It would probably become UINT_MAX, then I suppose what the GP means is that the value would violate the upper bound check, and then implicitly and magically fail the validation without having to type an extra " || x 0".
Yep I think the argument is crazy, but at least the code works.
As to how your numbers reinforce my point, if 2.25% is not reasonable for Samsung's technology (and I'm not arguing that it is reasonable), then how can Apple's demands for much larger amounts or even outright injunctions be reasonable for patents on bouncy scrolling, pinch to zoom, or slide to unlock?
This is the whole problem of the patent system. The whole *reason* there is a "R" in FRAND is that "normal" patents terms don't have to be reasonable at all! (or for that matter, it doesn't have to be FAND)
It's not the first time patent holders refuse to license their patents at whatever cost. The whole reason FRAND exists for standards essential patents is because without those commitments the patent holders could just hold the patent at ransom. I don't disagree that the patent system should be reformed, but claiming that FRAND would break down without a reform is ridiculous. FRAND exists BECAUSE the existing system is broken. Once you fix the system, perhaps FRAND doesn't have to exist any more.
Your whole argument about FRAND breaking down because it cannot be used as a retaliating weapon does not make sense at all. There was a reason why Samsung chose to commit to FRAND terms for some of their patents, and they did this because they wanted their technology to be in some widely used standard and collect royalties for that. They knew the tradeoffs of putting their patents in FRAND. Now you're arguing they should have their cake (standards royalties) and eat it too (able to weld it as a weapon to threaten injunction).
A friend of mine who was the sole author of a best paper in STOC 2013 just got offered and accepted a post-doc in Microsoft Research.
Knowing his general research area, (i.e. all abstract theory and absolutely no application all -- in case you don't know which STOC 2013 paper I'm referring to, it's the one where you have no idea what the abstract is talking about), I start to wonder why Microsoft is pumping so much money into Microsoft Research.
Seems funny after reading this from TFA:
Myhrvold identified three key advantages that research can provide a company: a time advantage in introducing new products and technologies; better access to strategic technology; and knowledge and intellectual property for the company. âoeYou shouldnâ(TM)t start research in an area unless there is a strong chance of getting a unique edge in one of these three ways.â (p. 9)
I'm starting to think MSR is more of a "charity" project than anything intended to drive the commercial success of Microsoft. If I phrased the GP's question as:
Can you show some examples of Microsoft research being commercialized successfully?
So, what crime, exactly, is the NSA committing by "hacking you"?
Not really. International "crime" is basically restricted to punishing war crimes for the side who lost the war. As a legal positivist, I concede this point for now.
Or are you seriously suggesting that the NSA is bound by your laws?
Now, you want to stop the NSA from spying on you? Go for it! I believe the technical phrase is "national technical means" (which means "if you can do it, go right ahead. It's not like we can stop you").
I agree. Basically you're asking whether I'm prepared to face the might of the US military (or at least call my country to do so). No thanks, I'm a coward. So that's why I'm just bitching on the Internet instead of trying to do anything about it.
I wouldn't want to take a bullet to the head like Malala just to have privacy. That's why I don't get nominated for human rights awards.
It's highly debatable if Snowden actually risked his life for what he did. Even if he did, it would be at the hands of a well organized state, so he would know the time, place and means.
Yeah, maybe he wouldn't be assassinated, just deported back to the US for a show trial and get slammed with a 35 year sentence. So given life expectancy at around 70 years, he just risked *half* of his life.... I mean, when he gets out from a 35 year jail he'll just be in his sixties, it's not like he doesn't have many more years before him!
Or have you forgotten that the same people who tried to silence her are also responsible for throwing acid in these young girls faces, poisoning the water wells these schools use, and other horrid ways to terrify little girls.
The same people trying to silence Snowden are also known to employ tactics considered torture, like waterboarding, hypothermia, sleep deprivation, and all sorts of other horrid ways to break grown up men.
Malala doesn't just face death, she faces a life time of terror & fear for wanting to do nothing more than learn.
Snowden doesn't just face death, he faces a life time of terror and fear, being stripped of his citizenship, deprived from seeing his family, for wanting to do nothing more than exposing lies.
Note that the NSA's mandate is FOREIGN signals intelligence gathering. If the NSA listens in on every phone call in the world not involving a US citizen, then its actions are no more a "world-wide illegal conspiracy" than me asking my wife what's for dinner.
This ignorance is the classic US-centric idiot worldview. When somebody in say Europe or Asia first heard about the leaks, do you think they'd be worried about those poor American citizens across the pond, or would they be more like "WTF the USA government is hacking us?!?!"
Keep in mind this is the the US government that has been publicly and loudly claiming rival countries are hacking their systems, trying to treat "cyberwar" as a real war, condemning military hacking activities, while in fact they run the biggest hacking and espionage business. That's American integrity for you.
Seriously, people outside the US don't give a shit what your congress has authorized your three letter agencies to do. It may be legal in the US because there's a US law allowing that to happen, but last I checked US law doesn't apply to the rest of the world.
Re:"We believed we knew better what customers need
on
How BlackBerry Blew It
·
· Score: 1
I wouldn't fault you if you left for Linux. But... you went back to using Windows because OSX was too expensive?
Apple Market Cap: 433.10B Coca-Cola Market Cap: 167.93B
Oh by the way, I've discovered this great company that literally doubled its value over the past 12 months!!! You really should check it out before it takes over the world.
It reminds me of this joke (which I heard my father who's a physician)
There was a chief physician at a renowned medical college who was said to always start the first round of the year for medical students by teaching them on the 'singular imporant principle of medicine'. He would begin by talking about diabetes mellitus: "Diabetes is a Greek name, but the Romans noticed that the bees like the urine of diabetics, so they added the word 'mellitus' which means sweet as honey. As you know, you may find sugar in the urine of a diabetic..."
He then held up a fresh sample of urine just taken from a patient and held up like a trophy, with the students staring at the straw-colored fluid as if they've never seen such a thing before. The physician then suddenly dipped his finger boldly into the urine, and licked his finger with the tip of his tongue. As if tasting wine, he opened and closed his lips rapidly. Could he perhaps detect a faint taste of sugar?
The sample was passed on for the students to try; they all dipped a finger into the fluid, and then licked their finger.
"Now you have learned the first principle of diagnosis, I mean the power of observation" said the physician grinning. "You see," he continued triumphantly, "I dipped my MIDDLE finger into the urine, but licked my INDEX finger, not like all you."
Where is the authorization for apple to modify/reduce functionality post-sale?
definitely unethical for apple to modify functionality post sale
I can see why Android handset manufacturers are so ethical. They don't provide any OS updates.
Look, OS upgrades inherently modify functionality post-sale. The user authorized them to do that. Oh, so you'd then want to argue that they didn't *warn* the user? Yes, I'll probably scream license agreement then, because before you know it your pea-brain theory of post-sale-ethics would require a thousand pages of fine print detailing ALL the changes in the OS upgrades that the user might or might not miss.
Unless of course, the user doesn't have an option to downgrade the OS to the backup.
What's your complaint again?
And to you mods who gave this idiot a +1, were you thinking with your brain, or did Apple Hatred burn through all your neurons?
* Insisting there is some conspiracy or that scientists are in it for the money. * Bringing up the same tired, well covered talking points ("scientists are so stupid they've forgotten about solar output"). * Attacking news and opinion articles and using this to "debunk" the actual science. * Latching on to the shrieking shrill enviro-nuts and using that to "debunk" the science. * Pretending that economic consequences of action say anything about the science,attacking proposed action and using that to "debunk" the science. * Cherry picking the actions of one or two scientists and using this to "debunk" all the other scientists. * Confusing scientists with everyone else arguing about it and using that to "debunk" the science.
Which side are you talking about again?
The only difference is that: #1 scientific consensus is on the warmists' side, and #2 you believe the warmist camp to hold the truth.
But, in that case, why not just flat out say the reason you're opposed to them is BECAUSE THEY ARE FUCKING WRONG? At least it's honest.
What extinct? You mean we have less survival abilities than the dinosaurs? Where is the peer reviewed Nature/Science journal article supporting this claim?
Slashdot, of course! The OP is obviously a paying customer of Slashdot, and he disables all advertisements, uses a fake username and email, so that he never becomes a "product" by Big Customers buying his personal info and eyeballs.
And this is why he hasn't deleted his Slashdot account yet.
the laws of physics care not what Al Gore thinks or does.
it does not matter if it is Al Gore, JP Morgan & Co., or Colonel Fucking Sanders who points it out: internalising the market externalities around the burning of fossil fuels is the single greatest tool we have to do something about this before it is too late.
The problem with your argument is that, while what politicians do is irrelevant to *science*, coming up with a solution to the physical problem is part of a *political* process, where we can of course discuss whether Al Gore, JP Morgan & Co, etc are working in the our (the unprivileged) interests.
For example, to take things to an extreme as an illustration, science tells us that if we kill everyone on Earth, the warming will be stopped. Shall we do that? Going down the ever slippery slope, we could ask what if the solution entails millions of people suffering more than they already do? What if under developed countries somehow bear an unfair burden of the problem? What if rich people receive unjust benefits from exploiting the "carbon offset" markets, at the expense of the sufferings of others? What if these political interests obscure and cast the supposedly objective *science* in doubt? What if people who don't have a PhD refuse to believe that more suffering *now* and making fat bastards rich is not a cost they would rather bear to avoid a supposed catastrophe that may happen in 50 years?
It's not just science. The physics is the easy part.
For traditional => simplified, it's a matter of adjusting a few days and thinking wtf why does it have to look so ugly, but it's still trivial. I never really spent time "learning" the simplified characters beyond trying to read a few novels in simplified Chinese. The difficulty is probably about the same as adjusting to read 1337 5p34k.
Not sure about the other way round. Might be harder, but I can't imagine it's as hard as learning another language or dialect...
What I really meant though, was that regardless of whether the two writing forms are mutually intelligible, they are still a basis where different spoken dialects can share a common written script. In contrast, a pronunciation based writing system would cause the written forms to diverge with each dialect having its own text.
You probably already know what I mean though, even if I might not be expressing myself clearly...
When something becomes a dialect vs another language seems a bit like selecting where colors change in a rainbow.
Indeed it's like trying to define the boundaries of (biology) species and variety. But still, in some cases the differences between Chinese dialects can arguably be greater than some of those within the European "languages".
To illustrate the differences between so called "dialects", "why" is "wei shen me" [1] in Mandarin, but "dim gai" in Cantonese; "who" is "shei" in Mandarin, but "bin gor" in Cantonese. Negatives ("no-something") usually takes a prefix of "bu" in Mandarin but "mm" in Cantonese. Their written forms are totally different too, so it's not like we have a very funny way to pronounce the same thing. I'd say it is the "basic language" that is different, while the large corpus of vocabulary is mostly shared among the "dialects". But then, vocabulary is liberally borrowed between the European languages too.
There's a few things that obscures the wide variation between the "dialects". One is that we write written Chinese in mostly the same way, due to tradition and communicative purposes. Standard modern Chinese is written in the form of modern Mandarin (i.e. Putonghua) and the norm is that "self-respecting" educated Chinese write in that standard form regardless of their spoken dialect. The second is that while our pronunciations are can be markedly different, a large part of the written script remains identical, because Chinese characters are not pronunciation based. So while there may be variations in the script in different European languages (eg. "wine" (en) => "vin" (fr) => "wein" (de)), the written text is the same in Chinese, even though there may be large pronunciation differences.
A fun thing that I like to mention is how written Japanese might in some cases be more legible to Mandarin speakers than written Cantonese. The Kanji in written Japanese has roots in classical Chinese (something comparable to Latin in Europe), and thus if the Japanese text is mostly written in Kanji (i.e. avoiding kana where possible), it's quite legible to those who understand Chinese. For example, the Kanji form of "who" in Japanese ("da-re") is written in the same character as "shei" in Mandarin. Of course, when spoken it is totally mutually illegible, but you can see how a supposedly "different" language (Chinese vs Japanese) can have more similar roots than a "dialect" within the Chinese language family.
[1] ("me" pronounced as in "mermaid" without the suffix)
Flattered with your title (it's my first spoken language), but you really have no idea what you're talking about.
There are various "accents" of Mandarin, but Cantonese, Hokkien, etc are not accents. I'd say they're somewhere between dialects and distinct languages. Even discounting phonetic differences, the written vocabulary can be very different -- to the extent that I probably understand written Japanese more than the colloquial use of various Chinese "dialects". (To a Mandarin speaker, I often hypothesize that Cantonese written in Chinese characters can be harder to understand than Japanese-written-in-mostly-kanji... it's a fun fact that shows the divergence of the local dialects/languages)
Not sure whether anyone thinks that people speaking Hokkien "suck" (I haven't heard of any such "dialect-discrimination", though the official discouragement [or even persecution] of local spoken dialects is surely happening), but it's a practical problem for communication if there's no common legible language for people within a country.
Slashdot Mirror
It would probably become UINT_MAX, then I suppose what the GP means is that the value would violate the upper bound check, and then implicitly and magically fail the validation without having to type an extra " || x 0".
Yep I think the argument is crazy, but at least the code works.
The Spring framework is the symptom.
I spent my idle hours contemplating who on earth would invent such a system, and who on earth would want to use one.
I think the GP might be in Europe. The EU thinks the GP's views is possible "reality".
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-12-1448_en.htm
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-27/samsung-submits-commitments-in-eu-antitrust-probe-almunia-says.html
Do you live in Korea?
Neither the White House, nor the ITC, nor any court of law has determined that Samsung was abusing their FRAND patent.
Fact #1: (quoted from you) The White House stated that ... SE patents should not be used as a basis for Cease and Desist orders
Fact #2: Samsung tried to use SE patents to ban imports (i.e. cease and desist).
Fact #3: "Abuse": the improper use of something.
Lemma A: Samsung tried to use SE patents in a way that the White House deemed improper. (#1) and (#2)
So, at this point do I really need to point out the obvious?
As to how your numbers reinforce my point, if 2.25% is not reasonable for Samsung's technology (and I'm not arguing that it is reasonable), then how can Apple's demands for much larger amounts or even outright injunctions be reasonable for patents on bouncy scrolling, pinch to zoom, or slide to unlock?
This is the whole problem of the patent system. The whole *reason* there is a "R" in FRAND is that "normal" patents terms don't have to be reasonable at all! (or for that matter, it doesn't have to be FAND)
It's not the first time patent holders refuse to license their patents at whatever cost. The whole reason FRAND exists for standards essential patents is because without those commitments the patent holders could just hold the patent at ransom. I don't disagree that the patent system should be reformed, but claiming that FRAND would break down without a reform is ridiculous. FRAND exists BECAUSE the existing system is broken. Once you fix the system, perhaps FRAND doesn't have to exist any more.
Your whole argument about FRAND breaking down because it cannot be used as a retaliating weapon does not make sense at all. There was a reason why Samsung chose to commit to FRAND terms for some of their patents, and they did this because they wanted their technology to be in some widely used standard and collect royalties for that. They knew the tradeoffs of putting their patents in FRAND. Now you're arguing they should have their cake (standards royalties) and eat it too (able to weld it as a weapon to threaten injunction).
Yes. Which part of "Non-Discriminatory" do you not understand? It means you don't get to be a non-jerk even if you don't like the other party.
I'm sure he doesn't get paid.
A friend of mine who was the sole author of a best paper in STOC 2013 just got offered and accepted a post-doc in Microsoft Research.
Knowing his general research area, (i.e. all abstract theory and absolutely no application all -- in case you don't know which STOC 2013 paper I'm referring to, it's the one where you have no idea what the abstract is talking about), I start to wonder why Microsoft is pumping so much money into Microsoft Research.
Seems funny after reading this from TFA:
Myhrvold identified three key advantages that research can provide a company: a time advantage in introducing new products and technologies; better access to strategic technology; and knowledge and intellectual property for the company. âoeYou shouldnâ(TM)t start research in an area unless there is a strong chance of getting a unique edge in one of these three ways.â (p. 9)
I'm starting to think MSR is more of a "charity" project than anything intended to drive the commercial success of Microsoft. If I phrased the GP's question as:
Can you show some examples of Microsoft research being commercialized successfully?
(emphasis part added by me)
I doubt you can answer that as easily.
So, what crime, exactly, is the NSA committing by "hacking you"?
Not really. International "crime" is basically restricted to punishing war crimes for the side who lost the war. As a legal positivist, I concede this point for now.
Or are you seriously suggesting that the NSA is bound by your laws?
No, I'm not that arrogant. But maybe your laws? http://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2013/03/19/cyberwar-manual-lays-down-rules-for-online-attacks
Now, you want to stop the NSA from spying on you? Go for it! I believe the technical phrase is "national technical means" (which means "if you can do it, go right ahead. It's not like we can stop you").
I agree. Basically you're asking whether I'm prepared to face the might of the US military (or at least call my country to do so). No thanks, I'm a coward. So that's why I'm just bitching on the Internet instead of trying to do anything about it.
I wouldn't want to take a bullet to the head like Malala just to have privacy. That's why I don't get nominated for human rights awards.
Public assignation at a human right award ceremony is if not across it considerably closer than anything the US has yet dared try.
No. His plane will just inexplicably crash. Or involved in some traffic accident.
Be imaginative.
Are you bloody kidding me?!?!?
Are you bloody kidding me?!?!?
It's highly debatable if Snowden actually risked his life for what he did. Even if he did, it would be at the hands of a well organized state, so he would know the time, place and means.
Yeah, maybe he wouldn't be assassinated, just deported back to the US for a show trial and get slammed with a 35 year sentence. So given life expectancy at around 70 years, he just risked *half* of his life.... I mean, when he gets out from a 35 year jail he'll just be in his sixties, it's not like he doesn't have many more years before him!
Or have you forgotten that the same people who tried to silence her are also responsible for throwing acid in these young girls faces, poisoning the water wells these schools use, and other horrid ways to terrify little girls.
The same people trying to silence Snowden are also known to employ tactics considered torture, like waterboarding, hypothermia, sleep deprivation, and all sorts of other horrid ways to break grown up men.
Malala doesn't just face death, she faces a life time of terror & fear for wanting to do nothing more than learn.
Snowden doesn't just face death, he faces a life time of terror and fear, being stripped of his citizenship, deprived from seeing his family, for wanting to do nothing more than exposing lies.
Note that the NSA's mandate is FOREIGN signals intelligence gathering. If the NSA listens in on every phone call in the world not involving a US citizen, then its actions are no more a "world-wide illegal conspiracy" than me asking my wife what's for dinner.
This ignorance is the classic US-centric idiot worldview. When somebody in say Europe or Asia first heard about the leaks, do you think they'd be worried about those poor American citizens across the pond, or would they be more like "WTF the USA government is hacking us?!?!"
Keep in mind this is the the US government that has been publicly and loudly claiming rival countries are hacking their systems, trying to treat "cyberwar" as a real war, condemning military hacking activities, while in fact they run the biggest hacking and espionage business. That's American integrity for you.
Seriously, people outside the US don't give a shit what your congress has authorized your three letter agencies to do. It may be legal in the US because there's a US law allowing that to happen, but last I checked US law doesn't apply to the rest of the world.
I wouldn't fault you if you left for Linux. But... you went back to using Windows because OSX was too expensive?
So, according to your methodology:
Apple Market Cap: 433.10B
Coca-Cola Market Cap: 167.93B
Oh by the way, I've discovered this great company that literally doubled its value over the past 12 months!!! You really should check it out before it takes over the world.
http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=NOK+Interactive#symbol=NOK;range=1y
It reminds me of this joke (which I heard my father who's a physician)
There was a chief physician at a renowned medical college who was said to always start the first round of the year for medical students by teaching them on the 'singular imporant principle of medicine'. He would begin by talking about diabetes mellitus: "Diabetes is a Greek name, but the Romans noticed that the bees like the urine of diabetics, so they added the word 'mellitus' which means sweet as honey. As you know, you may find sugar in the urine of a diabetic..."
He then held up a fresh sample of urine just taken from a patient and held up like a trophy, with the students staring at the straw-colored fluid as if they've never seen such a thing before. The physician then suddenly dipped his finger boldly into the urine, and licked his finger with the tip of his tongue. As if tasting wine, he opened and closed his lips rapidly. Could he perhaps detect a faint taste of sugar?
The sample was passed on for the students to try; they all dipped a finger into the fluid, and then licked their finger.
"Now you have learned the first principle of diagnosis, I mean the power of observation" said the physician grinning. "You see," he continued triumphantly, "I dipped my MIDDLE finger into the urine, but licked my INDEX finger, not like all you."
http://www.wydo.org/content/medicines-first-principle
Where is the authorization for apple to modify/reduce functionality post-sale?
definitely unethical for apple to modify functionality post sale
I can see why Android handset manufacturers are so ethical. They don't provide any OS updates.
Look, OS upgrades inherently modify functionality post-sale. The user authorized them to do that. Oh, so you'd then want to argue that they didn't *warn* the user? Yes, I'll probably scream license agreement then, because before you know it your pea-brain theory of post-sale-ethics would require a thousand pages of fine print detailing ALL the changes in the OS upgrades that the user might or might not miss.
Unless of course, the user doesn't have an option to downgrade the OS to the backup.
What's your complaint again?
And to you mods who gave this idiot a +1, were you thinking with your brain, or did Apple Hatred burn through all your neurons?
* Insisting there is some conspiracy or that scientists are in it for the money.
* Bringing up the same tired, well covered talking points ("scientists are so stupid they've forgotten about solar output").
* Attacking news and opinion articles and using this to "debunk" the actual science.
* Latching on to the shrieking shrill enviro-nuts and using that to "debunk" the science.
* Pretending that economic consequences of action say anything about the science,attacking proposed action and using that to "debunk" the science.
* Cherry picking the actions of one or two scientists and using this to "debunk" all the other scientists.
* Confusing scientists with everyone else arguing about it and using that to "debunk" the science.
Which side are you talking about again?
The only difference is that: #1 scientific consensus is on the warmists' side, and #2 you believe the warmist camp to hold the truth.
But, in that case, why not just flat out say the reason you're opposed to them is BECAUSE THEY ARE FUCKING WRONG? At least it's honest.
What extinct? You mean we have less survival abilities than the dinosaurs? Where is the peer reviewed Nature/Science journal article supporting this claim?
And go where, Yahoo, G+, Geocities?
Slashdot, of course! The OP is obviously a paying customer of Slashdot, and he disables all advertisements, uses a fake username and email, so that he never becomes a "product" by Big Customers buying his personal info and eyeballs.
And this is why he hasn't deleted his Slashdot account yet.
the laws of physics care not what Al Gore thinks or does.
it does not matter if it is Al Gore, JP Morgan & Co., or Colonel Fucking Sanders who points it out: internalising the market externalities around the burning of fossil fuels is the single greatest tool we have to do something about this before it is too late.
The problem with your argument is that, while what politicians do is irrelevant to *science*, coming up with a solution to the physical problem is part of a *political* process, where we can of course discuss whether Al Gore, JP Morgan & Co, etc are working in the our (the unprivileged) interests.
For example, to take things to an extreme as an illustration, science tells us that if we kill everyone on Earth, the warming will be stopped. Shall we do that? Going down the ever slippery slope, we could ask what if the solution entails millions of people suffering more than they already do? What if under developed countries somehow bear an unfair burden of the problem? What if rich people receive unjust benefits from exploiting the "carbon offset" markets, at the expense of the sufferings of others? What if these political interests obscure and cast the supposedly objective *science* in doubt? What if people who don't have a PhD refuse to believe that more suffering *now* and making fat bastards rich is not a cost they would rather bear to avoid a supposed catastrophe that may happen in 50 years?
It's not just science. The physics is the easy part.
Oh, I finally got what he meant.... thanks.
Yeah right. I'll come back to see whether it's half finished in twenty years.
For traditional => simplified, it's a matter of adjusting a few days and thinking wtf why does it have to look so ugly, but it's still trivial. I never really spent time "learning" the simplified characters beyond trying to read a few novels in simplified Chinese. The difficulty is probably about the same as adjusting to read 1337 5p34k.
Not sure about the other way round. Might be harder, but I can't imagine it's as hard as learning another language or dialect...
What I really meant though, was that regardless of whether the two writing forms are mutually intelligible, they are still a basis where different spoken dialects can share a common written script. In contrast, a pronunciation based writing system would cause the written forms to diverge with each dialect having its own text.
You probably already know what I mean though, even if I might not be expressing myself clearly...
When something becomes a dialect vs another language seems a bit like selecting where colors change in a rainbow.
Indeed it's like trying to define the boundaries of (biology) species and variety. But still, in some cases the differences between Chinese dialects can arguably be greater than some of those within the European "languages".
To illustrate the differences between so called "dialects", "why" is "wei shen me" [1] in Mandarin, but "dim gai" in Cantonese; "who" is "shei" in Mandarin, but "bin gor" in Cantonese. Negatives ("no-something") usually takes a prefix of "bu" in Mandarin but "mm" in Cantonese. Their written forms are totally different too, so it's not like we have a very funny way to pronounce the same thing. I'd say it is the "basic language" that is different, while the large corpus of vocabulary is mostly shared among the "dialects". But then, vocabulary is liberally borrowed between the European languages too.
There's a few things that obscures the wide variation between the "dialects". One is that we write written Chinese in mostly the same way, due to tradition and communicative purposes. Standard modern Chinese is written in the form of modern Mandarin (i.e. Putonghua) and the norm is that "self-respecting" educated Chinese write in that standard form regardless of their spoken dialect. The second is that while our pronunciations are can be markedly different, a large part of the written script remains identical, because Chinese characters are not pronunciation based. So while there may be variations in the script in different European languages (eg. "wine" (en) => "vin" (fr) => "wein" (de)), the written text is the same in Chinese, even though there may be large pronunciation differences.
A fun thing that I like to mention is how written Japanese might in some cases be more legible to Mandarin speakers than written Cantonese. The Kanji in written Japanese has roots in classical Chinese (something comparable to Latin in Europe), and thus if the Japanese text is mostly written in Kanji (i.e. avoiding kana where possible), it's quite legible to those who understand Chinese. For example, the Kanji form of "who" in Japanese ("da-re") is written in the same character as "shei" in Mandarin. Of course, when spoken it is totally mutually illegible, but you can see how a supposedly "different" language (Chinese vs Japanese) can have more similar roots than a "dialect" within the Chinese language family.
[1] ("me" pronounced as in "mermaid" without the suffix)
Flattered with your title (it's my first spoken language), but you really have no idea what you're talking about.
There are various "accents" of Mandarin, but Cantonese, Hokkien, etc are not accents. I'd say they're somewhere between dialects and distinct languages. Even discounting phonetic differences, the written vocabulary can be very different -- to the extent that I probably understand written Japanese more than the colloquial use of various Chinese "dialects". (To a Mandarin speaker, I often hypothesize that Cantonese written in Chinese characters can be harder to understand than Japanese-written-in-mostly-kanji... it's a fun fact that shows the divergence of the local dialects/languages)
Not sure whether anyone thinks that people speaking Hokkien "suck" (I haven't heard of any such "dialect-discrimination", though the official discouragement [or even persecution] of local spoken dialects is surely happening), but it's a practical problem for communication if there's no common legible language for people within a country.