the LGBT community is just like everyone else... I can tell you they are just as likely to blow someone away in a fit of passion as someone in the straight community.
Yeah. They may even forgo the "away" part of that sentence:-)
He could have a gun for work, handed back at the end of a shift. It could be a handgun it something less capable of mass murder. There are obvious solutions.
Of course, someone who plans a mass murder would definitely not nick an item from the workplace. Do you actually think before you type these things out?
By "Atheism can be a religion too", it was perhaps being suggested that some people cannot seem to help but to try forcing their beliefs unto others, whether they believe in deities or not.
Me telling you that I don't believe your story and do not wish to listen to it is not "forcing my belief" onto you. If you can't handle the fact that other people don't believe your story, then don't tell those people your story - they certainly don't wish to hear it.
Atheist behave just like any other religious extremists.
A bad question that has no answer isn't improved by insisting that the answer is "no." The only solution is to not ask the question because is based on faulty premises.
You do the same with unicorns too? How about invisible green elves living in the bottom of the garden?
I find it hard to believe that you say "Since I can neither find evidence for nor evidence against invisible pink unicorns, then the invisible pink unicorns might exist"?
Face it - sometimes the answer is a resounding "No", because the probability of overlooking any evidence *for* the claim involved is so vanishingly small that even protozoa are going to need microscopes to see that probability.
in normal movies, part of the fun is looking for significance behind every weird gesture, unexpected object, person, etc. in here, if it looks out of place, it's just out of place and doesn't mean anything.
Why do you think that? If (very big 'if') this was real AI that did the writing I'd expect there to be meaning in everything.
Alright, just gotta prove that the money is clean. You need to hire a lawyer to do that.
What are you gonna pay that lawyer with after all your money just got seized?
Oh, and better do it fast - rent is due soon.
FTFS: "If you can prove that you have a legitimate reason to have that money it will be given back to you. And we've done that in the past"
I'm guessing roughly half the voters are going to vote for "More of the Same!"; at this point even a bunch syphillitic monkeys will be an improvement over the current ruling class.
I'm not at all criticizing people who choose other paths --
Yes, you are. You are presenting the paths as a dichotomy, as follows:
if that big salary, giant house, fancy car, boat, etc. are valuable to you, enough to do what many do (work long hours, never see their kids, never take vacations, never have time for significant hobbies or time to learn something new outside of work, etc.)... well, that's a choice.
Actually, I get all of that without working more than 40 hours/week. I see my kids, I get the big house (700sqm indoor floor space), have a variety of hobbies (guitar, art, etc) and learn things new outside work all the time... all while earning the good money.
You present one path as the "nice" path, and *all* *other* *paths* as negative ones with only money as a positive. You clearly made a few wrong life decisions yourself.
But I don't find it ironic at all that people who demonstrate greater intellectual aptitude might value a life of intellectual activity higher than maximizing monetary gain.
Once again you are presenting something as fact that isn't at all so. There are multiple professions for people who demonstrate greater intellectual aptitude other than academic teaching/research. In fact, just yesterday an exec at my company (a qualified engineer) pointed out that in every graduating class, the only ones who remain behind to do postgrad are those who didn't get any job offers. It repeats after postgrad - the only postdocs who remain didn't get any offers.
Almost by definition, companies take the cream of the crop and leave the rest behind, who then try to do the best they can at their university.
The ones languishing in academia aren't "valuing a life of intellectual activity", it's just that no one made them any offers.
Each country has a strong culture, a strong heritage, a strong system of beliefs and the US must learn to recognise and respect these. US culture is NOT superior.
"Having culture" is something to be ashamed off, not proud off, considering all cultures have more negatives than positives. The US, in contrast, does not have a single homogenous "culture" so I have no idea what it is you appear to believe will be forced by the US onto the rest of the world?
Religion or Atheism? Pro-[some-right] or Anti-[some-right]? Hipster culture or Ghetto culture? Redneck culture or Yuppie culture? Whatever you *think* the US culture is, I can just about guarantee that there is a non-insignificant portion of the US that is the exact opposite.
Well, I can see how that might work, but I'd need to understand more about what you're intending. I don't intent the mutable state to be externally readable, only to affect the messages that it passes in response to incoming messages.
Ah, but I'm doing away with messages altogether[1]:-) What I propose is that the line of code[2]:
foo = funcall (func_ptr, arg1,... argN)
might get executed on another computer, so the implementation has to compile a list of state-variables that "func_ptr" reads and pass that stack to func_ptr. As func_ptr will be native code, the implementation will have to ensure at compile-time that func_ptr has all the references to state-variables that it might need during runtime. This obviates the need for many of the problems introduced by message-passing while allowing the implementation runtime to order/reorder expressions so that as many of the remote functions as possible are offloaded onto a remote node.
What I think might happen with your proposal is that external read access to the state might be difficult to synchronize leading to various race conditions. I'm sure this can be worked around, but it seems to me that it could add greatly to the complexity.
We'll see; you can't make progress if you don't every now and then attempt to break conventional thought. Probably nothing will come of this (certainly a paper or two), but it might just hit the sweet spot. Certainly, worse ideas than this got very popular very quickly:-)
[1] At the application/programmer level anyway.
[2] More likely to be useful in iteration/list comprehension scenarios.
I'm designing one, but not through message passing.
I'm trying to do a design which has state variables (clearly demarcated) and callable functions that execute on other nodes. This avoids the need for message-passing by allowing functions to execute remotely and asynchronously. It does, of course, mean that functions that access state variables are also marked as such and such functions have only read-only access to state.
Could ants detect signs of human civilization from their ant hill in the forest? Probably not, but this doesn't change the fact that human civilization exists, and side from occasional lawn extermination are largely unconcerned with ants.
We are not contacted because our civilization is likely not at all unique and not at all interesting to entities capable of contacting us.
We are concerned with ants. We study them. We build ant-farms. We use them in research. If ants were anything close to intelligent enough to express a desire to communicate with us, we'd know. Your analogy is incorrect; *you* may be unconcerned with ants, but humans as a group are.
Then you'd do well to go back to the original problem which is that malleability is not detectable in a mechanical system, only by inspection.
Nope, wrong again - malleability affects the dimensions of the part. Dimensions are something that can be felt just through usage, or heard due to varying clearances between parts. The part in question, which you originally chose to question, was the piston used to provide pressure to the hydraulic system in brakes. Should this part fail it degrades gradually.
So we're back to square one: An electrical system which can be setup to be reliable, redundant, self-diagnosing, and with predictable and controllable failure modes, vs.... a mechanical wire which needs periodic and highly unscientific inspection.
I did not dispute that, I disputed brakes, which you then took issue with. As far as I am aware, even the Teslas still have hydraulic brakes, in which case the non-fly-by-wire system is superior to a fly-by-wire system. And as for your "An electrical system which can be setup to be reliable, redundant, self-diagnosing, and with predictable and controllable failure modes", just because it *can* doesn't mean that it will. Mechanical systems can also be set up to be reliable, self-redundant, self-diagnosing with predictable and controllable failure modes.
In fact, they usually are. The hydraulic master cylinder is designed with two independent chambers that each serve two wheels that are diagonally opposite each other, so if a leak springs in the brake line you'll have stopping power on at least one side of the car *as well as* in the front and the back. All of these little pieces of mechanical genius went into engineering modern machines, so I'm at a loss to why you appear to believe that graceful degradation is only possible with electronic systems. It's fully possible with mechanical systems as well, and consistently predictable too.
And by that I mean there's a lot of room for judgement in the inspection of mechanical failure modes, not the kind of system that you want to entrust to an industry mostly consisting of people who didn't finish school.
So to summarise around the pedantry: You want redundant electrical fly-by-wire systems in a car if you're going for reliability and safety. Hell you want that in most of industry too.
It depends. Not for brakes, possibly not for steering either (another part with metal linkages that degrade gracefully). Use it for the accelerator, or the cruise-control, or the gearshift (all of which traditionally uses cables). Use it for the power windows, the fuel-filler (or recharge port) cap, the bootlid, the bonnet catch (all of which also uses cables).
But for brakes and steering, there is no point because you have to have the existing system in place anyway, so adding electronics only adds more failure points and does not remove any existing failure points. Brakes and steering are still going to come down to "use this piston/lever/gear to induce motion along this axis".
To be honest, more complexity does not necessarily mean less reliability - a manual gearbox, for example, is a great deal more complex with many more parts than an ICE, yet they tend to outlive ICE's by a factor of two. A lot of the reliability comes from using a design for decades and refining it each generation.
I'm not happy that this legislation has got this far, but fuck me I am glad I am not American.
The only reason that legislation like this gets made into law is because the people writing it and making it into law are exempt from it. The law should have a clause restricting anyone passing a law from which they themselves are exempt.
Cables stretch, pedals have a different "feel", etc.
Ahh yes, the old feeling that something isn't quite right somewhere. I'm going to put that one down as the least reliable detection mechanism of them all.
For brakes, I've never heard
Stopped reading right there since I was in a car which had breaks fail for no reason attributable to wear while I was in it. The car was 9 months old.
It's a pity you stopped reading; reading frequently cures ignorance. Those brakes that failed most certainly did not fail due to the piston snapping. Drive-by-wire systems for brakes still has the piston there, only now there are also electronics to fail as well.
We're talking about drive by wire systems for brakes (note carefully the spelling).
it's a piece of metal, it's not going to suddenly snap. Metal doesn't do that.
And I see I'm not talking to a mechanical engineer. A fun fact is that a large portion of electrical failures are actually to do with the metal that carries the magic smoke.
Metal doesn't suddenly snap. Metal's failure modes are, barring exceptions, gradual degradation. You would do well to look up 'malleability'.
Mechanical linkages can be grabbed and wiggled to be evaluated. Nothing will tell you if an electrical component is about to fail.
You got that backwards.
Nope; mechanical linkages give plenty of warning before breaking. Cables stretch, pedals have a different "feel", etc. For brakes, I've never heard of the mechanical linkage (a stout piston connected to the pedal) failing, but as it's a piece of metal, it's not going to suddenly snap. Metal doesn't do that.
For example, the person who sues can withdraw the case any time before trial, with no recourse for the defendant. So if you've hired a lawyer, you're still out legal fees.
Only if you approached a really stupid lawyer when you received notice. Whenever I receive a letter or notice of suit, my reply generally ends something like this:
....
If you persist any further with your action in spite of the above I shall seek legal remedies for any monies spent in defending your action.
As a result, I have an ex-wife who very stupidly withdrew her action a week before trial who now owes me a small sum of money. I haven't executed on it yet, but for the last 4 years I make sure my attorney sends her a claim every six months.
I don't need the money, but it sure feels nice to shut her up with "You talk to all your creditors like that?":-)
...And if I get ticketed for driving on a street my tax dollars payed for, I'm suing the city responsible into insolvency.
Nice try. It's a public road, which means the public, as represented by the city, gets to decide whether or not this particular piece of public commons should remain common. Your tax dollars paid for the City Museum as well, but you don't get to have unscheduled and unannounced parties in there. Why would you assume that merely because your tax dollars paid for a road you can use it whenever you want to?
Entitled much?
A city near me in South Florida tried that for a bit. They got smacked down HARD. As they should have.
Are you saying Hungarian notation was a self-evidently stupid idea?
In most incarnations, yes it was. Dumb devs prefixed the variable with the actual type it was declared as and not (as intended) with the type it was representing.
Say you're writing the implementation of a textarea for a native GUI application. It makes sense that you would want to differentiate between the variables storing the width in pixels and the width in the current font face. So, you make pxWidth and ffWidth. That was the intention: give the variable some context to help the reader know what it was used for.
Dumb devs, OTOH, saw it and immediately jumped into cargo cult mode - when they declared "int width;", they did it as "int iWidth;". The variable now has no context, but the reader now (very unhelpfully) knows that width is an integer. Of course, the stupidity of prefixing type-name info on variables was not really recognised at the time - even though everyone working on windows worked with those horrible typedefs anyway which broke the HN rules left and right.
TLDR; There were hipsters in every generation. Early 90's was no different, hence Hungarian Notation.
You know, if you're going to castigate, you *need* to read the story to avoid sounding... uncharitable.
"Uncharitable"? Fuck that - I donated two 1 year old laptops with Linux Ubuntu pre-loaded to a save-the-rhino group here in South Africa, only to find out a month later that they took their funds and purchased Windows 8 for those laptops. I'm sorry - donors get to complain when their donations are misused.
The laptop was donated. They have $0 hardware budget and $0 software budget. Their expectation (obviously mistaken) is that like other infrastructure, it should not change radically without direct user intervention or an act of God.
Regardless, *now* they know that it is not fit for purpose - are they going to change the OS (at a cost of $0) or are they going to attempt to shift the damn blame? I know where my money is on this.
Your insistence that people be knowledgeable about all the tools they use is, let's say, optimistic. And your inability to comprehend that these people might have more important things to do than become computer experts is...
When we hand people guns, medication, tools and farming tech, we actually do fucking insist that they know how to use 'em.
well it's interesting. Unless, of course, you *are* an expert is all of the infrastructure that you interact with on a daily basis, in which case you're just too awesome for us mere humans.
Like I said, now that they know that it is not suitable for their purpose, will they change the tool or change their purpose? You are working from the assumption that they did not know it was unsuitable - fine. Now, they *do* know. Lets see what they do.
Windows Update should not pull any data unless/explicitly told to/.
For/all/ types of connections.
Your message is "blame the user, always."
In this case it is totally appropriate - why the fuck was a cash-tight operation *spending their donor money* to buy a proprietary OS anyway? For their particular use-case I can almost guarantee that a default Linux installation with web-browser will work.
It's clearly a case of "Bought product not fit for purpose". You don't get to whine if you buy a car when what you needed was a goods van.
Oh, yeah, one more thing - these dumb fucks now actually *know* that the product is not fit for purpose, but I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that they continue using this OS, and they continue whining about it.
This is like complaining about a losing horse at the races, and then immediately doubling down on your losses!
There were C++ implementations going all the way back to the early 1980s. Do you really think it was a programming language on paper only for 20 years?
I didn't say it wasn't a programming language, I said it wasn't standardised. Of course, now that I think about it, I don't ever recall any vendor breaking existing code between releases pre-standardisation. With Swift there is only a single vendor, and that vendor breaks existing code between releases.
Slashdot Mirror
the LGBT community is just like everyone else ... I can tell you they are just as likely to blow someone away in a fit of passion as someone in the straight community.
Yeah. They may even forgo the "away" part of that sentence :-)
A purely destructive opinion shouldn't be given. It adds nothing to the discussion. It doesn't help or solve anything.
Thing is, you won't know how much an opinion adds until the opinion is actually given.
He could have a gun for work, handed back at the end of a shift. It could be a handgun it something less capable of mass murder. There are obvious solutions.
Of course, someone who plans a mass murder would definitely not nick an item from the workplace. Do you actually think before you type these things out?
By "Atheism can be a religion too", it was perhaps being suggested that some people cannot seem to help but to try forcing their beliefs unto others, whether they believe in deities or not.
Me telling you that I don't believe your story and do not wish to listen to it is not "forcing my belief" onto you. If you can't handle the fact that other people don't believe your story, then don't tell those people your story - they certainly don't wish to hear it.
Atheist behave just like any other religious extremists.
A bad question that has no answer isn't improved by insisting that the answer is "no." The only solution is to not ask the question because is based on faulty premises.
You do the same with unicorns too? How about invisible green elves living in the bottom of the garden?
I find it hard to believe that you say "Since I can neither find evidence for nor evidence against invisible pink unicorns, then the invisible pink unicorns might exist"?
Face it - sometimes the answer is a resounding "No", because the probability of overlooking any evidence *for* the claim involved is so vanishingly small that even protozoa are going to need microscopes to see that probability.
(Yeah, mixed metaphors, borked analogies, etc)
Now how does this court case make "average Joes" a little safer?
You don't know what 'precedent' means,do you?
it was just weird.
in normal movies, part of the fun is looking for significance behind every weird gesture, unexpected object, person, etc. in here, if it looks out of place, it's just out of place and doesn't mean anything.
Why do you think that? If (very big 'if') this was real AI that did the writing I'd expect there to be meaning in everything.
Innocent until proven guilty, huh?
Alright, just gotta prove that the money is clean. You need to hire a lawyer to do that.
What are you gonna pay that lawyer with after all your money just got seized?
Oh, and better do it fast - rent is due soon.
FTFS: "If you can prove that you have a legitimate reason to have that money it will be given back to you. And we've done that in the past"
I'm guessing roughly half the voters are going to vote for "More of the Same!"; at this point even a bunch syphillitic monkeys will be an improvement over the current ruling class.
I'm not at all criticizing people who choose other paths --
Yes, you are. You are presenting the paths as a dichotomy, as follows:
if that big salary, giant house, fancy car, boat, etc. are valuable to you, enough to do what many do (work long hours, never see their kids, never take vacations, never have time for significant hobbies or time to learn something new outside of work, etc.)... well, that's a choice.
Actually, I get all of that without working more than 40 hours/week. I see my kids, I get the big house (700sqm indoor floor space), have a variety of hobbies (guitar, art, etc) and learn things new outside work all the time... all while earning the good money.
You present one path as the "nice" path, and *all* *other* *paths* as negative ones with only money as a positive. You clearly made a few wrong life decisions yourself.
But I don't find it ironic at all that people who demonstrate greater intellectual aptitude might value a life of intellectual activity higher than maximizing monetary gain.
Once again you are presenting something as fact that isn't at all so. There are multiple professions for people who demonstrate greater intellectual aptitude other than academic teaching/research. In fact, just yesterday an exec at my company (a qualified engineer) pointed out that in every graduating class, the only ones who remain behind to do postgrad are those who didn't get any job offers. It repeats after postgrad - the only postdocs who remain didn't get any offers.
Almost by definition, companies take the cream of the crop and leave the rest behind, who then try to do the best they can at their university.
The ones languishing in academia aren't "valuing a life of intellectual activity", it's just that no one made them any offers.
Judging by your example the language would be useless for my purposes because of excessive inter-thread/process communication overhead.
OTOH, I think that you should probably look carefully at Erlang, as it seems to already handle the case you appear to be talking about quite well.
I've programmed in Erlang for a few years. Played with Haskell as well, adequate in Lisp too :-) But thanks anyway,
Cheers
Each country has a strong culture, a strong heritage, a strong system of beliefs and the US must learn to recognise and respect these. US culture is NOT superior.
"Having culture" is something to be ashamed off, not proud off, considering all cultures have more negatives than positives. The US, in contrast, does not have a single homogenous "culture" so I have no idea what it is you appear to believe will be forced by the US onto the rest of the world?
Religion or Atheism? Pro-[some-right] or Anti-[some-right]? Hipster culture or Ghetto culture? Redneck culture or Yuppie culture? Whatever you *think* the US culture is, I can just about guarantee that there is a non-insignificant portion of the US that is the exact opposite.
Well, I can see how that might work, but I'd need to understand more about what you're intending. I don't intent the mutable state to be externally readable, only to affect the messages that it passes in response to incoming messages.
Ah, but I'm doing away with messages altogether[1] :-) What I propose is that the line of code[2]:
... argN)
foo = funcall (func_ptr, arg1,
might get executed on another computer, so the implementation has to compile a list of state-variables that "func_ptr" reads and pass that stack to func_ptr. As func_ptr will be native code, the implementation will have to ensure at compile-time that func_ptr has all the references to state-variables that it might need during runtime. This obviates the need for many of the problems introduced by message-passing while allowing the implementation runtime to order/reorder expressions so that as many of the remote functions as possible are offloaded onto a remote node.
What I think might happen with your proposal is that external read access to the state might be difficult to synchronize leading to various race conditions. I'm sure this can be worked around, but it seems to me that it could add greatly to the complexity.
We'll see; you can't make progress if you don't every now and then attempt to break conventional thought. Probably nothing will come of this (certainly a paper or two), but it might just hit the sweet spot. Certainly, worse ideas than this got very popular very quickly :-)
[1] At the application/programmer level anyway.
[2] More likely to be useful in iteration/list comprehension scenarios.
I'm designing one, but not through message passing.
I'm trying to do a design which has state variables (clearly demarcated) and callable functions that execute on other nodes. This avoids the need for message-passing by allowing functions to execute remotely and asynchronously. It does, of course, mean that functions that access state variables are also marked as such and such functions have only read-only access to state.
So, limited shared state but not shared memory.
Could ants detect signs of human civilization from their ant hill in the forest? Probably not, but this doesn't change the fact that human civilization exists, and side from occasional lawn extermination are largely unconcerned with ants. We are not contacted because our civilization is likely not at all unique and not at all interesting to entities capable of contacting us.
We are concerned with ants. We study them. We build ant-farms. We use them in research. If ants were anything close to intelligent enough to express a desire to communicate with us, we'd know. Your analogy is incorrect; *you* may be unconcerned with ants, but humans as a group are.
Then you'd do well to go back to the original problem which is that malleability is not detectable in a mechanical system, only by inspection.
Nope, wrong again - malleability affects the dimensions of the part. Dimensions are something that can be felt just through usage, or heard due to varying clearances between parts. The part in question, which you originally chose to question, was the piston used to provide pressure to the hydraulic system in brakes. Should this part fail it degrades gradually.
So we're back to square one: An electrical system which can be setup to be reliable, redundant, self-diagnosing, and with predictable and controllable failure modes, vs .... a mechanical wire which needs periodic and highly unscientific inspection.
I did not dispute that, I disputed brakes, which you then took issue with. As far as I am aware, even the Teslas still have hydraulic brakes, in which case the non-fly-by-wire system is superior to a fly-by-wire system. And as for your "An electrical system which can be setup to be reliable, redundant, self-diagnosing, and with predictable and controllable failure modes", just because it *can* doesn't mean that it will. Mechanical systems can also be set up to be reliable, self-redundant, self-diagnosing with predictable and controllable failure modes.
In fact, they usually are. The hydraulic master cylinder is designed with two independent chambers that each serve two wheels that are diagonally opposite each other, so if a leak springs in the brake line you'll have stopping power on at least one side of the car *as well as* in the front and the back. All of these little pieces of mechanical genius went into engineering modern machines, so I'm at a loss to why you appear to believe that graceful degradation is only possible with electronic systems. It's fully possible with mechanical systems as well, and consistently predictable too.
And by that I mean there's a lot of room for judgement in the inspection of mechanical failure modes, not the kind of system that you want to entrust to an industry mostly consisting of people who didn't finish school.
So to summarise around the pedantry: You want redundant electrical fly-by-wire systems in a car if you're going for reliability and safety. Hell you want that in most of industry too.
It depends. Not for brakes, possibly not for steering either (another part with metal linkages that degrade gracefully). Use it for the accelerator, or the cruise-control, or the gearshift (all of which traditionally uses cables). Use it for the power windows, the fuel-filler (or recharge port) cap, the bootlid, the bonnet catch (all of which also uses cables).
But for brakes and steering, there is no point because you have to have the existing system in place anyway, so adding electronics only adds more failure points and does not remove any existing failure points. Brakes and steering are still going to come down to "use this piston/lever/gear to induce motion along this axis".
To be honest, more complexity does not necessarily mean less reliability - a manual gearbox, for example, is a great deal more complex with many more parts than an ICE, yet they tend to outlive ICE's by a factor of two. A lot of the reliability comes from using a design for decades and refining it each generation.
I'm not happy that this legislation has got this far, but fuck me I am glad I am not American.
The only reason that legislation like this gets made into law is because the people writing it and making it into law are exempt from it. The law should have a clause restricting anyone passing a law from which they themselves are exempt.
Cables stretch, pedals have a different "feel", etc.
Ahh yes, the old feeling that something isn't quite right somewhere. I'm going to put that one down as the least reliable detection mechanism of them all.
For brakes, I've never heard
Stopped reading right there since I was in a car which had breaks fail for no reason attributable to wear while I was in it. The car was 9 months old.
It's a pity you stopped reading; reading frequently cures ignorance. Those brakes that failed most certainly did not fail due to the piston snapping. Drive-by-wire systems for brakes still has the piston there, only now there are also electronics to fail as well.
We're talking about drive by wire systems for brakes (note carefully the spelling).
it's a piece of metal, it's not going to suddenly snap. Metal doesn't do that.
And I see I'm not talking to a mechanical engineer. A fun fact is that a large portion of electrical failures are actually to do with the metal that carries the magic smoke.
Metal doesn't suddenly snap. Metal's failure modes are, barring exceptions, gradual degradation. You would do well to look up 'malleability'.
Mechanical linkages can be grabbed and wiggled to be evaluated. Nothing will tell you if an electrical component is about to fail.
You got that backwards.
Nope; mechanical linkages give plenty of warning before breaking. Cables stretch, pedals have a different "feel", etc. For brakes, I've never heard of the mechanical linkage (a stout piston connected to the pedal) failing, but as it's a piece of metal, it's not going to suddenly snap. Metal doesn't do that.
For example, the person who sues can withdraw the case any time before trial, with no recourse for the defendant. So if you've hired a lawyer, you're still out legal fees.
Only if you approached a really stupid lawyer when you received notice. Whenever I receive a letter or notice of suit, my reply generally ends something like this:
....
If you persist any further with your action in spite of the above I shall seek legal remedies for any monies spent in defending your action.
As a result, I have an ex-wife who very stupidly withdrew her action a week before trial who now owes me a small sum of money. I haven't executed on it yet, but for the last 4 years I make sure my attorney sends her a claim every six months.
I don't need the money, but it sure feels nice to shut her up with "You talk to all your creditors like that?" :-)
...And if I get ticketed for driving on a street my tax dollars payed for, I'm suing the city responsible into insolvency.
Nice try. It's a public road, which means the public, as represented by the city, gets to decide whether or not this particular piece of public commons should remain common. Your tax dollars paid for the City Museum as well, but you don't get to have unscheduled and unannounced parties in there. Why would you assume that merely because your tax dollars paid for a road you can use it whenever you want to?
Entitled much?
A city near me in South Florida tried that for a bit. They got smacked down HARD. As they should have.
Link?
Are you saying Hungarian notation was a self-evidently stupid idea?
In most incarnations, yes it was. Dumb devs prefixed the variable with the actual type it was declared as and not (as intended) with the type it was representing.
Say you're writing the implementation of a textarea for a native GUI application. It makes sense that you would want to differentiate between the variables storing the width in pixels and the width in the current font face. So, you make pxWidth and ffWidth. That was the intention: give the variable some context to help the reader know what it was used for.
Dumb devs, OTOH, saw it and immediately jumped into cargo cult mode - when they declared "int width;", they did it as "int iWidth;". The variable now has no context, but the reader now (very unhelpfully) knows that width is an integer. Of course, the stupidity of prefixing type-name info on variables was not really recognised at the time - even though everyone working on windows worked with those horrible typedefs anyway which broke the HN rules left and right.
TLDR; There were hipsters in every generation. Early 90's was no different, hence Hungarian Notation.
You know, if you're going to castigate, you *need* to read the story to avoid sounding... uncharitable.
"Uncharitable"? Fuck that - I donated two 1 year old laptops with Linux Ubuntu pre-loaded to a save-the-rhino group here in South Africa, only to find out a month later that they took their funds and purchased Windows 8 for those laptops. I'm sorry - donors get to complain when their donations are misused.
The laptop was donated. They have $0 hardware budget and $0 software budget. Their expectation (obviously mistaken) is that like other infrastructure, it should not change radically without direct user intervention or an act of God.
Regardless, *now* they know that it is not fit for purpose - are they going to change the OS (at a cost of $0) or are they going to attempt to shift the damn blame? I know where my money is on this.
Your insistence that people be knowledgeable about all the tools they use is, let's say, optimistic. And your inability to comprehend that these people might have more important things to do than become computer experts is...
When we hand people guns, medication, tools and farming tech, we actually do fucking insist that they know how to use 'em.
well it's interesting. Unless, of course, you *are* an expert is all of the infrastructure that you interact with on a daily basis, in which case you're just too awesome for us mere humans.
Like I said, now that they know that it is not suitable for their purpose, will they change the tool or change their purpose? You are working from the assumption that they did not know it was unsuitable - fine. Now, they *do* know. Lets see what they do.
yes, and I meant to say brackets.
Did you also mean to confuse "then" with "than"?
Windows Update should not pull any data unless /explicitly told to/.
For /all/ types of connections.
Your message is "blame the user, always."
In this case it is totally appropriate - why the fuck was a cash-tight operation *spending their donor money* to buy a proprietary OS anyway? For their particular use-case I can almost guarantee that a default Linux installation with web-browser will work.
It's clearly a case of "Bought product not fit for purpose". You don't get to whine if you buy a car when what you needed was a goods van.
Oh, yeah, one more thing - these dumb fucks now actually *know* that the product is not fit for purpose, but I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that they continue using this OS, and they continue whining about it.
This is like complaining about a losing horse at the races, and then immediately doubling down on your losses!
There were C++ implementations going all the way back to the early 1980s. Do you really think it was a programming language on paper only for 20 years?
I didn't say it wasn't a programming language, I said it wasn't standardised. Of course, now that I think about it, I don't ever recall any vendor breaking existing code between releases pre-standardisation. With Swift there is only a single vendor, and that vendor breaks existing code between releases.