Disclaimer: I didn't read the article. I call bullshit.
I call troll... which is surprising because your last few posts didn't quite look troll like. If you're not a trolling: keep in mind that although what you say could be true (maybe he is just scaremongering or as your next post suggest just had a bad business going), your tone needs to be adjusted a lot. I applaud you for bringing in the seed of doubt, but there are a lot of things going on in the country that just smell really funky and you shouldn't just dismiss this with so much sureity.
I feel for you, bro. I really do, but I don't have much to add to the discussion, though. I've seen this stuff coming for a long time (as have a number of other people on Slashdot). The real people who need to be convinced are outside of Slashdot. That's where your words need to be taken. While you're out there telling your story as to what happened, please remind them that both political parties are responsible for this issue. I have tried to deal with family who think $POLITICAL_PARTY1 is somehow better than $POLITICAL_PARTY2. So far, nothing I say works. I might use your example to see how that works on them.
Be prepared for people to deny what is happening. Check out this comment earlier up in this thread. I responded to it, but will it help? Probably not. Words like this fall on deaf ears.
When you're liquored up, I suggest reading the following (because it's really depressing to read when you're sober):
Although there are stronger laws in Europe, I would not bet any money on that. Compare this story on the web (published in 2010) with this story (published in 2012).
For those who don't want to read both articles: Basically, in 2010, Europol was to oversee (secretly) the financial information that was going to be given to the U.S. and the law makers were promised bulk information wouldn't be passed to the U.S. As of 2012, it has been discovered that bulk information is being passed to the U.S. My logic is this: if we can't trust financial data to be passed properly, how can we expect any other information to be passed (or not passed) properly? Frankly, I'm surprised how unhappy Europeans are about how the U.S. is handling Snowden while being strangely quiet over the whole debacle with Morales' plane. That does not pass the sniff test with me.
Disclaimer: I'm an American living in Germany. I cannot read German yet so I don't know specifically what the news is saying concerning this. I do know Snowden is in the German Google headlines more often than in the U.S. Google headlines.
I feel they have upheld their professionalism more than just about every other major U.S. company. Since we don't know which companies feed Uncle Sam with every byte of information, we have to assume all of them are doing it. Lavabit is now known to not have been feeding the government every byte of information but only because they have done something really drastic. They have done something no other major company has really had the balls to do.
These people are probably going to lose not their company, but their jobs and the jobs of everyone who worked for them. They are risking their freedom to defend your freedom. (They are very much risking going to jail over this.) They have honored the Constitution. Then you start out with a subject line of "Thanks a fucking bunch Lavabit." and whine about your email.
Show them some fucking respect and tell them Thank You for going to bat to protect the privacy of your email. I wish I knew for certain that my email provider did that.
I know I'm repeating myself since I said it in another comment, but I thought I'd respond directly to you so I could set the record straight: No, it would not break cannon. Not by a long shot.
I still don't know why they haven't brought her back yet.
It would be one of the most awkward television moments ever. She's kind of married to both of her fathers -- both of whom are the Doctor. Sort of. It's complicated in a wibbly wobbly timey wimey sort of way.
It might be time for stories to be written about female secret agents, but that doesn't mean the one agent you've written about has to change genders.
Disagree. Yes, 007 should stay male, but Doctor Who is one of the few shows where a gender change could be done very successfully. Unfortunately, I've seen a lot of comments on Slashdot saying "don't give us a woman", but I don't recall the same vitriol comments when the male Starbuck became the female Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica.
BTW, nothing wrong with changing genders and in scifi scenarios where it was already written (lots of Ian Banks books for instance) it's welcome that the character might become female or male.
I'm glad you changed your mind. In the episode "The Doctor's Wife", it was stated that "The Corsair" (a time lord) changed personalities when he / she regenerated as a different gender.
If they introduced a female doctor it would mean at least two years of stories pretty much devoted to aspects and repercussions of the change.
Disagree. That would depend on what the writers and producers wanted. Although they'd have to address it some degree, I would hope they mostly stay away from the subject matter as it has very little to do with the Doctor and his / her story lines.
Even if they choose not to address it there would be an uproar from fans about not addressing it, and there would always be the undercurrent of novelty from it.. hehe, look at us we're edgy because we recast the Doctor as female.
That, I agree with, although the perception of edgy would probably come from the fans. Only if they flaunted the sex of the Doctor in our faces would the edgy come from the writers and producers.
It's a common trope of portraying men as bumbling fools in need of a woman to steer them through life. Witness just about every sitcom and police procedural in existence. There would be much hell raised if a female doctor was constantly being upstaged by a male companion in the same manner.
If I understand you correctly (that the doctor is always upstaged by his female companions), then I disagree. The doctor holds his own and is sometimes upstaged by them, but not always. In the modern Doctor Who, they seem to share the spotlight in a well balanced way. In the (very few) older versions of Doctor Who that I've seen, he seems to have some strong women companions too... quite a novelty for the time they were made.
Wish I knew. Perhaps he could have a little chat with my friends and family. I have very close family on two continents and good friends on 5 continents. These aren't facebook friends either. I met every single one of them face to face and spent significant time with all them face to face.
Your comment is rated 5 and you deserve that because you're hitting upon probably the most single important thing that will block these guys from wide spread usage if they finish writing everything. I'm going to go a step further. You cannot have secure email if you do not have a client and operating system that you can trust. Today's environments are migrating to a place where we can not trust that our emails are not intercepted and read even if we're told it is secure. If we go online and read our email from Google's servers, that is not protected. If our emails are stored and decrypted locally but then searched by Windows 8.1 quick-search and that information fed back to Microsoft, then that is not secure. As long as we use unsecure operating systems and unsecure web-apps, this cannot work. All of us -- not just these guys -- have a very hard battle to fight.
I still use Thunderbird because I like control over my email by downloading it to my local machine, but I am in the minority. I want to say kudos to these guys for trying this because I want this badly. I can't get pgp to work reliably while emailing in Thunderbird with another tech-savvy friend of mine. That is pretty damn sad.
He called a cab company up and asked them to pick him up at a particular time. I've done this and have never had a problem, but if things happened as he described, he most certainly was doing it right, and they disrespected him by wasting his time.
Had this happen to me. My wife doesn't drive and I had a doctor's appointment and, based on crappy / late / never showed up experiences with other cabs and cab companies in other cities, made an appointment that would allow me to be at the doctor's over an hour early. We called the cab place after the cab didn't show up 10 minutes after expected time. "They'll be there in 5 minutes!" Ok. No problem. Ten minutes, later no cab. We called again. "They'll be there in 5 minutes!" We were getting a little suspicious by then so we told them to ask the cabbie where he was. "Oh, don't worry, he'll be there in 5 minutes." Ten more minutes go by. I finally called up a guy we knew from work who left work, picked me up and got the two of us to the doctor's appointment on time, but barely. (My wife went with me and the out-patient procedure required that I didn't drive afterward. I really would have preferred that my colleague didn't know as much as he found out, but at least he was really nice about it.)
When we got home, there was a message on our answer phone from the cabbie saying his previous client kept wanting him to drive him / her everywhere and he couldn't get to us. He was now free and could pick us up and wanted to know if we wanted to be picked up. It was almost an hour after our appointment when he called. WTF? That is shitty service at its finest.
TL;DR: Yes, cab companies can waste your time / money and can really ruin your day.
They would have paid the tax, they just didn't like it. Glad to know that everyone else there must like it. I guess the Utah state constitution doesn't have any sort of equal protection clause that would prevent giving this unfair treatment to some but not to others (mine does, but it is ignored when inconvenient).
You know, I'm glad you said this because I don't see if said often. Different taxes for different entities blows my mind on a regular basis. People think giving large corporations (or in this case, large government) special tax breaks is a good thing. If cutting taxes are so good, why don't they do it across the board? Or, conversely, if raising taxes are so good, why don't they do it across the board? In other words, if the idea is good for one entity, it must be good for every entity or business. Why should my wife (who ran a business of just one person for a number of years) be treated any different from these guys or Amazon? Just treat everyone the same. Less waste of time, paperwork, and resources than making exceptions for here and there too.
I get politics, but it frustrates the hell out of me most days.
More than one person should be responsible for the network. (Or in my case, coding a program.) There should be a standardized way of doing things so the new guy doesn't have to come in and hit a brick wall on his initial sprint. Diagrams and documentation should be part of the every day life. I have to admit, though, that every place I've worked at and most places I read about do not have overlapping job responsibilities nor documentation that is worth anything. (I've seen lots of documentation, but the majority of it is useless. My criteria: Can a new guy come in and understand what is going on?) Personally, I think that is a shame. I think of it like insurance. You don't need insurance... except when something catastrophic happens.
I was a programmer for a small firm when I gave my two weeks. I offered them to come by now and again on on Saturdays or answer questions they may have had. Although they didn't call me often and I gladly went over there a few times, I did have to put my foot down and ask them to stop calling me after 6 months. I thought that was enough time for a transition and I only offered my services to be nice... not as a permanent solution to their inability to hire enough people to read and parse my code. The company didn't really want to look at my code or study it or become familiar with it until they needed a change and then they called me up so I could explain things to them. After reflection, I think most companies would either abuse my kind of offer or never call. Would I do it all over again? Yes. I'm a nice guy at heart and I'd make the same offer to the same people. They were a good bunch to work with.
I put this out here as a tidbit of info for others thinking about doing this.
Perfect example of the butterfly effect and floating point errors in weather. Over time, it can even change a person's name who wrote a book on weather simulations in the 60's. I bet no one predicted that!
Interestingly, out of the first 13 posts on this topic, only 2 have been by named individuals, the rest by anonymous cowards.
This may be caused by fear of the NSA as you speculate, but I have noticed a lot more comments by ACs in recent months. I was recently threatened on Slashdot for supporting someone who's opinion isn't popular. I didn't know the guy and could care less who he is. I only cared about the comment he made at that particular point in time. An AC threatened to bomb my karma into oblivion. Perhaps AC is the only way to post anything of quality of late if you're hated by the Slashdot community and don't have enough followers to help you out.
Personally, I think you're right about the NSA angle, but I pulled a devil's advocate as food for thought.
Some men and women have great courage... But the tyrant has ways of countering even this. Among those who do not fear death, some fear torture, disgrace, or humiliation. And even those who do not fear these things for themselves may fear them for their fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, wives, and children. The tyrant uses all these tools.
Even ignoring any threats by the government, I am always worried about the health and well being of my wife, my brother, his wife, their unborn child, my young goddaughter, my aging parents, my ill in-laws, etc. Being brave can mean watching your family get hurt. Being brave can mean your family hating you even if you are doing the right thing. Perhaps it's a medical thing like in my case. (Let's just say my mother in-law and I have disagreements about what is best for her.) Perhaps they hooked on drugs. Perhaps they have a gambling problem. Speaking in terms of a repressive government: having your whole family turn against you because you stand up for what is right is a very difficult thing to do. In fact, the water gets really muddy... is it better to stand up for your fellow countrymen or to keep your loved ones "safe" and alive? Sometimes, you can pick only one. A choice you make might remove their freedoms or their lives.
Unfortunately, I don't find the picture isn't quite black and white as a lot of others do.
There was supposed to be a Star Trek reboot movie, but it really should have been called Lens Flare.
An in case you missed it, "Lens Flare II: The Wrath of Lens Flare" came out this year. Wow! It was fantastic! I watched a lady become decapitated for a good 10 to 15 seconds from a lens flare -- in 3D no less! If you like the lens flare genre, it was pure awesome!
To be fair, the Y-chromosome isn't the only way of determining gender
Huh. Shows how much biology I forgot and / or didn't know about. Thank you.
I think that's more of a problem with bad science journalism than bad science, though.
Yes, you're absolutely correct, and I'll certainly concede that point. Despite that: in my personal view of the world, I still consider science journalism to be part of science. After all, without a good way to spread truth to the masses, can science really be considered science? (I suppose it's fair to say that too many people who believe in the whole earth-created-in-six-day-and-here's-scientific-proof has shaped this particular opinion.)
Yeah... I heard this a few decades ago in grade school and I thought "WTF? Just about every organism on earth has two genders including things like plants. How can they say that the Y chromosome is going away?"
Unfortunately, my WTF moments concerning these "scientific conclusions" haven't stopped. It's only gotten more frequent as I've matured. At least the poles haven't flipped like my "WTF sensor" for politics. I only go "WTF!?" when I hear something that actually makes sense in politics because I'm so used to hearing something ridiculous.
The definition of a getter and setter from wikipedia:
In computer science, a mutator method is a method used to control changes to a variable. They are also widely known as '''setter''' methods. Often a setter is accompanied by a '''getter''' (also known as an accessor), which returns the value of the private member variable.
In other words, the only function of getters and setters is to directly change the private variable within an object. If you do anything else (like update more than one variable at at time), then you have a function / subroutine / method. If I understand correctly, what you propose is changing the status of an object by updating three pieces of information. One method can do that. Even if you use three separate methods to do this (but only because the project requirements say should be done that way), then it should be viewed as changing the state of an object -- not setting variables. Everything in "object oriented" programming should be treated like an "object" and viewed through the lens of "objects". Calling a method to update a "variable" (which is the idea behind a getter and setter) is a bad idea. Calling a method to update the state of an object (even if, internally within the object, it updates only a single variable) is a good idea. The code between these two ideas can be the same, but the reasoning is different. Using the terms "getter and setter" not only waters down the distinction between object oriented programming and procedural programming, but (over time) subtly alters the way a program is ultimately written and documented. Why? Because your "lens" is different from my "lens". That makes it harder for us to understand each other when I have to update your work or you have to update my work. The idea behind strict object oriented programming is to make communication between programmers easier.
Still not quite clear? Let me put it this way: Using getters and setters is like using goto statements instead of if-then statements. Both do the exact same thing. Heck, under the hood of what is really happening inside a computer, our if-then statements in high level languages are being translated into goto statements in machine language when you compile and run executables. Why don't we use goto statements? What makes an if-then statement so much better? If you can understand that if-then statements are the same thing as goto statements and if you can understand why if-then statements are superior to goto statements (these are not contradictory statements even if they look like it on the surface), then you can understand why getters and setters are bad ideas.
Slashdot Mirror
Disclaimer: I didn't read the article. I call bullshit.
I call troll... which is surprising because your last few posts didn't quite look troll like. If you're not a trolling: keep in mind that although what you say could be true (maybe he is just scaremongering or as your next post suggest just had a bad business going), your tone needs to be adjusted a lot. I applaud you for bringing in the seed of doubt, but there are a lot of things going on in the country that just smell really funky and you shouldn't just dismiss this with so much sureity.
I feel for you, bro. I really do, but I don't have much to add to the discussion, though. I've seen this stuff coming for a long time (as have a number of other people on Slashdot). The real people who need to be convinced are outside of Slashdot. That's where your words need to be taken. While you're out there telling your story as to what happened, please remind them that both political parties are responsible for this issue. I have tried to deal with family who think $POLITICAL_PARTY1 is somehow better than $POLITICAL_PARTY2. So far, nothing I say works. I might use your example to see how that works on them.
Be prepared for people to deny what is happening. Check out this comment earlier up in this thread. I responded to it, but will it help? Probably not. Words like this fall on deaf ears.
When you're liquored up, I suggest reading the following (because it's really depressing to read when you're sober):
Dictator's Handbook and Little Brother. Little Brother specifically addresses why your words may fall on deaf ears.
Although there are stronger laws in Europe, I would not bet any money on that. Compare this story on the web (published in 2010) with this story (published in 2012).
For those who don't want to read both articles: Basically, in 2010, Europol was to oversee (secretly) the financial information that was going to be given to the U.S. and the law makers were promised bulk information wouldn't be passed to the U.S. As of 2012, it has been discovered that bulk information is being passed to the U.S. My logic is this: if we can't trust financial data to be passed properly, how can we expect any other information to be passed (or not passed) properly? Frankly, I'm surprised how unhappy Europeans are about how the U.S. is handling Snowden while being strangely quiet over the whole debacle with Morales' plane. That does not pass the sniff test with me.
Disclaimer: I'm an American living in Germany. I cannot read German yet so I don't know specifically what the news is saying concerning this. I do know Snowden is in the German Google headlines more often than in the U.S. Google headlines.
I feel they have upheld their professionalism more than just about every other major U.S. company. Since we don't know which companies feed Uncle Sam with every byte of information, we have to assume all of them are doing it. Lavabit is now known to not have been feeding the government every byte of information but only because they have done something really drastic. They have done something no other major company has really had the balls to do.
These people are probably going to lose not their company, but their jobs and the jobs of everyone who worked for them. They are risking their freedom to defend your freedom. (They are very much risking going to jail over this.) They have honored the Constitution. Then you start out with a subject line of "Thanks a fucking bunch Lavabit." and whine about your email.
Show them some fucking respect and tell them Thank You for going to bat to protect the privacy of your email. I wish I knew for certain that my email provider did that.
I know I'm repeating myself since I said it in another comment, but I thought I'd respond directly to you so I could set the record straight: No, it would not break cannon. Not by a long shot.
I still don't know why they haven't brought her back yet.
It would be one of the most awkward television moments ever. She's kind of married to both of her fathers -- both of whom are the Doctor. Sort of. It's complicated in a wibbly wobbly timey wimey sort of way.
It might be time for stories to be written about female secret agents, but that doesn't mean the one agent you've written about has to change genders.
Disagree. Yes, 007 should stay male, but Doctor Who is one of the few shows where a gender change could be done very successfully. Unfortunately, I've seen a lot of comments on Slashdot saying "don't give us a woman", but I don't recall the same vitriol comments when the male Starbuck became the female Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica.
BTW, nothing wrong with changing genders and in scifi scenarios where it was already written (lots of Ian Banks books for instance) it's welcome that the character might become female or male.
I'm glad you changed your mind. In the episode "The Doctor's Wife", it was stated that "The Corsair" (a time lord) changed personalities when he / she regenerated as a different gender.
If they introduced a female doctor it would mean at least two years of stories pretty much devoted to aspects and repercussions of the change.
Disagree. That would depend on what the writers and producers wanted. Although they'd have to address it some degree, I would hope they mostly stay away from the subject matter as it has very little to do with the Doctor and his / her story lines.
Even if they choose not to address it there would be an uproar from fans about not addressing it, and there would always be the undercurrent of novelty from it.. hehe, look at us we're edgy because we recast the Doctor as female.
That, I agree with, although the perception of edgy would probably come from the fans. Only if they flaunted the sex of the Doctor in our faces would the edgy come from the writers and producers.
It's a common trope of portraying men as bumbling fools in need of a woman to steer them through life. Witness just about every sitcom and police procedural in existence. There would be much hell raised if a female doctor was constantly being upstaged by a male companion in the same manner.
If I understand you correctly (that the doctor is always upstaged by his female companions), then I disagree. The doctor holds his own and is sometimes upstaged by them, but not always. In the modern Doctor Who, they seem to share the spotlight in a well balanced way. In the (very few) older versions of Doctor Who that I've seen, he seems to have some strong women companions too... quite a novelty for the time they were made.
FYI, I just compared Firefox 22 and 23. The about:config?filter=javascript.enabled option is still there.
Wish I knew. Perhaps he could have a little chat with my friends and family. I have very close family on two continents and good friends on 5 continents. These aren't facebook friends either. I met every single one of them face to face and spent significant time with all them face to face.
Your comment is rated 5 and you deserve that because you're hitting upon probably the most single important thing that will block these guys from wide spread usage if they finish writing everything. I'm going to go a step further. You cannot have secure email if you do not have a client and operating system that you can trust. Today's environments are migrating to a place where we can not trust that our emails are not intercepted and read even if we're told it is secure. If we go online and read our email from Google's servers, that is not protected. If our emails are stored and decrypted locally but then searched by Windows 8.1 quick-search and that information fed back to Microsoft, then that is not secure. As long as we use unsecure operating systems and unsecure web-apps, this cannot work. All of us -- not just these guys -- have a very hard battle to fight.
I still use Thunderbird because I like control over my email by downloading it to my local machine, but I am in the minority. I want to say kudos to these guys for trying this because I want this badly. I can't get pgp to work reliably while emailing in Thunderbird with another tech-savvy friend of mine. That is pretty damn sad.
He called a cab company up and asked them to pick him up at a particular time. I've done this and have never had a problem, but if things happened as he described, he most certainly was doing it right, and they disrespected him by wasting his time.
Had this happen to me. My wife doesn't drive and I had a doctor's appointment and, based on crappy / late / never showed up experiences with other cabs and cab companies in other cities, made an appointment that would allow me to be at the doctor's over an hour early. We called the cab place after the cab didn't show up 10 minutes after expected time. "They'll be there in 5 minutes!" Ok. No problem. Ten minutes, later no cab. We called again. "They'll be there in 5 minutes!" We were getting a little suspicious by then so we told them to ask the cabbie where he was. "Oh, don't worry, he'll be there in 5 minutes." Ten more minutes go by. I finally called up a guy we knew from work who left work, picked me up and got the two of us to the doctor's appointment on time, but barely. (My wife went with me and the out-patient procedure required that I didn't drive afterward. I really would have preferred that my colleague didn't know as much as he found out, but at least he was really nice about it.)
When we got home, there was a message on our answer phone from the cabbie saying his previous client kept wanting him to drive him / her everywhere and he couldn't get to us. He was now free and could pick us up and wanted to know if we wanted to be picked up. It was almost an hour after our appointment when he called. WTF? That is shitty service at its finest.
TL;DR: Yes, cab companies can waste your time / money and can really ruin your day.
They would have paid the tax, they just didn't like it. Glad to know that everyone else there must like it. I guess the Utah state constitution doesn't have any sort of equal protection clause that would prevent giving this unfair treatment to some but not to others (mine does, but it is ignored when inconvenient).
You know, I'm glad you said this because I don't see if said often. Different taxes for different entities blows my mind on a regular basis. People think giving large corporations (or in this case, large government) special tax breaks is a good thing. If cutting taxes are so good, why don't they do it across the board? Or, conversely, if raising taxes are so good, why don't they do it across the board? In other words, if the idea is good for one entity, it must be good for every entity or business. Why should my wife (who ran a business of just one person for a number of years) be treated any different from these guys or Amazon? Just treat everyone the same. Less waste of time, paperwork, and resources than making exceptions for here and there too.
I get politics, but it frustrates the hell out of me most days.
More than one person should be responsible for the network. (Or in my case, coding a program.) There should be a standardized way of doing things so the new guy doesn't have to come in and hit a brick wall on his initial sprint. Diagrams and documentation should be part of the every day life. I have to admit, though, that every place I've worked at and most places I read about do not have overlapping job responsibilities nor documentation that is worth anything. (I've seen lots of documentation, but the majority of it is useless. My criteria: Can a new guy come in and understand what is going on?) Personally, I think that is a shame. I think of it like insurance. You don't need insurance... except when something catastrophic happens.
I was a programmer for a small firm when I gave my two weeks. I offered them to come by now and again on on Saturdays or answer questions they may have had. Although they didn't call me often and I gladly went over there a few times, I did have to put my foot down and ask them to stop calling me after 6 months. I thought that was enough time for a transition and I only offered my services to be nice... not as a permanent solution to their inability to hire enough people to read and parse my code. The company didn't really want to look at my code or study it or become familiar with it until they needed a change and then they called me up so I could explain things to them. After reflection, I think most companies would either abuse my kind of offer or never call. Would I do it all over again? Yes. I'm a nice guy at heart and I'd make the same offer to the same people. They were a good bunch to work with.
I put this out here as a tidbit of info for others thinking about doing this.
640K of pixels should be enough for anyone.
I'll take a triple bacon and cheese burger with super sized fries annnnnnnd... a diet coke.
by Jmaes Gleick.
Perfect example of the butterfly effect and floating point errors in weather. Over time, it can even change a person's name who wrote a book on weather simulations in the 60's. I bet no one predicted that!
Interestingly, out of the first 13 posts on this topic, only 2 have been by named individuals, the rest by anonymous cowards.
This may be caused by fear of the NSA as you speculate, but I have noticed a lot more comments by ACs in recent months. I was recently threatened on Slashdot for supporting someone who's opinion isn't popular. I didn't know the guy and could care less who he is. I only cared about the comment he made at that particular point in time. An AC threatened to bomb my karma into oblivion. Perhaps AC is the only way to post anything of quality of late if you're hated by the Slashdot community and don't have enough followers to help you out.
Personally, I think you're right about the NSA angle, but I pulled a devil's advocate as food for thought.
I applaud you for your comment and your bravery, but I must correct you on one thing:
The brave aren't easily terrorized.
Yes, they are. Here is a quote of quote from the Dictator's Handbook:
Some men and women have great courage ... But the tyrant has ways of countering even this. Among those who do not fear death, some fear torture, disgrace, or humiliation. And even those who do not fear these things for themselves may fear them for their fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, wives, and children. The tyrant uses all these tools.
Even ignoring any threats by the government, I am always worried about the health and well being of my wife, my brother, his wife, their unborn child, my young goddaughter, my aging parents, my ill in-laws, etc. Being brave can mean watching your family get hurt. Being brave can mean your family hating you even if you are doing the right thing. Perhaps it's a medical thing like in my case. (Let's just say my mother in-law and I have disagreements about what is best for her.) Perhaps they hooked on drugs. Perhaps they have a gambling problem. Speaking in terms of a repressive government: having your whole family turn against you because you stand up for what is right is a very difficult thing to do. In fact, the water gets really muddy... is it better to stand up for your fellow countrymen or to keep your loved ones "safe" and alive? Sometimes, you can pick only one. A choice you make might remove their freedoms or their lives.
Unfortunately, I don't find the picture isn't quite black and white as a lot of others do.
MAD magazine had a spoof some 20 years ago, about a movie without any plot or any story.
Yeah. I think they're making an actual movie or something about it. I saw the trailer for it recently.
There was supposed to be a Star Trek reboot movie, but it really should have been called Lens Flare.
An in case you missed it, "Lens Flare II: The Wrath of Lens Flare" came out this year. Wow! It was fantastic! I watched a lady become decapitated for a good 10 to 15 seconds from a lens flare -- in 3D no less! If you like the lens flare genre, it was pure awesome!
To be fair, the Y-chromosome isn't the only way of determining gender
Huh. Shows how much biology I forgot and / or didn't know about. Thank you.
I think that's more of a problem with bad science journalism than bad science, though.
Yes, you're absolutely correct, and I'll certainly concede that point. Despite that: in my personal view of the world, I still consider science journalism to be part of science. After all, without a good way to spread truth to the masses, can science really be considered science? (I suppose it's fair to say that too many people who believe in the whole earth-created-in-six-day-and-here's-scientific-proof has shaped this particular opinion.)
Yeah... I heard this a few decades ago in grade school and I thought "WTF? Just about every organism on earth has two genders including things like plants. How can they say that the Y chromosome is going away?"
Unfortunately, my WTF moments concerning these "scientific conclusions" haven't stopped. It's only gotten more frequent as I've matured. At least the poles haven't flipped like my "WTF sensor" for politics. I only go "WTF!?" when I hear something that actually makes sense in politics because I'm so used to hearing something ridiculous.
The definition of a getter and setter from wikipedia:
In computer science, a mutator method is a method used to control changes to a variable. They are also widely known as '''setter''' methods. Often a setter is accompanied by a '''getter''' (also known as an accessor), which returns the value of the private member variable.
In other words, the only function of getters and setters is to directly change the private variable within an object. If you do anything else (like update more than one variable at at time), then you have a function / subroutine / method. If I understand correctly, what you propose is changing the status of an object by updating three pieces of information. One method can do that. Even if you use three separate methods to do this (but only because the project requirements say should be done that way), then it should be viewed as changing the state of an object -- not setting variables. Everything in "object oriented" programming should be treated like an "object" and viewed through the lens of "objects". Calling a method to update a "variable" (which is the idea behind a getter and setter) is a bad idea. Calling a method to update the state of an object (even if, internally within the object, it updates only a single variable) is a good idea. The code between these two ideas can be the same, but the reasoning is different. Using the terms "getter and setter" not only waters down the distinction between object oriented programming and procedural programming, but (over time) subtly alters the way a program is ultimately written and documented. Why? Because your "lens" is different from my "lens". That makes it harder for us to understand each other when I have to update your work or you have to update my work. The idea behind strict object oriented programming is to make communication between programmers easier.
Still not quite clear? Let me put it this way: Using getters and setters is like using goto statements instead of if-then statements. Both do the exact same thing. Heck, under the hood of what is really happening inside a computer, our if-then statements in high level languages are being translated into goto statements in machine language when you compile and run executables. Why don't we use goto statements? What makes an if-then statement so much better? If you can understand that if-then statements are the same thing as goto statements and if you can understand why if-then statements are superior to goto statements (these are not contradictory statements even if they look like it on the surface), then you can understand why getters and setters are bad ideas.