There are some tried and true methods of persuation and propaganda, none of these methods are secret.
They are secret to the people who haven't heard of them. Unfortunately, they don't teach much critical thinking in school. (I think it would be great to require a semester of media literacy in high school, where students learn all the classic propaganda techniques and how to spot them...)
And umm why do you need a screen for a simple mp3 player like a ipod shuffle?
As long as we are going to nitpick... in text-based conversation you are free to take as long as you like while typing and posting, so there is no need for time-filling noises like "umm". Please edit them out before submitting your reply.
What's the matter AC, did Steve Jobs kill your parents or something? Apple added this sensor to prevent hard drive damage, not to be used as an input method. The fact that some non-Apple folks want to use it that way has nothing to do with Apple's intelligence, or lack thereof.
Christ, some people will use any excuse to criticize.
a service that, at most, nets $30 per passenger who uses it, per flight
Don't forget to factor in the value of the extra tickets bought by geeks who now seek out your airline so they can have their internet fix during the flight...
If these processors had any utility, trust me, they'd find a way to make money off 'em.
Here's what you do: take three defective chips, glue them together so that they all run in parallel, and for each output pin, the pin's state is determined by "majority rule" of the three corresponding pins on the defective chips.
If it works for the space shuttle, it can work for your Radio Shack junk electronics.... the only inconvenient detail would be making this hack cheap/easy enough to be worthwhile...
The series should have stopped right at "Empire", which was probably the best of all of them.
[Clerks] "Empire" had the better ending. I mean, Luke gets his hand cut off, finds out Vader's his father, Han gets frozen and taken away by Boba Fett. It ends on such a down note. I mean, that's what life is, a series of down endings. All "Jedi" had was a bunch of Muppets.[/Clerks]
I mean, the force is still a mystical energy field which flows through the universe. But midiclorians are how humans (and whatever) manage to interface with this energy field. What's wrong with that?
With the wholly unnecessary introduction of "midiclorians", Lucas reduced the Force from a mystical quasi-religious power to a biological parasite.
Now as an atheist I'd be the first to entertain that sort of reductionist biological explanation for religion in real life... but what was the point of adding it to a work of fiction? It took all the meaning and mystery out of it. Now having "The Force" is like having herpes. It's no longer part of any grand moral schema, it's just an incidental property of your blood cells.
If there was any reason for introducing this idea, I might accept it, but as far as I can tell, the only reason "midiclorians" were brought up was that Lucas didn't have confidence that a new generation of kids would take "the force" at face value, and he thought that he needed to fob them off with some kind of pseudo-scientific explanation for it. It's that complete lack of faith in the audience that's made the second series of Star Wars movies look and feel like well-rendered video games rather than compelling (or even interesting) drama.
No it wouldn't, because you'd have more take-home pay to spend
True, but the tax laws would encourage you to save or invest that extra money rather than spend it, because you'd be taxed for spending it but not for investing it. (I'm not saying that's a bad thing, only that the commercial powers-that-be would prefer you spend your money on them rather than saving or investing it, and therefore they'd be against the proposed change)
Eliminating the income tax would eliminate a huge web of corruption. I don't care how we replace it, maybe with a federal sales tax excluding food and clothing, but it's got to go.
Replacing the income tax with a sales tax would makes people less willing/able to buy things, which would mean less income for the corporations that sell those things. Given the amount of influence corporations have on the US government, the chances of such a reform passing seem slim.
Large, complex functions are bad - they have more bugs, they are harder to maintain, harder to bug fix (a change has more likelyhood of breaking something else). If a function has grown beyond a hundred lines of (real) code, it is almost certainly too large. If it has more than 4 levels of nesting, it is too large.
I know the above is the conventional wisdom, but I don't necessarily agree. I think they key criteria for a function is that it should embody a single intuitive logical operation. If it takes a small amount of code to implement that operation, great -- if it takes a large amount of code, that's fine too. The key attributes of a function are that it has a well-defined interface, it can be called from different contexts and will do the things that its interface says it will. Code that has been split off into a separate function just to keep function size down to some arbitrary number of lines is schizophrenic code: it was designed to be called from only one context, but it's packaged as if it is callable from more than one context. That means that whenever you examine that code, you have to ask yourself "who calls this code? What do they expect from it? What precondition-state is necessary to have it work properly?". If the code is left as an inline part of a larger function, then that question doesn't come up -- you know there is exactly one place where that code can be executed. There is no way it can be called "from the wrong place". That is one less potential confounding factor to worry about when I am debugging/analyzing later on.
As far as too many levels of nesting making things difficult to trace, I don't find that to be a problem in practice... as least not as long as my text editor has automatic bracket matching (and these days they all do).
just about ever buffer overflow exploit around was enabled at least partly because the developers were sloppy and used unchecked buffers. This is not possible in C# or other.NET langauges.
Eh? I thought one of the big features of C# was the ability to run "unmanaged code"... so it's possible if you try:^)
Unfortunantly for giant corporations like Microsoft, employees are free to move between jobs. No doubt, this problem will be corrected in time. Perhaps some enterprising corporation will see this particular employee loss as incentive to begin the process of correcting this problem in our society.
Don't worry, the solution is already here: hire foreigners with H-1B visas. That way, if they quit working for your company, they get deported back to their home country. It's like slavery, except better because you don't have to feed and house them yourself.
Even though they know IE doesn't render correctly, even though they know that it allows all kinds of spyware, and even though they constantly have to close popups. They just won't do it! It's like they are not trying it for spite or something.
I think typically this sort of behaviour is a result of previous bad bad experiences leading to a "if it ain't completely broke, then for God's sake don't touch anything!" mentality. People are so afraid that their computer will stop working that they don't want to take any risks at all. (keep in mind that these people have no way to fix their computer if it does stop working, so this attitude isn't necessarily a bad one!)
I think what people are seeing is an example of the "nonpareil effect", named after the tasty little candies. The candies were typically colored either red or green, mixed together, and then stored in glass jars.
When looking at the candies through the side of the glass jar, the first thing you notice is that the distribution of red and green candies doesn't look evenly distributed at all. Instead, there are lots of areas where many red candies are adjacent, and lots of areas where many green candies are adjacent.
For a long time, many people thought there must be some kind of static electrical effect present that was causing candies of the same color to tend to stick together. Eventually, however, some statisticians did the math and found that there was no such effect at play -- in a completely random system, such "blobs" of like colors are inevitable. Indeed, a jar of candy with no such blobs would be a bit suspect -- what are the chances of the red and green candies always pairing up so that no groupings occur?
To put it another way: it's all in your heads, guys.
Because pointers aren't really null, they are zero.
If pointers can't be null, what does the word "null" mean in a programming context? Is there something other than pointers that can be null? Or are you saying that the word "null" has no application at all?
He's not talking about Linux running under Windows. He is talking about a stand-alone version of Linux released by Microsoft that can be packaged with a proprietary driver management program that allows Window's drivers to run easily under Linux (to get all of the Plug n Play capabilities)
It's an interesting idea, but it wouldn't work. To see why it wouldn't work, you have to understand why Windows is so nicely compatible with all sorts of hardware. Is it because the Windows driver APIs are better than Linux driver APIs? No, in fact they are much worse -- more complicated, more difficult to get working. So why does Windows work well "out of the box" with more hardware? Simple: because the hardware manufacturers do all their testing on Windows. Since Windows compatibility is a requirement to make money, you can bet they test the crap out of their drivers, on all popular versions of Windows, before releasing them.
Now what does this have to do with MS/Linux? It means in order to have MS/Linux work well with lots of hardware (which would be its main selling point), it's not enough to just interface the Windows drivers to Linux and hope they will work. You also have to convince the manufacturers to test all their drivers under MS/Linux, and fix them if/when there are problems. Otherwise people will have a poor out-of-box experience as they discover all the problems inherent in using Windows drivers that were never tested in a Windows/Linux hybrid environment.
So, can Microsoft convince all the hardware manufactureres to go to the effort of all this testing? Conceivably, but in order to do so, MS/Linux would have to have a large enough market to make it worth their while to do so. And if the only reason for people to use MS/Linux is "better hardware compatibility", but that compatibility won't actually be present until MS/Linux is popular enough to warrant the support that such compatibility requires, then there is no reason for anyone to want to buy MS/Linux -- they might as well stick with "pure" Linux, which is fairly well supported and much less complex to manage. Hardware manufacturers will see that fact, and say "no thanks, Microsoft". So we see that Microsoft is stuck with the same chicken-and-egg hardware support scenario that all new OS's face -- no market means no support means no market. Given that, I don't think this idea would fly.
Chemical rockets for spacecraft combine fuel (liquid hydrogen, hydrazine, kerosene, etc.) and oxidizer (liquid oxygen, n204, etc) to combust and produce thrust. These are not fossil fuels. they have nothing to do with petroleum.
Kerosene is a fossil fuel, isn't it? And the other ingredients you mention are typically extracted using fossil fuels as ingredients and/or power sources... (not that that needs to remain the case forever)
Slashdot Mirror
Great, just what I need... SUVs crawling over my house at night.
They are secret to the people who haven't heard of them. Unfortunately, they don't teach much critical thinking in school. (I think it would be great to require a semester of media literacy in high school, where students learn all the classic propaganda techniques and how to spot them...)
"People" may, but I sure don't. So why am I getting spam? Why don't they send it to people who want it instead?
so shut up and deal with it
Part of "dealing with it" is discussing the problem and potential solutions. So which is it? Are we to "shut up", or "deal with it"?
As long as we are going to nitpick... in text-based conversation you are free to take as long as you like while typing and posting, so there is no need for time-filling noises like "umm". Please edit them out before submitting your reply.
Hard drive? What is a hard drive? I riffled through my entire stack of punched cards and came up with nothing...
Christ, some people will use any excuse to criticize.
I did, once. Fortunately they offer 20,000,000 hours of free dial-up AOL access here in hell.
Don't forget to factor in the value of the extra tickets bought by geeks who now seek out your airline so they can have their internet fix during the flight...
Here's what you do: take three defective chips, glue them together so that they all run in parallel, and for each output pin, the pin's state is determined by "majority rule" of the three corresponding pins on the defective chips.
If it works for the space shuttle, it can work for your Radio Shack junk electronics.... the only inconvenient detail would be making this hack cheap/easy enough to be worthwhile...
Yeah, I think the most common use will look something like this:
while(1)
{
ReplicateSelf_Fork();
BuildSoldierRobot();
SendSoldierRobotOffToFightEastasia();
}
(cyni cal? who, me?)
[Clerks] "Empire" had the better ending. I mean, Luke gets his hand cut off, finds out Vader's his father, Han gets frozen and taken away by Boba Fett. It ends on such a down note. I mean, that's what life is, a series of down endings. All "Jedi" had was a bunch of Muppets.[/Clerks]
With the wholly unnecessary introduction of "midiclorians", Lucas reduced the Force from a mystical quasi-religious power to a biological parasite.
Now as an atheist I'd be the first to entertain that sort of reductionist biological explanation for religion in real life... but what was the point of adding it to a work of fiction? It took all the meaning and mystery out of it. Now having "The Force" is like having herpes. It's no longer part of any grand moral schema, it's just an incidental property of your blood cells.
If there was any reason for introducing this idea, I might accept it, but as far as I can tell, the only reason "midiclorians" were brought up was that Lucas didn't have confidence that a new generation of kids would take "the force" at face value, and he thought that he needed to fob them off with some kind of pseudo-scientific explanation for it. It's that complete lack of faith in the audience that's made the second series of Star Wars movies look and feel like well-rendered video games rather than compelling (or even interesting) drama.
All IMHO, of course.
True, but the tax laws would encourage you to save or invest that extra money rather than spend it, because you'd be taxed for spending it but not for investing it. (I'm not saying that's a bad thing, only that the commercial powers-that-be would prefer you spend your money on them rather than saving or investing it, and therefore they'd be against the proposed change)
Replacing the income tax with a sales tax would makes people less willing/able to buy things, which would mean less income for the corporations that sell those things. Given the amount of influence corporations have on the US government, the chances of such a reform passing seem slim.
I know the above is the conventional wisdom, but I don't necessarily agree. I think they key criteria for a function is that it should embody a single intuitive logical operation. If it takes a small amount of code to implement that operation, great -- if it takes a large amount of code, that's fine too. The key attributes of a function are that it has a well-defined interface, it can be called from different contexts and will do the things that its interface says it will. Code that has been split off into a separate function just to keep function size down to some arbitrary number of lines is schizophrenic code: it was designed to be called from only one context, but it's packaged as if it is callable from more than one context. That means that whenever you examine that code, you have to ask yourself "who calls this code? What do they expect from it? What precondition-state is necessary to have it work properly?". If the code is left as an inline part of a larger function, then that question doesn't come up -- you know there is exactly one place where that code can be executed. There is no way it can be called "from the wrong place". That is one less potential confounding factor to worry about when I am debugging/analyzing later on.
As far as too many levels of nesting making things difficult to trace, I don't find that to be a problem in practice... as least not as long as my text editor has automatic bracket matching (and these days they all do).
Geez.
Eh? I thought one of the big features of C# was the ability to run "unmanaged code"... so it's possible if you try
Don't worry, the solution is already here: hire foreigners with H-1B visas. That way, if they quit working for your company, they get deported back to their home country. It's like slavery, except better because you don't have to feed and house them yourself.
Bob did it first...
I think typically this sort of behaviour is a result of previous bad bad experiences leading to a "if it ain't completely broke, then for God's sake don't touch anything!" mentality. People are so afraid that their computer will stop working that they don't want to take any risks at all. (keep in mind that these people have no way to fix their computer if it does stop working, so this attitude isn't necessarily a bad one!)
When looking at the candies through the side of the glass jar, the first thing you notice is that the distribution of red and green candies doesn't look evenly distributed at all. Instead, there are lots of areas where many red candies are adjacent, and lots of areas where many green candies are adjacent.
For a long time, many people thought there must be some kind of static electrical effect present that was causing candies of the same color to tend to stick together. Eventually, however, some statisticians did the math and found that there was no such effect at play -- in a completely random system, such "blobs" of like colors are inevitable. Indeed, a jar of candy with no such blobs would be a bit suspect -- what are the chances of the red and green candies always pairing up so that no groupings occur?
To put it another way: it's all in your heads, guys.
If pointers can't be null, what does the word "null" mean in a programming context? Is there something other than pointers that can be null? Or are you saying that the word "null" has no application at all?
It's an interesting idea, but it wouldn't work. To see why it wouldn't work, you have to understand why Windows is so nicely compatible with all sorts of hardware. Is it because the Windows driver APIs are better than Linux driver APIs? No, in fact they are much worse -- more complicated, more difficult to get working. So why does Windows work well "out of the box" with more hardware? Simple: because the hardware manufacturers do all their testing on Windows. Since Windows compatibility is a requirement to make money, you can bet they test the crap out of their drivers, on all popular versions of Windows, before releasing them.
Now what does this have to do with MS/Linux? It means in order to have MS/Linux work well with lots of hardware (which would be its main selling point), it's not enough to just interface the Windows drivers to Linux and hope they will work. You also have to convince the manufacturers to test all their drivers under MS/Linux, and fix them if/when there are problems. Otherwise people will have a poor out-of-box experience as they discover all the problems inherent in using Windows drivers that were never tested in a Windows/Linux hybrid environment.
So, can Microsoft convince all the hardware manufactureres to go to the effort of all this testing? Conceivably, but in order to do so, MS/Linux would have to have a large enough market to make it worth their while to do so. And if the only reason for people to use MS/Linux is "better hardware compatibility", but that compatibility won't actually be present until MS/Linux is popular enough to warrant the support that such compatibility requires, then there is no reason for anyone to want to buy MS/Linux -- they might as well stick with "pure" Linux, which is fairly well supported and much less complex to manage. Hardware manufacturers will see that fact, and say "no thanks, Microsoft". So we see that Microsoft is stuck with the same chicken-and-egg hardware support scenario that all new OS's face -- no market means no support means no market. Given that, I don't think this idea would fly.
But through the miracle of competition, the private sector has shrunk this ratio to only 4-fold. At this rate we'll have parity by 2010.
Kerosene is a fossil fuel, isn't it? And the other ingredients you mention are typically extracted using fossil fuels as ingredients and/or power sources... (not that that needs to remain the case forever)