IMHO, using platform-specific dependencies (like DLL's) should be the only possible way to make Java that isn't cross-platform.
A worthy aim, but if you want to be certain that code will run anywhere, you'd have to make sure that all resources it could access looked the same everywhere.
So, for example, you'd have to disallow all access to the filesystem. (After all, different systems will have different files on them, and you could write something that depends on particular files or directories.) You'd have to restrict text display to a handful of supplied fonts (coz other fonts might have different metrics), and you'd have to disable font smoothing (coz that's done differently on different displays). In fact, you'd probably have to prevent any access to the display at all (because some embedded systems don't have one). You'd have to make it single-threaded (coz different host OSs have different schedulers and different numbers of processors). And you'd have to restrict it to a few hundred KB of memory (because that's all some embedded systems have).
You wouldn't be able to find out the current user ID (coz someone could write code that depended on it). Or the current OS or machine. And you'd have to artificially limit it to running at a fixed effective clock speed of only a few MHz (coz someone could write some time-dependent code); for the same reason, you'd have to disallow any access to the system clock. Network access would of course be right out, as would keyboards and pointing devices. In fact, by the time you'd ensured that every system looked the same, you wouldn't be able to do anything useful at all!
Seriously, any system that has enough interaction with the platform to do useful work also has enough that a (sufficiently clever) developer could use for some platform dependency. The best that Java can do is encouragement, by making it as easy as possible to be platform-independent, and as hard as possible to introduce dependency. Java's not perfect at this, but I think it does a pretty good job in general.
[fx: gets on hobbyhorse] Actually, I think you still overstate the case. It's not just that developers don't bother to validate their arguments; it's that they haven't worked out what those preconditions are, or even realised that there are preconditions!
It's not even laziness: it's the mindset. I've worked in a few IT departments, and IME most developers don't (can't?) see much beyond the code they're writing. They never think about who might be calling their function, who might be using their class, what that person might need to know in order to make proper use of it -- and, just as importantly, what they don't need to know. About the Big Picture(TM).
That might mean documentation/comments; it might mean setting up preconditions and invariants; it might mean picking meaningful names; it might just mean stopping and thinking about what you're writing.
The result: we end up with systems that are unnecessarily hard to maintain, where in order to understand any part of it you have to understand every other part as well, where each new developer has to reinvent the wheel because the tens of existing ones can only be used by their authors.
So maybe the biggest benefit of DbC isn't actually in the conditions, it's simply that it gets developers to think about them in the first place!
Yes, the author has a clear bias towards Apple, but I still find the site worth reading: it's clear, well-argued, interesting, and the author has a clear insight into many of the issues. He also explains many things rather better than I've seen elsewhere. He's very honest about Apple's past, even if he tends to see only the better side of their present. His analysis is often thought-provoking, whether I agree with it or not.
I'm a happy Mac user, and find myself agreeing with him on many points, though there are quite a few where I disagree strongly (for example, on his reasons for accepting the rumoured lockout of 3rd-party software on the iPhone). But I find it interesting to read despite that bias.
At least the bias is clear and honest, unlike some sites. If you can't read material you disagree with, then perhaps you should... well... stick to Slashdot?
Just because you can do mathematics doesn't mean you have any kind of ability to teach it.
Actually, I think it's worse than that: the sort of mathematical ability that gets you to professorships often makes you a WORSE teacher.
To be a good teacher, you need to be able to empathise with your students a little. You need to be able to see what someone is struggling with, and why they can't grasp something, so that you can join the right dots for them. (Even if this doesn't apply on an individual level, you'll need to know how to explain things so that the majority of your students can follow it.)
But if you've never struggled yourself, if you've never had trouble grasping certain concepts, or following certain logical arguments, then you'll find it harder to do that. And it's precisely the most gifted mathematicians who are likely to be in that position.
One of our lecturers was like that. He was unable to answer our questions, or explain things more clearly, because it was blindingly obvious to him already, and he couldn't comprehend how it wasn't just as blindingly obvious to the rest of us. It got to the point where we had to ask one of the assistants to give us a couple of lectures to explain it all.
Ah, happy days... My mistake was in having a couple of excellent sixth-form maths teachers, so that I did really well at A-level and decided to go on to do maths at uni. In hindsight, I should have switched to CS or similar... (Mind you, that hasn't stopped me having a good career in IT, so no harm done.)
Whether you choose to buy a new television set is pretty much a matter for you and your family alone. It might affect your neighbours if you turn the volume up too high, and of course the retailer and manufacturer benefit slightly, but other than that it has hardly any effect on those around you. So it's reasonably to leave that decision up to you.
However, whether or not you get immunised doesn't just affect you; it affects all those whom you go on to infect when you get infected (or become a carrier), because you chose against immunisation. It's a network effect.
Here in the UK, there's been quite a bit of (hysterical, unfounded, and irrational) public outcry against the combined MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine routinely given to young children. As a result, some parents are choosing instead to have their children given separate vaccines, or none at all. And so the rate of measles immunity in the population has fallen, causing health professionals to fear a measles epidemic, which would cause far far more harm than even the worst claims of the hysterics. Harm which wouldn't only apply to those who decided against the vaccine, or even their children; harm which would also come to a few of those who were vaccinated but caught the disease anyway.
So, given that the public as a whole are affected, isn't it reasonable for them to have some input to your decision?
So what does the word 'literally' mean, then, if you accept its use for exaggeration and hyperbole? Nothing. Its very meaning, its only reason for existing, is to indicate that you're NOT exaggerating, that you're describing the exact truth WITHOUT hyperbole. Without that, it's meaningless. You've just destroyed a useful word.
And what do you put in its place? How do you indicate that you're not exaggerating or using hyperbole NOW?
Exactly. You can't (short of some clumsy phrase like 'and I'm not exaggerating or using hyperbole'). Which is probably just as well, because if there were such a word, you'd probably want to destroy that too with your 'more generous and patient attitude'.
Congratulations, you've just made the language less useful for us all, for no apparent reason. I'm glad this prevents you from being 'very, very unhappy'.
Not quite as powerful as you want, but the standard Apple installer program has a menu option to list all the files it'll install. When I've checked it, it's seemed a reasonable guide to what the installer wants to do and why it wants privilege to do it.
Who thinks that any service provider will allow an uncertified software stack onto any of their handsets, and/or onto their network?
This isn't like getting a PC onto the internet, where any software can be installed and anything that talks TCP/IP can connect. Like it or not (and I don't), many of the more recent phones, music players, etc. are not open platforms in that sense. And the service providers are more than a tad concerned about keeping control of what connects to their networks. (I don't know whether their worries are about a compromised device crashing the network, introducing some unreliability, or just bypassing one of their many ways to profit from every byte that gets transferred.)
Do we have any reason to think that this stack will be treated any differently?
The problem is when some third party in between your ISP and Google tries to charge Google for bandwidth. Net traffic often travels through many systems and pipes, sorry, tubes, before it reaches its destination; it just takes one to screw things up.
(Oh, not the dropping-packets sort of screw-things-up; that'd be routed around. But the giving-preferential-bandwidth-to-those-who-pay-mor e type of screw-things-up. I don't think many routers are geared up to make decisions based on that sort of thing.)
So: you get slow response from Google, and your ISP isn't doing anything to your traffic. What do you do? Even if you find out who's doing it, what recourse do you have (short of paying them for the bandwidth yourself)? Even if you switch ISPs (assuming there is another one), who's to say the other one wouldn't have exactly the same problem?
I fail to see how running Adobe Acrobat is any better than running IE.
But we aren't talking about running Adobe Acrobat, are we? We're talking about PDF files. PDF is an open file format, and there are plenty of other viewers and creators out there. My OS of choice even uses it as its native printing/previewing format, and not an Adobe application in sight...
Of course, PDF isn't perfect, and as another poster says it's possible to write PDFs that aren't terribly portable. But it's still a long, long way from having to use IE.
Otherwise, why would any of these places provide free networking in the first place.
(Here, have a complementary question mark: ?)
Erm, OTTOMH: they provide it to encourage people to visit? Works perfectly well for complementary soap, coffee, maps, condiments, magazines, question marks, and all the other things such places provide. They may not be making 'a buck' from all those things directly, but you can bet the increase in customer numbers is improving the bottom line to some extent. (Otherwise, as you say, they wouldn't do them.) But that's no reason to infer snooping on your traffic.
(No reason not to, either, of course! But you'll need some other argument for that.)
It depends very much on the conductor. (Okay, my experience is more in choral rather than orchestral music, but I think the principle's the same.)
I've known conductors who did all the work in rehearsal, and in performance did just enough to keep people together. I've known conductors who have to work really really hard in performance to keep inexperienced and unskilled people doing roughly the right things at the right time. I've known inspirational conductors who can bring out meaning in a piece that was never there before, just from subtle changes in stress and timing. I've known conductors who can completely change the mood and style of a piece to match the flow of the programme or the mood of an audience.
Of course, it very much depends upon how well the performers know the music, how well they perform, and how well they know the conductor -- and of course, how much attention they're paying to him or her!
In performance, some conductors concentrate on low-level issues: exact timing, articulation, pitch. Some think more about overall balance, texture, and mood. Some think mainly about the melody, and mostly leave the rest to take care of itself.
And no one of these is right or wrong. It depends so much on the performers, the music, the occasion, and the conductor's own interests and preferences.
Conducting styles vary, too. Even when simply beating time, some conductors put the beat at the end of the downstroke, or halfway through, or during the following upstroke. (Some conductors don't beat strict time at all, just wave their arms in their own time to give a vague idea of when to speed up or slow down.) Some add expression to their beating time; others use the other hand or even both hands for that. And so on.
As to orchestras ignoring the conductor, I've heard tales of orchestras who decide after a rehearsal or two that the conductor is useless, and so the performance is secretly conducted by the lead violinist!
(Relating this all back to software project management is left as an exercise for the player^H^H^H^H^H^Hreader.)
I don't think anyone's saying NK is a lovely country. But that's FAR from saying it should be destroyed.
Firstly, there's the moral question. How bad must a government be before military action is justified? No government is perfect; even those of relatively liberal and democratic countries like mine commit acts that are outrageous and criminal from time to time. Come to that, my country has nukes, and even has the distinction of having pretty much invented the concentration camp, while fighting in South Africa, and has performed tests on chemical weapons. How much worse must a country be before we're morally justified in military action? What makes NK qualitatively different?
Closely allied to that, what gives us the right to change the NK government? There's no such thing as a World Policeman. Much as the USA might have delusions of grandeur (and of objectivity, and of invincibility), it's just another sovereign country. If every sovereign country who didn't like another one tried to invade, none of us would be here at all. What gives us the right in this case?
And thirdly, do we have the ability? I think the débâcles in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown that enforced régime change is hard; even massive military intervention cannot force a government upon a people who don't want it. Are we so sure that all the people of North Korea would be immediately convinced of the moral rightness of an invasion, and give their full support to it? (Or, if not, do we have the military power to invade against their wishes and install a government of our own that would be just as despotic?)
Then, of course, there would be the question of means: with UN and US forces overstretched in Iran, Afghanistan, and many other places, could anyone spare the forces needed?
I don't pretend to have the answers to all of these questions. But they do need to be answered. You can't just use 'It's not a nice place' as an excuse for military action. As Douglas Adams put it in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish:
"But that's terrible," said Arthur.
"Listen, bud," said Ford, "if I had one Altairian dollar for every time I heard one bit of the Universe look at another bit of the Universe and say 'That's terrible' I wouldn't be sitting here like a lemon looking for a gin."
Yes, I've personally experienced having my own work copied and losing revenue because of it. No it did not me want to stop having new ideas and being creative.
I see this 'creative people will always have ideas' line a lot, but I don't think it's actually helping the discussion; it's almost a straw man. Because the problem isn't only about having ideas; it's also about developing those ideas into something that people can enjoy, or at least experience.
Different fields of creativity make that more or less hard, of course. If your medium is a blog, then it's pretty quick and easy to type in those ideas -- thousands of people can be reading them within minutes of them occurring to you. Which, of course, is why there are so many blogs. (And, presumably, why so few of them are worth reading.)
At the other end of the scale, movies can take many years to reach the screen, and involve the years of work from hundreds of creative people in many different fields. That time and effort costs money. (Unless you want all these people to starve in the meantime?) As do all the resources they need. A director and/or writer can come up with all the creative story ideas they like, but without all that organisation behind them, those ideas are never going to end up as a movie that people watch.
And in between come everything from sketches and short stories to musicals and operas, paintings and installations, albums, concerts, novels, designs, ballets, plays, radio dramas, fridge magnets, web cartoons, and tons more, each with its own method of getting from someone's head out into the real world. Some just need raw materials and time; some need skilled and/or trained people; some need resources such as venues or equipment.
Now, it's true that some of that time and money isn't always necessary. Some films work best as quick, low-budget efforts, and some soungs sound best as live acoustic recordings. But many don't. And any work of art worth the name will take time and effort from the creator at least. (Tolkien may not have needed an army of technicians to write 'The Lord of the Rings', but he did take 12 years to do it.) The gap between idea and realisation can in some cases be narrowed by technology or skill, but it can never be removed.
As an amateur muso myself, I know how much grind goes into realising a work. Coming up with melodies and sounds can be relatively quick and easy; putting in the sheer hard work needed to turn those into a recording people can enjoy, or sheet music people can perform from, is often very far from quick or easy. And without being able to give up my day job and devote some serious time to it, most of my ideas will remain just that: ideas, unheard, and unloved.
Of course, I'm not saying that the business model of current Big Media is the only one, nor even the best one. There are plenty of others that can work in some circumstances, from a virtual tip-jar to old-fashioned patronage. But there needs to be some form of business model, because without it, creative people can have all the ideas they want, without any of the rest of us being able to benefit from them.
when advertising dollars begin to dictate the direction of wikipedia
And that can be much more subtle than advertisers saying "Don't show that or we'll stop paying you", because that's easy to understand and guard against. Where it really starts to compromise Wikipedia's integrity is when editors tweak articles because they think a certain wording looks 'more professional' and more likely to draw advertisers. That bias is unlikely to be deliberate; in most cases it'll be unconscious, which makes it much much much harder to fight, and much more pernicious.
BTW, my impression (from visits, movies, &c) is that advertising in the USA is much more aggressive, and much more ubiquitous than places such as here in the UK. Does anyone else find that, and if so, have any idea why? Do we have better safeguards in place, or is it just the worship of the Almighty Buck?
At least, it's not in the few OO languages I know.
There's all the stuff about making sure the superclass constructors are called, in the right order. Getting members initialised, in the right order. Coping with exceptions (and knowing when the object is 'live' and will need to be garbage-collected). In a language like Java with inner classes, it'll mean keeping track of the enclosing instance. And so on. A constructor may look superficially like another method, but it's not, and trying to pretend it is has more at stake than a 3-letter keyword.
What you're describing looks more to me like a factory method. This can do things no constructor can: in particular, it may return a subtype of the advertised type. It may also return a reference to an existing instance, rather than creating a new one, to allow for object sharing or reuse.
Both constructors and factory methods have their uses, but I wouldn't want to see them confused.
Mine sits on a stand which recharges its internal battery by induction, so such a thing is hardly a big surprise to me! It's an ideal case for inductive power: a device which gets wet in use, needs to be hygienically sealed, recharging uses very little power, and there are no sensitive electronic devices nearby for it to interfere with.
Mind you, electric kettles are a similar case, yet modern cordless kettles seem to have worked out how to do safe direct electrical connection even when there's likely to be splashes of water around. But then I doubt you could transfer that amount of power inductively. (Laptops may be power-hungry, but not yet to that degree!)
Joel Spolsky has just blogged about this. He's recently come to the conclusion that accepting gifts, even if completely moral, isn't worth the reduced personal credibility. He also feels that even if only a few bloggers acceptg them, it reduces the credibility of all blogs.
But ultimately, MS's tactic has worked. Whether or not many bloggers accept and/or write about these laptops, we're all talking about MS and Vista right here. As a form of advertising, those laptops were a pretty good investment!
I see a bolder way, in living openly, freely, and standing up against those who would punish us for exercise freedoms.
This looks like a classic case of the Prisoner's Dilemma in action. To take your gay rights example, if everyone comes out of the closet, then yes, as long as there are enough of them and enough influential people amongst them, then everyone benefits. But if only a few do, then they get the stigma, the discrimination, the misunderstanding and the hatred. So it's understandable that many decided not to sacrifice themselves for the grand principle.
And of whereas gays, lesbians, and bisexuals form an appreciable proportion of the population, things must be even worse for smaller minorities. Idealism is an honourable and praiseworthy quality, but not everyone is willing to lay down their lives for it.
Because all this tech has so improved the US military's ability to win glorious victories. In fact, I am authorised to say that the technology we are now reporting may well bring the war within a measurable distance of its end!
Slashdot Mirror
A worthy aim, but if you want to be certain that code will run anywhere, you'd have to make sure that all resources it could access looked the same everywhere.
So, for example, you'd have to disallow all access to the filesystem. (After all, different systems will have different files on them, and you could write something that depends on particular files or directories.) You'd have to restrict text display to a handful of supplied fonts (coz other fonts might have different metrics), and you'd have to disable font smoothing (coz that's done differently on different displays). In fact, you'd probably have to prevent any access to the display at all (because some embedded systems don't have one). You'd have to make it single-threaded (coz different host OSs have different schedulers and different numbers of processors). And you'd have to restrict it to a few hundred KB of memory (because that's all some embedded systems have).
You wouldn't be able to find out the current user ID (coz someone could write code that depended on it). Or the current OS or machine. And you'd have to artificially limit it to running at a fixed effective clock speed of only a few MHz (coz someone could write some time-dependent code); for the same reason, you'd have to disallow any access to the system clock. Network access would of course be right out, as would keyboards and pointing devices. In fact, by the time you'd ensured that every system looked the same, you wouldn't be able to do anything useful at all!
Seriously, any system that has enough interaction with the platform to do useful work also has enough that a (sufficiently clever) developer could use for some platform dependency. The best that Java can do is encouragement, by making it as easy as possible to be platform-independent, and as hard as possible to introduce dependency. Java's not perfect at this, but I think it does a pretty good job in general.
It's not even laziness: it's the mindset. I've worked in a few IT departments, and IME most developers don't (can't?) see much beyond the code they're writing. They never think about who might be calling their function, who might be using their class, what that person might need to know in order to make proper use of it -- and, just as importantly, what they don't need to know. About the Big Picture(TM).
That might mean documentation/comments; it might mean setting up preconditions and invariants; it might mean picking meaningful names; it might just mean stopping and thinking about what you're writing.
The result: we end up with systems that are unnecessarily hard to maintain, where in order to understand any part of it you have to understand every other part as well, where each new developer has to reinvent the wheel because the tens of existing ones can only be used by their authors.
So maybe the biggest benefit of DbC isn't actually in the conditions, it's simply that it gets developers to think about them in the first place!
Yes, the author has a clear bias towards Apple, but I still find the site worth reading: it's clear, well-argued, interesting, and the author has a clear insight into many of the issues. He also explains many things rather better than I've seen elsewhere. He's very honest about Apple's past, even if he tends to see only the better side of their present. His analysis is often thought-provoking, whether I agree with it or not.
I'm a happy Mac user, and find myself agreeing with him on many points, though there are quite a few where I disagree strongly (for example, on his reasons for accepting the rumoured lockout of 3rd-party software on the iPhone). But I find it interesting to read despite that bias.
At least the bias is clear and honest, unlike some sites. If you can't read material you disagree with, then perhaps you should... well... stick to Slashdot?
Actually, I think it's worse than that: the sort of mathematical ability that gets you to professorships often makes you a WORSE teacher.
To be a good teacher, you need to be able to empathise with your students a little. You need to be able to see what someone is struggling with, and why they can't grasp something, so that you can join the right dots for them. (Even if this doesn't apply on an individual level, you'll need to know how to explain things so that the majority of your students can follow it.)
But if you've never struggled yourself, if you've never had trouble grasping certain concepts, or following certain logical arguments, then you'll find it harder to do that. And it's precisely the most gifted mathematicians who are likely to be in that position.
One of our lecturers was like that. He was unable to answer our questions, or explain things more clearly, because it was blindingly obvious to him already, and he couldn't comprehend how it wasn't just as blindingly obvious to the rest of us. It got to the point where we had to ask one of the assistants to give us a couple of lectures to explain it all.
Ah, happy days... My mistake was in having a couple of excellent sixth-form maths teachers, so that I did really well at A-level and decided to go on to do maths at uni. In hindsight, I should have switched to CS or similar... (Mind you, that hasn't stopped me having a good career in IT, so no harm done.)
Whether you choose to buy a new television set is pretty much a matter for you and your family alone. It might affect your neighbours if you turn the volume up too high, and of course the retailer and manufacturer benefit slightly, but other than that it has hardly any effect on those around you. So it's reasonably to leave that decision up to you.
However, whether or not you get immunised doesn't just affect you; it affects all those whom you go on to infect when you get infected (or become a carrier), because you chose against immunisation. It's a network effect.
Here in the UK, there's been quite a bit of (hysterical, unfounded, and irrational) public outcry against the combined MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine routinely given to young children. As a result, some parents are choosing instead to have their children given separate vaccines, or none at all. And so the rate of measles immunity in the population has fallen, causing health professionals to fear a measles epidemic, which would cause far far more harm than even the worst claims of the hysterics. Harm which wouldn't only apply to those who decided against the vaccine, or even their children; harm which would also come to a few of those who were vaccinated but caught the disease anyway.
So, given that the public as a whole are affected, isn't it reasonable for them to have some input to your decision?
And what do you put in its place? How do you indicate that you're not exaggerating or using hyperbole NOW?
Exactly. You can't (short of some clumsy phrase like 'and I'm not exaggerating or using hyperbole'). Which is probably just as well, because if there were such a word, you'd probably want to destroy that too with your 'more generous and patient attitude'.
Congratulations, you've just made the language less useful for us all, for no apparent reason. I'm glad this prevents you from being 'very, very unhappy'.
This isn't like getting a PC onto the internet, where any software can be installed and anything that talks TCP/IP can connect. Like it or not (and I don't), many of the more recent phones, music players, etc. are not open platforms in that sense. And the service providers are more than a tad concerned about keeping control of what connects to their networks. (I don't know whether their worries are about a compromised device crashing the network, introducing some unreliability, or just bypassing one of their many ways to profit from every byte that gets transferred.)
Do we have any reason to think that this stack will be treated any differently?
The problem is when some third party in between your ISP and Google tries to charge Google for bandwidth. Net traffic often travels through many systems and pipes, sorry, tubes, before it reaches its destination; it just takes one to screw things up.
(Oh, not the dropping-packets sort of screw-things-up; that'd be routed around. But the giving-preferential-bandwidth-to-those-who-pay-mor e type of screw-things-up. I don't think many routers are geared up to make decisions based on that sort of thing.)
So: you get slow response from Google, and your ISP isn't doing anything to your traffic. What do you do? Even if you find out who's doing it, what recourse do you have (short of paying them for the bandwidth yourself)? Even if you switch ISPs (assuming there is another one), who's to say the other one wouldn't have exactly the same problem?
But we aren't talking about running Adobe Acrobat, are we? We're talking about PDF files. PDF is an open file format, and there are plenty of other viewers and creators out there. My OS of choice even uses it as its native printing/previewing format, and not an Adobe application in sight...
Of course, PDF isn't perfect, and as another poster says it's possible to write PDFs that aren't terribly portable. But it's still a long, long way from having to use IE.
(Here, have a complementary question mark: ? )
Erm, OTTOMH: they provide it to encourage people to visit? Works perfectly well for complementary soap, coffee, maps, condiments, magazines, question marks, and all the other things such places provide. They may not be making 'a buck' from all those things directly, but you can bet the increase in customer numbers is improving the bottom line to some extent. (Otherwise, as you say, they wouldn't do them.) But that's no reason to infer snooping on your traffic.
(No reason not to, either, of course! But you'll need some other argument for that.)
I've known conductors who did all the work in rehearsal, and in performance did just enough to keep people together. I've known conductors who have to work really really hard in performance to keep inexperienced and unskilled people doing roughly the right things at the right time. I've known inspirational conductors who can bring out meaning in a piece that was never there before, just from subtle changes in stress and timing. I've known conductors who can completely change the mood and style of a piece to match the flow of the programme or the mood of an audience.
Of course, it very much depends upon how well the performers know the music, how well they perform, and how well they know the conductor -- and of course, how much attention they're paying to him or her!
In performance, some conductors concentrate on low-level issues: exact timing, articulation, pitch. Some think more about overall balance, texture, and mood. Some think mainly about the melody, and mostly leave the rest to take care of itself.
And no one of these is right or wrong. It depends so much on the performers, the music, the occasion, and the conductor's own interests and preferences.
Conducting styles vary, too. Even when simply beating time, some conductors put the beat at the end of the downstroke, or halfway through, or during the following upstroke. (Some conductors don't beat strict time at all, just wave their arms in their own time to give a vague idea of when to speed up or slow down.) Some add expression to their beating time; others use the other hand or even both hands for that. And so on.
As to orchestras ignoring the conductor, I've heard tales of orchestras who decide after a rehearsal or two that the conductor is useless, and so the performance is secretly conducted by the lead violinist!
(Relating this all back to software project management is left as an exercise for the player^H^H^H^H^H^Hreader.)
Firstly, there's the moral question. How bad must a government be before military action is justified? No government is perfect; even those of relatively liberal and democratic countries like mine commit acts that are outrageous and criminal from time to time. Come to that, my country has nukes, and even has the distinction of having pretty much invented the concentration camp, while fighting in South Africa, and has performed tests on chemical weapons. How much worse must a country be before we're morally justified in military action? What makes NK qualitatively different?
Closely allied to that, what gives us the right to change the NK government? There's no such thing as a World Policeman. Much as the USA might have delusions of grandeur (and of objectivity, and of invincibility), it's just another sovereign country. If every sovereign country who didn't like another one tried to invade, none of us would be here at all. What gives us the right in this case?
And thirdly, do we have the ability? I think the débâcles in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown that enforced régime change is hard; even massive military intervention cannot force a government upon a people who don't want it. Are we so sure that all the people of North Korea would be immediately convinced of the moral rightness of an invasion, and give their full support to it? (Or, if not, do we have the military power to invade against their wishes and install a government of our own that would be just as despotic?)
Then, of course, there would be the question of means: with UN and US forces overstretched in Iran, Afghanistan, and many other places, could anyone spare the forces needed?
I don't pretend to have the answers to all of these questions. But they do need to be answered. You can't just use 'It's not a nice place' as an excuse for military action. As Douglas Adams put it in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish:
I see this 'creative people will always have ideas' line a lot, but I don't think it's actually helping the discussion; it's almost a straw man. Because the problem isn't only about having ideas; it's also about developing those ideas into something that people can enjoy, or at least experience.
Different fields of creativity make that more or less hard, of course. If your medium is a blog, then it's pretty quick and easy to type in those ideas -- thousands of people can be reading them within minutes of them occurring to you. Which, of course, is why there are so many blogs. (And, presumably, why so few of them are worth reading.)
At the other end of the scale, movies can take many years to reach the screen, and involve the years of work from hundreds of creative people in many different fields. That time and effort costs money. (Unless you want all these people to starve in the meantime?) As do all the resources they need. A director and/or writer can come up with all the creative story ideas they like, but without all that organisation behind them, those ideas are never going to end up as a movie that people watch.
And in between come everything from sketches and short stories to musicals and operas, paintings and installations, albums, concerts, novels, designs, ballets, plays, radio dramas, fridge magnets, web cartoons, and tons more, each with its own method of getting from someone's head out into the real world. Some just need raw materials and time; some need skilled and/or trained people; some need resources such as venues or equipment.
Now, it's true that some of that time and money isn't always necessary. Some films work best as quick, low-budget efforts, and some soungs sound best as live acoustic recordings. But many don't. And any work of art worth the name will take time and effort from the creator at least. (Tolkien may not have needed an army of technicians to write 'The Lord of the Rings', but he did take 12 years to do it.) The gap between idea and realisation can in some cases be narrowed by technology or skill, but it can never be removed.
As an amateur muso myself, I know how much grind goes into realising a work. Coming up with melodies and sounds can be relatively quick and easy; putting in the sheer hard work needed to turn those into a recording people can enjoy, or sheet music people can perform from, is often very far from quick or easy. And without being able to give up my day job and devote some serious time to it, most of my ideas will remain just that: ideas, unheard, and unloved.
Of course, I'm not saying that the business model of current Big Media is the only one, nor even the best one. There are plenty of others that can work in some circumstances, from a virtual tip-jar to old-fashioned patronage. But there needs to be some form of business model, because without it, creative people can have all the ideas they want, without any of the rest of us being able to benefit from them.
And that can be much more subtle than advertisers saying "Don't show that or we'll stop paying you", because that's easy to understand and guard against. Where it really starts to compromise Wikipedia's integrity is when editors tweak articles because they think a certain wording looks 'more professional' and more likely to draw advertisers. That bias is unlikely to be deliberate; in most cases it'll be unconscious, which makes it much much much harder to fight, and much more pernicious.
BTW, my impression (from visits, movies, &c) is that advertising in the USA is much more aggressive, and much more ubiquitous than places such as here in the UK. Does anyone else find that, and if so, have any idea why? Do we have better safeguards in place, or is it just the worship of the Almighty Buck?
There's all the stuff about making sure the superclass constructors are called, in the right order. Getting members initialised, in the right order. Coping with exceptions (and knowing when the object is 'live' and will need to be garbage-collected). In a language like Java with inner classes, it'll mean keeping track of the enclosing instance. And so on. A constructor may look superficially like another method, but it's not, and trying to pretend it is has more at stake than a 3-letter keyword.
What you're describing looks more to me like a factory method. This can do things no constructor can: in particular, it may return a subtype of the advertised type. It may also return a reference to an existing instance, rather than creating a new one, to allow for object sharing or reuse.
Both constructors and factory methods have their uses, but I wouldn't want to see them confused.
Mine sits on a stand which recharges its internal battery by induction, so such a thing is hardly a big surprise to me! It's an ideal case for inductive power: a device which gets wet in use, needs to be hygienically sealed, recharging uses very little power, and there are no sensitive electronic devices nearby for it to interfere with.
Mind you, electric kettles are a similar case, yet modern cordless kettles seem to have worked out how to do safe direct electrical connection even when there's likely to be splashes of water around. But then I doubt you could transfer that amount of power inductively. (Laptops may be power-hungry, but not yet to that degree!)
But ultimately, MS's tactic has worked. Whether or not many bloggers accept and/or write about these laptops, we're all talking about MS and Vista right here. As a form of advertising, those laptops were a pretty good investment!
This looks like a classic case of the Prisoner's Dilemma in action. To take your gay rights example, if everyone comes out of the closet, then yes, as long as there are enough of them and enough influential people amongst them, then everyone benefits. But if only a few do, then they get the stigma, the discrimination, the misunderstanding and the hatred. So it's understandable that many decided not to sacrifice themselves for the grand principle.
And of whereas gays, lesbians, and bisexuals form an appreciable proportion of the population, things must be even worse for smaller minorities. Idealism is an honourable and praiseworthy quality, but not everyone is willing to lay down their lives for it.