I keep coming back to the idea, though, that anybody focusing on that bit of prose--to the point where they believe that it trumps what is clearly labeled a "right of the people"--is usually doing so in a vacuum.
Funny, you just picked out another deeply-debated point: the definition of the term "the people", in the context of the second amendment. Is that an individual person? Or is that the people, as a group, say, a part of a well-regulated militia?
Have you ever gone through the writings of the people who founded our nation, and their thoughts on the right to bear arms?
I haven't, but many legal and historical scholars have, and only until recently have they decided that the second amendment may actually be an individual, as opposed to collective, right.
Even if there is no explicit right to bear arms defined in the second amendment (and I disagree completely with such a position) what about the ninth and the tenth?
Argue it that way if you will, but no gun advocate does. They rely on the second amendment. And my point is that not everyone agrees it says what you think it says. And that is the entirety of my point.
As for the other amendments, all that does is move things to a state level. The problem is, gun advocates would much prefer the second amendment to be an affirmative declaration of individual gun ownership rights, because then state laws cannot be written to regulate gun ownership.
The military in Iraq is *greatly* limited in the operations it can perform against the civilian populace. But if the military had freedom to do whatever it wished, it *could* carpet bomb, say, Basra, which would probably weaken the resolve of the insurgents.
So is freedom of speech a "collective right"? What's the difference? They are both in the Bill of Rights,
No, freedom of speech is an individual right. A collective right is one that a group holds. ie, as a regulated militia, that militia has the right to keep and bear arms. As opposed to some jackass in a trailerpark. Go do a little reading, it might enlighten you.
That argument only works if you view gun ownership as a personal right. Not everyone believes that, including many US courts (which view the 2nd amendment as a collective right, not a personal one).
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
And there's been a great deal of debate as to the choice of the phrase "A well regulated militia". Some have chosen to interpret the amendment as a blanket statement protecting the right to bear arms for all citizens. But not everyone agrees with that.
Uhh, it strikes me that, if you need to defend yourself from the US military, an assault rifle will likely be of little use, what with the tanks and air-dropped napalm...
Hell, most believe that.NET was an attempt by Microsoft to make a clean break from the old Win32 APIs because they're ugly, crufty, and riddled with hacks in order to support backward compatibility.
Man I hope this was a tongue-in-cheek post. Virtualization, used in this manner, is precisely equivalent to scheduling multiple processes across cores, only you also get the virtualization overhead. It's most definitely not a solution to the problem Intel is trying to solve (making it easy for developers to write individual pieces of software who's problems can be naturally broken down and distributed across multiple cores).
I think by "that people use", he probably means normal applications one would use and interact with (as opposed to mesh-network distributed computing applications, which clearly fit in a very different problem domain). And in that light, the OP is, I think, absolutely correct.
Umm, no. Not at all. Two people inventing the same thing just means that two very smart people had similar ideas. It doesn't make them obvious (Calculus being the most glaring example... both Newton and Leibniz built their work on existing efforts, but independently made leaps that none had before).
I strongly recommend Cryptonimicon as a good start. It's a big novel with two storylines from different historical points converging to a single dramatic and climatic end
You must be joking... the build up in Cryptonomicon is huge, most certainly. And the weaving of the two plots is well executed. But the ending? Jebus, it might as well have just ended with "and, blah blah blah, they lived happily ever after".
If your refcount doesn't reach 0, then you have a leak
What? No one uses reference counting in modern garbage collectors, and cycles are comfortably handled in virtually all modern GC'd languages.
That said, if spacetime complexity is something that concerns you, yeah, a GC does add additional wrinkles and is something you should be cognizant of. That said, most programmers can comfortably ignore it (assuming your language has a decent GC, anyway).
Err... wtf... no plugins or extension? Why? The additional overhead of such things is quite minimal, and it means you can have a bare-bones browser if you want, and you can have something more advanced if you want, too.
Ah, but this is the very point. There exists governments that aren't corrupt because they are designed to fight the seeds of corruption through things such as checks and balances.
So, no, there does not exist place in there world where there aren't corrupt people. But there are plenty of places in the world where there aren't corrupt *governments*, and that is so *precisely* because of the way those governments are structured, as you yourself have illustrated.
As such, to get back to the original poster's point: having the right to own a gun embedded in the constitution *because* it's inevitable that the government will become corrupt is extremely cynical (which, to me, describes the entire American mindset vis a vis the government, and explains many things, including the healthcare and education system, etc). After all, as I've already illustrated (and you've been unable to dispute), there are governments in the world that are not corrupt and do work for their citizenry, and have done so since their inception. And they do so, as you point out, because they were designed to resist corrupting influences.
Of course, this is ignoring the fact that, under a totalitarian regime, a handgun as rather little effect against the armed forces of an oppressive government...
Err, that is, "It's *impossible* to *prove*"... and that first paragraph is just mangled. Yay proofreading. Oh well, I hope my point at least came across...:)
Okay, you define that first. Personally, I can think of plenty of governments that continue to exist and serve the people. Hell, I'd wager the majority of first world nations have a functioning, first world nation has a working government that serves the people.
Basically, you're asking a stupid question. It's *impossible* to *disprove* that there exists an uncorruptable government because, given enough time, anything can happen. That said, there are many *many* stable democracies throughout the world that survive and prosper in the absence of corruption (or, at least, large scale corruption that would necessitate a violent revolt), the US included (having done so for hundreds of years, now).
Whether it's a good idea or not, you will have a VERY hard time convincing an old dog programmer that he should jump on the train.
Yes, because parallel programming is *so* very new.
Hey, maybe it's just that the old dogs have done parallel programming in the past, and they realized something: it sucks. A lot.
That's not to say it isn't the way of the future (multicore basically requires it). But to assume that more experienced programmers being reticent about parallel programming is simply stubbornness stinks of ageism, and we've got enough of that in the industry, thank you very much.
but it's also possible to spend to little time optimizing and large projects frequently fail because of performance problems.
Bah, I have never once seen a project fail because of software performance issues. A software project is *far* more likely to fail because of poor requirements, poor design, poor management, poor test, or more likely than not, all of the above.
And for those cases where a project *did* fail because of large-scale performance issues, I'd bet dollars to donuts it's because of high-level architectural issues. And only an idiot would mistake designing a correct architecture with "premature optimization".
Actually, I find the easiest way to understand regexes is to understand their underlying representation: the finite state machine. Understanding this not only helps to illuminate how regexes work, it also highlights their limitations (eg, counting).
'course, taking a course in formal language theory is even better (and should be a required course as part of a computing science degree, IMHO).:)
Slashdot Mirror
I keep coming back to the idea, though, that anybody focusing on that bit of prose--to the point where they believe that it trumps what is clearly labeled a "right of the people"--is usually doing so in a vacuum.
Funny, you just picked out another deeply-debated point: the definition of the term "the people", in the context of the second amendment. Is that an individual person? Or is that the people, as a group, say, a part of a well-regulated militia?
Have you ever gone through the writings of the people who founded our nation, and their thoughts on the right to bear arms?
I haven't, but many legal and historical scholars have, and only until recently have they decided that the second amendment may actually be an individual, as opposed to collective, right.
Even if there is no explicit right to bear arms defined in the second amendment (and I disagree completely with such a position) what about the ninth and the tenth?
Argue it that way if you will, but no gun advocate does. They rely on the second amendment. And my point is that not everyone agrees it says what you think it says. And that is the entirety of my point.
As for the other amendments, all that does is move things to a state level. The problem is, gun advocates would much prefer the second amendment to be an affirmative declaration of individual gun ownership rights, because then state laws cannot be written to regulate gun ownership.
The military in Iraq is *greatly* limited in the operations it can perform against the civilian populace. But if the military had freedom to do whatever it wished, it *could* carpet bomb, say, Basra, which would probably weaken the resolve of the insurgents.
So is freedom of speech a "collective right"? What's the difference? They are both in the Bill of Rights,
No, freedom of speech is an individual right. A collective right is one that a group holds. ie, as a regulated militia, that militia has the right to keep and bear arms. As opposed to some jackass in a trailerpark. Go do a little reading, it might enlighten you.
That argument only works if you view gun ownership as a personal right. Not everyone believes that, including many US courts (which view the 2nd amendment as a collective right, not a personal one).
the right to bear arms, and more
Well, no, the specific text of the amendment is:
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
And there's been a great deal of debate as to the choice of the phrase "A well regulated militia". Some have chosen to interpret the amendment as a blanket statement protecting the right to bear arms for all citizens. But not everyone agrees with that.
Uhh, it strikes me that, if you need to defend yourself from the US military, an assault rifle will likely be of little use, what with the tanks and air-dropped napalm...
Hell, most believe that .NET was an attempt by Microsoft to make a clean break from the old Win32 APIs because they're ugly, crufty, and riddled with hacks in order to support backward compatibility.
A Windows that can't run Windows apps?
It's called virtualization. Give Apple a call, they can tell you all about it.
Man I hope this was a tongue-in-cheek post. Virtualization, used in this manner, is precisely equivalent to scheduling multiple processes across cores, only you also get the virtualization overhead. It's most definitely not a solution to the problem Intel is trying to solve (making it easy for developers to write individual pieces of software who's problems can be naturally broken down and distributed across multiple cores).
I think by "that people use", he probably means normal applications one would use and interact with (as opposed to mesh-network distributed computing applications, which clearly fit in a very different problem domain). And in that light, the OP is, I think, absolutely correct.
Funny... I use a social networking site because it helps me keep in touch with people. But, hey, maybe I'm just the strange one, right?
Umm, no. Not at all. Two people inventing the same thing just means that two very smart people had similar ideas. It doesn't make them obvious (Calculus being the most glaring example... both Newton and Leibniz built their work on existing efforts, but independently made leaps that none had before).
I strongly recommend Cryptonimicon as a good start. It's a big novel with two storylines from different historical points converging to a single dramatic and climatic end
You must be joking... the build up in Cryptonomicon is huge, most certainly. And the weaving of the two plots is well executed. But the ending? Jebus, it might as well have just ended with "and, blah blah blah, they lived happily ever after".
If your refcount doesn't reach 0, then you have a leak
What? No one uses reference counting in modern garbage collectors, and cycles are comfortably handled in virtually all modern GC'd languages.
That said, if spacetime complexity is something that concerns you, yeah, a GC does add additional wrinkles and is something you should be cognizant of. That said, most programmers can comfortably ignore it (assuming your language has a decent GC, anyway).
Much of the worst code I've ever had to deal with is C++ code written by smart guys who don't know what parts of C++ to use
Those guys aren't smart. They're "clever". There's a difference.
Or you could just... not install them. Because you wanted a minimal browser. Remember?
BTW, by "such things", I meant a plugin/extension architecture.
Err... wtf... no plugins or extension? Why? The additional overhead of such things is quite minimal, and it means you can have a bare-bones browser if you want, and you can have something more advanced if you want, too.
Unless that Linux binary also exploits some service running as root the worst that can happen is an "rm -rf ~"
A remote, non-root exploit is just a local root exploit away from being a serious problem.
Ah, but this is the very point. There exists governments that aren't corrupt because they are designed to fight the seeds of corruption through things such as checks and balances.
So, no, there does not exist place in there world where there aren't corrupt people. But there are plenty of places in the world where there aren't corrupt *governments*, and that is so *precisely* because of the way those governments are structured, as you yourself have illustrated.
As such, to get back to the original poster's point: having the right to own a gun embedded in the constitution *because* it's inevitable that the government will become corrupt is extremely cynical (which, to me, describes the entire American mindset vis a vis the government, and explains many things, including the healthcare and education system, etc). After all, as I've already illustrated (and you've been unable to dispute), there are governments in the world that are not corrupt and do work for their citizenry, and have done so since their inception. And they do so, as you point out, because they were designed to resist corrupting influences.
Of course, this is ignoring the fact that, under a totalitarian regime, a handgun as rather little effect against the armed forces of an oppressive government...
Err, that is, "It's *impossible* to *prove*"... and that first paragraph is just mangled. Yay proofreading. Oh well, I hope my point at least came across... :)
Okay, you define that first. Personally, I can think of plenty of governments that continue to exist and serve the people. Hell, I'd wager the majority of first world nations have a functioning, first world nation has a working government that serves the people.
Basically, you're asking a stupid question. It's *impossible* to *disprove* that there exists an uncorruptable government because, given enough time, anything can happen. That said, there are many *many* stable democracies throughout the world that survive and prosper in the absence of corruption (or, at least, large scale corruption that would necessitate a violent revolt), the US included (having done so for hundreds of years, now).
Whether it's a good idea or not, you will have a VERY hard time convincing an old dog programmer that he should jump on the train.
Yes, because parallel programming is *so* very new.
Hey, maybe it's just that the old dogs have done parallel programming in the past, and they realized something: it sucks. A lot.
That's not to say it isn't the way of the future (multicore basically requires it). But to assume that more experienced programmers being reticent about parallel programming is simply stubbornness stinks of ageism, and we've got enough of that in the industry, thank you very much.
but it's also possible to spend to little time optimizing and large projects frequently fail because of performance problems.
Bah, I have never once seen a project fail because of software performance issues. A software project is *far* more likely to fail because of poor requirements, poor design, poor management, poor test, or more likely than not, all of the above.
And for those cases where a project *did* fail because of large-scale performance issues, I'd bet dollars to donuts it's because of high-level architectural issues. And only an idiot would mistake designing a correct architecture with "premature optimization".
Actually, I find the easiest way to understand regexes is to understand their underlying representation: the finite state machine. Understanding this not only helps to illuminate how regexes work, it also highlights their limitations (eg, counting).
:)
'course, taking a course in formal language theory is even better (and should be a required course as part of a computing science degree, IMHO).