This doesn't make the target object read-only - it just returns a reference to it.

  data = {one: "one"}
  ref = makeRef(data)
  ref().two = "two"
  
  data
  => Object {one: "one", two: "two"}

Just delete the modal from the DOM and you'll have full access to the article.

javascript:$('#TB_window').hide();$('#TB_overlay').hide()

5 year ban for parking violations? That seems extreme.

For inadvertent or pragmatic violations, but to say "Go ahead and fine me, I don't care" is pretty flagrant.

In college (1991 +/- 2), garage parking in Harvard Square was $15 for an evening. Resident parking violations were $10.

I regularly parked in resident parking areas, getting tickets perhaps half the time, rather than the certainty of a higher price in a garage.

As an engineer, that seemed perfectly reasonable to me. (Resident parking violations are now much more expensive, so this loophole is largely fixed.)

>As an engineer, that seemed perfectly reasonable to me.

But it was a bad thing to do, because you were taking parking spaces from the people they were for. Their fine structure was broken, but your moral calculus was the problem.

Wow.. this is amazing. I'm kind of blown away by how cheap it is. Is this your permanent residence or a vacation home? Does it feel weird to not have neighbors?

As of this month, the cabin has become my permanent residence while I build the house throughout the rest of the fall/winter/spring.

I actually have neighbors...sort of. There is a permanent resident of _extremely_ poor individuals 1.5 miles from me (they're quite nice when I've run into them), and next to them is a vacation residence put up years ago inhabited by a retiree on occasion.

This land is "open range", and there is a large cattle farm I can see about ~5 miles away whose cows occasionally wander out this way and graze.

And the land is pretty cheap! But, costs anywhere in the mountains _do_ increase even the shittiest of goods, including labor, which is why it's as much DIY as I can.

Living out here means monthly trips to larger cities to visit friends, check in with work HQ in Denver, and pickup all the decent food I can (I can't stand the markup at Whole Foods, but they have the best bulk foods of anywhere I've been).

Most automated phone systems will connect you to an operator if you press 0 repeatedly (as in 10 to 20 times in a row). There's almost always a way to get around automated phone systems.

Or when you call don't press anything. The system may assume you have an old rotary phone that can't make the correct tones and automatically forward you to a person.

You can also try http://gethuman.com/

It's simple. People who have more experience generally demand higher salaries. The company in question is probably seeking someone who's fairly experienced but doesn't have the budget to afford a superstar.

So then you put an "up to" salary number in the ad.

Ruby really is a great language. The author just posted a poor example that is frankly NOT idiomatic Ruby. The proper way to create a getter and setter method on an instance variable is like so:

  class Person
    attr_accessor :sanity

    def initialize
      @sanity = 50
    end
  end

All the attr_* class methods do is define precisely the instance methods the author wrote by hand. Indeed, if attr_reader, attr_writer, and attr_accessor weren't part of Ruby's Module class you could write them yourself, like so: https://gist.github.com/jfarmer/6b4deeb8bcfbe030f876

If using an "eval" method seems smelly to you, you can achieve the same result in pure Ruby using define_method, instance_exec, and instance_variable_get. There are good practical reasons to use module_eval, though.

Regardless, I think the author's point was more that there's nothing "special" about getters and setters in Ruby. They're just plain ol' methods. As a class of methods we write them often enough that we've also defined a higher-order method that takes an instance variable name as input and dynamically defines those getters and setters on the underlying object.

We wouldn't "lose" anything by not having attr_reader and friends, though. Our code would just be slightly more verbose.

>Regardless, I think the author's point was more that there's nothing "special" about getters and setters in Ruby. They're just plain ol' methods.

Ah, that's a good point. That seems to be a more accurate interpretation of what the author was trying to express.

And by "automatic classification content filter" they mean "someone manually added the Guardian to a blacklist".

How far do you take this? Kickstarter is a business and needs to make money.

Should it be acceptable for people to Kickstart escort businesses, "legal high" websites, or Amway pyramid schemes? All of those things are legal but are seen by the public as being slimy and taboo. Why would Kickstarter want to associate with these people?

Right, I'm not saying the all-free-speech route is the right answer for Kickstarter; in fact, in my personal opinion, it probably isn't. I'm just saying it's a reasonable question to ask, reasonable people can disagree about the answer, and the whole discussion is orthogonal to whether or not the first amendment obligates them to do anything in particular (since it doesn't).

Kickstarter is a business and has no obligation to uphold free speech. They need to curate their projects to protect their reputation. What if they allowed filmakers to Kickstart porn movies? You could call it free speech and make no judgments about the act itself, but at the end of the day people would start to see Kickstarter as a slimy business that's willing to host any project as long as they get a cut of it.

Somewhat related: There's another site called http://offbeatr.com/ which is like Kickstarter, except it is exclusively for porn, sex toys, erotic art/literature/games, and other such adult projects. I don't know if they are perceived as "slimy" or not, but there are a lot of interesting, innovative projects on offbeatr.