You seem to read a lot into the issue of legality of homeschooling and I can't help but think that you are very biased.
On one hand I do believe homeschooling should be legal but on the other hand I realize that there are some serious problems with homeschooling and depending on the state of your country's public school system it may very well make sense to mandate that all children must go to public schools for both their own good as well as the good of the population in general.
Similar arguments can also be made about private schools, especially those directly connected to political or religious organizations.
It's a pretty common newspaper tactic, there's a reason the front of the newspaper often looks like it was designed by someone who just found out that you can change the font size.
Except it tends to fail way too often and is primarily around in the console world because console gamers don't have as many buttons to map things to as PC gamers.
Hitting "use/reload" to disarm the bomb just to waste your last ammo and then get hurt when the bomb blows up? Not fun, I'd rather take the "complexity" of having separate "use" and "reload" keys.
Well, without speaking specifically about Pascal and C/C++ there is the simple matter of how the strings are dealt with. While with one language creating a string and storing it in memory may very well mean that the program just allocates enough memory and dumps the string there with another language the string stored in memory might come with some form of metadata/properties, so rather than having n bytes allocated to your string and being forced to scan through it looking for the null byte you know that, as a hypothetical example, the first eight bytes of memory allocated for the string are a 64 bit number that gives the exact length of the string. Of course, it all depends on what the program is doing with the data.
I'm sorry but I to me VB6 has always come off as being on-par with PHP 3.x. Not quite full-fledged, very rough around the edges and lacking lots of little niceties that developers have come to expect from modern development environments.
Just because it's familiar doesn't mean it's good. VB as a language was plagued with all sorts of quirks from the beginning, to this day VB.NET keeps a few of those alive (although in practice I'm inclined to agree with whoever it was that stated that VB.NET is just "[...] C#.NET for people who can't be bothered to remember to put a semicolon at the end of every statement and that there's a difference between = and ==", no that's not a word-for-word quote but I had someone describe VB.NET to me that way).
I'd have to say that I think that.NET has a bit more life in it than VB6 had when they released.NET.
.NET is actually modern and makes sense, VB6 (and earlier versions) was plain painful to work with. I still end up having to fix legacy VB6 software from time to time, it's not just the environment in which you're coding, it's also the fact that a large percentage of VB software, including "enterprise" software, looks like it was written by dyslexic monkeys with a fear of comments and proper indenting. By comparison most.NET software, even bad VB.NET code, looks amazing. And C#.NET is a lot like Java (better in some ways and worse in other ways).
Well, there's always the stuff that's kinky enough that you have to pay for any quality material. Not that I can imagine what it would be considering that if you go to any of the many many sites that specialize in porn torrents or streaming porn videos you're pretty much bombarded with "xXx Thai ladyboys and dalmatian golden shower urethral insertion of baseball bat and cactus AT THE SAME TIME!!1"...
They're already using "iSync", they have been using that name for a long time. Interestingly enough the logo for iSync is the whole "spinning arrows" bit around the standard wifi symbol that this app author uses.
Yes, I'm implying that he basically combined the commonly used image for syncing with the commonly used image for wifi and bitched about how Apple "stole" his logo design like it was somehow unique and special...
There are certain nutrients you need to live that only come from eating animals.
I call shenanigans. There are plenty of people who have no problem eating only lacto-ovo-vegetarian or even vegan food. For vegan food it does require you to occasionally consider what you're eating but we're not talking hours of work and tedious calculations, we're talking about simply taking a few seconds to consider simple things like whether you've eaten enough things rich in Vitamin B12 lately.
The rest of your post read like the regular anti-vegetarianism scaremongering that has been debunked oh so many times. So no, I'm not going to answer it, if anyone actually thinks you're right I advise them to use Google to figure out just how slanted your post is.
Of course I know that but it does not mean that variables in CSS would be pointless.
If anything variables would mean that you wouldn't be forced to say, use the same color value in multiple locations (or have a bunch of classes named "lightOrangeBackground", "darkOrangeBackground", "grayText", "lightGrayText" which makes for some annoyingly long lines in the HTML in the form of <div class="defaultLightBackground defaultDarkBackground blueLinks fooBorders barMargins">).
With variables/constants in the CSS you can have much clearer class names and rather than put "defaultLightBackground" on every element that is supposed to have that background you can define this directly in the CSS, which would actually make sense and which is why you don't really see people use multiple classes all that much, it is much more common to instead repeat the same boilerplate bits and pieces all over the place (oh, and here is where someone replies to me telling me that search-and-replace is enough to make global changes without considering the classic "int a = 20; int b = 20;" problem. Imagine that your global search and replace is for "20" but you only want to change the value of the variable a, when you have a 2k+ line CSS file you don't exactly want to have to step through every occurrence of a short string that appears a hundred times).
Well, without doing any calculations I suspect that the cost to the user in terms of CPU cycles in negligible compared to some of the Javascript and massive (X)HTML documents sent these days.
Not to mention that it should with some optimization be possible to cut down on the parsing required (since the browser only has to parse the '$bluebg' block once as opposed to parsing say, 300 different 'background:#00f;' statements).
And the maintenance wins are potentially enormous (with a custom server-side setup you are using a custom non-standard solution which can be a maintenance nightmare).
Yes, I've been hoping for way too long that someone at the W3C would just suggest something "radical" like simply adding simple reference variables in a useful way.
Even a very limited syntax like the below example would be useful:
Now, something like this could easily be implemented as a server-side module, but I would rather see it implemented into CSS proper. And I know there are various tricks and workarounds, it would just be a neat and powerful tool.
Well, to be honest I've only ever spent a few hours in Germany. But in those countries I've lived in it is common to use the PIN for both credit and debit cards when buying things in stores or withdrawing from an ATM.
In my experience (anecdotal of course) the use of signatures is a typically American thing, here in Sweden they're only ever used when the store loses its connection to the payment processor or the bank is having some kind of problem and is unable to verify transactions.
I've been shocked a few times when merchants have required a signature, although this has mostly been smaller stores run by people who should've retired ten years ago. I just haven't seen it that much in the last ten years or so, even restaurants tend to simply bring out a portable terminal or have you pay your bill at a terminal on your way out these days...
However. On undernet, I personally witnessed people on childporn channels. I used to scream at them. Now I realize they were probably cops.
And back in those days such things were traded a bit more openly (just a bit, as in, you could actually stumble across it without looking for it, this really isn't possible to the same extent these days).
I personally witnessed people get glined for silly reasons. I personally witnessed channel operators who traded netsex for channel ops. I witnessed a lot of things that were improper and corrupt. Then there was the warez. And bestiality. And other things that are hard to explain in a 1996 context, when not 'just anyone' could set up a server.
Oh, those things have happened since back then up until today. Although I think in the frenzy of the '90s and the dotcom era when the internet was the cool new thing there was definitely a lot more "buzz" about IRC. Not to mention that as a medium it was a lot less mature.
Also, as others have pointed out, even back then a lot of times the servers were actually run on some student's machine on a campus network somewhere.
I don't think the parent poster meant "[...] 5-10 years down the road, [...]" but rather a more imminent "Oh by the way, next week we want you to train your outsourced replacements and we've just disabled your logins, have a great weekend!".
I cringed when I discovered for myself iTunes forces you to enter and keep your credit card details, just to be able to get access to the app store to just download free stuff even.
No it doesn't. Sit closer to the monitor next time. I sure managed to setup an account without a credit card attached.
And even if you can't figure out how to not enter a CC# you aren't so dumb as to enter the number from a physical credit card, right? I hope you're at least using a time- and purchase-size-limited CC# that you generated through your bank's website...
In my case they used the incorrect pin digits from the back of the card and the bank denied the charge, but it must work some of the time.
Sorry for being pedantic but the card security code (also known as CSC, CVV, CVV2, etc.) is not a PIN code.
The PIN for Mastercard or VISA cards is a code you as the user must remember, here in Europe it is used pretty much every time you use your card instead of a signature.
No, once you've signed up you can download the DRM-free 256 kbps AAC copies to your computer. However, when you stop paying you can no longer download the files. You are also able to download anything you have in your computer's library that is also in the iTunes store directly from Apple to your iPhone. Now I don't know about you but my iPhone has less total storage than the size of my music collection. In fact, my music collection at home (mostly MP3s) is several times larger than the total storage on my phone. However, I suspect a very high percentage of this music is available from iTunes which would mean that if I'm at a friend's place, I have an iTunes Match subscription and I want to listen to a song I haven't synced to my phone I can just fetch it from Apple rather than go home and sync it from my computer (or scp it to my friend's computer from my home network which is also a bit of a hassle and not always an option, especially if I'm not actually at a friend's place but rather in at a bbq in a park or somewhere else where I can't use a computer).
Ah, but if you have say, a 16 GB iPhone, and you also have a 90 GB library at home you can't sync the whole library. Now, it is highly likely that a good 50+% of your library is on iTunes, this means you have at least 45 GB of music that also exists in the iTunes store, that's more than twice the total space on your iPhone (and if you have other data on the phone, like movies and photos, those take up some of that valuable space). So now you can sync this directly to your iPhone from Apple. Thus the part in my post about not having to pick carefully what to sync with your phone, you can just grab it from Apple on the go as long as your phone is connected to the net.
This seems to be the part of the service that's supposed to make people keep paying for it.
Didn't mp3.com get sued into oblivion for something similar to this? You told mp3.com "I have xyz song.." and then they provided you with access to their copy of the mp3.
I suspect the labels are on board with this, most likely getting a cut of that $24.99/year and figuring that getting that cut is better than not getting any music at all from the pirates. If that's the case then it's pretty clever, they'd be getting a little money from every pirate instead of no money at all (which is the current situation).
While this is possible and I definitely think you should be careful I suspect that the labels are going along with this because they figure getting a cut of that yearly $24.99 per user is better than not getting any money at all from the pirates.
Basically it could actually be a way in which they are adapting their business model.
You don't have to re-buy them. You compare your library to the iTunes store library and any songs it has that you have you can replace in your library with Apple's 256 kbps DRM-free AAC copy, you can also access the music directly from Apple using your iDevice (I assume this is the part that will make people renew their service every year).
This service will apparently, if the transcripts I've read are correct, cost $24.99. If you want to also store music you have in your library that Apple doesn't have then that will cost you extra since you need to pay for the storage.
Because if I understood correctly you can stream/download them to your iDevices directly from Apple without being home, which means that if you have a large-ish library (larger than the available storage on your iDevice anyway) you can still access a very large portion of your music library. So instead of picking carefully what music you want to bring along you can just sync the music that isn't on the iTunes store and fetch the rest from Apple.
That's actually a decent service that I'd pay for, especially if it is as well-integrated as Apple services usually are.
And I've tried Spotify, it's neat but it's more of a "pure subscription" service, when music goes away it's pretty much gone. And that happens all the time.
I believe the idea with Silk Road and similar sites is that they are reputation-based. So apart from just making sure that you and the seller are in the same country you can also check his/her reputation, someone with a very good or perfect reputation is unlikely to screw you over.
Also, from what I've seen from checking out Silk Road it appears to be mostly smaller amounts of drugs being sold, 5-10 grams of marijuana, a handful of MDMA pills and similar quantities. So not exactly $10k worth of cocaine. Besides, most sellers are doing this to make money and if they want to stay in business they are likely to want to keep their good reputation (there's always the risk of someone deciding to abuse their reputation to scam people out of larger amounts of bitcoins or the police creating a bunch of fake accounts but overall the risk should be fairly low if you buy from sellers with a solid reputation, sort of how the drug trade works in real life only you don't have to come face to face with the dealer)...
Because by doing it in an calm and orderly fashion now you save yourself a lot of panicking, firefighting and half-assed last-minute "fixes" in the future?
I actually suspect there will be a future market for IPv6-to-IPv4 proxy services for companies stuck with shitty ISPs that wake up late and realize they need their servers to be accessible through IPv6 yesterday. Just pay another company that has IPv6 access to proxy all IPv6 HTTP/SMTP/whatever requests to the company's IPv4 server for that service (and knowing how these things play out the "solution" will be an ugly kludge with services running on non-standard ports or through some proprietary tunnel protocol on the backend server so that they can tell which customers are using "IPv6" and which ones are connecting directly through IPv4).
Of course, I'm sure it's much more fiscally responsible to not invest a single cent in preventing this major cost down the road...</sarcasm>
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You seem to read a lot into the issue of legality of homeschooling and I can't help but think that you are very biased.
On one hand I do believe homeschooling should be legal but on the other hand I realize that there are some serious problems with homeschooling and depending on the state of your country's public school system it may very well make sense to mandate that all children must go to public schools for both their own good as well as the good of the population in general.
Similar arguments can also be made about private schools, especially those directly connected to political or religious organizations.
It's a pretty common newspaper tactic, there's a reason the front of the newspaper often looks like it was designed by someone who just found out that you can change the font size.
Except it tends to fail way too often and is primarily around in the console world because console gamers don't have as many buttons to map things to as PC gamers.
Hitting "use/reload" to disarm the bomb just to waste your last ammo and then get hurt when the bomb blows up? Not fun, I'd rather take the "complexity" of having separate "use" and "reload" keys.
Well, without speaking specifically about Pascal and C/C++ there is the simple matter of how the strings are dealt with. While with one language creating a string and storing it in memory may very well mean that the program just allocates enough memory and dumps the string there with another language the string stored in memory might come with some form of metadata/properties, so rather than having n bytes allocated to your string and being forced to scan through it looking for the null byte you know that, as a hypothetical example, the first eight bytes of memory allocated for the string are a 64 bit number that gives the exact length of the string. Of course, it all depends on what the program is doing with the data.
I'm sorry but I to me VB6 has always come off as being on-par with PHP 3.x. Not quite full-fledged, very rough around the edges and lacking lots of little niceties that developers have come to expect from modern development environments.
Just because it's familiar doesn't mean it's good. VB as a language was plagued with all sorts of quirks from the beginning, to this day VB.NET keeps a few of those alive (although in practice I'm inclined to agree with whoever it was that stated that VB.NET is just "[...] C#.NET for people who can't be bothered to remember to put a semicolon at the end of every statement and that there's a difference between = and ==", no that's not a word-for-word quote but I had someone describe VB.NET to me that way).
I'd have to say that I think that .NET has a bit more life in it than VB6 had when they released .NET.
.NET is actually modern and makes sense, VB6 (and earlier versions) was plain painful to work with. I still end up having to fix legacy VB6 software from time to time, it's not just the environment in which you're coding, it's also the fact that a large percentage of VB software, including "enterprise" software, looks like it was written by dyslexic monkeys with a fear of comments and proper indenting. By comparison most .NET software, even bad VB.NET code, looks amazing. And C#.NET is a lot like Java (better in some ways and worse in other ways).
Well, there's always the stuff that's kinky enough that you have to pay for any quality material. Not that I can imagine what it would be considering that if you go to any of the many many sites that specialize in porn torrents or streaming porn videos you're pretty much bombarded with "xXx Thai ladyboys and dalmatian golden shower urethral insertion of baseball bat and cactus AT THE SAME TIME!!1"...
[...] or perhaps 'iSync' even)
They're already using "iSync", they have been using that name for a long time. Interestingly enough the logo for iSync is the whole "spinning arrows" bit around the standard wifi symbol that this app author uses.
Yes, I'm implying that he basically combined the commonly used image for syncing with the commonly used image for wifi and bitched about how Apple "stole" his logo design like it was somehow unique and special...
There are certain nutrients you need to live that only come from eating animals.
I call shenanigans. There are plenty of people who have no problem eating only lacto-ovo-vegetarian or even vegan food. For vegan food it does require you to occasionally consider what you're eating but we're not talking hours of work and tedious calculations, we're talking about simply taking a few seconds to consider simple things like whether you've eaten enough things rich in Vitamin B12 lately.
The rest of your post read like the regular anti-vegetarianism scaremongering that has been debunked oh so many times. So no, I'm not going to answer it, if anyone actually thinks you're right I advise them to use Google to figure out just how slanted your post is.
Of course I know that but it does not mean that variables in CSS would be pointless.
If anything variables would mean that you wouldn't be forced to say, use the same color value in multiple locations (or have a bunch of classes named "lightOrangeBackground", "darkOrangeBackground", "grayText", "lightGrayText" which makes for some annoyingly long lines in the HTML in the form of <div class="defaultLightBackground defaultDarkBackground blueLinks fooBorders barMargins">).
With variables/constants in the CSS you can have much clearer class names and rather than put "defaultLightBackground" on every element that is supposed to have that background you can define this directly in the CSS, which would actually make sense and which is why you don't really see people use multiple classes all that much, it is much more common to instead repeat the same boilerplate bits and pieces all over the place (oh, and here is where someone replies to me telling me that search-and-replace is enough to make global changes without considering the classic "int a = 20; int b = 20;" problem. Imagine that your global search and replace is for "20" but you only want to change the value of the variable a, when you have a 2k+ line CSS file you don't exactly want to have to step through every occurrence of a short string that appears a hundred times).
Well, without doing any calculations I suspect that the cost to the user in terms of CPU cycles in negligible compared to some of the Javascript and massive (X)HTML documents sent these days.
Not to mention that it should with some optimization be possible to cut down on the parsing required (since the browser only has to parse the '$bluebg' block once as opposed to parsing say, 300 different 'background:#00f;' statements).
And the maintenance wins are potentially enormous (with a custom server-side setup you are using a custom non-standard solution which can be a maintenance nightmare).
Yes, I've been hoping for way too long that someone at the W3C would just suggest something "radical" like simply adding simple reference variables in a useful way.
Even a very limited syntax like the below example would be useful:
$bluebg = { background:#00f; } div#foo { $bluebg; }
Now, something like this could easily be implemented as a server-side module, but I would rather see it implemented into CSS proper. And I know there are various tricks and workarounds, it would just be a neat and powerful tool.
Well, to be honest I've only ever spent a few hours in Germany. But in those countries I've lived in it is common to use the PIN for both credit and debit cards when buying things in stores or withdrawing from an ATM.
In my experience (anecdotal of course) the use of signatures is a typically American thing, here in Sweden they're only ever used when the store loses its connection to the payment processor or the bank is having some kind of problem and is unable to verify transactions.
I've been shocked a few times when merchants have required a signature, although this has mostly been smaller stores run by people who should've retired ten years ago. I just haven't seen it that much in the last ten years or so, even restaurants tend to simply bring out a portable terminal or have you pay your bill at a terminal on your way out these days...
However. On undernet, I personally witnessed people on childporn channels. I used to scream at them. Now I realize they were probably cops.
And back in those days such things were traded a bit more openly (just a bit, as in, you could actually stumble across it without looking for it, this really isn't possible to the same extent these days).
I personally witnessed people get glined for silly reasons. I personally witnessed channel operators who traded netsex for channel ops. I witnessed a lot of things that were improper and corrupt. Then there was the warez. And bestiality. And other things that are hard to explain in a 1996 context, when not 'just anyone' could set up a server.
Oh, those things have happened since back then up until today. Although I think in the frenzy of the '90s and the dotcom era when the internet was the cool new thing there was definitely a lot more "buzz" about IRC. Not to mention that as a medium it was a lot less mature.
Also, as others have pointed out, even back then a lot of times the servers were actually run on some student's machine on a campus network somewhere.
I don't think the parent poster meant "[...] 5-10 years down the road, [...]" but rather a more imminent "Oh by the way, next week we want you to train your outsourced replacements and we've just disabled your logins, have a great weekend!".
I cringed when I discovered for myself iTunes forces you to enter and keep your credit card details, just to be able to get access to the app store to just download free stuff even.
No it doesn't. Sit closer to the monitor next time. I sure managed to setup an account without a credit card attached.
And even if you can't figure out how to not enter a CC# you aren't so dumb as to enter the number from a physical credit card, right? I hope you're at least using a time- and purchase-size-limited CC# that you generated through your bank's website...
In my case they used the incorrect pin digits from the back of the card and the bank denied the charge, but it must work some of the time.
Sorry for being pedantic but the card security code (also known as CSC, CVV, CVV2, etc.) is not a PIN code.
The PIN for Mastercard or VISA cards is a code you as the user must remember, here in Europe it is used pretty much every time you use your card instead of a signature.
No, once you've signed up you can download the DRM-free 256 kbps AAC copies to your computer. However, when you stop paying you can no longer download the files. You are also able to download anything you have in your computer's library that is also in the iTunes store directly from Apple to your iPhone. Now I don't know about you but my iPhone has less total storage than the size of my music collection. In fact, my music collection at home (mostly MP3s) is several times larger than the total storage on my phone. However, I suspect a very high percentage of this music is available from iTunes which would mean that if I'm at a friend's place, I have an iTunes Match subscription and I want to listen to a song I haven't synced to my phone I can just fetch it from Apple rather than go home and sync it from my computer (or scp it to my friend's computer from my home network which is also a bit of a hassle and not always an option, especially if I'm not actually at a friend's place but rather in at a bbq in a park or somewhere else where I can't use a computer).
Ah, but if you have say, a 16 GB iPhone, and you also have a 90 GB library at home you can't sync the whole library. Now, it is highly likely that a good 50+% of your library is on iTunes, this means you have at least 45 GB of music that also exists in the iTunes store, that's more than twice the total space on your iPhone (and if you have other data on the phone, like movies and photos, those take up some of that valuable space). So now you can sync this directly to your iPhone from Apple. Thus the part in my post about not having to pick carefully what to sync with your phone, you can just grab it from Apple on the go as long as your phone is connected to the net.
This seems to be the part of the service that's supposed to make people keep paying for it.
Didn't mp3.com get sued into oblivion for something similar to this? You told mp3.com "I have xyz song.." and then they provided you with access to their copy of the mp3.
I suspect the labels are on board with this, most likely getting a cut of that $24.99/year and figuring that getting that cut is better than not getting any music at all from the pirates. If that's the case then it's pretty clever, they'd be getting a little money from every pirate instead of no money at all (which is the current situation).
While this is possible and I definitely think you should be careful I suspect that the labels are going along with this because they figure getting a cut of that yearly $24.99 per user is better than not getting any money at all from the pirates.
Basically it could actually be a way in which they are adapting their business model.
You don't have to re-buy them. You compare your library to the iTunes store library and any songs it has that you have you can replace in your library with Apple's 256 kbps DRM-free AAC copy, you can also access the music directly from Apple using your iDevice (I assume this is the part that will make people renew their service every year).
This service will apparently, if the transcripts I've read are correct, cost $24.99. If you want to also store music you have in your library that Apple doesn't have then that will cost you extra since you need to pay for the storage.
Because if I understood correctly you can stream/download them to your iDevices directly from Apple without being home, which means that if you have a large-ish library (larger than the available storage on your iDevice anyway) you can still access a very large portion of your music library. So instead of picking carefully what music you want to bring along you can just sync the music that isn't on the iTunes store and fetch the rest from Apple.
That's actually a decent service that I'd pay for, especially if it is as well-integrated as Apple services usually are.
And I've tried Spotify, it's neat but it's more of a "pure subscription" service, when music goes away it's pretty much gone. And that happens all the time.
I believe the idea with Silk Road and similar sites is that they are reputation-based. So apart from just making sure that you and the seller are in the same country you can also check his/her reputation, someone with a very good or perfect reputation is unlikely to screw you over.
Also, from what I've seen from checking out Silk Road it appears to be mostly smaller amounts of drugs being sold, 5-10 grams of marijuana, a handful of MDMA pills and similar quantities. So not exactly $10k worth of cocaine. Besides, most sellers are doing this to make money and if they want to stay in business they are likely to want to keep their good reputation (there's always the risk of someone deciding to abuse their reputation to scam people out of larger amounts of bitcoins or the police creating a bunch of fake accounts but overall the risk should be fairly low if you buy from sellers with a solid reputation, sort of how the drug trade works in real life only you don't have to come face to face with the dealer)...
Because by doing it in an calm and orderly fashion now you save yourself a lot of panicking, firefighting and half-assed last-minute "fixes" in the future?
I actually suspect there will be a future market for IPv6-to-IPv4 proxy services for companies stuck with shitty ISPs that wake up late and realize they need their servers to be accessible through IPv6 yesterday. Just pay another company that has IPv6 access to proxy all IPv6 HTTP/SMTP/whatever requests to the company's IPv4 server for that service (and knowing how these things play out the "solution" will be an ugly kludge with services running on non-standard ports or through some proprietary tunnel protocol on the backend server so that they can tell which customers are using "IPv6" and which ones are connecting directly through IPv4).
Of course, I'm sure it's much more fiscally responsible to not invest a single cent in preventing this major cost down the road...</sarcasm>