I'd be interested in reading the statue for where you live. Because where I'm at, the law states you're required to have proof of insurance for the vehicle
A year or so back, my wife and I were on a vacation trip in the Southwest, and were pulled over in Arizona. We were ticketed for not having an "insurance card" in the car. We live in Massachusetts, where auto registration requires giving proof of insurance, and the registration paper (which we did have in the car) clearly states this at the bottom. It also states that the registration paper is proof of insurance. The cop didn't care; we didn't have what Arizona considers an "insurance card", so he wrote us a ticket.
As for the rest, there's a reason why you can make civilian complaints, but then again in the US; you guys got the police you wanted.
Sorry, that reasoning doesn't work in our case. As Massachusetts residents, we are not allowed to vote in Arizona, and thus are permitted no input to any Arizona state policies. So the hoary old "you voted for them so it's your fault" saw can't apply at all. We didn't vote for or against them, because we're not residents there.
Yet another reason to avoid being a tourist in Arizona. Too bad; except for the local authorities' attitudes toward non-residents of Arizona, there are lots of reasons one might like to vacation there.
Easy; just a tap of a key "translated" it for me. Y'see, years ago I wrote me a little program that I call rot13, and I've set up a lot of programs to map a function key to invoke it on the current text. When I saw your message, I hit the function key, and your message got translated to:
Like many/. readers, I read this at close to full reading speed without skipping a beat.
We h4x0rz have ways to deal with people like you.
Note that I've also encoded this message by feeding it to rot13 twice. According to the DMCA, unauthorized decoding of this message is thus a federal crime which can get you a huge fine and several years in a federal pen. So if you admit to reading this message without my written authorization, you can be in a lot of trouble.;-)
(And I wonder if speakers/writers of "Ebonics" could use the DMCA in a similar way to prevent people from trying to "decode" their speech? Others here have already made the argument that that dialect exists primarily to obscure the meaning of their words to people who know only a "standard" English dialect, so it should legally qualify as an "encryption" under the DMCA.)
*PS, do you guys actually call it American? Don't get me wrong, its your call and everything, I'm not one to interfere with your culture and all. It just seems really cheesey, as if American is so different from all other Englishes that we couldn't possibly understand you.
Suggestion: Go into any bookstore and find the case with all the dictionaries. Look for the "English" dictionaries. If you're in the US, you won't find many. The English dictionaries printed in the US mostly call themselves a "Dictionary of the American Language".
This isn't intended as a political action or anything, and it's not a claim that "American" is different from other dialects of English. It's just an acknowledgement of the fact that the English language contains lots of dialects. One of the major English dialects is General American, spoken by a majority of Americans. It contains many sub-dialects, of course, but they all have a long list of common features that distinguish them from other major English dialects.
American dictionary makers recognized long ago that English is a collection of dialects. They mostly agreed that "English" without modifiers really should mean a dialect primarily spoken in England. Again, this isn't a political or sociological stance; it's just acknowledging the linguistic facts in the collection of dialects known as "English".
Actually, it would be technically more accurate if they said "Dictionary of the General American dialect of English". There are several other major dialects of English spoken in North America. (Trivia question: What are the common names that linguists use for these other major dialects?)
There are yet other significant English dialects spoken in England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and India. The American publishers of dictionaries generally don't deal with those other English dialects, except in their etymological notes. But there are publishers in most of those countries that provide dictionaries for their dialects of English. Some of them just call their dialect "English", while others use more specific names for their dialects.
If we let ISPs decide for us which packets are more important than others, what's to stop them from favoring popular games while ignoring the rest?
Hey, that's a nice little MMPORPG you've got there. It'd be too bad if it weren't playable because the players of other games have soaked up all the bandwidth. Y'know, for a small monthly gratuity, we could make sure that didn't happen to your game. Whaddaya say?
Ok, so it's the US's fault that the taliban is cutting off woman's noses? OOOOOOOOOOk. Next.
No, it's not entirely the US government's fault; it's mainly the fault of the people who did it. But if the US government helps put a gang of people in power, and members of that gang commit atrocities, you'd sorta expect that people would pin part of the blame on the US government (and anyone else who has supported the bad guys). Every legal system recognizes concepts such as "accessory" to a crime, and puts part of the blame on people who support and assist the actual criminals.
BTW do any of you idiots hail from former soviet bloc counties? Thought not.
The fact that there are other evil people in the world isn't justification for being evil yourself. No legal system anywhere accepts "Other people are committing crimes" as exoneration for a crime that you committed or were an accessory to.
What we have is good? Try telling that to the old-timers like me who remember when USENET was a place where people enjoyed conversing, rather than a place of spam, hatred and hostility.
Well, that's what we get for inviting the marketers and politicos in on what we were building. If we'd kept up the pretense that it was an Ivory Tower thing only of interest to academic types (and our military funders;-), we wouldn't have these problems.
Of course, we'd also probably not have connectivity to our homes or mobile phones. The only way to make the Internet available everywhere we want to go is to make it universally available. The universe includes those marketers and politicos, so it was inevitable that they'd stumble into our sandbox and behave the way they've always behaved.
If you actually have to force someone to have sex with you, you're raping them. If they actually wanted this to occur, the intention would be unmistakably clear.
Oh, nonsense. I've been told by several women, usually several years after the fact, that I'd disappointed them by ignoring their offers of sex. Fact was that they'd just been a bit too subtle for my simple mind. Maybe their intention was unmistakably clear to someone else, but it wasn't to me.
Of course, I suppose they could have been lying to me with this later claim. In either case, it's obvious that I've misunderstood at least some of their intentions.
I learned long ago that whenever an advertiser says "up to", you should always translate it as "less than" in your mind. That's what they're really saying; they're just saying it in a way that's misleading but legal.
If you had been following the case you would know that students were expressly forbidden to put tape over the camera. They would have been punished had they done it.
Hmmm... That's something that I don't recall ever reading in the copious coverage of this case. If true, I'd think it would imply that the school officials had the intent of using the cameras so spy on the students. But is this actually true?
I've always routinely taped over anything that looks like a camera lens in any computer or other electronic gadget that I'm working on, and remove the tape during brief periods when I actually use the camera. So far, nobody has ever questioned this.
I guess the last lighting installation I did is in violation of your patent simply by using off the shelf components.
Um, I suspect that this is why that patent was described as "goofy". The folks at the patent office didn't understand that everything in it was decades-old technology. They just rubber-stamped it, went on to the next patent application, and collected their salary.
The main point here is the idiocy of the current USPTO. Corporations can and do patent any sort of old technology. A well-known poster child is the famous patent on a technique for swinging a swing sideways. Gosling's patent isn't nearly as goofy as that. His patent is mostly a demo of what you can achieve by taking an old idea and dressing it up in high-tech-sounding terminology.
It would be funny if it weren't turning into the standard technique for blocking startups, and reserving the "Market" for only corporations with the patent portfolio and legal team to drag court cases out for years, and bankrupting the small players with legal fees.
This may give them veto rights over any expansion of the EU.
Nah; what they'll do is calculate the new physical center of Europe, and sue the closest town to that point for infringement.
It's an easy way to make money of an innocent victim. The courts will probably go along, too, after deciding that the patent (or trademark or whatever) registration is valid.
On the other hand, there has been widespread acknowledgement that UTF-8 solves the charset problems well enough that we should simply decree it the standard and move on. But then, some organizations started doing that 15 years ago, and we still have a long way to go. Lots of people, especially most American corporate managers, simply don't care. Everyone should just learn English, y'know.
I can tell you: nothing beats plain old ASCII text files!
Well I believe utf-8 encoded text files beats them hands down. Especially for scientific research.//snarky
Hey, no need to be snarky about it!
I've run into a number of tasks where we "standardized" on ASCII plain-text files, and then ran across problems like people and place names in French, Russian, Greek, and/or Chinese. It was a real relief when we officially replaced the "ASCII" with "UTF-8" throughout the docs. The only problem then was finding versions of all the system commands that didn't garble the non-English names. That's a problem that you just have to fight one app at a time.
But we're slowly supplanting the "English only" attitude of the American vendors, primarily by not dealing with then when we stumble across this problem. It gets harder with the European vendors with their "8859-1 (Latin1) only" attitude. But we're finding ways to replace them with more cooperative vendors. All this is probably good news for the Asian vendors. We do find that if we buy software that supports Chinese and Japanese, then it also supports all European and American languages, too.
(But I just know that someday soon, we'll have to support Mayan writing. To my knowledge, Mayan still doesn't have its own Unicode block. But I could be wrong. And yes, I actually do have some Mayan writing on my own personal web site.;-)
I think it may be appropriate to consider pulling all Java related technologies out of Linux distributions. Clearly Java is now as dangerous as Mono is.
So is there a summary of all the Java-related stuff in Linux? I don't offhand know of anything critical that's written in Java, but I'm no expert on the topic. But if we can get a good list of the endangered Java-coded components, we can start working on rewriting them in a safer language.
For that matter, is there a reasonable way to put together a list of patent/copyright/trademark issues in various languages (and their libraries)? It could be useful to have an explicit list of such problems, and whether they're known, suspected, or charged, together with whatever knowledgeable commentary we can collect. Such information could help a lot of startups, small companies, and various other organizations who don't have millions of spare dollars to defend themselves in court.
... Miguel is the author of Mono, so take this with a grain of salt. He's usually the one having an argument against someone saying how everyone should use Java because Microsoft will pull the same type of stunt against Mono some day, so this must be a humorous day for him.
Oh, I dunno. I'd wonder how many developers are looking at this and deciding to use some language other than Java until the courts tell us that it's safe to use Java again.
Not that I expect the courts to say that. More likely, they'll say something that not even IP lawyers understand, and the legal status of our Java code will still be ambiguous.
I think I'll stick to C, perl, tcl and python. Are there any outstanding questions about the legal status of code in those languages?
(15 to 20 years back, I worked for several companies who decided against using Sys/V in products for just this reason. The C libraries there, and thus all binaries, contained AT&T copyright notices. The company lawyers said it was possible that if a product became successful, AT&T could sue for copyright violation, and might win. Using AT&T's libraries was possibly gambling all your profits on the good will of AT&T. So libraries were used that didn't do this. I just checked some binaries of mine on some FreeBSD, linux and OS X systems, and none of them contain copyright notices.)
Heh. Yeah, a lot of the better "algebraic" calculators get 2+2*2 right. But most of the cheaper calculators don't. I just tried an experiment with the Calculator app on my Macbook Pro. When I typed "2+2*2=", it gave me 6. So far, so good. Then I typed "2+2=*2=", to see the intermediate result. The final result was 8.;-)
I suspect that the people in the survey who replied with 8 were the sort that implement cheap calculators in their heads. That's what they've always used for their math, so that's the correct result in their minds.
Except that TFA didn't express it that way; they only referred to "the problem 4+3+2=()+2", with no further explanation of the unconventional use of "()". They they claimed that inability to solve this problem shows a lack of understanding of the "=", while it would more likely merely show unfamiliarity with the ill-formed expression "()". This would classify most experienced mathematicians as not understanding "=".
The arguments in favor of this approach might be summarized by the passage in Alice in Wonderland:
`But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument",' Alice objected.
`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'
The problem with this approach is that, when you use language or notation in a nonstandard manner, you usually lose the ability to communicate with anyone outside your tiny in-group with its own jargon or notation. It may well be true that most of the general population doesn't understand your peculiar notation, but that doesn't imply ignorance. It merely means that you've made up a nonstandard notation that most people don't understand.
I'm just an engineer and all, but I had to look at it twice to understand what they were looking for.
Yeah, me to, except I have math and comp sci degrees. I didn't even understand that that bizarre expression that's not a well-formed expression was a question to be answered, until I read the discussion and found a bunch of jerks ridiculing people who don't automatically grok nonstandard (and ill-formed) expressions such as that one.
I'm tempted to rephrase the question using traditional Chinese or Sanskrit or Arabic notation, and see how many of those jerks instantly understand what I'm writing. But luckily for them, slashdot doesn't permit non-Latin1 notation, so my rephrasings can't be posted here.
Presenting obscure or idiosyncratic notation, and then ridiculing people for not understanding it, is merely being a jerk. It says nothing about the intelligence or education of your victims. If it did, I could easily "prove" that 99% of Americans are totally ignorant of mathematics, by simply presenting them with a set of problems in classical Greek or Arabic or Chinese, and observing that they fail to answer any of the problems.
OTOH, I've learned some new notation from this discussion, so it's not a total loss.;-)
..., it's just that after punching everything into a calculator for all their lives, they don't understand that = means equality instead of "what do the things I just entered equal?"
An excellent example of this is the recent observation that if you ask most people under the age of 50 or so what 2 + 2 * 2 equals, they'll answer "8". And if you object that it should be 6, they'll pull out their calculator and "prove" that it's 8.
I don't see how blowing up sidewalk cafes and city buses could EVER be counted as revolutionary.
You clearly haven't paid much attention to modern marketing techniques. In a day when we can have ads for a "Revolutionary New Toothpaste!!!" (or dish detergent or nail polish), it's obviously easy to apply "revolutionary" to anything you like. Or don't like, as the case may be.
Similarly for "terrorism". The US Dept of State has a definition that basically reduces to "any use of force against us or our friends". So if we drop a kiloton bomb on your house, that's not terrorism, but if you accidentally brush against us while passing in a hallway, that's terrorism. It's not the act; its whether we approve of the person committing the act.
You should pay attention to the way the PR folks are using language. Then you'd understand a lot of the political language around you.
His (her?) point was probably that the less/fewer peeve is bogus. If you consult any competent history of the English language (e.g., the OED), you'll learn that "less" has been used for countable quantities for as long as we have cites for its uses. Also, math in English has always used "less than" for all numeric comparisons, discrete or continuous, and has rarely ever used "fewer" for anything. The math symbol '<' is always read "less than"; never "fewer than".
The idea that "less" should be only for mass-like quantities and "fewer" only for discrete, countable quantities is a pseudo-rule made up by people who wanted to limit them to distinct meanings. This pseudo-rule goes against the entire history of these two words in English.
(I wonder why we never seem to hear about a similar peeve for "more" vs. "greater". Hmmm... maybe I could start a whole new language peeve, with a bit of posting to various blogs...;-)
Not true; indenting by a tab means to indent however the reader has his/her tab stops set. I usually have my tab stops set to 3 or 4 chars, so when I read tab-indented code, that's what I see.
Not only is there no rule that "TAB is always 8 spaces"; if there were such a rule, there's be no way it could ever be enforced. Most display software written since 1980 or so has included the ability to define tab stops, and you can't prevent people from setting them however they like them.
(Occasionally, mostly when reading HTML from commercial junk-HTML generators, I set the tab stops to 2 spaces, so they'll be more readable on my screen, which is a mere 19200 pixels wide.;-)
If you read that xkcd comic's discussion, you'll find a number of explanations explaining why it's usually as bad as the comic describes. Some of those comments apply directly to the discussion here.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be interested in reading the statue for where you live. Because where I'm at, the law states you're required to have proof of insurance for the vehicle
A year or so back, my wife and I were on a vacation trip in the Southwest, and were pulled over in Arizona. We were ticketed for not having an "insurance card" in the car. We live in Massachusetts, where auto registration requires giving proof of insurance, and the registration paper (which we did have in the car) clearly states this at the bottom. It also states that the registration paper is proof of insurance. The cop didn't care; we didn't have what Arizona considers an "insurance card", so he wrote us a ticket.
As for the rest, there's a reason why you can make civilian complaints, but then again in the US; you guys got the police you wanted.
Sorry, that reasoning doesn't work in our case. As Massachusetts residents, we are not allowed to vote in Arizona, and thus are permitted no input to any Arizona state policies. So the hoary old "you voted for them so it's your fault" saw can't apply at all. We didn't vote for or against them, because we're not residents there.
Yet another reason to avoid being a tourist in Arizona. Too bad; except for the local authorities' attitudes toward non-residents of Arizona, there are lots of reasons one might like to vacation there.
f3e10hfYL, g3u 1ZCy1p4G10AF 0s 4 Fh8PHyghe3 Q3I3Y0c1A' 1g'f 0jA y4a9H493 E F3E10HFYL q1fGhe81a'. gehYl 4Z3e1p4 u4F S41Y3q gU3M3 p1G1M3af.
This made sense to you how?
Easy; just a tap of a key "translated" it for me. Y'see, years ago I wrote me a little program that I call rot13, and I've set up a lot of programs to map a function key to invoke it on the current text. When I saw your message, I hit the function key, and your message got translated to:
s3r10usLY, t3h 1MPl1c4T10NS 0f 4 Su8CUltur3 D3V3L0p1N' 1t's 0wN l4n9U493 R S3R10USLY d1sTur81n'. truLy 4M3r1c4 h4S F41L3d tH3Z3 c1T1Z3ns.
Like many /. readers, I read this at close to full reading speed without skipping a beat.
We h4x0rz have ways to deal with people like you.
Note that I've also encoded this message by feeding it to rot13 twice. According to the DMCA, unauthorized decoding of this message is thus a federal crime which can get you a huge fine and several years in a federal pen. So if you admit to reading this message without my written authorization, you can be in a lot of trouble. ;-)
(And I wonder if speakers/writers of "Ebonics" could use the DMCA in a similar way to prevent people from trying to "decode" their speech? Others here have already made the argument that that dialect exists primarily to obscure the meaning of their words to people who know only a "standard" English dialect, so it should legally qualify as an "encryption" under the DMCA.)
*PS, do you guys actually call it American? Don't get me wrong, its your call and everything, I'm not one to interfere with your culture and all. It just seems really cheesey, as if American is so different from all other Englishes that we couldn't possibly understand you.
Suggestion: Go into any bookstore and find the case with all the dictionaries. Look for the "English" dictionaries. If you're in the US, you won't find many. The English dictionaries printed in the US mostly call themselves a "Dictionary of the American Language".
This isn't intended as a political action or anything, and it's not a claim that "American" is different from other dialects of English. It's just an acknowledgement of the fact that the English language contains lots of dialects. One of the major English dialects is General American, spoken by a majority of Americans. It contains many sub-dialects, of course, but they all have a long list of common features that distinguish them from other major English dialects.
American dictionary makers recognized long ago that English is a collection of dialects. They mostly agreed that "English" without modifiers really should mean a dialect primarily spoken in England. Again, this isn't a political or sociological stance; it's just acknowledging the linguistic facts in the collection of dialects known as "English".
Actually, it would be technically more accurate if they said "Dictionary of the General American dialect of English". There are several other major dialects of English spoken in North America. (Trivia question: What are the common names that linguists use for these other major dialects?)
There are yet other significant English dialects spoken in England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and India. The American publishers of dictionaries generally don't deal with those other English dialects, except in their etymological notes. But there are publishers in most of those countries that provide dictionaries for their dialects of English. Some of them just call their dialect "English", while others use more specific names for their dialects.
If we let ISPs decide for us which packets are more important than others, what's to stop them from favoring popular games while ignoring the rest?
Hey, that's a nice little MMPORPG you've got there. It'd be too bad if it weren't playable because the players of other games have soaked up all the bandwidth. Y'know, for a small monthly gratuity, we could make sure that didn't happen to your game. Whaddaya say?
Ok, so it's the US's fault that the taliban is cutting off woman's noses? OOOOOOOOOOk. Next.
No, it's not entirely the US government's fault; it's mainly the fault of the people who did it. But if the US government helps put a gang of people in power, and members of that gang commit atrocities, you'd sorta expect that people would pin part of the blame on the US government (and anyone else who has supported the bad guys). Every legal system recognizes concepts such as "accessory" to a crime, and puts part of the blame on people who support and assist the actual criminals.
BTW do any of you idiots hail from former soviet bloc counties? Thought not.
The fact that there are other evil people in the world isn't justification for being evil yourself. No legal system anywhere accepts "Other people are committing crimes" as exoneration for a crime that you committed or were an accessory to.
What we have is good? Try telling that to the old-timers like me who remember when USENET was a place where people enjoyed conversing, rather than a place of spam, hatred and hostility.
Well, that's what we get for inviting the marketers and politicos in on what we were building. If we'd kept up the pretense that it was an Ivory Tower thing only of interest to academic types (and our military funders ;-), we wouldn't have these problems.
Of course, we'd also probably not have connectivity to our homes or mobile phones. The only way to make the Internet available everywhere we want to go is to make it universally available. The universe includes those marketers and politicos, so it was inevitable that they'd stumble into our sandbox and behave the way they've always behaved.
If you actually have to force someone to have sex with you, you're raping them. If they actually wanted this to occur, the intention would be unmistakably clear.
Oh, nonsense. I've been told by several women, usually several years after the fact, that I'd disappointed them by ignoring their offers of sex. Fact was that they'd just been a bit too subtle for my simple mind. Maybe their intention was unmistakably clear to someone else, but it wasn't to me.
Of course, I suppose they could have been lying to me with this later claim. In either case, it's obvious that I've misunderstood at least some of their intentions.
I learned long ago that whenever an advertiser says "up to", you should always translate it as "less than" in your mind. That's what they're really saying; they're just saying it in a way that's misleading but legal.
If you had been following the case you would know that students were expressly forbidden to put tape over the camera. They would have been punished had they done it.
Hmmm ... That's something that I don't recall ever reading in the copious coverage of this case. If true, I'd think it would imply that the school officials had the intent of using the cameras so spy on the students. But is this actually true?
I've always routinely taped over anything that looks like a camera lens in any computer or other electronic gadget that I'm working on, and remove the tape during brief periods when I actually use the camera. So far, nobody has ever questioned this.
I guess the last lighting installation I did is in violation of your patent simply by using off the shelf components.
Um, I suspect that this is why that patent was described as "goofy". The folks at the patent office didn't understand that everything in it was decades-old technology. They just rubber-stamped it, went on to the next patent application, and collected their salary.
The main point here is the idiocy of the current USPTO. Corporations can and do patent any sort of old technology. A well-known poster child is the famous patent on a technique for swinging a swing sideways. Gosling's patent isn't nearly as goofy as that. His patent is mostly a demo of what you can achieve by taking an old idea and dressing it up in high-tech-sounding terminology.
It would be funny if it weren't turning into the standard technique for blocking startups, and reserving the "Market" for only corporations with the patent portfolio and legal team to drag court cases out for years, and bankrupting the small players with legal fees.
This may give them veto rights over any expansion of the EU.
Nah; what they'll do is calculate the new physical center of Europe, and sue the closest town to that point for infringement.
It's an easy way to make money of an innocent victim. The courts will probably go along, too, after deciding that the patent (or trademark or whatever) registration is valid.
On the other hand, there has been widespread acknowledgement that UTF-8 solves the charset problems well enough that we should simply decree it the standard and move on. But then, some organizations started doing that 15 years ago, and we still have a long way to go. Lots of people, especially most American corporate managers, simply don't care. Everyone should just learn English, y'know.
WHERE IS MY TIN FOIL HAT?!?!
You left it on the shelf in the downstairs bathroom.
HTH.
Hey, no need to be snarky about it!
I've run into a number of tasks where we "standardized" on ASCII plain-text files, and then ran across problems like people and place names in French, Russian, Greek, and/or Chinese. It was a real relief when we officially replaced the "ASCII" with "UTF-8" throughout the docs. The only problem then was finding versions of all the system commands that didn't garble the non-English names. That's a problem that you just have to fight one app at a time.
But we're slowly supplanting the "English only" attitude of the American vendors, primarily by not dealing with then when we stumble across this problem. It gets harder with the European vendors with their "8859-1 (Latin1) only" attitude. But we're finding ways to replace them with more cooperative vendors. All this is probably good news for the Asian vendors. We do find that if we buy software that supports Chinese and Japanese, then it also supports all European and American languages, too.
(But I just know that someday soon, we'll have to support Mayan writing. To my knowledge, Mayan still doesn't have its own Unicode block. But I could be wrong. And yes, I actually do have some Mayan writing on my own personal web site. ;-)
I think it may be appropriate to consider pulling all Java related technologies out of Linux distributions. Clearly Java is now as dangerous as Mono is.
So is there a summary of all the Java-related stuff in Linux? I don't offhand know of anything critical that's written in Java, but I'm no expert on the topic. But if we can get a good list of the endangered Java-coded components, we can start working on rewriting them in a safer language.
For that matter, is there a reasonable way to put together a list of patent/copyright/trademark issues in various languages (and their libraries)? It could be useful to have an explicit list of such problems, and whether they're known, suspected, or charged, together with whatever knowledgeable commentary we can collect. Such information could help a lot of startups, small companies, and various other organizations who don't have millions of spare dollars to defend themselves in court.
... Miguel is the author of Mono, so take this with a grain of salt. He's usually the one having an argument against someone saying how everyone should use Java because Microsoft will pull the same type of stunt against Mono some day, so this must be a humorous day for him.
Oh, I dunno. I'd wonder how many developers are looking at this and deciding to use some language other than Java until the courts tell us that it's safe to use Java again.
Not that I expect the courts to say that. More likely, they'll say something that not even IP lawyers understand, and the legal status of our Java code will still be ambiguous.
I think I'll stick to C, perl, tcl and python. Are there any outstanding questions about the legal status of code in those languages?
(15 to 20 years back, I worked for several companies who decided against using Sys/V in products for just this reason. The C libraries there, and thus all binaries, contained AT&T copyright notices. The company lawyers said it was possible that if a product became successful, AT&T could sue for copyright violation, and might win. Using AT&T's libraries was possibly gambling all your profits on the good will of AT&T. So libraries were used that didn't do this. I just checked some binaries of mine on some FreeBSD, linux and OS X systems, and none of them contain copyright notices.)
Heh. Yeah, a lot of the better "algebraic" calculators get 2+2*2 right. But most of the cheaper calculators don't. I just tried an experiment with the Calculator app on my Macbook Pro. When I typed "2+2*2=", it gave me 6. So far, so good. Then I typed "2+2=*2=", to see the intermediate result. The final result was 8. ;-)
I suspect that the people in the survey who replied with 8 were the sort that implement cheap calculators in their heads. That's what they've always used for their math, so that's the correct result in their minds.
4+3+2=()+2 - what number goes in the ()?
Except that TFA didn't express it that way; they only referred to "the problem 4+3+2=()+2", with no further explanation of the unconventional use of "()". They they claimed that inability to solve this problem shows a lack of understanding of the "=", while it would more likely merely show unfamiliarity with the ill-formed expression "()". This would classify most experienced mathematicians as not understanding "=".
The arguments in favor of this approach might be summarized by the passage in Alice in Wonderland:
The problem with this approach is that, when you use language or notation in a nonstandard manner, you usually lose the ability to communicate with anyone outside your tiny in-group with its own jargon or notation. It may well be true that most of the general population doesn't understand your peculiar notation, but that doesn't imply ignorance. It merely means that you've made up a nonstandard notation that most people don't understand.
I'm just an engineer and all, but I had to look at it twice to understand what they were looking for.
Yeah, me to, except I have math and comp sci degrees. I didn't even understand that that bizarre expression that's not a well-formed expression was a question to be answered, until I read the discussion and found a bunch of jerks ridiculing people who don't automatically grok nonstandard (and ill-formed) expressions such as that one.
I'm tempted to rephrase the question using traditional Chinese or Sanskrit or Arabic notation, and see how many of those jerks instantly understand what I'm writing. But luckily for them, slashdot doesn't permit non-Latin1 notation, so my rephrasings can't be posted here.
Presenting obscure or idiosyncratic notation, and then ridiculing people for not understanding it, is merely being a jerk. It says nothing about the intelligence or education of your victims. If it did, I could easily "prove" that 99% of Americans are totally ignorant of mathematics, by simply presenting them with a set of problems in classical Greek or Arabic or Chinese, and observing that they fail to answer any of the problems.
OTOH, I've learned some new notation from this discussion, so it's not a total loss. ;-)
..., it's just that after punching everything into a calculator for all their lives, they don't understand that = means equality instead of "what do the things I just entered equal?"
An excellent example of this is the recent observation that if you ask most people under the age of 50 or so what 2 + 2 * 2 equals, they'll answer "8". And if you object that it should be 6, they'll pull out their calculator and "prove" that it's 8.
Lessee; my wife has an iPhone, and I have a G1 (Android) phone. Should I infer from this that she's getting more sex than I am?
I don't see how blowing up sidewalk cafes and city buses could EVER be counted as revolutionary.
You clearly haven't paid much attention to modern marketing techniques. In a day when we can have ads for a "Revolutionary New Toothpaste!!!" (or dish detergent or nail polish), it's obviously easy to apply "revolutionary" to anything you like. Or don't like, as the case may be.
Similarly for "terrorism". The US Dept of State has a definition that basically reduces to "any use of force against us or our friends". So if we drop a kiloton bomb on your house, that's not terrorism, but if you accidentally brush against us while passing in a hallway, that's terrorism. It's not the act; its whether we approve of the person committing the act.
You should pay attention to the way the PR folks are using language. Then you'd understand a lot of the political language around you.
His (her?) point was probably that the less/fewer peeve is bogus. If you consult any competent history of the English language (e.g., the OED), you'll learn that "less" has been used for countable quantities for as long as we have cites for its uses. Also, math in English has always used "less than" for all numeric comparisons, discrete or continuous, and has rarely ever used "fewer" for anything. The math symbol '<' is always read "less than"; never "fewer than".
The idea that "less" should be only for mass-like quantities and "fewer" only for discrete, countable quantities is a pseudo-rule made up by people who wanted to limit them to distinct meanings. This pseudo-rule goes against the entire history of these two words in English.
(I wonder why we never seem to hear about a similar peeve for "more" vs. "greater". Hmmm ... maybe I could start a whole new language peeve, with a bit of posting to various blogs ... ;-)
Kernel is 1 tab, which is always 8 spaces.
Not true; indenting by a tab means to indent however the reader has his/her tab stops set. I usually have my tab stops set to 3 or 4 chars, so when I read tab-indented code, that's what I see.
Not only is there no rule that "TAB is always 8 spaces"; if there were such a rule, there's be no way it could ever be enforced. Most display software written since 1980 or so has included the ability to define tab stops, and you can't prevent people from setting them however they like them.
(Occasionally, mostly when reading HTML from commercial junk-HTML generators, I set the tab stops to 2 spaces, so they'll be more readable on my screen, which is a mere 19200 pixels wide. ;-)
If you read that xkcd comic's discussion, you'll find a number of explanations explaining why it's usually as bad as the comic describes. Some of those comments apply directly to the discussion here.