Re:Adjust your tinfoil hat, guy.
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I never contested the existence of Echelon. I contested the existence of a secret US/UK pact to deliberately violate the laws of both countries. If you want me to believe that, you're going to need to present me direct evidence--not hearsay from third parties with their own private agendas.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. If you can't back up the extraordinary claim with extraordinary proof, then don't make the extraordinary claim.
Re:Adjust your tinfoil hat, guy.
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Ever heard of the U.S. Marshals' Service fugitive-search teams? They don't bother with search warrants; after all, they're not searching for a criminal conspiracy and they don't care if evidence gets thrown out. They don't bother with arrest warrants; the people they're after have already been convicted. They don't bother with Miranda warnings; it's not as if the conviction can be retroactively thrown out because the perp wasn't Mirandized after his trial.
When it comes to fugitive apprehension, the example you're using here, the Bill of Rights is much, much quieter than you probably think it is.
Nor is this a new development; it's been this way in the USMS for at least the last twenty-five years.
Re:Adjust your tinfoil hat, guy.
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I'm sorry that I'm not giving you verifiable facts, but it is *absolutely* true that this is going on
I didn't believe my NSA friends when they used that line on me. ("I can't tell you why PGP is so bad, but if you only knew what I knew...")
I don't buy it when you use that line on me ("it is absolutely true!").
Skepticism is a great tool. It's great to be skeptical about the government's claims of acting in your best interests. It's great to be skeptical of people's claims that the government is a nefarious conspiracy that routinely violates the law.
Either prove your statement, or else don't spread rumors you can't back up with fact.
Adjust your tinfoil hat, guy.
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At great risk of sounding like the Voice of Reason (and God knows how Slashdotters hate that!), could you please present some evidence to back up your assertion that the United States and United Kingdom are colluding to break the laws of both nations?
Look up the Federal laws: if it is illegal for a Federal agency to do $foo, then it is also illegal for a Federal agency to have a third party do $foo on their behalf.
If I break into a home and see a kilo of cocaine lying around, I can then go to the DEA and tell them. They can use my testimony to get a warrant to search the home and impound the drugs. Why? Because I didn't commit the crime on their behalf; I came in entirely of my own accord; there was no understanding between the DEA and myself that "if I see any drugs, I'm going to bring them to your attention".
But if the DEA asks me to break into a home, they'd better damn well have a warrant, otherwise they're breaking all manner of Federal laws.
So what you're positing is there is a tacit understanding between the US and UK that each will spy on the other's citizens and share with each other the fruits of those actions. Hmm. This sounds mind-bogglingly stupid.
Why?
Free hint: this is a Federal crime.
Free hint number two: the FBI and NSA do not get along.
Free hint number three: the FBI is the one with the charter to spy on American citizens--not the NSA.
Free hint number four: the FBI protects its jurisdictional turf very zealously.
Free hint number five: the FBI is one of the nation's intelligence agencies, co-equal with the CIA and NSA. The FBI has no charter to collect intelligence from foreign sources; the CIA and NSA have no charter to collect intelligence from domestic sources.
Free hint number six: if the NSA were to really be involved in this, the FBI would be doing a full-court-press investigation into the matter. (a), because it's a clear and massive violation of Federal law, and more importantly, (b) THE FBI DOES NOT SHARE ITS JURISDICTIONAL TURF.
Period.
So if you have any hard facts proving this tacit agreement, I'd love to hear it. If you have hard facts about it, then I'll talk to my FBI friends tomorrow and tell them about it.
During the dot-com boom, I was being paid $100,000 a year by a San Francisco dot-com. Of that, $50,000 went to Federal and California taxes, leaving me with $50K.
Due to SF real estate being so grotesquely overpriced, rent for my modest apartment cost $2,700. Add in utilities and you're smack at $3K/mo.
That left me with $14K/yr. to buy groceries, to make my car payments, to occasionally go out on a date, to... etc. It was a very unpleasant experience.
During the dot-com boom, $100K in San Francisco was enough for someone to pay their bills and have a decent place to live. That was it. There was no money leftover for 401Ks, to throw in a savings account, to finance a wedding or a honeymoon, etc. While it's certainly a better standard of living than most of the world has, a $100K salary was not enough for someone to engage in the great American pasttime of "upward mobility".
To make sure that the state did not drift into an official state religion (which invariably leads to problems) they put many safeguards into the USA constitution to keep the state and church seperate.
Quite false; the original intent of the First Amendment was not to guarantee the individual right to freedom of religious belief, but to guarantee the Federal government would not enforce a religious belief. Massachusetts had a state-sponsored church until the mid-1800s. It wasn't until the Fourteenth Amendment came along that the First Amendment was interpreted as a restriction on the states' authority to establish religion, as well as a restriction on the Federal government's.
While I'm very fond of the separation of church and state (and note, I'm a Christian), it does the goal of separation of church and state harm for people to throw about trivially-refuted nonsense like "the Framers put in many safeguards to keep the state and church separate". They did so only to the extent of keeping the Federal government and church separate. The more pervasive sense of separation is a post-Civil War addition.
If you watch Monday Night Football, you'll see a bright yellow line superimposed on the field representing the first-down line. This has made a significant change for viewers at home; it makes it much, much easier for a viewer to tell whether it's fourth-and-inches or first-and-ten. It's a great example of how CGI has changed the viewing experience for the better: the change is subtle, innocuous, doesn't distract from the plays, and was not possible before the fusion of cameras and computers.
I'll use Postfix just as soon as someone puts up some correct and current documentation about how to get it working with SASL (particularly, Cyrus-SASL's latest release) to allow SMTP-AUTH for authorized users.
I'm a university student and I'm often on a DHCP connection. I grab my mail off my home box using POP3s and I want to reply to it, but I can't since my university server requires that all outgoing mail be from "myname@example.edu", not my home domain of "rjh@homedomain.org".
So I have Sendmail set up right now to do SMTP-AUTH and everything works great. I get to use my home Sendmail server from anywhere in the world without it being an open relay. Love it. Unfortunately, Sendmail blows, securitywise. I've often been wishing I could go back to Postfix, but the documentation on SMTP-AUTH with Postfix is embarassingly scanty. USENET has been absolutely no help. Google can't find any current and accurate documentation beyond "you need to use Cyrus-SASL". Even dead-tree Postfix books have been useless.
So. Anyone want to throw me a bone here and tell me just how the $#(&! I can get Postfix + SMTP-AUTH working?
Re:ACLU does not live up to its principles.
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"The ACLU has often been criticized for `ignoring the Second Amendment' and refusing to fight for the individual's right to own a gun or other weapons. This issue, however, has not been ignored by the ACLU. The national board has in fact debated and discussed the civil liberties aspects of the Second Amendment many times.
We believe that the constitutional right to bear arms is primarily a collective one... The national ACLU is neutral on the issue of gun control. We believe that the Constitution contains no barriers to reasonable regulations of gun ownership. If we can license and register cars, we can license and register guns."
Strange, isn't it? The ACLU, which claims to be fanatically in favor of the Bill of Rights, supports mandatory licensure and registration for someone to exercise their rights under the Second Amendment.
Not only that, the ACLU's position is trivially refuted. I would be dancing in the streets if weapons were regulated the same as cars. My driver's license is valid in all 50 states--but a permit to carry a concealed weapon may not be valid outside of your county, depending on the local laws. I'm allowed to own any kind of car I wish, subject to a restriction that cars unable to pass safety regulations, etc., must not be driven on public roadways and that I must obey traffic law when on public roadways; but I'm not allowed to own an AK-47, even if I use it in only lawful and peaceful ways. You don't need governmental permission to buy a car; you only need registration and regulation if your car is used on public roadways. I'd love to not need governmental permission to buy a shotgun, and only need to pay a $5 ATF processing fee if I was going to hunt on public land.
As I said, the ACLU are cowards who lack the conviction of their oft-waved principles.
Re:Obvious if you're looking for it
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It's been federal judicial dogma for a long time.
Technically correct, but not as right as you think you are. There's no doubt that it is centrally applicable to militias, but just because it's centrally applicable to militias does not mean that it's a collectively-held right. In all the reading on Second Amendment law that I've done, both pro- and con-, I have yet to find any respectable journal which has given the slightest shred of credibility to the collectivist interpretation.
Looking at Supreme Court jurisprudence in US v Miller, (1939, the most recent Second Amendment case) it's clear the Supreme Court considers the Second Amendment to be an individually-held right. Miller was convicted of possessing a sawn-off shotgun, not on the legal theory that the state has the exclusive right to control the possession of arms, but on the basis that a sawn-off shotgun possessed no military value the court could see. The Miller decision strongly indicates that if Miller had been carrying a Thompson submachinegun (a weapon with clear military value), he would've been acquitted on appeal.
For that matter, it's possible he would've won his case outright if he'd bothered to present a defense. The Miller appeal was done in absentia and ex parte, due to Miller not showing up for the appeal.
Anyway. The upshot of this is that neither the Supreme Court nor legal professors put a single shred of credit in the collectivist interpretation of the Second Amendment. The ACLU is ethically lacking in that it would rather hide behind a discredited interpretation of the Second Amendment rather than own up to the fact the Bill of Rights has things in it which are offensive to a large portion of the ACLU's supporters.
ACLU does not live up to its principles.
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My beef with the ACLU centers around the Second Amendment. Not because I'm a gun-toting psychopath, but because our civil liberties are protected only to the degree that all of them are protected--including the ones we might disagree with. Regardless of whether you're pro-gun or anti-gun, the Second Amendment is still part of the Bill of Rights and is thus a civil right under American law.
The only problem is, the ACLU doesn't see it that way. Ask the ACLU why they have not once, not ever, taken a pro-Second Amendment case and you'll get the same answer every time: "because we believe the Second Amendment is a guarantee of the state's right to equip a militia, not the individual's right to possess firearms."
It would be an admirable sentiment, were it not for one fact... not one reputable legal scholar in America takes that position. Alan Dershowitz, a very far-left liberal Democrat lawyer and legal professor, has given the best analysis of why no reputable law professor has embraced this position.
According to Dershowitz, the Second Amendment reads "the right of the people..." The very instant you say "the right of the people" actually means "the right of the state", then you've thrown the entire Bill of Rights out the window. If "the right of the people" actually means "the right of the state", then what does that mean for any of the rights we cherish? Suddenly, we no longer have any individual rights; they're all held collectively by the state, which becomes our guardian, able to exercise our liberties in our name while not permitting us those liberties for our own use.
It's really a very 1984 example of doublespeak.
There is not one Supreme Court case which supports the collectivist interpretation of the Bill of Rights, either as a whole or for one specific amendment. In the most recent Supreme Court Second Amendment case, Miller v US, the Supreme Court explicitly recognized the Second Amendment as an individual--not a collective--right.
For the ACLU to claim that the Second Amendment is correctly read as a collective right is... I can't figure it out.
What I suspect is this: the ACLU has a lot of support from a lot of people who, while adamantly in favor of free speech and privacy and all manner of other things, are also staunchly in favor of the notion that nobody should have guns except the cops. And as a result of this, the ACLU has decided to cut the Second Amendment loose to fend for itself, on the theory that "it's better to lose one-tenth of the Bill of Rights than it is to piss off 95% of our contributors, and thus kill any good we can do for the nine-tenths that still remains."
I *have* learned Lisp (or is it LISP?), but not well.
Well, there you go! Pick up a copy of Friedman and Felleisen's The Little Schemer or The Little LISPer and go to town, go have fun, learn LISP. The Little... is the best introduction to programming I've ever seen, especially the best introduction to LISP and Scheme and SML/NJ.
nobody has tried to explain me the inner working of the interpreter
Classic LISP fits into 6k of Assembly. Scheme is even simpler. The Revised Report on Scheme (the definition of the language) is only a handful of pages. McCarthy's original LISP was completely and formally specified in just 12 pages. Common LISP's spec is over 1000 pages, but the vast majority of that (700 pages or more) is dedicated to the Common LISP Object System (CLOS), which is totally unnecessary to know in order to learn LISP goodness. Remove CLOS and the Common LISP spec is actually smaller than K&R's The C Programming Language.
Regarding whether it's LISP or Lisp... originally it was an acronym for LISt Processing, and hence was properly capitalized. But over the years LISP has become more or less a proper noun, and it can be spelled as Lisp, too. Generally, old-school LISP hackers use the all-caps, while the new generation of LISP hackers use Lisp.
I'm an oddball, in that I'm a new-generation (I'm 28) who was taught by a bunch of old-schoolers. So I picked up their method of spelling.
I'm at first german, and english I learned in school. So: That above is completely unreadable to me!
It's unreadable in English, too. It's perfectly legible when thinking in terms of formal computational theory. English, German or other natural languages are not good choices for programming; there's too much context sensitivity, too much implicit meaning, for it to reduce well to mathematics.
the only word in my english german dictionary where I can find a translation is null.
Your dictionary doesn't have "define"? (Although that's honestly a typo in my code; it should've been defun, not define. Scheme uses define, LISP uses defun.)
Besides, this is a red herring. Look up "Thread" in your dictionary, and then think about how that word is used in Java (hint: it has nothing to do with sewing). If you're going to learn a programming language, you need to learn the language--not preconceptions about "well, it uses this word, therefore it must mean this".
how should I know that cmp is a function?
By how it's used in the code. It cannot be anything other than a function. It's perfectly unambiguous.
I would asume null is something special similar to nil.
The first rule of programming: Thou Shalt Never Assume. If you don't know what something does, look it up.
This is something the OpenBSD developers discovered; lots of C programmers simply don't know their own APIs. Instead of bothering to check if sprintf() has a buffer-overflow vulnerability (it does), many C programmers are happily oblivious assuming that nothing bad can ever happen to it.
Look it up. If you don't understand it, if you aren't one hundred and ten percent sure on what it does, look it up. Nobody's going to think you're an idiot because you say "wait a minute, I don't grok this, where's my copy of Common LISP: The Language?"
(This is not an elitist attitude. If it were elitist, I'd say that if you didn't already know you weren't worthy of knowing, and that's one hundred and ten percent not true. But I do insist that people look it up instead of blindly assuming that function foo must do bar simply because it's named foo.)
I know pascal... C.... and other languages: how the heck am I supposed to memorize that the statement above (choose between d and e if you like) does perform a "return"?
You're supposed to look it up, of course.
I wonder what car means? Its not in my english/german dictionary....
Autofahren. Except in this case, where it means Contents of the Address Register (CAR). I'm old-fashioned in that I still use CAR; Common LISP also defines the much more English-like FIRST for people such as yourself who feel things ought to have more English-like names.
Of course, if you looked CAR up in CTLT, you'd already have known this.
why is it not written like this:
Because you haven't finished writing your own LISP-like language with that syntax. Stupid answer, but true. If you feel that strongly about it, LISP gives you the tools to do exactly that.
there are theveral things hidden in 8 line sof lisp code:
Not at all. Nothing's hidden. You should know that much computational theory already. If not, ask your professors why computational theory isn't being covered.
Recursion and functions-as-data are both extremely simple, extremely basic, freshman-year computational theory subject matter.
Your points 3 and 4 are trivial. Perl doesn't require you to explicitly return values, either. Nor does Python, nor does... insisting on explicit return statements says that all you know are C-style languages and you don't want to learn anything new.
For point 5, anyone who's looking up computer terms in a language dictionary deserves exactly what they get. Go to the Common
It's not mean to be easily read, but easily accessed from the language itself.
It is easily read. Just invest the time getting over the initial hurdle of the parentheses and it's a very easy-to-read language.
My point is that Lisp is a 40 years old programming language
John McCarthy first started working on LISP in the 50s. It's older than 40 years.
Lisp syntax is too simple for most everyday tasks as, for example, reading other people's code.
This would be true if LISP programmers generally had difficulty reading each other's code. Generally speaking, we don't.
If you have to remove the main attribute of the language in order to understand and think in it, is clear that THAT attribute should be removed.
The two main attributes of LISP are (a) everything's a list and (b) functional programming. I get rid of neither when I'm sketching out code. All I'm doing is ignoring the parts of the syntax which I don't need.
When I write C++ pseudocode, I don't specify type traits for templates. I use indentation instead of brackets. I play fast and loose with typing.
When I'm writing Python, I always leave off the "self." qualifier before member variables.
When I'm writing LISP, I ignore the parentheses.
Lisp high learning curve is something that most programmers can't simply afford.
Spoken like someone who's never learned LISP. LISP's learning curve is surprisingly gentle, which is why it and its derivatives are used in so many undergraduate CS curricula.
According to the latest spec, a vector iterator is a pointer. And besides, I'm not going to optimize my code before I run it through a profiler--premature optimization is the root of all evil.
the whole point is that Lisp is not a programming language but a kind of language definition language?
You've been fed a batch of bad Kool-Aid. Fortunately, it's not too late to come around.:) LISP is, without a doubt, a full-featured programming language. It supports everything Java does, for instance; objects, iteration, exceptions, variables, recursion... the list goes on and on.
It's what LISP brings to the table above and beyond being a programming language (as most programmers think of the term) which makes it so astonishingly wonderful.
Build Your Own Syntax. See why I say it's difficult? You haven't ANYTHING done for you in advance.
Presto. Right there's a merge done in eight lines of code. It's generalized to the point where it works for anything, provided you give it an appropriate comparison function. And note--I didn't need anything big and fancy to do it. No imports or includes, no useless structural scaffolding...
LISP provides you with all the tools you'd expect of a modern programming language. The beauty of LISP is that you can do a hell of a lot of things in very small amounts of code without needing anything special. Ever seen someone write a PROLOG interpreter in 150 lines of LISP?
But how do to learn to create those domain-specific languages?
You start by doing, of course. You start by solving just one little part of the problem set, and you'll get about fifty lines in and you'll realize, "wouldn't it be nice if the language allowed me to do $foo?" Then you go off and make the language do $foo. Lather, rinse, repeat, until you've got thousands of lines of code creating a new special-purpose language to solve problems in a given problem domain, and five lines of code that actually solve your problem.
It is so far away from conventional academic lectures
Ever taken a Computational Theory course? LISP and LISP-like languages are used very heavily in Computational Theory courses precisely because they're so intimately tied to the lambda calculus, which is a formal model of computation.
And at MIT, introductory CompSci students are taught in Scheme, so you can't even say it's far removed from undergraduate lectures, either.
that one needs to forget almost everything to start thinking that way!
Yep. You do need to forget everything in order to start thinking that way. That's why it's called progress. Once you grok LISP and the lambda calculus, you not only see how to recreate all the old ways of doing business--you see how the old ways of doing business actually work, because now you have a formal model of computation to fall back upon.
And I'm not convinced that that syntaxlessness is indispensable
Syntax is necessary because otherwise you're left with a jumbled mess--sound and fury signifying nothing. If I pound out random letters at my keyboard I can say that it's the complete works of Shakespeare ("yes, dsfw98eradjct9e! is actually `to be or not to be'"), but that doesn't mean anyone can comprehend them.
To that extent, LISP has a very strong syntax. Don't mistake the simplicity of LISP's syntax for a simplistic syntax. LISP's syntax is extremely regular and extremely simple--far more than any other language I've come across.
If the matter is problem solving, just learn problem solving, not Lisp language.
LISP is a language meant specifically to solve problems. Where's your problem with it?
I would prefer to have some syntactic sugar which does the code more readable than those ((if()(and no then)(nor else keywords))s)
Why is it surprising that it follows an exponential dropoff? The only interesting questions are the coefficients of exponential dropoff, not that it's exponential--I'd sit upright and take notice if it was a linear decrease.
Anything which follows a steady fractional diminishment will have a curve of y = ke**-ax, where k and a are constants. You see this basic equasion pop up all the time in physics, economics, statistics... etc. Why should server slashdotting be any different?
Antimatter is just like conventional matter, except for one (and only one) thing: the charges are reversed. E = mc**2 for it, just like for everything else in the universe. It has a positive mass, thus it has a positive energy level, thus it distorts spacetime in exactly the same way as matter.
The Constitution is Federal law; if it wasn't Federal law, it couldn't be cited as an authoritative and controlling document in court cases. It is an extremely special kind of law, but to say the Constitution is not law is nonsense.
It's true the Constitution is not legislated law, but then again, neither is Common Law. That doesn't keep Common Law from being law, does it?
Please, please, please, for the love of Bob, people, think a little bit before you go about saying "he just plead guilty because he was looking at 20-to-life, we don't actually know what he did."
There's a special kind of plea you use when you're taking a conviction on lesser charges out of fear that you're looking at a much greater time if you're convicted on the original charges. It's called an Alford plea, closely related to a nolo contendre plea.
Nolo has been expressed in layman's terms as "I didn't do it, judge, and I'll never do it again!" You neither admit guilt nor protest your innocence. As a result, many judges refuse to enter nolo pleas; they demand that you either admit or deny responsibility, and if you insist on nolo a "not guilty" plea will be entered instead.
An Alford plea is a far different thing. An Alford, in layman's terms, is "Judge, I didn't do it, but I'm terrified of the original charges and I think they could convict me on it." An Alford plea allows you to formally and legally protest your own innocence, while at the same time stipulating that the government could convict you if it went the whole nine yards, and thus avail yourself of the plea bargain.
Mike Hawash didn't plead either nolo or Alford.
Mike Hawash plead guilty.
Guilty, as in "yes, Your Honor, I fucking did it!"
Could we please, please, please stop seeing these self-important, self-aggrandizing rants from Damn-the-Man slashdotters who don't even care to learn about the difference between a guilty plea and an Alford plea, and why it's so significant that Hawash didn't plead Alford?
Thank you so much for being a voice of sanity. After reading what passes for reasoning among the "damn the man!" crowd of Slashdotters, I was getting ready to just walk away from Slashdot altogether.
Thanks for confirming my faith in at least a small fraction of the Slashdot readership.
The only idea that comes close is the suggestion that there's some force that started the whole ball rolling... but we know nothing about it, and praying to it or worshipping it as about as useful as praying to my own foot.
You'd be surprised how many of the religious faithful agree with you. Prayer is a theologically thorny subject; the idea of asking God for personal favors strikes me as... suspect.
"Okay, God, y'see, you're screwing up here because I WASN'T SUPPOSED TO GET CANCER so you better do something about that, you understand?!"
It's nonsense. If you accept the existence of the Divine, then you either need to accept (a) he's utterly ambivalent towards you, in which case he really doesn't want to hear you whine, or (b) he really has your best interests at heart, in which case the worst thing that could happen to you is for God to substitute your judgment for his. (Option (c), God hates us, is trivially disproven. If God hates me, he's sure done a lousy job of acting on it--I enjoy my life.:) )
Worship is likewise difficult. In the Torah, the word for God is "Abba"--literally, "Pop". Not "Father", not "Almighty", but a friendly and familiar term of address. In the New Testament, we're told that Christ is the ultimate friend of humanity. I dunno about you, but I don't worship my friends. I appreciate them, I take note of them, I go out of my way for them, I don't take them for granted... but I don't exactly prostrate myself down before my friends and whimper about how unworthy I am.
A conversation with a Jesuit once really opened my eyes. "The essence of the New Testament," he said, "is that God exists, and he wants you to love people. Especially the unlovable. Compared to that, the Resurrection, the Last Supper, the Sermon on the Mount--they're just commentary."
If you can believe there's some force out there that got this ball rolling, try asking yourself: how would the Creator want me to act towards his Creation?
Judaism, Christianity and Islam all pick up at an answer of "benevolently".
I'm certainly not trying to convert you, and I apologize if I'm coming across as that. I'm just trying to show that there are a lot of people (myself included) who have pretty much your same exact set of doubts, and who manage to find in their religion a faith which is not offensive to their reason.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I never contested the existence of Echelon. I contested the existence of a secret US/UK pact to deliberately violate the laws of both countries. If you want me to believe that, you're going to need to present me direct evidence--not hearsay from third parties with their own private agendas.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. If you can't back up the extraordinary claim with extraordinary proof, then don't make the extraordinary claim.
Ever heard of the U.S. Marshals' Service fugitive-search teams? They don't bother with search warrants; after all, they're not searching for a criminal conspiracy and they don't care if evidence gets thrown out. They don't bother with arrest warrants; the people they're after have already been convicted. They don't bother with Miranda warnings; it's not as if the conviction can be retroactively thrown out because the perp wasn't Mirandized after his trial.
When it comes to fugitive apprehension, the example you're using here, the Bill of Rights is much, much quieter than you probably think it is.
Nor is this a new development; it's been this way in the USMS for at least the last twenty-five years.
I'm sorry that I'm not giving you verifiable facts, but it is *absolutely* true that this is going on
I didn't believe my NSA friends when they used that line on me. ("I can't tell you why PGP is so bad, but if you only knew what I knew...")
I don't buy it when you use that line on me ("it is absolutely true!").
Skepticism is a great tool. It's great to be skeptical about the government's claims of acting in your best interests. It's great to be skeptical of people's claims that the government is a nefarious conspiracy that routinely violates the law.
Either prove your statement, or else don't spread rumors you can't back up with fact.
At great risk of sounding like the Voice of Reason (and God knows how Slashdotters hate that!), could you please present some evidence to back up your assertion that the United States and United Kingdom are colluding to break the laws of both nations?
Look up the Federal laws: if it is illegal for a Federal agency to do $foo, then it is also illegal for a Federal agency to have a third party do $foo on their behalf.
If I break into a home and see a kilo of cocaine lying around, I can then go to the DEA and tell them. They can use my testimony to get a warrant to search the home and impound the drugs. Why? Because I didn't commit the crime on their behalf; I came in entirely of my own accord; there was no understanding between the DEA and myself that "if I see any drugs, I'm going to bring them to your attention".
But if the DEA asks me to break into a home, they'd better damn well have a warrant, otherwise they're breaking all manner of Federal laws.
So what you're positing is there is a tacit understanding between the US and UK that each will spy on the other's citizens and share with each other the fruits of those actions. Hmm. This sounds mind-bogglingly stupid.
Why?
Free hint: this is a Federal crime.
Free hint number two: the FBI and NSA do not get along.
Free hint number three: the FBI is the one with the charter to spy on American citizens--not the NSA.
Free hint number four: the FBI protects its jurisdictional turf very zealously.
Free hint number five: the FBI is one of the nation's intelligence agencies, co-equal with the CIA and NSA. The FBI has no charter to collect intelligence from foreign sources; the CIA and NSA have no charter to collect intelligence from domestic sources.
Free hint number six: if the NSA were to really be involved in this, the FBI would be doing a full-court-press investigation into the matter. (a), because it's a clear and massive violation of Federal law, and more importantly, (b) THE FBI DOES NOT SHARE ITS JURISDICTIONAL TURF.
Period.
So if you have any hard facts proving this tacit agreement, I'd love to hear it. If you have hard facts about it, then I'll talk to my FBI friends tomorrow and tell them about it.
I guarantee you they'll be pissed off.
During the dot-com boom, I was being paid $100,000 a year by a San Francisco dot-com. Of that, $50,000 went to Federal and California taxes, leaving me with $50K.
Due to SF real estate being so grotesquely overpriced, rent for my modest apartment cost $2,700. Add in utilities and you're smack at $3K/mo.
That left me with $14K/yr. to buy groceries, to make my car payments, to occasionally go out on a date, to... etc. It was a very unpleasant experience.
During the dot-com boom, $100K in San Francisco was enough for someone to pay their bills and have a decent place to live. That was it. There was no money leftover for 401Ks, to throw in a savings account, to finance a wedding or a honeymoon, etc. While it's certainly a better standard of living than most of the world has, a $100K salary was not enough for someone to engage in the great American pasttime of "upward mobility".
To make sure that the state did not drift into an official state religion (which invariably leads to problems) they put many safeguards into the USA constitution to keep the state and church seperate.
Quite false; the original intent of the First Amendment was not to guarantee the individual right to freedom of religious belief, but to guarantee the Federal government would not enforce a religious belief. Massachusetts had a state-sponsored church until the mid-1800s. It wasn't until the Fourteenth Amendment came along that the First Amendment was interpreted as a restriction on the states' authority to establish religion, as well as a restriction on the Federal government's.
While I'm very fond of the separation of church and state (and note, I'm a Christian), it does the goal of separation of church and state harm for people to throw about trivially-refuted nonsense like "the Framers put in many safeguards to keep the state and church separate". They did so only to the extent of keeping the Federal government and church separate. The more pervasive sense of separation is a post-Civil War addition.
If you watch Monday Night Football, you'll see a bright yellow line superimposed on the field representing the first-down line. This has made a significant change for viewers at home; it makes it much, much easier for a viewer to tell whether it's fourth-and-inches or first-and-ten. It's a great example of how CGI has changed the viewing experience for the better: the change is subtle, innocuous, doesn't distract from the plays, and was not possible before the fusion of cameras and computers.
I'll use Postfix just as soon as someone puts up some correct and current documentation about how to get it working with SASL (particularly, Cyrus-SASL's latest release) to allow SMTP-AUTH for authorized users.
I'm a university student and I'm often on a DHCP connection. I grab my mail off my home box using POP3s and I want to reply to it, but I can't since my university server requires that all outgoing mail be from "myname@example.edu", not my home domain of "rjh@homedomain.org".
So I have Sendmail set up right now to do SMTP-AUTH and everything works great. I get to use my home Sendmail server from anywhere in the world without it being an open relay. Love it. Unfortunately, Sendmail blows, securitywise. I've often been wishing I could go back to Postfix, but the documentation on SMTP-AUTH with Postfix is embarassingly scanty. USENET has been absolutely no help. Google can't find any current and accurate documentation beyond "you need to use Cyrus-SASL". Even dead-tree Postfix books have been useless.
So. Anyone want to throw me a bone here and tell me just how the $#(&! I can get Postfix + SMTP-AUTH working?
From the Google cache of the ACLU Webpage (here):
"The ACLU has often been criticized for `ignoring the Second Amendment' and refusing to fight for the individual's right to own a gun or other weapons. This issue, however, has not been ignored by the ACLU. The national board has in fact debated and discussed the civil liberties aspects of the Second Amendment many times.
We believe that the constitutional right to bear arms is primarily a collective one... The national ACLU is neutral on the issue of gun control. We believe that the Constitution contains no barriers to reasonable regulations of gun ownership. If we can license and register cars, we can license and register guns."
Strange, isn't it? The ACLU, which claims to be fanatically in favor of the Bill of Rights, supports mandatory licensure and registration for someone to exercise their rights under the Second Amendment.
Not only that, the ACLU's position is trivially refuted. I would be dancing in the streets if weapons were regulated the same as cars. My driver's license is valid in all 50 states--but a permit to carry a concealed weapon may not be valid outside of your county, depending on the local laws. I'm allowed to own any kind of car I wish, subject to a restriction that cars unable to pass safety regulations, etc., must not be driven on public roadways and that I must obey traffic law when on public roadways; but I'm not allowed to own an AK-47, even if I use it in only lawful and peaceful ways. You don't need governmental permission to buy a car; you only need registration and regulation if your car is used on public roadways. I'd love to not need governmental permission to buy a shotgun, and only need to pay a $5 ATF processing fee if I was going to hunt on public land.
As I said, the ACLU are cowards who lack the conviction of their oft-waved principles.
It's been federal judicial dogma for a long time.
Technically correct, but not as right as you think you are. There's no doubt that it is centrally applicable to militias, but just because it's centrally applicable to militias does not mean that it's a collectively-held right. In all the reading on Second Amendment law that I've done, both pro- and con-, I have yet to find any respectable journal which has given the slightest shred of credibility to the collectivist interpretation.
Looking at Supreme Court jurisprudence in US v Miller, (1939, the most recent Second Amendment case) it's clear the Supreme Court considers the Second Amendment to be an individually-held right. Miller was convicted of possessing a sawn-off shotgun, not on the legal theory that the state has the exclusive right to control the possession of arms, but on the basis that a sawn-off shotgun possessed no military value the court could see. The Miller decision strongly indicates that if Miller had been carrying a Thompson submachinegun (a weapon with clear military value), he would've been acquitted on appeal.
For that matter, it's possible he would've won his case outright if he'd bothered to present a defense. The Miller appeal was done in absentia and ex parte, due to Miller not showing up for the appeal.
Anyway. The upshot of this is that neither the Supreme Court nor legal professors put a single shred of credit in the collectivist interpretation of the Second Amendment. The ACLU is ethically lacking in that it would rather hide behind a discredited interpretation of the Second Amendment rather than own up to the fact the Bill of Rights has things in it which are offensive to a large portion of the ACLU's supporters.
My beef with the ACLU centers around the Second Amendment. Not because I'm a gun-toting psychopath, but because our civil liberties are protected only to the degree that all of them are protected--including the ones we might disagree with. Regardless of whether you're pro-gun or anti-gun, the Second Amendment is still part of the Bill of Rights and is thus a civil right under American law.
The only problem is, the ACLU doesn't see it that way. Ask the ACLU why they have not once, not ever, taken a pro-Second Amendment case and you'll get the same answer every time: "because we believe the Second Amendment is a guarantee of the state's right to equip a militia, not the individual's right to possess firearms."
It would be an admirable sentiment, were it not for one fact... not one reputable legal scholar in America takes that position. Alan Dershowitz, a very far-left liberal Democrat lawyer and legal professor, has given the best analysis of why no reputable law professor has embraced this position.
According to Dershowitz, the Second Amendment reads "the right of the people..." The very instant you say "the right of the people" actually means "the right of the state", then you've thrown the entire Bill of Rights out the window. If "the right of the people" actually means "the right of the state", then what does that mean for any of the rights we cherish? Suddenly, we no longer have any individual rights; they're all held collectively by the state, which becomes our guardian, able to exercise our liberties in our name while not permitting us those liberties for our own use.
It's really a very 1984 example of doublespeak.
There is not one Supreme Court case which supports the collectivist interpretation of the Bill of Rights, either as a whole or for one specific amendment. In the most recent Supreme Court Second Amendment case, Miller v US, the Supreme Court explicitly recognized the Second Amendment as an individual--not a collective--right.
For the ACLU to claim that the Second Amendment is correctly read as a collective right is... I can't figure it out.
What I suspect is this: the ACLU has a lot of support from a lot of people who, while adamantly in favor of free speech and privacy and all manner of other things, are also staunchly in favor of the notion that nobody should have guns except the cops. And as a result of this, the ACLU has decided to cut the Second Amendment loose to fend for itself, on the theory that "it's better to lose one-tenth of the Bill of Rights than it is to piss off 95% of our contributors, and thus kill any good we can do for the nine-tenths that still remains."
I *have* learned Lisp (or is it LISP?), but not well.
Well, there you go! Pick up a copy of Friedman and Felleisen's The Little Schemer or The Little LISPer and go to town, go have fun, learn LISP. The Little... is the best introduction to programming I've ever seen, especially the best introduction to LISP and Scheme and SML/NJ.
nobody has tried to explain me the inner working of the interpreter
Classic LISP fits into 6k of Assembly. Scheme is even simpler. The Revised Report on Scheme (the definition of the language) is only a handful of pages. McCarthy's original LISP was completely and formally specified in just 12 pages. Common LISP's spec is over 1000 pages, but the vast majority of that (700 pages or more) is dedicated to the Common LISP Object System (CLOS), which is totally unnecessary to know in order to learn LISP goodness. Remove CLOS and the Common LISP spec is actually smaller than K&R's The C Programming Language.
Regarding whether it's LISP or Lisp... originally it was an acronym for LISt Processing, and hence was properly capitalized. But over the years LISP has become more or less a proper noun, and it can be spelled as Lisp, too. Generally, old-school LISP hackers use the all-caps, while the new generation of LISP hackers use Lisp.
I'm an oddball, in that I'm a new-generation (I'm 28) who was taught by a bunch of old-schoolers. So I picked up their method of spelling.
I'm at first german, and english I learned in school. So: That above is completely unreadable to me!
... C .... and other languages: how the heck am I supposed to memorize that the statement above (choose between d and e if you like) does perform a "return"?
....
It's unreadable in English, too. It's perfectly legible when thinking in terms of formal computational theory. English, German or other natural languages are not good choices for programming; there's too much context sensitivity, too much implicit meaning, for it to reduce well to mathematics.
the only word in my english german dictionary where I can find a translation is null.
Your dictionary doesn't have "define"? (Although that's honestly a typo in my code; it should've been defun, not define. Scheme uses define, LISP uses defun.)
Besides, this is a red herring. Look up "Thread" in your dictionary, and then think about how that word is used in Java (hint: it has nothing to do with sewing). If you're going to learn a programming language, you need to learn the language--not preconceptions about "well, it uses this word, therefore it must mean this".
how should I know that cmp is a function?
By how it's used in the code. It cannot be anything other than a function. It's perfectly unambiguous.
I would asume null is something special similar to nil.
The first rule of programming: Thou Shalt Never Assume. If you don't know what something does, look it up.
This is something the OpenBSD developers discovered; lots of C programmers simply don't know their own APIs. Instead of bothering to check if sprintf() has a buffer-overflow vulnerability (it does), many C programmers are happily oblivious assuming that nothing bad can ever happen to it.
Look it up. If you don't understand it, if you aren't one hundred and ten percent sure on what it does, look it up. Nobody's going to think you're an idiot because you say "wait a minute, I don't grok this, where's my copy of Common LISP: The Language?"
(This is not an elitist attitude. If it were elitist, I'd say that if you didn't already know you weren't worthy of knowing, and that's one hundred and ten percent not true. But I do insist that people look it up instead of blindly assuming that function foo must do bar simply because it's named foo.)
I know pascal
You're supposed to look it up, of course.
I wonder what car means? Its not in my english/german dictionary
Autofahren. Except in this case, where it means Contents of the Address Register (CAR). I'm old-fashioned in that I still use CAR; Common LISP also defines the much more English-like FIRST for people such as yourself who feel things ought to have more English-like names.
Of course, if you looked CAR up in CTLT, you'd already have known this.
why is it not written like this:
Because you haven't finished writing your own LISP-like language with that syntax. Stupid answer, but true. If you feel that strongly about it, LISP gives you the tools to do exactly that.
there are theveral things hidden in 8 line sof lisp code:
Not at all. Nothing's hidden. You should know that much computational theory already. If not, ask your professors why computational theory isn't being covered.
Recursion and functions-as-data are both extremely simple, extremely basic, freshman-year computational theory subject matter.
Your points 3 and 4 are trivial. Perl doesn't require you to explicitly return values, either. Nor does Python, nor does... insisting on explicit return statements says that all you know are C-style languages and you don't want to learn anything new.
For point 5, anyone who's looking up computer terms in a language dictionary deserves exactly what they get. Go to the Common
It's not mean to be easily read, but easily accessed from the language itself.
It is easily read. Just invest the time getting over the initial hurdle of the parentheses and it's a very easy-to-read language.
My point is that Lisp is a 40 years old programming language
John McCarthy first started working on LISP in the 50s. It's older than 40 years.
Lisp syntax is too simple for most everyday tasks as, for example, reading other people's code.
This would be true if LISP programmers generally had difficulty reading each other's code. Generally speaking, we don't.
If you have to remove the main attribute of the language in order to understand and think in it, is clear that THAT attribute should be removed.
The two main attributes of LISP are (a) everything's a list and (b) functional programming. I get rid of neither when I'm sketching out code. All I'm doing is ignoring the parts of the syntax which I don't need.
When I write C++ pseudocode, I don't specify type traits for templates. I use indentation instead of brackets. I play fast and loose with typing.
When I'm writing Python, I always leave off the "self." qualifier before member variables.
When I'm writing LISP, I ignore the parentheses.
Lisp high learning curve is something that most programmers can't simply afford.
Spoken like someone who's never learned LISP. LISP's learning curve is surprisingly gentle, which is why it and its derivatives are used in so many undergraduate CS curricula.
According to the latest spec, a vector iterator is a pointer. And besides, I'm not going to optimize my code before I run it through a profiler--premature optimization is the root of all evil.
You've been fed a batch of bad Kool-Aid. Fortunately, it's not too late to come around.
It's what LISP brings to the table above and beyond being a programming language (as most programmers think of the term) which makes it so astonishingly wonderful.
Build Your Own Syntax. See why I say it's difficult? You haven't ANYTHING done for you in advance.
Presto. Right there's a merge done in eight lines of code. It's generalized to the point where it works for anything, provided you give it an appropriate comparison function. And note--I didn't need anything big and fancy to do it. No imports or includes, no useless structural scaffolding...
LISP provides you with all the tools you'd expect of a modern programming language. The beauty of LISP is that you can do a hell of a lot of things in very small amounts of code without needing anything special. Ever seen someone write a PROLOG interpreter in 150 lines of LISP?
But how do to learn to create those domain-specific languages?
You start by doing, of course. You start by solving just one little part of the problem set, and you'll get about fifty lines in and you'll realize, "wouldn't it be nice if the language allowed me to do $foo?" Then you go off and make the language do $foo. Lather, rinse, repeat, until you've got thousands of lines of code creating a new special-purpose language to solve problems in a given problem domain, and five lines of code that actually solve your problem.
It is so far away from conventional academic lectures
Ever taken a Computational Theory course? LISP and LISP-like languages are used very heavily in Computational Theory courses precisely because they're so intimately tied to the lambda calculus, which is a formal model of computation.
And at MIT, introductory CompSci students are taught in Scheme, so you can't even say it's far removed from undergraduate lectures, either.
that one needs to forget almost everything to start thinking that way!
Yep. You do need to forget everything in order to start thinking that way. That's why it's called progress. Once you grok LISP and the lambda calculus, you not only see how to recreate all the old ways of doing business--you see how the old ways of doing business actually work, because now you have a formal model of computation to fall back upon.
And I'm not convinced that that syntaxlessness is indispensable
Syntax is necessary because otherwise you're left with a jumbled mess--sound and fury signifying nothing. If I pound out random letters at my keyboard I can say that it's the complete works of Shakespeare ("yes, dsfw98eradjct9e! is actually `to be or not to be'"), but that doesn't mean anyone can comprehend them.
To that extent, LISP has a very strong syntax. Don't mistake the simplicity of LISP's syntax for a simplistic syntax. LISP's syntax is extremely regular and extremely simple--far more than any other language I've come across.
If the matter is problem solving, just learn problem solving, not Lisp language.
LISP is a language meant specifically to solve problems. Where's your problem with it?
I would prefer to have some syntactic sugar which does the code more readable than those ((if()(and no then)(nor else keywords))s)
Get a good IDE and spend a few hour
And regarding your example code, the same can be done trivially in C++ with the added significant bonus of strong static typing:Three lines of Python, three lines of C++ (barring the typedef, which is only there to make the rest of it easier to read).
50.1%? But what if you only have 50.09%?
:) )
"Preponderance of the evidence" just means greater than 50%, or 50% plus an infinitestimal for math geeks in the audience.
(And yes, I'm obviously one of these math geeks, or else I wouldn't be posting this...
Why is it surprising that it follows an exponential dropoff? The only interesting questions are the coefficients of exponential dropoff, not that it's exponential--I'd sit upright and take notice if it was a linear decrease.
Anything which follows a steady fractional diminishment will have a curve of y = ke**-ax, where k and a are constants. You see this basic equasion pop up all the time in physics, economics, statistics... etc. Why should server slashdotting be any different?
- A precise mathematical model for what's happening
- Succinct explanations for observed behaviors
- Predictions about future behaviors, different from the predictions given to us by quantum mechanics or general relativity,
- And what evidence could come up which would totally disprove your theory
... Until you do that, you're smoking crack. Once you do all this, then you've got a scientific hypothesis, and that'll be worth listening to.Until then, get thee away from me, crack-monkey!
Antimatter is just like conventional matter, except for one (and only one) thing: the charges are reversed. E = mc**2 for it, just like for everything else in the universe. It has a positive mass, thus it has a positive energy level, thus it distorts spacetime in exactly the same way as matter.
The Constitution is Federal law; if it wasn't Federal law, it couldn't be cited as an authoritative and controlling document in court cases. It is an extremely special kind of law, but to say the Constitution is not law is nonsense.
It's true the Constitution is not legislated law, but then again, neither is Common Law. That doesn't keep Common Law from being law, does it?
Please, please, please, for the love of Bob, people, think a little bit before you go about saying "he just plead guilty because he was looking at 20-to-life, we don't actually know what he did."
There's a special kind of plea you use when you're taking a conviction on lesser charges out of fear that you're looking at a much greater time if you're convicted on the original charges. It's called an Alford plea, closely related to a nolo contendre plea.
Nolo has been expressed in layman's terms as "I didn't do it, judge, and I'll never do it again!" You neither admit guilt nor protest your innocence. As a result, many judges refuse to enter nolo pleas; they demand that you either admit or deny responsibility, and if you insist on nolo a "not guilty" plea will be entered instead.
An Alford plea is a far different thing. An Alford, in layman's terms, is "Judge, I didn't do it, but I'm terrified of the original charges and I think they could convict me on it." An Alford plea allows you to formally and legally protest your own innocence, while at the same time stipulating that the government could convict you if it went the whole nine yards, and thus avail yourself of the plea bargain.
Mike Hawash didn't plead either nolo or Alford.
Mike Hawash plead guilty.
Guilty, as in "yes, Your Honor, I fucking did it! "
Could we please, please, please stop seeing these self-important, self-aggrandizing rants from Damn-the-Man slashdotters who don't even care to learn about the difference between a guilty plea and an Alford plea, and why it's so significant that Hawash didn't plead Alford?
Thank you so much for being a voice of sanity. After reading what passes for reasoning among the "damn the man!" crowd of Slashdotters, I was getting ready to just walk away from Slashdot altogether.
Thanks for confirming my faith in at least a small fraction of the Slashdot readership.
The only idea that comes close is the suggestion that there's some force that started the whole ball rolling... but we know nothing about it, and praying to it or worshipping it as about as useful as praying to my own foot.
... suspect.
:) )
:)
You'd be surprised how many of the religious faithful agree with you. Prayer is a theologically thorny subject; the idea of asking God for personal favors strikes me as
"Okay, God, y'see, you're screwing up here because I WASN'T SUPPOSED TO GET CANCER so you better do something about that, you understand?!"
It's nonsense. If you accept the existence of the Divine, then you either need to accept (a) he's utterly ambivalent towards you, in which case he really doesn't want to hear you whine, or (b) he really has your best interests at heart, in which case the worst thing that could happen to you is for God to substitute your judgment for his. (Option (c), God hates us, is trivially disproven. If God hates me, he's sure done a lousy job of acting on it--I enjoy my life.
Worship is likewise difficult. In the Torah, the word for God is "Abba"--literally, "Pop". Not "Father", not "Almighty", but a friendly and familiar term of address. In the New Testament, we're told that Christ is the ultimate friend of humanity. I dunno about you, but I don't worship my friends. I appreciate them, I take note of them, I go out of my way for them, I don't take them for granted... but I don't exactly prostrate myself down before my friends and whimper about how unworthy I am.
A conversation with a Jesuit once really opened my eyes. "The essence of the New Testament," he said, "is that God exists, and he wants you to love people. Especially the unlovable. Compared to that, the Resurrection, the Last Supper, the Sermon on the Mount--they're just commentary."
If you can believe there's some force out there that got this ball rolling, try asking yourself: how would the Creator want me to act towards his Creation?
Judaism, Christianity and Islam all pick up at an answer of "benevolently".
I'm certainly not trying to convert you, and I apologize if I'm coming across as that. I'm just trying to show that there are a lot of people (myself included) who have pretty much your same exact set of doubts, and who manage to find in their religion a faith which is not offensive to their reason.