I believe it depends on exactly how bad the law was. The court should be able to determine whether legal fees should be paid by the loser or not based on whether the law runs afoul of established legal precedent or not.
The legislature has the right to pass any legislation it wants; the courts have the right to strike down the legislation.
Legislators are supposed to uphold the Constitution. If they don't know or understand the Constitution, and they're writing laws that ignore the Constitution and even legal precedent, then they deserve to pay for the costs of those that have to fight to overturn the bad law in court.
Now they're asking for more money. I guess my state just needs to learn how to not be stupid.
Maybe try protesting against gubernatorial candidates that like to grandstand with moronic legislation like this. Hold them accountable for the money they are costing your state!
We didn't want to elect him the first time. He was actually the lesser of two evils.
The real problem is that our election system doesn't really make elections with more than 2 real candidates feasible. You end up with the Nader dilemma anytime a serious third candidate enters the race. Until we move to a sensible election system, we will continue to have this problem. The problem is that the two parties will fight tooth-and-nail, lie, cheat, and steal to keep the current system. At least with that system they can claim that there is democracy and multiple viewpoints represented. The problem is that there will never be real change as long as we only have two parties. We'll keep switching from one crappy candidate to the next. Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!
Well, to be a bit cynical (and what corporation isn't?), increasing usage of Linux or other OSS eats into Windows' world-wide usage numbers. That's not a good thing for Bill.
Does the number really need to be ON the card? It's on the magnetic strip, which the machine reads. It never needs to be displayed. Sure, it's security through obscurity, but it is better than the current system.
A lot of cc and identity theft has been committed by running people's cards through readers that simply record the info from the card and store it to be retrieved later by the thieves. Often happened at grocery stores, convenience stores, restaurants, etc.
XML stands for Xtremely Media-hyped Language and PHP stands for Perl-Hater's Platform. They are both very overused and should be ignored from this point on. Oh crap. I guess I get a free downmod for going against Slashdot culture. Oh well.
No, you should get the downmod for posting a moronic comment that contains flamebait only with no facts or even anecdotes to back it up. You rightly deserve at least a -3 for such a comment.
Again, any decent software developer knows that you never trust outside input. You always check everything that comes in. Follow that simple rule and your software is secure from these kinds of attacks.
When you a grinding, if a GM suspects botting they will whisper you looking for you to respond. If you don't respond within a reasonable amount of time you get nailed for botting.
Same thing that admins would do back in the BBS days. A friend of mine and I used to write scripts for Telix to grind for us in a couple of MUDs. We ended up having to make the script give some kind of generic reply anytime someone talked to us and then start beeping to notify us that we were being watched. Worked really well. We never got caught.
You wouldn't be allowed to use your extra resources. You may spend your allotted campaign funds and that's it.
or given to me by supporters who really like my message. Why shouldn't I be able to use those?
Because there's no way to distinguish between "supporters who really like my message" and "supporters to whom I've promised some kind of quid pro quo once I'm in office". Given the fact that its extremely hard to prove which is the case, and given that such corruption would severely undermine our democracy, it seems like the preferable solution would be to give each person an equal amount to spend on their campaign.
Why should my ability to communicate be stifled? Why should my political speech be hampered?
What exactly is political speech anymore but a spending arms race with each candidate trying to outspend the other and thereby drown out the other's message with their own? I hardly see that as free speech. I think your idea is every bit as idealistic as my own, but mine costs a hell of a lot less and might have a chance at discouraging corruption rather than encouraging it as the current system does. Candidates have to sell their souls to lobbyists to pay for their campaigns. How is the voting public served by that?
Either patent something new or pay the licensing fee.
Hard to patent something new if you don't have the cash or existing patents to defend yourself with. They can tie you up in very expensive litigation for years. Hardly an incentive for innovation. The patent system is out of control now. Someone needs to seriously reign it in. Getting rid of business-method patents, probably software patents, and going back to the working prototype requirement would be good starts. Raising the bar (a lot) for obviousness is essential as well.
Of course, a simple "buy it now" on an online auction seems obvious now. It is. Would this have been obvious in 1994? I would argue not.
The problem is that their patents are quite obvious to anyone who is a serious web developer (or any sort of developer at all really). They make them look technical and specific because they go into great detail about how a database and website actually works. But databases and websites already existed and were already being used in exactly the manner they describe. They just describe using them to accomplish something that was already being done millions of times a day all over the world, but on the web. You could claim that they were being innovative by coming up with this before it had actually been implemented, but it could also be argued (and quite strongly I believe) that many of these kinds of things hadn't been implemented because the web was still too young and not yet trusted or understood by enough people to make such a venture profitable, or at least that the first sites to start auctioning online could not yet support the level of robust development that would include every feature that people might want or use in the real world. So, I don't think that they should be allowed to patent something that would be quite obvious to anyone seeking to build such a system just because it was not yet profitable for anyone to do so. That just leads to a huge problem of speculative patents, which, coincidentally I'm sure, is exactly where our patent system is right now.
There is. One requirement of a patent is that it be non-obvious.
Unfortunately, non-obvious seems to have been interpreted as "Something that a retarded gerbil might take more than a week to come up with." If they could just fix that little interpretation problem, many of the most egregious abuses of the patent system would be dealt with. Then we'd just have to deal with the rest of the problems (of which there are also many).
Well...fair enough. That doesn't help, though, does it? It's still your country. Do something about it. Please?
You can be arrested for wearing a political t-shirt to a political speech/rally here now. How far do you think an opposition is going to get with anything that might actually make a difference?
The problem with that philosophy is that you wind up restricting people in legitimate situations as well.
I think my point is that we should make sure that there aren't any legimate situations at all. Get rid of campaign contributions altogether. Maybe each candidate that gets on the ballot should receive some fixed amount of campaign money. This is the age of the internet. You can reach a lot of people cheaply. God forbid people have to do a little research on the candidates rather than having moronic attack ads force-fed to them on tv be the entirety of their knowledge of the candidates. I think that giving up a little bit of convenience would be a small price to pay to get rid of a lot of corruption. It might even have the added benefit of raising the level of political debate to something a little higher than the sound-bite.
You're worried about politicians being bought and sold? Then use the existing anti-corruption laws to prosecute politicians in tit-for-tat situations.
The problem is that it's damn near impossible to prove a quid-pro-quo arrangement between a politician and a contributor. They will both deny it, and you almost require at least one of them to testify against the other in the absence of some kind of smoking-gun evidence (which is highly unlikely). Yes, we have the Abramoff case now, but that was only because he eventually got a little too arrogant and sloppy, but it still took years to come to light and even now we're not sure if everyone involved will be convicted. And even if they are convicted, the cases that are being built required the cooperation of several of the conspirators, which allows them to get much lighter sentences than they otherwise would have.
So, while I'm not a fan of the McCain-Feingold law, I do think we need to do something to disallow what amounts to legalized bribery with campaign contributions. If it's not outright quid-pro-quo, it's at least a serious conflict of interest for politicians. I mean seriously, how likely are they to ignore the requests of their largest contributors? The ones that provide them with the money they need to stay in office? Let's be honest about this. It is a conflict of interest. I work for a contractor that does some work for the government. If we so much as buy a government employee lunch it's considered a conflict of interest that can bar us from receiving government contracts for at least 5 years. How come we don't have standards like that for politicians?
Such an indicator might also be used on an RFID tag, and the majority of the world would have no idea
Yes, I've heard the thing about barcodes, but that's a fundamentally different technology. RFID wouldn't need to use any particular numbers, and they could consciously avoid using any code that would cause fundies to get their collective panties in a wad.
One thing I've noticed from VB programmers, and I'm sure this is true of many of the VBesque GUI builders, no matter what the language, is the lack of 'program sense' which is often seen.
That's understandable if all they've ever written is small applications that don't require much design or flow. That probably describes a good number of VB developers as well as those from other RAD languages. However, if they've learned enough and worked on real business apps, then they should have just as good an understanding of programming as developers in other languages.
The thing is, OOP loses most of its power if there's no inheritance.
I wouldn't say it loses most of its power. Just some. Encapsulation and polymorphism are powerful concepts as well. VB6 did those fine. Regardless though, VB.NET has fixed the inheritance issue now anyway and the language is quite full-featured.
Yes, I've worked with c++, delphi, and java. I liked delphi and java better than VB6, and c++ is good for some things, but business apps isn't one of them. I prefer VB.NET and C# now though.
Why would anyone continue to subject themselves to a half-baked, BASIC ripoff syntax that wasn't very good to begin with and is incompatible with previous versions when you can do the same thing with a real syntax like C#?
Maybe because there's really nothing wrong with the syntax. You may prefer C#-like syntax, but that's just your preference. There's nothing inherently wrong with VB's syntax. It's easy to read and can do anything that C# can do, so it just comes down to personal preferences.
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I believe it depends on exactly how bad the law was. The court should be able to determine whether legal fees should be paid by the loser or not based on whether the law runs afoul of established legal precedent or not.
The legislature has the right to pass any legislation it wants; the courts have the right to strike down the legislation.
Legislators are supposed to uphold the Constitution. If they don't know or understand the Constitution, and they're writing laws that ignore the Constitution and even legal precedent, then they deserve to pay for the costs of those that have to fight to overturn the bad law in court.
Now they're asking for more money. I guess my state just needs to learn how to not be stupid.
Maybe try protesting against gubernatorial candidates that like to grandstand with moronic legislation like this. Hold them accountable for the money they are costing your state!
We didn't want to elect him the first time. He was actually the lesser of two evils.
The real problem is that our election system doesn't really make elections with more than 2 real candidates feasible. You end up with the Nader dilemma anytime a serious third candidate enters the race. Until we move to a sensible election system, we will continue to have this problem. The problem is that the two parties will fight tooth-and-nail, lie, cheat, and steal to keep the current system. At least with that system they can claim that there is democracy and multiple viewpoints represented. The problem is that there will never be real change as long as we only have two parties. We'll keep switching from one crappy candidate to the next. Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!
Well, to be a bit cynical (and what corporation isn't?), increasing usage of Linux or other OSS eats into Windows' world-wide usage numbers. That's not a good thing for Bill.
Does the number really need to be ON the card? It's on the magnetic strip, which the machine reads. It never needs to be displayed. Sure, it's security through obscurity, but it is better than the current system.
A lot of cc and identity theft has been committed by running people's cards through readers that simply record the info from the card and store it to be retrieved later by the thieves. Often happened at grocery stores, convenience stores, restaurants, etc.
At least a -3? +5 is greater than -3, right?
:)
I suppose I was speaking negatively rather than mathematically
XML stands for Xtremely Media-hyped Language and PHP stands for Perl-Hater's Platform. They are both very overused and should be ignored from this point on. Oh crap. I guess I get a free downmod for going against Slashdot culture. Oh well.
No, you should get the downmod for posting a moronic comment that contains flamebait only with no facts or even anecdotes to back it up. You rightly deserve at least a -3 for such a comment.
Clerk scans product and infects store database.
All prices for all products now set to $0.
Again, any decent software developer knows that you never trust outside input. You always check everything that comes in. Follow that simple rule and your software is secure from these kinds of attacks.
When you a grinding, if a GM suspects botting they will whisper you looking for you to respond. If you don't respond within a reasonable amount of time you get nailed for botting.
Same thing that admins would do back in the BBS days. A friend of mine and I used to write scripts for Telix to grind for us in a couple of MUDs. We ended up having to make the script give some kind of generic reply anytime someone talked to us and then start beeping to notify us that we were being watched. Worked really well. We never got caught.
But I've got extra resources - either on my own,
You wouldn't be allowed to use your extra resources. You may spend your allotted campaign funds and that's it.
or given to me by supporters who really like my message. Why shouldn't I be able to use those?
Because there's no way to distinguish between "supporters who really like my message" and "supporters to whom I've promised some kind of quid pro quo once I'm in office". Given the fact that its extremely hard to prove which is the case, and given that such corruption would severely undermine our democracy, it seems like the preferable solution would be to give each person an equal amount to spend on their campaign.
Why should my ability to communicate be stifled? Why should my political speech be hampered?
What exactly is political speech anymore but a spending arms race with each candidate trying to outspend the other and thereby drown out the other's message with their own? I hardly see that as free speech. I think your idea is every bit as idealistic as my own, but mine costs a hell of a lot less and might have a chance at discouraging corruption rather than encouraging it as the current system does. Candidates have to sell their souls to lobbyists to pay for their campaigns. How is the voting public served by that?
Either patent something new or pay the licensing fee.
Hard to patent something new if you don't have the cash or existing patents to defend yourself with. They can tie you up in very expensive litigation for years. Hardly an incentive for innovation. The patent system is out of control now. Someone needs to seriously reign it in. Getting rid of business-method patents, probably software patents, and going back to the working prototype requirement would be good starts. Raising the bar (a lot) for obviousness is essential as well.
How many millions in R&D did you spend to open that store across the street? Apples and oranges.
You still fail to address the gp poster's point about cross-licensing of patents being a method of barring entry to newcomers.
Of course, a simple "buy it now" on an online auction seems obvious now. It is. Would this have been obvious in 1994? I would argue not.
The problem is that their patents are quite obvious to anyone who is a serious web developer (or any sort of developer at all really). They make them look technical and specific because they go into great detail about how a database and website actually works. But databases and websites already existed and were already being used in exactly the manner they describe. They just describe using them to accomplish something that was already being done millions of times a day all over the world, but on the web. You could claim that they were being innovative by coming up with this before it had actually been implemented, but it could also be argued (and quite strongly I believe) that many of these kinds of things hadn't been implemented because the web was still too young and not yet trusted or understood by enough people to make such a venture profitable, or at least that the first sites to start auctioning online could not yet support the level of robust development that would include every feature that people might want or use in the real world. So, I don't think that they should be allowed to patent something that would be quite obvious to anyone seeking to build such a system just because it was not yet profitable for anyone to do so. That just leads to a huge problem of speculative patents, which, coincidentally I'm sure, is exactly where our patent system is right now.
There is. One requirement of a patent is that it be non-obvious.
Unfortunately, non-obvious seems to have been interpreted as "Something that a retarded gerbil might take more than a week to come up with." If they could just fix that little interpretation problem, many of the most egregious abuses of the patent system would be dealt with. Then we'd just have to deal with the rest of the problems (of which there are also many).
Well...fair enough. That doesn't help, though, does it? It's still your country. Do something about it. Please?
You can be arrested for wearing a political t-shirt to a political speech/rally here now. How far do you think an opposition is going to get with anything that might actually make a difference?
The problem with that philosophy is that you wind up restricting people in legitimate situations as well.
I think my point is that we should make sure that there aren't any legimate situations at all. Get rid of campaign contributions altogether. Maybe each candidate that gets on the ballot should receive some fixed amount of campaign money. This is the age of the internet. You can reach a lot of people cheaply. God forbid people have to do a little research on the candidates rather than having moronic attack ads force-fed to them on tv be the entirety of their knowledge of the candidates. I think that giving up a little bit of convenience would be a small price to pay to get rid of a lot of corruption. It might even have the added benefit of raising the level of political debate to something a little higher than the sound-bite.
You're worried about politicians being bought and sold? Then use the existing anti-corruption laws to prosecute politicians in tit-for-tat situations.
The problem is that it's damn near impossible to prove a quid-pro-quo arrangement between a politician and a contributor. They will both deny it, and you almost require at least one of them to testify against the other in the absence of some kind of smoking-gun evidence (which is highly unlikely). Yes, we have the Abramoff case now, but that was only because he eventually got a little too arrogant and sloppy, but it still took years to come to light and even now we're not sure if everyone involved will be convicted. And even if they are convicted, the cases that are being built required the cooperation of several of the conspirators, which allows them to get much lighter sentences than they otherwise would have.
So, while I'm not a fan of the McCain-Feingold law, I do think we need to do something to disallow what amounts to legalized bribery with campaign contributions. If it's not outright quid-pro-quo, it's at least a serious conflict of interest for politicians. I mean seriously, how likely are they to ignore the requests of their largest contributors? The ones that provide them with the money they need to stay in office? Let's be honest about this. It is a conflict of interest. I work for a contractor that does some work for the government. If we so much as buy a government employee lunch it's considered a conflict of interest that can bar us from receiving government contracts for at least 5 years. How come we don't have standards like that for politicians?
Such an indicator might also be used on an RFID tag, and the majority of the world would have no idea
Yes, I've heard the thing about barcodes, but that's a fundamentally different technology. RFID wouldn't need to use any particular numbers, and they could consciously avoid using any code that would cause fundies to get their collective panties in a wad.
Depends whether you want a PCI-Express or AGP card. If you're going AGP, you probably want to check this out.
One thing I've noticed from VB programmers, and I'm sure this is true of many of the VBesque GUI builders, no matter what the language, is the lack of 'program sense' which is often seen.
That's understandable if all they've ever written is small applications that don't require much design or flow. That probably describes a good number of VB developers as well as those from other RAD languages. However, if they've learned enough and worked on real business apps, then they should have just as good an understanding of programming as developers in other languages.
The thing is, OOP loses most of its power if there's no inheritance.
I wouldn't say it loses most of its power. Just some. Encapsulation and polymorphism are powerful concepts as well. VB6 did those fine. Regardless though, VB.NET has fixed the inheritance issue now anyway and the language is quite full-featured.
Yes, I've worked with c++, delphi, and java. I liked delphi and java better than VB6, and c++ is good for some things, but business apps isn't one of them. I prefer VB.NET and C# now though.
Why would anyone continue to subject themselves to a half-baked, BASIC ripoff syntax that wasn't very good to begin with and is incompatible with previous versions when you can do the same thing with a real syntax like C#?
Maybe because there's really nothing wrong with the syntax. You may prefer C#-like syntax, but that's just your preference. There's nothing inherently wrong with VB's syntax. It's easy to read and can do anything that C# can do, so it just comes down to personal preferences.
Option Strict is new for .NET and did not even exist for VB5/6, so that is incorrect.
.NET at the same time which is why I mentioned using both options. In VB6 I used Option Explicit. In VB.NET I use both.
I was referring to both VB6 and