Well, if you actually do your homework you will see that the commies are in the lead and pretty far, in fact.
Please show me where the US killed "millions" with their police actions. Yes, there were hundreds of thousands of deaths, but nowhere, even close to the amount of deaths cause by communist of fascist regimes. Even remotely, vaguely close, in fact.
Look at the following very detailed website if actual numbers interest you:
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/war-list.htm
and
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/20centry.htm
In Vietnam, the famous bugbear of all the hippies US-caused casualties were greatly outweighed by what the NVA and Vietcong did. But recently during the typical anti-american rage I saked a friend what was the second worse war after WW2. Her answekr? "Vietnam". Why? Because she hates Americans.
Vietnam was by far the most serious police action the US undertook in the 20th century. Only 1.2 million people died DURING THE ENTIRE WAR. Most of them were not caused by the US, nor did the US start the war. That does not excuse them for their intervention, although one might ask what would have happened if they did not intervene. Here's a hint: the North Vietnamese were not going to the South to give them Christmas presents. Nor would Pol Pol have murdered less Cambodians in the DRK period.
The problem is that this is a grey area thing. Lets get this straight: Nobody is lily white. The US is not lily white and no one can excuse some things they did. But they are not pitch dark black either. The problem is that you liberal hippies see anything that is not lily white as being totally evil.
There is a bloody reason people are not executed for stealing a bread but are for murder. The reason is that some crimes are worse than other ones. The world is not a simple angels and devils, black and white thing. If you think it is, welcome to hell.
And just because the US killed hundreds of thousands of people and cannot be excused does not put them or anyone in the West on the same moral level as the communists and the Nazis.
After changing a student's program recently (German) that had umlauts in his identifiers which are not 7 bit ASCII I can ensure you that Java compilers do not enforce that rule. However, its interesting that it exists. The program did not compile on my machine, it did on his.
IANAL and I am not familiar with US Law but in Europe and in Germany there is something called the Datenshutzgesetz (Data Protection Law) which prevents a business from accessing any such info without permission. It is also illegal to check the URL's that staff browsed and so on.
Basically digging through mail is considered the same as placing a wiretap on his phone: A definite no-no.
What we here do is to ask our new employees to sign a document that we make a copy of all mail that comes in to their account and treat it as normal business correspondence. Never had any problem with it and it is quite clear that we need to have access to old business mail.
That one particular mailbox is getting pretty damn large though:)
This is the same Abit who recently brought out a motherboard with a tube amplifier on board for that authentic sound with their onboard sound. A real honest-to-god vacuum tube.
The problem is more that what you mention of every program that takes a dump in my startmenu. I installed an Epson scanner the other day. The scanner is great, thanks. But there were like 5 items some with submenus in my startmenu! What sort of bullshit is this? That is MY startmenu.
Everything can go under "Epson", or "Scanner", thank you.
That, and program which install them selvves as Sierra/Games/Whatever or Massive Entertainment Corporation/Application Programs/SuperGame and crap like that.
A good install programs ASKS me where I want it and the same goes for icons on the desktop which is another favourite playpen for install programs.
Ok since you are so bright, does Windows Internet sharing automatically do NAT when you use it or does it forward your DHCP request to the rest of the net?
Because if it does not NAT could be quite a hassle to setup.
Stick both a mouse (or two mice or whatever) and a trackball into a USB port and it works. Everytime, seamlessly. This has alwys worked too, because many people plug mice into Laptops and both keep on working (the trackpad and the mouse).
> If you name two classes with different case only, I think that can be considered bad enough practice that it is ok that you can't store both of them.
Fair enough, but I was pointing out that Java's habit of forcing a directory structure for packages has the effect of having to force the language to use similar naming conventions as whatever filesystem lies underneath.
> However case dependece is vital so you can name a variable and a Class with different case.
This is a valid point, and a good argument fo case sensitivity, btw. Prolog does somthing like tis, varibles are force to use uppercase, symbols forced to use lowercase. Some people hate it, but some people also hate Python's indented code as delimiters thing. A matter of taste, I suppose. Since Java uses naming conventions to indicate semantics in lots of places (Java beans awith getters and setters being the prime example) such a convention might be in place here, as a previous poster indicated.
> Storing anything other than UTF-8 in filenames is an incredible mistake, and whoever at Microsoft did that should burn in hell.
NTFS uses Unicode for pathnams and was AFAIK the first filesystem to do so. FAT was invented before UTF8 so it has an excuse:)
> All Unix systems such as Linux fortunately use UTF-8.
This is actually a problem with java because Java states that thos packages must be in the correct directories:
org.foo.Bar.bleh must be in org/foo/Bar org.foo.bar.Bleh must be in org/foo/bar
This is NOT possible (unless they are in different section of the classpath) in Windows NT because the filesystem is not case-sensitive there. Java's mapping of case-sensitive package names to an underlying filesystem assumes that the filesystem has the same naming conventions that Java uses.
As far as I know Java can also take Unicode source as input and then the filesystem must also handle that, which would work on NTFS, but not of FAT and probably not on any Unix FS AFAIK.
How comfortable would you be to call an sound pocessing API or a OS kernel call or a image processng API or a database when you do not know how it works??
Most programmers have no idea how the SQL query optimizer works when they send a query to the database. Few programers can tell you exactly what happns insde a simple fopen() call. Even fewer would be able to explain a MP3 player. Hey, maybe that player is phoning home! Scared yet?
For that matter do you know how the transistors in your computer work? Do you know exactly how your CPU work? I did not think so. I do no think there is ayone in the world who knows exactly how every nuance and part in yor computer works. I am not even going into distributed systems where you have routers and things in play.
Almost no programmers do not understand exactly how 80% of the code that is executed by their own programs work bcause it is spent inside some OS call or library. Certainly not more or less than the blackbox to detect currency fraud.
Black box programing and pluggable components that work with an interface is called "good software engineering" where I come from, not "oh my go its time for a stupid kneejerk reaction"
Besides, if Newton ate Mercury Einstein would not have had to publish his theory of General Relativity to explain the discrepancy that Newton's theory of Gravity predicts for Mercury's orbit and Mercury's real orbit!
That means that the Black hole in the other universe had enough matter sucked in to build our entire universe. And the big bang that presumably created that universe comes from one that is vastly bigger than ours. So where do you stop? This infinite(?) Russian Dolls thing might run into some extra-universal sort of a planck limit. Or maybe not. Any infinite thing leads to some rather weird philosophical problems and paradoxes.
For instance, if our universe is infinite then, by probablility, there must be someplace in the universe that contains an exact copy of this one except that you are not reading slashdot now. And infinitely many of those in all subtle variations. In other words, in an infinite universe anything that CAN happen WILL happen somewhere, statistically. That sorts of put a damper on any speculation on the meaning of life.
There was a very nice article in SciAm (and reprinted in Popular Mechanics) about this recently. It was even on the web, might still be.
Infinity leads to weird issues as Cantor and Russel and Frege discovered at the end of the 19th century, and this goes for physics as well as mathematics. Actually, our field of computer science came to quite some extent from a attempt to put mathematics on a more secure foundation after it was shaken by the infitnity paradoxes, so this is not necessarily bad:)
Honestly, I am more interested in how they can recognize banknotes algorithmically. What happens if you put the note in at a 30 degree angle? What happens if you put the note in with another not overlappiong the edge a bit so that the aspect ratio is not the same. How do the ydeal with different resolutions. Will it work if I photograph a banknote and scan in the picture??
It would be interesting to see if this works if you scan a copy of a banknote (not an original) One way of doing this would be to use som kind of ink that has a specific spectral response which could be used by the scanner but a pre-existing copy would not have it. Then you would not have to use any image recognition.
He and Goebbels also asked Fritz Lang, the director of Metropolis, to direct some Nazi propaganda films. A few days after that Lang left Germany permanently for the States.
> The question nobody who wants to denounce globalisation ever wants to ask is Why? Why did they choose to work at a factory than work where they did before? Why?
Why? Good question, and one that I have always wondered about.
> Chinese factories do not go to cities with guns and tell people to work or die. > There are no guns held to heads at Chinese factories.
True and true. The problem here though is the assumption that all power flows from the barrel of a gun, Mao's famous dictum. People with lots of property have implicit power for the simple reason that saying "you are fired" can be very devastating. Obviously not as devastating as actually shooting soeone, but stll, the power to influence someone's economic fate is a rather powerful thing to put in the hands of a person. Ad as Voltaire said, absolute power corrupts absolutely. That goes for economic as well as political power.
This is why anti-trust laws are important. The arch-capitalists always moan that they are anti-competitive and that Gates worked for his money, yadda, yadda, yadda. This is true. Putting the brakes on Microsoft (and Standard oil in the old days) certainly prevents them from making the market more efficient by crushing the less efficent competitors. However, there are some downsides to this "each to himself" policy.
The first is that efficieny is not always the only criteron to measure a economic decsion by. If you wat efficency, shoot all blind babies. Certainly efficient, but not necessarily humane.
But the most important effect that it has is to smply remove absolute implicit economic power from the hands of ruthless businessmen. Democracy was invented to temper political power. For all the people who moan about the power of GW Bush and Senators they should still remember that Bush is much, much less powerful than any medieval king ever was. In some respect he is also less powerful than Saddam was simply because he cannot shoot people at will who dare to oppose him (Saddam certainly did). Not in his own country, in any case.
However, in the economic sphere there is not so much that really holds people back from attaining absolute economic power except perhaps anti-trust. This is deep problem, because it effects the right of peope to earn and hold on to their property, which, paradoxicaly is one of the central tenents of a democratic constitution.
But in the end society benefits if there is no abslutely super rich person whose sole decisions can devastate entire regions simply by withdrawing his capital at a whim. finding a balance between government's ability to control people's proerty by anti-trust (and taxation) and the right of people to control their own is a difficult complicated thing.
Thsw problem is the high profile "bad apples" are exactly those compaies that are on the cutting edge with some really advanced hardware which they would like to keep out of the hands of their competitors. NVidia and ATI for example.
There is not much sense in putting any IP on the programing info for an 8 year old SCSI chipset, and this is where most of those 1000s of C files are.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if you actually do your homework you will see that the commies are in the lead and pretty far, in fact.
Please show me where the US killed "millions" with their police actions. Yes, there were hundreds of thousands of deaths, but nowhere, even close to the amount of deaths cause by communist of fascist regimes. Even remotely, vaguely close, in fact.
Look at the following very detailed website if actual numbers interest you:
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/war-list.htm
and
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/20centry.htm
In Vietnam, the famous bugbear of all the hippies US-caused casualties were greatly outweighed by what the NVA and Vietcong did. But recently during the typical anti-american rage I saked a friend what was the second worse war after WW2. Her answekr? "Vietnam". Why? Because she hates Americans.
Vietnam was by far the most serious police action the US undertook in the 20th century. Only 1.2 million people died DURING THE ENTIRE WAR. Most of them were not caused by the US, nor did the US start the war. That does not excuse them for their intervention, although one might ask what would have happened if they did not intervene. Here's a hint: the North Vietnamese were not going to the South to give them Christmas presents. Nor would Pol Pol have murdered less Cambodians in the DRK period.
The problem is that this is a grey area thing. Lets get this straight: Nobody is lily white. The US is not lily white and no one can excuse some things they did. But they are not pitch dark black either. The problem is that you liberal hippies see anything that is not lily white as being totally evil.
There is a bloody reason people are not executed for stealing a bread but are for murder. The reason is that some crimes are worse than other ones. The world is not a simple angels and devils, black and white thing. If you think it is, welcome to hell.
And just because the US killed hundreds of thousands of people and cannot be excused does not put them or anyone in the West on the same moral level as the communists and the Nazis.
Comprehendo?
After changing a student's program recently (German) that had umlauts in his identifiers which are not 7 bit ASCII I can ensure you that Java compilers do not enforce that rule. However, its interesting that it exists. The program did not compile on my machine, it did on his.
IANAL and I am not familiar with US Law but in Europe and in Germany there is something called the Datenshutzgesetz (Data Protection Law) which prevents a business from accessing any such info without permission. It is also illegal to check the URL's that staff browsed and so on.
:)
Basically digging through mail is considered the same as placing a wiretap on his phone: A definite no-no.
What we here do is to ask our new employees to sign a document that we make a copy of all mail that comes in to their account and treat it as normal business correspondence. Never had any problem with it and it is quite clear that we need to have access to old business mail.
That one particular mailbox is getting pretty damn large though
This is the same Abit who recently brought out a motherboard with a tube amplifier on board for that authentic sound with their onboard sound. A real honest-to-god vacuum tube.
I did that and I have my DVD drive in a USB 2.0 case and it works very, very nicely, thank you.
The problem is more that what you mention of every program that takes a dump in my startmenu. I installed an Epson scanner the other day. The scanner is great, thanks. But there were like 5 items some with submenus in my startmenu! What sort of bullshit is this? That is MY startmenu.
Everything can go under "Epson", or "Scanner", thank you.
That, and program which install them selvves as Sierra/Games/Whatever or Massive Entertainment Corporation/Application Programs/SuperGame and crap like that.
A good install programs ASKS me where I want it and the same goes for icons on the desktop which is another favourite playpen for install programs.
Jesus, that woman should be able to render all the scenes in Titanic with her Beowulf cluster of liptop computers in 5 seconds!
Ok since you are so bright, does Windows Internet sharing automatically do NAT when you use it or does it forward your DHCP request to the rest of the net?
Because if it does not NAT could be quite a hassle to setup.
Stick both a mouse (or two mice or whatever) and a trackball into a USB port and it works. Everytime, seamlessly. This has alwys worked too, because many people plug mice into Laptops and both keep on working (the trackpad and the mouse).
Sure, if they partner with us and stop screwing us over!
they share the receiver!
They always use the same transmitter!
> If you name two classes with different case only, I think that can be considered bad enough practice that it is ok that you can't store both of them.
:)
:
Fair enough, but I was pointing out that Java's habit of forcing a directory structure for packages has the effect of having to force the language to use similar naming conventions as whatever filesystem lies underneath.
> However case dependece is vital so you can name a variable and a Class with different case.
This is a valid point, and a good argument fo case sensitivity, btw. Prolog does somthing like tis, varibles are force to use uppercase, symbols forced to use lowercase. Some people hate it, but some people also hate Python's indented code as delimiters thing. A matter of taste, I suppose. Since Java uses naming conventions to indicate semantics in lots of places (Java beans awith getters and setters being the prime example) such a convention might be in place here, as a previous poster indicated.
> Storing anything other than UTF-8 in filenames is an incredible mistake, and whoever at Microsoft did that should burn in hell.
NTFS uses Unicode for pathnams and was AFAIK the first filesystem to do so. FAT was invented before UTF8 so it has an excuse
> All Unix systems such as Linux fortunately use UTF-8.
So I live and learn
Blowing up a H2 powered tank would make a hell of a nice bang. Wait until Hollywood gets a hold of this!
This is actually a problem with java because Java states that thos packages must be in the correct directories:
org.foo.Bar.bleh must be in org/foo/Bar
org.foo.bar.Bleh must be in org/foo/bar
This is NOT possible (unless they are in different section of the classpath) in Windows NT because the filesystem is not case-sensitive there. Java's mapping of case-sensitive package names to an underlying filesystem assumes that the filesystem has the same naming conventions that Java uses.
As far as I know Java can also take Unicode source as input and then the filesystem must also handle that, which would work on NTFS, but not of FAT and probably not on any Unix FS AFAIK.
If you put an inverter on this thing to light up when she tells the truth "Honey you light up my life" will get a whole new meaning.
How comfortable would you be to call an sound pocessing API or a OS kernel call or a image processng API or a database when you do not know how it works??
Most programmers have no idea how the SQL query optimizer works when they send a query to the database. Few programers can tell you exactly what happns insde a simple fopen() call. Even fewer would be able to explain a MP3 player. Hey, maybe that player is phoning home! Scared yet?
For that matter do you know how the transistors in your computer work? Do you know exactly how your CPU work? I did not think so. I do no think there is ayone in the world who knows exactly how every nuance and part in yor computer works. I am not even going into distributed systems where you have routers and things in play.
Almost no programmers do not understand exactly how 80% of the code that is executed by their own programs work bcause it is spent inside some OS call or library. Certainly not more or less than the blackbox to detect currency fraud.
Black box programing and pluggable components that work with an interface is called "good software engineering" where I come from, not "oh my go its time for a stupid kneejerk reaction"
And they say obesity is a 21'st century problem.
Besides, if Newton ate Mercury Einstein would not have had to publish his theory of General Relativity to explain the discrepancy that Newton's theory of Gravity predicts for Mercury's orbit and Mercury's real orbit!
That means that the Black hole in the other universe had enough matter sucked in to build our entire universe. And the big bang that presumably created that universe comes from one that is vastly bigger than ours. So where do you stop? This infinite(?) Russian Dolls thing might run into some extra-universal sort of a planck limit. Or maybe not. Any infinite thing leads to some rather weird philosophical problems and paradoxes.
:)
For instance, if our universe is infinite then, by probablility, there must be someplace in the universe that contains an exact copy of this one except that you are not reading slashdot now. And infinitely many of those in all subtle variations. In other words, in an infinite universe anything that CAN happen WILL happen somewhere, statistically. That sorts of put a damper on any speculation on the meaning of life.
There was a very nice article in SciAm (and reprinted in Popular Mechanics) about this recently. It was even on the web, might still be.
Infinity leads to weird issues as Cantor and Russel and Frege discovered at the end of the 19th century, and this goes for physics as well as mathematics. Actually, our field of computer science came to quite some extent from a attempt to put mathematics on a more secure foundation after it was shaken by the infitnity paradoxes, so this is not necessarily bad
Honestly, I am more interested in how they can recognize banknotes algorithmically. What happens if you put the note in at a 30 degree angle? What happens if you put the note in with another not overlappiong the edge a bit so that the aspect ratio is not the same. How do the ydeal with different resolutions. Will it work if I photograph a banknote and scan in the picture??
It would be interesting to see if this works if you scan a copy of a banknote (not an original) One way of doing this would be to use som kind of ink that has a specific spectral response which could be used by the scanner but a pre-existing copy would not have it. Then you would not have to use any image recognition.
Even today calling a child Adolf in Germany would be about as popular upon as caling your child Osama in the States.
He and Goebbels also asked Fritz Lang, the director of Metropolis, to direct some Nazi propaganda films. A few days after that Lang left Germany permanently for the States.
> The question nobody who wants to denounce globalisation ever wants to ask is Why? Why did they choose to work at a factory than work where they did before? Why?
Why? Good question, and one that I have always wondered about.
> Chinese factories do not go to cities with guns and tell people to work or die.
> There are no guns held to heads at Chinese factories.
True and true. The problem here though is the assumption that all power flows from the barrel of a gun, Mao's famous dictum. People with lots of property have implicit power for the simple reason that saying "you are fired" can be very devastating. Obviously not as devastating as actually shooting soeone, but stll, the power to influence someone's economic fate is a rather powerful thing to put in the hands of a person. Ad as Voltaire said, absolute power corrupts absolutely. That goes for economic as well as political power.
This is why anti-trust laws are important. The arch-capitalists always moan that they are anti-competitive and that Gates worked for his money, yadda, yadda, yadda. This is true. Putting the brakes on Microsoft (and Standard oil in the old days) certainly prevents them from making the market more efficient by crushing the less efficent competitors. However, there are some downsides to this "each to himself" policy.
The first is that efficieny is not always the only criteron to measure a economic decsion by. If you wat efficency, shoot all blind babies. Certainly efficient, but not necessarily humane.
But the most important effect that it has is to smply remove absolute implicit economic power from the hands of ruthless businessmen. Democracy was invented to temper political power. For all the people who moan about the power of GW Bush and Senators they should still remember that Bush is much, much less powerful than any medieval king ever was. In some respect he is also less powerful than Saddam was simply because he cannot shoot people at will who dare to oppose him (Saddam certainly did). Not in his own country, in any case.
However, in the economic sphere there is not so much that really holds people back from attaining absolute economic power except perhaps anti-trust. This is deep problem, because it effects the right of peope to earn and hold on to their property, which, paradoxicaly is one of the central tenents of a democratic constitution.
But in the end society benefits if there is no abslutely super rich person whose sole decisions can devastate entire regions simply by withdrawing his capital at a whim. finding a balance between government's ability to control people's proerty by anti-trust (and taxation) and the right of people to control their own is a difficult complicated thing.
Thsw problem is the high profile "bad apples" are exactly those compaies that are on the cutting edge with some really advanced hardware which they would like to keep out of the hands of their competitors.
NVidia and ATI for example.
There is not much sense in putting any IP on the programing info for an 8 year old SCSI chipset, and this is where most of those 1000s of C files are.