While I don't (yet) have a position on the disenfranchisement of felons in the United States, I'm not sure if your argument really sways me either way.
America's prison population passed the two million mark back in 1992. By 2001, one in 37 adult Americans had been in prison for some period of time (including those who were still there.) For over a decade, sixty percent of the prison population is made up of minorities. While less than one percent of the population is in prison, nearly five percent of the black population of the US is incarcerated.
Summary: lots of people are convicted felons.
It's long past time to recognize the disenfranchisement of felons for what it is; a denial of democracy.
I think that's kind of the idea -- disenfranchisement is basically the removal of citizenship.
If you take the vote away from an entire class of people, their needs and problems need not be addressed; they are effectively denied a voice in government.
The former half of this is part of a point, but again, I think that's kind of the idea.
This becomes far easier when they are people who have been dehumanized by society.
By here, you begin to expand on your main idea, but then your argument ends.
"Disenfranchisement" -- kicking people out -- as punishment has been around forever. The English sent people to Australia (and even America, IIRC). Pirates maroon. We remove their rights as citizens. This doesn't make it good, just tested. I assume that you understand the reasons behind the policy in general.
Your argument seems to be that there are so many felons at this point, we might as well just let them back into citizenship. This is a non sequitur; why should it matter how many felons there are, or how many are minorities, etc.? The reason that a felon is disenfranchised is to remove them from society -- I'm sure the framers would have sent people to some uninhabited area if they could (the wild west, for instance). A few more felons wouldn't have made much difference.
Perhaps it's the permanent disenfranchisement that bothers you. You know, that bothers me a bit, too.
...isn't it interesting the lines that are most common?
I can tell that you're coding in C++ because of the private/public and the }/}; (that inconsistency has always bothered me: is it a statement or not?).
I ran this* on the Python files of the Django project, and got some interesting results:
Yes, that's right, 11,185 empty lines. We programmers sure like our whitespace.
""" is the delimiter for Python-friendly documentation. (Think javadocs.) If they documented each method and class, you could grep for def and class and get an estimate of how documented the project is.
pass basically marks an abstract/unimplemented method. I'm running straight from Subversion, so that may have something to do with it.
While Python doesn't use {} for methods, it does use them for dictionaries. The convention for multi-line dictionaries is to have the closing bracket on its own line.
__str__(self) is Python's analog to Java's toString or Ruby's to_s.
Interesting stuff. I wonder what it would look like in Haskell, or Lisp...
* I wrote a modified version in Python that walked the directory tree and stripped lines of whitespace, otherwise it was pretty much the same: Simple statistics. Yes, I know it's somewhat messy. I tried to clean it up a bit before putting it up. A few simple modifications would make it work with any extension.
The biggest advantage Windows has over everything else is that it will generally work with any hardware or software a person might pick off the shelf of any podunk software store anywhere on earth.
Wait, what? Oh, drivers, right. What kind of advantage is that on a battleship, most likely one that doesn't run on an x86?
You're going to have to write drivers for your battleship's components anyway -- might as well use an OS that supports the processor instead of sound cards and joysticks. (Note, I'm not a BSD user, I just find it funny that you position Windows there.)
I use it for killing all my FastCGI scripts, which could be named different things, or be run by different interpreters. I name them all with a ".fcgi" extension, though, so a regex will match.
Other than that I try to stick to killall or pkill, yes:)
Wow, and you people wonder why Linux hasn't taken hold for the average consumer. Sure it isn't difficult to type that line, but it looks confusing and intimidating to the average person.
I was talking to my wife about this last night. After a couple of years using Linux, I'm typing this stuff all the time without thinking. I've got a nice one-liner I use to kill processes based on a regular expression, for example:
This makes perfect sense to me (and most likely to the general Unix public), but would be scary as all else to a pure Windows user.
While I understand that the learning curve may frighten people away, it's not as great a barrier as the application base. People completely new to computers can handle Ubuntu just as well (or as poorly) as Windows or OSX. It's the experience with one that spoils you to the others.
(A digression: Who cares about Linux "succeeding" in the "desktop market?" We're not selling anything, and we use it because we like it (see Apple Jacks). If it takes off, great -- means more applications will be developed for us. If not, it's still got more power than anything else. The requisite car analogy: "The Formula-1 race car will never take off in the consumer market, because it gets terrible gas mileage.")
Just a note: The citizendium will be opened to the public after the public launch. The pre-release registration is to keep people from happening upon it before the general release -- sort of a voluntary beta test.
While I'm rather neutral about the entire concept, this seems to be a common misconception about their model. Hope you check it out when it goes public.
Registration is only for pre-release.
on
Is Wikipedia Failing?
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· Score: 3, Informative
They made people register just to SEE the site,...
Just a note: The citizendium will be opened to the public after the public launch. The pre-release registration is to keep people from happening upon it before the general release -- sort of a voluntary beta test.
While I'm rather neutral about the entire concept, this seems to be a common misconception about their model. Hope you check it out when it goes public.
[N]ovices are still out in the cold, and those are the users that Linux is trying to target, n'est pas?
C'est vrai, while things are getting better. (Personally, I use it for the power. That said, I'm a big fan of OSX and I run Windows XP for the games. We computer people are the minority, unfortunately.)
Actually, don't knock it until you've seen what's out there. While you might have to find alternatives to software (a problem of choice), solutions exist.
On the driver note, my current system requires more driver installs for Windows XP than for Ubuntu, which amazes me.
Linux... requires 16 config file 3 required packages and you need to code your own driver for random network card X if it's not a common one. I think in GUI and user [friendliness] *nix has a long way to go.
Have you even used Linux? Let alone Ubuntu recently? I have worse driver problems with Windows XP than Ubuntu. Even my sound card, the old standard of Linux incompatibility, just works out of the box with Ubuntu. I need to go through a half-hour of searching and installing for WinXP.
2. Sign those artists to highly unfair contracts because there is no other way to get music distributed.
Fortunately, as you noted, this is changing fast. Publishing services have sprung up that can publish on demand and deliver wherever you want (Kunaki is only $1.60/CD or DVD), and distribution services like CD Baby (they take 9% of download revenue, $4 of CD revenue; gets you into Apple's music store, among others) and Magnatune (50% flat; "We are not evil.") are slowly supplanting the ones less fair to artists.
It's a good time to be an indie artist, definitely.
NEWSWEEK: If one of our readers confronted you in a
CompUSA and said, "Bill, why upgrade to Vista?" what would
be your elevator pitch?
Bill Gates: The most effective thing would be if I could sit
down with them and just take them through the new look for a
couple of minutes, show them the Sidebar, show them the way
the search lets you go through lots of things, including
lots of photos. Set up a parental control. And then I might
edit a high-definition movie and make a little DVD that's
got photos. As I went through, they'd think, "Wow, is that
something I could use, would that make a difference for me?"
I'd first try and get your domains registered with whoever you're hosting with -- might be easier to deal with. Second, check out http://www.no-ip.com/
You do realize that the gameplay for these games are completely different, right? Aside from Mario Party (a brilliant concept -- episodic board games -- but not one that I'm a fan of), the various Mario games are extremely different. If you turn away from something just because of the main character, you might be missing out.
I've worked on several different webapps, from small and personal to large and corporate, using several different frameworks (J2EE, Django, Rails) as well as just straight PHP/ASP/static HTML. Frameworks don't really force anyone to stay in-bounds.
All of frameworks I've used allow you to drop down to straight SQL for database work, ignore their models and templating (or substitute others), and completely mess up the MVC pattern, if you want. Django goes the farthest towards restricting your options in the latter respect, but it's still possible.
I know you're somewhat kidding, but I just wanted to note that the reason for a framework is above all to have a starting point. Some frameworks do a much better job at that than others, but that's the purpose. If the only purpose was to restrict, they'd be more annoying than not, and people wouldn't use them by choice at all.
Slashdot Mirror
These are the kinds of points that I was looking for, especially your penultimate and last paragraphs. Thanks. :)
While I don't (yet) have a position on the disenfranchisement of felons in the United States, I'm not sure if your argument really sways me either way.
Summary: lots of people are convicted felons.
I think that's kind of the idea -- disenfranchisement is basically the removal of citizenship.
The former half of this is part of a point, but again, I think that's kind of the idea.
By here, you begin to expand on your main idea, but then your argument ends.
"Disenfranchisement" -- kicking people out -- as punishment has been around forever. The English sent people to Australia (and even America, IIRC). Pirates maroon. We remove their rights as citizens. This doesn't make it good, just tested. I assume that you understand the reasons behind the policy in general.
Your argument seems to be that there are so many felons at this point, we might as well just let them back into citizenship. This is a non sequitur; why should it matter how many felons there are, or how many are minorities, etc.? The reason that a felon is disenfranchised is to remove them from society -- I'm sure the framers would have sent people to some uninhabited area if they could (the wild west, for instance). A few more felons wouldn't have made much difference.
Perhaps it's the permanent disenfranchisement that bothers you. You know, that bothers me a bit, too.
tl;dr: Re-word your argument.
Truth, all the way. Although I have found the warehouse model (see Fry's) to work well for me, too.
...isn't it interesting the lines that are most common?
I can tell that you're coding in C++ because of the private/public and the }/}; (that inconsistency has always bothered me: is it a statement or not?).
I ran this* on the Python files of the Django project, and got some interesting results:
Interesting comments:
Interesting stuff. I wonder what it would look like in Haskell, or Lisp...
* I wrote a modified version in Python that walked the directory tree and stripped lines of whitespace, otherwise it was pretty much the same: Simple statistics. Yes, I know it's somewhat messy. I tried to clean it up a bit before putting it up. A few simple modifications would make it work with any extension.
What about XUL?
You're going to have to write drivers for your battleship's components anyway -- might as well use an OS that supports the processor instead of sound cards and joysticks. (Note, I'm not a BSD user, I just find it funny that you position Windows there.)
Is that anything like "pics or it didn't happen?" 'Cause I'm not sure I'd want to see those...
Hopefully this is the start of death throes for Microsoft, and application developers will start to wake up and code for other platforms.
I hope it was a joke. I don't feel that anyone would deserve that kind of treatment. Ah, the internet community...
Whoa, wait, what? Seriously?
I use it for killing all my FastCGI scripts, which could be named different things, or be run by different interpreters. I name them all with a ".fcgi" extension, though, so a regex will match.
:)
Other than that I try to stick to killall or pkill, yes
I was talking to my wife about this last night. After a couple of years using Linux, I'm typing this stuff all the time without thinking. I've got a nice one-liner I use to kill processes based on a regular expression, for example:
This makes perfect sense to me (and most likely to the general Unix public), but would be scary as all else to a pure Windows user.While I understand that the learning curve may frighten people away, it's not as great a barrier as the application base. People completely new to computers can handle Ubuntu just as well (or as poorly) as Windows or OSX. It's the experience with one that spoils you to the others.
(A digression: Who cares about Linux "succeeding" in the "desktop market?" We're not selling anything, and we use it because we like it (see Apple Jacks). If it takes off, great -- means more applications will be developed for us. If not, it's still got more power than anything else. The requisite car analogy: "The Formula-1 race car will never take off in the consumer market, because it gets terrible gas mileage.")
Just a note: The citizendium will be opened to the public after the public launch. The pre-release registration is to keep people from happening upon it before the general release -- sort of a voluntary beta test.
While I'm rather neutral about the entire concept, this seems to be a common misconception about their model. Hope you check it out when it goes public.
Just a note: The citizendium will be opened to the public after the public launch. The pre-release registration is to keep people from happening upon it before the general release -- sort of a voluntary beta test.
While I'm rather neutral about the entire concept, this seems to be a common misconception about their model. Hope you check it out when it goes public.
Actually, don't knock it until you've seen what's out there. While you might have to find alternatives to software (a problem of choice), solutions exist.
On the driver note, my current system requires more driver installs for Windows XP than for Ubuntu, which amazes me.
Have you even used Linux? Let alone Ubuntu recently? I have worse driver problems with Windows XP than Ubuntu. Even my sound card, the old standard of Linux incompatibility, just works out of the box with Ubuntu. I need to go through a half-hour of searching and installing for WinXP.
It's a good time to be an indie artist, definitely.
We need a "-1, Just Wrong" moderation...
Hmm, Mr. Gates, I'd definitely like some of those features. Perhaps I should go pick up a Mac. (In black, please.)
I'd first try and get your domains registered with whoever you're hosting with -- might be easier to deal with. Second, check out http://www.no-ip.com/
Do you think that having more and more of our currency in electronic form (out of circulation, but still in use, as it were) has an effect on this?
You do realize that the gameplay for these games are completely different, right? Aside from Mario Party (a brilliant concept -- episodic board games -- but not one that I'm a fan of), the various Mario games are extremely different. If you turn away from something just because of the main character, you might be missing out.
All of frameworks I've used allow you to drop down to straight SQL for database work, ignore their models and templating (or substitute others), and completely mess up the MVC pattern, if you want. Django goes the farthest towards restricting your options in the latter respect, but it's still possible.
I know you're somewhat kidding, but I just wanted to note that the reason for a framework is above all to have a starting point. Some frameworks do a much better job at that than others, but that's the purpose. If the only purpose was to restrict, they'd be more annoying than not, and people wouldn't use them by choice at all.