mpweiher

Well, let's take an example. Breivik built a bomb, which killed 8. Awful. Because he was dissatisfied with the result, he went on a shooting spree that killed 69. I think I see your point...

Switzerland is a great example, thanks for bringing it up! As you point out, Switzerland has an overall rate of violence that is quite low, for example slightly lower than that of Germany ( http://en.…

OK. "Operator" runs amok with a nerf gun. Slightly different outcome. How again is the highly efficient killing tool not part of the problem?

From that list, I count 16 events in the US and 4 in the EU. Populations are 501M (EU) and 316M (US) (Wikipedia). So 4:1 incidence rate, 6:1 adjusted for population. Very similar to the overall hom…

The Wapo article links to a graph that has the "deaths due to assault" (not limited to guns) for OECD countries: http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2012/07/20/america-... Luxembourg (total po…

What I am saying is that mental illness is not the fundamental issue of the case. Somebody going mental with a nerf gun just isn't the same sort of problem. At all. Not that mental illness isn't als…

Do you mean this series of attacks? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_attacks_in_China_(2010–2... If Wikipedia is correct, this was a whole series of attacks, sometimes with multiple assailants, …

Thank you, Captain Obvious. From the WaPo article: "Last year, economist Richard Florida dove deep into the correlations between gun deaths and other kinds of social indicators. Some of what he found…

Precisely: the attack in china wounded twenty. As of this writing none were killed. The "severity of the damage" is a highly relevant measure, not something to dismiss. "...poor attempt at treati…

Gladly! Firearm related death rate, per 100K of population. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-re... US: 9.0 Switzerland: 6.4 Finland: 3.64 Germany: 1.1 UK: 0.25 ...…

Outlawing is a straw man in that it is not the only option for regulation that would help. These things are not booleans! Countries with much tighter gun regulations than the US don't outlaw guns. …

Again, total prevention is a straw man. No-one is claiming that total prevention is an achievable goal. (Massive) reduction is. I am a pilot. It is said the FARs (Federal Aviation Regulations) are …

Regulating guns ("outlawing" is a straw man) ameliorates the problem of how much damage a mentally disturbed person can do. A knife in the same situation is much less dangerous, as evidenced by the in…

What other OSes do you require? GNUStep lists various BSDs, various Linuxes, HP/UX, Solaris, Windows and some embedded systems: http://wiki.gnustep.org/index.php/Platform_compatibility I also had a…

It should/will obviously also work on iOS, and using an Objective-C web-framework, your iOS device actually performs comparably to Ruby running on big iron. Imagine a server rack filled with old iPho…

Thanks! Exactly what I meant :) In other words: there was a WebObjects after v4? ;-)

3) You think that having a common language for all parts of your project could be an advantage, for example sharing your model code. Especially valuable if you've decoupled your model from your deli…

To me, this goes back to the "single page program": all programs should have a top level that can be expressed as a single page of executable code and comprehensibly captures the essence of the progr…

I think OO was a first (and pretty good) stab at the problem. The primary goal was recursion, so having things be self-similar, and Alan's insight was to make the small things look like the big things…

Donald "beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it" Knuth?

I think he is describing the (common) situation where you want to do TDD for new code, but are dealing with an already existing code-base that doesn't have test coverage and just isn't amenable to tes…

Odd, my experience is exactly the opposite: code that is written using TDD tends to be extremely concrete, because it does only as much as is needed to pass the test, no more. If you are making code …

There's actually a fairly simple way to deal with external systems that to me would seem to apply to hardware as well: First, write code that "tests" the actual hardware, that means it drives the hard…

Maybe we need a new name/acronym for this "pragmatic REST" style?

Well, the other issues with WebObjects is that at this point it is no longer Objective-C, but Java...

Exactly. We can't promise you dreams, but we can keep you safe from nightmares. Of course, we need some nightmares for that. For details, see the BBC documentary "The Power of Nightmares (The Rise o…

Objective-C has quite a few metaprogramming capabilities itself, what do you find missing?

Just curious, how have things changed? Apart from aligning message with reality wrt. to the Cocoa/Java bridge fiasco?

Well, the Mac was the "Computer for the rest of us", so I am not sure how this is news: developers were never the target market. IIRC, the original Mac also needed a Lisa for development with the MPW…

So that means I now have to disable JS as well as Flash?