You are very wrong. The EU is the only big power defending data privacy and fighting to protect the little rights user still have.
It helps, of course, that they don't have domestic internet mammoths putting money in their pockets to get away with whatever they want (USA) or a state sponsored big brother / AI yoke programme that depends on data being collected from all around the world (China _and_ USA).
If anything, the EU is trying to prevent external (and increasingly hostile) powers to use EU citizens data for gain or plain aggression (Cambridge Analytica & Brexit, for example).
If privacy were important, then protecting citizens from having the government violate it would be important. Protecting citizens from having governments share the findings of their violations with each other would be important.
But instead you have administration that wants to ban encryption and increase surveillance as much as possible. The idea that the EU cares about privacy has no credibility at all.
Governments are big and composed of competing interests, especially in a multi-party system like the EU. Assigning them a single stance is an oversimplification. (Parts of) the EU can be pro-privacy while being against it too.
Yes. Laws made vague enough so they can arbitrary claim something is a "data breach" or "antitrust", despite not being able to quantify the harm of these violations. Meanwhile, they still have yet to fine European automakers a single cent for Dieselgate, which had estimated to kill over a thousand EU residents.
There's no need to quantify harm for something to be illegal, especially if it's something as difficult to control and evaluate as personal data.
I have a suspicion you're talking from a USA standpoint, where antitrust is enforced based on provable harm. This is not necessarily the set of values that the EU population wants to live by.
The Dieselgate was already deemed illegal, making your remark a case of whataboutism.
If you're talking about the recent fine, that was on the grounds of antitrust and unrelated to lying about emissions. AFAICT, the EU has yet to fine any automaker for the latter.
We are talking about APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), not implementations. Of course you are free to change the implementation of your API at any moment, as long as you keep the semantic and performance characteristics.
If you have a much improved design which allows for a better implementation then it would be perfectly fine if you reimplement the old API on top of the new API. As long as this is strictly transparent (source and binary, if this makes sense), then why not.
Linus attitude about not breaking user space is the correct one.
Backwards compatibility is better than any other option. From time to time you need to provide new, clean versions of old APIs and that's it. Things get deprecated (as in "best not to use this unless you are aware of the consequences". Aggregate over time, don't replace. Garbage collect when not reachable. This works for APIs as weel as for functional programming data structures.
Clojure(script) approach is a good example of how this can work beautifully well in practice. Java also used to be reasonably good in this regard. Javascript (the language) is good. Javascript (the ecosystem) is criminally bad.
Suppose you create an API that allows users to enter nonsensical data or do things that are very bad for performance. Later, you realize your mistake, create a new, improved version of your API, and deprecate the old API.
However, as long as you keep the old API for backward compatibility, you will have to deal with nonsensical data and poor performance.
And not keeping the old API around incurs work, potentially a lot, for everyone using the thing - transitively.
We've seen this with Python2->3 transition. If the new version isn't backwards compatible (requires non-trivial work to transition), what you've done isn't an upgrade: you've created a new product, and deprecated the old one. As we've seen from Google, people hate it when that happens (how many different eras of deprecated chat app are Google on now?)
Other examples: Windows has, on a couple of occasions, attempted architecture transitions. Windows RT was the latest. They've not yet made the leap to ARM, despite having cutdown versions of Windows (CE) running on ARM for something like 20 years. Apple have managed multiple architecture transitions by providing emulators, bridges, "fat binaries" that work across the transition, and a history of being willing to tell both developers and customers to get stuffed if they don't like it.
> And not keeping the old API around incurs work, potentially a lot, for everyone using the thing - transitively.
Not only that, but breaking backwards compatibility will cause dependency conflicts once a dependency graph is a bit larger, and this can easily completely stall transitioning of software to a new version.
We are talking about an API, not a shared service.
That distinction is becoming a lot blurrier than it used to be as more and more "APIs" now are run as shared services with no option of running them locally.
Not really. Every EU Member State could only nominate one language. Some of them nominated an "alternative" one because their main one was already an official language (e.g. Irish).
This is the reason the only Spanish language which is an official EU language is Castillian. The other three (Galician, Catalan and Basque) are not EU official languages. Same happens to many other languages spoken in Europe.
That's an opinion, not a fact, and one that depends on who you ask and where. If you go to the Flanders region people will certainly tell you they speak Flemish.
Language researchers can argue all they want about how languages should be grouped, but they sound different, they use different words, and people call them different things. It is simply incorrect to state that people in Belgium speak Dutch. Might as well just expand the group to include German and English (etc) and say they speak Germanic.
Fun fact, the Dutch call their language Nederlands and refer to German as Duits ("Dutch").
The language is Dutch, the collection of dialects spoken in the Flanders region is Flemish. If you're feeling charitable, you can refer to it as a language variant.
Here is the constitution of Belgium: https://www.senate.be/doc/const_nl.html
Articles 2 and 3 define the Flemish (Vlaamse) community and region. Article 4 defines the language areas and specifically mentions Dutch (Nederlands), not Flemish.
> If you go to the Flanders region people will certainly tell you they speak Flemish.
And they would be right. They do indeed speak the Flemish dialect.
> That's an opinion, not a fact, and one that depends on who you ask and where
I don't see how it is "an opinion" if Flemish literally adheres to "Standaardnederlands" (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standaardnederlands). Your analogy to German doesn't make any sense here. The Dutch language doesn't adhere to some "Germanic" standard language or anything, and barely has any grammar rules in common with German (even though the languages are very similar).
Sometimes countries insist of fighting wars that have been over for a long time. This is one example. American attitude towards China rise is another example.
Now more seriously, I think what the French are trying to do is just to avoid a complete switch to English in the EU institutions. Since the start of the pandemic, most meetings which used to be multilingual (with interpretation) are now English only and nobody seems to have a big problem with that. If anything, it makes interactions more natural (talking through interpreters is a pain in the ass). French are probably worried that this could be here to stay and are just trying to go back to the status quo.
I think from the French Gov it's just a way to express how fed up they are with UK Gov Brexit policy.
They very well know that English is now the predominant language, Macron is in fact the first French president speaking English so well in public.
Long gone is the "francophonie" policy of the 80's, the number of French peoples speaking English have increased considerably in the last 15/20 years.
I see no "worries" about French being less used from the French officials, more a give up, which is kind of sad.
So this move is very political.
I don't really think that they care about British on this one. They are gone, after all.
What really happens is that in the 15 last years English has gained space foot in the EU institutions, to the point that they are quickly becoming just English speaking. You have a service which used to homd all meetings in English, a new Croatian, Hungarian or Polish staff member who doesn't speak French arrives and suddenly all the meetings and mass emails are written in English. The opposite doesn't really happen.
After the start of the pandemic French suddenly lost almost all space in meetings with Member States representatives or just multiple services present. They have become English onlycause there is no interpretation anymore and many people can't speak or even understand French. Many people that chose to speak French in meetings (mostly as a matter of principle) now speak English. The change in the last year was huge. French just want to go back to the previous status quo.
Why are they worried? English isn't English anymore. In fact it makes sense to chose a language that isn't the native language of any EU nation. (I'm squinting regarding Ireland).
In every country children are told quite silly things about the world and, in particular, about the importance of their country in the world. This is even worse for current or former empires (UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Greece, Russia, US, China...).
Children there are told they are special and superior in some way to other children who were born in other places. It's not surpising that they end up asuming those lies as something obvious and natural. The most striking example nowdays is of course the United States, just because they are the biggest superpower (China's children are not less indoctrinated, though). Most American adults believe that their country is the biggest democracy the world has ever seen (cough, cough, India), their lifestyle the highest (Scandinavia smiles amusingly with a barely hidden condescending gesture) or that their wars are fought just to defend freedom (and Irak invaded because of the mass destruction weapons, apparently).
In the case of France they take as reference the Napoleonic times where their country was dominant and their language the vehicule of culture and politics in Europe. They also think the French Revolution invented real democracy or something similar (even though American Revolution started more than ten years earlier and Greeks had true democracies a couple thousand years before that).
Of course, those days are long gone, but this is what French are tought since they are small children, so most of them end up believing it.
Nationalism is a serious disease and most countries are infected.
First of all, I don't understand why the French government wants to do that - it's quite ridiculous. However, I also suspect that it has to do this kind of public stunt to satisfy the conservative right wing, especially with the presidential election next year.
Furthermore, I think you are missing something quite fundamental here - French is pretty much one of the core building blocks of France, and no, this is not obvious. 150 years ago, not many people spoke French in France : they spoke Basque, Breton, Occitan, Corsican, Alsacian, and various forms of patois. What brought French everywhere was compulsory education led by missionary style teachers, world war I, and forbidding people from speaking their regional language. In essence, the language was a political tool to unify the country, and the French never stopped considering language as a political tool.
You may assume that this is 'arrogant nationalist French' behavior, but I will disagree.
The issue is that the fact they decided to impose a single language to all the country is another example of the nationalism I was talking about. Deciding to erradicate existing languages and cultures for nationalistic reasons. That is cultural genocide. It's not unlikely of what Chinese are doing.
You can contrast this with the case of Switzerland or India where you see you can have a strong cohesion and feeling of belonging to the cpuntry without needing to erradicate significant parts of your own culture.
I agree with the cultural genocide part, however I'm not sure if they did it for nationalistic reasons ('my country' s great and better') , or for practical reasons ('it would be much better if we spoke the same language and our soldiers could actually communicate' ,etc) unfortunately driven by the hypercentralism which has permeated throughout French history, and still plagues the country to this day.
As a non-American, I have a different perception. For me, Sundar is one of the few CEOs that doesn't sound like a maniac robotic snake oil seller. I find it refreshing and inspiring to get a CEO that talks line a normal human being addressing normal human beings.
I think it's just a cultural thing. When it comes to level of histrionism, Americans are on one extreme of the spectrum while some Asian cultures are on the opposite one. Sundar seems to me to be in the exact sweet spot.
Hmmmm... I wonder how you would avoid the expressions from being evaluated without wrapping then in a function (sorry if it's a lame question, I haven't done any JS in years).
Not that there is anything wrong with lambdas, but it's quite a los of boilerplate for something as simole as a cond.
