Children, by definition, are not responsible people.
I know several teenage girls that think they are not very good at math...If they took half the time studying for math as they do shopping for clothes, they would understand the concepts ten times better and have As.
Not necessarily. An ex-girlfriend of mine is an absolutely brilliant woman, a doctoral candidate in Eygptology who undertands seven or eight languages (most of them "dead"). She had no lack of dedication to studying. Her father is an engineer, a vice-president at Bell Labs, so there was no shortage of math knowledge around.
But she is math-blind. She can discourse at length about the sexagesimal numerical systems of the ancient Babylonians - but I never could get her to understand how to calculate a 20% tip by doubling the bill and moving the decimal point.
The background is that a bunch of twits fell for the junk science on PVC softened with lead phthalates.
The article you link to mentions nothing about lead. Here's an article with some information about lead in cabling (though it's about data, not power, cables):
In recent years, tests have indicated that the lead content in the cable jacket could be anywhere from 2 to 8 percent by weight, says Frank Bisbee of Communications Planning Corp. in Jacksonville, Fla. That equates to about 1 1/2 pounds per every 1,000 feet of cable, meaning the concentration is about 30,000 to 40,000 parts per million.
The Environmental Protection Agency limits lead exposure to 220 parts per million. The biggest risk to exposure is when the cable is being installed, Bisbee says. Chaffing the cable jacket against hands, cable trays or other structural elements could cause lead to be released.
The makeup of the cable jacket also complicates its disposal. Bisbee says the EPA is very close to classifying the material as a hazardous substance, meaning it could not simply be thrown away or recycled. Its disposal would require handling by special waste haulers, further increasing the time and expense necessary to remove abandoned cable.
Is lead exposure from handling cables as big a health risk as cigarette smoking? Probably not, unless you're chewing on it. (Even strip wire with your teeth? I used to do this when I was a kid.) But consider how long it took for evidence of the health dangers of smoking to mount to a convincing level.
Should people be aware of the potential risks, should people who are repeatedly exposed to these mechanisms take simple common-sense precautions, and should industry work for safer alternative? Sure.
Is labeling concerns about toxic substances in the environment "junk science" inflamatory? Does such labeling usually originate from polluters and their apologists? Absolutely.
Any half decent programmer could pick up C++ in a month with a toy project, easily.
Depends on what you mean by "pick up". I consider myself a very good coder, with over a decade's professional experience and about five years of working with C++. But it's a very "deep" language; I doubt anyone who's not named Stroustrup fully understands it completely. There are features of it I've never even touched. (The first C++ environment I used, back in the early 90s, didn't even have exception handling, much less the STL.)
In contrast, I've been working with PHP for about a year, and I don't think there's much significant to it beyond what I've seen. It's a shallow language.
I think architecture/design is on the logical path away from programming.
Master carpenters doesn't stop sawing wood, though they may leave the framing work to the apprentices and focus on the fine detail work. A master plumber still sweats pipe. Master surgeons don't stop cutting and sewing.
Master software developers analyze, design, and implement code. He who stops coding will lose the Tao of Programming, and his designs will suffer. The belief that actal coding is someone "beneath" experienced developers is responsible for much of lack of quality in software. Code written by a master developer not only serves as an example for the apprentice, it keeps the master grounded and aware of details.
but isn't it insane to discourage using some of the best features of a language?
If a language feature makes code hard for others to understand, then it is not a good feature of the language. It should either not be used, or used only if accompanied by annotation that explains it.
4 out of 5 of America's enemy leaders support Kerry for President. Why do you suppose that is?
Actually I'm sure that America's enemies would love to see Bush in power. Hell, the people who trampled federal, state, and international law to put him in the White House are America's enemies, a worse long-term threat to this nation than Bin Laden. (And I'll bet Osama would prefere to see the guy who's been a failure in catching him stay in power.)
You can't argue that safe drug use is better than no drug use at all.
Actually, in some instances I can. After all, some psychoactive drugs are recommended by doctors ("prescribed"); many people taking Valium or Prozac now would be better served by cannabis.
One of the greatest contributors to health problems is stress, and many "recreational" drugs are used to counteract stress. It may indeed by healthier for some people to have a little wine, or have a cup of tea, or eat a little chocolate (yes, it's a drug), or smoke (or eat) a little cannabis, than to not only deprive themselves of a stress remedy but to add to stress by surpressing a reasonably harmless desire. And some of these drugs have other beneficial health effects; evidence is growing that moderate wine drinking is beneficial - though of course, that depends on the individual. It's not beneficial for alcoholics, obviously.
This is not to say that drug use is not without risk, or that anti-stress benefits can't be gotten other ways; but the risk is different for each person.
Even a responsible drug user (recreational drugs) is harming his/her body.
Eating an order of french fries probably harms the body more than an effective dose of many recreational drugs. LSD, for example, is effective in such low doses that its side-effects on the body is virtually non-existant. For other drugs, the damage is more significant, but is increased several times when the drugs are purchased on the unregulated black market.
I tried H&R block and although they can do it, they want $100 to file my federal and $60 for my state.
Did you need some premium features? I filed on-line with H & R Block for $34.95. (Maryland now has it's own free web-based state filing.) No problems at all this time. (In past years there was a problem at the end with downloading the PDF of the return, where their server was too dumb to understand that, yes, I do have a PDF reader installed; this year they were smart enough to provide a "click here to download" link.)
Removing violent people from our company helps reduce violence. Locking up drug users doesn't help reduce drug abuse (indeed, drug abuse is present in prisons); locking up drug sellers creates job openings for dealers.
Prosecuting murder does not require gross invasions of privacy and civil liberties. (Which isn't to say that incompetent or overzealous police and prosecutors don't sometime commit such invasions, only that they're not necessary to the prosecution of such crimes.) Consensual crimes, by their victimless nature, require invasive enforcement.
Since when has looking around in a theater owned by the looker's employer been an invasion of privacy?
I was not referring to that behavior, to which I have no objection (though I would prefer not to patronize a theatre where covert surveillance was standard procedure). I was referring (in the case of the War on Copying) to snooping of network traffic, and to attempts to remove general-purpose computers from public possession (so called "Trusted Computing" or "Digital Rights Management").
Nor does the widespread use of drugs a good thing just because it's non-violent.
Who said it was a good thing? But the fact that something is not healthy doesn't mean the state should take people who do it and force them at gunpoint into cages.
Excuse me, but you have you ever seen a heroin addict missing his dose? Now that's violent
I have friends who are recovered heroin addicts. (I live just outside Baltimore, which makes that pretty inevitable.) None had any violent behavior during withdrawl. My father, on the other hand, was a nicotine addict for four decades, and was frighteningly short-tempered when he tried to quit; only the patch finally let him do it.
The problems of withdrawl are an excellent arguement for making sure the addicts can get safe and pure maintence doses, and - when they're ready - drug treatment. Many successful writers, musicians, artists, even physicians, have been opiate addicts; as long as they got their dose, no problem.
slashdotters seem to see it as a good thing(tm), it's not, it's illegal, we all know.
Questionable. Only violating valid copyrights can be illegal. But the Constitution only grant Congress the power to issue copyrights to the author, and only for a limited time. Many if not most claims of copyright are constitutionally questionable.
No, it's not. It may (or may not be) copyright infringment, but copying is not stealing. If there was ever any doubt - which there shouldn't have been - the Supreme Court removed it in the Dowling case. "[I]nterference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion or fraud." - Justice Blackmun.
I can't say for sure, any more than I can say for sure that the sun will come up tomorrow, but I would bet my right arm that under a scheme of outright legalization of soft drugs, prescription hard ones for addicts, and accurate drug education (not D.A.R.E. propaganda), things would indeed be better.
Please don't use the same word to refer to robbery and murder on the high seas, and copyright violation. It's not just inaccurate, it's stupid.
And why all the sudden is there an equation to the War on Drugs? It's completely irrelevant. Does that mean that Slashdot editors also believe drugs should be legalized?
Don't know about editors, but anyone with a lick of sense can see that after three decades, the War on (Some) Drugs is a failure in every way. Hard drugs are readily available in any urban area, our prisons are overflowing, our society several times more violent, and our liberties eroding.
The comparison to the current push for a War on Copying is that both unauthorized copying and drug use are widespread non-violent activities. They are both impossible to stop, but both Wars require gross invasions of privacy and civil liberties to continue their futile attempts at enforcement.
Except that these business majors never mention what the new model is supposed to be other than giving away shit for free.
I've been suggesting for years that a model similar to that of songwriter royalites should be applied - copying is free (just like singing a song), profit-making use rquires royalties. Other models have been proposed, you apparently just haven't been paying attention.
There are many free sites that rely on the income generated from pop-up ads to function.
First, we need to distinguish between "free" and "advertizing supported". Second, this isn't about website's own popups (which are bad enough), but about spyware-generated popups.
Unless you want to beg your users for money, or force them to CLICK on banners, popups are pretty much the only way you can go.
Google gets by without them. (In fact, every decent website gets by without them, since if you use pop-up ads, by definition you're not a decent web site.)
it's theoretically impossible to write a general test to find all race conditions in code. This is a variant of the Halting Problem.
I doubt PGN was refering to software to test for race conditions; I expect he was alluding to methods for writing code that does not contain them. People have, after all, been thinking about Dining Philosophers for quite a while now, yet coders still do amazingly stupid things with threads.
anyone with a gun (say, a super-cheap AK) can take out the greatest master swordsman. Sad in a way, but then that's real power to the people.
Actually, that depends on range - at close range a knife or sword-weilding opponent can carve you up before you have time to draw and fire a handgun, and long guns are awkward at point-blank range.
And it's really no different than the advantage of the bow over the sword, it's just easier to gain basic competence with a firearm.
So yeah, I need to look at code that they've written.
And they need to follow NDAs they've signed that prohibit them from keeping copies of code they've written for former employers, or risk getting crushed by lawyers. (Check the paperwork that your employees sign and see if they can show their next employer the stuff they right for you.) Catch 22.
Now, I'm sure that many of them have some tar files of old projects lying around that they never got around to deleting, and might even look at them for a reminder about problems that they've seen before, skirting on the edge of "fair use". But to show it to you, and expose themselves to legal sanction, would be foolhardy.
The day you can grab a CD, stick it in, and run an autostarted installer to install a printer driver will be the day Linux will actually be good enough for desktop use.
Of course, that has to do with the printer manufacturer, not your Linux distro. But I was able to do just that with my Samsung ML-1430 laser printer, so I guess that day is here.
if I have a gun, at 5'2" and female, it won't probably stay in my hand very long, especially if I'm surprised...
Yes, if you want to use a gun to defend yourself, getting training is essential. Since you're talking about letting the bad guy get close enough to take the gun away from you, I'm assuming that you haven't done even basic reading on defensive firearm use.
But if you're going to let the bad guy get that close, he at the least is likely to rob you of your cellphone, and quite possibly to leave
you in no condition to use it.
I had to call 911 once after receiving a threatening phone call from a lunatic who was stalking my housemate. The cops took twenty minutes to show up. My revolver, stored unloaded and locked, was ready in under thirty seconds. (Of course, my hands and feet are always will me and always ready, but learning to use them effectively took much more training than basic handgun competence.)
It's been said that branding one's opponents as 'mentally ill' has been a favorite tactic of tyrants, fascists, and communists.
I didn't brand you anything. I commented on a behavior. Settle down, take a few deep breaths.
What are these 'solvable problems'?
Keeping the focus just on taxes and overall spending trends, some solvable problems include balancing the budget, and a more equitable distribution of the tax burden, so that middle class people are not subsidizing the extremely wealthy.
We've had balanced budgets and more equitable tax burdens in the past; but I doubt any nation has ever had complete freedom from wasteful spending.
Yes sometimes when I should be focusing I'm not, but that's because it's so _boring_.
As my karate sensei is found of saying, only boring people get bored.
If you learn to focus - which takes work, no question - you'll find that even the most mundane things have their touch of the transcendental. "Miraculous power and marvelous activity, Chopping wood and carrying water." Consult any Zen master for further enlightenment.
Nobody is measuring how many tasks I can pay attention to at once, and no one is measuring how well I can focus in these situations.
Actually, measurements have been made of people "multitasking". The conclusion is that humans are lousy at it, but don't realize it; we feel like we're getting a lot done, but in fact we're doing several poor jobs at once.
Slashdot Mirror
Children, by definition, are not responsible people.
Not necessarily. An ex-girlfriend of mine is an absolutely brilliant woman, a doctoral candidate in Eygptology who undertands seven or eight languages (most of them "dead"). She had no lack of dedication to studying. Her father is an engineer, a vice-president at Bell Labs, so there was no shortage of math knowledge around.
But she is math-blind. She can discourse at length about the sexagesimal numerical systems of the ancient Babylonians - but I never could get her to understand how to calculate a 20% tip by doubling the bill and moving the decimal point.
Respect has to be earned. This is true whether you're working with adults or children.
The article you link to mentions nothing about lead. Here's an article with some information about lead in cabling (though it's about data, not power, cables):
Is lead exposure from handling cables as big a health risk as cigarette smoking? Probably not, unless you're chewing on it. (Even strip wire with your teeth? I used to do this when I was a kid.) But consider how long it took for evidence of the health dangers of smoking to mount to a convincing level.
Should people be aware of the potential risks, should people who are repeatedly exposed to these mechanisms take simple common-sense precautions, and should industry work for safer alternative? Sure.
Is labeling concerns about toxic substances in the environment "junk science" inflamatory? Does such labeling usually originate from polluters and their apologists? Absolutely.
Depends on what you mean by "pick up". I consider myself a very good coder, with over a decade's professional experience and about five years of working with C++. But it's a very "deep" language; I doubt anyone who's not named Stroustrup fully understands it completely. There are features of it I've never even touched. (The first C++ environment I used, back in the early 90s, didn't even have exception handling, much less the STL.)
In contrast, I've been working with PHP for about a year, and I don't think there's much significant to it beyond what I've seen. It's a shallow language.
Master carpenters doesn't stop sawing wood, though they may leave the framing work to the apprentices and focus on the fine detail work. A master plumber still sweats pipe. Master surgeons don't stop cutting and sewing.
Master software developers analyze, design, and implement code. He who stops coding will lose the Tao of Programming, and his designs will suffer. The belief that actal coding is someone "beneath" experienced developers is responsible for much of lack of quality in software. Code written by a master developer not only serves as an example for the apprentice, it keeps the master grounded and aware of details.
If a language feature makes code hard for others to understand, then it is not a good feature of the language. It should either not be used, or used only if accompanied by annotation that explains it.
Off-topic sig rant, but...
Actually I'm sure that America's enemies would love to see Bush in power. Hell, the people who trampled federal, state, and international law to put him in the White House are America's enemies, a worse long-term threat to this nation than Bin Laden. (And I'll bet Osama would prefere to see the guy who's been a failure in catching him stay in power.)
Hate America? Vote for Bush.
Actually, in some instances I can. After all, some psychoactive drugs are recommended by doctors ("prescribed"); many people taking Valium or Prozac now would be better served by cannabis.
One of the greatest contributors to health problems is stress, and many "recreational" drugs are used to counteract stress. It may indeed by healthier for some people to have a little wine, or have a cup of tea, or eat a little chocolate (yes, it's a drug), or smoke (or eat) a little cannabis, than to not only deprive themselves of a stress remedy but to add to stress by surpressing a reasonably harmless desire. And some of these drugs have other beneficial health effects; evidence is growing that moderate wine drinking is beneficial - though of course, that depends on the individual. It's not beneficial for alcoholics, obviously.
This is not to say that drug use is not without risk, or that anti-stress benefits can't be gotten other ways; but the risk is different for each person.
Eating an order of french fries probably harms the body more than an effective dose of many recreational drugs. LSD, for example, is effective in such low doses that its side-effects on the body is virtually non-existant. For other drugs, the damage is more significant, but is increased several times when the drugs are purchased on the unregulated black market.
Did you need some premium features? I filed on-line with H & R Block for $34.95. (Maryland now has it's own free web-based state filing.) No problems at all this time. (In past years there was a problem at the end with downloading the PDF of the return, where their server was too dumb to understand that, yes, I do have a PDF reader installed; this year they were smart enough to provide a "click here to download" link.)
Apparently it's easily done with satellite. I have Dish Pix service (no longer offered, sorry) - I picked 10 channels, I pay $15 a month.
If I understand the article correctly, they don't offer this choice anymore because of issues with Viacom channels.
Removing violent people from our company helps reduce violence. Locking up drug users doesn't help reduce drug abuse (indeed, drug abuse is present in prisons); locking up drug sellers creates job openings for dealers.
Prosecuting murder does not require gross invasions of privacy and civil liberties. (Which isn't to say that incompetent or overzealous police and prosecutors don't sometime commit such invasions, only that they're not necessary to the prosecution of such crimes.) Consensual crimes, by their victimless nature, require invasive enforcement.
I was not referring to that behavior, to which I have no objection (though I would prefer not to patronize a theatre where covert surveillance was standard procedure). I was referring (in the case of the War on Copying) to snooping of network traffic, and to attempts to remove general-purpose computers from public possession (so called "Trusted Computing" or "Digital Rights Management").
Who said it was a good thing? But the fact that something is not healthy doesn't mean the state should take people who do it and force them at gunpoint into cages.
I have friends who are recovered heroin addicts. (I live just outside Baltimore, which makes that pretty inevitable.) None had any violent behavior during withdrawl. My father, on the other hand, was a nicotine addict for four decades, and was frighteningly short-tempered when he tried to quit; only the patch finally let him do it.
The problems of withdrawl are an excellent arguement for making sure the addicts can get safe and pure maintence doses, and - when they're ready - drug treatment. Many successful writers, musicians, artists, even physicians, have been opiate addicts; as long as they got their dose, no problem.
Questionable. Only violating valid copyrights can be illegal. But the Constitution only grant Congress the power to issue copyrights to the author, and only for a limited time. Many if not most claims of copyright are constitutionally questionable.
Of course not. Touchy, aren't you?
No, it's not. It may (or may not be) copyright infringment, but copying is not stealing. If there was ever any doubt - which there shouldn't have been - the Supreme Court removed it in the Dowling case. "[I]nterference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion or fraud." - Justice Blackmun.
Ask the people in jail.
I can look at American history before the 1914 Harrison Act, and failures of alcohol and tobacco prohibition here and abroad, and I can look at the success of harm reduction policies in other nations. It's not like our current drug prohibition is unique in history - failed drug prohibition schemes go back thousands of years.
I can't say for sure, any more than I can say for sure that the sun will come up tomorrow, but I would bet my right arm that under a scheme of outright legalization of soft drugs, prescription hard ones for addicts, and accurate drug education (not D.A.R.E. propaganda), things would indeed be better.
Please don't use the same word to refer to robbery and murder on the high seas, and copyright violation. It's not just inaccurate, it's stupid.
Don't know about editors, but anyone with a lick of sense can see that after three decades, the War on (Some) Drugs is a failure in every way. Hard drugs are readily available in any urban area, our prisons are overflowing, our society several times more violent, and our liberties eroding.
The comparison to the current push for a War on Copying is that both unauthorized copying and drug use are widespread non-violent activities. They are both impossible to stop, but both Wars require gross invasions of privacy and civil liberties to continue their futile attempts at enforcement.
I've been suggesting for years that a model similar to that of songwriter royalites should be applied - copying is free (just like singing a song), profit-making use rquires royalties. Other models have been proposed, you apparently just haven't been paying attention.
First, we need to distinguish between "free" and "advertizing supported". Second, this isn't about website's own popups (which are bad enough), but about spyware-generated popups.
Google gets by without them. (In fact, every decent website gets by without them, since if you use pop-up ads, by definition you're not a decent web site.)
I doubt PGN was refering to software to test for race conditions; I expect he was alluding to methods for writing code that does not contain them. People have, after all, been thinking about Dining Philosophers for quite a while now, yet coders still do amazingly stupid things with threads.
Problem is, doing and verifying proofs is just as subject to error as creating and reviewing code. All you've really done is change your symbol set.
Actually, that depends on range - at close range a knife or sword-weilding opponent can carve you up before you have time to draw and fire a handgun, and long guns are awkward at point-blank range.
And it's really no different than the advantage of the bow over the sword, it's just easier to gain basic competence with a firearm.
And they need to follow NDAs they've signed that prohibit them from keeping copies of code they've written for former employers, or risk getting crushed by lawyers. (Check the paperwork that your employees sign and see if they can show their next employer the stuff they right for you.) Catch 22.
Now, I'm sure that many of them have some tar files of old projects lying around that they never got around to deleting, and might even look at them for a reminder about problems that they've seen before, skirting on the edge of "fair use". But to show it to you, and expose themselves to legal sanction, would be foolhardy.
Of course, that has to do with the printer manufacturer, not your Linux distro. But I was able to do just that with my Samsung ML-1430 laser printer, so I guess that day is here.
Yes, if you want to use a gun to defend yourself, getting training is essential. Since you're talking about letting the bad guy get close enough to take the gun away from you, I'm assuming that you haven't done even basic reading on defensive firearm use.
But if you're going to let the bad guy get that close, he at the least is likely to rob you of your cellphone, and quite possibly to leave you in no condition to use it.
I had to call 911 once after receiving a threatening phone call from a lunatic who was stalking my housemate. The cops took twenty minutes to show up. My revolver, stored unloaded and locked, was ready in under thirty seconds. (Of course, my hands and feet are always will me and always ready, but learning to use them effectively took much more training than basic handgun competence.)
I didn't brand you anything. I commented on a behavior. Settle down, take a few deep breaths.
Keeping the focus just on taxes and overall spending trends, some solvable problems include balancing the budget, and a more equitable distribution of the tax burden, so that middle class people are not subsidizing the extremely wealthy.
We've had balanced budgets and more equitable tax burdens in the past; but I doubt any nation has ever had complete freedom from wasteful spending.
As my karate sensei is found of saying, only boring people get bored.
If you learn to focus - which takes work, no question - you'll find that even the most mundane things have their touch of the transcendental. "Miraculous power and marvelous activity, Chopping wood and carrying water." Consult any Zen master for further enlightenment.
Actually, measurements have been made of people "multitasking". The conclusion is that humans are lousy at it, but don't realize it; we feel like we're getting a lot done, but in fact we're doing several poor jobs at once.