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Swift Justice? Mobile Justice In Brazil
tech_imp writes: "Yikes! Talk about swift justice. The BBC is reporting that Judges 'roaming' the streets in Brazil will be using laptops and an app written in VB to help dispense justice. I'm not sure that I would not want to trust my judgement to a VB app ... couldn't they have at least written it something more robust ... like Perl? I can see it now ... your sentence is GPF :')" Three words that spring to mind: "General Protection Fault."
Was it
Answer : Linux Torvalds. Source : Linux Journal.
...
http://www2.linuxjourn al.com/articles/conversations/006.html
Personally, I prefer Perl, but there ya go
Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
While I'm on the subject of beating Visual-Dredd 4.0, did anyone notice that it has limited input options?
Computer: Was the suspect intoxicated?
Cop: No.
Comp: Was the suspect driving in a suspiscious manner?
Cop: No.
Comp: I am ready to give my verdict. Please close all windows and click "OK"
Cop: Click... Click... Damn hourglass.
Comp: (5 minutes later) Not guilty.
Cop: Well Mr. Shoeboy, the computer says I have to let you go - but for the love of god either put some pants on or get tinted windows.
I really can't wait.
--Shoeboy
(former microserf)
People would be pretty proud of it, or at least the IDE.
Of course, no open source project would contain a language as ugly and inconsistent as VB's Basic; but the IDE is very nice for bolting together ActiveXs and UI widgets in a quick and dirty way. A lot of MIS type projects fall into this category.
One of the best things about VB is the ability of the IDE editor to understand and catalog ActiveX methods, which can only be discovered dynamically (sorry, no static IDL). That said, this also leads to the worst thing about VB, which is that its popularity encourages ActiveX developers to be lazy. Really, the only test of an ActiveX seems to be does it work in VB. This leads to broken function prototypes that only work in VB, not in Delphi, PowerBuilder or C++. Another wonderful case of interproduct synergy brought to us from the Microsoft monopoly. it's great for people whose application fits in the VB solution space, it sucks for everyone else.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Just because VB isn't open source doesn't mean it is not robust. I think open source software is the way of the FUTURE. The reality is that the best solution for many (not all) things today is still stuck in a proprietary world.
Umm, I'd argue that this is arse. While it is possible to write bad code in any language it is without doubt easier to read _average_ code in one language over another. As always with these things lets take the example to an extreme.
In the blue corner we have PentiumIII assembler, in the red corner the beast of all languages Ada, your task is to write a Multi Radar Processing system. We estimate it will take 3 years with 10 people to write. It is classified as being mission and safety critical (cat 1).
Do you think that the assembler app will be as maintainable or as manageable as the Ada app ?
Of course not. Certain languages are tailored towards certain things, FFT in FORTRAN is a breeze, I'd image its slightly harder in VB.
I've seen systems (as in had to interface to) written in many different languages (including all those written above, + Ada, COBOL, Perl, Assembler et al) assuming that most were written by a team and thus the ability is around the average I can safely say that certain languages lend theirselves to extendability and comprehension. Other can produce good and readable code but their normal standard is lower than the normal standard of other languages.
VB isn't one of the best mind. In fact that honour goes to Ada IMO. There have been many studies done on development times/maintainance times in different languages and it DOES make a difference what you code in.
Otherwise we'd all be using Turing Machine Instruction sets.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
OK, so the computer asks you "did he run the red light?".... ok the computer isn't exactly running some fuzzy-logic artificial intellegence program to determine wether the person is guilty or not, now is it? what kind of computation goes on behind the scene when you reply "yes, the driver did run the red light"? it must be microsoft bloatware... maybe a little dancing paperclip will pop up and say "this program has automatically sentenced the offender to death, would you like to know how to turn this feature off in the future?"
My father (a district judge here in the US) has shown me the tables that judges use to ensure that their verdicts fall within the guidelines set by the various laws that have been passed madating minimum & maximum sentences. So the system already exists here.
As for all the obvious jokes about the stability of VB apps: we're not talking about Quake here - it's just a very basic database & the rest of it is UI. VB does cheesy database UI better than anyone out there. If I have no idea who the programmer is, I'd trust a cheesy UI written in VB to a cheesy UI written in C/C++ any day. There are a lot more programmers out there able to write stable VB apps than there are those that can write stable C apps, given that the app is simple in the first place.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
BRAZILIAN DRUG KINGPIN SENTENCED TO BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH
Harsh Sentence From Judge Raises Some Eyebrows
RIO DE JANIERO (UPI) - Luis Sanchez, overlord of a drug cartel that stretches from the Cape Horn to the Bering Strait, was sentenced to the blue screen of death this afternoon by a federal judge. Judge Roberto Gonzalez carried out the sentence at a Starbuck's coffee house in downtown Rio after he was spotted by undercover agents. The agents called in Gonzalez and restrained Sanchez until he arrived with his laptop computer, running the Automatic Brazilian Justice Service Pack (ABJSP) of the Microsoft Windows 2000 operating system. The ABJSP is part of the default installation.
Opponents of the blue screen of death penalty were quick to criticize Gonzalez's actions. "The blue screen of death penalty is never justified," explained Mary Madalyn Murray Coughlin O'Laughlin, a representative of the National Council of Churches. "What sort of message do we send when we carry out a penalty like this? It puts us in the same boat with countries like China, Iran, and Afghanistan. It's brutal, it's barbaric, and it's an idea that is about a thousand years too old."
Famous programmer Linus Torvalds agreed with Coughlin O'Laughlin. "I'm from Finland," explained Torvalds, "and I can tell you that I have never, ever seen a blue screen of death penalty carried out. Ever. It's just something that doesn't happen in a sufficiently evolved society."
Ed Muth, newly-appointed Brazilian Minister of Justice, had a slightly different take.
"We need the blue screen of death penalty," explained Muth. "Studies have shown that it acts as a deterrent, that it gives criminals something to think about, that it stops them from committing violent crimes. Also, we cannot forget about the closure factor. While it might seem barbaric, I've had family members of murder victims come up to me and thank me for blue-screening a criminal. They'll tell me that they're finally able to get a good night's sleep, now that their long nightmare is over."
Texas governor and United States presidential candidate George W. Bush agrees. "The blue screen of death penalty remains a necessary evil," Bush explained during a campaign stopover at Berkeley. "It sends a compassionate, yet conservative message to the criminal population of the world." Over the past thirty years, Bush's home state of Texas has blue-screened more inmates than the rest of the Western world combined.
The big black guy from "The Green Mile" contributed to this report.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
I'm not sure that I would not want to trust my judgement to a VB app ... couldn't they have at least written it something more robust ... like Perl?
What is with the VB bigotry? In your review of competing products, do you dismiss out of hand the fact that VB is easily maintainable and readable, whereas Perl resembles abstract art drawn from the inner, inarticulate recesses of the mind that coded it?
I like VB, and I'm not alone in liking it. Lay off.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Give me a break. This is just a stupid story to fill space and generate a lot of banal arguments about nothing.
If the Judge wore sneakers with holes through them, it would say nothing of the judgements he made.
If the Judge drove a Fiat, it would not suggest bias or improper legal process.
If the Judge wired her decision to the clerk's office using Handspring or Linux or BeOS, it would not aid nor hinder the quality of justice.
And if the laptop in question burned up because it wasn't using a low-heat Transmeta chip, but was instead slogging away at slashdot-impoverished microsoft-laden Dell/Intel circuitry instead, the criminals would just have to wait for a handwritten slip to meet their legal fates.
(Judge, not Computer, is Interpreter of Law =anagram>
Mature projection upsetting free world.)
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