Forget BSD, forget LGPL, if you want anyone to be able to use your software for whatever they damn well please, release it into the public domain.
The standard arguments against public domain are silly. Releasing a work into the public domain does not waive all your legal rights as the author, only those derived from your copyright. You still have rights as a private person and as the person who made this public speech.
You are responsible for your actions (as is everyone else). If you release code into the public domain, you can still be liable if you coded malicious attacks into it (as you are in any case, no matter what kind of licence you use). However, there is no implied warrantee for public domain software (unlike software you've paid for), so nobody can blame you for any bugs in it.
Furthermore, simply releasing public domain software doesn't grant anyone a special legal right to use your name in their advertisments.
Also, if someone removes your name and claims to have written the software themself (note that this is not the same as simply not mentioning where all their source code came from), or adds malicious or poorly written code and claims that you wrote it, they are responsible for this fraudulent claim. If it harms you, generally you can sue them (the specific tort varies).
Public domain is the only truly free software. It is compatible with any open source licence and free to use for any purpose. The GPL has its place, personally I think it is overused, but there are some situations where it is absolutely vital (for instance, when competing businesses decide to collaborate and standardize on a piece of open software, and want to be sure that nobody sneaks off and breaks the compatability with a proprietary version). However, these other licences which almost recreate the freedom of public domain but add the problem of mutual incompatibility only cause harm.
Given the utterly clueless replies in this thread, I suppose I should clarify that I mean the advantages of a drum compared to a disc using the same modern material science advances etc. NOT the ancient main memory drum vs. modern RAM or even against a modern HD.
You'd think the advantages of drums would still apply today. I bet the data density and sustained read would be a lot better (and obviously more consistent) in both cases.
Are discs just that much cheaper or smaller, or what? I mean, a drum wouldn't fit nicely in the drive slot, but they might come in handy for high-performance web servers.
I bet if you had some nice solid drum drives running at that speed, you could mount them in your car and use them as flywheels for regenerative braking and to hold the world's greatest portable mp3 collection.
Some hardware does alpha blending, much like some hardware accelerates sprites.
More accurately, in the final digital-to-analog conversion hardware those 8 bits aren't used for anything (although they could be put to very good use, if the monitors were of sufficiently high quality: the human eye can detect very faint differences in intensity, more than the 256 possible levels of greyshade in a 24-bit pixel, though the human eye is not really sensitive enough to distinguish between all the possible colors of a 24-bit pixel, so the extra byte could be used to create higher intensity resolution, so you had 16-bits of intensity, 8 implicit in the RGB and 8 explicit). In the image composition acceleration hardware, the extra byte may or may not be used.
You can't have a transparent pixel on your monitor, but you can sometimes have a transparent pixel in your video memory.
Let's see, you want to learn about cookies. These queries bring up porn on the first page of links:
"yummy chocolate cooky"
"choclat"
"girl scout choclat cooky" (in "any" mode)
"make choclat cooky" (in "any" mode)
(where's my $100? ^_^ )
I only spent a few minutes thinking about what a child might write, I'm sure there are plenty of other ways to get porn.
Just think of what a kid on the wrestling team would find if he looks for information on his favorite sport! One of my hobbies is judo, which is really a type of wrestling. I like to look into other styles to see if I can adapt their moves, so I have first-hand experience (actually, the situation has greatly improved over the last couple of years, so this example didn't work out as well as I hoped). I had to sift through a lot of deviant gay fantasies before I finally found reviews of "Winning Wrestling Moves" (there aren't any really good web resources, IMHO, but I would probably have never bought this incredible book without the web reviews). I also found the pages of Matt Furey, which opened up a lot of information to me.
Searching simply on "wrestling" gives you a list of totally irrelevant WWF-type pages.
Searching on "amateur wrestling" gets better results.
However, the simple misspelling "amatuer wrestling" brings up porn as the second hit (and the first one doesn't have anything to do with wrestling), with many others to follow.
Don't even get me started on "submission holds"!
(BTW, I used metacrawler in all examples; it used to be the best, though now it pretty much sucks)
Yeah, it was really rude, but geez, that can't be healthy! I just got this image in my mind of a starved person I saw on TV; I guess he was probably more like 70 or 90 lbs, but that's still not that far. He mentioned that he didn't eat properly, so it sounded like he could really be hurting himself (forgetting to eat to the point of endangering your health: anorexia neglecta?).
Besides, that's how I talk to everyone. I'll be having a conversation, when suddenly I'll realize how stupid the person is. I'll say "My God, you're stupid! For the sake of humanity I hope you aren't planning on breeding." Or I'll notice that one of my co-workers is drinking too much coffee and I'll go up to him and say "Gods below! You pathetic drug addict! At least 3 major religions say you're going to hell." Or I'll notice that my girlfriend has bought a new dress, and I'll say "By the First Turnip! Did you look in a mirror before you bought that? Don't you know how fat your ass looks in that dress?" You know, whatever I can do to help in my uniquely tactful way. ^_^
If you want a sixpack, the trick is to lose the fat over your abs. Sorry, it's true. Everybody has those same muscles, you just can't see them because they're under the fat. It doesn't take a lot of fat, just the normal healthy amount. You have to ask yourself if it's worth it to get rid of it. It's not really healthy to lose every last bit of fat from your body. You need that fat to produce some hormones and stuff (yeah, I'm fuzzy on the details). It's also very hard to put on muscle mass if you don't have a little fat on your body (not a lot of fat - that's just hard to lose later), so don't go through the hardship of getting ripped if you still want to put on more muscle. It's also easier to lose fat when you have more muscle.
If you really decide you must lose fat (as I do from time to time; I compete at judo, and it's a weight-category sport), I'm a bit of an extremist, so you might not want to follow my advice (read: "don't follow my advice, I'm a wierdo; presented only for entertainment value"). I like the fat fast. It's a kind of controlled starvation, in which you eat only to attempt to preserve your muscle-mass. Oddly, this means eating almost pure fat, and only in very small quantities. It also means not exercising hard, because you won't have the energy, and your body will want to switch to eating your muscles if you use them. I have pretty good self-control (or maybe I'm just too lazy to figure out more appetizing acceptable food), so I just eat spoonfuls of salad oil. Drink lots of water (you have to flush out those ketones), and feel free to have a little alcohol (as long as there's no sugar in the booze), as it drives you deeper into ketogenesis. I won't provide any links to more information, but it's out there. I don't really recommend it for anyone, though it's probably healthier than what some wrestlers do to make weight...
Anyway, back on topic:
Leglifts work the psoas (hip flexors) more than your abs, which only play a supporting role. This is also true for a large part of situps. A situp is actually a crunch, followed by an isometric contraction while the psoas do the actual lifting. However, it's hard to get a good workout out of crunches on a flat floor.
Your lower abs really aren't seperate from your upper abs. They're part of the same chain, and anything that works one, works the other.
The trick to working out your abs is to exercise over a full range of motion, and to add weight when you need it. You know the way they teach you to do proper crunches? You lie on your back with your hips at a 90 degree angle, and your calves resting on a chair or something (this way, you only work your abs, not your psoas). Anyway, the problem here is that when you curl your abdomen, you're going all the way up, but you hit the floor long before you get all the way down (your back arches as well as curls). You have to put something under your butt and lower back so you can work over a larger range of motion. Ideally, you'd have a bench that matched the natural curve of your arched back, but you can simulate this fairly well on an incline situp bench with a properly sized cushion under your lower back.
Also, don't get silly with numbers. It's better to hold a dumbbell on your chest or behind your head so you can barely do 10 slow crunches than it is to do 150 unweighted crunches. Large weights are best for building muscle, large numbers of reps adapt your muscle to endurance.
However, while it's good to work your abs, the best way to put muscle on them is to work hard at the One True Lift. The OTL varies from person to person, either the deadlift or the squat. It works muscles all over your body and in some odd way puts muscle on everywhere. I have no idea why, but it works.
You can't be talking to the guy you replied to, since he was ranting about the gross overconsumption of protein. You certainly can't be talking to me, since I agreed that most Americans (being meat-eaters, and overfed at that) get plenty of protein.
I also agree that an excess of meat is bad for you. It collects in the colon, rots, and causes intestinal problems, for one thing. Eating too much of any one thing is bad for you. The best diet is a balanced one, and, for most people, including a moderate amount of meat.
Athletes vary widely in their eating habits (BTW, why would you except pro wrestlers? I wouldn't call them athletes per se, but the good ones are incredibly strong and shockingly agile for such large men), from vegans to people who pig out on fried chicken weekly. Most are more moderate and eat well-balanced meals with appropriate servings of meat, like I try to. Many take protein supplements. I can't figure out where your "chocolate-shake-and-fries" thing came from, since I only mentioned such diets as an unfortunate trend.
The Chinese love meat as much as any people on the planet. Their pictograph for happiness even contains the image of a pig. Are you going to tell me that's the sign of a society which has long considered meat undesirable? However, it is true that they don't eat anywhere near the quantities of meat typical of western countries.
As for the peoples of India, a great many of them have religious prohibitions against eating meat, so I wouldn't expect them to have anything good to say about it (the same would apply to many Chinese vegetarians). You might, however, read about Ghandi's little adventure in carnivorism, and the reasoning that led him to it (it doesn't really support my point, but it's amusing). At any rate, protein deficiency is fairly common in India.
Regardless of whether your claims about these countries are true, they are occupied by people of generally small stature. How, exactly, does that support the notion that eating meat doesn't affect stature?
Sure, you can live without meat, if you're careful to get a complete diet. I don't dispute that. I do, however, say that meat is a wholesome food that contains the most essential ingredients for growth. Most people are better off with it than without it.
"most people who smoke will shorten their life" - (off topic, but while we're at it...) not necessarily true. First of all, most smokers ridiculously overindulge. They should be called "smoking addicts" or some such thing, to distinguish them from responsible smokers as "alcoholic" distinguishes alcohol addicts from responsible drinkers. I smoke a pipe once every few weeks, and I honestly believe it will never harm me. Secondly, some people are more vulnerable to smoking-related illness than others. Women, for instance, are much more likely to get lung cancer from smoking than men are. Women should never smoke, or have to work in places where they are constantly exposed to second-hand smoke. Some men, though, are quite capable of smoking through their entire lives without any side-effect. However, I do believe that men who get sick from smoking are mostly people who abuse tobacco in an insane manner, rather than smoking a few cigarettes per week, they smoke a several per day, or even over a pack, to the point that it impairs them even in the short term. That's just stupid, they shouldn't be surprised when they get sick from it. At any rate, it's not good for you, but I think most men could get away with it without any ill effects, if only they'd be reasonable about their usage.
Meat makes you strong. This isn't a modern fad, but a truism held among the majority of cultures for all history. Meat eaters are, in general, bigger and stronger than vegetarians. This applies both in individual and cultural comparisons. People of wealthy countries in southeast asia are getting larger, rapidly approaching the size of typical westerners, where they've added more meat to their diet. The most important thing about meat is the concentration of protien in usable form, though it contains other important nutrients.
It's true, though, that most people in wealthy western countries easily get enough protein. That doesn't mean that a diet of meatless burritos wouldn't be short on protein.
The rise in fragile bones among young people is just one among many growing nutrition problems due mostly to the wierdly picky yet lazy eating habits of a spoiled generation, and, more fundamentally, the disappearance of the traditional homemaker and isolation of the child-raising household from the traditional helpers (like grandparents and other close relatives). Where do you learn good eating habits? From your mother, of course. If she makes sure you eat three squares a day and stay away from sugary treats and garbage fried in rancid oil, you tend to follow those guidelines. If she lets you have anti-food like pop tarts for breakfast and Coke as your staple beverage because she doesn't have the time or support to develop proper parenting skills (rather, I should say, mothering skills, since a father's traditional role is rather different) which allow her to efficiently deal with a child's determined opposition (or simply doesn't have time for anything healthy, which I feel is a lesser issue), you tend to follow those habits as well (and start out your independent adult life already unhealthy from a poor diet).
Convenience food is bad food. Someone in the household needs to spend about an hour or two each day in preparing real food, or the family's health suffers. Even if people have the right idea about what foods are good, they need time to make it. It's a cultural problem, based on overprideful specialization which devalues the skills of ability for direct action. People are expected to do nothing but pursue money, and are chastised if they try to provide for their loved ones other than through purchasing. A homemade garment is ridiculed, a wholesome home-cooked meal is less desired than food-like items from McDonalds, and people are even looked down on for having their hair cut at home. It's a sad state of affairs.
Everyone has "studies" and "facts" supporting their claims, but most of it is just sophistry to support emotional judgements.
If you want real truth about nutrition, just look at the diets of primitive societies. They didn't cheat on their diets, because they couldn't. There is no confusion over supposed mechanisms, because you are looking at the actual results, without even considering mechanisms.
Yes, eating lots of meat reduces the calcium in your bones, that must be true. Yeah, that's why european explorers and researchers marveled at the incredible strength in the teeth of the eskimos, who ate a diet consisting almost entirely of meat. One notable anecdote is of a fellow, whose fingers proved unequal to the task, removed a tight nut from a bolt with this teeth. They had their problems, but fragile bones weren't an issue.
That's why tribal humans often go to great lengths to acquire meagre servings of meat when they have little of it: because it's bad for them and nature's brutal teaching process has slowly shaped their society into the pursuit of poor health. That makes perfect biological sense, doesn't it?
Actually, a diet of nothing but raw meat contains everything a person needs to be healthy. Every essential nutrient is present in adequate quantities. Mind you, cooking the meat destroys some of these nutrients (like vitamin C), and eating uncooked meat has many dangers, not to mention the cost of meat.
A little meat goes a long way toward fixing all sorts of dietary deficiencies. That's why it's so highly valued in so many cultures.
The truth is that most vegans must be extremely careful with their diets, or end up weak and sickly (and many end up that way no matter how careful they are). They need to take supplements, because there are some things (like B12) that are either very hard or impossible to get from plants. People with normal, balanced diets which include reasonable servings of meat need only be careful not to eat too much (quite possibly the dumbest nutritional problem to face the wealthy areas of the world: too much food).
IMHO, while it's pretty good for most people, in the standard nutrition system taught in schools, grains and dairy products are overemphasized. Milk is a great food... for some people. Others it just makes sick. I haven't seen studies, but I wouldn't be surprised if ancestry was a factor: in some areas of the world, people have been drinking cow's milk as a staple for millennia, while in other areas milk was only recently introduced. At any rate, people can get by without milk. I like to think of it as being similar to wine and beer; alcoholics tend to be rather unsuccessful individuals, and correspondingly a tendency toward alcoholism is much rarer among peoples who have had booze for millennia (smallpox wasn't the only disease europeans brought to the Americas). The point is that some people can drink several servings of alcohol each day, enjoy lower stress, have no long term damage, and show no signs of addiction, while others who try to follow a habit of daily moderate consumption will be destroyed by it. One human isn't biochemically equivalent to another. Grains tend to be processed into nutritionally worthless starch - great for athletes who have trouble keeping up their short-term glycogen stores, but they just make sedentary people fat.
It's a fuzzy area, due to the rather large variations between humans and the rather narrow samples in typical studies, but when you go dramatically against the conventional wisdom of most cultures going back thousands of years (such as the claim that meat is bad for you), you are almost certainly wrong.
I remember the book, and what he was talking about wasn't a snack with synthetic vitamins mixed in, but a one-stop solution for healthy eating, for the lazy geek who doesn't care too much about variety in his food.
There isn't enough protein, and too many of the calories are from carbohydrates. You can't just eat three of these things per day and have an ideal diet, which was the idea (would it even be safe, with 100% of the recommended intake of so many nutrients?). You have to eat other foods in appropriate quantities.
This doesn't really simplify anything, unless you think multivitamin pills are too complicated.
I'm the same height and weigh about 160 lbs, and I thought I weighed a bit too little, but you must look like a concentration camp victim. By whatever you believe in, man, eat something! It's not a small problem to joke about, you are starving yourself, and it's going to cause problems.
Try keeping a bag of unsalted prezels and a jar of peanut butter at your desk while you work, and learn to munch without thinking about it. Get in the habit of eating three hearty squares per day (or three light meals plus three substantial snacks, if you don't like stuffing yourself), whether you feel like it or not.
If you take a little exercise, too, you'll put on pure muscle, not fat. Two or three times a week, deadlift (that's just grabbing a barbell that's on the floor - keep your back straight and lift with your hips! - and standing up while holding it) with as much weight as you can manage for twenty repetitions (start with the bare bar and add five pounds each time until you can't finish the 20), do as many pushups as you can, then do as many sit-ups as you can. It'll take about 10 minutes each time, and you won't believe the difference it makes in the way you feel (after six months or so, you'll want to balance the program out with some chin-ups and overhead barbell presses and such to keep your body balanced, but keep it simple when you're starting out).
If you don't have easy access to weights, you can do just fine with floor exercises, though you have to learn a bit of technique. The exercises described here are really top notch, though you can get by with the simple exercises you learned in grade school. I would, however, recommend getting a length of bungee cord and doing "pull the bow" and "draw the sword" exercises with it, to balance out the muscles in your shoulders and upper back (watch that you don't snap yourself in the face with it though; goggles are a good idea).
that he praised Windows... in the context of an article on system stability.
WTF?! Most problems with system instability are caused by Windows! The whole article was, in fact, about how to work around the flaws of Windows. A real operating system stays up however badly an app falls apart.
That fewer women go into CS than men is not a problem to be dealt with, just a fact to be recognized.
Individual human beings should not be manipulated to shift demographic trends; it is immoral to do so. Incentives and media campaigns are as wrong as quotas.
So long as individual women are given the respect due their actual talent, without consideration of gender, there is nothing wrong with the fact that fewer of them choose to pursue education or work in any particular field.
As well complain that too few men are training for jobs as kindergarten teachers.
There are natural trends in any distinct human group. Fighting these trends is as unjust and damaging to individual persons as pigeonholing exceptional individuals into stereotypical roles.
I'm not writing about how Perl sucks, because the way in which Perl sucks are well documented: auto-obfuscated, too focused on text processing if you want to do something else, etc.
Perl sucks at some stuff for good reasons, or at least because it is getting old and new stuff had to be kludged in oddly to avoid breaking too much old code. Python, on the other hand, seems to suck because Guido was taking shortcuts when he wrote the original parser and engine, and then never cleaned them up.
The colon: with all this nice, minimal syntax, why oh why do you have to start each block with a colon? You already have the indentation, and you know the line has started at the line break, so why would this superfluous character be included? It's always there, so it provides no useful purpose and you shouldn't have to type it. If it was optional, to be used for single-line blocks, then I would understand, but as it is, it's as silly as if you had to end every line with a semicolon.
The "self" variable: okay, I can sort of accept typing "self" every time I want to access a member, but why do I have to explicitly include it in the declaration of every single method? It is always there, yet you have to type it in again every time!
Why don't the lists efficiently and trivially act as dequeues, like in Perl? A great many problems become trivial with the application of a hash (fortunately present), stack, or queue. A fair portion of Programming Python is dedicated to examples of working around the fact that Python doesn't come with an explicit stack data type built in. The simple inclusion of push, pop, shift, and unshift methods for lists would have standardized and simplified a whole class of problems.
Why can't I specify what data members my class has? If I mistype a name, I want a compile-time error! What kind of class definition doesn't include explicit data members? The mind boggles...
Butt ugly operator overloading: when I define I symbol, I don't want to call it by another name! Use quotes, or use a single new overloading keyword, but don't make me remember a new keyword for every single operator.
No '+=' type operators: I can live without '++' quite happily, but with names stretched by OOP, I just can't stand having to type 'self.objectList[self.currentObject].counter = self.objectList[self.currentObject].counter + 1'. The need for cutting and pasting is a flaw in any language.
No adequate goto replacement: even though Perl has a goto, it also provides an excellent way to avoid goto altogether: the next, last, and repeat statements. With these you can break out of deeply nested loops without any stupid flags or gotos.
These all seem like trifling, silly little things, but in a scripting language, it's the little things that count most, and I've only touched the tip of the iceberg of all the annoying little things in Python. Much as Python people like to talk about the superiority of Python for large-scale projects, I usually reach for a scripting language when I want to hack something with a couple hundred lines of code; if I end up cutting and pasting stacks, or having to write modules for such an elementary function, or otherwise including standard "boilerplate", I might as well go use C++. These are actually major reasons I chose not to switch from Perl to Python.
Python has some really incredible ideas, and borrows some good stuff from Perl. Unfortunately, it fails to steal the very best ideas from Perl, doesn't follow out its own best ideas to their logical ends, and does some other really dumb stuff for no apparent reason. It's a tragedy, because the clean syntax, OOP support, and list handling (except for the dequeue thing) is so superior to Perl it's not even funny. Even with all these flaws, it was a very near race, and I probably would have stuck with Python if I had learned it first.
I'm not sure if you got the joke. I hoped that it was clearly ludicrous, but the truth was intermixed with the lies closely enough to create doubt.
For the record here is what was true and what was a joke (all these statements are true, if it says "joke" that means that I joked the opposite in the original post):
(joke)Most Canadians usually eat soup with a spoon.
(joke)In Ontario (the province in which Toronto, our largest city, is located) high school did indeed go up to grade 13 until recently.
(joke)Canada has more than five provinces, and none of them are named "Southern Canada".
(truth)Every summer, some American tourists come to the southern area of Canada packing cold-weather gear during heat waves. This is the wierdest mental block I've ever observed, as it's not just Floridans but North Dakotans and other people who live nearby and ought to know better.
(truth)Canadians do not live in igloos and no Canadian that I ever heard of has had a pet polar bear, but these are jokes that I've seen Americans believe.
(joke)We do not have compulsory military service in Canada.
(joke)Canadians can own land, however leasing "Crown" land (land belonging to the state, which is technically a monarchy) is quite a common practice. I think property rights may be a bit stronger in the US.
(half-truth)Life in most of Canada is basically very similar to life in the northern states of the US: similar system of education, similar standard of living, we listen to mostly the same music and watch mostly the same TV and movies. There are some significant differences, though; both cultural and in the government.
(half-truth)Canadians do have to pay for their university tuition, but it is subsidized heavily by the government and therefore much cheaper than in the States. FYI, doctor and hospital costs are socialized, but not dentistry and prescription drugs. Also, all wheat farmers have to sell their product through a central government agency (the wheat board). It's an odd mix, generally like in the US but with some random things socialized.
(joke)It would be a very bad idea to "tip" any border offical.
(joke)I made up the concept of maple beer on the spot; while there may or may not be such a thing, it certainly isn't a staple beverage for Canadians.
Somehow I forgot to work in jokes about our 2-dollar bills (isn't there an American saying "phoney as a 2-dollar bill"?). Unfortunately, like grade 13, these were recently phased out, in favor of 2-dollar coins (much to the delight of waitresses, pizza delivery personnel, and border attendents - whoops! did I do it again?).
Perhaps I phrased it poorly. My point was not about whether some individual hedging strategy will result in financial security for a few individuals, but whether any hedging strategy can provide safety for anyone who wants it.
Of course some people will always make money. That doesn't mean that their strategy was foolproof, it means that their strategy coincided with chance market fluctuations. They made a gamble and won; it happens at the horse races all the time.
So many people in the financial world talk about hedging to "remove risk" or "reduce risk" when they're really talking about shifting risk to someone else. When you save your own ass by shorting before a crash, it's at the expense of making the crash doubly worse for someone else.
The truth is that the risk has been moved from betting on individual stocks to betting on hedging strategies. Everyone is doing it, leaving the exact same situation as before sophisticated mathematical hedging strategies came out.
The market will eventually go down. A major downward correction is overdue. Do I have a crystal ball? Of course not, it is a well known fact that stocks in general are overvalued, that their prices are inflated by an excess of capital in the system. I suppose it is possible that instead of stock prices crashing the whole thing will be solved by inflation, but the net result is the same: people don't have the money they think they have, and people who buy in now to stay will lose.
Of course, you could always weasel out of it by calling "getting out" "investing in currency" or some such thing. The best way to short a whole market you know is going down is to get out and stay out until it starts making sense again. If people do this in a considered, rational way instead of waiting for the first frightening downward hickup as an excuse to dump everything and run, we might have a true correction and avoid a drastic crash. The damage has already been done, some people are going to lose, it can be done thoughtfully and the system as a whole will survive, or it can be done thoughtlessly, and goverments will be destabilized, banks will be broken, and chaos will result.
Ah, but they make money from the benefits of doing these things quietly, not from loudly announcing their future intention of doing so.
(besides, treating children badly will never arouse public uproar like killing cute little fuzzy baby seals; after all, the seals would otherwise expect a perfectly comfortable life through to adulthood whereas the children are as likely as not to fall victim to some predator)
No amount of hedging is going to help when the market crashes, and it will inevitably crash. Stocks are grossly overvalued, so they must come down across the board, and when they do, everyone invested in the stock market is going to lose money, and some will lose a lot. A lot of retirement plans are going to come up as around half of what people thought they had squirreled away. If your strategy isn't day-trade gambling, this is the worst possible time to invest (and if it is day trading, go to Vegas and be honest about what you want!).
Do you remember the LTCM fiasco? (LTCM = Long Term Crisis^H^H^H^H^H^HCapital Management) They were the perfect hedgers, leveraged to an insane degree and diversified beyond reproach: they nearly brought down the whole shebang (and probably would have, except for a multi-billion-dollar government bailout).
Why? Because a hedging strategy only works as long as the system remains stable: no major government collapses, no large-scale wars, and no general stock corrections. Since a general downward correction is due, no hedging strategy is valid even in the short term. Since the world in general is not stable, no hedging strategy is ever valid in the long term.
...I wonder if we might not see companies behaving unethically (or at least unpopularly) in the hopes of driving up their stock price.
Things might get a little wierd when you start buying stock in companies you're opposed to.
"Last week, Nil Ethicus Mercantile announced its new plan to club baby seals (using frozen dolphins and beluga whales to cut down on club costs) for the meat of their tongues, to be included in the recipe of an undisclosed school cafeteria supplier's luncheon meat. This week, the value of their shares shot up an amazing 400% as GreenPeace members bought up 60% of their stock. Recognizing the clear market support, several other companies have announced their intent to take up the plan NEM abruptly dropped under its new ownership."
Selling at a loss can be against the law - if there is just an intent to harm a competitor, in much the same way that swinging a hammer can be against the law - if there is an intent to hit someone in the head.
Selling at a loss is a common practice. Ever hear of a "loss leader"? Grocery stores love to advertise a few grossly under-priced items (often with purchase limits), and then rack up the bucks when people fill the cart.
While people talk about companies attacking the competition, doing something with the purpose of harming a competitor is generally not allowed. Since intent can be hard to prove, this generally means a company can't do something that harms a competitor but provides no direct benefit. Predatory pricing is just one example of this. This doesn't mean that a company is obligated to avoid harming competitors (what meaning could "compete" have?), just that it can't go out of its way to cause harm.
If MS intends to put Sega, Nintendo, and Sony out of the game console business by taking large losses for several years, and thereby gain a monopolistic position from which to reap huge profits, they will face legal action.
(IANAL, and I am disgusted by legally enforced monopolies on certain types of speech)
No offense to clueful Americans, but the bulk of your population probably couldn't find Canada on a map.
All the time we get American tourists who expect freezing weather in July in Southern Canada (the largest of the 5 provinces). Or some fool who comes into a restaurant and expects a spoon for their soup (imagine it, eating with a spoon in public! I mean, I do it sometimes at home when I'm alone, but I would never touch one in a restaurant). Worst are the people who don't seem to know to tip the border attendants. I mean, they are way too polite to ever say anything about it, but tips are half of their income!
When I travel to the States, I often find people who believe me when I tell them that I live in an igloo, and a friend of mine even had a group believing that he had a pet polar bear. Then I had one guy believing that life was essentially the same in Canada as in the States. Seriously! He believed me when I told him we didn't have compulsory military service and that Canadians have to pay for a university education just like in the States, he even bought it when I told him Canadians can own land! The funniest time, though, was a few years ago when I had a fellow believing that kids in Toronto go to school up to grade 13. Believe me, I've gotten a few free rounds of maple beer with that little story.
I too am a Canadian, but once I heard this song I recognized the error of my ways!
We Canadians are to blame for all the great American problems. Look at how subtly we insinuate ourselves into American culture, twisting their pleasant music and inoffensive comedy into horrid reflections of the Canadian soul. Just look at how Canadians dominate these fields in the US!
Canada is a backwards nation that has only attained a modern standard of living by leeching off of American accomplishments. For example, there was that period of time when we had an organized program that stole a substantial portion of American slaves! (we called it the Underground Railroad, if you want to look it up) For a more modern example, I don't know a single Canadian who doesn't make unauthorized copies of American software and movies. The government of Canada runs nothing but Windows, but has never paid for a single piece of MS software.
Not only are the creators of South Park Canadian, but so are many prominent people you may have thought were a bit odd, but still American. They don't go to any great lengths to hide it, but somehow it never gets mentioned by any of the 95% of news anchors that are Canadian. Howard Stern, Marilyn Manson, Bill Gates, and Monica Lewinsky are all examples of people you might not have known were born Canadian.
America, on behalf of all Canadians, I apologize! We will destroy your country and feed the entrails of your children to our dogs, but it's nothing personal, eh?
About VERGE... (and the rest)
on
Anarchy Online
·
· Score: 2
Yeah, the page is down, like I said. It crashed a few weeks ago and hasn't come back up. There's a link at the bottom...
Anyway that's kind of the point. It went down and the people running it haven't brought it back up (but surely next time it will come back bigger and better! - so they dream). Giving the developers more freedom killed it because, no longer limited by the engine, they all had these grandiose visions of incredible games which they really couldn't finish.
Anyway, back on topic, I mentioned EROS(seemingly also down...), because one of its big things is persistent store. Instead of having a filesystem, it just has the most incredible virtual memory system you've ever seen. Efficient multithreading is also really the OS's concern; it can do it so much more efficiently with special code.
As for QuakeC, a massive multiplayer RPG is much more complex than Quake. Imagine trying to track everything you do in a MUD while running a Quake match between 400 people.
Also, for your primitives to do most of the work, you need to have a very close idea about what your going to be doing with those primitives, meaning a very specialized and limited engine. I don't dispute that scripting languages in games can be valuable tools, but there's a big difference between a specialized scripting language you use to define the top level interactions and a "sky is the limit" wide open general purpose interpreted language that you use to place the scales on a dragon's back.
You've gotta wonder, is it worth all that effort to put another layer between the implementor and the hardware?
Slashdot Mirror
Forget BSD, forget LGPL, if you want anyone to be able to use your software for whatever they damn well please, release it into the public domain.
The standard arguments against public domain are silly. Releasing a work into the public domain does not waive all your legal rights as the author, only those derived from your copyright. You still have rights as a private person and as the person who made this public speech.
You are responsible for your actions (as is everyone else). If you release code into the public domain, you can still be liable if you coded malicious attacks into it (as you are in any case, no matter what kind of licence you use). However, there is no implied warrantee for public domain software (unlike software you've paid for), so nobody can blame you for any bugs in it.
Furthermore, simply releasing public domain software doesn't grant anyone a special legal right to use your name in their advertisments.
Also, if someone removes your name and claims to have written the software themself (note that this is not the same as simply not mentioning where all their source code came from), or adds malicious or poorly written code and claims that you wrote it, they are responsible for this fraudulent claim. If it harms you, generally you can sue them (the specific tort varies).
Public domain is the only truly free software. It is compatible with any open source licence and free to use for any purpose. The GPL has its place, personally I think it is overused, but there are some situations where it is absolutely vital (for instance, when competing businesses decide to collaborate and standardize on a piece of open software, and want to be sure that nobody sneaks off and breaks the compatability with a proprietary version). However, these other licences which almost recreate the freedom of public domain but add the problem of mutual incompatibility only cause harm.
(IANAL, TINLA)
Given the utterly clueless replies in this thread, I suppose I should clarify that I mean the advantages of a drum compared to a disc using the same modern material science advances etc. NOT the ancient main memory drum vs. modern RAM or even against a modern HD.
You'd think the advantages of drums would still apply today. I bet the data density and sustained read would be a lot better (and obviously more consistent) in both cases.
Are discs just that much cheaper or smaller, or what? I mean, a drum wouldn't fit nicely in the drive slot, but they might come in handy for high-performance web servers.
I bet if you had some nice solid drum drives running at that speed, you could mount them in your car and use them as flywheels for regenerative braking and to hold the world's greatest portable mp3 collection.
Some hardware does alpha blending, much like some hardware accelerates sprites.
More accurately, in the final digital-to-analog conversion hardware those 8 bits aren't used for anything (although they could be put to very good use, if the monitors were of sufficiently high quality: the human eye can detect very faint differences in intensity, more than the 256 possible levels of greyshade in a 24-bit pixel, though the human eye is not really sensitive enough to distinguish between all the possible colors of a 24-bit pixel, so the extra byte could be used to create higher intensity resolution, so you had 16-bits of intensity, 8 implicit in the RGB and 8 explicit). In the image composition acceleration hardware, the extra byte may or may not be used.
You can't have a transparent pixel on your monitor, but you can sometimes have a transparent pixel in your video memory.
Let's see, you want to learn about cookies. These queries bring up porn on the first page of links:
(where's my $100? ^_^ )
I only spent a few minutes thinking about what a child might write, I'm sure there are plenty of other ways to get porn.
Just think of what a kid on the wrestling team would find if he looks for information on his favorite sport! One of my hobbies is judo, which is really a type of wrestling. I like to look into other styles to see if I can adapt their moves, so I have first-hand experience (actually, the situation has greatly improved over the last couple of years, so this example didn't work out as well as I hoped). I had to sift through a lot of deviant gay fantasies before I finally found reviews of "Winning Wrestling Moves" (there aren't any really good web resources, IMHO, but I would probably have never bought this incredible book without the web reviews). I also found the pages of Matt Furey, which opened up a lot of information to me.
Searching simply on "wrestling" gives you a list of totally irrelevant WWF-type pages.
Searching on "amateur wrestling" gets better results.
However, the simple misspelling "amatuer wrestling" brings up porn as the second hit (and the first one doesn't have anything to do with wrestling), with many others to follow.
Don't even get me started on "submission holds"!
(BTW, I used metacrawler in all examples; it used to be the best, though now it pretty much sucks)
Yeah, it was really rude, but geez, that can't be healthy! I just got this image in my mind of a starved person I saw on TV; I guess he was probably more like 70 or 90 lbs, but that's still not that far. He mentioned that he didn't eat properly, so it sounded like he could really be hurting himself (forgetting to eat to the point of endangering your health: anorexia neglecta?).
Besides, that's how I talk to everyone. I'll be having a conversation, when suddenly I'll realize how stupid the person is. I'll say "My God, you're stupid! For the sake of humanity I hope you aren't planning on breeding." Or I'll notice that one of my co-workers is drinking too much coffee and I'll go up to him and say "Gods below! You pathetic drug addict! At least 3 major religions say you're going to hell." Or I'll notice that my girlfriend has bought a new dress, and I'll say "By the First Turnip! Did you look in a mirror before you bought that? Don't you know how fat your ass looks in that dress?" You know, whatever I can do to help in my uniquely tactful way. ^_^
If you want a sixpack, the trick is to lose the fat over your abs. Sorry, it's true. Everybody has those same muscles, you just can't see them because they're under the fat. It doesn't take a lot of fat, just the normal healthy amount. You have to ask yourself if it's worth it to get rid of it. It's not really healthy to lose every last bit of fat from your body. You need that fat to produce some hormones and stuff (yeah, I'm fuzzy on the details). It's also very hard to put on muscle mass if you don't have a little fat on your body (not a lot of fat - that's just hard to lose later), so don't go through the hardship of getting ripped if you still want to put on more muscle. It's also easier to lose fat when you have more muscle.
If you really decide you must lose fat (as I do from time to time; I compete at judo, and it's a weight-category sport), I'm a bit of an extremist, so you might not want to follow my advice (read: "don't follow my advice, I'm a wierdo; presented only for entertainment value"). I like the fat fast. It's a kind of controlled starvation, in which you eat only to attempt to preserve your muscle-mass. Oddly, this means eating almost pure fat, and only in very small quantities. It also means not exercising hard, because you won't have the energy, and your body will want to switch to eating your muscles if you use them. I have pretty good self-control (or maybe I'm just too lazy to figure out more appetizing acceptable food), so I just eat spoonfuls of salad oil. Drink lots of water (you have to flush out those ketones), and feel free to have a little alcohol (as long as there's no sugar in the booze), as it drives you deeper into ketogenesis. I won't provide any links to more information, but it's out there. I don't really recommend it for anyone, though it's probably healthier than what some wrestlers do to make weight...
Anyway, back on topic:
Leglifts work the psoas (hip flexors) more than your abs, which only play a supporting role. This is also true for a large part of situps. A situp is actually a crunch, followed by an isometric contraction while the psoas do the actual lifting. However, it's hard to get a good workout out of crunches on a flat floor.
Your lower abs really aren't seperate from your upper abs. They're part of the same chain, and anything that works one, works the other.
The trick to working out your abs is to exercise over a full range of motion, and to add weight when you need it. You know the way they teach you to do proper crunches? You lie on your back with your hips at a 90 degree angle, and your calves resting on a chair or something (this way, you only work your abs, not your psoas). Anyway, the problem here is that when you curl your abdomen, you're going all the way up, but you hit the floor long before you get all the way down (your back arches as well as curls). You have to put something under your butt and lower back so you can work over a larger range of motion. Ideally, you'd have a bench that matched the natural curve of your arched back, but you can simulate this fairly well on an incline situp bench with a properly sized cushion under your lower back.
Also, don't get silly with numbers. It's better to hold a dumbbell on your chest or behind your head so you can barely do 10 slow crunches than it is to do 150 unweighted crunches. Large weights are best for building muscle, large numbers of reps adapt your muscle to endurance.
However, while it's good to work your abs, the best way to put muscle on them is to work hard at the One True Lift. The OTL varies from person to person, either the deadlift or the squat. It works muscles all over your body and in some odd way puts muscle on everywhere. I have no idea why, but it works.
You can't be talking to the guy you replied to, since he was ranting about the gross overconsumption of protein. You certainly can't be talking to me, since I agreed that most Americans (being meat-eaters, and overfed at that) get plenty of protein.
I also agree that an excess of meat is bad for you. It collects in the colon, rots, and causes intestinal problems, for one thing. Eating too much of any one thing is bad for you. The best diet is a balanced one, and, for most people, including a moderate amount of meat.
Athletes vary widely in their eating habits (BTW, why would you except pro wrestlers? I wouldn't call them athletes per se, but the good ones are incredibly strong and shockingly agile for such large men), from vegans to people who pig out on fried chicken weekly. Most are more moderate and eat well-balanced meals with appropriate servings of meat, like I try to. Many take protein supplements. I can't figure out where your "chocolate-shake-and-fries" thing came from, since I only mentioned such diets as an unfortunate trend.
The Chinese love meat as much as any people on the planet. Their pictograph for happiness even contains the image of a pig. Are you going to tell me that's the sign of a society which has long considered meat undesirable? However, it is true that they don't eat anywhere near the quantities of meat typical of western countries.
As for the peoples of India, a great many of them have religious prohibitions against eating meat, so I wouldn't expect them to have anything good to say about it (the same would apply to many Chinese vegetarians). You might, however, read about Ghandi's little adventure in carnivorism, and the reasoning that led him to it (it doesn't really support my point, but it's amusing). At any rate, protein deficiency is fairly common in India.
Regardless of whether your claims about these countries are true, they are occupied by people of generally small stature. How, exactly, does that support the notion that eating meat doesn't affect stature?
Sure, you can live without meat, if you're careful to get a complete diet. I don't dispute that. I do, however, say that meat is a wholesome food that contains the most essential ingredients for growth. Most people are better off with it than without it.
"most people who smoke will shorten their life" - (off topic, but while we're at it...) not necessarily true. First of all, most smokers ridiculously overindulge. They should be called "smoking addicts" or some such thing, to distinguish them from responsible smokers as "alcoholic" distinguishes alcohol addicts from responsible drinkers. I smoke a pipe once every few weeks, and I honestly believe it will never harm me. Secondly, some people are more vulnerable to smoking-related illness than others. Women, for instance, are much more likely to get lung cancer from smoking than men are. Women should never smoke, or have to work in places where they are constantly exposed to second-hand smoke. Some men, though, are quite capable of smoking through their entire lives without any side-effect. However, I do believe that men who get sick from smoking are mostly people who abuse tobacco in an insane manner, rather than smoking a few cigarettes per week, they smoke a several per day, or even over a pack, to the point that it impairs them even in the short term. That's just stupid, they shouldn't be surprised when they get sick from it. At any rate, it's not good for you, but I think most men could get away with it without any ill effects, if only they'd be reasonable about their usage.
Meat makes you strong. This isn't a modern fad, but a truism held among the majority of cultures for all history. Meat eaters are, in general, bigger and stronger than vegetarians. This applies both in individual and cultural comparisons. People of wealthy countries in southeast asia are getting larger, rapidly approaching the size of typical westerners, where they've added more meat to their diet. The most important thing about meat is the concentration of protien in usable form, though it contains other important nutrients.
It's true, though, that most people in wealthy western countries easily get enough protein. That doesn't mean that a diet of meatless burritos wouldn't be short on protein.
The rise in fragile bones among young people is just one among many growing nutrition problems due mostly to the wierdly picky yet lazy eating habits of a spoiled generation, and, more fundamentally, the disappearance of the traditional homemaker and isolation of the child-raising household from the traditional helpers (like grandparents and other close relatives). Where do you learn good eating habits? From your mother, of course. If she makes sure you eat three squares a day and stay away from sugary treats and garbage fried in rancid oil, you tend to follow those guidelines. If she lets you have anti-food like pop tarts for breakfast and Coke as your staple beverage because she doesn't have the time or support to develop proper parenting skills (rather, I should say, mothering skills, since a father's traditional role is rather different) which allow her to efficiently deal with a child's determined opposition (or simply doesn't have time for anything healthy, which I feel is a lesser issue), you tend to follow those habits as well (and start out your independent adult life already unhealthy from a poor diet).
Convenience food is bad food. Someone in the household needs to spend about an hour or two each day in preparing real food, or the family's health suffers. Even if people have the right idea about what foods are good, they need time to make it. It's a cultural problem, based on overprideful specialization which devalues the skills of ability for direct action. People are expected to do nothing but pursue money, and are chastised if they try to provide for their loved ones other than through purchasing. A homemade garment is ridiculed, a wholesome home-cooked meal is less desired than food-like items from McDonalds, and people are even looked down on for having their hair cut at home. It's a sad state of affairs.
Everyone has "studies" and "facts" supporting their claims, but most of it is just sophistry to support emotional judgements.
If you want real truth about nutrition, just look at the diets of primitive societies. They didn't cheat on their diets, because they couldn't. There is no confusion over supposed mechanisms, because you are looking at the actual results, without even considering mechanisms.
Yes, eating lots of meat reduces the calcium in your bones, that must be true. Yeah, that's why european explorers and researchers marveled at the incredible strength in the teeth of the eskimos, who ate a diet consisting almost entirely of meat. One notable anecdote is of a fellow, whose fingers proved unequal to the task, removed a tight nut from a bolt with this teeth. They had their problems, but fragile bones weren't an issue.
That's why tribal humans often go to great lengths to acquire meagre servings of meat when they have little of it: because it's bad for them and nature's brutal teaching process has slowly shaped their society into the pursuit of poor health. That makes perfect biological sense, doesn't it?
Actually, a diet of nothing but raw meat contains everything a person needs to be healthy. Every essential nutrient is present in adequate quantities. Mind you, cooking the meat destroys some of these nutrients (like vitamin C), and eating uncooked meat has many dangers, not to mention the cost of meat.
A little meat goes a long way toward fixing all sorts of dietary deficiencies. That's why it's so highly valued in so many cultures.
The truth is that most vegans must be extremely careful with their diets, or end up weak and sickly (and many end up that way no matter how careful they are). They need to take supplements, because there are some things (like B12) that are either very hard or impossible to get from plants. People with normal, balanced diets which include reasonable servings of meat need only be careful not to eat too much (quite possibly the dumbest nutritional problem to face the wealthy areas of the world: too much food).
IMHO, while it's pretty good for most people, in the standard nutrition system taught in schools, grains and dairy products are overemphasized. Milk is a great food... for some people. Others it just makes sick. I haven't seen studies, but I wouldn't be surprised if ancestry was a factor: in some areas of the world, people have been drinking cow's milk as a staple for millennia, while in other areas milk was only recently introduced. At any rate, people can get by without milk. I like to think of it as being similar to wine and beer; alcoholics tend to be rather unsuccessful individuals, and correspondingly a tendency toward alcoholism is much rarer among peoples who have had booze for millennia (smallpox wasn't the only disease europeans brought to the Americas). The point is that some people can drink several servings of alcohol each day, enjoy lower stress, have no long term damage, and show no signs of addiction, while others who try to follow a habit of daily moderate consumption will be destroyed by it. One human isn't biochemically equivalent to another. Grains tend to be processed into nutritionally worthless starch - great for athletes who have trouble keeping up their short-term glycogen stores, but they just make sedentary people fat.
It's a fuzzy area, due to the rather large variations between humans and the rather narrow samples in typical studies, but when you go dramatically against the conventional wisdom of most cultures going back thousands of years (such as the claim that meat is bad for you), you are almost certainly wrong.
I remember the book, and what he was talking about wasn't a snack with synthetic vitamins mixed in, but a one-stop solution for healthy eating, for the lazy geek who doesn't care too much about variety in his food.
There isn't enough protein, and too many of the calories are from carbohydrates. You can't just eat three of these things per day and have an ideal diet, which was the idea (would it even be safe, with 100% of the recommended intake of so many nutrients?). You have to eat other foods in appropriate quantities.
This doesn't really simplify anything, unless you think multivitamin pills are too complicated.
Try keeping a bag of unsalted prezels and a jar of peanut butter at your desk while you work, and learn to munch without thinking about it. Get in the habit of eating three hearty squares per day (or three light meals plus three substantial snacks, if you don't like stuffing yourself), whether you feel like it or not.
If you take a little exercise, too, you'll put on pure muscle, not fat. Two or three times a week, deadlift (that's just grabbing a barbell that's on the floor - keep your back straight and lift with your hips! - and standing up while holding it) with as much weight as you can manage for twenty repetitions (start with the bare bar and add five pounds each time until you can't finish the 20), do as many pushups as you can, then do as many sit-ups as you can. It'll take about 10 minutes each time, and you won't believe the difference it makes in the way you feel (after six months or so, you'll want to balance the program out with some chin-ups and overhead barbell presses and such to keep your body balanced, but keep it simple when you're starting out).
If you don't have easy access to weights, you can do just fine with floor exercises, though you have to learn a bit of technique. The exercises described here are really top notch, though you can get by with the simple exercises you learned in grade school. I would, however, recommend getting a length of bungee cord and doing "pull the bow" and "draw the sword" exercises with it, to balance out the muscles in your shoulders and upper back (watch that you don't snap yourself in the face with it though; goggles are a good idea).
WTF?! Most problems with system instability are caused by Windows! The whole article was, in fact, about how to work around the flaws of Windows. A real operating system stays up however badly an app falls apart.
That fewer women go into CS than men is not a problem to be dealt with, just a fact to be recognized.
Individual human beings should not be manipulated to shift demographic trends; it is immoral to do so. Incentives and media campaigns are as wrong as quotas.
So long as individual women are given the respect due their actual talent, without consideration of gender, there is nothing wrong with the fact that fewer of them choose to pursue education or work in any particular field.
As well complain that too few men are training for jobs as kindergarten teachers.
There are natural trends in any distinct human group. Fighting these trends is as unjust and damaging to individual persons as pigeonholing exceptional individuals into stereotypical roles.
I'm not writing about how Perl sucks, because the way in which Perl sucks are well documented: auto-obfuscated, too focused on text processing if you want to do something else, etc.
Perl sucks at some stuff for good reasons, or at least because it is getting old and new stuff had to be kludged in oddly to avoid breaking too much old code. Python, on the other hand, seems to suck because Guido was taking shortcuts when he wrote the original parser and engine, and then never cleaned them up.
The colon: with all this nice, minimal syntax, why oh why do you have to start each block with a colon? You already have the indentation, and you know the line has started at the line break, so why would this superfluous character be included? It's always there, so it provides no useful purpose and you shouldn't have to type it. If it was optional, to be used for single-line blocks, then I would understand, but as it is, it's as silly as if you had to end every line with a semicolon.
The "self" variable: okay, I can sort of accept typing "self" every time I want to access a member, but why do I have to explicitly include it in the declaration of every single method? It is always there, yet you have to type it in again every time!
Why don't the lists efficiently and trivially act as dequeues, like in Perl? A great many problems become trivial with the application of a hash (fortunately present), stack, or queue. A fair portion of Programming Python is dedicated to examples of working around the fact that Python doesn't come with an explicit stack data type built in. The simple inclusion of push, pop, shift, and unshift methods for lists would have standardized and simplified a whole class of problems.
Why can't I specify what data members my class has? If I mistype a name, I want a compile-time error! What kind of class definition doesn't include explicit data members? The mind boggles...
Butt ugly operator overloading: when I define I symbol, I don't want to call it by another name! Use quotes, or use a single new overloading keyword, but don't make me remember a new keyword for every single operator.
No '+=' type operators: I can live without '++' quite happily, but with names stretched by OOP, I just can't stand having to type 'self.objectList[self.currentObject].counter = self.objectList[self.currentObject].counter + 1'. The need for cutting and pasting is a flaw in any language.
No adequate goto replacement: even though Perl has a goto, it also provides an excellent way to avoid goto altogether: the next, last, and repeat statements. With these you can break out of deeply nested loops without any stupid flags or gotos.
These all seem like trifling, silly little things, but in a scripting language, it's the little things that count most, and I've only touched the tip of the iceberg of all the annoying little things in Python. Much as Python people like to talk about the superiority of Python for large-scale projects, I usually reach for a scripting language when I want to hack something with a couple hundred lines of code; if I end up cutting and pasting stacks, or having to write modules for such an elementary function, or otherwise including standard "boilerplate", I might as well go use C++. These are actually major reasons I chose not to switch from Perl to Python.
Python has some really incredible ideas, and borrows some good stuff from Perl. Unfortunately, it fails to steal the very best ideas from Perl, doesn't follow out its own best ideas to their logical ends, and does some other really dumb stuff for no apparent reason. It's a tragedy, because the clean syntax, OOP support, and list handling (except for the dequeue thing) is so superior to Perl it's not even funny. Even with all these flaws, it was a very near race, and I probably would have stuck with Python if I had learned it first.
I'm not sure if you got the joke. I hoped that it was clearly ludicrous, but the truth was intermixed with the lies closely enough to create doubt.
For the record here is what was true and what was a joke (all these statements are true, if it says "joke" that means that I joked the opposite in the original post):
Somehow I forgot to work in jokes about our 2-dollar bills (isn't there an American saying "phoney as a 2-dollar bill"?). Unfortunately, like grade 13, these were recently phased out, in favor of 2-dollar coins (much to the delight of waitresses, pizza delivery personnel, and border attendents - whoops! did I do it again?).
Perhaps I phrased it poorly. My point was not about whether some individual hedging strategy will result in financial security for a few individuals, but whether any hedging strategy can provide safety for anyone who wants it.
Of course some people will always make money. That doesn't mean that their strategy was foolproof, it means that their strategy coincided with chance market fluctuations. They made a gamble and won; it happens at the horse races all the time.
So many people in the financial world talk about hedging to "remove risk" or "reduce risk" when they're really talking about shifting risk to someone else. When you save your own ass by shorting before a crash, it's at the expense of making the crash doubly worse for someone else.
The truth is that the risk has been moved from betting on individual stocks to betting on hedging strategies. Everyone is doing it, leaving the exact same situation as before sophisticated mathematical hedging strategies came out.
The market will eventually go down. A major downward correction is overdue. Do I have a crystal ball? Of course not, it is a well known fact that stocks in general are overvalued, that their prices are inflated by an excess of capital in the system. I suppose it is possible that instead of stock prices crashing the whole thing will be solved by inflation, but the net result is the same: people don't have the money they think they have, and people who buy in now to stay will lose.
Of course, you could always weasel out of it by calling "getting out" "investing in currency" or some such thing. The best way to short a whole market you know is going down is to get out and stay out until it starts making sense again. If people do this in a considered, rational way instead of waiting for the first frightening downward hickup as an excuse to dump everything and run, we might have a true correction and avoid a drastic crash. The damage has already been done, some people are going to lose, it can be done thoughtfully and the system as a whole will survive, or it can be done thoughtlessly, and goverments will be destabilized, banks will be broken, and chaos will result.
Really! Grade 13! Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous?
Ah, but they make money from the benefits of doing these things quietly, not from loudly announcing their future intention of doing so.
(besides, treating children badly will never arouse public uproar like killing cute little fuzzy baby seals; after all, the seals would otherwise expect a perfectly comfortable life through to adulthood whereas the children are as likely as not to fall victim to some predator)
No amount of hedging is going to help when the market crashes, and it will inevitably crash. Stocks are grossly overvalued, so they must come down across the board, and when they do, everyone invested in the stock market is going to lose money, and some will lose a lot. A lot of retirement plans are going to come up as around half of what people thought they had squirreled away. If your strategy isn't day-trade gambling, this is the worst possible time to invest (and if it is day trading, go to Vegas and be honest about what you want!).
Do you remember the LTCM fiasco? (LTCM = Long Term Crisis^H^H^H^H^H^HCapital Management) They were the perfect hedgers, leveraged to an insane degree and diversified beyond reproach: they nearly brought down the whole shebang (and probably would have, except for a multi-billion-dollar government bailout).
Why? Because a hedging strategy only works as long as the system remains stable: no major government collapses, no large-scale wars, and no general stock corrections. Since a general downward correction is due, no hedging strategy is valid even in the short term. Since the world in general is not stable, no hedging strategy is ever valid in the long term.
...I wonder if we might not see companies behaving unethically (or at least unpopularly) in the hopes of driving up their stock price.
Things might get a little wierd when you start buying stock in companies you're opposed to.
"Last week, Nil Ethicus Mercantile announced its new plan to club baby seals (using frozen dolphins and beluga whales to cut down on club costs) for the meat of their tongues, to be included in the recipe of an undisclosed school cafeteria supplier's luncheon meat. This week, the value of their shares shot up an amazing 400% as GreenPeace members bought up 60% of their stock. Recognizing the clear market support, several other companies have announced their intent to take up the plan NEM abruptly dropped under its new ownership."
Curse Extrans! I'm going back to HTML!
Selling at a loss can be against the law - if there is just an intent to harm a competitor, in much the same way that swinging a hammer can be against the law - if there is an intent to hit someone in the head.
Selling at a loss is a common practice. Ever hear of a "loss leader"? Grocery stores love to advertise a few grossly under-priced items (often with purchase limits), and then rack up the bucks when people fill the cart.
While people talk about companies attacking the competition, doing something with the purpose of harming a competitor is generally not allowed. Since intent can be hard to prove, this generally means a company can't do something that harms a competitor but provides no direct benefit. Predatory pricing is just one example of this. This doesn't mean that a company is obligated to avoid harming competitors (what meaning could "compete" have?), just that it can't go out of its way to cause harm.
If MS intends to put Sega, Nintendo, and Sony out of the game console business by taking large losses for several years, and thereby gain a monopolistic position from which to reap huge profits, they will face legal action.
(IANAL, and I am disgusted by legally enforced monopolies on certain types of speech)
I sure as hell do.
No offense to clueful Americans, but the bulk of your population probably couldn't find Canada on a map.
All the time we get American tourists who expect freezing weather in July in Southern Canada (the largest of the 5 provinces). Or some fool who comes into a restaurant and expects a spoon for their soup (imagine it, eating with a spoon in public! I mean, I do it sometimes at home when I'm alone, but I would never touch one in a restaurant). Worst are the people who don't seem to know to tip the border attendants. I mean, they are way too polite to ever say anything about it, but tips are half of their income!
When I travel to the States, I often find people who believe me when I tell them that I live in an igloo, and a friend of mine even had a group believing that he had a pet polar bear. Then I had one guy believing that life was essentially the same in Canada as in the States. Seriously! He believed me when I told him we didn't have compulsory military service and that Canadians have to pay for a university education just like in the States, he even bought it when I told him Canadians can own land! The funniest time, though, was a few years ago when I had a fellow believing that kids in Toronto go to school up to grade 13. Believe me, I've gotten a few free rounds of maple beer with that little story.
I too am a Canadian, but once I heard this song I recognized the error of my ways!
We Canadians are to blame for all the great American problems. Look at how subtly we insinuate ourselves into American culture, twisting their pleasant music and inoffensive comedy into horrid reflections of the Canadian soul. Just look at how Canadians dominate these fields in the US!
Canada is a backwards nation that has only attained a modern standard of living by leeching off of American accomplishments. For example, there was that period of time when we had an organized program that stole a substantial portion of American slaves! (we called it the Underground Railroad, if you want to look it up) For a more modern example, I don't know a single Canadian who doesn't make unauthorized copies of American software and movies. The government of Canada runs nothing but Windows, but has never paid for a single piece of MS software.
Not only are the creators of South Park Canadian, but so are many prominent people you may have thought were a bit odd, but still American. They don't go to any great lengths to hide it, but somehow it never gets mentioned by any of the 95% of news anchors that are Canadian. Howard Stern, Marilyn Manson, Bill Gates, and Monica Lewinsky are all examples of people you might not have known were born Canadian.
America, on behalf of all Canadians, I apologize! We will destroy your country and feed the entrails of your children to our dogs, but it's nothing personal, eh?
Yeah, the page is down, like I said. It crashed a few weeks ago and hasn't come back up. There's a link at the bottom...
Anyway that's kind of the point. It went down and the people running it haven't brought it back up (but surely next time it will come back bigger and better! - so they dream). Giving the developers more freedom killed it because, no longer limited by the engine, they all had these grandiose visions of incredible games which they really couldn't finish.
Anyway, back on topic, I mentioned EROS(seemingly also down...), because one of its big things is persistent store. Instead of having a filesystem, it just has the most incredible virtual memory system you've ever seen. Efficient multithreading is also really the OS's concern; it can do it so much more efficiently with special code.
As for QuakeC, a massive multiplayer RPG is much more complex than Quake. Imagine trying to track everything you do in a MUD while running a Quake match between 400 people.
Also, for your primitives to do most of the work, you need to have a very close idea about what your going to be doing with those primitives, meaning a very specialized and limited engine. I don't dispute that scripting languages in games can be valuable tools, but there's a big difference between a specialized scripting language you use to define the top level interactions and a "sky is the limit" wide open general purpose interpreted language that you use to place the scales on a dragon's back.
You've gotta wonder, is it worth all that effort to put another layer between the implementor and the hardware?