Cops killing and destroying the lives of innocent people (aka "asset forfeiture", see http://www.november.org/essay1.html for some more along these lines), drug dealers killing each other and other innocent people, insane amounts of money corrupting government and law enforcement, is all justifiable "collateral damage" to prevent a relative handful of abusers from killing themselves?
Oh, wait, I forgot. Since our justice system is so overburdened that it can't provide justice (and actually punish people who hurt/maim/kill other people, drunk drivers for example), we have to assume that it never would work even with the source of the overburden (nonviolent crimes being prosecuted with higher priority than typical murder and assault cases) removed.
I really suspect this is a Troll, too bad it's moderated up as "insightful", given that it's SO un-insightful.
All you have to do is look at our attempt to prohibit alcohol consumption for a beautiful example of what is wrong with "the War on Drugs". Deaths due to poisoned product and gang war, as well as corruption of all kinds, escalated amazingly during prohibition, and most of those factors faded out after re-legalization of alcohol. People who just wanted to provide a product and make money became legitimate businessmen, in a regulated industry. Deaths still occur due to alcohol, but they are a significantly smaller percentage of the population than during prohibition, and reforms to have mandatory sentencing for things like alcoholic manslaughter would do a lot more to keep us safe than mandatory sentencing for a pot smoker caught in his own home.
The primary thing that was left over after the end of prohibition, unfortunately, was the money and corruption, and if you don't think that money helped buy prohibitions of other things to keep the money flowing to the mob and such, you're the one smoking something you shouldn't.
Perl makes me fast for similar reasons (I would substitute premade modules to do darn near everything for the built in data types though). Where did I say anything about productivity? I simply said that in whatever langauges I've programmed in, bad delimiters (missing quotes, braces, etc) are the source of more "weird" errors than anything else. At least when I have braces for blocks, I can use built in editor functions to check my brace balancing. Can't do that effectively with whitespace, and when I wrote all this it was not clear how forgiving or not forgiving Python might be. Other posts have clarified that.....
I use vi exclusively, and I did mention early on that I don't do Python, so I did not mean to imply that my issues with mis-delimited blocks were in Python. I was speaking generally of the various languages I do use; typically the problem is forgetting a brace, which is easy enough to find when I realize my mistake.
It's not completely impossible, though; that's why Python's unofficial rule is: "no tabs, and if you want to use tabs, never put
spaces before a tab." This is good human advice anyhow.
If it's only an unofficial rule, it's going to be easy to fall afoul of it.
Of course I would never badmouth Python on such shaky grounds though:-).
I suppose I could have gone on at some greater length about how *I* can't even necessarily match white space visually. Being uncertain of exactly how Python uses white space (I'm a Perl geek), I would suppose that there are means of formatting Python that are not immediately obvious to the naked eye. While that's also true of braces, at least I have editor functions to help me with braces. And if it were anything but whitespace, I *could* probably program vi to help me identify the delimiters.
Beyond that, at least braces are printable characters--I think it is important to focus the language on what can be seen rather than what is omitted or "invisible" in some sense, and I like the fact that most of the languages I program in are free form about white space (C, perl, shell).
Whitespace does doesn't seem to me to lend itself to ease of use as an active formatting element--what about environments that map tabs to 4 spaces instead of 8, what about (hypothetical) environments where tab doesn't even do what you'd expect, or requires tab settings to be made before use, etc. It seems to easy to get an extra space or tab in there where it could actively hurt you without being obvious to observe.
The bottom line: my vi editor, and I'm sure someone else's EMACS editor, allow me to match braces with a keystroke. While there may be some way to program EMACS to do the same for white space delimitations, I can't imagine finding a way to do that in vi. Considering which of these is the "standard" Unix editor, that seems like a big flaw.
When my wife was in school, and was bullied by other kids, her mother always reacted, went to the school, demanded that it be dealt with. After a while, this made things worse for her day to day, because 1) she got a reputation as a snitch and 2) her mother was very confrontational, which made her very embarassed. So the end result was that she stopped telling her mother about such things.
How do we know that Sean told his father about the bullying, more than perhaps once, if that?
Litman
observes that people don't obey laws they don't believe in.
Unfortunately, as the war on drugs shows, massive noncompliance does not necessarily have any significant impact on the law, even in the medium term. Laws against marijuana possession and consumption have been on the books for somewhere over 50 years, and while enforcement has waned and waxed over that time, it's still mostly illegal, and the political establishment generally considers "legalization" a third rail topic.
It's all but certain that the same will very likely be true regarding all of this copyright flap as well. There will always be the underground where you can trade your MP3's and Ripped software, but the populace at large will not regain its rights in our lifetimes, and maybe not even our children's lifetimes.
If Jabber actually had a client that was easy to install and use, this would be good news. But every time myself or my wife have tried to get a Jabber client of any stripe to work (keep in mind, I've had about 14 years of Unix experience, and also done home Windows maintenance for most of that time) IT HAS FAILED UTTERLY. I'm sticking with ICQ until Jabber folks can actually produce useable software.
Could this be yet another attempt by the corporate power elite to keep the really good stuff away from the American masses?
No, it's probably more a case of the studio thinking it's not likely to make money (after all it might confuse the poor audience), so they're giving it limited release to see whether it will take off or not. My wife went to see it Friday when it opened in Chicago, and she loved it. I'd say make the drive, 'cos you may not get an opportunity to see it nearby in a theater.
They found that these open source tools ran much better on a 700-MHz Pentium III than a quad
processor Sun E220.
Let's see. they're open source tools. They very likely are single threaded, since the vast majority of open source projects are targeted at Linux which is primarily run on single CPU systems (yes, I know, there *are* exceptions, but I'm speaking generally). A Sun E220 has a *maximum* processor speed of 480MHz. Checking SPEC results shows you that for many things, a Pentium III is going to run at something close to parity with an equivalent speed SPARC (again there are exceptions, but I'm not talking about them).
So, you have a 700 MHz CPU against an unnamed, but not possibly more than 480 MHz CPU. I wonder why it would be faster on the 700 MHz system?
You're right, I was moving the decimal in the wrong direction; however the fact remains that most DSL broadband is 4 times slower than that (at 600Kbits vs 2.4 Mbits). It's still broadband, and it's still capable of streaming.
2.4 MegaBITS is about 24 MegaBYTES (modulo whatever redundancy checking they have, but that's typical for networking). That's STILL a hell of a lot better than my 684 MegaBITS DSL at home, where I routinely stream audio feeds and occasionally stream video as well. I.E. It sure DOES seem like a broadband replacement.
Sprint's coverage in Chicago is pretty awful too. Not so much weak signals, but not being able to get calls even when I have a *strong* signal. Instead, the caller gets my voice mail, and I wait up to half an hour for the voice mail to finally get through to me that I have a message. When you're trying to meet someone at the el and the two of you have which stop confused, this can be a very bad thing.
I wouldn't trust their networking services even with a solid guarantee of service
1) You mean like the sprint broadband service they've already announced?
2)Are you claiming that there aren't going to be distance limitations? Currently the aforementioned broadband service is going to be relying on a transmitter on the sears tower to serve Chicago, but that "only" has a 35 mile radius. Impressiove, but not "no matter how far".
I specifically wrote Mr. Orwant about this question (are subscriptions prior to the collapse going to be honored) and his reply was yes, he intends to honor them. I got the reply in nothing flat, no less. Whether there are "no errors" in the transfer of information may still be an open question, but he intends to do The Right Thing, and more power to him.
Interestingly, I knew some folks working for MasterCard, and they had a whole lot of fun passing around the, shall we say, questionable taste jpgs going around about black party dresses and doing the limbo etc, which were just as much infringers on this. Sadly, a jpg can't be traced to a specific person, so I guess the lawyers had to attack people who were more identifiable.
The only reason they say we were in their "territorial space" is because, in defiance of international law, they claim 200 miles of airspace as "their territory". So both stories are "right" depending on whether you accept their claim of 200 miles or not. I don't think we should, and apparently neither does dubya.
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Cops killing and destroying the lives of innocent people (aka "asset forfeiture", see http://www.november.org/essay1.html for some more along these lines), drug dealers killing each other and other innocent people, insane amounts of money corrupting government and law enforcement, is all justifiable "collateral damage" to prevent a relative handful of abusers from killing themselves?
Oh, wait, I forgot. Since our justice system is so overburdened that it can't provide justice (and actually punish people who hurt/maim/kill other people, drunk drivers for example), we have to assume that it never would work even with the source of the overburden (nonviolent crimes being prosecuted with higher priority than typical murder and assault cases) removed.
I really suspect this is a Troll, too bad it's moderated up as "insightful", given that it's SO un-insightful.
All you have to do is look at our attempt to prohibit alcohol consumption for a beautiful example of what is wrong with "the War on Drugs". Deaths due to poisoned product and gang war, as well as corruption of all kinds, escalated amazingly during prohibition, and most of those factors faded out after re-legalization of alcohol. People who just wanted to provide a product and make money became legitimate businessmen, in a regulated industry. Deaths still occur due to alcohol, but they are a significantly smaller percentage of the population than during prohibition, and reforms to have mandatory sentencing for things like alcoholic manslaughter would do a lot more to keep us safe than mandatory sentencing for a pot smoker caught in his own home.
The primary thing that was left over after the end of prohibition, unfortunately, was the money and corruption, and if you don't think that money helped buy prohibitions of other things to keep the money flowing to the mob and such, you're the one smoking something you shouldn't.
Perl makes me fast for similar reasons (I would substitute premade modules to do darn near everything for the built in data types though). Where did I say anything about productivity? I simply said that in whatever langauges I've programmed in, bad delimiters (missing quotes, braces, etc) are the source of more "weird" errors than anything else. At least when I have braces for blocks, I can use built in editor functions to check my brace balancing. Can't do that effectively with whitespace, and when I wrote all this it was not clear how forgiving or not forgiving Python might be. Other posts have clarified that.....
I use vi exclusively, and I did mention early on that I don't do Python, so I did not mean to imply that my issues with mis-delimited blocks were in Python. I was speaking generally of the various languages I do use; typically the problem is forgetting a brace, which is easy enough to find when I realize my mistake.
In my experience, mis-delimited blocks are one of the biggest sources of weird problems, at least when I'm writing code in a hurry.
If it's only an unofficial rule, it's going to be easy to fall afoul of it.
Of course I would never badmouth Python on such shaky grounds though :-).
Beyond that, at least braces are printable characters--I think it is important to focus the language on what can be seen rather than what is omitted or "invisible" in some sense, and I like the fact that most of the languages I program in are free form about white space (C, perl, shell).
Whitespace does doesn't seem to me to lend itself to ease of use as an active formatting element--what about environments that map tabs to 4 spaces instead of 8, what about (hypothetical) environments where tab doesn't even do what you'd expect, or requires tab settings to be made before use, etc. It seems to easy to get an extra space or tab in there where it could actively hurt you without being obvious to observe.
The bottom line: my vi editor, and I'm sure someone else's EMACS editor, allow me to match braces with a keystroke. While there may be some way to program EMACS to do the same for white space delimitations, I can't imagine finding a way to do that in vi. Considering which of these is the "standard" Unix editor, that seems like a big flaw.
How do we know that Sean told his father about the bullying, more than perhaps once, if that?
My sig is a quote from lobster magnet.
Or you can go to http://www.readerware.com/ for a book database if you don't want to write any code yourself.
He said the value of "Cues" which are the little magic barcodes that DC sells to the advertisers, not the CueCats which they gave to consumers.
Unfortunately, as the war on drugs shows, massive noncompliance does not necessarily have any significant impact on the law, even in the medium term. Laws against marijuana possession and consumption have been on the books for somewhere over 50 years, and while enforcement has waned and waxed over that time, it's still mostly illegal, and the political establishment generally considers "legalization" a third rail topic.
It's all but certain that the same will very likely be true regarding all of this copyright flap as well. There will always be the underground where you can trade your MP3's and Ripped software, but the populace at large will not regain its rights in our lifetimes, and maybe not even our children's lifetimes.
If Jabber actually had a client that was easy to install and use, this would be good news. But every time myself or my wife have tried to get a Jabber client of any stripe to work (keep in mind, I've had about 14 years of Unix experience, and also done home Windows maintenance for most of that time) IT HAS FAILED UTTERLY. I'm sticking with ICQ until Jabber folks can actually produce useable software.
But what about things that can get suspended in it? That's where the trouble comes in.
No, it's probably more a case of the studio thinking it's not likely to make money (after all it might confuse the poor audience), so they're giving it limited release to see whether it will take off or not. My wife went to see it Friday when it opened in Chicago, and she loved it. I'd say make the drive, 'cos you may not get an opportunity to see it nearby in a theater.
Let's see. they're open source tools. They very likely are single threaded, since the vast majority of open source projects are targeted at Linux which is primarily run on single CPU systems (yes, I know, there *are* exceptions, but I'm speaking generally). A Sun E220 has a *maximum* processor speed of 480MHz. Checking SPEC results shows you that for many things, a Pentium III is going to run at something close to parity with an equivalent speed SPARC (again there are exceptions, but I'm not talking about them).
So, you have a 700 MHz CPU against an unnamed, but not possibly more than 480 MHz CPU. I wonder why it would be faster on the 700 MHz system?
You're right, I was moving the decimal in the wrong direction; however the fact remains that most DSL broadband is 4 times slower than that (at 600Kbits vs 2.4 Mbits). It's still broadband, and it's still capable of streaming.
If only they can provide it reliably.....
I wouldn't trust their networking services even with a solid guarantee of service
2)Are you claiming that there aren't going to be distance limitations? Currently the aforementioned broadband service is going to be relying on a transmitter on the sears tower to serve Chicago, but that "only" has a 35 mile radius. Impressiove, but not "no matter how far".
I specifically wrote Mr. Orwant about this question (are subscriptions prior to the collapse going to be honored) and his reply was yes, he intends to honor them. I got the reply in nothing flat, no less. Whether there are "no errors" in the transfer of information may still be an open question, but he intends to do The Right Thing, and more power to him.
And how many printers or scanners or graphics tables support firewire?
Interestingly, I knew some folks working for MasterCard, and they had a whole lot of fun passing around the, shall we say, questionable taste jpgs going around about black party dresses and doing the limbo etc, which were just as much infringers on this. Sadly, a jpg can't be traced to a specific person, so I guess the lawyers had to attack people who were more identifiable.
Agreed. So tell me what your source of the absolute truth is.
The only reason they say we were in their "territorial space" is because, in defiance of international law, they claim 200 miles of airspace as "their territory". So both stories are "right" depending on whether you accept their claim of 200 miles or not. I don't think we should, and apparently neither does dubya.