His moves certainly show that he doesn't care about anyone but himself and his power. When he arrested parts of the military during their coup practices he created this situation of violence. If he stepped down as more rational PMs did when given hints, he would be living in luxury but in house arrest or exile. The other path is a smaller less official coup, and that ends in his death and longer term instability from the poor and unpredictable transfers of power without the legitimacy of the generals..

> I don't get why people are still advocating Octave as a Matlab alternative.

Because it is the closest thing to a drop in replacement, which is what you need when taking a class or following a tutorial based on MATLAB. Trying to use a different language and follow along is a much more advanced challenge and can be borderline impossible for a MOOC with an autograder or a class with a dusty professor.

I wasn't very happy with octave and I wouldn't use it for an independent project.. but I can't say how much of that is the pesky little octave specific bugs and how much is that I wouldn't like MATLAB's syntax when it is perfectly implemented. I suppose I could make the same criticisms of R as much of its frustratingly odd behavior comes from its history in emulating an old proprietary language's syntax..

I did take a class which worked with MATLAB and was using Octave to develop for it.

Well, and I guess it already says enough that I actually had MATLAB installed, but still preferred using Octave.

Just the minor annoyances in MATLAB like it taking probably a minute to start up, being in general really sluggish and having an annoying (read: not particularly bash-like) command-line were already enough to make up for the just as minor compatibility-problems I occasionally had to correct before handing in.

So, at least up until the stuff that you can get to in one semester, the compatibility was pretty good and I only really once had a problem which couldn't be fixed by a simple find+replace.

And in that case, it was actually something where I didn't understand why it didn't work in MATLAB (if I remember correctly, you for some reason couldn't use `hold on/off` with multiple `ezplot`-instructions in it).

So, yeah, I don't think at all that it was Octave-specific bugs bugging you, especially also because the MATLAB-syntax is actually even more annoying than Octave's.

>I did take a class which worked with MATLAB and was using Octave to develop for it.

Well, and I guess it already says enough that I actually had MATLAB installed, but still preferred using Octave.

That is exactly what happened with me. And then we started doing more advanced stuff next semester and Octave fell flat on it's face.

intentionally bad programmers don't need the certification, just to pay the standard $25 play store fee. I think this program will help the quality of play store iff they can get a lot of people through without sacraficing content, such that their certificates actually matter in the market.

Warning the user that it may be illegal to take photos is reasonable, but making a device that acts on the theoretical authority of someone else against its own/possessor is not. Taking your example of polls, it may be illegal for me to take a photo, but it may be my responsibility to do it anyways. For example, I may see visual evidence of large scale voting fraud within a polling station. It is similar for sensitive data and whistle-blowers.

The biggest trick in US history was the South convincing the North that the reward for winning was keeping them. The North is stillpaying today.

Are you trying to argue that the states formerly in the Confederacy haven't made huge contributions to the culture and economy of the United States?

Many, many good people in the South would beg to differ and probably find the notion that they're dragging down the rest of the nation offensive.

Many states in the South are dragging down the rest of the nation.

Sorry.

That creationism thing, that climate denial thing, and that extreme conservatism thing stunt progress in the rest of the country.

I'm sorry, I don't think I was clear. For the record, I've met Southerners and they're all nice and reasonable people. (You know what they say about Southern hospitality.)

I was referring to each state as a whole, and especially those politicians at the top. My post did not indicate that, and I do apologize if I offended.

I'm not offended, I just don't think it's useful to think of even states as monolithic blocks, even if prominent politicians hailing from there are sacks of shit.

(Actually, I think it's useful for entertainment value and that's about it. Fuckin' Florida, amirite?)

I'm actually more annoyed by the us-versus-them-ism. "'Those People' are nutty and bad. Dragging 'Us People' down." It's dismissive.

And the United States is unlikely to break up any time soon -- and unlikely to start kicking out states with weak economies like Mississippi. So if you really think some things about those areas are, in fact, dragging down the country, maybe a helpful action would be to support policies that would help people in those areas. Or take direct action via an organization like Teach For America. A lot of the stereotypes you list stem from a mix of lack of education and general fear about getting by. Those things are correctable.

I'm not sure that's fair. The reason there was a Civil War at all was in large part that the North didn't think secession from the union was legal. They wanted the South to be part of the USA from the beginning, and I don't think ever regarded them as or recognized them as another nation.

And the way the South was treated during reconstruction doesn't suggest the South had any say on the matter in the end.

I'm not contesting any of those views, I am saying that the costs to the North were significant and the drain of resources caused by the poorer South continues to be significant.

Using the civil war to justify another military action against a portion of the country that simply votes out would be an example of learning nothing from the past.

I think his theory is inconsistent with the pro-brexit group being older, and the anti being younger.. But I think both the brexit group and Trump express the right wing disillusionment, which seem to be older people that thought they were in the political/economic in group and ended up marginalized with nothing relevant to the globally connected youth. I'm not sure older Scotts would have believed they were in the in-group in terms of UK power or economy.

The British as non-EU can't get a better deal than the Swiss as a non EU Schengen area member.. I think the British will either lose more control of immigration from this vote or be pretty crippled by poor EU trade agreements leading to the US learning to deal direct with the mainland.

Charging for renunciation is the most ridiculous part. You are paying for a process that:

is expensive only since they want to investigate you as a presumed criminal or tax dodger (the movie Brazil comes to mind)

is a result of their non-compliance with international norms

is the result of the US declaring you have a status that was never requested

As an expat I consider all US citizens to be indentured servants due to this requirement to buy independence from the US and whatever it chooses to enact next. Effectively, these changes are not noticed by the US' domestics, but those who think they "can flee to Canada" when they have ethical problems with the US are now deluding themselves. "If you don't like it, then leave" may have been sarcastic BS, but at least it was a real choice that many people made in the Vietnam era, etc. If you don't like us leave us money (which we will use in the ways you probably object to)" is something else.

I will find it both funny and sad that when the people who supported the two party system are pissed by someone like Trump implementing fascist policies they will finally realize that their own willingness to destroy our basic civil rights makes it impossible for them to avoid helping a system they find morally repugnent and criminal.

I'm curious, what is stopping expats with foreign citizenship and an objection to the paperwork from just letting their US passports expire (or for the "accidental americans" not ever establishing one) and just not complying with all the annoying rules?

Foreign Banks will refuse you service if they discover you are a US person with no intention/ability to comply. If they don't they face tax penalties on any US holding and possibly local penalties due to treaties with the US.

*Over time the US will enlist more and more help with these kinds of methods (for example many foreign employers would have obligations from paperwork they signed to accept US customer payments) so at some point you will probably have to come into compliance if you aren't somewhere totally at odds with the US.

Holding a passport is simply an indication of your citizenship, it is not considered the sole record of it. You can't fail to be a citizen by ignoring rules and not having the right piece of paper.

You could find yourself having a great deal of trouble coming back across the border.

So kiss vacations or business travel to the USA goodbye.

If you can live without that, I suspect you are fine.

Nope, if you are in Canada for example they'll just take your assets. They strongarmed the Canadian banks into forcing disclosure of all US citizens bank account contents.

And there are plenty of people around the world who have discovered they have US citizenship without knowing it before. And now they have to file with the IRS.

Glad I never got dual citizenship through my grandmother. In the past having USian citizenship would be nice. Now it would just be a pain.

If they let their US passports expire they are still a US citizens with obligations to report tax etc.

If saying an employee acted without authorization and/or tampering with the papertrail will save a few million in fines then you better hope no one like that is on your board. But your stock options will be safe.. though you probably wont be entitled to them.

I see very little of this in tech and remain pissed at my peers over storage, printers, cpu mmus, mobile phone upgrades, software with no model to reason/guess about how it will implement an unfamiliar feature... I am often happier with a 5 year old hardware product or a 15 year old software one since its not as well tuned for obsolescence as a current one.

For example, 5 year old celerons support 16Gb of ram which makes them useful for another five years, modern celerons support 8Gb making them perfectly engineered for 5 years ago.

[Edit - 5 years ago was 16Gb, 2013 was 32Gb, today's celeron is 8Gb.. progress.]