Yeah, but I have seen enough religious propaganda to know that it's easy to show that any group you pick teaches and/or practices such things. If you take words out of context, put your own spin on historical events, find one or two loud-mouthed extremists to quote, dig up old writings than nobody takes literally any more, you can do this to anybody. I suggest looking at the inspirational output of Chick Publications for examples of this.
The question is, how do most Muslims understand the teachings of the Prophet? If most of them really do think it's okay to murder people because they are "infidels", then we have a major problem. In that case, it's pretty much our DUTY to publish the cartoons, and more.
But if most of them do NOT think that, then it is THEIR duty (and certainly in their best interests) to put out their alternate message, and to tell the world that murder and kidnappings are NOT what Islam teaches. If the passages you quoted above are in the Koran (and not taken out of context), and Bin Ladin and his ilk interpret them the way they seem to read, and the rest of the Islamic world either keeps silent, then they have only themselves to blame for the consequences -- they can hardly blame the people who take Bin Ladin at his word that he is speaking for Muslims everywhere.
One wonders where to find the Muslim mobs shouting "Down with Al-Qaeda! Down with terrorism! Stop killing innocent people in the name of Islam, because YOU are profaning the very name of Islam. Stop ridiculing the name of the Prophet in the eyes of the world by claiming that murder is part of Islam!"
Yes, Muslim governments are trying to control the terrorists, but governments always do that sort of thing. Where are the clerics denouncing the suicide bombers and those who send them? Why is there not a loud RELIGIOUS opposition to these people?
Because if there isn't, then the world is quite JUSTIFIED in believing that the terrorists are right when they claim that Islam teaches them to kill innocent people just because they belong to a nation that they claim are "enemies of Islam". And if Mohammed really did teach such things, then the caricatures of him are completely justified.
So don't attack the messenger! Don't attack the cartoonist who says "this is the picture that Muslims are showing us of Mohammed." Attack the people who are GIVING the world this picture of Mohammed.
I've found unit tests to be very useful. Only when you're sure that all the basic components function as they ought to function, is it worthwhile looking at interactions between the components.
A unit test finds simple errors simply.
Sure, as you move closer to using real data in the field, you will find more errors. But it's stupid to run the whole system in real time in order to trigger a bug where an "and" should have been an "or", then go through mountains of debugging data in order to localize it. Get rid of those things first, then do more complicated tests to find the harder-to-find things like race conditions.
I always understood "theory" to mean a set of principles or equations to explain phenomena, period.
If you think of an underlying mechanism that would explain things (whether we're talking scientific measurements or theology or whatever), you have a theory. If your explanation isn't internally consistent, you do NOT have a theory. If your theory doesn't have anything to distinguish it from other theories that could explain the same results, it is "just a theory". If your theory makes predictions which can be tested, and the tests match your predicted results, your theory looks good. But whether it is a crackpot explanation that can be easily disproven, or something that has been tested and not disproven over and over and over again, it is still a THEORY, because the word "theory" describes what sort of thing it is and has no implications, positive or negative, about its truth or validity.
Not unlike, say, the word "explanation". There are good explanations, and bad explanations, and ridiculous explanations, and so on, but its quality does not change it from an "explanation" to an "assumption" or an "observation" or a "calculation" or an "introduction" or a "poem" or a "classification system" or a "bedtime story". Well, some explanations may be suitable bedtime stories, or may be poetic, or may involve calculation or observation, but this is an independent attribute.
On the other hand, in my experience, small towns have some other problems, or maybe just some of them do. Things related to kids having not much to do and being bored.
Another HUGE difference between kibbutzim and state communism is that one is voluntary and the other one is enforced by violence.
By the way, I'm impressed with the quality of the discussion going on in this topic. People are raising really good points and expressing really good ideas.
Well, at some point in the past, a community didn't think of the gov'ment as some abstract higher power, but as an agreement among the community about how to do things.
YES! That's EXACTLY the concept that's missing these days. I would say "Mod parent up", except that that always sounds so dumb.
Maybe we need smaller communities, so that EVERYBODY can be involved in the decision making.
Also, with smaller communities, it might become more obvious that taxes are the way that we all pool our money to do something for all of us. It's pretty common to think of taxes as going to "them" somewhere (who then waste them), and that money for projects we want also comes from some benevolent "them". We need to get it through our skulls that it's not "them", it's "us". WE pool OUR money, and then WE, through our representatives, spend it. It's not their money to do with as they please. It's not someone giving us a gift of a library from above, it's our money and our neighbours' money.
I once read a book which said that a major factor in the way the Soviet Union was dysfunctional was that nobody felt that they were doing something for anyone. You didn't make shoes for some customer that might be your neighbour, you made shoes for "the system", for some giant warehouse "out there", that had no connection to actual people that you know that might be buying them eventually. You didn't grow potatoes to feed your family, or to sell to your neighbours in exchange for the fruits of their labour, you grew potatoes for "the system", which would in all probability ship them to some totally inappropriate place and let them rot while your neighbours go hungry. And if the world is like that, then why make any effort to do a good job? Why NOT steal whatever you can get away with, since everybody else is doing the same thing. It's not like there is someone you would hurt by that, you would only hurt "the system", and Lord knows it owes it to you.
I think that this is part of the mentality that allows looting during natural disasters or, for that matter, simple power outages. It's not Mr. Smith who lives two doors over that you're hurting when you break his window and take stuff from his store; it's some nameless, faceless corporation, who is insured anyway, and who owes it to you by now anyway, so why not take whatever you can get away with? It's just "the system".
No, we need to get things back onto a human scale, where we're interacting with each other, instead of each interacting with "the system". Where the "government" is just US who are making agreements about how to do things (including how to spend OUR money).
I really think that the United States was founded on principles like these, but they have gotten lost over the last few hundred years.
... We have most of the source, but no clue of how to approach a task of this magnitude.
Reverse engineering is generally thought of as a "cleanroom" technique that involves having the binary and/or specification but not the source. If you have the source, then you're just reading/rewriting it
If you have the source but not the spec, and you're working on recreating the spec, then you're reverse engineering.
Unfortunately, it doesn't take much to be modded insightful these days. I got modded insightful a few months ago for a post which literally said nothing but "It's difficult to RTFA when it's slashdotted already."
On the other hand, I wasn't deliberately trolling, either. I really meant what I wrote, although I admit it did sound like a troll or like flamebait.
I found the responses interesting and, in general, encouraging. Maybe part of the problem is the way things are reported in the media -- if out of a million people, ten do something violent, it is those ten who will make it onto the evening news and the fron pages of the papers. The vast majority of N.O. residents may indeed have been helping one another (and, come to think of it, there was at least one major story about that, as well), but the ones who are doing something "newsworthy" are the ones that get reported. But, yeah, I was also thinking about power failures -- in some cities, people sat outside and talked to their neighbours while they waited for the power to come back on, while in others, they used the opportunity to loot stores.
I found quite amusing what one friend wrote to me in email: Apparently, when there was massive flooding in Bombay a while back, everyone pulled together to help each other. And they didn't loot stores and homes. And they didn't shoot at rescue helicopters. So I guess we can chalk this up to "cultural differences" rather than "human nature".
"...people are shooting, looting (not food - TV's, etc), causing violence and intimidation"
What kind of a F!-ed up society do you guys live in, anyway? In most places around the world (not all, admittedly), when a natural disaster hits, or even a power failure, people's natural instincts are to help one another, not steal things from stores, or beat and rape each other.
Is the USA really in such a state that law and order are maintained only by the presence of police? And if something happens to disrupt the power of the police, that the first things that come to people's minds is to break into the neighborhood shops and take the TV's? Is your country filled with people who are so ready to backstab their neighbors?
If this is true, it seems like a really, really sick (and scary!) society. You've got far bigger problems than worrying about the DMCA or the Patriot Act. Yes, those things are a danger to any society, but it sure sounds like you are way past the point where changing the laws or changing the administration will help very much. Wow!
I want to point out, though, that there are ways of helping people without giving them money. For example: making laws and policies that promote job creation, make it easier to hold a part-time job and get an education at the same time, etc., etc.
I'm not sure what your point is. Are you trying to say that the anti-abortion-but-pro-death-penalty people are pro-life because they call themselves that?
I find that those who oppose ESCR because "it's murder" are just fine with killing criminals and foreign civilians.
That's a very general, and false, statement. You will find that anybody who is pro-life is against the death penalty and against war in general.
I greatly resent that people are taking the American anti-abortion spokespeople and treating them as if they spoke for the pro-life cause. It doesn't help that these spokespeople confuse the issue by claiming that they are pro-life when, as illustrated by their support of capital punishment and pre-emptive war, as well as their lack of support for measures that would help those living in poverty, they are anything but!
I've been involved in editing some wikipedia articles, and in observing what was going in them.
Certainly, you don't want to put too much of a damper on people's ability to modify the text in good faith, but some people are just vandals. In one case, somebody thought his version of history was the correct one, and whenever anybody edited the article, he would always just put his own version back. The thing is, he wouldn't discuss the issues, so there was no way to come to any kind of consensus about how to say something in a factual and neutral way, he would simply replace the current version with his own version. What little discussion he did actually get involved in was mostly him calling all the other editors extremely rude and racist names, and saying they should all go to the gas chambers. This is not a disagreement about the facts or the point of view, this is simply vandalism.
I've also seen the text of articles replaced in whole or in part by obscenities. Not controversial articles, not appropriate or funny obscenities, just obscenities. Again, simply vandalism.
As is replacing the Pope's picture, I suppose, but I would think that that was just a joke, which I suppose may have been offensive to some people, etc, etc, but that's the type of mistake I myself have made more times than I care to remember.
Well put. Too bad there are so many comments already that the casual user is not likely to see yours. Although, I suppose, the moderation system might help.
Science tries to answer the question "how?". Philosophy tries to answer the question "why?". Whenever we forget that these are two separate worlds of discourse, we run into trouble. Was it Stephen Jay Gould that wrote a book about this idea of Non-Overlapping Magisteria?
Good point. This feature was added in C99. I guess I wasn't aware of it because none of the compilers that I use support it:
"[c:\junk]cl junk.c Microsoft (R) 32-bit C/C++ Optimizing Compiler Version 12.00.8168 for 80x86 Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1984-1998. All rights reserved.
[c:\junk]tcc junk.c "junk.c", line 3: Serious error: C2291E: expression expected but found 'int' "junk.c", line 3: Serious error: C2282E: expected ';' - inserted before 'int' "junk.c", line 3: Serious error: C2291E: expression expected but found 'int' "junk.c", line 3: Serious error: C2282E: expected ';' - inserted before 'int' "junk.c", line 3: Serious error: C2291E: expression expected but found 'int' "junk.c", line 3: Serious error: C2282E: expected ')' - inserted before 'int' "junk.c", line 3: Serious error: C2304E: command expected but found 'int' "junk.c", line 3: Error: C2456E: undeclared name, inventing 'extern int i' "junk.c", line 3: Warning: C2917W: no side effect in void context: 'expr [less than] expr' "junk.c", line 3: Serious error: C2284E: expected ';' after command - inserted before ')' "junk.c", line 3: Serious error: C2304E: command expected but found ')' junk.c: 1 warning, 1 error, 9 serious errors"
Sorry, slight editing was required to prevent less-than signs from looking like HTML.
Now I don't feel nearly so good about when one of my posts is modded Insightful.
The parent poster is talking about a wind TUNNEL, while TFA is talking about a wind TURBINE. Or, I assume it is, because it's slashdotted already so I couldn't read the article.
Let's try to restrict Insightful to those posts that actually show SOME insight, okay?
We are more concerned if they "feel good about themselves" than if they actually learn something. Demand high performance and if they don't meet it, than [sic] they need to work harder.
Actually, demand high performance, do everything you can to help them achieve it, and then, when they do, they will really have something to feel good about themselves for. They will have a sense of achievement.
On the other hand, if you make those that CAN'T achieve high performance feel like rejects, they're likely to stop trying altogether. I'm not talking about coddling those with attitude problems, but helping those who are not quick on the uptake (such as the grade 1 kid who is having difficulty learning to read, like my daughter did). Pretending that they HAVE met the requirements is no good, but neither is coming down hard on them.
By the way, our solution for our daughter was to take her out of school and teach her at home. It worked well.
We SHOULD live in a society where anyone can say whatever they want without having to hide behind a cloak of anonymity. But, as they say, there's that word "should" again.
Not that it helps any, but sometimes I really miss the days when most people who had access to the Internet (or even Usenet) were at least somewhat intelligent and responsible. The days when most people gained access either through work or through school, and would be afraid of losing their account if they were caught vandalizing or posting spam. The days when it was possible to respond to the occasional spam that came through by an email to the sender (before that was faked as a standard practice), and you would often get an apology in response.
What makes people vandalize web sites and buildings? Why do people smash store windows during a power failure? Why is this EXPECTED behaviour, or, at least, what kind of a society is this where it is necessary to expect that kind of behaviour?
I remember working on a project, where one of the specifications was that the rear stairwells of transit buses (in a large U.S. city) had to be urine-proof, because the drivers REGULARLY used the rear stairwell to relieve themselves. It's not entirely the drivers' fault -- they were afraid to leave their vehicles. But doesn't this just seem WRONG? And if it doesn't, if this just seems normal, doesn't that indicate something even worse about this society?
The "U.S." isn't doing this. It's the U.S. Government. It hasn't been in the control of the people for decades.
But the majority of you did actually vote for the guy, so yes, it is the U.S. who is doing it.
The U.S. was founded on a number of principles. One of them was the idea of an informed, politically-active citizenry who governed themselves, rather than being governed by somebody else. Another one was, basically, "F! the rest of the world". The first of these seems to be falling by the wayside, but the second one is still going strong!:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but I have seen enough religious propaganda to know that it's easy to show that any group you pick teaches and/or practices such things. If you take words out of context, put your own spin on historical events, find one or two loud-mouthed extremists to quote, dig up old writings than nobody takes literally any more, you can do this to anybody. I suggest looking at the inspirational output of Chick Publications for examples of this.
The question is, how do most Muslims understand the teachings of the Prophet? If most of them really do think it's okay to murder people because they are "infidels", then we have a major problem. In that case, it's pretty much our DUTY to publish the cartoons, and more.
But if most of them do NOT think that, then it is THEIR duty (and certainly in their best interests) to put out their alternate message, and to tell the world that murder and kidnappings are NOT what Islam teaches. If the passages you quoted above are in the Koran (and not taken out of context), and Bin Ladin and his ilk interpret them the way they seem to read, and the rest of the Islamic world either keeps silent, then they have only themselves to blame for the consequences -- they can hardly blame the people who take Bin Ladin at his word that he is speaking for Muslims everywhere.
One wonders where to find the Muslim mobs shouting "Down with Al-Qaeda! Down with terrorism! Stop killing innocent people in the name of Islam, because YOU are profaning the very name of Islam. Stop ridiculing the name of the Prophet in the eyes of the world by claiming that murder is part of Islam!"
Yes, Muslim governments are trying to control the terrorists, but governments always do that sort of thing. Where are the clerics denouncing the suicide bombers and those who send them? Why is there not a loud RELIGIOUS opposition to these people?
Because if there isn't, then the world is quite JUSTIFIED in believing that the terrorists are right when they claim that Islam teaches them to kill innocent people just because they belong to a nation that they claim are "enemies of Islam". And if Mohammed really did teach such things, then the caricatures of him are completely justified.
So don't attack the messenger! Don't attack the cartoonist who says "this is the picture that Muslims are showing us of Mohammed." Attack the people who are GIVING the world this picture of Mohammed.
I've found unit tests to be very useful. Only when you're sure that all the basic components function as they ought to function, is it worthwhile looking at interactions between the components.
A unit test finds simple errors simply.
Sure, as you move closer to using real data in the field, you will find more errors. But it's stupid to run the whole system in real time in order to trigger a bug where an "and" should have been an "or", then go through mountains of debugging data in order to localize it. Get rid of those things first, then do more complicated tests to find the harder-to-find things like race conditions.
I always understood "theory" to mean a set of principles or equations to explain phenomena, period.
If you think of an underlying mechanism that would explain things (whether we're talking scientific measurements or theology or whatever), you have a theory. If your explanation isn't internally consistent, you do NOT have a theory. If your theory doesn't have anything to distinguish it from other theories that could explain the same results, it is "just a theory". If your theory makes predictions which can be tested, and the tests match your predicted results, your theory looks good. But whether it is a crackpot explanation that can be easily disproven, or something that has been tested and not disproven over and over and over again, it is still a THEORY, because the word "theory" describes what sort of thing it is and has no implications, positive or negative, about its truth or validity.
Not unlike, say, the word "explanation". There are good explanations, and bad explanations, and ridiculous explanations, and so on, but its quality does not change it from an "explanation" to an "assumption" or an "observation" or a "calculation" or an "introduction" or a "poem" or a "classification system" or a "bedtime story". Well, some explanations may be suitable bedtime stories, or may be poetic, or may involve calculation or observation, but this is an independent attribute.
Good points.
On the other hand, in my experience, small towns have some other problems, or maybe just some of them do. Things related to kids having not much to do and being bored.
Another HUGE difference between kibbutzim and state communism is that one is voluntary and the other one is enforced by violence.
By the way, I'm impressed with the quality of the discussion going on in this topic. People are raising really good points and expressing really good ideas.
Well, at some point in the past, a community didn't think of the gov'ment as some abstract higher power, but as an agreement among the community about how to do things.
YES! That's EXACTLY the concept that's missing these days. I would say "Mod parent up", except that that always sounds so dumb.
Maybe we need smaller communities, so that EVERYBODY can be involved in the decision making.
Also, with smaller communities, it might become more obvious that taxes are the way that we all pool our money to do something for all of us. It's pretty common to think of taxes as going to "them" somewhere (who then waste them), and that money for projects we want also comes from some benevolent "them". We need to get it through our skulls that it's not "them", it's "us". WE pool OUR money, and then WE, through our representatives, spend it. It's not their money to do with as they please. It's not someone giving us a gift of a library from above, it's our money and our neighbours' money.
I once read a book which said that a major factor in the way the Soviet Union was dysfunctional was that nobody felt that they were doing something for anyone. You didn't make shoes for some customer that might be your neighbour, you made shoes for "the system", for some giant warehouse "out there", that had no connection to actual people that you know that might be buying them eventually. You didn't grow potatoes to feed your family, or to sell to your neighbours in exchange for the fruits of their labour, you grew potatoes for "the system", which would in all probability ship them to some totally inappropriate place and let them rot while your neighbours go hungry. And if the world is like that, then why make any effort to do a good job? Why NOT steal whatever you can get away with, since everybody else is doing the same thing. It's not like there is someone you would hurt by that, you would only hurt "the system", and Lord knows it owes it to you.
I think that this is part of the mentality that allows looting during natural disasters or, for that matter, simple power outages. It's not Mr. Smith who lives two doors over that you're hurting when you break his window and take stuff from his store; it's some nameless, faceless corporation, who is insured anyway, and who owes it to you by now anyway, so why not take whatever you can get away with? It's just "the system".
No, we need to get things back onto a human scale, where we're interacting with each other, instead of each interacting with "the system". Where the "government" is just US who are making agreements about how to do things (including how to spend OUR money).
I really think that the United States was founded on principles like these, but they have gotten lost over the last few hundred years.
... We have most of the source, but no clue of how to approach a task of this magnitude.
Reverse engineering is generally thought of as a "cleanroom" technique that involves having the binary and/or specification but not the source. If you have the source, then you're just reading/rewriting it
If you have the source but not the spec, and you're working on recreating the spec, then you're reverse engineering.
Because it will be much easier to read disassembled binary that to try to figure out what half a million lines of C or C++ code does.
That's right. Since the code is only half a million lines, it should be pretty straight forward simply to read it starting at main().
Hey! I post to Slashdot, and I have 7 kids. No, really.
Unfortunately, it doesn't take much to be modded insightful these days. I got modded insightful a few months ago for a post which literally said nothing but "It's difficult to RTFA when it's slashdotted already."
On the other hand, I wasn't deliberately trolling, either. I really meant what I wrote, although I admit it did sound like a troll or like flamebait.
I found the responses interesting and, in general, encouraging. Maybe part of the problem is the way things are reported in the media -- if out of a million people, ten do something violent, it is those ten who will make it onto the evening news and the fron pages of the papers. The vast majority of N.O. residents may indeed have been helping one another (and, come to think of it, there was at least one major story about that, as well), but the ones who are doing something "newsworthy" are the ones that get reported. But, yeah, I was also thinking about power failures -- in some cities, people sat outside and talked to their neighbours while they waited for the power to come back on, while in others, they used the opportunity to loot stores.
I found quite amusing what one friend wrote to me in email: Apparently, when there was massive flooding in Bombay a while back, everyone pulled together to help each other. And they didn't loot stores and homes. And they didn't shoot at rescue helicopters. So I guess we can chalk this up to "cultural differences" rather than "human nature".
"...people are shooting, looting (not food - TV's, etc), causing violence and intimidation"
What kind of a F!-ed up society do you guys live in, anyway? In most places around the world (not all, admittedly), when a natural disaster hits, or even a power failure, people's natural instincts are to help one another, not steal things from stores, or beat and rape each other.
Is the USA really in such a state that law and order are maintained only by the presence of police? And if something happens to disrupt the power of the police, that the first things that come to people's minds is to break into the neighborhood shops and take the TV's? Is your country filled with people who are so ready to backstab their neighbors?
If this is true, it seems like a really, really sick (and scary!) society. You've got far bigger problems than worrying about the DMCA or the Patriot Act. Yes, those things are a danger to any society, but it sure sounds like you are way past the point where changing the laws or changing the administration will help very much. Wow!
Fair enough.
I want to point out, though, that there are ways of helping people without giving them money. For example: making laws and policies that promote job creation, make it easier to hold a part-time job and get an education at the same time, etc., etc.
I'm not sure what your point is. Are you trying to say that the anti-abortion-but-pro-death-penalty people are pro-life because they call themselves that?
I find that those who oppose ESCR because "it's murder" are just fine with killing criminals and foreign civilians.
That's a very general, and false, statement. You will find that anybody who is pro-life is against the death penalty and against war in general.
I greatly resent that people are taking the American anti-abortion spokespeople and treating them as if they spoke for the pro-life cause. It doesn't help that these spokespeople confuse the issue by claiming that they are pro-life when, as illustrated by their support of capital punishment and pre-emptive war, as well as their lack of support for measures that would help those living in poverty, they are anything but!
I've been involved in editing some wikipedia articles, and in observing what was going in them.
Certainly, you don't want to put too much of a damper on people's ability to modify the text in good faith, but some people are just vandals. In one case, somebody thought his version of history was the correct one, and whenever anybody edited the article, he would always just put his own version back. The thing is, he wouldn't discuss the issues, so there was no way to come to any kind of consensus about how to say something in a factual and neutral way, he would simply replace the current version with his own version. What little discussion he did actually get involved in was mostly him calling all the other editors extremely rude and racist names, and saying they should all go to the gas chambers. This is not a disagreement about the facts or the point of view, this is simply vandalism.
I've also seen the text of articles replaced in whole or in part by obscenities. Not controversial articles, not appropriate or funny obscenities, just obscenities. Again, simply vandalism.
As is replacing the Pope's picture, I suppose, but I would think that that was just a joke, which I suppose may have been offensive to some people, etc, etc, but that's the type of mistake I myself have made more times than I care to remember.
Well put. Too bad there are so many comments already that the casual user is not likely to see yours. Although, I suppose, the moderation system might help.
Science tries to answer the question "how?". Philosophy tries to answer the question "why?". Whenever we forget that these are two separate worlds of discourse, we run into trouble. Was it Stephen Jay Gould that wrote a book about this idea of Non-Overlapping Magisteria?
I thought water was rather scarce on Mars.
Good point. This feature was added in C99. I guess I wasn't aware of it because none of the compilers that I use support it:
"[c:\junk]cl junk.c
Microsoft (R) 32-bit C/C++ Optimizing Compiler Version 12.00.8168 for 80x86
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1984-1998. All rights reserved.
junk.c
junk.c(3) : error C2143: syntax error : missing ';' before 'type'
junk.c(3) : error C2143: syntax error : missing ';' before 'type'
junk.c(3) : error C2143: syntax error : missing ')' before 'type'
junk.c(3) : error C2143: syntax error : missing ';' before 'type'
junk.c(3) : error C2065: 'i' : undeclared identifier
junk.c(3) : warning C4552: [less than] : operator has no effect; expected operator with side-effect
junk.c(3) : error C2059: syntax error : ')'
junk.c(3) : error C2143: syntax error : missing ';' before '{'
[c:\junk]tcc junk.c
"junk.c", line 3: Serious error: C2291E: expression expected but found 'int'
"junk.c", line 3: Serious error: C2282E: expected ';' - inserted before 'int'
"junk.c", line 3: Serious error: C2291E: expression expected but found 'int'
"junk.c", line 3: Serious error: C2282E: expected ';' - inserted before 'int'
"junk.c", line 3: Serious error: C2291E: expression expected but found 'int'
"junk.c", line 3: Serious error: C2282E: expected ')' - inserted before 'int'
"junk.c", line 3: Serious error: C2304E: command expected but found 'int'
"junk.c", line 3: Error: C2456E: undeclared name, inventing 'extern int i'
"junk.c", line 3: Warning: C2917W: no side effect in void context: 'expr [less than] expr'
"junk.c", line 3: Serious error: C2284E: expected ';' after command - inserted before ')'
"junk.c", line 3: Serious error: C2304E: command expected but found ')'
junk.c: 1 warning, 1 error, 9 serious errors"
Sorry, slight editing was required to prevent less-than signs from looking like HTML.
And the fact that it won't compile :-)
"for (int i"? C won't let you declare a variable in that context. D'uh!
Insightful???
Now I don't feel nearly so good about when one of my posts is modded Insightful.
The parent poster is talking about a wind TUNNEL, while TFA is talking about a wind TURBINE. Or, I assume it is, because it's slashdotted already so I couldn't read the article.
Let's try to restrict Insightful to those posts that actually show SOME insight, okay?
We are more concerned if they "feel good about themselves" than if they actually learn something. Demand high performance and if they don't meet it, than [sic] they need to work harder.
Actually, demand high performance, do everything you can to help them achieve it, and then, when they do, they will really have something to feel good about themselves for. They will have a sense of achievement.
On the other hand, if you make those that CAN'T achieve high performance feel like rejects, they're likely to stop trying altogether. I'm not talking about coddling those with attitude problems, but helping those who are not quick on the uptake (such as the grade 1 kid who is having difficulty learning to read, like my daughter did). Pretending that they HAVE met the requirements is no good, but neither is coming down hard on them.
By the way, our solution for our daughter was to take her out of school and teach her at home. It worked well.
Agreed!
We SHOULD live in a society where anyone can say whatever they want without having to hide behind a cloak of anonymity. But, as they say, there's that word "should" again.
Not that it helps any, but sometimes I really miss the days when most people who had access to the Internet (or even Usenet) were at least somewhat intelligent and responsible. The days when most people gained access either through work or through school, and would be afraid of losing their account if they were caught vandalizing or posting spam. The days when it was possible to respond to the occasional spam that came through by an email to the sender (before that was faked as a standard practice), and you would often get an apology in response.
What makes people vandalize web sites and buildings? Why do people smash store windows during a power failure? Why is this EXPECTED behaviour, or, at least, what kind of a society is this where it is necessary to expect that kind of behaviour?
I remember working on a project, where one of the specifications was that the rear stairwells of transit buses (in a large U.S. city) had to be urine-proof, because the drivers REGULARLY used the rear stairwell to relieve themselves. It's not entirely the drivers' fault -- they were afraid to leave their vehicles. But doesn't this just seem WRONG? And if it doesn't, if this just seems normal, doesn't that indicate something even worse about this society?
Where did we start to go wrong?
The "U.S." isn't doing this. It's the U.S. Government. It hasn't been in the control of the people for decades.
:-)
But the majority of you did actually vote for the guy, so yes, it is the U.S. who is doing it.
The U.S. was founded on a number of principles. One of them was the idea of an informed, politically-active citizenry who governed themselves, rather than being governed by somebody else. Another one was, basically, "F! the rest of the world". The first of these seems to be falling by the wayside, but the second one is still going strong!