If M$ had done a proper job they would have put this rider at the bottom of every email sent from every M$ product, and also have their email products strip it out. That way they only 'selectively target' people not using their products already.
really. I was fixing to get all fired up. But if it ASKS you, tough titty. Including an ad in the message may be annoying, but it's called good marketing. Don't like it? Gee, I guess you'd better say no and write the message yourself.
If it doesn't TELL YOU what it's going to do you won't know to send your own message will you? ----
...references only exist for objects and ARE a primitive type on an equal footing with the other primitives
Cogently put, you just have to remember that the ONLY way to access objects is via a reference. I'm not sure why the 'other' primitives aren't accessed via reference (a la wrapper classes) too, but I suspect performance might be a factor. ----
It's worth noting that every language that is any use at all uses pointers: Lisp, Pascal, Java and of course C and C++. They differ in how exposed to the programmer the pointers are. Java, for xample, has an annoying impedance mismatch where objects are passed by reference but things like ints and chars are passed by value.
You can think of this as being totally in keeping with the java way, what is passed is the thing that the program uses.
Primitives are the only thing that you can access directly, i.e. no pointers, everything else is hidden, so you are always working with pointer indirection even though you can't control it yourself. It makes sense to me when I think of it like that.
If you want you can alway use the wrapper classes. (Or should that be Wrapper?) ----
Surely it should be possible to compare several different copies of the same file and XOR them together to start with? If this is done with enough samples, of several different files, it should be a start on understanding the method.
This should not fall under the provisions of the DMCA as it doesn't concern any form of copy protection - until DMCA2 prevents removal of watermarks.....
When the RIAA discover that all the mp3s on the net were ripped from CDs bought using cash how long before it will be illegal not to give ID when buying music? I mean forget fertillizer for home-made bombs, we can't have unlicenced music. ----
Yah. I've heard a lot of things described as acceptable that I still think of as inelegant. Mostly it seems
to me that if you have to split an infinitive, your sentence is constructed in an unclear fashion in the first
place. But that's just me.
I agree, I still try to avoid it where reasonable, but there are occasion where I would have to contort a sentence beyond other peoples tolerance. I am still this picky sometimes though!
At least it's not as bad as 'should of' or 'would of,' which I see in print from people that should know
better, all the time....
You have no argument here;-)
I object less to sloppy english where the meaning is clear, but I still object.
One of the english misuses which irritates me most is a gem from London Underground: "passengers must produce on demand a valid ticket for their entire journey" - so when someone asks I have to hold my ticket up for an hour? Why can't they think about getting word order right sometimes?
----
I have to agree with my other anonymous poster regarding your grammar skills. The sentence
beginning "As to quoting" is a run-on. I hope this comment was not too serious, or I shall have to start making much longer posts and quote the previous two or three posts to provide full context, and not use the customary conversational style;-)
e.g.
emerson: I think you mean "not the first."
belroth: Oh yes - "not the first":-)
That's what comes of previewing for spelling and not content!
emerson:And, yeah, the rules for quoting have been slipping (sadly) over the years, but the exceptions that are allowable have to do with changing the meaning of an actual quotation. In this case, quotation marks are being used to set off a word as interesting, not as an indicator of something someone actually said. So, the punctuation-inside rule should hold here.
belroth: As to quoting, I use "geek" (ahem) quoting almost exclusively, so to me the "interesting" is a semantic element in its own right and I would put the comma after it, as if it were a word that is spelt with quotation marks.
I suppose that it comes from the programming mindset - sort of analagous to avoiding overlapping tags in html?
etc. etc.
I suppose that comes of using a conversational mode for discussing written style.
So, no it would be a run-on if taken in isolation, but the rest of the thread isn't taken that way so why pick on this message and not its parent also?
I admit to not understaing your objection to my use of the comma, in my view I incorrectly capitalised "it" and the sentence has two commas - i.e. I did not omit a full stop. The "[sic]" is debatable because I suspect we are from opposing sides of the Atlantic and you refer to the 's'/'z' spelling option?.
Why is the last Paragraph a mess? I will plead guilty to bad formatting, I thought the < BR> tag after "saying" would make it easier to read, but it didn't. The last sentence could have been better phrased "Ignoring the question of whether one should use 'an unix' or 'a unix'.".
When I write papers I use a highly formal style, unlike that used by most posters to slashdot.
Splitting infinitives is something that not all linguists disparage. I used to avoid this but after hearing a professor of English explaining it as being acceptable I am less bothered by it.:-)
From the OED: elision: the act of dropping out or suppresing a letter or syllable in pronunciation.
What you may mean is liaison:french phonetics. The joining of a final consonant (which would in pause or before a consonant be silent) to a following word beginning with a vowel or 'mute' h. <ibid.>
Philosophically written language must derive from the oral, surely?
I suppose it's another vagary of the non-phonetic nature of written english that there are multiple vowel sounds for the same symbol:
we have an umbrella and a unix, and even I'm not going to start saying "an oonix" instead of "a yoonix"!
I do get irritated by the grammar checker in Word informing me that I use the passive voice excessively. I know what I'm trying to say and it's how I was taught to write reports. No-one has told me why USians use "of" in the way I mentioned though....:-) ----
Oh yes - "not the first":-)
That's what comes of previewing for spelling and not content!
As to quoting, I use "geek" (ahem) quoting almost exclusively, so to me the "interesting" is a semantic element in its own right and I would put the comma after it, as if it were a word that is spelt with quotation marks. I suppose that it comes from the programming mindset - sort of analagous to avoiding overlapping tags in html?
So I appreciate your comment, and sympathise with your stand against linguistic degradation, It just doesn't really bother me.:-) (Does punctuation go before or after the smiley?)
One thing that does bother me, and I have only recently started to notice this, is the american way of saying "How Good Of A Unix is Mac OS X?", and not "How Good A Unix is Mac OS X?". Why is this? Leaving aside that I ought to say "an unix" and not "a unix" that is. ----
>Emerson: telling moderators what to do isn't "Informative", it's "Anal Retentive"
The comma after "Informative" should go inside the quotation marks; also don't forget your closing punctuation.
Personally I'd agree with the second point, not the second. 'Rules' for things like quoting have changed in the last few decades - I think it's explained in the Jargon File. ----
Well, if I was running a company, who would I rather hire, an American programmer for 70-90k who might leave any time, or import an indentured servant who will work for 50k and can't leave, hmm tricky decision.
One of the problems with the H1B workers is the depression of the market rate for American workers. There was an analysis referenced on/. recently explaining how there isn't any REAL shortage of programmers - if there were the salaries would be going up much faster. Also there aren't many unemployed programmers as they all take other jobs (i.e. aren't programmers any more).
I'm heading for 40 and trying to change to another speciality to stay marketable. Easy it isn't. ----
Back in the mists of time (ok 1984) I had a BBC micrcomputer and a very, very, cold room. When I switched on the beeb in the winter it wouldn't start and I got error messages - the (EE)PROMs containing the BIOS were out of spec. So what I did was to use a hairdrier to heat up the chips and then switch on. Simple. I suspect that the problem these guys are having is that they're cooling too much of the mobo - I doubt if anything other than the CPU needs this amount of cooling.
I'd like to know if they've tried running this MB/CPU at room temp after this experiment, I wouldn't be surprised if it was working. ----
Well, in the UK we're about to get a law to do just this.
The R.I.P. bill is due to become law soon,
I wonder if I feel moved to change my sig in a while (for whatever reason) I may be liable to 5 years in gaol.
Any English lawyers out there care to comment?
Any Scottish Lawyers-will this apply to Scotland too? ----
I pay Freeserve £10 a month for unmetered access, and that is 24/7.
Admittedly I have to reconnect every few hours so I have to use a smart FTP package for downloads (go!Zilla), and lately it's taken a few tries before connecting.
Oh, and that's 64k ISDN, not V90, the only downside is still paying BT for the ISDN line rental, but I'm not going back now- so my quarterly bill is down to about £110 from $300-£400, because the ISDN is a business line almost exclusively for intrenet. When ADSL rolls in (Ha ha, it's already 2 months late) I shall have my ISDN line down-graded to PSTN and then up-graded to ADSL, as BT can't install ADSL over ISDN, even though Deutsche Telekom can....
I also get the 'free' £10 calls from Energis too - and that's on a separate line from the ISDN.
As the Freeserve service has a 7 day notice period I'm happy to drop it to get ADSL and I'm also keeping my old (non-free) ISP account to handle my email etc.
How safe do you think you'd really be there? If the UK gov is into this sort of rubbish then starving Sealand into submission isn't going to worry them, after all with the internet connections cut and radio jammed who'd even now there was a blockade?
As a subject of Her Majesty I am depressed at the conduct of Her Government, I just wish it was practicable for her to refuse Royal Assent. For you 'merkins that's sort of like your Prez signing, the difference being it's more of a rubber stamp - I'm not aware of the Royal assent not being given since the Civil War (Er, that's the 1640s, guys.) ----
Current FM radio is a lossy transmission so the record industry isn't too bothered, but they will probably change their mind when digital radio really takes off.
I don't iamgine that the RIAA etc will take to the idea of perfect copiable music transmitted to everyone..... ----
Gee I must have been doubly affected as I got an email from my ISP telling me about the virus before anyone else, and that they were filtering it out for me. (Nice going Frontier - they've also stripped out all the clones with no hassle). And the second strike is my friend telling me he had 500 copies, so I had to listen to that. Yep I was affected. NOT. ----
Personally I find a significant difference between countries spying on their allies and keeping what they did secret, and using that information to give a competitive advantage to domestic companies.
One of the things that irritated the British intelligence services during WWII was what the US did with the Enigma decodes of German U-Boat messages. To keep the Germans from realising that their traffic was being read the RN (Coastal Command) flew patrols over where they knew the U-Boats were going to be, 'happened' to spot them and then sent someone to sink them. The USN just sailed up and sank them, considered to be a bit of a giveaway. I believed the US was now better at 'protecting assets'.
Except this sort of Industrial espionage is a dead giveaway.
Would it not be pertinent for some 'Merkins to write their CongreeCritter and ask why the US has spent so many billions of dollars spying for Boeing?
Or is this another 'creative' deal by an Inteligence agency selling Industrial Secrets to fund 'black ops'? Did the NSA receive any fiscal grattitude from any US companies?
I'd suggest they confiscate (through the courts) all the expensive computers, receivers, dishes etc at Menwith Hills, which would definitely cramp the NSA spying on them for a fair time.
Don't forget guys, ALL encryption was illegal in France, and last year(?) they changed the law to make it LEGAL - the French aren't totally clueless (just mostly like most Govs.)
Actually UK police DO need a search warrant to enter, unless in 'hot pursuit' (which I expect is true in the US also) or, of course you let them in.
The police powers are less than that of H.M.Customs and Excise - they have powers that the cops can only dream of (so far anyway). On the whole I still prefer being here than the US, but the balance is tipping...
compare & contrast: NSA v. GCHQ FBI V. MI5 CIA V. MI6 etc.... ----
I emailed the Mark Thomas product about RIP last week (after his last pop at Jack Straw), they don't ack emailed suggestions so I don't know if they're thinking about a program (or they may have been before I wrote them). Oh BTW I sent an update earlier, I hope he does it.
I really like him doing balloon trips over Menwith Hills (The 'secret' site where the NSA monitors all European satellite comms).
Great, now I have no privacy. I suppose I'll have to print off any sensitive email and delete any e-version.
Trouble is, I have to be able to PROVE that I have no encrypted messages. "Evening sir, we 'ave 'eard about this 'ere setganography lark, so chummy, wot 'ave you got 'idden in your wallpaper then?"
How would you PROVE you have no hidden data in a Mpeg/DVD/BMP on your hard drive?
OH, and I can't tell you I've been forced to do this on pain of 5 years in the pokey.
I hereby inform you that the police have NOT served me with a warrant demanding decodes of any possible encrypted/hidden data on my computers. ----
Re:Good, but he's no Tolkein...
on
The Truth
·
· Score: 1
As an aside on Small Gods, I was reminded of this when reading the/. discussion on
When Students Become Informers
, especially the bit where he explains how someone must be guilty if they are suspected by the religious police, or the suspicion wouldn't have occured to them....
Pterry also strikes uncomfortably close to home with Vimes attitude that Everybody is guilty of something, you just have to decide what.
I'd still rather have Vimes running the CIA/FBI/MI5 or whatever though. ----
Slashdot Mirror
No-one does a proper job these days...
----
If it doesn't TELL YOU what it's going to do you won't know to send your own message will you?
----
Cogently put, you just have to remember that the ONLY way to access objects is via a reference. I'm not sure why the 'other' primitives aren't accessed via reference (a la wrapper classes) too, but I suspect performance might be a factor.
----
You can think of this as being totally in keeping with the java way, what is passed is the thing that the program uses.
Primitives are the only thing that you can access directly, i.e. no pointers, everything else is hidden, so you are always working with pointer indirection even though you can't control it yourself. It makes sense to me when I think of it like that.
If you want you can alway use the wrapper classes. (Or should that be Wrapper?)
----
This should not fall under the provisions of the DMCA as it doesn't concern any form of copy protection - until DMCA2 prevents removal of watermarks.....
When the RIAA discover that all the mp3s on the net were ripped from CDs bought using cash how long before it will be illegal not to give ID when buying music? I mean forget fertillizer for home-made bombs, we can't have unlicenced music.
----
Use 2 sound cards, and put the output from one into the input of another, or as this is /. why not do this with two computers instead?
----
----
I agree, I still try to avoid it where reasonable, but there are occasion where I would have to contort a sentence beyond other peoples tolerance. I am still this picky sometimes though!
You have no argument here
I object less to sloppy english where the meaning is clear, but I still object.
One of the english misuses which irritates me most is a gem from London Underground:
"passengers must produce on demand a valid ticket for their entire journey" - so when someone asks I have to hold my ticket up for an hour? Why can't they think about getting word order right sometimes?
----
----
From the OED:
elision: the act of dropping out or suppresing a letter or syllable in pronunciation.
What you may mean is
liaison: french phonetics. The joining of a final consonant (which would in pause or before a consonant be silent) to a following word beginning with a vowel or 'mute' h. <ibid.>
Philosophically written language must derive from the oral, surely?
I suppose it's another vagary of the non-phonetic nature of written english that there are multiple vowel sounds for the same symbol:
we have an umbrella and a unix, and even I'm not going to start saying "an oonix" instead of "a yoonix"!
I do get irritated by the grammar checker in Word informing me that I use the passive voice excessively. I know what I'm trying to say and it's how I was taught to write reports. :-)
No-one has told me why USians use "of" in the way I mentioned though....
----
That's what comes of previewing for spelling and not content!
As to quoting, I use "geek" (ahem) quoting almost exclusively, so to me the "interesting" is a semantic element in its own right and I would put the comma after it, as if it were a word that is spelt with quotation marks.
I suppose that it comes from the programming mindset - sort of analagous to avoiding overlapping tags in html?
So I appreciate your comment, and sympathise with your stand against linguistic degradation, It just doesn't really bother me. :-) (Does punctuation go before or after the smiley?)
One thing that does bother me, and I have only recently started to notice this, is the american way of saying
"How Good Of A Unix is Mac OS X?", and not "How Good A Unix is Mac OS X?". Why is this? Leaving aside that I ought to say "an unix" and not "a unix" that is.
----
'Rules' for things like quoting have changed in the last few decades - I think it's explained in the Jargon File.
----
One of the problems with the H1B workers is the depression of the market rate for American workers. /. recently explaining how there isn't any REAL shortage of programmers - if there were the salaries would be going up much faster. Also there aren't many unemployed programmers as they all take other jobs (i.e. aren't programmers any more).
There was an analysis referenced on
I'm heading for 40 and trying to change to another speciality to stay marketable. Easy it isn't.
----
So what I did was to use a hairdrier to heat up the chips and then switch on. Simple.
I suspect that the problem these guys are having is that they're cooling too much of the mobo - I doubt if anything other than the CPU needs this amount of cooling.
I'd like to know if they've tried running this MB/CPU at room temp after this experiment, I wouldn't be surprised if it was working.
----
The R.I.P. bill is due to become law soon,
I wonder if I feel moved to change my sig in a while (for whatever reason) I may be liable to 5 years in gaol.
Any English lawyers out there care to comment?
Any Scottish Lawyers-will this apply to Scotland too?
----
Admittedly I have to reconnect every few hours so I have to use a smart FTP package for downloads (go!Zilla), and lately it's taken a few tries before connecting.
Oh, and that's 64k ISDN, not V90, the only downside is still paying BT for the ISDN line rental, but I'm not going back now- so my quarterly bill is down to about £110 from $300-£400, because the ISDN is a business line almost exclusively for intrenet. When ADSL rolls in (Ha ha, it's already 2 months late) I shall have my ISDN line down-graded to PSTN and then up-graded to ADSL, as BT can't install ADSL over ISDN, even though Deutsche Telekom can....
I also get the 'free' £10 calls from Energis too - and that's on a separate line from the ISDN.
As the Freeserve service has a 7 day notice period I'm happy to drop it to get ADSL and I'm also keeping my old (non-free) ISP account to handle my email etc.
I suppose it could be simpler...
----
If the UK gov is into this sort of rubbish then starving Sealand into submission isn't going to worry them, after all with the internet connections cut and radio jammed who'd even now there was a blockade?
As a subject of Her Majesty I am depressed at the conduct of Her Government, I just wish it was practicable for her to refuse Royal Assent.
For you 'merkins that's sort of like your Prez signing, the difference being it's more of a rubber stamp - I'm not aware of the Royal assent not being given since the Civil War (Er, that's the 1640s, guys.)
----
I don't iamgine that the RIAA etc will take to the idea of perfect copiable music transmitted to everyone.....
----
Gee I must have been doubly affected as I got an email from my ISP telling me about the virus before anyone else, and that they were filtering it out for me. (Nice going Frontier - they've also stripped out all the clones with no hassle). And the second strike is my friend telling me he had 500 copies, so I had to listen to that. Yep I was affected. NOT.
----
One of the things that irritated the British intelligence services during WWII was what the US did with the Enigma decodes of German U-Boat messages.
To keep the Germans from realising that their traffic was being read the RN (Coastal Command) flew patrols over where they knew the U-Boats were going to be, 'happened' to spot them and then sent someone to sink them.
The USN just sailed up and sank them, considered to be a bit of a giveaway.
I believed the US was now better at 'protecting assets'.
Except this sort of Industrial espionage is a dead giveaway.
Would it not be pertinent for some 'Merkins to write their CongreeCritter and ask why the US has spent so many billions of dollars spying for Boeing?
Or is this another 'creative' deal by an Inteligence agency selling Industrial Secrets to fund 'black ops'? Did the NSA receive any fiscal grattitude from any US companies?
----
Don't forget guys, ALL encryption was illegal in France, and last year(?) they changed the law to make it LEGAL - the French aren't totally clueless (just mostly like most Govs.)
----
The police powers are less than that of H.M.Customs and Excise - they have powers that the cops can only dream of (so far anyway).
On the whole I still prefer being here than the US, but the balance is tipping...
compare & contrast:
NSA v. GCHQ
FBI V. MI5
CIA V. MI6
etc....
----
Oh BTW I sent an update earlier, I hope he does it.
I really like him doing balloon trips over Menwith Hills (The 'secret' site where the NSA monitors all European satellite comms).
----
I suppose I'll have to print off any sensitive email and delete any e-version.
Trouble is, I have to be able to PROVE that I have no encrypted messages.
"Evening sir, we 'ave 'eard about this 'ere setganography lark, so chummy, wot 'ave you got 'idden in your wallpaper then?"
How would you PROVE you have no hidden data in a Mpeg/DVD/BMP on your hard drive?
OH, and I can't tell you I've been forced to do this on pain of 5 years in the pokey.
I hereby inform you that the police have NOT served me with a warrant demanding decodes of any possible encrypted/hidden data on my computers.
----
Pterry also strikes uncomfortably close to home with Vimes attitude that Everybody is guilty of something, you just have to decide what. I'd still rather have Vimes running the CIA/FBI/MI5 or whatever though.
----