I thought the article was describing IRC, where these "many game-playing kids" hang out a lot, and where they are even more likely to be explicitly propositioned.
WE can. That does not mean we SHOULD. It's a moral principle.
WW2 was obviously a case of stopping Germany from breaking that principle, so you cannot use that to justify invading Iraq.
If we wanted to remove Saddam from power, the proper time would have been after he invaded Kuwait. But we screwed that up too, and decided on a lesser punishment for that crime.
Losing power is a just punishment for a government which invades some other country, but if they respect other nations sovereignty, we should respect theirs.
Yes, just make DST *the* time year-round, like pretending you live in the next time zone over.
Nobody has to change their clocks, and everybody gets to sleep in an extra hour.
Actually, by the timezone map, Alaska has already done that (but their daylight hours are messed up from being so far north). Hawaii straddles the hour line, so they are basically on half saving time all the time, depending on which island they are on.
It can't be that bad. The people in western china have to deal with the official time being 2-3 hours off sun time.
I installed Fedore Core 4 on my circa 5 year old PC last week.
I had ghosting on the monitor, even with the exact same ModeLine I was using on RedHat 7. I guess X.org isn't interested in supporting old hardware (Matrox 100) when they optimize for the latest and greatest.
Then when the mouse went batty every time I switched computers on the KVM switch, I booted back to RH7 and stayed there. It's not worth the effort, because I really just wanted to run OpenOffice.
Anyone know where I can get a statically linked OpenOffice?
Avaya also has a windows-based eIVR product, which they will sell you for a minimum $50k plus custom programming rates of $20k-$50k if you actually want to run anything on it. (Custom programmed in VBScript, and they won't bother to test it with any database other than Sql Server.)
Or you could spend $5k on hardware, install Linux, Asterisk PBX software, spend an afternoon hacking, and have the same thing.
Lots of people mention Skype and similar services. But I want to know how the new MS offering will stack up against Asterisk?
Java is now Lisp? Paul Graham writes about 9 features that made Lisp unique when it debuted in the 50s. Access to the parse trees is one of the most advanced features of Lisp. He argues that when a language has all 9 features (and Java today is at about #5), you've not created a new language but a dialect of Lisp.
Interesting pointer.
Sorry for mentioning the 'p' word in a java discussion, but perl5 is at #6, and perl6 (which is finally making progress) will have all 9.
Although I'm failing to see the significance of #7 as other than an optimization. Could someone illuminate me?
We'll never know what Aquinas or Augustine would have contributed to science with their great minds.
Actually we do know, because religion was the cutting-edge science in the Dark Ages. They read Plato and Aristotle, and applied it in their writings.
Aquinas wrote that man was made from the elements of earth and air, because God formed him from the dust of the earth and breathed into him the breath of life. This mixing of Platonic and Biblical philosophy may sound silly today, but most of the philosophizing about quantum mechanics that goes on today will end up sounding just as silly if we ever really get a grip on how wave collapsing works.
You have some fine posts here, and make some really good points, especially the examples of how less regulation works better. Thanks.
I think you are getting a little too extreme here though:
We don't have true capitalism. At mises.org, they explain how true capitalism works. It works best when government regulates the least. No one entity would ever monopolize in a truly capitalist society -- competition would never allow it. If a large company had too much power and raised prices too much, in an unregulated economy, another competitor would come in with a better service at a better price.
In our economy, government mandates that only one company or cartel can offer a product (cable, local phone service, taxi cabs, milk producers, drug companies, etc) to you. This is the only way a monopoly can be created -- by government.
Actually the Anti-Trust laws came into being to control monopolies which were NOT created by government. Shell Oil and other large corporations were able to abuse the capitalist system by offering low prices where there was competition to drive the competition out of business, and then charge high prices where there was no competition to subsidize the low prices elsewhere. Once they were bigger than anyone else, they could use this strategy to keep other out of the market. Similar strategies were used by Microsoft to beat Netscape.
So pure capitalism CAN be abused. Any system run by greedy, self-interested individuals can fail. If you get rid of all the greedy, self-interested individuals, any system would succeed, but that is impossible.
We need something to check and balance corporations when they get out of hand, just as we need different branches of government need to check and balance each other.
But as you know, we are currently in the situation of having way too many regulations, and the Medicare bill is a good example of how the corporations are able to pick and choose the regulations that are best for them.
These are the extremes of government. The vast majority of what government does is, by law, open to the people's scrutiny. In addition, the functions you mentioned have been corrupted by corporate influence. We can take that power back if we choose.
You are talking about the extremes of corporations. Please allow me the same privilege.
"We the people" are not the government. "We the people... establish" the government. You are confusing our government with communism, and we aren't quite there yet.
Wow, what an extremist you are. You've very selectively edited the Constitution, then equated rule by the people with communism. That's just ideological hyperbole that doesn't have any place in an honest debate.
Read it again. I have equated the assertion that "the people are the government" to communism. It's still not true, of course, but that is the only ideology to try to make that claim.
Now look up the words "consumer" and "taxpayer", and tell me which one has more freedom.
Again, very selective in your word choice. I notice that you didn't use "citizen" in your false dichotomy. Look that one up.
The above is an analogy, not a dichotomy: both are paying money. Which one has has more freedom?
and we getting very, very close with the trend of presidential orders pioneered by Clinton and exploited by Bush.
You guys just can't get over Clinton, can you?
"You guys?" How many people do you think I am?
I was trying to hint that both major parties are to blame for the situation, and that neither will help us solve it.
The worst evil of all: a government-sponsored monopoly!
Hmmm. I don't know, I think I'd give the nod to a monopoly-sponsored government as being worse.
That's what we have now.
Do you understand that big government is as bad, if not worse than, big corporations?
Absolutely not. Government is chartered to act in the interest of the people. Corporations are chartered to act in the interest of their profit. Which one do you think is more likely to act in your interest?
Both corporations and government are run by people acting in their own self interest. Corporations will act in my interest if they think they will profit. Government will act in my interest if it thinks it can get my vote. 90% of the people in Washington DC are NOT controlled by my vote.
Do you understand that the big corporations you hate are controlling the big government you love?
Duh! What do you think I'm bitching about? That's the whole problem. If we could pry the corporate hands off of government and put it back in the hands of the people then things would be much better for us. It wouldn't be perfect but we could choose our destiny instead of having it forced on us by greedy corporations who just want to strip-mine us for our labor.
You don't say how we can "pry the corporate hands off of government". I well tell you how: smaller, decentralized government.
In a large, centralized government, such as we have now, the voter has little power. The corporations have lots of money which they can concentrate on this small group of governors.
In a smaller, decentralized government, where more power is in the hands of state and local governments, the voter has much more power. His vote matters more for the people who have the power. Corporations still have lots of money, but it would be diluted because they have to spread it far and wide to people who are paying more attention to the voters.
The only way we, the people have to grab the power is via government. The power is there for us to grab if we choose to. I'm not really anxious to throw that power away and let corporations come in and take over.
And there's the real problem. You want power.
The constitution worked because people were willing to give up power. To the states. To the people. To anyone except the people in charge, who need lots of checks and balances to keep them in line.
It took over 200 years to get from there to here. That is not a power grab. That is a slow power consolidation, because people don't give up power to a grab very easily.
We have to stop trying to grab power, and start giving it away. Instead of a giant social security system that answers to no one, let's give control of retirement benefits back to competing corporations or to individuals own retirement accounts. Let's trust people to take care of themselves instead of proposing a new goverment agency to administer every social problem. Let's allow people to take care of each other instead of using taxes for welfare.
This thread is about coporations controlling government. Making the government bigger and more centralized will only make it easier for the corporations harder for the people to control it. Right now the corporations can concentrate their money on a few people in Washington DC. What if they had to try to control people in every state legislature to get their way? Does your vote have more influence in local, state, or national elections?
Now, how much control does the constitution give us over government?
1 person, 1 vote.
That's not even the right question because government is us -- We, the people.
citizen. employee.
One of us will be in charge. Corporations or government(the people). Which do you want it to be?
I choose your third option, which unfortunately you do not even see: the people.
"We the people" are not the government. "We the people... establish" the government. You are confusing our government with communism, and we aren't quite there yet.
Now look up the words "consumer" and "taxpayer", and tell me which one has more freedom.
You can't really be that foolish.
Can you be that foolish?
Do you understand that big government is as bad, if not worse than, big corporations? Do you understand that the big corporations you hate are controlling the big government you love?
I freely admit that government is the only thing that can control a monopolistic corporations. I also realize that nothing can control a despotic government (without bloodshed), and we getting very, very close with the trend of presidential orders pioneered by Clinton and exploited by Bush.
The worst evil of all: a government-sponsored monopoly!
OTOH I am pretty sure both Hatch and SCO are widely supported but the population at large in Utah.
Hatch: probably. This is a republican-controlled state.
SCO: What are you smoking? The population at large still doesn't even know what SCO is, unless they work in the computer industry or read the smaller articles on the back of the business section. The population at large still supports MICROSOFT.
That's not XP. XP forbids long hours for more than a week, because you can't write good code when you are tired, overworked, and have low morale.
Do the simplest thing - add whatever you need to the existing classes and just do it.
That's not XP either. XP says do the simplest thing, but specifically does NOT define "simplest" as "least time to implement". The simplest thing in XP is a compromise between least time and least code, with the specific condition that code is not allowed to be duplicated. The least time solution is often "copy this function and modify it for my needs". The XP solution is "refactor this function so I can use it too". This means you are doing small refactorings throughout your project, and modularity appears wherever it is needed.
Refactoring is then a very painful process
Refactoring is painful if you are not confident that the changes will work. If you are not confident, it is because you do not have a full automated testing suite. Let me guess... you aren't doing that either?
pair programming... no one really does this because this
You tell us about all the parts of XP that you don't do, and then you complain that it does not work. Building a brick wall without mortar won't work either, but it's not the brick's fault.
"my" makes it a local variable. It's only necessary if you want that.
"$" is used to denote a scalar variable. Technically, it is extraneous. (It's part of perl's shell heritage.) On the other hand, some programmers intentionally add several extraneous characters to every variable (hungarian notation), so it must be a taste thing.
";" is necessary in languages which don't consider whitespace to be significant. Some people consider significant white space to be annoying and/or dangerous.
What about $_ and @_ ?... "<>"
"$_" and "@_" are pronouns. They usually disappear in the same way "self" does. (Actually, in perl6, "self" is spelled "$_".) Perl, imitating natural language, has more pronouns than most computer languages.
"<>" is an idiom. In natural languages, commonly used idioms tend to get shorter. "<>" is an idiom for "read the next line from the file(s) named on the command line, or from standard input if there are no files on the command line." How much code would it take you to write that in python?
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the article was describing IRC, where these "many game-playing kids" hang out a lot, and where they are even more likely to be explicitly propositioned.
WE can. That does not mean we SHOULD. It's a moral principle.
WW2 was obviously a case of stopping Germany from breaking that principle, so you cannot use that to justify invading Iraq.
If we wanted to remove Saddam from power, the proper time would have been after he invaded Kuwait. But we screwed that up too, and decided on a lesser punishment for that crime.
Losing power is a just punishment for a government which invades some other country, but if they respect other nations sovereignty, we should respect theirs.
Not quite right:
"The problem was, and still is, that you can't go to war with a country and remove their government."
There. That is the principle we violated.
I once had to work with a project which can only be described as spaghettini code.
Only an insane Pick programmer would use serial numbers for function names...
Yes, just make DST *the* time year-round, like pretending you live in the next time zone over.
Nobody has to change their clocks, and everybody gets to sleep in an extra hour.
Actually, by the timezone map, Alaska has already done that (but their daylight hours are messed up from being so far north). Hawaii straddles the hour line, so they are basically on half saving time all the time, depending on which island they are on.
It can't be that bad. The people in western china have to deal with the official time being 2-3 hours off sun time.
Not really.
I installed Fedore Core 4 on my circa 5 year old PC last week.
I had ghosting on the monitor, even with the exact same ModeLine I was using on RedHat 7. I guess X.org isn't interested in supporting old hardware (Matrox 100) when they optimize for the latest and greatest.
Then when the mouse went batty every time I switched computers on the KVM switch, I booted back to RH7 and stayed there. It's not worth the effort, because I really just wanted to run OpenOffice.
Anyone know where I can get a statically linked OpenOffice?
Avaya also has a windows-based eIVR product, which they will sell you for a minimum $50k plus custom programming rates of $20k-$50k if you actually want to run anything on it. (Custom programmed in VBScript, and they won't bother to test it with any database other than Sql Server.)
Or you could spend $5k on hardware, install Linux, Asterisk PBX software, spend an afternoon hacking, and have the same thing.
Lots of people mention Skype and similar services. But I want to know how the new MS offering will stack up against Asterisk?
Interesting pointer.
Sorry for mentioning the 'p' word in a java discussion, but perl5 is at #6, and perl6 (which is finally making progress) will have all 9.
Although I'm failing to see the significance of #7 as other than an optimization. Could someone illuminate me?
Their customers are major pharmaceutical companies. You know, the people who brought you Botox and Olestra.
I don't think they will blink at a bit of spam. It's driving their Viagra sales.
Being that I'm socially liberal and fiscally conservative, who am I to vote for?
Try the Libertarians. I think they can qualify as "socially liberal and fiscally conservative".
You're right, neither major party is fiscally conservative, so if that matters to you, your vote is wasted if you choose either one.
How long before people start building shiny silver missiles?
We'll never know what Aquinas or Augustine would have contributed to science with their great minds.
Actually we do know, because religion was the cutting-edge science in the Dark Ages. They read Plato and Aristotle, and applied it in their writings.
Aquinas wrote that man was made from the elements of earth and air, because God formed him from the dust of the earth and breathed into him the breath of life. This mixing of Platonic and Biblical philosophy may sound silly today, but most of the philosophizing about quantum mechanics that goes on today will end up sounding just as silly if we ever really get a grip on how wave collapsing works.
perhaps someone has a refutation?
Define "observer".
Lori Anderson would not be happy with what you're doing under the name of her song.
:)
At least I know how to spell her name.
As if someone who wants power to be in the hands of the people is somehow advocating that they be installed as dictator.
Here you are practically quoting Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini, and not even realizing it. Oh well...
Sorry to pick on you so much today. Good luck saving WV.
You have some fine posts here, and make some really good points, especially the examples of how less regulation works better. Thanks.
I think you are getting a little too extreme here though:
We don't have true capitalism. At mises.org, they explain how true capitalism works. It works best when government regulates the least. No one entity would ever monopolize in a truly capitalist society -- competition would never allow it. If a large company had too much power and raised prices too much, in an unregulated economy, another competitor would come in with a better service at a better price.
In our economy, government mandates that only one company or cartel can offer a product (cable, local phone service, taxi cabs, milk producers, drug companies, etc) to you. This is the only way a monopoly can be created -- by government.
Actually the Anti-Trust laws came into being to control monopolies which were NOT created by government. Shell Oil and other large corporations were able to abuse the capitalist system by offering low prices where there was competition to drive the competition out of business, and then charge high prices where there was no competition to subsidize the low prices elsewhere. Once they were bigger than anyone else, they could use this strategy to keep other out of the market. Similar strategies were used by Microsoft to beat Netscape.
So pure capitalism CAN be abused. Any system run by greedy, self-interested individuals can fail. If you get rid of all the greedy, self-interested individuals, any system would succeed, but that is impossible.
We need something to check and balance corporations when they get out of hand, just as we need different branches of government need to check and balance each other.
But as you know, we are currently in the situation of having way too many regulations, and the Medicare bill is a good example of how the corporations are able to pick and choose the regulations that are best for them.
Top secret. CIA. FBI. Patriot Act.
... establish" the government. You are confusing our government with communism, and we aren't quite there yet.
These are the extremes of government. The vast majority of what government does is, by law, open to the people's scrutiny. In addition, the functions you mentioned have been corrupted by corporate influence. We can take that power back if we choose.
You are talking about the extremes of corporations. Please allow me the same privilege.
"We the people" are not the government. "We the people
Wow, what an extremist you are. You've very selectively edited the Constitution, then equated rule by the people with communism. That's just ideological hyperbole that doesn't have any place in an honest debate.
Read it again. I have equated the assertion that "the people are the government" to communism. It's still not true, of course, but that is the only ideology to try to make that claim.
Now look up the words "consumer" and "taxpayer", and tell me which one has more freedom.
Again, very selective in your word choice. I notice that you didn't use "citizen" in your false dichotomy. Look that one up.
The above is an analogy, not a dichotomy: both are paying money. Which one has has more freedom?
and we getting very, very close with the trend of presidential orders pioneered by Clinton and exploited by Bush.
You guys just can't get over Clinton, can you?
"You guys?" How many people do you think I am?
I was trying to hint that both major parties are to blame for the situation, and that neither will help us solve it.
The worst evil of all: a government-sponsored monopoly!
Hmmm. I don't know, I think I'd give the nod to a monopoly-sponsored government as being worse.
That's what we have now.
Do you understand that big government is as bad, if not worse than, big corporations?
Absolutely not. Government is chartered to act in the interest of the people. Corporations are chartered to act in the interest of their profit. Which one do you think is more likely to act in your interest?
Both corporations and government are run by people acting in their own self interest. Corporations will act in my interest if they think they will profit. Government will act in my interest if it thinks it can get my vote. 90% of the people in Washington DC are NOT controlled by my vote.
Do you understand that the big corporations you hate are controlling the big government you love?
Duh! What do you think I'm bitching about? That's the whole problem. If we could pry the corporate hands off of government and put it back in the hands of the people then things would be much better for us. It wouldn't be perfect but we could choose our destiny instead of having it forced on us by greedy corporations who just want to strip-mine us for our labor.
You don't say how we can "pry the corporate hands off of government". I well tell you how: smaller, decentralized government.
In a large, centralized government, such as we have now, the voter has little power. The corporations have lots of money which they can concentrate on this small group of governors.
In a smaller, decentralized government, where more power is in the hands of state and local governments, the voter has much more power. His vote matters more for the people who have the power. Corporations still have lots of money, but it would be diluted because they have to spread it far and wide to people who are paying more attention to the voters.
Power, like nature, abhors a vacuum.
Look, ma! He doesn't know anything about science OR government!
FYI. The "Nature abhors a vacuum" myth was discredited in 1643 by a student of Galileo. Read about it.
The only way we, the people have to grab the power is via government. The power is there for us to grab if we choose to. I'm not really anxious to throw that power away and let corporations come in and take over.
And there's the real problem. You want power.
The constitution worked because people were willing to give up power. To the states. To the people. To anyone except the people in charge, who need lots of checks and balances to keep them in line.
It took over 200 years to get from there to here. That is not a power grab. That is a slow power consolidation, because people don't give up power to a grab very easily.
We have to stop trying to grab power, and start giving it away. Instead of a giant social security system that answers to no one, let's give control of retirement benefits back to competing corporations or to individuals own retirement accounts. Let's trust people to take care of themselves instead of proposing a new goverment agency to administer every social problem. Let's allow people to take care of each other instead of using taxes for welfare.
This thread is about coporations controlling government. Making the government bigger and more centralized will only make it easier for the corporations harder for the people to control it. Right now the corporations can concentrate their money on a few people in Washington DC. What if they had to try to control people in every state legislature to get their way? Does your vote have more influence in local, state, or national elections?
Words to look up in your dictionary:
... establish" the government. You are confusing our government with communism, and we aren't quite there yet.
How much control do you have over corporations?
Stock. Stockholder.
Hell, you aren't even allowed to see their internal documents,
Top secret. CIA. FBI. Patriot Act.
let alone know what they are doing and exercise any influence over them.
Audit. Corporate earnings statement. Stockholder voting.
Now, how much control does the constitution give us over government?
1 person, 1 vote.
That's not even the right question because government is us -- We, the people.
citizen. employee.
One of us will be in charge. Corporations or government(the people). Which do you want it to be?
I choose your third option, which unfortunately you do not even see: the people.
"We the people" are not the government. "We the people
Now look up the words "consumer" and "taxpayer", and tell me which one has more freedom.
You can't really be that foolish.
Can you be that foolish?
Do you understand that big government is as bad, if not worse than, big corporations? Do you understand that the big corporations you hate are controlling the big government you love?
I freely admit that government is the only thing that can control a monopolistic corporations. I also realize that nothing can control a despotic government (without bloodshed), and we getting very, very close with the trend of presidential orders pioneered by Clinton and exploited by Bush.
The worst evil of all: a government-sponsored monopoly!
The depth of naivete:
Thinking the government will suddenly back off the regulations and let us be free once the corporations are gone.
Hatch: probably. This is a republican-controlled state.
SCO: What are you smoking? The population at large still doesn't even know what SCO is, unless they work in the computer industry or read the smaller articles on the back of the business section. The population at large still supports MICROSOFT.
If you legalize drugs, less people will use them.
You can solve all crime problems by taking guns away from people who obtain them legally.
Spotted owls have more rights than children.
All adolescents have sex, so it's no use teaching abstinence.
It is the government's obligation to provide everyone with jobs, healthcare, bread, circuses, and to protect them from their own stupidity.
Perjury is a crime ... unless you are the president.
The solution to every problem involves raising taxes.
The words "separation of church and state" are in the constitution.
Atheism is not a religion and zero is not a number.
The goverment can provide services more economically than private organizations.
Now can can just agree that both parties suck?
There already is a better init system: simpleinit. I've worked with it on embedded systems, and it rocks.
It's dependency-based, so you only start up the services you need. Read all about it.
Dependancies are a big improvement over runlevels, although you could implement runlevels on top of it.
programmers had to put in long hours
... no one really does this because this
That's not XP. XP forbids long hours for more than a week, because you can't write good code when you are tired, overworked, and have low morale.
Do the simplest thing - add whatever you need to the existing classes and just do it.
That's not XP either. XP says do the simplest thing, but specifically does NOT define "simplest" as "least time to implement". The simplest thing in XP is a compromise between least time and least code, with the specific condition that code is not allowed to be duplicated. The least time solution is often "copy this function and modify it for my needs". The XP solution is "refactor this function so I can use it too". This means you are doing small refactorings throughout your project, and modularity appears wherever it is needed.
Refactoring is then a very painful process
Refactoring is painful if you are not confident that the changes will work. If you are not confident, it is because you do not have a full automated testing suite. Let me guess... you aren't doing that either?
pair programming
You tell us about all the parts of XP that you don't do, and then you complain that it does not work. Building a brick wall without mortar won't work either, but it's not the brick's fault.
my $perlNumber = 1;
... "<>"
"my" makes it a local variable. It's only necessary if you want that.
"$" is used to denote a scalar variable. Technically, it is extraneous. (It's part of perl's shell heritage.) On the other hand, some programmers intentionally add several extraneous characters to every variable (hungarian notation), so it must be a taste thing.
";" is necessary in languages which don't consider whitespace to be significant. Some people consider significant white space to be annoying and/or dangerous.
What about $_ and @_ ?
"$_" and "@_" are pronouns. They usually disappear in the same way "self" does. (Actually, in perl6, "self" is spelled "$_".) Perl, imitating natural language, has more pronouns than most computer languages.
"<>" is an idiom. In natural languages, commonly used idioms tend to get shorter. "<>" is an idiom for "read the next line from the file(s) named on the command line, or from standard input if there are no files on the command line." How much code would it take you to write that in python?
Perl is refreshingly concise and expressive.