One does not violate Godwin's Law, one invokes it.
To violate it would mean that the subject of said Law is never mentioned in an infinitely long thread, which as jd mentioned earlier, would be impossible.
Except, as others have pointed out, JD got to that correct conclusion through an incorrect argument. I could write a script that would generate an infinitely long thread that never mentioned Nazis (because every post in the thread would just say "Hello, Cowboy Neal!") but because it could never run to termination the infinite thread with no reference to Nazism would never actually exist. Of course, somebody else could post to the thread with a reference to Nazism, so unless it did run to termination (or somebody made such a post) we would never know whether or not Godwin's law was going to be violated at some point in the future.
Gosh, you hate menus so much you can't bear to use a product that lets other people use them? I've said elsewhere in this thread that I don't mind the graphical interface, as long as I can switch it off and use menus instead (as I could with toolbars on earlier versions of MS tools). If you could switch IE between menu and icon interface, would that really be enough to drive you to another browser?
I wasn't just talking about water vapour -- I also had methane in mind (and although I am a vegetarian, I can't claim moral superiority over the carnivores here, because rice production is a significant contributor to atmospheric methane).
I wasn't suggesting anything about IP, just observing that MS Office 2007 and MSIE 7 have both made navigation much harder by completely eliminating drop down menus. Menus work very well if designed correctly, but we've lost them. I don't mind icons being available for visual reasoners, but I'm a verbal reasoner and resent having the text-based menus taken away from me. I find the new interfaces an absolute nightmare to use.
Or were you suggesting that MS is trying to kill the menu because they can't claim IP over it, and trying to shift us all over to something that they can claim IP over? Now, there's a worrying thought.
So, out of 80+ chemicals that contribute, you want to ignore the largest
Second largest. Water vapour is the largest. And I don't say it should be ignored, just that it's not the only thing we should be looking at. Particularly since we don't actually want to lose much greenhouse effect as that could kick us into another ice age.
It isn't GW denying, it's that CO2 probably accounts for less than 25% of the greenhouse effect. If we're looking to manage the greenhouse effect ("manage" because if we overdo it we get a global cooling problem) then it's no good just looking at CO2. The fact that the effects of greenhouse gasses are often quoted in CO2 equivalent tends to mislead people into thinking that CO2 is the only gas that matters.
Mod parent up--this is it, right here. That's what I love about Firefox. If I say that I will restart later, it believes me, and doesn't pop up asking 5 minutes later. "It's later now! It's later now!"
Just as you start typing "Yours sincerely" on that crucial letter you've spent ages crafting...
Then that 40% could consider upgrading to an old toy like OS like Ubuntu 6.06 LTS. It's not shiny, it's not new, it's not a toy and it doesn't serve blue screens everytime you press Ctrl-Alt-Del at the wrong moment.
That 40% are probably thinking "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". In 13 years of MS Windows use, I have never pressed Ctrl-Alt-Del at the "wrong moment", so it certainly wouldn't be high on my list of reasons to break the system I'm used to if I were one of that 40%.
I wish I were amongst them. IE7 is way less useable than earlier versions, because of the thing that MS seems to have about getting rid of menus meaning that lots of the features that I want are now hidden. Yes, I avoid IE when possible, but some sites are very persistent about only working with IE.
Just because you believe someone should tell you something privately, doesn't mean they will. People were sending each other pictures of their newborns - in the belief, I'm sure, that it was private - and they were openly exposed by Google's cache because of the stupidity of the O2 developers.
In my experience of parents, they will show pictures of their newborns to anybody who doesn't run away fast enough. O2 could have publicised this as a customer feature -- it's the people who hack in to get the pictures who lose out here.
Stolen HTML code remains stolen HTML code even if it's no longer the code used on the site. (And yes, for the sake of other readers, I am aware of the controversy over the use of the word "stolen" in the context of IP).
No problem for the original con artists though: They sold to a big german media house for an undisclosed two-digit million sum estimated to be around 50 million Euros.
When did that happen? It sounds to me as if Facebook might have the timing just right, not late at all, now that it's owned by somebody with enough assets to be suing for.
They could take off the critic's hat and -fix- the things that they complain about.
I mean, isn't that one of the things that makes OSS great?
And there is the fundamental problem with Linux -- the "geeks only" attitude of so many of its proponents. The lawyer who wants an office system, the granny who has just heard that they can video-conference with their grandchild halfway around the world, the schoolkid who wants to get their geography assignment done -- most potential Linux users will never have anything to contribute to Linux except advocacy, and as long as any requests for help are met with "fix it yourself" suggestions or a pile of technical gibberish (heck, I am a coder, and I struggle to understand most of the supposed support on offer) then they will stay with other systems whose developers do understand the needs of the non-technical user. That way they'll never be more than potential users, and Linux won't even get their advocacy.
... as the process and the explanation. Every rule in the guidelines should be there for a reason, and the reason should be explained so that it's clear (and straightforward to justify) when you should breach the guidelines ("The customer won't pay us if we don't do this" is, of course, a perfectly valid reason, and may be the case in some heavily regulated industries). And the guidelines should not be set in stone -- if a rule causes more problems than it's meant to solve then it should be easy to get rid of it. It should probably be harder to get a rule put in, but it should be possible. Neither of those is practicable for major, published standards such as MISRA C, so you need local standards.
I'm not sure it's meaningful to talk about coding standards in isolation, by the way. I consider it essential for serious development that the purpose of every function and its parameters be recorded, but whether that's done in a comment (in which case it belongs in the coding standards) or in external documentation (in which case it belongs in development standards) depends on the type of environment.
The clearest way is whatever way you learned first when you were learning to code. It's impossible to get programmers to agree to which is best, so you either need a diktat from above or evryone run the code through a prettyprinter (configured to the particular user) on the check-out process, so it's always formatted the way the person reading it likes.
What proportion of Google's income does come from AdSense and AdWords, then?
I don't think anything Google does is covered by that patent.
You may well be right, but with Google and Yahoo having settled out of court on the issue, and with the terms of the settlement being unclear, it's kind of hard to tell, isn't it? There's enough uncertainty and doubt for FUD, the question is whether MS could add in the fear -- could they go after Google's advertisers rather than Google itself?
I don't really have a horse in this race, but you might like to know that Linnaean classification isn't a good example for your argument. It's been heavily modified since Linnaeus, and parts of it have in fact been abandoned for some applications, like the angiosperms (APG II is a lot more useful, generally).
But the current, adapted form is still called Linnean classification, isn't it? It's the modern form I was referring to, I knew it had evolved since Linneus.
So we have a definition that is ill-defined, works only for 1 star system out of tens of billions, and makes a distinction based on hard to observe dynamics that would only make sense for a portion of these star systems.
Gosh, we'd better abandon Linnean classification in biology then, because of problems with the definition of species boundaries, because it doesn't specify where extraterrestial species would fit in, and it depends on features of species that would be hard to observe in the case of extraterrestial species.
Well, either that or you're special pleading, and making demands of planetary classification that the scientific community would not normally make of a classification system.
If you are talking about Patent 6,269,361 mentioned in a later post, I'm pretty sure that Google would argue that they do know how to make money without that patent.
What proportion of Google's income does come from AdSense and AdWords, then?
Slashdot Mirror
"Merits own their on seriously taken be will ideas her if see and man 50-year-old a as pose can girl 14-year-old a that thing good a it's think I"?
You are assuming that all discussions can and do last forever.
Er, no I'm not. I explicitly wrote that the script could not run to termination.
with a Godwin Law violation...
One does not violate Godwin's Law, one invokes it.
To violate it would mean that the subject of said Law is never mentioned in an infinitely long thread, which as jd mentioned earlier, would be impossible.
Except, as others have pointed out, JD got to that correct conclusion through an incorrect argument. I could write a script that would generate an infinitely long thread that never mentioned Nazis (because every post in the thread would just say "Hello, Cowboy Neal!") but because it could never run to termination the infinite thread with no reference to Nazism would never actually exist. Of course, somebody else could post to the thread with a reference to Nazism, so unless it did run to termination (or somebody made such a post) we would never know whether or not Godwin's law was going to be violated at some point in the future.
Ooh, thanks! So it'still there, MS just want to keep it quiet.
Somebody mod that post informative!
Gosh, you hate menus so much you can't bear to use a product that lets other people use them? I've said elsewhere in this thread that I don't mind the graphical interface, as long as I can switch it off and use menus instead (as I could with toolbars on earlier versions of MS tools). If you could switch IE between menu and icon interface, would that really be enough to drive you to another browser?
I wasn't just talking about water vapour -- I also had methane in mind (and although I am a vegetarian, I can't claim moral superiority over the carnivores here, because rice production is a significant contributor to atmospheric methane).
I wasn't suggesting anything about IP, just observing that MS Office 2007 and MSIE 7 have both made navigation much harder by completely eliminating drop down menus. Menus work very well if designed correctly, but we've lost them. I don't mind icons being available for visual reasoners, but I'm a verbal reasoner and resent having the text-based menus taken away from me. I find the new interfaces an absolute nightmare to use.
Or were you suggesting that MS is trying to kill the menu because they can't claim IP over it, and trying to shift us all over to something that they can claim IP over? Now, there's a worrying thought.
it's OpenSource (which is a big deal for a lot of people)
And is probably the reason for the better plugins -- my life would be a lot harder without zotero.
And useability. What have Microsoft got against menus nowadays?
So, out of 80+ chemicals that contribute, you want to ignore the largest
Second largest. Water vapour is the largest. And I don't say it should be ignored, just that it's not the only thing we should be looking at. Particularly since we don't actually want to lose much greenhouse effect as that could kick us into another ice age.
It isn't GW denying, it's that CO2 probably accounts for less than 25% of the greenhouse effect. If we're looking to manage the greenhouse effect ("manage" because if we overdo it we get a global cooling problem) then it's no good just looking at CO2. The fact that the effects of greenhouse gasses are often quoted in CO2 equivalent tends to mislead people into thinking that CO2 is the only gas that matters.
It's no more open as the English Language itself, and authors are still able to copyright their work.
Mod parent up--this is it, right here. That's what I love about Firefox. If I say that I will restart later, it believes me, and doesn't pop up asking 5 minutes later. "It's later now! It's later now!"
Just as you start typing "Yours sincerely" on that crucial letter you've spent ages crafting...
Then that 40% could consider upgrading to an old toy like OS like Ubuntu 6.06 LTS. It's not shiny, it's not new, it's not a toy and it doesn't serve blue screens everytime you press Ctrl-Alt-Del at the wrong moment.
That 40% are probably thinking "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". In 13 years of MS Windows use, I have never pressed Ctrl-Alt-Del at the "wrong moment", so it certainly wouldn't be high on my list of reasons to break the system I'm used to if I were one of that 40%.
I wish I were amongst them. IE7 is way less useable than earlier versions, because of the thing that MS seems to have about getting rid of menus meaning that lots of the features that I want are now hidden. Yes, I avoid IE when possible, but some sites are very persistent about only working with IE.
Just because you believe someone should tell you something privately, doesn't mean they will. People were sending each other pictures of their newborns - in the belief, I'm sure, that it was private - and they were openly exposed by Google's cache because of the stupidity of the O2 developers.
In my experience of parents, they will show pictures of their newborns to anybody who doesn't run away fast enough. O2 could have publicised this as a customer feature -- it's the people who hack in to get the pictures who lose out here.
Stolen HTML code remains stolen HTML code even if it's no longer the code used on the site. (And yes, for the sake of other readers, I am aware of the controversy over the use of the word "stolen" in the context of IP).
No problem for the original con artists though: They sold to a big german media house for an undisclosed two-digit million sum estimated to be around 50 million Euros.
When did that happen? It sounds to me as if Facebook might have the timing just right, not late at all, now that it's owned by somebody with enough assets to be suing for.
They could take off the critic's hat and -fix- the things that they complain about.
I mean, isn't that one of the things that makes OSS great?
And there is the fundamental problem with Linux -- the "geeks only" attitude of so many of its proponents. The lawyer who wants an office system, the granny who has just heard that they can video-conference with their grandchild halfway around the world, the schoolkid who wants to get their geography assignment done -- most potential Linux users will never have anything to contribute to Linux except advocacy, and as long as any requests for help are met with "fix it yourself" suggestions or a pile of technical gibberish (heck, I am a coder, and I struggle to understand most of the supposed support on offer) then they will stay with other systems whose developers do understand the needs of the non-technical user. That way they'll never be more than potential users, and Linux won't even get their advocacy.
... as the process and the explanation. Every rule in the guidelines should be there for a reason, and the reason should be explained so that it's clear (and straightforward to justify) when you should breach the guidelines ("The customer won't pay us if we don't do this" is, of course, a perfectly valid reason, and may be the case in some heavily regulated industries). And the guidelines should not be set in stone -- if a rule causes more problems than it's meant to solve then it should be easy to get rid of it. It should probably be harder to get a rule put in, but it should be possible. Neither of those is practicable for major, published standards such as MISRA C, so you need local standards.
I'm not sure it's meaningful to talk about coding standards in isolation, by the way. I consider it essential for serious development that the purpose of every function and its parameters be recorded, but whether that's done in a comment (in which case it belongs in the coding standards) or in external documentation (in which case it belongs in development standards) depends on the type of environment.
I've always found this to be clearer.
Drawing a line up to an opening brace
The clearest way is whatever way you learned first when you were learning to code. It's impossible to get programmers to agree to which is best, so you either need a diktat from above or evryone run the code through a prettyprinter (configured to the particular user) on the check-out process, so it's always formatted the way the person reading it likes.
What proportion of Google's income does come from AdSense and AdWords, then?
I don't think anything Google does is covered by that patent.
You may well be right, but with Google and Yahoo having settled out of court on the issue, and with the terms of the settlement being unclear, it's kind of hard to tell, isn't it? There's enough uncertainty and doubt for FUD, the question is whether MS could add in the fear -- could they go after Google's advertisers rather than Google itself?
I don't really have a horse in this race, but you might like to know that Linnaean classification isn't a good example for your argument. It's been heavily modified since Linnaeus, and parts of it have in fact been abandoned for some applications, like the angiosperms (APG II is a lot more useful, generally).
But the current, adapted form is still called Linnean classification, isn't it? It's the modern form I was referring to, I knew it had evolved since Linneus.
So we have a definition that is ill-defined, works only for 1 star system out of tens of billions, and makes a distinction based on hard to observe dynamics that would only make sense for a portion of these star systems.
Gosh, we'd better abandon Linnean classification in biology then, because of problems with the definition of species boundaries, because it doesn't specify where extraterrestial species would fit in, and it depends on features of species that would be hard to observe in the case of extraterrestial species.
Well, either that or you're special pleading, and making demands of planetary classification that the scientific community would not normally make of a classification system.
If you are talking about Patent 6,269,361 mentioned in a later post, I'm pretty sure that Google would argue that they do know how to make money without that patent.
What proportion of Google's income does come from AdSense and AdWords, then?