I wouldn't buy a Kindle either, not after the 1984 incident.
The real reason that I won't even consider Sony is they way the removed Linux capability from devices after people had bought them. Their root-kit on users machines, however, rather confirmed my opinion...I won't even touch their CDs.
But for now the question is "What does this mean for Qt?" I really doubt that the company is currently a patent troll. OTOH, the posts about where it has been getting its money aren't reassuring, and they may be driven to it. The gripping hand is that the LGPL is powerful magic. On the fourth hand, running a major project like Qt isn't something that can be set up quickly and do well. What percentage of the developers are external to the company? (My guess is rather few, perhaps none.)
If forking Qt were a minor problem, then KDE would have done it when Trolltech was bought. It may be technically possible...well, it's certainly *technically* possible...but I'm not at all sure that it's practical on any short timespan.
I was aware of him. I even voted for him at least once, but I forget the context. I knew at the time, however, that he didn't have a chance.
It's quite rare for a candidate that honestly represents the voters to get elected, but it does happen, and once in office they are often able to use the incumbent advantage to stay in office. Occasionally they accumulate enough seniority to have some power. (I'm thinking Ron Dellums, but there may be others.) Note, however, that these are rare events. As such, unless they are a committee chairman or some other position of power, they can just be ignored by the non-elected powerful. They are even used a proof that they system is honest.
You need to read the wording of that more carefully. The filer of the request for a takedown just says that he has a good-faith belief that he is acting on the behalf of the owners of the copyright. The guy who tells him to fire the notice isn't under any kind of oath or penalty at all.
So all the lawyer has to say is "I believed my client." and he's off the hook. And the client was never ON the hook.
Whether gender in natural languages is a bug or a feature depends on context. In many traditional contexts it's a feature. In others it acts to reduce the error rate of a noisy signal. But there are times when it just increases the amount of information that must be transmitted, without increasing the amount of useful information. In that case it's a bug.
And also remember that the information that others deem significant in a particular context may not match that which you deem significant. So you may think it a bug where others are deeming it a feature.
While that's basically correct, I feel that modern assemblers are too complex. The M68000 was the last decent assembler to learn on, but even that was too much. 7094 assembler was a much better choice, but honestly, probably the best choice is MIXX. Or possibly Parrot.
Remember, you aren't learning the assembler to write productive programs, you're learning it to learn how the mechanics works, and to get an idea of efficiencies. For that simpler languages have real advantages. MIXX has the additional value that there's this series by Knuth that helps you REALLY understand. Parrot doesn't have that, but it's nicely designed, and you can test your programs on your actual machine (sort of) rather than on an isolated emulator. (Parrot is actually isolated enough that it's reasonably safe to learn one. I suppose that MIXX is no worse, but I like the Parrot machine better.)
For that matter, the JVM would be a better choice than the x86 assembler to learn. I just don't like or trust Oracle.
Scala does, indeed, have its fans. So do many other minor languages. I don't think one could call it a successful language, however.
For that matter, I'd be as likely to favor Clojure as Scala. But it's also a minor language with a following. Or Groovy. Note that I'm mentioning languages that can piggy-back on the Java library system. This is an important commonality. I'm unwilling to invest time or effort in them, because I don't trust Oracle, but that *is* a significant strength, unless it turns into a fatal weakness.
Note that nobody has mentioned Google's go. This is a language that has the possibility to really take of, if Google decides to push it. It needs a good GUI interface, though. It may have other weaknesses, but I stopped examining it when I discovered that there was in way to create a GUI in the language.
FWIW, the language I'm currently looking at is Erlang. If it won't do the job I need, then I'll switch my development back to Python, but I was trying for a language that was faster. As a result I've been looking at many different languages over the past month. For my purposes there aren't many good candidates. (The latest one I dropped was Racket Scheme. I needed a library that it didn't support. Yes, one can always use an FFI, but I'd really rather avoid that.)
The real problem is libraries. A language could get a critical mass of followers without ever involving those who are planning ahead for a career in business, but you've got to be able to do things.
For this reason, I give Vala a decent chance if they can ever get to a 1.0 version...and if Gnome doesn't backstab them by changing all the libraries. (This wouldn't keep Vala from using them, but would so fragment the userbase that it could never get a large enough community.)
OTOH, if you don't have access to a good set of libraries, you'd better have the backing of a major corporation, because writing them from scratch takes lots of time and effort.
The lack of decent access to libraries is one of the main features keeping many languages in a minority position. Note that Python comes "Batteries included". I don't know if they still advertise that, but they used to. Ruby, an otherwise excellent language (though a bit slow) is only successful in the areas where users developed libraries to handle things that other languages couldn't handle easily. I think it's probably lost that advantage now, but I'm not a web developer, so I'm not sure. OTOH, it probably now has a large enough user community to keep moving forwards.
Now to consider a failure: Common Lisp. The main problem is that it's fragmented libraries, which are often of low quality. If I compare this to Racket Scheme, Scheme is a much friendlier environment to enter, because it has decent libraries that work well. This is due to a LOT of work by Rice University. I'm not going to claim that Scheme is a success, but it's not a clear failure.
Note that in every case that I mentioned it is POSSIBLE to use non-supported libraries. But it's difficult, and there isn't any real support or documentation. So it's basically, people develop where it's pleasant. (This is a problem many languages have. Coming up with a pleasant development environment isn't easy. Usually I find that I prefer to just use an editor and a terminal. Netbeans is an obvious exception, but I find it hard to trust something so tightly tied to Oracle.)
There may have been some places that taught basic, other than Dartmuth, but in the University that I went to the choices were, for a first language, FORTRAN.
For a follow on you could choose Algol-60 (pretty much, it was a local implementation) or Snobol. Assembler was also available, but not recommended...and you had to take it as an Electrical Engineering class.
OTOH, I was in the Math department. The business school might have had a class in Cobol. If so I never heard of it. Electrical Engineering was strictly a FORTRAN school, except that they had a single class in assembler, and several classes that required it.
Well, the real problem with this article is that just about every location has environmental problems that can get so bad that no company is going to pay enough to withstand them.
Just consider tornados, earthquakes, blizzards, and anything else that could take down the power grid and/or communications. Yes, Hurricanes can get bad. So can all of the others. And even if your data center survives, if your power and/or communications are down, it doesn't solve the problem.
The only real solution is dispersed holdings, with each one hardened. But that's expensive. Are you going to spend money being secure, or growing your business?
Yes. Driving a herd over the edge of a cliff is a technique dating back to the old stone age, however, and it didn't wipe out the asian mammoth, or, for that matter, either the asian or african elephants.
So *MY* expectation is a "perfect storm" involving at least a new predator (humans) AND an ecological crisis (that was about the time the ice age was rolling back the glaciers). I *believe* (not know!) that the Asiatic Mammoths, etc. died out at about the same time, but the end of the glaciation was much more sudden and thorough in North America. So they lasted longer in Asia.
N.B.: I'm giving MY opinions, and I'm definitely NOT an expert in this field. But at least I've read some popularizations of scientific studies.
It a law is never enforced, to what extent is it a law, and to what is it just an illegal pretext for punishing those you disagree with? The law is not enforced against HFT.
To be strictly honest, it would be quite difficult to claim that a program had an intention, and corporations are never jailed. So if the program is making the trades automatically as an agent of a corporation, who is breaking what law? And how could it be enforced? (Well, if the penalty were a fine, I suppose the corporation could be made to pay, but we don't put corporations in jail.) There used to be laws that would pull the charter of a corporation that acted in ways deemed anti-social, but I've never heard of such a law being used.
I don't know. I ran a across a reference to it, so I remembered it's existence, but I wasn't very interested in it, so that's all I know. It couldn't be ketamine, as that doesn't match the description.
OTOH, it could be something like the "cat reaction" to morphine. Only some people have it, but those it makes want to climb the walls.
Still, my comment was about making claims that drugs will act in predictable ways on everyone. The cat reaction to morphine (or the dog reaction, of getting "sick as a dog") are excellent counterexamples to that.
There was a court decision that I ran into that said that if something was legal to sell, you couldn't forbid advertising it. So I want a fine for selling it just sufficient to allow the ban on advertising.
It's not at all clear what wiped out the megafauna, but it happened so long ago that the people living then were definitely a different group of people living under a different social system.
FWIW, hunting has, indeed, been proposed as a reason. And it's not impossible. But so have plagues which the new immigrants from Asia carried. So have two or three different ecological catastrophes. And so has a "perfect storm" combining the prior ingredients. There isn't any good evidence. Certainly the Eurasian megafauna weren't wiped out by the other branches of the same groups of people, so hunting, by itself, is rather unlikely. But the Eurasian continent, because it's so large, has produced many plagues that denizens of other continents have been susceptible to. OTOH, that would seem to mean that the original immigrants came with livestock, and this is not believed to be the case. (Plagues that cross from primates to bovines or elephants are not unheard of, anthrax for example, but they are quite rare.)
OTOH, I don't have any knowledge of the number of bison around in 1500. It could be that they were many fewer. Or there could have been just as many as later. But if their ancestors were able to wipe out the mammoths, then I doubt that the bison would have given the Amerinds much problem.
There's no real contradiction between the claims. It's cheaper for the trading houses. It's more expensive for those who aren't doing high speed trades.
I've also heard it claimed that the mechanisms used in high speed trading would be illegal if done by people instead of by computers. I'm not really into stock frauds, so I couldn't evaluate the claims. Something about "forward pruning"? The impression I got was that it involved making bids that you didn't intend to execute, so that you clogged up the system until it got to the price where you were willing to buy, but I'm not at all sure I understood this correctly.
The idea is that if Oracle or Google paid someone to post, it's anonymous speech BY either Oracle or Google. That it is attributed to some person doesn't reveal the real speaker.
I'm not really convinced that it fits in with the Supreme Court case, but then there were different justices on the bench then. Now it would probably be accepted without a qualm.
"Angle dust" can cause anyone who uses it to behave unpredictably violently. And I think there's a horse tranquillizer that has a similar effect.
Note that neither of these drugs is at all popular, or ever have been. So much is that the case that even with their known bad side effects they are not on the "most prohibited" list, while many relatively harmless drugs, like LSD, are on that list.
The prohibition of drugs is politically motivated. It doesn't have much to do with whether they are injurious or useful. (I will grant that before it was made illegal, opium was drastically overused. It should never have been a part of a baby's teething syrup. I'm not convinced that the appropriate solution was to make it illegal.)
Additionally, sorry to be brutal, but... Many of these drugs are quite dangerous to the consumer of them. If they are cheaply available, then the people without control will kill themselves off relatively quickly and harmlessly. And if they aren't dangerous, then what's wrong with them.
I really think making them illegal causes more problems than it solves. I will agree that it reduces some problems.
Actually, I'm not in favor of total legalization. I think there should be a 10 cent fine for being caught with an illegal drug in public, and a 50 cent fine for selling them. But a million dollar fine for publicly advertising them seems appropriate. (This would need to be carefully tailored so that writers of fact or fiction didn't end up needing to defend themselves against ridiculous charges, though. A tricky proposition.) N.B.: The ONLY reason that I'm in favor of laws against drugs it to prohibit them being advertised. I have not heard of another argument that I find compelling, and that one argument is satisfied by a trivial penalty for anything except advertising them.
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I wouldn't buy a Kindle either, not after the 1984 incident.
The real reason that I won't even consider Sony is they way the removed Linux capability from devices after people had bought them. Their root-kit on users machines, however, rather confirmed my opinion...I won't even touch their CDs.
Sony used to make great hardware, but I wouldn't trust ANYTHING with their name on it anymore.
Mod the parent as funny.
Believe him if you want to. Politicians aren't the only professional liars.
Yes. An excellent analogy.
But for now the question is "What does this mean for Qt?" I really doubt that the company is currently a patent troll. OTOH, the posts about where it has been getting its money aren't reassuring, and they may be driven to it. The gripping hand is that the LGPL is powerful magic. On the fourth hand, running a major project like Qt isn't something that can be set up quickly and do well. What percentage of the developers are external to the company? (My guess is rather few, perhaps none.)
If forking Qt were a minor problem, then KDE would have done it when Trolltech was bought. It may be technically possible...well, it's certainly *technically* possible...but I'm not at all sure that it's practical on any short timespan.
I was aware of him. I even voted for him at least once, but I forget the context. I knew at the time, however, that he didn't have a chance.
It's quite rare for a candidate that honestly represents the voters to get elected, but it does happen, and once in office they are often able to use the incumbent advantage to stay in office. Occasionally they accumulate enough seniority to have some power. (I'm thinking Ron Dellums, but there may be others.) Note, however, that these are rare events. As such, unless they are a committee chairman or some other position of power, they can just be ignored by the non-elected powerful. They are even used a proof that they system is honest.
You need to read the wording of that more carefully. The filer of the request for a takedown just says that he has a good-faith belief that he is acting on the behalf of the owners of the copyright. The guy who tells him to fire the notice isn't under any kind of oath or penalty at all.
So all the lawyer has to say is "I believed my client." and he's off the hook. And the client was never ON the hook.
I think your third option is the only plausible one. There's a name for that kind of action. It's called terrorism.
You mention a candidate that does not have a chance of being elected.
There are a few politicians that I consider relatively ethical. Of these none are near the levers of power.
Whether gender in natural languages is a bug or a feature depends on context. In many traditional contexts it's a feature. In others it acts to reduce the error rate of a noisy signal. But there are times when it just increases the amount of information that must be transmitted, without increasing the amount of useful information. In that case it's a bug.
And also remember that the information that others deem significant in a particular context may not match that which you deem significant. So you may think it a bug where others are deeming it a feature.
While that's basically correct, I feel that modern assemblers are too complex. The M68000 was the last decent assembler to learn on, but even that was too much. 7094 assembler was a much better choice, but honestly, probably the best choice is MIXX. Or possibly Parrot.
Remember, you aren't learning the assembler to write productive programs, you're learning it to learn how the mechanics works, and to get an idea of efficiencies. For that simpler languages have real advantages. MIXX has the additional value that there's this series by Knuth that helps you REALLY understand. Parrot doesn't have that, but it's nicely designed, and you can test your programs on your actual machine (sort of) rather than on an isolated emulator. (Parrot is actually isolated enough that it's reasonably safe to learn one. I suppose that MIXX is no worse, but I like the Parrot machine better.)
For that matter, the JVM would be a better choice than the x86 assembler to learn. I just don't like or trust Oracle.
Scala does, indeed, have its fans. So do many other minor languages. I don't think one could call it a successful language, however.
For that matter, I'd be as likely to favor Clojure as Scala. But it's also a minor language with a following. Or Groovy. Note that I'm mentioning languages that can piggy-back on the Java library system. This is an important commonality. I'm unwilling to invest time or effort in them, because I don't trust Oracle, but that *is* a significant strength, unless it turns into a fatal weakness.
Note that nobody has mentioned Google's go. This is a language that has the possibility to really take of, if Google decides to push it. It needs a good GUI interface, though. It may have other weaknesses, but I stopped examining it when I discovered that there was in way to create a GUI in the language.
FWIW, the language I'm currently looking at is Erlang. If it won't do the job I need, then I'll switch my development back to Python, but I was trying for a language that was faster. As a result I've been looking at many different languages over the past month. For my purposes there aren't many good candidates. (The latest one I dropped was Racket Scheme. I needed a library that it didn't support. Yes, one can always use an FFI, but I'd really rather avoid that.)
The real problem is libraries. A language could get a critical mass of followers without ever involving those who are planning ahead for a career in business, but you've got to be able to do things.
For this reason, I give Vala a decent chance if they can ever get to a 1.0 version...and if Gnome doesn't backstab them by changing all the libraries. (This wouldn't keep Vala from using them, but would so fragment the userbase that it could never get a large enough community.)
OTOH, if you don't have access to a good set of libraries, you'd better have the backing of a major corporation, because writing them from scratch takes lots of time and effort.
The lack of decent access to libraries is one of the main features keeping many languages in a minority position. Note that Python comes "Batteries included". I don't know if they still advertise that, but they used to. Ruby, an otherwise excellent language (though a bit slow) is only successful in the areas where users developed libraries to handle things that other languages couldn't handle easily. I think it's probably lost that advantage now, but I'm not a web developer, so I'm not sure. OTOH, it probably now has a large enough user community to keep moving forwards.
Now to consider a failure: Common Lisp. The main problem is that it's fragmented libraries, which are often of low quality. If I compare this to Racket Scheme, Scheme is a much friendlier environment to enter, because it has decent libraries that work well. This is due to a LOT of work by Rice University. I'm not going to claim that Scheme is a success, but it's not a clear failure.
Note that in every case that I mentioned it is POSSIBLE to use non-supported libraries. But it's difficult, and there isn't any real support or documentation. So it's basically, people develop where it's pleasant. (This is a problem many languages have. Coming up with a pleasant development environment isn't easy. Usually I find that I prefer to just use an editor and a terminal. Netbeans is an obvious exception, but I find it hard to trust something so tightly tied to Oracle.)
There may have been some places that taught basic, other than Dartmuth, but in the University that I went to the choices were, for a first language, FORTRAN.
For a follow on you could choose Algol-60 (pretty much, it was a local implementation) or Snobol. Assembler was also available, but not recommended...and you had to take it as an Electrical Engineering class.
OTOH, I was in the Math department. The business school might have had a class in Cobol. If so I never heard of it. Electrical Engineering was strictly a FORTRAN school, except that they had a single class in assembler, and several classes that required it.
Nobody (as in no department) taught Basic.
Well, the real problem with this article is that just about every location has environmental problems that can get so bad that no company is going to pay enough to withstand them.
Just consider tornados, earthquakes, blizzards, and anything else that could take down the power grid and/or communications. Yes, Hurricanes can get bad. So can all of the others. And even if your data center survives, if your power and/or communications are down, it doesn't solve the problem.
The only real solution is dispersed holdings, with each one hardened. But that's expensive. Are you going to spend money being secure, or growing your business?
Yes. Driving a herd over the edge of a cliff is a technique dating back to the old stone age, however, and it didn't wipe out the asian mammoth, or, for that matter, either the asian or african elephants.
So *MY* expectation is a "perfect storm" involving at least a new predator (humans) AND an ecological crisis (that was about the time the ice age was rolling back the glaciers). I *believe* (not know!) that the Asiatic Mammoths, etc. died out at about the same time, but the end of the glaciation was much more sudden and thorough in North America. So they lasted longer in Asia.
N.B.: I'm giving MY opinions, and I'm definitely NOT an expert in this field. But at least I've read some popularizations of scientific studies.
It a law is never enforced, to what extent is it a law, and to what is it just an illegal pretext for punishing those you disagree with? The law is not enforced against HFT.
To be strictly honest, it would be quite difficult to claim that a program had an intention, and corporations are never jailed. So if the program is making the trades automatically as an agent of a corporation, who is breaking what law? And how could it be enforced? (Well, if the penalty were a fine, I suppose the corporation could be made to pay, but we don't put corporations in jail.) There used to be laws that would pull the charter of a corporation that acted in ways deemed anti-social, but I've never heard of such a law being used.
I don't know. I ran a across a reference to it, so I remembered it's existence, but I wasn't very interested in it, so that's all I know. It couldn't be ketamine, as that doesn't match the description.
OTOH, it could be something like the "cat reaction" to morphine. Only some people have it, but those it makes want to climb the walls.
Still, my comment was about making claims that drugs will act in predictable ways on everyone. The cat reaction to morphine (or the dog reaction, of getting "sick as a dog") are excellent counterexamples to that.
There was a court decision that I ran into that said that if something was legal to sell, you couldn't forbid advertising it. So I want a fine for selling it just sufficient to allow the ban on advertising.
It's not at all clear what wiped out the megafauna, but it happened so long ago that the people living then were definitely a different group of people living under a different social system.
FWIW, hunting has, indeed, been proposed as a reason. And it's not impossible. But so have plagues which the new immigrants from Asia carried. So have two or three different ecological catastrophes. And so has a "perfect storm" combining the prior ingredients. There isn't any good evidence. Certainly the Eurasian megafauna weren't wiped out by the other branches of the same groups of people, so hunting, by itself, is rather unlikely. But the Eurasian continent, because it's so large, has produced many plagues that denizens of other continents have been susceptible to. OTOH, that would seem to mean that the original immigrants came with livestock, and this is not believed to be the case. (Plagues that cross from primates to bovines or elephants are not unheard of, anthrax for example, but they are quite rare.)
OTOH, I don't have any knowledge of the number of bison around in 1500. It could be that they were many fewer. Or there could have been just as many as later. But if their ancestors were able to wipe out the mammoths, then I doubt that the bison would have given the Amerinds much problem.
Cheaper for who, and more expensive for who?
There's no real contradiction between the claims. It's cheaper for the trading houses. It's more expensive for those who aren't doing high speed trades.
I've also heard it claimed that the mechanisms used in high speed trading would be illegal if done by people instead of by computers. I'm not really into stock frauds, so I couldn't evaluate the claims. Something about "forward pruning"? The impression I got was that it involved making bids that you didn't intend to execute, so that you clogged up the system until it got to the price where you were willing to buy, but I'm not at all sure I understood this correctly.
The idea is that if Oracle or Google paid someone to post, it's anonymous speech BY either Oracle or Google. That it is attributed to some person doesn't reveal the real speaker.
I'm not really convinced that it fits in with the Supreme Court case, but then there were different justices on the bench then. Now it would probably be accepted without a qualm.
Sorry, but that's not strictly true.
"Angle dust" can cause anyone who uses it to behave unpredictably violently. And I think there's a horse tranquillizer that has a similar effect.
Note that neither of these drugs is at all popular, or ever have been. So much is that the case that even with their known bad side effects they are not on the "most prohibited" list, while many relatively harmless drugs, like LSD, are on that list.
The prohibition of drugs is politically motivated. It doesn't have much to do with whether they are injurious or useful. (I will grant that before it was made illegal, opium was drastically overused. It should never have been a part of a baby's teething syrup. I'm not convinced that the appropriate solution was to make it illegal.)
Cthulhu 2012 - Why vote for the lesser evil?
Unfortunately, he isn't on the ballot, and I can't decide which candidate is his logical substitute.
Additionally, sorry to be brutal, but...
Many of these drugs are quite dangerous to the consumer of them. If they are cheaply available, then the people without control will kill themselves off relatively quickly and harmlessly. And if they aren't dangerous, then what's wrong with them.
I really think making them illegal causes more problems than it solves. I will agree that it reduces some problems.
Actually, I'm not in favor of total legalization. I think there should be a 10 cent fine for being caught with an illegal drug in public, and a 50 cent fine for selling them. But a million dollar fine for publicly advertising them seems appropriate. (This would need to be carefully tailored so that writers of fact or fiction didn't end up needing to defend themselves against ridiculous charges, though. A tricky proposition.)
N.B.: The ONLY reason that I'm in favor of laws against drugs it to prohibit them being advertised. I have not heard of another argument that I find compelling, and that one argument is satisfied by a trivial penalty for anything except advertising them.