Because you can't just exit a failure with half-initialized resources that won't be freed automatically on exit ('cause it won't exit until you shut down).
Right. Basically, well-used C gotos provide the functionality that a try-catch block would in C++. Like many C constructs, they can be dangerous in the hands of the ignorant and elegant in the hands of the wise.
One of my friends pointed Unicomp to me a while back. They make the old IBM keyboards
Thanks for the pointer! I just dug an old-school IBM keyboard (those all-metal ones) up at work, so nice...just wish it was a little quieter.
My favorite keyboard is an old 101 key "Suntouch" made by Siig. It's got just the right amount of "clickyness" and the right stroke distance for me (just slightly less force needed to depress and just a little smaller stroke distance than the classic IBM one, at least that's how it feels to me). My first one was getting worn out and I found this one at Goodwill, of all places - just about jumped for joy.
The cost of generating electricity by nukes. It is about 2.5 cents per kilowatt hour.
This includes decomissioning and disposal costs...
Since decomissioning and disposal are not yet solved problems, this cost is not accounted for.
This also doesn't account for the environmental costs of digging uranium out of the ground, or for the huge security costs of keeping fissionables away from people we don't like. (It should be obvious that a technology that we'll only allow certain nations to use, is not a viable long-term solution for the world's power needs.)
The tenth is perhaps the strongest (in a legal sense) way for opponents of the list to fight it -- powers not granted elsewhere in
the Constitution, either explicitly or implicitly, are reserved to the states.
So long as the telemarketing company itself, or the company it's marketing for, is engaged in interstate commerce, the feds have a legitimate Constitutional power to pretty well smack 'em around.
If it's "Bob's Handyman Service" that only does local business, than the interstate commerce clause doesn't apply; unfortunately the courts seem to have problems with literacy, and like to pretend that all commerce counts as interstate.
On average, I would estimate that I get 2 or 3 telemarketing calls per year. Is it normal for people to receive that many telemarketing calls?
I don't know much about "normal":-), but I got two tele-spam calls last night, and one this morning.
Those are just the ones that happened to get picked up - usually I let the machine get it and only pick up if it's a "real" call. (More and more I get calls targeted at the machine, though...a long pause followed by a recording about how "I'm sorry I missed you but I wanted to let you know about the great deal we're offering...")
Many probably do stem from owning a house - I get a lot of remodelers and mortgage refinancing offers.
We know there has to be dark matter because the galaxies are spinning too quickly to be held together by the gravity of their
visible mass; something else has to be there to make the sums add up.
I wonder if some day we'll figure out that either some other force is at work, or gravity doesn't work over distances the way we think it does, and dark matter will join the luminiferous ether in the dustbin of old cosmological constructs...
If the speed of light is constant, then why does it vary as it goes through different things? For example: when light goes through
glass, it slows through the glass then speeds back up again.
You're correct. What's constant for all observers is the speed of light in a vacuum.
Perhaps the running of the internet should become a United Nations function?
I was just thinking that perhaps it should be handed over to the ITU. If they can get the world's phone systems talking to one another, the Internet should be a piece of cake in comparison. (You ever look at telephony protocols? You don't want to. Trust me.)
The California government has become, for all intensive purposes, a socialist one. Socialism at its heart is based opon the principles of active appropriation.
Uh, no. It's not.
Socialism is simply the idea that the economy should be based on labor, rather than on property; that the workers - the people who actually do stuff - should control the means of production, rather than a state-designated and backed class of "owners".
One form of socialism is Marx's communism, which took an authoritarian, command-economy approach towards this goal. But there are also libertarian socialists - indeed "libertarian" originally refered to these libertarian socialists, and was hijacked by followers of the inherently contradictory doctrine of "libertarian capitalism" in the mid-20th century.
The idea that if everyone banded together then more money to pay workers would magically appear is rediculous.
There's nothing magical or ridiculous about it - it's the market in action. It's no different than buyers pooling their market power in buyers' clubs or co-ops to negotiate the best deal.
In the US any retard can kill somebody else, they could not if they did not have a gun...Obviously the cause of so much violence is the widespread availability of guns.
Actually:
Canada has more guns per capita than the U.S;
Killing people without firearms is not difficult - about 30% of U.S. homicides do not use a firearm (per capita, we have many more non-firearm homicides than the U.K. has total homicides), and the majority of violent crimes do not involve a firearm;
Defensive uses of firearms far outnumber homicides by means of firearms; and,
Gun laws keep firearms away from violent criminals about as well as drug laws keep drugs away from junkies.
Our problem lies not within our guns, but ourselves - our culture of violence and fear. Let me recommend Michael Moore's recent movie Bowling For Columbine
You can't stop the future. You can only simulate it by stopping progress.
Not all change is progress. Some globaliztion is progress; some is exploitation.
Re:So stop voting for higher taxes.
on
Giant Sucking Noise
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· Score: 2, Informative
If you don't like seeing companies leave to US, why do you not spend more time considering the role of higher taxes in forcing companies to make the exodus?
people leave California due to high taxes and the cost of living
Taxes probably have less to do with that than a inflated real-estate market. So the exodus is good - there will be fewer people and less demand for real estate, and the cost of living will fall. Supply and demand. The free market at work.
Also, implimenting a "Flat Tax" would eliminate the 100,000 pages of our broken tax laws and take the politics out of paying taxes.
The "flat tax" as a means of simplifing tax law is a red herring at best and outright bullshit at worst. The complexity is not figuring out how much tax to pay on x dollars of taxable income (I just look it up in the darn table in the back of my 1040); it's all the income deductions and tax credits. You're probably right about a lot of that being "favors" for "contributors", but I doubt we'll ever see it change much.
If someone took a freely available program and modified it and sold it, clearly they are selling the value of the delta/changes, NOT the value of the program which is no less freely avaiable to any and all.
Well, no, that's not clear at all, since those deltas have no value in themselves. What is being sold is a derivative work of the original.
Actually I had looked into this at one point and read, from several sources, that the physical toll put on a masseur over a rather short time can be quite painful, often times leading to a short career.
That's part of the reason I chose shiatsu over the "standard" massage program (focusing on Swedish, deep tissue, and myofascial release) - there seems to be much less risk of RSI. It's done on the floor (no bending over tables) and uses acupressure and manipulation (less grabbing with the hands).
Of course, even with standard massage, that risk can be lessened by proper ergonomics. I know that this is part of the curriculum at the school I'll be attending.
My uncle has been a successful massage therapist for over a decade with no problems. OTOH, I know a woman who went throught the training only to find that she didn't have enough strength in her hands to do it full-time.
liberal arts folk are importent to the people who care about that stuff, but it does not help people survive.
Without the arts, why bother to survive?
The sciences have not affected everyone - there are still humans on this planet whose daily lives are not touched by technology newer than the stone age. But every culture has its art, and its stories.
I doubt any code I write will still exist in a few decades. But I have hope to write a poem that will be read and understood a hundred years from now.
Re:From hobby it came, and hopefully will soon ret
on
Lifetime Careers in IT?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Of course, it takes a few years of experience to make it to the 65K level.
Well, same applies in software development. 65k is about 50% more than what I made my first year working full time, and that with an master's in CS. (Of course, that was in 1993, pre-boom.)
I'm 33, have an M.S. in computer science, and got my first paying job in software development in 1990. While I expect I'll always be playing around with computers, I doubt that it will be my primary employment in the long-term.
Partly this is because of my growing frustration with the universality of poor management; partly it's because of the ceiling I see for techies who don't want to become managers; partly it's the threat of jobs moving overseas.
I'm a second generation programmer. My father started programming in the late 60s. He had a pretty good career going (a few rough times, but all in all pretty darn good for someone without a college degree) until about a year and a half ago.
When the downturn hit, he found that no one was interested in hiring a 58 year old programmer/analyst. (What percentage of coders, designers, and analysts at your shop are over 50?)
He's finally just about given up on getting back into the field, and gone on to take real estase classes, just passed his licening exam.
I've decided not to wait, but start laying the groundwork for a second career now. I've cut my day job back to 30 hours/week and will be starting classes in Shiatsu in a month. No rapidly changing skill set in massage and acupressure....
I hope that in five or ten years, I'll have my own bodywork practice, and do some computer consulting on the side.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, I just got back from performing music and poetry at a great open-mic.
"It is noticeable (and contrary to many outsiders' expectations) that the better a hacker is at hacking, the more likely he or she is to have outside interests at which he or she is more than merely competent." - The Jargon File
You could map "caps lock" to "control", the way it used to be (and still is on some *nix systems).
The assertation that QWERTY is significantly slower than Dvorak or other layouts also seems to be a myth.
Thanks for the pointer! I just dug an old-school IBM keyboard (those all-metal ones) up at work, so nice...just wish it was a little quieter.
My favorite keyboard is an old 101 key "Suntouch" made by Siig. It's got just the right amount of "clickyness" and the right stroke distance for me (just slightly less force needed to depress and just a little smaller stroke distance than the classic IBM one, at least that's how it feels to me). My first one was getting worn out and I found this one at Goodwill, of all places - just about jumped for joy.
Since decomissioning and disposal are not yet solved problems, this cost is not accounted for.
This also doesn't account for the environmental costs of digging uranium out of the ground, or for the huge security costs of keeping fissionables away from people we don't like. (It should be obvious that a technology that we'll only allow certain nations to use, is not a viable long-term solution for the world's power needs.)
Because they are remorseless sociopaths who should be strung up by their thumbs and severely beaten?
So long as the telemarketing company itself, or the company it's marketing for, is engaged in interstate commerce, the feds have a legitimate Constitutional power to pretty well smack 'em around.
If it's "Bob's Handyman Service" that only does local business, than the interstate commerce clause doesn't apply; unfortunately the courts seem to have problems with literacy, and like to pretend that all commerce counts as interstate.
I don't know much about "normal" :-), but I got two tele-spam calls last night, and one this morning.
Those are just the ones that happened to get picked up - usually I let the machine get it and only pick up if it's a "real" call. (More and more I get calls targeted at the machine, though...a long pause followed by a recording about how "I'm sorry I missed you but I wanted to let you know about the great deal we're offering...")
Many probably do stem from owning a house - I get a lot of remodelers and mortgage refinancing offers.
I wonder if some day we'll figure out that either some other force is at work, or gravity doesn't work over distances the way we think it does, and dark matter will join the luminiferous ether in the dustbin of old cosmological constructs...
You're correct. What's constant for all observers is the speed of light in a vacuum.
I was just thinking that perhaps it should be handed over to the ITU. If they can get the world's phone systems talking to one another, the Internet should be a piece of cake in comparison. (You ever look at telephony protocols? You don't want to. Trust me.)
Uh, no. It's not.
Socialism is simply the idea that the economy should be based on labor, rather than on property; that the workers - the people who actually do stuff - should control the means of production, rather than a state-designated and backed class of "owners".
One form of socialism is Marx's communism, which took an authoritarian, command-economy approach towards this goal. But there are also libertarian socialists - indeed "libertarian" originally refered to these libertarian socialists, and was hijacked by followers of the inherently contradictory doctrine of "libertarian capitalism" in the mid-20th century.
Uh, no, actually. Unix based things have always been suited for desktop workstations, games (Space Traveller), typesetting, laptops (the Sparcbook)...
There's nothing magical or ridiculous about it - it's the market in action. It's no different than buyers pooling their market power in buyers' clubs or co-ops to negotiate the best deal.
Actually:
Our problem lies not within our guns, but ourselves - our culture of violence and fear. Let me recommend Michael Moore's recent movie Bowling For Columbine
"Remove the Stone of Shame!"
"Woo-hoo!"
"Attach the Stone of Triumph!"
"D'oh!"
Very rarely, hiccuping can persist for weeks or months. It's an unusual but serious medical problem.
Not all change is progress. Some globaliztion is progress; some is exploitation.
Um, you do know that that the U.S. has very low tax rates compared to other industrialized nations, right?
Taxes probably have less to do with that than a inflated real-estate market. So the exodus is good - there will be fewer people and less demand for real estate, and the cost of living will fall. Supply and demand. The free market at work.
The "flat tax" as a means of simplifing tax law is a red herring at best and outright bullshit at worst. The complexity is not figuring out how much tax to pay on x dollars of taxable income (I just look it up in the darn table in the back of my 1040); it's all the income deductions and tax credits. You're probably right about a lot of that being "favors" for "contributors", but I doubt we'll ever see it change much.
Well, no, that's not clear at all, since those deltas have no value in themselves. What is being sold is a derivative work of the original.
That's part of the reason I chose shiatsu over the "standard" massage program (focusing on Swedish, deep tissue, and myofascial release) - there seems to be much less risk of RSI. It's done on the floor (no bending over tables) and uses acupressure and manipulation (less grabbing with the hands).
Of course, even with standard massage, that risk can be lessened by proper ergonomics. I know that this is part of the curriculum at the school I'll be attending.
My uncle has been a successful massage therapist for over a decade with no problems. OTOH, I know a woman who went throught the training only to find that she didn't have enough strength in her hands to do it full-time.
Without the arts, why bother to survive?
The sciences have not affected everyone - there are still humans on this planet whose daily lives are not touched by technology newer than the stone age. But every culture has its art, and its stories.
I doubt any code I write will still exist in a few decades. But I have hope to write a poem that will be read and understood a hundred years from now.
Well, same applies in software development. 65k is about 50% more than what I made my first year working full time, and that with an master's in CS. (Of course, that was in 1993, pre-boom.)
I'm 33, have an M.S. in computer science, and got my first paying job in software development in 1990. While I expect I'll always be playing around with computers, I doubt that it will be my primary employment in the long-term.
Partly this is because of my growing frustration with the universality of poor management; partly it's because of the ceiling I see for techies who don't want to become managers; partly it's the threat of jobs moving overseas.
I'm a second generation programmer. My father started programming in the late 60s. He had a pretty good career going (a few rough times, but all in all pretty darn good for someone without a college degree) until about a year and a half ago. When the downturn hit, he found that no one was interested in hiring a 58 year old programmer/analyst. (What percentage of coders, designers, and analysts at your shop are over 50?) He's finally just about given up on getting back into the field, and gone on to take real estase classes, just passed his licening exam.
I've decided not to wait, but start laying the groundwork for a second career now. I've cut my day job back to 30 hours/week and will be starting classes in Shiatsu in a month. No rapidly changing skill set in massage and acupressure....
I hope that in five or ten years, I'll have my own bodywork practice, and do some computer consulting on the side.