Let's assume a 10% tax on income. So a $20,000 income is taxes for $2,000. A $200,000 income is taxed for $20,000. Seems perfectly fair. The higher income person pays as much tax as the lower income person makes. The more you make, you more you pay.
Now for a progressive tax. Let's stick with 10% for the lower income, but jump it to 40% for the higher income. Now the $200,000 is taxed for $80,000.
Is making more money inherently wrong? No. Does making less money make you a better person deserving of special privileges? No. The progressive tax is nothing but an arbitrary and unfair taxation system that politicians implemented because they knew they could get away with it.
I make way more than $200K a year. If anyone has a right to complain about progressive taxes, I do. And yet I fully support them.
The simple fact is that most of my income is, strictly speaking, unnecessary. I don't need a fancy home theater or a swimming pool to survive. Only a relatively small percentage of my paycheck goes towards food, shelter, and other necessities. Someone living at the poverty line, though, needs to devote every cent they have towards making ends meet, and they simply don't have any money to spare.
To bring in the same amount of money using a flat tax that the IRS gets from the current progressive tax, the tax percentage would be less than I'm currently paying and more than what someone at the poverty line is paying. It would be giving me more money and the poor person less.
And that's the problem. I don't need more money. Sure, I wouldn't complain about a ten percent increase in my yearly earnings, but I don't need it. A poor person, on the other hand, can't spare any more than they already are. Taxing them more and taxing me less is equivalent to taking money from the poor and giving it to me. How can you possibly reason that that is a good thing? In what universe does that make sense?
Despite the fact that I stand to gain significantly from a flat tax, I'm still fiercely against it.
This is part of the problem with North America these days. People divest themselves of any responsibility for their actions. "It's not my fault 10,000 people died from toxic waste poisoning, I was just doing my job, delivering the barrels to the river and dumping them." How about, "Yeah, so what if I killed a one-room school full of children? Those were my orders."
Why is it impossible to have an argument about something like this without someone bringing up the worn-out Slippery Slope logical fallacy? It's called a 'fallacy' for a reason.
Let's examine the merits of your argument:
1) Your two examples are: dumping toxic waste in a river, leading to the deaths of 10,000 people, and killing a room full of schoolchildren.
Both of these examples involve killing innocent people, which has absolutely nothing to do with the actual situation with SCO. You might as well compare someone who breaks the law by driving 60 in a 55MPH zone to someone who breaks the law by commiting serial murders, and consider the two crimes equivalent.
2) In case #1, the individual dumping toxic waste in the river was directly helping carry out the deadly actions. In case #2, the individual killed the schoolchildren himself.
Both of your examples have the individuals having (some or all) personal responsibility for the deaths, whereas in the actual situation with SCO we're debating lowly cube workers who have absolutely nothing to do with the lawsuits and may well oppose them completely. Once again, your examples have nothing to do with the actual situation and display a complete logical disconnect.
The slippery slope fallacy pisses me off. Debate the merits of the actual situation, not one far more horrible that has nothing to do with what's really going on.
In conclusion, Ireland is a land of great cultural contrasts. Thank you.
Re:Is Java finished?
on
Java vs .NET
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I know you're trolling but, How is java related open sourced? I can not get the javac.exe source code.
Please follow along carefully:
1) Go to http://java.sun.com. 2) Click the button labelled "J2SE - Core Java Software". It's the big blue button in the middle. 3) On the next page, click "Source Licensing". It's in the links on the left-hand side of the page. 4) On the Source Licensing page, click "Download". 5) Follow the directions to download the entire J2SDK source code.
Now, what was that about the source code not being available?
I guess the writer for the sight never learned stage magic. Lucky is quite cool, but Chandler's hand goes into his bag for controls before Lucky gives any reaction to the copter.
According to the article, the dinosaur is controlled by two seeming bystanders, not the dinosaur handler himself.
Well, since "sounding better" is a subjective judgement, anyone who says so is right.
No, no, no, no.
Anyone who says they sound better after a controlled, blind test is right. Anything else is just mental masturbation. If you firmly believe that tubes sound better than transistors, and you know which is which during the test, you're going to pick the tubes out every time. Hell, you could even label them backwards -- "Okay, and this is the vacuum tube system" *really the transistor system* "Yeah, that sounds way better than the other one! I told you tubes sound better!"
It's just the way humans work, and you're kidding yourself if you think you're not subject to it. We all are.
Why do they stick more and more satelites into orbit when they're only going to ultimately fall back down to earth anyways?
A) The JWST is not going to be an Earth satellite. It will be placed at the L2 Lagrange point, which makes it more properly a satellite of both the Earth and the Sun. The L2 Lagrange point is very, very far away -- around a million miles from the Earth, and the JWST will have to travel for three months to get there.
B) It's not going to fall back to the Earth. It will drift off into space.
Here's a wild thought.... build these space telescopes right on the surface of the moon!
C) Here's a wild thought -- maybe the rocket scientists know more about this than you do! In this case, they can't put the JWST on the moon, because the temperature is far too warm (some of the JWST's sensors will operate at a mere 7 degrees Kelvin). Being in space also makes life a lot easier in other respects, as you don't have a rocky body blocking half your possible field of vision at all times.
He said that was enough of a reason for him to force her to take a breathalizer.
Of course, your friend simply could have said "No", at which point the cop can't do a damned thing short of arresting her (and then he's on very shaky ground). Similarly, you have the right to refuse any search request not backed by a search warrant.
It's important to know your rights in situations like this -- and yes, I did know that in high school, so I don't view her age as an excuse.
You are never going to be able to take that many pic's without changing batteries so why not have a couple of cheaper 1GB cards and swap em out with the batteries?
My wife is a professional photographer who shoots with a Nikon D1x, and I frequently function as her assistant, so I'm intimately familiar with this subject. She can easily take few gigs of pictures without draining the battery -- the D1x has remarkably good battery life, and takes pretty damned big pictures.
This is obviously a high-end pro card, so don't use your experience with consumer cameras as a grade of how useful this is. Nobody but a serious pro should even be considering something like this. Trust me, it's not always as simple as "just change the card when it fills up" -- having to do that can mean the difference between getting the critical shot and missing it. That alone can justify the price premium to a pro.
Go build me a pyramid. Without any modern machines. In the middle of the desert.
With ten thousand workers to help, a government that doesn't give a crap about death tolls or reasonable working conditions, and enough funding to bankrupt an empire, I'm sure I could manage.
The pyramids were gigantic, backbreaking undertakings, but I maintain my stance that software is the most complicated endeavor undertaken by mankind.
Decimal is well known for screwing up binary floating point. I'm wondering if much of the problem is using decimal where binary or hexadecimal should be used. Do you really want to have complicated decimalbinary floating point routines slowing down your aircraft?
WTF?
Decimal fractions are well-known for not always being exactly representable in finite-length binary fractions, true. However, the rest of your comment is complete nonsense.
Floating point always implies rounded, potentially-inaccurate results. There is no other way for it to operate. So decimal vs. binary doesn't introduce any new complications -- even if all of your numbers were in binary to begin with, you're still going to face roundoff.
The only reason most people are familiar with the decimal vs. binary problem in the first place is due to financial calculations. Since many common decimal numbers (such as 0.1) cannot be exactly represented in finite-length binary, roundoff errors are inevitable and will ultimately lead to misplaced pennies. That's why you can't use imprecise floating-point math for precise financial calculations which require every penny to be accounted for.
What the hell that has to do with the F-22 flight control software, I have no idea. I don't even know if the F-22 uses floating point math in the first place (it's entirely possible that it uses fixed point or even integers), and if it does, the engineers working on this are certainly smart enough to understand that floating point math is by its very nature an approximation. Even if you never convert a decimal number to a binary number, you're still going to end up with rounded, potentially imprecise results after any floating point calculation.
Further, how the hell would a slightly inaccurate floating point number be a likely cause for a crash? I'm not denying that it could happen, but there are a million things more likely to be causing crashes than an incomplete understanding of floating point math.
Re:It may be normal...
on
In-Flight Reboot?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Good enough isn't. Stable code can be written. It merely takes talented engineers, design time to conceptualize and architech the product up front before coding it and giving QA what they need to test and committment to FIXING the issues that QA identifies.
I'm curious -- do you do development? Have you ever worked on a 2 million line program? No offense, but anyone who uses the word "merely" in a paragraph like that strikes me as someone with a tenuous grip on reality.
I am a senior engineer at a very big company. Applications I have written are in use by literally millions of people. And I'm scared stiff by the idea of writing the kind of software that powers the F-22. Software of this scale is the single most complicated project humanity has ever undertaken, and to belittle the efforts of the engineers involved by suggesting that they don't know what they're doing or aren't following responsible development guidelines shows a serious lack of understanding. I promise you, the software on the F-22 has been subjected to more rigorous QA than anything you or I have ever touched, but that still doesn't make it easy.
Humans aren't perfect, and as long as that continues to be the case, writing a multi-million line chunk of software will always be a ridiculously expensive and difficult proposition with no guarantee of success.
A lot of people in the US are Christians - and there isn't a commandment against copyright violation. I wonder how many judges to to church?
There also isn't a commandment against walking up to a random woman on the street and calling her a stupid fat worthless whore. Does that mean it's okay to do so?
A) This country is run by laws, not commandments. B) Not everybody is Christian. Most of the world is not, in fact. C) The Bible was written thousands of years ago. It's safe to assume that, regardless of whether or not you personally believe that it's the Word of God, it might just possibly not cover every situation in the modern world.
I'm a coder, not a musician. The products of my labors are strictly intangible, and copyright is the only reason I am entitled to any money for my work.
Are you suggesting that I should start scheduling concerts in order to support myself?
Re:How are we any more sane?
on
Psychotic Lab Mice
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Three points of note:
A) These activities consume up to half of the creatures' waking hours, every single day.
B) The affected animals also exhibit other deficiencies and obsessive behaviors.
C) The entire lifestyle of these creatures is wildly altered by the addition of something as simple as a cardboard tube to their cages.
I hardly think that an hour on a trampoline every now and then is even remotely similar.
These are the extremely high-polygon count models from which the final models + bump maps will be computed. The in-game models will have far fewer polygons, but automatically-computed bump maps that simulate the higher-count renders.
Take a look at Polybump for an example of this technology.
Re:you know it's true
on
All The Rave
·
· Score: 2, Informative
and copying music is NOT stealing in any sense of the word "stealing"
Excerpt from Merriam Webster:
steal, v:
1 : to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as an habitual or regular practice
...
1 a : to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully
Sounds like stealing to me. Of course, next you're going to argue that the first definition doesn't apply, because music isn't "property". Thankfully, I've got that covered too.
property, n:
2 c : something to which a person or business has a legal title
Next, you're going to argue that it still doesn't count, because you didn't "take" it, you just "made a copy of it", to which I answer: shut up. You didn't make the music, and you don't have a natural right to listen to it. I don't see what is so wrong about others expecting to be paid for their efforts, despite the fact that the product of those efforts is intangible. If you don't want to pay for it, feel free to not listen to it.
Oh my god, you've got to be joking. C# and Java murder performance compared to C++.
I'll be the first to admit that Java still has some performance hurdles to overcome -- notably that independent VMs still don't share memory, and that graphics performance is still poor -- but you've got to be joking if you think that C++ "murders" Java's performance. Either that, or you haven't actually used it recently.
For virtually any sort of program that doesn't depend upon high-performance graphics (games, video editing, and the like) Java's performance is more than adequate. In fact, gcc's code generation isn't exactly stellar, either -- Java actually beats it in a number of benchmarks.
The fact of the matter is that there's a little more to it than Turing equivalence. Sure, you could write a massively OO object exchange system in Assembly, or a language metaparser in Visual Basic, or just about anything in Befunge. They're all turing equivalent. For that matter, so is morse code to an interpreter with an abacus over tin cans and string.
So basically, you're rehashing the rest of my message while appearing to argue with me. I'm unclear as to what exactly I said that you disagree with, quite frankly.
What sort of hardware? Graphics? Take a look at java.awt.Graphics2D. Sound? The javax.sound package. Networking? java.net has everything you need.
Yes, I freely admit that you can't write device drivers in Java, since that's about the only point you could possibly claim and actually be correct. For the 99.9999% of us that aren't actually writing device drivers, it's completely and utterly irrelevant. Use JNI if you really need something like that, and it's still easier than trying to write the whole program in C++.
With that said, it's an extremely powerful and flexible language. Very much more powerful than Java or C#.
This sort of statement bugs me. A lot. First, all "real" programming languages are equally powerful -- they are all Turing-equivalent, and therefore capable of computing anything which is computable. In addition to that, modern computers provide a ton of features which aren't covered by the Turing machine, such as graphics and sound, but all real programming languages are also fully equivalent in those areas.
So, when we say a language is more "powerful" than another language, we don't mean that it is capable of doing tasks that cannot be performed by other languages, because they can all perform the same tasks. What we really mean that it makes tasks easier than other languages. Perl, for instance, makes working with regular expressions very easy, and is therefore powerful with respect to string processing. It's easier to do this sort of thing in Perl than virtually any other language, although Perl is no more capable (in raw terms) than any other language.
So, what you're actually arguing that C++ is easier to program in than Java or C#. And if you really, truly believe that, then I despair for the future of software engineering. That isn't idle hyperbole -- I am honestly frightened that people still consider C++ to be a reasonable programming language in the year 2003. It is a pile of hacks glued together with cruft, and C++ has been responsible for more bugs, hacks, and security holes than any other single factor in software engineering.
I'm going to pipe up here with some more Perforce lovin'. My team uses it for our sccs here at work, and I honestly can't imagine going back to CVS after having used Perforce. It's a hell of a good tool.
why hasn't a genuinely better replacement materialized in the last twenty years and become truly widely adopted (in a manner like Perl, for example)?
The Java community uses Ant almost exclusively, and Ant kicks the living crap out of make as far as, well, everything.
True, the C++ community has had trouble coming up with anything better than make, but come on -- we're talking about people that consider C++ to be a reasonable 21st-century programming language, which already leaves me with serious doubts about their sanity. Given that, I'm not too surprised that most of them also consider make to be a reasonable 21st-century build tool.
Engine dies, aircraft attempts to make emergency landing on beach, freeway, etc. Aircraft won't turn, stalls, falls from the sky.
Why are Slashbots so convinced that every new technology cannot possibly work? The softwalls will likely only protect areas that there is no conceivable need for a plane to be anywhere near, and would not hedge out beaches or most stretches of freeway.
When was the last time you heard of plane making an emergency landing on a freeway in any case?
These 'soft-walls' will obviously have a vertical limit. So go above the vertical limit, cut off the master switch and dive in from the top
Why would they "obviously" have a vertical limit?
An operative in maintanence, simply removes the device
The "device" is software. It's built into the plane's flight control software.
An operative in maintanence, modifies the device to force the airplane to go where they want it. Now they don't even need the suicide person on the airplane.
Planes are already flown by software. If you have the technology to hack into the softwall system, you also have the technology to hack into the plane's general flight-control software, so this doesn't increase the risk.
Malfunctions. Every aircraft going through Insrument conditions must have *2* independent and different devices by which to fly with. (i.e. GPS, VOR, etc). And then you put a single point of failure in like this? not likely.
This is the only part of your post that I agree with.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's assume a 10% tax on income. So a $20,000 income is taxes for $2,000. A $200,000 income is taxed for $20,000. Seems perfectly fair. The higher income person pays as much tax as the lower income person makes. The more you make, you more you pay.
Now for a progressive tax. Let's stick with 10% for the lower income, but jump it to 40% for the higher income. Now the $200,000 is taxed for $80,000.
Is making more money inherently wrong? No. Does making less money make you a better person deserving of special privileges? No. The progressive tax is nothing but an arbitrary and unfair taxation system that politicians implemented because they knew they could get away with it.
I make way more than $200K a year. If anyone has a right to complain about progressive taxes, I do. And yet I fully support them.
The simple fact is that most of my income is, strictly speaking, unnecessary. I don't need a fancy home theater or a swimming pool to survive. Only a relatively small percentage of my paycheck goes towards food, shelter, and other necessities. Someone living at the poverty line, though, needs to devote every cent they have towards making ends meet, and they simply don't have any money to spare.
To bring in the same amount of money using a flat tax that the IRS gets from the current progressive tax, the tax percentage would be less than I'm currently paying and more than what someone at the poverty line is paying. It would be giving me more money and the poor person less.
And that's the problem. I don't need more money. Sure, I wouldn't complain about a ten percent increase in my yearly earnings, but I don't need it. A poor person, on the other hand, can't spare any more than they already are. Taxing them more and taxing me less is equivalent to taking money from the poor and giving it to me. How can you possibly reason that that is a good thing? In what universe does that make sense?
Despite the fact that I stand to gain significantly from a flat tax, I'm still fiercely against it.
This is part of the problem with North America these days. People divest themselves of any responsibility for their actions. "It's not my fault 10,000 people died from toxic waste poisoning, I was just doing my job, delivering the barrels to the river and dumping them." How about, "Yeah, so what if I killed a one-room school full of children? Those were my orders."
Why is it impossible to have an argument about something like this without someone bringing up the worn-out Slippery Slope logical fallacy? It's called a 'fallacy' for a reason.
Let's examine the merits of your argument:
1) Your two examples are: dumping toxic waste in a river, leading to the deaths of 10,000 people, and killing a room full of schoolchildren.
Both of these examples involve killing innocent people, which has absolutely nothing to do with the actual situation with SCO. You might as well compare someone who breaks the law by driving 60 in a 55MPH zone to someone who breaks the law by commiting serial murders, and consider the two crimes equivalent.
2) In case #1, the individual dumping toxic waste in the river was directly helping carry out the deadly actions. In case #2, the individual killed the schoolchildren himself.
Both of your examples have the individuals having (some or all) personal responsibility for the deaths, whereas in the actual situation with SCO we're debating lowly cube workers who have absolutely nothing to do with the lawsuits and may well oppose them completely. Once again, your examples have nothing to do with the actual situation and display a complete logical disconnect.
The slippery slope fallacy pisses me off. Debate the merits of the actual situation, not one far more horrible that has nothing to do with what's really going on.
In conclusion, Ireland is a land of great cultural contrasts. Thank you.
I know you're trolling but, How is java related open sourced? I can not get the javac.exe source code.
Please follow along carefully:
1) Go to http://java.sun.com.
2) Click the button labelled "J2SE - Core Java Software". It's the big blue button in the middle.
3) On the next page, click "Source Licensing". It's in the links on the left-hand side of the page.
4) On the Source Licensing page, click "Download".
5) Follow the directions to download the entire J2SDK source code.
Now, what was that about the source code not being available?
Java is not an optimal text parsing language - first off you have to find a regex engine for it.
Like, for instance, the built-in java.util.regex package?
I guess the writer for the sight never learned stage magic. Lucky is quite cool, but Chandler's hand goes into his bag for controls before Lucky gives any reaction to the copter.
According to the article, the dinosaur is controlled by two seeming bystanders, not the dinosaur handler himself.
Well, since "sounding better" is a subjective judgement, anyone who says so is right.
No, no, no, no.
Anyone who says they sound better after a controlled, blind test is right. Anything else is just mental masturbation. If you firmly believe that tubes sound better than transistors, and you know which is which during the test, you're going to pick the tubes out every time. Hell, you could even label them backwards -- "Okay, and this is the vacuum tube system" *really the transistor system* "Yeah, that sounds way better than the other one! I told you tubes sound better!"
It's just the way humans work, and you're kidding yourself if you think you're not subject to it. We all are.
Why do they stick more and more satelites into orbit when they're only going to ultimately fall back down to earth anyways?
A) The JWST is not going to be an Earth satellite. It will be placed at the L2 Lagrange point, which makes it more properly a satellite of both the Earth and the Sun. The L2 Lagrange point is very, very far away -- around a million miles from the Earth, and the JWST will have to travel for three months to get there.
B) It's not going to fall back to the Earth. It will drift off into space.
Here's a wild thought.... build these space telescopes right on the surface of the moon!
C) Here's a wild thought -- maybe the rocket scientists know more about this than you do! In this case, they can't put the JWST on the moon, because the temperature is far too warm (some of the JWST's sensors will operate at a mere 7 degrees Kelvin). Being in space also makes life a lot easier in other respects, as you don't have a rocky body blocking half your possible field of vision at all times.
He said that was enough of a reason for him to force her to take a breathalizer.
Of course, your friend simply could have said "No", at which point the cop can't do a damned thing short of arresting her (and then he's on very shaky ground). Similarly, you have the right to refuse any search request not backed by a search warrant.
It's important to know your rights in situations like this -- and yes, I did know that in high school, so I don't view her age as an excuse.
You are never going to be able to take that many pic's without changing batteries so why not have a couple of cheaper 1GB cards and swap em out with the batteries?
My wife is a professional photographer who shoots with a Nikon D1x, and I frequently function as her assistant, so I'm intimately familiar with this subject. She can easily take few gigs of pictures without draining the battery -- the D1x has remarkably good battery life, and takes pretty damned big pictures.
This is obviously a high-end pro card, so don't use your experience with consumer cameras as a grade of how useful this is. Nobody but a serious pro should even be considering something like this. Trust me, it's not always as simple as "just change the card when it fills up" -- having to do that can mean the difference between getting the critical shot and missing it. That alone can justify the price premium to a pro.
Go build me a pyramid. Without any modern machines. In the middle of the desert.
With ten thousand workers to help, a government that doesn't give a crap about death tolls or reasonable working conditions, and enough funding to bankrupt an empire, I'm sure I could manage.
The pyramids were gigantic, backbreaking undertakings, but I maintain my stance that software is the most complicated endeavor undertaken by mankind.
Decimal is well known for screwing up binary floating point. I'm wondering if much of the problem is using decimal where binary or hexadecimal should be used. Do you really want to have complicated decimalbinary floating point routines slowing down your aircraft?
WTF?
Decimal fractions are well-known for not always being exactly representable in finite-length binary fractions, true. However, the rest of your comment is complete nonsense.
Floating point always implies rounded, potentially-inaccurate results. There is no other way for it to operate. So decimal vs. binary doesn't introduce any new complications -- even if all of your numbers were in binary to begin with, you're still going to face roundoff.
The only reason most people are familiar with the decimal vs. binary problem in the first place is due to financial calculations. Since many common decimal numbers (such as 0.1) cannot be exactly represented in finite-length binary, roundoff errors are inevitable and will ultimately lead to misplaced pennies. That's why you can't use imprecise floating-point math for precise financial calculations which require every penny to be accounted for.
What the hell that has to do with the F-22 flight control software, I have no idea. I don't even know if the F-22 uses floating point math in the first place (it's entirely possible that it uses fixed point or even integers), and if it does, the engineers working on this are certainly smart enough to understand that floating point math is by its very nature an approximation. Even if you never convert a decimal number to a binary number, you're still going to end up with rounded, potentially imprecise results after any floating point calculation.
Further, how the hell would a slightly inaccurate floating point number be a likely cause for a crash? I'm not denying that it could happen, but there are a million things more likely to be causing crashes than an incomplete understanding of floating point math.
Good enough isn't. Stable code can be written. It merely takes talented engineers, design time to conceptualize and architech the product up front before coding it and giving QA what they need to test and committment to FIXING the issues that QA identifies.
I'm curious -- do you do development? Have you ever worked on a 2 million line program? No offense, but anyone who uses the word "merely" in a paragraph like that strikes me as someone with a tenuous grip on reality.
I am a senior engineer at a very big company. Applications I have written are in use by literally millions of people. And I'm scared stiff by the idea of writing the kind of software that powers the F-22. Software of this scale is the single most complicated project humanity has ever undertaken, and to belittle the efforts of the engineers involved by suggesting that they don't know what they're doing or aren't following responsible development guidelines shows a serious lack of understanding. I promise you, the software on the F-22 has been subjected to more rigorous QA than anything you or I have ever touched, but that still doesn't make it easy.
Humans aren't perfect, and as long as that continues to be the case, writing a multi-million line chunk of software will always be a ridiculously expensive and difficult proposition with no guarantee of success.
A lot of people in the US are Christians - and there isn't a commandment against copyright violation. I wonder how many judges to to church?
There also isn't a commandment against walking up to a random woman on the street and calling her a stupid fat worthless whore. Does that mean it's okay to do so?
A) This country is run by laws, not commandments.
B) Not everybody is Christian. Most of the world is not, in fact.
C) The Bible was written thousands of years ago. It's safe to assume that, regardless of whether or not you personally believe that it's the Word of God, it might just possibly not cover every situation in the modern world.
I'm a coder, not a musician. The products of my labors are strictly intangible, and copyright is the only reason I am entitled to any money for my work.
Are you suggesting that I should start scheduling concerts in order to support myself?
Three points of note:
A) These activities consume up to half of the creatures' waking hours, every single day.
B) The affected animals also exhibit other deficiencies and obsessive behaviors.
C) The entire lifestyle of these creatures is wildly altered by the addition of something as simple as a cardboard tube to their cages.
I hardly think that an hour on a trampoline every now and then is even remotely similar.
These are the extremely high-polygon count models from which the final models + bump maps will be computed. The in-game models will have far fewer polygons, but automatically-computed bump maps that simulate the higher-count renders.
Take a look at Polybump for an example of this technology.
and copying music is NOT stealing in any sense of the word "stealing"
...
Excerpt from Merriam Webster:
steal, v:
1 : to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as an habitual or regular practice
1 a : to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully
Sounds like stealing to me. Of course, next you're going to argue that the first definition doesn't apply, because music isn't "property". Thankfully, I've got that covered too.
property, n:
2 c : something to which a person or business has a legal title
Next, you're going to argue that it still doesn't count, because you didn't "take" it, you just "made a copy of it", to which I answer: shut up. You didn't make the music, and you don't have a natural right to listen to it. I don't see what is so wrong about others expecting to be paid for their efforts, despite the fact that the product of those efforts is intangible. If you don't want to pay for it, feel free to not listen to it.
Oh my god, you've got to be joking. C# and Java murder performance compared to C++.
I'll be the first to admit that Java still has some performance hurdles to overcome -- notably that independent VMs still don't share memory, and that graphics performance is still poor -- but you've got to be joking if you think that C++ "murders" Java's performance. Either that, or you haven't actually used it recently.
For virtually any sort of program that doesn't depend upon high-performance graphics (games, video editing, and the like) Java's performance is more than adequate. In fact, gcc's code generation isn't exactly stellar, either -- Java actually beats it in a number of benchmarks.
The fact of the matter is that there's a little more to it than Turing equivalence. Sure, you could write a massively OO object exchange system in Assembly, or a language metaparser in Visual Basic, or just about anything in Befunge. They're all turing equivalent. For that matter, so is morse code to an interpreter with an abacus over tin cans and string.
So basically, you're rehashing the rest of my message while appearing to argue with me. I'm unclear as to what exactly I said that you disagree with, quite frankly.
What sort of hardware? Graphics? Take a look at java.awt.Graphics2D. Sound? The javax.sound package. Networking? java.net has everything you need.
Yes, I freely admit that you can't write device drivers in Java, since that's about the only point you could possibly claim and actually be correct. For the 99.9999% of us that aren't actually writing device drivers, it's completely and utterly irrelevant. Use JNI if you really need something like that, and it's still easier than trying to write the whole program in C++.
With that said, it's an extremely powerful and flexible language. Very much more powerful than Java or C#.
This sort of statement bugs me. A lot. First, all "real" programming languages are equally powerful -- they are all Turing-equivalent, and therefore capable of computing anything which is computable. In addition to that, modern computers provide a ton of features which aren't covered by the Turing machine, such as graphics and sound, but all real programming languages are also fully equivalent in those areas.
So, when we say a language is more "powerful" than another language, we don't mean that it is capable of doing tasks that cannot be performed by other languages, because they can all perform the same tasks. What we really mean that it makes tasks easier than other languages. Perl, for instance, makes working with regular expressions very easy, and is therefore powerful with respect to string processing. It's easier to do this sort of thing in Perl than virtually any other language, although Perl is no more capable (in raw terms) than any other language.
So, what you're actually arguing that C++ is easier to program in than Java or C#. And if you really, truly believe that, then I despair for the future of software engineering. That isn't idle hyperbole -- I am honestly frightened that people still consider C++ to be a reasonable programming language in the year 2003. It is a pile of hacks glued together with cruft, and C++ has been responsible for more bugs, hacks, and security holes than any other single factor in software engineering.
Yeah, yeah, troll, flamebait, I know.
I'm going to pipe up here with some more Perforce lovin'. My team uses it for our sccs here at work, and I honestly can't imagine going back to CVS after having used Perforce. It's a hell of a good tool.
why hasn't a genuinely better replacement materialized in the last twenty years and become truly widely adopted (in a manner like Perl, for example)?
The Java community uses Ant almost exclusively, and Ant kicks the living crap out of make as far as, well, everything.
True, the C++ community has had trouble coming up with anything better than make, but come on -- we're talking about people that consider C++ to be a reasonable 21st-century programming language, which already leaves me with serious doubts about their sanity. Given that, I'm not too surprised that most of them also consider make to be a reasonable 21st-century build tool.
God, if you ever figure that out, let me know. I fucking hate HTML email, and Mozilla really seems hell-bent on creating it.
Engine dies, aircraft attempts to make emergency landing on beach, freeway, etc. Aircraft won't turn, stalls, falls from the sky.
Why are Slashbots so convinced that every new technology cannot possibly work? The softwalls will likely only protect areas that there is no conceivable need for a plane to be anywhere near, and would not hedge out beaches or most stretches of freeway.
When was the last time you heard of plane making an emergency landing on a freeway in any case?
These 'soft-walls' will obviously have a vertical limit. So go above the vertical limit, cut off the master switch and dive in from the top
Why would they "obviously" have a vertical limit?
An operative in maintanence, simply removes the device
The "device" is software. It's built into the plane's flight control software.
An operative in maintanence, modifies the device to force the airplane to go where they want it. Now they don't even need the suicide person on the airplane.
Planes are already flown by software. If you have the technology to hack into the softwall system, you also have the technology to hack into the plane's general flight-control software, so this doesn't increase the risk.
Malfunctions. Every aircraft going through Insrument conditions must have *2* independent and different devices by which to fly with. (i.e. GPS, VOR, etc). And then you put a single point of failure in like this? not likely.
This is the only part of your post that I agree with.