The problem with racism is not that it targets people of color. It's that it targets them in order to treat them bad. The KKK wouldn't be any better if they targeted people blindly. So, I take offense with your behavior here: being rude to everybody and anybody is just as bad as being racist in a tweet.
The arguments put forth in the parent comments seem perfectly valid. The sample is in the region of statistical noise, and as such gives very little information about the matter.
Also, I believe that Twitter as a sampling space is flawed. E.g places like Mississippi and Alabama might have far more rampant racism than California, but be underrepresented in the category of "people with tweeter accounts" because of poverty rates.
Is this supposed to mean that the Chinese are too tame and subservient?
They already had a huge communist revolution -- and two more revolutions in the last 120 years (the Boxer and the Hsin-hai Revolution). Even the last 2-3 decades, they had massive strikes and struggles, and the Tien-An Men square thing.
>There is no place for humor or overly subjective terms like "evil" in a software license or other legal document, and the problem with Douglas Crockford's license is that he fails to understand that.
No, the problem is that the other guys WANT to use Douglas Crockford's code.
It's they who are needy and demanding, not Douglas, who doesn't have to "understand" anything.
People that "stopped reading" after some point, but still went on to rant about an article, rarely provide any useful insight.
Case in point.
Oh, and "those two things" are not unrelated. His argument is that Firefox never drove UI innovation, and almost all the good things we now take for granted were copied from other browsers (Opera and Chrome). Left to itself, Firefox had (and would continue to have) a subpar UI.
Your point is that being a late adopter of UI goodness doesn't preclude you having a good UI. But "good UI" is relative. If you are a late adopter your UI is always worse than the competition.
>Human translators are so expensive today that they are only used in situations where the translation has to be correct -- diplomacy, courtrooms, books, etc.
Professional translators and trained interpreters yes.
But thousands of people work solely (or assume the role periodically) as interpreters and translators for many more situations, mainly revolving around business.
Now, signing a business deal will still involve translator and a trained lawyer, but those other everyday cases, including showing a western partner around the Chinese offices, could switch to machine translation.
Or you know...many of the middle class Chinese that work in the offices that already speak English. Honestly, when I've walked into a Chinese office I've never had the "noone speaks English" problem, while the big boss who doesn't speak English would prefer to have one of the younger guy/gals around anyways as a sign of status.
>How am I supposed to know which is best? Do I need a degree in Keynesian economics or can I just listen to a few talking heads on the local news?
You're not supposed to vote for what is "best".
You are supposed to vote for what you WANT to happen.
It could be the worst thing for the country but very good for you. That's OK too, if a tad selfish.
Now, if you don't know what you want or what is good for you, you still get to decide. Anything major that will be legislated, like taxes, WILL affect you. So, what would you do if you don't know which option is the best? What you do in every similar situation in life:
a) User your direct knowledge.
b) Use your experience.
c) Try to learn for other people that know that stuff.
d) Discuss it with others in general.
e) Read up on the issue.
d) When everything fails, just your gut.
You'll have to suffer any consequences anyway.
And it's not like you can just have people with "degrees" and experts to make your opinion, or have the only right to vote on an issue.
1) For one, because those people also have biases, personal interests and hidden agendas. And even the non outright lying ones can be partisan, deluded, dogmatic, ideological or simply idiots with rich dads that bought them a good education.
2) Second, YOU'LL suffer from the consequences of any law, so it's YOUR decision to make, not theirs.
Sure, raw benchmark speed doesn't matter for code dealing with external latency sources (databases and similar IO bound cases), but it's very nice for CPU intensive code. TL;DR: V8 and Dart are blazingly fast.
Now, maybe Dart doesn't have much future in the browser space without being adopted by the major vendors, but, wouldn't it be nice if Dart could got some adoption like Go did in the scripting/server area. It would make a nice and modern dynamic language to balance something like Go that plays at the statically typed side.
Of course, getting someone like Lars Bak to make a screaming fast Ruby or Python VM would be even better. He could improve on one of the next-gen implementations of those languages, like Rubinious or PyPy.
Maybe there's hope a crowd-funding project to pay the man? Because, as it seems, volunteer effort can only get you that far.
The problem with racism is not that it targets people of color. It's that it targets them in order to treat them bad. The KKK wouldn't be any better if they targeted people blindly. So, I take offense with your behavior here: being rude to everybody and anybody is just as bad as being racist in a tweet.
The arguments put forth in the parent comments seem perfectly valid. The sample is in the region of statistical noise, and as such gives very little information about the matter.
Also, I believe that Twitter as a sampling space is flawed. E.g places like Mississippi and Alabama might have far more rampant racism than California, but be underrepresented in the category of "people with tweeter accounts" because of poverty rates.