I also said several other things in that post that provided context for the statement you quoted.
If you read the full post it is (intended) to be equivilent to:
I just ate lunch. I supported Fred before I ate lunch and I supported him after I ate lunch. My lunch provided nothing to change my opinion of Fred.
I hardly think it would be reasonable to assert that my lunch reaffirmed my support for Fred. That was the point of the post
As for my responses to the PS/PPS, etc -- I did not resort to insults and hyperbole because someone disagreed with me. I resorted to insults and hyperbole because someone misrepresented my post but more importantly because this is slashdot and one has to take out their aggression somewhere.
Finally, I'd much rather be sitting hear arguing the meaning of the words reaffirmed, detailed and comprehensive than sitting through another 4 years where we argue about what is is. As for your apparent support for Ron Paul, its is hard to disagree with that.
This single issue is so important that I will vote for Gulianni. His policies may include 1984 type directives, but at least he will not make GTA V illegal.
I can already see this thread is going to go in a bad direction and the negative moderation points will be flying...oh well.
If one were really serious about this one particular issue that I don't see how you could support Gulianni or anyone else. You'd really need to back Ron Paul. He is the closest to being a Libertarian candidate. In general the Republicans and the Democrats both want to take away your rights -- they just differ on which of your rights they want to take away.
I have a very hard time with Ron Paul since I agree with quite a bit of what he says. I'm supporting Fred Thompson and unfortunately I really can't tell you how he would come down on this issue. I'd like to think (based on understanding his other positions) that he would come down on the side of freedom but then there is that whole Republican/Democrat just differing on which rights they want to take thing so I can't be sure.
Of course it is easy to blame the politicians for this but unfortunately, I am pretty sure that they end up accurately reflecting the anti-freedom sentiments of the public. If only the founding fathers had though about this sort of thing and had created some sort of document that enumerated the powers of the government so they would not go off and start writing laws about all sorts of silly things. Oh wait, they did -- too bad the idea of enumerated powers went out the window years ago.
You read this stuff and it reaffirmed your faith in this guy?
No, that was the whole point of my post that this supposedly great table that was meant to provide people insight into the positions of the candidates was a failure. Which is why I also wrote that I expected no one that read the full article was going to change their position after reading it.
Now, this has run on for more than a few lines so I've probably gone way past your capacity to process and store information. You did not understand my post so it is no wonder that when you went to Fred's site and read it that you though there was no substance.
His positions on issues at his website are at least as detailed as any of the other candidates.
The club for growth said that his tax plan was the most detailed of any candidate.
I am guessing where you are getting confused is that his policies don't call for an endless supply of programs that confiscate money from me at gunpoint and give it to you. So apparently it is not just intellectual property rights that a number of people on slashdot don't respect. It turns out it is all property rights that are a problem.
I'll be stopping over your house later today to take your TV and computer and give it to someone less fortunate.
Wow you are right it is totally biased. They totally left out the 3 candidates for the Libertarian Party nomination.
Wayne Allyn Root
Michael Jingozian
Daniel Imperato
Granted I've only skimmed over the about half of the entries in the writeup but I supported Fred before I read this and support him after I read it. I suspect this will be true (i.e. no change in position) for everyone that looks at this article. It is pretty low on detail and then links back to full proposals but it is not a particularly user friendly format.
The problem is Americans (and to be fair I suspect others) spend too much time watching sports and picking their favorite teams to win the big playoff game. This results in a mindset where all big choices are validated in people's heads based on whether or not they 'picked winner' rather than picking the one that is going to do what they want.
This appears to apply to peoples selections of Politicians, programming languages, and to some extent stores like CompUSA.
Having said that, there is a different factor that sometimes applies when picking stores which does tend to favor the big chains (in my experience). If you buy something from a small store, and something very bad happens and you attempt to argue with the store to settle thing, you pretty much get one level of appeal at the most (the owner) and if you don't get satisfaction, your only recourse is to not shop there again and perhaps tell your friends. Obviously if it is horribly bad there are other options like going down either a legal path (painful for moderate purchases) or in some cases putting a stop on the credit card but that sometimes is not enough.
When dealing with a large store (never have tried this with CompUSA) despite what others have said, it is very rare too not get satisfaction for a complaint if you keep pushing it up the corporate chain. You can often get satisfaction even if you are in the wrong because by the time it gets to some level of management, they are so disconnected from the issue that it is hard for them to know for sure they are not in the wrong and it is just easier to make the problem go away. Applying this rule with a non-justified intent is of course wrong but most people when they get angry about a transaction are sure they are in the right (even if they are not).
Having said that, my last desktop computer was from a local privately run computer store. I still have not found a local small store that sells what I want for laptops so those continue to come mail order from the various well known giants.
Actually the money is taken at gun-point from the rich / middle class and loaned to the poor, who then get college degrees with which they get real jobs and become middle class, pay that loan back with interest, and pay massive taxes on their own thus reducing the tax burden on the original rich/middle class.
Slashdot - We respond to more full articles and posts without reading them before 8:00 than most communities do all day.
Parent that I replied to (and quoted) said: "The Pell students represent the lowest income". The pell grant program is not a loan program. It is a grant that you do not pay back.
To be clear here neither the original article, the parent I replied to nor even my reply is really a comment on the "goodness" of the programs that are being impacted. We are however discussing the impacts of cutting off this funding in certain cases. I am just arguing that we should avoid the doublespeak that we criticize leaders for using.
Note in the interest of full disclosure:
The original full article is talking about both student loan and Pell grants being impacted.
I received some Pell grant money when I went to college.
The Pell students represent the lowest income where each dollar is going to be a serious item. Stealing from the poor(est) students...deleted
Now there is some double speak. The rich/middle class have money taken from them at gun point in the form of taxes-some of which is given to the poor. Now, we are still going to be taking away the money at gun point from the rich/middle class and give less of it to the poor and we define that as stealing from the poor....Sweet. And I thought only congress talked like that.
You really might want to consider going with Wind River's Linux product. It keeps the bosses happy because they have a familiar vendor and honestly, it is not a bad embedded distribution/tool suite either.
As usual, the Mythbusters experiment is inadequate and does not actually represent science.
I won't argue with that. As I said, it was a quick reference, however, I think the burden of proof is on the non-common sense statements like it taking 3 hours of electricity to turn the bulb on. As for another quick and poor rebuttal lets take your 4 40 watt tubes and the 3 hour turn on metric. That is 480 Watt/hours. So, assuming something like trying to use all of that in 10 seconds that would pretty much blow the main breaker in your house. Even assuming the higher usage spread over a minute can easily blow a typical 30 amp breaker.
Then we have to consider both the cost of recycling those which are recycled (since they have Mercury in them it is vitally important to recycle them)
Not sure I would agree that it is vitally important. The amount of Mercury that they prevent from going into the air over their life is far more than the amount of Mercury that is in the bulb since Coal plants dump a lot of Mercury into the atmosphere. http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/06/what_about _merc.php There are plenty of other sources as well.
Still, it would be nice to recycle so you are correct that it should be included in the cost.
All in all this is a pretty pathetic alternative to just building a couple nuclear plants in California, and letting technology solve the lamp power consumption problem.
That raises a great point. Traditional flourescents use more power during warmup than they do in like two or three hours of use, maybe more. Does this apply to CFLs as well? Any light frequently cycled would then be an unsuitable application for flourescents.
Does the DoD still use Ada? Only for legacy systems? Just curious.
Actually, the DoD never really "used" Ada. There was a mandate for a while. Some programs used Ada during this time. Most did not.
There was lots of talk about it and in general it was a success (though Ada initially was somewhat ahead of its time and it clearly showed).
When programs failed for a variety of reasons, people would try to point to the Mandate, Ada, their dogs or anything. Eventually, the mandate was repealed and replaced with a saner DoD statement that said "Just figure out what the right thing is to do on each job.". Which then got interpreted as "Quick thou shall use C, I mean C++, I mean C#, I mean Python" or whatever the flavor of the day was. Contracts still come in and have mandated languages.
DoD software was and is a mess largely because:
People who know very little about software try to force policies without really understanding anything about software.
There is a constant belief that the COTS world knows what they are doing so we need to do what they are doing (but DoD software is always 5-10 years behind commercial software now so they pick things up just after they have been abandoned by the commercial world.
95% of all software is a mess.
I have not seen any requests for proposal mandate Ada in about 10 years. Some new projects still select it for new development. Most seem to have forgotten that it even exists. There is a new Ada standard getting ready to be released (Actually, the standard has been available for a while but it takes a while to get things through the ISO board).
There was a pretty good overview of its new features in Crosstalk magazine a few months ago: http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/crosstalk/2006/08/inde x.html
In any case, the vast majority of JSF software is indeed C++. There is some Ada 95 in some places but it is the exception rather than the rule and seems to be limited to safety critical areas of JSF.
I beg to differ with the parent post.
US Patent #414159.905
Abstract: A novel approach for the standard compliance for C++ compilers
What is claimed:
1. A series of ASCII characters constructed of valid keywords within the C++ programming language assembled in a manner to elicit error output from a standard conforming c++ compiler.
2. The system of claim 1, wherein the compiler is a C++ programming language compiler.
3. The system of claim 1, wherein the operator all of the keywords a valid words within the standard.
4. The system of claim 1, wherein the compiler comprises a scanner, a parser, an analyzer and an executable-generator.
5. The system of claim 4, wherein the source code comprises at least one statement, and the statement comprises a keyword representing several operators, the keyword recognized by the scanner.
6. The system of claim 5, wherein the parser receives the scanned source code from the scanner and determines if the operator is preceded by and followed by an operand.
7. The text provided to system comprising claims 1 through 6 such that an error message is generated.
Hint for the moderators...Funny. Hint for future moderators, funny if it weren't true:)
I have discovered the most interesting proof that Microsoft has infringed on MY intellectual property. Unfortunately, this web space is too small to contain it.
This is getting really old and although many here will probably disagree, it will eventually have an impact. I can just hear my legal department now "We keep hearing case after case of Linux infringing on someone's IP. We better ban it. Microsoft is a big secure company that would never do anything like that and if they did, there is no way the effects of it could ever impact the end user"...Oh wait.... Scratch that.
Increase the car efficiency standards at least to the Chinese level in the USA?
"Overall, the Chinese fuel economy standards are slightly more stringent than the current regulations in the U.S." - (http://www.greencarcongress.com/2004/11/chinese_f uel_ec.html). Yippie. Another 0.00001 C savings...maybe..these are just standards afterall and not actual numbers. It also assumes that people would actually buy these more efficient cars..(Though I suppose since we are going the China model the one child (wait, make that one boy child and little girls we kill, or give away to other countries) would help with this too.
Stop trying to deny the manmade global warming, which the scientific consensus supports and engage in a worldwide debate about what steps need to be taken in order to minimize CO2 output? Just off the top of my head...
Gotta love consensus. I am sure some part of the warming is due to Human influences. Even if we stipulate it is 100% human cause and that the Mars rovers we sent are big SUVs and causing the global warming that is happening there (http://www.mos.org/cst-archive/article/80/9.html) you still have to ask what we can and should really do about it. It is quite easy to blame Bush or Soccer Moms or Exxon but quite of few people that are in the "The sky is falling" crowd clearly are not doing their part to help matters.
Are your cars Hybrids or some alternative fuel thing like BioDiesel?
Do you bike to work?
Have move moved close enough to work/school to make Biking practical?
Have you replaced at least half of the lights in your house with LED or compact florescent bulbs?
If you haven't done all or most of those things then I really wish you'd get off of "Bush", "The Democrats", "The Republicans", and Fox news and go save a baby seal or something. If you have done all or most of those things, then great job. Keep it up and encourage your friends to do the same. Either way, stop waiting for "someone to do something" and do something yourself.
By the way, I do all of those things, am not a supporter of Kyoto and not at all a fan of computer climate models (Software sucks).
*waves fingers three inches in front of Ada_Rules's eyes*
Think of it this way. The airplane belongs to the airline and they're letting us ride it, so they get to make the rules about what we do in it. It's in their best interest to keep the passengers happy on the whole. (They often fail miserably at this, but anyway.) Passengers will be happier if they don't have to listen to the guy next to them yakking away. So the airline says you can only sit on their plane if you promise not to call anyone until you land.
Sound like an unfair deal? Flap yours arms really hard and enjoy your trans-Atlantic sojourn. It's your right, after all.
Actually I have no problem if the airline wants to ban cellphones because it will make their customers happier. It is the customers that I have a problem with.
Now please, stop all of this political speech on slashdot. It really offends me and distracts me from my ability to judge people for other superficial things.
But when I do for business I enjoy the fact that myself and everyone else on the plane cannot talk and is not in contact with anyone.
Its like a few hours of peace and quiet where I actually don't need to think about work or listen to other people yack on about similar stuff.
I'd be happy to see planes without Internet and phone access because then I wouldn't feel preassured into actually doing more work during a time where I should be relaxing.
Yes, I totally agree. And while we are at it lets get rid of phones and Internet in the house since people should be spending time with their kids. Also, I really hate seeing people mow their lawns on Sunday. It really bothers me. Lets get rid of that too. People should be relaxing on Sunday.
I don't know what happened to the land of the free but my fellow Americans have turned into the biggest bunch of busy bodies complainers in the world. We want to limit the rights of others because "it is just so annoying".
What is wrong with you people. My right to extend my arm ends when it hits your face, not before.
Most of the software that the government uses comes from contractors. And while we might all want to believe they are slimy and out to make money, that same sliminess will prevent them from making use of this software for fear that they might get into trouble for doing it. In fact, I would best that most large businesses even if they were not military would toss this license out on the basis that it is too vague and scary.
If I were writing software that I planned to donate to the world that would cure AIDS, Cancer and crotchrot just by running it, I probably still could not use this license if there is even a small chance that running the software could kill someone.
This is going to read like a troll..especially given all the IT support people out there...but oh well.
Turn on all the freaking ports and get back to the support desk so someone is there when I call.
I am so tired of the IT group doing huge make work projects in the name of security/scalabilty/Enterprise/CRM/blah blah blah.
What a bunch of crap. You know us users out here... We really do have work to get done. I am sorry we are using the computers, storing files on the disks and want the Ethernet ports to actually work but we do. I really don't need to be down for 3 days when I need to move a computer to another desk to be closer to some new custom hardware I need to bring up. Who exactly do you think you are stopping from "getting at your network" with these toy approaches such as turning off the ports if no computer access it for a day or locking down by MAC address. These approaches are very good at stopping the actual users of the network from getting work done. They are a pathetic attempt at security for anyone that actually wants to do damage to the network.
Note that on big projects, during the point when your actually writing code and doing unit testing, you need to be creating about 100 to 150 LOC (not including the test code) per 8 hour day to end up with something like 20 lines of code per day as the project metric.
The issue are
before you even start writing the first line of code you need to work to establish the requirements. Sure there might be a little prototyping during this phase but it is usually heavily non-code driven (be it documents, databases, wiki's etc). During the entire requirements phase you are spending days but getting no code.
Then, often there is a little bit if a design phase where people who rarely can code their way out of a paper bag get really excited about what the objects are, what the methods are and they argue about if something might be a pattern for a while. Again, spending days and getting no code.
Then the coding starts, some of the developers that did the requirements and design are still around but they are starting to loose interest because this coding stuff is below them. They had off the pretty designs to some mid level to junior engineers to do that monkey work of writing code and they move to another project. The "code monkeys" start to implement the design and find that large portions of it are not workable and so they throw away pieces that were started by the design gods and write something that works. At this point we finally start getting some code while the days are being spent, but we loose some too as the crappy stuff is thrown away (and what is thrown away is not counted at the end when they count lines of code / days).
Next comes integration so we can get all of the code from all of the players working together. Again another batch of developers bail out. SSure it was fun to pick on those design guys and rewrite their stuff but now that the real code has to run together on the real hardware and not just unit tests it is less fun because you need to get familiar with almost everyone's code. The remaining developers are totally baffled as to why integration is going so poorly. I mean they selected to program in so this should never happen. They work to get the code going and make slow progress. Some smaller percentage of the developers just sit back and talk to each other about how things could have been on the project if there had just been some up-front design work.
In the end, the product finally makes it out there, full of buffer overflows, memory leaks and all sorts of bugs but the productivity is poor because there were just too many days when no code was written. Too many days when code was written and tossed away and too many mini-managers who spent time talking about the way it program should have been run.
Wow, some of that felt good to write. Behind all of that complaining though there are some real truths. Even if you are running the most agile process in the world and avoid many of the pitfalls I mentioned, there are still days where there are meetings, requirements changes and other impacts were no code gets written but days get spent. The bigger the project, the more of this there is.
Learn it, love it, live it...
Oh, and I forgot to mention all the days where you are collecting metrics and justifying why metric 3 has a 2% variance over the threshold line that was set by someone that never wrote a line of code in their life....
If you are only managing 30 LOC/night when actually writing code, you would probably pull down the average LOC/day on projects I have worked on where we "book" 12-30 LOC/day loaded with all that crap above.
A few weeks ago, one of my computers started claiming it was a pirated version of windows. Seemed odd since it is more than a year old and has been claiming it was a valid copy all of this time.
I poked around trying to figure out what was wrong.. Didn't see anything. I clicked the "get legal" or whatever it says button at login but nothing ever happened. I eventually remembered that this particular computer had locked up on reboot the week before on a Tuesday and thought perhaps it had something to do with the latest updates from MS. I uninstalled the last few updates I could find. Rebooted, reinstalled them and eventually everything came back to normal and no more complaints about an illegal copy.
I hope this never happens to aunt Tilly. I wonder when XP will really be ready for the desktop.
The purpose is not to stop terrorists. It's abundantly clear that the measures that have been taken are ineffective at doing so. The purpose of airline security is assure middle America that Something Is Being Done .
Oh those poor morons in middle America. Thank goodness we on the coasts are all so smart as to never be fooled by crap from the government. We are all so wise. Gotta run now, time to head to the store and I need to sit in 2 hours of traffic on the way there and think about how lucky and smart I am to not live in middle America. I don't mind sitting in traffic though, just think of how much interest is accumulating on my portion of the Social Security trust fund while I am sitting there...Cha.. ching..
A three week public flame war? Incidents like this are why I have a hard time selling Linux as something other than a "high school kid" operating system. Regardless of the reasons behind it, there are much better ways to handle it than a flame war, let alone one that lasts three weeks.
Three weeks of a public flame war? That is terrible. Wind River and Greenhills were able to keep a public flamewar (e.g. http://www.us.design-reuse.com/news/news9493.html) for at least a year.
Linux apparently has a long way to go before they can be considered one of the big boys if they are able to solve complex license related issues in only three weeks. You are supposed to drag these things on or how can we feed the children of the lawyers.
Re:Rumors that they're 'upgrading' from Ada.
on
Mars Rover Upgraded
·
· Score: 1
I have read on other Internet forums that they're also planning on switching from Ada to Java for the software on upcoming rovers.
I am not aware of any significant NASA sw still done in Ada..Which probably helps explain the results of there "Better, faster, cheaper - Choose any 0" results they've been getting.
For the second time, someone was too stupid to actually READ my post
Oh, I read the post. I saw the part about saying you did not want to stop building helicopters. Still, it is worth pointing out that building them is indeed already providing some jobs and it is also worth pointing out that they do serve a purpose. Replies to post are not just to answer statements made by the poster but to help focus the noise that qualifies as thought in the people that are reading the thread.
As for the "Stupid" comment...I thought most people in Canada were nicer than that. Must be some Quebec blood in there someplace:).
As for the cost of the Canadian military. It looks like pretty small fraction of the total budget. At least we can agree that healtcare spending is quite large.
Perhaps things are different in Canada than here with respect to your welfare programs but the problem here is not that we are underfunded such that there are not enough workers to determine who really needs aide. There are plenty of "people at work" doing these jobs, there are just damn few that actually do any work while they are there.
Slashdot Mirror
If you read the full post it is (intended) to be equivilent to: I just ate lunch. I supported Fred before I ate lunch and I supported him after I ate lunch. My lunch provided nothing to change my opinion of Fred.
I hardly think it would be reasonable to assert that my lunch reaffirmed my support for Fred. That was the point of the post
As for my responses to the PS/PPS, etc -- I did not resort to insults and hyperbole because someone disagreed with me. I resorted to insults and hyperbole because someone misrepresented my post but more importantly because this is slashdot and one has to take out their aggression somewhere.
Finally, I'd much rather be sitting hear arguing the meaning of the words reaffirmed, detailed and comprehensive than sitting through another 4 years where we argue about what is is. As for your apparent support for Ron Paul, its is hard to disagree with that.
I can already see this thread is going to go in a bad direction and the negative moderation points will be flying...oh well.
If one were really serious about this one particular issue that I don't see how you could support Gulianni or anyone else. You'd really need to back Ron Paul. He is the closest to being a Libertarian candidate. In general the Republicans and the Democrats both want to take away your rights -- they just differ on which of your rights they want to take away.
I have a very hard time with Ron Paul since I agree with quite a bit of what he says. I'm supporting Fred Thompson and unfortunately I really can't tell you how he would come down on this issue. I'd like to think (based on understanding his other positions) that he would come down on the side of freedom but then there is that whole Republican/Democrat just differing on which rights they want to take thing so I can't be sure.
Of course it is easy to blame the politicians for this but unfortunately, I am pretty sure that they end up accurately reflecting the anti-freedom sentiments of the public. If only the founding fathers had though about this sort of thing and had created some sort of document that enumerated the powers of the government so they would not go off and start writing laws about all sorts of silly things. Oh wait, they did -- too bad the idea of enumerated powers went out the window years ago.
No, that was the whole point of my post that this supposedly great table that was meant to provide people insight into the positions of the candidates was a failure. Which is why I also wrote that I expected no one that read the full article was going to change their position after reading it.
Now, this has run on for more than a few lines so I've probably gone way past your capacity to process and store information. You did not understand my post so it is no wonder that when you went to Fred's site and read it that you though there was no substance.
His positions on issues at his website are at least as detailed as any of the other candidates. The club for growth said that his tax plan was the most detailed of any candidate.
I am guessing where you are getting confused is that his policies don't call for an endless supply of programs that confiscate money from me at gunpoint and give it to you. So apparently it is not just intellectual property rights that a number of people on slashdot don't respect. It turns out it is all property rights that are a problem.
I'll be stopping over your house later today to take your TV and computer and give it to someone less fortunate.
Wow you are right it is totally biased. They totally left out the 3 candidates for the Libertarian Party nomination. Wayne Allyn Root Michael Jingozian Daniel Imperato
Granted I've only skimmed over the about half of the entries in the writeup but I supported Fred before I read this and support him after I read it. I suspect this will be true (i.e. no change in position) for everyone that looks at this article. It is pretty low on detail and then links back to full proposals but it is not a particularly user friendly format.
Having said that, there is a different factor that sometimes applies when picking stores which does tend to favor the big chains (in my experience). If you buy something from a small store, and something very bad happens and you attempt to argue with the store to settle thing, you pretty much get one level of appeal at the most (the owner) and if you don't get satisfaction, your only recourse is to not shop there again and perhaps tell your friends. Obviously if it is horribly bad there are other options like going down either a legal path (painful for moderate purchases) or in some cases putting a stop on the credit card but that sometimes is not enough.
When dealing with a large store (never have tried this with CompUSA) despite what others have said, it is very rare too not get satisfaction for a complaint if you keep pushing it up the corporate chain. You can often get satisfaction even if you are in the wrong because by the time it gets to some level of management, they are so disconnected from the issue that it is hard for them to know for sure they are not in the wrong and it is just easier to make the problem go away. Applying this rule with a non-justified intent is of course wrong but most people when they get angry about a transaction are sure they are in the right (even if they are not).
Having said that, my last desktop computer was from a local privately run computer store. I still have not found a local small store that sells what I want for laptops so those continue to come mail order from the various well known giants.
Slashdot - We respond to more full articles and posts without reading them before 8:00 than most communities do all day.
Parent that I replied to (and quoted) said: "The Pell students represent the lowest income". The pell grant program is not a loan program. It is a grant that you do not pay back.
To be clear here neither the original article, the parent I replied to nor even my reply is really a comment on the "goodness" of the programs that are being impacted. We are however discussing the impacts of cutting off this funding in certain cases. I am just arguing that we should avoid the doublespeak that we criticize leaders for using.
Note in the interest of full disclosure:
The original full article is talking about both student loan and Pell grants being impacted.
I received some Pell grant money when I went to college.
Now there is some double speak. The rich/middle class have money taken from them at gun point in the form of taxes-some of which is given to the poor. Now, we are still going to be taking away the money at gun point from the rich/middle class and give less of it to the poor and we define that as stealing from the poor....Sweet. And I thought only congress talked like that.
You really might want to consider going with Wind River's Linux product. It keeps the bosses happy because they have a familiar vendor and honestly, it is not a bad embedded distribution/tool suite either.
Not sure I would agree that it is vitally important. The amount of Mercury that they prevent from going into the air over their life is far more than the amount of Mercury that is in the bulb since Coal plants dump a lot of Mercury into the atmosphere. http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/06/what_about _merc.php There are plenty of other sources as well.
Still, it would be nice to recycle so you are correct that it should be included in the cost.
Now there is something we can agree upon.Wrong - The payback time for traditional fluorescents is 23 seconds and much less than 1 second for CFL. There are probably better links to prove this but http://kwc.org/mythbusters/2006/12/episode_69_2200 0_foot_fall_lig.html was the quickest I could find.
Actually, the DoD never really "used" Ada. There was a mandate for a while. Some programs used Ada during this time. Most did not.
There was lots of talk about it and in general it was a success (though Ada initially was somewhat ahead of its time and it clearly showed).
When programs failed for a variety of reasons, people would try to point to the Mandate, Ada, their dogs or anything. Eventually, the mandate was repealed and replaced with a saner DoD statement that said "Just figure out what the right thing is to do on each job.". Which then got interpreted as "Quick thou shall use C, I mean C++, I mean C#, I mean Python" or whatever the flavor of the day was. Contracts still come in and have mandated languages.
DoD software was and is a mess largely because:
People who know very little about software try to force policies without really understanding anything about software.
There is a constant belief that the COTS world knows what they are doing so we need to do what they are doing (but DoD software is always 5-10 years behind commercial software now so they pick things up just after they have been abandoned by the commercial world.
95% of all software is a mess.
I have not seen any requests for proposal mandate Ada in about 10 years. Some new projects still select it for new development. Most seem to have forgotten that it even exists. There is a new Ada standard getting ready to be released (Actually, the standard has been available for a while but it takes a while to get things through the ISO board). There was a pretty good overview of its new features in Crosstalk magazine a few months ago: http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/crosstalk/2006/08/inde x.html
In any case, the vast majority of JSF software is indeed C++. There is some Ada 95 in some places but it is the exception rather than the rule and seems to be limited to safety critical areas of JSF.
I beg to differ with the parent post. US Patent #414159.905 Abstract: A novel approach for the standard compliance for C++ compilers What is claimed: 1. A series of ASCII characters constructed of valid keywords within the C++ programming language assembled in a manner to elicit error output from a standard conforming c++ compiler. 2. The system of claim 1, wherein the compiler is a C++ programming language compiler. 3. The system of claim 1, wherein the operator all of the keywords a valid words within the standard. 4. The system of claim 1, wherein the compiler comprises a scanner, a parser, an analyzer and an executable-generator. 5. The system of claim 4, wherein the source code comprises at least one statement, and the statement comprises a keyword representing several operators, the keyword recognized by the scanner. 6. The system of claim 5, wherein the parser receives the scanned source code from the scanner and determines if the operator is preceded by and followed by an operand. 7. The text provided to system comprising claims 1 through 6 such that an error message is generated. Hint for the moderators...Funny. Hint for future moderators, funny if it weren't true :)
This is getting really old and although many here will probably disagree, it will eventually have an impact. I can just hear my legal department now "We keep hearing case after case of Linux infringing on someone's IP. We better ban it. Microsoft is a big secure company that would never do anything like that and if they did, there is no way the effects of it could ever impact the end user"...Oh wait.. .. Scratch that.
Are your cars Hybrids or some alternative fuel thing like BioDiesel?
Do you bike to work?
Have move moved close enough to work/school to make Biking practical?
Have you replaced at least half of the lights in your house with LED or compact florescent bulbs? If you haven't done all or most of those things then I really wish you'd get off of "Bush", "The Democrats", "The Republicans", and Fox news and go save a baby seal or something. If you have done all or most of those things, then great job. Keep it up and encourage your friends to do the same. Either way, stop waiting for "someone to do something" and do something yourself.
By the way, I do all of those things, am not a supporter of Kyoto and not at all a fan of computer climate models (Software sucks).
I don't know what happened to the land of the free but my fellow Americans have turned into the biggest bunch of busy bodies complainers in the world. We want to limit the rights of others because "it is just so annoying".
What is wrong with you people. My right to extend my arm ends when it hits your face, not before.
If I were writing software that I planned to donate to the world that would cure AIDS, Cancer and crotchrot just by running it, I probably still could not use this license if there is even a small chance that running the software could kill someone.
This is going to read like a troll..especially given all the IT support people out there...but oh well. Turn on all the freaking ports and get back to the support desk so someone is there when I call. I am so tired of the IT group doing huge make work projects in the name of security/scalabilty/Enterprise/CRM/blah blah blah. What a bunch of crap. You know us users out here... We really do have work to get done. I am sorry we are using the computers, storing files on the disks and want the Ethernet ports to actually work but we do. I really don't need to be down for 3 days when I need to move a computer to another desk to be closer to some new custom hardware I need to bring up. Who exactly do you think you are stopping from "getting at your network" with these toy approaches such as turning off the ports if no computer access it for a day or locking down by MAC address. These approaches are very good at stopping the actual users of the network from getting work done. They are a pathetic attempt at security for anyone that actually wants to do damage to the network.
The issue are before you even start writing the first line of code you need to work to establish the requirements. Sure there might be a little prototyping during this phase but it is usually heavily non-code driven (be it documents, databases, wiki's etc). During the entire requirements phase you are spending days but getting no code.
Then, often there is a little bit if a design phase where people who rarely can code their way out of a paper bag get really excited about what the objects are, what the methods are and they argue about if something might be a pattern for a while. Again, spending days and getting no code.
Then the coding starts, some of the developers that did the requirements and design are still around but they are starting to loose interest because this coding stuff is below them. They had off the pretty designs to some mid level to junior engineers to do that monkey work of writing code and they move to another project. The "code monkeys" start to implement the design and find that large portions of it are not workable and so they throw away pieces that were started by the design gods and write something that works. At this point we finally start getting some code while the days are being spent, but we loose some too as the crappy stuff is thrown away (and what is thrown away is not counted at the end when they count lines of code / days).
Next comes integration so we can get all of the code from all of the players working together. Again another batch of developers bail out. SSure it was fun to pick on those design guys and rewrite their stuff but now that the real code has to run together on the real hardware and not just unit tests it is less fun because you need to get familiar with almost everyone's code. The remaining developers are totally baffled as to why integration is going so poorly. I mean they selected to program in so this should never happen. They work to get the code going and make slow progress. Some smaller percentage of the developers just sit back and talk to each other about how things could have been on the project if there had just been some up-front design work.
In the end, the product finally makes it out there, full of buffer overflows, memory leaks and all sorts of bugs but the productivity is poor because there were just too many days when no code was written. Too many days when code was written and tossed away and too many mini-managers who spent time talking about the way it program should have been run.
Wow, some of that felt good to write. Behind all of that complaining though there are some real truths. Even if you are running the most agile process in the world and avoid many of the pitfalls I mentioned, there are still days where there are meetings, requirements changes and other impacts were no code gets written but days get spent. The bigger the project, the more of this there is.
Learn it, love it, live it...
Oh, and I forgot to mention all the days where you are collecting metrics and justifying why metric 3 has a 2% variance over the threshold line that was set by someone that never wrote a line of code in their life....
If you are only managing 30 LOC/night when actually writing code, you would probably pull down the average LOC/day on projects I have worked on where we "book" 12-30 LOC/day loaded with all that crap above.
I poked around trying to figure out what was wrong.. Didn't see anything. I clicked the "get legal" or whatever it says button at login but nothing ever happened. I eventually remembered that this particular computer had locked up on reboot the week before on a Tuesday and thought perhaps it had something to do with the latest updates from MS. I uninstalled the last few updates I could find. Rebooted, reinstalled them and eventually everything came back to normal and no more complaints about an illegal copy.
I hope this never happens to aunt Tilly. I wonder when XP will really be ready for the desktop.
Oh those poor morons in middle America. Thank goodness we on the coasts are all so smart as to never be fooled by crap from the government. We are all so wise. Gotta run now, time to head to the store and I need to sit in 2 hours of traffic on the way there and think about how lucky and smart I am to not live in middle America. I don't mind sitting in traffic though, just think of how much interest is accumulating on my portion of the Social Security trust fund while I am sitting there...Cha .. ching..
As for the "Stupid" comment...I thought most people in Canada were nicer than that. Must be some Quebec blood in there someplace :).
As for the cost of the Canadian military. It looks like pretty small fraction of the total budget. At least we can agree that healtcare spending is quite large.
Perhaps things are different in Canada than here with respect to your welfare programs but the problem here is not that we are underfunded such that there are not enough workers to determine who really needs aide. There are plenty of "people at work" doing these jobs, there are just damn few that actually do any work while they are there.