You are absolutely right if the project only ever has to support a single UI option. However, products that expect to be around for a few years accumulate dozens of such options. At this point, nobody has the bandwidth to test every possible configuration or fix bugs that only affect a few users who chose a particular combination. The code which is not used in default configuration is likely to not work properly with new core code, not be ported to additional platforms and plain look ugly with main UI which is skinned for a particular layout. Users who try the product on someone else's machine walk away with a negative impression as it has been customized to something that most people find unusable.
On the other hand, if you fix the UI, lots of users will complain initially. A majority of those will quickly adjust and stop noticing the difference. Some will walk away or fork the project. However, for those that stick around are much more likely to find that the UI functions properly in the manner intended than if the attention of developers was spread among thousands of possible configurations.
It's a basic choice for a project developer to do one thing well or provide many options where some or all do not work quite as well.
Dead person does indeed have specific rights. For example copyrights are (unfortunately) preserved after death and assigned to the next of kin or more commonly the employer. The body is protected by law from desecration or medical use which has not been explicitly agreed upon by the deceased.
But more importantly, this young man most probably used his computer and online accounts to communicate with living people. If he was having sex with some girl, she may not want that to be widely known. If he did a PHP project for some company, that project does not become family's property. Gmail is also not dead and it's not permissible to hack their account regardless if you theoretically have legal rights to the content within.
That said, if your friend's brother was below 18, parents may have a legal right to use his accounts and even to have Google and MSN reset passwords to let them examine e-mail. Also, if the computer legally belongs to them, it could be legally permissible to hack local content. Even if not, it would be pretty much impossible to prosecute such activity that takes place entirely on and upon someone's own property. You may well find Gmail and MSN passwords in a swapfile or browser cache. Although it might be still illegal to login, again it would be undetectable.
Actually, curing cancer is one area where you would expect the best minds to work for the cause, not for money (provided they get enough salary to support their family) but you probably want ONLY such people to work on it. Otherwise you have the situation where companies abandon work on prevention and cures to make the most money off ongoing treatment, conduct unethical trials or cover up untoward results and refuse to grant free patent licenses to countries where most patients will not be able to afford medicine costs otherwise. It is additionally in everyone's interest to both pay for education of people who show talent in this area and to contribute taxes toward government grants that will pay them a reasonable middle class salary.
Most software is not a life-and-death necessity, so there is far less need to cover development with grants or require licensing safeguards to ensure continued access if the vendor folds. Still one could argue that a basic operating system, web browser, e-mail client, word processor and Internet access are essential in a persons participation in society and even access to government and should be available at no cost to all citizens. Experience has shown that hobbyists do not need government grants to fill in this need. However, some action may be needed to ensure that government uses open standards and hardware vendors release driver specs to ensure feasibility of free software.
All your data is transfered unencrypted and, with Web 2.0 "revolution", on servers accessible to outsourced personal in jurisdictions with questionable privacy laws. I hope this is a wake up call for widespread adoption of IPSec/SSL and return to hosting content on your own machine, like it was meant to be at inception of Internet and World Wide Web. Opportunistic encryption solutions can exchange public keys with assumption of trust during the first communication between two given users. Law enforcement or black hats who start to listen in later will not get much once your circle of online friends is established.
We are still working on stimulating private fire department services. After all, the temperatures are nothing compared to the heat of reentry into Earth atmosphere and the payoff for individuals investing to have this service is much more immediate than that for building a space elevator.
Why are you equating the break up of Soviet Union with downfall of communism? Those are orthogonal events and separation of various republics was motivated much more by racism and religious intolerance rather desire for capitalism or democracy. The break up resulted in many (all?) republics falling under control of local warlords and conditions more conductive to reemergence of communism than successful market economy. In Russia proper, the discontent over dissolution of the union resulted in the election of a dictator who is undermining much of the progress that Gorbachev set into motion.
Registering an.su domain can be expression of a desire for a country with stable market economy, working democracy and rule of law and order rather than a bunch of mafia men.
So seriously, what do you suggest? A total ban on peanut and bee cultivation? Forcing every web developer, even a one-person startup entrepreneur, to hire a blind QA person? Banning AJAX? I hope you are at least willing to make similar concessions to other people with special needs. For example, I am pretty sure my daughter is allergic to gunshots and polar bears are allergic to CO2 melting away their habitat. Are you up to giving up your firearm and SUV?
If you really look at all the facts regarding Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, you will see that there were many more factors in at least the choice of targets than crippling Japanese military and ending WW II. Japan was ready to negotiate peace with Soviet Union. The cities were specifically chosen because they were NOT military targets and were undamaged by prior conventional bombing. A whole lot of folks, including unborn fetuses conceived long after the bombing, were harmed or killed simply for the sake of experimentation with new weapon technology and showing the world who is the boss.
Regarding tax, would you prefer everyone to pay for the cost of accounting involved in making sure your taxes are not directly and indirectly used for financing abortions? I can make a case for religious objections to road maintenance. We are destroying God's creation by refusing to walk to our job, restaurant or grocery store. Besides carbon pollution, dying of preventable obesity or heart attack is a kind of suicide. Would you allow people not to pay any taxes at all by claiming that their fringe religion objects to ANY government programs? I think America will experience a sudden rise in spirituality, but a dramatic fall in living standards. I would rather have either a) a democratic allocation of spending or b) having people who opt out pay for the cost of accounting of their particular tax returns.
Java source can be fed into static analysis tools that will guarantee that your HashMap will only contain Doubles, and never any other type of Object. You are either trolling or are dangerously misinformed about Java.
I don't like STL for this reason, among many others. It's trivial to defined classes that disallow default copy constructor/assignment, or do reference counting.
Your home business expenses are also legal. How would you like en experienced lawyer to sift through your house and forward any items that need further proof for an IRS audit, as well as positing them on Internet for all your neighbors to see?
Well, if the robot has ED, he can shake his gun all he wants, be he sure as hell doesn't shoot very far.
Re:Skill and not language used?
on
The Return of Ada
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· Score: 2, Insightful
That is, for those bugs that make it past the relatively extensive automated checks that are possible because of the straightforward syntax.
Are we talking about the same old Java that doesn't support typedefs and uses Object for all standard data structures? Generics add a bit of syntactic sugar, but do little to ensure safety. You can cast a HashMap to HashMap without any way to check if it is valid at compile OR run time. Compared to that, C++ can be used for safer programming by encapsulating all pointers into template classes and relying on local destructors for reliable memory management.
Anything that's designed or directly intended to end an innocent person's life, no matter the reason, should not be paid for with my money. So basically 1) You wouldn't pay taxes for WW II effort, since air bombing of Berlin (not to mention Hiroshima!) killed way more innocent civilians than soldiers and 2) you expect to get the money as a tax refund rather than redirecting it to some other government program as a contentious objector. Interesting. My religion is opposed to road maintenance.
You may think aborting 2 fetuses in a sextuplet pregnancy to get the other 4 a chance to survive is worth than waging a war where some civilians might get hurt to supposedly save lives of more civilians. I disagree, and perhaps we should each get a chance to opt out of funding respective programs. But personally benefiting from such decisions financially casts serious doubts on a person's motive and on why the society should accommodate that person's inconvenient beliefs.
So do most american citizens believe they should be fined $100K for each MP3 shared on LimeWire? That somebody should take 10% of their hard earned money and use it to kill people half way across the globe? That they shouldn't have an option of voting for a pro-market economy, anti-tax, pro-environment and pro-choice candidate in a presidential election?
Clearly we lack the mechanism to set consistent rules in "fair, non-authoritarian fashion by a group process".
So who decides who is a crook and who is not? We The People.
In the perfect world, we would have a working democracy and organizations like RIAA would be legally disbanded and their money redistributed to their victims (such as artists) or used for worthwhile social programs. Unfortunately, we have a two-party system that stacked the rules to prevent election of grass-root candidates. Truly courageous people should join an uprising to restore working democracy. But in the meantime, stealing some money out of the system to weaken it's power can also be a noble act.
Even if there were little risk and great reward, some people have a moral system that would still prohibit them from undertaking a life of crime. But if you think about it, the highest moral system would actually push people into life of crime. There are lots of evil entities that need stealing from (nuclear weapons manufacturing, Bin Laden family in Saudi Arabia, Dick Cheney, Microsoft, RIAA,...) and lots of hungry children in Africa. It's not immoral to steal from crooks!
Ok, a woman whose fetus is medically certain to die in womb or shortly after birth. A woman who must for health reasons keep taking medication which will severely harm the fetus and for which no safer alternative is available. A partial abortion for a sextuplet pregnancy which otherwise likely to end in complete miscarriage. A confirmed statement from two independent psychiatrists that the women is so distraught by the pregnancy she is likely to harm herself and the fetus and/or end up in looney bin for the rest of her life, and there is no effective treatment that doesn't run into the second scenario. As in every other case, if a legitimate medical professional says that the procedure is medically necessary, it's reasonable to cover it with tax money as a form of collective insurance from which anyone can potentially benefit.
If people want to do abortions (or plastic surgery, gender reassignment, performance-enhancement drugs, alternative medicine, life support for brain-dead patients) for the heck of it, they should come up with their own finances. This is separate from the question of legality, but in US there is such a bitter disagreement on all these issues that it will HAVE to be decided on state-by-state basis.
I have no problem, in principal, with people opting out of specific uses of their own tax money as long as they still pay the same or more tax overall. However, in practice this will cause widespread cheating and enormous accounting problems. Money earmarked for government worker lunch program may end up being used for launches in a public clinic that happens to do abortions, freeing more money from other people on the procedure itself.
It's no use having all the networks if they are going to stop working in several years, after IPV4 address space runs out. The fair question would be which countries networks can be upgraded to IPV6 with minimum effort. Full support for systems that need inbound connectivity, working NAT gateways for the rest.
Those are low-resolution photos of someone's driveway. Fume all your want, the outside of your house is not legally private. You may get upset by me standing on a public road and gawking at it for the whole day, but there is not anything you can do about that (unless I make any threatening comments about my future intent).
Slashdot Mirror
You are absolutely right if the project only ever has to support a single UI option. However, products that expect to be around for a few years accumulate dozens of such options. At this point, nobody has the bandwidth to test every possible configuration or fix bugs that only affect a few users who chose a particular combination. The code which is not used in default configuration is likely to not work properly with new core code, not be ported to additional platforms and plain look ugly with main UI which is skinned for a particular layout. Users who try the product on someone else's machine walk away with a negative impression as it has been customized to something that most people find unusable.
On the other hand, if you fix the UI, lots of users will complain initially. A majority of those will quickly adjust and stop noticing the difference. Some will walk away or fork the project. However, for those that stick around are much more likely to find that the UI functions properly in the manner intended than if the attention of developers was spread among thousands of possible configurations.
It's a basic choice for a project developer to do one thing well or provide many options where some or all do not work quite as well.
Dead person does indeed have specific rights. For example copyrights are (unfortunately) preserved after death and assigned to the next of kin or more commonly the employer. The body is protected by law from desecration or medical use which has not been explicitly agreed upon by the deceased.
But more importantly, this young man most probably used his computer and online accounts to communicate with living people. If he was having sex with some girl, she may not want that to be widely known. If he did a PHP project for some company, that project does not become family's property. Gmail is also not dead and it's not permissible to hack their account regardless if you theoretically have legal rights to the content within.
That said, if your friend's brother was below 18, parents may have a legal right to use his accounts and even to have Google and MSN reset passwords to let them examine e-mail. Also, if the computer legally belongs to them, it could be legally permissible to hack local content. Even if not, it would be pretty much impossible to prosecute such activity that takes place entirely on and upon someone's own property. You may well find Gmail and MSN passwords in a swapfile or browser cache. Although it might be still illegal to login, again it would be undetectable.
It is very fascinating if you can take half a year off your job for a murder trial, don't have small kids at home and do not take family vacations.
If they are able to distinguish between encrypted data and JPEG images, the encryption used is seriously flawed.
It will become an unpopular ISP once people realize that they are not allowed to use BitTorrent, play multiuser games or videoconference.
Actually, curing cancer is one area where you would expect the best minds to work for the cause, not for money (provided they get enough salary to support their family) but you probably want ONLY such people to work on it. Otherwise you have the situation where companies abandon work on prevention and cures to make the most money off ongoing treatment, conduct unethical trials or cover up untoward results and refuse to grant free patent licenses to countries where most patients will not be able to afford medicine costs otherwise. It is additionally in everyone's interest to both pay for education of people who show talent in this area and to contribute taxes toward government grants that will pay them a reasonable middle class salary.
Most software is not a life-and-death necessity, so there is far less need to cover development with grants or require licensing safeguards to ensure continued access if the vendor folds. Still one could argue that a basic operating system, web browser, e-mail client, word processor and Internet access are essential in a persons participation in society and even access to government and should be available at no cost to all citizens. Experience has shown that hobbyists do not need government grants to fill in this need. However, some action may be needed to ensure that government uses open standards and hardware vendors release driver specs to ensure feasibility of free software.
All your data is transfered unencrypted and, with Web 2.0 "revolution", on servers accessible to outsourced personal in jurisdictions with questionable privacy laws. I hope this is a wake up call for widespread adoption of IPSec/SSL and return to hosting content on your own machine, like it was meant to be at inception of Internet and World Wide Web. Opportunistic encryption solutions can exchange public keys with assumption of trust during the first communication between two given users. Law enforcement or black hats who start to listen in later will not get much once your circle of online friends is established.
We are still working on stimulating private fire department services. After all, the temperatures are nothing compared to the heat of reentry into Earth atmosphere and the payoff for individuals investing to have this service is much more immediate than that for building a space elevator.
Why are you equating the break up of Soviet Union with downfall of communism? Those are orthogonal events and separation of various republics was motivated much more by racism and religious intolerance rather desire for capitalism or democracy. The break up resulted in many (all?) republics falling under control of local warlords and conditions more conductive to reemergence of communism than successful market economy. In Russia proper, the discontent over dissolution of the union resulted in the election of a dictator who is undermining much of the progress that Gorbachev set into motion.
.su domain can be expression of a desire for a country with stable market economy, working democracy and rule of law and order rather than a bunch of mafia men.
Registering an
So seriously, what do you suggest? A total ban on peanut and bee cultivation? Forcing every web developer, even a one-person startup entrepreneur, to hire a blind QA person? Banning AJAX? I hope you are at least willing to make similar concessions to other people with special needs. For example, I am pretty sure my daughter is allergic to gunshots and polar bears are allergic to CO2 melting away their habitat. Are you up to giving up your firearm and SUV?
If you really look at all the facts regarding Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, you will see that there were many more factors in at least the choice of targets than crippling Japanese military and ending WW II. Japan was ready to negotiate peace with Soviet Union. The cities were specifically chosen because they were NOT military targets and were undamaged by prior conventional bombing. A whole lot of folks, including unborn fetuses conceived long after the bombing, were harmed or killed simply for the sake of experimentation with new weapon technology and showing the world who is the boss.
Regarding tax, would you prefer everyone to pay for the cost of accounting involved in making sure your taxes are not directly and indirectly used for financing abortions? I can make a case for religious objections to road maintenance. We are destroying God's creation by refusing to walk to our job, restaurant or grocery store. Besides carbon pollution, dying of preventable obesity or heart attack is a kind of suicide. Would you allow people not to pay any taxes at all by claiming that their fringe religion objects to ANY government programs? I think America will experience a sudden rise in spirituality, but a dramatic fall in living standards. I would rather have either a) a democratic allocation of spending or b) having people who opt out pay for the cost of accounting of their particular tax returns.
I don't like STL for this reason, among many others. It's trivial to defined classes that disallow default copy constructor/assignment, or do reference counting.
Your home business expenses are also legal. How would you like en experienced lawyer to sift through your house and forward any items that need further proof for an IRS audit, as well as positing them on Internet for all your neighbors to see?
Well, if the robot has ED, he can shake his gun all he wants, be he sure as hell doesn't shoot very far.
That is, for those bugs that make it past the relatively extensive automated checks that are possible because of the straightforward syntax.
Are we talking about the same old Java that doesn't support typedefs and uses Object for all standard data structures? Generics add a bit of syntactic sugar, but do little to ensure safety. You can cast a HashMap to HashMap without any way to check if it is valid at compile OR run time. Compared to that, C++ can be used for safer programming by encapsulating all pointers into template classes and relying on local destructors for reliable memory management.
You may think aborting 2 fetuses in a sextuplet pregnancy to get the other 4 a chance to survive is worth than waging a war where some civilians might get hurt to supposedly save lives of more civilians. I disagree, and perhaps we should each get a chance to opt out of funding respective programs. But personally benefiting from such decisions financially casts serious doubts on a person's motive and on why the society should accommodate that person's inconvenient beliefs.
So do most american citizens believe they should be fined $100K for each MP3 shared on LimeWire? That somebody should take 10% of their hard earned money and use it to kill people half way across the globe? That they shouldn't have an option of voting for a pro-market economy, anti-tax, pro-environment and pro-choice candidate in a presidential election?
Clearly we lack the mechanism to set consistent rules in "fair, non-authoritarian fashion by a group process".
Oh really? Even if I actually travel to Africa and personally hand out hot soup in the cities?
In the perfect world, we would have a working democracy and organizations like RIAA would be legally disbanded and their money redistributed to their victims (such as artists) or used for worthwhile social programs. Unfortunately, we have a two-party system that stacked the rules to prevent election of grass-root candidates. Truly courageous people should join an uprising to restore working democracy. But in the meantime, stealing some money out of the system to weaken it's power can also be a noble act.
Making money by creating value vs making money by just taking it from other people. Hmm.. what's going to easier?
There are after all established concepts of taxes, payday loans and patents that pretty much amount to the same thing.
Ok, a woman whose fetus is medically certain to die in womb or shortly after birth. A woman who must for health reasons keep taking medication which will severely harm the fetus and for which no safer alternative is available. A partial abortion for a sextuplet pregnancy which otherwise likely to end in complete miscarriage. A confirmed statement from two independent psychiatrists that the women is so distraught by the pregnancy she is likely to harm herself and the fetus and/or end up in looney bin for the rest of her life, and there is no effective treatment that doesn't run into the second scenario. As in every other case, if a legitimate medical professional says that the procedure is medically necessary, it's reasonable to cover it with tax money as a form of collective insurance from which anyone can potentially benefit.
If people want to do abortions (or plastic surgery, gender reassignment, performance-enhancement drugs, alternative medicine, life support for brain-dead patients) for the heck of it, they should come up with their own finances. This is separate from the question of legality, but in US there is such a bitter disagreement on all these issues that it will HAVE to be decided on state-by-state basis.
I have no problem, in principal, with people opting out of specific uses of their own tax money as long as they still pay the same or more tax overall. However, in practice this will cause widespread cheating and enormous accounting problems. Money earmarked for government worker lunch program may end up being used for launches in a public clinic that happens to do abortions, freeing more money from other people on the procedure itself.
It's no use having all the networks if they are going to stop working in several years, after IPV4 address space runs out. The fair question would be which countries networks can be upgraded to IPV6 with minimum effort. Full support for systems that need inbound connectivity, working NAT gateways for the rest.
Those are low-resolution photos of someone's driveway. Fume all your want, the outside of your house is not legally private. You may get upset by me standing on a public road and gawking at it for the whole day, but there is not anything you can do about that (unless I make any threatening comments about my future intent).
Did people forget how to buy curtains?