Katrina was a big storm, but not ridiculously so. What destroyed New Orleans was flooding made extra destructive by the fact that the city is below sea level.
...and what killed 1,464 people is that neither the city, nor the state, nor the feds had any freaking plan for evacuating people out of the city who couldn't do it by themselves. And that would've never happened in Puerto Rico. I mean, (a) classify the areas of the city beforehand by their vulnerability to a flood, (b) when the hurricane warning is issued, send out dudes in vans and buses to the most vulnerable places to order the residents out and take to shelters the ones who can't get out on their own.
Note that Irene has been no joke in the Caribbean; in Puerto Rico (with relatively modern infrastructure), about a third of the island lost power.
Dont fucking insult me. Relatively modern infrastructure? We don't build our buildings with fucking wood and gypsum board... We use armed concrete... that is why we can take a Category 5 Hurricane (like Hugo) or Category 4 (like Georges or Katrina) and survive it without the DRAMA the US experienced with Katrina... When we get a hurricane like that, we receive it with Don Q Rum and in a Beach Chair...
Bullshit. I was there for Hugo and Georges. Hugo when it hit PR was a category 3, but it barely scraped the northeastern tip of the island (close to Fajardo). The Vieques and Culebra islands got hit the hardest, followed by the eastern municipalities, and the rest of the island got off easy. My street was without power for over a month afterward.
Georges was category 3 when it hit PR, too, not a 5. That did cut diagonally right through the middle of the main island. My parent's house lost a crappy zinc roof used in an extension that they should've never made to the house.
Now If you had said that the island was a step up from a third world country, I couldn't agree with you more... If the goverment agencies did their job right one third of the island wouldn't have lost power and water for more than a day... The services down there are such a fucking joke compared to 20yrs ago when a Category 5 Hurricane would cause the same inconveniences that this Category 1 hurricane caused.
Dude, 22 years ago when Hugo hit I was without power for a whole damn month. And I lived in a middle upper class neighborhood.
When it comes to hurricanes, the guys in PR who've got their shit down are Defensa Civil—the government emergency preparedness agency.
I think we are the only country in the world that actually roots for a hurricane to come because it means there will be a chance to not go to work and still get paid LOL!
Eh, there's no lack of poor country folks living in houses built on flood zones in PR, and they're terrified of hurricanes.
The government however is very good at going to the most dangerous flood zones and actually evacuating people. If the PR government had been in charge of New Orleans, there would have been only a few dozen deaths from Katrina...
I'm from California, and live here still; a 5.8 would be all over the news unless it was in the middle of East Bumfuck, San Bernardino County. [...] So yes, I know that in California we generally take these things in stride (though I guarantee you would be talking about a 5.8 if it hit near you), but just quit with the bullshit.
Yup. The most recent comparable earthquake I can recall here in the San Francisco Peninsula was the 2007 Alum Rock Earthquake, a 5.6. It was very noticeable, many people stopped working and spent the next 10 minutes chatting about it and browsing the web for information about it. It was a minor nationwide news story, meriting an AP story and brief mentions in CNN and the likes, and there were a few local stories the next day about the minor damage close to the epicenter. But then after that nobody really talks about it anymore.
A 5.9 in the east coast, well, that's a modest quake, but it's also a "Man bites dog" story.
What happens is that the resource is freed as required because you're using RAII.
Except that if RAII frees the memory the pointer points at, and something else is using that memory, you've just broken your program.
There are two solutions to this problem: (a) avoid sharing object references, which means that you're deep copying object graphs all the time and using more memory than you should need; (b) use a smart pointer that does reference counting—which is like GC, except crappy.
The solution that I have is to use a regular laptop backpack and a camera shoulder bag that will fit inside the backpack. That way, when I want just one I can get just one.
You never, EVER fire a weapon at someone you don't intend to kill, just as you don't point a weapon at something you don't intend to shoot.
"Intent to kill" is too strong in this case. Your intent in firing a gun at somebody should be to use lethal force to prevent them from using the same. Lethal force is force that you should reasonably expect to kill the target (you can't say "Gee, Your Honor, I didn't think that shooting him would kill him"), but such force is not always guaranteed to kill them; people survive being gunshot wounds at a non-trivial rate.
Basically, you're allowed to do things that fatally endanger your attacker's life, and nobody expects you to wear kid gloves while doing it.
I think you guys are mostly just disagreeing about terminology. The thing is that using guns in self defense is shaped by both of these facts: (a) shooting somebody is always deadly force, (b) you have a right to defend yourself from deadly force with deadly force, but you don't have a right to prevent the attacker from surviving; taking an extra shot just to make sure the attacker dies is murder.
Saying that guns are deadly force means that there is no "safe" way to shoot somebody, like the "shoot him in the leg" meme would have you believe. If you shoot somebody, that person may die, period. If you shoot somebody in the leg and they die, no court will take it seriously any defense where you say that you only meant to wound them and used only wounding force and the death was a freak accident so please give me involuntary manslaughter only please. No; once more, shooting is deadly force, and you should expect the target to die.
Yet shooting somebody doesn't guarantee that they will die; a sizeable portion of gunshot victims survive. The law places a huge value on life, even the life of the attacker. If you defend yourself with deadly force, you're not allowed to prevent your attacker from surviving.
So what do you do, concretely? (a) You aim at the center of mass, because that's basically the only reliable way to hit in a high-stress situation; (b) you shoot until you can see that they are no longer a threat; (c) you're done; call 911. If the attacker lives, they live; if they die, they die.
The Gizmodo thing probably cost Gizmodo more in the end - Apple's basically blackballed them, and Apple brings in LOTS of clicks. In fact, at WWDC 2010, they were BEGGING for a press pass. Why they didn't think to purchase a ticket instead (sure, the press pass is free, but the iPhone4 reveal made that super unlikely).
Well, Apple may well have reached the point where they refuse to admit them to the event even if they bought tickets.
And if Gawker was smart, everything they did would've been over the phone or in-person. They weren't charged because there's simply no evidence. They said they paid $10,000, but the only evidence was a posting.
"Sir, our statement that we paid $10,000 for the stolen phone was a lie. The truth is that knowingly accepted that stolen phone for free!"
Before the seller sold it to Gizmodo, he called Apple and explained he had one of their prototype phones. He did this multiple times. At first they told him that could not be the case, then they took his information and just never got back to him.
So, the front-desk people Hogan talked to at Apple didn't know about the supar secret prototype. Um, actually, I mean, the front-desk people he talked to at Apple instead of contacting the guy that he knew had lost the phone (whose name he knew!) or the bar where he lost it (which the phone-loss guy called a few times trying to recover it), didn't know about the supar secret prototype. This just means that Hogan knew better than those front-desk folks. Not just that, but he also knew that he knew better, which is obvious from his subsequent actions; why would he ask for $10,000 for the phone unless he believed it was an Apple prototype?
At that point, it's abandoned property.
No it's not. California law clearly spells out the requirements are for claiming abandoned property. It involves going to the police and turning it in, and them holding it for 90 days (IIRC) before they're allowed to give it to you for you to keep.
They knew the phone did not belong to the person selling it to them and they paid money for it. It doesn't matter what their intent was - they could be the most altruistic people ever to live, but paying money for property you know to be stolen/not owned by the person selling it to you: illegal.
You're misunderstanding some fundamental elements of criminal law. With a few exceptions, there are two elements that are necessary for any crime: an actus reus (a.k.a. external element, physical element, objective element, guilty act) and mens rea (a.k.a. fault element, subjective element, guilty mind). The first is the forbidden act; the second is a mental state that makes somebody criminally culpable for performing that act. Correspondingly, there are two ways of defending against a criminal accusation: "I didn't do the requisite act" and "assuming I did the act, my state of mind at the time excuses me from fault."
The problem with your statement that I quote is that you're basically saying that proving the actus reus is sufficient for guilt. This is not the case; it is necessary to prove both that and the mens rea, and there are such situations. So for example, if an altruistic person knowingly buys some stolen property and promptly returns it to its owner, they have performed the actus reus but without the mens rea, and thus committed no crime.
Now, I think we can agree that Gizmodo's actions have both elements. They have admitted to paying for the phone, and their actions demonstrate that they believed it belonged to Apple. Their intention in acquiring the phone, as demonstrated also by their actions, was to profit at the cost of depriving Apple of its property for some length of time.
That's right. Nobody gives a fuck if there's no harm to the company that can actually be proven in court.
Ok, for the sake of argument, let's leave aside the whole angle where they revealed confidential information about Apple's business, that can be used by competitors to unfair advantage. Let's assume there is no harm in that.
They deprived Apple of some of its property for three weeks, during which they disassembled and broke it. How is that not harm?
Maybe the person paying for it would have to give it back. But go to jail? No.
So how would you write theft and other related laws so that either (a) paying somebody $10,000 for a phone you know doesn't belong to them is not theft or a substantially similar crime, or (b) it is theft, but you shouldn't go to jail because after you got caught you said you were gonna give it back?
Depending on how they couched the previous press releases, they may have contended that they paid $10,000 for the rights to a story about the new iPhone, and the "finder" gave them the hardware to prove that his story about the new iPhone details was real.
...so the defense would be: "No, sir, we didn't buy this phone we knew to be stolen; we rented it in order to profit by dismantling it and putting photos of it in our website. (And yeah, sorry for breaking it!)" Yeah, that's gonna work great.
I don't understand why the DA isn't going after them.
I don't see how this is a bad idea. A pointer can become invalid. If you *know* it is going to be invalid, why not set it to a "known invalid" state instead of leaving it invalid and letting the program choke on it because there's no way to check for its validity.
You're missing the point. The important idea here is that a reference that might be invalid should not have the same type as one that's guaranteed to be valid, and that the latter one should be the common case. I.e., the language should not force you to accept a nullable pointer just because you want a pointer; you should be able to write code that assumes that the pointer is not null, and the compiler should enforce that such code can't be called with a null pointer. If the caller has a nullable pointer, then the caller's going to have to prove it's not null before passing it to your function.
without null, I can't imagine what would have been the case for implementing so many programming constructs today. Most languages have some type of isempty() which can b seen as a continuation of null, and I for one wouldn't want to implement any sort of list without it.
The fundamental problem that most programming languages that have a "null" value make is that they fail to distinguish between what ought to be two different types: basic types and nullable types. The basic idea is that Foo and nullable Foo should be two different types, such that the first one is always guaranteed to refer to some Foo, and only the second one may be null. You can always cast a value of one of these two types to the other; the cast from Foo to nullable Foo always succeds (and is in fact a noop), but the cast from nullable Foo to Foo will produce a runtime error if the runtime value is null.
To address your example, a simply linked list is simply a record that contains two fields: a content field and a nullable field for the next record. If the content field is not of a nullable type, then none of the list elements can be null.
This stuff is trivial to implement. It doesn't eliminate null pointer errors, but it makes them happen precisely at the points where you needed to have null checking. As things are in most language today, a null pointer will often get passed to and returned from dozens of functions or methods before it reaches one that actually uses it and gets stuck with an error that was caused somewhere else.
You may want to look at how data types work in Haskell, which has a more general solution that lumps nullability with enumerated and union types.
One performance advantage of NULL-terminated strings is you can trivially maintain two independent representations of the same string, one of which has a static prefix.
char *str2 = str1 + prefix_length;
In Java, strings are represented as an object that has a char[], a start index in the array, and a length. This representation gives you all of the advantages of the string-with-length-baked-in design and the representation sharing that you describe.
Any non-reallocating modification of one string instantly affects the other.
Which is a form of aliasing, one of the major sources of software bugs. Don't do that!
And, because most people are morons and get a lump sum, it's taxed even more.
People who are good at math know that it's much better, for tax purposes, to get one million a year over ten years, instead of ten million in one year. And it's even worse, because the lump sum for that would be more like eight million.
But something like 80% of the winner go for the lump sum, and get like 20% less, and pay like 10% more in taxes. All so they can have a giant bank balance immediately.
I'll join the chorus of people saying: it's not that simple. People have mentioned inflation, which can be generalized to expected real returns on investment (i.e., investment returns minus inflation): what rate of real return is required on the lump sum in order to make up for the extra taxes, and what investment risk the winner is willing to bear on their lump payout. Or, in other terms, what happens when you take the lump payment and pay the tax, but put the remainder into something like an internationally diversified, periodically rebalanced 60% stock/40% bond portfolio?
Then again there's the question of whether you could borrow against the future income from the the periodic payments, but this strikes me as unlikely to be workable; quick googling suggests that an income stream from lottery winnings are typically not transferable or even inheritable, which suggests to me that you won't be able to take a secured loan against it.
Enough of this drivel. What's fair? The 35% they pay now? The 39.6% they paid under Clinton? The 70% they paid under Kennedy? Or the 94% they paid under FDR?
The rich don't pay 35% of their income as taxes. That's the highest Federal marginal tax rate on ordinary income (e.g., salaries). For 2009, that rate applied to each dollar of ordinary income earned in excess of $372,951 for the year. The thing is that the truly rich avoid this 35% on most of their income by receiving most of their income as long term capital gains, which are taxed at 15%.
So, what's you're saying is that it's a Vast Right Wing conspiracy, where people have been instructed by a cable news channel to head to slashdot, obtain mod points "with a ton of fake accounts" all in an effort to? What? Silence the opposition by modding them offtopic?
Well, let's tackle the first piece of this: trolls have in the past created "mod farms" by creating a few hundred accounts to collect mod points and software to manage all of these accounts and easily use them for posting and modding. I know this because some guys I knew on IRC built one back in 2003 or so. Their modus operandi was primarily trolling; they'd post outrageous stuff looking to provoke posters into unhinged responses, use the mod farm to mod themselves up so that their comments were among the most prominent, and downmod folks who figured out that they were trolling.
So no, it wouldn't be a Vast Right Wing conspiracy; it would be a handful of guys with programming skills who built it for the lulz, but at least one of which also happens to be teabagger who just wants one side of the argument to "win."
So the real question is: if there is such a thing out there, active, how could we detect it? GP claims to have detected it by observing a pattern where an inordinate number of mod points were used to moderate comments ideologically. Well, then the question becomes whether there were really 300 mod points used that way (can we replicate GP's claimed observation?), and whether this is really inordinate, or just usual mod behavior on Slashdot.
The one I'm describing back in the day was detected because one of the dumber users decided to get into a modding match with the site admins. The admins have unlimited mod points, so apparently if you keep upmodding to 5 comments that they modded to -1 they will get suspicious, look at who's modding and what IP address they come from, and figure out what the game is.
In the FAQ, which details specifics about importing, editing, media management, export and purchase, Apple's tried to make one thing clear: some of the missing features will return with future software updates.
Indeed, Apple may be as inclined due to this backlash to reverse itself with OSX Lion as it was with Final Cut Pro. It's entirely reasonable to project that missing server features may make their return to the Sever Admin panel or as stand-alone add-ons.
The problem is that for the professional market, the "temporary downgrade" strategy, if it can be pulled off at all, can only be done so when the vendor offers visibility into the roadmap and continues to support the older, fuller-featured version while the new one catches up.
And Apple are pretty bad at this, not just with FCP, but also with Aperture, which I've experience first-hand. Want to know when Apple is planning to add support to Aperture for a new camera that was just released? Good luck; it could be next month, or it could be more than a year, and no indication from Apple on which is more likely. In the meantime, Adobe will have at least limited support within a month, with an explanation of the roadmap to full support.
After all, I doubt that Apple is trying to get rid of the userbase of corporate departments that use OSX Server and technologies like the group print spooler and the Quicktime streaming server are already developed, coded, and released -- so why not roll them back in?
Um, because they perceive that spending those resources on something else will have a higher return?
Fairly certain that the 9/11 conspiracies came along first.
No. The conspiracy to make Barack Obama the first non-citizen President of the USA started around the time of his birth, in the early 60s. The Bushes only started the 9/11 conspiracy in 1990. Get your facts straight, you dumbass...
You deserve to be flamed, if only for your blatant ignorance of biology. There is no difference between micro and macro evolution.
This response begs the question. The claim that "there is no difference between micro and macro evolution" is equivalent to the claim that all biological diversity is the result of natural selection from a common ancestor. And guess what, that's precisely what GP is questioning: the claim that, for all putative ancestors A and descendants B, natural selection could realistically turn A's into B's in the time scale claimed. Pointing out examples of "observed speciation events" helps, but not as much as you make it out, because (a) you're defining "species" in a funny way the creationist doesn't have to accept, (b) you're trying to defend a universally quantified statement ("for all x, P(x)") by pointing out individual instances where it's true, while it just takes one counterexample to refute it, and the creationist will find an example you can't respond to.
Evolutionary theory has weaknesses; there is the difficulty of demonstrating that there is some sequence of small, viable, inheritable mutations that can, over hundreds of millions of years, slowly turn fish into elephants. And then there's the impossibility of doing that over and over for all of life on Earth. This means it's easy to cast doubt on the whole edifice; there will always be cases where somebody can raise the question whether natural selection really could've done what it's been claimed to do, and some of those cases will turn out to have been wrong.
We teach this stuff in schools not because it's bulletproof and perfect; we do it because it's scientific, which creationism isn't.
What's not OK, however, is logically invalid responses to creationist claims, like you have done by assuming the conclusion. If you try to pull that off with a smart creationist (and yes, they exist), you're gonna get ripped apart. The correct answer to objections like GP is to point at the large body work that's constantly being done exploring intermediate stages for big evolutionary changes, both works that attempt to explain how they can be useful (the serious answers to the question of what good is "half a wing") as well as the slow but gradual growth of fossil specimens and how the fossil gap is actually decreasing over time. Then there's the responses that simply amount to recognizing that some of the auxiliary sciences are still very weak (e.g., fossils tell us phenotypes, fossil DNA tells us genotypes, but we still don't have a detailed enough science of gene expression to fill a lot of the gaps).
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Katrina was a big storm, but not ridiculously so. What destroyed New Orleans was flooding made extra destructive by the fact that the city is below sea level.
...and what killed 1,464 people is that neither the city, nor the state, nor the feds had any freaking plan for evacuating people out of the city who couldn't do it by themselves. And that would've never happened in Puerto Rico. I mean, (a) classify the areas of the city beforehand by their vulnerability to a flood, (b) when the hurricane warning is issued, send out dudes in vans and buses to the most vulnerable places to order the residents out and take to shelters the ones who can't get out on their own.
Note that Irene has been no joke in the Caribbean; in Puerto Rico (with relatively modern infrastructure), about a third of the island lost power.
Dont fucking insult me. Relatively modern infrastructure? We don't build our buildings with fucking wood and gypsum board... We use armed concrete... that is why we can take a Category 5 Hurricane (like Hugo) or Category 4 (like Georges or Katrina) and survive it without the DRAMA the US experienced with Katrina... When we get a hurricane like that, we receive it with Don Q Rum and in a Beach Chair...
Bullshit. I was there for Hugo and Georges. Hugo when it hit PR was a category 3, but it barely scraped the northeastern tip of the island (close to Fajardo). The Vieques and Culebra islands got hit the hardest, followed by the eastern municipalities, and the rest of the island got off easy. My street was without power for over a month afterward.
Georges was category 3 when it hit PR, too, not a 5. That did cut diagonally right through the middle of the main island. My parent's house lost a crappy zinc roof used in an extension that they should've never made to the house.
Now If you had said that the island was a step up from a third world country, I couldn't agree with you more... If the goverment agencies did their job right one third of the island wouldn't have lost power and water for more than a day... The services down there are such a fucking joke compared to 20yrs ago when a Category 5 Hurricane would cause the same inconveniences that this Category 1 hurricane caused.
Dude, 22 years ago when Hugo hit I was without power for a whole damn month. And I lived in a middle upper class neighborhood.
When it comes to hurricanes, the guys in PR who've got their shit down are Defensa Civil—the government emergency preparedness agency.
I think we are the only country in the world that actually roots for a hurricane to come because it means there will be a chance to not go to work and still get paid LOL!
Eh, there's no lack of poor country folks living in houses built on flood zones in PR, and they're terrified of hurricanes.
The government however is very good at going to the most dangerous flood zones and actually evacuating people. If the PR government had been in charge of New Orleans, there would have been only a few dozen deaths from Katrina...
I'm from California, and live here still; a 5.8 would be all over the news unless it was in the middle of East Bumfuck, San Bernardino County. [...] So yes, I know that in California we generally take these things in stride (though I guarantee you would be talking about a 5.8 if it hit near you), but just quit with the bullshit.
Yup. The most recent comparable earthquake I can recall here in the San Francisco Peninsula was the 2007 Alum Rock Earthquake, a 5.6. It was very noticeable, many people stopped working and spent the next 10 minutes chatting about it and browsing the web for information about it. It was a minor nationwide news story, meriting an AP story and brief mentions in CNN and the likes, and there were a few local stories the next day about the minor damage close to the epicenter. But then after that nobody really talks about it anymore.
A 5.9 in the east coast, well, that's a modest quake, but it's also a "Man bites dog" story.
In other news, when it comes to choosing mutual funds, past performance is a great predictor of future returns!
What happens is that the resource is freed as required because you're using RAII.
Except that if RAII frees the memory the pointer points at, and something else is using that memory, you've just broken your program.
There are two solutions to this problem: (a) avoid sharing object references, which means that you're deep copying object graphs all the time and using more memory than you should need; (b) use a smart pointer that does reference counting—which is like GC, except crappy.
The solution that I have is to use a regular laptop backpack and a camera shoulder bag that will fit inside the backpack. That way, when I want just one I can get just one.
You never, EVER fire a weapon at someone you don't intend to kill, just as you don't point a weapon at something you don't intend to shoot.
"Intent to kill" is too strong in this case. Your intent in firing a gun at somebody should be to use lethal force to prevent them from using the same. Lethal force is force that you should reasonably expect to kill the target (you can't say "Gee, Your Honor, I didn't think that shooting him would kill him"), but such force is not always guaranteed to kill them; people survive being gunshot wounds at a non-trivial rate.
Basically, you're allowed to do things that fatally endanger your attacker's life, and nobody expects you to wear kid gloves while doing it.
I think you guys are mostly just disagreeing about terminology. The thing is that using guns in self defense is shaped by both of these facts: (a) shooting somebody is always deadly force, (b) you have a right to defend yourself from deadly force with deadly force, but you don't have a right to prevent the attacker from surviving; taking an extra shot just to make sure the attacker dies is murder.
Saying that guns are deadly force means that there is no "safe" way to shoot somebody, like the "shoot him in the leg" meme would have you believe. If you shoot somebody, that person may die, period. If you shoot somebody in the leg and they die, no court will take it seriously any defense where you say that you only meant to wound them and used only wounding force and the death was a freak accident so please give me involuntary manslaughter only please. No; once more, shooting is deadly force, and you should expect the target to die.
Yet shooting somebody doesn't guarantee that they will die; a sizeable portion of gunshot victims survive. The law places a huge value on life, even the life of the attacker. If you defend yourself with deadly force, you're not allowed to prevent your attacker from surviving.
So what do you do, concretely? (a) You aim at the center of mass, because that's basically the only reliable way to hit in a high-stress situation; (b) you shoot until you can see that they are no longer a threat; (c) you're done; call 911. If the attacker lives, they live; if they die, they die.
The Gizmodo thing probably cost Gizmodo more in the end - Apple's basically blackballed them, and Apple brings in LOTS of clicks. In fact, at WWDC 2010, they were BEGGING for a press pass. Why they didn't think to purchase a ticket instead (sure, the press pass is free, but the iPhone4 reveal made that super unlikely).
Well, Apple may well have reached the point where they refuse to admit them to the event even if they bought tickets.
And if Gawker was smart, everything they did would've been over the phone or in-person. They weren't charged because there's simply no evidence. They said they paid $10,000, but the only evidence was a posting.
"Sir, our statement that we paid $10,000 for the stolen phone was a lie. The truth is that knowingly accepted that stolen phone for free!"
Before the seller sold it to Gizmodo, he called Apple and explained he had one of their prototype phones. He did this multiple times. At first they told him that could not be the case, then they took his information and just never got back to him.
So, the front-desk people Hogan talked to at Apple didn't know about the supar secret prototype. Um, actually, I mean, the front-desk people he talked to at Apple instead of contacting the guy that he knew had lost the phone (whose name he knew!) or the bar where he lost it (which the phone-loss guy called a few times trying to recover it), didn't know about the supar secret prototype. This just means that Hogan knew better than those front-desk folks. Not just that, but he also knew that he knew better, which is obvious from his subsequent actions; why would he ask for $10,000 for the phone unless he believed it was an Apple prototype?
At that point, it's abandoned property.
No it's not. California law clearly spells out the requirements are for claiming abandoned property. It involves going to the police and turning it in, and them holding it for 90 days (IIRC) before they're allowed to give it to you for you to keep.
They knew the phone did not belong to the person selling it to them and they paid money for it. It doesn't matter what their intent was - they could be the most altruistic people ever to live, but paying money for property you know to be stolen/not owned by the person selling it to you: illegal.
You're misunderstanding some fundamental elements of criminal law. With a few exceptions, there are two elements that are necessary for any crime: an actus reus (a.k.a. external element, physical element, objective element, guilty act) and mens rea (a.k.a. fault element, subjective element, guilty mind). The first is the forbidden act; the second is a mental state that makes somebody criminally culpable for performing that act. Correspondingly, there are two ways of defending against a criminal accusation: "I didn't do the requisite act" and "assuming I did the act, my state of mind at the time excuses me from fault."
The problem with your statement that I quote is that you're basically saying that proving the actus reus is sufficient for guilt. This is not the case; it is necessary to prove both that and the mens rea, and there are such situations. So for example, if an altruistic person knowingly buys some stolen property and promptly returns it to its owner, they have performed the actus reus but without the mens rea, and thus committed no crime.
Now, I think we can agree that Gizmodo's actions have both elements. They have admitted to paying for the phone, and their actions demonstrate that they believed it belonged to Apple. Their intention in acquiring the phone, as demonstrated also by their actions, was to profit at the cost of depriving Apple of its property for some length of time.
Ok, for the sake of argument, let's leave aside the whole angle where they revealed confidential information about Apple's business, that can be used by competitors to unfair advantage. Let's assume there is no harm in that.
They deprived Apple of some of its property for three weeks, during which they disassembled and broke it. How is that not harm?
Maybe the person paying for it would have to give it back. But go to jail? No.
So how would you write theft and other related laws so that either (a) paying somebody $10,000 for a phone you know doesn't belong to them is not theft or a substantially similar crime, or (b) it is theft, but you shouldn't go to jail because after you got caught you said you were gonna give it back?
Depending on how they couched the previous press releases, they may have contended that they paid $10,000 for the rights to a story about the new iPhone, and the "finder" gave them the hardware to prove that his story about the new iPhone details was real.
...so the defense would be: "No, sir, we didn't buy this phone we knew to be stolen; we rented it in order to profit by dismantling it and putting photos of it in our website. (And yeah, sorry for breaking it!)" Yeah, that's gonna work great.
I don't understand why the DA isn't going after them.
I don't see how this is a bad idea. A pointer can become invalid. If you *know* it is going to be invalid, why not set it to a "known invalid" state instead of leaving it invalid and letting the program choke on it because there's no way to check for its validity.
You're missing the point. The important idea here is that a reference that might be invalid should not have the same type as one that's guaranteed to be valid, and that the latter one should be the common case. I.e., the language should not force you to accept a nullable pointer just because you want a pointer; you should be able to write code that assumes that the pointer is not null, and the compiler should enforce that such code can't be called with a null pointer. If the caller has a nullable pointer, then the caller's going to have to prove it's not null before passing it to your function.
without null, I can't imagine what would have been the case for implementing so many programming constructs today. Most languages have some type of isempty() which can b seen as a continuation of null, and I for one wouldn't want to implement any sort of list without it.
The fundamental problem that most programming languages that have a "null" value make is that they fail to distinguish between what ought to be two different types: basic types and nullable types. The basic idea is that Foo and nullable Foo should be two different types, such that the first one is always guaranteed to refer to some Foo, and only the second one may be null. You can always cast a value of one of these two types to the other; the cast from Foo to nullable Foo always succeds (and is in fact a noop), but the cast from nullable Foo to Foo will produce a runtime error if the runtime value is null.
To address your example, a simply linked list is simply a record that contains two fields: a content field and a nullable field for the next record. If the content field is not of a nullable type, then none of the list elements can be null.
This stuff is trivial to implement. It doesn't eliminate null pointer errors, but it makes them happen precisely at the points where you needed to have null checking. As things are in most language today, a null pointer will often get passed to and returned from dozens of functions or methods before it reaches one that actually uses it and gets stuck with an error that was caused somewhere else.
You may want to look at how data types work in Haskell, which has a more general solution that lumps nullability with enumerated and union types.
One performance advantage of NULL-terminated strings is you can trivially maintain two independent representations of the same string, one of which has a static prefix.
char *str2 = str1 + prefix_length;
In Java, strings are represented as an object that has a char[], a start index in the array, and a length. This representation gives you all of the advantages of the string-with-length-baked-in design and the representation sharing that you describe.
Any non-reallocating modification of one string instantly affects the other.
Which is a form of aliasing, one of the major sources of software bugs. Don't do that!
UTF-16 is not fixed width. It combines all disadvantages of UTF-8 and UCS4 while having no advantages of either.
...unless you're encoding Chinese, Japanese or Korean text, in which case it's much more compact than UTF-8.
And, because most people are morons and get a lump sum, it's taxed even more.
People who are good at math know that it's much better, for tax purposes, to get one million a year over ten years, instead of ten million in one year. And it's even worse, because the lump sum for that would be more like eight million.
But something like 80% of the winner go for the lump sum, and get like 20% less, and pay like 10% more in taxes. All so they can have a giant bank balance immediately.
I'll join the chorus of people saying: it's not that simple. People have mentioned inflation, which can be generalized to expected real returns on investment (i.e., investment returns minus inflation): what rate of real return is required on the lump sum in order to make up for the extra taxes, and what investment risk the winner is willing to bear on their lump payout. Or, in other terms, what happens when you take the lump payment and pay the tax, but put the remainder into something like an internationally diversified, periodically rebalanced 60% stock/40% bond portfolio?
Then again there's the question of whether you could borrow against the future income from the the periodic payments, but this strikes me as unlikely to be workable; quick googling suggests that an income stream from lottery winnings are typically not transferable or even inheritable, which suggests to me that you won't be able to take a secured loan against it.
Enough of this drivel. What's fair? The 35% they pay now? The 39.6% they paid under Clinton? The 70% they paid under Kennedy? Or the 94% they paid under FDR?
The rich don't pay 35% of their income as taxes. That's the highest Federal marginal tax rate on ordinary income (e.g., salaries). For 2009, that rate applied to each dollar of ordinary income earned in excess of $372,951 for the year. The thing is that the truly rich avoid this 35% on most of their income by receiving most of their income as long term capital gains, which are taxed at 15%.
What you want to compare is effective tax rates, which is the true percentage of income paid as tax after all the math is done. Over the past few years, the 400 highest-income Americans have had an effective federal income tax rate of about 17-18%. For comparison, I make low six figures, and my effective tax rate is about 21%.
So, what's you're saying is that it's a Vast Right Wing conspiracy, where people have been instructed by a cable news channel to head to slashdot, obtain mod points "with a ton of fake accounts" all in an effort to? What? Silence the opposition by modding them offtopic?
Well, let's tackle the first piece of this: trolls have in the past created "mod farms" by creating a few hundred accounts to collect mod points and software to manage all of these accounts and easily use them for posting and modding. I know this because some guys I knew on IRC built one back in 2003 or so. Their modus operandi was primarily trolling; they'd post outrageous stuff looking to provoke posters into unhinged responses, use the mod farm to mod themselves up so that their comments were among the most prominent, and downmod folks who figured out that they were trolling.
So no, it wouldn't be a Vast Right Wing conspiracy; it would be a handful of guys with programming skills who built it for the lulz, but at least one of which also happens to be teabagger who just wants one side of the argument to "win."
So the real question is: if there is such a thing out there, active, how could we detect it? GP claims to have detected it by observing a pattern where an inordinate number of mod points were used to moderate comments ideologically. Well, then the question becomes whether there were really 300 mod points used that way (can we replicate GP's claimed observation?), and whether this is really inordinate, or just usual mod behavior on Slashdot.
The one I'm describing back in the day was detected because one of the dumber users decided to get into a modding match with the site admins. The admins have unlimited mod points, so apparently if you keep upmodding to 5 comments that they modded to -1 they will get suspicious, look at who's modding and what IP address they come from, and figure out what the game is.
In the FAQ, which details specifics about importing, editing, media management, export and purchase, Apple's tried to make one thing clear: some of the missing features will return with future software updates.
Indeed, Apple may be as inclined due to this backlash to reverse itself with OSX Lion as it was with Final Cut Pro. It's entirely reasonable to project that missing server features may make their return to the Sever Admin panel or as stand-alone add-ons.
The problem is that for the professional market, the "temporary downgrade" strategy, if it can be pulled off at all, can only be done so when the vendor offers visibility into the roadmap and continues to support the older, fuller-featured version while the new one catches up.
And Apple are pretty bad at this, not just with FCP, but also with Aperture, which I've experience first-hand. Want to know when Apple is planning to add support to Aperture for a new camera that was just released? Good luck; it could be next month, or it could be more than a year, and no indication from Apple on which is more likely. In the meantime, Adobe will have at least limited support within a month, with an explanation of the roadmap to full support.
After all, I doubt that Apple is trying to get rid of the userbase of corporate departments that use OSX Server and technologies like the group print spooler and the Quicktime streaming server are already developed, coded, and released -- so why not roll them back in?
Um, because they perceive that spending those resources on something else will have a higher return?
Fairly certain that the 9/11 conspiracies came along first.
No. The conspiracy to make Barack Obama the first non-citizen President of the USA started around the time of his birth, in the early 60s. The Bushes only started the 9/11 conspiracy in 1990. Get your facts straight, you dumbass...
You deserve to be flamed, if only for your blatant ignorance of biology. There is no difference between micro and macro evolution.
This response begs the question. The claim that "there is no difference between micro and macro evolution" is equivalent to the claim that all biological diversity is the result of natural selection from a common ancestor. And guess what, that's precisely what GP is questioning: the claim that, for all putative ancestors A and descendants B, natural selection could realistically turn A's into B's in the time scale claimed. Pointing out examples of "observed speciation events" helps, but not as much as you make it out, because (a) you're defining "species" in a funny way the creationist doesn't have to accept, (b) you're trying to defend a universally quantified statement ("for all x, P(x)") by pointing out individual instances where it's true, while it just takes one counterexample to refute it, and the creationist will find an example you can't respond to.
Evolutionary theory has weaknesses; there is the difficulty of demonstrating that there is some sequence of small, viable, inheritable mutations that can, over hundreds of millions of years, slowly turn fish into elephants. And then there's the impossibility of doing that over and over for all of life on Earth. This means it's easy to cast doubt on the whole edifice; there will always be cases where somebody can raise the question whether natural selection really could've done what it's been claimed to do, and some of those cases will turn out to have been wrong.
We teach this stuff in schools not because it's bulletproof and perfect; we do it because it's scientific, which creationism isn't.
What's not OK, however, is logically invalid responses to creationist claims, like you have done by assuming the conclusion. If you try to pull that off with a smart creationist (and yes, they exist), you're gonna get ripped apart. The correct answer to objections like GP is to point at the large body work that's constantly being done exploring intermediate stages for big evolutionary changes, both works that attempt to explain how they can be useful (the serious answers to the question of what good is "half a wing") as well as the slow but gradual growth of fossil specimens and how the fossil gap is actually decreasing over time. Then there's the responses that simply amount to recognizing that some of the auxiliary sciences are still very weak (e.g., fossils tell us phenotypes, fossil DNA tells us genotypes, but we still don't have a detailed enough science of gene expression to fill a lot of the gaps).