Sadly, that doesn't work so well for template classes. I understand why, but it's still unfortunate that you can't separate template declarations from their definitions -- as it is, the code winds up being somewhat messy and hard to read, and if you care about such things (I don't for our in-house software) you can't "hide" the implementation of your code.
I know for our newer programmers, it's hard to read through a messy.h file to see what's "available" -- and that's always the problem when learning a new language or environment, isn't it? You need to know what's there for you to use, so you don't reinvent the wheel -- good header files do that for you.
It takes me over an hour to build our project, when I have to. We have to build more often that I'd like because several years ago we screwed up some interfaces such that our originally-separate libraries and our main app are somewhat locked together (cross-referencing #include) -- it can be fixed, it'd just take time (and we don't have a good tool to hunt down the dependencies we want to rid ourselves of.) Just changing one of a few files affects everything, even if it shouldn't in theory (that is, if I had been in my right mind.) In our case at least, there's a clear advantage when we don't build the project, but only a subset (over an hour vs. a couple minutes, including linking) Maybe if you only have a *few* source files... but when you've got hundreds?
Besides, you don't always have the source. Eventually, you start having to rely on interfaces to get what you want anyway. Might as well stick with good habits and separate implementation from interface. Eh.
XML is more like A4 or 8.5"x11" paper than it is like a rosetta stone. The rosetta stone allowed us to translate semantics, not just syntax. There are many more efficient file formats than XML; if you're sending table (relation) data, then.csv files are pretty much automatically more efficient, and libraries have existed "forever" to handle them. Sure, you can squeeze more efficiency out of them, but the point is that XML was never about efficiency, it was about having a single syntax and a single library for reading all your files and parsing them into... something. But it was never about semantics either; it won't automatically translate between two different schemas, it can't tell you what a file means, it can just present you with a tree of stuff for you to parse. And that's still the hardest part of the job. I can't say parsing ever worried me... I've been working on HL7-related stuff for a few months. Nasty syntax, but nastier semantics. The main problem's been a lack of documentation on what the fields "mean" and when they're appropriate, when they go together, etc. It doesn't matter that the file is human readable; I could read greek all day and still not grok it.
I'm of a mind to encourage these stickers -- teachers wind up stressing important things like "theory is not fact." If it keeps up, maybe they'll also stress "stories are not fact." Think that'll piss off the people who wanted the stickers in the first place? More careful education can't be a bad thing (at least not for most of us.)
... and then I read stories from space.com (through my handy-dandy slashdot sidebar) and every single article quotes some scientist or other (and sometimes several) making a point of saying that whatever was just said is only a "lead" or "partial evidence" or "theory"...
People just need to be more honest in general, really. The problem is that science is, by definition, only about theories -- that's just how it works. If we want to be "fair", then every textbook that tries to tackle the history of anything will have to include every single point of view, including swords being dipped into pre-existing seas to form islands. And there's no truly objective way for us to pick just a few and drop the rest of these "theories".
The distinctive factor in science is self-testing. If you find out your theory doesn't fit the facts, then it doesn't fit the facts and you need to start over or adjust. You may come out with some really nasty functions by the end, but so long as they fit the facts (past/present/future,) they're as good as any other theory. We just prefer simpler ones, by custom. Science is about making models that fit the facts, and revising those models when they're obviously wrong (which does depend on observation, which admittedly is a gray area.) Religion doesn't change to match available data points; it simply declares them wrong/invalid/misinterpreted until you can't prove religion wrong.
My brother, my girlfriend, and I went to a baptist church meeting in oklahoma one weekday night to hear a talk to the local congregation about evolution. We'd gotten the flyer, figured it could be fun -- and we were pretty much unemployed with nothing better to do than get free entertainment. The guy was attempting to prove the science was always false because it sometimes changed its mind to fit the facts -- because it couldn't guarantee it was true from the get-go, it was forever wrong. Somehow, that didn't keep him from using pseudo-scientific evidence to prove his other points (about how the T-Rex could never have existed because he would have tripped and killed himself the moment he tried to walk) and asked the congregation to give him money so he could rescue dinosaur skeletons from museums to add to his collection (end purpose unknown.)
Why do we pick current scientific sources only for schools? Because it's the only self-correcting source of theories available. We can even present multiple scientific theories simultaneously in the classroom -- the point isn't that they're different and therefore cover all "beliefs" without offending anyone, but that they're more-or-less equally-valid (though rarely perfect) interpretations of available facts presented within the context of peer review. It's a given that they're all theories -- and that's precisely why they're in textbooks for schools, and religious beliefs aren't. It's a lot like the arguments for open-source: it's not that it's perfect or absolutely true, it's that it's in a context that lets it evolve toward perfection rather than dogmatic dictatorship. Change and uncertainty are good things; we need to be honest about it, yes, absolutely, but we need to recognize a good thing when we see it too.
You know, as funny as you're being, you're right. I searched this page right before posting -- not a single entry for "meta"... I don't know about everybody else, but searching text is the -last- thing I do. I don't care about text. I care about images and sound; I want to be able to hunt down all music that includes a violin and singing, but exclude all music involving an electric guitar. And yeah, there's porn too. These tools don't do any work for you beyond "fast" text searching; they won't tag files appropriately, they won't organize them, they won't add all the metadata you'll someday want. And so long as we rely on file formats that can't include arbitrary additional plugin-specific metadata, we're screwed. You want to start tracking your mp3's by certain criteria? There's a set built-in; now if you want to add onto that, either you have an external database referencing the file which a) means you get things out of sync and b) means you can't just copy the file around, or you just do without. Every file format supports different metadata (and really, metadata and data are the same thing)... but few ever support arbitrary extensions (I seem to remember targa files having the ability to store user-defined binary sections for future compatibility -- and it's a file format almost nobody uses anymore.)
Re:Will someone please think of the parents?
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The Law as a Parent
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So you don't mean simply "some" people do, but "most", that is, "more than 50% of the voting population" does? In that case, voters should mobilize to demand that their congresscritters (at whatever level) actually obey them, and if they don't, vote them out of office the next time around (unless, of course, the alternative is worse.) The fact that our congresspeople do things we don't agree with is a separate matter, though one worthy of discussion. Our system has no solution; so long as the politicians in office do "more things right" than their potential adversaries, they can get away with whatever side-crusades they like, including this one. Politicians don't sign contracts specifying they'll obey the wishes of the majority of their constituents once in office, particularly not presidents. Sorry, our system just sucks. Maybe we should ask to be annexed by Switzerland... at least they get to vote on pretty much everything directly (referendums, all over the place.) Then again, the reason our system was set up this way was an underlying assumption that the people voted into office would "know better" than the general population, would be more educated, more intelligent, etc. It's the sheep vs. the shepard, basically -- I don't much care for that analogy, but that's how people think about it. Given a choice, people might, en masse, decide to be "baaad", and you need someone with a strong will to steer them clear of the "baaad" path, even if it's what they want. That's kind of a fundamental regime-deciding factor though -- whether our laws exist because of principles, or because people simply wanted them. We vary randomly between the two. Grand words to justify stupid requests, public support to justify bad laws...
Re:Will someone please think of the parents?
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The Law as a Parent
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I agree alcohol/drug laws are often stupid (though not entirely; see my posts further down for an explanation.)
Your argument, however, is unsound. Keeping only the logic: "People already commit murder as it is. Laws like those really just make more criminals." Just because people break current or proposed laws does not mean those laws should be abolished or abandoned before being passed. We don't need laws to record our current culture for us, we already know what it is.
One thing that MacOS got "right" was how easy it is to move and/or delete software from a computer -- just delete a single file or folder that contains everything. You can move your settings from one computer to another by just moving your configuration files over, which are (always?) in your home directory. You can copy software from one computer to another by copying a file, from what I've seen, and installations are a snap. If you back up your entire home directory on a regular basis, you've got everything you care about. Linux has had individual configuration files per-program -- that makes it fairly easy to back up the configuration (piecemeal) of a server, for example. I know it's saved me a lot of trouble on occasion to keep backups of config files around.
Users often don't understand the difference between software and data (admittedly, it's all binary to me.) They ask us to just transfer everything from their old computer to their new one (I was about to say "to their new Dell" -- shows how common that is) -- when you tell them you need the installation CD for stuff, and that their settings might not transfer but their documents will, they just don't get it. Why isn't it easy to transfer? Why can't you hunt down every last little chunk of what they had and transfer it? You transferred documents -- that should be "it", right? And when they don't have the CDs anymore, they get all bitchy about how sucky you are. Because obviously you're going to charge them to spend all day and night finding every last.dll file needed, checking versions manually, hunting down registry keys and exporting them individually and re-importing them on the other side (note that most software won't tell you that you've only transferred -some- of the registry keys, so being sure you got it all is difficult at best.)
In other words, splitting configuration files up (or having an easy tool to do so) makes sense in a lot of cases. Having them in a readable format makes sense. Storing them in home directories if the settings are per-user makes sense. Having some assurance that you got it "all" makes sense, no more hunting and guessing. Making software be as compact and easy-to-move (in compiled form, if necessary) as possible makes sense. I'm not sure what the "good" solutions for shared libraries are, though. I like the idea of updating in one place (particularly in the case of vulnerabilities,) but there's also the problem of version compatibility, of moving a program over and wanting all of its required libraries to follow... and the fact that some people may ship their software with libraries statically compiled in just because they want to, and you won't realize it (thus updating a single library might not be enough to patch a problem.) It's not like we don't have disk space for it. I realize there's a RAM gain too, but there's got to be a solution that gives us everything.
... or on French TV, the green circle, yellow triangle, and red square that appear in the bottom-right corner of shows/movies (during the entire thing, as opposed to the black/white notices before shows in the US)... designed to let parents stroll through a room, glance at the TV, and just *know* if something is inappropriate or not. It's doable in video games. And it could easily be a private thing -- companies wanting to have it as a seal of good will / parternship / whatever: parents might automatically consider any game that doesn't have a symbol in the lower-right corner of the screen to be worthy of more attention for lack of rating. Or not. Whatever.
Laws are about protecting society from harm -- does that include harming yourself voluntarily? I'm not sure I understand your definition.
You mean like their special page on our non-existant area 51? They were actively promoting it the last time I was using terraserver for any amount of time. Yeah, not giving out GIS data is really going to keep us safe. It's not like we have bases where by driving for a few minutes away from the main entrance you can find areas with no fence and straight-line access to base facilities... oh, wait.
I actually wouldn't mind the hassle, personally. I was just explaining why someone would think this a bad thing. But I doubt you finished reading my post, because you clearly ignored all other situations where parents (non-liberal, in your post) might want their children restricted from something, because it's easier on them. Or should it be based simply on how many parents care? If 40% of parents want their kids not to have access to buying peanuts, should it be law? Should we make laws every time parents think it's annoying to keep their children safe and don't want to do the legwork themselves? I even offered an alternative -- a simple policy that children can't buy anything, ever. But then that doesn't cover situations like playing card games or "bad" music when parents aren't watching, does it. Laws, laws, and more laws?
Maybe everything should be illegal for a child, unless there's parental consent -- oh, wait, that's basically the case. When the parent finds out, the child is guilty in the eyes of the parent and can/will therefore be punished. Funny how well that works out. "But the kid might hide the game!" Well damn -- like hiding crime is a new thing. Old problem, old arguments, old (lack of) solutions.
Since when are laws about convenience?
Quotes prove nothing, but they do help express.
"You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered." -- Lyndon Baines Johnson (36th US President)
"Useless laws weaken the necessary laws." -- Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron De Montesquieu
"The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this." -- Albert Einstein
While re-reading what you said, I came across this: But I suggest that total compliance (although it may be a dream) is not the point of these laws. No law enforcement official in there (sic) right mind will tell you that any law has been 100% complied with.
Are laws just suggestions? If we don't mean for everyone to comply, why are we making laws in the first place? And why should the fact that we're not enforcing the laws make it any more acceptable to make crap laws for the future? We don't enforce what we already have; from a practical perspective, it's obvious that creating more laws won't make the job of enforcement any easier. From an idealistic perspective, you're talking about making laws "for the hell of it" like it's a good thing. Make into law that which you actually intend to enforce, leave the rest alone. ("Enforce" includes both cops making the rounds and lawsuits where the law is needed to settle disputes -- but is only enforced upon request.)
The proper place for "suggestions" and "morals" or "ethics" is in your personal life. If you think it's best for your child to learn a certain way of life, that's your duty, not ours. Law is there to give me leverage when your (or someone else's) screwed-up kid decides to take harmful action in my general direction. Law is the last line of defense, while you're the first. I think it's great that you're doing what you're doing, actually raising your kid to be honest and good -- but it's still your job.
Using the law as a "reason" why something is bad is... detrimental. It teaches a kid that something is wrong only because it's in the law; laws are meant to codify what we already believe to be so very wrong that it needs codification. Your kid may wonder "if the law were struck down, would it make this a good idea?" It also suggests that if you can't make up a good reason why something is bad, but the law says it's bad, then laws must be illogical (most of them admittedly are.) I won't tell you how to raise your kid, it's not my job; I just think this sort of distinction fits well with the rest of your really good intentions in educating your children.
By the way, laws about peeing in public make sense. Unlike private areas, public areas are common to all of us, we are all part-owners; that which we deem harmful to our property is illegal in public areas, even if it could be done legally in private. In the extreme, this does become a problem, which is why libertarians want everything to be private in one way or another. At some point someone's going to say that it should be illegal to walk on grass in any public area, because he loves grass so much. He's part-owner, but we don't want to care about his opinion. That's a problem. (Which we neatly solve by out-voting him -- but that's not really a solution so much as an excuse.)
Again, thanks for doing a great job (at least from the sound of it) raising your kid(s). I wish more people did so.
Parents can go and buy the game, yes. Just like you could (if it weren't for extra laws) go and buy cigarettes and alcohol for your kid, if you were so inclined. What the grandparent is complaining about is that now kids have to go whine to parents even if the parents have a policy of "do whatever you like" -- there's no mechanism to short-circuit this. It's an annoyance, at least.
You're right; a lot of no-harm things are restricted; masturbation is even illegal (crime against nature) in some US states. Sex between consensual adults. Prostitution. Pot smoking (have you seen the statistics on how little harm it does, compared to a lot of legal things?) Even if we allowed the notion that no-harm-to-you things should be legal, that ignores all the cases of harm-to-yourself-only -- suicide only recently became legal, for example. We have a history of telling you what you can and can't do to yourself, or allow others to do to themselves. Not a clear policy, mind you, but a history of it.
We restrict alcohol and drugs because of their potential hallucigenic properties -- when you're drunk, you're not really in control of your actions. Your sense of responsibility is altered, which means you can harm people without intent (except inasmuch as you chose to drink in the first place.) If we were consistent, the legal drinking age would be equal to the age of consent in all matters, but we're not. Children are generally considered to be automatically irresponsible, with parents bearing the full cost of their childrens' actions. Children cannot contract (although I've seen a bit about children being able to do so at age 13, or in cases of dire need, such as orphans contracting to work in exchange for food and board.) Their crimes are the crimes of their parents. A purchase is an exchange of items of value, it constitutes a contract. Why can a child purchase anything at all without an adult guardian (of some sort) present?
(Then again, we're not consistent about responsibility: an elderly person who is no longer fully in control is not forced back under the responsibility of a guardian. Age isn't even a good indicator of whether or not someone should be responsible, it's just a random attribute we picked because of its correlation factor.)
Someone (the great-grandparent?) had a good point though about how far we can allow responsibility to go. You're responsible for your child; does that mean you can kill your child? Does it mean you can legally sell her into prostitution? We should separate the concepts of ownership and guardianship (stewardship). There's a concept of "restricting the child from doing something he would later realize is bad for him" involved, which is entirely subjective. If the child were responsible for himself, then you would be treated as equals -- the law (generally) restricts you from harming your neighbor. You therefore should not be allowed to harm your child, as you are simply his guardian until he grows up. Can you let him harm himself? He's not responsible, you are -- you're therefore liable for any harm he does to himself (children should therefore be forced to wait until they're 18 to commit suicide.)
But video games? There are a lot of books in the library that could more thoroughly damage a child -- apparently we're not too worried about that though, what with how little people read these days. What if I didn't want my child buying, say, peanuts at the store because he's allergic and it's bad for him? Can we have a law that restricts that too, so I don't have to watch his every purchase? Or a law to prevent children from playing cards without permission from their parents, who think it's evil? (Yes, there are people like that -- I've met them.) Can we have a law to restrict children from playing hip-hop on their CD players when their parents haven't authorized such listening, because parents have deemed the music dangerous? Parents can get so nit-picky about what their children can or can't do, and every parent is different -- to be fair, we'd have a lot of laws
My woman's been programming for our county for the last year, replacing some recording software. What's interesting is how much trouble it is to convince people that it's okay to replace what they have -- she had to call the state offices to confirm that they did not, in fact, have laws requiring the use of the software made by a particular vendor (out of 3)... the clerks all thought they had to. It didn't matter what other software was out there, as far as they were concerned, the state required them to buy particular software from particular vendors, and they tacked on the idea that there must be certification involved (but a certification that nobody else would ever be able to get.) Who cares if it's f/oss or not -- if the users who make the requests for purchase orders are convinced there's only one solution, you're going to have a tough time changing anything. I'm sure the existing vendors are happy to encourage these notions at their seminars, too. (I write medical-related software for a tribe; from seeing the data-entry clerks go to seminars for the other vendors, I'm jealous. I want seminars. They make your data-entry people go nuts for you, pretty much forever and no matter what you do to them or how crappy your software is. You won't ever have to worry about bug reports again, if you can just get them to pay a lot of money to go to one of your exclusive club-like seminars where you tell them practically nothing except that they should buy your upgrades.)
I think this needs to be repeated -- if you're planning on learning and using SQL, actually learn it. Don't just pretend to learn it. Don't just learn to do simple selects that "get you by". Actually learn it. Pick up a good relational theory book (Darwen, Date, Pascal, or Celko if you have to) and read it end-to-end. If you're not *really* good at it, find someone who is, and have them take care of it for you. Ugly graphics can be fixed as needed, ugly queries take longer, and bad database design tends to stick with a project forever.
But most of all, learn to listen to what people are trying to say. Actively seek information. It doesn't matter how good you are at building something if you build the wrong thing.
If you generalize, you find that a government is a business where citizens and (in theory) equal shareholders are the same thing, while an every-day business has fewer shareholders, and the citizenship isn't so much an issue. At that point, the "self-serving" interest of the business scales to the "public-serving" interest of the government. Not that it matters much. We have immense trouble getting democracy even near right; we delegate to committes left and right; we pay attention to what's going on once a year... As shareholders, we've pretty much given up our powers to the few who were/are interested enough to run for office. We can't be bothered to think, can't be bothered to voice our opinions, can't be bothered to rebel.
Tyranny of the majority need not be quite so brain-dead though; we occasionally make an effort to have some sort of concensus, even though one is not needed for government. We're just not very good at it, and we have no incentive to do so. We're quite willing to restrict personal, private freedoms of individuals simply because we want to, not because there's any particular harm that will come of not doing so (the popular topics of the sort currently include gay marriage, legalizing drugs, etc.) We have no policy of making laws only as needed to ensure (well, sort of) the safety or liberty of citizens from each other or the "outside world"... the Constitution is only a list of "do-nots", not a policy, not a compass.
I've taken us way off topic and are -so- getting modded into oblivion.
No business has a god given right to exist if a democratically elected government says no.
Nor do governments have a god-given right to exist... nor a god-given right to overrule the wishes of the people who form businesses. A government is just a bunch of people. A business is just a bunch of people.
It's always the same -- bunches of people disagreeing with bunches of people; labeling parties as "the government" or "a business" is just part of the marketing that goes on in this sort of case, just like labeling someone "radical" or "moderate" or "progressive" or "right-wing".
What you're saying is simply that if the majority disagree with something, then it is wrong. While that's how our system works, there's nothing universal about it, except power -- the majority can probably set fire to the minority's ass if necessary. What's so great about that? We're not moving forward -- we're just renaming "the big wooden club" to "the government".
There are a lot of government ventures that could just as easily be private ventures, and quite a few private ones that might be better done as public works. The problem is that we have no policy to decide what's "right" -- we just vote, and each time we vote, it's a random selection of feelings from that particular moment in time that make the decision.
As an example: we've privatized things like water, gas, and electricity in places where there's only one set of lines, one source of water/gas/electricity, etc.... such that you have a bunch of companies competing to do the same thing in the same place across the same resources -- the only money-saving they can do is in the area of customer service, how much paper to use, and salaries. Yawn. Was that good for us? Yet we keep as public works things like the postal system; why not allow any number of companies to deliver mail to the same mail boxes if they like? Is it essential that the system be centralized, unified into a single government service? That's the consequence of not having a clear policy and relying stupidly on democracy for every decision.
Sounds like a research project, eh? Agreed, it's possible it's only correlation. I have seen though that users incapable of explaining things logically can be taught; you just have to be patient enough to point out why their explanations-to-date are incomplete (loopholes, overlap conditions, non-relevance, etc.)... eventually they start to get the idea. Learning to program would give them a similar feedback loop -- they code, the computer runs the program, spits out the wrong result (or an error)... eventually they learn (a bit) how to be careful about explaining things. I just need my users to be able to understand that repeating the word "blue" at me is not going to get them the report they want, but that it is in fact possible to communicate complicated ideas in a meaningful way. I'm not picky though. (Btw, what's with the webhosting default page? I was looking forward to your page.)
Absolutely. You can actually accomplish "stuff" with mindstorms, despite limited abilities (3 inputs, 3 outputs.) To a certain extent, the constraint is a good thing; we keep the new lego X-Pod kits on the coffee table for guests to play with, as having only a few pieces forces you to figure out what to do with them rather than being daunted by a large pile of bricks and no ideas for something to build. The mindstorms commands are relatively simple (atomic), like assembly instructions. You can build functions, so once you learn how to use the small pieces, you can start moving up to higher-level concepts. All in all, it's a good way to learn programming. And while you're at it, you're likely playing with lego Technic, which introduces kids to all the wonders of mechanics, physics, building nice modular things, etc. Kind of a two-fields-in-one toy.
I think some amount of programming should be required for everyone -- people are absolutely incapable of describing what they want or how they want it even in daily situations; between that and horrible reading/comprehension skills, it's amazing we ever get any sort of specs, or work at all, out of our users. One of our professors always like to start out his intro-to-CS class by asking people to describe, precisely, how to get from the school to the shopping center; it served to explain the low-to-high concepts in programming, functions, code re-use, algorithms, everything.
As a kid, my brother and I battled out our differences on AT-robot, using assembly-like instructions to lead our killer robots to victory. It's a lot more fun when you're competing in an iterative process against someone you know; at first we'd build robots tailored to defeat a specific opponent, then when that started to not work as well, robots that were more general-purpose. I had learned the concepts of assembly before going to college and having an actual course in it (x86-based), which was handy. Interrupts, registers, call stacks, moving memory around manually, it was all there.
That seems to at least be the general idea when it comes to civil disobedience, and yes, revolt. If you succeed, your new order/government/society won't punish you for your actions (well, they might, if you were terribly overzealous and gave them a bad name in the process.) If you fail, the status-quo will punish you. In our society, you get to look up the law ahead of time and make the calculated choice between the cost of failure and the cost of not trying. In others, well, you get what you get (which may be reason enough for rebelling in the first place.)
If you take their definition as-is, any society that includes police can be seen as a terrorist force -- employing the threat of brute force against property or person (fines, beatings, imprisonment, or even the death penalty) to keep you "in line" obeying a sub-set of the society's wishes. (Nobody ever agrees with every law in the book, not even the "everything the government does is right" people.)
Reminder: at the time this definition came out (wasn't it part of the PATRIOT act?), it was much discussed for its failure to adequately describe terrorism. The definition above also describes rebellion, civil war, wars of independence, etc. By the definition above, the US was created through a reprehensible act of terrorism. (Wars aren't intended to kill everyone -- they're intended to make the other side back down/roll over; it's intimidation.) It's a choice you have to make, but I think we should work on our definition of terrorism.
The primary purpose of this move is not to hurt downloaders, as others have suggested. The intent is to further pollute the p2p networks and scare users away; if you might get something nasty installed on your computer by downloading music (most people wouldn't understand what could and could not infect their computer) then you might decide not to risk it at all, and just give up and become a good citizen. Yes, it's a fear tactic. In fact, they might be willing to be sued by the few people who actually get infected and complain, if it means they can scare away an order of magnitude more people from downloading anything. Most people won't get infected, and won't complain, and might also stop downloading. It's a calculated risk.
I always found Caligari's TrueSpace to have a rather good GUI for its genre. It didn't take over your workspace, buttons were grouped in ways that make sense... and it uses fairly standard OS GUI components so it doesn't look totally off-the-wall. I never got the hang of the 3d widgets though, the ones appearing -inside- the workspace as objects. It was an interesting idea, but... something about having to rotate my view to get the tool I need seems a bit weird. Eh.
As to users accepting just about anything -- I'm a programmer in the medical industry. From looking at the software we replace or use as examples (get some idea of what the users might want or need, since they're incapable of telling us themselves)... they really will accept just about anything -- even love it! (I think the love part comes from attending vendor-sponsored workshops and seminars: data-entry ladies just fall in love with their vendors at those events. We need seminars, our data-entry ladies don't love us enough yet.) I've seen a lot of DOS programs (all?) that look better than what most users put up with in the medical industry. I mean really; is it so hard to align controls, use a decent (small) set of colors, standardize on one font (preferably the system one), make menus accessible, and while you're at it make the questions asked of the user be somewhat related to the underlying cardinality problems? It would probably be asking too much for standard window functions (like Ok/Cancel/Save/Undo/etc.) to be in a consistent spot, too... and out of the question for reports to stop using fixed-width fonts across 80 columns, such that you can barely fit anything on a piece of paper at all... And Matt, if you read this: no more "four-winds" button placement, k?
Okay, so they have to comply with take-down requests from copyright owners if received, but may otherwise allow transmission so long as they don't filter, modify, or keep longer than needed any of the content being exchanged by users across their equipment. Oh, and they have to not know what's going on, and not get money directly from illegal activity. And the service provider has to make clear and accessible a way to send take-down notices. And have a stated policy of banning users if they are repeat infringers (note that the law specifically states repetition is involved.) The same applies to linking, indexing, referecing, pointing, or using informatin-location-tools, and "service providers" is defined very broadly. I'd say it applies to bittorrent trackers. And based on subsection (j), the most courts get to do is somehow order the service providers to make stuff stop, including just terminating specific users' accounts if that's sufficient, or ordering the service provider to block of IP's, etc. There's also mention of "standard technical measures" and mention of cost burden to service providers, such that if the service provider cannot reasonably find out who's infringing or whether or not the content is being illegally copies, the law seems to just let them off the hook. But hey, I'm not a lawyer either. (Then again, the law really shouldn't be the realm of lawyers. We should just as soon sue priests for misleading us on theology when God sends us to hell. People are just whiny babies about advice.)
Anybody care to comment on how this relates to "common carrier" status? That's usually how ISP's get out of having to worry about their client's use of bandwidth: because they don't look at anything, they don't police it, so they're not responsible. By being entirely agnostic about how and why a service is used, the service provider gets out of having any liability for what's done. The problem is when ISP's (for example) do start to block certain things; at that point it's obvious they know how to, and become liable for everything they didn't do that they could have... do torrent sites have a right to claim common-carrier status because they index but don't filter? (it's just an idea. lemme know.)
It's okay, it was last updated in January of 2005 -- obviously they know about upcoming changes that you don't. The Firebird section is sorely lacking in detail too; most of the "other interesting db comparisons" seem centered (biased?) around MySQL. I would more willingly trust a comparison between, say, PostgreSQL and Firebird if it were put out by either of those teams than anything coming from MySQL, Oracle, or anybody else with a high monetary stake in the deal.
Everybody's going to be a bit sloppy though, downplaying things they don't have as not being needed, upgrading features as must-see when nobody needs them, making a big deal out of slight differences of support of a feature or claiming they have equal support when they don't (possibly different rather than better/worse, too.)
For my part, I'll say that Firebird's made a good attempt at simplifying administration and maintenance, keeping things optimized in spite of users, running on various platforms (they've actually dropped support for some old platforms) -- while PostgreSQL has done some amazing things for orthogonality like user-defined datatypes, support for random languages in the server, etc. I wish I could have it all. Congrats to the PostgreSQL team, as always.
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Sadly, that doesn't work so well for template classes. I understand why, but it's still unfortunate that you can't separate template declarations from their definitions -- as it is, the code winds up being somewhat messy and hard to read, and if you care about such things (I don't for our in-house software) you can't "hide" the implementation of your code.
.h file to see what's "available" -- and that's always the problem when learning a new language or environment, isn't it? You need to know what's there for you to use, so you don't reinvent the wheel -- good header files do that for you.
... but when you've got hundreds?
I know for our newer programmers, it's hard to read through a messy
It takes me over an hour to build our project, when I have to. We have to build more often that I'd like because several years ago we screwed up some interfaces such that our originally-separate libraries and our main app are somewhat locked together (cross-referencing #include) -- it can be fixed, it'd just take time (and we don't have a good tool to hunt down the dependencies we want to rid ourselves of.) Just changing one of a few files affects everything, even if it shouldn't in theory (that is, if I had been in my right mind.) In our case at least, there's a clear advantage when we don't build the project, but only a subset (over an hour vs. a couple minutes, including linking) Maybe if you only have a *few* source files
Besides, you don't always have the source. Eventually, you start having to rely on interfaces to get what you want anyway. Might as well stick with good habits and separate implementation from interface. Eh.
I just can't help it: "what", not "how."
.csv files are pretty much automatically more efficient, and libraries have existed "forever" to handle them. Sure, you can squeeze more efficiency out of them, but the point is that XML was never about efficiency, it was about having a single syntax and a single library for reading all your files and parsing them into ... something. But it was never about semantics either; it won't automatically translate between two different schemas, it can't tell you what a file means, it can just present you with a tree of stuff for you to parse. And that's still the hardest part of the job. I can't say parsing ever worried me ... I've been working on HL7-related stuff for a few months. Nasty syntax, but nastier semantics. The main problem's been a lack of documentation on what the fields "mean" and when they're appropriate, when they go together, etc. It doesn't matter that the file is human readable; I could read greek all day and still not grok it.
XML is more like A4 or 8.5"x11" paper than it is like a rosetta stone. The rosetta stone allowed us to translate semantics, not just syntax. There are many more efficient file formats than XML; if you're sending table (relation) data, then
I'm of a mind to encourage these stickers -- teachers wind up stressing important things like "theory is not fact." If it keeps up, maybe they'll also stress "stories are not fact." Think that'll piss off the people who wanted the stickers in the first place? More careful education can't be a bad thing (at least not for most of us.)
... and then I read stories from space.com (through my handy-dandy slashdot sidebar) and every single article quotes some scientist or other (and sometimes several) making a point of saying that whatever was just said is only a "lead" or "partial evidence" or "theory" ...
People just need to be more honest in general, really. The problem is that science is, by definition, only about theories -- that's just how it works. If we want to be "fair", then every textbook that tries to tackle the history of anything will have to include every single point of view, including swords being dipped into pre-existing seas to form islands. And there's no truly objective way for us to pick just a few and drop the rest of these "theories".
The distinctive factor in science is self-testing. If you find out your theory doesn't fit the facts, then it doesn't fit the facts and you need to start over or adjust. You may come out with some really nasty functions by the end, but so long as they fit the facts (past/present/future,) they're as good as any other theory. We just prefer simpler ones, by custom. Science is about making models that fit the facts, and revising those models when they're obviously wrong (which does depend on observation, which admittedly is a gray area.) Religion doesn't change to match available data points; it simply declares them wrong/invalid/misinterpreted until you can't prove religion wrong.
My brother, my girlfriend, and I went to a baptist church meeting in oklahoma one weekday night to hear a talk to the local congregation about evolution. We'd gotten the flyer, figured it could be fun -- and we were pretty much unemployed with nothing better to do than get free entertainment. The guy was attempting to prove the science was always false because it sometimes changed its mind to fit the facts -- because it couldn't guarantee it was true from the get-go, it was forever wrong. Somehow, that didn't keep him from using pseudo-scientific evidence to prove his other points (about how the T-Rex could never have existed because he would have tripped and killed himself the moment he tried to walk) and asked the congregation to give him money so he could rescue dinosaur skeletons from museums to add to his collection (end purpose unknown.)
Why do we pick current scientific sources only for schools? Because it's the only self-correcting source of theories available. We can even present multiple scientific theories simultaneously in the classroom -- the point isn't that they're different and therefore cover all "beliefs" without offending anyone, but that they're more-or-less equally-valid (though rarely perfect) interpretations of available facts presented within the context of peer review. It's a given that they're all theories -- and that's precisely why they're in textbooks for schools, and religious beliefs aren't. It's a lot like the arguments for open-source: it's not that it's perfect or absolutely true, it's that it's in a context that lets it evolve toward perfection rather than dogmatic dictatorship. Change and uncertainty are good things; we need to be honest about it, yes, absolutely, but we need to recognize a good thing when we see it too.
You know, as funny as you're being, you're right. I searched this page right before posting -- not a single entry for "meta" ... I don't know about everybody else, but searching text is the -last- thing I do. I don't care about text. I care about images and sound; I want to be able to hunt down all music that includes a violin and singing, but exclude all music involving an electric guitar. And yeah, there's porn too. These tools don't do any work for you beyond "fast" text searching; they won't tag files appropriately, they won't organize them, they won't add all the metadata you'll someday want. And so long as we rely on file formats that can't include arbitrary additional plugin-specific metadata, we're screwed. You want to start tracking your mp3's by certain criteria? There's a set built-in; now if you want to add onto that, either you have an external database referencing the file which a) means you get things out of sync and b) means you can't just copy the file around, or you just do without. Every file format supports different metadata (and really, metadata and data are the same thing) ... but few ever support arbitrary extensions (I seem to remember targa files having the ability to store user-defined binary sections for future compatibility -- and it's a file format almost nobody uses anymore.)
So you don't mean simply "some" people do, but "most", that is, "more than 50% of the voting population" does? In that case, voters should mobilize to demand that their congresscritters (at whatever level) actually obey them, and if they don't, vote them out of office the next time around (unless, of course, the alternative is worse.) The fact that our congresspeople do things we don't agree with is a separate matter, though one worthy of discussion. Our system has no solution; so long as the politicians in office do "more things right" than their potential adversaries, they can get away with whatever side-crusades they like, including this one. Politicians don't sign contracts specifying they'll obey the wishes of the majority of their constituents once in office, particularly not presidents. Sorry, our system just sucks. Maybe we should ask to be annexed by Switzerland ... at least they get to vote on pretty much everything directly (referendums, all over the place.) Then again, the reason our system was set up this way was an underlying assumption that the people voted into office would "know better" than the general population, would be more educated, more intelligent, etc. It's the sheep vs. the shepard, basically -- I don't much care for that analogy, but that's how people think about it. Given a choice, people might, en masse, decide to be "baaad", and you need someone with a strong will to steer them clear of the "baaad" path, even if it's what they want. That's kind of a fundamental regime-deciding factor though -- whether our laws exist because of principles, or because people simply wanted them. We vary randomly between the two. Grand words to justify stupid requests, public support to justify bad laws...
I agree alcohol/drug laws are often stupid (though not entirely; see my posts further down for an explanation.)
Your argument, however, is unsound. Keeping only the logic: "People already commit murder as it is. Laws like those really just make more criminals." Just because people break current or proposed laws does not mean those laws should be abolished or abandoned before being passed. We don't need laws to record our current culture for us, we already know what it is.
One thing that MacOS got "right" was how easy it is to move and/or delete software from a computer -- just delete a single file or folder that contains everything. You can move your settings from one computer to another by just moving your configuration files over, which are (always?) in your home directory. You can copy software from one computer to another by copying a file, from what I've seen, and installations are a snap. If you back up your entire home directory on a regular basis, you've got everything you care about. Linux has had individual configuration files per-program -- that makes it fairly easy to back up the configuration (piecemeal) of a server, for example. I know it's saved me a lot of trouble on occasion to keep backups of config files around.
.dll file needed, checking versions manually, hunting down registry keys and exporting them individually and re-importing them on the other side (note that most software won't tell you that you've only transferred -some- of the registry keys, so being sure you got it all is difficult at best.)
... and the fact that some people may ship their software with libraries statically compiled in just because they want to, and you won't realize it (thus updating a single library might not be enough to patch a problem.) It's not like we don't have disk space for it. I realize there's a RAM gain too, but there's got to be a solution that gives us everything.
Users often don't understand the difference between software and data (admittedly, it's all binary to me.) They ask us to just transfer everything from their old computer to their new one (I was about to say "to their new Dell" -- shows how common that is) -- when you tell them you need the installation CD for stuff, and that their settings might not transfer but their documents will, they just don't get it. Why isn't it easy to transfer? Why can't you hunt down every last little chunk of what they had and transfer it? You transferred documents -- that should be "it", right? And when they don't have the CDs anymore, they get all bitchy about how sucky you are. Because obviously you're going to charge them to spend all day and night finding every last
In other words, splitting configuration files up (or having an easy tool to do so) makes sense in a lot of cases. Having them in a readable format makes sense. Storing them in home directories if the settings are per-user makes sense. Having some assurance that you got it "all" makes sense, no more hunting and guessing. Making software be as compact and easy-to-move (in compiled form, if necessary) as possible makes sense. I'm not sure what the "good" solutions for shared libraries are, though. I like the idea of updating in one place (particularly in the case of vulnerabilities,) but there's also the problem of version compatibility, of moving a program over and wanting all of its required libraries to follow
... or on French TV, the green circle, yellow triangle, and red square that appear in the bottom-right corner of shows/movies (during the entire thing, as opposed to the black/white notices before shows in the US) ... designed to let parents stroll through a room, glance at the TV, and just *know* if something is inappropriate or not. It's doable in video games. And it could easily be a private thing -- companies wanting to have it as a seal of good will / parternship / whatever: parents might automatically consider any game that doesn't have a symbol in the lower-right corner of the screen to be worthy of more attention for lack of rating. Or not. Whatever.
Laws are about protecting society from harm -- does that include harming yourself voluntarily? I'm not sure I understand your definition.
http://www.terraserver.com/special/area51/area51.a sp
... oh, wait.
You mean like their special page on our non-existant area 51? They were actively promoting it the last time I was using terraserver for any amount of time. Yeah, not giving out GIS data is really going to keep us safe. It's not like we have bases where by driving for a few minutes away from the main entrance you can find areas with no fence and straight-line access to base facilities
I actually wouldn't mind the hassle, personally. I was just explaining why someone would think this a bad thing. But I doubt you finished reading my post, because you clearly ignored all other situations where parents (non-liberal, in your post) might want their children restricted from something, because it's easier on them. Or should it be based simply on how many parents care? If 40% of parents want their kids not to have access to buying peanuts, should it be law? Should we make laws every time parents think it's annoying to keep their children safe and don't want to do the legwork themselves? I even offered an alternative -- a simple policy that children can't buy anything, ever. But then that doesn't cover situations like playing card games or "bad" music when parents aren't watching, does it. Laws, laws, and more laws?
Maybe everything should be illegal for a child, unless there's parental consent -- oh, wait, that's basically the case. When the parent finds out, the child is guilty in the eyes of the parent and can/will therefore be punished. Funny how well that works out. "But the kid might hide the game!" Well damn -- like hiding crime is a new thing. Old problem, old arguments, old (lack of) solutions.
Since when are laws about convenience?
Quotes prove nothing, but they do help express.
"You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered." -- Lyndon Baines Johnson (36th US President)
"Useless laws weaken the necessary laws." -- Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron De Montesquieu
"The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this." -- Albert Einstein
I'm really sorry to double-post.
... detrimental. It teaches a kid that something is wrong only because it's in the law; laws are meant to codify what we already believe to be so very wrong that it needs codification. Your kid may wonder "if the law were struck down, would it make this a good idea?" It also suggests that if you can't make up a good reason why something is bad, but the law says it's bad, then laws must be illogical (most of them admittedly are.) I won't tell you how to raise your kid, it's not my job; I just think this sort of distinction fits well with the rest of your really good intentions in educating your children.
While re-reading what you said, I came across this: But I suggest that total compliance (although it may be a dream) is not the point of these laws. No law enforcement official in there (sic) right mind will tell you that any law has been 100% complied with.
Are laws just suggestions? If we don't mean for everyone to comply, why are we making laws in the first place? And why should the fact that we're not enforcing the laws make it any more acceptable to make crap laws for the future? We don't enforce what we already have; from a practical perspective, it's obvious that creating more laws won't make the job of enforcement any easier. From an idealistic perspective, you're talking about making laws "for the hell of it" like it's a good thing. Make into law that which you actually intend to enforce, leave the rest alone. ("Enforce" includes both cops making the rounds and lawsuits where the law is needed to settle disputes -- but is only enforced upon request.)
The proper place for "suggestions" and "morals" or "ethics" is in your personal life. If you think it's best for your child to learn a certain way of life, that's your duty, not ours. Law is there to give me leverage when your (or someone else's) screwed-up kid decides to take harmful action in my general direction. Law is the last line of defense, while you're the first. I think it's great that you're doing what you're doing, actually raising your kid to be honest and good -- but it's still your job.
Using the law as a "reason" why something is bad is
By the way, laws about peeing in public make sense. Unlike private areas, public areas are common to all of us, we are all part-owners; that which we deem harmful to our property is illegal in public areas, even if it could be done legally in private. In the extreme, this does become a problem, which is why libertarians want everything to be private in one way or another. At some point someone's going to say that it should be illegal to walk on grass in any public area, because he loves grass so much. He's part-owner, but we don't want to care about his opinion. That's a problem. (Which we neatly solve by out-voting him -- but that's not really a solution so much as an excuse.)
Again, thanks for doing a great job (at least from the sound of it) raising your kid(s). I wish more people did so.
Parents can go and buy the game, yes. Just like you could (if it weren't for extra laws) go and buy cigarettes and alcohol for your kid, if you were so inclined. What the grandparent is complaining about is that now kids have to go whine to parents even if the parents have a policy of "do whatever you like" -- there's no mechanism to short-circuit this. It's an annoyance, at least.
You're right; a lot of no-harm things are restricted; masturbation is even illegal (crime against nature) in some US states. Sex between consensual adults. Prostitution. Pot smoking (have you seen the statistics on how little harm it does, compared to a lot of legal things?) Even if we allowed the notion that no-harm-to-you things should be legal, that ignores all the cases of harm-to-yourself-only -- suicide only recently became legal, for example. We have a history of telling you what you can and can't do to yourself, or allow others to do to themselves. Not a clear policy, mind you, but a history of it.
We restrict alcohol and drugs because of their potential hallucigenic properties -- when you're drunk, you're not really in control of your actions. Your sense of responsibility is altered, which means you can harm people without intent (except inasmuch as you chose to drink in the first place.) If we were consistent, the legal drinking age would be equal to the age of consent in all matters, but we're not. Children are generally considered to be automatically irresponsible, with parents bearing the full cost of their childrens' actions. Children cannot contract (although I've seen a bit about children being able to do so at age 13, or in cases of dire need, such as orphans contracting to work in exchange for food and board.) Their crimes are the crimes of their parents. A purchase is an exchange of items of value, it constitutes a contract. Why can a child purchase anything at all without an adult guardian (of some sort) present?
(Then again, we're not consistent about responsibility: an elderly person who is no longer fully in control is not forced back under the responsibility of a guardian. Age isn't even a good indicator of whether or not someone should be responsible, it's just a random attribute we picked because of its correlation factor.)
Someone (the great-grandparent?) had a good point though about how far we can allow responsibility to go. You're responsible for your child; does that mean you can kill your child? Does it mean you can legally sell her into prostitution? We should separate the concepts of ownership and guardianship (stewardship). There's a concept of "restricting the child from doing something he would later realize is bad for him" involved, which is entirely subjective. If the child were responsible for himself, then you would be treated as equals -- the law (generally) restricts you from harming your neighbor. You therefore should not be allowed to harm your child, as you are simply his guardian until he grows up. Can you let him harm himself? He's not responsible, you are -- you're therefore liable for any harm he does to himself (children should therefore be forced to wait until they're 18 to commit suicide.)
But video games? There are a lot of books in the library that could more thoroughly damage a child -- apparently we're not too worried about that though, what with how little people read these days. What if I didn't want my child buying, say, peanuts at the store because he's allergic and it's bad for him? Can we have a law that restricts that too, so I don't have to watch his every purchase? Or a law to prevent children from playing cards without permission from their parents, who think it's evil? (Yes, there are people like that -- I've met them.) Can we have a law to restrict children from playing hip-hop on their CD players when their parents haven't authorized such listening, because parents have deemed the music dangerous? Parents can get so nit-picky about what their children can or can't do, and every parent is different -- to be fair, we'd have a lot of laws
My woman's been programming for our county for the last year, replacing some recording software. What's interesting is how much trouble it is to convince people that it's okay to replace what they have -- she had to call the state offices to confirm that they did not, in fact, have laws requiring the use of the software made by a particular vendor (out of 3) ... the clerks all thought they had to. It didn't matter what other software was out there, as far as they were concerned, the state required them to buy particular software from particular vendors, and they tacked on the idea that there must be certification involved (but a certification that nobody else would ever be able to get.) Who cares if it's f/oss or not -- if the users who make the requests for purchase orders are convinced there's only one solution, you're going to have a tough time changing anything. I'm sure the existing vendors are happy to encourage these notions at their seminars, too. (I write medical-related software for a tribe; from seeing the data-entry clerks go to seminars for the other vendors, I'm jealous. I want seminars. They make your data-entry people go nuts for you, pretty much forever and no matter what you do to them or how crappy your software is. You won't ever have to worry about bug reports again, if you can just get them to pay a lot of money to go to one of your exclusive club-like seminars where you tell them practically nothing except that they should buy your upgrades.)
I think this needs to be repeated -- if you're planning on learning and using SQL, actually learn it. Don't just pretend to learn it. Don't just learn to do simple selects that "get you by". Actually learn it. Pick up a good relational theory book (Darwen, Date, Pascal, or Celko if you have to) and read it end-to-end. If you're not *really* good at it, find someone who is, and have them take care of it for you. Ugly graphics can be fixed as needed, ugly queries take longer, and bad database design tends to stick with a project forever.
But most of all, learn to listen to what people are trying to say. Actively seek information. It doesn't matter how good you are at building something if you build the wrong thing.
If you generalize, you find that a government is a business where citizens and (in theory) equal shareholders are the same thing, while an every-day business has fewer shareholders, and the citizenship isn't so much an issue. At that point, the "self-serving" interest of the business scales to the "public-serving" interest of the government. Not that it matters much. We have immense trouble getting democracy even near right; we delegate to committes left and right; we pay attention to what's going on once a year ... As shareholders, we've pretty much given up our powers to the few who were/are interested enough to run for office. We can't be bothered to think, can't be bothered to voice our opinions, can't be bothered to rebel.
... the Constitution is only a list of "do-nots", not a policy, not a compass.
Tyranny of the majority need not be quite so brain-dead though; we occasionally make an effort to have some sort of concensus, even though one is not needed for government. We're just not very good at it, and we have no incentive to do so. We're quite willing to restrict personal, private freedoms of individuals simply because we want to, not because there's any particular harm that will come of not doing so (the popular topics of the sort currently include gay marriage, legalizing drugs, etc.) We have no policy of making laws only as needed to ensure (well, sort of) the safety or liberty of citizens from each other or the "outside world"
I've taken us way off topic and are -so- getting modded into oblivion.
No business has a god given right to exist if a democratically elected government says no.
... nor a god-given right to overrule the wishes of the people who form businesses. A government is just a bunch of people. A business is just a bunch of people.
... such that you have a bunch of companies competing to do the same thing in the same place across the same resources -- the only money-saving they can do is in the area of customer service, how much paper to use, and salaries. Yawn. Was that good for us? Yet we keep as public works things like the postal system; why not allow any number of companies to deliver mail to the same mail boxes if they like? Is it essential that the system be centralized, unified into a single government service? That's the consequence of not having a clear policy and relying stupidly on democracy for every decision.
Nor do governments have a god-given right to exist
It's always the same -- bunches of people disagreeing with bunches of people; labeling parties as "the government" or "a business" is just part of the marketing that goes on in this sort of case, just like labeling someone "radical" or "moderate" or "progressive" or "right-wing".
What you're saying is simply that if the majority disagree with something, then it is wrong. While that's how our system works, there's nothing universal about it, except power -- the majority can probably set fire to the minority's ass if necessary. What's so great about that? We're not moving forward -- we're just renaming "the big wooden club" to "the government".
There are a lot of government ventures that could just as easily be private ventures, and quite a few private ones that might be better done as public works. The problem is that we have no policy to decide what's "right" -- we just vote, and each time we vote, it's a random selection of feelings from that particular moment in time that make the decision.
As an example: we've privatized things like water, gas, and electricity in places where there's only one set of lines, one source of water/gas/electricity, etc.
Sounds like a research project, eh? Agreed, it's possible it's only correlation. I have seen though that users incapable of explaining things logically can be taught; you just have to be patient enough to point out why their explanations-to-date are incomplete (loopholes, overlap conditions, non-relevance, etc.) ... eventually they start to get the idea. Learning to program would give them a similar feedback loop -- they code, the computer runs the program, spits out the wrong result (or an error) ... eventually they learn (a bit) how to be careful about explaining things. I just need my users to be able to understand that repeating the word "blue" at me is not going to get them the report they want, but that it is in fact possible to communicate complicated ideas in a meaningful way. I'm not picky though. (Btw, what's with the webhosting default page? I was looking forward to your page.)
Absolutely. You can actually accomplish "stuff" with mindstorms, despite limited abilities (3 inputs, 3 outputs.) To a certain extent, the constraint is a good thing; we keep the new lego X-Pod kits on the coffee table for guests to play with, as having only a few pieces forces you to figure out what to do with them rather than being daunted by a large pile of bricks and no ideas for something to build. The mindstorms commands are relatively simple (atomic), like assembly instructions. You can build functions, so once you learn how to use the small pieces, you can start moving up to higher-level concepts. All in all, it's a good way to learn programming. And while you're at it, you're likely playing with lego Technic, which introduces kids to all the wonders of mechanics, physics, building nice modular things, etc. Kind of a two-fields-in-one toy.
I think some amount of programming should be required for everyone -- people are absolutely incapable of describing what they want or how they want it even in daily situations; between that and horrible reading/comprehension skills, it's amazing we ever get any sort of specs, or work at all, out of our users. One of our professors always like to start out his intro-to-CS class by asking people to describe, precisely, how to get from the school to the shopping center; it served to explain the low-to-high concepts in programming, functions, code re-use, algorithms, everything.
As a kid, my brother and I battled out our differences on AT-robot, using assembly-like instructions to lead our killer robots to victory. It's a lot more fun when you're competing in an iterative process against someone you know; at first we'd build robots tailored to defeat a specific opponent, then when that started to not work as well, robots that were more general-purpose. I had learned the concepts of assembly before going to college and having an actual course in it (x86-based), which was handy. Interrupts, registers, call stacks, moving memory around manually, it was all there.
That seems to at least be the general idea when it comes to civil disobedience, and yes, revolt. If you succeed, your new order/government/society won't punish you for your actions (well, they might, if you were terribly overzealous and gave them a bad name in the process.) If you fail, the status-quo will punish you. In our society, you get to look up the law ahead of time and make the calculated choice between the cost of failure and the cost of not trying. In others, well, you get what you get (which may be reason enough for rebelling in the first place.)
If you take their definition as-is, any society that includes police can be seen as a terrorist force -- employing the threat of brute force against property or person (fines, beatings, imprisonment, or even the death penalty) to keep you "in line" obeying a sub-set of the society's wishes. (Nobody ever agrees with every law in the book, not even the "everything the government does is right" people.)
Reminder: at the time this definition came out (wasn't it part of the PATRIOT act?), it was much discussed for its failure to adequately describe terrorism. The definition above also describes rebellion, civil war, wars of independence, etc. By the definition above, the US was created through a reprehensible act of terrorism. (Wars aren't intended to kill everyone -- they're intended to make the other side back down/roll over; it's intimidation.) It's a choice you have to make, but I think we should work on our definition of terrorism.
The primary purpose of this move is not to hurt downloaders, as others have suggested. The intent is to further pollute the p2p networks and scare users away; if you might get something nasty installed on your computer by downloading music (most people wouldn't understand what could and could not infect their computer) then you might decide not to risk it at all, and just give up and become a good citizen. Yes, it's a fear tactic. In fact, they might be willing to be sued by the few people who actually get infected and complain, if it means they can scare away an order of magnitude more people from downloading anything. Most people won't get infected, and won't complain, and might also stop downloading. It's a calculated risk.
I always found Caligari's TrueSpace to have a rather good GUI for its genre. It didn't take over your workspace, buttons were grouped in ways that make sense ... and it uses fairly standard OS GUI components so it doesn't look totally off-the-wall. I never got the hang of the 3d widgets though, the ones appearing -inside- the workspace as objects. It was an interesting idea, but ... something about having to rotate my view to get the tool I need seems a bit weird. Eh.
... they really will accept just about anything -- even love it! (I think the love part comes from attending vendor-sponsored workshops and seminars: data-entry ladies just fall in love with their vendors at those events. We need seminars, our data-entry ladies don't love us enough yet.) I've seen a lot of DOS programs (all?) that look better than what most users put up with in the medical industry. I mean really; is it so hard to align controls, use a decent (small) set of colors, standardize on one font (preferably the system one), make menus accessible, and while you're at it make the questions asked of the user be somewhat related to the underlying cardinality problems? It would probably be asking too much for standard window functions (like Ok/Cancel/Save/Undo/etc.) to be in a consistent spot, too ... and out of the question for reports to stop using fixed-width fonts across 80 columns, such that you can barely fit anything on a piece of paper at all ... And Matt, if you read this: no more "four-winds" button placement, k?
As to users accepting just about anything -- I'm a programmer in the medical industry. From looking at the software we replace or use as examples (get some idea of what the users might want or need, since they're incapable of telling us themselves)
17 USC 512
Okay, so they have to comply with take-down requests from copyright owners if received, but may otherwise allow transmission so long as they don't filter, modify, or keep longer than needed any of the content being exchanged by users across their equipment. Oh, and they have to not know what's going on, and not get money directly from illegal activity. And the service provider has to make clear and accessible a way to send take-down notices. And have a stated policy of banning users if they are repeat infringers (note that the law specifically states repetition is involved.) The same applies to linking, indexing, referecing, pointing, or using informatin-location-tools, and "service providers" is defined very broadly. I'd say it applies to bittorrent trackers. And based on subsection (j), the most courts get to do is somehow order the service providers to make stuff stop, including just terminating specific users' accounts if that's sufficient, or ordering the service provider to block of IP's, etc. There's also mention of "standard technical measures" and mention of cost burden to service providers, such that if the service provider cannot reasonably find out who's infringing or whether or not the content is being illegally copies, the law seems to just let them off the hook. But hey, I'm not a lawyer either. (Then again, the law really shouldn't be the realm of lawyers. We should just as soon sue priests for misleading us on theology when God sends us to hell. People are just whiny babies about advice.)
Anybody care to comment on how this relates to "common carrier" status? That's usually how ISP's get out of having to worry about their client's use of bandwidth: because they don't look at anything, they don't police it, so they're not responsible. By being entirely agnostic about how and why a service is used, the service provider gets out of having any liability for what's done. The problem is when ISP's (for example) do start to block certain things; at that point it's obvious they know how to, and become liable for everything they didn't do that they could have ... do torrent sites have a right to claim common-carrier status because they index but don't filter? (it's just an idea. lemme know.)
It's okay, it was last updated in January of 2005 -- obviously they know about upcoming changes that you don't. The Firebird section is sorely lacking in detail too; most of the "other interesting db comparisons" seem centered (biased?) around MySQL. I would more willingly trust a comparison between, say, PostgreSQL and Firebird if it were put out by either of those teams than anything coming from MySQL, Oracle, or anybody else with a high monetary stake in the deal.
Everybody's going to be a bit sloppy though, downplaying things they don't have as not being needed, upgrading features as must-see when nobody needs them, making a big deal out of slight differences of support of a feature or claiming they have equal support when they don't (possibly different rather than better/worse, too.)
For my part, I'll say that Firebird's made a good attempt at simplifying administration and maintenance, keeping things optimized in spite of users, running on various platforms (they've actually dropped support for some old platforms) -- while PostgreSQL has done some amazing things for orthogonality like user-defined datatypes, support for random languages in the server, etc. I wish I could have it all. Congrats to the PostgreSQL team, as always.