You seem to be falling into the trap that so many people (including the original author) do: assuming that the test must be meaningless unless the "amount of knowledge" is proportional to the test score. Why does it matter that "Knowledge Candidate" only gets a 19% lower score than "Double Knowledge Candidate", if the only way for the first guy to have a shot at matching 2KC's score *is to double his own knowledge*?
Just use some creativity in interpreting the scores, and it mostly works out fine.
There are problems with his analysis. One problem is, the "examples" he cites don't actually exist. I'm guessing that there is no professional test out there where an unqualified candidate would know only one fewer question than a qualified candidate.
The author seems to suggest that a "hard" test is one where every question is brutally hard, and only a true zen master would answer a significant number of questions based on knowledge rather than guessing. In fact, well designed tests try to stagger the difficulty of questions to provide for maximum discrimination between candidates of varying levels of knowledge. There will be a handful of very easy and very difficult questions, but most will be at about "moderate" difficulty (think of it as a bell curve). So in reality, the difficulty of the test is governed primarily by the cutoff score. The higher the score, the less likely the easy questions and judicious guessing are going to save you.
The more knowledgeable candidate should be better at guessing questions he doesn't know. But even ignoring this, even as little as a five question advantage to the more knowledgeable candidate is huge. Say that X knows 25/80 questions, and Y knows only 20/80 questions. Each question has four answers, and each candidate guesses randomly on questions he/she doesn't know. We expect X to wind up with a score of around 38.75, and Y to end up with a score of 35. Even with most of the questions being guesses, there is a 75% chance of X winding up with a better score than Y. If he knows 30 questions, the odds raise to 95%. If he knows 35, the odds surpass the 99% mark. Because the difficulty of the questions are staggered, any two candidates with different amounts of "tested knowledge" are going to have a noticeable difference in the number of questions they can confidently answer.
It's one thing to claim that most tests would benefit by punishing guessing. But the author goes further, dismissing any test that doesn't punish guessing as utterly meaningless. I don't think that anyone who understands the probabilities involved could honestly describe them that way, "former background in mathematics" or no.
I think the original article/clueless-blog forgets to factor in a very important fact: in well-designed multiple choice tests, the test has questions across a wide range of difficulties. Say you have a test with 80 questions, divvied up into four levels of difficulty (easy, moderate, difficult, impossible).
If you've mastered half the "moderate" material, you have an automatic ten question advantage over those who know only the easy material. Even if you're only equally adept at guessing the answers to the other questions (fifty for you, sixty for your opponent), it's very unlikely that your opponent will guess well enough to match your score.
Also notice that he insists on talking about tests with only twenty questions, even though most tests are significantly longer. Short tests certainly offer the best chance for guessing your way to a good score. But the only test I've ever seen that was that short were the Novell Netware certification tests I took in 1999, and those were adaptive (read: the computer administering the test was selecting questions based on how well you were doing. The longer the test, the more questions you were getting wrong.)
Interesting that you brought up baseball. I read a book by Arthur Jensen a decade ago (I didn't realize at the time how controversial he was). I think he was trying to argue against one of the standard objections to testing. Specifically, that tests with domain-specific content were biased against minorities who were less likely to have been exposed to that content.
Anyhow, part of his argument was that intelligent people were more likely to pick up and retain content. To illustrate, he pitted one of his colleagues -- a very high-IQ person who claimed to know nothing of baseball and who took great pride in his lack of said knowledge -- against a high-functioning mentally retarded man who was obsessed with baseball. In this instance, at least, his colleague won by a landslide.
I only bring this up to support my hunch that you probably know more about baseball than you suspect.
If you really think that the money you have is representative of the value you've created (rather than simply a representation of the goods and services you can convince others to give you) then you believe in a world far more fair and equitable than anyone over the age of six can justifiably believe in. In truth, the powerful have always co-opted the value created by the less powerful, as well as the value that was not created by human action at all.
We've never come remotely close to a system that gives everyone fair compensation for the value they work to create. Not communism, not capitalism, not ever.
The mere fact that Griffin is a Bush appointee practically guarantees that he's at least borderline incompetent. The fact that he's not qualified or active in climate research means that he's irrelevant to the point you're trying to make (that research is being supressed). The fact that he equates 'choosing to reduce our impact on the climate' with 'choosing the climate' shows that he's either dishonest or merely stunningly confused. The fact that he tries to spin anti-GW measures like so:
I guess I would ask which human beings - where and when - are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that's a rather arrogant position for people to take."
shows that again, he's engaged in jawdropping dishonesty or stupidity. That's because with every bit of energy we use, we're helping to decide what kind of climate everyone else on the planet has. We, who have 5% of the world's population and use 25% of the world's energy, are arrogantly choosing a warmer world, regardless of the needs and wants of less resource hungry countries.
Even if there is some pressure for scientists to hop on the GW bandwagon -- whether for grant money, the environmental agenda, or whatever the hell reason you climate deniers use to delude yourself into believing that 95% of the world's scientists are lying their asses off -- there should still be enough stubborn, honest scientists out there to do the solid research needed to blow global warming out of the water. Scientists aren't mocking and castigating the skeptics for derailing their gravy train; they're doing it because the skeptics are doing crap science, and doing most of their work in the court of public opinion.
In the defense of the corrupt blowhards, if they didn't spend so much time fundraising, they're very likely to lose to someone who spends more. If you want our elected officials doing the peoples' business, rather than spending their time shoring up their own power, we need to support comprehensive campaign finance reform.
Invading a country that might maybe someday think about conspiring to pose a threat to you is a proper function of government? How about funneling vast amounts of taxpayer money to corporate cronies under the guise of rebuilding the infrastructure of another country? How about using military and political power to compel the supposedly independent government (which your government basically imposed on the country) to enact an oil bill that gives undeservedly huge windfalls to international energy corporations?* Of course not. Hell, no conservative since Goldwater has had a shot at the presidency.
When it comes to prisons, the primary difference between conservatives and liberals isn't about how harsh prison should be, how many people should be incarcerated, how prisons should be paid for, or whatever. For conservatives, the primary purpose is punishment. A sin has been committed, and a price must be extracted. Sure, there is the hope that if prison is made awful enough an experience, people will behave better to avoid getting entangled in the system. But that's a secondary motivation.
For liberals, prisons are supposed to be about rehabilitation. Imprisoning the clinically insane is therefore futile, since prisons aren't equipped to handle serious mental disabilities. In fact, imprisoning *anyone* is stupidity, if that person can be more effectively rehabilitated another way. I think that's a far more reasonable position to take than the conservative position. But when we suggest actually trying to figure out a criminal's motivations and focus on fixing them, we're accused of coddling. Whereas, taking every single person, locking them up for a specified amount of time, and hoping the experience magically 'scares them straight' is called being tough on crime. I'd call it, 'living in a fantasy land'.
Criminals go free in every state in the Union. California is very unexceptional in its incarceration statistics, compared to the U.S. as a whole. Of course, as you've noticed, the U.S. is exceptionally incarceration-happy. I believe we're second only to China. And yet we have a higher murder rate than any one of those failed socialist states in western Europe. Perhaps this most capitalistic of cultures is breeding a bit of tension and resentment.
Nah.
* Show me one Middle East nation that has ever voluntarily chosen profit-sharing agreements as the mechanism for purchasing extraction expertise.
Is the rule of law really worth defending, if that rule of law values your stereo system over another person's life?
What -- in your libertarian wet-dream world -- are you allowed to do in the course of protecting the all-sacred right to own crap? Kill a fleeing, unarmed man? Cap his knee, drag him inside, and work him over for a couple of hours? Slaughter his family, to show him just how seriously we take our crap ownin' 'round these parts? Why the hell can't we believe that a robber could be victimized by a homeowner defending his property?
You've clearly divided the world into good and evil, and -- surprise of surprises -- guess which category you put yourself in?
1) Someone who steals from you would certainly be just as likely to murder you.
2) Therefore, even if the person no longer poses a threat to you, you get to cap their ass.
I did a quick search. At least in Salt Lake, you're forty times more likely to be robbed than murdered, so you've got some sloppy slippery-slope reasoning going on there. Try to spin it any way you like, but if you come downstairs to find some guy hauling off your stereo, and he bolts, you're not defending yourself by shooting him. You're not defending your family. You're not even defending some abstract principle of private property. You're just taking revenge, and I don't give a rat whether you live in a state where it's legal or not.
Your reading comprehension needs some work. GP was clearly discussing killing *after the fact*. Killing the perpetrator doesn't "un-rape" the victim. For many people, it wouldn't even make them feel better.
But if the RAM *is* the document, then the records exist, and every use of the free() system call is effectively the same as running your documents through the shredder.
Nah, a lawyer would never be so brazen as to make an argument like that. Wait, yes they would.
Even in Utah (not the most environmentally aware state in the nation), they have ways of dealing with this. Here, alternative fuel vehicles are registered with the state as such, and owners are required to buy a license that covers the expected revenues they would have received from driving with gasoline. They sell them for $85 or $125 (depending on the type of vehicle), regardless of how much you actually drive.
My brother-in-law has been considering modding his truck to use natural gas. He drives all over the state installing satellite dishes, and he figures that he'll be saving hundreds of dollars a year, simply based on the difference between the $85 he'd pay for the license, and the amount he actually pays in state gas taxes. That's not even counting federal.
I really don't see the purpose of posting a $2,500 bond, as the story says NC requires. Generally, when you post a bond, you can do something to get it back. If you post bail, you get the money back by showing up in court when you're expected to. What do you do to get this money back? Prove that the car is now destroyed, and you never actually drove it anywhere?
Buncha redneck idiots. Just set up some standard fee structure that applies to any untaxed fuel, and stop buggin' people!
Presuming that everything available under the GPLv2 now shifts over to the GPLv3, many manufacturers that otherwise would have chosen GPL probably will (or to open source alternatives under BSD-style licenses, etc.). How will that advance the goals of supporters of the GPL?
The goal of the GPL is to promote the creation and adoption of freely modifiable, freely redistributable software. If the software running on that little black box underneath your television cannot be modified, then the GPL is no more serving its intended purpose than if the box was running something entirely proprietary.
What you have to understand is, if the corporate bastards have their way, the same "feature" that prevents you from running unsigned software on your TiVo will be coming to every computing device you buy, rendering the whole concept of open software irrelevant. TiVo is just a scouting party in advance of the main invasion. That's what the GPL3 is designed to counter.
GPL2 was great for its time, but since then loopholes have been discovered that undermine the whole concept of freely shareable software. If businesses only jump on the bandwagon because they find those loopholes attractive, then we're better off without them.
Why would you have to wait for release? It might be risky to say "GPL2 until v3 is released," if you think someone could pull something nasty before v3 is released, and try to claim the terms of v2 until the end of time. But nothing is stopping you from putting a disclaimer in your code saying, "This software may only be distributed under the terms of GPLv3, which is expected to be released on xx/xx/xxxx. Prior to the release of GPLv3, you do not have permission to redistribute this software."
TiVo is a great example of why GPLv3 is needed. I mean, look at the situation under GPLv2 (which TiVo is perfectly happy with): TiVo takes the Linux kernel so it can run their black box. TiVo makes changes to the code so it will run on black box. TiVo dutifully releases those changes to the world at large, because GPLv2 says they gotta. The world at large does not benefit, because the hardware the changes were meant to support will only run official TiVo-signed binaries.
The loophole in v2 frees hardware manufacturers from the burden of "giving back" in any meaningful sense. If they find the idea of giving back so irksome, let them switch to Windows CE.
Yeah, but if the forest is under the BSD license, Microsoft will come in, make a copy of the forest, tweak the genes of the pine trees so that the lumber from their forest is incompatible with the lumber from the old forest, and sign an exclusive deal with Home Depot. Then the subcontractors of the world will be banging on your door, asking you why the hell your lumber isn't compatible with Microsoft lumber, and suddenly giving it away for free just isn't enough, and then the hippies come in and chain themselves to your trees and you just can't get away from the strains of "Puff the Magic Dragon."
God, it's annoying when people try to take an analogy they disagree with and extend it until it says what they want it to say. The analogy is supposed to convey an idea. Argue the idea, not the analogy. Observe:
>>> If Free Software were a forest, we'd want to clear-cut it, because that leads to PROFIT FOR US and screw everyone else!
>> Software is infinitely reproducible, so there is no way to "clear cut"; everyone can take as much as they like.
> But if someone takes a code base, privatizes it, and makes it incompatible with the original, they undermine the welfare of their users and the success of the original developers for their own gain. The point of "clear cutting" wasn't to highlight the disappearance of a finite resource, but to point out that their behavior promotes their own self interest, while harming the community.
Generally, when you try to pull the ol' extend-and-reverse on an analogy, clarity of thought is the first casualty. Just say no.
Looking at the responses to your post, I think you have received enough of a heads-up on global oil politics. But I would like to address the wood chipper thing.
And there you have the long and short of the available evidence for a human-shredding machine -- an uncorroborated statement made by an individual in northern Iraq, hearsay comments made by someone widely suspected of being a 'bullshitter' (who, like the Australian Prime Minister, made his comments about the shredder shortly after Clwyd first wrote of it in the Times), and a record book, in Arabic, that mentions 'mincing' but whose whereabouts are presently unknown. Other groups have no recorded accounts of a human shredder. A spokesman at Amnesty International tells me that his inquiries into the shredder story 'drew a blank'. 'We checked it with our people here, and we have no information about a shredder.' Widney Brown, deputy programme director of Human Rights Watch, says: 'We don't know anything about a shredder, and have not heard of that particular form of execution or torture.' [source]
The story seems utterly unlikely, since it wasn't corroborated after the war. The machine was never found, the people who ran the prisons didn't verify the story, and neither did prisoners.
But, true or not, it provides a compelling justification for the Iraq invasion, and therefore has taken a life of its own within the right wing, far out of proportion to its certainty. Plug hussein "wood chipper" into Google, and just about all of the top fifty hits take for granted that Hussein regularly fed his enemies to wood chippers.
Four questions:
1) Was Saddam Hussein a genocidal dictator? Absolutely.
2) Did his people suffer under his regime? Absolutely.
3) Is Iraq better off without him? That's hard to predict. It depends on what eventually replaces him. While there is plenty of room for improvement, the fact that the nation plunged into civil war once he was deposed indicates that he provided some stability to the country.
4) Should America depose dictators who mismanage their countries? No, for lots of reasons. First, our record for interfering with the internal affairs of other countries is abysmal. It would be bad enough if our interference was just good intentions gone bad. But it's clear that, despite the lofty rhetoric about freedom and liberty, we choose to interfere based primarily on the self-interests of the centers of power. We installed the Shah in Iran because the country chose to nationalize their oil industry, and now we're putting the screws to Iraq to ensure that their reserves fall into the hands of the multinational energy conglomerates. I don't think we've shown that we can use war powers responsibly, so I don't believe it should be up to us to decide who gets to rule other countries.
As the other guy noted, this isn't about the government regulating the rest of us. It's about the government regulating itself. Are you saying that the government shouldn't have rules about how it communicates with the public? Is it perfectly fine if some branches of your state government refuse to communicate using anything but WordPerfect 5.1 file format? Of course not. They should communicate in a way that lowers the barriers to public participation. Requiring that citizens purchase Microsoft Office to communicate effectively with the government is ludicrous. Laws like these keep that from happening.
Not all new laws present an onerous burden or a restriction on the freedom of citizens. Some actually force the government to behave in a way that makes it easier for people to deal with the government. Laws favoring open formats do just that.
I disagree about the config file. If you know you're going to want something hard-coded when you ship, you might still want to be able to tweak it without recompiling, or have separate config files for development, testing, and production. Hell, you might even decide to leave some of the options for power users to muck about with. Config files add a great deal of flexibility to your program for very little overhead.
As for TDD, I would argue that the tests you write ought to completely, rigorously embody the problem you want to solve, so saying that you end up writing to pass the tests rather than to solve the problem may be misleading.
1) Your first attempts at optimization are often misguided, and add little if anything to the overall performance. If an optimization doesn't improve performance, and makes the code less readable, you've done yourself a disservice.
2) Something may be necessary to meet deadline, and still not be conducive to writing good, maintainable code. I guess that's less important for games than other applications. Still, at best you're arguing in favor of a necessary evil.
I read someone's signature, saying that "99.9% of people have more than the average number of legs."
If you said that exactly half the population was of below-average intelligence, it would mean that you're assuming a standard gaussian distribution of intelligence. But why say "at least"? That implies that intelligence might not follow a precise standard distribution, but that the deviation can only be in one direction.
Ah, I love the smell of gratuitous pedantry in the morning.
Correction: Why should customers do Heinz's ad agency's job?
It's a fair question, but unless people are just really really bad at calculating the odds of getting the first prize (likely), then people are probably getting their compensation in other forms. My guess is it's the same motivation that drives so many to try out for reality TV shows, or bloviate on Slashdot: the desire to be a little famous. I mean, it's not like there was this deep, vibrant well of grassroots ketchup-love waiting to be tapped. Especially for Heinz ketchup. Those wankers made a ketchup that took an eternity to pour, then tried to turn it into a selling point. "Why, yes! I'd love to spend more time installing the condiments on my burger than I do actually eating it! The anticipation just makes it that much better!" Complete waste of everyone's time.
I can see some products that would naturally lend themselves to this sort of contest. Some things naturally get people enthused. Portable music players. Burning Man. Certain popular web development frameworks. But ketchup? The commercials I saw all seemed to say, "I don't actually love the product, but it would be nice to get on TV."
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to be falling into the trap that so many people (including the original author) do: assuming that the test must be meaningless unless the "amount of knowledge" is proportional to the test score. Why does it matter that "Knowledge Candidate" only gets a 19% lower score than "Double Knowledge Candidate", if the only way for the first guy to have a shot at matching 2KC's score *is to double his own knowledge*?
Just use some creativity in interpreting the scores, and it mostly works out fine.
There are problems with his analysis. One problem is, the "examples" he cites don't actually exist. I'm guessing that there is no professional test out there where an unqualified candidate would know only one fewer question than a qualified candidate.
The author seems to suggest that a "hard" test is one where every question is brutally hard, and only a true zen master would answer a significant number of questions based on knowledge rather than guessing. In fact, well designed tests try to stagger the difficulty of questions to provide for maximum discrimination between candidates of varying levels of knowledge. There will be a handful of very easy and very difficult questions, but most will be at about "moderate" difficulty (think of it as a bell curve). So in reality, the difficulty of the test is governed primarily by the cutoff score. The higher the score, the less likely the easy questions and judicious guessing are going to save you.
The more knowledgeable candidate should be better at guessing questions he doesn't know. But even ignoring this, even as little as a five question advantage to the more knowledgeable candidate is huge. Say that X knows 25/80 questions, and Y knows only 20/80 questions. Each question has four answers, and each candidate guesses randomly on questions he/she doesn't know. We expect X to wind up with a score of around 38.75, and Y to end up with a score of 35. Even with most of the questions being guesses, there is a 75% chance of X winding up with a better score than Y. If he knows 30 questions, the odds raise to 95%. If he knows 35, the odds surpass the 99% mark. Because the difficulty of the questions are staggered, any two candidates with different amounts of "tested knowledge" are going to have a noticeable difference in the number of questions they can confidently answer.
It's one thing to claim that most tests would benefit by punishing guessing. But the author goes further, dismissing any test that doesn't punish guessing as utterly meaningless. I don't think that anyone who understands the probabilities involved could honestly describe them that way, "former background in mathematics" or no.
I think the original article/clueless-blog forgets to factor in a very important fact: in well-designed multiple choice tests, the test has questions across a wide range of difficulties. Say you have a test with 80 questions, divvied up into four levels of difficulty (easy, moderate, difficult, impossible).
If you've mastered half the "moderate" material, you have an automatic ten question advantage over those who know only the easy material. Even if you're only equally adept at guessing the answers to the other questions (fifty for you, sixty for your opponent), it's very unlikely that your opponent will guess well enough to match your score.
Also notice that he insists on talking about tests with only twenty questions, even though most tests are significantly longer. Short tests certainly offer the best chance for guessing your way to a good score. But the only test I've ever seen that was that short were the Novell Netware certification tests I took in 1999, and those were adaptive (read: the computer administering the test was selecting questions based on how well you were doing. The longer the test, the more questions you were getting wrong.)
Interesting that you brought up baseball. I read a book by Arthur Jensen a decade ago (I didn't realize at the time how controversial he was). I think he was trying to argue against one of the standard objections to testing. Specifically, that tests with domain-specific content were biased against minorities who were less likely to have been exposed to that content.
Anyhow, part of his argument was that intelligent people were more likely to pick up and retain content. To illustrate, he pitted one of his colleagues -- a very high-IQ person who claimed to know nothing of baseball and who took great pride in his lack of said knowledge -- against a high-functioning mentally retarded man who was obsessed with baseball. In this instance, at least, his colleague won by a landslide.
I only bring this up to support my hunch that you probably know more about baseball than you suspect.
If you really think that the money you have is representative of the value you've created (rather than simply a representation of the goods and services you can convince others to give you) then you believe in a world far more fair and equitable than anyone over the age of six can justifiably believe in. In truth, the powerful have always co-opted the value created by the less powerful, as well as the value that was not created by human action at all.
We've never come remotely close to a system that gives everyone fair compensation for the value they work to create. Not communism, not capitalism, not ever.
shows that again, he's engaged in jawdropping dishonesty or stupidity. That's because with every bit of energy we use, we're helping to decide what kind of climate everyone else on the planet has. We, who have 5% of the world's population and use 25% of the world's energy, are arrogantly choosing a warmer world, regardless of the needs and wants of less resource hungry countries.
Even if there is some pressure for scientists to hop on the GW bandwagon -- whether for grant money, the environmental agenda, or whatever the hell reason you climate deniers use to delude yourself into believing that 95% of the world's scientists are lying their asses off -- there should still be enough stubborn, honest scientists out there to do the solid research needed to blow global warming out of the water. Scientists aren't mocking and castigating the skeptics for derailing their gravy train; they're doing it because the skeptics are doing crap science, and doing most of their work in the court of public opinion.
In the defense of the corrupt blowhards, if they didn't spend so much time fundraising, they're very likely to lose to someone who spends more. If you want our elected officials doing the peoples' business, rather than spending their time shoring up their own power, we need to support comprehensive campaign finance reform.
If you can't name at least three reasons why that is an unconscionably bad idea, you really shouldn't be putting forward policy suggestions.
src plz kthxbye!!1
Invading a country that might maybe someday think about conspiring to pose a threat to you is a proper function of government? How about funneling vast amounts of taxpayer money to corporate cronies under the guise of rebuilding the infrastructure of another country? How about using military and political power to compel the supposedly independent government (which your government basically imposed on the country) to enact an oil bill that gives undeservedly huge windfalls to international energy corporations?* Of course not. Hell, no conservative since Goldwater has had a shot at the presidency.
When it comes to prisons, the primary difference between conservatives and liberals isn't about how harsh prison should be, how many people should be incarcerated, how prisons should be paid for, or whatever. For conservatives, the primary purpose is punishment. A sin has been committed, and a price must be extracted. Sure, there is the hope that if prison is made awful enough an experience, people will behave better to avoid getting entangled in the system. But that's a secondary motivation.
For liberals, prisons are supposed to be about rehabilitation. Imprisoning the clinically insane is therefore futile, since prisons aren't equipped to handle serious mental disabilities. In fact, imprisoning *anyone* is stupidity, if that person can be more effectively rehabilitated another way. I think that's a far more reasonable position to take than the conservative position. But when we suggest actually trying to figure out a criminal's motivations and focus on fixing them, we're accused of coddling. Whereas, taking every single person, locking them up for a specified amount of time, and hoping the experience magically 'scares them straight' is called being tough on crime. I'd call it, 'living in a fantasy land'.
Criminals go free in every state in the Union. California is very unexceptional in its incarceration statistics, compared to the U.S. as a whole. Of course, as you've noticed, the U.S. is exceptionally incarceration-happy. I believe we're second only to China. And yet we have a higher murder rate than any one of those failed socialist states in western Europe. Perhaps this most capitalistic of cultures is breeding a bit of tension and resentment.
Nah.
* Show me one Middle East nation that has ever voluntarily chosen profit-sharing agreements as the mechanism for purchasing extraction expertise.
Is the rule of law really worth defending, if that rule of law values your stereo system over another person's life?
What -- in your libertarian wet-dream world -- are you allowed to do in the course of protecting the all-sacred right to own crap? Kill a fleeing, unarmed man? Cap his knee, drag him inside, and work him over for a couple of hours? Slaughter his family, to show him just how seriously we take our crap ownin' 'round these parts? Why the hell can't we believe that a robber could be victimized by a homeowner defending his property?
You've clearly divided the world into good and evil, and -- surprise of surprises -- guess which category you put yourself in?
So your entire theory of criminal justice is:
1) Someone who steals from you would certainly be just as likely to murder you.
2) Therefore, even if the person no longer poses a threat to you, you get to cap their ass.
I did a quick search. At least in Salt Lake, you're forty times more likely to be robbed than murdered, so you've got some sloppy slippery-slope reasoning going on there. Try to spin it any way you like, but if you come downstairs to find some guy hauling off your stereo, and he bolts, you're not defending yourself by shooting him. You're not defending your family. You're not even defending some abstract principle of private property. You're just taking revenge, and I don't give a rat whether you live in a state where it's legal or not.
Your reading comprehension needs some work. GP was clearly discussing killing *after the fact*. Killing the perpetrator doesn't "un-rape" the victim. For many people, it wouldn't even make them feel better.
But if the RAM *is* the document, then the records exist, and every use of the free() system call is effectively the same as running your documents through the shredder.
Nah, a lawyer would never be so brazen as to make an argument like that. Wait, yes they would.
Even in Utah (not the most environmentally aware state in the nation), they have ways of dealing with this. Here, alternative fuel vehicles are registered with the state as such, and owners are required to buy a license that covers the expected revenues they would have received from driving with gasoline. They sell them for $85 or $125 (depending on the type of vehicle), regardless of how much you actually drive.
My brother-in-law has been considering modding his truck to use natural gas. He drives all over the state installing satellite dishes, and he figures that he'll be saving hundreds of dollars a year, simply based on the difference between the $85 he'd pay for the license, and the amount he actually pays in state gas taxes. That's not even counting federal.
I really don't see the purpose of posting a $2,500 bond, as the story says NC requires. Generally, when you post a bond, you can do something to get it back. If you post bail, you get the money back by showing up in court when you're expected to. What do you do to get this money back? Prove that the car is now destroyed, and you never actually drove it anywhere?
Buncha redneck idiots. Just set up some standard fee structure that applies to any untaxed fuel, and stop buggin' people!
What you have to understand is, if the corporate bastards have their way, the same "feature" that prevents you from running unsigned software on your TiVo will be coming to every computing device you buy, rendering the whole concept of open software irrelevant. TiVo is just a scouting party in advance of the main invasion. That's what the GPL3 is designed to counter.
GPL2 was great for its time, but since then loopholes have been discovered that undermine the whole concept of freely shareable software. If businesses only jump on the bandwagon because they find those loopholes attractive, then we're better off without them.
Why would you have to wait for release? It might be risky to say "GPL2 until v3 is released," if you think someone could pull something nasty before v3 is released, and try to claim the terms of v2 until the end of time. But nothing is stopping you from putting a disclaimer in your code saying, "This software may only be distributed under the terms of GPLv3, which is expected to be released on xx/xx/xxxx. Prior to the release of GPLv3, you do not have permission to redistribute this software."
TiVo is a great example of why GPLv3 is needed. I mean, look at the situation under GPLv2 (which TiVo is perfectly happy with): TiVo takes the Linux kernel so it can run their black box. TiVo makes changes to the code so it will run on black box. TiVo dutifully releases those changes to the world at large, because GPLv2 says they gotta. The world at large does not benefit, because the hardware the changes were meant to support will only run official TiVo-signed binaries.
The loophole in v2 frees hardware manufacturers from the burden of "giving back" in any meaningful sense. If they find the idea of giving back so irksome, let them switch to Windows CE.
Yeah, but if the forest is under the BSD license, Microsoft will come in, make a copy of the forest, tweak the genes of the pine trees so that the lumber from their forest is incompatible with the lumber from the old forest, and sign an exclusive deal with Home Depot. Then the subcontractors of the world will be banging on your door, asking you why the hell your lumber isn't compatible with Microsoft lumber, and suddenly giving it away for free just isn't enough, and then the hippies come in and chain themselves to your trees and you just can't get away from the strains of "Puff the Magic Dragon."
God, it's annoying when people try to take an analogy they disagree with and extend it until it says what they want it to say. The analogy is supposed to convey an idea. Argue the idea, not the analogy. Observe:
>>> If Free Software were a forest, we'd want to clear-cut it, because that leads to PROFIT FOR US and screw everyone else!
>> Software is infinitely reproducible, so there is no way to "clear cut"; everyone can take as much as they like.
> But if someone takes a code base, privatizes it, and makes it incompatible with the original, they undermine the welfare of their users and the success of the original developers for their own gain. The point of "clear cutting" wasn't to highlight the disappearance of a finite resource, but to point out that their behavior promotes their own self interest, while harming the community.
Generally, when you try to pull the ol' extend-and-reverse on an analogy, clarity of thought is the first casualty. Just say no.
But, true or not, it provides a compelling justification for the Iraq invasion, and therefore has taken a life of its own within the right wing, far out of proportion to its certainty. Plug hussein "wood chipper" into Google, and just about all of the top fifty hits take for granted that Hussein regularly fed his enemies to wood chippers.
Four questions:
1) Was Saddam Hussein a genocidal dictator? Absolutely.
2) Did his people suffer under his regime? Absolutely.
3) Is Iraq better off without him? That's hard to predict. It depends on what eventually replaces him. While there is plenty of room for improvement, the fact that the nation plunged into civil war once he was deposed indicates that he provided some stability to the country.
4) Should America depose dictators who mismanage their countries? No, for lots of reasons. First, our record for interfering with the internal affairs of other countries is abysmal. It would be bad enough if our interference was just good intentions gone bad. But it's clear that, despite the lofty rhetoric about freedom and liberty, we choose to interfere based primarily on the self-interests of the centers of power. We installed the Shah in Iran because the country chose to nationalize their oil industry, and now we're putting the screws to Iraq to ensure that their reserves fall into the hands of the multinational energy conglomerates. I don't think we've shown that we can use war powers responsibly, so I don't believe it should be up to us to decide who gets to rule other countries.
As the other guy noted, this isn't about the government regulating the rest of us. It's about the government regulating itself. Are you saying that the government shouldn't have rules about how it communicates with the public? Is it perfectly fine if some branches of your state government refuse to communicate using anything but WordPerfect 5.1 file format? Of course not. They should communicate in a way that lowers the barriers to public participation. Requiring that citizens purchase Microsoft Office to communicate effectively with the government is ludicrous. Laws like these keep that from happening.
Not all new laws present an onerous burden or a restriction on the freedom of citizens. Some actually force the government to behave in a way that makes it easier for people to deal with the government. Laws favoring open formats do just that.
I disagree about the config file. If you know you're going to want something hard-coded when you ship, you might still want to be able to tweak it without recompiling, or have separate config files for development, testing, and production. Hell, you might even decide to leave some of the options for power users to muck about with. Config files add a great deal of flexibility to your program for very little overhead.
As for TDD, I would argue that the tests you write ought to completely, rigorously embody the problem you want to solve, so saying that you end up writing to pass the tests rather than to solve the problem may be misleading.
Two counterpoints:
1) Your first attempts at optimization are often misguided, and add little if anything to the overall performance. If an optimization doesn't improve performance, and makes the code less readable, you've done yourself a disservice.
2) Something may be necessary to meet deadline, and still not be conducive to writing good, maintainable code. I guess that's less important for games than other applications. Still, at best you're arguing in favor of a necessary evil.
I read someone's signature, saying that "99.9% of people have more than the average number of legs."
If you said that exactly half the population was of below-average intelligence, it would mean that you're assuming a standard gaussian distribution of intelligence. But why say "at least"? That implies that intelligence might not follow a precise standard distribution, but that the deviation can only be in one direction.
Ah, I love the smell of gratuitous pedantry in the morning.
Correction: Why should customers do Heinz's ad agency's job?
It's a fair question, but unless people are just really really bad at calculating the odds of getting the first prize (likely), then people are probably getting their compensation in other forms. My guess is it's the same motivation that drives so many to try out for reality TV shows, or bloviate on Slashdot: the desire to be a little famous. I mean, it's not like there was this deep, vibrant well of grassroots ketchup-love waiting to be tapped. Especially for Heinz ketchup. Those wankers made a ketchup that took an eternity to pour, then tried to turn it into a selling point. "Why, yes! I'd love to spend more time installing the condiments on my burger than I do actually eating it! The anticipation just makes it that much better!" Complete waste of everyone's time.
I can see some products that would naturally lend themselves to this sort of contest. Some things naturally get people enthused. Portable music players. Burning Man. Certain popular web development frameworks. But ketchup? The commercials I saw all seemed to say, "I don't actually love the product, but it would be nice to get on TV."