I define that as an obsolete machine. For $800 I can get you a tower with 2 gigs of ram, at least 500 gigs of hard drive, a decent dual core cpu and a moderate video card. Add $200 for a monitor and $100 for peripherals. thats an $1100 machine.
I call that low end. Seriously guys, you are geeks, get with the friggin program!
Actually I have always found that Ubuntu, like Vista, uses at least half of my ram pre-caching things. Like Vista. In fact while Vista will limit this to about 1 gig of ram at the most, I have seem Ubuntu try to use about 75% of my ram all the time.
And you can qualify this statement with evidence? I can attest to the fact that this comment of your is patently false, and that is through extensive experience on vista using 1, 2 and 4 gigs of ram on different machines.
I'll bite. But first I'll put myself in context: I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy on slashdot, hell I even used to type M$ when I was younger. I use Linux where it suits and Windows usually when I have to. I was deeply skeptical of Vista for months, probably years up until its launch, but about a year ago I wanted to get a tablet PC. One thing Vista offered me was very good and integrated tablet functionality, so I figured I could try it out and if I was not happy I'd change back to XP tablet edition. So I was mightily suprised when I found that vista had nothing wrong with it at all. Nothing. Using it was like using XP, but with improvements. So there is the context for my ensuing diatribe, I'm not a shill or fanboy.
Indexed search is integrated into the start menu, the control panel and Windows Explorer. Where certain features are placed now is entirely irrelevant, you just search. Say you want to change some obscure thing that is buried deep into half a dozen popup menus in XP (and Vista), open control panel and start typing, it will come up immediately. Item descriptions can be used as search keywords. Same goes for installed software and your files for that matter, you don't go hunting through three levels of start menu, you just start typing and it pops up. You can even add your own metadata to files if they are not responding to the search terms you want them to, and expand the indexed areas of your hard drive if need be. The use of indexed search so uniformly across the UI is probably the biggest improvement in productivity for me, it is incredibly useful and I would never, ever go back.
Now if you are going to respond "well I like using nested flyout menus for launching applications" (as many people do) then you are a lost cause to begin with (and vista can be set this way). But I'll be 400% faster at achieving just about any task in the OS than you are, and thats called productivity. This nested menu paradigm is being left behind by all OSes, because it is inefficient and arbitrary. I run Xubuntu on my netbook, and I installed deskbar as soon as I set it up so I can have indexed desktop search. On my XP machine I use Launchy for the same reason.
In Windows explorer now, lets say you are four folders deep in the directory tree, and it doesn't come close to fitting inside that column. In Vista it scrolls horizontally left and right as you move your mouse over different areas of your directory tree, so you can always read what the folders are by moving the mouse over them. Its not revolutionary, its just a nice feature. The directory path in explorer is now replaced by a list of the folders through which you are nested, like: Computer > Local Disk > Users > User > Documents. But you can click on each of the arrows in that list and it displays a dropdown list with the contents of that respective folder. So with two clicks you can go from your current folder (Documents) to say Program Files which is on the local disk. Its not revolutionary, its just a nice feature. If you don't like it you click on the icon and your path comes back.
In Vista you get preview popups of each window you have in the task bar, minimised or not. This means that I can be copying a large file or burning a disk and navigate away from this window, do som web browsing, and I can constantly check on the progress of my operation without switching windows. Again its not revolutionary, its just a nice feature. Compiz has it, and probably OSX if I ever used that particular os.
The truth is there is a pervasive irrationality to Vista hatred. Most people I encounter who bang on about Vista and its problems have not used it more than once or twice. Most people seem to take the initial offense anyone gets to doing things the slightest bit different and extend this into some huge reason why Vista is a total failure. I don't like using XP any more, it has a clunky interface that slows me down, I can't search when I feel like it in different contexts, and that annoys me to no end. N
I love firebug, best addon to firefox ever, but then I do a bit of web development. However, chromes java console is far superior to firebug, far far superior.
This is the third time I've said it in this discussion: Chrome has a better-than-firebug website debugger built into it. Right click on anything and select "inspect element" and it will open up, alternatively you can go to the page menu > developer > javascript console. It will list the dom in full, give you each and every css property and where it is coming from, highlight dom elements as you hover over them, and it has a nice verbose javascript debugger. Seriously, try it out. I love firebug but chrome is just so much nicer than firefox in every possible way.
I feel that Chrome is to Firefox what utorrent is to Azureus.
Chrome has a status bar? Its sort of half length, but you can certainly hover over links and see where they go. Its in the same place it is in firefox, bottom left.
Also to the parent, I am a huge firebug fan, but chromes "inspect element" wins hands down, it is by far the superior debugger.
(e.g. I hate that I can't view the properties of an image. Sometimes I need to verify that its under a certain size. Or that there's no easy method of tracking page errors.)
This I don't understand it, but this is the biggest misconception about chrome there is! Chrome has the best and most comprehensive page debugger I have seen, for Javascript, html and css. Right click on your image, and select "inspect element" from the menu. You will get all of your image properties plus all of its surrounding code. Page errors, same deal just right click and select "inspect element" and you can get an extremely good, verbose output of any javascript errors, or track your way through the dom as it highlights elements firebug style.
Chrome rules, it is the best browser bar none, especially when it comes to development!
Left wing does not simply equate with freedom! To say that Stalins rule was authoritarian and thus not left wing is utterly wrong. You can't talk about left and right wing social policy because you are on flimsy ground, they are economic philosophies. When you talk about social policy you talk in terms of authoritarian and libertarian.
The thing is that it is often hard to distinguish economic freedoms from social freedoms in many areas (not all!) so in this sense the left wing policies (economics) lead to authoritarian social stances. This is not a hard rule and certainly the opposite is often true.
ou've taken a multi-dimensional space of possibilities/ideas and projected it one-dimensionally. It's no wonder you miss the bigger picture.
No, actually I am trying to correct your one dimensional "left or right" viewpoint, because this is not how the world is described. Read up on the Political Compass because this is exactly what I am talking about.
You are clearly blinded by ideology, you are obviously taking a stance that 'left wing' = 'good, freedom, liberty etc' and 'right wing' = 'bad, opression, authoritarian etc.' Now I'm sorry mate but I'm not the one here espousing a narrow world view. I'm not even pushing any agenda I'm simply correcting your technical error.
Mate, get yourself straightened out. Yes Howard was right wing, but the vast expansion of welfare under Howard was socialist policy. Left wing. Many in the media made this criticism.
The conservative or right wing approach to this problem would be to offer up the censorship service to those who want it (Howards policy). Note here individual freedom and responsibility is emphasised.
mandatory filtering is straight out of the leftist handbook on public policy: impose a blanket ban, clap your hands together and pronounce the problem fixed.
Note: Stalin ran a left wing government, the Chinese run a left wing government. The only thing wrong here is that you (and a bloody lot of others) seem to equate opression and control with 'right wing' and freedom, happiness and bunny rabbits with 'left wing'. This is what is completely wrong! Left and right wing government can each be opressive or liberal, that is not the point of left and right wing.
Please read up on it, left and right wing are economic positions, not social ones. Left wing means the state favours state run institutions over the private sector, a right wing government favours free markets and private enterprise. Forcing regulation like this on private enterprise is left wing policy.
Where is it? Come on Rudd, where the hell is the broadband infrastructure promised during the campaign?
This is what gets to me the most of all in this debate, they have not even begun to build the infrastructure they promised to build, and here we are bogged down in this utter waste of time instead! I am dead set against the censorship plan, but what I am even more pissed off about is that the national broadband scheme has taken a back seat to this bullshit!
The one reason this government appealed to me is that they appeared to understand the importance of infrastructure to the digital economy. But it seems like they are not even close to getting it.
Guy guys guys, not even close, its more like this:
1. Drink Beer 2. Knee jerk reaction to minority public opinion 3. Implementation 4. Ignore public opinion, frame debate in terms of moral shades of black and white 5. Drink beer
Note the whole 'concept' part is where you have all been getting this wrong.
Blanket bans such as this one proposed come directly from the left-wing handbook on public policy. The left has always sought for government to have greater control over individuals lives, individual freedoms and responsibilities are the traditional calls of the right.
I always thought that Howard was one of the most left wing conservatives we have ever seen. He greatly expanded welfare programs into the realm of every day middle class families, and used this carrot and stick approach to attempt to control the way families budgeted. Take through the tax system and hand it back to those who live 'approved' lifestyles, see family tax benefits A and B. This is textbook socialist policy.
I'm not so sure that this is what the proponents of decriminalisation are intending. The point is to bring drug use back from the fringe of society, say to everybody that they have both a freedom and a responsibility to society: Use your drugs, you will be monitored, if you abuse the right, you will be dealt with in a medical fashion.
What do we do with the mentally ill when it becomes clear they are a threat to themselves and society? They are dealt with through the medical system, rehabilitated involuntarily. I think that this is more along the lines of what is being suggested here.
The truth is that this issue is not a black and white one, it is entirely possible to use drugs in a responsible manner that does no harm to yourself or the society in which you live. More to the point, the drug war does literally nothing, other than empower criminals with a lucrative market to both make money and recruit new volunteers.
Your scenario is clearly questionable, that is to say you are correct: we can't simply put potentially dangerous drugs on the shelves and tell everybody to go nuts. However I believe there is some middle ground, something along the lines of current drug regulation, but perhaps relaxing the 'only when necessary' part of prescriptions. Alcohol is not simply offered up for all to use, although it is not a model I would say should be emulated in other drugs, for some however this would be ok.
The fact is that the 'war' is going nowhere fast, and a tremendous expense, both fiscally and geopolitically. It is about time we started to think outside the box we are stuck in, it is plainly obvious that it is not working.
I think the point is that through regulation you can better control drug addiction. Want some smack? Fine but you'll need a script and for that you need counseling and you'll be monitored, but its $5 a hit. Any sign of abuse and its compulsory rehab and no more prescriptions.
There is also an economic argument behind this, you can price the criminals out of the market by supplying the public through controlled avenues at bargain basement prices. Ritalin gets you high, people love valium, vicodin etc and so on ad infinitium. But there are not huge markets for these drugs in underground channels, barely at all really. The 'war on drugs' creates demand by enforcing scarcity where none exists. The 'war on drugs' allows dangerous substances to be produced in an uncontrolled manner. It actually bothers me to no end when you hear as part of the propaganda that drugs are dangerous because they are made in backyard laboratories, so regulate them for christ's sake!
I'm not about to say that legalisation or decriminalisation are complete solutions to substance abuse problems, but I will say that fighting a 'war' on substance use (not even abuse!) is about as idiodic as you can get. The whole idea demonstrates how poorly the problem is understood in law making circles. The criminal element is literally created by prohibition, and yet it is the specific target of this 'war'.
The important point I'm trying to make is that drug abuse and drug addiction are medical problems akin to (but not the same as) mental health problems. My god would we accept a war on insane people? Crime is crime, and is easily distinguished from substance abuse, regardless of the criminal status of said substances. Drug dealing can be dealt with under criminal law if substances were not in themselves criminal, this is easy: is it legal to just up and start selling moonshine? The fact is that a big part of the problem is that drug users feel isolated from society, and so turn inward as society shuns them. If we embraced these issues in the open we might at least make some progress. Right now we are making no progress at all, none whatsoever, and it is coming at tremendous taxpayer expense.
"If you mess up indentation in Python, there's a real good chance it'll still run, but do something different. That's a serious issue."
This is no more likely to happen than missing a semicolon, and the chaos that will ensue from that. If you stuff up your whitespace, chances are the code will just not run, simple.
I'm a complete coding noob, and engineering student, and I make zero whitespace errors when I code python. I'm sure a big experienced and mature coder like yourself can handle it if I can.
This "I hate whitespace" stuff is an alarmingly parochial attack on a given language. You are clearly used to reading curlies and other screen barf as something meaningful. Python uses whitespace to be more human readable, this helps debugging other peoples code, you know, real world stuff, teamwork and all that. I get the impression here that these ideas upset precious little coders just a bit too easily.
This is an argument akin to Newton vs Leibniz notation in calculus. No mathematician will have this argument because it is a fucking stupid argument to have. You use what makes sense to be used in a given scenario. Precious little coders, my god.
"Source code would not rely on indentation to function properly"
But that is the whole point of python? If you don't like it then fine but mate, its really not that hard. Really.
Furthermore the Python foundation recommends using 4 standard spaces as a tab. If your text editor can't be set up to recognise python and automatically use this tabbing convention, then maybe you need to broaden your view just a little.
Python makes many things dead simple, and if you are rejecting it out of hand simply because you think using a certain style of indentation makes a coder arrogant then sorry mate but you are the one who is missing out here.
Reading these slashdot arguments about such petty, petty things makes me realise why, at the end of the day, coders are on the bottom of the IT shit heap. You actually care about this shit, and its hilarious.
You don't use tabs in the first place. And in any case Python enforces no standard of block indent, it simply requires that you use the same indent for all blocks. So you can tab+space all you want so long as all of it is the same. The human reader merely requires that you use a unicode font and everything lines up. What exactly is hard about that? The reason to use braces is to speak to the computer, humans still indent to make it readable.
The recommended way to indent in python is to use 4 spaces, and any half decent text editor can be set up to do this when you press the 'tab' key. Rather than bitch and moan from the sidelines why don't you try it. Python kicks ass in so many ways and I haven't met any coder who has tried it and thinks its a bad language. It has pitfalls and quirks but all languages do, Pythons pros outweigh its cons easily.
I thought the same thing when I first started learning python, and there were one or two other things that annoyed me. But now I'm learning some other languages and I just want my python back! I started learning php but I have decided that in the days of AJAX methods I can do it all with javascript and python. As much as I don't like Javascript, I hate php.
I agree, completely. I'm a mechanical engineering student and we learn Python at university.
There are three things that hold python back in scientific computing as far as I am aware and they are iteration, recursion and multithreading. Python iteration is just plain slow, its stack is small, and it doesn't support parallel processing without extra libraries, but you can get parallel processing going with some add ons and hack work. However if you just think a little differently what you do is use Numpy arrays instead of loops (Numpy is awesome), then use opengl libraries to solve your arrays on a decent GPU, suddenly you have a high level language with some scientific muscle, and I think if your stack is getting that big then recursion is not the right choice for the task.
Of course C will always be faster, however you can have a python script out and running days before the C equivalent is near finished. That kind of makes up for the overheads in most cases.
I'm a mechanical engineering student and we are taught Python and Matlab. In another generation or so I think its possible nobody will be using Fortran, nobody is learning it. Seems like a bit of a baby boomer language to me;)
The truth about python in the real world is that development time efficiency, even in the sciences, seems to be far more costly than run time efficiency. Of course there are examples that contradict this but then there is also C. I believe a clever use of Numpy arrays and the python opengl library can speed things up a tremendous amount too.
Honestly I think the only reason people are still using fortran in engineering is because thats simply what they were taught and never learned anything new. You certainly don't hear anyone in academia singing it praises, my engineering professors all seem to be of the opinion that fortran is an antiquated memory.
No, because the filter will be more strict than what you see on state video store shelves. There is no R classification for online content, thus the situation online will be the same as the situation with video games: In the eyes of the government, we are all children.
The best part: Unclassifiable material is banned... ok, and? I hear you say, well in our grand nation there is no R rating for online content, much like there is no R rating for video game content. Thus these things will be banned.
This leads us to the absurd situation whereby under the current proposals you will not be able to legally stream video content that you can hire from the video store down the road... if its rated 'naughty'.
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I define that as an obsolete machine. For $800 I can get you a tower with 2 gigs of ram, at least 500 gigs of hard drive, a decent dual core cpu and a moderate video card. Add $200 for a monitor and $100 for peripherals. thats an $1100 machine.
I call that low end. Seriously guys, you are geeks, get with the friggin program!
Actually I have always found that Ubuntu, like Vista, uses at least half of my ram pre-caching things. Like Vista. In fact while Vista will limit this to about 1 gig of ram at the most, I have seem Ubuntu try to use about 75% of my ram all the time.
And you can qualify this statement with evidence? I can attest to the fact that this comment of your is patently false, and that is through extensive experience on vista using 1, 2 and 4 gigs of ram on different machines.
To put it simply: You sir, are full of shit.
I'll bite. But first I'll put myself in context: I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy on slashdot, hell I even used to type M$ when I was younger. I use Linux where it suits and Windows usually when I have to. I was deeply skeptical of Vista for months, probably years up until its launch, but about a year ago I wanted to get a tablet PC. One thing Vista offered me was very good and integrated tablet functionality, so I figured I could try it out and if I was not happy I'd change back to XP tablet edition. So I was mightily suprised when I found that vista had nothing wrong with it at all. Nothing. Using it was like using XP, but with improvements. So there is the context for my ensuing diatribe, I'm not a shill or fanboy.
Indexed search is integrated into the start menu, the control panel and Windows Explorer. Where certain features are placed now is entirely irrelevant, you just search. Say you want to change some obscure thing that is buried deep into half a dozen popup menus in XP (and Vista), open control panel and start typing, it will come up immediately. Item descriptions can be used as search keywords. Same goes for installed software and your files for that matter, you don't go hunting through three levels of start menu, you just start typing and it pops up. You can even add your own metadata to files if they are not responding to the search terms you want them to, and expand the indexed areas of your hard drive if need be. The use of indexed search so uniformly across the UI is probably the biggest improvement in productivity for me, it is incredibly useful and I would never, ever go back.
Now if you are going to respond "well I like using nested flyout menus for launching applications" (as many people do) then you are a lost cause to begin with (and vista can be set this way). But I'll be 400% faster at achieving just about any task in the OS than you are, and thats called productivity. This nested menu paradigm is being left behind by all OSes, because it is inefficient and arbitrary. I run Xubuntu on my netbook, and I installed deskbar as soon as I set it up so I can have indexed desktop search. On my XP machine I use Launchy for the same reason.
In Windows explorer now, lets say you are four folders deep in the directory tree, and it doesn't come close to fitting inside that column. In Vista it scrolls horizontally left and right as you move your mouse over different areas of your directory tree, so you can always read what the folders are by moving the mouse over them. Its not revolutionary, its just a nice feature. The directory path in explorer is now replaced by a list of the folders through which you are nested, like: Computer > Local Disk > Users > User > Documents. But you can click on each of the arrows in that list and it displays a dropdown list with the contents of that respective folder. So with two clicks you can go from your current folder (Documents) to say Program Files which is on the local disk. Its not revolutionary, its just a nice feature. If you don't like it you click on the icon and your path comes back.
In Vista you get preview popups of each window you have in the task bar, minimised or not. This means that I can be copying a large file or burning a disk and navigate away from this window, do som web browsing, and I can constantly check on the progress of my operation without switching windows. Again its not revolutionary, its just a nice feature. Compiz has it, and probably OSX if I ever used that particular os.
The truth is there is a pervasive irrationality to Vista hatred. Most people I encounter who bang on about Vista and its problems have not used it more than once or twice. Most people seem to take the initial offense anyone gets to doing things the slightest bit different and extend this into some huge reason why Vista is a total failure. I don't like using XP any more, it has a clunky interface that slows me down, I can't search when I feel like it in different contexts, and that annoys me to no end. N
I love firebug, best addon to firefox ever, but then I do a bit of web development. However, chromes java console is far superior to firebug, far far superior.
This is the third time I've said it in this discussion: Chrome has a better-than-firebug website debugger built into it. Right click on anything and select "inspect element" and it will open up, alternatively you can go to the page menu > developer > javascript console. It will list the dom in full, give you each and every css property and where it is coming from, highlight dom elements as you hover over them, and it has a nice verbose javascript debugger. Seriously, try it out. I love firebug but chrome is just so much nicer than firefox in every possible way.
I feel that Chrome is to Firefox what utorrent is to Azureus.
Chrome has a status bar? Its sort of half length, but you can certainly hover over links and see where they go. Its in the same place it is in firefox, bottom left.
Also to the parent, I am a huge firebug fan, but chromes "inspect element" wins hands down, it is by far the superior debugger.
This I don't understand it, but this is the biggest misconception about chrome there is! Chrome has the best and most comprehensive page debugger I have seen, for Javascript, html and css. Right click on your image, and select "inspect element" from the menu. You will get all of your image properties plus all of its surrounding code. Page errors, same deal just right click and select "inspect element" and you can get an extremely good, verbose output of any javascript errors, or track your way through the dom as it highlights elements firebug style.
Chrome rules, it is the best browser bar none, especially when it comes to development!
Left wing does not simply equate with freedom! To say that Stalins rule was authoritarian and thus not left wing is utterly wrong. You can't talk about left and right wing social policy because you are on flimsy ground, they are economic philosophies. When you talk about social policy you talk in terms of authoritarian and libertarian.
The thing is that it is often hard to distinguish economic freedoms from social freedoms in many areas (not all!) so in this sense the left wing policies (economics) lead to authoritarian social stances. This is not a hard rule and certainly the opposite is often true.
No, actually I am trying to correct your one dimensional "left or right" viewpoint, because this is not how the world is described. Read up on the Political Compass because this is exactly what I am talking about.
You are clearly blinded by ideology, you are obviously taking a stance that 'left wing' = 'good, freedom, liberty etc' and 'right wing' = 'bad, opression, authoritarian etc.' Now I'm sorry mate but I'm not the one here espousing a narrow world view. I'm not even pushing any agenda I'm simply correcting your technical error.
Mate, get yourself straightened out. Yes Howard was right wing, but the vast expansion of welfare under Howard was socialist policy. Left wing. Many in the media made this criticism.
The conservative or right wing approach to this problem would be to offer up the censorship service to those who want it (Howards policy). Note here individual freedom and responsibility is emphasised.
Here, I'll quote Jack the Insider on this very topic for you:
Note: Stalin ran a left wing government, the Chinese run a left wing government. The only thing wrong here is that you (and a bloody lot of others) seem to equate opression and control with 'right wing' and freedom, happiness and bunny rabbits with 'left wing'. This is what is completely wrong! Left and right wing government can each be opressive or liberal, that is not the point of left and right wing.
Please read up on it, left and right wing are economic positions, not social ones. Left wing means the state favours state run institutions over the private sector, a right wing government favours free markets and private enterprise. Forcing regulation like this on private enterprise is left wing policy.
Where is it? Come on Rudd, where the hell is the broadband infrastructure promised during the campaign?
This is what gets to me the most of all in this debate, they have not even begun to build the infrastructure they promised to build, and here we are bogged down in this utter waste of time instead! I am dead set against the censorship plan, but what I am even more pissed off about is that the national broadband scheme has taken a back seat to this bullshit!
The one reason this government appealed to me is that they appeared to understand the importance of infrastructure to the digital economy. But it seems like they are not even close to getting it.
Guy guys guys, not even close, its more like this:
1. Drink Beer
2. Knee jerk reaction to minority public opinion
3. Implementation
4. Ignore public opinion, frame debate in terms of moral shades of black and white
5. Drink beer
Note the whole 'concept' part is where you have all been getting this wrong.
Blanket bans such as this one proposed come directly from the left-wing handbook on public policy. The left has always sought for government to have greater control over individuals lives, individual freedoms and responsibilities are the traditional calls of the right.
I always thought that Howard was one of the most left wing conservatives we have ever seen. He greatly expanded welfare programs into the realm of every day middle class families, and used this carrot and stick approach to attempt to control the way families budgeted. Take through the tax system and hand it back to those who live 'approved' lifestyles, see family tax benefits A and B. This is textbook socialist policy.
I'm not so sure that this is what the proponents of decriminalisation are intending. The point is to bring drug use back from the fringe of society, say to everybody that they have both a freedom and a responsibility to society: Use your drugs, you will be monitored, if you abuse the right, you will be dealt with in a medical fashion.
What do we do with the mentally ill when it becomes clear they are a threat to themselves and society? They are dealt with through the medical system, rehabilitated involuntarily. I think that this is more along the lines of what is being suggested here.
The truth is that this issue is not a black and white one, it is entirely possible to use drugs in a responsible manner that does no harm to yourself or the society in which you live. More to the point, the drug war does literally nothing, other than empower criminals with a lucrative market to both make money and recruit new volunteers.
Your scenario is clearly questionable, that is to say you are correct: we can't simply put potentially dangerous drugs on the shelves and tell everybody to go nuts. However I believe there is some middle ground, something along the lines of current drug regulation, but perhaps relaxing the 'only when necessary' part of prescriptions. Alcohol is not simply offered up for all to use, although it is not a model I would say should be emulated in other drugs, for some however this would be ok.
The fact is that the 'war' is going nowhere fast, and a tremendous expense, both fiscally and geopolitically. It is about time we started to think outside the box we are stuck in, it is plainly obvious that it is not working.
I think the point is that through regulation you can better control drug addiction. Want some smack? Fine but you'll need a script and for that you need counseling and you'll be monitored, but its $5 a hit. Any sign of abuse and its compulsory rehab and no more prescriptions.
There is also an economic argument behind this, you can price the criminals out of the market by supplying the public through controlled avenues at bargain basement prices. Ritalin gets you high, people love valium, vicodin etc and so on ad infinitium. But there are not huge markets for these drugs in underground channels, barely at all really. The 'war on drugs' creates demand by enforcing scarcity where none exists. The 'war on drugs' allows dangerous substances to be produced in an uncontrolled manner. It actually bothers me to no end when you hear as part of the propaganda that drugs are dangerous because they are made in backyard laboratories, so regulate them for christ's sake!
I'm not about to say that legalisation or decriminalisation are complete solutions to substance abuse problems, but I will say that fighting a 'war' on substance use (not even abuse!) is about as idiodic as you can get. The whole idea demonstrates how poorly the problem is understood in law making circles. The criminal element is literally created by prohibition, and yet it is the specific target of this 'war'.
The important point I'm trying to make is that drug abuse and drug addiction are medical problems akin to (but not the same as) mental health problems. My god would we accept a war on insane people? Crime is crime, and is easily distinguished from substance abuse, regardless of the criminal status of said substances. Drug dealing can be dealt with under criminal law if substances were not in themselves criminal, this is easy: is it legal to just up and start selling moonshine? The fact is that a big part of the problem is that drug users feel isolated from society, and so turn inward as society shuns them. If we embraced these issues in the open we might at least make some progress. Right now we are making no progress at all, none whatsoever, and it is coming at tremendous taxpayer expense.
Should have just used a single space, since you know, python will happily accept that space as your indent :)
"If you mess up indentation in Python, there's a real good chance it'll still run, but do something different. That's a serious issue."
This is no more likely to happen than missing a semicolon, and the chaos that will ensue from that. If you stuff up your whitespace, chances are the code will just not run, simple.
I'm a complete coding noob, and engineering student, and I make zero whitespace errors when I code python. I'm sure a big experienced and mature coder like yourself can handle it if I can.
This "I hate whitespace" stuff is an alarmingly parochial attack on a given language. You are clearly used to reading curlies and other screen barf as something meaningful. Python uses whitespace to be more human readable, this helps debugging other peoples code, you know, real world stuff, teamwork and all that. I get the impression here that these ideas upset precious little coders just a bit too easily.
This is an argument akin to Newton vs Leibniz notation in calculus. No mathematician will have this argument because it is a fucking stupid argument to have. You use what makes sense to be used in a given scenario. Precious little coders, my god.
"Source code would not rely on indentation to function properly"
But that is the whole point of python? If you don't like it then fine but mate, its really not that hard. Really.
Furthermore the Python foundation recommends using 4 standard spaces as a tab. If your text editor can't be set up to recognise python and automatically use this tabbing convention, then maybe you need to broaden your view just a little.
Python makes many things dead simple, and if you are rejecting it out of hand simply because you think using a certain style of indentation makes a coder arrogant then sorry mate but you are the one who is missing out here.
Reading these slashdot arguments about such petty, petty things makes me realise why, at the end of the day, coders are on the bottom of the IT shit heap. You actually care about this shit, and its hilarious.
You don't use tabs in the first place. And in any case Python enforces no standard of block indent, it simply requires that you use the same indent for all blocks. So you can tab+space all you want so long as all of it is the same. The human reader merely requires that you use a unicode font and everything lines up. What exactly is hard about that? The reason to use braces is to speak to the computer, humans still indent to make it readable.
The recommended way to indent in python is to use 4 spaces, and any half decent text editor can be set up to do this when you press the 'tab' key. Rather than bitch and moan from the sidelines why don't you try it. Python kicks ass in so many ways and I haven't met any coder who has tried it and thinks its a bad language. It has pitfalls and quirks but all languages do, Pythons pros outweigh its cons easily.
I thought the same thing when I first started learning python, and there were one or two other things that annoyed me. But now I'm learning some other languages and I just want my python back! I started learning php but I have decided that in the days of AJAX methods I can do it all with javascript and python. As much as I don't like Javascript, I hate php.
Python is a great language.
I agree, completely. I'm a mechanical engineering student and we learn Python at university.
There are three things that hold python back in scientific computing as far as I am aware and they are iteration, recursion and multithreading. Python iteration is just plain slow, its stack is small, and it doesn't support parallel processing without extra libraries, but you can get parallel processing going with some add ons and hack work. However if you just think a little differently what you do is use Numpy arrays instead of loops (Numpy is awesome), then use opengl libraries to solve your arrays on a decent GPU, suddenly you have a high level language with some scientific muscle, and I think if your stack is getting that big then recursion is not the right choice for the task.
Of course C will always be faster, however you can have a python script out and running days before the C equivalent is near finished. That kind of makes up for the overheads in most cases.
I'm a mechanical engineering student and we are taught Python and Matlab. In another generation or so I think its possible nobody will be using Fortran, nobody is learning it. Seems like a bit of a baby boomer language to me ;)
The truth about python in the real world is that development time efficiency, even in the sciences, seems to be far more costly than run time efficiency. Of course there are examples that contradict this but then there is also C. I believe a clever use of Numpy arrays and the python opengl library can speed things up a tremendous amount too.
Honestly I think the only reason people are still using fortran in engineering is because thats simply what they were taught and never learned anything new. You certainly don't hear anyone in academia singing it praises, my engineering professors all seem to be of the opinion that fortran is an antiquated memory.
No, because the filter will be more strict than what you see on state video store shelves. There is no R classification for online content, thus the situation online will be the same as the situation with video games: In the eyes of the government, we are all children.
The best part: Unclassifiable material is banned... ok, and? I hear you say, well in our grand nation there is no R rating for online content, much like there is no R rating for video game content. Thus these things will be banned.
This leads us to the absurd situation whereby under the current proposals you will not be able to legally stream video content that you can hire from the video store down the road... if its rated 'naughty'.