Stop trying to paint companies as always bad, and employees as always good - I have twice seen employees near the critical point in large contracts suddenly present offers from other companies, and in effect try and blackmail massive payments from their current company, because they hold information entrusted to them by the company...
Something that probably wouldn't have been necessary if the company had kept those employee's salaries commensurate with the market rate. I lose no love for companies that overwork and underpay their employees, and then cry foul when the employee threatens to leave during a critical project.
In order to get a passport quickly to fly to a funeral, or to cancel a flight or trip, you often need a clip from a newspaper to proove the death actually happened.
Why would they want a newspaper clipping when they could call the foreign Office of Births Deaths and Marriages for an actual authoritative verification of the death?
Even, then it seems that verifying your story is probably a waste of their time:
How do they know you didn't just pick a random obit in your destination city's newspaper and claim that as your reason for needing a passport ASAP?
Or use an obit in your local newspaper so you can claim that as your reason for cancelling a flight?
As a small developer, you can be absolutely sure that just about any useful software you write will infringe on numerous patents. The only thing keeping you 'safe' is that you are either flying below the radar of those that hold the patents, or those patents currently remain unenforced against small developers.
No one is saying that you have to work for free, but unless you're a supra-genius, chances are that your idea is not as original as you think it is. I have seen very few exceptions to this, and the ones that I have seen are so esoteric that reverse engineering is almost always less effective than hiring someone else that is skilled in the same field of expertise to implement the general concept properly.
If the bar is set high enough for the patent system to work effectively, you can be pretty sure that 99.9% percent of the people that think as you do will not be able to submit a patent that wouldn't be rejected due to obviousness/unoriginality. If the bar remains as low as it has been, then you suffer as per my first paragraph.
OTOH, if your invention is that good and original that it warrants being framed in the glass cabinet of the patent system, then I have no issues with allowing a patent for a reasonable term (17 years being far too long in light of the speed of innovation in todays technical climate).
I see VERY FEW patents that are truly worthy of the protection they have been granted. Most seem to be so ridiculously obvious to anyone skilled in their fields that if they were kept as trade secrets there would be no net loss to the advancement of the state-of-the-art in that field.
I believe that patents have their place, but that the bar must be raised considerably higher than it has been set historically. And by considerably higher, I don't mean just a couple of rungs, I mean way above the scale as it currently stands. And additionally a significant reduction in term length would also go a long way to mitigating abuse of the system.
And to top that off, if someone did innovate, but kept it to themselves, how long would it take everyone else to 'catch up'?
In reality 99% of the things I see patented are barely an advancement of the state-of-the-art at all. IMO if something would be invented in short order by numerous other competing players, then that invention is effectively obvious (or at least obvious enough) to anyone skilled in the art.
The real purpose of a patent is for those incredibly clever inventions that even other experts in their respective fields will openly admit to being sparks of pure brilliance. Anything less than that and there's no reason to grant someone a monopoly.
This doubly applies to software patents. You can pretty much guarantee that anything you thought was super clever was already conceived numerous times by many other programmers working in your field of engineering. Those ideas may not have yet been implemented, but they are definitely not original discoveries or inventions that deserve 'protection' under a patent.
The higher the bar for allowing a patent, the less of a problem patents become. A high bar also stops patents being taken out with only marginal improvements on a pre-existing patent (or art).
Exactly, because one of the earlier claims will be "a device that implements the algorithm as described in Claim N". Which is basically the same as patenting the use of the algorithm on any platform.
It may or may not stand up to the Supreme Court. But who has the finances to take a case that far that wouldn't feel safer settling out of court lest they dilute the stomping power of their own patent portfolio?
Although in most cases, if you have the ability to drive most of the way into the intersection and don't turn your wheels, then even if the lights change and no one moves, you won't be blocking anyone that wasn't already blocked. That way, when the traffic does eventually start moving, you can turn your wheels and complete the left turn into the cross street. Additionally, you will have cleared your right turn bay of at least one more vehicle per cycle.
Just sitting there waiting only contributes further to gridlock behind you.
But, you are absolutely right that there are some situations where it is clearly pointless to drive into a gridlocked intersection if you don't see yourself being able to turn out before the cycle repeats.
The idea is to wait until the oncoming traffic has stopped at their red light, and then complete your left hand turn.
Just as bad as the people that don't drive into the intersection, are the people that nearly miss the oncoming traffic as they burn around the corner while the light is still yellow. If it's yellow, and there is a big enough gap, then go ahead, otherwise just wait until the traffic has stopped. This isn't rocket science people.
When turning across traffic, your wheels should remain pointed forward until you are ready to turn. And in the intersection with loads of oncoming traffic, you don't turn across anyone until they have stopped - which is usually _after_ the light has turned red.
Also, this is not an offence anywhere in the USA that I've driven, and in fact it is both legal and expected behaviour. These are not 'bad' left turn spots we're talking about, just busy ones.
A bad 'left' turn spot is one across multiple lanes with lots of pedestrian traffic and without traffic lights. ie. where you might have to wait 10 minutes before you get a large enough gap in the pedestrian and vehicular traffic before you can safely turn.
I take it that every left turn you make is a protected turn?
Not every one. But I don't pull into the intersection until I know I can make my turn. Gridlock sucks, and I refuse to contribute to it.
This is not what causes gridlock. Gridlock happens when non-turning straight-through traffic queues across the intersection.
If you're turning left and you drive all the way into the far side of the intersection and wait, then you will automatically move off when the perpendicular light turns green. If your new direction is not able to move, then you only block traffic that would also have not been able to move anyway (ie. no grid lock).
There should always be at least one car able to turn left at every cycle of the lights. It is extremely annoying when the guy at the front of the left turn queue doesn't move into the intersection and you end up waiting half a dozen cycles longer than you would otherwise have needed to.
Of course, if there is a controlling red arrow, then you don't move off until it has turned green and the intersection is clear.
That's not called 'running the red', that's called 'loading the intersection'. The safe thing to do is wait for the traffic to stop before you turn right. If the light is red as you turn, you're still safe, because the perpendicular traffic can see you right in front of them.
And it is a moving violation to accelerate into a stationery object whatever the colour of the light (or anywhere for that matter).
One of the most dangerous things you can do is to try to break the flow of oncoming traffic while the light is yellow. Those cars are already at a critical decision making point whether or not to stop or keep going. Why make it harder. It is not an offence to turn once the light has turned red, because technically, your light is now the green light on the perpendicular. (This all assumes you didn't have a red/green arrow controlling your movement.)
Some cities around the world that have tram lines running down the middle of the road let you execute something called a 'hook turn'. This is where you turn left from the right-most lane by entering the intersection and sitting directly in front of the stopped traffic. When the perpendicular light turns green, you complete the turn and drive off in front of all the traffic that was waiting at the perpendicular red light. That may sound strange, but it works safely.
Camera or not, if there is no yellow, then the guard interval between the light turning red and the perpendicular light turning green had better be a few seconds long, or people are going to get killed or injured.
I assume you mean a long term historical reference. Since I highly doubt that anyone would care about microsecond accuracy 10000 years after a 'singularity' event.
For long term referencing, other more obvious interstellar events would be much more effective.
The most likely reason for wanting a stable periodic reference from a pulsar is it could establish a baseline from where observed perturbations would allow the inference of third party gravitational distortions.
Actually, it's an interesting marketing exercise to compare this with the way certain OSes and software became market leaders.
The ultimate wet dream from a sales perspective is to be able to sell the same thing to different people at a price relative to their ability to pay. ie. rich people pay more than poor people.
The closest example in the physical word is 'generic' labels and re-branding.
In the software world, the idea is to let those that can pay for the software do so. And those that can't (or won't) are left to pirate the software with only 'token' resistance. Imagine where MS would be today if they had unbreakable copy protection on their OS.
Apple seems to be playing a similar game with the iPhone/iPad, but instead of playing fast and loose with pricing, it's doing it with features.
From the average end user's point of view, the device should just work. ie. no spyware, virusware or crapware. To make that happen, Apple needs to support the device fully and verify everything that runs on the platform. The way to do that is to control the entire software channel.
If Apple provided a simple option so random users could run their iPhones jail-broken, that would seriously increase their support load when the unwashed masses constantly complain they have: a virus, a trojan, a crashfest of a machine, a high phone bill, etc. The content providers might also start to become nervous.
By limiting the 'jail-break' to people that are at least semi-technically competent and determined, this reduces the overall problem to a small minority. It also lets Apple tell their content providers that their platform is relatively safe from piracy, while at the same time throwing an under-the-table biscuit to the technorati.
It is unfortunate, but this is probably the best way to keep as many people happy as possible. Remember, most of the engineers working at Apple probably have iPhones, and they are by definition part of the 'geek' elite. A few percent of the user base is not going to worry Apple or its content providers. And it's very likely that Apple will make sure that jail-breaking is just hard enough to keep this percentage at level that is satisfactory to both themselves and their content providers.
The other good thing is that everything above is technically plausibly deniable, so no one gets 'in trouble' over things that may be questionable either legally or contractually.
End of Time (Part 1) felt like an Obama promotion. It amazes me to see a British show showing such hero-worship (to the point of Obama going to save the Britain's economy - until the evil white master foiled him) of an American president. It felt out of place considering that the previous American presidents and British Prime Ministers in Doctor Who and the last Torchwood series were clearly not current presidents / Prime Ministers.
Interestingly I felt like that was more of a double backhanded slap at both the UK and the US governments. It made the UK government seem incompetent and the US government seem both arrogant and incompetent.
But, you're right that identifying the current US president in such an obvious way was pretty lame. It would have been much more appropriate if they'd kept him generic.
Doctor who never 'pushed' any fixed agendas. The writers may have written things that directly related to (and was thus more scary to) a contemporary audience, because, well, that's how good story telling works.
Being a family show, the stories/'horror'/humour is written on multiple levels.
As for 'pushing homosexual tendencies'; that has to be the most ridiculous statement I've ever heard. No kid is going to 'turn gay' because of something they saw on Dr Who (or anywhere for that matter). The Doctor has always been a little 'lawless' with all the trespassing and break-and-enters he seems to pull off. So would you say that the show is also pushing that kind of behaviour?
Yeah, RTD had his own biases when writing for his episodes, as I'm sure did many other writers over the years. However, nothing of what I've ever seen on Dr Who could ever really be classed as 'pro government' propaganda (either left or right wing). In most cases I'd say it took the opposite stance to whatever the government of the time was 'pushing'. Usually turning it up a notch to enhance the fear factor.
If you truly didn't recognise the Big Brother/Nanny State elements as satire, then I can understand why you might have thought it was promoting those things.
Comparing the Sci-fi coming out of the US/Canada to Dr Who is quite valid, but IMO it appears that the opposite is true. BSG/Caprica/V/Heroes are all great shows, but I much prefer the self-contained story lines of Dr Who over the long winded 'story-arcs' that seem to consume those other shows. Story arcs are great when used sparingly, but can become a bit annoying when nothing seems to get resolved until the end of the season. Production-wise, all of those shows have their warts, none particularly worse than the others. It's probably just that Dr Who has spent more effort trying to depict the alien/fantasy angle - which requires a greater effort to maintain suspension-of-disbelief.
Oops, sorry I was thinking of the UK fire-brigade when I wrote the first part.
However, the UK ambulance service should operate in the same way as the fire brigade and charge for false and frivolous call-outs. Just because health care is free, doesn't mean that people using the health-care system inappropriately should get a free ride.
In Australia, ambulance transport is not covered by Medicare (which is pretty stupid IMO), but it is covered by most private health insurances (which usually make you pay an excess/residual for each incident). And in most states/territories, it is an offence with potentially large fines (and possible jail time) for anyone making a false emergency call - whether it be ambulance, police or fire.
The solution is simple and I'm quite flabbergasted that the UK doesn't impose some sort of penalty for abuse of its healthcare services.
The ambulance will only take you to the hospital. If the trip was deemed unnecessary and avoidable (or under false pretences), then you'll receive a sizeable invoice in the mail.
'Free' healthcare is not the bogeyman you think it is. Just because you don't become forever crushed by unrecoverable debt doesn't mean it's a free-for-all wanton orgy of people abusing the system.
...let us not forget that there is no actual *evidence* to indicate that this was actually an action of the Israeli gov't. There's just been a lot of hot wind coming out of Dubai, and a bunch of finger pointing going on in the world. So until there is some evidences, let's not let this spin out of control into a pro-zionist vs. anti-zionist flamewar.
Maybe Israel has been set up?
It comes down to what nations (or organisations) had the capabilities to do what was done with the various passport forgeries, actors, intelligence gathering efforts, etc. And then what nations had the motive and desire to set up Israel in this way (or to get rid of that particular Hamas operative).
Dubai probably checked their short list of suspect countries and not only did they see Israel at the top of the list, but it seemed to be the only one on the list. So whoever did it either expected it to get away with it undetected, or to have it blow up in Israel's direction.
As far as the media is concerned, they just parrot what they're told. I can't imagine that any useful research was done by any media organisation beyond absorbing press releases from various government spokespersonnel.
What he seems to have done is to call the Sort() command using a callback to a user definable comparison function. His function instead of returning a valid comparison, just returned a random value. This makes the distribution highly dependant on both the array data and the internal implementation of the sort algorithm. For an algorithm like qsort this will cause the results to be significantly non-uniform.
Whenever you use a 'black box' API call beyond the obvious intended usage, you open yourself up to all the problems that can befall the inexperienced/undereducated coder. And since most libraries are not sufficiently documented with details of precisely how they work internally, the programmer is left open to all sorts of potential implementation issues.
The whole problem seems to have stemmed from the fact that the programmer didn't have an appropriate library function available to him, and then proceeded to use an alternative library function in an inappropriate way.
I have no argument that the best programming approach is to use any available supplied libraries to the maximum extent possible. Which is tempered by how well you understand any individual library's implementation. And you are correct in that supplemental functionality is best performed within the abstracted domain of the library's own methods (wherever possible). But, I believe that in this case the programmer didn't even know he was doing anything 'wrong' when he blindly followed some directions that he probably read on a scripting tutorial website.
In this day and age of out-of-work qualified coders, there is no good reason for any programmer that you hire to not have at least a basic understanding of computer science. The days of 'cowboy coders' and 'keyboard jockeys' are over. And there is definitely no excuse for this in a corporation like Microsoft that is so deeply entrenched in the computer industry.
The problem is that there probably wasn't a library call for "randomly shuffle array elements".
So the analogy is more like: you went to get a part for your car, but no one had it available so you decide to jury rig your own out of other spare parts. That kind of attitude gets people killed on the road.
It all comes down to this: A man's gotta know his limitations.
If you're just a keyboard jockey, chances are that everything is not going to be straight forward to you. Either you have to constantly ask questions of people that know what they're doing, or you end up taking a risk trying to do it yourself.
It looks like the guy that wrote the offending javascript used a solution that he found on the web. Unfortunately, not everything you read on the web is reliable. Whereas what you read in Knuth is as reliable as it gets.
Not necessarily. If the court deems they did this through negligence or intent, they could risk further fines. And those fines could cost considerably more than using the 5 second solution instead of the 3 second solution.
I can see it now:
Divisional manager: "Hey boss, we saved $5 dollars of coder time by using a junior guy that didn't know his arse from a uniform distribution shuffle algorithm."
Boss: "We know. Because of that mistake, the courts just imposed another $10000 dollars per day penalty over and above our current fine."
No, Microsoft's solution has a 50% probability of putting them in the rightmost position on the screen. It has been shown that people are biased to selecting the first and last elements of a list with much greater probability than the central elements.
So, in this case, Microsoft's error was definitely in their favour over the other four browsers.
Slashdot Mirror
Stop trying to paint companies as always bad, and employees as always good - I have twice seen employees near the critical point in
large contracts suddenly present offers from other companies, and in effect try and blackmail massive payments from their current
company, because they hold information entrusted to them by the company...
Something that probably wouldn't have been necessary if the company had kept those employee's salaries commensurate with the market rate. I lose no love for companies that overwork and underpay their employees, and then cry foul when the employee threatens to leave during a critical project.
In order to get a passport quickly to fly to a funeral, or to cancel a flight or trip, you often need a clip from a newspaper to proove the death actually happened.
Why would they want a newspaper clipping when they could call the foreign Office of Births Deaths and Marriages for an actual authoritative verification of the death?
Even, then it seems that verifying your story is probably a waste of their time:
How do they know you didn't just pick a random obit in your destination city's newspaper and claim that as your reason for needing a passport ASAP?
Or use an obit in your local newspaper so you can claim that as your reason for cancelling a flight?
As a small developer, you can be absolutely sure that just about any useful software you write will infringe on numerous patents. The only thing keeping you 'safe' is that you are either flying below the radar of those that hold the patents, or those patents currently remain unenforced against small developers.
No one is saying that you have to work for free, but unless you're a supra-genius, chances are that your idea is not as original as you think it is. I have seen very few exceptions to this, and the ones that I have seen are so esoteric that reverse engineering is almost always less effective than hiring someone else that is skilled in the same field of expertise to implement the general concept properly.
If the bar is set high enough for the patent system to work effectively, you can be pretty sure that 99.9% percent of the people that think as you do will not be able to submit a patent that wouldn't be rejected due to obviousness/unoriginality. If the bar remains as low as it has been, then you suffer as per my first paragraph.
OTOH, if your invention is that good and original that it warrants being framed in the glass cabinet of the patent system, then I have no issues with allowing a patent for a reasonable term (17 years being far too long in light of the speed of innovation in todays technical climate).
I see VERY FEW patents that are truly worthy of the protection they have been granted. Most seem to be so ridiculously obvious to anyone skilled in their fields that if they were kept as trade secrets there would be no net loss to the advancement of the state-of-the-art in that field.
I believe that patents have their place, but that the bar must be raised considerably higher than it has been set historically. And by considerably higher, I don't mean just a couple of rungs, I mean way above the scale as it currently stands. And additionally a significant reduction in term length would also go a long way to mitigating abuse of the system.
And to top that off, if someone did innovate, but kept it to themselves, how long would it take everyone else to 'catch up'?
In reality 99% of the things I see patented are barely an advancement of the state-of-the-art at all. IMO if something would be invented in short order by numerous other competing players, then that invention is effectively obvious (or at least obvious enough) to anyone skilled in the art.
The real purpose of a patent is for those incredibly clever inventions that even other experts in their respective fields will openly admit to being sparks of pure brilliance. Anything less than that and there's no reason to grant someone a monopoly.
This doubly applies to software patents. You can pretty much guarantee that anything you thought was super clever was already conceived numerous times by many other programmers working in your field of engineering. Those ideas may not have yet been implemented, but they are definitely not original discoveries or inventions that deserve 'protection' under a patent.
The higher the bar for allowing a patent, the less of a problem patents become. A high bar also stops patents being taken out with only marginal improvements on a pre-existing patent (or art).
Exactly, because one of the earlier claims will be "a device that implements the algorithm as described in Claim N". Which is basically the same as patenting the use of the algorithm on any platform.
It may or may not stand up to the Supreme Court. But who has the finances to take a case that far that wouldn't feel safer settling out of court lest they dilute the stomping power of their own patent portfolio?
True.
Although in most cases, if you have the ability to drive most of the way into the intersection and don't turn your wheels, then even if the lights change and no one moves, you won't be blocking anyone that wasn't already blocked. That way, when the traffic does eventually start moving, you can turn your wheels and complete the left turn into the cross street. Additionally, you will have cleared your right turn bay of at least one more vehicle per cycle.
Just sitting there waiting only contributes further to gridlock behind you.
But, you are absolutely right that there are some situations where it is clearly pointless to drive into a gridlocked intersection if you don't see yourself being able to turn out before the cycle repeats.
Why would you get hit by oncoming traffic?
The idea is to wait until the oncoming traffic has stopped at their red light, and then complete your left hand turn.
Just as bad as the people that don't drive into the intersection, are the people that nearly miss the oncoming traffic as they burn around the corner while the light is still yellow. If it's yellow, and there is a big enough gap, then go ahead, otherwise just wait until the traffic has stopped. This isn't rocket science people.
When turning across traffic, your wheels should remain pointed forward until you are ready to turn. And in the intersection with loads of oncoming traffic, you don't turn across anyone until they have stopped - which is usually _after_ the light has turned red.
Also, this is not an offence anywhere in the USA that I've driven, and in fact it is both legal and expected behaviour. These are not 'bad' left turn spots we're talking about, just busy ones.
A bad 'left' turn spot is one across multiple lanes with lots of pedestrian traffic and without traffic lights. ie. where you might have to wait 10 minutes before you get a large enough gap in the pedestrian and vehicular traffic before you can safely turn.
What you describe is a different offence with a different fine/demerit structure (ie. much lower).
So they'd still need multiple pictures (or video) if they want to ping you for 'running the red' versus 'queueing across the intersection'.
Not every one. But I don't pull into the intersection until I know I can make my turn. Gridlock sucks, and I refuse to contribute to it.
This is not what causes gridlock. Gridlock happens when non-turning straight-through traffic queues across the intersection.
If you're turning left and you drive all the way into the far side of the intersection and wait, then you will automatically move off when the perpendicular light turns green. If your new direction is not able to move, then you only block traffic that would also have not been able to move anyway (ie. no grid lock).
There should always be at least one car able to turn left at every cycle of the lights. It is extremely annoying when the guy at the front of the left turn queue doesn't move into the intersection and you end up waiting half a dozen cycles longer than you would otherwise have needed to.
Of course, if there is a controlling red arrow, then you don't move off until it has turned green and the intersection is clear.
That's not called 'running the red', that's called 'loading the intersection'. The safe thing to do is wait for the traffic to stop before you turn right. If the light is red as you turn, you're still safe, because the perpendicular traffic can see you right in front of them.
And it is a moving violation to accelerate into a stationery object whatever the colour of the light (or anywhere for that matter).
One of the most dangerous things you can do is to try to break the flow of oncoming traffic while the light is yellow. Those cars are already at a critical decision making point whether or not to stop or keep going. Why make it harder. It is not an offence to turn once the light has turned red, because technically, your light is now the green light on the perpendicular. (This all assumes you didn't have a red/green arrow controlling your movement.)
Some cities around the world that have tram lines running down the middle of the road let you execute something called a 'hook turn'. This is where you turn left from the right-most lane by entering the intersection and sitting directly in front of the stopped traffic. When the perpendicular light turns green, you complete the turn and drive off in front of all the traffic that was waiting at the perpendicular red light. That may sound strange, but it works safely.
Camera or not, if there is no yellow, then the guard interval between the light turning red and the perpendicular light turning green had better be a few seconds long, or people are going to get killed or injured.
...because people keep blowing through red lights like there's no tomorrow.
And for some of those people, there indeed will be no tomorrow.
I assume you mean a long term historical reference. Since I highly doubt that anyone would care about microsecond accuracy 10000 years after a 'singularity' event.
For long term referencing, other more obvious interstellar events would be much more effective.
The most likely reason for wanting a stable periodic reference from a pulsar is it could establish a baseline from where observed perturbations would allow the inference of third party gravitational distortions.
Exterminate!
Actually, it's an interesting marketing exercise to compare this with the way certain OSes and software became market leaders.
The ultimate wet dream from a sales perspective is to be able to sell the same thing to different people at a price relative to their ability to pay. ie. rich people pay more than poor people.
The closest example in the physical word is 'generic' labels and re-branding.
In the software world, the idea is to let those that can pay for the software do so. And those that can't (or won't) are left to pirate the software with only 'token' resistance. Imagine where MS would be today if they had unbreakable copy protection on their OS.
Apple seems to be playing a similar game with the iPhone/iPad, but instead of playing fast and loose with pricing, it's doing it with features.
From the average end user's point of view, the device should just work. ie. no spyware, virusware or crapware. To make that happen, Apple needs to support the device fully and verify everything that runs on the platform. The way to do that is to control the entire software channel.
If Apple provided a simple option so random users could run their iPhones jail-broken, that would seriously increase their support load when the unwashed masses constantly complain they have: a virus, a trojan, a crashfest of a machine, a high phone bill, etc. The content providers might also start to become nervous.
By limiting the 'jail-break' to people that are at least semi-technically competent and determined, this reduces the overall problem to a small minority. It also lets Apple tell their content providers that their platform is relatively safe from piracy, while at the same time throwing an under-the-table biscuit to the technorati.
It is unfortunate, but this is probably the best way to keep as many people happy as possible. Remember, most of the engineers working at Apple probably have iPhones, and they are by definition part of the 'geek' elite. A few percent of the user base is not going to worry Apple or its content providers. And it's very likely that Apple will make sure that jail-breaking is just hard enough to keep this percentage at level that is satisfactory to both themselves and their content providers.
The other good thing is that everything above is technically plausibly deniable, so no one gets 'in trouble' over things that may be questionable either legally or contractually.
End of Time (Part 1) felt like an Obama promotion. It amazes me to see a British show showing such hero-worship (to the point of Obama going to save the Britain's economy - until the evil white master foiled him) of an American president. It felt out of place considering that the previous American presidents and British Prime Ministers in Doctor Who and the last Torchwood series were clearly not current presidents / Prime Ministers.
Interestingly I felt like that was more of a double backhanded slap at both the UK and the US governments. It made the UK government seem incompetent and the US government seem both arrogant and incompetent.
But, you're right that identifying the current US president in such an obvious way was pretty lame. It would have been much more appropriate if they'd kept him generic.
Doctor who never 'pushed' any fixed agendas. The writers may have written things that directly related to (and was thus more scary to) a contemporary audience, because, well, that's how good story telling works.
Being a family show, the stories/'horror'/humour is written on multiple levels.
As for 'pushing homosexual tendencies'; that has to be the most ridiculous statement I've ever heard. No kid is going to 'turn gay' because of something they saw on Dr Who (or anywhere for that matter). The Doctor has always been a little 'lawless' with all the trespassing and break-and-enters he seems to pull off. So would you say that the show is also pushing that kind of behaviour?
Yeah, RTD had his own biases when writing for his episodes, as I'm sure did many other writers over the years. However, nothing of what I've ever seen on Dr Who could ever really be classed as 'pro government' propaganda (either left or right wing). In most cases I'd say it took the opposite stance to whatever the government of the time was 'pushing'. Usually turning it up a notch to enhance the fear factor.
If you truly didn't recognise the Big Brother/Nanny State elements as satire, then I can understand why you might have thought it was promoting those things.
Comparing the Sci-fi coming out of the US/Canada to Dr Who is quite valid, but IMO it appears that the opposite is true. BSG/Caprica/V/Heroes are all great shows, but I much prefer the self-contained story lines of Dr Who over the long winded 'story-arcs' that seem to consume those other shows. Story arcs are great when used sparingly, but can become a bit annoying when nothing seems to get resolved until the end of the season. Production-wise, all of those shows have their warts, none particularly worse than the others. It's probably just that Dr Who has spent more effort trying to depict the alien/fantasy angle - which requires a greater effort to maintain suspension-of-disbelief.
Oops, sorry I was thinking of the UK fire-brigade when I wrote the first part.
However, the UK ambulance service should operate in the same way as the fire brigade and charge for false and frivolous call-outs. Just because health care is free, doesn't mean that people using the health-care system inappropriately should get a free ride.
In Australia, ambulance transport is not covered by Medicare (which is pretty stupid IMO), but it is covered by most private health insurances (which usually make you pay an excess/residual for each incident). And in most states/territories, it is an offence with potentially large fines (and possible jail time) for anyone making a false emergency call - whether it be ambulance, police or fire.
The solution is simple and I'm quite flabbergasted that the UK doesn't impose some sort of penalty for abuse of its healthcare services.
The ambulance will only take you to the hospital. If the trip was deemed unnecessary and avoidable (or under false pretences), then you'll receive a sizeable invoice in the mail.
'Free' healthcare is not the bogeyman you think it is. Just because you don't become forever crushed by unrecoverable debt doesn't mean it's a free-for-all wanton orgy of people abusing the system.
...let us not forget that there is no actual *evidence* to indicate that this was actually an action of the Israeli gov't. There's just been a lot of hot wind coming out of Dubai, and a bunch of finger pointing going on in the world. So until there is some evidences, let's not let this spin out of control into a pro-zionist vs. anti-zionist flamewar.
Maybe Israel has been set up?
It comes down to what nations (or organisations) had the capabilities to do what was done with the various passport forgeries, actors, intelligence gathering efforts, etc. And then what nations had the motive and desire to set up Israel in this way (or to get rid of that particular Hamas operative).
Dubai probably checked their short list of suspect countries and not only did they see Israel at the top of the list, but it seemed to be the only one on the list. So whoever did it either expected it to get away with it undetected, or to have it blow up in Israel's direction.
As far as the media is concerned, they just parrot what they're told. I can't imagine that any useful research was done by any media organisation beyond absorbing press releases from various government spokespersonnel.
What he seems to have done is to call the Sort() command using a callback to a user definable comparison function. His function instead of returning a valid comparison, just returned a random value. This makes the distribution highly dependant on both the array data and the internal implementation of the sort algorithm. For an algorithm like qsort this will cause the results to be significantly non-uniform.
Whenever you use a 'black box' API call beyond the obvious intended usage, you open yourself up to all the problems that can befall the inexperienced/undereducated coder. And since most libraries are not sufficiently documented with details of precisely how they work internally, the programmer is left open to all sorts of potential implementation issues.
The whole problem seems to have stemmed from the fact that the programmer didn't have an appropriate library function available to him, and then proceeded to use an alternative library function in an inappropriate way.
I have no argument that the best programming approach is to use any available supplied libraries to the maximum extent possible. Which is tempered by how well you understand any individual library's implementation. And you are correct in that supplemental functionality is best performed within the abstracted domain of the library's own methods (wherever possible). But, I believe that in this case the programmer didn't even know he was doing anything 'wrong' when he blindly followed some directions that he probably read on a scripting tutorial website.
In this day and age of out-of-work qualified coders, there is no good reason for any programmer that you hire to not have at least a basic understanding of computer science. The days of 'cowboy coders' and 'keyboard jockeys' are over. And there is definitely no excuse for this in a corporation like Microsoft that is so deeply entrenched in the computer industry.
The problem is that there probably wasn't a library call for "randomly shuffle array elements".
So the analogy is more like: you went to get a part for your car, but no one had it available so you decide to jury rig your own out of other spare parts. That kind of attitude gets people killed on the road.
It all comes down to this: A man's gotta know his limitations.
If you're just a keyboard jockey, chances are that everything is not going to be straight forward to you. Either you have to constantly ask questions of people that know what they're doing, or you end up taking a risk trying to do it yourself.
It looks like the guy that wrote the offending javascript used a solution that he found on the web. Unfortunately, not everything you read on the web is reliable. Whereas what you read in Knuth is as reliable as it gets.
Not necessarily. If the court deems they did this through negligence or intent, they could risk further fines. And those fines could cost considerably more than using the 5 second solution instead of the 3 second solution.
I can see it now:
Divisional manager: "Hey boss, we saved $5 dollars of coder time by using a junior guy that didn't know his arse from a uniform distribution shuffle algorithm."
Boss: "We know. Because of that mistake, the courts just imposed another $10000 dollars per day penalty over and above our current fine."
No, Microsoft's solution has a 50% probability of putting them in the rightmost position on the screen. It has been shown that people are biased to selecting the first and last elements of a list with much greater probability than the central elements.
So, in this case, Microsoft's error was definitely in their favour over the other four browsers.