Well, I do code using best practices, by using languages in which this kind of error is caught by default. Not only does that mean that I don't have to think about it, I also don't have to worry about whether other people's code uses "best practices".
One can legitimately debate the merits of dynamic vs static typing. But weak (Perl, Tcl, Shell) vs strong (everybody else) typing is pretty much a settled issue.
Sure. This is DWIW (Do What I Want). Why should the code to add a string and a number include a type conversion?
In order to capture programming errors.
You've used the + operator, so its obvious to everyone that you want to add. Why should the code have to be more verbose than that?
Because (1) adding a string to an integer is often indicative of an error elsewhere, (2) there is no single correct way of adding a string to an integer; it's ambiguous. Is the string an integer? A floating point number? Is it hex, binary, or octal?
Well, I can't speak for others, but I have used Perl for nearly twenty years. Perl's syntax and type system still suck, even in Perl 6. But unlike other badly designed languages (C and C++), there are fortunately excellent real-world alternatives available to Perl. I see little risk of Perl ever coming back, thank God.
I'd just as soon make recording with zero consent illegal.
So if I record my kids at Disneyland and you walk into my frame while chatting with your girlfriend, I have committed an illegal act? Sorry, that's very bad.
There do need to be reasonable exceptions for the press, etc (in public at least).
Many news videos these days come from the public. So, what do you want? Only government-licensed "members of the press" are permitted to record? Again, bad idea.
The current set of US laws is fine. Further restrictions on recording are anti-democratic and anti-freedom.
What about bed/bath rooms? What about corporate espionage? Messy divorces? Foreign agents?
Those issues can (and are) legally addressed without requiring one party consent.
It's really pretty simple: where there is no expectation of privacy, you should be able to record without restrictions. Where there is an expectation of privacy, there are limits.
There is a second set of laws that determine what you can do with those recordings, It's this second set of laws that makes strong restrictions on the recording itself less important.
Google is in big legal trouble over what they did.
And that should worry you, because if Google Streetview and Wifi scanning is held illegal, chances are a lot of things you and your cell phone are doing are illegal too.
You're comparing marginal tax rates in the highest tax brackets. Progression into the highest tax bracket is much faster in Europe than in the US. In addition, European nations impose a lot of other requirements on you that result in additional annual expenses: television licensing fees, intellectual property fees, administrative fees, etc. Of course, salaries tend to be lower and prices higher in Europe as well. The limit for Danish immigration is about $80k these days, which is quite high for Denmark.
Of course, moving to Denmark isn't exactly a walk in the park for non-Danish people anyway: there's the language barrier and a big cultural barrier. There's a reason Denmark makes it comparatively easy to immigrate: supply and demand for Danish immigration.
Why the hell do you think there's a law against speeding?
US speeding laws were enacted during the oil crisis, in order to save on gas.
For the fun of it? IT'S BECAUSE IT KILLS INNOCENT PEOPLE!
The evidence for that is far from clear. And a speeding motorcycle is likely to kill only its rider anyway.
Generally, I'm actually for speed limits, simply because they make driving less stressful and because it does save on gas. It also allows public transportation to compete. But purely on safety grounds, there is little justification to adopt speed limits; there are far more frequent and important causes of fatalities than speeding.
I certainly hope they're going to charge him for it.
He got his ticket. The question is now whether he should have been allowed to record and publish the video.
The fact that the police are trying to get away with this doesn't mean that they will be able to. Court rulings in the US have so far generally been in favor of people charged with illegal taping. We should, however, make sure that laws make it even clearer that photography, video, and audio recordings in public places are completely legal, by anybody, for any purpose, and can generally be published as well.
Whatever the situation in the US is, it is far worse in Europe. The UK, for example, passed explicit laws against photographing police. Similar laws exist in some other European nations.
The cop was behaving completely unprofessionally by pulling his gun and not identifying himself. The video is quite embarrassing to him, so the police are trying to go after the rider, it's as simple as that.
We really need laws that ensure that recording public officials is legal while they are on the job, with or without their consent, with or without their knowledge. That shouldn't just apply to cops, it should also apply to government offices and anywhere else public servants work.
My facts, like the fact the industrial revolution happened, despite cities that were much smaller, go directly to the point, and have not be refuted thus far.
The industrial revolution was two centuries ago. Yeah, you can build steam engines, looms, and Ford T's in small towns. But we're talking about modern lifestyles here: Internet, DVDs, desktop supercomputers, 3D movies, and cell phones, and all for a pittance.
If you want to make the ridiculous claim that you can do all that without urban areas of a million inhabitants or larger, the burden of proof is on you.
Of course, whether you know it or not, the fiction you promulgate is politically motivated and shared variously by tree huggers on the one side, and city-hating libertarians and conservatives on the other.
Right, that's why they're the two most popular languages in the world, because they don't work very well and aren't very productive. Why is it people pick these languages if they suck so bad, and there's obviously better choices available?
People pick them because it's easy to find programmers, libraries, documentation, training materials, and tools for them. And initially, Java and C++ caught on because a few large companies (Microsoft, IBM, Sun) pushed them.
Being able to hire low-productivity programmers working in a mediocre programming language still beats having no programmers working in a well designed language.
Very true. This is also the case for every other language in existence.
No, they are not "the case for every other language in existence". Few languages other than C++ have even the possibility of a buffer overrun or pointer error, one of the most common sources of security errors in UNIX and Windows software. Few languages other than C++ have such widespread use of undefined effects in their definitions. Few languages other than Java have poorly designed features like covariant arrays, type erasure, or class loaders.
Yes.. we're all fools with no knowledge. Just robots programmed to do as the master tells us.
If you do have actual knowledge of programming languages, why don't you come up with a technical analysis comparing, oh, the Java type system to the type system of other languages, or the C++ runtime and performance to the runtime and performance of other languages? In what way do you think it's actually technically better? Do you even know other languages besides Java?
Nope. There's been multiple studies that say cell phones are essentially harmless, or at the very worst have such a small effect to not be measurable. Many of them have had slashdot stories.
Absence of a statistically significant effect in multiple studies doesn't show that cell phones are "essentially harmless", it shows you nothing at all. These statistical tests are one sided: if they see an effect, it's probably real, if they don't see an effect, it means nothing at all.
Furthermore, one wouldn't expect to see epidemiological effects just yet; brain cancers take decades to develop and detect, and the current cell phone frequencies have only been in widespread use for a few years. If you want to see how long epidemiological studies take to demonstrate harmful effects, just look at how long it took to demonstrate the harm from smoking and get regulation in place, and those effects are extremely strong.
Studies clearly show that cell phone radiation induces changes in gene expression and repair mechanisms, and that is a serious and valid concern. Saying that it is "hardly anything worth any concern" just flies in the face of data and facts.
After all, there is no convincing evidence for a lot of things in life, yet we do not ban or document every single aspect of every thing that touches our life so that people can make a choice.
No, but in this case there are indications that there may be a risk. Furthermore, people want this information. So, why should the information not be provided.
But I have to ask, instead of shotgunning a google search at us,
I didn't "shotgun a Google search at you", I gave you a Scholar search that gives you a reasonable selection of papers demonstrating biological effects. Read them and then try to come up with an argument why cell phone radiation is harmless.
why not just find one un-refuted peer reviewed study showing harm?
DNA breaks in tissue culture, changes in phosphorylation, induction of heat shock proteins, and changes in gene regulation are sufficient demonstrations of harm to warrant regulation.
One wouldn't expect to see epidemiological effects yet because these cell phone frequencies haven't been in use that long; it likely takes decades for consequences to develop.
just to translate this into modern terms
on
The Amiga Turns 25
·
· Score: 1
The Amiga effectively had a microkernel, multitasking, and hardware accelerated graphics. Kind of like Apple got 20 years later. Programming it also was fun and made a lot more sense than Apple's mess of toolboxes.
Unfortunately, the Amiga's fonts were ugly as sin, the marketing was horrendous, the people selling it had no charisma, and Amiga made one business mistake after another.
And you know what? Even non-heating, non-ionizing radiation causes observable biological effects, like induction of heat shock proteins: http://bit.ly/duq1ZZ
Where someone tries to explain the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation and specific absorption rate to the city council.
Feel free to explain the difference.
Afterwards, you should continue explaining observed changes in gene expression patterns, DNA phosphorylation, and other biological markers resulting from non-ionizing radiation.
It conveys the idea that radio emissions are somehow harmful, which they aren't.
That's unknown. Radio emissions at cell phone bands do have biological effects, and it is currently unknown whether those are harmful.
and DON'T know anything about the actual studies which have shown no even correlation between cell phones and disease
Those studies are indeed inconclusive. However, there is significant evidence for changes in gene expression patterns, cellular stress, and DNA damage: http://bit.ly/bTSVvj Those results don't show that these radio emissions cause disease, but they make it quite plausible.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I do code using best practices, by using languages in which this kind of error is caught by default. Not only does that mean that I don't have to think about it, I also don't have to worry about whether other people's code uses "best practices".
One can legitimately debate the merits of dynamic vs static typing. But weak (Perl, Tcl, Shell) vs strong (everybody else) typing is pretty much a settled issue.
Sure. This is DWIW (Do What I Want). Why should the code to add a string and a number include a type conversion?
In order to capture programming errors.
You've used the + operator, so its obvious to everyone that you want to add. Why should the code have to be more verbose than that?
Because (1) adding a string to an integer is often indicative of an error elsewhere, (2) there is no single correct way of adding a string to an integer; it's ambiguous. Is the string an integer? A floating point number? Is it hex, binary, or octal?
Would you mind saying why you think it sucks?
Because this still works:
And what other languages do it better?
Just about any other language.
Well, I can't speak for others, but I have used Perl for nearly twenty years. Perl's syntax and type system still suck, even in Perl 6. But unlike other badly designed languages (C and C++), there are fortunately excellent real-world alternatives available to Perl. I see little risk of Perl ever coming back, thank God.
I'd just as soon make recording with zero consent illegal.
So if I record my kids at Disneyland and you walk into my frame while chatting with your girlfriend, I have committed an illegal act? Sorry, that's very bad.
There do need to be reasonable exceptions for the press, etc (in public at least).
Many news videos these days come from the public. So, what do you want? Only government-licensed "members of the press" are permitted to record? Again, bad idea.
The current set of US laws is fine. Further restrictions on recording are anti-democratic and anti-freedom.
What about bed/bath rooms? What about corporate espionage? Messy divorces? Foreign agents?
Those issues can (and are) legally addressed without requiring one party consent.
It's really pretty simple: where there is no expectation of privacy, you should be able to record without restrictions. Where there is an expectation of privacy, there are limits.
There is a second set of laws that determine what you can do with those recordings, It's this second set of laws that makes strong restrictions on the recording itself less important.
The initial traffic stop was completely justified
Nobody disputes that (although there is some question as to whether the cop behaved correctly).
and the guy should lose his license if not worse.
He got his ticket.
Don't make him into some kind of innocent victim.
He is a guilty perpetrator with respect to speeding. He's been punished for that. Whether that punishment is to your liking or not is not material.
He is an innocent victim with respect to being charged with illegally recording a police officer.
Google is in big legal trouble over what they did.
And that should worry you, because if Google Streetview and Wifi scanning is held illegal, chances are a lot of things you and your cell phone are doing are illegal too.
You're comparing marginal tax rates in the highest tax brackets. Progression into the highest tax bracket is much faster in Europe than in the US. In addition, European nations impose a lot of other requirements on you that result in additional annual expenses: television licensing fees, intellectual property fees, administrative fees, etc. Of course, salaries tend to be lower and prices higher in Europe as well. The limit for Danish immigration is about $80k these days, which is quite high for Denmark.
Of course, moving to Denmark isn't exactly a walk in the park for non-Danish people anyway: there's the language barrier and a big cultural barrier. There's a reason Denmark makes it comparatively easy to immigrate: supply and demand for Danish immigration.
Why the hell do you think there's a law against speeding?
US speeding laws were enacted during the oil crisis, in order to save on gas.
For the fun of it? IT'S BECAUSE IT KILLS INNOCENT PEOPLE!
The evidence for that is far from clear. And a speeding motorcycle is likely to kill only its rider anyway.
Generally, I'm actually for speed limits, simply because they make driving less stressful and because it does save on gas. It also allows public transportation to compete. But purely on safety grounds, there is little justification to adopt speed limits; there are far more frequent and important causes of fatalities than speeding.
I certainly hope they're going to charge him for it.
He got his ticket. The question is now whether he should have been allowed to record and publish the video.
The police's actions out in the open should be subject to public scrutiny.
And police actions on private property should be subject to public scrutiny at the discretion of the property owner.
No public official should have an expectation of privacy in the execution of his job.
The fact that the police are trying to get away with this doesn't mean that they will be able to. Court rulings in the US have so far generally been in favor of people charged with illegal taping. We should, however, make sure that laws make it even clearer that photography, video, and audio recordings in public places are completely legal, by anybody, for any purpose, and can generally be published as well.
Whatever the situation in the US is, it is far worse in Europe. The UK, for example, passed explicit laws against photographing police. Similar laws exist in some other European nations.
They always got something to hide. So since they hidden that this guy is an asshole, what more are they hiding?
"They" have hidden nothing; they guy admits he was speeding.
Because I personally think speeders should be locked up for life,
A speeding motorcycle is mostly a risk to itself and relatively harmless to other drivers.
ACLU and every other privacy nutgroup, learn that if you expect people to take you serious,
I doubt anybody gives a f*ck whether a moron like you takes them seriously.
The cop was behaving completely unprofessionally by pulling his gun and not identifying himself. The video is quite embarrassing to him, so the police are trying to go after the rider, it's as simple as that.
We really need laws that ensure that recording public officials is legal while they are on the job, with or without their consent, with or without their knowledge. That shouldn't just apply to cops, it should also apply to government offices and anywhere else public servants work.
My facts, like the fact the industrial revolution happened, despite cities that were much smaller, go directly to the point, and have not be refuted thus far.
The industrial revolution was two centuries ago. Yeah, you can build steam engines, looms, and Ford T's in small towns. But we're talking about modern lifestyles here: Internet, DVDs, desktop supercomputers, 3D movies, and cell phones, and all for a pittance.
If you want to make the ridiculous claim that you can do all that without urban areas of a million inhabitants or larger, the burden of proof is on you.
Of course, whether you know it or not, the fiction you promulgate is politically motivated and shared variously by tree huggers on the one side, and city-hating libertarians and conservatives on the other.
Right, that's why they're the two most popular languages in the world, because they don't work very well and aren't very productive. Why is it people pick these languages if they suck so bad, and there's obviously better choices available?
People pick them because it's easy to find programmers, libraries, documentation, training materials, and tools for them. And initially, Java and C++ caught on because a few large companies (Microsoft, IBM, Sun) pushed them.
Being able to hire low-productivity programmers working in a mediocre programming language still beats having no programmers working in a well designed language.
Very true. This is also the case for every other language in existence.
No, they are not "the case for every other language in existence". Few languages other than C++ have even the possibility of a buffer overrun or pointer error, one of the most common sources of security errors in UNIX and Windows software. Few languages other than C++ have such widespread use of undefined effects in their definitions. Few languages other than Java have poorly designed features like covariant arrays, type erasure, or class loaders.
Yes.. we're all fools with no knowledge. Just robots programmed to do as the master tells us.
If you do have actual knowledge of programming languages, why don't you come up with a technical analysis comparing, oh, the Java type system to the type system of other languages, or the C++ runtime and performance to the runtime and performance of other languages? In what way do you think it's actually technically better? Do you even know other languages besides Java?
Nope. There's been multiple studies that say cell phones are essentially harmless, or at the very worst have such a small effect to not be measurable. Many of them have had slashdot stories.
Absence of a statistically significant effect in multiple studies doesn't show that cell phones are "essentially harmless", it shows you nothing at all. These statistical tests are one sided: if they see an effect, it's probably real, if they don't see an effect, it means nothing at all.
Furthermore, one wouldn't expect to see epidemiological effects just yet; brain cancers take decades to develop and detect, and the current cell phone frequencies have only been in widespread use for a few years. If you want to see how long epidemiological studies take to demonstrate harmful effects, just look at how long it took to demonstrate the harm from smoking and get regulation in place, and those effects are extremely strong.
Studies clearly show that cell phone radiation induces changes in gene expression and repair mechanisms, and that is a serious and valid concern. Saying that it is "hardly anything worth any concern" just flies in the face of data and facts.
After all, there is no convincing evidence for a lot of things in life, yet we do not ban or document every single aspect of every thing that touches our life so that people can make a choice.
No, but in this case there are indications that there may be a risk. Furthermore, people want this information. So, why should the information not be provided.
But I have to ask, instead of shotgunning a google search at us,
I didn't "shotgun a Google search at you", I gave you a Scholar search that gives you a reasonable selection of papers demonstrating biological effects. Read them and then try to come up with an argument why cell phone radiation is harmless.
why not just find one un-refuted peer reviewed study showing harm?
DNA breaks in tissue culture, changes in phosphorylation, induction of heat shock proteins, and changes in gene regulation are sufficient demonstrations of harm to warrant regulation.
One wouldn't expect to see epidemiological effects yet because these cell phone frequencies haven't been in use that long; it likely takes decades for consequences to develop.
The Amiga effectively had a microkernel, multitasking, and hardware accelerated graphics. Kind of like Apple got 20 years later. Programming it also was fun and made a lot more sense than Apple's mess of toolboxes.
Unfortunately, the Amiga's fonts were ugly as sin, the marketing was horrendous, the people selling it had no charisma, and Amiga made one business mistake after another.
And you know what? Even non-heating, non-ionizing radiation causes observable biological effects, like induction of heat shock proteins: http://bit.ly/duq1ZZ
Where someone tries to explain the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation and specific absorption rate to the city council.
Feel free to explain the difference.
Afterwards, you should continue explaining observed changes in gene expression patterns, DNA phosphorylation, and other biological markers resulting from non-ionizing radiation.
If that emitted at cell phone frequencies, it would blind you and might even kill you if you aimed it at your head.
Yes, the frequency of electromagnetic radiation matters.
The problem is that people latch on to the word "radiation,"
Some people do. Other people have legitimate concerns. Go read the literature. Here's a pointer to get you started: http://bit.ly/bTSVvj
It conveys the idea that radio emissions are somehow harmful, which they aren't.
That's unknown. Radio emissions at cell phone bands do have biological effects, and it is currently unknown whether those are harmful.
and DON'T know anything about the actual studies which have shown no even correlation between cell phones and disease
Those studies are indeed inconclusive. However, there is significant evidence for changes in gene expression patterns, cellular stress, and DNA damage: http://bit.ly/bTSVvj Those results don't show that these radio emissions cause disease, but they make it quite plausible.
Yes, and the label is accurate: pure oxygen is both poisonous (lung, retina) and causes oxidative damage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_toxicity