Cool, a Popularity Tax! So the masses would pay more for those craptastic pop songs and American Idol drek. Whereas, us Metalheads, Punks, and fans of other less popular genres will be getting sweet low prices. Sounds like a most excellent idea, Ted! [guitar-riff]
[Note: I was tempted to call this a "Stupidity Tax", but that just seemed overly cruel to the followers of Pop - they have their own problems.]
abusive interrogations that have involved employees of private contractors operating in Iraq
Hmm, "abusive interrogations"... does this euphemism include the deliberate TORTURE and KILLING of prisoners? Sheesh, talk about purposefully choosing words to downplay our culpability...
Re:How do you do a character literal?
on
Vim 6.4 Released
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· Score: 1
Another nice tip: if you want to do some complicated search and replace, it's often a lot quicker to do:perldo s/foo/bar/ rather than remember the vim regexp syntax.
Wow! Very nice. I've been using ViM for years now and hadn't clued to the:perl* commands. I think I may have tried:perl or:perldo in an early version of gvim for Win32 when Perl support had not been compiled in. It is in v6.3 . Very cool to have that level of power without having to shell oput to an external program. Thanks for the tip!
Is it just me, or should every article include the Coral mirror links for any HREFs to avoid the SlashDot effect? So here they are for the links in the parent article (other than the link to the download page on SourceForge):
Re:Getters/setters bad?
on
Holub on Patterns
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
An obvious reason not to use "public" members in Data Objects is if the member must be validated to prevent illegal values from being assigned. Or if changing one member will automatically cause other members to be changed. Or if the internal encoding of an object differs from the external representation. Or if sychronization or transactions are needed. Or to prevent access/mod by certain classes or users or under other circumstances. Need I go on? Yes, there are times when using "public" members is fine (think: simple code). But there are a multitude of reasons not to. YMMV.
You did have the foresight to open a SpamHole temporary email address to use when you submitted to the DoNotCall list, right? Seems pretty obvious to me.
Since I believe in the importance of the public domain, extending the copyright on a work shouldn't be a trivial proposition. Copyright holders should be charged a fee that mirrors its value to the public; say, 1-2% of all profits attributable to the work in question over its lifetime. My reasoning is, if a copyright holder doesn't expect to make even that much from the work over the next twenty years, then revoking the copyright doesn't significantly hurt the copyright holder.
Most of the plan here is good, but not this particular part. Recall the Hollywood schemes we have read about on/. wherein they make ZERO "profit". The lesson for actors and writers is: never ask for points on the Net (profit). Instead, always ask for points on the Gross (revenue). Still there should likely be some minimum fee so that even products with very low revenue will have incentive to be released to the Public Domain rather than paying a few pennies per year to keep entending a copyright forever.
Or go with other folks' idea of a set fee that doubles every N years for extension of that copyright for the next N years. "N" is a positive integer which could be 1 or higher. (redundancy provided for the math-challenged) It is amazing how fast repeated doubling amounts to a lot! (geometrically one might say for the math-clued).
>What's a good Windows-based development language that DOESN'T take 2000 lines
>of code to pop up "Hello World", and isn't slow as a dog in the process?
At the risk of responding to a troll, how about Perl with the Tk module to provide GUI? It is certainly fast to develop, runs fast enough for most things (unless you are looking to use it for real-time games or something), and is very powerful. Below is a sample Hello World:
Of course, if you don't need a GUI and can just use the command line, then this simplifies to just:
#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
print "Hello World\n";
I use perl with the Tk module quite a bit. It's powerful, easy to use, and don't forget fun. Of course it helps that I love perl! And it works very well on the Win95/98/NT platforms.
I'm sure that many others are going to (or have already) made the Gattica association here. For the few of you out there who have not seen the movie, Gattica, is a dystopian future wherein babies are fully gene-engineered to eliminate defects and choose features. At least they are for the wealthy. The societal ramifications then present all manner of discrimination of those who have defects. They are relegated to menial work. Classism based on genes becomes the way of the world. And the technology presumably we (geeks) create supports a truly oppressive and anti-privacy world.
Way to go Britain, now you support partitioning people in insurance via their own health records.:-(
Interesting article. "such killings account for only one-tenth of 1 percent of all homicides"
Of course, later in the article it dives into arguments for more gun control laws and more invasive police procedures. Cor! What freedoms and rights some people are willing to give up.
This suggestion is good on the surface. We as techies would love to save the day and solve this problem. But it is fraught with complications. Effectively this would be mass moderation. As we have seen even here on/. , it is not wise to allow everyone to moderate. The reason is that there are many people with axes to grind, or pranks to pull, or just want to screw up things.
Under such mass moderation, the rabid right moderates all Democratic Party or Libertarian Party sites as "bad" pr0n-filled. Tree huggers flag logging company web sites (along with chemical, mining, nuclear power, etc. companies). Script kiddies decide to have a go at mass filling the "bad" central database to see when/if it will explode. Some p*ssed-off user decides to slam all Micro$oft sites. An Amazon sales droid decides it would be beneficial to ban the Barnes & Noble site. Evil foes of Open Source declare bans upon multitudes of Linux, Perl, Python, etc. sites. College students flag their rival schools as bad. Religious fanatics would ban other religions as a matter of course (they deserve being pariah).
Imagine the flag-unflag wars that would likely ensue if you allowed automatic ban/unban moderation. (Wonder what percentage of traffic this could generate as the war scripts would be polling and posting in rapid fire exchanges.)
Ok, I don't plan to belabor the point, but mass moderation is a difficult problem. Possible designs had been discussed for Usenet back in the late 1980's as volume was increasing exponentially with more noise and spam appearing daily. No workable mechanism has been created because of the wetware problem. That is, people are the problem. Simply put:
people will intentionally misuse it especially if it gives them an advantage (e.g. monetary, political, "moral", or other).
Slashdot Mirror
Cool, a Popularity Tax! So the masses would pay more for those craptastic pop songs and American Idol drek. Whereas, us Metalheads, Punks, and fans of other less popular genres will be getting sweet low prices. Sounds like a most excellent idea, Ted! [guitar-riff]
[Note: I was tempted to call this a "Stupidity Tax", but that just seemed overly cruel to the followers of Pop - they have their own problems.]
An obvious reason not to use "public" members in Data Objects is if the member must be validated to prevent illegal values from being assigned. Or if changing one member will automatically cause other members to be changed. Or if the internal encoding of an object differs from the external representation. Or if sychronization or transactions are needed. Or to prevent access/mod by certain classes or users or under other circumstances. Need I go on? Yes, there are times when using "public" members is fine (think: simple code). But there are a multitude of reasons not to. YMMV.
You did have the foresight to open a SpamHole temporary email address to use when you submitted to the DoNotCall list, right? Seems pretty obvious to me.
--
Mike Arms
Most of the plan here is good, but not this particular part. Recall the Hollywood schemes we have read about on /. wherein they make ZERO "profit". The lesson for actors and writers is: never ask for points on the Net (profit). Instead, always ask for points on the Gross (revenue). Still there should likely be some minimum fee so that even products with very low revenue will have incentive to be released to the Public Domain rather than paying a few pennies per year to keep entending a copyright forever.
Or go with other folks' idea of a set fee that doubles every N years for extension of that copyright for the next N years. "N" is a positive integer which could be 1 or higher. (redundancy provided for the math-challenged) It is amazing how fast repeated doubling amounts to a lot! (geometrically one might say for the math-clued).
--Mike Arms
- You want an editor - Get VIM - Vi IMproved
Flamers spotted at six o'clock, Sir!>What's a good Windows-based development language that DOESN'T take 2000 lines
>of code to pop up "Hello World", and isn't slow as a dog in the process?
At the risk of responding to a troll, how about Perl with the Tk module to provide GUI? It is certainly fast to develop, runs fast enough for most things (unless you are looking to use it for real-time games or something), and is very powerful. Below is a sample Hello World:
#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
use Tk;
my $mw = MainWindow->new;
$mw->title( "Hello World" );
$mw->Label( -text => "Hello World", -foreground => "blue" )->pack;
$mw->Button( -text => "Done", -command => sub {exit } )->pack;
MainLoop;
Of course, if you don't need a GUI and can just use the command line, then this simplifies to just:
#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
print "Hello World\n";
I use perl with the Tk module quite a bit. It's powerful, easy to use, and don't forget fun. Of course it helps that I love perl! And it works very well on the Win95/98/NT platforms.
Way to go Britain, now you support partitioning people in insurance via their own health records. :-(
Here is the correct link to the NY Times article A Closer Look at Rampage Killings.
Interesting article. "such killings account for only one-tenth of 1 percent of all homicides"
Of course, later in the article it dives into arguments for more gun control laws and more invasive police procedures. Cor! What freedoms and rights some people are willing to give up.
--
Mike Arms
Under such mass moderation, the rabid right moderates all Democratic Party or Libertarian Party sites as "bad" pr0n-filled. Tree huggers flag logging company web sites (along with chemical, mining, nuclear power, etc. companies). Script kiddies decide to have a go at mass filling the "bad" central database to see when/if it will explode. Some p*ssed-off user decides to slam all Micro$oft sites. An Amazon sales droid decides it would be beneficial to ban the Barnes & Noble site. Evil foes of Open Source declare bans upon multitudes of Linux, Perl, Python, etc. sites. College students flag their rival schools as bad. Religious fanatics would ban other religions as a matter of course (they deserve being pariah).
Imagine the flag-unflag wars that would likely ensue if you allowed automatic ban/unban moderation. (Wonder what percentage of traffic this could generate as the war scripts would be polling and posting in rapid fire exchanges.)
Ok, I don't plan to belabor the point, but mass moderation is a difficult problem. Possible designs had been discussed for Usenet back in the late 1980's as volume was increasing exponentially with more noise and spam appearing daily. No workable mechanism has been created because of the wetware problem. That is, people are the problem. Simply put:
--
Mike Arms