It's not about altruism - they're talking about benefits for themselves just as much as for everyone else: we can all do better. Some things can't be done alone nearly as well as they can by a collective, which is why we have government in the first place. Sure one could say that simpler collectives like religious organizations, corporation and charities can accomplish collective goals, but even they operate at levels too small and single-minded to accomplish goals as large as an interstate highway system or an international space station as well as government does. These people want better roads and I think are seeing many areas in which our whole country is lacking and wondering why we are so hesitant to do something about it, considering how easily it appears we could afford it. I think often times people are stuck in their ways not because they really don't want anything else, but because they don't realize the consequences of their choices and what really matters. Have you heard the stories of the areas that have discovered that housing the homeless ends up costing less than leaving them homeless? It takes someone with a vision to suggest such a counter-intuitive improvement. People who measure *everything* in dollars are missing a lot. And now some people are speaking up, pointing out, hey, we can all live in a better world for all of us. Don't you want to try? It may mean fewer dollars in individual pockets, but I think they're proposing that the benefits outweigh the cost for *everyone* affected, and can we agree to find a better balance here? Just think about it... too many people just don't think about what really matters and don't realize what all the impacts of their capitalist upbringing are. As the late great Paul Wellstone said, "We all do better when we all do better."
Of course the non-wealthy would be proponents of raising taxes on the wealthy, but when wealthy people themselves are saying the same thing, it's really time to call into question whether the weight consensus should really be shifted in favor of higher taxes on the wealthy even if there are hold-outs... seems like it's time to at least talk about it.
I believe the problem is not that the keys used by the bitcoin infrastructure are too short, but rather that the variation in brain wallet passwords is insufficient, or that it's too easy to convert a brain wallet passwords into a bitcoin public keys to check if they match. The fact that randomly generated keys are not susceptible to this attack like brain wallet passwords are is an indication that its not the infrastructure at fault, I believe.
This doesn't seem like a very big vulnerability because it still requires the user to explicitly trust an installer to install executable code. Whether that code is an executable or a DLL that gets loaded into another application, once you've installed malicious software, you're screwed.
Only if you specify the domain as humans. There are far too many insects to make that true if your domain is multi-cellular animal life forms. The problem here is that people seem to be forgetting about having different averages across different domains. To clarify, I think the intended statement was, "many employed *people* make more than your average employed *programmer*." I don't know if that's true. I'm a programmer, and I certainly think I make more than an average American employee. But I'm working for an international company and I'm reasonably certain that some of our programmers in other geographies make much less. Actually technically I may not be considered a programmer any more seeing as how I'm writing designs *for* the programmers. So maybe the statement is accurate.
It's still not clear how an application rendering Japanese text could end up making the bad assumption. If it's using a Japanese font, why would it bother to switch to another font when the character to be rendered exists in the current font? Does the problem only occur when the current font *doesn't* contain the character, and then the application goes hunting for it and ends up picking up characters from potentially multiple inconsistent fonts? That seems like an application issue, failing to try to retain a consistent font in this defaulting process. It points again to the notion that we should not even be doing that, but rather force applications to use "Unicode fonts" if they want to support Unicode text properly. This seems like a font issue more than a Unicode issue. Does Unicode have separate code points for italic and bold characters in other languages? Why should that information be part of the character instead of the font?
What I still don't understand is, if there's only one code point for this character, where are the multiple renderings coming from? Multiple fonts? Is the source of the problem that Japanese fonts are providing a bad glyph/rendering for this character that doesn't match the style of the rest of the font, or is it that they are unable to provide both glyphs because there's only one code point? Would there still be a problem if they just changed their glyph to the other style; could this just be considered a bug in Japanese fonts?
So, pardon my apparent inexperience with Unicode, fonts and glyphs, but this looks like an application or framework issue wherein someone decided that we should switch fonts in the middle of a string if there's another font that contains a glyph for the character we're after in some circumstances. Is that what's happening? Why shouldn't all text drawing operations be restricted to the currently active font, and make it the responsibility of the application developer and user to pick a font that contains all the glyphs required by their application. This doesn't really seem like a fault in Unicode, but in how the application or framework outsmarted itself in trying to switch fonts. Following the K.I.S.S. principle, this never would have happened, right? The application should simply stick to a single font. Also, under what circumstances (if any) would that "wrong" character ever be desired? Is it ever correct? Does it have a similar meaning in these other circumstances?
I have been reading the comments for 20 minutes because I don't understand Japanese, but I still don't understand the problem. There's a Japanese character called no, it looks very much like a lowercase English/Latin "e" rotated clockwise about 80 degrees and then flipped over the vertical axis. Is this being mixed up with something else or rendered wrongly? Can anybody provide examples of what it's getting mixed up with or how or where it's being rendered improperly?
Why then, at 40, do I still get weekly contacts from recruiters looking to fill local development positions? Is it possibly your comment applies to a local market, possible in Silicon Valley, but not to the Midwest? Or is it possible that every one of these recruiters is just trying to fill a quota of prospects despite the fact that the employer they're hunting for couldn't afford me?
From the user perspective, I think Wikipedia is correct. To any coder using a sparse array, it just looks and acts like an array where most of the elements are 0 or null. From the implementation perspective, when you know this is the case, there are some optimizations you can make to significantly reduce the memory usage of such a structure, which is why the term "implementation" was used to describe sparse arrays' relation to maps. Internally sparse arrays are implemented as maps so that space doesn't need to be allocated for all those zeros. Although a sparse array's implementation doesn't define it, it is a notable detail about how they are generally implemented. So if you want to split hairs on the definition of "is", Wikipedia probably has a better definition, but it's also not incorrect to say that they are implemented as maps.
I thought the LCA involved in an H-1B visa is supposed to prevent paying the visa worker a wage lower than what would be paid to a native worker doing the same job. I can't find any reputable source for this, but Wikipedia states, "The LCA also contains an attestation section designed to prevent the program from being used to import foreign workers to break a strike or replace U.S. citizen workers." Is this a misconception that is not in fact backed up by any real requirement?
I created an easter egg in a product called Fourth Shift Edition for SAP Business One (http://findaccountingsoftware.com/directory/softbrands/fourth-shift-edition-for-sap-business-one/) maybe 5 years ago that rendered an interesting sequence of John Conway's game of Life (starting from the acorn state) while displaying names of developers in a marquee. Trying to remember how to access it... I think it was just typing "LIFE!" while looking at the about dialog. I work pretty efficiently so it was hard to keep me busy at times. The easter egg was a (self-inspired) way to do something interesting related to the software I was working on for a couple hours while waiting to see what came next... and I thought it might someday briefly amuse someone too accustomed to nothing but business all day long. (The software is for ERP.) I showed it to my boss and a few coworkers who, if I recall, all had positive reactions... or at least no negative reactions I'm aware of. I'm not sure if anyone would have expressed a negative reaction to me if they had one because I feel pretty well respected there.
I'm not sure anyone who knew about it is still with the company. Maybe I should tell a couple support people about it in case they feel like using it as a diversion while researching a solution to someone's inquiry, especially since it's Easter time.:)
No, it's more appropriately celebrated than any typical holy holiday. It's a day of humor and jest whose purpose has not been lost. And celebrating it has more real and lasting effect than a typical holiday. What better way to lighten a spirit for a holiday than laughter? Nothing compares.
The mere fact that you appear to be putting people who use certain technologies on a scale from "less-smart" to "smart" directly counteracts your assertion that complexity is subjective. If complexity were subjective, you would have simply referred to C++ users as "familiar with C++" and Ruby users as "familiar with Ruby" not put them on a scale from Ruby==less-smart to C++==smart. But since you use the terms "smart" and "less-smart", you imply that there is an absolute scale of complexity which can be measured in the smartness required to understand it.
All fine and good when there's no clean-up to be done. However, if you're in an error handler after opening a database connection, creating a temp file, and allocating a block of shared memory, now you've just leaked resources all over the place by skipping all the clean-up. Or you have to duplicate all that clean-up in this and every subsequent error handler within the function.
Sorry for using layman-speak in a geek forum, but I tire of picking all my nits before posting:). The point is that any particular value or set of values might be considered infinitesimally likely in an unknown and possibly infinite domain. We only have one universe so we can't very well figure out how many other possible values could have existed for all the conditions that support life in this universe. And we can't very well say for certain that none of these other possibilities would have ever resulted in conscious life. It's the anthropic principle.
The reply (with which I agree) is that it's silly to calculate the probability of life out of context when you don't know what context(s) allow life. Take a simpler example. Assume I tell you to pick a random number between 1 and a quadrillion. You pick 709,108,554,989,243. Taken out of context someone can ask, "What are the chances that this exact number would turn up, one in a quadrillion!? They're so slim, this can't be random!" In fact you could have picked any of a much larger set of numbers and the same could be said about all of those. Calculating probabilities on an unknown domain doesn't work.
Even if the statement is that their policy hasn't changed, that doesn't say that their policy allows VPN access, according to a CNET article:
"We say very specifically that VPNs violate the terms of our service, and we believe very much so that anybody who licenses content should get paid for their content," he said. "We hear a lot in every market about this, and what we tend to find too is that, after launch, these issues drop significantly."
The reason it might still be working for many is that they are not using updated software that might be checking IP addresses internally, either innocently for other reasons, or to specifically start enforcing this policy in a limited scope.
Changing your legal name for anything except marriage is much harder in some states than changing it for marriage. The process seems streamlined for marriage because it's so common, but is sometimes prohibitively difficult and/or expensive in other cases. I see this decision as Facebook wanting to be like one of the "easier" states and be available that way to people in all states regardless of how hard it is to change your legal name there. Kudos if they can accomplish that goal without significantly compromising the integrity of peoples' identities in other ways.
I think the point is to limit you in virtual space to the same number of identities you have in reality. You only have one body, and so Facebook wants you to have one identity with them. Even a schizophrenic has to accept the fact that their many personalities have to share the same body, and, just like their body, Facebook can't automatically adjust to their new identity as it comes forward. So they have to pick a single identity through which to present themselves to others, even if they are separate internally. Cross dressers similarly have to make a choice. You only get one identity, so make it the one you want to share with everyone. You can either be transgender or not, not both... pick one identity to share with others, and make it the one you're sharing in reality.
I've heard from people in the transgender community that often times it's much harder to change your name outside the context of marriage than inside. I think this is because the process is streamlined for marriages because they are so common. The process is not at all streamlined for transgender name changes (at least in some states).
Slashdot Mirror
It's not about altruism - they're talking about benefits for themselves just as much as for everyone else: we can all do better. Some things can't be done alone nearly as well as they can by a collective, which is why we have government in the first place. Sure one could say that simpler collectives like religious organizations, corporation and charities can accomplish collective goals, but even they operate at levels too small and single-minded to accomplish goals as large as an interstate highway system or an international space station as well as government does. These people want better roads and I think are seeing many areas in which our whole country is lacking and wondering why we are so hesitant to do something about it, considering how easily it appears we could afford it. I think often times people are stuck in their ways not because they really don't want anything else, but because they don't realize the consequences of their choices and what really matters. Have you heard the stories of the areas that have discovered that housing the homeless ends up costing less than leaving them homeless? It takes someone with a vision to suggest such a counter-intuitive improvement. People who measure *everything* in dollars are missing a lot. And now some people are speaking up, pointing out, hey, we can all live in a better world for all of us. Don't you want to try? It may mean fewer dollars in individual pockets, but I think they're proposing that the benefits outweigh the cost for *everyone* affected, and can we agree to find a better balance here? Just think about it... too many people just don't think about what really matters and don't realize what all the impacts of their capitalist upbringing are. As the late great Paul Wellstone said, "We all do better when we all do better."
Of course the non-wealthy would be proponents of raising taxes on the wealthy, but when wealthy people themselves are saying the same thing, it's really time to call into question whether the weight consensus should really be shifted in favor of higher taxes on the wealthy even if there are hold-outs... seems like it's time to at least talk about it.
I believe the problem is not that the keys used by the bitcoin infrastructure are too short, but rather that the variation in brain wallet passwords is insufficient, or that it's too easy to convert a brain wallet passwords into a bitcoin public keys to check if they match. The fact that randomly generated keys are not susceptible to this attack like brain wallet passwords are is an indication that its not the infrastructure at fault, I believe.
This doesn't seem like a very big vulnerability because it still requires the user to explicitly trust an installer to install executable code. Whether that code is an executable or a DLL that gets loaded into another application, once you've installed malicious software, you're screwed.
Only if you specify the domain as humans. There are far too many insects to make that true if your domain is multi-cellular animal life forms. The problem here is that people seem to be forgetting about having different averages across different domains. To clarify, I think the intended statement was, "many employed *people* make more than your average employed *programmer*." I don't know if that's true. I'm a programmer, and I certainly think I make more than an average American employee. But I'm working for an international company and I'm reasonably certain that some of our programmers in other geographies make much less. Actually technically I may not be considered a programmer any more seeing as how I'm writing designs *for* the programmers. So maybe the statement is accurate.
It's still not clear how an application rendering Japanese text could end up making the bad assumption. If it's using a Japanese font, why would it bother to switch to another font when the character to be rendered exists in the current font? Does the problem only occur when the current font *doesn't* contain the character, and then the application goes hunting for it and ends up picking up characters from potentially multiple inconsistent fonts? That seems like an application issue, failing to try to retain a consistent font in this defaulting process. It points again to the notion that we should not even be doing that, but rather force applications to use "Unicode fonts" if they want to support Unicode text properly. This seems like a font issue more than a Unicode issue. Does Unicode have separate code points for italic and bold characters in other languages? Why should that information be part of the character instead of the font?
What I still don't understand is, if there's only one code point for this character, where are the multiple renderings coming from? Multiple fonts? Is the source of the problem that Japanese fonts are providing a bad glyph/rendering for this character that doesn't match the style of the rest of the font, or is it that they are unable to provide both glyphs because there's only one code point? Would there still be a problem if they just changed their glyph to the other style; could this just be considered a bug in Japanese fonts?
So, pardon my apparent inexperience with Unicode, fonts and glyphs, but this looks like an application or framework issue wherein someone decided that we should switch fonts in the middle of a string if there's another font that contains a glyph for the character we're after in some circumstances. Is that what's happening? Why shouldn't all text drawing operations be restricted to the currently active font, and make it the responsibility of the application developer and user to pick a font that contains all the glyphs required by their application. This doesn't really seem like a fault in Unicode, but in how the application or framework outsmarted itself in trying to switch fonts. Following the K.I.S.S. principle, this never would have happened, right? The application should simply stick to a single font. Also, under what circumstances (if any) would that "wrong" character ever be desired? Is it ever correct? Does it have a similar meaning in these other circumstances?
I have been reading the comments for 20 minutes because I don't understand Japanese, but I still don't understand the problem. There's a Japanese character called no, it looks very much like a lowercase English/Latin "e" rotated clockwise about 80 degrees and then flipped over the vertical axis. Is this being mixed up with something else or rendered wrongly? Can anybody provide examples of what it's getting mixed up with or how or where it's being rendered improperly?
The reply is not responding to the sentence with "perception" in it. It's replying to the prior sentence.
Why then, at 40, do I still get weekly contacts from recruiters looking to fill local development positions? Is it possibly your comment applies to a local market, possible in Silicon Valley, but not to the Midwest? Or is it possible that every one of these recruiters is just trying to fill a quota of prospects despite the fact that the employer they're hunting for couldn't afford me?
From the user perspective, I think Wikipedia is correct. To any coder using a sparse array, it just looks and acts like an array where most of the elements are 0 or null. From the implementation perspective, when you know this is the case, there are some optimizations you can make to significantly reduce the memory usage of such a structure, which is why the term "implementation" was used to describe sparse arrays' relation to maps. Internally sparse arrays are implemented as maps so that space doesn't need to be allocated for all those zeros. Although a sparse array's implementation doesn't define it, it is a notable detail about how they are generally implemented. So if you want to split hairs on the definition of "is", Wikipedia probably has a better definition, but it's also not incorrect to say that they are implemented as maps.
I thought the LCA involved in an H-1B visa is supposed to prevent paying the visa worker a wage lower than what would be paid to a native worker doing the same job. I can't find any reputable source for this, but Wikipedia states, "The LCA also contains an attestation section designed to prevent the program from being used to import foreign workers to break a strike or replace U.S. citizen workers." Is this a misconception that is not in fact backed up by any real requirement?
I created an easter egg in a product called Fourth Shift Edition for SAP Business One (http://findaccountingsoftware.com/directory/softbrands/fourth-shift-edition-for-sap-business-one/) maybe 5 years ago that rendered an interesting sequence of John Conway's game of Life (starting from the acorn state) while displaying names of developers in a marquee. Trying to remember how to access it... I think it was just typing "LIFE!" while looking at the about dialog. I work pretty efficiently so it was hard to keep me busy at times. The easter egg was a (self-inspired) way to do something interesting related to the software I was working on for a couple hours while waiting to see what came next... and I thought it might someday briefly amuse someone too accustomed to nothing but business all day long. (The software is for ERP.) I showed it to my boss and a few coworkers who, if I recall, all had positive reactions... or at least no negative reactions I'm aware of. I'm not sure if anyone would have expressed a negative reaction to me if they had one because I feel pretty well respected there. I'm not sure anyone who knew about it is still with the company. Maybe I should tell a couple support people about it in case they feel like using it as a diversion while researching a solution to someone's inquiry, especially since it's Easter time. :)
OK, the spooky thing is that I read your comment, looked at my clock, and it said 2:10
No, it's more appropriately celebrated than any typical holy holiday. It's a day of humor and jest whose purpose has not been lost. And celebrating it has more real and lasting effect than a typical holiday. What better way to lighten a spirit for a holiday than laughter? Nothing compares.
Am I reading the wrong article? The article I read doesn't contain the word "Fractal".
The mere fact that you appear to be putting people who use certain technologies on a scale from "less-smart" to "smart" directly counteracts your assertion that complexity is subjective. If complexity were subjective, you would have simply referred to C++ users as "familiar with C++" and Ruby users as "familiar with Ruby" not put them on a scale from Ruby==less-smart to C++==smart. But since you use the terms "smart" and "less-smart", you imply that there is an absolute scale of complexity which can be measured in the smartness required to understand it.
Yeah, at least with major league OSes like Windows we never have to worry about decade-old bugs. And Windows 8.0 was the model of usability.
All fine and good when there's no clean-up to be done. However, if you're in an error handler after opening a database connection, creating a temp file, and allocating a block of shared memory, now you've just leaked resources all over the place by skipping all the clean-up. Or you have to duplicate all that clean-up in this and every subsequent error handler within the function.
Sorry for using layman-speak in a geek forum, but I tire of picking all my nits before posting :). The point is that any particular value or set of values might be considered infinitesimally likely in an unknown and possibly infinite domain. We only have one universe so we can't very well figure out how many other possible values could have existed for all the conditions that support life in this universe. And we can't very well say for certain that none of these other possibilities would have ever resulted in conscious life. It's the anthropic principle.
The reply (with which I agree) is that it's silly to calculate the probability of life out of context when you don't know what context(s) allow life. Take a simpler example. Assume I tell you to pick a random number between 1 and a quadrillion. You pick 709,108,554,989,243. Taken out of context someone can ask, "What are the chances that this exact number would turn up, one in a quadrillion!? They're so slim, this can't be random!" In fact you could have picked any of a much larger set of numbers and the same could be said about all of those. Calculating probabilities on an unknown domain doesn't work.
-- CNET
The reason it might still be working for many is that they are not using updated software that might be checking IP addresses internally, either innocently for other reasons, or to specifically start enforcing this policy in a limited scope.
Changing your legal name for anything except marriage is much harder in some states than changing it for marriage. The process seems streamlined for marriage because it's so common, but is sometimes prohibitively difficult and/or expensive in other cases. I see this decision as Facebook wanting to be like one of the "easier" states and be available that way to people in all states regardless of how hard it is to change your legal name there. Kudos if they can accomplish that goal without significantly compromising the integrity of peoples' identities in other ways.
I think the point is to limit you in virtual space to the same number of identities you have in reality. You only have one body, and so Facebook wants you to have one identity with them. Even a schizophrenic has to accept the fact that their many personalities have to share the same body, and, just like their body, Facebook can't automatically adjust to their new identity as it comes forward. So they have to pick a single identity through which to present themselves to others, even if they are separate internally. Cross dressers similarly have to make a choice. You only get one identity, so make it the one you want to share with everyone. You can either be transgender or not, not both... pick one identity to share with others, and make it the one you're sharing in reality.
I've heard from people in the transgender community that often times it's much harder to change your name outside the context of marriage than inside. I think this is because the process is streamlined for marriages because they are so common. The process is not at all streamlined for transgender name changes (at least in some states).