I am straining my suspension of disbelief circuits here.
Do you have an example of any working software that acutally does anything ? How about a description of how to achieve a specific task eg, how would you sort some numbers into ascending order using this methodology ?
Think of the BBC as our national PR agency. It does a pretty good job too. BBC's foreign broadcasts offset our worrying habit of invading other countries, reducing resentment against Brits leading to everything from better prospects for British companies to a reduced likelihood of vacationing Brits getting shot.
Because if funding came directly from government it would give government too much control. If there could be some way of doing this without that problem, I would be entirely in favour.
I object far more to being forced to break for ads every 12 minutes when I'm watching something I enjoy than I object to the license fee.
There may be a fairer way of funding bbc, license fee is effectively a poll tax. Not sure what would be a better alternative though, pay per view definitely isnt.
> Speaking of Fight Club, am I insane? Why do so many people hate/dislike this movie? It *is* startlingly great, right?
Yes, it *is* startlingly great.
Many people don't like it for pseudo feminist reasons. Also, many of those most anti the movie have neve seen it, and then there are those who decided they hated it, saw it anyway, and then try to invent justification afterwards as is normal for pretentious arsholes. I think there is something else with this movie though, some people really really hated what it because on some level it made them question whether their lives were empty and meaningless which is the same reason why some people like it so much.
> people in the UK seem to more aware of subtle > humour and irony than many people in the US.
I don't think so. I'm a Brit who lived in US for 5 years, and its true that many Americans don't get subtle humour, but then again neither do many Brits. We're not all fans of the Office or the Royale Family [which is funnier than the Office IMHO, although Gervais is a fricking genius]. There are huge numbers of fans for Jim Davidson for the love of God.
Also, there are subtle American comedy shows, eg Larry Sanders, and my personal favorite Beavis and Butthead. I'm not kidding either, the Office was in your face subtle, but Beavis and Butthead was so subtle most people didn't even realise it was subtle. They couldnt see past the sophomoric/moronic exterior to the zen perfection of minimalist humour that ran underneath.
The last thing the US wants is to start trying people for breaches of international law. It was made clear at the Nuremburg trials that the gravest crime a statesman can commit is to wage war on a sovereign nation.
Indictments
Count One: Conspiracy to Wage Aggressive War This count helped address the crimes committed before the war began, showing a plan to commit crimes during the war.
Count Two: Waging Aggressive War, or "Crimes Against Peace" Including "the planning, preparation, initiation, and waging of wars of aggression, which were also wars in violation of international treaties, agreements, and assurances." Count Three: War Crimes These were the more "traditional" violations of the law of war including treatment of prisoners of war, slave labor, and use of outlaws weapons. Count Four: Crimes Against Humanity This count involved the actions in concentration camps and other death rampages.
So in international law, crimes against humanity are considered less significant than waging an agressive war. Saddam will be tried by Iraqis [appointed by Americans].
The law applies to everybody, and everybody is entitled to read laws and understand them to the best of their ability. lawyersIt's true that there are pitfalls for the unwary, but even so you do NOT need to be a lawyer to read and understand laws. Linus, being smart, and the field being relevent to him understands copyright law a lot better than most lawyers.
There is nothing magical about the process of going to law school. What do you think happens there ?
It is a fiction that lawyers love to propogate that non-lawyers should never attempt to interpret laws.
If you had been nice about it you could have embarrassed her kindly and she might have wanted to make it up to you [unlikely but possible]. There's a also a chance she could have been encouraged to stop and think before she accuses someone of racism again.
Maybe people who don't suffer fools gladly have something in common with queer bashers, ie stupidity wouldnt bother them so much if they didnt feel they had something to prove.
> Programmers that can follow an arbitrary coding standard are, in the long run, more useful than programmers that generate a lot of code that nobody can use.
Whether you are able to follow coding standards or not says very little about whether you are useful. Code that nobody can use is useless of course, but so is code that follows coding standards but doesnt solve the right problem. Truly brilliant programmers produce code that is *eaiser* to understand than average programmers. In almost any project with real complexity, the problem is very vague. The difference between brilliant programmers and average programmers is the problem they choose to solve rather than the code they use to solve it.
A lot of productivity "improvements" are hugely detrimental. For instance, a company says a few cents per call by having a voice automated telephone help system. It cuts the time taken on their end to deal with a call by 20% or so. However, it can increase time wasted for caller by several hundred percent, but this is thought not to matter since nobody measures it. Or your doctor insists you come in at 10.00 and then makes you sit around for 20 minutes, you are seen by a nurse for no reason, and then a doctor 20 minutes later. It saves money because the nurse is paid a fraction of what the doctor earns and it shaves a few minutes off his time by having you see a nurse first no matter what. The clinic is not measuring the time it wastes for you, and you are not in a position to charge them for that.
These false productivity improvements are not the main problem though. The real issue is that society cannot spend productivity improvements on extra leisure or higher living standards owing to an insane monetary system. Capitalist society as a whole is like a company that grows and grows but almost never pays dividends to the shareholders [mankind]. Unless people are earning, spending and most importantly, borrowing money, nothing can happen. There is something strange and surprising going on which would take ages to explain, I recommend "The grip of death" by Douglas Rowbotham if you are interested.
Well, I came from your perspective a couple of years ago and had to go down J2EE route. I wish I hadn't but then again, I may well have had greater regrets if I had stuck with C++. EJB overhead is pretty horrendous but does provide locking, persistence, transactions, concurrency, caching, DB pooling, security, clustering.
I dont think clustering would be necessary without huge overhead introduced by J2EE, but its no picnic either way.
Most great art is in public museums. You would think that having someone with a decent digital camera to take a picture and stick it online would be a low cost way of sharing these images. I thought the whole point of publicly funded museums was to allow public access to great art.
I would expect to find a vast library of high quality free art online. High resolution jpeg's of great artists work should be freely available.
However, so far I have not come across a decent collection. Any links ?
Also, most great art is out of copyright. If someone took a picture of it, then it could be distributed freely without any hindrence. So, what exactly does Corbis own, and how does it own it ?
> If you can't afford to spend significantly more on your lenses than you did on your SLR body (whether film or digital), you will definitely get better photos with a Sony digicam.
Oh, c'mon... a D100 is $1500, good 2nd hand lenses for it cost in the region of $500. Sure, if you have lots of lenses maybe.. but a decent 24-70 will cover most non-specialist needs
He has a point though... if you want this structure [ie class only containing public data members] to be available to two classes you do need to create a whole file for it in java. This happens quite while in C++ one could add a strut to a.h file or even better just return pair or whatever
Anybody who cares about freedom. It is not the job of law enforcement agencies to see how far they can twist the law to suit their ends. This is an example of blatent intimitation. Special Agent Howard Leadbetter has disgraced the FBI. He should apologise or resign.
The word "debunked" seems to cause some kind of short circuit in people's brains. Scientist A comes out with a theory, then scientist B comes out with another theory that contradicts the first theory. Under normal circumstances, sensible people would compare the credibility and wealth of evidence of theories A and B. However, when theory B is said to "debunk" theory A, then a lot of people completely disregard theory A and take theory B to be complete gospel.
This problem annoys the hell out of me because as stated the correct solution is to stick with your original choice, which agrees with intuition. Smarty pants math geeks will argue that you should switch since this wins 2/3 times while sticking with same door wins 1/3.
This is wrong since it is never stated that the host HAS to open a door and give you a chance to switch. What if he only opens a [wrong] door when he feels like it ? In this situation, you should NEVER switch [assuming the host does not want you to win] since the optimal strategy for the host would be to only open a door and give you a chance to switch if your original choice was correct.
So, this problem is used as a way for Maths geeks to show off that they are cleverer than everyone else because people's intuition tells normal people that there is no benefit in switching, and in fact, they're right.
I have NEVER seen a description of this problem where it is stated that the host always opens a door after the initial choice, so the "correct" answer is always wrong. I know of a couple of other questions of this type where the accepted answer is wrong - anybody else like to mention some ?
> Did I mention coding in Java is much easier than fighting with ancient macros in C or C++?
Mustn't feed the troll, mustn't feed the troll... arrgh... cannot resist, if only java did have macro's there would be a decent way of dealing with version hell, if only it had templates we wouldn't need a ton of hideous upcasts, oh well nevermind, java's lack of features is always going to please some.
Slashdot Mirror
I am straining my suspension of disbelief circuits here.
Do you have an example of any working software that acutally does anything ? How about a description of how to achieve a specific task eg, how would you sort some numbers into ascending order using this methodology ?
Or, is this just some kind of elaborate joke ?
tight git
ever heard of PR ?
Think of the BBC as our national PR agency. It does a pretty good job too. BBC's foreign broadcasts offset our worrying habit of invading other countries, reducing resentment against Brits leading to everything from better prospects for British companies to a reduced likelihood of vacationing Brits getting shot.
What's the name of a politcal system where the main qualification of the head of state is that he is the son of the previous head of state ?
Because if funding came directly from government it would give government too much control. If there could be some way of doing this without that problem, I would be entirely in favour.
I object far more to being forced to break for ads every 12 minutes when I'm watching something I enjoy than I object to the license fee.
There may be a fairer way of funding bbc, license fee is effectively a poll tax. Not sure what would be a better alternative though, pay per view definitely isnt.
90% of german military casualties in WII were sustained fighting Russians. About 3% was from fighting US, but it was an important 3%.
Never attribute to malice that which can be reasonably explained by stupidity [ignorance].
> Speaking of Fight Club, am I insane? Why do so many people hate/dislike this movie? It *is* startlingly great, right?
Yes, it *is* startlingly great.
Many people don't like it for pseudo feminist reasons. Also, many of those most anti the movie have neve seen it, and then there are those who decided they hated it, saw it anyway, and then try to invent justification afterwards as is normal for pretentious arsholes. I think there is something else with this movie though, some people really really hated what it because on some level it made them question whether their lives were empty and meaningless which is the same reason why some people like it so much.
I reckon most people wanting to learn c++ these days would be better off with http://www.constructionbook.net/products/plumbing
> people in the UK seem to more aware of subtle
> humour and irony than many people in the US.
I don't think so. I'm a Brit who lived in US for 5 years, and its true that many Americans don't get subtle humour, but then again neither do many Brits. We're not all fans of the Office or the Royale Family [which is funnier than the Office IMHO, although Gervais is a fricking genius]. There are huge numbers of fans for Jim Davidson for the love of God.
Also, there are subtle American comedy shows, eg Larry Sanders, and my personal favorite Beavis and Butthead. I'm not kidding either, the Office was in your face subtle, but Beavis and Butthead was so subtle most people didn't even realise it was subtle. They couldnt see past the sophomoric/moronic exterior to the zen perfection of minimalist humour that ran underneath.
I could get a dual athlon system, but then I wouldnt be able to hear the dog barking
The last thing the US wants is to start trying people for breaches of international law. It was made clear at the Nuremburg trials that the gravest crime a statesman can commit is to wage war on a sovereign nation.
Indictments
Count One: Conspiracy to Wage Aggressive War
This count helped address the crimes committed before the war began, showing a plan to commit crimes during the war.
Count Two: Waging Aggressive War, or "Crimes Against Peace"
Including "the planning, preparation, initiation, and waging of wars of aggression, which were also wars in violation of international treaties, agreements, and assurances."
Count Three: War Crimes
These were the more "traditional" violations of the law of war including treatment of prisoners of war, slave labor, and use of outlaws weapons.
Count Four: Crimes Against Humanity
This count involved the actions in concentration camps and other death rampages.
So in international law, crimes against humanity are considered less significant than waging an agressive war. Saddam will be tried by Iraqis [appointed by Americans].
> He is a programmer and not a lawyer.
The law applies to everybody, and everybody is entitled to read laws and understand them to the best of their ability. lawyersIt's true that there are pitfalls for the unwary, but even so you do NOT need to be a lawyer to read and understand laws. Linus, being smart, and the field being relevent to him understands copyright law a lot better than most lawyers.
There is nothing magical about the process of going to law school. What do you think happens there ?
It is a fiction that lawyers love to propogate that non-lawyers should never attempt to interpret laws.
If you had been nice about it you could have embarrassed her kindly and she might have wanted to make it up to you [unlikely but possible]. There's a also a chance she could have been encouraged to stop and think before she accuses someone of racism again.
Maybe people who don't suffer fools gladly have something in common with queer bashers, ie stupidity wouldnt bother them so much if they didnt feel they had something to prove.
> Programmers that can follow an arbitrary coding standard are, in the long run, more useful than programmers that generate a lot of code that nobody can use.
Whether you are able to follow coding standards or not says very little about whether you are useful. Code that nobody can use is useless of course, but so is code that follows coding standards but doesnt solve the right problem. Truly brilliant programmers produce code that is *eaiser* to understand than average programmers. In almost any project with real complexity, the problem is very vague. The difference between brilliant programmers and average programmers
is the problem they choose to solve rather than the code they use to solve it.
A lot of productivity "improvements" are hugely detrimental. For instance, a company says a few cents per call by having a voice automated telephone help system. It cuts the time taken on their end to deal with a call by 20% or so. However, it can increase time wasted for caller by several hundred percent, but this is thought not to matter since nobody measures it. Or your doctor insists you come in at 10.00 and then makes you sit around for 20 minutes, you are seen by a nurse for no reason, and then a doctor 20 minutes later. It saves money because the nurse is paid a fraction of what the doctor earns and it shaves a few minutes off his time by having you see a nurse first no matter what. The clinic is not measuring the time it wastes for you, and you are not in a position to charge them for that.
These false productivity improvements are not the main problem though. The real issue is that society cannot spend productivity improvements on extra leisure or higher living standards owing to an insane monetary system. Capitalist society as a whole is like a company that grows and grows but almost never pays dividends to the shareholders [mankind]. Unless people are earning, spending and most importantly, borrowing money, nothing can happen. There is something strange and surprising going on which would take ages to explain, I recommend "The grip of death" by Douglas Rowbotham if you are interested.
Well, I came from your perspective a couple of years ago and had to go down J2EE route. I wish I hadn't but then again, I may well have had greater regrets if I had stuck with C++. EJB overhead is pretty horrendous but does provide locking, persistence, transactions, concurrency, caching, DB pooling, security, clustering.
I dont think clustering would be necessary without huge overhead introduced by J2EE, but its no picnic either way.
Most great art is in public museums. You would think that having someone with a decent digital camera to take a picture and stick it online would be a low cost way of sharing these images.
I thought the whole point of publicly funded museums was to allow public access to great art.
I would expect to find a vast library of high quality free art online. High resolution jpeg's of great artists work should be freely available.
However, so far I have not come across a decent collection. Any links ?
Also, most great art is out of copyright. If someone took a picture of it, then it could be distributed freely without any hindrence.
So, what exactly does Corbis own, and how does it own it ?
> If you can't afford to spend significantly more on your lenses than you did on your SLR body (whether film or digital), you will definitely get better photos with a Sony digicam.
Oh, c'mon... a D100 is $1500, good 2nd hand lenses for it cost in the region of $500. Sure, if you have lots of lenses maybe.. but a decent 24-70 will cover most non-specialist needs
He has a point though... if you want this structure [ie class only containing public data members] to be available to two classes you do need to create a whole file for it in java. This happens quite while in C++ one could add a strut to a .h file or even better just return pair or whatever
> who can blame them for trying?
Anybody who cares about freedom. It is not the job of law enforcement agencies to see how far they can twist the law to suit their ends. This is an example of blatent intimitation. Special Agent Howard Leadbetter has disgraced the FBI. He should apologise or resign.
The word "debunked" seems to cause some kind of short circuit in people's brains. Scientist A comes out with a theory, then scientist B comes out with another theory that contradicts the first theory. Under normal circumstances, sensible people would compare the credibility and wealth of evidence of theories A and B. However, when theory B is said to "debunk" theory A, then a lot of people completely disregard theory A and take theory B to be complete gospel.
This problem annoys the hell out of me because as stated the correct solution is to stick with your original choice, which agrees with intuition. Smarty pants math geeks will argue that you should switch since this wins 2/3 times while sticking with same door wins 1/3.
This is wrong since it is never stated that the host HAS to open a door and give you a chance to switch. What if he only opens a [wrong] door when he feels like it ? In this situation, you should NEVER switch [assuming the host does not want you to win] since the optimal strategy for the host would be to only open a door and give you a chance to switch if your original choice was correct.
So, this problem is used as a way for Maths geeks to show off that they are cleverer than everyone else because people's intuition tells normal people that there is no benefit in switching, and in fact, they're right.
I have NEVER seen a description of this problem where it is stated that the host always opens a door after the initial choice, so the "correct" answer is always wrong. I know of a couple of other questions of this type where the accepted answer is wrong - anybody else like to mention some ?
> Did I mention coding in Java is much easier than fighting with ancient macros in C or C++?
Mustn't feed the troll, mustn't feed the troll... arrgh... cannot resist, if only java did have macro's there would be a decent way of dealing with version hell, if only it had templates we wouldn't need a ton of hideous upcasts, oh well nevermind, java's lack of features is always going to please some.
> In 1967 the Arabs chose war again
This is a simplistic and one-sided analysis: http://www.cactus48.com/1967war.html
> The problem is that the majority of Arabs refuse to have an Israeli state (of any size) in the middle east, under any circumstances.
That's one problem to be sure. It's not the only one by a long shot.