You seem to be mixing up what's technically possible and what's legally possible. It's technically possible for them to listen in on your phone conversations or tap you room, but it's not (normally) legal, and the terms of service of my provider mention nothing about reading the contents of my emails (they do have the right to track which web sites I go to, and possibly the addresses of emails, but not the content of them).
It's not about whether your emails are secure, it's about whether your government has the legal right to read them.
It may sound daft, but it's not a totally unreasonable stance. One of the features of most antivirus products is that they can give daily updates for newly found viruses, so in theory you are permanently protected. You may be running an OS that has no viruses today, but however confident you may be, there is no way that you can guarantee that there will never be a virus for it, and without something that would update and protect you if this did happen, how can you be sure that you are safe?
I'm not claiming that you he's right and that you should be running antivirus software, but I can at least see where your "dude" was coming from.
Personally I find it difficult to use my land-line phone on the bus or when I'm in the pub.
There are certainly countries where mobile usage has picked up due to poor fixed line infrastructure (in some of the Eastern European countries you can have a 6 month - a year wait for a land line), but the takeup in most places is nothing to do with this.
You can achieve that effect by putting a computer disk in your old audio CD player. I did that once (by accident), with a magazine cover disk. I couldn't hear anything so I kept turning up the volume. Just as I got to max, I got an extremely loud bang, followed by more silence. I thought I'd blown something up, but it all seemed OK afterwards (except for my ear). I don't recommend it.
That might be true, although it is a lot less likely that the poorer and more rural areas would have much exposure to computers or the Internet.
To some extent true, but I have at least one Chinese friend who's parents speak not one word of any language except Chinese, but who keep in contact with him via email.
There will always be people that the Internet won't reach, in the same way that many people have never used a phone, but seeing the way it has taken off amongst people like my parents (the first time my father ever used a mouse was 6 months ago, but he's now addicted to the Internet), and the way new technology like mobile phones have taken off in China (and not just amongst the 'educated', it's not unreasonable to expect that there is a good likelihood that usage could start to pick up amongst the 'average' Chinese in the near future, and having to learn another alphabet in order to use it would be a barrier to this.
For the sake of having just 2 less letters, I don't think these problems make Korean a simpler or more convenient option for anyone, except Koreans of course.
The point about Korean was not a suggestion that it becomes the default language for the internet, just that if it had been the language that needed to be used to access anything, then this would be a barrier to the takeup of the Internet by average people in the West, and most people would not be prepared to learn it, even though it is not that complex, just for this purpose.
No, but I'm sure we would. The dominant culture at the time of a field's inception tends to define that particular field. Have you noticed that biology is still heavily Latin, that music is heavily Italian,
This is true, for people who work within that field. I suspect that your average person in the street wouldn't know what adagio meant. Also a better comparison is actually Greek symbols in maths, as they are in a different alphabet. I suspect that most people would recognise the pi symbol, but few of them (unless they are mathematicians) would recognise, or be prepared to learn, any of the others. This use of other languages/symbols in particular fields is almost universally seen by outsiders as a mechanism to stop them understanding that particular field. And if you had to learn a different alphabet/set of symbols to get on the internet, this would be a huge barrier to the the average person ever figuring out how to use it. I suspect that if we had to use ip addresses instead of urls to access sites, my parents (and most people like them) would never be able to get anywhere on the internet, and ip addresses are at least made up of symbols that they can read.
Think about this situation. If I speak Japanese as my native language, I probably see English characters often, and am at least familiar with the 26 letters (and probably have studied a Latin-based language at some point).
Japanese, probably. Chinese, not necessarily. Most highly educated Chinese will have studied English (or some other Western language), but there are still vast amounts of Chinese people who have never seen a Western alphabet (or at least any more than you have seen Chinese on a Chinese menu etc). The Chinese equivilent of Mom & Dad USA usually speaks not one word of English.
More likely would be the creation of a Latin-based Internet in the West.
Which is almost exactly the route that is being taken by creating Unicode URLs.
but it's just a fact that Chinese (as well as Japanese) takes much longer to learn
If you want an easier alphabet, would you expect everyone in the US to learn Korean (24 letters, my wife picked up the basics in a week or so)?
but it's just a fact that Chinese (as well as Japanese) takes much longer to learn than Latin-based languages and is much less widespread geographically.
Geographically, possibly, population-wise, Chinese is spoken as a first (and usually only) language by almost 1/4 of the worlds population. When you take into account other non-Western languages (Cyrillic, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, etc), it's probably getting on for (if not more than) half the world's population.
Re:Are international domain names even necessary?
on
Spoofing URLs With Unicode
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
What if the Internet had started in China? Would you be happy to learn the Chinese alphabet in order to enter URLs?
If the Mr Pibb cans looked too much like the Dr Pepper cans, so that it was difficult to distinguish them, the I believe that they could be done for "Passing Off" which is the use of someone elses marks. However, as Mr Pibb is made by Coke, who also have a licence for producing Dr Pepper in many areas, I suspect that Dr Pepper won't be suing them.
I understand the concept of soldiers following orders unquestioningly. I was a military cadet (admittedly not a full-time soldier, but I have experienced military discipline), but that is beside the point.
Governments do sometimes ask their armed forces to perform tasks that are nothing to do with protecting the people of that country or democracy. Do you feel that no-one should challenge this? You seem to claim that as a soldier, you can't challenge it because it's against military code, but civilians can't challenge it because they are not the ones that are doing it, and they are denegrading the soldiers when they do.
And back to the point, this is exactly what I think the original posted is getting at - that as a soldier you are not signing up to a force who's role it is to defend your country, but who's role it is to follow the orders of their commanders, whatever they may be.
The people involved lost the original court case, as they failed to prove a couple of the (many)points on their pamphlet. McDonalds did eventually decide not to pursue the damages that they had been awarded, but not until the defendants had lost over a year of their lives, and large amounts of money, defending the case.
It took extreme commitment and sacrifice for them defend the case. The point was that this is the kind of struggle you are going to have to put up to stand any chance of winning a case of this sort against a large organisation (and even then you may still end up losing), and for most people it is a lot easier to throw in the towel whether they are right or not.
I don't think (although I'm only guessing) that it was intended to belittle the work that is done by soldiers. I read it as a comment on the fact that this is meant to be an advert for life in the army, but which concentrates on what is, in reality, a very small part of the actual work of soldier. The other stuff may be necessary, but it is still boring, and not something many people probably consider before they sign up.
And as for the Iraq comment - yes it is an issue with the leadership, but they are the ones that make the decisions, and as a soldier are you as happy risking your life to help their popularity as you are defending freedom?
Re:In a similar vein
on
KaZaA Collapses
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Just because you're right doesn't mean that you aren't going to lose in court. See the McLibel case for a demonstration of this. If someone else has enough money and you don't, then you are almost definitely going to either lose the case, or are going to end up settling out of court because you can't afford to carry on. It's nothing to do with right or wrong.
I'm not claiming that Kazaa are right, but their moving to Vanuatu proves nothing.
Try ordering your next pizza in C and see how far you get;)
Hopefully, you won't be getting the pizza delivery guy to edit your code.
If you are having to explain what the code is doing, then either you've written the code badly, or the person reading it has not got enough language skill to be touching it. You may need to explain why a function is doing something, but never how. The code does that.
The comments we always see in these discussions along the lines of, "comments are for the weak; real programmers don't use comments..." don't take into consideration the fact that the odds are very good that you won't be supporting your own code in a year, you'll be dealing with someone else's crap. As professionals, it behooves us to provide as many clues as we can to the poor sods who'll follow after us -- because what goes around, comes around.
I agree entirely that it's important to make code as simple as possible for whoever is going to maintain it. However, this is one of the reasons why I normally avoid commenting except where absolutely needed.
How many times have you seen out of date comments in code, because the person changing the code didn't bother updating the comment? You may be dilligent in updating the comments, but most people I know aren't. If, instead of putting a comment in to describe what you are doing, you broke that piece of code into a separate function with a clear and accurate function name, then you've still got something that tells you what the code is doing. However, a function name is, in my experience, much more likely to be updated if the meaning of the function changes. This seems to be because, depending on what you are doing with code, and how well you know it, most people either see the code or the comment, not both. If you are skimming the code to see what it is doing, the chances are that you will read the comments if they are there, but once you've dived into the code, you no longer see the comments - you become blind to them, so you don't notice that they are now out of step, whereas the function name is part of the code and something that you are reading while you are editing it, so you'll notice that it's now wrong.
I'm not against all comments - they do have their place (e.g., usage details on public methods to tell other people how to call the class), but very rarely to detail the internals of what your code is doing - clear, well named code should do that for you. In my view, most comments are just a poor substitute for badly named/written code.
I've handed off a lot of code to other people, and I've never gotten any complaints about too many comments (or about useless ones). I, too, have spent many years handing code to other people, and rarely have I ever had any complaints about lack of comments.
For some very specific areas there may be a good reason to avoid extra function calls, but for almost all areas I've ever worked in, any extra overhead of the function call is almost totally irrelevant.
I almost always start with writing code in the most readable way that I can, and then if there's a performance issue, analyse the code and optimise later. I've forgotten where I first read it, but I agree entirely with the statement It's a lot easier to optimise tidy code than to tidy up optimised code.
I suppose it depends on what language you use, but for most of the ones I've worked on this doesn't involve bouncing around bewteen files. The function would live in the same class/module as the calling function.
As for your last line, that is exactly what it is doing. Your 'if' statement, and whole function that you are working on, is wanting to know whether the particular thing is true or false, not how it came to that conclusion. By moving it to a separate function, you are specifically abstracting out the concept of how that decision was reached. If it's a complex decision, then it should be abstracted to a separate place to hide that complexity.
if (whatever()) {
doSomething(); } ------ boolean whatever() {
[complex bit of code]; }
This gives you a nicely separated block of code. But I do agree with the general point about sensible names being preferable to comments in most situations.
If you find yourself having to comment the variable, it is extremely likely that you've not used a descriptive enough name. Why not describe it in the name, rather than with a comment? There are circumstances where this would lead to ridiculously long variable names, but very few. Normally, the context of the function that it sits in, along with a short name, are enough to describe it clearly - especially if you keep your functions short.
On the odd occasion where your function name cannot easily describe its purpose, then the comment that you add will stand out more because it's not surrounded by pointless comments.
If you need to be flicking up and down the code to figure out which block you are closing, then you've probably got too big a block. Try rewriting the contents of your loop as a separate function with a name that describes what it's doing. This gives several benefits - small loops, self-documenting code (as the function name describes the content) and a function that it may be possible to reuse elsewhere in the code. See Refactoring for more details.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to be mixing up what's technically possible and what's legally possible. It's technically possible for them to listen in on your phone conversations or tap you room, but it's not (normally) legal, and the terms of service of my provider mention nothing about reading the contents of my emails (they do have the right to track which web sites I go to, and possibly the addresses of emails, but not the content of them).
It's not about whether your emails are secure, it's about whether your government has the legal right to read them.
It may sound daft, but it's not a totally unreasonable stance. One of the features of most antivirus products is that they can give daily updates for newly found viruses, so in theory you are permanently protected. You may be running an OS that has no viruses today, but however confident you may be, there is no way that you can guarantee that there will never be a virus for it, and without something that would update and protect you if this did happen, how can you be sure that you are safe?
I'm not claiming that you he's right and that you should be running antivirus software, but I can at least see where your "dude" was coming from.
Personally I find it difficult to use my land-line phone on the bus or when I'm in the pub.
There are certainly countries where mobile usage has picked up due to poor fixed line infrastructure (in some of the Eastern European countries you can have a 6 month - a year wait for a land line), but the takeup in most places is nothing to do with this.
You can achieve that effect by putting a computer disk in your old audio CD player. I did that once (by accident), with a magazine cover disk. I couldn't hear anything so I kept turning up the volume. Just as I got to max, I got an extremely loud bang, followed by more silence. I thought I'd blown something up, but it all seemed OK afterwards (except for my ear). I don't recommend it.
Most places in the world outside the US have drinking age of 18 or younger.
For once Altavista actually beat Google. Vaginal contraceptive inserts.
I can't believe I bothered to do a search for that.
That might be true, although it is a lot less likely that the poorer and more rural areas would have much exposure to computers or the Internet.
To some extent true, but I have at least one Chinese friend who's parents speak not one word of any language except Chinese, but who keep in contact with him via email.
There will always be people that the Internet won't reach, in the same way that many people have never used a phone, but seeing the way it has taken off amongst people like my parents (the first time my father ever used a mouse was 6 months ago, but he's now addicted to the Internet), and the way new technology like mobile phones have taken off in China (and not just amongst the 'educated', it's not unreasonable to expect that there is a good likelihood that usage could start to pick up amongst the 'average' Chinese in the near future, and having to learn another alphabet in order to use it would be a barrier to this.
For the sake of having just 2 less letters, I don't think these problems make Korean a simpler or more convenient option for anyone, except Koreans of course.
The point about Korean was not a suggestion that it becomes the default language for the internet, just that if it had been the language that needed to be used to access anything, then this would be a barrier to the takeup of the Internet by average people in the West, and most people would not be prepared to learn it, even though it is not that complex, just for this purpose.
No, but I'm sure we would. The dominant culture at the time of a field's inception tends to define that particular field. Have you noticed that biology is still heavily Latin, that music is heavily Italian,
This is true, for people who work within that field. I suspect that your average person in the street wouldn't know what adagio meant. Also a better comparison is actually Greek symbols in maths, as they are in a different alphabet. I suspect that most people would recognise the pi symbol, but few of them (unless they are mathematicians) would recognise, or be prepared to learn, any of the others. This use of other languages/symbols in particular fields is almost universally seen by outsiders as a mechanism to stop them understanding that particular field. And if you had to learn a different alphabet/set of symbols to get on the internet, this would be a huge barrier to the the average person ever figuring out how to use it. I suspect that if we had to use ip addresses instead of urls to access sites, my parents (and most people like them) would never be able to get anywhere on the internet, and ip addresses are at least made up of symbols that they can read.
Think about this situation. If I speak Japanese as my native language, I probably see English characters often, and am at least familiar with the 26 letters (and probably have studied a Latin-based language at some point).
Japanese, probably. Chinese, not necessarily. Most highly educated Chinese will have studied English (or some other Western language), but there are still vast amounts of Chinese people who have never seen a Western alphabet (or at least any more than you have seen Chinese on a Chinese menu etc). The Chinese equivilent of Mom & Dad USA usually speaks not one word of English.
More likely would be the creation of a Latin-based Internet in the West.
Which is almost exactly the route that is being taken by creating Unicode URLs.
but it's just a fact that Chinese (as well as Japanese) takes much longer to learn
If you want an easier alphabet, would you expect everyone in the US to learn Korean (24 letters, my wife picked up the basics in a week or so)?
but it's just a fact that Chinese (as well as Japanese) takes much longer to learn than Latin-based languages and is much less widespread geographically.
Geographically, possibly, population-wise, Chinese is spoken as a first (and usually only) language by almost 1/4 of the worlds population. When you take into account other non-Western languages (Cyrillic, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, etc), it's probably getting on for (if not more than) half the world's population.
What if the Internet had started in China? Would you be happy to learn the Chinese alphabet in order to enter URLs?
Normal programmers write crappy code and the best coders get all frothy about all the crappy code out there.
In my experience, most of the normal programmers also get all frothy about everyone elses crappy code, without realising how bad their own is.
If the Mr Pibb cans looked too much like the Dr Pepper cans, so that it was difficult to distinguish them, the I believe that they could be done for "Passing Off" which is the use of someone elses marks. However, as Mr Pibb is made by Coke, who also have a licence for producing Dr Pepper in many areas, I suspect that Dr Pepper won't be suing them.
I understand the concept of soldiers following orders unquestioningly. I was a military cadet (admittedly not a full-time soldier, but I have experienced military discipline), but that is beside the point.
Governments do sometimes ask their armed forces to perform tasks that are nothing to do with protecting the people of that country or democracy. Do you feel that no-one should challenge this? You seem to claim that as a soldier, you can't challenge it because it's against military code, but civilians can't challenge it because they are not the ones that are doing it, and they are denegrading the soldiers when they do.
And back to the point, this is exactly what I think the original posted is getting at - that as a soldier you are not signing up to a force who's role it is to defend your country, but who's role it is to follow the orders of their commanders, whatever they may be.
The people involved lost the original court case, as they failed to prove a couple of the (many)points on their pamphlet. McDonalds did eventually decide not to pursue the damages that they had been awarded, but not until the defendants had lost over a year of their lives, and large amounts of money, defending the case.
It took extreme commitment and sacrifice for them defend the case. The point was that this is the kind of struggle you are going to have to put up to stand any chance of winning a case of this sort against a large organisation (and even then you may still end up losing), and for most people it is a lot easier to throw in the towel whether they are right or not.
"Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die".
"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing"
So, you accept orders unquestioningly, yet realise that by not standing up to the wrongs of others you are complicit in their evil? Interesting.
I don't think (although I'm only guessing) that it was intended to belittle the work that is done by soldiers. I read it as a comment on the fact that this is meant to be an advert for life in the army, but which concentrates on what is, in reality, a very small part of the actual work of soldier. The other stuff may be necessary, but it is still boring, and not something many people probably consider before they sign up.
And as for the Iraq comment - yes it is an issue with the leadership, but they are the ones that make the decisions, and as a soldier are you as happy risking your life to help their popularity as you are defending freedom?
Just because you're right doesn't mean that you aren't going to lose in court. See the McLibel case for a demonstration of this. If someone else has enough money and you don't, then you are almost definitely going to either lose the case, or are going to end up settling out of court because you can't afford to carry on. It's nothing to do with right or wrong.
I'm not claiming that Kazaa are right, but their moving to Vanuatu proves nothing.
If you've got Windows and IE (well, it is a pro-Microsoft story), the Google tool bar does the job extremely well.
Try ordering your next pizza in C and see how far you get ;)
Hopefully, you won't be getting the pizza delivery guy to edit your code.
If you are having to explain what the code is doing, then either you've written the code badly, or the person reading it has not got enough language skill to be touching it. You may need to explain why a function is doing something, but never how. The code does that.
The comments we always see in these discussions along the lines of, "comments are for the weak; real programmers don't use comments..." don't take into consideration the fact that the odds are very good that you won't be supporting your own code in a year, you'll be dealing with someone else's crap. As professionals, it behooves us to provide as many clues as we can to the poor sods who'll follow after us -- because what goes around, comes around.
I agree entirely that it's important to make code as simple as possible for whoever is going to maintain it. However, this is one of the reasons why I normally avoid commenting except where absolutely needed.
How many times have you seen out of date comments in code, because the person changing the code didn't bother updating the comment? You may be dilligent in updating the comments, but most people I know aren't. If, instead of putting a comment in to describe what you are doing, you broke that piece of code into a separate function with a clear and accurate function name, then you've still got something that tells you what the code is doing. However, a function name is, in my experience, much more likely to be updated if the meaning of the function changes. This seems to be because, depending on what you are doing with code, and how well you know it, most people either see the code or the comment, not both. If you are skimming the code to see what it is doing, the chances are that you will read the comments if they are there, but once you've dived into the code, you no longer see the comments - you become blind to them, so you don't notice that they are now out of step, whereas the function name is part of the code and something that you are reading while you are editing it, so you'll notice that it's now wrong.
I'm not against all comments - they do have their place (e.g., usage details on public methods to tell other people how to call the class), but very rarely to detail the internals of what your code is doing - clear, well named code should do that for you. In my view, most comments are just a poor substitute for badly named/written code.
I've handed off a lot of code to other people, and I've never gotten any complaints about too many comments (or about useless ones). I, too, have spent many years handing code to other people, and rarely have I ever had any complaints about lack of comments.
For some very specific areas there may be a good reason to avoid extra function calls, but for almost all areas I've ever worked in, any extra overhead of the function call is almost totally irrelevant.
I almost always start with writing code in the most readable way that I can, and then if there's a performance issue, analyse the code and optimise later. I've forgotten where I first read it, but I agree entirely with the statement It's a lot easier to optimise tidy code than to tidy up optimised code.
I suppose it depends on what language you use, but for most of the ones I've worked on this doesn't involve bouncing around bewteen files. The function would live in the same class/module as the calling function.
As for your last line, that is exactly what it is doing. Your 'if' statement, and whole function that you are working on, is wanting to know whether the particular thing is true or false, not how it came to that conclusion. By moving it to a separate function, you are specifically abstracting out the concept of how that decision was reached. If it's a complex decision, then it should be abstracted to a separate place to hide that complexity.
Personally, I prefer
if (whatever())
{
doSomething();
}
------
boolean whatever()
{
[complex bit of code];
}
This gives you a nicely separated block of code. But I do agree with the general point about sensible names being preferable to comments in most situations.
If you find yourself having to comment the variable, it is extremely likely that you've not used a descriptive enough name. Why not describe it in the name, rather than with a comment? There are circumstances where this would lead to ridiculously long variable names, but very few. Normally, the context of the function that it sits in, along with a short name, are enough to describe it clearly - especially if you keep your functions short.
On the odd occasion where your function name cannot easily describe its purpose, then the comment that you add will stand out more because it's not surrounded by pointless comments.
If you need to be flicking up and down the code to figure out which block you are closing, then you've probably got too big a block. Try rewriting the contents of your loop as a separate function with a name that describes what it's doing. This gives several benefits - small loops, self-documenting code (as the function name describes the content) and a function that it may be possible to reuse elsewhere in the code. See Refactoring for more details.