And if the UK were split into constituent parts, no US state is likely to be worse than Scotland for general health and life expectancy.
Deep-fried butter vs deep-fried mars bars... no, I don't think I can call that one. (OTOH, Scotland's much further north than anywhere in the continental 48, so there's a lot of health problems associated with lack of winter sunlight to contend with in addition to historically poor diet.)
One major issue I have with current copyright laws is that it seems that characters can be copyrighted.
That's you being confused, as what is going on there is Trademark. Trademarks are theoretically perpetual, but only if actively used. They also have to be wholly non-functional aspects whose primary purpose is to be distinctive in the public mind, and are typically very specific as that is far easier to defend. Every trademark exists to allow a particular participant in the marketplace to clearly identify themselves to their customers, and nobody should ever need to copy one.
An expiry of the copyright on Steamboat Willie would allow that creative work to be freely redistributed, but not new Mickey Mouse works to be created because that's an active trademark. OTOH, why would you want to copy Disney's trademarks? Why would you want to pretend to be them? Be yourself! Create your own distinctive voice.
Sometimes the wealth piles up in great mounds on the "elite"
Actually, the place in society where the wealth piles up pretty much defines who is part of the elite. There are many possible reasons for the accumulation to happen (inheritance, business, kleptocracy, all sorts of possibilities) and many people think that the reason for it is terribly important. I'm not so sure it is though: I prefer to abstract all that away and use a thermodynamic model where the basis of economic activity is random exchange of money (totally an approximation!) The amazing thing is that *just that* (and the fact that money isn't infinitely divisible) gives an accumulation of wealth, an elite, and a middle class too. Of course, once you've got a thermodynamic model, you can measure its temperature (with many thanks to Ludwig Boltzmann). What I don't know, but suspect is true, is that healthier economies have higher monetary temperatures, that recessions are when the temperature is falling and booms are when it is rising.
Of course, it's vastly oversimplified. But it is an interesting thought experiment that any true geek ought to appreciate as it is rooted in universal truths and abstracts away from vast amounts of confusing detail. Probably scares the pants off social scientists though...
Yes but if the over-the-Internet Consultation is suppose to be free or a minimal charge; you will not find a lot of Doctors doing it. The good thing I guess, is that it would be easy to weed out the Doctors who are in it for the money, verses the Doctors that actually care about their Patients. From my personal experience, a real caring Doctor is a rarity in the USA.
The healthcare system is very different in the US to in the UK. In particular, patients don't (usually) pay doctors to get treated in the UK so there's no incentive for the medics to incompletely treat someone, and there's a part of the system that is genuinely motivated to reduce overall costs and which will therefore invest in preventative medicine. (I won't argue that it's a perfect system though, just less broken in terms of overall cost-effectiveness.)
Java is designed to be predictable? Can I have RAII with it?
For memory? No. Not that that's really all that important when dealing with a garbage-collected system (and modern GC systems don't have to pause the world while they run).
For other resources — the ones where it is really important to get it right — you've got the try-with-resources construct in Java 7 (a good idea basically borrowed from C#) which gives you predictable reclamation points. Older code used try-finally (or was buggy; ho hum).
Can I know how memory I use at any given moment?
Yes. There's good tools for that sort of thing, and they're actually easier to use than with C and C++.
Can I guarantee repeatable runtime behavior?
If you stick to deterministic constructs and software patterns, the behavior of the program will be repeatable. If you don't, it won't. That's true for all languages. In terms of memory management, generational garbage collection is the big thing that makes the difference: most allocated objects have very short lifespans (because Java doesn't use stack allocation at all) and so can be disposed of very rapidly.
It would be somewhat effective against artillery shells. Most large shells travel slowly and rely on explosives for their damage. Heat one up enough and you'll either bork the fuse or set off the explosives prematurely. Now you've got non-aerodynamic shrapnel with a relatively low terminal velocity raining down rather than a high explosive shell.
The other thing about slow moving artillery shells is that they're slow, so there's time to effect the flight path. Heat the metal enough and you'll have superheated metal gas ablating from the surface of the shell. The force from that will be enough to alter the course of the projectile. With enough tracking/accuracy, you could theoretically divert the shell to land somewhere harmless (or at least less damaging).
Yes, but there's also hypervelocity rail guns under development that get the projectile going rather faster (many times the speed of sound) where the time to heat up the incoming shell would be a lot less. Admittedly, the main target use for them is probably going to be making the range extreme, but at close quarters the sheer kinetic energy would be devastating and a laser would make next to no difference at all.
Of course, Congressman Greg Walden's press release didn't say he introduced a bill, nor shared it with the public - it merely says he announced that he has a plan to introduce a bill.
Oh, so he has a plan to come up with a plan that won't work because people likely to be opposed to it can block it forever? That's such a good use of his time there...
The simplest fix is to raise the retirement age so that the boomers have less time to claim it before they die. Congress doesn't want to do that of course, since it will be incredibly unpopular with the segment of the population most likely to vote, but it is the financially- and actuarially-correct fix.
It's the boomers' fault, their collective failure; they didn't pop out enough kids or persuade their children to do that.
As of this writing (January 2013) the United Kingdom still uses MILES to measure distance, MILES PER HOUR to measure speed, STONES and POUNDS and OUNCES to measure weight, and FLUID OUNCES to measure volume.
That's inaccurate. While miles and mph are used for road distances and vehicular speeds, and pints and gills (but not fluid ounces so much) for certain liquid measures (principally of alcoholic drinks other than wine, though some milk sales are still in pints), the vast majority of the country operates on metric units. The big changes were prompted by the fact that changing made trade with the rest of the EU much easier, I suspect. The other big change was in temperature measurements, where the change was driven by TV weather forecasters just switching to mainly showing temperatures in C rather than F on the screen; some people grumbled for a while, but people very quickly adapted. After all, the two key temperature boundaries are "do I need to watch out for ice when driving?" and — very rare in the UK this — "do I need the AC on or I'll die?" and you can learn two numbers very quickly indeed.
I hadn't looked in depth at them before; the mix of HTTP, TCP and low-level bit-bashing is just... too depressing for Monday. I look forward to seeing someone implement websockets over BLOAT. After all, there's no problem that can't be fixed by another layer of abstraction!!!
1)Web programmers tend to be lower skill programmers....
2)There's a hack it and get it done mentality to web programmers....
I agree with these two statements. But your next one:
3)The entire AJAX and framework of web programming is wrong. It was a quick hack added so that you could make dynamic apps using existing technologies without major changes to clients. But its layered hack upon hack upon hack. We really need to scrap it all and come up with a web application programming stack- a new markup language that's meant to do pixel perfect rendering (HTML is not, but its used that way), an HTTP replacement that's stateful rather than stateless, a cleaner way of sending data back and forth from the server. But if you write on top of an ugly platform, you're going to get ugly code.
That's just ignorant of how nasty client programming really is. The reality is that using a stateless base layer of HTTP and building a state system on top of that (e.g., with REST) is significantly easier to make work properly in a hostile physical network environment than what you propose.
AJAX is one heck of a lot easier to deal with though once it's been tamed with a library like jQuery, and once you've wrapped your head around asynchronous programming. Some programmers never really get async programming (I feel sorry for them, missing out on such powerful techniques) but it is really very useful for almost all network and GUI coding. There's no shame in using a library to make networking nicer; raw POSIX socket calls are horrendous from the perspective of the vast majority of application programmers...
4)Language issues. Javascript was never a good language- hell, you can tell that from the fact it's very name was a blatant marketing maneuver. Lack of a good object model is a real problem.
There's not much wrong with prototype-based object models; they're different, not wrong. If you were going to rag on the language design, it would be far better to grouse about the "fun" gotchas in scoping and the way one handles modularization...
Computer science and software engineering are very different things. The former is largely about theory and is often heavily mathematical. The latter is about the practical things that the CMU student didn't get. Many of the best known CS programs have the same weakness; courses on the practicalities of programming are either not required or not even offered.
Problem is there's not really time to run the really critical things to make someone appreciate SE, such as having to maintain some piece of code for several years in the face of mostly-nonsensical user requests. A good CS course is already full of other material, some of which is really important and non-trivial (Foundational Concurrency is full of stuff that is genuinely non-obvious and useful, yet you need to cover a lot of other material first to understand it properly).
The best programmers are those who are eager naturals at both CS and SE, and who have had proper exposure to college-level material; it greatly accelerates the willing mind by helping it to avoid the many dead-ends. (Now, if only more programmers knew properly about the history of computing and so stopped repeating the SAME STUPID MISTAKES over and over and over, life would be so much better...)
Are those newspapers going to pay €300 to each of the sites that they link to? Or do they think that they should be specially privileged and allowed to charge outrageously without ever needing to let someone do it back to them?
Presumably Google does advertising business in Ireland.
Google does a lot of business in Ireland (mainly for morally-shady tax reasons) but why would they care about some newspapers there? Google doesn't normally advertise with the newspapers for some reason, and yet I suspect that the newspapers may well sell their online ads via Google.
Google won't want to pay, so Google won't post a link to their sites. Ever. Anywhere.
If there's no legal teeth, no agreement or contract, then Google will just ignore them. Setting a policy does not by itself mean anything if you can't get the people to whom you think that policy should apply to to agree to abide by it.
Otherwise I could easily use that same trick to my advantage: I have a policy that everyone on Slashdot that has a "q" in their username should pay me $500! So what if you think it's silly? It's a policy!!!!!
The meter was defined as the 10 millionth of the distance between Northpole and Equator.
It's even better than that; it was originally the distance from the North Pole to the Equator along the Paris meridian. Which they measured wrongly, as it was a very difficult thing with surveying equipment of the time (only with the advent of satellites have we managed to nail that figure down properly). However, the length of the meter itself is rather arbitrary; it doesn't really matter how long it actually is as long as we know exactly how long it is. Any other length unit should be a constant multiple of it (and that pretty much works up to a light year; the parsec is a little more awkward). These days, it's defined in terms of the second and the speed of light and is known with extreme precision.
Base 12 is actually much easier to "bring calculation...within the arithmetic of every man..."
12 has 6 factors. 10 has 4. Divide 12 into thirds and you get a nice and neat "4" instead of.33333333....
No base is perfect for all uses; by the time you get a nice number of divisors in, the minimum size of the base becomes too large to have a sane set of symbols; 60 is the minimum to get all nice divisors up to 5. (Unless you're a computer, of course, when using a base like 256 makes a great deal of sense even if that doesn't deal with dividing by 3...)
Slashdot Mirror
There's nothing he can do to hurt Star Wars: the prequels have already ruined it forever.
The Holiday Special. You have not even begun to appreciate the power of the dark side.
And if the UK were split into constituent parts, no US state is likely to be worse than Scotland for general health and life expectancy.
Deep-fried butter vs deep-fried mars bars... no, I don't think I can call that one. (OTOH, Scotland's much further north than anywhere in the continental 48, so there's a lot of health problems associated with lack of winter sunlight to contend with in addition to historically poor diet.)
One major issue I have with current copyright laws is that it seems that characters can be copyrighted.
That's you being confused, as what is going on there is Trademark. Trademarks are theoretically perpetual, but only if actively used. They also have to be wholly non-functional aspects whose primary purpose is to be distinctive in the public mind, and are typically very specific as that is far easier to defend. Every trademark exists to allow a particular participant in the marketplace to clearly identify themselves to their customers, and nobody should ever need to copy one.
An expiry of the copyright on Steamboat Willie would allow that creative work to be freely redistributed, but not new Mickey Mouse works to be created because that's an active trademark. OTOH, why would you want to copy Disney's trademarks? Why would you want to pretend to be them? Be yourself! Create your own distinctive voice.
Being an asshole is legal, and should be.
But it does mean you don't get invited to nearly so many parties.
What's going to happen with 3D printers?
You want a gun that only might fire safely once?
Sometimes the wealth piles up in great mounds on the "elite"
Actually, the place in society where the wealth piles up pretty much defines who is part of the elite. There are many possible reasons for the accumulation to happen (inheritance, business, kleptocracy, all sorts of possibilities) and many people think that the reason for it is terribly important. I'm not so sure it is though: I prefer to abstract all that away and use a thermodynamic model where the basis of economic activity is random exchange of money (totally an approximation!) The amazing thing is that *just that* (and the fact that money isn't infinitely divisible) gives an accumulation of wealth, an elite, and a middle class too. Of course, once you've got a thermodynamic model, you can measure its temperature (with many thanks to Ludwig Boltzmann). What I don't know, but suspect is true, is that healthier economies have higher monetary temperatures, that recessions are when the temperature is falling and booms are when it is rising.
Of course, it's vastly oversimplified. But it is an interesting thought experiment that any true geek ought to appreciate as it is rooted in universal truths and abstracts away from vast amounts of confusing detail. Probably scares the pants off social scientists though...
Yes but if the over-the-Internet Consultation is suppose to be free or a minimal charge; you will not find a lot of Doctors doing it. The good thing I guess, is that it would be easy to weed out the Doctors who are in it for the money, verses the Doctors that actually care about their Patients. From my personal experience, a real caring Doctor is a rarity in the USA.
The healthcare system is very different in the US to in the UK. In particular, patients don't (usually) pay doctors to get treated in the UK so there's no incentive for the medics to incompletely treat someone, and there's a part of the system that is genuinely motivated to reduce overall costs and which will therefore invest in preventative medicine. (I won't argue that it's a perfect system though, just less broken in terms of overall cost-effectiveness.)
Linux is an operating system, not a belief system.
Heretic! Heathen! Infidel!
If you repent and say three Hail Stallmans we'll let you off this time...
Java is designed to be predictable? Can I have RAII with it?
For memory? No. Not that that's really all that important when dealing with a garbage-collected system (and modern GC systems don't have to pause the world while they run).
For other resources — the ones where it is really important to get it right — you've got the try-with-resources construct in Java 7 (a good idea basically borrowed from C#) which gives you predictable reclamation points. Older code used try-finally (or was buggy; ho hum).
Can I know how memory I use at any given moment?
Yes. There's good tools for that sort of thing, and they're actually easier to use than with C and C++.
Can I guarantee repeatable runtime behavior?
If you stick to deterministic constructs and software patterns, the behavior of the program will be repeatable. If you don't, it won't. That's true for all languages. In terms of memory management, generational garbage collection is the big thing that makes the difference: most allocated objects have very short lifespans (because Java doesn't use stack allocation at all) and so can be disposed of very rapidly.
Beer and Hammers being made of atoms does equate to beer being made of hammers.
But you could make a (not very practical) hammer out of frozen beer.
It would be somewhat effective against artillery shells. Most large shells travel slowly and rely on explosives for their damage. Heat one up enough and you'll either bork the fuse or set off the explosives prematurely. Now you've got non-aerodynamic shrapnel with a relatively low terminal velocity raining down rather than a high explosive shell.
The other thing about slow moving artillery shells is that they're slow, so there's time to effect the flight path. Heat the metal enough and you'll have superheated metal gas ablating from the surface of the shell. The force from that will be enough to alter the course of the projectile. With enough tracking/accuracy, you could theoretically divert the shell to land somewhere harmless (or at least less damaging).
Yes, but there's also hypervelocity rail guns under development that get the projectile going rather faster (many times the speed of sound) where the time to heat up the incoming shell would be a lot less. Admittedly, the main target use for them is probably going to be making the range extreme, but at close quarters the sheer kinetic energy would be devastating and a laser would make next to no difference at all.
Of course, Congressman Greg Walden's press release didn't say he introduced a bill, nor shared it with the public - it merely says he announced that he has a plan to introduce a bill.
Oh, so he has a plan to come up with a plan that won't work because people likely to be opposed to it can block it forever? That's such a good use of his time there...
Because people will take out more than they put in with all of those systems. No, enough interest is not earned to make up the difference.
Not anymore: Social Security Now Takes More Than it Gives (or Google: SSI return on investment)
The simplest fix is to raise the retirement age so that the boomers have less time to claim it before they die. Congress doesn't want to do that of course, since it will be incredibly unpopular with the segment of the population most likely to vote, but it is the financially- and actuarially-correct fix.
It's the boomers' fault, their collective failure; they didn't pop out enough kids or persuade their children to do that.
As of this writing (January 2013) the United Kingdom still uses MILES to measure distance, MILES PER HOUR to measure speed, STONES and POUNDS and OUNCES to measure weight, and FLUID OUNCES to measure volume.
That's inaccurate. While miles and mph are used for road distances and vehicular speeds, and pints and gills (but not fluid ounces so much) for certain liquid measures (principally of alcoholic drinks other than wine, though some milk sales are still in pints), the vast majority of the country operates on metric units. The big changes were prompted by the fact that changing made trade with the rest of the EU much easier, I suspect. The other big change was in temperature measurements, where the change was driven by TV weather forecasters just switching to mainly showing temperatures in C rather than F on the screen; some people grumbled for a while, but people very quickly adapted. After all, the two key temperature boundaries are "do I need to watch out for ice when driving?" and — very rare in the UK this — "do I need the AC on or I'll die?" and you can learn two numbers very quickly indeed.
js can be used for console scripting just as well as perl.
So too can PHP I hear, but of the three I'd still prefer Perl.
And yet, WebSockets exist.
I hadn't looked in depth at them before; the mix of HTTP, TCP and low-level bit-bashing is just... too depressing for Monday. I look forward to seeing someone implement websockets over BLOAT. After all, there's no problem that can't be fixed by another layer of abstraction!!!
1)Web programmers tend to be lower skill programmers. ...
2)There's a hack it and get it done mentality to web programmers. ...
I agree with these two statements. But your next one:
3)The entire AJAX and framework of web programming is wrong. It was a quick hack added so that you could make dynamic apps using existing technologies without major changes to clients. But its layered hack upon hack upon hack. We really need to scrap it all and come up with a web application programming stack- a new markup language that's meant to do pixel perfect rendering (HTML is not, but its used that way), an HTTP replacement that's stateful rather than stateless, a cleaner way of sending data back and forth from the server. But if you write on top of an ugly platform, you're going to get ugly code.
That's just ignorant of how nasty client programming really is. The reality is that using a stateless base layer of HTTP and building a state system on top of that (e.g., with REST) is significantly easier to make work properly in a hostile physical network environment than what you propose.
AJAX is one heck of a lot easier to deal with though once it's been tamed with a library like jQuery, and once you've wrapped your head around asynchronous programming. Some programmers never really get async programming (I feel sorry for them, missing out on such powerful techniques) but it is really very useful for almost all network and GUI coding. There's no shame in using a library to make networking nicer; raw POSIX socket calls are horrendous from the perspective of the vast majority of application programmers...
4)Language issues. Javascript was never a good language- hell, you can tell that from the fact it's very name was a blatant marketing maneuver. Lack of a good object model is a real problem.
There's not much wrong with prototype-based object models; they're different, not wrong. If you were going to rag on the language design, it would be far better to grouse about the "fun" gotchas in scoping and the way one handles modularization...
It did, and we are all now posting from hell.
No change there then.
Are car designers responsible for drunk drivers?
Does their design replace the passenger seat with a beer keg?
If not, why not?! That sounds awesome!
Provided the car is self-driving, of course.
Computer science and software engineering are very different things. The former is largely about theory and is often heavily mathematical. The latter is about the practical things that the CMU student didn't get. Many of the best known CS programs have the same weakness; courses on the practicalities of programming are either not required or not even offered.
Problem is there's not really time to run the really critical things to make someone appreciate SE, such as having to maintain some piece of code for several years in the face of mostly-nonsensical user requests. A good CS course is already full of other material, some of which is really important and non-trivial (Foundational Concurrency is full of stuff that is genuinely non-obvious and useful, yet you need to cover a lot of other material first to understand it properly).
The best programmers are those who are eager naturals at both CS and SE, and who have had proper exposure to college-level material; it greatly accelerates the willing mind by helping it to avoid the many dead-ends. (Now, if only more programmers knew properly about the history of computing and so stopped repeating the SAME STUPID MISTAKES over and over and over, life would be so much better...)
Are those newspapers going to pay €300 to each of the sites that they link to? Or do they think that they should be specially privileged and allowed to charge outrageously without ever needing to let someone do it back to them?
Presumably Google does advertising business in Ireland.
Google does a lot of business in Ireland (mainly for morally-shady tax reasons) but why would they care about some newspapers there? Google doesn't normally advertise with the newspapers for some reason, and yet I suspect that the newspapers may well sell their online ads via Google.
Google won't want to pay, so Google won't post a link to their sites. Ever. Anywhere.
If there's no legal teeth, no agreement or contract, then Google will just ignore them. Setting a policy does not by itself mean anything if you can't get the people to whom you think that policy should apply to to agree to abide by it.
Otherwise I could easily use that same trick to my advantage: I have a policy that everyone on Slashdot that has a "q" in their username should pay me $500! So what if you think it's silly? It's a policy!!!!!
The meter was defined as the 10 millionth of the distance between Northpole and Equator.
It's even better than that; it was originally the distance from the North Pole to the Equator along the Paris meridian. Which they measured wrongly, as it was a very difficult thing with surveying equipment of the time (only with the advent of satellites have we managed to nail that figure down properly). However, the length of the meter itself is rather arbitrary; it doesn't really matter how long it actually is as long as we know exactly how long it is. Any other length unit should be a constant multiple of it (and that pretty much works up to a light year; the parsec is a little more awkward). These days, it's defined in terms of the second and the speed of light and is known with extreme precision.
Base 12 is actually much easier to "bring calculation...within the arithmetic of every man..."
12 has 6 factors. 10 has 4. Divide 12 into thirds and you get a nice and neat "4" instead of .33333333....
No base is perfect for all uses; by the time you get a nice number of divisors in, the minimum size of the base becomes too large to have a sane set of symbols; 60 is the minimum to get all nice divisors up to 5. (Unless you're a computer, of course, when using a base like 256 makes a great deal of sense even if that doesn't deal with dividing by 3...)