Suppose that you're accused of a crime in North Korea and somehow you manage to escape the country.
Will you still respect what you said in the comment and return to NK to stand trial ?
Replace North Korea with Iran, Iraq, Syria or any other country known to be a corrupt or totalitarian state...
Aka at least half of all the countries in the world...
As a foreigner, you wouldn't trust the justice system in those countries and you would be right to try to avoid the trial.
So you see, the validity of what you said depends a lot on the context.
Even if the Swedish investigation and the trial is totally fair, it is not really the issue.
The issue is the extradition treaty with the US - Sweden will have to make a choice - Assange or good relations with the U.S.
And this is were the deadlock is. Go to Sweden and get unfairly convicted (low probability) or get extradited to the US and get life in prison (high probability). Or both.
Sweden is not North Korea and countries don't extradite to the US all the time because the US justice system is atrocious by first world standards.
Should a Swedish court rule against extraditing Assange to the US, that will have exactly no impact on the relationship between the US and Sweden. No government can reasonably expect from another to break its own laws and it is certainly not in US interest for Sweden to go down that route. Not to mention that the US also reserves the right not to extradite to Sweden in individual cases.
> No government can reasonably expect from another to break its own laws and it is certainly not in US interest for Sweden to go down that route.
I feel and respect your desire for and belief in integrity on the part of the system, but it's extremely naive to believe that.
Maybe it's the fact that I've lived in many different cultures (including Sweden for a year btw!) or maybe it's my age, but what I've taken away from life so far is this:
There's the story which all people (should) believe and then there's the shit that happens.
We're being lied to since we're born - santa claus, tooth fairy, God, then justice, patriotism, news, terrorism, traitors and so on.
Wikileaks is one of the tools which shows us a glimpse of the shit that really happens.
Corruption, under-the-table deals, intimidations - including members of foreign governments, illegal detentions of foreign citizens, surveillance..
Always treat 'the System' with healthy skepticism - and that is because the information that it broadcasts is often false - due to incompetence on the part of the 'reporters' (usually) or due to hidden agendas that so many groups have.
The world is a combination of many chess games played at the same time - in some you're a pawn, in some you're a rook, in some you're the board ;).
If you're thinking of updating to Xcode 8, hoping that your project will 'just build', don't get your hopes too high.
I've already spent all day fixing, updating, searching around for all kinds of errors that the build system throws at me.
It also required me to update the project dependencies to their latest versions which support swift 3/xcode 8.
Some dependencies (like SwiftBond 5) have changed a lot and now my project has hundreds of syntax errors due to renamed methods, not that hard to fix, but not sure if they'll still run the same...
So this is a major upgrade to your project - do it when you have spare time to waste.
In the meantime, I'm thinking of reverting to Xcode 7.3 and running the two versions side by side... Is that possible ?
> In the meantime, I'm thinking of reverting to Xcode 7.3 and running the two versions side by side... Is that possible ?
I think you're probably better off just keeping Xcode 8 by itself, but use Swift 2.3 for projects if you need to. There are very very few differences between 2.2 and 2.3, converting existing code over is much faster than 2.2 -> 3.0.
Tried that, but it seems the build setting now needs an explicit SWIFT_VERSION configured .. And carthage dependencies don't have that so the build fails.
Basically, I couldn't get my carthage dependencies to compile with Swift 2.3, so I went the Swift3 route, which now, after 10 hours wasted, was such a bad idea!
Appstore was bugging me to update Xcode so I caved in and now I'm stuck with a project that doesn't build and the deadline approaching fast. Such a useless waste of time.
Some of you might disagree, but there's this thing happening right now with the younger generation: they don't seem to worship technology like we do.
Which is to say, for them - it's not something 'wow cool', it just is.
My 6-year old is fascinated by bugs and trees a lot more than she is by her iPad.
I mean, the iPad she just uses. A lot. Like the lightbulb.
But she's quite neutral about all the things that we care about - the cool minimalistic design, the powerful chip inside it, the version of the OS.
Like it should be.
As a programmer, I feel very strongly about my machines, but in the grand scheme of things - especially in the time dimension - our gadgets are just tools which we use to achieve stuff, which are always getting worse as time passes.
Now this sounds more like the future, where devices are all standard and common.
I don't really care about the brand of my lightbulb. I also barely care about the brand of my fridge. Maybe in 30 years a phone will be just a phone, not an Android phone, or an iphone.
> is to close your account, block social media bugs and encourage your friends and family to do the same.
Much easier said than done.
First, there is no way to 'close' your account - you can only 'deactivate' it.
I did it in July, but then I noticed that a lot of social activities - like concerts, festivals, parties, etc, are organised using Facebook so if you're not on it, you can't participate.
This is very frustrating and wrong, but that's what the world does.
I personally think that Facebook is breaking the Internet and we're just starting to see the first signs of the bad things to come out of it.
Back to account 'deactivation' - if you log in to your deactivated account, Facebook conveniently 'reactivates' your account automatically, so you can't just log in to look at your data, which of course is not yours and is the currency which Facebook exchanges for real cash.
Telling friends and family to do the same is useless - most don't care even for 1 second about 'privacy' or things like that.
So 'closing' your account is more than just stopping to use a web application. It's a lifestyle choice - do you want to stay secluded, excluded from a lot of social activities and considered an 'introverted loner' or do you go with the flow and get trapped more and more into this social experiment ...
> I did it in July, but then I noticed that a lot of social activities - like concerts, festivals, parties, etc, are organised using Facebook so if you're not on it, you can't participate.
They are organised this way because it is an effective way to organise them; so the only sure way to stop them being organised this way is to make it ineffective (by not participating, by urging others not to do so, and, crucially, by making your reasons known to the organisers). It is true that not using Facebook is an inconvenience, but there is no guarantee of a right to protest without inconvenience!
You can delete it there are what only 5 datacenters...finding your data and cleansing it should not be too hard just alittle repetative ;) But the more effective way to make Facebook listen is to hit them in the pocketbook. Keep your account use an ad-blocker if enough people did that long enough...
They'll still profit from additional ad revenue when other people, like your friends and family, view your posts and use facebook longer than they would have because they are interested in you and your life.
> You can delete it there are what only 5 datacenters...finding your data and cleansing it should not be too hard just alittle repetative ;)
I don't know if your comment was tongue-in-cheek, so here goes. Actually, it's not about the number of data centers Facebook has, but the number of CDNs and edge caches around the world and how FB manages those, including third party companies (like Akamai) that provide this service for Facebook. Plus, Facebook has had a lot of trouble, in a very shameful and absolutely incompetent kind of way, in removing the visibility of photos that were "deleted" by users. See this saga spanning from 2009 through 2012 as reported by Ars. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
> But the more effective way to make Facebook listen is to hit them in the pocketbook. Keep your account use an ad-blocker if enough people did that long enough…
Facebook is already trying to push more users to use its mobile and desktop apps so it can have more control over the content (read as "ads") shown and collect more information that's not easily wipeable by end users (like cookies, cache, etc.). We will see a time in the coming years when there won't be a browser interface for the platform, and the cat and mouse game between ads that look like content and ad blockers (to block FB ads that look like content) will continue on. Depending on the platform, people may start needing content blockers on their routers (or an internal proxy server) to deal with this.
There are many people who consider the older OS versions to be "better" than the latest Windows X.
What "better" means is quite subjective - familiarity, stability, privacy, compatibility, etc.
I really don't know, because I haven't used Windows in many years.
Finally, there's the "pirates" - hundreds of millions of people who run older versions of Windows, which are easier to crack because they're not as 'cloud-enabled' as Windows X.
But all in all, I agree that it's not such a big of a deal..
>Finally, there's the "pirates" - hundreds of millions of people who run older versions of Windows, which are easier to crack because they're not as 'cloud-enabled' as Windows X.
Windows 10 is just as easy to crack as windows 8.1. Just install a local KMS server and you're good to go.
Windows 10 is just as easy to crack as windows 8.1. Just install a local KMS server and you're good to go.
I wonder if the obligatory updates will eventually detect and defeat those cracks, or have the pirates thought of that too? (Or perhaps, given the aggressive push by MS to get everyone on Win10, even giving it away for free, they won't really care.)
Albert Einstein was a smoker, as were a lot of other scientists.
NASA mission control celebrated with cigars when the mission was successful...
From my own experience, smoking sometimes helped me improve concentration and it gave me a 10 minute cigarette break every hour or so, during which I could do some out of the box thinking on the problem.
Tobacco is like a close friend/advisor which is always with you.
Had it not been for the health issues it provoked in me (circulatory/heart), I would still be smoking today.
Even as a non-smoker now, I still respect the plant and I'm grateful for our relationship which lasted for 20 years.
I think it has greatly influenced our (human) development. This is very hard to measure or prove, of course, but given the mystical status that shamans attribute to it ("most powerful plant in the jungle"), I would suspect that it had something to do with the giant expansion of human consciousness that we've experienced since it was introduced into "our" culture.
Good or bad, we don't know, it just did, since so many people use(d) it.
In the eyes of the traditional establishment, LSD is an extremely dangerous substance, not because of it's potential for causing physical harm (which is very close to zero), but because of it's consciousness altering ability, also called "mind expansion" ability.
People who go through a proper acid trip are permanently changed. Their core philosophy, religious and political views can be dramatically altered.
They stop believing the stories that the State and Church wants them to believe and some become hard to control, insubordinate, etc which I would sum up with one word - "free" (of course, with it's own set of consequences).
If the System "brainwashes", the LSD "braincleans".
And then people turn into "hippies", wearing flowers in their hairs, hugging trees and eating vegetarian food. They look at all people as "human beings", instead of "Communist", "Muslim" or "Gay".
They also want everyone to take it.
If I were the military-industrial ego-centric paranoid war-mongering establishment of the '60s, then I would definitely outlaw it and try to get rid of everyone who promotes its use.
Fortunately, LSD and Marijuana are making a major come back, now globally, with millions of young people "waking up", which in our day and age is vitally important, so I hope we'll see news like these more often, including the release of Ross Ulbricht of SilkRoad fame among others.
Because LSD ended up being used primarily within counterculture after academia dismissed its medical potential, I do believe there is some degree of truth in the Erlichmann quote / rememberance. But the fact that LSD culture was aligned with the rise of the beatniks and hippies does not mean that every person who takes LSD becomes a rebel-against-the-system hippie.
Some early LSD use was actually intended for therapeutic treatment, recall. LSD was also experimented with by those same military-industrial complex you are talking about, in the infamous Project MKULTRA experiments. These experiments may have contributed to making a hippie or two (Ken Kesey famously was a participant), but clearly not all participants became a hippie for sure. (Some individuals in fact received negative effects from what I recall, LSD is safer than DARE videos would have it, but the potential for causing mental harm is there, paranoia / schizophrenic type issues in particular) Do also recall that the Hell's Angels (in the California / Hunter S. Thompson circle at least) were also pretty big fans of LSD "back in the day". Biker culture is quite far away from hippie culture.
Today, with marijuana in particular, currently I think you are seeing somewhat of a "normalization" with marijuana in that it's becoming more "normal" to use in a casual manner (ala casual consumption of alcohol). It's not just "hippies" smoking marijuana anymore, it's anyone from CEOs to Olympic athletes these days. It's why, in my opinion, it eventually will be legalized. It won't happen with LSD as easily in my opinion, not enough potential for casual usage, but marijuana's story is a good reason why one has to be careful conflating the recreational substance with the culture it is associated with.
The choice of the UI library depends a lot on the type of app you're developing.
For many types of apps, a single page HTML/JS/CSS app bundled as an executable is the best choice.
If your app will do a lot with the hardware (sound, video, networking,...), then you should look at native libraries for cross-platform hardware access and UI (though HTML/JS/CSS based UIs with native core are also possible).
In my experience, making a good "cross-platform" UI can be tricky, especially if your platforms include both desktop and mobile.
The reason is that each platform has it's own set of features, limitations and design requirements, which you either have to emulate, ignore or implement as platform-specific modules.
Most UI libraries implement their own windowing systems which makes it possible to have an app that behaves similarly on all platforms.
The drawback is that the app looks and feels 'cooked' - things aren't quite standard, animations are a bit off, fonts are rendered differently, etc.
One such example is Qt, which has been mentioned many times here. It is probably the best choice if pixel perfection and native look/feel isn't your primary requirement. With a bit of work you could probably achieve native 'perfection' with it too.
If you work with sound, then you should take a good look at JUCE - it has a very pleasant API, has a low overhead and a very friendly community.
That being said, the best choice IMHO is to develop native UIs for each platform or at least for the mobile versions of your app.
The trick is to separate your design into "core" and "ui" parts.
The core is a cross platform C++ library, which implements all the business logic and low level hardware access, exposing an API to the UI layer.
The UI is then implemented in Qt/JUCE for the desktop apps, Objective-C++ and Swift for iOS (and OSX if you want) and Java+JNI on Android.
The advantage of this method is that it forces you to have clear separation of concerns between the core business and UI layers and you can have different people working on the core and the specific platform UIs.
The ultimate advantage is of course your user's experience - native apps are more gratifying.
It might sound like a lot more work, but it's usually not as bad as it sounds - if you have a well designed core API, the UI is just a visual representation of your application state, which is not that difficult to implement on each platform.
In the end, personal preference and tastes also matter - use whatever makes you (and your team) feel more comfortable.
Good luck !
