And what great advances to mankind have you brought, anonymous coward?
They had humans first, they had the head start.
This isn't a game of Civilization where every country is entirely independent, starting from having to discover The Wheel. New nations are still made up of people who bring the knowledge already known - after all, look how US is now where it is, despite being around for less. Clearly the people who travelled from Africa didn't have to start from scratch.
The evil whites (and Arabs, don't forget their slave trade which in fact started before the European one) have pushed us into poverty, they say.
It's not an unreasonable question, but I can see that it is a troll well-disguised as that reasonable question: the comparison to Africa seems totally arbitrary (why Germany vs Africa, as if they're the only two places in the world?) and then we end up with the reference of Obama's father being a Keynan. I mean, come one:
Africans contributed almost nothing to human technical achievement. (The father of Barack Hussein Obama is a Kenyan.
You're telling me that's not a troll? Followed up with the witch burning, as if that has anything to do with Obama or his father?
Perhaps it wasn't meant as a troll - but I can certainly see a mod taking it that way, and I'm curious why he wrote it like this if it wasn't meant as a troll.
And I don't see what "PC" has got to do with it - no one is claiming offence at language. Crying "OMG PC gone mad" is typically the cry of someone who disagrees, but can't explain why - let's stick to the facts rather than claiming "PC" (indeed if anything, you are the one being PC, as you are complaining about moderation that's offended you, saying it "shouldn't be tolerated" - should the mods not mod as they think best, out of fear of offending you? That would be PC).
You're asking why more inventions have come from developed countries, than third world countries?
I don't think that needs answering. The question of why Europe (and America) began accelerating technological progress into the industrial revolution before other continents is a more interesting question.
There's nothing special about Germany in particular. And your reference to Obama's father, trying to associate him with belief in witchcraft, makes me wonder if your post is just an anti-Obama troll in disguise (and anyway, the overwhelming majority of the US believes in supernatural things such as witchcraft, Creationism, God and so on, although thankfully far fewer people kill over it these days).
I agree entirely. But mod parent up? Surely he was saying the very thing you were arguing against, by saying Fortran was one of the best, and then saying Python was bad at it?
Well okay, that explains it - my point was that the article was wrong to highlight Python, but there are plenty of other languages such as C or C++ to consider also (or perhaps Pascal, if one is concerned about easy of use).
That's a good point - although it's perhaps a shame that this becomes circular: Universities teach a language only because of the libraries, and then that's what people write more libraries in.
That still doesn't answer why Fortran is one of the fastest languages?
Even if not phython, what does Fortran have over modern compiled languages, for example?
Crumbs, looks like I upset one Fortran-fan with mod points today. I have nothing against Fortran. I merely asked the OP for evidence for his claim that Fortran was better than all other languages. I also pointed out that Python wasn't the only option.
But hey, let's ignore debate and pretend Fortran is now the best language around.
This is a good point. In some countries like the UK, you can add adult images to that list.
I don't think it affects this case too much though - the bigger problem is that the law is unjust, not that the evidence is admissible.
The main reason for saying that evidence shouldn't be admissible is surely the risk of tampering (e.g., if a policeman breaks in without a warrant and then claims he's found something, there's the much bigger risk of it being planted). This argument could apply to this case here.
However, if he concedes that he owns the image, or there is proof that they weren't planted, then I don't see he has much of a leg to stand on - we know now that he committed the crime, no matter how we found that out.
As an aside, there is an argument of privacy rights - if we know that someone's gone snooping around your private files without permission, is that right? Should that be a civil or criminal issue? (My understanding is that "right to privacy" isn't as strong in the US as it is in say, the EU, but it's something to think about.) Note, this shouldn't affect the evidence being admissible - it's plausible we might say that both the evidence is admissible, and he has a valid case against them for snooping on his computer.
More generally - even if you have nothing that falls under the unfairly broad and dubious censorship/adult images/obscenity laws we have, it's worrying to think that all sorts of private and personal information, from emails to images, perhaps of your boy/girlfriend, might be routinely looked at by some stranger. All the more reason to use encryption, of course.
Indeed, if we're going to talk about child pr0n - why not scaremonger about the possibility that PC repair places might be looking over private pictures of someone's child?
Not a problem, because it's not a contract. People are entirely free to refuse the licence, and still use the software. You are not required to agree or accept it.
However, if you've distributed software against the terms of the licence, and the first thing you say in court is "I don't accept the licence", you've just shot yourself in the foot, as you're now automatically guilty of copyright infringement. Copyright comes from the law, not a EULA, licence or anything else.
I agree - there's also the problem that for many EULAs, you are coerced into agreeing to them to use software you legally bought. So it's rather unreasonable to conclude that the person clicked "Okay" because he actually agreed, since he may have done so just to use his software. Consider, if I say to someone in the street "If you walk past me, you agree to pay me $100", that's clearly not valid if they walk past me, because they have every right to walk past me, and they never indicated agreement.
Hopefully this case can put the "But EULAs are valid!" claims to rest.
As for being one-sided: remember how we used to have gift vouchers that were bits of paper, but a few years ago they got replaced by cards (in the UK, at least)? One of the differences that occurred with this was that the gift cards came with a long list of "terms and conditions", including dubious stuff such as "We can wipe the money on this card if you don't use it in X months" - I'm not sure if this has been tested in court (it's outright theft, if you ask me).
But anyway, I recently spent some of those old paper gift vouchers in WHSmiths that I had from years ago. Normally the practice was to give you change in vouchers, but those were long gone, so she insisted that she was going to give me the £1.50 change on a gift card. This annoyed me - not just the fact that their conditions annoyed me, but also not wanting to have to carry a card around for such a small amount.
"I'm sorry, I don't accept the terms and conditions", I said. For the first time, I realised I was in a position to refuse a one-sided "contract", and put a spanner in the works.
After a stalemate for a few minutes, she finally gave me the change in cash (the only disappointment is that I get the feeling that she was bending the rules to do that - I would have rathered she'd taken it up to management if necessary, to make the point known to them...)
I'm not talking about small print or being misleading, I'm talking about what is a standardised practice for drawing graphs. I don't really mind the white space, but equally, it would have been okay if they'd have got rid of it, with the appropriate symbol for a broken axis.
It also means it's harder to see the actual differences.
It's perfectly legitimate to have a cropped graph, so long as you indicate it as such with the broken axis squiggle (I forget the technical name for it) (unfortunately many people don't, which is a problem, but that's another matter).
I think also people tend to notice it more often, because of the way your attention is drawn to it - e.g., someone saying "I'll just do this on my Mac", but no one says "I'll just do this on my Windows laptop". So even if that only happens 5% of the time, we have a tendancy to overestimate its occurance.
Similarly with people who say "I'll just check this website on my Iphone", but no one else ever bothers to mention their model of phone, they just use the perfectly acceptable word that already exists: phone.
The only vague meaning it has is to do with how people are descended from or related to each other. Whilst this isn't exactly the same as nationality (e.g, a British person might move to America and have children; and it's why we still consider Jews a "race", independent on their country), when looking at a large group of a whole, distinguishing between "Americans" and "Europeans" is reasonably described as a race issue (in that people within in each group are related to each other vastly more than they are between the two groups).
TFS makes some unfounded summary that there is a difference between the two groups. Trying to pick up on someone because they referred to it as "racism" is just pedantry - and especially dubious when you don't even have a concrete definition of your own.
You're missing the point - it's not about what you think he should have, it's about what he wants to have. And this is the problem - Apple have made up his mind for him, and he isn't offered the choice.
I'm amazed to read that the Iphone has groundbreaking features like WiFi and GPS, that surely haven't been commonplace of phones for years, oh no.
I look forward to articles such as "Using the Iphone to read a website" (actually we did have one of those recently), "Iphone now allows copy and paste" and if we're really lucky "Using the Iphone as a speaking device to communicate with people who are elsewhere". That would really be revolutionary.
All but maybe 10 blogs in the universe are created solely as ego exercises, where the author is saying "whee, look at me!"
Including Slashdot, right? In fact, that's even worse. You post on here, expecting everyone to have to see your comment. When people post on their own blogs, it's a choice to read it.
Slashdot Mirror
And what great advances to mankind have you brought, anonymous coward?
They had humans first, they had the head start.
This isn't a game of Civilization where every country is entirely independent, starting from having to discover The Wheel. New nations are still made up of people who bring the knowledge already known - after all, look how US is now where it is, despite being around for less. Clearly the people who travelled from Africa didn't have to start from scratch.
The evil whites (and Arabs, don't forget their slave trade which in fact started before the European one) have pushed us into poverty, they say.
It probably didn't bloody help, did it.
It's not an unreasonable question, but I can see that it is a troll well-disguised as that reasonable question: the comparison to Africa seems totally arbitrary (why Germany vs Africa, as if they're the only two places in the world?) and then we end up with the reference of Obama's father being a Keynan. I mean, come one:
Africans contributed almost nothing to human technical achievement. (The father of Barack Hussein Obama is a Kenyan.
You're telling me that's not a troll? Followed up with the witch burning, as if that has anything to do with Obama or his father?
Perhaps it wasn't meant as a troll - but I can certainly see a mod taking it that way, and I'm curious why he wrote it like this if it wasn't meant as a troll.
And I don't see what "PC" has got to do with it - no one is claiming offence at language. Crying "OMG PC gone mad" is typically the cry of someone who disagrees, but can't explain why - let's stick to the facts rather than claiming "PC" (indeed if anything, you are the one being PC, as you are complaining about moderation that's offended you, saying it "shouldn't be tolerated" - should the mods not mod as they think best, out of fear of offending you? That would be PC).
You're asking why more inventions have come from developed countries, than third world countries?
I don't think that needs answering. The question of why Europe (and America) began accelerating technological progress into the industrial revolution before other continents is a more interesting question.
There's nothing special about Germany in particular. And your reference to Obama's father, trying to associate him with belief in witchcraft, makes me wonder if your post is just an anti-Obama troll in disguise (and anyway, the overwhelming majority of the US believes in supernatural things such as witchcraft, Creationism, God and so on, although thankfully far fewer people kill over it these days).
I agree entirely. But mod parent up? Surely he was saying the very thing you were arguing against, by saying Fortran was one of the best, and then saying Python was bad at it?
Well okay, that explains it - my point was that the article was wrong to highlight Python, but there are plenty of other languages such as C or C++ to consider also (or perhaps Pascal, if one is concerned about easy of use).
Of course, most of these can be wrapped in C and then used in whatever high level language you like.
Indeed, so it isn't that much of an argument for saying that Fortran is the best, or fastest, in the long run...
That's a good point - although it's perhaps a shame that this becomes circular: Universities teach a language only because of the libraries, and then that's what people write more libraries in.
That still doesn't answer why Fortran is one of the fastest languages?
Even if not phython, what does Fortran have over modern compiled languages, for example?
Crumbs, looks like I upset one Fortran-fan with mod points today. I have nothing against Fortran. I merely asked the OP for evidence for his claim that Fortran was better than all other languages. I also pointed out that Python wasn't the only option.
But hey, let's ignore debate and pretend Fortran is now the best language around.
Just you, and the techs at Circuit City ;)
This is a good point. In some countries like the UK, you can add adult images to that list.
I don't think it affects this case too much though - the bigger problem is that the law is unjust, not that the evidence is admissible.
The main reason for saying that evidence shouldn't be admissible is surely the risk of tampering (e.g., if a policeman breaks in without a warrant and then claims he's found something, there's the much bigger risk of it being planted). This argument could apply to this case here.
However, if he concedes that he owns the image, or there is proof that they weren't planted, then I don't see he has much of a leg to stand on - we know now that he committed the crime, no matter how we found that out.
As an aside, there is an argument of privacy rights - if we know that someone's gone snooping around your private files without permission, is that right? Should that be a civil or criminal issue? (My understanding is that "right to privacy" isn't as strong in the US as it is in say, the EU, but it's something to think about.) Note, this shouldn't affect the evidence being admissible - it's plausible we might say that both the evidence is admissible, and he has a valid case against them for snooping on his computer.
More generally - even if you have nothing that falls under the unfairly broad and dubious censorship/adult images/obscenity laws we have, it's worrying to think that all sorts of private and personal information, from emails to images, perhaps of your boy/girlfriend, might be routinely looked at by some stranger. All the more reason to use encryption, of course.
Indeed, if we're going to talk about child pr0n - why not scaremonger about the possibility that PC repair places might be looking over private pictures of someone's child?
Citation needed.
Even if not phython, what does Fortran have over modern compiled languages, for example?
Click "Reply to This" to agree to pay me $100.
Not a problem, because it's not a contract. People are entirely free to refuse the licence, and still use the software. You are not required to agree or accept it.
However, if you've distributed software against the terms of the licence, and the first thing you say in court is "I don't accept the licence", you've just shot yourself in the foot, as you're now automatically guilty of copyright infringement. Copyright comes from the law, not a EULA, licence or anything else.
I agree - there's also the problem that for many EULAs, you are coerced into agreeing to them to use software you legally bought. So it's rather unreasonable to conclude that the person clicked "Okay" because he actually agreed, since he may have done so just to use his software. Consider, if I say to someone in the street "If you walk past me, you agree to pay me $100", that's clearly not valid if they walk past me, because they have every right to walk past me, and they never indicated agreement.
Hopefully this case can put the "But EULAs are valid!" claims to rest.
As for being one-sided: remember how we used to have gift vouchers that were bits of paper, but a few years ago they got replaced by cards (in the UK, at least)? One of the differences that occurred with this was that the gift cards came with a long list of "terms and conditions", including dubious stuff such as "We can wipe the money on this card if you don't use it in X months" - I'm not sure if this has been tested in court (it's outright theft, if you ask me).
But anyway, I recently spent some of those old paper gift vouchers in WHSmiths that I had from years ago. Normally the practice was to give you change in vouchers, but those were long gone, so she insisted that she was going to give me the £1.50 change on a gift card. This annoyed me - not just the fact that their conditions annoyed me, but also not wanting to have to carry a card around for such a small amount.
"I'm sorry, I don't accept the terms and conditions", I said. For the first time, I realised I was in a position to refuse a one-sided "contract", and put a spanner in the works.
After a stalemate for a few minutes, she finally gave me the change in cash (the only disappointment is that I get the feeling that she was bending the rules to do that - I would have rathered she'd taken it up to management if necessary, to make the point known to them...)
I'm not talking about small print or being misleading, I'm talking about what is a standardised practice for drawing graphs. I don't really mind the white space, but equally, it would have been okay if they'd have got rid of it, with the appropriate symbol for a broken axis.
It also means it's harder to see the actual differences.
It's perfectly legitimate to have a cropped graph, so long as you indicate it as such with the broken axis squiggle (I forget the technical name for it) (unfortunately many people don't, which is a problem, but that's another matter).
I think also people tend to notice it more often, because of the way your attention is drawn to it - e.g., someone saying "I'll just do this on my Mac", but no one says "I'll just do this on my Windows laptop". So even if that only happens 5% of the time, we have a tendancy to overestimate its occurance.
Similarly with people who say "I'll just check this website on my Iphone", but no one else ever bothers to mention their model of phone, they just use the perfectly acceptable word that already exists: phone.
There is no scientific basis for race.
The only vague meaning it has is to do with how people are descended from or related to each other. Whilst this isn't exactly the same as nationality (e.g, a British person might move to America and have children; and it's why we still consider Jews a "race", independent on their country), when looking at a large group of a whole, distinguishing between "Americans" and "Europeans" is reasonably described as a race issue (in that people within in each group are related to each other vastly more than they are between the two groups).
TFS makes some unfounded summary that there is a difference between the two groups. Trying to pick up on someone because they referred to it as "racism" is just pedantry - and especially dubious when you don't even have a concrete definition of your own.
In this context, there isn't any difference between calling it xenophobia, or racism.
You still haven't answered my question as to how you are defining race?
We need a Poe's Law for Apple...
Race can reasonably refer to people based on their birthplace, e.g., Americans versus Europeans. How else would you define it?
Hackintosh
Apple - it Just Works!
You're missing the point - it's not about what you think he should have, it's about what he wants to have. And this is the problem - Apple have made up his mind for him, and he isn't offered the choice.
I'm amazed to read that the Iphone has groundbreaking features like WiFi and GPS, that surely haven't been commonplace of phones for years, oh no.
I look forward to articles such as "Using the Iphone to read a website" (actually we did have one of those recently), "Iphone now allows copy and paste" and if we're really lucky "Using the Iphone as a speaking device to communicate with people who are elsewhere". That would really be revolutionary.
All but maybe 10 blogs in the universe are created solely as ego exercises, where the author is saying "whee, look at me!"
Including Slashdot, right? In fact, that's even worse. You post on here, expecting everyone to have to see your comment. When people post on their own blogs, it's a choice to read it.