Ever wondered why the secret courts approve 99 % of the NSA's requests to spy on people?

> The FISC is one of the United States’ least publicly understood judicial entities. All of its 11 sitting judges, who serve seven-year terms, are appointed by the Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. Ten of the 11 FISC judges are conservative Republicans.

arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/…

> As part of this evaluation, a Court attorney will often have one or more telephone conversations with the government to seek additional information and/or raise concerns about the application.

Cozy coöperation between court and NSA.

Yeah. Not exactly news, though.

Just...more specific than what I've heard before.

"secret courts" should not be a feature of any democracy under any circumstances.

Fake cops robbing people in Detroit turned out to be real cops robbing people in Detroit

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Were they arrested for impersonating a felon?

Hahaha.

Can't argue with that.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Well, how about if they have to decide on something that would actually hinder the investigation of a real crime?

Or do you rather mean there can be secret court sessions, but they must be held in a normal court?

@JohanLarsson Nice. And perhaps true.

> Sources said the teenage daughter of the St. Clair Shores sergeant was recently robbed of her cell phone and that the two officers were tracking down the people responsible. Flood would not confirm or deny that. "This is a situation where there's more to it than what meets the eye or what's being reported," he said.

Why, hello.

'Lo.

Evening.

How goes it?

Very well, thank you! Yourself?

Pretty well. It's nearly bedtime, which is good.

I need some bed time.

I feel that. Bed time is nice.

Just lie there in warmth.

I just turned it down a little.

I get too hot, see.

Ah, yes.

As do I.

Darned Finnish blood.

You are back home?

Yeah.

Greek here.

Ah, yeah.

Shouldn't you guys be sleeping?

It's… 9PM?

Going.

I was writing in my to-do book.

It's 11PM.

@cornbreadninja麵包忍者 Were you writing how you need to remember to come to the next Writer's chat?

@KitFox I could.

Tuesdays? 11AM?

well

Mm, leftover baby potatoes.

11AM Central

devours mercilessly

The horror!

For you, I could make a different chat time. If you want.

O_O

grins

Well, I can't be talking about the boys I chat with all the time. My husband will get annoyed.

tries to think of other provocative things to say

(Twirl your hair! I hear that works)

Cornbread, only mods may read what is in parentheses. If you disobey you will be fed to The Clouds.

Sorry.

twirls hair, fondles pendant on necklace

You could really help me a lot.

suppresses mighty yawn

I think I chased her off.

Maybe it's my fault. I mentioned The Clouds.

They are pretty scary.

Truly. Those cumuli are so terrifyingly poofy.

Sorry, I was reading aloud a draft.

I thought the nimbus were poofy ones.

Cumulonimbus?

Le tours.

@KitFox They're both poofy.

Well. That's nice.

Sorry.

For what?

Mentioning poofy clouds? I like poofy clouds.

I'm not sure. I feel as though I have wronged you.

Oh. Well, it's normal to feel awkward when you cock-block someone, but in this case it was totally harmless. No foul.

I'm just acting funny because I'm tired.

And recovering from a migraine.

Please accept this photo of some poofy clouds as my formal apology:

@KitFox Aw man, those suck.

I'm sorry to hear that you had to experience that.

This one I got to early, but it left me feeling very weird.

And the caffeine is keeping me up even though I want to sleep.

I've never had one, but I dread the day I do.

Maybe you won't.

I hope not.

You seem to take good care of yourself.

I try to, yeah. Eat well and all that.

If you don't have a history, I'd be surprised if you ever had one.

Good to hear!

And you can trust me. I used to be a neuroscientist.

trusts you

Excellent.

Although you are really too young to be a minion. I guess the practice is useful.

I'm too Edgy and Rebellious to be a minion.

giggles

Right. That you are.

Edgy and rebellious. Exactly how I would describe you.

Darn right.

What draft were you reading @cornbread?

Maybe there's still some chance to seduce you tonight.

I just noticed that the streetlights are out. It's very dark down the way.

I like darkness. Stars come out in the darkness.

Stars are so pretty.

I look forward to moving. The new house is even more remote, hardly any light pollution.

That sounds fantastic.

I want to build an observatory on the roof of the barn.

! That sounds even more fantastic!

Which is to say a very safe platform with a telescope.

I used to have dreams about flying through the universe. I loved those. They were my favorites.

Most of my dreams involve silly things that I'm nervous about in day-to-day life.

And my mom still gets "missed final exams" nightmares.

Me too.

I haven't had a fun dream in ages. Not since I was a kid.

The funniest dream I've had involved band camp. I've never been in band. But there were lots of tuba jokes.

Although...I used to meditate before I fell asleep, to try to suggest dreams to myself.

@Mahnax hahaha very funny.

@KitFox I'm serious. There were tuba jokes made.

That was most of the dream. I was at band camp, and tuba jokes were made.

I am sure they were very funny.

It's quite late now. I'm going to see if I can sleep now. Thanks for the company.

Sleep well!

> ...Samsung was allegedly only exposing its 533MHz GPU clock to specific benchmarking tests while limiting other apps and games to 480MHz. Anandtech's initial results had the team wondering about CPU performance as well. And their final research showed that three tests—AnTuTu, GLBenchmark 2.5.1, and Quadrant—"get fixed CPU frequencies and a 532MHz max GPU block" while others did not.

arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/07/…

Anyone knows Android in this room?

yeah

I know very well about android

=D

Cool

I am working on an app that takes pictures using the Camera class

nice

camera.takePicture(shutterCallback, rawPictureCallback, jpegPictureCallback);

I was told this method is not supported across all android devices.

Wondeirng if you could help.

yeah

?

Are you taking a photo using an existing camera app?

(which is the traditional method)

Oh

I think you have to use the existing camera app and take picture then receive image in a call back function

if you want it to work on every platforms including the old ones

What do you mean by the existing camera app?

The reason why I have to do this is because I don't want the user to go through manually selecting and saving an image.

The default app is a pain in the neck

I think you don't have to worry

too much about its compatibility on older devices (if you meant older devices by saying across all devices), because it says takePicture function has been available since API level 5

(most devices at least support API level above 8)

Okay great. One more thing.

If a phone doesn't have an SDCard, what options should I use for image storage?

@O0oO0oOO0ooO

I wonder what this guy is saying handycodeworks.com/?p=19

Does he mean the takePicture works but you need a SurfaceView or does he mean that it may not work on some devices.

Hmm, that sounds like it's going follow up with massive compatibility issues

later on

Official way of taking photo and accessing those files is (capture photo -> save into sd card -> access it by file path)

What events get fired when you press the backbutton from an Android activity?

do you mean "which activity state it becomes when back button pressed"?

or if you meant keyevent, then

Is this good English:

I never understood what is so hard with just moving along to another question if you find a bad one. Perhaps vtc or suggest an improvement if you feel like taking time off your day.

@JohanLarsson What is your TOEIC/TOEFL/IELTS score?

@O0oO0oOO0ooO what does it mean?

@JohanLarsson "time out of your day" otherwise it is good

ty sir

Those are some of most popular English exams for English Second Language people who wants to measure or prove their language proficiency. I thought you might have a score so gently asked your score just to see.

@O0oO0oOO0ooO oh, I never heard about it, would not expect my score to be high though.

@MattЭллен Was for this comment, started second guessing myself.

I see. Seems you know what you're doing after all :D

have you used ef much?

not at all (you mean Entity framework, right?)

yep meant Entity Framework

I got out of DB stuff just as EF was coming out

I've used linq a lot

I started playing with it yesterday, was surprised at how easy it is to make errors. Not seen this many exceptions for a while.

lol

what kind of errors?

all kinds of errors, many due to noob no doubt

sounds really user friendly

I found adding/inserting stuff a lot harder than I expected. Duplicate key error et al.

The messages are decent at least, for someone knowing db they are probably even good :)

key errors are so annoying. that should be the easiest thing of all

I was playing with SqlAlchemy the other day (hooked into python via Flask). It's pretty easy.

I guess I expected some kind of 'did not even notice there was a db' experience

yeah. that's preferable

but it i not fair for me to judge it really, after only one day of using it and zero days lifetime exp with db.

That's why I like linq - no need for DB experience

Most chatters like ef so it is probably good

guess there is also some convention over configuration going on making the learning curve a bit steeper

I want to destroy something after a user clicks on the back button in Android

try throwing rocks at windows

HOw

Want me to destroy a bridge

or a wall

pick up a rock. throw it at a window. They only hard part is knowing that a user has pressed the back button

Do you speak Android?

@Noah these are too strong :D

@Noah I can't say I do.

That sounds not good.

In anyevent, iam sureyoudo

I think I need to solve 1000 more questions and read 10 hours of reading on TOEIC listening tips in order to become fully familiar with this particular section of the test and get full mark =D

The Javainess of it has put me off learning for now

Do you hate Java?

doesn't Android speak Mono?

@O0oO0oOO0ooO I find it overly verbose

@JohanLarsson probably, if you hack it

No, @JohanLarsson

wish there was a new big open language after Java, don't think anything good can come out of Oracle.

I don't problem with being verbose is not with language itself but people who created its API or library.

@JohanLarsson There is this

I noticed from my C++ teacher long time ago he hated how Spring framework had long-ass names for each functions.

But I think it is an advantage sometimes because it makes thing more readable

@MattЭллен oh, read that name a couple of times, never understood what it was for, ty.

and understandable, structured

Also, if I want something to work in c#, python or PHP, there is an easy way. I just run them. I haven't found things to be that easy for Java

long names hurts readability ime, visual noise.

plus, who enters every single letters to call a function or create a new class? IDEs like Eclipse or IntelliJ automatically writes them for you

my university experience with Java was much like my university experience with Jack Daniels. Something I don't want to repeat

guess that must be a star

:D

Is there much reason for learning Python if I know C#?

yeah. they're used for different things. Scripting is a lot easier with python than C#

Hear good things about Python.

It's much easier to make websites in python, IME

desktop apps are still better done in C#, for windows at least

Scripting meaning small utility apps?

yeah

I think it's easier to write games in python, too

although I've not tried

I have a habit of making scripts in test-projects, find it convenient to run them from there.

I usually write all kinds of prototypes and stuff in the test projetcs

do you write tests in them? ;)

now and then

I try to keep the noise in folders though, and use [Explicit]

[Explicit]?

What is that?

nUnit attribute, means it will not run when running all tests, must be run explicitly

very useful ime

oh. nice.

works on tests and classes

dumping xml is a common util I script in Explicit tests

Python seemed really promising to me in few ways, like in language itself, it definitely was largely influenced by functional programming languages (e.g. pattern matching) but I think the problem with Python is it's not really a competitive player in real markets.

Java is intensely used in mobile, web, desktop apps but Python is only popular in web

@O0oO0oOO0ooO it is used everywhere — how is it not a player?

and it doesn't always mean you must use python to build web sites

this is another example, exlpicit is missing though, perhaps it was on the class

Why my keyboard is not entering key properly today?

??? XD

@MattЭллен I think any mainstream programming language is used at everywhere in that sense

aye. I agree with that. Haskell is so wonderful, though

wish I knew Haskell or at least F#

I wish I could properly use monads

I think Java and C# will always be more popular than Python in real markets at least for next 10 more years because in my university they taught Java and C# to students so for companies, it is easy to find more skilled Java programmers than python programmers. However I've seen a lot of universities making transition from Java to Python for teaching students

I think it's because Python is a good example of multi paradigm language but Java is not yet, maybe in Java 8.

I think it depends where you are. Where I am you would struggle to find any Java devs, but good python devs are 10 a penny.

So where do you live?

Oxford, UK

I doidn't sleep well last night so I don't have enough concentration power =(

maybe you should have a short nap? 10 minute power naps are good for getting energy back

power naps turns me into a zombie

bad news for those around you!

most of time it is you :)

oh, well, I'll be fine so long as noöne invents "Bite over IP"

Computer science is a major that has the highest prospective in finding a job but the problem is it is easy to end up in a company like in the movie Office Space, don't you agree?

or a drag axe over wan

@O0oO0oOO0ooO Yeah, that's a risk. Most corporate structures end up something similar

@O0oO0oOO0ooO not sure I agree, medicine is much better at least in Sweden, also if you read medicine there is a chance you can get some $ for practicing what you learned.

Also, most of the money is in financial services and stock market ventures.

they're so regulated, getting things done is a real chore

As a cs the best way to make $ is probably to aim for writing as little code as possible, book meetings etc.

I'm not a cs btw

Nor me :D

I did psychology, then a masters in interactive intelligent systems. Very little actual CS

I was mechanical engineering, don't think I am that anymore, in some kind of a vacuum

engineering in a vacuum! That must have been a frictionless experience

it is breathtaking

:D

sry about the pun

It's OK. I started it

is about correct there? for?

about is correct

for would be OK, too. about sounds better, to me.

lol

from what I hear, men in porn don't have it easy.

in the IT department of a pornography maker? Fair enough.

oh, I am just joking man

I know. I'm going along with it.

Stressed sylLABles are inTEResting.

Ah, Carlo. The system is not using the present tense at all to tell you "you have gained" privileges.

@MattЭллен: Step away from your ploughman's lunch and come entertain me.

@Cerberus: Come on, turn at least one of your heads in this direction.

I'm bored.

how do you say thank you to your dad that he cover your pament that you can't afford it?

Can you say like Thank you for covering my back?

How about "Thank you for helping me with my payment"?

Ok good. I was looking for something strong

Yeah, the house is fine but the big problem is that the village is getting transportation. I know it's a big problem in all over the country, but it's bigger in here. Anyway, since I don't have time to look for another house, I will pay him for six months.

@Robusto do you have access to our CCTV?

@MattЭллен I wouldn't even know.

@Robusto oh i see. Thank you very much!

@Robusto your observation was uncanny.

Morning.

Hello.

licks Matt's face

mod just froze the most active chatroom on SO

chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/10/loungec

@KitFox giggles like a school girl That tickles!

I am trying to ask a question regarding to exam rules of TOEIC test but ELL seems like it's not a right place to ask such questions, can I just ask it here?

ELL would be a better place. unless by here you mean chat

You can ask it here

I heard that I cannot take notes during the listening section of the test (correct me if I am wrong) but I am wondering if similar rules apply to the reading section. Can I take note or highlight texts in the reading section?

@Matt I think it's your turn on the collaborative.

@JohanLarsson Why?

@tchrist read transcript, started with a NSFW link and trolling, unfrozen now btw

@JohanLarsson Yes.

Git is written partially in Perl

@MattЭллен Really? Seems that you keep more “interesting” company that I ever imagined.

@Mahnax Yes, those last a very long time. I still get that every now and then. But I was in school a long time. Eventually missed-the-airplane dreams came to dominate though. Those too are now gone.

@JohanLarsson And bad things. It does get in your way sometimes. It has some of Java’s gratuitous verbositis mindset bug, although nothing so bad as that.

you never tried C#?

@MattЭллен I don’t really know what that statement means. Define “scripting”.

@JohanLarsson How could I do that? I’d rather a bullet to the head than to deal with Microsoft!

@MattЭллен Way easier.

And I do not kid.

@JohanLarsson git-cvsserver is in Perl, yes. More than that?

@KitFox Yeah. I saw. I'll have to have a read of the story so far :D

@JohanLarsson If I wanted to use a static language, I would use Go for fun or C for work.

Maybe Go for work once I were better at it.

Go is the only static language I know that doesn’t get in your face.

@JohanLarsson Saying C# is less annoying than Java at this or that idiocy is like saying Purgatory is more fun to holiday in than Hell: you’ll never sell vacation timeshares to people who already live in Heaven, but you might get some takers from the Inferno.

:D

I don't get my commas right often. Don't even know what is right, throw in a couple every now and then.

@Robusto Yes and $life =~ /(\pP+)/ saves punctuation.

@JohanLarsson Let's eat Johan Larsson!

Thanks for bringing the C++ dispute to my attention @Johan.

There's a dispute about C++? I thought it was pretty much a dead issue.

@tchrist I want to program in DWIM - Do What I Mean. Also it's professional version J-DWIM, Just Do What I Mean, and its optimized version J-DWIFMA, Just Do What I Fucking Mean Already.

@KitFox It was nothing, NSFW link and childish trolling, can't blame Gordon I think even if he probably regrets it now.

@Mitch The 7th Gen languages are all WMFCA: Where's My Fucking Code Already?

@Robusto I believe it was a chatroom squibble, not a God-this-is-too-fucking-complicated squabble.

@Robusto I'm probably tender

@KitFox what does it mean?

@Robusto Those are all magic languages, per Clarke’s Law.

@JohanLarsson We can't be sure until we try.

what part will you start with?