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There are always exceptions, and obviously there are cases where a goto (by that or another name) is the best way to do it. But in the overwhelming number of cases, a higher-level structure will be a much better choice.

Or even better, a COME FROM statement.

One word. INTERCAL.

Better than COME FROM or PERFORM A THRU B.

Provided that this is still the /. that we all know, this should not be necessary, but one may never be sure about the level of truth...

Had Stallman not tried to redefine "free" in the first place, there wouldn't have been a problem.

He didn't try to redefine "free": the definition was always there (i.e. "land of the free"). It is just the unfortunate situation that English, the world's working technical language, has two very different definitions mapped to the same word. Other languages make the distinction with the different words "gratis" and "libre".

You're worried about a nanny state so you want to vote for Bob Barr? The guy wants to control your bedroom and your religion.

The Libertarian Party would not have chosen Bob Barr as it's candidate if he still wanted control. He himself said he was wrong and now opposes government control. I once opposed him but now I can support him. Of course, as with all other politicians, he needs to be monitored.

He led the fight to try and get the Army's first Wiccan Distinctive Faith Group disbanded (he lost that one).

During the 2000 campaign Bush went so for as to say Wicca wasn't a religion "I don't think that witchcraft is a religion. I wish the military would rethink this decision." I'm not one myself but I have studied it and have friends who are Wiccans. Several years ago I probably gave my sister a shock, she's a Christian even though she doesn't act like one all the tyme, when she asked me if I wanted to join a church and I said I was thinking of joining a Wiccan Coven.

Add tot hat the fact that the Libertarians would demolish the what little control the government still exercises on Corporate America

Corporate libertarians perhaps. However: "B7. What would libertarians do about concentrations of corporate power?" Libertarians oppose the power corporations wield. Many corporations got their power by monopoly and Libertarians oppose monopolies. Corporations also offer stockholders limited liability, and Libertarians would end that thus making stockholders liable for actions the corporations take. It's Democrats, and others, who spread such lies that Libertarians would allow corporations to get away with whatever they want.

Falcon

Similar to a metasyntactic variable, such as foo/bar/baz...

Alice and Bob serve as the archetype personalities in cryptographic communication examples.

Similar to a metasyntactic variable, such as foo/bar/baz...

Alice and Bob serve as the archetype personalities in cryptographic communication examples.

Um, I have to disagree with you on this. Mexico (and presumably other more equatorial Latin American countries {almost definitely Venezuela}) have more natural resources per area than the United States does but are a lot poorer. As someone mentioned above, Iceland is, on average, wealthier than the United States is, but it lacks a lot of desirable natural resources (besides coastline, fishes, and geothermal vents). If anything, this data shows an inverse correlation between natural wealth and total wealth. Eric Raymond discussed this issue in his essay Fear and Loathing in Caracas.

It's called erotics, isn't it?

Is it September again already?

I HOPE [snip]... LAST BREATH!

That's not a troll, that's a blunt, racist, unfeeling and callous diatribe. A troll is something else entirely.

A troll is an attempt to trick readers in to thinking that one is taking a taboo position or a position which runs against a generally accepted notion when, in fact, one is simply trying to egg newbies on and goad them into an irrational and impulsive riposte.

See the definition in The Jargon File:

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/T/troll.html

troll

1. v.,n. [From the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban] To utter a posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or flames; or, the post itself. Derives from the phrase "trolling for newbies" which in turn comes from mainstream "trolling", a style of fishing in which one trails bait through a likely spot hoping for a bite. The well-constructed troll is a post that induces lots of newbies and flamers to make themselves look even more clueless than they already do, while subtly conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact a deliberate troll. If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it. See also YHBT.

2. n. An individual who chronically trolls in sense 1; regularly posts specious arguments, flames or personal attacks to a newsgroup, discussion list, or in email for no other purpose than to annoy someone or disrupt a discussion. Trolls are recognizable by the fact that they have no real interest in learning about the topic at hand - they simply want to utter flame bait. Like the ugly creatures they are named after, they exhibit no redeeming characteristics, and as such, they are recognized as a lower form of life on the net, as in, "Oh, ignore him, he's just a troll." Compare kook.

3. n. [Berkeley] Computer lab monitor. A popular campus job for CS students. Duties include helping newbies and ensuring that lab policies are followed. Probably so-called because it involves lurking in dark cavelike corners.

Some people claim that the troll (sense 1) is properly a narrower category than flame bait, that a troll is categorized by containing some assertion that is wrong but not overtly controversial. See also Troll-O-Meter.

The use of 'troll' in any of these senses is a live metaphor that readily produces elaborations and combining forms. For example, one not infrequently sees the warning "Do not feed the troll" as part of a followup to troll postings.

Eric S Raymond semi-batshit libertarian crank programmer (of which there are far far too many in the open source/free software movement)

http://www.catb.org/~esr
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond

What a ridiculous conspiracy theory! Everyone knows it's really Shub-Internet!

Two words: "Gorilla arm."

As long as you're not trying to load up Fedora or Ubuntu or whatnot Linux can load very quickly. NetBSD, OpenBSD and FreeBSD also a fast booters. Faster still is to use the suspend-to-disk option in Windows, Linux, etc.

You don't even have to use an old version of Linux. 2.6 kernels will do just fine. LFS or Slackware are a couple fast booters.

Mostly I think your question is lacking in information to be properly answered. Try to ask smarter questions.

Liberatarians are okay with corporations drug testing, possibly even DNA testing their employees.

I know of no libertarian, small "l" or big "L", who agrees it's alright for corporations to require drug tests. Actually the Libertarian Party was started by Republicans when Nixon refused to legalize at least hemp, aka marijuana, among other issues like the gold standard. He had a presidential commission investigate whether hemp should be legalized. He then said no matter what they decided he'd never go along with legalizing it. Which is exactly what the commission decided, that hemp should be legalized. Instead Nixon started the War on Drugs, he used the term first in 1972. I don't know any that support employers testing DNA either.

The more extreme liberatarians are okay with the sale of human organs!

And what's wrong with that? If I have an organ I want someone else to have I should be able to give it to them, whether I donate it or I'm paid. Despite what people in the US think of Iran if a person there needs a new organ they are usually able to find an organ and don't have to wait on a waiting list for years.

There is no difference if the government is one of those several major employers, except the government is required to respect more rights of their employees than private employers are.

"B7. What would libertarians do about concentrations of corporate power?"
"First of all, stop creating them as our government does with military contractors and government-subsidized industries. Second, create a more fluid economic environment in which they'd break up. This happens naturally in a free market; even in ours, with taxes and regulatory policies that encourage gigantism, it's quite rare for a company to stay in the biggest 500 for longer than twenty years. We'd abolish the limited-liability shield laws to make corporate officers and stockholders fully responsible for a corporation's actions. We'd make it impossible for corporations to grow fat on "sweetheart deals" paid for with taxpayers' money; we'd lower the cost of capital (by cutting taxes) and regulatory compliance (by repealing regulations that presume guilt until you prove your innocence), encouraging entrepreneurship and letting economic conditions (rather than government favoritism) determine the optimum size of the business unit."

If I'm wrong, I'd love to learn why

You are wrong, which isn't surprising as both Democrats and Republican have been making Libertarians as lunatics on the fringe. I gave examples above in how you are wrong but if you really want to learn more read the Libertarian FAQ linked to above. The Libertarian Party's platform explains the party stances, and BTW I'm not registered Libertarian (that's why I call myself a small "l" "libertarian" not a big "L" "libertarian"), I am registered "No Party Affiliation" and vote for the person not the party. For any given office I look at where the candidates stand on the issues that concern me and I'll vote for the one that comes closest to me on those issues.

Falcon

What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0

Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.

Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.

These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.

As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.

Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0

Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.

Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.

These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.

As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.

Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

or will daemons start spewing out of cracks in time and space?

Nope, they will just simply spew from our noses.

TinLC

For those not understandng this,
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/T/TINLC.html
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/L/Lumber-Cartel.html

TinLC

For those not understandng this,
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/T/TINLC.html
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/L/Lumber-Cartel.html

You silly git! Correct pronounciation has different answers.

1) 'Linus' can be pronounced differently (and therefore the related 'Linux') depending on the native language of the speaker, and Linus recognizes that and gives a recorded sample of two different ways here http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/linus/
2) Linus says it this way, but since he's Swedish it's not just a "short I or long I" question - it sounds to me like a short I blended with a bit of a long E. http://www.paul.sladen.org/pronunciation/

I don't think anyone has ever said "this is how you pronounce it". We try to do it like the guy who wrote it does, but if you're not a native Swede you're probably going to only get close. I think it's clear that Linus doesn't really care. If I were you I wouldn't correct them, and if the conversation came up, tell them to listen to the MP3 here Linus pronounces it.

Carpentry and software development are very different in this respect: carpentry is old (one carpenter better known for his religious teachings lived 20 centuries ago, and it was an old craft even then) and software development was invented within the memory of people still alive. Carpenters have had a long time to refine their toolset, whereas programming tools are very much a work in progress.

Also, "sufficient" is not a meaningful concept here. Any Turing-complete programming language is sufficient to write any program. There's a sort of quasi-sufficiency issue with low-level languages (doing a serious modern software project in machine language would consumer many lifetimes), but once you get past a certain point, all languages are sufficient, even the poorly designed ones. It's just a matter of whether the tool meets the particular programmer's needs.

I assume that the point you're trying to make with your sarcasm is, "The second amendment is out of date because our founders could not conceive of the guns today." Let's assume for a moment that you're right, that the founders did not conceive of the kinds of personal arms we have today. By the way, you're not right about that, but for the duration of this paragraph, let's assume you are. Now, let's apply that logic to the First Amendment: "The first amendment is outdated because there was no internet, TV, or radio then. These new communications tools make the individual much more dangerous today than our founders every imagined." How do you feel about that?

Now, about your spurious point that the founders did not envision powerful weapons in the hands of individual. Perhaps you know the line from our national anthem, "And the rockets' red glare?" At the time the Second Amendment was written, there were rockets, mortars, and bombs. And none of them were excluded from the Second Amendment.

Consider the fact that the Colonists possessed rifles that were more accurate at greater range than the English government troops. The modern parallel would be if we as individuals possessed Heckler and Koch XM8 assault rifles while the government possessed only M-16s.

Ask yourself this question: Would you prefer to live in a society where every citizen is unarmed, so that the physically stronger are always able to prey upon the physically weaker? Or would you prefer to live in a society where every adult has the ability to take responsibility for his/her personal safety, and can be trusted with the power of life and death? And do you think that we'll get to that point by continuing to infantalize our population with laws that limit our rights?

The only comparable accomplishment was that of Niklaus Wirth, purportedly the namesake of bucky bits.

So, the next time we write code using FLOSS libraries, we must read every line of code?
How productive is that?
Where should I stop - 1000 lines, 10k, 100k, or all of the millions of the Linux kernel?

From the Big Fucking Manual:
http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#believe2

can be applied broadly with great success. See: The Art of Unix Programming by Eric Steven Raymond http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html

Even earlier, the concept of a world-spanning network of thought had previously been developed by other thinkers predominantly known in the French-speaking world as well (most notably dissident cleric Pierre Teilhard de Chardin) under the name of noosphere - the field of mind(s).

It never seemed to have made much of an impact in English until famously picked up and popularized by Eric S. Raymond (and in another variant referred to by John Perry Barlow as "Cyberspace, the new home of Mind"), recognizing the importance in retrospect when The Net was young.

There's a better reason why this is going nowhere: it is designed to subvert the companies' carefully-crafted connector conspiracy.

We've also read something about IBM and FUD which are evidenced in the Businessweek article and demise of the OLPC. Microsoft and Intel are the new lords of FUD. OLPC is not shipping because Intel and M$ made sure preexisting orders were cancelled. Shame on Businessweek for not catching those accusations and instead acting like people cared about Windows and that Microsoft is somehow helping things.

I agree. But on the bright side, at least the "hackers took over" quote made the geek-friendly hacker/cracker distinction, which is fairly rare in the mainstream press. It makes me wonder how many BusinessWeek readers misunderstood it.

The whole thing about free and open source software is that it works based on what is called a gift economy. A gift economy is an economic system where resources (in this case computing power and memory) are essentially unlimited. In such a system, resources, the primary moving force in the economy of the real world, are essentially valueless. But then, what is to be gained by participating in the society? In such a system, instead of working for resources, individuals work for other forms of gratification such as the joy of the work or the reputation accrued among others in the community. The "gain" of such a system is related to what a person can give back to the community, thus the name "gift economy".

In the real world, the stakes are prosperity and basic survival, and rational actors make distinctly different decisions in such a situation. Thus your argument that the success of free and open source software over commercial enterprises supports the system of communism in general is somewhat fallacious, since the general conclusion does not exist in the same context as the specific example.

A more detailed look at the idea of a gift economy in relation to free and open source software can be seen in Eric Raymond's essay Homesteading the Noosphere. It's essential reading for those interested in understanding free software, along with the other essays in The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

The whole thing about free and open source software is that it works based on what is called a gift economy. A gift economy is an economic system where resources (in this case computing power and memory) are essentially unlimited. In such a system, resources, the primary moving force in the economy of the real world, are essentially valueless. But then, what is to be gained by participating in the society? In such a system, instead of working for resources, individuals work for other forms of gratification such as the joy of the work or the reputation accrued among others in the community. The "gain" of such a system is related to what a person can give back to the community, thus the name "gift economy".

In the real world, the stakes are prosperity and basic survival, and rational actors make distinctly different decisions in such a situation. Thus your argument that the success of free and open source software over commercial enterprises supports the system of communism in general is somewhat fallacious, since the general conclusion does not exist in the same context as the specific example.

A more detailed look at the idea of a gift economy in relation to free and open source software can be seen in Eric Raymond's essay Homesteading the Noosphere. It's essential reading for those interested in understanding free software, along with the other essays in The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

The consensus seems to be that the router is at fault if SP3 crashes it. There is a major factor that people are overlooking here. uPNP is a M$ "standard." So here is the possible, and I would even assert likely, scenario:

M$ creates the uPNP standard, then revises it, then revises it again. To the extent that it is a standard, different versions of the "standard" are made available to different router designers, based on how close they come to touching their palms to the floor when bending over for M$. Now, those who handed over their first born have the newer tweaked standard available, and if they comply their router doesn't crash. In the meantime, other router companies have a different/older standard, to which they comply fully. Of course, SP3 makes use of the newer, less widely disseminated standard. Doing so causes implementations that haven't "paid up" to crash.

Yes, this definitely sounds like a scenario imagined by a guy who wears a tin-foil hat to those who don't know the M$ history, haven't read the M$ internal documents known as the Halloween Documents, etc. To people who know the history and understand how M$ works, this is a likely though unproven scenario.

... and WTF is it anyway? You'd expect a geek to know better than to ask such a half-assed question. For shame!

I'm more interested in machines that can replicate functional copies of themselves. I want to know how close we are to forkbombing the universe.

FYI, from the jargon file:
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/W/war-dialer.html

I'm clicking on your link, but nothing is happening. Am I doing it wrong?

I click the link and it DOES bring up the page.

Hi, sorry, I was teasing you. You pasted a URL, but did not make it a link. Do you perhaps have a linkifier? Because, not everyone does.

HEY! Thanks for that! I just recently stopped making an explicit link in posts here because they seemed to automagically turn into a link anyway. I just figured it was some /. feature. No idea how long it'd take for me to discover it was my linkification Firefox addon unless you had pointed it out! Thanks again!

bacause most developers do it because of their personal interest.

Isn't the microLenat the fundamental unit of bogosity in quantum bogodynamics?

Parent is a good example of ha ha only serious.

I turn my machines off if they won't be needed for a while, uptime be damned.

Except that the plural of Box is not Boxen. Stop making up words.

Did you walk uphill in the snow, both ways, when you were a kid, too? At one point in time, high-level languages like ASSEMBLER were considered crutches for people who weren't Real Programmers. Get some perspective!

Look, people make mistakes, and regardless of how good a programmer you are, there is a limit to the amount of state you can hold in your head, and you WILL dereference a NULL pointer, or create a reference loop, at some point in your career.

Using a computer to catch these errors is just another flavor of metaprogramming. Get over it, and go be more productive with these tools, instead of whining for the days when you coded on bare metal with your bare hands and you liked it.

Arrgh.

If you are answering this question, then obviously you never had to deal with one of the early touchscreen systems.

We had a touchscreen "card catalog" system at the Philly public library back in the 80s. It didn't work too well. It didn't always know when you were touching it, and sometimes it would register the touch in the wrong place entirely. Also, it forced you to spend long periods of time standing with your arm in front of you poking at the screen. This caused an uncomfortable soreness in your arm, known as Gorilla Arm. In fact, this is typically seen as an example of failed usability design.

Plus, you have to remember that interfaces at the time weren't particularly graphical. So you were using a touch-screen interface to actuate an all-text system. A keyboard would have made a lot more sense. Instead, you were forced to learn a completely new metaphor, with no actual improvement to the user experience.

Touchscreens didn't really make any sense until you had things that you could click on and drag around.