In the EU it is not legal to try and forbid anyone to resell items acquired by any means whatsoever.
But if it is formally a rental agreement (whether or not for money) then you are naturally prohibited from reselling. It's not yours to sell. Of course, in that case you'd have a different set of rights instead. The problem only comes with scum who try to claim that you have none of the rights of ownership or of being a lessee, even when you're holding the device in your hands and have given quite a bit of money over for that privilege; it's that which got totally slapped down.
I would pay for NewScientist if I could afford it.
It's worth it; it's the only magazine I subscribe to and I've been getting it for over 20 years. If I was going to get anything else, I'd be seriously torn between Scientific American (more depth than NewSci, but not as current) and the Economist (very smart, even if not always in agreement with me). The only reason I don't is that I'd have a lot of trouble finding time to read them in as much depth as they deserve: I usually only pick up copies when on a business trip...
if I want to make a long distance journey between two cities, I don't get to choose between lots of competing operators - there is one company that operates that route and I'm stuck with them, which means no competition and that's bad for the customer
That depends on the cities in question, and whether you are really keen on optimizing for costs or whether you care about how long it takes as well. It's usually (always?) the case that if you want the fastest vaguely sane option, you pay more.
But developing theories or how life came to be when we have absolutely no definitive way of knowing the original conditions is not science.
A lot of the initial conditions are known — the fundamental energetics of chemistry haven't changed since then, we can make a decent go of estimating what sort of rocks were present, and we know there are some weird things in meteorites because that's still true now — so it is possible to take a reasonable, educated guess as to what is feasible. If the energetics are right and the ingredients are (probably) present, it's a theory that doesn't fall at the first hurdle; the likelihood of something like that happening isn't desperately low.
Can't prove it utterly, of course. We don't have that kind of time machine. But we can have theories, and we can at least make them not require magical intervention to happen.
Of course, this particular theory probably isn't the last word on this particular topic (how life came to be using ATP for energy management inside the cell). Feel free to go away and come up with something better. But if you're going to do that, at least come up with one where the ingredients were somewhat likely to be present and which doesn't require very fancy catalysts (i.e., enzymes powered by ATP) to do critical steps.
Get a starship or space probe to the planet in question and then we'll talk names. Right now, a catalog index is far more useful. (We're not cats, so "I see it, it's mine" doesn't apply.)
No pointers are complicated in any large size software project.
Are you saying they're all simple, or that there aren't any?
Minimizing the potential error, there's a comma missing from the GP's post. Duh! (Pointers are both simple — it doesn't take much to describe what they do — and horribly complicated — their implications run very deep indeed.)
idiots who concatenated strings instead of using string builders, and similar abuses of common sense
Hmm. In many languages, string concatenation is simply string concatenation. Possibly a language which artificially creates two separate ways of handling strings - and not the user's "ignorance" of this baroque mechanism - is actually the thing which is violating common sense?
Doing strings well is very hard, especially if you have the (sensible!) security requirement that they present an immutable model. If you look across many languages, there's always something that's got to give along the way. Some don't have the immutable requirement (which means you've got to manually copy values at key points, an extremely easy way to screw up), some have a tendency to have quadratic performance when building the strings (ow!) and others lock strings to a thread so that they can determine when they can do clever shenanigans under the covers (doing so when there are multiple threads having access to the string is very expensive). Java goes the "quadratic performance" route (viewing immutability and lack of shenanigans to be better ideals to adhere to) adding the StringBuffer/StringBuilder class to allow you to avoid the worst of the problems if you know what you're doing. Alas, a lot of programmers don't really know what they're doing in the first place...
It should also be noted that Java's strings mark a major step change in string implementations; they strongly influenced nearly everything that came afterwards. This wasn't so much to do with performance, but rather to do with the fact that they broke the mold when it came to characters-are-bytes meme that had persisted beforehand. Yes, there were multibyte encodings before; they were rightly regarded with a lot of suspicion (usually because they were truly horrible). Java was able to start out with Unicode, which got rid of a lot of the craziness.
Apple could build their own fab anywhere they wanted with the amount of cash they have. Why is this an issue?
Because it takes 18-24 months between breaking ground on a modern fab to getting chips out the door.
And the margins on being in the physical manufacturing business are totally different to those that Apple is used to today. Investing in a fab would make Wall Street very unhappy with Apple's board...
Easy: Economics. You have similar, if not greater, problems conducting controlled experiments, especially in macroeconomics, and there's even more money and politics involved.
Part of the problem with economics is that any real breakthrough in producing detailed results at the large scale ends up in people rapidly changing their behavior so as to make that breakthrough meaningless. Microeconomics has less of a problem, as most ordinary people (sensibly!) don't read economics journals and wouldn't change their behavior even if they did. Well, except they'd probably sleep rather more soundly; I've never read an economics paper that didn't bore me to tears.
There's lots of evidence that they're not really any safer than handheld calls.
Incidentally, many modern smartphones allow hands-free texting using voice recognition.
You've got to balance ability to enforce as well. Banning things that you can't prove are happening (or at least not without disproportionate effort) is a way to bring the law into disrepute. Not that this stops some legislators. In any case, there's also a general "don't drive distracted" rule too; it's more difficult to prove, which is why other laws like the anti-texting ones are also present, but it is the real rule that people want enforced. After all, a moving car has a lot of momentum and kinetic energy, so failure to keep it under control can have bad consequences for many people.
The weird thing is that electronic devices are so extremely distracting, and good at holding our attention...
This is geek news because she created the conditions where IT professionals could sell their skills at a decent price.
Most of that was actually driven by a combination of generally high skills because of the nascent hobbyist scene, the general world bull market for IT until 2000-2001 (neither of which are really anything to do with the government of the time at all) and a tax loophole which meant that contracting was exceptionally lucrative relative to the costs of working that way. I remember a number of my friends being very upset when that one got closed...
Get enough of it and it will. This occasionally kills people near the crater lakes of some volcanoes. The ratio of partial pressures of O2 and CO2 is many orders of magnitude away from that level in the general atmosphere though.
Ever ask yourself why Computer Modern hasn't become the standard outside of the TeX world?
Ever wonder if you can use other fonts with TeX? Like, you know, lots of people actually do? (I prefer using the classic Times/Helvetica combo for my documents, and that has the advantage of minimizing the size of the postscript/PDF that I produce; YMMV.)
That is true, although it doesn't mean it's easy to find a missing brace in an entire document when you don't know where to look.
Split the document up into separate files. You know, like you would if you were writing a significant program.
Actually the worse problem is finding things like \end{enumerate} etc.
Your environments are too long in that case, and you're putting too much in them. I know you won't like this given your comment, but you actually keep yourself productive and readable by sticking to normal paragraphs as much as possible. By contrast, if you're going for complex nested structures then you're doing it wrong. Or writing law (but I repeat myself).
Even if mining on non-specialized hardware is inefficient it doesn't cost the operator anything, and it greatly reduces their risk of being caught, assuming they don't use the stolen bitcoins in any traceable transactions (the bitcoins are always traceable, but to be caught you have to use them in some transaction that can link them up with your real-world identity).
The bitcoins would look entirely legit, as they wouldn't need to be actually minted on the zombie; the distributed client could just report the key information back to the C&C server which would then do the actual minting (very easy, as there would be no search required). From the outside world's perspective, it would look just like the C&C server has lots of kick-ass hardware to do the searching.
Customary: All human readable date components are 1-based (the first "CE" date is 0001-01-01, not 0000-00-00).
The first date when that calendar system was used was substantially later; it wasn't invented until 525 and took the best part of 300 years to become widely used.
Of course, the widely used calendar systems from 2000 years ago were mostly pretty weird; the Romans would name the year according to the consuls in office that year. Think of it a bit like calling the current year "the fifth year of Obama" except that was the name that was widely used for things like censuses, commercial transactions, and not just politics. (The other system, counting from the founding of the Roman Republic, was only really used by historians.) To our modern eyes, this is just crazy.
You're responding to an AC, arguing with an AC... And you're even arguing against the wrong one!
One had a bit of a point (C++'s template metaprogramming is indeed complicated, especially when combined with some features of C++'s type system, operators and exceptions, and some C++ programmers think that using every last bit of that complexity is a good thing) but obscured it with stupid and irrelevant ranting. (It's not really that important whether the standard library is large or small.) The other was just valueless denialisms from the C++ Internet Defense Force that could only be said to have won anything because the net value of the post being responded to was actually negative.
I wish I hadn't clicked on the "2 hidden comments" link; watching a battle of wits between two unarmed combatants isn't really my thing.
Slashdot Mirror
The bet only counts if you find someone to bet against you. Good luck with that in your case!
In the EU it is not legal to try and forbid anyone to resell items acquired by any means whatsoever.
But if it is formally a rental agreement (whether or not for money) then you are naturally prohibited from reselling. It's not yours to sell. Of course, in that case you'd have a different set of rights instead. The problem only comes with scum who try to claim that you have none of the rights of ownership or of being a lessee, even when you're holding the device in your hands and have given quite a bit of money over for that privilege; it's that which got totally slapped down.
I would pay for NewScientist if I could afford it.
It's worth it; it's the only magazine I subscribe to and I've been getting it for over 20 years. If I was going to get anything else, I'd be seriously torn between Scientific American (more depth than NewSci, but not as current) and the Economist (very smart, even if not always in agreement with me). The only reason I don't is that I'd have a lot of trouble finding time to read them in as much depth as they deserve: I usually only pick up copies when on a business trip...
Ballmer has vision too! Tunnel vision...
if I want to make a long distance journey between two cities, I don't get to choose between lots of competing operators - there is one company that operates that route and I'm stuck with them, which means no competition and that's bad for the customer
That depends on the cities in question, and whether you are really keen on optimizing for costs or whether you care about how long it takes as well. It's usually (always?) the case that if you want the fastest vaguely sane option, you pay more.
The trick is; to multitask all the steps at once.
But that strengthens the burnout when it hits.
But developing theories or how life came to be when we have absolutely no definitive way of knowing the original conditions is not science.
A lot of the initial conditions are known — the fundamental energetics of chemistry haven't changed since then, we can make a decent go of estimating what sort of rocks were present, and we know there are some weird things in meteorites because that's still true now — so it is possible to take a reasonable, educated guess as to what is feasible. If the energetics are right and the ingredients are (probably) present, it's a theory that doesn't fall at the first hurdle; the likelihood of something like that happening isn't desperately low.
Can't prove it utterly, of course. We don't have that kind of time machine. But we can have theories, and we can at least make them not require magical intervention to happen.
Of course, this particular theory probably isn't the last word on this particular topic (how life came to be using ATP for energy management inside the cell). Feel free to go away and come up with something better. But if you're going to do that, at least come up with one where the ingredients were somewhat likely to be present and which doesn't require very fancy catalysts (i.e., enzymes powered by ATP) to do critical steps.
However, do remember the CEO can be held accountable if he or she is deemed negligent.
Normally only by the shareholders (a.k.a., your family).
There's no vanity naming any more.
Get a starship or space probe to the planet in question and then we'll talk names. Right now, a catalog index is far more useful. (We're not cats, so "I see it, it's mine" doesn't apply.)
Are you saying they're all simple, or that there aren't any?
Minimizing the potential error, there's a comma missing from the GP's post. Duh! (Pointers are both simple — it doesn't take much to describe what they do — and horribly complicated — their implications run very deep indeed.)
idiots who concatenated strings instead of using string builders, and similar abuses of common sense
Hmm. In many languages, string concatenation is simply string concatenation. Possibly a language which artificially creates two separate ways of handling strings - and not the user's "ignorance" of this baroque mechanism - is actually the thing which is violating common sense?
Doing strings well is very hard, especially if you have the (sensible!) security requirement that they present an immutable model. If you look across many languages, there's always something that's got to give along the way. Some don't have the immutable requirement (which means you've got to manually copy values at key points, an extremely easy way to screw up), some have a tendency to have quadratic performance when building the strings (ow!) and others lock strings to a thread so that they can determine when they can do clever shenanigans under the covers (doing so when there are multiple threads having access to the string is very expensive). Java goes the "quadratic performance" route (viewing immutability and lack of shenanigans to be better ideals to adhere to) adding the StringBuffer/StringBuilder class to allow you to avoid the worst of the problems if you know what you're doing. Alas, a lot of programmers don't really know what they're doing in the first place...
It should also be noted that Java's strings mark a major step change in string implementations; they strongly influenced nearly everything that came afterwards. This wasn't so much to do with performance, but rather to do with the fact that they broke the mold when it came to characters-are-bytes meme that had persisted beforehand. Yes, there were multibyte encodings before; they were rightly regarded with a lot of suspicion (usually because they were truly horrible). Java was able to start out with Unicode, which got rid of a lot of the craziness.
Because it takes 18-24 months between breaking ground on a modern fab to getting chips out the door.
And the margins on being in the physical manufacturing business are totally different to those that Apple is used to today. Investing in a fab would make Wall Street very unhappy with Apple's board...
That project might not succeed, but if they're getting 18 women pregnant I suspect there are a lot of happy developers anyway.
Well, as long as there's no support issues being raised, sure. I've never known a developer be keen on maintenance.
However, a pagerank-like system at the level of individual journals could work. It's called impact factor and it already exists.
And in fact pagerank is derived from bibliometrics, which is how impact factors are calculated.
Easy: Economics. You have similar, if not greater, problems conducting controlled experiments, especially in macroeconomics, and there's even more money and politics involved.
Part of the problem with economics is that any real breakthrough in producing detailed results at the large scale ends up in people rapidly changing their behavior so as to make that breakthrough meaningless. Microeconomics has less of a problem, as most ordinary people (sensibly!) don't read economics journals and wouldn't change their behavior even if they did. Well, except they'd probably sleep rather more soundly; I've never read an economics paper that didn't bore me to tears.
"[...]and 97% less complexity than traditional servers."
Wait, what? How in the world did they measure this? I'm seriously curious as to this dubious number.
"Now with 67.3% more dubious numbers than traditional advertising copy!"
Now we know why Village People did the song In the Navy.
There's lots of evidence that they're not really any safer than handheld calls.
Incidentally, many modern smartphones allow hands-free texting using voice recognition.
You've got to balance ability to enforce as well. Banning things that you can't prove are happening (or at least not without disproportionate effort) is a way to bring the law into disrepute. Not that this stops some legislators. In any case, there's also a general "don't drive distracted" rule too; it's more difficult to prove, which is why other laws like the anti-texting ones are also present, but it is the real rule that people want enforced. After all, a moving car has a lot of momentum and kinetic energy, so failure to keep it under control can have bad consequences for many people.
The weird thing is that electronic devices are so extremely distracting, and good at holding our attention...
This is geek news because she created the conditions where IT professionals could sell their skills at a decent price.
Most of that was actually driven by a combination of generally high skills because of the nascent hobbyist scene, the general world bull market for IT until 2000-2001 (neither of which are really anything to do with the government of the time at all) and a tax loophole which meant that contracting was exceptionally lucrative relative to the costs of working that way. I remember a number of my friends being very upset when that one got closed...
CO2 doesn't suffocate stuff
Get enough of it and it will. This occasionally kills people near the crater lakes of some volcanoes. The ratio of partial pressures of O2 and CO2 is many orders of magnitude away from that level in the general atmosphere though.
Ever ask yourself why Computer Modern hasn't become the standard outside of the TeX world?
Ever wonder if you can use other fonts with TeX? Like, you know, lots of people actually do? (I prefer using the classic Times/Helvetica combo for my documents, and that has the advantage of minimizing the size of the postscript/PDF that I produce; YMMV.)
That is true, although it doesn't mean it's easy to find a missing brace in an entire document when you don't know where to look.
Split the document up into separate files. You know, like you would if you were writing a significant program.
Actually the worse problem is finding things like \end{enumerate} etc.
Your environments are too long in that case, and you're putting too much in them. I know you won't like this given your comment, but you actually keep yourself productive and readable by sticking to normal paragraphs as much as possible. By contrast, if you're going for complex nested structures then you're doing it wrong. Or writing law (but I repeat myself).
Even if mining on non-specialized hardware is inefficient it doesn't cost the operator anything, and it greatly reduces their risk of being caught, assuming they don't use the stolen bitcoins in any traceable transactions (the bitcoins are always traceable, but to be caught you have to use them in some transaction that can link them up with your real-world identity).
The bitcoins would look entirely legit, as they wouldn't need to be actually minted on the zombie; the distributed client could just report the key information back to the C&C server which would then do the actual minting (very easy, as there would be no search required). From the outside world's perspective, it would look just like the C&C server has lots of kick-ass hardware to do the searching.
Customary: All human readable date components are 1-based (the first "CE" date is 0001-01-01, not 0000-00-00).
The first date when that calendar system was used was substantially later; it wasn't invented until 525 and took the best part of 300 years to become widely used.
Of course, the widely used calendar systems from 2000 years ago were mostly pretty weird; the Romans would name the year according to the consuls in office that year. Think of it a bit like calling the current year "the fifth year of Obama" except that was the name that was widely used for things like censuses, commercial transactions, and not just politics. (The other system, counting from the founding of the Roman Republic, was only really used by historians.) To our modern eyes, this is just crazy.
You're responding to an AC, arguing with an AC... And you're even arguing against the wrong one!
One had a bit of a point (C++'s template metaprogramming is indeed complicated, especially when combined with some features of C++'s type system, operators and exceptions, and some C++ programmers think that using every last bit of that complexity is a good thing) but obscured it with stupid and irrelevant ranting. (It's not really that important whether the standard library is large or small.) The other was just valueless denialisms from the C++ Internet Defense Force that could only be said to have won anything because the net value of the post being responded to was actually negative.
I wish I hadn't clicked on the "2 hidden comments" link; watching a battle of wits between two unarmed combatants isn't really my thing.