You are, in fact, an American. The US is a federation, meaning power is granted by the federal government to the lower states. So the government of the US determines whether a state can set a legal drinking age, or whether that is up to the US government itself. The European union is a union of sovereign states. It is the sovereign states that determine (together) which powers are granted to the union government. That's quite a big difference.
Another way to determine your nationality is to check your passport. Mine certainly doesn't say European Union like yours says United States;)
I think one concern is that allowing Oracle to control MySql is in a way asking the fox to guard the henhouse. If the solution is to wait for a fork of MySql, then you might as well force Oracle to divest MySql directly. Else you've effectively allowed Oracle to kill of the MySql brand.
Another thing is that Oracle formally announced the merger two weaks earlier in the US than in Europe, effectively making sure that the US authorities would be first to publish their verdict. As I read it in the newspaper, that is not the normal procedure and it may have irritated the European Commisioner. Mrs Kroes has a reputation for toughness so the current powerplay will like do little.
As I understand, it is illegal to know about the future crime and keep that knowledge to yourself.
That doesn't make sense. Assume you don't report the future crime. Then you're in violation at that moment, even before the crime has been committed. But how do you prove that in court before the crime has actually been committed? You can't since the criminal act itself has not yet occurred.
Now if the crime is actually committed, you can't be guilty of knowing about a future crime and not reporting it, since the crime itself is now past and no longer future.
Some disclaimers: - if *planning* a crime is criminal, then you might be liable to report knowledge about that. but again the crime is not future then since the planning itself is (partially) past and that is the criminal act in question. - if you're a foolproof fortuneteller, then I guess you could be convicted of knowledge about a future crime with the help of another foolproof fortuneteller. Off course it would be simpler to just have the witness foolproof fortuneteller inform the police beforehand but I digress.
Hasn't your sig been the same for several years now? Are you *still* working on that movie? Wouldn't it be time to expand the description to include 'slow going' ?;)
The prevailing mood on/. seems to be that users should become better at expressing their requirements. I find that baffling; it's like walking into a restaurant and having the chef come up to you to ask how many teaspoons of cumin should go into your dish. User's don't have requirements - the whole concept was made up by developers in response to complaints that they were developing sh*t software. The focus on requirements is a symptom, not a cure. Instead we should focus on empathizing with users: what is it they are trying to achieve and in what context are those goals embedded?
[blatant self-promotion] my company actually works that way, with considerable success (measured by happy clients)[/]
Well the difference is you're paying for your model trains with your own money, whereas the scientist is being paid with *our* money. Big difference.
The same goes for the difference between a business man focused on the bottom line and a scientist. The public never complains about companies performing useless research, they complain about government paid scientists doing useless research.
Strange that the other replies praising your post didn't pick up on this. (I wonder whether they're scientists...).
I have actually, and your comment does not hold true for government in general, luckily.
What you and the OP seem to have lost somewhere along the way is the realization that you are spending taxpayers money and you have a moral obligation to do so sparingly.
It is unlikely North Korea is looking for a fight. They don't stand a chance and are very well aware of that. Up until now they've used their nuclear program to leverage negotations with the US, nothing else. There's no point in them starting a nuclear war (or any other type of armed conflict for that matter) since they are sure to lose.
You could compare North Korea to an well-versed spoiled kid: enough of a distraction to annoy you and get you to do stuff, but too little of a threat to actually take any serious action on. Let 'em be and worry about Pakistan instead.
If you can do it faster and for less RAM in a different language then you owe your users to do so.
4GB (yes Gigabyte) will cost you $75 nowadays. If you let your choice of language be determined by 30MB extra memory usage, you're optimizing the wrong variable (unless you're targetting a memory constricted environment of course). Better select the language that lets you write code the quickest. Considering the lack of refactoring support for C++ mentioned in other posts, I'd say C# should be a lot faster to write code for.
Fact: We have far more space to cover than most countries
As for rail, land is too expensive / valuable in the US for any real rail development.
These two statements don't combine very well. Just look at Japan (or France, or Germany, the Netherlands, etc, etc). Land is very expensive in those countries yet they have an extensive rail system in place.
The trouble with rail is more that you need someone to invest in the common rail infrastructure. That's expensive - and you need some way to recoup that investment. Typically something that government should initiate since no one else will invest while the total gains from such an investment are positive for the whole population. Since US culture is rather hostile to government investment, it's not something that will get done quickly...
the other posters may have pointed this out already, but for sake of completeness:
Over time these two populations no longer breed amongst each other. By my understanding, evolution defines them as two separate species and state that MACRO-evolution has occurred. I call that a convenient definition to suit evolutionist agenda. Utterly ridiculous.
Agreed that would be ridiculous. However your understanding is incorrect.
They're only considered seperate species when they can't reproduce succesfully. Succes is defined as producing children that can reproduce.
The canonical example is the horse and the donkey. They can breed succesfully, producing a mule. A mule however is sterile. By definition horses and donkeys are considered seperate species. The example you give with fish has been observed in the wild (with Cichlids in Lake Victoria).
If you are genuinely interested in this matter, you would enjoy reading Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene. He makes a very clear case in that book for how complex life can have evolved from simple reproducing agents (proteins).
I fully agree with your criticism that aliens (were they to exist) must have come from somewhere as well. That argument applies to God as well of course. Clearly God must have originated somewhere. If you are to believe that God just came to be, then you might as well believe that life just came to be. According to Occam's razor the God concept would just be an unnecessary idea. Like one of them famous people once said about God: "I have no need for that hypothesis"
Joel Spolsky wrote a nice article about this a while back. Since non-technical people don't see the code that's behind the UI, they can't really judge the difference between a polished UI with no code behind it and a fully working application. It is very reasonable for them to look at a polished UI and say "let's ship this tomorrow".
The solution is quite simple: make the UI reflect the state of the application! Use sketched buttons for stuff that doesn't work yet, use strike-through text to label stuff that doesn't work, etc. I've been using this technique for years with my customers. It gets the point across every time.
and don't listen to all that stuff about prototypes being proof-of-concepts, that's non-agile blatter from the 70's;-). If the prototype is attractive enough that the business people would like to use it then you'd be wasting money by throwing it away and starting over. The fallacy behind starting over is that the prototype is a code mess and the rewrite will be clean. Forget it. If you're no good at refactoring and organizing code then the rewrite will end up a mess too. And if you are good at it, you should apply those skills to the prototype!
I took the course at the ANWB training center in Lelystad. FYI, that's in the Netherlands where it doesn't get very bitterly cold but were we do get lousy summers.
The ANWB is like the AAA. They're quite professional. The scenario we were training was an emergency swerve on the highway. This is a typical situation where ABS will save your life, as we discovered. In your verbage, the point of ABS is that it will keep the car driving in the direction your pointing your tires at.
I agree with what you're saying though: you shouldn't be driving faster than road conditions allow.
They make you able to steer your car while maximum braking
mod parent up. I've you've ever attended a safe driving course where you train emergency stops you'll know why you need ABS. Without ABS you'll have to let go of the brakes to steer your car around the obstacle. During our practice runs we killed quite a few virtual deer without ABS, whereas with ABS you just steer around the obstacle while keeping the brakes applied.
BTW if you've never experienced ABS you'd be well advised to try it on a quiet road someday. The first time you're likely to think you broke something as ABS makes a terrible noise. As our instructor said: when you start hearing the grinding sound, kick the brakes even further.
might I just point out that the HTC Touch is the nicest non-iphone around? What other phones are you aware of that have no (bulky) slide mechanism, run windows mobile with gprs, have a build in music player and a 3D touch interface? The phone weighs little and is small enough to fit into your pants without creating a big bulge in your pocket.
HTC sold more than a million of these phones and you're putting it down as a failure? have you even used it?
no no no, really you don't understand. Since the login page is not encrypted, it may have been changed during transfer to your browser. You'll be sending your user credentials to the evil MITM.
See? since you can't trust the login page it doesn't matter that your username & password are sent using SSL, since you'd be sending them encrypted to the evil MITM.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're going to be pedantic I'll join :)
You are, in fact, an American. The US is a federation, meaning power is granted by the federal government to the lower states. So the government of the US determines whether a state can set a legal drinking age, or whether that is up to the US government itself. The European union is a union of sovereign states. It is the sovereign states that determine (together) which powers are granted to the union government. That's quite a big difference.
Another way to determine your nationality is to check your passport. Mine certainly doesn't say European Union like yours says United States ;)
I think one concern is that allowing Oracle to control MySql is in a way asking the fox to guard the henhouse. If the solution is to wait for a fork of MySql, then you might as well force Oracle to divest MySql directly. Else you've effectively allowed Oracle to kill of the MySql brand.
Another thing is that Oracle formally announced the merger two weaks earlier in the US than in Europe, effectively making sure that the US authorities would be first to publish their verdict. As I read it in the newspaper, that is not the normal procedure and it may have irritated the European Commisioner. Mrs Kroes has a reputation for toughness so the current powerplay will like do little.
As I understand, it is illegal to know about the future crime and keep that knowledge to yourself.
That doesn't make sense. Assume you don't report the future crime. Then you're in violation at that moment, even before the crime has been committed. But how do you prove that in court before the crime has actually been committed? You can't since the criminal act itself has not yet occurred.
Now if the crime is actually committed, you can't be guilty of knowing about a future crime and not reporting it, since the crime itself is now past and no longer future.
Some disclaimers:
- if *planning* a crime is criminal, then you might be liable to report knowledge about that. but again the crime is not future then since the planning itself is (partially) past and that is the criminal act in question.
- if you're a foolproof fortuneteller, then I guess you could be convicted of knowledge about a future crime with the help of another foolproof fortuneteller. Off course it would be simpler to just have the witness foolproof fortuneteller inform the police beforehand but I digress.
dude where is this heat coming from? From sunlight, right.
Where did that sunlight go before they started converting it into energy (as proproped by this plan)? Exactly, it warmed up the environment.
See it now? You're not adding any heat in this case, so there's no negative impact on the climate.
oh don't sweat it. It gives your fellow /. readers a warm feeling of "hey I've been here a while... and apparently so has this guy!".
And don't forget, (even Picasso hated to finish work)
Hasn't your sig been the same for several years now? Are you *still* working on that movie? Wouldn't it be time to expand the description to include 'slow going' ? ;)
wouldn't your solution restrict you to circular lenses only? not very fashionable i'd say...
So what you're saying is that developers should become better at:
/. seems to be that users should become better at expressing their requirements. I find that baffling; it's like walking into a restaurant and having the chef come up to you to ask how many teaspoons of cumin should go into your dish. User's don't have requirements - the whole concept was made up by developers in response to complaints that they were developing sh*t software. The focus on requirements is a symptom, not a cure. Instead we should focus on empathizing with users: what is it they are trying to achieve and in what context are those goals embedded?
- eliciting requirements
- designing simple, usable software
The prevailing mood on
[blatant self-promotion] my company actually works that way, with considerable success (measured by happy clients)[/]
Well the difference is you're paying for your model trains with your own money, whereas the scientist is being paid with *our* money. Big difference.
The same goes for the difference between a business man focused on the bottom line and a scientist. The public never complains about companies performing useless research, they complain about government paid scientists doing useless research.
Strange that the other replies praising your post didn't pick up on this. (I wonder whether they're scientists...).
I have actually, and your comment does not hold true for government in general, luckily.
What you and the OP seem to have lost somewhere along the way is the realization that you are spending taxpayers money and you have a moral obligation to do so sparingly.
How is this a bad thing? If you can spend less to achieve your objective, why wouldn't you?
It is unlikely North Korea is looking for a fight. They don't stand a chance and are very well aware of that. Up until now they've used their nuclear program to leverage negotations with the US, nothing else. There's no point in them starting a nuclear war (or any other type of armed conflict for that matter) since they are sure to lose.
You could compare North Korea to an well-versed spoiled kid: enough of a distraction to annoy you and get you to do stuff, but too little of a threat to actually take any serious action on. Let 'em be and worry about Pakistan instead.
4GB (yes Gigabyte) will cost you $75 nowadays. If you let your choice of language be determined by 30MB extra memory usage, you're optimizing the wrong variable (unless you're targetting a memory constricted environment of course). Better select the language that lets you write code the quickest. Considering the lack of refactoring support for C++ mentioned in other posts, I'd say C# should be a lot faster to write code for.
try Resharper. It'll fix that code completion for you, and do tons of more useful stuff.
no we didn't. I happen to think Vista is a big usability improvement over XP, and I'm certain I've seen like minded statements here.
As much as you might want it, this place is not a hive mind. Please post your opinions but make clear they're your own.
Smoking is a very good way to create mandatory step-back moments. Very effective, but unfortunately not that great for your health :)
I know for 15 years, that the brain entered a transformation 50-60 years ago
you seem to think there is some sort of global blueprint on which all brains are based, and this global blueprint was somehow altered 50-60 years ago.
Just try and think about it for a second. That idea is complete bullocks.
Fact: We have far more space to cover than most countries
As for rail, land is too expensive / valuable in the US for any real rail development.
These two statements don't combine very well. Just look at Japan (or France, or Germany, the Netherlands, etc, etc). Land is very expensive in those countries yet they have an extensive rail system in place.
The trouble with rail is more that you need someone to invest in the common rail infrastructure. That's expensive - and you need some way to recoup that investment. Typically something that government should initiate since no one else will invest while the total gains from such an investment are positive for the whole population. Since US culture is rather hostile to government investment, it's not something that will get done quickly...
the other posters may have pointed this out already, but for sake of completeness:
Over time these two populations no longer breed amongst each other. By my understanding, evolution defines them as two separate species and state that MACRO-evolution has occurred. I call that a convenient definition to suit evolutionist agenda. Utterly ridiculous.
Agreed that would be ridiculous. However your understanding is incorrect.
They're only considered seperate species when they can't reproduce succesfully. Succes is defined as producing children that can reproduce.
The canonical example is the horse and the donkey. They can breed succesfully, producing a mule. A mule however is sterile. By definition horses and donkeys are considered seperate species. The example you give with fish has been observed in the wild (with Cichlids in Lake Victoria).
If you are genuinely interested in this matter, you would enjoy reading Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene. He makes a very clear case in that book for how complex life can have evolved from simple reproducing agents (proteins).
I fully agree with your criticism that aliens (were they to exist) must have come from somewhere as well. That argument applies to God as well of course. Clearly God must have originated somewhere. If you are to believe that God just came to be, then you might as well believe that life just came to be. According to Occam's razor the God concept would just be an unnecessary idea. Like one of them famous people once said about God: "I have no need for that hypothesis"
Joel Spolsky wrote a nice article about this a while back. Since non-technical people don't see the code that's behind the UI, they can't really judge the difference between a polished UI with no code behind it and a fully working application. It is very reasonable for them to look at a polished UI and say "let's ship this tomorrow".
The solution is quite simple: make the UI reflect the state of the application! Use sketched buttons for stuff that doesn't work yet, use strike-through text to label stuff that doesn't work, etc. I've been using this technique for years with my customers. It gets the point across every time.
and don't listen to all that stuff about prototypes being proof-of-concepts, that's non-agile blatter from the 70's ;-). If the prototype is attractive enough that the business people would like to use it then you'd be wasting money by throwing it away and starting over.
The fallacy behind starting over is that the prototype is a code mess and the rewrite will be clean. Forget it. If you're no good at refactoring and organizing code then the rewrite will end up a mess too. And if you are good at it, you should apply those skills to the prototype!
ah yes bob. Thank you for the well laid out argument. And good job mods, for marking it +4 Insightful.
I took the course at the ANWB training center in Lelystad. FYI, that's in the Netherlands where it doesn't get very bitterly cold but were we do get lousy summers.
The ANWB is like the AAA. They're quite professional. The scenario we were training was an emergency swerve on the highway. This is a typical situation where ABS will save your life, as we discovered. In your verbage, the point of ABS is that it will keep the car driving in the direction your pointing your tires at.
I agree with what you're saying though: you shouldn't be driving faster than road conditions allow.
They make you able to steer your car while maximum braking
mod parent up. I've you've ever attended a safe driving course where you train emergency stops you'll know why you need ABS. Without ABS you'll have to let go of the brakes to steer your car around the obstacle. During our practice runs we killed quite a few virtual deer without ABS, whereas with ABS you just steer around the obstacle while keeping the brakes applied.
BTW if you've never experienced ABS you'd be well advised to try it on a quiet road someday. The first time you're likely to think you broke something as ABS makes a terrible noise. As our instructor said: when you start hearing the grinding sound, kick the brakes even further.
might I just point out that the HTC Touch is the nicest non-iphone around? What other phones are you aware of that have no (bulky) slide mechanism, run windows mobile with gprs, have a build in music player and a 3D touch interface? The phone weighs little and is small enough to fit into your pants without creating a big bulge in your pocket.
HTC sold more than a million of these phones and you're putting it down as a failure? have you even used it?
no no no, really you don't understand. Since the login page is not encrypted, it may have been changed during transfer to your browser. You'll be sending your user credentials to the evil MITM.
See? since you can't trust the login page it doesn't matter that your username & password are sent using SSL, since you'd be sending them encrypted to the evil MITM.