Chalk it up to the difference between a "common law" system like the U.S. and the rest of the former British Empire live under verus a "civil law" system like what they have in most of Europe? In a common law system, the statutes tend to be relatively terse and somewhat vague leaving the courts to sort out the exact boundaries through the creation and application of Precedent.
This bending you complain about is how the system is supposed to work. Then what happens is that the legislature tweaks the statutes correctively in order to correct the precedents set in court. So you look in MO's 565.024, that's why they have several paragraphs dealing with drunk drivers and explain most of the other cases of manslaughter in 7 words: recklessly causes the death of another person.
I'd say "designed" to work, but it wasn't designed. It evolved over a millennium of English practice.
Precedent starts with a creative lawyer trying to figure out how old law fits new circumstances. The LA prosecutor had the right idea but the real case was outside his jurisdiction.
Win or lose, a prosecutor bringing a manslaughter case would have lit the way for the legislature to understand how to adjust the law to deal with this sort of thing. Instead, the MO legislature will go back and make a series of heinous laws that hurt people instead of solving the problem.
The incompetent prosecuter screwed this one up big time
The "incompetent prosecutor" was limited by his jurisdiction. The crime, if there was one, happened in Missouri where the prosecutors declined to bring a case. The only way the LA prosecutor could get involved was if he forwarded a theory that the crime was against MySpace.
So, the LA prosecutor wasn't incompetent. Wrongheaded to try to bring the case at all, but not incompetent.
As for the Missouri prosecutor... Well, you know what they say: Missouri loves company.
I usually kill off my firefox 3.0 and restart it once it reaches the point where its holding 400 megs of ram and takes a quarter-second to respond to button presses. Wasn't Firefox's advantage over Mozilla supposed to be the lack of bloat?
Creativity is the ability to look at one thing and see another. All creativity involves combining and recombining previously known elements into unique configurations.
Nobody has been able to pin down a solid theory of creativity but psychologists have been able to describe a few of the characteristics. One of them is more or less this:
Given a difficult question with many right answers, an intelligent person will come up with half a dozen of them immediately and another one or two over the next day. And that's it.
A creative person will come up with a few answers immediately too. Then he'll come up with a few more. And a few more. And a few more. The longer he considers the problem, the more possible answers he'll see. It'll eventually taper off, but slowly.
Got any hot tips as to how, please share. I've tried and I've watch others try to bring out creativity in others. Smart people. Friends some of them. People I have a strong personal motivation to see succeed. I've seen vast improvements in competence and skill but I've yet to see an improvement in creativity.
I occasionally have a really hard time with this myself.
Two suggestions which have helped me:
1. Get a really good night's sleep. Get to sleep early if you can. Get to work late if you have to. I can do lots of kinds of work without enough sleep but writing code isn't one of them.
2. Break out the headphones and the mp3 player. Music can help block out the rest of the world and put you back in the groove. Lose your IM and email while you're at it. Whatever they want, it can wait.
3. Pick the smallest task you can do on the project and focus on it, excluding any other potential improvements.
If all else fails, you may simply be burned out on the project. It happens. If so, the solution is to hand the project off to someone else and move on to another one.
It isn't about power, its about gain and signal-to-noise ratio. With the right antenna carefully pointed, I can read your signal loud and clear at 10 miles or more, no matter how wimpy your transmitter.
You've seen the pictures of radio-telescopes, basically huge dishes? That's what they're doing: reading very weak signals from very far away but only with an extremely narrow beam width.
Yes, we could beam a high-power 802.11 service into at least the border regions of Iran and we could use well enough focused antenna arrays to pick up the wimpy signals their 802.11 cards sent back. And the nature of spread spectrum is such that they'd have a devil of a time jamming it.
The problem is, the friendly policefolk in Iran would be able to pick up the wimpy 802.11 signals as well, and trace them right back to the Iranians who are transmitting. It isn't like an AM radio signal where the receivers are, in a practical sense, untraceable.
On the one hand, I object to requiring a driver's license for any travel other than driving. General travel documents are one of the hallmarks of a police state.
On the other hand, I have no great objection to requiring the states to standardize the physical driver's license card so that law enforcement doesn't need to know about the designs of fifty plus different licenses.
To the extent that Pass ID does the latter, I'm in favor.
I'd only recommend Python to my enemies, but I don't hate anyone enough to suggest that they learn Fortran.
Pure sciences folks would be better served by something like Mathcad or Mathematica, advanced mathematics packages which include reasonably rich scripting languages. No form of "real" software development will serve you well in your core discipline.
Most likely the phone line is already Twisted Pair
The hell you say. If the insulation colors are red/green/black/yellow then its plain old straight wire. Cat-nothing. If it's solid/stripe, such as blue/white-blue-stripe then its twisted pair but don't bet on it being cat-3 let alone cat-5.
Cat-3 is a relatively recent development in telephone years. Its common use in new home construction is even more recent, really only within the last decade and hardly universal.
Slashdot Mirror
Chalk it up to the difference between a "common law" system like the U.S. and the rest of the former British Empire live under verus a "civil law" system like what they have in most of Europe? In a common law system, the statutes tend to be relatively terse and somewhat vague leaving the courts to sort out the exact boundaries through the creation and application of Precedent.
This bending you complain about is how the system is supposed to work. Then what happens is that the legislature tweaks the statutes correctively in order to correct the precedents set in court. So you look in MO's 565.024, that's why they have several paragraphs dealing with drunk drivers and explain most of the other cases of manslaughter in 7 words: recklessly causes the death of another person.
I'd say "designed" to work, but it wasn't designed. It evolved over a millennium of English practice.
Precedent starts with a creative lawyer trying to figure out how old law fits new circumstances. The LA prosecutor had the right idea but the real case was outside his jurisdiction.
Win or lose, a prosecutor bringing a manslaughter case would have lit the way for the legislature to understand how to adjust the law to deal with this sort of thing. Instead, the MO legislature will go back and make a series of heinous laws that hurt people instead of solving the problem.
while Drew did a craptastical thing, she didn't actually break any laws.
Missouri Revised Statutes
Chapter 565
Offenses Against the Person
Section 565.024
565.024. 1. A person commits the crime of involuntary manslaughter in the first degree if he or she:
(1) Recklessly causes the death of another person; or
2. Involuntary manslaughter in the first degree under subdivision (1) or (2) of subsection 1 of this section is a class C felony.
3. A person commits the crime of involuntary manslaughter in the second degree if he acts with criminal negligence to cause the death of any person.
4. Involuntary manslaughter in the second degree is a class D felony.
The incompetent prosecuter screwed this one up big time
The "incompetent prosecutor" was limited by his jurisdiction. The crime, if there was one, happened in Missouri where the prosecutors declined to bring a case. The only way the LA prosecutor could get involved was if he forwarded a theory that the crime was against MySpace.
So, the LA prosecutor wasn't incompetent. Wrongheaded to try to bring the case at all, but not incompetent.
As for the Missouri prosecutor... Well, you know what they say: Missouri loves company.
'Doh! I meant Netscape whose internal codename was also mozilla.
I usually kill off my firefox 3.0 and restart it once it reaches the point where its holding 400 megs of ram and takes a quarter-second to respond to button presses. Wasn't Firefox's advantage over Mozilla supposed to be the lack of bloat?
Creativity is the ability to look at one thing and see another. All creativity involves combining and recombining previously known elements into unique configurations.
Nobody has been able to pin down a solid theory of creativity but psychologists have been able to describe a few of the characteristics. One of them is more or less this:
Given a difficult question with many right answers, an intelligent person will come up with half a dozen of them immediately and another one or two over the next day. And that's it.
A creative person will come up with a few answers immediately too. Then he'll come up with a few more. And a few more. And a few more. The longer he considers the problem, the more possible answers he'll see. It'll eventually taper off, but slowly.
Actually it's worked out quite nicely for me including financially with more money than you can imagine
Sure it has. How many points do you earn with your troll buddies for each post that you keep me going?
It only means you didn't look.
Got any hot tips as to how, please share. I've tried and I've watch others try to bring out creativity in others. Smart people. Friends some of them. People I have a strong personal motivation to see succeed. I've seen vast improvements in competence and skill but I've yet to see an improvement in creativity.
Smalltalk eh? Drop me a line in a decade or so and let me know how that worked out for you.
Initiative only works if the infrastructure supports it
I never said otherwise... What I did say is that a programmer without initiative is not a good programmer.
A programmer is only as good or as bad as the direction he gets.
Nonsense. If he's any good, he won't wait for direction. He'll proactively evaluate the big picture and start tackling it. That's called "initiative."
The absence of evidence to the contrary.
Things like PERL are deeply disturbing to anyone with a sense of design.
Perl is glue. Glue is messy. It's supposed to be messy; it handily fits things together that wouldn't otherwise interoperate.
Not much of a designer if you don't even know what glue is for.
EA has not yet mentioned this in an official announcement, probably hoping to keep their servers from being overwhelmed.
We can take care of that for you...
I occasionally have a really hard time with this myself.
Two suggestions which have helped me:
1. Get a really good night's sleep. Get to sleep early if you can. Get to work late if you have to. I can do lots of kinds of work without enough sleep but writing code isn't one of them.
2. Break out the headphones and the mp3 player. Music can help block out the rest of the world and put you back in the groove. Lose your IM and email while you're at it. Whatever they want, it can wait.
3. Pick the smallest task you can do on the project and focus on it, excluding any other potential improvements.
If all else fails, you may simply be burned out on the project. It happens. If so, the solution is to hand the project off to someone else and move on to another one.
these strange cases that have been made possible by the advancement of technology
What technology? Scissors and glue?
http://www.wildblue.com/aboutWildblue/how_it_works_demo.jsp
WildBlue's two satellites, located 22,500 miles above the Earth's equator in geostationary orbit
So no, that isn't LEO.
It isn't about power, its about gain and signal-to-noise ratio. With the right antenna carefully pointed, I can read your signal loud and clear at 10 miles or more, no matter how wimpy your transmitter.
You've seen the pictures of radio-telescopes, basically huge dishes? That's what they're doing: reading very weak signals from very far away but only with an extremely narrow beam width.
Yes, we could beam a high-power 802.11 service into at least the border regions of Iran and we could use well enough focused antenna arrays to pick up the wimpy signals their 802.11 cards sent back. And the nature of spread spectrum is such that they'd have a devil of a time jamming it.
The problem is, the friendly policefolk in Iran would be able to pick up the wimpy 802.11 signals as well, and trace them right back to the Iranians who are transmitting. It isn't like an AM radio signal where the receivers are, in a practical sense, untraceable.
As far as I'm aware the US Federal Government doesn't have the mandate or authority to "require" the states to do anything like that.
Then link it to highway funds. Unlike the drinking age, it'd at least be relevant.
On the one hand, I object to requiring a driver's license for any travel other than driving. General travel documents are one of the hallmarks of a police state.
On the other hand, I have no great objection to requiring the states to standardize the physical driver's license card so that law enforcement doesn't need to know about the designs of fifty plus different licenses.
To the extent that Pass ID does the latter, I'm in favor.
I'd only recommend Python to my enemies, but I don't hate anyone enough to suggest that they learn Fortran.
Pure sciences folks would be better served by something like Mathcad or Mathematica, advanced mathematics packages which include reasonably rich scripting languages. No form of "real" software development will serve you well in your core discipline.
Most likely the phone line is already Twisted Pair
The hell you say. If the insulation colors are red/green/black/yellow then its plain old straight wire. Cat-nothing. If it's solid/stripe, such as blue/white-blue-stripe then its twisted pair but don't bet on it being cat-3 let alone cat-5.
Cat-3 is a relatively recent development in telephone years. Its common use in new home construction is even more recent, really only within the last decade and hardly universal.
They also control in-addr.arpa, ip6.arpa and some other second-level domains.