Curiously, in C++, that definition would be invalid, even if the underlying implementation of NULL was in fact not 0.
C++ has several rather odd requirements for NULL that basically come down to the following:
NULL is defined as 0, no discussion. 0, as a constant, has special behavior allowing it to be implicitly cast to any pointer type, where it will be a "NULL value" that is distinct from any valid pointer, but is not guaranteed to take any particular bit pattern. Testing a pointer in a conditional, or casting it to bool implicitly or explicitly, results in true if the pointer is not a "NULL value" or false if it is.
The end result is that you can end up treating 0 as NULL, and treating a null pointer as 0, right up until you decide to muck about with direct memory access, at which point that all goes out the window.
Essentially, int *x = NULL; if(x) fail(); is guaranteed to not fail, while int *x = NULL; int y; memcpy(&y, &x, sizeof(y)); if(y) fail(); is not guaranteed to not fail (even if x and y are the same size.) Also, NULL == 0 is always true, and int *x = NULL; x == 0 is also always true.
As I understand it, C doesn't pin things down quite this firmly, but in the end it gives some of the same guarantees. I suspect that definition of NULL isn't technically conforming to the C language spec, though I wouldn't bet money on it - I don't know C minutiae as well as I do C++.
Now you know more about NULL in C++ than you ever really wanted to.:D
Really, it all comes down to neither BSD nor GPL being strictly freer. They both prevent some freedoms in other to preserve others - they've simply chosen mutually exclusive freedoms. BSD prioritizes the freedom of the end user, GPL prioritizes the freedom of the source code.
It's just that they both have restrictions also, in one sense or another.
What freedom do you get with the 'truly free' BSD? You get the 'freedom' to restrict people further down the line so that they can't modify or redistribute the software. Ever wonder what people 'down the line' think of this truly free BSD software? Oh wait... they didn't get any. By the time the software got to them it wasn't BSD anymore, it wasn't free anymore.
They think "hey, this product is pretty good! I wonder why they can offer it so cheaply? They must have gotten some really good licenses for it!"
I run a game studio. I'm writing a game. Right now, the build process involves eleven different open-source libraries, with various LGPL, BSD, and zlib/libpng licenses.
I'm not taking the open-source libraries and closing them - I don't have modified versions of any of them. I'm building something separate, on top of those libraries. Yes, I'm "closing" the BSD libraries because I'm not distributing source, but why should anyone mind? I'm not modifying them - there's nothing of interest for me to distribute.
Now, if you think that I shouldn't be allowed to write a game that uses open-source libraries without open-sourcing my game, then I suppose that is your right - "if you're not contributing, we're not going to give us our toys". Fine, then. But sometimes, having a good shoulder to stand on can produce flat-out better software.
However, if we start assuming that the courts are flawed and their decisions shouldn't be trusted, you open up another huge can of worms. Why would someone not be liable for court fees, but still liable for jail term/fines? That's honestly ridiculous.
The only thing we can do here is trust the courts, and base our financial penalties off court decisions. If the courts make mistakes - which they will, inevitably - there's not really any way we can fix that from the position of "who pays court fees".
Also, your logic is flawed. "Gets litigation brought against them" is not the same as "loses a lawsuit". If you get litigation brought against you, and you win, you may very well end up *getting* paid.
Yeah they did. They could not break the law. And if they broke the law, and didn't bother putting up much of a defense because they knew they were guilty and didn't want to waste anyone's time, they wouldn't have to pay much.
Loser pays the winner the cost of the loser's lawyer fees. (As well as their own lawyer fees, obviously.)
If the winner had to fork over ten million to win, and the loser paid ten thousand, then the winner gets ten thousand of it back. If the loser paid ten million and still lost, and the winner could only afford ten thousand, congrats, mr. winner now has $9,990,000.
I'm sure it's horribly flawed in some way. But it's also beautifully poetic.
If it's buoyant, watertight, and has an appropriate center of gravity, then it'll usually right itself if it capsizes. If it's equipped with some device to "flip it over" on the off chance that it doesn't do so automatically, it could easily make it the entire way - the only risk would be damage from storms or running out of power.
The amount of energy transmitted by a standard house microwave dish is minimal, and the nature of microwave-transparent materials is that they'll absorb virtually none of that energy. No risk whatsoever, at least microwave-related.
Personally, I don't actually agree. They are equally awful in different ways - yes, the Republicans are driving this country into the ground economically, but the Democrats are trying to eliminate any possible way of fixing it in the future.
Democrats want to increase government spending and lower taxes, in that order. Republicans, on the other hand, want to lower taxes and increase government spending, in that order.
If that's not enough, there's other issues they differ on. Republicans are in favor of important useful rights like firearm ownership, and strongly against dangerous inhuman practices like abortion. Democrats, however, are in favor of important useful rights like abortion, and strongly against dangerous inhuman practices like firearm ownership.
On all other points they're pretty much the same though.
"Should" according to what? In the case of Gamestop, at least, it's pretty trivially clear that Gamestop shouldn't, largely because nobody has driven them out of business by doing that yet - it must be less profitable than what Gamestop is currently doing. (I suspect actually unprofitable, because those profit margins would suck.)
In the case of power lines, there are many trickier issues. There are losses, for example - if you put one watt of power in, you don't get one watt out. There's maintenance, which is actually pretty significant considering the scale and nowhere near easy. And, of course, there's the fact that makes the entire thing incredibly hard to figure out, which is that it's a monopoly and figuring out the "right" pricing for monopolies is a hideous bitch.
And, from what I know of the payment system, they do indeed pay more during peak times than they do off peak times.
On our current scale, supply is only limited because they haven't built more power plants. It's not like we're hurting for space to put nuclear reactors, and it's not like we're hurting for nuclear reactor fuel. They're just expensive, and some people think they're evil.
Eventually you might be able to say "we can't generate more power", but we're nowhere near there and won't be for decades even with the most pessimistic predictions.
Our supply is limited, not by physics or any sort of universal constant, but simply by the fact that we haven't built more supply.
While high demand does cause blackouts, there's another way to phrase it:
Insufficient supply causes blackouts.
It's not the consumer's fault that they're asking for too much power, it's fundamentally more the producer's fault for not providing it. Or, at the very least, equally the producer's fault.
Because the power companies are providing a service, namely, the transmission lines.
Why would you find it fair to sell used games to Gamestop for $1 per game, and buy games for $20 per game? Same reason - because Gamestop provides a service, and pays money for the right to provide it (in inventory space, real estate, and employee wages.)
You're still arguing based on gut feeling and hyperbole. "Well, I don't think it would be useful. And people might get killed! Therefore it must be bad."
I agree - if little Bobby is hurt, it's probably thanks to his family. What makes you think guns would make this worse? If Bobby is old enough - let's say he's 8 or 9 - he should be getting some very basic training on firearm safety anyway, which means he's not likely to kill people accidentally but he can, in theory at least, defend himself.
Meanwhile, if big old Uncle Jake comes at him with a knife, and Bobby's only got a knife to defend himself, he's pretty much screwed.
Hypothetical situation obviously, but it's just as valid as your gut feelings.
Do you -really- feel the need for a citation to believe my claim that having loaded guns around in situations where couples attack eachothers (for whatever reason) is unlikely to be helpful ?
Do you *really* feel the need for a citation to believe my claim that common weapon carrying would cause people to be, on average, more civil to each other, and less likely to attack each other in rage in general?
Well, obviously, you do. And, yes, in that case, I do too.
Guns are pretty damn deadly, but it turns out knives are also, and the vast majority of houses have an ample supply of knives. Banning one weapon doesn't help all that much.
Basically, yes, chances are very good that each individual person will not save anyone by carrying a firearm around. But chances are even lower than each individual person will cause an accident due to easy availability of firearms. (And I also highly suspect that chances are lower that that same person will kill someone in a rage.)
You're right, it is a long-term thing, and it's a case where people worry about the obvious things without considering the more subtle ones. People want to control whatever they possibly can, and when they hear "gun" they think "my little Bobby could be shot by that gun, let's ban guns". They don't think "my little Bobby could be saved by a guy defending him when Bobby gets attacked by a guy wielding a broken bottle/knife/rock/etc", and, I mean, I can't blame them, because it's more of an stretch . . . but from what I've seen, it turns out the second situation is a lot more common than the first.
We can define the relationships between charge and current and between flux and voltage. (charge as an integral of current, flux as an integral of voltage over time)
Pretty much the only objection I have to this is the idea of "ignorable murders". My arguments aren't based around "I think I deserve to be safer", they're based around "what causes the least harm/most good to humanity in general". I don't know how large your town is - I'm going to guess it's small because it's peaceful, so let's pull a number out of a hat and say it's 10,000 people. In that case the statistics you listed is one death every two years, and, honestly, one death every two years is at least worth a little debate.
(Yes, numbers basically made up, I'm just making a comment on "completely ignorable".)
The other objection I have is:
Having more guns around wouldn't help with those. (infact it'd likely make it worse)
That is true, but as I mentioned in a different comment, that doesn't really change the conclusion I was drawing (since, obviously, the chance of stopping a murder/burglary/rape/attempted-conquering-of-the-world-by-aliens increases by the same factor.)
I'm not quite sure what logic you're trying to follow here. Are you saying that people should [i]not[/i] be allowed to defend themselves? Because if so, I don't want to live in any country that you have any ability to set laws in.
Well, now you're getting into both philosophy and a very curious game theory area. For example, if the robber knew that you couldn't possibly have a real gun, waving a plastic gun in his face would be unlikely to do much . . . while if the robber thought there was a 10% chance of your gun being real, then plastic ones would be largely ineffective and (I suspect) real ones would be used more often with more fatal results.
However, as tough as statistics for the previous debate were to get, statistics for this one are barely even imaginable. I don't even know where you'd start with this, send a thousand hookers through parks at midnight, with various levels of fake guns, and see which of them get raped and/or murdered?
There is an argument against fake guns, though - if people grow up around fake guns, they might start to believe that all guns are fake, leading to a series of inevitable and darkly hilarious"hey look I found Jim's fake gun! Watch me pretend to shoot myself!" Darwin moments. I believe this is one of the arguments used for making fake guns brighly-colored and easily-recognizable. Now, how valid is this argument, and how often will this happen?
Man, I have no fucking clue.
I've been largely arguing against bad logic here - the people saying "omg guns kill people! ban guns" and the like. Actually weighing the relative values . . . well, that's tough. Good luck.
On the other hand, combining this and this suggests that, if you took US crime statistics and imported it directly into Germany's population numbers, you would have approximately 380,000 violent crimes, of which slightly under 110,000 are committed with assistance of a firearm. Leaving 270,000 violent crimes if firearms vanished and so did every crime ever committed with use of a gun, while Germany actually, apparently, had around 211,000, as you said. Almost a 30% difference.
Perhaps the two countries are different in more than just population? Nah. Couldn't be.
Also, I'm not arguing that easy accessibility to guns doesn't also make some crimes more likely. (You'll notice that this debate started with someone making a claim that accidental gun-related deaths vastly outstripped any useful use of guns. This new point, whether guns are actually an improvement or not, is a point I haven't touched on before.) I do think that it's a net profit, but it's extremely hard to come up with meaningful arguments on either side due simply to the impossibility of a good test.
If the criminal's walking up with a baseball bat, and the victim pulls a gun, I suspect the criminal would just run away. Yes, I imagine there are cases where having a gun would cause the victim to be killed when they wouldn't be otherwise - but I highly doubt that's the majority of cases.
Naturally, of course, neither of us has any real evidence for these points.
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Curiously, in C++, that definition would be invalid, even if the underlying implementation of NULL was in fact not 0.
:D
C++ has several rather odd requirements for NULL that basically come down to the following:
NULL is defined as 0, no discussion.
0, as a constant, has special behavior allowing it to be implicitly cast to any pointer type, where it will be a "NULL value" that is distinct from any valid pointer, but is not guaranteed to take any particular bit pattern.
Testing a pointer in a conditional, or casting it to bool implicitly or explicitly, results in true if the pointer is not a "NULL value" or false if it is.
The end result is that you can end up treating 0 as NULL, and treating a null pointer as 0, right up until you decide to muck about with direct memory access, at which point that all goes out the window.
Essentially, int *x = NULL; if(x) fail(); is guaranteed to not fail, while int *x = NULL; int y; memcpy(&y, &x, sizeof(y)); if(y) fail(); is not guaranteed to not fail (even if x and y are the same size.) Also, NULL == 0 is always true, and int *x = NULL; x == 0 is also always true.
As I understand it, C doesn't pin things down quite this firmly, but in the end it gives some of the same guarantees. I suspect that definition of NULL isn't technically conforming to the C language spec, though I wouldn't bet money on it - I don't know C minutiae as well as I do C++.
Now you know more about NULL in C++ than you ever really wanted to.
Really, it all comes down to neither BSD nor GPL being strictly freer. They both prevent some freedoms in other to preserve others - they've simply chosen mutually exclusive freedoms. BSD prioritizes the freedom of the end user, GPL prioritizes the freedom of the source code.
It's just that they both have restrictions also, in one sense or another.
They think "hey, this product is pretty good! I wonder why they can offer it so cheaply? They must have gotten some really good licenses for it!"
I run a game studio. I'm writing a game. Right now, the build process involves eleven different open-source libraries, with various LGPL, BSD, and zlib/libpng licenses.
I'm not taking the open-source libraries and closing them - I don't have modified versions of any of them. I'm building something separate, on top of those libraries. Yes, I'm "closing" the BSD libraries because I'm not distributing source, but why should anyone mind? I'm not modifying them - there's nothing of interest for me to distribute.
Now, if you think that I shouldn't be allowed to write a game that uses open-source libraries without open-sourcing my game, then I suppose that is your right - "if you're not contributing, we're not going to give us our toys". Fine, then. But sometimes, having a good shoulder to stand on can produce flat-out better software.
However, if we start assuming that the courts are flawed and their decisions shouldn't be trusted, you open up another huge can of worms. Why would someone not be liable for court fees, but still liable for jail term/fines? That's honestly ridiculous.
The only thing we can do here is trust the courts, and base our financial penalties off court decisions. If the courts make mistakes - which they will, inevitably - there's not really any way we can fix that from the position of "who pays court fees".
Also, your logic is flawed. "Gets litigation brought against them" is not the same as "loses a lawsuit". If you get litigation brought against you, and you win, you may very well end up *getting* paid.
Yeah they did. They could not break the law. And if they broke the law, and didn't bother putting up much of a defense because they knew they were guilty and didn't want to waste anyone's time, they wouldn't have to pay much.
What I've always liked:
Loser pays the winner the cost of the loser's lawyer fees. (As well as their own lawyer fees, obviously.)
If the winner had to fork over ten million to win, and the loser paid ten thousand, then the winner gets ten thousand of it back. If the loser paid ten million and still lost, and the winner could only afford ten thousand, congrats, mr. winner now has $9,990,000.
I'm sure it's horribly flawed in some way. But it's also beautifully poetic.
If it's buoyant, watertight, and has an appropriate center of gravity, then it'll usually right itself if it capsizes. If it's equipped with some device to "flip it over" on the off chance that it doesn't do so automatically, it could easily make it the entire way - the only risk would be damage from storms or running out of power.
The amount of energy transmitted by a standard house microwave dish is minimal, and the nature of microwave-transparent materials is that they'll absorb virtually none of that energy. No risk whatsoever, at least microwave-related.
Personally, I don't actually agree. They are equally awful in different ways - yes, the Republicans are driving this country into the ground economically, but the Democrats are trying to eliminate any possible way of fixing it in the future.
I think they both rather need to be eradicated.
Oh yes, the difference is quite simple.
Democrats want to increase government spending and lower taxes, in that order. Republicans, on the other hand, want to lower taxes and increase government spending, in that order.
If that's not enough, there's other issues they differ on. Republicans are in favor of important useful rights like firearm ownership, and strongly against dangerous inhuman practices like abortion. Democrats, however, are in favor of important useful rights like abortion, and strongly against dangerous inhuman practices like firearm ownership.
On all other points they're pretty much the same though.
"Should" according to what? In the case of Gamestop, at least, it's pretty trivially clear that Gamestop shouldn't, largely because nobody has driven them out of business by doing that yet - it must be less profitable than what Gamestop is currently doing. (I suspect actually unprofitable, because those profit margins would suck.)
In the case of power lines, there are many trickier issues. There are losses, for example - if you put one watt of power in, you don't get one watt out. There's maintenance, which is actually pretty significant considering the scale and nowhere near easy. And, of course, there's the fact that makes the entire thing incredibly hard to figure out, which is that it's a monopoly and figuring out the "right" pricing for monopolies is a hideous bitch.
And, from what I know of the payment system, they do indeed pay more during peak times than they do off peak times.
On our current scale, supply is only limited because they haven't built more power plants. It's not like we're hurting for space to put nuclear reactors, and it's not like we're hurting for nuclear reactor fuel. They're just expensive, and some people think they're evil.
Eventually you might be able to say "we can't generate more power", but we're nowhere near there and won't be for decades even with the most pessimistic predictions.
Our supply is limited, not by physics or any sort of universal constant, but simply by the fact that we haven't built more supply.
While high demand does cause blackouts, there's another way to phrase it:
Insufficient supply causes blackouts.
It's not the consumer's fault that they're asking for too much power, it's fundamentally more the producer's fault for not providing it. Or, at the very least, equally the producer's fault.
Because the power companies are providing a service, namely, the transmission lines.
Why would you find it fair to sell used games to Gamestop for $1 per game, and buy games for $20 per game? Same reason - because Gamestop provides a service, and pays money for the right to provide it (in inventory space, real estate, and employee wages.)
You're still arguing based on gut feeling and hyperbole. "Well, I don't think it would be useful. And people might get killed! Therefore it must be bad."
I agree - if little Bobby is hurt, it's probably thanks to his family. What makes you think guns would make this worse? If Bobby is old enough - let's say he's 8 or 9 - he should be getting some very basic training on firearm safety anyway, which means he's not likely to kill people accidentally but he can, in theory at least, defend himself.
Meanwhile, if big old Uncle Jake comes at him with a knife, and Bobby's only got a knife to defend himself, he's pretty much screwed.
Hypothetical situation obviously, but it's just as valid as your gut feelings.
Do you -really- feel the need for a citation to believe my claim that having loaded guns around in situations where couples attack eachothers (for whatever reason) is unlikely to be helpful ?
Do you *really* feel the need for a citation to believe my claim that common weapon carrying would cause people to be, on average, more civil to each other, and less likely to attack each other in rage in general?
Well, obviously, you do. And, yes, in that case, I do too.
Guns are pretty damn deadly, but it turns out knives are also, and the vast majority of houses have an ample supply of knives. Banning one weapon doesn't help all that much.
Basically, yes, chances are very good that each individual person will not save anyone by carrying a firearm around. But chances are even lower than each individual person will cause an accident due to easy availability of firearms. (And I also highly suspect that chances are lower that that same person will kill someone in a rage.)
You're right, it is a long-term thing, and it's a case where people worry about the obvious things without considering the more subtle ones. People want to control whatever they possibly can, and when they hear "gun" they think "my little Bobby could be shot by that gun, let's ban guns". They don't think "my little Bobby could be saved by a guy defending him when Bobby gets attacked by a guy wielding a broken bottle/knife/rock/etc", and, I mean, I can't blame them, because it's more of an stretch . . . but from what I've seen, it turns out the second situation is a lot more common than the first.
If law was all-powerful, we wouldn't have any worries about people tampering with voting machines, either.
Good systems do not rely on law to function.
Pretty much the only objection I have to this is the idea of "ignorable murders". My arguments aren't based around "I think I deserve to be safer", they're based around "what causes the least harm/most good to humanity in general". I don't know how large your town is - I'm going to guess it's small because it's peaceful, so let's pull a number out of a hat and say it's 10,000 people. In that case the statistics you listed is one death every two years, and, honestly, one death every two years is at least worth a little debate.
:D
(Yes, numbers basically made up, I'm just making a comment on "completely ignorable".)
The other objection I have is:
Having more guns around wouldn't help with those. (infact it'd likely make it worse)
[citation needed]
That is true, but as I mentioned in a different comment, that doesn't really change the conclusion I was drawing (since, obviously, the chance of stopping a murder/burglary/rape/attempted-conquering-of-the-world-by-aliens increases by the same factor.)
You may be entertained by this news story.
I don't know if it would work as well in a larger community, but I would personally be quite willing to live in such a community.
Then he should be arrested and tried for murder?
I'm not quite sure what logic you're trying to follow here. Are you saying that people should [i]not[/i] be allowed to defend themselves? Because if so, I don't want to live in any country that you have any ability to set laws in.
Well, now you're getting into both philosophy and a very curious game theory area. For example, if the robber knew that you couldn't possibly have a real gun, waving a plastic gun in his face would be unlikely to do much . . . while if the robber thought there was a 10% chance of your gun being real, then plastic ones would be largely ineffective and (I suspect) real ones would be used more often with more fatal results.
However, as tough as statistics for the previous debate were to get, statistics for this one are barely even imaginable. I don't even know where you'd start with this, send a thousand hookers through parks at midnight, with various levels of fake guns, and see which of them get raped and/or murdered?
There is an argument against fake guns, though - if people grow up around fake guns, they might start to believe that all guns are fake, leading to a series of inevitable and darkly hilarious"hey look I found Jim's fake gun! Watch me pretend to shoot myself!" Darwin moments. I believe this is one of the arguments used for making fake guns brighly-colored and easily-recognizable. Now, how valid is this argument, and how often will this happen?
Man, I have no fucking clue.
I've been largely arguing against bad logic here - the people saying "omg guns kill people! ban guns" and the like. Actually weighing the relative values . . . well, that's tough. Good luck.
On the other hand, combining this and this suggests that, if you took US crime statistics and imported it directly into Germany's population numbers, you would have approximately 380,000 violent crimes, of which slightly under 110,000 are committed with assistance of a firearm. Leaving 270,000 violent crimes if firearms vanished and so did every crime ever committed with use of a gun, while Germany actually, apparently, had around 211,000, as you said. Almost a 30% difference.
Perhaps the two countries are different in more than just population? Nah. Couldn't be.
Also, I'm not arguing that easy accessibility to guns doesn't also make some crimes more likely. (You'll notice that this debate started with someone making a claim that accidental gun-related deaths vastly outstripped any useful use of guns. This new point, whether guns are actually an improvement or not, is a point I haven't touched on before.) I do think that it's a net profit, but it's extremely hard to come up with meaningful arguments on either side due simply to the impossibility of a good test.
If the criminal's walking up with a baseball bat, and the victim pulls a gun, I suspect the criminal would just run away. Yes, I imagine there are cases where having a gun would cause the victim to be killed when they wouldn't be otherwise - but I highly doubt that's the majority of cases.
Naturally, of course, neither of us has any real evidence for these points.