Even with a formal proof you can't be sure there are no bugs. You can prove the code matches a specification, but you can't prove the specification to be correct.
I've got one worse, after discovering that the third party software obviously malfunctions and you get past support but you run into a brick wall of coders that claim the project is working according to specification. Try proving that the specification is incorrect and that not even a drunken baboon would purposely make it work that way, but they act like it's the Holy Scripture and infallible because they only talk bits and bytes. Fortunately after pestering them for long enough they usually find someone with a business clue to alter the specification, but you feel like you just managed to convince the Church that Earth isn't the center of the universe every time...
I'm not a "core" developer for any public projects. I've never submitted a bug fix to someone like Microsoft (but have sent bug complaints that went unanswered). I have sent quite a few bug fixes for open source applications, most of which were used in future release. I'm just another guy, or as indicated, another pair of eyes.
Well, in my experience what's annoying about closed source software is that you can't solve your own problems. I've reported quite a few defects and gotten quite a few of them fixed, but when you're working with a large vendor just getting through the support organization, down to development and back out through the normal release process means the implementation project is normally over before you get it. There's also a hotfix process but that creates its own headaches both in getting it, running other support cases on the same module and getting rid of it when it's rolled into a normal release.
Sometimes I really wish you could just patch it and roll your own build to solve your own problems. Right now, reporting bugs is more of a chore in the project and really more of a long term investment in not getting as many headaches in the future. I honestly admit there's been times where I've thought "man, am I glad I reported that six months ago" but other times I've cursed that I "wasted" time on support rather than just accept that it'll never work and get what works working and just do damage control on the rest. Ah well, nothing like a little undeserved flak for the consultant.
This is not quite a dead issue. Quite recently, a Quaker hired to teach remedial math at Cal State East Bay lost her job after somebody noticed that she'd amended the mandatory oath she'd signed when she was hired. (The oath requires the signer to "support and defend" the California and U.S,. constitutions; not wanting to violate her religious principles, she'd inserted the word "nonviolently".)
Personally I find the whole oath thing weird, here in Norway being a public school teacher is just a job not being an agent of the state. It binds you no more or less to uphold the constitution than it should for any other citizen, not that being a citizen is required either. And even for a citizen I find it weird, think of some of the amendments that have been repealed like Prohibition, what if you say "I don't support or defend Prohibition, it is wrong and should be removed"? Such oaths should not infringe on your first amendment rights.
You reckon (laughing to myself) that nobody gave a fuck about electrons until 'we made TVs' ?!?
Well to be quite specific I was thinking of electron beams like CRTs, things that'd require you to actually know something about electrons. You can do tons with say chemistry, but you don't really need to know about electrons to mix various compounds. Including making a battery and thus electricity, which predates the discovery of the electron.
Well, close. Firefox will be unable to include the decoding of h264 right into the browser. But there is already work underway to simply hand over the video to an underlaying OS system, (Gstreamer for Linux, as example.).
Last I heard from Mozilla was "we could, but we'll do no such thing to protect your freedoms". Has that changed recently, or are you talking about a patched version that won't come with Firefox's trademark?
1) Sure linking to a comparison on xiph.org, that'll be unbiased. Please, can we have a comparison that isn't devoid of all neutrality?
2) Lots of companies in the MPEG LA have an interest in making H.264 videos free to play, like say all those selling H.264 cameras and selling editing software and encoders and whatnot. Microsoft and Apple are already licensing it for Windows and OS X, I'm sure they have licenses that are permanent to make it a base technology like that. In other words, this is getting very close to patent FUD.
3) Look around, everywhere MPEG2 and H.263 is considered legacy and slowly being replaced with H.264. Theora is like Vorbis, the only place I ever hear about it is on slashdot. To your "Propaganda. If it was over, we'd all know that already." is that some people here are like the Iraqi information ministry. There is no threat from H.264, the glorious Theora is victorious on all fronts.
wasteful science at it's worst. trying to detect something we can't see, 99.999% (at least) of the worlds population wouldn't care if it was found and finding it would have zero impact on the worlds population. the world of physics and physicists needs to take a good long hard look at itself... and try and work out what it's going to do when the funding runs out... next year
I'm sure nobody technically gives a fuck about electromagnetic waves either, until we made radios and wireless and microwaves and cell phones I'm sure nobody technically gives a fuck about electrons either, until we made TVs and computer monitors (and electricity itself) I'm sure nobody technically gives a fuck about photons either, until we made lasers and optical fibers to be the backbone of the Internet
They're literally trying to understand what creates mass. If you don't think anything useful or cool can come out of that, you seriously lack imagination. But since you're ACing I assume you're trolling and I just bought it.
While youtube is nice for idling away some downtime, it's not the internet-dominating force this article makes out. If it disappeared tomorrow, than apart from instantly increasing corporate productivity and allowing children everywhere to get their homework done on time, there wouldn't be so much of a change.
You're right, but there's a big difference between YouTube disappearing and YouTube not working for you. People link to YouTube all the time, be it friends or chats or blogs and even newspaper articles do that around here, it'd be like a part of Internet that is broken to you. Personally, I think moving from flash/H.264 to HTML5/H.264 is a great step forward, and those that are desperately trying to hold it back (Mozilla, Opera) just aren't achieving anything. Even if they will or can not support H.264 natively or via system codecs you can always play it in their browser via flash, no matter how little they like it. They have no force to push a change to Theora and since everybody won't support it all the providers are looking at double the systems and double the support cost, so there's no business case to motivate anyone else.
When i was in school (age 6), (...) The teacher saw, called my actions stupid and sent me to the headmaster, who promptly banned me from ever touching a computer again so long as i was at that school.
Somehow, this picture from the US of six year olds in hand cuffs comes to mind. That reaction is just fucked up in so many ways.
But they also said "within the confines of the seat". So you have a guy who normally takes two seats, he's managed to somehow squish himself into one but I imagine he was overflowing into the next (it's amazing how flabby these people get) and the stewardess had to call him on it. Tough for him but I bet the passenger next to him was very, very happy.
Contrary to popular belief, it is a dish not a torture method. I know it's hard to believe but people volunteer to eat it, so the simple solution is to not eat it. There's no quite so easy solution for lack of proper broadband.
What are they rolling out in Norway? Is it some form of xPON or are they using switched ethernet (like I expect Google will be doing)?
Since I don't have fiber myself, I "only" have a 25/2.5 Mbit cable line I don't know. I do know they lay fiber to inside the house where a converter box makes it into TV, internet and phone signals so it's a full end-to-end fiber network. The biggest provider (80%) is a franchise company so the terms differ slightly but 10/10 Mbit or 15/15 Mbit is their lowest offering. The family package normally has a 30/30 Mbit line but you can get up to 100 Mbit/s if you really want to pay. I think there are trials running with 1 Gbit/s but I honestly don't think there's much market, since they tend to have to actually deliver and not just fake it with "up to".
Now, in a higher-end neighborhood in Seattle, the fastest DSL available is 1.5M/768k and even then it's rarely that fast.
For someone claiming to not be a third world country, you do wonderful impressions. Here in Norway about 10% of the households have fiber now and it's growing rapidly, I think the most optimistic claim I saw was 35% by 2015. About 80% have broadband, with an average download speed of 5.7 Mbit/s and a median speed of 3.4 Mbit/s. That's in a country that is more sparesly populated than the US and where Seattle is bigger than our biggest city.
No, his problem is MS. It's just that people who need medication think they are entitled to it, and its a pretty reasonable to thing to just give it to them when it is cheap, but, now, that is expensive, that question needs to be reasked.
That's like being forced to renegotiate your fire insurance between discovering your couch is on fire and your house has burned down. The whole point of insurance is that you pay a small premium on an unlikely event, and if it strikes you get compensated far more than you paid in. The way people with health problems are treated in the US is the greatest insurance fraud in history.
But I don't care, I don't need that.
You don't need it now, so you don't care now. This precious son of yours, does he have a medical insurance? Or is your theory you can just hit him over the head real hard and make a new one if he ever has a serious medical problem? And if he did develop a problem, would you like it if they just cheated their way out of paying for treatment and hiked the premiums until you couldn't afford it?
The reality is that spread across the whole population, health care is not that expensive. I just checked out national budget here in Norway and the costs for all the hospitals was 4.5% of the GDP/captia. That is all medical facilities excluding nursing/senior citizen homes (local, so no central figure) and subsidized health related supplies (another 1.0%). If you include all health stations and school nurses and whatnot that's another 0.4%, but then you're really scraping the barrel. For that, I don't have a private health insurance and I don't know anyone else that has either, unless they're professional athletes or the like.
If these 5.7 billion people around the world are so damned smart, why are they unable to build up their fricking countries rather than unload all their crap on us. Frankly, I would just as soon bar all imports of any good whatsoever (...) The rest of the world can go fuck itself.
Because it's making us profitable and the US debt slaves? I'm sorry, but that your country is full of idiots with loose credit is you fucking yourself over.
Here's the thing about spammers, they don't play nice. They'll happily give some fake clicks to legitimate sites, causing a support nightmare trying to figure out which are legitimate and which are not. Then there's be some false positives and people will howl over lost money and frozen accounts and either they'll have to create too many cracks for the spammers to slip through or they'll kill themselves on support overhead and bad reputation. Ad companies can live with a certain level of clickfraud, I'm not sure a micro payment company can.
Re:And the zombification of our children continues
on
The Wi-Fi On the Bus
·
· Score: 1
There's not one minute of my childhood I wished I'd be crammed in a bus being forced to sit still and shut up because it builds character and patience.
Life is short. Wasting away your life because you think you have so much of it is one of the worst things you can do./says the guy posting on slashdot.
They can't always appeal. The appeal process has to be requested and it's possible it's denied if the defendants can't create valid reasons for it. (...) They are in no way "innocent until proven guilty" now as the parent put it. They are guilty already, but they still have a possibility to turn that around.
Formally, you are wrong. An appeal does not turn the burden of evidence around, they start again with a presumption of innocence and the prosecution has to prove their guilt. I don't have the exact details for Sweden but at least here in Norway you can appeal the lowest court's decision on findings of fact, findings or law or procedural errors. There Supreme court will often refuse an appeal, but the appeals court (hovrätten in Sweden, lagmannsretten in Norway) will rarely refuse an appeal.
The whole concept is a bit different in Scandinavia than in the US, remember here both sides can appeal, so both the prosecution and defendant has to accept the decision. If there's real material disputes or legal principles at stake, it's almost always appealed. A ruling here can equally well find you guilty even though you were found not guilty in the first trial, make your sentence longer and damages higher rather than acquit, shorten and lower it. It more a "full" trial versus a "light" trial than a US appeal.
Formally the legal system is one big process with up to three stages (courts) and your guilt is not decided and the sentence is not binding and final until all the possibilities for appeal have expired. That works both ways, an acquittal is also not binding and final so it can be appealed without causing double jeopardy, to be double jeopardy the system must have found you not guilty not just a single court. The Supreme court's decisions are immediately final since there is no more appeals, anything else is not.
I strongly agree with you, the grandparent's example is just showing alphabet soup but if I was to do any maintenance on this code like say an air drag factor I'd much rather work on your code than the grandparent's. Some write like the number of variables is an optimization, but I expect the compiler to figure that out and if it doesn't then I still want you to do it only in the innermost loop of a performance-critical section. But only if it makes the code clearer to the developers, not to obfuscate it.
For the same reason I hate SQL queries that use the pattern:
SELECT [expression] FROM some_table a, other_table b, foo_table c, bar_table d WHERE [expression]
and make the whole rest of the query into alphabet soup where you must do variable substitution in your mind to figure out WTF is going on and there can be half a page of conditions between the FROM statement and the conditions that link table b and d (what, you thought d would link to c?). Yey for:
a) ANSI joins keeping the conditions near in the ON b) Using sensible aliases that are fairly constant in all queries (e.g. resources table = res) c) Prefixing fields in the query so it doesn't break if I have to join in another table.
Oh yeah, and another thing to get back on topic. If you're being very verbose as the code above at least in C++ you should consider scoping it inside a set of braces. That way, someone debugging the function doesn't have to deal with all the temps as they quickly go out of scope. If you're not reusing the formula anywhere else, it's much better than making it a function:
Web applications. For pages with no to little javascript (and without the flash hog) the speed is just fine in all browsers unless you got an obsession about saving 30 seconds over a day of surfing. But if you are working in web applications for extended periods of time, the speed really matters. Now none of the big corporations has enough guts to publicly stab IE in the back, but IT departments aren't all clueless and web applications are becoming commonplace now that the hype has moved on and "the cloud" is the next big thing.
Probably not for long, because mirrors are far from perfect and any dust particles on the missile would also heat up rapidly and as it heats heats up the reflection ability will likely be soon lost.
I like this line..."Bronfman contended that this revenue comes nowhere near what they need in compensation for each individual's enjoyment of each work" - it's a complete summary of the way the labels are thinking. Each time you do something - anything - that resembles enjoyment, their feeling is that somebody - somewhere - should be getting money from you. (...) I know executives in his industry have the feeling of "If we cut off access, people will pay us 100x more to listen to it! They'll be dying to listen to our music!"
Flip that statement around, and you're only willing to pay for something when you enjoy it. The more you enjoy it, the more you're willing but not inclined to pay for it. So if you offer it real cheap, many people will listen but because the ad revenue is so little you make less in total and you could make more by charging more. 10,000 fans willing to pay 0.65$ (+ 0.34 to Apple) at iTunes = 6500$ is still more than 10,000,000 times played at Spotify at 0.0002$/play = 2000$. Yes, the payouts have really been on that order. Now I don't actually keep count of the songs played but there's very, very few songs I've played over 1000 times. Spotify claims to make the pirates pay a little and a little is more than nothing, but if it eats even a fraction into their CD/online sales they're losing money on it.
No normal government will ever tie their own hands. Right after a revolution - be it a war of independence or civil war - is the only time when people wronged by the government will sit in government and have the power to do anything about it. The rest of the time, claw into what you have and don't let go - it's not coming back.
To some people, it's just the internet. It's not a technology that has revolutionized the entire world. (...) Like a car.
And the wheel was not a revolution, you could always walk and carry what you needed. If neither Internet nor cars is a revolution, despite affecting more than a billion people of all ages in almost every profession, then I'd like you to list all the technical revolutions in human history. Will that require one hand to count or two?
Slashdot Mirror
Even with a formal proof you can't be sure there are no bugs. You can prove the code matches a specification, but you can't prove the specification to be correct.
I've got one worse, after discovering that the third party software obviously malfunctions and you get past support but you run into a brick wall of coders that claim the project is working according to specification. Try proving that the specification is incorrect and that not even a drunken baboon would purposely make it work that way, but they act like it's the Holy Scripture and infallible because they only talk bits and bytes. Fortunately after pestering them for long enough they usually find someone with a business clue to alter the specification, but you feel like you just managed to convince the Church that Earth isn't the center of the universe every time...
I'm not a "core" developer for any public projects. I've never submitted a bug fix to someone like Microsoft (but have sent bug complaints that went unanswered). I have sent quite a few bug fixes for open source applications, most of which were used in future release. I'm just another guy, or as indicated, another pair of eyes.
Well, in my experience what's annoying about closed source software is that you can't solve your own problems. I've reported quite a few defects and gotten quite a few of them fixed, but when you're working with a large vendor just getting through the support organization, down to development and back out through the normal release process means the implementation project is normally over before you get it. There's also a hotfix process but that creates its own headaches both in getting it, running other support cases on the same module and getting rid of it when it's rolled into a normal release.
Sometimes I really wish you could just patch it and roll your own build to solve your own problems. Right now, reporting bugs is more of a chore in the project and really more of a long term investment in not getting as many headaches in the future. I honestly admit there's been times where I've thought "man, am I glad I reported that six months ago" but other times I've cursed that I "wasted" time on support rather than just accept that it'll never work and get what works working and just do damage control on the rest. Ah well, nothing like a little undeserved flak for the consultant.
This is not quite a dead issue. Quite recently, a Quaker hired to teach remedial math at Cal State East Bay lost her job after somebody noticed that she'd amended the mandatory oath she'd signed when she was hired. (The oath requires the signer to "support and defend" the California and U.S,. constitutions; not wanting to violate her religious principles, she'd inserted the word "nonviolently".)
Personally I find the whole oath thing weird, here in Norway being a public school teacher is just a job not being an agent of the state. It binds you no more or less to uphold the constitution than it should for any other citizen, not that being a citizen is required either. And even for a citizen I find it weird, think of some of the amendments that have been repealed like Prohibition, what if you say "I don't support or defend Prohibition, it is wrong and should be removed"? Such oaths should not infringe on your first amendment rights.
You reckon (laughing to myself) that nobody gave a fuck about electrons until 'we made TVs' ?!?
Well to be quite specific I was thinking of electron beams like CRTs, things that'd require you to actually know something about electrons. You can do tons with say chemistry, but you don't really need to know about electrons to mix various compounds. Including making a battery and thus electricity, which predates the discovery of the electron.
Well, close. Firefox will be unable to include the decoding of h264 right into the browser. But there is already work underway to simply hand over the video to an underlaying OS system, (Gstreamer for Linux, as example.).
Last I heard from Mozilla was "we could, but we'll do no such thing to protect your freedoms". Has that changed recently, or are you talking about a patched version that won't come with Firefox's trademark?
1) Sure linking to a comparison on xiph.org, that'll be unbiased. Please, can we have a comparison that isn't devoid of all neutrality?
2) Lots of companies in the MPEG LA have an interest in making H.264 videos free to play, like say all those selling H.264 cameras and selling editing software and encoders and whatnot. Microsoft and Apple are already licensing it for Windows and OS X, I'm sure they have licenses that are permanent to make it a base technology like that. In other words, this is getting very close to patent FUD.
3) Look around, everywhere MPEG2 and H.263 is considered legacy and slowly being replaced with H.264. Theora is like Vorbis, the only place I ever hear about it is on slashdot. To your "Propaganda. If it was over, we'd all know that already." is that some people here are like the Iraqi information ministry. There is no threat from H.264, the glorious Theora is victorious on all fronts.
wasteful science at it's worst. trying to detect something we can't see, 99.999% (at least) of the worlds population wouldn't care if it was found and finding it would have zero impact on the worlds population. the world of physics and physicists needs to take a good long hard look at itself... and try and work out what it's going to do when the funding runs out... next year
I'm sure nobody technically gives a fuck about electromagnetic waves either, until we made radios and wireless and microwaves and cell phones
I'm sure nobody technically gives a fuck about electrons either, until we made TVs and computer monitors (and electricity itself)
I'm sure nobody technically gives a fuck about photons either, until we made lasers and optical fibers to be the backbone of the Internet
They're literally trying to understand what creates mass. If you don't think anything useful or cool can come out of that, you seriously lack imagination. But since you're ACing I assume you're trolling and I just bought it.
Next thing you know, they'll be telling us it was made by the world's most powerful soup nazi.
While youtube is nice for idling away some downtime, it's not the internet-dominating force this article makes out. If it disappeared tomorrow, than apart from instantly increasing corporate productivity and allowing children everywhere to get their homework done on time, there wouldn't be so much of a change.
You're right, but there's a big difference between YouTube disappearing and YouTube not working for you. People link to YouTube all the time, be it friends or chats or blogs and even newspaper articles do that around here, it'd be like a part of Internet that is broken to you. Personally, I think moving from flash/H.264 to HTML5/H.264 is a great step forward, and those that are desperately trying to hold it back (Mozilla, Opera) just aren't achieving anything. Even if they will or can not support H.264 natively or via system codecs you can always play it in their browser via flash, no matter how little they like it. They have no force to push a change to Theora and since everybody won't support it all the providers are looking at double the systems and double the support cost, so there's no business case to motivate anyone else.
When i was in school (age 6), (...) The teacher saw, called my actions stupid and sent me to the headmaster, who promptly banned me from ever touching a computer again so long as i was at that school.
Somehow, this picture from the US of six year olds in hand cuffs comes to mind. That reaction is just fucked up in so many ways.
But they also said "within the confines of the seat". So you have a guy who normally takes two seats, he's managed to somehow squish himself into one but I imagine he was overflowing into the next (it's amazing how flabby these people get) and the stewardess had to call him on it. Tough for him but I bet the passenger next to him was very, very happy.
U.S.:
crappy broadband
Norway:
Pickled Herring
Contrary to popular belief, it is a dish not a torture method. I know it's hard to believe but people volunteer to eat it, so the simple solution is to not eat it. There's no quite so easy solution for lack of proper broadband.
What are they rolling out in Norway? Is it some form of xPON or are they using switched ethernet (like I expect Google will be doing)?
Since I don't have fiber myself, I "only" have a 25/2.5 Mbit cable line I don't know. I do know they lay fiber to inside the house where a converter box makes it into TV, internet and phone signals so it's a full end-to-end fiber network. The biggest provider (80%) is a franchise company so the terms differ slightly but 10/10 Mbit or 15/15 Mbit is their lowest offering. The family package normally has a 30/30 Mbit line but you can get up to 100 Mbit/s if you really want to pay. I think there are trials running with 1 Gbit/s but I honestly don't think there's much market, since they tend to have to actually deliver and not just fake it with "up to".
Now, in a higher-end neighborhood in Seattle, the fastest DSL available is 1.5M/768k and even then it's rarely that fast.
For someone claiming to not be a third world country, you do wonderful impressions. Here in Norway about 10% of the households have fiber now and it's growing rapidly, I think the most optimistic claim I saw was 35% by 2015. About 80% have broadband, with an average download speed of 5.7 Mbit/s and a median speed of 3.4 Mbit/s. That's in a country that is more sparesly populated than the US and where Seattle is bigger than our biggest city.
No, his problem is MS. It's just that people who need medication think they are entitled to it, and its a pretty reasonable to thing to just give it to them when it is cheap, but, now, that is expensive, that question needs to be reasked.
That's like being forced to renegotiate your fire insurance between discovering your couch is on fire and your house has burned down. The whole point of insurance is that you pay a small premium on an unlikely event, and if it strikes you get compensated far more than you paid in. The way people with health problems are treated in the US is the greatest insurance fraud in history.
But I don't care, I don't need that.
You don't need it now, so you don't care now. This precious son of yours, does he have a medical insurance? Or is your theory you can just hit him over the head real hard and make a new one if he ever has a serious medical problem? And if he did develop a problem, would you like it if they just cheated their way out of paying for treatment and hiked the premiums until you couldn't afford it?
The reality is that spread across the whole population, health care is not that expensive. I just checked out national budget here in Norway and the costs for all the hospitals was 4.5% of the GDP/captia. That is all medical facilities excluding nursing/senior citizen homes (local, so no central figure) and subsidized health related supplies (another 1.0%). If you include all health stations and school nurses and whatnot that's another 0.4%, but then you're really scraping the barrel. For that, I don't have a private health insurance and I don't know anyone else that has either, unless they're professional athletes or the like.
If these 5.7 billion people around the world are so damned smart, why are they unable to build up their fricking countries rather than unload all their crap on us. Frankly, I would just as soon bar all imports of any good whatsoever (...) The rest of the world can go fuck itself.
Because it's making us profitable and the US debt slaves? I'm sorry, but that your country is full of idiots with loose credit is you fucking yourself over.
Here's the thing about spammers, they don't play nice. They'll happily give some fake clicks to legitimate sites, causing a support nightmare trying to figure out which are legitimate and which are not. Then there's be some false positives and people will howl over lost money and frozen accounts and either they'll have to create too many cracks for the spammers to slip through or they'll kill themselves on support overhead and bad reputation. Ad companies can live with a certain level of clickfraud, I'm not sure a micro payment company can.
There's not one minute of my childhood I wished I'd be crammed in a bus being forced to sit still and shut up because it builds character and patience.
Life is short. Wasting away your life because you think you have so much of it is one of the worst things you can do. /says the guy posting on slashdot.
They can't always appeal. The appeal process has to be requested and it's possible it's denied if the defendants can't create valid reasons for it. (...) They are in no way "innocent until proven guilty" now as the parent put it. They are guilty already, but they still have a possibility to turn that around.
Formally, you are wrong. An appeal does not turn the burden of evidence around, they start again with a presumption of innocence and the prosecution has to prove their guilt. I don't have the exact details for Sweden but at least here in Norway you can appeal the lowest court's decision on findings of fact, findings or law or procedural errors. There Supreme court will often refuse an appeal, but the appeals court (hovrätten in Sweden, lagmannsretten in Norway) will rarely refuse an appeal.
The whole concept is a bit different in Scandinavia than in the US, remember here both sides can appeal, so both the prosecution and defendant has to accept the decision. If there's real material disputes or legal principles at stake, it's almost always appealed. A ruling here can equally well find you guilty even though you were found not guilty in the first trial, make your sentence longer and damages higher rather than acquit, shorten and lower it. It more a "full" trial versus a "light" trial than a US appeal.
Formally the legal system is one big process with up to three stages (courts) and your guilt is not decided and the sentence is not binding and final until all the possibilities for appeal have expired. That works both ways, an acquittal is also not binding and final so it can be appealed without causing double jeopardy, to be double jeopardy the system must have found you not guilty not just a single court. The Supreme court's decisions are immediately final since there is no more appeals, anything else is not.
I strongly agree with you, the grandparent's example is just showing alphabet soup but if I was to do any maintenance on this code like say an air drag factor I'd much rather work on your code than the grandparent's. Some write like the number of variables is an optimization, but I expect the compiler to figure that out and if it doesn't then I still want you to do it only in the innermost loop of a performance-critical section. But only if it makes the code clearer to the developers, not to obfuscate it.
For the same reason I hate SQL queries that use the pattern:
SELECT [expression]
FROM some_table a, other_table b, foo_table c, bar_table d
WHERE [expression]
and make the whole rest of the query into alphabet soup where you must do variable substitution in your mind to figure out WTF is going on and there can be half a page of conditions between the FROM statement and the conditions that link table b and d (what, you thought d would link to c?). Yey for:
a) ANSI joins keeping the conditions near in the ON
b) Using sensible aliases that are fairly constant in all queries (e.g. resources table = res)
c) Prefixing fields in the query so it doesn't break if I have to join in another table.
Oh yeah, and another thing to get back on topic. If you're being very verbose as the code above at least in C++ you should consider scoping it inside a set of braces. That way, someone debugging the function doesn't have to deal with all the temps as they quickly go out of scope. If you're not reusing the formula anywhere else, it's much better than making it a function:
{
float hspeed = projectile.speed * cos(projectile.angle)
float vspeed = projectile.speed * sin(projectile.angle)
float seconds_in_air = vspeed / gravity * 2
float reqdist = sqrt((destination.X - start.X) ^ 2 + (destination.Y - start.Y) ^ 2)
far_enough = seconds_in_air * hspeed >= reqdist
}
Web applications. For pages with no to little javascript (and without the flash hog) the speed is just fine in all browsers unless you got an obsession about saving 30 seconds over a day of surfing. But if you are working in web applications for extended periods of time, the speed really matters. Now none of the big corporations has enough guts to publicly stab IE in the back, but IT departments aren't all clueless and web applications are becoming commonplace now that the hype has moved on and "the cloud" is the next big thing.
Probably not for long, because mirrors are far from perfect and any dust particles on the missile would also heat up rapidly and as it heats heats up the reflection ability will likely be soon lost.
I like this line..."Bronfman contended that this revenue comes nowhere near what they need in compensation for each individual's enjoyment of each work" - it's a complete summary of the way the labels are thinking. Each time you do something - anything - that resembles enjoyment, their feeling is that somebody - somewhere - should be getting money from you. (...) I know executives in his industry have the feeling of "If we cut off access, people will pay us 100x more to listen to it! They'll be dying to listen to our music!"
Flip that statement around, and you're only willing to pay for something when you enjoy it. The more you enjoy it, the more you're willing but not inclined to pay for it. So if you offer it real cheap, many people will listen but because the ad revenue is so little you make less in total and you could make more by charging more. 10,000 fans willing to pay 0.65$ (+ 0.34 to Apple) at iTunes = 6500$ is still more than 10,000,000 times played at Spotify at 0.0002$/play = 2000$. Yes, the payouts have really been on that order. Now I don't actually keep count of the songs played but there's very, very few songs I've played over 1000 times. Spotify claims to make the pirates pay a little and a little is more than nothing, but if it eats even a fraction into their CD/online sales they're losing money on it.
No normal government will ever tie their own hands. Right after a revolution - be it a war of independence or civil war - is the only time when people wronged by the government will sit in government and have the power to do anything about it. The rest of the time, claw into what you have and don't let go - it's not coming back.
To some people, it's just the internet. It's not a technology that has revolutionized the entire world. (...) Like a car.
And the wheel was not a revolution, you could always walk and carry what you needed. If neither Internet nor cars is a revolution, despite affecting more than a billion people of all ages in almost every profession, then I'd like you to list all the technical revolutions in human history. Will that require one hand to count or two?