Except there was a very broad international consensus that Hitler was a threat - that's where the "World" in WW2 comes from.
It took a while for that "consensus" to form. Does the term "appeasement" mean anything to you with regard to WW2?
I always find it funny how anti-war types are quick to say that they'd support declaring war against Germany during the time of WW2 when for many years the anti-war types of the time were caving in to Hitler's demands in an effort to avoid war at any cost.
That may indeed be less verbose than its Java equivalent, but you still have to deal with having big, manually-escaped string blocks or numerous "create node"-type statements strewn about your source, whereas with XSL it's much more natural as your processing elements and output elements are merged together.
Of course, you're neglecting to consider the amount of overhead code needed to load the XML document as a DOM document, traverse the DOM, perform matching on particular elements (which gets incredibly hairy depending on how much context is required), place results back in another DOM document, serialize it to text and write it to disk. Hell, that little snippet you posted would translate into a Java source snippet sort of like this one:
Doesn't look so simple anymore, does it (remember, this is but a small snippet of a much larger program)? Of the two, which one looks less verbose and easier to glean meaning from? And woe be to you when you decide you need to select, for example, all elements whose ancestors have some particular attribute value AND whose descendants DO NOT have some other attribute value. The DOM code will get horrendous.
XSL makes tasks that would otherwise result in hundreds of lines of ugly, hard to follow, and unmanageable DOM manipulation compact, easy to understand, and easy to change.
Being a good programmer means knowing when to set aside your macho "real programmers use assembly" attitude and learn how to properly use multiple technologies that will allow you to create a simpler, more flexible solution.
Watching a poor-quality.avi of a movie is a completely different experience than seeing a much better version - even a rented VHS.
You must not have gotten the memo. Movies on DVD are ripped to MPEG4, and generally look indistinguishable from the DVD itself (and many times include the actual Dolby Digital 5.1 audio track). In essence, you're downloading a copy of the movie that many are hard pressed to differentiate from a DVD.
In the case of movies running in the theater, ones shot from camcorders are watchable but not in excellent quality, whereas those ripped from a screener DVD (this practice may have been discontinued recently, I'm not sure) are quite excellent.
The same is true with music uploaded at 128 kbs as compared to straight off the CD.
Of course, no one releases albums in 128Kbps anymore, it's all 192Kbps or VBR. Throw those tracks on a CD and most people would be hard pressed to tell the difference.
The "downloaded copies have poor quality, so that's why people will still buy the product" argument doesn't hold that much water in a lot of cases. Most people would gladly take 99% quality at 0% price rather than 100% quality and 100% price. THAT'S what the movie studios and record companies have to compete with. There are far fewer altruistic downloaders than you may think.
You're completely disregarding the fact that the US is far larger than Japan in terms of area. Blanketing a single US state with cellular and wireless internet service is one thing -- blanketing all fifty is quite another.
Besides which, even if some company (or companies) were to say, cover all of California (only about 10% larger than Japan) with cellular service, they'd end up only being able to service a customer base approximately four times smaller than that of Japan. Doesn't really make much financial sense does it? And that's our MOST densely populated state. Let's not even consider what a financial disaster blanketing Wyoming with cellular service would be...
Why is there such concern over accessing RSS feeds as opposed to accessing the web site? Take for instance Slashdot: as of this writing, the main page is 65K and the RSS feed is 14K. Isn't this the case for most websites? So why the big fuss? If people are continuously refreshing the RSS feed, at least less bandwidth is consumed than if they were continuously refreshing the main page.
... Or is this one of those things where geeks have become so enamored with the technology that they go completely overboard with it? Are people refreshing the RSS feeds every two seconds or something?
The one thing I really wish ZSNES/Snes9X had is the ability to isolate individual sound channels during sound playback. I remember that Nesticle used to have the ability to turn off and on the various NES sound channels (i.e., triangle wave, square wave, etc.). That was really useful for sampling e.g., just the bass line of a particular song. Is there an SNES emulator that does this? Or better yet, is there an SPC player that does this?
I think what a lot of moderators do is mod topics "Redundant" or "Offtopic" simply because they disagree with the poster's point of view, but don't want to be seen that way in metamoderation. I always find it funny how one post can spawn a completely unrelated thread of discussion, and about five levels deep, a comment that is related to the new discussion gets moderated "Offtopic". Really now, the discussion was "Offtopic" long before that. Mods, if a discussion gets off-topic, moderate the post that started the discussion "Offtopic" and moderate all subsequent replies according to the new discussion at hand. Is this really that hard to understand?
And please, if there are two redundant posts, the post that occurs first should never be moderated "Redundant".
How did you guys ever come up with conspiracy theories that explain why a Republican candidate won the presidency before the advent of electronic voting machines?
Does this mean the Battle Angel anime DVD will be released again some time in the future? I remember a few years ago that the DVD stopped being produced right about the time it was announced that James Cameron bought the rights. Naturally, I had been putting off buying the DVD for quite some time and when I finally wanted to pick it up, it was completely gone.
The average user, I don't think, is terribly concerned about regular backups (and definitely not willing to do them on a daily basis -- remember, even with periodic backups you could still face tremendous loss if you're between backups). Furthermore, if a new or casual user has made the switch to Linux (by either being convinced by a Linux nerd friend to so or because said Linux friend went ahead and did it without the user's knowledge), I think they'd be less inclined to perform backups, after hearing constant talk about how secure Linux is.
other organizations have sat on information for over a year without issuing a patch, which is an unacceptable turn-around.
Sort of like how Mozilla "classified" bugs that sat around for YEARS before getting fixed? Case in point, the "shell:" expoit of a few months ago. Turns out the Mozilla team knew of a potential problem for years, but "classified" the problem and didn't do anything about it until an actual exploit surfaced. Of course, here on Slashdot, there was no harsh words for Mozilla, because after all, it was "Microsoft's problem".
so in Linux it can "only" trash the user's home directory.
I think a lot of Linux zealots tend to downplay the importance of the home directory. After all, if you're a smart user and don't run as root, all your important data is going to be in the home directory (and possibly other directories where your user has permissions). I could care less if the OS install gets wiped out -- that can easily be replaced. The data in my home directory can't. In that regard, losing your home directory is just as bad as losing the entire system.
how else do you verify that a paperless voting system is working properly?
Easy. If the Democrat candidate won, the voting system is working properly. Because, after all, only Republicans cheat in elections. And paper ballots are infallible, because no one could "lose" them or otherwise misrepresent the count.
I've learned these and other "election truths" from liberals by watching the past two elections. The moment Bush won this election, I got a kick out of watching the "rigged election" accusations come rolling in. Now let's be honest here folks: if Kerry had won, would the reaction have been the same? Would the same people who are today bemoaning electronic voting machines have immediately stepped up afterwards and said "wait a minute, how do we know Kerry didn't rig the election? I don't trust these electronic voting machines"? No, absolutely not. If Kerry had won, the liberals would believe that electronic voting is infallible (up until the point that another Republican president wins).
Sorry, but I don't buy all these rumors about electronic voting software being so incredibly difficult to write that every implementation is hopelessly buggy. You punch a button and a counter gets incremented. It hardly gets much easier than that. Bells and whistles like printing increase the complexity slightly, but the core software used to tally votes is trivially simple. I don't think it's the voting software you have to look out for, but the people who have unrestricted, after-hours access to the machines. THEY are the ones tampering with the machines, much like in other elections they've been able to tamper with boxes full of ballots.
Well, you've certainly convinced me that Linux has significant market share by posting the download stats of an Open Source game hosted on Sourceforge!
Reward Zone pisses me off. At the beginning of the year, I bought a laptop and decided to buy the $10 Reward Zone card since the cost of the laptop would earn me the equivalent of a $50 gift certificate. So I bought the laptop and some other items, and figured I had about $80 worth in gift certificates coming my way. I waited. And waited. Finally, a $5 gift certificate came in the mail, and the totals section on the printout said that the $80 gift certificates had already been sent out! I called Best Buy and had them re-send my gift certificates, and I'm still waiting (meanwhile, another $5 gift certificate came). I figure there's probably no way they're going to send me the gift certificates I deserve short of expending a lot of effort, so I'm not really going to bother.
Moral of the story: don't get Reward Zone. Best Buy gets really stingy about sending out the gift certificates if you've got a lot coming your way. Or perhaps that was just my experience. Anyone else in a similar situation?
For 2003 a single man making 28,400 dollars, and living in WA state (8% sales tax) he will pay 27% of his wages in tax.
Where are you getting those numbers? Spending half of his earnings on taxable goods yields about $1100 in sales tax, or about 4% of the income. Are you implying that he would have a 23% income tax rate? Think again...
At the other end of the income spectrum, the bottom 50 percent of the nation's taxpayers (everyone whose adjusted gross income was under $28,654) earned more and paid less. Total income for this group rose from $861 billion to $870 billion. That was up from 13.8 percent of all income in 2001 to 14.23 percent in 2002. Despite growth in the percentage of total income earned by the bottom half of earners, their average tax rate fell from 4.1 percent to 3.2 percent.
What a lot of people are confused about when it comes to income taxes is that just because you get a certain amount of money taken out of your paycheck (in the neighborhood of >20%) doesn't mean that that's your actual tax rate. When tax return time comes around, you get a lot of it back (depending on how much you make), making your effective tax rate far lower than what it APPEARS to be on your paychecks. If you make a decent amount of money, you OWE additional money come tax time, making your effective income tax rate even HIGHER.
You know why low income earners don't get many tax breaks? Because they hardly pay any taxes to begin with!
What, you mean looking at the Iraq War in an extremely short-sighted, "it-didn't-cease-world-terrorism-after-fifteen-min utes" point of view? Probably not much. However, I have no doubt that Iraq will be a major area in which US military will be stationed and therefore be able to quickly smack around terrorists in the middle east.
Slashdot Mirror
Except there was a very broad international consensus that Hitler was a threat - that's where the "World" in WW2 comes from.
It took a while for that "consensus" to form. Does the term "appeasement" mean anything to you with regard to WW2?
I always find it funny how anti-war types are quick to say that they'd support declaring war against Germany during the time of WW2 when for many years the anti-war types of the time were caving in to Hitler's demands in an effort to avoid war at any cost.
That may indeed be less verbose than its Java equivalent, but you still have to deal with having big, manually-escaped string blocks or numerous "create node"-type statements strewn about your source, whereas with XSL it's much more natural as your processing elements and output elements are merged together.
Of course, you're neglecting to consider the amount of overhead code needed to load the XML document as a DOM document, traverse the DOM, perform matching on particular elements (which gets incredibly hairy depending on how much context is required), place results back in another DOM document, serialize it to text and write it to disk. Hell, that little snippet you posted would translate into a Java source snippet sort of like this one:
if (curElem.getAttribute ("NUMBER_OF_PAGES").length() > 0) {
resultDoc.appendChild (resultDoc.createTextNode (curElem.getAttribute ("NUMBER_OF_PAGES")));
}
else {
resultDoc.appendChild (resultDoc.createTextNode ("0"));
}
Doesn't look so simple anymore, does it (remember, this is but a small snippet of a much larger program)? Of the two, which one looks less verbose and easier to glean meaning from? And woe be to you when you decide you need to select, for example, all elements whose ancestors have some particular attribute value AND whose descendants DO NOT have some other attribute value. The DOM code will get horrendous.
XSL makes tasks that would otherwise result in hundreds of lines of ugly, hard to follow, and unmanageable DOM manipulation compact, easy to understand, and easy to change.
Being a good programmer means knowing when to set aside your macho "real programmers use assembly" attitude and learn how to properly use multiple technologies that will allow you to create a simpler, more flexible solution.
Watching a poor-quality .avi of a movie is a completely different experience than seeing a much better version - even a rented VHS.
You must not have gotten the memo. Movies on DVD are ripped to MPEG4, and generally look indistinguishable from the DVD itself (and many times include the actual Dolby Digital 5.1 audio track). In essence, you're downloading a copy of the movie that many are hard pressed to differentiate from a DVD.
In the case of movies running in the theater, ones shot from camcorders are watchable but not in excellent quality, whereas those ripped from a screener DVD (this practice may have been discontinued recently, I'm not sure) are quite excellent.
The same is true with music uploaded at 128 kbs as compared to straight off the CD.
Of course, no one releases albums in 128Kbps anymore, it's all 192Kbps or VBR. Throw those tracks on a CD and most people would be hard pressed to tell the difference.
The "downloaded copies have poor quality, so that's why people will still buy the product" argument doesn't hold that much water in a lot of cases. Most people would gladly take 99% quality at 0% price rather than 100% quality and 100% price. THAT'S what the movie studios and record companies have to compete with. There are far fewer altruistic downloaders than you may think.
In a nutshell, the reviewer finds that the iPodLinux Project has progressed a long way from its early proof-of-concept days.
Looks like it has support for the "back" and "stop" buttons. Support for the "play" button should be available shortly. But it plays OGG!
Joel Spolsky astutely notes that this will raise the bar in terms of how people expect the "internets" to work.
Couldn't just post the story without bashing Bush, could you?
Didn't mean most densely populated state -- I meant the state with the largest population.
You're completely disregarding the fact that the US is far larger than Japan in terms of area. Blanketing a single US state with cellular and wireless internet service is one thing -- blanketing all fifty is quite another.
Besides which, even if some company (or companies) were to say, cover all of California (only about 10% larger than Japan) with cellular service, they'd end up only being able to service a customer base approximately four times smaller than that of Japan. Doesn't really make much financial sense does it? And that's our MOST densely populated state. Let's not even consider what a financial disaster blanketing Wyoming with cellular service would be...
Why is there such concern over accessing RSS feeds as opposed to accessing the web site? Take for instance Slashdot: as of this writing, the main page is 65K and the RSS feed is 14K. Isn't this the case for most websites? So why the big fuss? If people are continuously refreshing the RSS feed, at least less bandwidth is consumed than if they were continuously refreshing the main page.
... Or is this one of those things where geeks have become so enamored with the technology that they go completely overboard with it? Are people refreshing the RSS feeds every two seconds or something?
Does Adobe make a special effects package the removes pretentiousness from independent films?
Someone's actually got 500 years worth of accurate temperature recordings?
Surely they must be on the web somewhere...
The one thing I really wish ZSNES/Snes9X had is the ability to isolate individual sound channels during sound playback. I remember that Nesticle used to have the ability to turn off and on the various NES sound channels (i.e., triangle wave, square wave, etc.). That was really useful for sampling e.g., just the bass line of a particular song. Is there an SNES emulator that does this? Or better yet, is there an SPC player that does this?
I think what a lot of moderators do is mod topics "Redundant" or "Offtopic" simply because they disagree with the poster's point of view, but don't want to be seen that way in metamoderation. I always find it funny how one post can spawn a completely unrelated thread of discussion, and about five levels deep, a comment that is related to the new discussion gets moderated "Offtopic". Really now, the discussion was "Offtopic" long before that. Mods, if a discussion gets off-topic, moderate the post that started the discussion "Offtopic" and moderate all subsequent replies according to the new discussion at hand. Is this really that hard to understand?
And please, if there are two redundant posts, the post that occurs first should never be moderated "Redundant".
How did you guys ever come up with conspiracy theories that explain why a Republican candidate won the presidency before the advent of electronic voting machines?
Does this mean the Battle Angel anime DVD will be released again some time in the future? I remember a few years ago that the DVD stopped being produced right about the time it was announced that James Cameron bought the rights. Naturally, I had been putting off buying the DVD for quite some time and when I finally wanted to pick it up, it was completely gone.
The average user, I don't think, is terribly concerned about regular backups (and definitely not willing to do them on a daily basis -- remember, even with periodic backups you could still face tremendous loss if you're between backups). Furthermore, if a new or casual user has made the switch to Linux (by either being convinced by a Linux nerd friend to so or because said Linux friend went ahead and did it without the user's knowledge), I think they'd be less inclined to perform backups, after hearing constant talk about how secure Linux is.
And all of the above things are steps that are immediately obvious to new and casual users, I'm sure.
other organizations have sat on information for over a year without issuing a patch, which is an unacceptable turn-around.
Sort of like how Mozilla "classified" bugs that sat around for YEARS before getting fixed? Case in point, the "shell:" expoit of a few months ago. Turns out the Mozilla team knew of a potential problem for years, but "classified" the problem and didn't do anything about it until an actual exploit surfaced. Of course, here on Slashdot, there was no harsh words for Mozilla, because after all, it was "Microsoft's problem".
so in Linux it can "only" trash the user's home directory.
I think a lot of Linux zealots tend to downplay the importance of the home directory. After all, if you're a smart user and don't run as root, all your important data is going to be in the home directory (and possibly other directories where your user has permissions). I could care less if the OS install gets wiped out -- that can easily be replaced. The data in my home directory can't. In that regard, losing your home directory is just as bad as losing the entire system.
how else do you verify that a paperless voting system is working properly?
Easy. If the Democrat candidate won, the voting system is working properly. Because, after all, only Republicans cheat in elections. And paper ballots are infallible, because no one could "lose" them or otherwise misrepresent the count.
I've learned these and other "election truths" from liberals by watching the past two elections. The moment Bush won this election, I got a kick out of watching the "rigged election" accusations come rolling in. Now let's be honest here folks: if Kerry had won, would the reaction have been the same? Would the same people who are today bemoaning electronic voting machines have immediately stepped up afterwards and said "wait a minute, how do we know Kerry didn't rig the election? I don't trust these electronic voting machines"? No, absolutely not. If Kerry had won, the liberals would believe that electronic voting is infallible (up until the point that another Republican president wins).
Sorry, but I don't buy all these rumors about electronic voting software being so incredibly difficult to write that every implementation is hopelessly buggy. You punch a button and a counter gets incremented. It hardly gets much easier than that. Bells and whistles like printing increase the complexity slightly, but the core software used to tally votes is trivially simple. I don't think it's the voting software you have to look out for, but the people who have unrestricted, after-hours access to the machines. THEY are the ones tampering with the machines, much like in other elections they've been able to tamper with boxes full of ballots.
Well, you've certainly convinced me that Linux has significant market share by posting the download stats of an Open Source game hosted on Sourceforge!
I'm not sure why you mentioned XSL and XML Schema. They actually very widely used.
Reward Zone pisses me off. At the beginning of the year, I bought a laptop and decided to buy the $10 Reward Zone card since the cost of the laptop would earn me the equivalent of a $50 gift certificate. So I bought the laptop and some other items, and figured I had about $80 worth in gift certificates coming my way. I waited. And waited. Finally, a $5 gift certificate came in the mail, and the totals section on the printout said that the $80 gift certificates had already been sent out! I called Best Buy and had them re-send my gift certificates, and I'm still waiting (meanwhile, another $5 gift certificate came). I figure there's probably no way they're going to send me the gift certificates I deserve short of expending a lot of effort, so I'm not really going to bother.
Moral of the story: don't get Reward Zone. Best Buy gets really stingy about sending out the gift certificates if you've got a lot coming your way. Or perhaps that was just my experience. Anyone else in a similar situation?
For 2003 a single man making 28,400 dollars, and living in WA state (8% sales tax) he will pay 27% of his wages in tax.
l
Where are you getting those numbers? Spending half of his earnings on taxable goods yields about $1100 in sales tax, or about 4% of the income. Are you implying that he would have a 23% income tax rate? Think again...
At the other end of the income spectrum, the bottom 50 percent of the nation's taxpayers (everyone whose adjusted gross income was under $28,654) earned more and paid less. Total income for this group rose from $861 billion to $870 billion. That was up from 13.8 percent of all income in 2001 to 14.23 percent in 2002. Despite growth in the percentage of total income earned by the bottom half of earners, their average tax rate fell from 4.1 percent to 3.2 percent.
(http://www.taxfoundation.org/prtopincome.html)
What a lot of people are confused about when it comes to income taxes is that just because you get a certain amount of money taken out of your paycheck (in the neighborhood of >20%) doesn't mean that that's your actual tax rate. When tax return time comes around, you get a lot of it back (depending on how much you make), making your effective tax rate far lower than what it APPEARS to be on your paychecks. If you make a decent amount of money, you OWE additional money come tax time, making your effective income tax rate even HIGHER.
You know why low income earners don't get many tax breaks? Because they hardly pay any taxes to begin with!
Here's a good table: http://www.taxfoundation.org/prtopincometable.htm
What, you mean looking at the Iraq War in an extremely short-sighted, "it-didn't-cease-world-terrorism-after-fifteen-min utes" point of view? Probably not much. However, I have no doubt that Iraq will be a major area in which US military will be stationed and therefore be able to quickly smack around terrorists in the middle east.