some reading material

[cellio]

Stack Overflow has a candidate site for Q&A on Jewish topics. Stack Overflow takes what looks like a sound approach to launching new sites like this, waiting until enough people commit before launching. After all, if they can't attract good questions and good answers, no one will care. I committed.

What Level 3 v. Comcast says about the FCC's obsolescence is a good explanation of what is going on with throttling internet traffic (link, as with many on this topic, from osewalrus). goldsquare writes about why you should care.

Law and the Multiverse (now syndicated at law_multiverse) does fun legal analysis of superhero law. From their "about" page: "If there's one thing comic book nerds like doing it's over-thinking the smallest details. Here we turn our attention to the hypothetical legal ramifications of comic book tropes, characters, and powers. Just a few examples: Are mutants a protected class? Who foots the bill when a hero damages property while fighting a villain? What happens legally when a character comes back from the dead?" Thanks to anastasiav for pointing it out.

The first truly honest privacy policy sounds about right to me. Link from cahwyguy.

The semicolon wars discusses differences in programming languages and some of the religious wars that have been fought over them. Thanks to nancylebov for the link.

Thanks to brokengoose for pointing me to Kindle Feeder, which supports RSS feeds to the Kindle. Now, do any of you know how to get an RSS feed to cough up the entire article instead of just the first paragraph? If the publisher didn't set it up that way is there anything I can do about it?

Comments

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

Thanks for link to Law and Multiverse feed!

[cahwyguy.livejournal.com]

Q and A site on Jewish Topics? Been there, don't that, got the T-shirt. (http://www.scjfaq.org/). :-)

[jducoeur]

The semicolon wars discusses differences in programming languages and some of the religious wars that have been fought over them.

Humph -- doesn't even mention Scala. Piker. Yes, I'm as biased as anybody, but having programming in the majority of the displayed languages, I do feel that I at least have an informed opinion. His core point -- that there is no single perfect language -- is certainly correct, but some at least try harder than others.

More seriously, his argument about the polarization of the programming world looks pretty dated, and is getting moreso with each passing month. Few serious languages are strictly OO or Functional, and the good ones are embracing both paradigms with a will. Scala goes further than any other language in being utterly serious about doing both paradigms *well*, but even Java is giving ground and becoming more functional. (Notably, C# is also doing a good job of stealing all the best ideas from both sides of the argument -- one of those cases where MS is doing it right.)

So the reality is that things are actually getting steadily *less* polarized: while there are outliers, the majority of programming languages are getting more and more alike at the moment...