If you delve deeper into LISP you will see that calling a language without tail recursion and macros LISP-like is an exaggeration...
Congratulations: you have come up with a definition of "LISP-like" that excludes both McCarthy's original LISP and ANSI Common Lisp. You must be proud.
Nowadays we have a flat namespace where all names have a.com appended at the end. Nobody wants to use anything else
Look up at the location bar of the browser window you are reading this comment in. Observe the lack of a ".com" in the URL. Observe how silly your claim now looks.
Might this be connected to the constant complaints that the UK is falling behind in most every academic subject?
No, those are more connected to the fact that whining about academic standards sells newspapers.
Look, "68% = 2:1" doesn't mean that a 2:1 is easy to get; it means that the examinations are very difficult, and the grading is set up to make it easier to distinguish between the scores achieved by top-ranking students, i.e. at the end of the scale where it matters.
Better slow downloads than meeting your new Swedish boyfriend in jail.
Even better, how about paying for your movies, games, and music? That way you can download them as fast as you like, and the government won't try to put you in jail even if they spy on you doing it!
I realise this is Slashdot, where "not getting busted for copyright infringement" is apparently categorised as a "right", so I'm probably about to be modded into oblivion -- but hey, that's life, isn't it?
Hey, it gets better. Look at their map -- Cuba doesn't appear on it at all! What sinister motive is driving UNICEF to deny the existence of an entire island? I bet it's because that's where Guantanamo Bay is located! Yes, it all makes sense now...
However, you will notice that one can click on the European part of the map and on the resulting page appear France and Germany.
And also the United States, and Israel, and Japan, and South Korea. Japan and South Korea do not, however, appear when you click on the link marked "East Asia and the Pacific". OMG! UNICEF is claiming that Japan is in Europe, not East Asia! CONSPIRACY!
Maybe they should reconfigure the image map to have Israel point to the page on which she appears.
Oh, please. Look at the size of the map! There is no way they could make Israel clickable -- it would be, what, a single pixel wide at best?
Seriously, get some perspective here. You are totally overreacting to a non-issue. Information on Israel is easy to find simply by using the alphabetical list of countries that is prominently located directly below the map, and is what most people are likely to use if they are looking for a specific country by name. And, back on UNICEF's front page, you will observe on the far right a block of flags showing countries involved with UNICEF. You will observe the flag of Israel among them, exactly the same size as all the others, in alphabetical order as you'd expect.
There is no global anti-Semitic conspiracy at work in UNICEF.
More accurately--the kid just ruined his own life completely.
Indeed, but that's true regardless of whether he goes to jail or not -- what school will accept someone who has done something like this? What company will want to employ him?
It's hard to see what benefit a jail term would provide in this case; frankly it would be a waste of taxpayers' money. Far better to give him a fine or some community service or whatever, and let the real punishment be the fact that he is marked for life as a liar and a cheat.
The point, I guess, is that the law should not even suggest that such a sentence might be possible for a case like this. Even a couple of years in jail would be unjust and counterproductive (likely outcome: the kid meets some real fraudsters and learns how to apply his hacking skills to steal credit cards). A suspended sentence would be appropriate, to make sure he doesn't get tempted to hack anything else. Beyond that, the kid has basically punished himself -- no college is going to take him now, and he'll have a tough time finding employment too.
Kids are always going to try hacking school networks, and decades behind bars is basically never going to be an appropriate punishment for that. So we need specific laws that are dedicated to cases like this, and specify suitable punishments, instead of applying generic laws that were written with totally different scenarios in mind. That way, we could be reassured that the law will continue to dish out justice appropriately, and nobody will be able to defend inflammatory headlines like this any more.
You forgot to mention independence of United States from British rule.
Oh, wait. That did take an armed resistance.
It used one. That doesn't necessarily mean that it took one.
Unless of course you've got some kind of magical time machine that lets you experiment with alternate histories, and you have managed to use it to prove that there really was no way the USA could gain its independence without bloodshed.
If I was a British citizen I'd take this opportunity to refuse the title as a protest against the USA-like paranoid police state UK is morphing itself into.
Declining an honour is a great way to protest against the monarchy itself, or the corruption many believe is widespread in the honours system, but I don't think it would be very effective as a protest against trends in policing and surveillance, due to the lack of any direct connection between the issue and the protest.
Better approaches (for any famous people who happen to read Slashdot and don't like the way they think Britain is going) would be either noisy emigration, or some kind of publicity stunt that directly related to the thing you hate. For example, buy a copy of the Anarchist's Cookbook and parade up and down outside the Houses of Parliament shouting "Arrest me! I have material that could be of use to terrorists!"
OK, it is generally believed that OSS is inherently secure
No, that's a popular strawman argument used by opponents of OSS. There have been enough vulnerabilities found in OSS that it is trivially obvious that any such claim is false, and no serious OSS proponent would dream of saying any such thing.
The Navy wouldn't sit there waiting for a torpedo, just to make the ship believe it couldn't be tracked.
What torpedo? Since when were we at war with China?
Okay, so we probably wouldn't have been able to tell it was a Chinese submarine. So, for the last few years we've been at war with al-Qaida, the Taleban, various insurgent militias in Iraq, Terror, Poverty, and Drugs. Exactly which of those groups do you believe has submarines in the Pacific?
I'm perfectly willing to believe that the submarine was indeed undetected, but I don't think the evidence is quite 100% conclusive.
For all you know, we simply pretended not to have detected them. If I were in command of a Navy carrier group, I certainly wouldn't want to hand the Chinese any information on our submarine detection capabilities.
Most vendors are pumping out the 6bit panels- it's now hard to find the 8 bit panels
Hardly. You can get them from Dell, for heaven's sake! All you have to do is not buy the cheapest monitor of a given size from a given manufacturer, and you're fairly likely to end up with an 8-bit panel.
No, GCC only killed the market for C and C++ compilers.
Which is why Microsoft is very happily selling one, and Intel is very happily selling one, and, oh yes, Sun still seems to be selling one, and, goodness me, is that EDG still making a decent living over there out of their C++ frontend? I do believe it is!
the whole OS world is still gaga about GCC...
Which is why the BSD developers dislike GCC so much that they're investing massive effort into developing an alternative, backed by Apple.
But that's OS "choice" for you... It's kind of like saying "any color will do as long it's black".
Which is why every open-source fan uses the Vimacs editor under the Knome desktop environment on the Sudrivbuntoraware LinBSD platform, right? Yeah, it's totally standard for open-source folk to standardise on a single option and kill off all possible competition. Sure.
My experience is that buyers at all levels won't do that when there's a cost-free alternative.
Personally, speaking as someone who is daily required to use a hideously expensive program that is less featureful, less reliable, slower, and less user-friendly than any of three or four free/open-source alternatives -- I only wish your experience was universal.
Basically, both reactions exist. Some people go for the lowest price tag whatever the TCO; others reject all free options out of hand. Various reasons are given: "you get what you pay for" is common, as is the belief that all free/open-source products are inherently hard to use, or that buying a product gives you better support. (All these things are sometimes true, of course; what I object to is prejudice driving bad decisions.)
That's rich. Where are your figures to back up your precious 6%?
Current estimates of overall Windows market share range from 91% to 96%, but that includes a heck of a lot of computers that are not owned by D&D players.
They would have to decide whether reaching another 6% of the audience is worth however much they'd have to spend porting their product.
I find that 6% figure highly dubious in the inherently geeky D&D-playing demographic, but that isn't really the point.
See, this isn't the 1990s any more. Nowadays, making a Windows-only desktop app limits your userbase even among people who run Windows on their computer at home. Because they aren't always at home. Maybe they want to play D&D on their iPhone, had you thought of that? Or on their Windows Mobile phone, if that's what they prefer. If it was a web app, they could play it on any kind of device that has an internet connection.
Is that worth how much it would cost to port it? Oh, wait, if it was a web app, porting it would cost a whopping $0.00.
That's why developing a Windows-only desktop app is stupid, unless your app actually requires the kind of things that web apps don't do well, like real-time 3D graphics. Which D&D totally doesn't.
Slashdot Mirror
No, those are more connected to the fact that whining about academic standards sells newspapers.
Look, "68% = 2:1" doesn't mean that a 2:1 is easy to get; it means that the examinations are very difficult, and the grading is set up to make it easier to distinguish between the scores achieved by top-ranking students, i.e. at the end of the scale where it matters.Even better, how about paying for your movies, games, and music? That way you can download them as fast as you like, and the government won't try to put you in jail even if they spy on you doing it!
I realise this is Slashdot, where "not getting busted for copyright infringement" is apparently categorised as a "right", so I'm probably about to be modded into oblivion -- but hey, that's life, isn't it?
When they say "Taiwan", I think they're talking about Formosa.
Hey, it gets better. Look at their map -- Cuba doesn't appear on it at all! What sinister motive is driving UNICEF to deny the existence of an entire island? I bet it's because that's where Guantanamo Bay is located! Yes, it all makes sense now...
Oh, please. Look at the size of the map! There is no way they could make Israel clickable -- it would be, what, a single pixel wide at best?
Seriously, get some perspective here. You are totally overreacting to a non-issue. Information on Israel is easy to find simply by using the alphabetical list of countries that is prominently located directly below the map, and is what most people are likely to use if they are looking for a specific country by name. And, back on UNICEF's front page, you will observe on the far right a block of flags showing countries involved with UNICEF. You will observe the flag of Israel among them, exactly the same size as all the others, in alphabetical order as you'd expect.
There is no global anti-Semitic conspiracy at work in UNICEF.
Indeed, but that's true regardless of whether he goes to jail or not -- what school will accept someone who has done something like this? What company will want to employ him?
It's hard to see what benefit a jail term would provide in this case; frankly it would be a waste of taxpayers' money. Far better to give him a fine or some community service or whatever, and let the real punishment be the fact that he is marked for life as a liar and a cheat.
The point, I guess, is that the law should not even suggest that such a sentence might be possible for a case like this. Even a couple of years in jail would be unjust and counterproductive (likely outcome: the kid meets some real fraudsters and learns how to apply his hacking skills to steal credit cards). A suspended sentence would be appropriate, to make sure he doesn't get tempted to hack anything else. Beyond that, the kid has basically punished himself -- no college is going to take him now, and he'll have a tough time finding employment too.
Kids are always going to try hacking school networks, and decades behind bars is basically never going to be an appropriate punishment for that. So we need specific laws that are dedicated to cases like this, and specify suitable punishments, instead of applying generic laws that were written with totally different scenarios in mind. That way, we could be reassured that the law will continue to dish out justice appropriately, and nobody will be able to defend inflammatory headlines like this any more.
Educational analogy: stream classes by achievement, not age.
Unless of course you've got some kind of magical time machine that lets you experiment with alternate histories, and you have managed to use it to prove that there really was no way the USA could gain its independence without bloodshed.
Better approaches (for any famous people who happen to read Slashdot and don't like the way they think Britain is going) would be either noisy emigration, or some kind of publicity stunt that directly related to the thing you hate. For example, buy a copy of the Anarchist's Cookbook and parade up and down outside the Houses of Parliament shouting "Arrest me! I have material that could be of use to terrorists!"
Okay, so we probably wouldn't have been able to tell it was a Chinese submarine. So, for the last few years we've been at war with al-Qaida, the Taleban, various insurgent militias in Iraq, Terror, Poverty, and Drugs. Exactly which of those groups do you believe has submarines in the Pacific?
I'm perfectly willing to believe that the submarine was indeed undetected, but I don't think the evidence is quite 100% conclusive.
For all you know, we simply pretended not to have detected them. If I were in command of a Navy carrier group, I certainly wouldn't want to hand the Chinese any information on our submarine detection capabilities.
Just one reason why I like emacs. Not that I use vi emulation myself, but I love having that degree of control over my editing environment.
Basically, both reactions exist. Some people go for the lowest price tag whatever the TCO; others reject all free options out of hand. Various reasons are given: "you get what you pay for" is common, as is the belief that all free/open-source products are inherently hard to use, or that buying a product gives you better support. (All these things are sometimes true, of course; what I object to is prejudice driving bad decisions.)
Current estimates of overall Windows market share range from 91% to 96%, but that includes a heck of a lot of computers that are not owned by D&D players.
See, this isn't the 1990s any more. Nowadays, making a Windows-only desktop app limits your userbase even among people who run Windows on their computer at home. Because they aren't always at home. Maybe they want to play D&D on their iPhone, had you thought of that? Or on their Windows Mobile phone, if that's what they prefer. If it was a web app, they could play it on any kind of device that has an internet connection.
Is that worth how much it would cost to port it? Oh, wait, if it was a web app, porting it would cost a whopping $0.00.
That's why developing a Windows-only desktop app is stupid, unless your app actually requires the kind of things that web apps don't do well, like real-time 3D graphics. Which D&D totally doesn't.