You do if it's an iPhone. [...] Apple removed that screen [...] There is no option to place an emergency call on iPhones
No you don't, no they didn't, and yes there is.
Pretend it's an emergency and you're using someone else's iPhone. What's the first thing you'd do after getting the screen to turn on? Try doing that on someone else's iPhone and see what happens.
I'd wager you tried pressing the home button first thing, and, sure enough, if you do that with an iPhone running iOS 9 or iOS 10 you'll see the old unlock screen, including the "Emergency" button that gives you access to the owner's medical info and a keypad to dial out. That screen appears anytime an unregistered finger is used to press the home button. And the reason it doesn't appear for registered fingers (and why you're likely unaware that it was still there) is because there's no need for a special emergency screen when you can already use your registered finger to unlock the entire phone.
I suppose you would blame the road you were on for your car falling apart around you?
Lousy carriers are as common as lousy roads, which is why products should take them into account and deal with the problems they cause. If they fail to do so, then sure, the bad road/carrier shares some of the blame, but the product's design owns the lion's share of the blame.
P.S. This is NOT a backhanded way of saying iOS has it right. This is about tradeoffs. Google suffers in this area of their design to gain in other areas. Apple benefits in this area of their design at the cost of other areas. Neither approach is necessarily right, each approach will cater to different users, and each approach falls apart and excels in different ways.
until they get to a point where your entire monthly bill including internet is cheaper than just getting internet itself [...]
Some of them actually do that. Or did. Not sure if they still do.
I was on the phone with Suddenlink a few years back to reduce my subscription from their then-top Internet plan (no bundle) to a mid-tier plan (still no bundle) so I could save some money. The lady mentioned that I could "save $7 by bundling TV", which I understood to be the typical con game you're talking about. I said no, but she pushed back and insisted I'd save $7/mo. by bundling. I explained that I'd actually be paying more and that any amount for TV would be more than I wanted to pay. Finally, she just said, "The total bill will be $43/mo. for the bundle. Not $43 extra, $43 in total, whereas you'll be paying $50 for Internet by itself."
To say the least, I went for the bundle.
I can only assume they made money from someone else in the media distribution chain for keeping me subscribed. I never actually used my cable subscription at all (I hooked it up so guests could watch sports if they wanted to, which happened all of once, I think), but the special pricing lasted for about two years, saving me quite a bit. Of course, whenever the special pricing finally expired without much notice, I didn't realize it until after the fact, so that cost me around $30 for one month of the non-special price of the bundle, but still, it was a net savings.
Removing features simply because they're not used by everyone every single day never made sense to me. Even if it is something only a very small percentage of users use, so what?
There are costs for keeping features, other than the immediate cost to maintain the software itself. For instance, maybe keeping the feature...
...forces users to navigate through it or read past it to reach commonly-used features, thus getting in the way ...makes the software feel more complicated, decreasing satisfaction for most users ...simply distracts most users, wasting the finite amount of attention you get from them ...makes the software seem poorly maintained for not dropping support for something perceived as outdated
Mind you, I'm not espousing any of these (nor am I suggesting the list is exhaustive), but you need to remember that Chrome is not just code. For better or worse, it's a product. As a product, users have certain expectations, and those expectations oftentimes conflict with one another. It's Google's job to sort through the mess of contradictory expectations to make something that satisfies as many users as possible to the greater extent possible (for as cheaply as possible). Apparently they think that dropping these features will do that.
I have nothing to add or respond with, other than a sincere Thank You for taking the time to respond. The rest of us are talking out of our asses based on a few sentences or a paragraph we read as a summarization of the issue, so it's nice to have someone with an informed perspective actually chime in. Thanks again!
If what you took away from my post was that it was nothing more than a dick measuring contest, despite my statements to the contrary, that's a shame. I don't care which is larger. I was simply blown away at the notion that the coastlines may in any way be comparable, and I wanted to share my exploration of that topic with others here who might find the numbers are methodologies involved similarly fascinating.
Regardless of whether he's correct or not, I'm incredibly glad that Terje Mathisen made the claim he did, simply because it prompted me to discover something remarkable about Norway that otherwise I would've been unaware of, in much the same way that the point of my last post apparently went right by you.
I quite agree. In this situation, if you don't have enough to convict already, then how can it be a foregone conclusion? And if you do have enough to convict, then why do you need additional evidence? Convict him with what you have; don't use shady methods for procuring more evidence to try to make your case stronger.
I couldn't help but following your link after you said that, since it's one of those, "I knew Norway had a lot of coast, but THAT much?!" moments for me. I did want to point out that the numbers even at the link you shared are a bit incongruous, since they seem to vary quite a bit from source to source based on how they define a coast or shore (e.g. do they include freshwater or inland bodies of water? if they're measuring the actual coast (as opposed to the boundary of jurisdictional waters), are they measuring to a particular depth of tidal water, or are they measuring the shore as it's represented on a map? are overseas territories included in the country's total? ). For instance, here are some official numbers, most of which were pulled from the Wikipedia article you linked (I also grabbed numbers from other sources I've linked):
USA's coast: 19,924 km (World Factbook) or 133,312 km (World Resources Institute) or 153,646 km (NOAA)
All of which is to say, while I can't say with any certainty which has the longer coastline (not that it matters), it's indisputable that the overall point you were driving at--that Norway has a LOT of coast (particularly given its size) and that it impacts things in all sorts of ways that most of us may be unaware of--is both correct and inherently fascinating. Thanks for sharing the info!
ADDENDA: In case you're curious about the massive differences in the numbers...
The World Resource Institute's dataset was designed to be used for comparisons between countries. They talk at that link about the difficulty in producing useful numbers and in comparing numbers from different sources. To get around most of the issues they identified, they used a vectorization of the coastlines at a constant resolution (to ensure that no country benefitted from having a more detailed mapping than other countries) and didn't include overseas territories. As such, theirs are useful approximations for the purpose of comparisons and are relatively accurate as far as these sorts of measurements go, but for coastlines with lots of nooks and crannies (e.g. Norway's), their approximations may have a greater degree of error than they would for locations with simpler coastlines.
NOAA and Statistics Norway are, I believe, both official organizations, but I wasn't able to find much about the methodology that either used. NOAA mentions that it includes outlying territories, so that immediately inflates their numbers a bit. They also include the shorelines of the Great Lakes, which makes some sense given that they are boundary waters between the US and Canada, but some people may question their inclusion. Either way, it's probably safe to say that both NOAA and Statistics Norway are working with highly detailed maps when making their measurements, so they're likely to be closer to the true numbers than the World Resource Institute's, though it's difficult to compare them without adjusting for differences in methodology.
As for the CIA World Factbook, they don't list their methodology in a place I could find, but it's pretty clear from their numbers for landlocked countries that they're not including inland bodies of water. Given how much lower their numbers are than everyone else's, I'd wager they were calculated at a low resolution, or else they may simply measure at a set distance from the shore, effectively decreasing the resolution of their measurements significantly.
At the end of the day, it looks like the US' coastline may be slightly longer, but the country also benefits from being significantly larger. Ba
Basically, yup. The iPad Air 2 was effectively a prototype 9.7 inch iPad Pro, and bears more in common with the current 9.7 inch iPad Pro than it does with the new iPad, for exactly the reasons you specified.
To be fair, the iPad Air 2 remains a great machine, and by all indications that trend has continued into the Pro line. I still use my iPad Air 2 on a daily basis and have no plans to replace it anytime soon, given that it's still operating just as well today as the day that I bought it. But with a situation like mine leading to fewer sales, it makes sense that they'd back off on the specs a bit and offer people a more entry-level model to the line, that way they don't leave such a huge umbrella in their lineup that a competitor can easily work under.
Ruling that it's a "foregone conclusion" is exactly what happened here, but for different reasons.
While the defendant hadn't provided the Mac Pro and hard drive passwords previously, the investigators managed to figure out the password to his Mac Pro and were able to use that access to determine that it had been used to visit child porn sites and download thousands of files that matched the hashes for recognized child porn files. Those files weren't found on the Mac Pro, but the defendant's sister testified "that Doe had shown her hundreds of images of child pornography on the encrypted external hard drives". Between the download history, hash matches, and testimony about the location of the files, the judge ruled that it's a foregone conclusion that the drives contain child porn and that turning over the password is not testimonial in nature as a result.
I'm not sure that I necessarily agree with that assessment (it could be that providing the passwords is still testimonial in nature with regards to crimes they don't know about that his knowledge of the passwords would implicate him of), and the article points out that it's likely this case will go all the way to the Supreme Court.
Re-read my comment and you'll see that I constrained it to the moral failing of the previous poster, rather than addressing the broader issue of whether or not this is extortion. If you think I'm wrong in saying that two wrongs don't make a right, I'm happy to discuss the matter further, but with regards to whether this is extortion, I've already said elsewhere that I don't think it is.
I'm not sure if we are or aren't disagreeing. The point I was trying to make is that we shouldn't unquestioningly follow rules for their own sake. Instead, we should follow them inasmuch as they help us to write more maintainable code. At the end of the day, we want maintainable, well-designed code, not a mess of code in a single function, nor a mess of code scattered across too many functions.
As a general statement, I run into more developers who would benefit from the "keep functions short" rule, just because there's a tendency (particularly among novices) to sit down at a keyboard and start typing until the code "works", rather than starting with a design and then building code to that design. For those developers, the "keep functions short" rule forces them to take stock early in the process and realize that they need to think through the design of their code, but for more experienced developers, I should hope they know when to disregard the rule because it'll make the code less discoverable.
It's pedantic to constrain my comment to the specific topic I wanted to address? I don't think so. I kept my comment to the exact issue I wanted to discuss. That someone else jumped to a conclusion based on what I said is unsurprising, but I didn't want to dilute my original comment by addressing all angles of this situation. I wanted to make it very clear that I was taking issue with their "two wrongs make a right" mentality.
Exactly. At the end of the day, legalistically following most "rules" will result in poor code. A good software developer understands when it makes sense to have a longer function or shorter one. They understand when and how to break functionality out. They understand when shorter code is easier to maintain and when longer code is easier to maintain.
It's hard to point to any particular rule and say that it ALWAYS holds true, though it's easy for us to cite examples of rules that should've been followed in particular situations (e.g. the 12,000 line function I once saw that could've been done in about 200-300 lines, had the guy broken the repeated functionality out into other functions; devs creating smaller functions without regard for their interplay, resulting in a stack overflow because they used the functions recursively without realizing it).
It seems you took my comment as an implicit affirmation that I think this is extortion, but that's not the case. I was merely pointing out the moral flaw in the previous poster's comment. Whether or not this is extortion is being discussed elsewhere, but at least from what I know of the situation, I don't think it is.
If the formatting was irrelevant, why did you abandon the formatting to push your interpretation?
I didn't drop the formatting to push my interpretation. I dropped the formatting because it allowed the examples to fit nicely on one line, making them easier to compare with one another. Nothing more. If you think the formatting of the numbered list is relevant to the interpretation of the series, I'll disagree, but I have no problem with the formatting, so feel free to continue using it.
As to validity and whatnot, it's clear we're talking about different topics. I thought you were asking about the grammatical validity of the example you provided, hence why I addressed "correct" usage, but if you're talking about the legal validity, it seems to me that the sentence is wildly inconsistent, making it virtually impossible to say with any certainty what either the intended or actual meanings are. And even if we accept my interpretation that, as it is currently written, "distribution" must be it's own element, the sentence is still inconsistent (e.g. if it's in the series, then why doesn't it end in "-ing" like the rest of the items, and why doesn't it have an Oxford comma before it like how they used the semicolons inthe numbered list?), so my interpretation doesn't solve anything from a legal perspective (though I never intended for it to do so).
All of which is to say that the only one who's right in all of this is the judge. He ruled that it was ambiguous, which it is.
Yup, that's invalid due to the lack of "or" before "packing". Consider these simplified versions:
Overtime rules do not apply to the canning, freezing, or packing of: produce, meat, and food.
Overtime rules do not apply to the canning, freezing, packing of: produce, meat, and food.
I believe that for all of the important characteristics, these should accurately represent what we're talking about. To me, the latter is clearly incorrect. A series must have an "and" or "or" to denote the last item, so the second example leaves you hanging without a final entry in the series. I keep expecting something more at the end.
And they are "paying for it" with grants from the U.S. government (i.e. the taxpayers).
That's a bit of an overgeneralization. While what you're saying may be true in some cases (e.g. Egypt used the US military aid it receives each year to place its $1.3B order for Patriot missiles), most of those countries I listed were making purchases far in excess of any aid they receive from the US, disproving the notion that the US is giving them away because no one will buy them.
While digital changed quite a bit on the backend, how did it actually change the experience of watching a film in the theater?
Sure, we can point to a spec sheet that says the resolution has improved, but did it really change people's experiences? We had IMAX during the analog days, so we weren't lacking for sharp, hi-res images, and even in everyday theaters the resolution was already high enough that most viewers didn't notice when the digital changeover occurred. The speakers we use today are in many cases the same ones in the same configurations we used decades ago. And when was the last time normal people actually cared about colors? I'd wager it was when Technicolor was still new, if even then.
There's less visual noise (e.g. specks, film grain, scan lines, etc.) and less cases of a projectionists forgetting to start the movie on time (thanks to it being easier to automate now), but otherwise I can't think of much else I've noticed that's changed, let alone anything that I actually thought was a problem before.
On the other hand, Netflix has completely changed the way that we as a culture consume media. Binge watching wasn't a thing before they were around. Or how about getting back hours of your day, thanks to Netflix taking 5 hours of broadcast TV and turning it into less than 3.5 hours by stripping out commercials and skipping intro sequences. Packing movies for a trip doesn't involve packing anything extra, thanks to them. These are all things that they helped push into the mainstream.
I didn't even realize how spoiled I was by Netflix until I signed up for Sling TV. Being able to fast forward, rewind, or pause a VOD? Netflix always can, but Sling sometimes can't. Being able to watch anything available without paying extra? Netflix can, but Sling usually can't. Watching something while my wife watches something else? Netflix, yes, Sling, not without paying even more. The list goes on and on (which was why we cancelled our Sling subscription within the trial period), which just went to show us how much Netflix has changed our expectations about how we consume media.
Moreover, as someone who never bought popcorn (or any other concessions) in the theaters, I'm not even enjoying THAT improvement.
America give 4B in free arms to Egypt, 5-6B to Israel and 2B to Jordan. They wouldnt buy PAtriots if they were not free as they have their own Missile programs.
Or why did Israel take part in a purchase order with Kuwait, Taiwan, and Spain to purchase $12.5B in Patriot missiles? Source: https://sputniknews.com/milita...
In fact, for a system you say that no one would buy, there seem to be an awful lot of countries lining up to pay for it... - UAE - $3.3B - Qatar - $2.4B - Saudi Arabia - $1.75B - Greece - $1.1B - Japan - $1B
There were more countries and more links, but I'll stop there, since I think I've made my point.
The only way that "packing" can be applied to "distribution" is if we use the "or" to create a compound item. Unfortunately, using it that way doesn't quite do what you think it does. Instead, here's what would happen:
1) Your series would only have 7 items 2) #7 would be "packing for shipment or distribution", not "packing for shipment" 3) We'd be missing an "and" or "or" to denote the final item, so you'd actually need more elements
If they had added an "or" before "packing" (i.e. "..., or packing for shipping or distribution"), you'd be correct. Likewise, if there were another element in the series after "distribution", you'd be correct. As it is, however, the only valid interpretation is that the "or" is separating the final item in the series, "distribution", from the preceding, distinct items.
Of course, had they added an Oxford comma this would have been moot. The fact that legal documents don't use it as a matter of course boggles my mind.
Slashdot Mirror
You do if it's an iPhone. [...] Apple removed that screen [...] There is no option to place an emergency call on iPhones
No you don't, no they didn't, and yes there is.
Pretend it's an emergency and you're using someone else's iPhone. What's the first thing you'd do after getting the screen to turn on? Try doing that on someone else's iPhone and see what happens.
I'd wager you tried pressing the home button first thing, and, sure enough, if you do that with an iPhone running iOS 9 or iOS 10 you'll see the old unlock screen, including the "Emergency" button that gives you access to the owner's medical info and a keypad to dial out. That screen appears anytime an unregistered finger is used to press the home button. And the reason it doesn't appear for registered fingers (and why you're likely unaware that it was still there) is because there's no need for a special emergency screen when you can already use your registered finger to unlock the entire phone.
I suppose you would blame the road you were on for your car falling apart around you?
Lousy carriers are as common as lousy roads, which is why products should take them into account and deal with the problems they cause. If they fail to do so, then sure, the bad road/carrier shares some of the blame, but the product's design owns the lion's share of the blame.
P.S. This is NOT a backhanded way of saying iOS has it right. This is about tradeoffs. Google suffers in this area of their design to gain in other areas. Apple benefits in this area of their design at the cost of other areas. Neither approach is necessarily right, each approach will cater to different users, and each approach falls apart and excels in different ways.
until they get to a point where your entire monthly bill including internet is cheaper than just getting internet itself [...]
Some of them actually do that. Or did. Not sure if they still do.
I was on the phone with Suddenlink a few years back to reduce my subscription from their then-top Internet plan (no bundle) to a mid-tier plan (still no bundle) so I could save some money. The lady mentioned that I could "save $7 by bundling TV", which I understood to be the typical con game you're talking about. I said no, but she pushed back and insisted I'd save $7/mo. by bundling. I explained that I'd actually be paying more and that any amount for TV would be more than I wanted to pay. Finally, she just said, "The total bill will be $43/mo. for the bundle. Not $43 extra, $43 in total, whereas you'll be paying $50 for Internet by itself."
To say the least, I went for the bundle.
I can only assume they made money from someone else in the media distribution chain for keeping me subscribed. I never actually used my cable subscription at all (I hooked it up so guests could watch sports if they wanted to, which happened all of once, I think), but the special pricing lasted for about two years, saving me quite a bit. Of course, whenever the special pricing finally expired without much notice, I didn't realize it until after the fact, so that cost me around $30 for one month of the non-special price of the bundle, but still, it was a net savings.
Removing features simply because they're not used by everyone every single day never made sense to me. Even if it is something only a very small percentage of users use, so what?
There are costs for keeping features, other than the immediate cost to maintain the software itself. For instance, maybe keeping the feature...
...forces users to navigate through it or read past it to reach commonly-used features, thus getting in the way
...makes the software feel more complicated, decreasing satisfaction for most users
...simply distracts most users, wasting the finite amount of attention you get from them
...makes the software seem poorly maintained for not dropping support for something perceived as outdated
Mind you, I'm not espousing any of these (nor am I suggesting the list is exhaustive), but you need to remember that Chrome is not just code. For better or worse, it's a product. As a product, users have certain expectations, and those expectations oftentimes conflict with one another. It's Google's job to sort through the mess of contradictory expectations to make something that satisfies as many users as possible to the greater extent possible (for as cheaply as possible). Apparently they think that dropping these features will do that.
I have nothing to add or respond with, other than a sincere Thank You for taking the time to respond. The rest of us are talking out of our asses based on a few sentences or a paragraph we read as a summarization of the issue, so it's nice to have someone with an informed perspective actually chime in. Thanks again!
If what you took away from my post was that it was nothing more than a dick measuring contest, despite my statements to the contrary, that's a shame. I don't care which is larger. I was simply blown away at the notion that the coastlines may in any way be comparable, and I wanted to share my exploration of that topic with others here who might find the numbers are methodologies involved similarly fascinating.
Regardless of whether he's correct or not, I'm incredibly glad that Terje Mathisen made the claim he did, simply because it prompted me to discover something remarkable about Norway that otherwise I would've been unaware of, in much the same way that the point of my last post apparently went right by you.
Yup, by around an order of magnitude from the looks of things.
I quite agree. In this situation, if you don't have enough to convict already, then how can it be a foregone conclusion? And if you do have enough to convict, then why do you need additional evidence? Convict him with what you have; don't use shady methods for procuring more evidence to try to make your case stronger.
I.e. significantly longer than the US
I couldn't help but following your link after you said that, since it's one of those, "I knew Norway had a lot of coast, but THAT much?!" moments for me. I did want to point out that the numbers even at the link you shared are a bit incongruous, since they seem to vary quite a bit from source to source based on how they define a coast or shore (e.g. do they include freshwater or inland bodies of water? if they're measuring the actual coast (as opposed to the boundary of jurisdictional waters), are they measuring to a particular depth of tidal water, or are they measuring the shore as it's represented on a map? are overseas territories included in the country's total? ). For instance, here are some official numbers, most of which were pulled from the Wikipedia article you linked (I also grabbed numbers from other sources I've linked):
Norway's coast:
25,148 km (World Factbook) or 53,199 km (World Resources Institute) or 125,225 km (Statistics Norway)
USA's coast:
19,924 km (World Factbook) or 133,312 km (World Resources Institute) or 153,646 km (NOAA)
All of which is to say, while I can't say with any certainty which has the longer coastline (not that it matters), it's indisputable that the overall point you were driving at--that Norway has a LOT of coast (particularly given its size) and that it impacts things in all sorts of ways that most of us may be unaware of--is both correct and inherently fascinating. Thanks for sharing the info!
ADDENDA:
In case you're curious about the massive differences in the numbers...
The World Resource Institute's dataset was designed to be used for comparisons between countries. They talk at that link about the difficulty in producing useful numbers and in comparing numbers from different sources. To get around most of the issues they identified, they used a vectorization of the coastlines at a constant resolution (to ensure that no country benefitted from having a more detailed mapping than other countries) and didn't include overseas territories. As such, theirs are useful approximations for the purpose of comparisons and are relatively accurate as far as these sorts of measurements go, but for coastlines with lots of nooks and crannies (e.g. Norway's), their approximations may have a greater degree of error than they would for locations with simpler coastlines.
NOAA and Statistics Norway are, I believe, both official organizations, but I wasn't able to find much about the methodology that either used. NOAA mentions that it includes outlying territories, so that immediately inflates their numbers a bit. They also include the shorelines of the Great Lakes, which makes some sense given that they are boundary waters between the US and Canada, but some people may question their inclusion. Either way, it's probably safe to say that both NOAA and Statistics Norway are working with highly detailed maps when making their measurements, so they're likely to be closer to the true numbers than the World Resource Institute's, though it's difficult to compare them without adjusting for differences in methodology.
As for the CIA World Factbook, they don't list their methodology in a place I could find, but it's pretty clear from their numbers for landlocked countries that they're not including inland bodies of water. Given how much lower their numbers are than everyone else's, I'd wager they were calculated at a low resolution, or else they may simply measure at a set distance from the shore, effectively decreasing the resolution of their measurements significantly.
At the end of the day, it looks like the US' coastline may be slightly longer, but the country also benefits from being significantly larger. Ba
Basically, yup. The iPad Air 2 was effectively a prototype 9.7 inch iPad Pro, and bears more in common with the current 9.7 inch iPad Pro than it does with the new iPad, for exactly the reasons you specified.
To be fair, the iPad Air 2 remains a great machine, and by all indications that trend has continued into the Pro line. I still use my iPad Air 2 on a daily basis and have no plans to replace it anytime soon, given that it's still operating just as well today as the day that I bought it. But with a situation like mine leading to fewer sales, it makes sense that they'd back off on the specs a bit and offer people a more entry-level model to the line, that way they don't leave such a huge umbrella in their lineup that a competitor can easily work under.
Ruling that it's a "foregone conclusion" is exactly what happened here, but for different reasons.
While the defendant hadn't provided the Mac Pro and hard drive passwords previously, the investigators managed to figure out the password to his Mac Pro and were able to use that access to determine that it had been used to visit child porn sites and download thousands of files that matched the hashes for recognized child porn files. Those files weren't found on the Mac Pro, but the defendant's sister testified "that Doe had shown her hundreds of images of child pornography on the encrypted external hard drives". Between the download history, hash matches, and testimony about the location of the files, the judge ruled that it's a foregone conclusion that the drives contain child porn and that turning over the password is not testimonial in nature as a result.
I'm not sure that I necessarily agree with that assessment (it could be that providing the passwords is still testimonial in nature with regards to crimes they don't know about that his knowledge of the passwords would implicate him of), and the article points out that it's likely this case will go all the way to the Supreme Court.
Wrong.
Re-read my comment and you'll see that I constrained it to the moral failing of the previous poster, rather than addressing the broader issue of whether or not this is extortion. If you think I'm wrong in saying that two wrongs don't make a right, I'm happy to discuss the matter further, but with regards to whether this is extortion, I've already said elsewhere that I don't think it is.
I'm not sure if we are or aren't disagreeing. The point I was trying to make is that we shouldn't unquestioningly follow rules for their own sake. Instead, we should follow them inasmuch as they help us to write more maintainable code. At the end of the day, we want maintainable, well-designed code, not a mess of code in a single function, nor a mess of code scattered across too many functions.
As a general statement, I run into more developers who would benefit from the "keep functions short" rule, just because there's a tendency (particularly among novices) to sit down at a keyboard and start typing until the code "works", rather than starting with a design and then building code to that design. For those developers, the "keep functions short" rule forces them to take stock early in the process and realize that they need to think through the design of their code, but for more experienced developers, I should hope they know when to disregard the rule because it'll make the code less discoverable.
It's pedantic to constrain my comment to the specific topic I wanted to address? I don't think so. I kept my comment to the exact issue I wanted to discuss. That someone else jumped to a conclusion based on what I said is unsurprising, but I didn't want to dilute my original comment by addressing all angles of this situation. I wanted to make it very clear that I was taking issue with their "two wrongs make a right" mentality.
Exactly. At the end of the day, legalistically following most "rules" will result in poor code. A good software developer understands when it makes sense to have a longer function or shorter one. They understand when and how to break functionality out. They understand when shorter code is easier to maintain and when longer code is easier to maintain.
It's hard to point to any particular rule and say that it ALWAYS holds true, though it's easy for us to cite examples of rules that should've been followed in particular situations (e.g. the 12,000 line function I once saw that could've been done in about 200-300 lines, had the guy broken the repeated functionality out into other functions; devs creating smaller functions without regard for their interplay, resulting in a stack overflow because they used the functions recursively without realizing it).
It seems you took my comment as an implicit affirmation that I think this is extortion, but that's not the case. I was merely pointing out the moral flaw in the previous poster's comment. Whether or not this is extortion is being discussed elsewhere, but at least from what I know of the situation, I don't think it is.
Regardless, what of it? Extortion is wrong. Period. The fact that someone else extorted first doesn't make your extortion of others right.
The local cinema even had a session of "The Princess Bride" the other week. With the old distribution system such flexibility would be inconceivable.
Well played, sir.
If the formatting was irrelevant, why did you abandon the formatting to push your interpretation?
I didn't drop the formatting to push my interpretation. I dropped the formatting because it allowed the examples to fit nicely on one line, making them easier to compare with one another. Nothing more. If you think the formatting of the numbered list is relevant to the interpretation of the series, I'll disagree, but I have no problem with the formatting, so feel free to continue using it.
As to validity and whatnot, it's clear we're talking about different topics. I thought you were asking about the grammatical validity of the example you provided, hence why I addressed "correct" usage, but if you're talking about the legal validity, it seems to me that the sentence is wildly inconsistent, making it virtually impossible to say with any certainty what either the intended or actual meanings are. And even if we accept my interpretation that, as it is currently written, "distribution" must be it's own element, the sentence is still inconsistent (e.g. if it's in the series, then why doesn't it end in "-ing" like the rest of the items, and why doesn't it have an Oxford comma before it like how they used the semicolons inthe numbered list?), so my interpretation doesn't solve anything from a legal perspective (though I never intended for it to do so).
All of which is to say that the only one who's right in all of this is the judge. He ruled that it was ambiguous, which it is.
That's an issue with the correct use of appositives and capitalization, not the Oxford comma.
Yup, that's invalid due to the lack of "or" before "packing". Consider these simplified versions:
Overtime rules do not apply to the canning, freezing, or packing of: produce, meat, and food.
Overtime rules do not apply to the canning, freezing, packing of: produce, meat, and food.
I believe that for all of the important characteristics, these should accurately represent what we're talking about. To me, the latter is clearly incorrect. A series must have an "and" or "or" to denote the last item, so the second example leaves you hanging without a final entry in the series. I keep expecting something more at the end.
And they are "paying for it" with grants from the U.S. government (i.e. the taxpayers).
That's a bit of an overgeneralization. While what you're saying may be true in some cases (e.g. Egypt used the US military aid it receives each year to place its $1.3B order for Patriot missiles), most of those countries I listed were making purchases far in excess of any aid they receive from the US, disproving the notion that the US is giving them away because no one will buy them.
While digital changed quite a bit on the backend, how did it actually change the experience of watching a film in the theater?
Sure, we can point to a spec sheet that says the resolution has improved, but did it really change people's experiences? We had IMAX during the analog days, so we weren't lacking for sharp, hi-res images, and even in everyday theaters the resolution was already high enough that most viewers didn't notice when the digital changeover occurred. The speakers we use today are in many cases the same ones in the same configurations we used decades ago. And when was the last time normal people actually cared about colors? I'd wager it was when Technicolor was still new, if even then.
There's less visual noise (e.g. specks, film grain, scan lines, etc.) and less cases of a projectionists forgetting to start the movie on time (thanks to it being easier to automate now), but otherwise I can't think of much else I've noticed that's changed, let alone anything that I actually thought was a problem before.
On the other hand, Netflix has completely changed the way that we as a culture consume media. Binge watching wasn't a thing before they were around. Or how about getting back hours of your day, thanks to Netflix taking 5 hours of broadcast TV and turning it into less than 3.5 hours by stripping out commercials and skipping intro sequences. Packing movies for a trip doesn't involve packing anything extra, thanks to them. These are all things that they helped push into the mainstream.
I didn't even realize how spoiled I was by Netflix until I signed up for Sling TV. Being able to fast forward, rewind, or pause a VOD? Netflix always can, but Sling sometimes can't. Being able to watch anything available without paying extra? Netflix can, but Sling usually can't. Watching something while my wife watches something else? Netflix, yes, Sling, not without paying even more. The list goes on and on (which was why we cancelled our Sling subscription within the trial period), which just went to show us how much Netflix has changed our expectations about how we consume media.
Moreover, as someone who never bought popcorn (or any other concessions) in the theaters, I'm not even enjoying THAT improvement.
America give 4B in free arms to Egypt, 5-6B to Israel and 2B to Jordan. They wouldnt buy PAtriots if they were not free as they have their own Missile programs.
They wouldn't buy Patriots, you say?
So why did Egypt pay $1.3B for the Patriot missiles they purchased?
Source: http://www.nti.org/learn/count...
Or why did Israel take part in a purchase order with Kuwait, Taiwan, and Spain to purchase $12.5B in Patriot missiles?
Source: https://sputniknews.com/milita...
In fact, for a system you say that no one would buy, there seem to be an awful lot of countries lining up to pay for it...
- UAE - $3.3B
- Qatar - $2.4B
- Saudi Arabia - $1.75B
- Greece - $1.1B
- Japan - $1B
There were more countries and more links, but I'll stop there, since I think I've made my point.
I understand 8 as "packing for distribution".
The only way that "packing" can be applied to "distribution" is if we use the "or" to create a compound item. Unfortunately, using it that way doesn't quite do what you think it does. Instead, here's what would happen:
1) Your series would only have 7 items
2) #7 would be "packing for shipment or distribution", not "packing for shipment"
3) We'd be missing an "and" or "or" to denote the final item, so you'd actually need more elements
If they had added an "or" before "packing" (i.e. "..., or packing for shipping or distribution"), you'd be correct. Likewise, if there were another element in the series after "distribution", you'd be correct. As it is, however, the only valid interpretation is that the "or" is separating the final item in the series, "distribution", from the preceding, distinct items.
Of course, had they added an Oxford comma this would have been moot. The fact that legal documents don't use it as a matter of course boggles my mind.