer to prove that it was a "copy" of their work rather than an independent creation. At a certain point it comes down to this intangible idea of intent and process.

Reminds me of the "What Color are your Bits" piece http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/lawpoli/colour/2004061001.php

FlemishBeeCycle

15 jaar geledendiscuss

"Uniqueness" isn't a qualification for determining whether something is "art". Most art is not unique, and certainly not most photographs.

Calling the pixelated version a "flippant" capturing is disingenuous, as it seems to be a reflection of your (apparent) dislike of pixel art rather than the artist's intentions.

FlemishBeeCycle

15 jaar geledendiscuss

I don't follow your argument.

If a painter and a photographer both depict the same scene, your argument seems to be suggesting that the "degree of 'artistic' creation" from the photographer would somehow be greater than that of the painter? How would that work? Although painting from real life allows for perhaps better capture of a scene, it is arguably similar to painting from a photograph of the same scene.

There's a much higher degree of creativity / variability inherent in drawing / painting / pixelating over than in photography simply by the mechanical process alone.

FlemishBeeCycle

15 jaar geledendiscuss

I would blame poor/lazy devs inappropriately using JS rather than the evolution of the browser for this. For the average web page, it's unnecessary 90% of the time to require JavaScript for any core functionality ( not so much with web applications ). I have a hard time understanding why people do this as it's often much easier to test and develop when you're layering on JS unobtrusively.

FlemishBeeCycle

15 jaar geledendiscuss

You are a much less cynical person than myself if you think that society is a reflection of its members' values. There is a mismatch between what people say/think that they value, and what people actually value. It takes only sidelong glance at the current political climate in the US to see myriad examples of people voting against their own best interests.

By and large, people expect the status quo, and as it has been, so shall it be. Had the internet been born in some corporate boardroom - restricted, tiered, filtered - people would expect nothing more.

I suspect we only a few rebrands from control be wrested away - look at Verizon/Google's net neutrality bill making a distinction between wired and wireless internet access. Certainly a reasonable person might agree that wired vs wireless internet access are conceivably "different" - and if the average person can be convinced that there is a difference, they will accept the terms of this difference as it is given to them.

I think that like most things in life, the internet will be controlled by a few people with a desire to shape it. The question is whether or not the people who value freedom, take a vested interest as well.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

FlemishBeeCycle

15 jaar geledendiscuss

Mirah is what finally got me started with Android development. Coming from a Ruby background there's practically zero learning curve, plus you can install it from RubyGems (which when using RVM makes it dead-simple).

That being said, for my first application I decided to do it in plain old Java - since I had never worked with Java, I imagined that a rudimentary understanding of its workings would help me down the road in debugging issues that might arise when working with Mirah (somewhat like knowing JavaScript before working with CoffeeScript).

There's even a tool for writing Mirah for Android called Pindah https://github.com/mirah/pindah/ .

All in all, it's quite a nice package.

FlemishBeeCycle

15 jaar geledendiscuss

No one is questioning the existence of the patent - it's the validity of the patent that's being doubted. Given the current processes followed by the USPTO, existence says _nothing_ for its validity.

FlemishBeeCycle

15 jaar geledendiscuss

Why should one identify with a country they may have never been to, or a culture they may never have experienced? What's the point of romanticizing an intangible connection that only exists if you want it to?

As a person of mixed-raced descent, the idea that I should somehow be confused over where I "belong" always amused me. I am myself - the incalculable chain of events that led up to my existence are not particularly informative or suggestive of who I am or should be.