I wanted to use date-fns on the current project. But, the gotcha is due to its lack of timezone support many of its functions are inherently broken (e.g. startOfWeek). So, if you need rich calculations with timezone support watch out!
Funny, I have the same story from the other side. They could have chosen to not alienate and lay off the clojure team. We were pretty happy, working on interesting projects, independent enough to get things done. But, turns out paying more for a smaller team of experts who know what they’re doing isn’t compatible with Quarterly-Earnings-Driven-Development.
Actually, though... If they've been monitoring everyone's internet traffic, it's feasible they have unwittingly downloaded illegal copies of media. Meaning they've committed copyright infringement on a massive scale?
It's generally not copyright infringement to simply collect data available on the internet. For example, Google downloads tons of copyrighted information; but that's not considered copyright infringement because using it for a search engine is a "transformative" use. Google is not replacing the copyright owner by redistributing the page, but is instead using it in a completely different way to provide an index of all pages.
The same would be true of the NSA. They aren't redistributing the data they download to anyone who asks, they are instead compiling an index to be searched for intelligence gathering purposes.
IANAL, but I suspect there's a difference between uploading a video and saying "I didn't mean to" vs just copying massive quantities of data. For example offering a backup service.
A backup service means you're acting as a dumb pipe/dumb disk. You're copying bytes without knowing the contents at the request of your user. This doesn't apply when you're seeking out data to copy on your own. In some situations you're still fine, like if you're requesting files from public web servers. But I'm not aware of any protection that would blanketly apply to intercepted connections.
If you're operating a dragnet then really you're close enough to a dumb pipe. If you're doing very targeted capture then you can filter stuff out anyway.
Being a dumb service works because you're acting on behalf of someone else. Someone has to order the data to be copied, and they are the ones responsible for ensuring there is sufficient licensing.
Alt (assuming you actually mean Meta ;) is completely unnecessary for emacs. Meta-<Key> can always be produced by pressing ESC <Key>
I guess technically ctrl is also unnecessary since you could type out whole commands with M-x (ESC x command). It wouldn't be fun, but you could do it.
Although most keyboards nowadays use Alt for Meta, they were distinct keys on some older keyboards. I personally never used an MIT Lisp machine, but I have used Sun keyboards with a Meta key.
It's also fun to note that EMACS is an acronym for Escape Meta Alt Control Shift, which generally describes the experience of using it.
As joke acronyms go, I preferred "Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping" back when Eight Megs was a lot of memory. "Eighty Megs" worked for a while after that. These days you'd have to rename it EGACS to use that joke.
For what it is worth I use an "otaku" Happy Hacking KeyBoard Pro 2 (HHKB Pro 2) with "blank" black keys and I remapped | to HYPER+[ (and I'm of course using right alt as a "new" modifier, HYPER).
tl;dr: you can't never be sure how Emacs hacker have configured their keys/modifiers ; )
Based on their feature list, it stores your email addresses and passwords encrypted on their servers, with your inky account password being the decryption key. The idea being that you can just login to your inky account on any computer and it loads all your email accounts.
It seems disingenuous that this article completely ignores Google as a source of innovation in the last 15 years. A company which (pretty successfully) organizes the entirety of human knowledge, and lets you query it in milliseconds? Sounds like some pretty serious innovation to me...
The thing that made Google unique is that they ranked pages according to the links between them (i.e. PageRank), as opposed to more traditional document ranking methods that are keyword based.
As a result, Google found showed you content that people liked (and linked to). From the end-user's perspective, Google search was noticeably better and more relevant.
As far as I know, it was the first massive application of data mining graphs, which now drives social networking, content recommendations and more.
The algorithm is quite fascinating (from what we can infer). Using things like a markov chain to model results in Google shows a big jump from human-compiled results in early search engines - it's a new application of theoretical knowledge that has greatly enhanced society, and frankly shows a degree of automation that could be a basis machine intelligence.
This is a very good point. Google is more accurate, and faster, but in the end it does the same thing. It helps the user find information on the web. It's not a great new idea, it's an improvement on an existing idea.
Sometimes a quantitative difference becomes a qualitative difference. For example, motorcycles are just faster horses (in some ways worse, like for off-roading), but you could hardly argue they are the same thing. I would argue that google is substantially more useful than altavista, or dogpile, ever were.
And ultimately Altavista and Dogpile are irrelevant, because neither existed just a few years before Google. Web search is revolutionary; search engines before Google were just halting steps on the way. That is, the contention isn't that Google revolutionized web search, but that web search revolutionized the world.
More stuff indexed, for one thing, paper books and videos included. And hopefully, more intelligent interpretation of queries, though that's more debatable.
Fair point. It just seemed odd to use Procter & Gamble as an example of the most innovative companies while ignoring a < 15 year old company which now has a higher market cap than P&G (200M to 177M).
Maybe the innovation is so powerful and so large that it basically become the background and ignored. We all take googling for granted and hardly remember a time when search engines literally don't work.
