You'd be surprised. I live in a city with a population under 25,000, but my home, my office, most of my neighbor's homes, most restaurants, the mall, and most other offices have open wifi.
but the process of diagnosing ADHD would condemn just about every kid who took the test. "Doctor, doctor! My child runs around uncontrollably, can't keep his attention on one thing at a time, and doesn't like school...oh Doctor, what do I do?"
How about this instead: "Doctor, doctor! My child behaves well and gets along with adults and other kids, and we've had random strangers in restaurants compliment us on how nicely he acts. He's a smart kid and in the gifted program at school. He thinks his teachers are great, but just can't pay attention in class even though he really wants to, and he's been begging me for help. What do I do?" That's how it played out in our house.
I have a severely ADHD child- he's not normal, he needs serious drugs to function in school, and he knows it. (He's extremely bright and is fully aware of what he's capable of when he's on them- you ever have to deal with child sobbing because he can't focus on simple tasks?)
You beat me to it. My son had the same problems. He simply couldn't focus on his homework, even when we put him in a quiet, calm environment. I'd peek in at him and he'd be playing with his toes, or counting bumps on the ceiling, or staring at his pencil while he twirled it. We tried everything, from carrot to stick, to get him to just finish his homework. A 15 minute assignment would turn into a 2 hour ordeal. One time he came to me crying and upset that he just could not focus on his homework, no matter how badly he wanted to or how hard he tried.
I took him to a neurologist who diagnosed him with ADD (not H) and prescribed Strattera, a non-stimulant. His problems disappeared literally overnight. I didn't have him take it over summer vacation because he doesn't have any behavioral issues and the meds didn't treat any problems that he has when he's not in school.
I only mention all this to reinforce your point that ADH?D is a real condition for a lot of kids. You'd think that wouldn't have to be said, but there are plenty of people who think all diagnoses of it are fakes by parents who don't want to deal with their kids. That's simply not true, and if a pill each morning makes the difference between straight C grade cards and straight As without any change in personality or behavior, then I'm on board with it.
Thats great for the mobile (still niche) market. Now how about bigger picture market of desktops and notebooks?
Apple is on track to sell about 10 million iPods in the June-August quarter. They've sold about a million iPads a month since launch. No one but Apple seems to be sure how many iPhones they sold since the first 1.5 million in three days in June, but pundits seem to think that Android models are outselling iPhones.
In short, you have a pretty interesting idea of "niche".
Now are you really trying to tell me that the choppy, customized Quake 2 that most likely took quite modern hardware to run at even that level of "smoothness" is somehow proof that the Flash version of Quake Live (Quake 3) that runs smooth, without customized extras on hardware that is 5 years old is the proof that Flash is dying and ready to be replaced by the standard HTML5?
Yes, because of the fact that it works at all. Let's face it: no one is going to be really playing Quake N in their browser any time soon, but if Quake 2 can be made to run, even badly, then Farmville and Bejeweled and poker should be a piece of cake.
You could have almost the exact same conversation about x86 versus ARM. Today, x86 boasts a lot more raw power - which is nice if you're one of the relatively small subset of people who needs raw power. ARM has its own charms and is good enough for a lot of people, as evidenced by sales of iPhones, iPods, iPads, and other ultra-portable devices. I wouldn't want to play Quake Live on my iPod Touch but there are over 100,000 apps that run just fine on it.
Specifically I know plenty of people with smartphones who would much sooner give up the phone portion of their device than their mobile internet access.
Those people, like me, can buy iPod Touches. It's my primary personal computer these days.
People who love making music should be able to make a living.
I agree with the rest of your post, but wholly disagree with this part. It's nice people can make a living doing what they love, but a very small percentage of the world actually gets that luxury. I'm incredibly lucky that I love my work, but there's no right for me to make a living doing it; it's only a coincidence of the market that makes my occupation supportable.
There are probably people who deeply love to pluck their eyebrows. Good for them, but I'm not saying they should be able to make a living at it.
But, freaks running around buying up multi-million dollar condos, million dollar cars, and multi-million dollar jets and yachts is just ridiculous. None of them are WORTH IT!!
If the market says they are, then they are, even if you and I think the market is stupid for it.
they have not sold a copy of xp in years. anyone that thinks they are "buying" xp is actualy buying vista or windows 7 and back loading XP stupid
Really? What part of this gives any indication that it comes with anything other than stock XP SP3, as opposed to a Win7 license that's pre-downgraded? Note that most (all?) Dell corporate machines with XP explicitly state that you're really buying Win7, so it's kind of telling that this machine does not say so.
It is not only young people who don't read newspapers. I don't read newspapers, and I am certainly not young.
I cancelled my newspaper subscription when I realized that I was skipping past the news stores (which I'd already read online a day earlier) to get to the comics (which are all available online). I set up an RSS reader on my iPod to fetch all my comics, saved $100+ a year, and still read the same amount of news.
There is room for paid news, though. I bought a subscription to the Christian Science Monitor daily sheet on my Nook. I don't mind paying a few dollars for good content and not just regurgitated, minimally-edited AP reprints.
I skipped some for the sake of brevity. Basically, it was a small school and I got the impression that the teacher had "poisoned the well" by telling the other teachers what a pain in the butt I was for pestering her about my kid. Transferring to a different school with a reputation for a much more rigorous curriculum seemed like a better alternative than fighting against the first school's staff for the next several years.
Do you have any proof for anything you said or do we really need to listen to your ridiculous Anecdotal story about the horrors of public schools.
My anecdote was about bad teachers in general, and your reading comprehension sucks. She went to a different public school before the one in my story and I have nothing but good to say about that one. In fact, my two younger children still attend there. If I had my way, that school would expand from K-3 to K-12 because it's truly excellent and I wish more kids could go to it. My daughter's new school happens to be private but that had nothing to do with the main point of the story.
yet you have not provided a single technical advantage over static languages
All sufficiently powerful languages are equivalent, says Mr. Turing. And yet we don't routinely write web services on an actual Turing machine. You're correct in the sense that you can rewrite a Python program in C or COBOL or 6502 assembler or Befunge, but in the real world there are non-technical considerations. Developer efficiency, complexity, and maintainability are all important factors, and in my experience dynamic languages win on all of those counts.
Here's a Python snippet that implements grep:
#!/usr/bin/env python
import re
def grep(pattern, infile): print ''.join(line for line in infile if re.search(pattern, line))
It opens a file and iterates across all lines in it, printing the ones that match the given regular expression. That might look a little strange to people not accustomed to Python, but I assure you that it's pretty idiomatic. That's basically a single line that handles file IO, string manipulation, regular expressions, and text output. How long would it take you to write the C equivalent that's immune to buffer overflows and other security vulnerabilities? When you need to tweak it a year later, how long will it take you to reacquaint yourself with the code? And once you've got it written, how long will it take you to make it work when some smartass decides you need to be able to grep websites and not just local files?
The difference between the languages in this case is expressiveness. There's no such thing as a "more powerful" language, but there are definitely "more expressive" languages.
If you didn't then it is inevitable that your application will crash, and the larger the program, the more likely you are to encounter a crash.
Except in practice that's absolutely not the case. The whole standard library is written without millions of tiny case tests, but it's extremely stable to the point that I've never seen an error in the base system.
I've heard a lot of horror stories about the imminent dangers of dynamic typing. Back in the real world, it never seems to be an actual problem.
Given the history of web development, dynamic languages became widely used mainly out of ignorance, and have remained widely used due to continuing ignorance. There's no technical argument in favor of dynamic languages.
Speaking of ignorance; pot, meet kettle! Dynamic languages became widely used mainly because they're so damn nice to use. I have a lot of background in C, functional languages, and various assembler dialects (which are really the ultimate in dynamic languages!), but I'd rather use Python than any of them for routine development.
What specifically don't you like about dynamicism? Most of the complaints I've heard are that it forces you to write all the checks yourself!, as though the kinds of constraints you'd need in a static language are required (or even desirable) in a dynamic language.
For example, I love duck typing. I can write a class that implements read() and pass it to almost any function that expects to receive a file-type object as an argument. I can write def add(x,y): return x+y and know that it will do the right thing whether I pass in ints, floats, or strings. (Side note: dynamic typing is not the same as weak typing; you can't add 1+"2" because those types are incompatible. I can't stand working in languages that attempt to do what I mean by guessing).
So a static language adherent might complain that my definition of add doesn't check for every possible combination of input datatypes. That's kind of the point, though; in Python you wouldn't want to prevalidate everything. Just run the operation and let it do its thing. If you've passed in, say, a file handle and a PDF, then the "+" operation will fail, but every sane case will actually work as you'd expect.
I guess I can summarize it this way: the only type errors I've ever received while programming in Python have been when I passed None to a function by accident because (for example) a database call returned an empty set. In each of those cases, I'd have gotten the same kind of error if I'd accidentally passed a null pointer to a C function - except that the Python program threw an exception instead of opening a security vulnerability.
I can program in plenty of static languages. Now that I'm far enough along in my career that I can pick my own tools, I almost always choose not to. I love dynamic languages and I won't voluntarily go back.
My kids go to the public Montessori school in my city. It only goes to 3rd grade, though, and after that they have to transfer. We'd heard good things about another local public school and enrolled my daughter there. It was a fucking disaster.
Examples:
In 3rd grade, she was doing square roots. Her new 4th grade class was starting to learn 2-column addition.
The class had one hour to do math problems 1 through 20 (out of 100). She finished in about 10 minutes because it was remedial to her. For want of something to do, she went ahead and finished problems 21-100. Her teacher called her out in front of the entire class: "The assignment was 1-20, not 1-100. You didn't pay attention."
Since she wasn't allowed to work ahead, she pulled out a book to read. Again, from the teacher: "This is math, not reading. Put that away!" She was literally required to sit quietly in her desk for the remaining time.
Her weekly list of words to memorize for the spelling test on Fridays included "off" and "zoo". In 4th grade. I swear to God that I'm not exaggerating.
She'd cry in the mornings. "Please don't make me go to school today! I hate it there! Can't you tell them I'm sick and work from home and let me stay here with you?" I'd be sad if she was saying those things 6 years from now. Coming from my 4th grader, it broke my heart.
So I went to talk to the principal. He was a nice guy, and I'm a nice guy. We had a great visit and he said he'd work with the teacher to find more challenging work for my daughter to keep her busy and interested. We shook hands and I left.
Within the week, my daughter got detention for "looking bored in class". Shortly after that, she got a 96% on a test. Her teacher asked her (yet again, in front of the class) why she doesn't "get perfect scores on all her tests if [she's] so smart."
That afternoon, I enrolled her in a different local private school. They were doing cubes and long division in math class, and learning Latin and Greek word components in language class.
Sometimes it's not enough to talk to the teachers and administration.
Why would I want to do an assignment in an if statement or a loop condition check anyway?
Look at it this way: do you really want to have context-sensitive syntax so that expressions in one location have a different effect than expressions in another?
Someone mentioned the case of if(result=function()) {do_something();}. I wouldn't want to depend on a language where result=function() is a test or an assignment depending on how you're using it. On top of confusing humans, that also requires a more complex, context-sensitive parser. When C was written, that extra complexity would have been reason enough alone to skip it.
Families of the deceased want to remember their family members AS THEY ACTUALLY EXISTED. A fucked-up markov chain impersonation would not come anywhere close to doing what you think it will... instead, it will cause pain, further un-needed grief, and lots of other feelings, the nature of which you have NO FUCKING CLUE ABOUT unless you've lost someone close to you.
You speak for yourself. I lost my dad a few years ago, and I'd like getting a message that sounded like something he'd say. It wouldn't be him, but it would remind me of him and I'd like that.
You wouldn't like such a thing, at least at this time, and that's OK. I understand. But don't take that as an opinion everyone would share.
It's not just a problem with social networks, of course; the question of what to do with a site when the owner dies is a question that has to be dealt with by all websites.
A friend died suddenly in a motorcycle accident. His roommate vowed to pay for his domain registration and hosting forever, but that fell by the wayside a year later. I'm glad I mirrored his site and host a copy of it on my own domain.
Is it really? Perhaps I can get some education here. *nix systems come with a tool called shred, which overwrites a file multiple times with random data to provide secure deletion. [...] How securely do tools like these erase data?
If you're using a filesystem like ZFS (AFAIK) where writes are implemented as appending to a log, they don't erase data at all.
With 8 gigs of glacially slow swap, true everything will keep running but performance will drop by a factor of perhaps 1000. The users will SCREAM. Which means your pager/cellphone will scream. Eventually you can log in, manually restart the processes, and the users will be happy, for a little while.
Is there a modern OS with a VM manager that horrible? And while I agree that the ratio of memory speed to HDD speed (but not necessarily SSD speed) keeps growing in favor of RAM, the ratio of RAM size to hard drive throughput still seems about the same. For instance, my first 512KB Amiga 1000 had a 5KB/s floppy, so writing out the entire contents of RAM would take about 100 seconds. These days my home server has 8GB of RAM and each of its drives can sustain about 80MB/s throughput, so writing out the entire contents of RAM would take about... 100 seconds.
Finally, while I don't know as much about Linux's VMM, I know that FreeBSD's is fairly proactive about copying long-unused RAM pages to swap during idle periods. If those processes suddenly decide to access those pages, they're still in RAM and the processes race ahead as normal. If some other process tries to allocate that RAM, then those pages are released and allocated to the new process with no new disk IO at all - because they've already been copied out. I can't think of a single real-world reason why that isn't a good thing.
I wrote an email regarding health care reform to my (US) senators a while ago. One of them called me personally within a week to discuss the matter. I wasn't home at the time but he left a long message on my answering machine: "Hi. This is Senator Mike Johanns calling for Kirk. I got your email and would like to talk to you about [...]" My other senator replied with a form letter a month later: "I received your message and am committed to [exact opposite of my position] and appreciate your support. Thank you for writing!"
I'll never forget the first senator who took the time to personally address my letter. At that point, I'd completely respect him even if he disagreed with my position because he cared enough to actually listen and talk to his constituents. I don't expect my representatives to always say and do exactly what I'd like them to, but I like when they seem interested in finding out what that would be.
No matter how cool we make the spacecraft, they'll still need raw materials from time to time, which would still mean strip-mining another planet somewhere.
So instead of caching views you are now forced to look up every single users combination of mods
No, you're not. In a hidden field next to each comment, list the moderators who have rated it and what rating they gave it; since this is user-independent, you can statically generate this data and serve it to every visitor. Use an AJAXey request to return the visitor's "moderator approval list", then use some JavaScript to apply the user's preferences to every comment on the page based on their approval list. Note that the "moderator approval list" can also be cached client-side or server side - you don't have to regenerate the list for each page view.
Cue "JavaScript is evil and slow!" comments, but honestly, even if every comment on a 600-comment story had been moderated 10 times, JavaScript would only have to consult the moderator approval list 6,000 times. That should be lightning fast even on slow machines using ancient browsers with bad JavaScript performance.
In pseudocode:
foreach (comment in comments) { foreach (moderation in comment.moderations) { comment.score += approval[moderation.moderator] * moderation.score; } }
If I tell the system that I totally mistrust you as a moderator, it could set approval["Splab"] = -1 so that every score you give out is negated.
Yes, yes, they mean "invasive" in the medical sense: the frequencies they're using don't penetrate inside the body.
That's correct: the radiation will be absorbed by the first layer of watery tissue it encounters. Like, you know, your cornea. Will your airline tickets come with a coupon for cataract surgery?
Slashdot Mirror
You'd be surprised. I live in a city with a population under 25,000, but my home, my office, most of my neighbor's homes, most restaurants, the mall, and most other offices have open wifi.
Thanks for ruining my lunch.
Why? Were you having a little lamb?
but the process of diagnosing ADHD would condemn just about every kid who took the test. "Doctor, doctor! My child runs around uncontrollably, can't keep his attention on one thing at a time, and doesn't like school...oh Doctor, what do I do?"
How about this instead: "Doctor, doctor! My child behaves well and gets along with adults and other kids, and we've had random strangers in restaurants compliment us on how nicely he acts. He's a smart kid and in the gifted program at school. He thinks his teachers are great, but just can't pay attention in class even though he really wants to, and he's been begging me for help. What do I do?" That's how it played out in our house.
I have a severely ADHD child- he's not normal, he needs serious drugs to function in school, and he knows it. (He's extremely bright and is fully aware of what he's capable of when he's on them- you ever have to deal with child sobbing because he can't focus on simple tasks?)
You beat me to it. My son had the same problems. He simply couldn't focus on his homework, even when we put him in a quiet, calm environment. I'd peek in at him and he'd be playing with his toes, or counting bumps on the ceiling, or staring at his pencil while he twirled it. We tried everything, from carrot to stick, to get him to just finish his homework. A 15 minute assignment would turn into a 2 hour ordeal. One time he came to me crying and upset that he just could not focus on his homework, no matter how badly he wanted to or how hard he tried.
I took him to a neurologist who diagnosed him with ADD (not H) and prescribed Strattera, a non-stimulant. His problems disappeared literally overnight. I didn't have him take it over summer vacation because he doesn't have any behavioral issues and the meds didn't treat any problems that he has when he's not in school.
I only mention all this to reinforce your point that ADH?D is a real condition for a lot of kids. You'd think that wouldn't have to be said, but there are plenty of people who think all diagnoses of it are fakes by parents who don't want to deal with their kids. That's simply not true, and if a pill each morning makes the difference between straight C grade cards and straight As without any change in personality or behavior, then I'm on board with it.
Thats great for the mobile (still niche) market. Now how about bigger picture market of desktops and notebooks?
Apple is on track to sell about 10 million iPods in the June-August quarter. They've sold about a million iPads a month since launch. No one but Apple seems to be sure how many iPhones they sold since the first 1.5 million in three days in June, but pundits seem to think that Android models are outselling iPhones.
In short, you have a pretty interesting idea of "niche".
Now are you really trying to tell me that the choppy, customized Quake 2 that most likely took quite modern hardware to run at even that level of "smoothness" is somehow proof that the Flash version of Quake Live (Quake 3) that runs smooth, without customized extras on hardware that is 5 years old is the proof that Flash is dying and ready to be replaced by the standard HTML5?
Yes, because of the fact that it works at all. Let's face it: no one is going to be really playing Quake N in their browser any time soon, but if Quake 2 can be made to run, even badly, then Farmville and Bejeweled and poker should be a piece of cake.
You could have almost the exact same conversation about x86 versus ARM. Today, x86 boasts a lot more raw power - which is nice if you're one of the relatively small subset of people who needs raw power. ARM has its own charms and is good enough for a lot of people, as evidenced by sales of iPhones, iPods, iPads, and other ultra-portable devices. I wouldn't want to play Quake Live on my iPod Touch but there are over 100,000 apps that run just fine on it.
Specifically I know plenty of people with smartphones who would much sooner give up the phone portion of their device than their mobile internet access.
Those people, like me, can buy iPod Touches. It's my primary personal computer these days.
People who love making music should be able to make a living.
I agree with the rest of your post, but wholly disagree with this part. It's nice people can make a living doing what they love, but a very small percentage of the world actually gets that luxury. I'm incredibly lucky that I love my work, but there's no right for me to make a living doing it; it's only a coincidence of the market that makes my occupation supportable.
There are probably people who deeply love to pluck their eyebrows. Good for them, but I'm not saying they should be able to make a living at it.
But, freaks running around buying up multi-million dollar condos, million dollar cars, and multi-million dollar jets and yachts is just ridiculous. None of them are WORTH IT!!
If the market says they are, then they are, even if you and I think the market is stupid for it.
they have not sold a copy of xp in years. anyone that thinks they are "buying" xp is actualy buying vista or windows 7 and back loading XP stupid
Really? What part of this gives any indication that it comes with anything other than stock XP SP3, as opposed to a Win7 license that's pre-downgraded? Note that most (all?) Dell corporate machines with XP explicitly state that you're really buying Win7, so it's kind of telling that this machine does not say so.
It is not only young people who don't read newspapers. I don't read newspapers, and I am certainly not young.
I cancelled my newspaper subscription when I realized that I was skipping past the news stores (which I'd already read online a day earlier) to get to the comics (which are all available online). I set up an RSS reader on my iPod to fetch all my comics, saved $100+ a year, and still read the same amount of news.
There is room for paid news, though. I bought a subscription to the Christian Science Monitor daily sheet on my Nook. I don't mind paying a few dollars for good content and not just regurgitated, minimally-edited AP reprints.
I skipped some for the sake of brevity. Basically, it was a small school and I got the impression that the teacher had "poisoned the well" by telling the other teachers what a pain in the butt I was for pestering her about my kid. Transferring to a different school with a reputation for a much more rigorous curriculum seemed like a better alternative than fighting against the first school's staff for the next several years.
Do you have any proof for anything you said or do we really need to listen to your ridiculous Anecdotal story about the horrors of public schools.
My anecdote was about bad teachers in general, and your reading comprehension sucks. She went to a different public school before the one in my story and I have nothing but good to say about that one. In fact, my two younger children still attend there. If I had my way, that school would expand from K-3 to K-12 because it's truly excellent and I wish more kids could go to it. My daughter's new school happens to be private but that had nothing to do with the main point of the story.
yet you have not provided a single technical advantage over static languages
All sufficiently powerful languages are equivalent, says Mr. Turing. And yet we don't routinely write web services on an actual Turing machine. You're correct in the sense that you can rewrite a Python program in C or COBOL or 6502 assembler or Befunge, but in the real world there are non-technical considerations. Developer efficiency, complexity, and maintainability are all important factors, and in my experience dynamic languages win on all of those counts.
Here's a Python snippet that implements grep:
It opens a file and iterates across all lines in it, printing the ones that match the given regular expression. That might look a little strange to people not accustomed to Python, but I assure you that it's pretty idiomatic. That's basically a single line that handles file IO, string manipulation, regular expressions, and text output. How long would it take you to write the C equivalent that's immune to buffer overflows and other security vulnerabilities? When you need to tweak it a year later, how long will it take you to reacquaint yourself with the code? And once you've got it written, how long will it take you to make it work when some smartass decides you need to be able to grep websites and not just local files?
The difference between the languages in this case is expressiveness. There's no such thing as a "more powerful" language, but there are definitely "more expressive" languages.
If you didn't then it is inevitable that your application will crash, and the larger the program, the more likely you are to encounter a crash.
Except in practice that's absolutely not the case. The whole standard library is written without millions of tiny case tests, but it's extremely stable to the point that I've never seen an error in the base system.
I've heard a lot of horror stories about the imminent dangers of dynamic typing. Back in the real world, it never seems to be an actual problem.
Given the history of web development, dynamic languages became widely used mainly out of ignorance, and have remained widely used due to continuing ignorance. There's no technical argument in favor of dynamic languages.
Speaking of ignorance; pot, meet kettle! Dynamic languages became widely used mainly because they're so damn nice to use. I have a lot of background in C, functional languages, and various assembler dialects (which are really the ultimate in dynamic languages!), but I'd rather use Python than any of them for routine development.
What specifically don't you like about dynamicism? Most of the complaints I've heard are that it forces you to write all the checks yourself!, as though the kinds of constraints you'd need in a static language are required (or even desirable) in a dynamic language.
For example, I love duck typing. I can write a class that implements read() and pass it to almost any function that expects to receive a file-type object as an argument. I can write def add(x,y): return x+y and know that it will do the right thing whether I pass in ints, floats, or strings. (Side note: dynamic typing is not the same as weak typing; you can't add 1+"2" because those types are incompatible. I can't stand working in languages that attempt to do what I mean by guessing).
So a static language adherent might complain that my definition of add doesn't check for every possible combination of input datatypes. That's kind of the point, though; in Python you wouldn't want to prevalidate everything. Just run the operation and let it do its thing. If you've passed in, say, a file handle and a PDF, then the "+" operation will fail, but every sane case will actually work as you'd expect.
I guess I can summarize it this way: the only type errors I've ever received while programming in Python have been when I passed None to a function by accident because (for example) a database call returned an empty set. In each of those cases, I'd have gotten the same kind of error if I'd accidentally passed a null pointer to a C function - except that the Python program threw an exception instead of opening a security vulnerability.
I can program in plenty of static languages. Now that I'm far enough along in my career that I can pick my own tools, I almost always choose not to. I love dynamic languages and I won't voluntarily go back.
[citation needed]
Here I am. Cite me: I'm an original source.
My kids go to the public Montessori school in my city. It only goes to 3rd grade, though, and after that they have to transfer. We'd heard good things about another local public school and enrolled my daughter there. It was a fucking disaster.
Examples:
In 3rd grade, she was doing square roots. Her new 4th grade class was starting to learn 2-column addition.
The class had one hour to do math problems 1 through 20 (out of 100). She finished in about 10 minutes because it was remedial to her. For want of something to do, she went ahead and finished problems 21-100. Her teacher called her out in front of the entire class: "The assignment was 1-20, not 1-100. You didn't pay attention."
Since she wasn't allowed to work ahead, she pulled out a book to read. Again, from the teacher: "This is math, not reading. Put that away!" She was literally required to sit quietly in her desk for the remaining time.
Her weekly list of words to memorize for the spelling test on Fridays included "off" and "zoo". In 4th grade. I swear to God that I'm not exaggerating.
She'd cry in the mornings. "Please don't make me go to school today! I hate it there! Can't you tell them I'm sick and work from home and let me stay here with you?" I'd be sad if she was saying those things 6 years from now. Coming from my 4th grader, it broke my heart.
So I went to talk to the principal. He was a nice guy, and I'm a nice guy. We had a great visit and he said he'd work with the teacher to find more challenging work for my daughter to keep her busy and interested. We shook hands and I left.
Within the week, my daughter got detention for "looking bored in class". Shortly after that, she got a 96% on a test. Her teacher asked her (yet again, in front of the class) why she doesn't "get perfect scores on all her tests if [she's] so smart."
That afternoon, I enrolled her in a different local private school. They were doing cubes and long division in math class, and learning Latin and Greek word components in language class.
Sometimes it's not enough to talk to the teachers and administration.
Why would I want to do an assignment in an if statement or a loop condition check anyway?
Look at it this way: do you really want to have context-sensitive syntax so that expressions in one location have a different effect than expressions in another?
Someone mentioned the case of if(result=function()) {do_something();}. I wouldn't want to depend on a language where result=function() is a test or an assignment depending on how you're using it. On top of confusing humans, that also requires a more complex, context-sensitive parser. When C was written, that extra complexity would have been reason enough alone to skip it.
Families of the deceased want to remember their family members AS THEY ACTUALLY EXISTED. A fucked-up markov chain impersonation would not come anywhere close to doing what you think it will... instead, it will cause pain, further un-needed grief, and lots of other feelings, the nature of which you have NO FUCKING CLUE ABOUT unless you've lost someone close to you.
You speak for yourself. I lost my dad a few years ago, and I'd like getting a message that sounded like something he'd say. It wouldn't be him, but it would remind me of him and I'd like that.
You wouldn't like such a thing, at least at this time, and that's OK. I understand. But don't take that as an opinion everyone would share.
It's not just a problem with social networks, of course; the question of what to do with a site when the owner dies is a question that has to be dealt with by all websites.
A friend died suddenly in a motorcycle accident. His roommate vowed to pay for his domain registration and hosting forever, but that fell by the wayside a year later. I'm glad I mirrored his site and host a copy of it on my own domain.
Is it really? Perhaps I can get some education here. *nix systems come with a tool called shred, which overwrites a file multiple times with random data to provide secure deletion. [...] How securely do tools like these erase data?
If you're using a filesystem like ZFS (AFAIK) where writes are implemented as appending to a log, they don't erase data at all.
With 8 gigs of glacially slow swap, true everything will keep running but performance will drop by a factor of perhaps 1000. The users will SCREAM. Which means your pager/cellphone will scream. Eventually you can log in, manually restart the processes, and the users will be happy, for a little while.
Is there a modern OS with a VM manager that horrible? And while I agree that the ratio of memory speed to HDD speed (but not necessarily SSD speed) keeps growing in favor of RAM, the ratio of RAM size to hard drive throughput still seems about the same. For instance, my first 512KB Amiga 1000 had a 5KB/s floppy, so writing out the entire contents of RAM would take about 100 seconds. These days my home server has 8GB of RAM and each of its drives can sustain about 80MB/s throughput, so writing out the entire contents of RAM would take about... 100 seconds.
Finally, while I don't know as much about Linux's VMM, I know that FreeBSD's is fairly proactive about copying long-unused RAM pages to swap during idle periods. If those processes suddenly decide to access those pages, they're still in RAM and the processes race ahead as normal. If some other process tries to allocate that RAM, then those pages are released and allocated to the new process with no new disk IO at all - because they've already been copied out. I can't think of a single real-world reason why that isn't a good thing.
I wrote an email regarding health care reform to my (US) senators a while ago. One of them called me personally within a week to discuss the matter. I wasn't home at the time but he left a long message on my answering machine: "Hi. This is Senator Mike Johanns calling for Kirk. I got your email and would like to talk to you about [...]" My other senator replied with a form letter a month later: "I received your message and am committed to [exact opposite of my position] and appreciate your support. Thank you for writing!"
I'll never forget the first senator who took the time to personally address my letter. At that point, I'd completely respect him even if he disagreed with my position because he cared enough to actually listen and talk to his constituents. I don't expect my representatives to always say and do exactly what I'd like them to, but I like when they seem interested in finding out what that would be.
No matter how cool we make the spacecraft, they'll still need raw materials from time to time, which would still mean strip-mining another planet somewhere.
Or an asteroid. There are 1 or 2 to spare.
So instead of caching views you are now forced to look up every single users combination of mods
No, you're not. In a hidden field next to each comment, list the moderators who have rated it and what rating they gave it; since this is user-independent, you can statically generate this data and serve it to every visitor. Use an AJAXey request to return the visitor's "moderator approval list", then use some JavaScript to apply the user's preferences to every comment on the page based on their approval list. Note that the "moderator approval list" can also be cached client-side or server side - you don't have to regenerate the list for each page view.
Cue "JavaScript is evil and slow!" comments, but honestly, even if every comment on a 600-comment story had been moderated 10 times, JavaScript would only have to consult the moderator approval list 6,000 times. That should be lightning fast even on slow machines using ancient browsers with bad JavaScript performance.
In pseudocode:
If I tell the system that I totally mistrust you as a moderator, it could set approval["Splab"] = -1 so that every score you give out is negated.
Yes, yes, they mean "invasive" in the medical sense: the frequencies they're using don't penetrate inside the body.
That's correct: the radiation will be absorbed by the first layer of watery tissue it encounters. Like, you know, your cornea. Will your airline tickets come with a coupon for cataract surgery?