Wow. You have, like blown my mind, man. I mean, like, now I know what Camus meant when he wrote: "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide." It's like, *man*. Now putting a bullet in my head would only be a external manifestation of what you've already been doing to it.
Also known as: Get a job you love doing and you'll never work a day in your life.
That's good advice, as far as it goes. The problem is people trying to follow that advice and ending up with jobs they hate. That's because they haven't thought about their fantasy jobs critically.
Ah, but here the Comic-Con fans have demonstrated how misguided your position is. Phelps has provided them with an opportunity not only to express their own contrary opinions, but to have fun doing so.
The metaphysical poet (and Anglican priest) George Herbert has a much more sensible position on this than yours. He once said, "Living well is the best revenge."
Being fulfilled by your work isn't a promise you can trust when made to you by somebody else. It's more the kind of promise you ought to make yourself, and then keep. I've had bad days at work. Lots of them. But I've never had a job that was more pain than pleasure. Most of the jobs I've done, I'd consider doing for free if I didn't need any money. Come to think of it, all of my jobs have been like that. Is that luck? Absolutely not.
I don't think it's true that work sucks, that it has always sucked etc. I think that no matter how good work gets, people will still find a way to be ill content, and no matter how much fulfilling work is available to them, people will still make bad choices.
The Stoic philosophers had an interesting take on this problem (which is by no means a new one). If happiness is having all your wants fulfilled, the surest path to happiness is to restrain your wants. The more extensive and interconnected you let your desires become, the more certain you are to feel unhappy.
Let's look at the young programmer who desperately wants to work in the games industry. Unfortunately, that's oversimplifying his wants. What he really wants is a job
a) in the gaming industry
b) that is interesting
c) with excellent pay
d) with reasonable responsibilities
e) where he is treated with respect
Now you can probably get any one of these desires fulfilled by a job pretty easily, but all of them? That is a tall order. A stoic career counselor (if there were such a thing), would advise a trimming of desires, and (a) would be right at the top of his list. There are so many people who want to work in the games industry, that a realistic person should see that he'll have to compromise on his other desires in order to get it.
There are undoubtedly people working in the games industry whose talent and skill would enable them to fulfill all their desires if they just let go of (a). If they cannot let go of their other desires in order to achieve (a), they've made a bad choice.
The good news is that if you can compromise on overvalued desires (like working in the game industry, or making a boatload of money) you can probably find a bargain on the undervalued desires, like decent working conditions and personal respect. That also requires disciplining your wants in other areas, like driving a very expensive car or collecting lots of high end home electronics. That may sound terrible, but the payoff is that you get to be happy and fulfilled.
I've had a huge payoff on a job criterion that I got from Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Be useful to somebody; be a burden to no one." Most people never even consider the potential of a job to make the lives of people around them easier, more pleasant and rewarding. That property doesn't sound so exciting, but it is extremely undervalued in the job seeker market. That means it's bargain priced. You can get boatloads of the stuff practically for free (i.e. not compromising on other desires). I can almost guarantee that if you put that at the top of your list of job desires, you'll find work that is personally fulfilling.
Let's actually talk about "hubris" for a second: the overweening pride of the tragic hero. Hubris means he cannot see the unintended consequences of his own actions.
In real life, hubris is always a two-way street. It is perfectly possible for the people who want A to suffer from just as much hubris as the people who want not-A. It's quite possible for some people on both sides of the climate debate to suffer from hubris.
The real tip-off is when somebody says something like "I've always thought it was more hubris. It takes quite a bit of arrogance to believe that humanity can change the Earth's climate that much, that fast." What kind of argument is that? The writer dismisses anything that contradicts his intuition as "hubris", and therefore not just one sided (as real hubris is), but entirely wrong. That attitude doesn't even have the one-sided semi-validity needed to qualify as hubris. It's simply argument by magic. The bogeyman might not be real, but wishing somebody didn't exist then calling him a "bogeyman" isn't a valid argument.
It reminds me of the time in the early 90s that the board of a certain public agency turned down the MIS department's request to buy anti-virus software. There was a lot of pressure to reduce the appearance of overspending. The board was outraged that after spending so much money on systems and then be forced to pay more money to keep them running. In their decision, they wrote this: "The integrity of the systems we have paid for will prevent damage from computer viruses." It was like verbally classifying their systems as "having integrity" negated the facts they'd been prevented.
Wishful thinking and a thesaurus is a dangerous combination.
I'm guessing that they managed to coax the potatoes into maintaining their normal osmotic balance when watered with brackish water. For one thing a crop that absorbed the salt would be hard to get consistent.
I actually installed the community edition of SugarCRM a few years ago. My take on it is that it's got the right problem (a big, big, big part of creating a great piece of software), but that the system design and implementation is painfully amateurish. The database schema was an incoherent joke, the code meandering, verbose and inarticulate. There's no reason for code (even PHP) to be that bad.
Obviously a huge amount of work went into the thing. The kind of work you do when you've got a poorly thought out system and real customers to satisfy. The thing about that kind of work is that if you hack away at a system long enough *in response to customer needs*, eventually it will fill those needs fairly well. Being badly engineered doesn't preclude providing value to users. We certainly found it useful, but whenever I had to fix a bug or tweak something, I was constantly amazed that the system worked at all.
Now we all know there are two schools of thought about software development: the incrementalist (make the software work even if it is ugly) and the purist (make it elegant even if you have to rewrite it). The reason these two schools persist is that they are both right in different situations. There are times you have to live with less than elegant, and times when you have to bite the bullet and do major rewrites. I think most successful programmers balance these impulses, tidying up and refactoring as they fix bugs and meet customer's needs. The sign of a skillful programmer is that the more he works on a body of code, the simpler and more elegant it becomes. But when you have a gawdawful mess like SugarCRM, it makes no sense to invest anything more than occasional trivial effort unless you're willing to commit to a complete fork. You'd have to do major refactoring unless you were willing to spend all your time hacking your way through cruft, and the SugarCRM folks probably wouldn't because they actually understand all that unnecessary complexity.
Overall I'd say that SugarCRM is a useful, but mediocre piece of software. If you can live with its limitations, it is an asset, particularly in a small business where you have to introduce management to the novel concept of CRM before getting them to part with money. SugarCRM is not much of an asset to F/OSS, because it's not likely to attract many talented contributors to the core system, yet discourages them from developing competing solutions because it is "good enough" for not-too-demanding users.
Sure it's perfectly legal and moral to set up shell corporations. It's what you do with them that matters.
I do happen to know a little something about corporate accounting. I actually once recommended that a company be split into two captive parts. The reason was that it had highly profitable software half and a very unprofitable hardware sales half. Splitting the company in two had a legitimate purpose: it made it easier to sell the software business by making its value more clear. Eventually it was sold to a company that already had a hardware business and it's co-joined hardware twin simply folded. That was all completely above board.
In accounting you are constantly making up fictional "expenses", but they are offset by fictional income. You do this in order to make the financial performance of your various business structures more clear. What you CANNOT do is make up expenses to mask changes in owner's equity.
I know that stuff that looks like this happens all the time, and there are lots of borderline cases where legal corporations are created in order to take advantage of various angles in tax law. Many of those schemes are probably illegal, but are allowed de facto because nobody has the time to unravel them. That's why certain politicians always try to understaff the IRS. It's not to defend Joe Blow, who can't hide any significant income. It's to protect the guy who can play the "blind them with bullshit" game with armies of lawyers and accountants.
The situation is different for taxes (which are an exaction in which you have no say) and business deals (which are supposed to be negotiated in good faith). When you enter into a profit sharing contract, you can't take a chunk of revenue, move it from your left pocket to your right and call that an "expense". The proper name for that is "fraud". It doesn't matter how formally correct you make the transaction appear. Substance matters in accounting, and if the substance of a transaction is fraudulent, it's fraud.
In fact, that is the very essence of skillful fraud: to make that which is unconscionable seem superficially correct in every form. You can't pass a counterfeit bill and use "it's such a good copy it is indistinguishable from the real thing." You can't engage in a fraudulent transaction and say, "But all the incorporation papers, purchase orders and invoices are in order."
There's a huge gap between having a head full of numbers, being good at math, and being good at understanding the world (which requires math).
There's tension and interplay between understanding statistics (for example) and the experiential knowledge and even imaginative faculties needed to apply statistics to a problem like (for instance) running a business. Mathematics is like a map of the real world; it tells you about places you haven't been yet, but being there tell you things that aren't on a map.
Well, I agree that collecting information from volunteers is inappropriate (if they are doing that), but clearly quoting the website -- even in its entirely -- serves a legitimate purpose.
Candidates always use each others words against each other, but normally they take the words out of context. What could be more fair than quoting the entire context? Arguably this is the most fair way of doing it. It seems unlikely that anyone would mistake this domain name for one that Angle would choose for herself, but that is easily enough handled.
An if statement is certainly not a goto, since goto is unconditional. However if you mean and if-then-goto like in early dialects of basic, the difference is that the if-then-goto is much more expressive for very little practical advantage. It makes shooting yourself in the foot far more convenient for very little gain in convenience at hitting the target. Goto in a language where any statement can be the target makes mistakes extraordinarily convenient to commit for zero increment in utility.
Unconditional "goto" is a natural idiom in some languages to express certain programming patterns, like state machines. Even so, competent programmers will put most the actions into separate routines. The key is to make it possible to understand the context of any line of code you are looking at. That applies to structured programming constructs like "switch". Code that has switch statements that go on for dozens of lines and possibly even nest switches are almost always a buggy disaster produced by some idiot who is trigger happy with the cut and paste buttons. The first thing I do when confronted with such a mess is break each case down into separate routines, even if I have no other reason to do so, because I need to understand what the code actually does (what the programmer intended is begging the question; we don't know he intended anything coherent). What nearly always emerges is that the original programmer had lost track of what he was doing, and quit when he got a result that looked approximately right.
I've been making my living programming for thirty years now, since the bad old days of "computed goto", so don't lecture me about "getting the job done". Getting the job done is only *part* of the job. The first step is to understand the job. The second is understand how to do the job. The third is to do the job in the way that makes that understanding plain. The fourth is to keep the job done as the nature of the job changes.
That's not easy, and you need all the help you can get. Absolutely, a programmer who can parrot theory without understanding its use is a bad programmer, but I'll take him over a programmer who is so stupid he thinks he's above gaining a more sophisticated understanding of his job. You can at least train the cargo cult programmer. You can't do anything with someone who is ignorant and proud of it.
Well, that may be true for the Ontario Science Center, but as a devoted museum goer I'd have to say it's not true in general. Science museums (even Children's museums) are far more interactive than they were forty years ago.
The most interactive science museum I've visited in the last several years is the Exploratorium in San Francisco. The least is the Smithsonian's Air and Space, but that's really an historical museum. The thrill is to be in the presence of the actual artifacts.
Oh, I'm very liberal, but I often have trouble stomaching dKos. I'm not alone in this. The "I can't take it anymore" diary by respected participants is a regular feature of the site. At one point the admins threatened permanent bans on users who post GBCW (GoodBye Cruel World) diaries... at least ones that make the rec list. That's stupid. Sometimes people need a hiatus from the overheated emotionalism.
I started participating on the site in around 2003. It was nice to have an outlet where people weren't bamboozled by GWB's War on Terror.
The problem is that DKos ecame too big and too prominent. To get any notice you have to be loud and emotional. It's become one big noisy echo chamber. There were and remain some posters there who are worth paying attention to, but a random sampling of posts, even high rated posts, would yield very little of value.
It was a much better site when it was small and obscure. Possibly as much good stuff is posted there as ever, but the site suffers from really crappy moderation. In fact, crappy moderation is encouraged. From the DKos FAQ:
Recommend: Good comment. Also usually a shorthand for 'I agree', or also 'good job'.
Environmental impact is, in economic terms, all about externalizing costs. Furthermore, like any other cost the *margins* of environmental costs vary with volume and at some point consistently trend upward with scale.
That means that from an environmental economic perspective there is an optimal volume for something like natural gas. If reduce production, the slack is taken up by marginally dirtier sources. If we increase production, we are replacing marginally cleaner sources. At some point we end up letting the impacts of NG (as in from phracking) get out of hand, which only happens because we can pass them off to third parties (as BP did by passing the risks of DWH onto everyone else who was dependent on the Gulf to make a living).
So for a given level of energy consumption, there is an environmentally optimal *mix* of sources.
Efficient electricity distribution and local storage is key to making that possible. You can't put an environmentally optimal mixture of energy sources into an internal combustion engine car's gas tank, but you *can* do that for electric cars.
Nobody honest says we shouldn't hurt a company because it will hurt shareholders.
The GP poster just did:
If BP is seized it will quit laying golden eggs. BP isn't human, so damaging the shareholder value does _nothing_ against the employees who screwed up.
Really, you have no idea how screwed up some people's thinking has become. BP (the entity) is the victim. Investors deserve profits no matter how obtained because that encourages investment, but workers should bear the cost of risky practices because making shareholders do that discourages investment (well duh). It's not BP's fault because the government should have stopped them from cutting corners and killing ten guys. If a CEO doesn't know what's going on in his company, bad things are not his fault.
Step back and look at this, and what you see is something like the attitude of certain of the English aristocracy under the Restoration: the King can do no wrong because ruling by divine right anything he does by definition is right. For some people in America, the super-wealthy can do no wrong because they are more deserving than ordinary people. How do we know they're more deserving? Because they have lots of money.
No matter where you go or when you live, there will be people around you who believe the powerful can do no wrong. Sycophancy is the survival reflex of the habitually timorous, the hopelessly mediocre, the perennial victims. Look at places where people are the most ground down, and you'll find the most fatuous admiration of the people doing the grinding.
With respect to the liability shield for stockholders, I agree, but only if there is a vigorous regulatory regime. Otherwise you get huge investments in quick returns that dump the costs on the public, as we've seen in this situation. We can barely bring ourselves to make BP forgo a couple of years of stockholder dividends to pay for destroying the lives of thousands of people who aren't rich enough for us to identify.
A vote is different because we have polling stations and systems to ensure that people who aren't voters don't vote, or that registered voters don't vote more than once.
A petition is for situations before a measure can be approached in such a systematic way. There are additional interests to be protected. How do you know that a neighbor didn't vote in your name? Because when you go to vote your name is already signed off. Presumably if you wanted to make sure your vote had not been cast you could ask the election authorities to check.
Now how do you know your neighbor hasn't signed a petition in your name?
You have to balance interests and consequences. A secret ballot protects you from politically motivated consequences of exercising your franchise. A secret petition is potentially a violation of your rights as a citizen, if someone forges your name. There may be politically motivated consequences to signing or not signing a petition, but you get a do-over in the voting booth where you can vote your conscience safely.
Does that make transparency a perfect solution for petitions? No. But it makes it a workable one.
No it didn't. It removed software neither of which you owned, according to the provisions of the Android Market TOS.
This would be entirely a different kettle of fish if you HAD to use the Android Market. But you don't. You could if you wanted to create an entirely independent Android Market with its own policies and TOS, and Google isn't going to brick your customer's phones or void their warranties.
It is not Google that has hijacked user phones for its own ends, it is the developer. He told users his app did one thing when in fact he was tricking users into letting him use their phones for a different purpose. The Android Market service includes remote removal of malware. If you don't want that service, contact the malware's author directly or use a malware friendly app store.
This seems to me to be an entirely reasonable position. Use the Android Market, and let Google remove apps like this remotely, or manage your device's apps yourself. The Apple App Store situation is entirely different, because you are punished if you try to manage your device yourself.
I vote pancreas. I've lost three family members to cancer: lung, nasopharyngeal and pancreatic. If you are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer you are more than 95% likely to be dead in five years.
They've apparently been able to use this technique to create liver implants. That's cool too.
Slashdot Mirror
maybe it *does* owe me a living.
Wow. You have, like blown my mind, man. I mean, like, now I know what Camus meant when he wrote: "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide." It's like, *man*. Now putting a bullet in my head would only be a external manifestation of what you've already been doing to it.
This is, like, seriously good stuff.
Also known as: Get a job you love doing and you'll never work a day in your life.
That's good advice, as far as it goes. The problem is people trying to follow that advice and ending up with jobs they hate. That's because they haven't thought about their fantasy jobs critically.
Ah, but here the Comic-Con fans have demonstrated how misguided your position is. Phelps has provided them with an opportunity not only to express their own contrary opinions, but to have fun doing so.
The metaphysical poet (and Anglican priest) George Herbert has a much more sensible position on this than yours. He once said, "Living well is the best revenge."
"fatigue, hostility, being at odds with one's employer and questioning one's career course is frighteningly common in the _RECLUSIVE_HERMIT_ industry"
Being fulfilled by your work isn't a promise you can trust when made to you by somebody else. It's more the kind of promise you ought to make yourself, and then keep. I've had bad days at work. Lots of them. But I've never had a job that was more pain than pleasure. Most of the jobs I've done, I'd consider doing for free if I didn't need any money. Come to think of it, all of my jobs have been like that. Is that luck? Absolutely not.
I don't think it's true that work sucks, that it has always sucked etc. I think that no matter how good work gets, people will still find a way to be ill content, and no matter how much fulfilling work is available to them, people will still make bad choices.
The Stoic philosophers had an interesting take on this problem (which is by no means a new one). If happiness is having all your wants fulfilled, the surest path to happiness is to restrain your wants. The more extensive and interconnected you let your desires become, the more certain you are to feel unhappy.
Let's look at the young programmer who desperately wants to work in the games industry. Unfortunately, that's oversimplifying his wants. What he really wants is a job
a) in the gaming industry
b) that is interesting
c) with excellent pay
d) with reasonable responsibilities
e) where he is treated with respect
Now you can probably get any one of these desires fulfilled by a job pretty easily, but all of them? That is a tall order. A stoic career counselor (if there were such a thing), would advise a trimming of desires, and (a) would be right at the top of his list. There are so many people who want to work in the games industry, that a realistic person should see that he'll have to compromise on his other desires in order to get it.
There are undoubtedly people working in the games industry whose talent and skill would enable them to fulfill all their desires if they just let go of (a). If they cannot let go of their other desires in order to achieve (a), they've made a bad choice.
The good news is that if you can compromise on overvalued desires (like working in the game industry, or making a boatload of money) you can probably find a bargain on the undervalued desires, like decent working conditions and personal respect. That also requires disciplining your wants in other areas, like driving a very expensive car or collecting lots of high end home electronics. That may sound terrible, but the payoff is that you get to be happy and fulfilled.
I've had a huge payoff on a job criterion that I got from Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Be useful to somebody; be a burden to no one." Most people never even consider the potential of a job to make the lives of people around them easier, more pleasant and rewarding. That property doesn't sound so exciting, but it is extremely undervalued in the job seeker market. That means it's bargain priced. You can get boatloads of the stuff practically for free (i.e. not compromising on other desires). I can almost guarantee that if you put that at the top of your list of job desires, you'll find work that is personally fulfilling.
Wonderful. Just the thing for my next cave diving expedition.
Let's actually talk about "hubris" for a second: the overweening pride of the tragic hero. Hubris means he cannot see the unintended consequences of his own actions.
In real life, hubris is always a two-way street. It is perfectly possible for the people who want A to suffer from just as much hubris as the people who want not-A. It's quite possible for some people on both sides of the climate debate to suffer from hubris.
The real tip-off is when somebody says something like "I've always thought it was more hubris. It takes quite a bit of arrogance to believe that humanity can change the Earth's climate that much, that fast." What kind of argument is that? The writer dismisses anything that contradicts his intuition as "hubris", and therefore not just one sided (as real hubris is), but entirely wrong. That attitude doesn't even have the one-sided semi-validity needed to qualify as hubris. It's simply argument by magic. The bogeyman might not be real, but wishing somebody didn't exist then calling him a "bogeyman" isn't a valid argument.
It reminds me of the time in the early 90s that the board of a certain public agency turned down the MIS department's request to buy anti-virus software. There was a lot of pressure to reduce the appearance of overspending. The board was outraged that after spending so much money on systems and then be forced to pay more money to keep them running. In their decision, they wrote this: "The integrity of the systems we have paid for will prevent damage from computer viruses." It was like verbally classifying their systems as "having integrity" negated the facts they'd been prevented.
Wishful thinking and a thesaurus is a dangerous combination.
I'm guessing that they managed to coax the potatoes into maintaining their normal osmotic balance when watered with brackish water. For one thing a crop that absorbed the salt would be hard to get consistent.
I actually installed the community edition of SugarCRM a few years ago. My take on it is that it's got the right problem (a big, big, big part of creating a great piece of software), but that the system design and implementation is painfully amateurish. The database schema was an incoherent joke, the code meandering, verbose and inarticulate. There's no reason for code (even PHP) to be that bad.
Obviously a huge amount of work went into the thing. The kind of work you do when you've got a poorly thought out system and real customers to satisfy. The thing about that kind of work is that if you hack away at a system long enough *in response to customer needs*, eventually it will fill those needs fairly well. Being badly engineered doesn't preclude providing value to users. We certainly found it useful, but whenever I had to fix a bug or tweak something, I was constantly amazed that the system worked at all.
Now we all know there are two schools of thought about software development: the incrementalist (make the software work even if it is ugly) and the purist (make it elegant even if you have to rewrite it). The reason these two schools persist is that they are both right in different situations. There are times you have to live with less than elegant, and times when you have to bite the bullet and do major rewrites. I think most successful programmers balance these impulses, tidying up and refactoring as they fix bugs and meet customer's needs. The sign of a skillful programmer is that the more he works on a body of code, the simpler and more elegant it becomes. But when you have a gawdawful mess like SugarCRM, it makes no sense to invest anything more than occasional trivial effort unless you're willing to commit to a complete fork. You'd have to do major refactoring unless you were willing to spend all your time hacking your way through cruft, and the SugarCRM folks probably wouldn't because they actually understand all that unnecessary complexity.
Overall I'd say that SugarCRM is a useful, but mediocre piece of software. If you can live with its limitations, it is an asset, particularly in a small business where you have to introduce management to the novel concept of CRM before getting them to part with money. SugarCRM is not much of an asset to F/OSS, because it's not likely to attract many talented contributors to the core system, yet discourages them from developing competing solutions because it is "good enough" for not-too-demanding users.
Sure it's perfectly legal and moral to set up shell corporations. It's what you do with them that matters.
I do happen to know a little something about corporate accounting. I actually once recommended that a company be split into two captive parts. The reason was that it had highly profitable software half and a very unprofitable hardware sales half. Splitting the company in two had a legitimate purpose: it made it easier to sell the software business by making its value more clear. Eventually it was sold to a company that already had a hardware business and it's co-joined hardware twin simply folded. That was all completely above board.
In accounting you are constantly making up fictional "expenses", but they are offset by fictional income. You do this in order to make the financial performance of your various business structures more clear. What you CANNOT do is make up expenses to mask changes in owner's equity.
I know that stuff that looks like this happens all the time, and there are lots of borderline cases where legal corporations are created in order to take advantage of various angles in tax law. Many of those schemes are probably illegal, but are allowed de facto because nobody has the time to unravel them. That's why certain politicians always try to understaff the IRS. It's not to defend Joe Blow, who can't hide any significant income. It's to protect the guy who can play the "blind them with bullshit" game with armies of lawyers and accountants.
The situation is different for taxes (which are an exaction in which you have no say) and business deals (which are supposed to be negotiated in good faith). When you enter into a profit sharing contract, you can't take a chunk of revenue, move it from your left pocket to your right and call that an "expense". The proper name for that is "fraud". It doesn't matter how formally correct you make the transaction appear. Substance matters in accounting, and if the substance of a transaction is fraudulent, it's fraud.
In fact, that is the very essence of skillful fraud: to make that which is unconscionable seem superficially correct in every form. You can't pass a counterfeit bill and use "it's such a good copy it is indistinguishable from the real thing." You can't engage in a fraudulent transaction and say, "But all the incorporation papers, purchase orders and invoices are in order."
There's a huge gap between having a head full of numbers, being good at math, and being good at understanding the world (which requires math).
There's tension and interplay between understanding statistics (for example) and the experiential knowledge and even imaginative faculties needed to apply statistics to a problem like (for instance) running a business. Mathematics is like a map of the real world; it tells you about places you haven't been yet, but being there tell you things that aren't on a map.
Well, I agree that collecting information from volunteers is inappropriate (if they are doing that), but clearly quoting the website -- even in its entirely -- serves a legitimate purpose.
Candidates always use each others words against each other, but normally they take the words out of context. What could be more fair than quoting the entire context? Arguably this is the most fair way of doing it. It seems unlikely that anyone would mistake this domain name for one that Angle would choose for herself, but that is easily enough handled.
Yep. Harry Reid has been the senator from Nevada for over twenty years. McCain and Kyl are the senators from Arizona.
An if statement is certainly not a goto, since goto is unconditional. However if you mean and if-then-goto like in early dialects of basic, the difference is that the if-then-goto is much more expressive for very little practical advantage. It makes shooting yourself in the foot far more convenient for very little gain in convenience at hitting the target. Goto in a language where any statement can be the target makes mistakes extraordinarily convenient to commit for zero increment in utility.
Unconditional "goto" is a natural idiom in some languages to express certain programming patterns, like state machines. Even so, competent programmers will put most the actions into separate routines. The key is to make it possible to understand the context of any line of code you are looking at. That applies to structured programming constructs like "switch". Code that has switch statements that go on for dozens of lines and possibly even nest switches are almost always a buggy disaster produced by some idiot who is trigger happy with the cut and paste buttons. The first thing I do when confronted with such a mess is break each case down into separate routines, even if I have no other reason to do so, because I need to understand what the code actually does (what the programmer intended is begging the question; we don't know he intended anything coherent). What nearly always emerges is that the original programmer had lost track of what he was doing, and quit when he got a result that looked approximately right.
I've been making my living programming for thirty years now, since the bad old days of "computed goto", so don't lecture me about "getting the job done". Getting the job done is only *part* of the job. The first step is to understand the job. The second is understand how to do the job. The third is to do the job in the way that makes that understanding plain. The fourth is to keep the job done as the nature of the job changes.
That's not easy, and you need all the help you can get. Absolutely, a programmer who can parrot theory without understanding its use is a bad programmer, but I'll take him over a programmer who is so stupid he thinks he's above gaining a more sophisticated understanding of his job. You can at least train the cargo cult programmer. You can't do anything with someone who is ignorant and proud of it.
Well, that may be true for the Ontario Science Center, but as a devoted museum goer I'd have to say it's not true in general. Science museums (even Children's museums) are far more interactive than they were forty years ago.
The most interactive science museum I've visited in the last several years is the Exploratorium in San Francisco. The least is the Smithsonian's Air and Space, but that's really an historical museum. The thrill is to be in the presence of the actual artifacts.
Whenever I have a crappy day, I go on YouTube and look for videos of laughing babies. Is that creepy or what?
Oh, I'm very liberal, but I often have trouble stomaching dKos. I'm not alone in this. The "I can't take it anymore" diary by respected participants is a regular feature of the site. At one point the admins threatened permanent bans on users who post GBCW (GoodBye Cruel World) diaries ... at least ones that make the rec list. That's stupid. Sometimes people need a hiatus from the overheated emotionalism.
I started participating on the site in around 2003. It was nice to have an outlet where people weren't bamboozled by GWB's War on Terror.
The problem is that DKos ecame too big and too prominent. To get any notice you have to be loud and emotional. It's become one big noisy echo chamber. There were and remain some posters there who are worth paying attention to, but a random sampling of posts, even high rated posts, would yield very little of value.
It was a much better site when it was small and obscure. Possibly as much good stuff is posted there as ever, but the site suffers from really crappy moderation. In fact, crappy moderation is encouraged. From the DKos FAQ:
Recommend: Good comment. Also usually a shorthand for 'I agree', or also 'good job'.
My argument is for regulatory enforcement to internalize costs, or where costs cannot be internalized to prevent reckless action.
Environmental impact is, in economic terms, all about externalizing costs. Furthermore, like any other cost the *margins* of environmental costs vary with volume and at some point consistently trend upward with scale.
That means that from an environmental economic perspective there is an optimal volume for something like natural gas. If reduce production, the slack is taken up by marginally dirtier sources. If we increase production, we are replacing marginally cleaner sources. At some point we end up letting the impacts of NG (as in from phracking) get out of hand, which only happens because we can pass them off to third parties (as BP did by passing the risks of DWH onto everyone else who was dependent on the Gulf to make a living).
So for a given level of energy consumption, there is an environmentally optimal *mix* of sources.
Efficient electricity distribution and local storage is key to making that possible. You can't put an environmentally optimal mixture of energy sources into an internal combustion engine car's gas tank, but you *can* do that for electric cars.
Nobody honest says we shouldn't hurt a company because it will hurt shareholders.
The GP poster just did:
If BP is seized it will quit laying golden eggs. BP isn't human, so damaging the shareholder value does _nothing_ against the employees who screwed up.
Really, you have no idea how screwed up some people's thinking has become. BP (the entity) is the victim. Investors deserve profits no matter how obtained because that encourages investment, but workers should bear the cost of risky practices because making shareholders do that discourages investment (well duh). It's not BP's fault because the government should have stopped them from cutting corners and killing ten guys. If a CEO doesn't know what's going on in his company, bad things are not his fault.
Step back and look at this, and what you see is something like the attitude of certain of the English aristocracy under the Restoration: the King can do no wrong because ruling by divine right anything he does by definition is right. For some people in America, the super-wealthy can do no wrong because they are more deserving than ordinary people. How do we know they're more deserving? Because they have lots of money.
No matter where you go or when you live, there will be people around you who believe the powerful can do no wrong. Sycophancy is the survival reflex of the habitually timorous, the hopelessly mediocre, the perennial victims. Look at places where people are the most ground down, and you'll find the most fatuous admiration of the people doing the grinding.
With respect to the liability shield for stockholders, I agree, but only if there is a vigorous regulatory regime. Otherwise you get huge investments in quick returns that dump the costs on the public, as we've seen in this situation. We can barely bring ourselves to make BP forgo a couple of years of stockholder dividends to pay for destroying the lives of thousands of people who aren't rich enough for us to identify.
I cast "root device" then "alter /etc/hosts".
A vote is different because we have polling stations and systems to ensure that people who aren't voters don't vote, or that registered voters don't vote more than once.
A petition is for situations before a measure can be approached in such a systematic way. There are additional interests to be protected. How do you know that a neighbor didn't vote in your name? Because when you go to vote your name is already signed off. Presumably if you wanted to make sure your vote had not been cast you could ask the election authorities to check.
Now how do you know your neighbor hasn't signed a petition in your name?
You have to balance interests and consequences. A secret ballot protects you from politically motivated consequences of exercising your franchise. A secret petition is potentially a violation of your rights as a citizen, if someone forges your name. There may be politically motivated consequences to signing or not signing a petition, but you get a do-over in the voting booth where you can vote your conscience safely.
Does that make transparency a perfect solution for petitions? No. But it makes it a workable one.
No it didn't. It removed software neither of which you owned, according to the provisions of the Android Market TOS.
This would be entirely a different kettle of fish if you HAD to use the Android Market. But you don't. You could if you wanted to create an entirely independent Android Market with its own policies and TOS, and Google isn't going to brick your customer's phones or void their warranties.
It is not Google that has hijacked user phones for its own ends, it is the developer. He told users his app did one thing when in fact he was tricking users into letting him use their phones for a different purpose. The Android Market service includes remote removal of malware. If you don't want that service, contact the malware's author directly or use a malware friendly app store.
This seems to me to be an entirely reasonable position. Use the Android Market, and let Google remove apps like this remotely, or manage your device's apps yourself. The Apple App Store situation is entirely different, because you are punished if you try to manage your device yourself.
I vote pancreas. I've lost three family members to cancer: lung, nasopharyngeal and pancreatic. If you are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer you are more than 95% likely to be dead in five years.
They've apparently been able to use this technique to create liver implants. That's cool too.