the Democratic Party, which is dominated by leftists with outdated social theories that have been disproven by the collapse of Soviet Russia and the Eastern Block?
Um, no. That "Democratic Party" exists only in the fertile imaginations of right-wing propagandists -- and, unfortunately, in the imaginations of those who believe that nonsense even though (IMHO) they should know better.
the whole anti trust thing goes against the basic nature of a free market
True. The "basic nature of a free market" is for some areas of the market to coagulate into monopolies. What happens then is that prices rise, quality plummets, and society as a whole loses in a big way.
The gov't has no damn business in the business world and should get the hell out.
They tried that already. It brought us the Great Depression. Nowadays they're a bit more realistic about it. If you're not selling apples on a street corner, you can thank a lot of people for that (including, no doubt, yourself), but the SEC is not the least of them.
A pure free-market economy operates with just about as much concern for the common good (read "national interest") as a pure centralized economy. As Bill Buckley said, "As ideals approach reality, the cost becomes prohibitive". The free market is no less an ideal than Maoism. It's not as crazy as Maoism, but it's still an ideal. It assumes that reality as a far simpler thing than it ever actually is.
The government has a legitimate interest in trying to avoid monopolies and depressions, just as it has a legitimate interest in maintaining a military. I'm not so fond of the military, you're not so fond of anti-trust legislation, and other people aren't so fond of other things. Realistically, you have to weigh one thing against another and optimize. Imagine if Microsoft manages to kill off the rest of the domestic software industry. Next, imagine how long the US will remain competitive in the world market, against nations which can still produce quality software at a reasonable price. Nations whose networks don't crash. Nations whose navies can go cruising along day after day without being towed back into port because of a divide-by-zero error in a database program. I'm really not joking here.
There's also a lot to be said WRT the notion that a corporation is legally equivalent to a human being, and has rights and so forth. Not everybody sees a whole lot of sense in that.
obviously you are special, and only other people have problems.
Erm . . . I really sounded like a jackass there, didn't I? Sorry. I do think that not enough people are willing to bear in mind that a pointer is a sharp pointy thing that you shouldn't carry when you're running. C is a language that will merrily bite you if you don't keep a close eye on it. (Actually, that was exactly the point that I was replying to, wasn't it?) IMHO people who get hurt with it are probably not looking at it the right way. A different language isn't just a different syntax; it's a different mentality. At any rate, running off the end of an array in basic or whatever is a bug, too.
Obviously, as you point out, people a lot smarter and more experienced than I make these mistakes. It may be that I'm in denial, or merely that I was drunk when I wrote that post:)
See the Fuzz Revisited paper. The most common programming errors in the standard unix utilities which they tested were pointer errors and array access errors.
I didn't read that, but I remember reading about it, and IIRC GNU utilities came out looking a lot better than most. This was gratifying, because GNU has these coding guidelines somewhere, which (among other things, like their barbaric indenting style:) encourage a really paranoid mentality about pointers: Never allocate without checking the pointer you get, never use a buffer of fixed size unless you can guarantee the size of what goes in it, etc. ad infinitum. I mean, I'll willingly grant that I'm probably not up to their standards, but it appears that people who are, can write very solid code in C.
The more I think about it, the more I think I'm just defending C because I like it so much on an emotional level. So, as in all things, YMMV and use what works best for what you use it for.
On the positive side: It is more productive than writing in assembler. It is relatively easy to write a compiler for. It is nearly universal.
You forgot one: From the user's standpoint, it's an enormously elegant, graceful, pleasant, powerful language. People like it. It's clear and simple, minimal and (for the most part) sufficient. It's a beautiful piece of software.
It is not typesafe.
You mean casts? Hmmm. Yeah, I'll go along with you there. They're good to have, but they're unsafe.
It doesn't check array access. It doesn't have automatic memory management.
True -- you get to do those jobs:) But when you need the cycles, you can blow 'em off. This can be (and frequently is) seen as a feature.
It has pointers, a source of constant errors.
I've never understood why people say that. You just have to know what you're doing, which is a requirement anyway. Anybody who gets "constant errors" with pointers, would probably get constant errors with references or psychic data levelling or anything else.
It doesn't support functional programming.
Well, that's probably true, but since I have NFI what functional programming is, I haven't often felt the absence as a loss:)
It doesn't support object-oriented programming.
True. There are people who say that you can do OOP in C, but IMHHHO they don't grok OOP. For one example, much of what is implied by inheritance just doesn't translate into C in any way that I can imagine. I don't see a need for OOP in C, though, because we already have OOP in C, a.k.a. C++, which out of the two is my preferred language most days. For some (relatively trivial) uses, I really think C++ is overkill, and for others it's not efficient enough (kernels etc.) -- but day in and day out it's a really damn nice language to program computers with. I like the fact that C has thrived (thriven?) separately from C++. It's cool to have both.
One of the common initial implementation goals of new general purpose programming languages is to bootstrap the language in itself.
Not if it's interpreted. You sure could write a java compiler in java (in fact it's probably been done) but I don't think you'd want a JVM written in java. I mean, it's turtles all the way down, you know?
Your point is valid, though, as a general observation. It's a good acid test of a language. If you can't write its compiler in it (or if the developers just don't *want* to:), then it's probably not as good for writing compilers as C is. Then again, not every language needs to be good for that. On the third hand, if a language is called "better than C", then it's being compared to C, right? So, you get either A or B:
A) It's comparable in intent to C. In that case, the comparison is fair, and it damn well better be good for writing compilers. Ada is probably an example if this, right? I tend to think that Pascal is also, but I really don't have any feel for what the original intent of Pascal was. The dialects I've used (all Borland) smelled a lot like C, but with clunky keywords and assignments inexplicably refusing to return values the way any red-blooded expression ought to. Then again, maybe it grew that way in an attempt to compete with C. Um, I guess nobody actually cares one way or the other:)
B) It's not at all comparable in intent to C. In that case, it's probably excused from the compiler implementation requirement, but it's also meaningless to say it's "better" than C. Perl is an example of this second category. Saying Perl is "better" or "worse" than C is like saying cats are "better" or "worse" than dogs -- not only is it meaningless, but nobody with half a brain gives a rat's ass either way. I mean, what are you going to do about it? Pass laws? Run for congress on the C platform?
You would get far fewer errors, I think, with an AreStringsEqual or even a strequ function, rather than using strcmp when all you care about is equivalence.
If that's what yer into, IMHO use C++, which is a cool language for a whole lot of reasons, not just that kinda stuff.
I don't agree with the "far fewer errors" thing, though I certainly never do !strcmp( ). The problem with that isn't that people forget what strcmp( ) does, but rather that it's easy not to notice the !. I think anybody who's been writing C code for more than a month has come to terms with what strcmp( ) does. Some people always put whitespace around ! (except in !=, obviously), and I respect that a lot. In this particular case, though, strcmp( ) == 0 is far harder to miss, and IMHO it expresses the intent better. Since strcmp() does not return a boolean value, IMHO there's no good reason to use a "boolean value" idiom to deal with it. Once you get past the boolean thing, the whole issue melts into air.
Of course, that's just strcmp( ), which we all know and love from infancy onward. Some random function foo( ) that my pothead coworker dreams up is another matter. Still, I have, after all, seen things like that before, and there should certainly be an explanatory comment in the header file.
You can certainly define a macro
#define streq(a,b) (strcmp((a),(b))==0)
. . . but IMHO that kind of syntactic sugar misses the point of c. Next thing you know, you'll be defining even worse things . . .
#define begin { #define end } #define then/* pfft! */
You mean you know of a skyscraper that was completely evolved from scratch? One where wild animals were let loose on a set of raw materials at close to their lowest form, and through almost completely random action, along with natural selection and survival of the fittest, produced a completed building?
Just one? Hell, right across the river in Boston there's a slew of 'em:)
I had a book of his when I was learning C, but I threw it away because so few of the examples would compile. The book was specifically written for the compiler I had, but that shouldn't matter much anyway with most code. I mean, you know, ANSI and all that. I'm reminded of O. S. Card's comments about his generally horrifying experiences editing programming books.
OTOH, I know some sensible people who've liked other Schildt books a lot.
It didn't make sense to me for the first couple of years either, but now I can't live without it.
I agree that he sure has his off days. Actually, I don't like anything of his that I've heard from before Rain Dogs. Hmmm . . .
-j
The road to Hell is paved w/ good intentions.
on
Salon buys The Well
·
· Score: 1
Geocities
Didja ever notice how much "geocities" looks like "atrocities"? Just a thought.
Believe me, Salon will not make the same mistakes.
That's what they all say:)
Some companies don't make those mistakes, but simply knowing history is not enough to avoid repeating it. For example, everybody knows what happened in Germany in the thirties and forties, and you can bet your life that no western democracy will ever again elect an Austrian guy with a funny little mustache and an armband.
Good luck. I like Salon. I'm even optimistic about this.
Then Red Hat publically admits that they bought Slashdot last year (the truth is that all the anti-Red Hat zealots on Slashdot are actually Red Hat employees making their valid critics look like silly, paranoid buttheads due to the association with the great mass of, well . . . silly, paranoid buttheads).
Then we find out who's really behind all of this -- the secret Dark Lord pulling the strings at Red Hat, Slashdot, and the WELL -- could it be . . . yes, it could! But . . . could it really be . . .
Okay, if it had never been said before, I could see a high score for it; but it's been said again and again and again. Not only that, but it's usually been said a lot more coherently and persuasively than this. A smug toddler telling us all how the world works is not, like, you know . . . big news on Slashdot, is it?
If "free" is a problem, why not "freed software"? (As in "freed from restrictions.")
Well, you said it right there: If you have to explain it to somebody with a stupid nick on Slashdot (me), it ain't gonna play in Peoria.
Also, "freed from restrictions" could easily be misinterpreted as cracked/"liberated from copy protection", um, you know what I mean? There's enough confusion already.
The more I think about "communitarian", the more I like it. "Free software" requires a manual; "open source" leaves out too much; "open code" is gibberish -- but "communitarian" describes the part we all agree on. I really dig it. Too bad nobody will ever use it but me. -j
The OED is descriptive, not prescriptive. Nothing goes in the OED but what they've got at least one citation from common usage. Well, usage in print, anyway. Common spoken language is so damn friable (or ephemeral, or vaporous, or whatever -- I'm sleepy) that it's just not practical to worry about it.
The OED is a vast snapshot of an eternally moving target. They are not now, and have never been, in the business of defining the language -- and rightly so. Or "rightly not", or whatever. You know what I mean:) They're just trying to keep up with it. By the time they finish an edition, the language has changed out from under them and they're already 'way behind schedule on the next edition. Talk about job security!:) BTW, you know Tolkien worked on the OED? -j
The only problem with "Communist" is that it's wildly innacurate. Other than that, it's okay.
:)
-j
"rich latencies"?!?!, "Communitarian Software"
on
The Power of Openness
·
· Score: 1
. . . the rich latencies of this Internet-facilitated phenomenon may never develop if a new kind of networking leadership does not coalesce . ..
Jesus Christ. It's actually a meaningful sentence, but once I've gone to the effort of parsing that kind of crap, I damn well expect it to evaluate to a thought that couldn't have been expressed in what people disingenuously call "plain english". Uhhh, heh heh heh . . . let's try that again:
What's with all the arglebargle?
Heh. Well, anyway, howzabout this for a notion: An advocacy group which sincerely tries to represent the community-of-many-names (free software, open source, open code, hackers, etc. ad nauseam) rather than just representing itself. Nah. It'd never fly.
Here's another thought: Anybody want to call it "Communitarian Software"? It weasels around the speech-vs.-beer problem, yet it still puts the emphasis where it belongs.
We can't have such an important development as . . . open source . . . without having SOMEONE IN CHARGE.
True, but he just announced yesterday that he's not actually quitting -- he's just taking a vacation. Of course, that doesn't excuse your decision to discuss the issue in public rather than privately emailing those-who-are-in-charge.
I thought (probably delusionally, but never mind:) that I'd coined that . . . I've been using it sporadically on slashdot for a couple of months, hoping that it would catch on. It wouldn't surprise me at all if somebody else came up with it first. It certainly fits in with GNU naming practices, like Gnumeric and whatnot.
I like "Lignux" because it lets me get the "GNU" in there without hammering anybody over the head with it in print, and without having to change the way I pronounce it. No extra syllables! Very important.
-j
Duh, that was awk, dammit. forgot to mention.
on
Slate Takes on Linux
·
· Score: 1
I saved this page here on slashdot to a text file and ran it through the flollowing (please pardon the lack of indentation):
// { for ( i = 1; i = NF; ++i ) if ( tolower( $i ) ~/fud/ ) ++fud_ct; }
END { print( " The word \"fud\" appeared " fud_ct " times." ); }
. . . and got the following:
The word "fud" appeared 34 times.
Only thirty-four times? Now, if you ask me, that's a pretty damn low level of paranoia, as slashdot goes. Way to go, guys! Maybe fear of moderation is having a positive effect.
What he said. I might not express it in such strong terms -- the term "censorship" is a lightning rod for idiotic hair-splitting -- but he's on the right track.
It seems like no great loss if dumb bullshit gets moderated out of existence -- but don't forget: "Dumb bullshit", in human speech, generally translates as "unpopular and/or unfamiliar".
Slashdot Mirror
the Democratic Party, which is dominated by leftists with outdated social theories that have been disproven by the collapse of Soviet Russia and the Eastern Block?
Um, no. That "Democratic Party" exists only in the fertile imaginations of right-wing propagandists -- and, unfortunately, in the imaginations of those who believe that nonsense even though (IMHO) they should know better.
-j
the whole anti trust thing goes against the basic nature of a free market
True. The "basic nature of a free market" is for some areas of the market to coagulate into monopolies. What happens then is that prices rise, quality plummets, and society as a whole loses in a big way.
The gov't has no damn business in the business world and should get the hell out.
They tried that already. It brought us the Great Depression. Nowadays they're a bit more realistic about it. If you're not selling apples on a street corner, you can thank a lot of people for that (including, no doubt, yourself), but the SEC is not the least of them.
A pure free-market economy operates with just about as much concern for the common good (read "national interest") as a pure centralized economy. As Bill Buckley said, "As ideals approach reality, the cost becomes prohibitive". The free market is no less an ideal than Maoism. It's not as crazy as Maoism, but it's still an ideal. It assumes that reality as a far simpler thing than it ever actually is.
The government has a legitimate interest in trying to avoid monopolies and depressions, just as it has a legitimate interest in maintaining a military. I'm not so fond of the military, you're not so fond of anti-trust legislation, and other people aren't so fond of other things. Realistically, you have to weigh one thing against another and optimize. Imagine if Microsoft manages to kill off the rest of the domestic software industry. Next, imagine how long the US will remain competitive in the world market, against nations which can still produce quality software at a reasonable price. Nations whose networks don't crash. Nations whose navies can go cruising along day after day without being towed back into port because of a divide-by-zero error in a database program. I'm really not joking here.
There's also a lot to be said WRT the notion that a corporation is legally equivalent to a human being, and has rights and so forth. Not everybody sees a whole lot of sense in that.
-j
obviously you are special, and only other people have problems.
Erm . . . I really sounded like a jackass there, didn't I? Sorry. I do think that not enough people are willing to bear in mind that a pointer is a sharp pointy thing that you shouldn't carry when you're running. C is a language that will merrily bite you if you don't keep a close eye on it. (Actually, that was exactly the point that I was replying to, wasn't it?) IMHO people who get hurt with it are probably not looking at it the right way. A different language isn't just a different syntax; it's a different mentality. At any rate, running off the end of an array in basic or whatever is a bug, too.
Obviously, as you point out, people a lot smarter and more experienced than I make these mistakes. It may be that I'm in denial, or merely that I was drunk when I wrote that post
See the Fuzz Revisited paper. The most common programming errors in the standard unix utilities which they tested were pointer errors and array access errors.
I didn't read that, but I remember reading about it, and IIRC GNU utilities came out looking a lot better than most. This was gratifying, because GNU has these coding guidelines somewhere, which (among other things, like their barbaric indenting style
The more I think about it, the more I think I'm just defending C because I like it so much on an emotional level. So, as in all things, YMMV and use what works best for what you use it for.
-j
On the positive side:
It is more productive than writing in assembler.
It is relatively easy to write a compiler for.
It is nearly universal.
You forgot one: From the user's standpoint, it's an enormously elegant, graceful, pleasant, powerful language. People like it. It's clear and simple, minimal and (for the most part) sufficient. It's a beautiful piece of software.
It is not typesafe.
You mean casts? Hmmm. Yeah, I'll go along with you there. They're good to have, but they're unsafe.
It doesn't check array access.
It doesn't have automatic memory management.
True -- you get to do those jobs
It has pointers, a source of constant errors.
I've never understood why people say that. You just have to know what you're doing, which is a requirement anyway. Anybody who gets "constant errors" with pointers, would probably get constant errors with references or psychic data levelling or anything else.
It doesn't support functional programming.
Well, that's probably true, but since I have NFI what functional programming is, I haven't often felt the absence as a loss
It doesn't support object-oriented programming.
True. There are people who say that you can do OOP in C, but IMHHHO they don't grok OOP. For one example, much of what is implied by inheritance just doesn't translate into C in any way that I can imagine. I don't see a need for OOP in C, though, because we already have OOP in C, a.k.a. C++, which out of the two is my preferred language most days. For some (relatively trivial) uses, I really think C++ is overkill, and for others it's not efficient enough (kernels etc.) -- but day in and day out it's a really damn nice language to program computers with. I like the fact that C has thrived (thriven?) separately from C++. It's cool to have both.
-j
One of the common initial implementation goals of new general purpose programming languages is to bootstrap the language in itself.
Not if it's interpreted. You sure could write a java compiler in java (in fact it's probably been done) but I don't think you'd want a JVM written in java. I mean, it's turtles all the way down, you know?
Your point is valid, though, as a general observation. It's a good acid test of a language. If you can't write its compiler in it (or if the developers just don't *want* to
A) It's comparable in intent to C. In that case, the comparison is fair, and it damn well better be good for writing compilers. Ada is probably an example if this, right? I tend to think that Pascal is also, but I really don't have any feel for what the original intent of Pascal was. The dialects I've used (all Borland) smelled a lot like C, but with clunky keywords and assignments inexplicably refusing to return values the way any red-blooded expression ought to. Then again, maybe it grew that way in an attempt to compete with C. Um, I guess nobody actually cares one way or the other
B) It's not at all comparable in intent to C. In that case, it's probably excused from the compiler implementation requirement, but it's also meaningless to say it's "better" than C. Perl is an example of this second category. Saying Perl is "better" or "worse" than C is like saying cats are "better" or "worse" than dogs -- not only is it meaningless, but nobody with half a brain gives a rat's ass either way. I mean, what are you going to do about it? Pass laws? Run for congress on the C platform?
-j
You would get far fewer errors, I think, with an AreStringsEqual or even a strequ function, rather than using strcmp when all you care about is equivalence.
If that's what yer into, IMHO use C++, which is a cool language for a whole lot of reasons, not just that kinda stuff.
I don't agree with the "far fewer errors" thing, though I certainly never do !strcmp( ). The problem with that isn't that people forget what strcmp( ) does, but rather that it's easy not to notice the !. I think anybody who's been writing C code for more than a month has come to terms with what strcmp( ) does. Some people always put whitespace around ! (except in !=, obviously), and I respect that a lot. In this particular case, though, strcmp( ) == 0 is far harder to miss, and IMHO it expresses the intent better. Since strcmp() does not return a boolean value, IMHO there's no good reason to use a "boolean value" idiom to deal with it. Once you get past the boolean thing, the whole issue melts into air.
Of course, that's just strcmp( ), which we all know and love from infancy onward. Some random function foo( ) that my pothead coworker dreams up is another matter. Still, I have, after all, seen things like that before, and there should certainly be an explanatory comment in the header file.
You can certainly define a macro
#define streq(a,b) (strcmp((a),(b))==0)
. . . but IMHO that kind of syntactic sugar misses the point of c. Next thing you know, you'll be defining even worse things . . .
#define begin {
#define end }
#define then
. . . or, worst of all . . .
#define LPSTR char *
aaaarrrrgggghhhh!
-j
You mean you know of a skyscraper that was completely evolved from scratch? One where wild animals were let loose on a set of raw materials at close to their lowest form, and through almost completely random action, along with natural selection and survival of the fittest, produced a completed building?
Just one? Hell, right across the river in Boston there's a slew of 'em
If you have, I suggest you alert the media.
I think they know already.
-j
for some reason those have slacked off recently.
Maybe they all realized it's a dumb thing to argue about.
-j
Seriously, don't knock evolution. Given ten million years of hard knocks, "all bugs are shallow".
-j
I had a book of his when I was learning C, but I threw it away because so few of the examples would compile. The book was specifically written for the compiler I had, but that shouldn't matter much anyway with most code. I mean, you know, ANSI and all that. I'm reminded of O. S. Card's comments about his generally horrifying experiences editing programming books.
OTOH, I know some sensible people who've liked other Schildt books a lot.
-j
They hired a lot of programmers so as to make intelligent[???] ircbot like programs to respond to posts.
Uh . . .
I do believe that on some days they unleash a libertarianbot, though.
-j
Rain Dogs? What's that all about?
It didn't make sense to me for the first couple of years either, but now I can't live without it.
I agree that he sure has his off days. Actually, I don't like anything of his that I've heard from before Rain Dogs. Hmmm . . .
-j
Geocities
Didja ever notice how much "geocities" looks like "atrocities"? Just a thought.
Believe me, Salon will not make the same mistakes.
That's what they all say
Some companies don't make those mistakes, but simply knowing history is not enough to avoid repeating it. For example, everybody knows what happened in Germany in the thirties and forties, and you can bet your life that no western democracy will ever again elect an Austrian guy with a funny little mustache and an armband.
Good luck. I like Salon. I'm even optimistic about this.
-j
heh.
Then Red Hat publically admits that they bought Slashdot last year (the truth is that all the anti-Red Hat zealots on Slashdot are actually Red Hat employees making their valid critics look like silly, paranoid buttheads due to the association with the great mass of, well . . . silly, paranoid buttheads).
Then we find out who's really behind all of this -- the secret Dark Lord pulling the strings at Red Hat, Slashdot, and the WELL -- could it be . . . yes, it could! But . . . could it really be . . .
Cher?!?!
Yep.
You heard it here first.
-j
Jesus christ.
Okay, if it had never been said before, I could see a high score for it; but it's been said again and again and again. Not only that, but it's usually been said a lot more coherently and persuasively than this. A smug toddler telling us all how the world works is not, like, you know . . . big news on Slashdot, is it?
Oh, well.
-j
If "free" is a problem, why not "freed software"? (As in "freed from restrictions.")
Well, you said it right there: If you have to explain it to somebody with a stupid nick on Slashdot (me), it ain't gonna play in Peoria.
Also, "freed from restrictions" could easily be misinterpreted as cracked/"liberated from copy protection", um, you know what I mean? There's enough confusion already.
The more I think about "communitarian", the more I like it. "Free software" requires a manual; "open source" leaves out too much; "open code" is gibberish -- but "communitarian" describes the part we all agree on. I really dig it. Too bad nobody will ever use it but me.
-j
The OED is descriptive, not prescriptive. Nothing goes in the OED but what they've got at least one citation from common usage. Well, usage in print, anyway. Common spoken language is so damn friable (or ephemeral, or vaporous, or whatever -- I'm sleepy) that it's just not practical to worry about it.
The OED is a vast snapshot of an eternally moving target. They are not now, and have never been, in the business of defining the language -- and rightly so. Or "rightly not", or whatever. You know what I mean
-j
The only problem with "Communist" is that it's wildly innacurate. Other than that, it's okay.
:)
-j
. . . the rich latencies of this Internet-facilitated phenomenon may never develop if a new kind of networking leadership does not coalesce . .
Jesus Christ. It's actually a meaningful sentence, but once I've gone to the effort of parsing that kind of crap, I damn well expect it to evaluate to a thought that couldn't have been expressed in what people disingenuously call "plain english". Uhhh, heh heh heh . . . let's try that again:
What's with all the arglebargle?
Heh. Well, anyway, howzabout this for a notion: An advocacy group which sincerely tries to represent the community-of-many-names (free software, open source, open code, hackers, etc. ad nauseam) rather than just representing itself. Nah. It'd never fly.
Here's another thought: Anybody want to call it "Communitarian Software"? It weasels around the speech-vs.-beer problem, yet it still puts the emphasis where it belongs.
-j
We can't have such an important development as . . . open source . . . without having SOMEONE IN CHARGE.
True, but he just announced yesterday that he's not actually quitting -- he's just taking a vacation. Of course, that doesn't excuse your decision to discuss the issue in public rather than privately emailing those-who-are-in-charge.
:)
-j
I thought (probably delusionally, but never mind
I like "Lignux" because it lets me get the "GNU" in there without hammering anybody over the head with it in print, and without having to change the way I pronounce it. No extra syllables! Very important.
-j
duh.
-j
I saved this page here on slashdot to a text file and ran it through the flollowing (please pardon the lack of indentation):
// {
for ( i = 1; i = NF; ++i )
if ( tolower( $i ) ~
}
END {
print( " The word \"fud\" appeared " fud_ct " times." );
}
. . . and got the following:
The word "fud" appeared 34 times.
Only thirty-four times? Now, if you ask me, that's a pretty damn low level of paranoia, as slashdot goes. Way to go, guys! Maybe fear of moderation is having a positive effect.
-j
Rob is restricting access to comments.
What he said. I might not express it in such strong terms -- the term "censorship" is a lightning rod for idiotic hair-splitting -- but he's on the right track.
It seems like no great loss if dumb bullshit gets moderated out of existence -- but don't forget: "Dumb bullshit", in human speech, generally translates as "unpopular and/or unfamiliar".
-j
This is the stupidest damn thing I've ever heard of.
You obviously never read anything by E. M. Forster.
:)
-j