Convenient, then, that "calling external functions in some MS dll library" is something that's trivial to do in C#. Why reinvent the wheel?
MS has made a lot of crappy stuff over the years, but I find I actually enjoy programming in C# more than any other language I've tried. Granted, there are a lot of languages I haven't tried, but there are a fair number I have, too.
Because I don't care. Things can track me all they like. I seriously don't care whether they do or not. (Except every once in a blue moon, in which case, I toggle on private mode. Or just log out of google, because that's where most of the major tracking is going on...:p)
I don't carry quarters. There are plenty of things you can buy with a dollar or two. If they replaced dollars with dollar coins, I'd just start carrying around more fives, and my random coin bin in my car for when I need to pay a parking meter or something would be worth more. And it would be lame.
Would you also yell at the millions of places around the world offering promotional "buy one, get one free" deals? If you have to buy something, it's not free, right? No. Not right. If you buy $x, you were going to buy $x anyway, and now buying $x gives you $y at no additional cost (or, in most cases, already owned $x because have fun buying a non-Mac PC without it), you could say you got $y for free.
I actually totally enjoyed the first one, minus only a couple scenes. I didn't even really mind Jar Jar that much in the first movie. Yes, he was dumb, but so is C3PO. So are the ewoks. It wasn't until the end, when Anakin accidentally saved the day by being an idiot that I went seriously wtf, this is dumb. But overall, I still enjoyed the movie. (Amusingly, I stated this opinion to some friends a couple weeks ago, and got internet-wall-quoted and laughed at. I still hold to it, though.)
On the other hand, the second and third movies were painfully terrible. If you told me to cut out all the stupid or boring parts of episode one, it'd be maybe 2/3s of its original length. If you told me to cut out all the stupid or boring parts of episodes 2 and 3, you'd get about 15 minutes of lightsaber duels. Put together.
People at the college I graduated from, at least at the time I was there several years ago, used "artistic" as a euphemism for "extremely stupid". As in (this is the conversation that coined the usage - while playing some FPS, I think Counterstrike):
"[The bomb sites] are...artistic."
"And by 'artistic', you mean 'stupid'."
"Yes." And a few minutes later: "We've taken an 'interesting' route. And by 'interesting', I mean 'dumb'."
"I thought that was 'artistic'..."
So yes. RotS is totally the most artistic movie of our generation.
There are already at least a couple such programs in existence. I couldn't remember the name of the one I used a couple years ago, but I just googled "tool to remove crapware", and got loads of relevant results.:p
Oddly, the one time I've tried to use Amazon to purchase something from out of country (a new cd by a moderately obscure British folk musician), I had no problem buying it from amazon.co.uk and shipping it to the US... maybe Canada just sucks. (The cd was also available from amazon.com, but oddly, was more expensive there even when you factored in international shipping cost.)
I also use adblock plus to block all sorts of random things that aren't ads. Like shock images, or random nsfw images that people post to sites that are otherwise totally safe for work, when I'm at work. So I would agree with that assessment completely.
If you look for work, and you don't like the way a particular employer operates, you can find a job somewhere else (my employer certainly doesn't give us badges we have to wear). If you go to school, and your school says wear this, you can suck it.
I do play all kinds of games. Most are either browser games, or old enough that you could easily play them in a VM (in fact, some are old enough that you have no choice to play them in a VM or equivalent, i.e. dosbox). For those that aren't, I would be willing to dual-boot on the occasion that I wanted to play one.
No, it's not the games. It's primarily the desktop environments: there are several choices, but they all blow. You have your choice between bloated, overgrown shiny garbage (Gnome or KDE), or intentionally not-bloated, not-shiny choices, that are so intentionally not-bloated that instead they feel crippled in their lack of basic features Windows has had since 95. In either case, they're being designed by a combination of clueless-about-UIs programmers, and useability "experts" that care more about doing something crazy and new than actually giving people what they want. No thanks.
In fact, I'll even go so far as to say this: if anyone were to give me a simple (but not simple to the point of crippled) window manager that basically just acted like XP in all the important ways, complete with a file manager program that worked as well as the one in XP (i.e. not the one post-XP that keeps getting buggier and more annoying), I'd probably try it out. But I haven't seen one yet.
I do. There are two differences, a moral one and a (related) logical one.
The moral difference is, almost -everyone- believes landmines are terrible things that should be severely limited in their use. A large minority of the population thinks the war on drugs is ridiculous, and at least some of the drugs currently being fought should just be regulated but available, and be done with it.
Thus, corollarily, with, say, pot being banned, only "criminals" will by definition buy pot. But loads of people are going to be "criminals" for the sole purpose of buying pot, and would not be otherwise. On the other hand, lots of places use landmines but would be totally happy to stop if their opponents did, and both places want to consider themselves law-abiding, so if there's a law, both places would stop using them. Sure, some might not, but even if it weren't 100% effective, fewer landmines than before is still a win for the world.
It sold any copies at all? To people who don't work at Microsoft, get kickbacks for reviewing Windows positively, or work at companies testing software that has to prove that their software runs on Windows 8? (Or who had it installed on their new computers and didn't have a choice about it?) Apparently, but I'm kind of surprised.
Windows 8 really doesn't have anything, not a single feature, that I would want. And a lot of things I'd like to stay away from. So why would I buy it? Why would anyone? (Unless they had no choice, or as mentioned, were testing software that had to be tested in Win8, though even then, I'd install it inside a VM running on a computer with 7.)
When various forms ask me for a job title, I pick completely randomly between "programmer", "software developer" and "software engineer", because they're all the same thing and I can't remember which one is the official name for the position. (I just checked, it's "software engineer". Now I'm going to forget again.)
Well, and sometimes to people who know what it means, I say "codemonkey", which to me is a slang but not at all derogatory term that means the same as the above three, except explicitly not being responsible for the actual design of any large systems, which is fine, as I don't really want to be responsible for the design of any large systems (smaller subsystems, though, sure. Everyone does that.) That is clearly not going on any official titles, though.
Heh. While I do love that show (new episodes starting now, woo!), my first thought was really more about Covert Affairs. Burn Notice doesn't really deal much with the guys at the top, like Covert Affairs does. I could totally see this as a smear campaign driving Arthur Campbell crazy (though I couldn't really see him actually cheating.)
Hey, if they haven't announced the plot at all, there's nothing explicitly barring the Thrawn trilogy still getting in there. I'm pessimistic and doubt that they'd decide to do anything so popular, but I haven't seen total proof that I'm right about it yet... (After all, even if they do use an existing story, they would still need a screenwriter.)
Drug: n. 1. A substance that has a physiological effect when ingested or otherwise introduced into the body, in particular. 2. A medicine, esp. a pharmaceutical preparation 3. A substance taken for its narcotic or stimulant effects, often illegally
Those definitions match up to my internal conception of what the word means... nowhere in there or in my brain is anything saying it's not a drug if you can't OD on it. (There are plenty of drugs you can't OD on.)
Meanwhile, other than euphemistically, I wouldn't really call it an herb. I might call it "herb", with finger-quotes, but not an herb. An herb is a plant, or part of a plant, that's used for seasoning food.
p.s. ellipses are great, but periods are good for other things, too. Sentences are much easier to read when they, you know... end.
Totally off topic, but your last sentence just struck me as particularly hilarious: think about what you actually said. Would you actually wanted someone who routinely put human refuse into his mouth to go anywhere near your nether regions with that same mouth? I sure wouldn't.
send us to Mars, usher in a new era of world peace, and while he's at it, make us all sandwiches?
How did this make it to the front page? It's not even a slashvertizement for a product; that might occasionally be useful. It's a slashvertizement for a person, that doesn't even have any useful information in it beyond "this person is awesome". It doesn't even make the slightest effort to argue the statement given in the title: I'd love to see an "era of electric cars" get ushered in.
Walked to my polling place (a small National Guard facility), as it was totally walking distance, and I knew its parking lot was nowhere near big enough to support all the cars that were going to be parking there (or trying to). Got in, tried to check in, they said they didn't have any record of it. Apparently that's because they split my polling center's region in half geographically, put half the region in one binder and half in another, put one binder on one table and the other on another table on the other side of the room, and then didn't put up any signs mentioning that, and I picked the wrong table. Go them.
Apparently they also didn't really split it quite in half, because once I checked in, there was a long line for a ballot desk on that side of the room, and several empty desks on the other one. So I just walked to the other side of the room, filled my ballot, then walked back and turned it in. Not the best organized, but still, I didn't have to wait much.
They did seem to have some kind of electronic ballot-reader this year, though, that I think was new? You still used a circle-marking pen to fill in circles on ballot paper that you slid into a physical ballot, but when you were done, you fed it into a machine, instead of just dropping it in a box.
Apparently, for each copy of the game we download, we're only allowed to install it on one computer, and optionally one other computer assuming we only run it on one of those two at once. Despite the fact that we're totally free to instead just click download again, and then that second download becomes a primary copy, and we -are- allowed to install them both and run them both at the same time. Is it just me, or is that a really odd bit of licensing for something that's being released completely free?
That's nice, but it didn't answer my question at all, of why you (or at least I assume it was you; the above AC, if it wasn't) claimed my statements were ridiculous and that Road to Serfdom would say in what way(s) that was the case. Yes, obviously, there will always be a tradeoff between personal freedom and handing over responsibilities to larger organizations to take care of in common. In general I lean on the side of personal freedom, but when it comes to deterring crime by responding to it, I don't so much.
p.s. I just glanced at The Law, he would seem to agree with me too, judging from passages like "The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all."
Ok... I haven't read it, but I did just look it up on wikipedia, and it doesn't seem particularly relevant. It's likely I would even agree with at least a decent chunk of it if I did read it, but it appears to be mainly economic in its scope. Pinker actually spends a good chunk of time talking about capitalism, too - as relates to his primary concern, the continued decrease in violence, he's all for it! Free trade reduces incentives to take by force what you could instead take peaceably through trade.
I wasn't talking about generalities, I was talking specifically about the example given, and how it isn't hypocritical to not support lethal vigilantism but to support lethal force as an appropriate response in extreme circumstances in the hands of those appointed to the position (assuming we're able to trust those appointed, and those doing the appointing). Surrendering the ability to legally murder to only those with no direct ties to either involved party dramatically increases the life expectancy and quality of life for the whole region (unless those to whom it's surrendered abuse that privilege). Does Hayek even talk about that specifically at all?
You might not need the government to tell you that, but guess what? Loads of people do. I just finished reading Guns, Germs and Steel, followed by Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature. They come from opposite sides of the discussion (one is about war, one is about peace), but both have a lot just exactly how much better off we are precisely because we have for the most part surrendered our rights to violence to an impartial third party (the federal government).
The latter does, of course, also talk about the issue where the nominally impartial third party isn't always - the Hobbesian Leviathan is obviously only better than anarchy when it actually is for the people, not for itself. But while I wouldn't claim our current government in the US is perfect on that account (there certainly have been overreaches both military and police), I would claim occasional police overreach (and really, it is pretty occasional here) is still much better than no police.
You should read those books, and then rethink what you just said.
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Convenient, then, that "calling external functions in some MS dll library" is something that's trivial to do in C#. Why reinvent the wheel?
MS has made a lot of crappy stuff over the years, but I find I actually enjoy programming in C# more than any other language I've tried. Granted, there are a lot of languages I haven't tried, but there are a fair number I have, too.
Because I don't care. Things can track me all they like. I seriously don't care whether they do or not. (Except every once in a blue moon, in which case, I toggle on private mode. Or just log out of google, because that's where most of the major tracking is going on... :p)
I don't carry quarters. There are plenty of things you can buy with a dollar or two. If they replaced dollars with dollar coins, I'd just start carrying around more fives, and my random coin bin in my car for when I need to pay a parking meter or something would be worth more. And it would be lame.
Would you also yell at the millions of places around the world offering promotional "buy one, get one free" deals? If you have to buy something, it's not free, right? No. Not right. If you buy $x, you were going to buy $x anyway, and now buying $x gives you $y at no additional cost (or, in most cases, already owned $x because have fun buying a non-Mac PC without it), you could say you got $y for free.
I actually totally enjoyed the first one, minus only a couple scenes. I didn't even really mind Jar Jar that much in the first movie. Yes, he was dumb, but so is C3PO. So are the ewoks. It wasn't until the end, when Anakin accidentally saved the day by being an idiot that I went seriously wtf, this is dumb. But overall, I still enjoyed the movie. (Amusingly, I stated this opinion to some friends a couple weeks ago, and got internet-wall-quoted and laughed at. I still hold to it, though.)
On the other hand, the second and third movies were painfully terrible. If you told me to cut out all the stupid or boring parts of episode one, it'd be maybe 2/3s of its original length. If you told me to cut out all the stupid or boring parts of episodes 2 and 3, you'd get about 15 minutes of lightsaber duels. Put together.
People at the college I graduated from, at least at the time I was there several years ago, used "artistic" as a euphemism for "extremely stupid". As in (this is the conversation that coined the usage - while playing some FPS, I think Counterstrike):
"[The bomb sites] are...artistic."
"And by 'artistic', you mean 'stupid'."
"Yes."
And a few minutes later:
"We've taken an 'interesting' route. And by 'interesting', I mean 'dumb'."
"I thought that was 'artistic'..."
So yes. RotS is totally the most artistic movie of our generation.
There are already at least a couple such programs in existence. I couldn't remember the name of the one I used a couple years ago, but I just googled "tool to remove crapware", and got loads of relevant results. :p
Oddly, the one time I've tried to use Amazon to purchase something from out of country (a new cd by a moderately obscure British folk musician), I had no problem buying it from amazon.co.uk and shipping it to the US... maybe Canada just sucks. (The cd was also available from amazon.com, but oddly, was more expensive there even when you factored in international shipping cost.)
I also use adblock plus to block all sorts of random things that aren't ads. Like shock images, or random nsfw images that people post to sites that are otherwise totally safe for work, when I'm at work. So I would agree with that assessment completely.
If you look for work, and you don't like the way a particular employer operates, you can find a job somewhere else (my employer certainly doesn't give us badges we have to wear). If you go to school, and your school says wear this, you can suck it.
I do play all kinds of games. Most are either browser games, or old enough that you could easily play them in a VM (in fact, some are old enough that you have no choice to play them in a VM or equivalent, i.e. dosbox). For those that aren't, I would be willing to dual-boot on the occasion that I wanted to play one.
No, it's not the games. It's primarily the desktop environments: there are several choices, but they all blow. You have your choice between bloated, overgrown shiny garbage (Gnome or KDE), or intentionally not-bloated, not-shiny choices, that are so intentionally not-bloated that instead they feel crippled in their lack of basic features Windows has had since 95. In either case, they're being designed by a combination of clueless-about-UIs programmers, and useability "experts" that care more about doing something crazy and new than actually giving people what they want. No thanks.
In fact, I'll even go so far as to say this: if anyone were to give me a simple (but not simple to the point of crippled) window manager that basically just acted like XP in all the important ways, complete with a file manager program that worked as well as the one in XP (i.e. not the one post-XP that keeps getting buggier and more annoying), I'd probably try it out. But I haven't seen one yet.
I do. There are two differences, a moral one and a (related) logical one.
The moral difference is, almost -everyone- believes landmines are terrible things that should be severely limited in their use. A large minority of the population thinks the war on drugs is ridiculous, and at least some of the drugs currently being fought should just be regulated but available, and be done with it.
Thus, corollarily, with, say, pot being banned, only "criminals" will by definition buy pot. But loads of people are going to be "criminals" for the sole purpose of buying pot, and would not be otherwise. On the other hand, lots of places use landmines but would be totally happy to stop if their opponents did, and both places want to consider themselves law-abiding, so if there's a law, both places would stop using them. Sure, some might not, but even if it weren't 100% effective, fewer landmines than before is still a win for the world.
It sold any copies at all? To people who don't work at Microsoft, get kickbacks for reviewing Windows positively, or work at companies testing software that has to prove that their software runs on Windows 8? (Or who had it installed on their new computers and didn't have a choice about it?) Apparently, but I'm kind of surprised.
Windows 8 really doesn't have anything, not a single feature, that I would want. And a lot of things I'd like to stay away from. So why would I buy it? Why would anyone? (Unless they had no choice, or as mentioned, were testing software that had to be tested in Win8, though even then, I'd install it inside a VM running on a computer with 7.)
In some places it's legal to stone women to death for getting raped.
When various forms ask me for a job title, I pick completely randomly between "programmer", "software developer" and "software engineer", because they're all the same thing and I can't remember which one is the official name for the position. (I just checked, it's "software engineer". Now I'm going to forget again.)
Well, and sometimes to people who know what it means, I say "codemonkey", which to me is a slang but not at all derogatory term that means the same as the above three, except explicitly not being responsible for the actual design of any large systems, which is fine, as I don't really want to be responsible for the design of any large systems (smaller subsystems, though, sure. Everyone does that.) That is clearly not going on any official titles, though.
Anyway, Betteridge's, etc.
Heh. While I do love that show (new episodes starting now, woo!), my first thought was really more about Covert Affairs. Burn Notice doesn't really deal much with the guys at the top, like Covert Affairs does. I could totally see this as a smear campaign driving Arthur Campbell crazy (though I couldn't really see him actually cheating.)
Hey, if they haven't announced the plot at all, there's nothing explicitly barring the Thrawn trilogy still getting in there. I'm pessimistic and doubt that they'd decide to do anything so popular, but I haven't seen total proof that I'm right about it yet... (After all, even if they do use an existing story, they would still need a screenwriter.)
Drug:
n.
1. A substance that has a physiological effect when ingested or otherwise introduced into the body, in particular.
2. A medicine, esp. a pharmaceutical preparation
3. A substance taken for its narcotic or stimulant effects, often illegally
Those definitions match up to my internal conception of what the word means... nowhere in there or in my brain is anything saying it's not a drug if you can't OD on it. (There are plenty of drugs you can't OD on.)
Meanwhile, other than euphemistically, I wouldn't really call it an herb. I might call it "herb", with finger-quotes, but not an herb. An herb is a plant, or part of a plant, that's used for seasoning food.
p.s. ellipses are great, but periods are good for other things, too. Sentences are much easier to read when they, you know... end.
Totally off topic, but your last sentence just struck me as particularly hilarious: think about what you actually said. Would you actually wanted someone who routinely put human refuse into his mouth to go anywhere near your nether regions with that same mouth? I sure wouldn't.
send us to Mars, usher in a new era of world peace, and while he's at it, make us all sandwiches?
How did this make it to the front page? It's not even a slashvertizement for a product; that might occasionally be useful. It's a slashvertizement for a person, that doesn't even have any useful information in it beyond "this person is awesome". It doesn't even make the slightest effort to argue the statement given in the title: I'd love to see an "era of electric cars" get ushered in.
Walked to my polling place (a small National Guard facility), as it was totally walking distance, and I knew its parking lot was nowhere near big enough to support all the cars that were going to be parking there (or trying to). Got in, tried to check in, they said they didn't have any record of it. Apparently that's because they split my polling center's region in half geographically, put half the region in one binder and half in another, put one binder on one table and the other on another table on the other side of the room, and then didn't put up any signs mentioning that, and I picked the wrong table. Go them.
Apparently they also didn't really split it quite in half, because once I checked in, there was a long line for a ballot desk on that side of the room, and several empty desks on the other one. So I just walked to the other side of the room, filled my ballot, then walked back and turned it in. Not the best organized, but still, I didn't have to wait much.
They did seem to have some kind of electronic ballot-reader this year, though, that I think was new? You still used a circle-marking pen to fill in circles on ballot paper that you slid into a physical ballot, but when you were done, you fed it into a machine, instead of just dropping it in a box.
Apparently, for each copy of the game we download, we're only allowed to install it on one computer, and optionally one other computer assuming we only run it on one of those two at once. Despite the fact that we're totally free to instead just click download again, and then that second download becomes a primary copy, and we -are- allowed to install them both and run them both at the same time. Is it just me, or is that a really odd bit of licensing for something that's being released completely free?
That's nice, but it didn't answer my question at all, of why you (or at least I assume it was you; the above AC, if it wasn't) claimed my statements were ridiculous and that Road to Serfdom would say in what way(s) that was the case. Yes, obviously, there will always be a tradeoff between personal freedom and handing over responsibilities to larger organizations to take care of in common. In general I lean on the side of personal freedom, but when it comes to deterring crime by responding to it, I don't so much.
p.s. I just glanced at The Law, he would seem to agree with me too, judging from passages like "The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all."
Sounds just like Pinker's argument to me!
Ok... I haven't read it, but I did just look it up on wikipedia, and it doesn't seem particularly relevant. It's likely I would even agree with at least a decent chunk of it if I did read it, but it appears to be mainly economic in its scope. Pinker actually spends a good chunk of time talking about capitalism, too - as relates to his primary concern, the continued decrease in violence, he's all for it! Free trade reduces incentives to take by force what you could instead take peaceably through trade.
I wasn't talking about generalities, I was talking specifically about the example given, and how it isn't hypocritical to not support lethal vigilantism but to support lethal force as an appropriate response in extreme circumstances in the hands of those appointed to the position (assuming we're able to trust those appointed, and those doing the appointing). Surrendering the ability to legally murder to only those with no direct ties to either involved party dramatically increases the life expectancy and quality of life for the whole region (unless those to whom it's surrendered abuse that privilege). Does Hayek even talk about that specifically at all?
You might not need the government to tell you that, but guess what? Loads of people do. I just finished reading Guns, Germs and Steel, followed by Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature. They come from opposite sides of the discussion (one is about war, one is about peace), but both have a lot just exactly how much better off we are precisely because we have for the most part surrendered our rights to violence to an impartial third party (the federal government).
The latter does, of course, also talk about the issue where the nominally impartial third party isn't always - the Hobbesian Leviathan is obviously only better than anarchy when it actually is for the people, not for itself. But while I wouldn't claim our current government in the US is perfect on that account (there certainly have been overreaches both military and police), I would claim occasional police overreach (and really, it is pretty occasional here) is still much better than no police.
You should read those books, and then rethink what you just said.