Try asking anyone under 30 if they know what the phrase "Papers Please!" denotes
It's just two words... It's a lot of things.
It's when the Military place soldiers in a natural disaster area such as New Orleans after Katrina requiring you to show military ID or proof of government authorization, to avoid arrest, or having vehicles impounded
It's a name given to a section of an Arizona law upheld by the Supreme court.
It's the name of a complaint against changes the US is making starting this Fall 2013 to further restrict the free travel of Americans and greatly increase the difficulty of US citizens getting passports
It's the name of a dystopian video game about communist immigration control.
Exhibit 2: According to the Supreme Court, the police may arrest for failure to identify
Arrested at Circuit City for refusing to show ID: "It all started when I refused to show my receipt to the loss prevention employee at Circuit City, and it ended when a police officer arrested me for refusing to provide my driver's license."
I follow the blog of a guy who walked across the country (California to New York) last year. He was arrested in Greencastle, Indiana last summer, after a prison worker called the police to report him as a suspicious person after they exchanged words while he was walking past the prison complex.
if the retailers buys something for $10 and it costs them $1 to get is shipped to them, then at a minimum they charge $11. Thus, the shipping cost IS taxed, just not directly.
Those are distribution costs, not shipping costs.
Amazon has distribution costs as well --- they have to get products from their suppliers, to their warehouses and fulfillment centers.
However, these bulk distribution costs are likely on the order of $0.03 to $0.05 an item, not $1.
Whether they're a retailer or Amazon; they're certainly not going to ship a package containing the item from warehouse to warehouse; it will get loaded on a semi; which won't depart, until it's filled with things going out from that supplier.
I noticed the charges were way off. The book cost $8.09. The tax I was to be levied was $0.85. That's a 10.5% tax rate! Why am I being charged 10.5%? It turns out that Amazon is also charging me tax on the $3.99 cost of shipping and handling.
This is why the arguments for a national sales tax to "level the playing field" with B&M retailers are totally bogus.
They always want to tax shipping and handling.
Buyers from B&M retailers do not have to pay for delivery to complete the sale
Therefore, taxing the sale and the delivery at the same rate, doesn't level the playing field It gives B&M retailers an unfair advantage
By the way, this unfair advantage comes from increased usage of the roads and other infrastructure (people driving to stores), and pollution by people's automobiles ---- so the B&M retailers actually create more costs for the government, and it's only fair that the taxes should be greater for the B&M firms.
so makes no sense that they can sue you over something that has been around long before skype.
Microsoft lawyers are beyond what makes sense --- if your pocketbooks are deep enough
and you use them to hire the right set of patent attorneys, and lawyers to prosecute
the forthcoming cases,
you can warp reality towards satisfying your desires.
The boss's boss's boss's boss's droneing motivational speech? I fell asleep last time.
Pro Tip: Falling asleep during the exec's droning motivational speech might be okay, loud snoring, collapsing on the table, or falling out of your chair are not okay.
They don't need the radar gun reading to ticket you for speeding - if you ever go to court, you'll find that all police claim to be "trained in visual speed observation", and will back up the radar evidence with their professional judgement of how fast you were going.
This is where you need to bring in some basic scientific facts about physics, about measurement errors, about the unlikelihood of highly accurate estimates, and in particular, the likelihood of high estimation errors as well, even by experts.
And the psychological issue of an erroneous radar reading affecting human judgement about the actual speed, AND
affecting human memory regarding their recollection of what their estimate was.
For example: their undocumented estimate suddenly increases by 20% after looking at the radar reading, because they had not committed it to paper yet, before looking at the radar, they are subject to a post-estimate correction bias; where their recollection of what their estimate was changes, as soon as they see the radar reading, but before the details are committed in writing.
upping his range to about 800 miles.... To foil the police, he installed a switch to kill the rear lights and bought two laser jammers and three radar detectors. He commissioned a radar jammer, but it wasn't finished in time for the trek. There was also a police scanner,
Tickets coming in the mail from many states; with article cited as evidence..... be prepared for huge fines!
These two statements are completely contradictory. Java is dying a slow death
There are large banks, ecommerce companies, insurance companies, brokerages, and government institutions including the IRS that have websites built using Java EE technology (java servlets).
It's a lot more than a small step up from VB; it is one of the top technologies that many large enterprises have built their websites on.
Please. the problem is that no CEO's would work for what Joe the broke liberal thinks they should.
There are large numbers of CEOs that work for not nearly as much compensation.
More than a few hundred thousand for the CEO only makes sense, if it comes with a long term contract, that says the CEO has to give all that money back, if they jump ship to go work for the management of a different company.
The use of stock options means that Larry only gets paid if the company is doing well; or rather more specifically if the company's shares are doing well
Well exactly... the company doesn't have to do well in the long term Just its shares. Providing an executive options, means that the exec is going to be focused on trying to maximize short term share price increase, at the potential cost of tens of billions in long-term opportunity, for the company.
And switching to traditional compensation packages would eat into Oracle's profits.
Using the options-based compensation eats into shareholder's equity interests, with regards to the company's current profit and future profit, forever.
Almost universally in software development, starting from scratch is a stupid fucking idea repeated by inexperienced developers.
When the code is an unsalvageable pile of crap; sometimes it does make more sense, to reevaluate the design, and re-implement the entire application properly, using the old code only as a reference; than to try and repair.
.... Now what's really funny are two-dimensional arrays.
Remember: when you are defining an array of two dimensions dynamically,
there are two completely different approaches.
1. List of pointers technique
int **Array = malloc(sizeof(int*) * OuterMax);
And
2. Built-in array type
Both result in the a[i][j] notation.
Both are structured completely differently.
Hilarity ensues, when a programmer accidentally forgets which type of 2D array it is,
and tries to resize (a[i]); or bcopy/memcpy on 'a' in an array created using the list-of-pointers technique
There is a third option. The NSA is not looking for terrorists. They are doing all this monitoring for other purposes.
Why does it matter, when your organization defines who terrorists are?
The people in the US speaking out against the NSA's practices are in the process of being recategorized as political terrorists.
I'm sure chinese sponsors of the NSA will shortly be putting megabucks into lobbying congress, to ensure the NSA doesn't lose any of its surveillance privileges
Yes it is. Evaluating the expression "a" causes undefined behaviour if "a" is indeterminate. "a" is considered to no longer have a value, any attempt to refer to its value causes UB.
No.... it's *a that becomes indeterminate. I suppose the case could be made, that some strange clause of one of the new drafts could be interpreted as
'a' the pointer, instead of the value of the pointer becoming indeterminate.
But nonetheless, in traditional C, it is perfectly valid, and a compiler will have to support it, to avoid breaking backwards compatibility.
I suppose this becomes something like the argument, that the programmer should not be able to rely on MySQL
coercing a NULL value to 0, when inserting a SQL row, containing a NOT NULL column, where the NULL has been presented;
after all, the formal papers from the SQL standardization effort don't show that the DB engine can coerce NULL in such a manner.
Nonetheless, there is sometimes one established convention or another that predates the standard, and has more authority than the standard.
the value of a is indeterminate unless realloc failed, that is b = NULL.
In practice; I see most developers neglecting or ignoring the condition where b is NULL; realloc, malloc, and calloc are assumed to always succeed.
On their platform of choice, it may be the case, that the system kills a process with OOM, when allocation fails, instead of these procedures returning NULL.
plenty of more sophisticated memory managers will monkey with the contents of pointers from time to time.
The memory heap manager library is passed the value of the pointer, not a reference to the pointer itself.
e.g. if you had p =malloc(10);
To release the memory, you do free(p); not free(&p);
The key thing to keep in mind is, the memory manager has no knowledge of the object 'p';
only the address of the object that p had pointed to.
Furthermore, there could be plenty of other copies of the pointer lying around, that the memory manager does not know the address of.
A perfectly valid construct would be...
In this case, you have 4 copies of the pointer in scope, they each contain an memory offset within program address space, plus the copy that gets created when free is called. At no time is any memory management library able to change the contents of any of those 4 copies in a C program. The memory manager can only change what is the object contained at the address referenced by the pointers.
gcc's optimizer deleted "if (!tun) return POLLERR;" because *sk=tun->sk implies that tun!=NULL.
I don't necessarily agree that GCC's optimizer is correct in that case. 'tun' could very well be NULL, in which case, we have an exception on our hands.
Personally, I would want that condition to be a compiler error.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not saying Obama didn't fail miserably to express the sentiment clearly, but there's no "great man" that doesn't owe anything to anyone.
Every person owes a contribution back to society.
But no "great man" owes back to society more, just because his creation turned out to be more valuable, and he was more successful in the marketplace.
Apple did contribute back to that society, by providing technology.
Apple doesn't owe taxes back to society; not at the rate that taxes are charged, anyways. Taxes are nothing more than immoral, but legalized thievery.
Apple doesn't owe jobs to society. Jobs are a resource for creators, that some but not all companies require large numbers of.
Apple's creations and technology are reward enough for society. The payment for these products is the creator's fair economic incentive.
Seeking extra "taxes" or "jobs"; in greater amounts from creators, is just a form of unfair rent-seeking created by greed.
Doesn't it make the assumption that there was no lead time? The shutdown had been threatened for weeks. /em>
They probably have pre-developed a site to be displayed during the government shutdown, and a site to display during normal operation.
Some secretary inserts a little key at their desk, turns it, and the website changes to the shutdown version.
Try asking anyone under 30 if they know what the phrase "Papers Please!" denotes
It's just two words... It's a lot of things.
It's when the Military place soldiers in a natural disaster area such as New Orleans after Katrina requiring you to show military ID or proof of government authorization, to avoid arrest, or having vehicles impounded
It's an attack onAmerican birthright citizenship
It's two words that succinctly describe America's dark future.
Personal and Professional Encounters with Surveillance
anti-state.com: May I See Your Papers Please?
It's what Mr. Hiibel of Nevada went to jail for refusing to comply with
It's what police do now to ordinary people minding their own business.
It's congress work on the REAL ID act
It's a name given to a section of an Arizona law upheld by the Supreme court.
It's the name of a complaint against changes the US is making starting this Fall 2013 to further restrict the free travel of Americans and greatly increase the difficulty of US citizens getting passports
It's the name of a dystopian video game about communist immigration control.
It's the name of an anti-TSA blog
It's a request you comply with when asked by the police; otherwise, you face immediate arrest.
If you're living in the 40s, that means avoid learning about integration.
Wow. Little known fact.... learning about differentiation and exponentiation was okay though.
Living in 2013? Don't learn about avoiding government interrogation.
It's more like 2001 - 2013
Living in 2015? Don't even THINK about avoiding surveillance.
It's more like 2013 - 2015
2015 - 2020 is Don't even THINK about how this is not democracy
if the retailers buys something for $10 and it costs them $1 to get is shipped to them, then at a minimum they charge $11. Thus, the shipping cost IS taxed, just not directly.
Those are distribution costs, not shipping costs.
Amazon has distribution costs as well --- they have to get products from their suppliers, to their warehouses and fulfillment centers.
However, these bulk distribution costs are likely on the order of $0.03 to $0.05 an item, not $1.
Whether they're a retailer or Amazon; they're certainly not going to ship a package containing the item from warehouse to warehouse; it will get loaded on a semi; which won't depart, until it's filled with things going out from that supplier.
And pretty much all states tax S&H.
I noticed the charges were way off. The book cost $8.09. The tax I was to be levied was $0.85. That's a 10.5% tax rate! Why am I being charged 10.5%? It turns out that Amazon is also charging me tax on the $3.99 cost of shipping and handling.
This is why the arguments for a national sales tax to "level the playing field" with B&M retailers are totally bogus.
They always want to tax shipping and handling.
Buyers from B&M retailers do not have to pay for delivery to complete the sale
Therefore, taxing the sale and the delivery at the same rate, doesn't level the playing field It gives B&M retailers an unfair advantage
By the way, this unfair advantage comes from increased usage of the roads and other infrastructure (people driving to stores), and pollution by people's automobiles ---- so the B&M retailers actually create more costs for the government, and it's only fair that the taxes should be greater for the B&M firms.
so makes no sense that they can sue you over something that has been around long before skype.
Microsoft lawyers are beyond what makes sense --- if your pocketbooks are deep enough and you use them to hire the right set of patent attorneys, and lawyers to prosecute the forthcoming cases, you can warp reality towards satisfying your desires.
The boss's boss's boss's boss's droneing motivational speech? I fell asleep last time.
Pro Tip: Falling asleep during the exec's droning motivational speech might be okay, loud snoring, collapsing on the table, or falling out of your chair are not okay.
Or, rather, we've stopped learning how to just be quiet and focused on the here and now, no matter how "boring" it might be.
Speak for yourself.... I can just be quiet, and focused, on my own thoughts, after spacing out, or falling asleep in my chair.
They don't need the radar gun reading to ticket you for speeding - if you ever go to court, you'll find that all police claim to be "trained in visual speed observation", and will back up the radar evidence with their professional judgement of how fast you were going.
This is where you need to bring in some basic scientific facts about physics, about measurement errors, about the unlikelihood of highly accurate estimates, and in particular, the likelihood of high estimation errors as well, even by experts.
And the psychological issue of an erroneous radar reading affecting human judgement about the actual speed, AND affecting human memory regarding their recollection of what their estimate was.
For example: their undocumented estimate suddenly increases by 20% after looking at the radar reading, because they had not committed it to paper yet, before looking at the radar, they are subject to a post-estimate correction bias; where their recollection of what their estimate was changes, as soon as they see the radar reading, but before the details are committed in writing.
upping his range to about 800 miles. ... To foil the police, he installed a switch to kill the rear lights and bought two laser jammers and three radar detectors. He commissioned a radar jammer, but it wasn't finished in time for the trek. There was also a police scanner,
Tickets coming in the mail from many states; with article cited as evidence..... be prepared for huge fines!
Cue sad trombone sound for people who are outraged that MS would take Skype and change it.
Steve: I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further.
Microsoft's working on that!
And since Skype is pretty much the last major have-to-have content provider that doesn't work for IPv6-only users... all the better.
These two statements are completely contradictory. Java is dying a slow death
There are large banks, ecommerce companies, insurance companies, brokerages, and government institutions including the IRS that have websites built using Java EE technology (java servlets).
It's a lot more than a small step up from VB; it is one of the top technologies that many large enterprises have built their websites on.
Please. the problem is that no CEO's would work for what Joe the broke liberal thinks they should.
There are large numbers of CEOs that work for not nearly as much compensation.
More than a few hundred thousand for the CEO only makes sense, if it comes with a long term contract, that says the CEO has to give all that money back, if they jump ship to go work for the management of a different company.
The use of stock options means that Larry only gets paid if the company is doing well; or rather more specifically if the company's shares are doing well
Well exactly... the company doesn't have to do well in the long term Just its shares. Providing an executive options, means that the exec is going to be focused on trying to maximize short term share price increase, at the potential cost of tens of billions in long-term opportunity, for the company.
And switching to traditional compensation packages would eat into Oracle's profits.
Using the options-based compensation eats into shareholder's equity interests, with regards to the company's current profit and future profit, forever.
b. ask to rewrite the whole thing
Seeing as it's Oracle, Redhat, and Google.... the application will probably be:
Rewritten to run on Oracle Java, throwing away that old Visual-Basic code.
Leverage Google AppEngine and BigTable for data storage, instead of the Microsoft Access-based backend
Run on 64-bit Redhat Enterprise Linux servers, instead of 32-bit Windows 2003 and XP servers running IIS
In other words..... it ought to be a smashing success
Almost universally in software development, starting from scratch is a stupid fucking idea repeated by inexperienced developers.
When the code is an unsalvageable pile of crap; sometimes it does make more sense, to reevaluate the design, and re-implement the entire application properly, using the old code only as a reference; than to try and repair.
Here we have a struct 100 bytes in size. However, st.a is not a pointer.
Where? Of course st.a is a pointer.... there are rules in C of pointer-array interchangeability.
st.a has type uint_t [100]. And sizeof both of those is the same.
&st.a has type uint_t (*)[100]
Just try it.... http://pastebin.com/7an0MS9g
Remember: when you are defining an array of two dimensions dynamically, there are two completely different approaches.
1. List of pointers technique
int **Array = malloc(sizeof(int*) * OuterMax);
And 2. Built-in array type
Both result in the a[i][j] notation.
Both are structured completely differently.
Hilarity ensues, when a programmer accidentally forgets which type of 2D array it is, and tries to resize (a[i]); or bcopy/memcpy on 'a' in an array created using the list-of-pointers technique
There is a third option. The NSA is not looking for terrorists. They are doing all this monitoring for other purposes.
Why does it matter, when your organization defines who terrorists are?
The people in the US speaking out against the NSA's practices are in the process of being recategorized as political terrorists.
I'm sure chinese sponsors of the NSA will shortly be putting megabucks into lobbying congress, to ensure the NSA doesn't lose any of its surveillance privileges
Yes it is. Evaluating the expression "a" causes undefined behaviour if "a" is indeterminate. "a" is considered to no longer have a value, any attempt to refer to its value causes UB.
No.... it's *a that becomes indeterminate. I suppose the case could be made, that some strange clause of one of the new drafts could be interpreted as 'a' the pointer, instead of the value of the pointer becoming indeterminate. But nonetheless, in traditional C, it is perfectly valid, and a compiler will have to support it, to avoid breaking backwards compatibility.
I suppose this becomes something like the argument, that the programmer should not be able to rely on MySQL coercing a NULL value to 0, when inserting a SQL row, containing a NOT NULL column, where the NULL has been presented; after all, the formal papers from the SQL standardization effort don't show that the DB engine can coerce NULL in such a manner.
Nonetheless, there is sometimes one established convention or another that predates the standard, and has more authority than the standard.
the value of a is indeterminate unless realloc failed, that is b = NULL.
In practice; I see most developers neglecting or ignoring the condition where b is NULL; realloc, malloc, and calloc are assumed to always succeed.
On their platform of choice, it may be the case, that the system kills a process with OOM, when allocation fails, instead of these procedures returning NULL.
plenty of more sophisticated memory managers will monkey with the contents of pointers from time to time.
The memory heap manager library is passed the value of the pointer, not a reference to the pointer itself.
e.g. if you had p =malloc(10);
To release the memory, you do free(p); not free(&p);
The key thing to keep in mind is, the memory manager has no knowledge of the object 'p'; only the address of the object that p had pointed to.
Furthermore, there could be plenty of other copies of the pointer lying around, that the memory manager does not know the address of. A perfectly valid construct would be...
struct { char * x; } bar4; char *bar1, *bar2, *bar3;
bar3 = malloc(256); bar1 = bar3;
bar2 = bar1;
bar4.x = bar2; free(bar4.x);
In this case, you have 4 copies of the pointer in scope, they each contain an memory offset within program address space, plus the copy that gets created when free is called. At no time is any memory management library able to change the contents of any of those 4 copies in a C program. The memory manager can only change what is the object contained at the address referenced by the pointers.
If tun==NULL, then tun->sk will cause the executing code to crash (unless it is suppressed with a custom SIGSEGV handler).
It's possible that NULL is mapped to a valid address, and therefore, the dereference will work, and won't cause an exception.
In that case, the optimization allows execution of more code, instead of an immediate return with error.
gcc's optimizer deleted "if (!tun) return POLLERR;" because *sk=tun->sk implies that tun!=NULL.
I don't necessarily agree that GCC's optimizer is correct in that case. 'tun' could very well be NULL, in which case, we have an exception on our hands.
Personally, I would want that condition to be a compiler error.