Of course, the easiest route is to simply talk to your boss and try to get the job back after the facts have come out.
The lawsuit is to fix mistakes, if and only if they make it far enough to "screw up your lifestyle significantly". When a friend of mine got arrested, the police office involved voluntarily removed the arrest from his record. The police department sure doesn't want to go through a lawsuit. What's wrong with this country is that there are far too many people who think that the world's out to get them, so they'll burn bridges as fast as they can.
How about instead of wasting the police's already-tiny budget on drudgery, we do something to let them be more effective so less mistakes are made in the first place?
It's "by the people, for the people." not "by the people, for anyone who feels like screwing over someone else." I don't harm others, so others shouldn't be able to harm me. Well, that's how it's supposed to work anyway.
Of course it's absurd, and also absolutely serious. Why can't such qualities coexist?
My argument is that the knee-jerk reaction of "police bad! rights good!" is as absurd as claiming that torture is a natural human right. Samalie's implied claim that knowing one's location is in itself somehow a breach of their rights is equally absurd.
The Fourth Amendment restricts search and seizure. Is tracking your vehicle's location on public roads considered a search? That's the vital question that the court answered here, with a not-quite-absolute "no". It's not a search, because it reveals only knowledge that the public could obtain without invading your private property.
If you'll forgive my tangent for a moment, let's consider a scenario where a GPS tracker was attached under the hood of my car. While installing it (without my permission), the police find a bag of cocaine in the engine compartment. Can they then use that evidence, clear as it is, against me? No. That would have been a search without a warrant. They'd have to walk away, and find something else I'm doing wrong. Yes, that may be as simple as watching my every move, but that would require an excessive amount of resources.
One interesting side effect (which would require another court's judgement) would be whether movements on a 100-acre farm are considered "private" or not. The point about "only in my house" is actually the far more interesting one in this specific case, if you'll read TFA. The court determined that the yard and driveway were not protected private property, which goes against many years of precedent. That's the part that worries me, but nobody seems to be paying much attention to that.
Technology has changed before. Phone lines cannot be tapped without a warrant or Super FBI Powers (which I find absurd as well). Over time, there has always been a balance found, often falling into the general form of "If something has a reasonable expectation of being unobserved by the public, police need a warrant to observe it". This is why I mentioned the current (though expensive) tracking ability. If the police (or even just a member of the public) wanted to track you from your home to your employment, it's pretty simple to do so.
Personally, my opinion is that knowing someone's location is not much of a problem. Likewise, video, audio, and heart rate are meaningless without context. In a court of law, there is a explicit right to defend yourself, and explain the context of anything that the prosecution may have. You have a right to examine the evidence against you in its entirety. If that right is violated, the evidence is likely to be eliminated, favoring a fair trial over conviction.
The fourth amendment wasn't written in jest, nor was it written to cripple the American government. It was written to provide a balance between enforcement and freedom. That balance is absolutely necessary in modern societies. Tip too far in favor of absolute liberal freedom, and the only government remaining is anarchy. Too far the other way, and we get a police state. I personally believe that the use of GPS trackers only slightly affects the balance. I also believe American police forces are already stretched too thin with a budget that's too small to function, and the use of GPS tracking can help restore their effectiveness.
Regarding the Holocaust: Got a source? Last I heard, Hitler himself had dark brown hair. I haven't heard that bit about persecuting hair color since I was in grade school. Thanks for the memories.
Regarding the health reform bill: Got a source? Everything I'm seeing shows noclearconsensus, at which point it falls to the legislature to decide on their own. Even that was pretty evenly split.
Regarding arrest: In the event that you get arrested and it does screw up your lifestyle significantly, you have the right to sue for wrongful arrest. Mistakes happen, and you have the ability to try to get things fixed. That would be a great time to point out that, hypothetically, the police used only a GPS device, rather than an audio recorder, to show your association. Show that the arrest wasn't justified, and you can get it almost erased from history. Of course, the easiest route is to simply talk to your boss and try to get the job back after the facts have come out.
Regarding attorneys: Who did you think presents the evidence to a judge? It's the attorney general and the other assistant attorneys, and those with other titles depending on the state.
I misread the headline as "Useless gesture interface". I'm not so certain that's wrong.
Seriously, people already have a hard enough time using computers. Humans in general simply aren't perceptive enough to realize "clockwise swirly motion" means refresh the browser page. Then there's the complications of positioning, and people who talk with their hands......I think I'll stick to a mouse. Thanks.
Out of curiosity, when in American history has brown hair actually been illegal?
The first flaw in your comment is the fifth word: "someone" does not "decide" to pass a law. Maybe you missed something in school, but laws are proposed by representatives. Then they're debated and voted on multiple times. During that whole process, you can submit comments to your representatives. In short, you, collectively with your peers, pass your own laws. The United States maintains a government of the people, for the people, and not a government of the random politicians for the apathetic Slashdot users.
Moving on, if associating with the arms smuggler were indeed illegal, then the prosecution would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that I intended to associate with an arms smuggler to get a "guilty" verdict. No attorney that enjoys their career is going to support a warrant they believe to be baseless. That means the various levels of attorneys would first all have to agree that the evidence against me indicated that I knew beforehand that he was a smuggler before an arrest warrant could even be issued. The GPS records alone wouldn't be nearly enough.
warrant: (n) a writ from a court commanding police to perform specified acts
warrant: (v) show to be reasonable or provide adequate ground for
No beacon? Even better! No chases at all, no risk of the driver taking off and hitting pedestrians, and even less manpower needed. Just evidence (for or against their case) to be picked up when convenient.
Why wouldn't there be oversight? Elsewhere in this discussion, a commenter says the trackers would cost about $300. That's a pretty expensive piece of equipment to throw out without a paper trail.
Perhaps GPS trackers will even reduce police mistakes. When following someone with an attached beacon, there's no chance of getting lost in traffic or confused by similar-looking cars. If the device is attached to the wrong car, that can be seen pretty quickly when they have totally different behavior patterns.
No-knock warrants also have their purpose, but that's an entirely different (and offtopic) issue. If you don't like them, go write your representative and complain, like with any other law.
What's evil about it? So what if someone knows I'm talking to a known international arms smuggler? Maybe the police could use that information to get a warrant to search specifically for weapons, but they won't find anything here worse than a butcher knife. After all, he was just asking for the time.
American citizens are protected from unreasonable search and seizure. Watching where I go? That's not a search or a seizure. Me talking to a smuggler? That's a reason. Possession of a knife? That's not illegal. I see nothing evil here.
This is the WORST possible argument one can give regarding the erosion of our rights.
Not at all. It's a valid opinion. In my own opinion, the worst argument for eroding rights is "Think of the children!"
It is never acceptable to give away our rights...regardless of whether we ever perceive we may need them.
What about my right to murder someone who looks at me funny? Should I have a right to torture you until you work for me? All but the most basic civilizations are based on the careful limiting of what people can do. If everyone respects those limits, the society runs smoothly.
SHould I take away your right to free speech, because you don't speak about controversial topics? How about taking away your right to the free pratice of your religion? How about taking away your right to be secure in person & property...the government doesn't want my stuff, why should I care if they take away Joe's house?
Yes, you should outlaw yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater. Yes, you should take away the right for someone to murder others in the name of religion. Yes, you should place limits on the amount of hazardous materials a person can gather, or the amount of stuff they can take from others without paying, or the ability to have certain devices capable of quickly causing widespread harm.
For the love of god people...this shit is important to everyone. I can't believe anyone would say "Who cares?" when it comes to our rights & freedoms.
And I can't believe someone would be so insanely trusting of humans.
Here's a thought for you: The police can already do this. They can follow you by car, bike, helicopter, or on foot. They can check every license plate in the city. They don't need a warrant unless they start entering the conceptual ground of "search and seizure". The problem is that costs a lot of time and money that could be better spent elsewhere, like looking for people who are actually committing real crimes. Personally, I'm glad that technology can make our police more effective, instead of just finding new ways for us to kill each other.
What essential right is actually being given up here? Where in the constitution does it require that police already know your actions before they can investigate them? All societies apart from absolute anarchy exchange liberty for security. The key aspect is whether what's lost is actually worth anything beyond just being an academic "liberty".
And yet, when that routine needs to run three billion times per execution, it completes a few hours faster than a slightly less-efficient algorithm! That's a significant improvement for any company today working with large-scale data. A lesser programmer simply wouldn't be able to do the job.
There are indeed some huge loopholes with copyright law, like allowing record labels to utterly screw over artists by stealing their music. Then there's the less-absolute screwing in the form of abusive contracts. Copyright law certainly sucks, but it's already in the industry's favor.
Not quite. Cooper found no variation with regards to one specific isotope of plutonium. There could be a different mechanism at work to cause plutonium's decay, or multiple mechanisms. Maybe neutrinos are involved. Maybe not. The ideas presented in TFA are theories, which will (hopefully) eventually lead to a testable hypothesis.A single contradictory result, without explanation, should not be enough to halt research in the field.
Adding to that fine point, it's entirely possible that that company simply didn't distribute their product. Under the GPL, you are only required to distribute source is you distribute (in a legal sense) the product.
If you're merely selling access to the software (like selling hosting, or software-as-a-service access, or any of many other back-end technologies), you can use GPL code without releasing your modifications to the rest of the world. It's somewhat underhanded, but perfectly in line with the license. That's why the Affero GPL exists. It specifically requires releasing the source to users, even if "distribution" doesn't occur.
My original point is that evaluating a platform on a single application is asinine. Your point seems to be that you've spent less than five minutes looking at Java, and have concluded that because you can't figure out the reasoning behind its behavior, there is none.
You have to download 100s MB to run your code in a VM
Just like every other interpreted language out there, you have to download an interpreter. Compare this to C#, where not only do you need the interpreter (a few hundred megs included with the OS), you also download the updates from MS, whether you actually need them or not. Maybe your claim would have some weight if Java were like C or C++, where (static) libraries are compiled into the executable, and can be duplicated for each application. It's not like that at all, though. You download a JVM, and almost always have everything you need right there. If you have several Java applications on one box, you're averaging a pretty small library for each. That's not bad.
it runs slower then native apps
Just like every other non-native language! It also uses about a third less code, and doesn't suffer from memory leaks. Again, if you were to compare it to a similar language like C#, you'd get more equal results. This is why I mentioned demoscene in my earlier comment: Demoscene folks have been pushing the limits of hardware for many years, and it comes at the expense of much more difficult programming. I don't doubt that a demoscene programmer could run a 1080p FPS on a phone. It'd take them a few years to make it, and the code would be unmaintainable, but it'd run.
hogs a shit-ton of memory
Here's the part that shows off how little you know of Java. When the JVM starts, it asks for a certain (configurable) amount of memory. The OS happily gives away that much memory, but Java never actually does anything with most of it. If you want a Java program to take up 50-gigabytes of memory, make a 50-gigabyte swap partition and start up a 50-gigabyte JVM. That sets the upper limit on what the JVM can use, just in case some programmer decides that loading a 45-gigabyte array is a good idea. That memory (usually... if you have a decent OS) sits allocated in swap until it's actually used, leaving RAM for other applications. The main benefit here is that there's a hard upper bound on how much memory a program can leak. Having an application crash without taking down the whole system is a good thing.
and you have to type HugeFunctionNamesThatAreStupidlyLong() to get anything done.
Do you have any examples? The longest one I've used lately is GenericValidator.isBlankOrNull(). That's not bad. Now, maybe if by some perverse sense of style you insisted on fully qualifying all names with their packages, you could reach something actually long, but I don't think anyone, not even an AC troll, could be that stupid.
Now you can get sued by Oracle for forking it when it's already GPL code.
No, you can't. You can get sued for using patented software without a license, which is a risk with all GPLv2 software where patents are involved. If you don't want to comply with the Sun patent license, replace those parts of the forked code with something of your own design.
Compared to any other language it's a turd to use and the only people that do use it are too stupid to learn anything better.
Compared to any other language offering similar features, Java is similar. The only people who use it are those
who think it's best for their purposes. Such a decision should be the result of careful analysis of the platform's behavior, rather that something ridiculously juvenile, such as counting the number of "good games".
Shocking revelation: There are some people who use computers for actual work! Hard to believe, I know, but I hear they're out there. They do things like view documents, run simulations, and perform calculations. Even more amazingly, they'll do so in whatever language suits them best for whatever job they're doing. Weird, isn't it?
After all, it just makes sense that smart phones should be able to run the latest shooter game in full 1080p at 60 frames per second, right? I mean, demoscene folks have been doing stuff like that for years, and it only takes them a few hundred times the effort of any other development work...
And yet, Greece is still there, and still enjoying a pretty decent quality of life overall.
In a few hundred years, I'd wager that America will still be here, still in decline. We were in decline when that crazy president freed all the slaves. We were in decline when the Communists were infiltrating our government and industries. We were in decline while jobs were outsourced overseas. Now we're in decline because politicians are corrupt.
Hyperbole aside, I think that what we're facing now is very similar to the McCarthy crusade. We see a few corrupt investors/politicians/executives, and start investigating others. As usually happens under increased scrutiny, more are found. The cycle continues until a new threat grabs the public attention, and all the while the media (and people talking to the media) claim that "America's values are eroding away!"
Are there more corrupt investors/politicians/executives than ever before? Probably. Is there a higher percentage? Probably not. Humans have a tendency to see the past as being superior, while forgetting that the past had its own troubles. As a species, we've screwed up a lot, and this is just another screw-up.
Parity bits and other similar forms of error correction need physical bits, but don't provide any virtual bits to anything outside the drive itself. The number of (accessible) virtual bits will be lower than the physical number. On the other hand, a drive with built-in compression would offer more virtual bits than it has physical ones.
Well, sure. After all, a car and a pen are both made of metal and plastic, so I should be able to drive my nice fountain pen down the highway, right? "Fountain" even starts with "f", just like "Ferrari" does!
Of course those biomedical scientists have no idea what they're doing. They're all just greedy bastards, who'll lie to keep their industry alive. It's not like they're highly educated, or have spent many years studying the complex interactions of the body. Methylphenidate and methamphetamine look similar, so they must be the same, right?
That's probably because you were 20, and should be capable of recognizing your own thought patterns. When I was diagnosed, it was over a two-week process, with about 8 hours of doctor contact.
The problem isn't really the extra energy. It's the distractions that affect the ability to focus. Having ADHD is, for me, like having six alarm clocks, each going off at random intervals of no more than five minutes. The medications are like earmuffs. I can ignore the distracting ideas, and focus on my work. Unfortunately, the medications also dull any "good" distractions for me, so I've trained myself over 7 years to not take them and still be focused.
Now I live with the distractions, and try not to annoy my coworkers too much with my occasional random ideas. I still move around much more than my coworkers and keep a messier desk, but at least I can work on my own.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, the easiest route is to simply talk to your boss and try to get the job back after the facts have come out.
The lawsuit is to fix mistakes, if and only if they make it far enough to "screw up your lifestyle significantly". When a friend of mine got arrested, the police office involved voluntarily removed the arrest from his record. The police department sure doesn't want to go through a lawsuit. What's wrong with this country is that there are far too many people who think that the world's out to get them, so they'll burn bridges as fast as they can.
How about instead of wasting the police's already-tiny budget on drudgery, we do something to let them be more effective so less mistakes are made in the first place?
It's "by the people, for the people." not "by the people, for anyone who feels like screwing over someone else." I don't harm others, so others shouldn't be able to harm me. Well, that's how it's supposed to work anyway.
Of course it's absurd, and also absolutely serious. Why can't such qualities coexist?
My argument is that the knee-jerk reaction of "police bad! rights good!" is as absurd as claiming that torture is a natural human right. Samalie's implied claim that knowing one's location is in itself somehow a breach of their rights is equally absurd.
The Fourth Amendment restricts search and seizure. Is tracking your vehicle's location on public roads considered a search? That's the vital question that the court answered here, with a not-quite-absolute "no". It's not a search, because it reveals only knowledge that the public could obtain without invading your private property.
If you'll forgive my tangent for a moment, let's consider a scenario where a GPS tracker was attached under the hood of my car. While installing it (without my permission), the police find a bag of cocaine in the engine compartment. Can they then use that evidence, clear as it is, against me? No. That would have been a search without a warrant. They'd have to walk away, and find something else I'm doing wrong. Yes, that may be as simple as watching my every move, but that would require an excessive amount of resources.
One interesting side effect (which would require another court's judgement) would be whether movements on a 100-acre farm are considered "private" or not. The point about "only in my house" is actually the far more interesting one in this specific case, if you'll read TFA. The court determined that the yard and driveway were not protected private property, which goes against many years of precedent. That's the part that worries me, but nobody seems to be paying much attention to that.
Technology has changed before. Phone lines cannot be tapped without a warrant or Super FBI Powers (which I find absurd as well). Over time, there has always been a balance found, often falling into the general form of "If something has a reasonable expectation of being unobserved by the public, police need a warrant to observe it". This is why I mentioned the current (though expensive) tracking ability. If the police (or even just a member of the public) wanted to track you from your home to your employment, it's pretty simple to do so.
Personally, my opinion is that knowing someone's location is not much of a problem. Likewise, video, audio, and heart rate are meaningless without context. In a court of law, there is a explicit right to defend yourself, and explain the context of anything that the prosecution may have. You have a right to examine the evidence against you in its entirety. If that right is violated, the evidence is likely to be eliminated, favoring a fair trial over conviction.
The fourth amendment wasn't written in jest, nor was it written to cripple the American government. It was written to provide a balance between enforcement and freedom. That balance is absolutely necessary in modern societies. Tip too far in favor of absolute liberal freedom, and the only government remaining is anarchy. Too far the other way, and we get a police state. I personally believe that the use of GPS trackers only slightly affects the balance. I also believe American police forces are already stretched too thin with a budget that's too small to function, and the use of GPS tracking can help restore their effectiveness.
Regarding the Holocaust: Got a source? Last I heard, Hitler himself had dark brown hair. I haven't heard that bit about persecuting hair color since I was in grade school. Thanks for the memories.
Regarding the health reform bill: Got a source? Everything I'm seeing shows no clear consensus, at which point it falls to the legislature to decide on their own. Even that was pretty evenly split.
Regarding arrest: In the event that you get arrested and it does screw up your lifestyle significantly, you have the right to sue for wrongful arrest. Mistakes happen, and you have the ability to try to get things fixed. That would be a great time to point out that, hypothetically, the police used only a GPS device, rather than an audio recorder, to show your association. Show that the arrest wasn't justified, and you can get it almost erased from history. Of course, the easiest route is to simply talk to your boss and try to get the job back after the facts have come out.
Regarding attorneys: Who did you think presents the evidence to a judge? It's the attorney general and the other assistant attorneys, and those with other titles depending on the state.
I misread the headline as "Useless gesture interface". I'm not so certain that's wrong.
Seriously, people already have a hard enough time using computers. Humans in general simply aren't perceptive enough to realize "clockwise swirly motion" means refresh the browser page. Then there's the complications of positioning, and people who talk with their hands... ...I think I'll stick to a mouse. Thanks.
Out of curiosity, when in American history has brown hair actually been illegal?
The first flaw in your comment is the fifth word: "someone" does not "decide" to pass a law. Maybe you missed something in school, but laws are proposed by representatives. Then they're debated and voted on multiple times. During that whole process, you can submit comments to your representatives. In short, you, collectively with your peers, pass your own laws. The United States maintains a government of the people, for the people, and not a government of the random politicians for the apathetic Slashdot users.
Moving on, if associating with the arms smuggler were indeed illegal, then the prosecution would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that I intended to associate with an arms smuggler to get a "guilty" verdict. No attorney that enjoys their career is going to support a warrant they believe to be baseless. That means the various levels of attorneys would first all have to agree that the evidence against me indicated that I knew beforehand that he was a smuggler before an arrest warrant could even be issued. The GPS records alone wouldn't be nearly enough.
warrant: (n) a writ from a court commanding police to perform specified acts
warrant: (v) show to be reasonable or provide adequate ground for
The word's definitions are not coincidental.
No beacon? Even better! No chases at all, no risk of the driver taking off and hitting pedestrians, and even less manpower needed. Just evidence (for or against their case) to be picked up when convenient.
Why wouldn't there be oversight? Elsewhere in this discussion, a commenter says the trackers would cost about $300. That's a pretty expensive piece of equipment to throw out without a paper trail.
Perhaps GPS trackers will even reduce police mistakes. When following someone with an attached beacon, there's no chance of getting lost in traffic or confused by similar-looking cars. If the device is attached to the wrong car, that can be seen pretty quickly when they have totally different behavior patterns.
No-knock warrants also have their purpose, but that's an entirely different (and offtopic) issue. If you don't like them, go write your representative and complain, like with any other law.
What's evil about it? So what if someone knows I'm talking to a known international arms smuggler? Maybe the police could use that information to get a warrant to search specifically for weapons, but they won't find anything here worse than a butcher knife. After all, he was just asking for the time.
American citizens are protected from unreasonable search and seizure. Watching where I go? That's not a search or a seizure. Me talking to a smuggler? That's a reason. Possession of a knife? That's not illegal. I see nothing evil here.
This is the WORST possible argument one can give regarding the erosion of our rights.
Not at all. It's a valid opinion. In my own opinion, the worst argument for eroding rights is "Think of the children!"
It is never acceptable to give away our rights...regardless of whether we ever perceive we may need them.
What about my right to murder someone who looks at me funny? Should I have a right to torture you until you work for me? All but the most basic civilizations are based on the careful limiting of what people can do. If everyone respects those limits, the society runs smoothly.
SHould I take away your right to free speech, because you don't speak about controversial topics? How about taking away your right to the free pratice of your religion? How about taking away your right to be secure in person & property...the government doesn't want my stuff, why should I care if they take away Joe's house?
Yes, you should outlaw yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater. Yes, you should take away the right for someone to murder others in the name of religion. Yes, you should place limits on the amount of hazardous materials a person can gather, or the amount of stuff they can take from others without paying, or the ability to have certain devices capable of quickly causing widespread harm.
For the love of god people...this shit is important to everyone. I can't believe anyone would say "Who cares?" when it comes to our rights & freedoms.
And I can't believe someone would be so insanely trusting of humans.
Here's a thought for you: The police can already do this. They can follow you by car, bike, helicopter, or on foot. They can check every license plate in the city. They don't need a warrant unless they start entering the conceptual ground of "search and seizure". The problem is that costs a lot of time and money that could be better spent elsewhere, like looking for people who are actually committing real crimes. Personally, I'm glad that technology can make our police more effective, instead of just finding new ways for us to kill each other.
What essential right is actually being given up here? Where in the constitution does it require that police already know your actions before they can investigate them? All societies apart from absolute anarchy exchange liberty for security. The key aspect is whether what's lost is actually worth anything beyond just being an academic "liberty".
And yet, when that routine needs to run three billion times per execution, it completes a few hours faster than a slightly less-efficient algorithm! That's a significant improvement for any company today working with large-scale data. A lesser programmer simply wouldn't be able to do the job.
I've spent many years working with microcontrollers. I wholeheartedly agree.
Yes, it makes sense. The students get an intimate feel for writing programs without being able to waste resources ramapantly.
There are indeed some huge loopholes with copyright law, like allowing record labels to utterly screw over artists by stealing their music. Then there's the less-absolute screwing in the form of abusive contracts. Copyright law certainly sucks, but it's already in the industry's favor.
Not quite. Cooper found no variation with regards to one specific isotope of plutonium. There could be a different mechanism at work to cause plutonium's decay, or multiple mechanisms. Maybe neutrinos are involved. Maybe not. The ideas presented in TFA are theories, which will (hopefully) eventually lead to a testable hypothesis.A single contradictory result, without explanation, should not be enough to halt research in the field.
Adding to that fine point, it's entirely possible that that company simply didn't distribute their product. Under the GPL, you are only required to distribute source is you distribute (in a legal sense) the product.
If you're merely selling access to the software (like selling hosting, or software-as-a-service access, or any of many other back-end technologies), you can use GPL code without releasing your modifications to the rest of the world. It's somewhat underhanded, but perfectly in line with the license. That's why the Affero GPL exists. It specifically requires releasing the source to users, even if "distribution" doesn't occur.
I decide that Steam can run on my silicon.
Obvious troll is obvious. Let's play.
My original point is that evaluating a platform on a single application is asinine. Your point seems to be that you've spent less than five minutes looking at Java, and have concluded that because you can't figure out the reasoning behind its behavior, there is none.
You have to download 100s MB to run your code in a VM
Just like every other interpreted language out there, you have to download an interpreter. Compare this to C#, where not only do you need the interpreter (a few hundred megs included with the OS), you also download the updates from MS, whether you actually need them or not. Maybe your claim would have some weight if Java were like C or C++, where (static) libraries are compiled into the executable, and can be duplicated for each application. It's not like that at all, though. You download a JVM, and almost always have everything you need right there. If you have several Java applications on one box, you're averaging a pretty small library for each. That's not bad.
it runs slower then native apps
Just like every other non-native language! It also uses about a third less code, and doesn't suffer from memory leaks. Again, if you were to compare it to a similar language like C#, you'd get more equal results. This is why I mentioned demoscene in my earlier comment: Demoscene folks have been pushing the limits of hardware for many years, and it comes at the expense of much more difficult programming. I don't doubt that a demoscene programmer could run a 1080p FPS on a phone. It'd take them a few years to make it, and the code would be unmaintainable, but it'd run.
hogs a shit-ton of memory
Here's the part that shows off how little you know of Java. When the JVM starts, it asks for a certain (configurable) amount of memory. The OS happily gives away that much memory, but Java never actually does anything with most of it. If you want a Java program to take up 50-gigabytes of memory, make a 50-gigabyte swap partition and start up a 50-gigabyte JVM. That sets the upper limit on what the JVM can use, just in case some programmer decides that loading a 45-gigabyte array is a good idea. That memory (usually... if you have a decent OS) sits allocated in swap until it's actually used, leaving RAM for other applications. The main benefit here is that there's a hard upper bound on how much memory a program can leak. Having an application crash without taking down the whole system is a good thing.
and you have to type HugeFunctionNamesThatAreStupidlyLong() to get anything done.
Do you have any examples? The longest one I've used lately is GenericValidator.isBlankOrNull(). That's not bad. Now, maybe if by some perverse sense of style you insisted on fully qualifying all names with their packages, you could reach something actually long, but I don't think anyone, not even an AC troll, could be that stupid.
Now you can get sued by Oracle for forking it when it's already GPL code.
No, you can't. You can get sued for using patented software without a license, which is a risk with all GPLv2 software where patents are involved. If you don't want to comply with the Sun patent license, replace those parts of the forked code with something of your own design.
Compared to any other language it's a turd to use and the only people that do use it are too stupid to learn anything better.
Compared to any other language offering similar features, Java is similar. The only people who use it are those who think it's best for their purposes. Such a decision should be the result of careful analysis of the platform's behavior, rather that something ridiculously juvenile, such as counting the number of "good games".
Shocking revelation: There are some people who use computers for actual work! Hard to believe, I know, but I hear they're out there. They do things like view documents, run simulations, and perform calculations. Even more amazingly, they'll do so in whatever language suits them best for whatever job they're doing. Weird, isn't it?
After all, it just makes sense that smart phones should be able to run the latest shooter game in full 1080p at 60 frames per second, right? I mean, demoscene folks have been doing stuff like that for years, and it only takes them a few hundred times the effort of any other development work...
Oh, right... No, it doesn't make sense.
And yet, Greece is still there, and still enjoying a pretty decent quality of life overall.
In a few hundred years, I'd wager that America will still be here, still in decline. We were in decline when that crazy president freed all the slaves. We were in decline when the Communists were infiltrating our government and industries. We were in decline while jobs were outsourced overseas. Now we're in decline because politicians are corrupt.
Hyperbole aside, I think that what we're facing now is very similar to the McCarthy crusade. We see a few corrupt investors/politicians/executives, and start investigating others. As usually happens under increased scrutiny, more are found. The cycle continues until a new threat grabs the public attention, and all the while the media (and people talking to the media) claim that "America's values are eroding away!"
Are there more corrupt investors/politicians/executives than ever before? Probably. Is there a higher percentage? Probably not. Humans have a tendency to see the past as being superior, while forgetting that the past had its own troubles. As a species, we've screwed up a lot, and this is just another screw-up.
Possible, yes. Within the realm of imaginable possibility, no.
Parity bits and other similar forms of error correction need physical bits, but don't provide any virtual bits to anything outside the drive itself. The number of (accessible) virtual bits will be lower than the physical number. On the other hand, a drive with built-in compression would offer more virtual bits than it has physical ones.
Well, sure. After all, a car and a pen are both made of metal and plastic, so I should be able to drive my nice fountain pen down the highway, right? "Fountain" even starts with "f", just like "Ferrari" does!
Of course those biomedical scientists have no idea what they're doing. They're all just greedy bastards, who'll lie to keep their industry alive. It's not like they're highly educated, or have spent many years studying the complex interactions of the body. Methylphenidate and methamphetamine look similar, so they must be the same, right?
- Ideas run through his mind unrelated to the task at hand, serving only to confuse and frustrate.
- Shortly before a group of kids went from being pissed off and distracted to being happier and focused.
Based on my own experience.
That's probably because you were 20, and should be capable of recognizing your own thought patterns. When I was diagnosed, it was over a two-week process, with about 8 hours of doctor contact.
The problem isn't really the extra energy. It's the distractions that affect the ability to focus. Having ADHD is, for me, like having six alarm clocks, each going off at random intervals of no more than five minutes. The medications are like earmuffs. I can ignore the distracting ideas, and focus on my work. Unfortunately, the medications also dull any "good" distractions for me, so I've trained myself over 7 years to not take them and still be focused.
Now I live with the distractions, and try not to annoy my coworkers too much with my occasional random ideas. I still move around much more than my coworkers and keep a messier desk, but at least I can work on my own.