Re:It would be nice to get a view from the other s
on
Best Software Writing I
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Here's a review I wrote of this book for The Perl Review, issue 2.0:
There's a lot of good writing in the world. Some of that has to do with software. So hey, why not put some of it in a book?
Therein lies the apparent purpose of The Best Software Writing I, brought to us by software bloggerexpertpundit Joel Spolsky. Beyond that broad categorical relationship, it's hard to see how everything in the book relates, either to each other, or to the reader.
I like tables, but I don't buy a book with various articles written about tables. If I want to build a table, I buy a book on building tables. If I want to look at antique tables, I'll buy a book about antique tables. I won't buy a book about tables and hope it has something I am interested in.
I don't want to say this is a bad book, because that might imply the content is bad, and hardly any of it is. Some of it to me is quite boring--which highlights my main problem with the book--but most of it is quite good.
The opening chapter by Ken Arnold on why languages should enforce strict whitespace use at the compiler level was useless. And the final chapter, by "why the lucky stiff," which attempts to teach Ruby with a few short guidelines and cartoon foxes, had me skimming the pictures before gratefully reaching the conclusion.
But in between there was some really good stuff, including Paul Graham's OSCON 2004 keynote address about what makes a great hacker, Raymond Chen's piece on why Windows retains backward compatibility for broken apps, and danah boyd's article about social software. There's an insightful piece by Clay Shirky about how to encourage good discussion and discourage bad discussion online, a perceptive article by John Gruber about how the browser's location field is the new command line, and an amusing PowerPoint presentation outline by Aaron Swartz about why you shouldn't use PowerPoint.
And you know they are good, because each piece has an introduction by Spolsky, telling you not just how good they are, but that Spolsky thought of it first. Some of the articles even refer back to Spolsky, which is nice, in case you forgot how great he is. Not that other people don't engage in similar practices: the last three pieces I mentioned above are related to me, in that Shirky favorably mentions Slashdot (where I work), and Gruber and Swartz are my acquaintances, and that's a big part of why I singled them out for mention. It just seems to me that Spolsky shines the light far too much on himself, to make the book almost as much about himself as the writing.
What's especially odd is that this book couldn't appeal to people who are not already into software, who don't already know who some of these people are, or who are familiar with the issues they are writing about. They won't get any of it. Yet the book is littered with footnotes from Spolsky explaining things like "iTunes" ("Apple's online music store") and "dev" ("Dev = developer = an actual computer programmer").
Which brings me back to the point of the book. It's not for non-software people, and it is not for software people, including those who enjoy this sort of thing so much that they already read it when it went online.
So what is the point? I don't know. Maybe it is just to make more of a name for Apress, by saying they published a book by known software bloggerexpertpundit Joel Spolsky.
Well, I think its my right not to be adressed as "he" all the time.
As far as I can tell, you're not. The inspecific person is, not you specifically.
Im tired of this "its not gender specific" bullshit. yes, it is.
Well, no, in fact, it is not. I know facts are sometimes hard to swallow, but that makes them facts no less.
The only reason why its used when gender is unknown is because male is the human standard and female is an exception.
So you're saying that it is not gender-inspecific, but that it is used often to be gender inspecific? That is self-evidently false: if one is true, the other cannot be. Since it is often used in a gender-inspecific manner, it therefore is gender-inspecific. I don't see why you are disagreeing with me when you actually agreed with me.
By that you are implying that women have been subjected to a "male" pronoun for indeterminant-gender antecedents. But as "he" in such contexts IS gender-inspecific (hence my inclusion of the quotes), such an implication is incorrect.
Besides, the article used both at random.
Yes, I already know that the writing was poor. I don't need a reminder.
Reasonable style is to use the so-called "male" pronoun, period. Anything else gets in the way of the message. Yes, for some hypersensitive audiences, the "male" pronoun may get in the way; in such instances, the correct option is to use the "plural" forms -- they/them/their -- e.g.:
"The player has a right to know how they're doing, and in particular, to some means of determining if they're in danger of losing the game. If the player doesn't get feedback, they can't adjust their strategy, and the outcome will feel random."
That's perfectly legitimate, but too unwieldy, IMO. But it's far superior to using the female pronoun, which is far superior to switching back and forth: the point is not the gender, and using the female pronoun (or, to an even greater degree, switching back and forth) just emphasizes the gender as though it matters, and it diminishes the actual message. The author chose the absolute worst of the available choices.
I love the language sycophants modding my post as a troll.
Don't blame them: you're the one who said obviously incorrect things like "PHP is faster and more secure."
I can take a pencil and use it to sew; I can spend a ton of time so that I can demonstrate that *I* can sew using a pencil faster than someone else using a needle. That doesn't mean that the pencil is superior to the needle for sewing. It means you have too much time on your hands and are wasting energy trying to shove a square peg into a round hole.
Right, and you could use PHP for Slash. But it would be a mistake, because PHP is not nearly as good for large applications.
Perl was never designed for the web. PHP was designed from the ground up to be a web scripting language. As such, it blows the doors off of Perl in terms of speed, funtionality, ease-of-use, deployment, understanding and security. PERIOD.
Except, no, it doesn't. PHP is not faster. Most people say this when what they mean is that PHP has a smaller memory footprint, and can therefore handle more connections on a given machine. I will grant this, but we have no problem adding more hardware, as it is a negligble cost in the grand scheme of things.
Functionality? Are you kidding? There's nothing PHP can do that Perl can't, but Perl can do much PHP can't.
Ease-of-use, deployment, and understanding are in the eye of the beholder. I understand Perl quite well, thanks very much. That (hypothetical) you don't puts no obligation on me to stop using Perl.
As to security: why is it that we are almost constantly seeing CSS and other vulnerabilities for Slash-a-likes written in PHP, but almost never see the same for Slash itself, which is written in Perl? Granted, it could be that PHP is more secure but Slash's programmers are just superior.:-)
But Slashdot is an uber minority when it comes to selecting Perl as the real-time scripting language to use on the web. They've done a fine job, but if the application were written in PHP instead of Perl, it would likely perform twice as fast.
Thank you. But no, it likely would not be faster, since the bottleneck is not Perl, but the database. You might contend that if we wrote it in PHP, it would take fewer machines to get handle the same number of queries, but that would mean using a language that we like less, are less familiar with, and which has a whole host of problems with functionality that we'd have to spend more time (read: money) to work around.
only crazy people use it in high-traffic, mission critical, real-time enviroments like./
People keep saying that as if the facts -- for both Slashdot and LiveJournal, as well as others -- don't absolutely refute the statement.
I would agree with this stated solely because US unilateralism is a UN accepted rule and the world cannot afford economically to boycott us the way to impose on others.
But it is actual fact that UN rules do not prohibit anything we did. You're still trying to make it sound like they do, but those rules are just ignored because we're the U.S. No, that is not true.
Negative on this one and you need to read the treaty ending the war.
I am not at all wrong, and I have read UN Security Council Resolution 687 many times. You're the one who needs to read it. It nowhere implies the war has ended, but states explicitly that it is merely a cease-fire. Any peace to be found is dependent on the fulfillment of the provisions of the resolution by all parties, most particularly Iraq, which never happened.
See especially 1. and 33., and 34., which notes that the UN not only reserves the right to take further action if Iraq does not fulfill its obligations, but actually takes obligates itself to take action to ensure Iraq's compliance.
Agreed but in doing so, the US needs to quit using it to justify their actions.
Well, Bush preferred to do just that, but it was decided it would be better to go through the UN. It's probably a wash: on the one hand, you lend too much credibility to the UN to go through it, but on the other, people actually do give the UN a lot of credibility.
Just honestly admit they are doing it unilateral reasons.
Except, of course, that it was not remotely unilateral, having the significant support of most of Iraq's neighbors, and Australia and Great Britain (among others, but those are the most important).
Unless you mean that the U.S. would have felt it had the right to do it even if it had to go alone: there's no doubt of that, and no U.S. official speaking for the President has ever said anything otherwise. When 1441 was signed in late 2002, the U.S. officials said they would not require the approval or cooperation of anyone else in order to act against Iraq. I don't know what more "honesty" you want.
The problem here is the sheeple of Amerika are unaware and actually believe the US is complying with international law as opposed to breaking internation law in socially acceptable ways.
It actually *is* complying with international law, and you have yet to show otherwise.
To vague and open to interpertation and leads to abuse and ineffectiveness.
That's fine, but the point is that it is vague and open to interpretation, and the UN has no real way of giving a legal finding about it, not one that is binding on anyone, except through the Security Council, which the U.S. has a veto over.
On a personal note here, I am a firm believe in absolute sovereign rights for the record.
So you don't believe in the right of self-defense. Noted.
We fully reconginzed the Taliban government and were working trading agreements with them, they were no rogue nation (whereas Iran we have no formal relationship with).
So what if they were an established government? How does that follow that we didn't have the right to invade? It doesn't follow, at all.
We no more had the right to invade Afghanistan to capture a criminal than we the right to invade Panama to capture a drug dealer or Canada for refusing to extradite a vietnam war deserter.
Those comparisons are stupid. The Taliban were actually protecting and aiding al Qaeda. al Qaeda didn't "just happen" to be in their country.
We may of had the right in a absolute soveriegn nation sort of way, but not in compliance with international law.
You keep saying that, but it is not remotely true, and you have provided not a jot of evidence supporting it. It was perfectly legal.
While the UN is not international law per sae [sic]
Well, no, UN agreements, including the charter, most certainly do constitute international law. But we didn't violate any UN accepted rules.
At the top, you are quoting the aims of the UN, not obligations of its member states, and so I won't bother directly responding to any of those quotes, as they have no relevance.
UN never approved NATO invasions of Kosovo or Afghansistan. UN never approved (other than American doubletalk) the COW invasion of Iraq.
Well, that's the point, the UN *did* approve of the Gulf War, *which never ended*. Again, this is what the law says. It's not about doubletalk, it's the actual law. And yes, the UN did not approve those other invasions, but *no one* in the UN seriously contended they were illegal, which only proves the point: the UN has never consistently held aggression as a violation of the UN charter, and does so only when it suits them to, because they happen to disagree with a particular engagement. This sucks the force out of what few and vague rules the UN has on the subject.
1. The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.
Just like we respected the SOVERIGNITY of the Iraq government, the Afghans, the Vietnamese, Yugoslavia.
That respect is not absolute, and the UN charter never intends it to be, as the right of self-defense is also defined in the same charter, which almost everyone agrees gave the U.S. the right to invade Afghanistan (for example).
Note well:
Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations...
"3. All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered."
Again, this is never intended to be absolute. Where was the uproar over the supposed illegality of Kosovo? There wasn't any, not from the UN member states.
As for other international law, how about the Geneva condition and treatment of prisoners.
This is shifting the goalposts. You were talking about the illegality of the invasions, and that is what I responded to. I won't respond to changes of subject.
The weird part is that you didn't quote the parts of the UN charter that actually makes a real case against what the U.S. did. For example:
All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.
Of course, it was the UN's own top weapons inspector, Hans Blix, who said the U.S. threats -- supposedly barred here -- were useful and good, and without which what little cooperation Iraq offered pre-invasion would not have even been possible. And that's the sort of problems you have: the UN arbitrarily enforces its own charter, which means when they do want to enforce it, they are unable to.
Just like how they promised the world, and the U.S., they would force Iraq to comply, back in 1991, with the cease-fire resolution, and never did, which is what brought us to the invasion in 2003. It was the direct result of the UN's failure to properly force Iraqi compliance over 12 years, and the last nail in the coffin of worldwide respect for the ability of the UN to actually do anything useful in such matters.
if your fucking imperialist government would quit meddling in the affairs of others AND FUCKING RESPECT SOVERIEGN rights as promised by international law
Can you give one example of such a violation of international law? The Iraq invasion did not violate international law. Neither did Afghanistan. Got any other recent examples?
If you would really like to go over the actual law, we can. But the basic point is that the Gulf War never ended, and the U.S. and Iraq were both parties to a cease fire agreement that Iraq never complied with, and the U.S. therefore had every legal right to resume the hostilities.
You may consider that a technicality, but you're the one who brought up the law.
Besides, all your citizens are valid targets and participants in the war... not innocent in the slightest.
Now, how is ignoring international law? According to all accepted treaties regarding warfare, civilian targets are not, in general, valid.
Maybe you should stop talking about "law" until you actually know what the law says?
Umm, no. The US is a shortening of "The United States"; the USA is a shortening of "The United States of America". Legally the former is not a shortening of the latter and technically only refers to the government. The United States is the government that runs the United States of America.
Actually, no. Both refer to precisely the same thing. What is this "legally" you speak of? No law distinguishes between the two terms.
-US, please notice calling yourself "America" basically takes that title away from Canadians and South Americans.... Don't get me wrong, I'm not crying to you in the hopes a whole nation will read this post and change the way they address themselves. I don't give a shit what you guys call each other... it's just silly.
We've been calling ourselves Americans before there even WAS a United States of America. There's no reason to stop now, however inaccurate it may be. Not that it is especially inaccurate: it derives from the fact that this was intended to be a new American nation, and Americans were different from Europeans, so therefore we are Americans, not Europeans. It wasn't intended to be a statement of nationality per se, but merely to distinguish from Europe. Once the nation was formed, incorporating America into its name, the moniker inevitably stuck, and there's not a thing wrong with that.
It's confusing, but not wrong.
And incidentally, you would have more luck convincing people to stop calling Native Americans, Indians, and that won't go away either, and has a far less rational (though just as historical) basis for sticking around.
As long as I am forced to pay taxes to *protect* me and laws limit my rights to protect my items, then YES, I do expect (read the police who get paid to do this) somebody to protect my items.
I will read what is not true. No, the police are not, in any way, paid to protect your items. Where did you get this nonsense? Police are reactive, not proactive, in almost all cases. They act once someone has broken the law, they rarely prevent the breaking of the law.
Unless I have the legal right to proect my items to the extent I feel necessary then they are not my responsibility. Unless I have a absolute right to shoot people for breaking my window or kids for tagging my property,
Wow, this is so retarded it is hard to know where to begin.
First, no one with a brain in his head thinks lethal force is necessary to protect his iPod, unless it has state secrets on it.
Second, the cops can't use lethal force for that either, so if in your opinion lethal force is necessary for it to be someone's responsibility, then it is no one's responsibility at all, in which case you are only contributing to the idea that anyone can steal it, since no one will take responsibility.
Third, if you feel you don't have the right to protect your things while they are in a car -- which is a stupid thing to think -- then leave them at home, where you actually (in most states) *do* have the legal right to shoot someone who illegally enters. No one is forcing you to take those items and leave them in your car.
Either give me the rights or quit stealing my money to pay for police that don't do their job.
Bottom line -- and this is a fact -- you have all the rights you need, and no one is stealing your money, and it is not the police's job. It's difficult to imagine how more incorrect you could be.
Being irritated at victims who left the car running, becomes "left the keys inside" becomes "left the door unlocked" is likely to become "didn't have an alarm system installed" when that becomes necessary for most people
Likely to become? You might not have insurance coverage if you leave the keys inside, or the doors unlocked. And you get lower rates if you have an alarm system. Because those things *are* your responsibility. You are free to disregard them, but then you are increasing your liklihood of being a victim, and taking that responsibility on yourself.
Or do you think it is someone else's responsibility to make sure no one steals your items?
Yes, it sucks that there is a lot of theft in the modern world. It's a terrible thing. But your items are your responsibility, period.
I mostly agree with your point of view on this, if I leave the top down on my car (hey it's a sunny day out!) I shouldn't have to worry that someone will steal my loose change or cell phone charger.
But neither should the insurance company have to worry if then someone takes your possessions. If you won't take basic precautions, then others shouldn't have to take responsibility for that.
Both times the cops and insurance company made me feel as I if I did something wrong.
You did. Insurance is there as a backup. If you don't take precautionary measures, then it makes everyone else's insurance cost more money. You certainly did do something wrong, if you left your car doors and windows open, and expect insurance to cover it.
Americans seem to have this ingrain belief that if it isn't locked down, you must want me to steal it. Bullshit.
It is bullshit that anyone has this belief, except for the thieves.
What's worse bullshit is that people expect insurance should be there to provide for them when they are too careless to provide for themselves.
For example, a dedicated outboard DAC usually (but not always) does a better job than a CD player or the DAC built into an amplifier.
But you never want to do analog out from the CD/DVD player, ever, if you can possibly have your decoder separate, or in the amp. Unless you've got multichannel analog output from the player, which almost no one does, and certainly these cheap players don't do.
Also, except for a few amplifiers, none of them actually produce the final signal digitally. Yes, there are a few digital amps, but they are few and far between right now. Ultimately, it goes into the amp in analog. Having the DAC in the amp doesn't mean that there isn't an analog stage most of the time.
That's beside the point, which is why replace all these components in the *player* when you should be using digital output anyway?
Also, even if you go digital into the amp, the CD player can still have an impact because of jitter in the CD player. The bitstream coming out of the CD player is not timed completely accurately. Some amps (very very few) might have a retiming chip but these tend to be expensive.
First, this rarely comes up in the real world with recent equipment. Second, that won't be fixed by the given modifications.
But the question was why use analog and the answer would be, you can get a higher quality signal.
No, you can't. The significant reduction in sound fidelity, not to mention the inability to do multichannel and higher-quality (DTS, etc.) audio, far outweighs the problems of jitter.
Do you think it's possible that the majority in this case ruled the way they did because they felt the wording of the Constitution was [weak|vague|wrong], and that even though they might not necessarily feel that it could ever be right to use Eminent Domain on behalf of a coporate entity, it was better in the long run to highlight the weakness in the original text rather than interpret according to their own ethics, i.e. "legislate from the bench?"
No. I think the majority believes the Congressional powers of the Constitution must be interpreted as broadly as possible. Even though it's clear the intent was for actual public use, they look at the words, not the intent, and as long as the meaning can be shoehorned into the desired meaning, then it is acceptable to them.
It reminds me of Eldred case (although obviously we have different players on different sides, except for Ginsberg, Souter, and Kennedy; it's sad that no one dissented with both court opinions). It's absolutely clear that the intent of the Constitutional copyright clause was not to allow Congress to offer unlimited (or in Breyer's words, "virtually perpetual") copyright terms. But the court found that hey, the words can be read that way, so that's good enough.
No, but it's more likely to be true if those closest to the situation held that belief.
Right, like Richardson.
Unshocked? Apparently you need no help from me when it comes to impugning your intelligence.
Huh? Are you incorrectly implying the word is not a legitimate one? Here's a hint: dictionaries are not prescriptive, but descriptive. The lack of a word's appearance in a dictionary means nothing about a word's legitimacy.
Nice partial quote. Why am I not surprised? The complete sentence was:
Uh... yes, and? If someone wants the complete context, the click the little "Parent" link.
Bork had no qualms about firing Cox.
You're a liar.
Bork said:
Yes, he made it clear in that quote, and others, that he was conflicted over it, that he "had qualms."
The only thing that Ruckelhaus did was tell him that there was no sense in firing Cox and resigning. He didn't urge Bork to fire Cox, as you implied.
I implied no such thing. I was talking about Richardson, not Ruckelshaus. In his resignation letter, Richardson even said the *only* reason he resigned was because he promised he would not do what Nixon asked of him. Had he not made such a promise, he would have carried out Nixon's orders. Same with Ruckelshaus. Both would have fired Cox if they had not made promises not to.
Even Cox expressed no ill will toward Bork, but said that his job was done, it was now up to Congress.
So we have a guy who did what his predecessors would have done had they been in his shoes, what one of them urged him to do, what was perfectly legal, what was in keeping with the best traditions of the chain of command of the executive branch.
Bork not only did nothing remotely wrong, but he did precisely what he was supposed to do, what he should have done. I would have done the same thing, and I would not want to work with someone at that level who would not.
and the widely held view of those who reported on Watergate at it unfolded.
Oh, well, since it is *widely held,* it must be true!
He should have had the ethics and courage to resign
He did. But Richardson talked him out of it, convinced him to put the Justice Department ahead of himself.
This coming from you after you referred to me as "a stupid person"
I was being ironic when I said that, as you had just attempted to impugn my own intelligence. I am unshocked that you didn't get it.
I can make the case quite simply
No, you really cannot.
When Cox refused, Nixon started at the top of the Justice Department and worked his way down looking for someone willing to fire Cox. Attorney General Elliot Richardson refused to fire Archibald Cox, resigning his position instead. So did Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus. Only Bork was willing to do so
Yes, at the urging of Richardson, who knows a hell of a lot more about the ethics of the situation than you ever could. Right there you undercut your entire case by directly implying Bork should follow Richardson's lead, because he *did* follow Richardson's lead.
You act like Bork actually did something wrong. That's your problem. You can't see he actually did the morally and legally right thing. Either that, or you simply know you can't actually make the case that he did something wrong, and that's probably why you've consistently resorted to ad hominem, to disguise that fact.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a review I wrote of this book for The Perl Review, issue 2.0:
There's a lot of good writing in the world. Some of that has to do with software. So hey, why not put some of it in a book?
Therein lies the apparent purpose of The Best Software Writing I, brought to us by software bloggerexpertpundit Joel Spolsky. Beyond that broad categorical relationship, it's hard to see how everything in the book relates, either to each other, or to the reader.
I like tables, but I don't buy a book with various articles written about tables. If I want to build a table, I buy a book on building tables. If I want to look at antique tables, I'll buy a book about antique tables. I won't buy a book about tables and hope it has something I am interested in.
I don't want to say this is a bad book, because that might imply the content is bad, and hardly any of it is. Some of it to me is quite boring--which highlights my main problem with the book--but most of it is quite good.
The opening chapter by Ken Arnold on why languages should enforce strict whitespace use at the compiler level was useless. And the final chapter, by "why the lucky stiff," which attempts to teach Ruby with a few short guidelines and cartoon foxes, had me skimming the pictures before gratefully reaching the conclusion.
But in between there was some really good stuff, including Paul Graham's OSCON 2004 keynote address about what makes a great hacker, Raymond Chen's piece on why Windows retains backward compatibility for broken apps, and danah boyd's article about social software. There's an insightful piece by Clay Shirky about how to encourage good discussion and discourage bad discussion online, a perceptive article by John Gruber about how the browser's location field is the new command line, and an amusing PowerPoint presentation outline by Aaron Swartz about why you shouldn't use PowerPoint.
And you know they are good, because each piece has an introduction by Spolsky, telling you not just how good they are, but that Spolsky thought of it first. Some of the articles even refer back to Spolsky, which is nice, in case you forgot how great he is. Not that other people don't engage in similar practices: the last three pieces I mentioned above are related to me, in that Shirky favorably mentions Slashdot (where I work), and Gruber and Swartz are my acquaintances, and that's a big part of why I singled them out for mention. It just seems to me that Spolsky shines the light far too much on himself, to make the book almost as much about himself as the writing.
What's especially odd is that this book couldn't appeal to people who are not already into software, who don't already know who some of these people are, or who are familiar with the issues they are writing about. They won't get any of it. Yet the book is littered with footnotes from Spolsky explaining things like "iTunes" ("Apple's online music store") and "dev" ("Dev = developer = an actual computer programmer").
Which brings me back to the point of the book. It's not for non-software people, and it is not for software people, including those who enjoy this sort of thing so much that they already read it when it went online.
So what is the point? I don't know. Maybe it is just to make more of a name for Apress, by saying they published a book by known software bloggerexpertpundit Joel Spolsky.
Well, I think its my right not to be adressed as "he" all the time.
As far as I can tell, you're not. The inspecific person is, not you specifically.
Im tired of this "its not gender specific" bullshit. yes, it is.
Well, no, in fact, it is not. I know facts are sometimes hard to swallow, but that makes them facts no less.
The only reason why its used when gender is unknown is because male is the human standard and female is an exception.
So you're saying that it is not gender-inspecific, but that it is used often to be gender inspecific? That is self-evidently false: if one is true, the other cannot be. Since it is often used in a gender-inspecific manner, it therefore is gender-inspecific. I don't see why you are disagreeing with me when you actually agreed with me.
Now you know how it feels.
By that you are implying that women have been subjected to a "male" pronoun for indeterminant-gender antecedents. But as "he" in such contexts IS gender-inspecific (hence my inclusion of the quotes), such an implication is incorrect.
Besides, the article used both at random.
Yes, I already know that the writing was poor. I don't need a reminder.
Reasonable style is to use the so-called "male" pronoun, period. Anything else gets in the way of the message. Yes, for some hypersensitive audiences, the "male" pronoun may get in the way; in such instances, the correct option is to use the "plural" forms -- they/them/their -- e.g.:
"The player has a right to know how they're doing, and in particular, to some means of determining if they're in danger of losing the game. If the player doesn't get feedback, they can't adjust their strategy, and the outcome will feel random."
That's perfectly legitimate, but too unwieldy, IMO. But it's far superior to using the female pronoun, which is far superior to switching back and forth: the point is not the gender, and using the female pronoun (or, to an even greater degree, switching back and forth) just emphasizes the gender as though it matters, and it diminishes the actual message. The author chose the absolute worst of the available choices.
I have the right not to be subjected to female third-person pronouns when the antecedent is of indeterminant gender.
I love the language sycophants modding my post as a troll.
Don't blame them: you're the one who said obviously incorrect things like "PHP is faster and more secure."
I can take a pencil and use it to sew; I can spend a ton of time so that I can demonstrate that *I* can sew using a pencil faster than someone else using a needle. That doesn't mean that the pencil is superior to the needle for sewing. It means you have too much time on your hands and are wasting energy trying to shove a square peg into a round hole.
Right, and you could use PHP for Slash. But it would be a mistake, because PHP is not nearly as good for large applications.
Perl was never designed for the web. PHP was designed from the ground up to be a web scripting language. As such, it blows the doors off of Perl in terms of speed, funtionality, ease-of-use, deployment, understanding and security. PERIOD.
:-)
./
Except, no, it doesn't. PHP is not faster. Most people say this when what they mean is that PHP has a smaller memory footprint, and can therefore handle more connections on a given machine. I will grant this, but we have no problem adding more hardware, as it is a negligble cost in the grand scheme of things.
Functionality? Are you kidding? There's nothing PHP can do that Perl can't, but Perl can do much PHP can't.
Ease-of-use, deployment, and understanding are in the eye of the beholder. I understand Perl quite well, thanks very much. That (hypothetical) you don't puts no obligation on me to stop using Perl.
As to security: why is it that we are almost constantly seeing CSS and other vulnerabilities for Slash-a-likes written in PHP, but almost never see the same for Slash itself, which is written in Perl? Granted, it could be that PHP is more secure but Slash's programmers are just superior.
But Slashdot is an uber minority when it comes to selecting Perl as the real-time scripting language to use on the web. They've done a fine job, but if the application were written in PHP instead of Perl, it would likely perform twice as fast.
Thank you. But no, it likely would not be faster, since the bottleneck is not Perl, but the database. You might contend that if we wrote it in PHP, it would take fewer machines to get handle the same number of queries, but that would mean using a language that we like less, are less familiar with, and which has a whole host of problems with functionality that we'd have to spend more time (read: money) to work around.
only crazy people use it in high-traffic, mission critical, real-time enviroments like
People keep saying that as if the facts -- for both Slashdot and LiveJournal, as well as others -- don't absolutely refute the statement.
"Clown Calls Ringmaster Silly"
I would agree with this stated solely because US unilateralism is a UN accepted rule and the world cannot afford economically to boycott us the way to impose on others.
But it is actual fact that UN rules do not prohibit anything we did. You're still trying to make it sound like they do, but those rules are just ignored because we're the U.S. No, that is not true.
Negative on this one and you need to read the treaty ending the war.
I am not at all wrong, and I have read UN Security Council Resolution 687 many times. You're the one who needs to read it. It nowhere implies the war has ended, but states explicitly that it is merely a cease-fire. Any peace to be found is dependent on the fulfillment of the provisions of the resolution by all parties, most particularly Iraq, which never happened.
See especially 1. and 33., and 34., which notes that the UN not only reserves the right to take further action if Iraq does not fulfill its obligations, but actually takes obligates itself to take action to ensure Iraq's compliance.
Agreed but in doing so, the US needs to quit using it to justify their actions.
Well, Bush preferred to do just that, but it was decided it would be better to go through the UN. It's probably a wash: on the one hand, you lend too much credibility to the UN to go through it, but on the other, people actually do give the UN a lot of credibility.
Just honestly admit they are doing it unilateral reasons.
Except, of course, that it was not remotely unilateral, having the significant support of most of Iraq's neighbors, and Australia and Great Britain (among others, but those are the most important).
Unless you mean that the U.S. would have felt it had the right to do it even if it had to go alone: there's no doubt of that, and no U.S. official speaking for the President has ever said anything otherwise. When 1441 was signed in late 2002, the U.S. officials said they would not require the approval or cooperation of anyone else in order to act against Iraq. I don't know what more "honesty" you want.
The problem here is the sheeple of Amerika are unaware and actually believe the US is complying with international law as opposed to breaking internation law in socially acceptable ways.
It actually *is* complying with international law, and you have yet to show otherwise.
To vague and open to interpertation and leads to abuse and ineffectiveness.
That's fine, but the point is that it is vague and open to interpretation, and the UN has no real way of giving a legal finding about it, not one that is binding on anyone, except through the Security Council, which the U.S. has a veto over.
On a personal note here, I am a firm believe in absolute sovereign rights for the record.
So you don't believe in the right of self-defense. Noted.
We fully reconginzed the Taliban government and were working trading agreements with them, they were no rogue nation (whereas Iran we have no formal relationship with).
So what if they were an established government? How does that follow that we didn't have the right to invade? It doesn't follow, at all.
We no more had the right to invade Afghanistan to capture a criminal than we the right to invade Panama to capture a drug dealer or Canada for refusing to extradite a vietnam war deserter.
Those comparisons are stupid. The Taliban were actually protecting and aiding al Qaeda. al Qaeda didn't "just happen" to be in their country.
We may of had the right in a absolute soveriegn nation sort of way, but not in compliance with international law.
You keep saying that, but it is not remotely true, and you have provided not a jot of evidence supporting it. It was perfectly legal.
Al Queda was not a UN member, Afghanistan was.
So? What's that got to do with anything?
Iraq di
Nevertheless, the point is that I couldn't care less if you think someone else is black, when you're covered in soot yourself.
when I am around Americans ... I lose my mind. Just can't deal with the modern america me me me can't play in nice in the sandbox with others culture.
... you can't deal with a culture that can't deal with other cultures?
Wait
Uh-huh.
Pull the other one.
Well, no, UN agreements, including the charter, most certainly do constitute international law. But we didn't violate any UN accepted rules.
At the top, you are quoting the aims of the UN, not obligations of its member states, and so I won't bother directly responding to any of those quotes, as they have no relevance.
UN never approved NATO invasions of Kosovo or Afghansistan. UN never approved (other than American doubletalk) the COW invasion of Iraq.
Well, that's the point, the UN *did* approve of the Gulf War, *which never ended*. Again, this is what the law says. It's not about doubletalk, it's the actual law. And yes, the UN did not approve those other invasions, but *no one* in the UN seriously contended they were illegal, which only proves the point: the UN has never consistently held aggression as a violation of the UN charter, and does so only when it suits them to, because they happen to disagree with a particular engagement. This sucks the force out of what few and vague rules the UN has on the subject.
1. The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.
Just like we respected the SOVERIGNITY of the Iraq government, the Afghans, the Vietnamese, Yugoslavia.
That respect is not absolute, and the UN charter never intends it to be, as the right of self-defense is also defined in the same charter, which almost everyone agrees gave the U.S. the right to invade Afghanistan (for example).
Note well:
"3. All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered."
Again, this is never intended to be absolute. Where was the uproar over the supposed illegality of Kosovo? There wasn't any, not from the UN member states.
As for other international law, how about the Geneva condition and treatment of prisoners.
This is shifting the goalposts. You were talking about the illegality of the invasions, and that is what I responded to. I won't respond to changes of subject.
The weird part is that you didn't quote the parts of the UN charter that actually makes a real case against what the U.S. did. For example:
Of course, it was the UN's own top weapons inspector, Hans Blix, who said the U.S. threats -- supposedly barred here -- were useful and good, and without which what little cooperation Iraq offered pre-invasion would not have even been possible. And that's the sort of problems you have: the UN arbitrarily enforces its own charter, which means when they do want to enforce it, they are unable to.
Just like how they promised the world, and the U.S., they would force Iraq to comply, back in 1991, with the cease-fire resolution, and never did, which is what brought us to the invasion in 2003. It was the direct result of the UN's failure to properly force Iraqi compliance over 12 years, and the last nail in the coffin of worldwide respect for the ability of the UN to actually do anything useful in such matters.
if your fucking imperialist government would quit meddling in the affairs of others AND FUCKING RESPECT SOVERIEGN rights as promised by international law
... not innocent in the slightest.
Can you give one example of such a violation of international law? The Iraq invasion did not violate international law. Neither did Afghanistan. Got any other recent examples?
If you would really like to go over the actual law, we can. But the basic point is that the Gulf War never ended, and the U.S. and Iraq were both parties to a cease fire agreement that Iraq never complied with, and the U.S. therefore had every legal right to resume the hostilities.
You may consider that a technicality, but you're the one who brought up the law.
Besides, all your citizens are valid targets and participants in the war
Now, how is ignoring international law? According to all accepted treaties regarding warfare, civilian targets are not, in general, valid.
Maybe you should stop talking about "law" until you actually know what the law says?
Umm, no. The US is a shortening of "The United States"; the USA is a shortening of "The United States of America". Legally the former is not a shortening of the latter and technically only refers to the government. The United States is the government that runs the United States of America.
Actually, no. Both refer to precisely the same thing. What is this "legally" you speak of? No law distinguishes between the two terms.
-US, please notice calling yourself "America" basically takes that title away from Canadians and South Americans. ... Don't get me wrong, I'm not crying to you in the hopes a whole nation will read this post and change the way they address themselves. I don't give a shit what you guys call each other... it's just silly.
We've been calling ourselves Americans before there even WAS a United States of America. There's no reason to stop now, however inaccurate it may be. Not that it is especially inaccurate: it derives from the fact that this was intended to be a new American nation, and Americans were different from Europeans, so therefore we are Americans, not Europeans. It wasn't intended to be a statement of nationality per se, but merely to distinguish from Europe. Once the nation was formed, incorporating America into its name, the moniker inevitably stuck, and there's not a thing wrong with that.
It's confusing, but not wrong.
And incidentally, you would have more luck convincing people to stop calling Native Americans, Indians, and that won't go away either, and has a far less rational (though just as historical) basis for sticking around.
As long as I am forced to pay taxes to *protect* me and laws limit my rights to protect my items, then YES, I do expect (read the police who get paid to do this) somebody to protect my items.
I will read what is not true. No, the police are not, in any way, paid to protect your items. Where did you get this nonsense? Police are reactive, not proactive, in almost all cases. They act once someone has broken the law, they rarely prevent the breaking of the law.
Unless I have the legal right to proect my items to the extent I feel necessary then they are not my responsibility. Unless I have a absolute right to shoot people for breaking my window or kids for tagging my property,
Wow, this is so retarded it is hard to know where to begin.
First, no one with a brain in his head thinks lethal force is necessary to protect his iPod, unless it has state secrets on it.
Second, the cops can't use lethal force for that either, so if in your opinion lethal force is necessary for it to be someone's responsibility, then it is no one's responsibility at all, in which case you are only contributing to the idea that anyone can steal it, since no one will take responsibility.
Third, if you feel you don't have the right to protect your things while they are in a car -- which is a stupid thing to think -- then leave them at home, where you actually (in most states) *do* have the legal right to shoot someone who illegally enters. No one is forcing you to take those items and leave them in your car.
Either give me the rights or quit stealing my money to pay for police that don't do their job.
Bottom line -- and this is a fact -- you have all the rights you need, and no one is stealing your money, and it is not the police's job. It's difficult to imagine how more incorrect you could be.
Being irritated at victims who left the car running, becomes "left the keys inside" becomes "left the door unlocked" is likely to become "didn't have an alarm system installed" when that becomes necessary for most people
Likely to become? You might not have insurance coverage if you leave the keys inside, or the doors unlocked. And you get lower rates if you have an alarm system. Because those things *are* your responsibility. You are free to disregard them, but then you are increasing your liklihood of being a victim, and taking that responsibility on yourself.
Or do you think it is someone else's responsibility to make sure no one steals your items?
Yes, it sucks that there is a lot of theft in the modern world. It's a terrible thing. But your items are your responsibility, period.
I mostly agree with your point of view on this, if I leave the top down on my car (hey it's a sunny day out!) I shouldn't have to worry that someone will steal my loose change or cell phone charger.
But neither should the insurance company have to worry if then someone takes your possessions. If you won't take basic precautions, then others shouldn't have to take responsibility for that.
Had this happen to me twice in the real world.
That sucks.
Both times the cops and insurance company made me feel as I if I did something wrong.
You did. Insurance is there as a backup. If you don't take precautionary measures, then it makes everyone else's insurance cost more money. You certainly did do something wrong, if you left your car doors and windows open, and expect insurance to cover it.
Americans seem to have this ingrain belief that if it isn't locked down, you must want me to steal it. Bullshit.
It is bullshit that anyone has this belief, except for the thieves.
What's worse bullshit is that people expect insurance should be there to provide for them when they are too careless to provide for themselves.
For example, a dedicated outboard DAC usually (but not always) does a better job than a CD player or the DAC built into an amplifier.
But you never want to do analog out from the CD/DVD player, ever, if you can possibly have your decoder separate, or in the amp. Unless you've got multichannel analog output from the player, which almost no one does, and certainly these cheap players don't do.
Also, except for a few amplifiers, none of them actually produce the final signal digitally. Yes, there are a few digital amps, but they are few and far between right now. Ultimately, it goes into the amp in analog. Having the DAC in the amp doesn't mean that there isn't an analog stage most of the time.
That's beside the point, which is why replace all these components in the *player* when you should be using digital output anyway?
Also, even if you go digital into the amp, the CD player can still have an impact because of jitter in the CD player. The bitstream coming out of the CD player is not timed completely accurately. Some amps (very very few) might have a retiming chip but these tend to be expensive.
First, this rarely comes up in the real world with recent equipment. Second, that won't be fixed by the given modifications.
But the question was why use analog and the answer would be, you can get a higher quality signal.
No, you can't. The significant reduction in sound fidelity, not to mention the inability to do multichannel and higher-quality (DTS, etc.) audio, far outweighs the problems of jitter.
Why is anyone using analog with CD/DVD players anymore?
Just do digital to your amp and get a decent amp. Then it doesn't matter what your player does, as long as it can get the digital signal to the amp.
http://homepage.mac.com/pudge/geeksunite.net/
...
It won't last long
Do you think it's possible that the majority in this case ruled the way they did because they felt the wording of the Constitution was [weak|vague|wrong], and that even though they might not necessarily feel that it could ever be right to use Eminent Domain on behalf of a coporate entity, it was better in the long run to highlight the weakness in the original text rather than interpret according to their own ethics, i.e. "legislate from the bench?"
No. I think the majority believes the Congressional powers of the Constitution must be interpreted as broadly as possible. Even though it's clear the intent was for actual public use, they look at the words, not the intent, and as long as the meaning can be shoehorned into the desired meaning, then it is acceptable to them.
It reminds me of Eldred case (although obviously we have different players on different sides, except for Ginsberg, Souter, and Kennedy; it's sad that no one dissented with both court opinions). It's absolutely clear that the intent of the Constitutional copyright clause was not to allow Congress to offer unlimited (or in Breyer's words, "virtually perpetual") copyright terms. But the court found that hey, the words can be read that way, so that's good enough.
No, but it's more likely to be true if those closest to the situation held that belief.
... yes, and? If someone wants the complete context, the click the little "Parent" link.
Right, like Richardson.
Unshocked? Apparently you need no help from me when it comes to impugning your intelligence.
Huh? Are you incorrectly implying the word is not a legitimate one? Here's a hint: dictionaries are not prescriptive, but descriptive. The lack of a word's appearance in a dictionary means nothing about a word's legitimacy.
Nice partial quote. Why am I not surprised? The complete sentence was:
Uh
Bork had no qualms about firing Cox.
You're a liar.
Bork said:
Yes, he made it clear in that quote, and others, that he was conflicted over it, that he "had qualms."
The only thing that Ruckelhaus did was tell him that there was no sense in firing Cox and resigning. He didn't urge Bork to fire Cox, as you implied.
I implied no such thing. I was talking about Richardson, not Ruckelshaus. In his resignation letter, Richardson even said the *only* reason he resigned was because he promised he would not do what Nixon asked of him. Had he not made such a promise, he would have carried out Nixon's orders. Same with Ruckelshaus. Both would have fired Cox if they had not made promises not to.
Even Cox expressed no ill will toward Bork, but said that his job was done, it was now up to Congress.
So we have a guy who did what his predecessors would have done had they been in his shoes, what one of them urged him to do, what was perfectly legal, what was in keeping with the best traditions of the chain of command of the executive branch.
Bork not only did nothing remotely wrong, but he did precisely what he was supposed to do, what he should have done. I would have done the same thing, and I would not want to work with someone at that level who would not.
It's reality
No, it's not.
and the widely held view of those who reported on Watergate at it unfolded.
Oh, well, since it is *widely held,* it must be true!
He should have had the ethics and courage to resign
He did. But Richardson talked him out of it, convinced him to put the Justice Department ahead of himself.
This coming from you after you referred to me as "a stupid person"
I was being ironic when I said that, as you had just attempted to impugn my own intelligence. I am unshocked that you didn't get it.
I can make the case quite simply
No, you really cannot.
When Cox refused, Nixon started at the top of the Justice Department and worked his way down looking for someone willing to fire Cox. Attorney General Elliot Richardson refused to fire Archibald Cox, resigning his position instead. So did Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus. Only Bork was willing to do so
Yes, at the urging of Richardson, who knows a hell of a lot more about the ethics of the situation than you ever could. Right there you undercut your entire case by directly implying Bork should follow Richardson's lead, because he *did* follow Richardson's lead.
You act like Bork actually did something wrong. That's your problem. You can't see he actually did the morally and legally right thing. Either that, or you simply know you can't actually make the case that he did something wrong, and that's probably why you've consistently resorted to ad hominem, to disguise that fact.