So stop playing in the mud and come to the city! We're open all night!
Which is exactly the problem. I like to, you know, sleep at night--not listen to cars zooming around, people getting stabbed, ambulance sirens blaring, that kind of thing.
This is exactly what Network Solutions/Verisign did with domain names when they had a government-protected monopoly. Have we forgotten so soon, one year domain registration was free (via SRI), and the mext year it was $100 per year per domain (via Verisign), despite actual costs of $7/year.
I'm not sure where you get the $100/year figure, because my wallet says it's been no more than $35/year since at least 1996, the same year Verisign was started (and before it got into the domain business). Perhaps NetSol charged more in the early days?
You ever try to move a directory structure full of source code from one place to another in CVS -- or even to move or rename a single file...?
HINT: When you do it the way CVS provides, you will lose all of your revision history.
s/lose/have to check another file for/
Yes, I'm working on a 100k-line project (in CVS) that's undergone significant directory restructuring, and no, I've never found this to be a problem. If anything was to push me to Subversion, it'd be the fact that the CVS logs are split up among files in the first place, so I can't get a concise log of changes to the project as a whole (without maintaining a separate ChangeLog, and then why do VC in the first place?).
My main beef with Subversion, from what I've read of it so far (correct me if I'm wrong), is that it insists on using some form of database to store the project data, rather than using ordinary files as CVS does. This may improve the efficiency of accesses, but it also makes it harder to recover the data when catastrophic failure occurs. With CVS, even if part of the repository gets nuked, I can still recover anything that's left, at worst by just comparing the,v file in the repository with my working copy; I'd be pretty nervous about using a VC system in which that sort of last-ditch fallback wasn't available.
Living in Japan, I hadn't had a chance to see this yet, but now that I do . . . he got fired over that? It's so obviously an offhand remark, and besides, "nappy-headed" doesn't even make sense to me unless he's saying they fall asleep a lot. If the targets of the comment found it insulting, then an apology is certainly in order, but that ought to be the end of it.
On the other hand, he's got a crazy-ass accent the airwaves could sure do without. (Oops, am I going to get my Slashdot account fired for that?)
As long as you don't mind everybody and their brother getting a look at what you're writing when the next XSS or AJAX or what-have-you flaw pops up . ..
(Yes, one presumes that Google takes "reasonable" precautions with user data stored on their servers. But in many real-world cases, "reasonable" isn't good enough. "It's Google's fault" only sounds like immature whining when a browser flaw, or perhaps a disgruntled Google employee, lets your client's confidential data out into the wild.)
I don't happen to have Kojien handy, but even my little Obunsha dictionary gives more than that for nenpi:
(1) The amount of fuel needed to perform a certain amount of work. Particularly, the number of kilometers an automobile, etc. can be driven with one liter of fuel. (2) The cost of fuel.
Ah, then it's OK, I guess. After all, it's not as if anyone could go to the nearest Office Depot and print an additional 35000 cards without notifying the election officials, right?
I suppose they could, if they wanted to get banned from holding office for five years (Japanese link again, sorry), like the previous governor of Fukushima prefecture. Granted, in his case it bribes that occurred while in office rather than election improprieties, but the same penalty applies--I just can't recall a specific recent case to cite.
In fairness, the law simply isn't ready for YouTube. Given the conservative approach taken with respect to other media (placing strict limits on basically all of a candidate's activities; see this comment, for example), I can't really blame the government for this reaction, as ineffective as it may be. The real test will come when they review the law and decide how to deal with sites like YouTube.
Then what about the situation suggested by this poster, where one candidate makes use of massive funds to effectively smother another? I'd hardly call that "fair".
The Japanese law is arguably conservative, but its you-may-do-nothing-but-this approach does (or at least did, pre-Internet) work well to preserve a level playing field, or at least punish those who broke the rules. Whether the voters are making good use of that level playing field is a completely separate issue I won't delve into here . ..
The Japanese election laws are actually very strict about this kind of thing. I haven't gone through all the details, but for example, Article 142 of the Public Election Law (Japanese link) limits candidates in prefectural governor elections to 35000+X postcards, where X depends on the number of lower-house national representative in the prefecture, and no fliers at all. There are lots of other rules--applying to anyone, not just candidates--preventing things like visiting people to ask for votes and all sorts of stuff.
Of course, none of it was written with the Internet in mind, so it'll undoubtedly have to change in some manner, and I agree that sites like YouTube could potentially be used to help level the playing field. But at least with respect to the current law, the fairness argument is a valid one.
Perhaps I should have clarified that I was using the legal meaning of "duress" (in the sense of "not under one's unhindered free will"), not the colloquial meaning of "hardship". If someone signs a contract they would not otherwise sign only because failing to do so would have some adverse effect, then--again, by my non-lawyerly understanding--the contract can in at least some cases be nullified, as it was signed "under duress".
Here in Japan, paper and pen work just fine for 50 million voters in national elections. And they don't mark boxes--they actually write out the candidate's name (or the party's, depending on the election).
Seriously, I've heard all the arguments before about giving people every chance to cast their vote, and for the most part I agree--but at the same time I think the voters ought to be responsible as well, and realize that if they don't make their choice clear, their vote may not count. (And don't tell me how computerized systems prevent the "scratch-out-and-fix" problem, because (1) there's nothing preventing the pen-and-paper voter from getting a new ballot, and (2) what if the voter accidentally brushes the touch-sensitive screen, for example, and changes their vote without noticing? On ballots with dozens of questions, the chance they'll notice the error drops significantly.)
As far as counting goes, a simple optical scanner will alleviate much of that work without introducing all the pitfalls of fully electronic voting. Tally all the obviously countable votes, and spit out the unclear ones for humans to check; that lets the computer do what it's good at (counting) and humans do what they're good at (pattern recognition). As a bonus, a simple scan-and-count machine would be much easier to prove correct than would a complex electronic voting system.
And I honestly don't see what the problem with long ballots are. Surely, for something done only once every two or four years, voters can afford to take the time to read the ballot and ensure that their voice is heard. (I do see your point with respect to electronic voting machines that output a paper ballot the voter can then deposit in the ballot box; that's one change I could possibly accept, as long as the machines did not store votes internally. Given the present state of society, though, I'd tend to lean against it just because the temptation to add little feature after little feature would take us right back to an all-electronic system.)
IANAL yadda yadda, of course, but I'm pretty sure that contracts (including EULAs and TOS's) are invalid if signed or otherwise agreed to under duress, among other reasons. If the student is required to submit their work to Turnitin or get a zero on the assignment, wouldn't that count as duress? If so, the students here ought to have a valid argument against Turnitin despite any attempted ass-covering by the latter.
On the other hand, Turnitin can probably argue back that they weren't the ones causing the duress and so shouldn't get the blame. I doubt that would hold water in the end (they've got to be aware of the fact that some universities require the use of their service--who knows, maybe they even suggested it themselves), but it could make things messy in the meantime.
This may not be quite that bad, but the point still stands: Don't use more technology than is needed to solve the problem. In this case, it's much simpler than you suggest:
Election supervisor checks that voter is authorized to vote.
Voter takes pen and paper ballot.
Voter writes candidate's name on paper.
Voter deposits ballot in box.
In fact, if you were clever you could even combine steps 1 and 4, saving a line at the supervisor's table.
Oh, and don't give the voter a copy to take home, unless you want supporters for the "wrong" party to start getting their pillows replaced by severed horse heads. "I've got a very good deal for you, and all it needs from you is one little piece of paper . .."
Not to be blunt, but the "whiner" argument still stands. As others have pointed out, there are many people (myself among them) who enjoy that length, the drawing-out of the story. Everyone has their own limits; for example, I like exploring the game environment, and I don't mind occasionally fighting "interchangeable monsters" as I'm doing so, while I don't like being forced to fight such monsters for the sole purpose of strengthening my characters. But the corollary to that is, not all games appeal to everyone--and while you're perfectly entitled to dislike RPGs because they take too much of your time, claiming that that makes RPGs "bad" in some objective sense is going too far.
Out of curiosity, would you also think that the Lord of the Rings trilogy should have been a single short novel, eliminating the "unnecessary" detours through which Tolkien described the world of Middle-Earth?
People don't reuse code because it's broken
on
Finding New Code
·
· Score: 1
Ignoring the slashvertisement, I think the real reason people tend not to reuse code is because any code they find will be either (1) broken, or (2) not up to the specific task and also broken. With rare exceptions, all code is broken to some degree, including yours (and including mine). Newer code tends to be slightly less broken about older code, as more people find new ways to break things; but however much some CS professors like to go on about OOP or whatever the latest fad is, the art of software engineering simply hasn't advanced to the point where people can reliably build non-broken software, in the sense that civil engineers build non-broken bridges or architects build non-collapsing buildings. Until we find the silver bullet that reduces software engineering to a reliably solvable problem, there's really not much we can do.
What, there's no silver bullet? Well, then I guess we're just SOL(*), aren't we?
Ignorance or uneducated? You're son is on the computer in the den collecting child porn.
Perhaps you missed these paragraph from The Fine Article (emphasis added):
"When they asked me have you ever looked up or uploaded or downloaded erotic images of minors, I was just taken aback and . . . I said, 'No,'" says Matthew.
Nevertheless, Matthew did have an embarrassing confession. He had been sneaking peaks at adult erotic photos on the family computer.
Despite the positive polygraphs and psychiatric exams, the district attorney pressed on. So the Bandys and their attorney tackled the most difficult question on the table. If Matthew didn't put the pictures on the computer, how did they get there?
Kindly refrain from perpetuating the kind of insanity this kid has had to go through.
Since March 30 of this year, Japan's Meteorological Agency has been operating a nationwide system [Japanese] to measure P-waves and estimate the earthquake's strength before the S-waves hit. While they say it's still experimental, it's been brought up in the news several times, and has in fact predicted [Japanese--partial list only] several significant earthquakes successfully, though it's put out a few false alarms as well. (One false alarm is listed as having been caused by a lightning strike, and they wrote that they deliberately accept such false alarms to maximize the pre-earthquake warning time for real earthquakes, rather than wait for additional data to come in that would delay the warning.)
With respect to the Shinkansen, I'm pretty sure they take advantage of this system, as do at least some other railways in the Tokyo area (I don't recall which). The data is also supposedly sent around to places like city halls, schools, etc.
The big problem with systems like these is that you can't just attach them to loudspeakers and whatnot, because whether it's not a false alarm or not, such broadcasts would easily lead to panic and stampedes that could cause more injuries and even deaths than the earthquake itself. So don't go looking for big "Earthquake Warning" boards next time you're in Japan, because you won't find them--the agency is being very careful with who they give the data to, at least for now.
Unfounded conspiracy theory: SCO v IBM goes to trial, SCO loses terribly, and the court rules that IBM and Linux do not in any way infringe upon SCO's property by copyright, contract, or any other method. Microsoft, seeing that the FUD engine that is SCO is losing steam fast and when fully dead will actually make IBM and Linux stronger, gets Novel to call back the attack dog, making it look like a friendly gesture but actually preventing the stronger precedent from being set.
Unfortunately (for Microsoft), the part of SCO v IBM about declaring Linux "clean" is a counterclaim by IBM, not a claim by SCO. So even if Novell got SCO's claims waived, IBM's counterclaims could still go forward, and they probably would unless IBM decided it was tired of the whole mess.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is exactly the problem. I like to, you know, sleep at night--not listen to cars zooming around, people getting stabbed, ambulance sirens blaring, that kind of thing.
I'm not sure where you get the $100/year figure, because my wallet says it's been no more than $35/year since at least 1996, the same year Verisign was started (and before it got into the domain business). Perhaps NetSol charged more in the early days?
s/lose/have to check another file for/
Yes, I'm working on a 100k-line project (in CVS) that's undergone significant directory restructuring, and no, I've never found this to be a problem. If anything was to push me to Subversion, it'd be the fact that the CVS logs are split up among files in the first place, so I can't get a concise log of changes to the project as a whole (without maintaining a separate ChangeLog, and then why do VC in the first place?).
My main beef with Subversion, from what I've read of it so far (correct me if I'm wrong), is that it insists on using some form of database to store the project data, rather than using ordinary files as CVS does. This may improve the efficiency of accesses, but it also makes it harder to recover the data when catastrophic failure occurs. With CVS, even if part of the repository gets nuked, I can still recover anything that's left, at worst by just comparing the ,v file in the repository with my working copy; I'd be pretty nervous about using a VC system in which that sort of last-ditch fallback wasn't available.
Living in Japan, I hadn't had a chance to see this yet, but now that I do . . . he got fired over that? It's so obviously an offhand remark, and besides, "nappy-headed" doesn't even make sense to me unless he's saying they fall asleep a lot. If the targets of the comment found it insulting, then an apology is certainly in order, but that ought to be the end of it.
On the other hand, he's got a crazy-ass accent the airwaves could sure do without. (Oops, am I going to get my Slashdot account fired for that?)
As long as you don't mind everybody and their brother getting a look at what you're writing when the next XSS or AJAX or what-have-you flaw pops up . . .
(Yes, one presumes that Google takes "reasonable" precautions with user data stored on their servers. But in many real-world cases, "reasonable" isn't good enough. "It's Google's fault" only sounds like immature whining when a browser flaw, or perhaps a disgruntled Google employee, lets your client's confidential data out into the wild.)
Ah, then it's OK, I guess. After all, it's not as if anyone could go to the nearest Office Depot and print an additional 35000 cards without notifying the election officials, right?
I suppose they could, if they wanted to get banned from holding office for five years (Japanese link again, sorry), like the previous governor of Fukushima prefecture. Granted, in his case it bribes that occurred while in office rather than election improprieties, but the same penalty applies--I just can't recall a specific recent case to cite.
In fairness, the law simply isn't ready for YouTube. Given the conservative approach taken with respect to other media (placing strict limits on basically all of a candidate's activities; see this comment, for example), I can't really blame the government for this reaction, as ineffective as it may be. The real test will come when they review the law and decide how to deal with sites like YouTube.
Then what about the situation suggested by this poster, where one candidate makes use of massive funds to effectively smother another? I'd hardly call that "fair".
The Japanese law is arguably conservative, but its you-may-do-nothing-but-this approach does (or at least did, pre-Internet) work well to preserve a level playing field, or at least punish those who broke the rules. Whether the voters are making good use of that level playing field is a completely separate issue I won't delve into here . . .
The Japanese election laws are actually very strict about this kind of thing. I haven't gone through all the details, but for example, Article 142 of the Public Election Law (Japanese link) limits candidates in prefectural governor elections to 35000+X postcards, where X depends on the number of lower-house national representative in the prefecture, and no fliers at all. There are lots of other rules--applying to anyone, not just candidates--preventing things like visiting people to ask for votes and all sorts of stuff.
Of course, none of it was written with the Internet in mind, so it'll undoubtedly have to change in some manner, and I agree that sites like YouTube could potentially be used to help level the playing field. But at least with respect to the current law, the fairness argument is a valid one.
Perhaps I should have clarified that I was using the legal meaning of "duress" (in the sense of "not under one's unhindered free will"), not the colloquial meaning of "hardship". If someone signs a contract they would not otherwise sign only because failing to do so would have some adverse effect, then--again, by my non-lawyerly understanding--the contract can in at least some cases be nullified, as it was signed "under duress".
Here in Japan, paper and pen work just fine for 50 million voters in national elections. And they don't mark boxes--they actually write out the candidate's name (or the party's, depending on the election).
Seriously, I've heard all the arguments before about giving people every chance to cast their vote, and for the most part I agree--but at the same time I think the voters ought to be responsible as well, and realize that if they don't make their choice clear, their vote may not count. (And don't tell me how computerized systems prevent the "scratch-out-and-fix" problem, because (1) there's nothing preventing the pen-and-paper voter from getting a new ballot, and (2) what if the voter accidentally brushes the touch-sensitive screen, for example, and changes their vote without noticing? On ballots with dozens of questions, the chance they'll notice the error drops significantly.)
As far as counting goes, a simple optical scanner will alleviate much of that work without introducing all the pitfalls of fully electronic voting. Tally all the obviously countable votes, and spit out the unclear ones for humans to check; that lets the computer do what it's good at (counting) and humans do what they're good at (pattern recognition). As a bonus, a simple scan-and-count machine would be much easier to prove correct than would a complex electronic voting system.
And I honestly don't see what the problem with long ballots are. Surely, for something done only once every two or four years, voters can afford to take the time to read the ballot and ensure that their voice is heard. (I do see your point with respect to electronic voting machines that output a paper ballot the voter can then deposit in the ballot box; that's one change I could possibly accept, as long as the machines did not store votes internally. Given the present state of society, though, I'd tend to lean against it just because the temptation to add little feature after little feature would take us right back to an all-electronic system.)
IANAL yadda yadda, of course, but I'm pretty sure that contracts (including EULAs and TOS's) are invalid if signed or otherwise agreed to under duress, among other reasons. If the student is required to submit their work to Turnitin or get a zero on the assignment, wouldn't that count as duress? If so, the students here ought to have a valid argument against Turnitin despite any attempted ass-covering by the latter.
On the other hand, Turnitin can probably argue back that they weren't the ones causing the duress and so shouldn't get the blame. I doubt that would hold water in the end (they've got to be aware of the fact that some universities require the use of their service--who knows, maybe they even suggested it themselves), but it could make things messy in the meantime.
Perhaps you might not have heard the story of the king and the toaster?
This may not be quite that bad, but the point still stands: Don't use more technology than is needed to solve the problem. In this case, it's much simpler than you suggest:
In fact, if you were clever you could even combine steps 1 and 4, saving a line at the supervisor's table.
Oh, and don't give the voter a copy to take home, unless you want supporters for the "wrong" party to start getting their pillows replaced by severed horse heads. "I've got a very good deal for you, and all it needs from you is one little piece of paper . . ."
It's exactly the same experiment we've seen time & time again, and it's meaningless because no information is transmitted.
Well, I guess that explains why we keep seeing dupes about it.
I guess the only question is, do the birds have B and A buttons too?
HAND.
Step 1: Drop the stupid Blu-ray drive.
Step 2: Manufacturing costs plummet.
Step 3: Profit!
Sorry, just had to get that off my chest . . .
Not to be blunt, but the "whiner" argument still stands. As others have pointed out, there are many people (myself among them) who enjoy that length, the drawing-out of the story. Everyone has their own limits; for example, I like exploring the game environment, and I don't mind occasionally fighting "interchangeable monsters" as I'm doing so, while I don't like being forced to fight such monsters for the sole purpose of strengthening my characters. But the corollary to that is, not all games appeal to everyone--and while you're perfectly entitled to dislike RPGs because they take too much of your time, claiming that that makes RPGs "bad" in some objective sense is going too far.
Out of curiosity, would you also think that the Lord of the Rings trilogy should have been a single short novel, eliminating the "unnecessary" detours through which Tolkien described the world of Middle-Earth?
Ignoring the slashvertisement, I think the real reason people tend not to reuse code is because any code they find will be either (1) broken, or (2) not up to the specific task and also broken. With rare exceptions, all code is broken to some degree, including yours (and including mine). Newer code tends to be slightly less broken about older code, as more people find new ways to break things; but however much some CS professors like to go on about OOP or whatever the latest fad is, the art of software engineering simply hasn't advanced to the point where people can reliably build non-broken software, in the sense that civil engineers build non-broken bridges or architects build non-collapsing buildings. Until we find the silver bullet that reduces software engineering to a reliably solvable problem, there's really not much we can do.
What, there's no silver bullet? Well, then I guess we're just SOL(*), aren't we?
(*) SOL: Secure in Our Ljobs (the L is silent)
If I'm lucky that'll make up for most of the electric bill from using it.
And yet I feed it anyway . . .
Ignorance or uneducated? You're son is on the computer in the den collecting child porn.
Perhaps you missed these paragraph from The Fine Article (emphasis added):
Kindly refrain from perpetuating the kind of insanity this kid has had to go through.
Since March 30 of this year, Japan's Meteorological Agency has been operating a nationwide system [Japanese] to measure P-waves and estimate the earthquake's strength before the S-waves hit. While they say it's still experimental, it's been brought up in the news several times, and has in fact predicted [Japanese--partial list only] several significant earthquakes successfully, though it's put out a few false alarms as well. (One false alarm is listed as having been caused by a lightning strike, and they wrote that they deliberately accept such false alarms to maximize the pre-earthquake warning time for real earthquakes, rather than wait for additional data to come in that would delay the warning.)
With respect to the Shinkansen, I'm pretty sure they take advantage of this system, as do at least some other railways in the Tokyo area (I don't recall which). The data is also supposedly sent around to places like city halls, schools, etc.
The big problem with systems like these is that you can't just attach them to loudspeakers and whatnot, because whether it's not a false alarm or not, such broadcasts would easily lead to panic and stampedes that could cause more injuries and even deaths than the earthquake itself. So don't go looking for big "Earthquake Warning" boards next time you're in Japan, because you won't find them--the agency is being very careful with who they give the data to, at least for now.
Unfortunately (for Microsoft), the part of SCO v IBM about declaring Linux "clean" is a counterclaim by IBM, not a claim by SCO. So even if Novell got SCO's claims waived, IBM's counterclaims could still go forward, and they probably would unless IBM decided it was tired of the whole mess.
#include <stddisclaimer/ianal.h>