The point is that 'people like you' think about the horrible cases of actual children being raped by adults (abhorrent, of course), but as a result support criminalizing a whole range of behaviors that have nothing to do with the above (plenty of examples in this discussion, so I won't bore you by listing them).
The distinction here (of which I see no awareness in your post btw) is that people who can be legally liable under the slew of anti-pedophile laws currently on the books are an insanely wider proportion of population that the sum total of the kind of truly dangerous people you talk about.
Many people here on slashdot are really really pissed at what they perceive as irrational overkill in that direction that strangles everybody's freedoms without having much impact on the real predators - hence the emotional tone that strikes a chord with a lot of us here.
How good is your math? If it's reasonably good, then together with those IT skills you can try your hand at quant/algo trading, either from home (risky but fun), or working for some hedge fund or bank (initially as a quant developer, probably). In the latter case you certainly will have a better income than now;) After all the firing of last year, right now there is quite a high demand in finance for experienced IT people.
It is high-stress, of course, but financially quite well-rewarded.
And I hope nobody comes up with a way to treat that... Kids will do stupid shit, that's normal, and I think only in extreme cases, such as causing serious bodily harm to others, should the lives of those kids be damaged by including a jail sentence. Getting beat up by their peers, however, or in fact spanked by their parents, would provide a useful short-term feedback in many cases.
No, it never should. Besides, 'cause some peolple to hurt themselves' is meaningless, everybody is free to choose their own actions unless they are physically compelled or threatened physical harm - and even threats should have a fairly high threshold before they're taken seriously.
Erm, I was rather pointing out the difference between an objective risk and a subjective perception of one. Just my 'being not sure' or even strongly suspecting that God will turn me into a pillar of salt if I watch too much porn doesn't make it an actual 'risk' as I understand the word - only knowing that, say, 10% of those who request their file get one started.
Rule of thumb is, the thinner Heinlein's books, the better they are. Starship troopers is nice and thin as is Moon is a Harsh Mistress, I rather liked Friday and Door into Summer (nothing earthshaking, but nice reads), but all his thick books were steaming piles of crap, with Cat being near the top of the shit list (and I didn't even bother remembering the names of a couple other thick ones I read).
I watch BBC because they don't have to struggle like mad for popularity, so they can afford to do a wider range of programs, and keep advertising minimal. I can't stand commercial TV as it's firstly, 80% fucking ads, and secondly, the programs are cheap stuff designed to appeal to the biggest possible audience (i.e., morons with ADD), such as Big Brother. On BBC, you get a huge range of documentaries, at least some investigative journalism, and all sorts of delightfully quirky stuff.
The thing I have against subscription channels is that empirically, they are all shit (from my point of view, of course-YMMV), so there must be strong commercial pressures causing that. And they are even more shit in the US where there is no real competition from something like the BBC, which serves to confirm my thesis.
Because some people, such as myself, are fully in favor of making fun of religions, but object to the 'cracking down' part. As insane as Falun Gong might be, they should be allowed to preach and practice whatever the hell they want as long as they don't resort to actual physical violence, just as the society should be free to do any counter-propaganda - but blanket censorship and putting a lot of practitioners in prison is crossing the line.
Erm, I can't think of _any_ situation in applied programming where C++ is a good idea (I design medium to high frequency automated trading algos for a major bank, well run a small team that does that). 90% of the time something like jython or matlab is fast enough and a hell of a lot easier to write and debug, and doesn't give you nearly the amount of options to cut your limbs off by chance - and the 10% of performance bottlenecks can be handled by C/Fortran snippets.
I am aware that many coders seem to think the very messiness of C++ (several languages crunched into one, but not really in a consistent or compatible manner) is somehow an advantage (trying to call C++ DLLs from other languages, oh my god what a pain, tripled if you want it to work on both windows and Linux), but I'd rather fill my brain with domain-specific knowledge and not with language-specific trivia (eg valarray copy semantics are not compatible with STL, but the code using vector<valarray<> > only actually breaks under gcc and works under VC++; and so on and so forth - why the fuck should I care?).
I was in the "C++ is great" camp for a couple of years and filled my head with all those stupid quirks (local typedefs in recursive templated classes, oh what fun) , but at one point realized I just couldn't be bothered. Even Java, as crippled as it is language-wise, is IMO preferable to C++, because once it compiles, you can just use the jar, no linker issues, no memory corruption - and if I do need to manage my memory in a bottleneck, a C snippet will do just fine.
And if I can keep using the JVM but one day switch from Java to a less crippled language, maybe Scala, that's the best of all worlds.
Yes. I might have considered an iPhone as my next gadget, and I certainly won't now. As a user, I _wouldn't_ know what I was getting into if it wasn't for stories like this.
Erm, first, if an average person only downloads a handful of songs, then an average person only uploads a couple of songs - simple math.
Second, 'treble damages' would be fine, ten thousand-fold damages are not.
Third, if the current damages agree with your idea of what the rights of the copyright holder should be, your ideas about that are very different from mine and a lot of other people. It's not that 'I'm looking at copyright wrong', it's that I think the current extent and strength of copyright protection are wrong, by about an order of magnitude.
Thankfully, now there are pirate parties - I joined the one in my country.
My exposure to ipod and itunes taught me to avoid apple in the future, can't see what the fuss is about - mediocre UI (not terrible; just mediocre) and automatic behaviors that I hate but can't turn off (whenever I plugged in my ipod to recharge, on-the-go playlist got reset if itunes was present, for example). That was the old ipod to be sure (gen 5 I think), but rather than buying the touch I'll wait for the competition to deliver a comparable device that obeys _me_ (give Android another half a year or so).
Writing this from Ubuntu - set this laptop (Samsung Q35) up as a dual-boot with XP Pro, but still haven't faced up to the hassle of making all the hardware work on Windows (bloody drivers, won't even recognize ethernet), while Ubuntu just works. Who wants OSX?
Latency is for algorithmic trading, where the human trader just monitors the parameters, and it's the algo that takes in the market price feed and immediately responds with orders. It's enough if the latency of the *GUI layer* including workstation OS is under 100ms or so because the latency of the human response dominates that anyway.
That card sounds like BloombergAnywhere - bloomberg is just a market data provider, and they use this to make sure one account can be used only by one user, but at any machine of their choice. That one has nothing to do with security as such, just access control to a paid service (though I'm sure he has plenty security measures as well).
I want my games to be not very challenging but spectacular looking and amusing interactive movies, little more. Really hard intricate challenges is what work is for (well I'm lucky enough to have one of those).
If other gamers want to derive a sense of achievement from really hard-to-master games, good for them - but with this, Nintendo is reaching another market, namely people like myself, who couldn't care less about whether it's 'cheating' or not because 'winning' is not the reason why they play games at all.
Actually, I liked the cerebral part fine, it was the emo part that annoyed the shit out of me. If that book completely omitted any mention of Novinha and Cao, and spent a lot more time on the pequeninos, I might have liked it;)
> it enforces good programming practices by not giving a programmer as much freedom.
Which is why I hated it on sight, and happily avoided learning it. Didn't it force you to declare all variables at the start of your program, and stupid shit like that? Good programming practices are good because they're a result of conscious choice between alternatives, and thus what's good depends on the context - not on the preconceived notions of Wirth's.
For teaching, I think one should use a language which is very expressive, but consistent (which rules C++ right out, for example), so python would be a good choice - everything is a first-class object, including doubles, user-defined objects, types, and functions, and in fact functions are just objects you can execute. And it has built-in closures. Also an interpreted language is much better for teaching because you can stop at a breakpoint anywhere in the program and evaluate arbitrary expressions, and then resume - can one do that with Fortran?
Matlab lint (code-checker) recognizes constructs like x=inv(A)*b and suggests you use x=A\b instead. I wonder if it's so smart why doesn't it just make that substitution internally before interpreting the code.
The thing is, solving the 'right problems' on your list is usually very hard or impossible - any substantial disparity in power, which always arises in any society, will make anonymity very helpful to giving voice to the weaker side.
And in the case under discussion, if it was possible to completely hide information about social caste, the prejudices would likely die out within a few generations, as there would be nobody to apply them to.
Not by any means saying one shouldn't tackle the core causes, as well - but the OP's statement was glib and patently untrue.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is that 'people like you' think about the horrible cases of actual children being raped by adults (abhorrent, of course), but as a result support criminalizing a whole range of behaviors that have nothing to do with the above (plenty of examples in this discussion, so I won't bore you by listing them).
The distinction here (of which I see no awareness in your post btw) is that people who can be legally liable under the slew of anti-pedophile laws currently on the books are an insanely wider proportion of population that the sum total of the kind of truly dangerous people you talk about.
Many people here on slashdot are really really pissed at what they perceive as irrational overkill in that direction that strangles everybody's freedoms without having much impact on the real predators - hence the emotional tone that strikes a chord with a lot of us here.
Except that most of what passes for 'left' in the US would count as moderate right in Europe.
How good is your math? If it's reasonably good, then together with those IT skills you can try your hand at quant/algo trading, either from home (risky but fun), or working for some hedge fund or bank (initially as a quant developer, probably). In the latter case you certainly will have a better income than now;) After all the firing of last year, right now there is quite a high demand in finance for experienced IT people.
It is high-stress, of course, but financially quite well-rewarded.
And I hope nobody comes up with a way to treat that... Kids will do stupid shit, that's normal, and I think only in extreme cases, such as causing serious bodily harm to others, should the lives of those kids be damaged by including a jail sentence. Getting beat up by their peers, however, or in fact spanked by their parents, would provide a useful short-term feedback in many cases.
Concur on all points
No, it never should. Besides, 'cause some peolple to hurt themselves' is meaningless, everybody is free to choose their own actions unless they are physically compelled or threatened physical harm - and even threats should have a fairly high threshold before they're taken seriously.
Erm, I was rather pointing out the difference between an objective risk and a subjective perception of one. Just my 'being not sure' or even strongly suspecting that God will turn me into a pillar of salt if I watch too much porn doesn't make it an actual 'risk' as I understand the word - only knowing that, say, 10% of those who request their file get one started.
See the difference?
Um, how do you know that? From the discussion above I can only see that 'it's kind of sad *we think* we can't find out etc'
Yeah, just leave the sequels alone.
Rule of thumb is, the thinner Heinlein's books, the better they are. Starship troopers is nice and thin as is Moon is a Harsh Mistress, I rather liked Friday and Door into Summer (nothing earthshaking, but nice reads), but all his thick books were steaming piles of crap, with Cat being near the top of the shit list (and I didn't even bother remembering the names of a couple other thick ones I read).
I watch BBC because they don't have to struggle like mad for popularity, so they can afford to do a wider range of programs, and keep advertising minimal. I can't stand commercial TV as it's firstly, 80% fucking ads, and secondly, the programs are cheap stuff designed to appeal to the biggest possible audience (i.e., morons with ADD), such as Big Brother. On BBC, you get a huge range of documentaries, at least some investigative journalism, and all sorts of delightfully quirky stuff.
The thing I have against subscription channels is that empirically, they are all shit (from my point of view, of course-YMMV), so there must be strong commercial pressures causing that. And they are even more shit in the US where there is no real competition from something like the BBC, which serves to confirm my thesis.
Because some people, such as myself, are fully in favor of making fun of religions, but object to the 'cracking down' part. As insane as Falun Gong might be, they should be allowed to preach and practice whatever the hell they want as long as they don't resort to actual physical violence, just as the society should be free to do any counter-propaganda - but blanket censorship and putting a lot of practitioners in prison is crossing the line.
Erm, I can't think of _any_ situation in applied programming where C++ is a good idea (I design medium to high frequency automated trading algos for a major bank, well run a small team that does that). 90% of the time something like jython or matlab is fast enough and a hell of a lot easier to write and debug, and doesn't give you nearly the amount of options to cut your limbs off by chance - and the 10% of performance bottlenecks can be handled by C/Fortran snippets.
I am aware that many coders seem to think the very messiness of C++ (several languages crunched into one, but not really in a consistent or compatible manner) is somehow an advantage (trying to call C++ DLLs from other languages, oh my god what a pain, tripled if you want it to work on both windows and Linux), but I'd rather fill my brain with domain-specific knowledge and not with language-specific trivia (eg valarray copy semantics are not compatible with STL, but the code using vector<valarray<> > only actually breaks under gcc and works under VC++; and so on and so forth - why the fuck should I care?).
I was in the "C++ is great" camp for a couple of years and filled my head with all those stupid quirks (local typedefs in recursive templated classes, oh what fun) , but at one point realized I just couldn't be bothered. Even Java, as crippled as it is language-wise, is IMO preferable to C++, because once it compiles, you can just use the jar, no linker issues, no memory corruption - and if I do need to manage my memory in a bottleneck, a C snippet will do just fine.
And if I can keep using the JVM but one day switch from Java to a less crippled language, maybe Scala, that's the best of all worlds.
Yes. I might have considered an iPhone as my next gadget, and I certainly won't now.
As a user, I _wouldn't_ know what I was getting into if it wasn't for stories like this.
Erm, first, if an average person only downloads a handful of songs, then an average person only uploads a couple of songs - simple math.
Second, 'treble damages' would be fine, ten thousand-fold damages are not.
Third, if the current damages agree with your idea of what the rights of the copyright holder should be, your ideas about that are very different from mine and a lot of other people. It's not that 'I'm looking at copyright wrong', it's that I think the current extent and strength of copyright protection are wrong, by about an order of magnitude.
Thankfully, now there are pirate parties - I joined the one in my country.
Um. No. Why would I?
My exposure to ipod and itunes taught me to avoid apple in the future, can't see what the fuss is about - mediocre UI (not terrible; just mediocre) and automatic behaviors that I hate but can't turn off (whenever I plugged in my ipod to recharge, on-the-go playlist got reset if itunes was present, for example). That was the old ipod to be sure (gen 5 I think), but rather than buying the touch I'll wait for the competition to deliver a comparable device that obeys _me_ (give Android another half a year or so).
Writing this from Ubuntu - set this laptop (Samsung Q35) up as a dual-boot with XP Pro, but still haven't faced up to the hassle of making all the hardware work on Windows (bloody drivers, won't even recognize ethernet), while Ubuntu just works. Who wants OSX?
Latency is for algorithmic trading, where the human trader just monitors the parameters, and it's the algo that takes in the market price feed and immediately responds with orders. It's enough if the latency of the *GUI layer* including workstation OS is under 100ms or so because the latency of the human response dominates that anyway.
That card sounds like BloombergAnywhere - bloomberg is just a market data provider, and they use this to make sure one account can be used only by one user, but at any machine of their choice. That one has nothing to do with security as such, just access control to a paid service (though I'm sure he has plenty security measures as well).
I want my games to be not very challenging but spectacular looking and amusing interactive movies, little more. Really hard intricate challenges is what work is for (well I'm lucky enough to have one of those).
If other gamers want to derive a sense of achievement from really hard-to-master games, good for them - but with this, Nintendo is reaching another market, namely people like myself, who couldn't care less about whether it's 'cheating' or not because 'winning' is not the reason why they play games at all.
At least with unmanaged C++ it's a total pain to use in VS, in my experience. Maybe the managed .NET languages do better.
Actually, I liked the cerebral part fine, it was the emo part that annoyed the shit out of me. If that book completely omitted any mention of Novinha and Cao, and spent a lot more time on the pequeninos, I might have liked it ;)
Hey, Ender's Game isn't that bad. Compared to Speaker for the Dead, that is, which is all you said, cubed. ;)
> it enforces good programming practices by not giving a programmer as much freedom.
Which is why I hated it on sight, and happily avoided learning it. Didn't it force you to declare all variables at the start of your program, and stupid shit like that? Good programming practices are good because they're a result of conscious choice between alternatives, and thus what's good depends on the context - not on the preconceived notions of Wirth's.
For teaching, I think one should use a language which is very expressive, but consistent (which rules C++ right out, for example), so python would be a good choice - everything is a first-class object, including doubles, user-defined objects, types, and functions, and in fact functions are just objects you can execute. And it has built-in closures. Also an interpreted language is much better for teaching because you can stop at a breakpoint anywhere in the program and evaluate arbitrary expressions, and then resume - can one do that with Fortran?
Matlab lint (code-checker) recognizes constructs like x=inv(A)*b and suggests you use x=A\b instead. I wonder if it's so smart why doesn't it just make that substitution internally before interpreting the code.
The thing is, solving the 'right problems' on your list is usually very hard or impossible - any substantial disparity in power, which always arises in any society, will make anonymity very helpful to giving voice to the weaker side.
And in the case under discussion, if it was possible to completely hide information about social caste, the prejudices would likely die out within a few generations, as there would be nobody to apply them to.
Not by any means saying one shouldn't tackle the core causes, as well - but the OP's statement was glib and patently untrue.