does freedom of the press have anything to do with freedom to go anywhere you want? Freedom of the press is about publishing without interference, not about being able to go anywhere one wants. What happened to the journalists trying to cover OWS was no good, but it wasn't a freedom of the press issue.
This is the same story that this organization publishes every year. Essentially, they say that by not giving "reporters" special dispensation to break the law, that the U.S. is infringing on the "freedom of the press."
Honestly, I have a hard time imagining someone who doesn't know about net neutrality issues, but would still choose to install a plugin that actively detracts from their usage of the internet in order to support net neutrality. Seems that anyone who might be interested enough to download the plugin would probably be interested enough to do their own research.
Generally speaking, when people refer to 1%, they speak of the top 1% in terms of wealth, not income.
Considering that one of the OWS types biggest demands is to increase income taxes on the "1%", it seems like they're more interested in income rather than wealth.
But the comment can become useful if you only change it slightly:
/* Skip the objectInfo structure */ offset += 17;
Then you don't have to search in the code where objectInfo is stored - it's clear that it isn't.
Sometimes I find myself reading the code, explaining it to someone, and then I say "actually, that's exactly what the comment is saying..."
In that case, your comment is explaining why you're skipping 17 bytes -- something not contained within the code you just wrote -- so I don't have any objection to it. Of course, if it had been written:
offset += sizeof(struct objectInfo);
Then that line wouldn't have necessarily needed a comment at all, since anyone reading it would know what just happened.
The product I work on has been in development for about fifteen years now. One of the first things that I learned when getting started was the the comments are your last resort when you're trying to read some code. Trusting that the comments actually match what the code actually does is a recipe for disaster.
There are a couple factors that contributed to this. One of them is that some of the original developers were the type that would write things like this:
Of course, they would completely neglect to document why they were incrementing the byte count in the first place. As time went on, other developers would change the code and not bother to update the (worthless) comments.
I'm in agreement that the "what" of your code ought to be self-documenting. Repeating it in your comments is redundant and makes it harder to read (or keep updated) the important comments -- the ones that say "why."
Well, so do I, but that doesn't actually matter all that much. There's zero chance that the climate could change fast enough to eliminate cold weather in our lifetimes.
By the way: it would never be uniformly 30C. The equator would be more like 70 or 80 C.
As it happens, it's theorized that during the Cretaceous, the poles and the equator were close to the same. (Around 25 C, compared to an average temperature of about 15 C today). During the Mesozoic, that apparently wasn't the case, with average temperatures more like 18-20 C. No ice during that period either. It's very doubtful that we could ever induce temperatures approaching 80 C.
This sealevel increase would flood most of the land...
"Most" is an overstatement. While there are many places that would end up being flooded, there is plenty of land that would still be above sea level. And at the same time, there would be a lot of land that is currently essentially unusable that would become useful.
Really, there's no way to accurately gauge whether or not a change in global temperatures would be beneficial or harmful, as long as it changed slowly enough for us to make adjustments. Since we know that the climate can and does change, it would be good for us to make sure that we're ready to handle it when it does change, regardless of whether or not we attempt to do anything to slow the changes.
The second objection, that one zip code may cover multiple taxing areas, is more serious. However, I tend to doubt that there is any example of it. Can you cite one?
Uh, this is easy. The zip code where I live covers areas both inside and outside of the limits of the city. The tax rate inside the city is different than the tax rate outside it.
Zip codes are set by the postal service, and don't generally follow boundaries set by the local government (which frequently change, unlike zip codes.) He's right, you can't assume anything based on zip code.
I suppose of you could grow giant forests of bambo, and find a way of cutting it down and sealing it. Maybe burying it beneath clay?
Just burying it is probably good enough -- stick a few feet of packed dirt over it and there really won't be that much oxygen getting down to it. After all, that's roughly how we ended up with the fossil fuels that we're burning in the first place. Some of the carbon will get released, but not as much as you might think and it will take a while.
If you want to get fancier, you can turn it into charcoal first, which should essentially prevent it from being released back into the air after it's buried.
There's a lot of plants using expensive carbon dioxide scrubbers -- if the money spent installing those things was instead spent planting trees (/bamboo/grasses/algae/whatever) and burying it, it would do a lot more overall to actually reduce overall carbon dioxide levels.
As far as they are concerned, I'm one of those idiots, even though I am taking deliberate steps to avoid known-dangerous driving. Obviously, I think THEY are the idiots. At least one of us is wrong.
Maybe you'd like to tell us what it is? Modeling the liquid metal core of the Earth with a sphere of liquid metal seems like a pretty reasonable approach to me. And given the scale of the project, a $2 million price tag doesn't seem particularly high.
My guess is that if you followed that advice, your email archives are now about a quarter of their original size. And nothing of value was lost.
Well, except the time that you spent sorting through all your old e-mails. I'm sure that I could erase 99% of the old e-mails in my archive... but that would require actually going through them so that I could save the ones that I may need in the future. (And yes, every once in a while I have a reason to go find something from ten years ago or more.)
Remember, "clutter" only matters where it actually impedes your efficiency. Your computer doesn't care how many junk e-mails you've got in your archives. In my case (and it sounds like the question submitter's case), storage prices are dropping and capacity is rising much faster than my e-mail archive's size. It makes a lot more sense for me to just save everything and search for what I need when I need it.
Since they got the memory use under control in v7, life is good.
This might be a little more meaningful if we hadn't been hearing "the memory problems are fixed now, honest!" for every Firefox release in the last six years or so...
means we won't hit 4.0 (assuming 3.9 --> 4.0) until sometime near the end of 2012.
That would be a rather silly assumption, since the "." in the version number is not a decimal separator. The version after 3.9 will presumably be 3.10.
If the 3.x series lasts as long as the 2.6.x series, then 4.0 would happen around 2019. Or if Linus decides to stick with a time-based approach to incrementing the major number, then a sensible schedule might be to incremement the major number every five years. In any case, I would doubt that it would be anywhere near as quick as every 15 months.
Although lots of people are linking to that promise, it doesn't address what is (to my mind) rather more troubling -- the claim that they are deleting information about using prior open-source versions of the software. Checking out the linked post, it looks like it was indeed removed from their own forum archives. So why are they hiding it?
One RHEL6, one Debian 6.0. I'm sure that eventually I'll pick up LibreOffice when I upgrade to the new versions of those OSs, but the notion that "Linux users" have dropped OpenOffice already is obviously wrong.
People who used OpenOffice.org on Linux have already switched to LibreOffice.
Not hardly. I have two Linux machines, and since OpenOffice is still the default in the repositories, that's what I use. Why would I bother?
Although one thing for the people saying that "LibreOffice" is a stupid name -- maybe it is, but at least it's not named after a website. It takes a very special kind of stupid to think that the name "OpenOffice.org" is a good name for a program.
Ah yes. Lotus Symphony. You take OpenOffice, somehow manage to make it slower, and then put the Lotus brand on it so that everyone associates it with the other "quality" Lotus products.
I'm sure that someone, somewhere, thought this was a good idea.
Funny thing, I somehow didn't notice that the post that I was replying to was a reply to a post that already said what I was saying. Go ahead and mod my stupidity down...
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Question: is an imperial minute longer or shorter than a parsec?
does freedom of the press have anything to do with freedom to go anywhere you want? Freedom of the press is about publishing without interference, not about being able to go anywhere one wants. What happened to the journalists trying to cover OWS was no good, but it wasn't a freedom of the press issue.
This is the same story that this organization publishes every year. Essentially, they say that by not giving "reporters" special dispensation to break the law, that the U.S. is infringing on the "freedom of the press."
Honestly, I have a hard time imagining someone who doesn't know about net neutrality issues, but would still choose to install a plugin that actively detracts from their usage of the internet in order to support net neutrality. Seems that anyone who might be interested enough to download the plugin would probably be interested enough to do their own research.
Considering that one of the OWS types biggest demands is to increase income taxes on the "1%", it seems like they're more interested in income rather than wealth.
But the comment can become useful if you only change it slightly:
offset += 17;
Then you don't have to search in the code where objectInfo is stored - it's clear that it isn't.
Sometimes I find myself reading the code, explaining it to someone, and then I say "actually, that's exactly what the comment is saying..."
In that case, your comment is explaining why you're skipping 17 bytes -- something not contained within the code you just wrote -- so I don't have any objection to it. Of course, if it had been written:
Then that line wouldn't have necessarily needed a comment at all, since anyone reading it would know what just happened.
The product I work on has been in development for about fifteen years now. One of the first things that I learned when getting started was the the comments are your last resort when you're trying to read some code. Trusting that the comments actually match what the code actually does is a recipe for disaster.
There are a couple factors that contributed to this. One of them is that some of the original developers were the type that would write things like this:
Of course, they would completely neglect to document why they were incrementing the byte count in the first place. As time went on, other developers would change the code and not bother to update the (worthless) comments.
I'm in agreement that the "what" of your code ought to be self-documenting. Repeating it in your comments is redundant and makes it harder to read (or keep updated) the important comments -- the ones that say "why."
Well, so do I, but that doesn't actually matter all that much. There's zero chance that the climate could change fast enough to eliminate cold weather in our lifetimes.
As it happens, it's theorized that during the Cretaceous, the poles and the equator were close to the same. (Around 25 C, compared to an average temperature of about 15 C today). During the Mesozoic, that apparently wasn't the case, with average temperatures more like 18-20 C. No ice during that period either. It's very doubtful that we could ever induce temperatures approaching 80 C.
"Most" is an overstatement. While there are many places that would end up being flooded, there is plenty of land that would still be above sea level. And at the same time, there would be a lot of land that is currently essentially unusable that would become useful.
Really, there's no way to accurately gauge whether or not a change in global temperatures would be beneficial or harmful, as long as it changed slowly enough for us to make adjustments. Since we know that the climate can and does change, it would be good for us to make sure that we're ready to handle it when it does change, regardless of whether or not we attempt to do anything to slow the changes.
Uh, this is easy. The zip code where I live covers areas both inside and outside of the limits of the city. The tax rate inside the city is different than the tax rate outside it.
Zip codes are set by the postal service, and don't generally follow boundaries set by the local government (which frequently change, unlike zip codes.) He's right, you can't assume anything based on zip code.
Just burying it is probably good enough -- stick a few feet of packed dirt over it and there really won't be that much oxygen getting down to it. After all, that's roughly how we ended up with the fossil fuels that we're burning in the first place. Some of the carbon will get released, but not as much as you might think and it will take a while.
If you want to get fancier, you can turn it into charcoal first, which should essentially prevent it from being released back into the air after it's buried.
There's a lot of plants using expensive carbon dioxide scrubbers -- if the money spent installing those things was instead spent planting trees (/bamboo/grasses/algae/whatever) and burying it, it would do a lot more overall to actually reduce overall carbon dioxide levels.
Unfortunately -- probably not.
Not necessarily. You could both be idiots.
Don't forget your $60 anti-vibration ebony outlet cover, or that $150 power outlet won't do you any good.
Bet you ten bucks that you can't actually come up with a reference to a time that happened.
According to http://xkcd.com/archive/, try 1/29/2010 for the XKCD comic, and 10/24/2006 for the Onion article.
As usual with the xkcd comics that people always link to, there was somebody else who did it better...
http://www.theonion.com/articles/mars-rover-beginning-to-hate-mars,2072/
Maybe you'd like to tell us what it is? Modeling the liquid metal core of the Earth with a sphere of liquid metal seems like a pretty reasonable approach to me. And given the scale of the project, a $2 million price tag doesn't seem particularly high.
Well, except the time that you spent sorting through all your old e-mails. I'm sure that I could erase 99% of the old e-mails in my archive ... but that would require actually going through them so that I could save the ones that I may need in the future. (And yes, every once in a while I have a reason to go find something from ten years ago or more.)
Remember, "clutter" only matters where it actually impedes your efficiency. Your computer doesn't care how many junk e-mails you've got in your archives. In my case (and it sounds like the question submitter's case), storage prices are dropping and capacity is rising much faster than my e-mail archive's size. It makes a lot more sense for me to just save everything and search for what I need when I need it.
This might be a little more meaningful if we hadn't been hearing "the memory problems are fixed now, honest!" for every Firefox release in the last six years or so...
That would be a rather silly assumption, since the "." in the version number is not a decimal separator. The version after 3.9 will presumably be 3.10.
If the 3.x series lasts as long as the 2.6.x series, then 4.0 would happen around 2019. Or if Linus decides to stick with a time-based approach to incrementing the major number, then a sensible schedule might be to incremement the major number every five years. In any case, I would doubt that it would be anywhere near as quick as every 15 months.
So far, no credible study has ever shown a link between the vaccinations and autism.
Although lots of people are linking to that promise, it doesn't address what is (to my mind) rather more troubling -- the claim that they are deleting information about using prior open-source versions of the software. Checking out the linked post, it looks like it was indeed removed from their own forum archives. So why are they hiding it?
One RHEL6, one Debian 6.0. I'm sure that eventually I'll pick up LibreOffice when I upgrade to the new versions of those OSs, but the notion that "Linux users" have dropped OpenOffice already is obviously wrong.
Not hardly. I have two Linux machines, and since OpenOffice is still the default in the repositories, that's what I use. Why would I bother?
Although one thing for the people saying that "LibreOffice" is a stupid name -- maybe it is, but at least it's not named after a website. It takes a very special kind of stupid to think that the name "OpenOffice.org" is a good name for a program.
Ah yes. Lotus Symphony. You take OpenOffice, somehow manage to make it slower, and then put the Lotus brand on it so that everyone associates it with the other "quality" Lotus products.
I'm sure that someone, somewhere, thought this was a good idea.
Funny thing, I somehow didn't notice that the post that I was replying to was a reply to a post that already said what I was saying. Go ahead and mod my stupidity down...