Way too late to the game here, but I'm not sure I agree that what they did was 'right'. I'm not saying it wasn't right either. Just thinking out loud, really.
Can what BMW did be considered analogous to placing an ad into the yellow pages under "AAA Zorba's Plumbing", just to bump the ad to the head of the Plumbing section? I know you pay for Yellow Page listings, so maybe the argument breaks down there. But regardless, isn't it up to Google to fix their engine versus saying, "Hey, stop hacking around our system, it's not nice (and we're too lazy to change our code)!".
Dungeons of Daggorath on the TRS-80 was the first '1st person' game I ever played.
I think it could make a legitimate claim to the title "Original First Person Shooter". Even though it wasn't a shooter. All subsequent 1st person kill 'em all games are derivatives of what they did on that game.
Thought I'd throw in my buck-o-five on code reviews.
In my experience, the most successful code reviews I've been involved in have worked as follows:
The reviewee creates a 'task branch' in source control where they do all the work for this 'unit', say a use case or a portion of a use case. They check their changes into this task branch.
When they are done with their unit of work, the reviewer(s) is notified (email works fine) that a task branch is ready for review.
The reviewer(s) pull down the task branch to be reviewed, and proceed to add '// REVIEW' comments to the code, where necessary.
e.g.,// REVIEW [dvh] Try using recursion here instead of nested fors...
The reviewed code is checked back into the branch. The original author goes about addressing the issues uncovered by the reviewer(s). Once finished, the branch is merged with the head.
Depending on the reviewee and your level of paranoia, you can repeat this process before merging to the head, if you don't trust the reviewee to do the work properly. But if you don't trust them, why were they hired in the first place?
I'm not the originator of this idea, but I think it works pretty darn well.
Alternative hypothesis: Life was created by organic rich goo.
Statement for falsifiability: No combination of organic rich goo yields life.
I can then go on to give evidence (logical, comprehensive, honest, repeatable evidence) supporting my claim (hypothesis or falsifiable).
On the other hand, if you say: Life was created by an unknowable supreme being which controls all things in the universe.
There is no conceivable statement I can make to claim falsifiabitlity, other than, "No, it wasn't", which doesn't the statement falsifiable. They're both subjective opinion.
Read the articles I linked to. Really. They make a lot of sense. Critical thinking is why we are where we are today. Faith based reasoning told us the world was flat, critical thinking told us it was round.
If a statement isn't falsifiable, it is impossible for it to be true.
Some magical, unknowable force is at work designing all the creatures on the planet.
There is no conceivable statement (true or false) I can make that can disprove the above statement. Therefore it is not falsifiable. It is not a statement of fact, but rather of subjective opinion.
This is a great article on the subject of Critical Thinking. Here is another.
Re:Scripting Plug-ins with Javascript - the new VB
on
Google Desktop 2 Live
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Javascript is a much maligned language that is actually pretty powerful.
I've been toying around with XUL applications on Mozilla and have been learning alot about the power of the language.
I think it's humble beginnings have stereotyped it as a toy, while the reality is that it's extremely powerful and flexible.
I'm not an uber-gamer anymore, but b/c I enjoyed B&W1, I bought this game.
While my machine is on the lower end of the specs for the game, I believe I'm well within tolerance. So far, I have had crashes involving the start of the game, clicking on scrolls within the game, and army battles.
It's quite frustrating, really. And since I promised myself I wouldn't spend $300 upgrading my machine just to play a game, I guess I'm out of luck.
As someone who grew up playing PC games (starting with Dungeons of Daggorath on the TRS80), I have to say I'm pretty disappointed with the stability.
As far as the gameplay, I do enjoy it. Given that I don't have a lot of time to play, though, I just can't tolerate losing 15m to.5h worth of work. When you only play 2 to 3 hours a week, that's a pretty significant portion of wasted time.
Why shouldn't they be allowed to decide some reporters piss off their chief executive, and they are going to ignore them?
I agree!!!!!!! And as a natural extension of your argument, I think our country's chief executive should take the same approach with those pesky left wing commie liberal media types. That'll learn 'em to question his authority!
No, I think Google is a big, whiny baby who decided to stick it's head in the sand rather than address the issue. While that may be blasphemy around these parts, I'm going for it.
Free speech does not grant you access to documents for the sake of discussion.
Nailed it.
As far as any religion claiming to have all the answers for the low, low price of 5% of your monthly income, I look to the age old adage, "A fool and his money are easily parted."
Holy cow. Either you're an idiot or an excellent troll. Either way you're an idiot, seeing that a troll is a sub-class of an idiot.
Stereotypes and Racism are two vastly different things; Racism stating a race has certain intrinsic values and stereotypes stating oversimplified conceptions.
Examples:
Racism: People of European ancestry are more intelligent as those of other ancestries.
Stereotype: All Asians are good students.
To be clear, the former attributes superiority due to ancestry or race, while the latter oversimplifies a conception based, to some degree, on fact.
But I digress from my main point. To reiterate: You, sir, are an idiot.
The smart thing would be to not induce those riots in the first place.
I had this nice, reasoned post as to why this kind of thing is actually a good thing, but I think this quote from Team America illustrates my point of view better than I ever could:
Warning, the following quote is rated PG-13/R, depending on your level of purity
See, there's three kinds of people: dicks, pussies, and assholes. Pussies think everyone can get along, and dicks just want to fuck all the time without thinking it through. But then you got your assholes, Chuck. And all the assholes want us to shit all over everything! So, pussies may get mad at dicks once in a while, because pussies get fucked by dicks. But dicks also fuck assholes, Chuck. And if they didn't fuck the assholes, you know what you'd get? You'd get your dick and your pussy all covered in shit!
[snip]It's much easier than setting all my watches and clocks all the time.[/snip]
Yeah, it's murder changing my clocks twice a year.:-)
Seriously, though. I'm guessing you're in Europe as L.A. is 10 hours back for you. Which probably means you're only an hour or two off of UTC (a guess). I honestly believe it'd be easier for me to change my clocks twice a year versus having to subtract 6 or 7 hours from the apparent time with each look at the clock. I'm sure there's a brain-guru out there who could calculate the amount a brain power for both approaches. My uneducated guess would be that my way is easier. And I'm all about saving the clock cycles.
Here, I'll consisticize it for you, since you want to be pedantic:
Legalize marijuana, but make it illegal as hell to drive while intoxicated by marijuana because it's the intoxicated driving that directly injures other people, not the actual intoxication. Or let me own whatever gun I want, but punish me severely if I shoot at someone with it other than in legally justified defense of myself, my property, or others.
Ummm, yeah, I don't think you have a firm grasp on the free market...
The PC side of things has been operating under free market competition since people started cloning the 8080. If low price always wins, why aren't we all still using TRS-80s?
Downward price pressure drives the old and busted out and the new hotness in. The free market is teh shizzle!!!11!!one
To proffer an analogy: Apple is a Monarchy, where you're told what you'll get, how you'll use it, and what you'll pay. The PC industry is a Democracy, where voting is done with dollars.
For some, living under a Monarcy is comfortable. You don't have to make any decisions or worry about anything. Everything is taken care of for you. Just fork over your $2500. Apparantly that doesn't work for most people, who want lower prices and more choices, despite the risk involved.
But, you know, some people like to be ruled with an iron fist.
Man, that's a much better explanation to Mr. Y than I could have mustered. I was going to go with:
Damn kids! With your loud music!
But seriously, Mr. Y, here's wonderful mathematical proof of why you actually don't know more than those soulless adults:
Take your current age and subtract 10 years from it. Did you know what you were talking about at that age? Of course you didn't. You were a god damn idiot. And ten years from now, you'll come to the same conclusion about your current self and ideas.
...nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself...
and you said:
Assuming you were under the influence, you'd be incriminating yourself if you do use the breathalyzer.
Now, I'm no constitutional law expert, but I would infer 'criminal case' to mean a trial in a court of law, which a traffic stop is not. So I don't think your position holds water.
If you want a defense against your 1-year suspension, I suspect you'd have better luck arguing the officer had no probable cause to pull you over in the first place.
I then ask those same people if other privleges such as voting... should be taken away on the spot if you fail to give the authorities your DNA when they ask for it.
Umm, no. I think your analogy is flawed. Losing your driving privileges after refusing to take a breathalizer (which you presumable refused to do while in your car, having been pulled over by a cop) is in no way similar to losing your voting rights b/c you failed to submit DNA.
The drunk driving scenario is more analogous to you losing your right to wear a tin foil hat after refusing to take of said hat to receive your daily dose of government control microwaves.
...and if you think my support of FreeNet means that you're free to move in on my kid you're liable...
Yeah, no. That's not what I was saying.
I'm not willing to betray my kid's potential future in a free society in exchange for a little more convenience in safeguarding his present well-being.
And neither were the founding fathers. That's why the First Amendment speaks of both Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press. It does not, however, speak of the Freedom to Say Whatever You Want Without Accountability.
Re:Great, here come the CP trolls
on
Revamping Freenet
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm just asking you to be honest about it. I'm asking you to say: "I don't beleive in a censorship-free medium" if you want to oppose Freenet on the grounds that it allows CP.
Now, I'm not who you said this to, but I'll agree to say that I don't believe in a censorship-free medium.
For example, during World War II, I don't think American reporters stationed in Britain should have been allowed to say whatever they wanted.
I don't think that fertilizer truck bomb recipes should be publically available.
I don't think that 'Grow Weapons Grade Antrhax in Your Basement' should be available to the average Joe, either.
And I don't think that 'How to kidnap, rape, kill, and dispose of your neighbors 9 year old girl without getting caught.mp3' should be accessible by anyone.
What I'm trying to say is that there's a balance to what you're looking for. If you want to protect whistle-blowers, elections, DeCSS, or what have you, do so through the law. That's what they've been doing for over 200 years.
There's no quick fix to what you want (I don't think anonymous speech is the answer, as it creates it's own host of IMO significant problems). To me, it seems like you're asking for 'Anarchy of Speech', where there are no rules. I think there's a better way...
With that said, I will concede that many people significantly smarter than I have lost much more sleep over this issue and all to no avail.
Re:Great, here come the CP trolls
on
Revamping Freenet
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Everything stated below is my opinion. It is not to be mistaken for fact.
"...you can be either for or against absolute, anonymous free speech."
You hit the nail on the head. Remember, though, the bill of rights makes no guarantee to anonymity.
It's my opinion that the rule of law has to be more important than a right to anonymous free speech. If someone were to use Freenet to post pictures of two nuclear warheads, and nuke New York with one of them, and subsequently hold the country hostage, can you legitimately say their right to that 'speech' supercedes those of the millions dead and millions more threatened? I don't believe that's a reasonable position.
That the gains from proof of election fraud outweigh the losses from child porn.
You don't have a child, do you.
There has to be a balance. The right to free speech can exist with limitations. After all, you can't yell "Fire" in a crowded theatre.
If you're concerned about election fraud or police brutality, run for the election board or mayor. Or do you believe the system to be so completely rigged as to prevent you from attaining those offices?
There are other responses above mine which better address your questions/disagreements. My responses below are meant to be humorous and/or obnoxious, depending on your perspective.
Why the hell not? Is it uncool now? Do I need to stop using it for l33t status?
Yes. It's uncool. If you wish to be 1337, you need to stop using Vector. Only \/\/4|\|k3rz use Vector. At least that's what they told me in my Java class at DeVry(1). ** braces for DeVry graduate flames **
One might argue it is easier to read especially for something simple.
Those of use with inferior programming skills prefer to separate our View code (JSPs) from our Controller code (Servlets). We do so because we are not capable of remembering where some page setup code was originally written (Where is that list box set up? In the servlet? the display.jsp? the header.jsp include? the vars.jsp include? one of the includes in one of the includes? The base servlet? The action servlet? the form? the application initialization plugin? etc.). Following this practice, we always know where to go to find the setup for a view. However, someone with your superior coding skills, who can clearly remember where all page setup code exists within an application (whether written by you or not), need not adhere to this rule.
No, it is I who hopes to never work with you. I would clearly be out of my league and unable to keep up, what with having to use design patterns like MVC to help me remember where to find code that I have (and even have not) written.
Are you one of those types that spend all thier time critizing other people's code just because it is not how they would code it? I hope I never work with you.
Yes. I am. I'll give you an example.
"thier" != "their"
and
"critizing" != "criticizing"
(1) I have nothing against DeVry graduates or their skills. I don't know any DeVry alumni, nor have never worked with anyone having any affiliation with DeVry. I'm merely making a joke.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's see. You're a parent. I'm a parent. OP is a parent.
There could be a pattern there.
Our average age may be higher than you think.
Way too late to the game here, but I'm not sure I agree that what they did was 'right'. I'm not saying it wasn't right either. Just thinking out loud, really.
Can what BMW did be considered analogous to placing an ad into the yellow pages under "AAA Zorba's Plumbing", just to bump the ad to the head of the Plumbing section? I know you pay for Yellow Page listings, so maybe the argument breaks down there. But regardless, isn't it up to Google to fix their engine versus saying, "Hey, stop hacking around our system, it's not nice (and we're too lazy to change our code)!".
I don't know. It just seems a little draconian.
This is NOT meant to be a flame, just an honest reaction:
by the AH in Org: Huh?
asking me to take her to UBRS.: Sweet! Sounds sexy!
went to UBRS... and yeah.:Oh yeah! I'll bet!
just greeded it and LPed it later: **dazed**
stereotype that all Chinese people are Ninja Gold Farmers: WTF?
Sigh, multiculturalism for the loss.: **confused**
The ironic twist here, of course: is that I am clearly to old to know what the hell you're talking about.
Again, all in good fun! I used to game, but I have a wife and child now.
Dungeons of Daggorath on the TRS-80 was the first '1st person' game I ever played.
I think it could make a legitimate claim to the title "Original First Person Shooter". Even though it wasn't a shooter. All subsequent 1st person kill 'em all games are derivatives of what they did on that game.
Circa 1982, 8K.
Thought I'd throw in my buck-o-five on code reviews.
// REVIEW [dvh] Try using recursion here instead of nested fors...
In my experience, the most successful code reviews I've been involved in have worked as follows:
The reviewee creates a 'task branch' in source control where they do all the work for this 'unit', say a use case or a portion of a use case. They check their changes into this task branch.
When they are done with their unit of work, the reviewer(s) is notified (email works fine) that a task branch is ready for review.
The reviewer(s) pull down the task branch to be reviewed, and proceed to add '// REVIEW' comments to the code, where necessary.
e.g.,
The reviewed code is checked back into the branch. The original author goes about addressing the issues uncovered by the reviewer(s). Once finished, the branch is merged with the head.
Depending on the reviewee and your level of paranoia, you can repeat this process before merging to the head, if you don't trust the reviewee to do the work properly. But if you don't trust them, why were they hired in the first place?
I'm not the originator of this idea, but I think it works pretty darn well.
Alternative hypothesis: Life was created by organic rich goo.
Statement for falsifiability: No combination of organic rich goo yields life.
I can then go on to give evidence (logical, comprehensive, honest, repeatable evidence) supporting my claim (hypothesis or falsifiable).
On the other hand, if you say: Life was created by an unknowable supreme being which controls all things in the universe.
There is no conceivable statement I can make to claim falsifiabitlity, other than, "No, it wasn't", which doesn't the statement falsifiable. They're both subjective opinion.
Read the articles I linked to. Really. They make a lot of sense. Critical thinking is why we are where we are today. Faith based reasoning told us the world was flat, critical thinking told us it was round.
If a statement isn't falsifiable, it is impossible for it to be true.
There is no conceivable statement (true or false) I can make that can disprove the above statement. Therefore it is not falsifiable. It is not a statement of fact, but rather of subjective opinion.
This is a great article on the subject of Critical Thinking. Here is another.
Javascript is a much maligned language that is actually pretty powerful.
I've been toying around with XUL applications on Mozilla and have been learning alot about the power of the language.
I think it's humble beginnings have stereotyped it as a toy, while the reality is that it's extremely powerful and flexible.
The new ECMA 357 spec is pretty interesting, too.
I'm not an uber-gamer anymore, but b/c I enjoyed B&W1, I bought this game.
.5h worth of work. When you only play 2 to 3 hours a week, that's a pretty significant portion of wasted time.
While my machine is on the lower end of the specs for the game, I believe I'm well within tolerance. So far, I have had crashes involving the start of the game, clicking on scrolls within the game, and army battles.
It's quite frustrating, really. And since I promised myself I wouldn't spend $300 upgrading my machine just to play a game, I guess I'm out of luck.
As someone who grew up playing PC games (starting with Dungeons of Daggorath on the TRS80), I have to say I'm pretty disappointed with the stability.
As far as the gameplay, I do enjoy it. Given that I don't have a lot of time to play, though, I just can't tolerate losing 15m to
Whatever. Nevermind.
PostgreSQL Fanboy: MySQL Sucks!
MySQL Zealot: STFU!!!1! MySQL Rules! PostgreSQL is for weenies!!!1!1!elventy-one
There. Now that that's done, can we move on?
I agree!!!!!!! And as a natural extension of your argument, I think our country's chief executive should take the same approach with those pesky left wing commie liberal media types. That'll learn 'em to question his authority!
No, I think Google is a big, whiny baby who decided to stick it's head in the sand rather than address the issue. While that may be blasphemy around these parts, I'm going for it.
Nailed it.
As far as any religion claiming to have all the answers for the low, low price of 5% of your monthly income, I look to the age old adage, "A fool and his money are easily parted."
Holy cow. Either you're an idiot or an excellent troll. Either way you're an idiot, seeing that a troll is a sub-class of an idiot.
Stereotypes and Racism are two vastly different things; Racism stating a race has certain intrinsic values and stereotypes stating oversimplified conceptions.
Examples:
Racism: People of European ancestry are more intelligent as those of other ancestries.
Stereotype: All Asians are good students.
To be clear, the former attributes superiority due to ancestry or race, while the latter oversimplifies a conception based, to some degree, on fact.
But I digress from my main point. To reiterate: You, sir, are an idiot.
I had this nice, reasoned post as to why this kind of thing is actually a good thing, but I think this quote from Team America illustrates my point of view better than I ever could:
Warning, the following quote is rated PG-13 /R, depending on your level of purity
Yeah, it's murder changing my clocks twice a year. :-)
Seriously, though. I'm guessing you're in Europe as L.A. is 10 hours back for you. Which probably means you're only an hour or two off of UTC (a guess). I honestly believe it'd be easier for me to change my clocks twice a year versus having to subtract 6 or 7 hours from the apparent time with each look at the clock. I'm sure there's a brain-guru out there who could calculate the amount a brain power for both approaches. My uneducated guess would be that my way is easier. And I'm all about saving the clock cycles.
Here, I'll consisticize it for you, since you want to be pedantic:
There.
Hear, hear!
This kind of thing can't be said often/loud enough.
Please, people, please! Check out the Libertarian Party. They get my local and state votes.
Ummm, yeah, I don't think you have a firm grasp on the free market...
The PC side of things has been operating under free market competition since people started cloning the 8080. If low price always wins, why aren't we all still using TRS-80s?
Downward price pressure drives the old and busted out and the new hotness in. The free market is teh shizzle!!!11!!one
To proffer an analogy: Apple is a Monarchy, where you're told what you'll get, how you'll use it, and what you'll pay. The PC industry is a Democracy, where voting is done with dollars.
For some, living under a Monarcy is comfortable. You don't have to make any decisions or worry about anything. Everything is taken care of for you. Just fork over your $2500. Apparantly that doesn't work for most people, who want lower prices and more choices, despite the risk involved.
But, you know, some people like to be ruled with an iron fist.
Man, that's a much better explanation to Mr. Y than I could have mustered. I was going to go with:
But seriously, Mr. Y, here's wonderful mathematical proof of why you actually don't know more than those soulless adults:
Take your current age and subtract 10 years from it. Did you know what you were talking about at that age? Of course you didn't. You were a god damn idiot. And ten years from now, you'll come to the same conclusion about your current self and ideas.
Which is why you should never get a tatoo.
Proof courtesy of http://rvb.roosterteeth.com/archive/episode.php?id =110.
Now, I'm no constitutional law expert, but I would infer 'criminal case' to mean a trial in a court of law, which a traffic stop is not. So I don't think your position holds water.
If you want a defense against your 1-year suspension, I suspect you'd have better luck arguing the officer had no probable cause to pull you over in the first place.
Umm, no. I think your analogy is flawed. Losing your driving privileges after refusing to take a breathalizer (which you presumable refused to do while in your car, having been pulled over by a cop) is in no way similar to losing your voting rights b/c you failed to submit DNA.
The drunk driving scenario is more analogous to you losing your right to wear a tin foil hat after refusing to take of said hat to receive your daily dose of government control microwaves.
Holy cow! They're being threatened with death?
I have to remember to never go to Sacromento [sic].
Yeah, no. That's not what I was saying.
And neither were the founding fathers. That's why the First Amendment speaks of both Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press. It does not, however, speak of the Freedom to Say Whatever You Want Without Accountability.
Now, I'm not who you said this to, but I'll agree to say that I don't believe in a censorship-free medium.
For example, during World War II, I don't think American reporters stationed in Britain should have been allowed to say whatever they wanted.
I don't think that fertilizer truck bomb recipes should be publically available.
I don't think that 'Grow Weapons Grade Antrhax in Your Basement' should be available to the average Joe, either.
And I don't think that 'How to kidnap, rape, kill, and dispose of your neighbors 9 year old girl without getting caught.mp3' should be accessible by anyone.
What I'm trying to say is that there's a balance to what you're looking for. If you want to protect whistle-blowers, elections, DeCSS, or what have you, do so through the law. That's what they've been doing for over 200 years.
There's no quick fix to what you want (I don't think anonymous speech is the answer, as it creates it's own host of IMO significant problems). To me, it seems like you're asking for 'Anarchy of Speech', where there are no rules. I think there's a better way...
With that said, I will concede that many people significantly smarter than I have lost much more sleep over this issue and all to no avail.
You hit the nail on the head. Remember, though, the bill of rights makes no guarantee to anonymity.
It's my opinion that the rule of law has to be more important than a right to anonymous free speech. If someone were to use Freenet to post pictures of two nuclear warheads, and nuke New York with one of them, and subsequently hold the country hostage, can you legitimately say their right to that 'speech' supercedes those of the millions dead and millions more threatened? I don't believe that's a reasonable position.
You don't have a child, do you.
There has to be a balance. The right to free speech can exist with limitations. After all, you can't yell "Fire" in a crowded theatre.
If you're concerned about election fraud or police brutality, run for the election board or mayor. Or do you believe the system to be so completely rigged as to prevent you from attaining those offices?
No, it is I who hopes to never work with you. I would clearly be out of my league and unable to keep up, what with having to use design patterns like MVC to help me remember where to find code that I have (and even have not) written.
Yes. I am. I'll give you an example.and (1) I have nothing against DeVry graduates or their skills. I don't know any DeVry alumni, nor have never worked with anyone having any affiliation with DeVry. I'm merely making a joke.