If I choose to make a posting on my own blog, or here on Slashdot, or (fill in the blank), of course that should be my right, political or not-and it is. No one's stopping me, and no one's stopping you either.
Considering McCain-Feingold, that is far from clear. Do you pay hosting fees for your blog? Aha, that's "money" and not "speech". And what about the time you spend blogging when you could be working? The opportunity cost of your time is obviously equivalent to a cash donation. (Don't laugh; that's not much of a stretch from what the IRS does with "imputed income").
If I'm wrong, when was your last visit from the FEC?
Random bloggers are probably safe, just like downloading a few songs probably won't get you sued. But there's massive potential for abuse via selective enforcement. Think Bush vs democraticunderground or Hillary vs freerepublic.
However, maybe if we stopped allowing whites to publically slur other races sooner, we could have ended segregation sooner, prevented Japanese Americans from being sent to internment camps, and prevented our own ethnic crimes from being committed in Tuskeegee.
All of those travesties were committed by racist governments. Such governments are not going to pass racist speech laws (at least not laws they intend to enforce), and non-racist governments aren't going to commit such actions regardless of whether racist speech is illegal. In terms of the effect of those laws on the general public, as you said we can look at Europe, and when we do we find lots of racism still. It may be swept under the table more than it is in the US, but that's worse.
You can't cry fire in a crowded theater
That "speech" has no expressive content; its only purpose is to cause chaos and destruction. "Race X is evil" may be intended to cause chaos, but it doesn't do so in the immediate situation, and also expresses an (almost certainly moronic, but usually sincere) opinion.
you can't call Bush a baby killer without proof
Sure you can, otherwise there would be a whole lot of leftists in prison. (That's because "public figures" have less protection against libel and slander than ordinary citizens, which is necessary so that political debates don't end up with everyone involved being arrested).
you should not be able to go onto a radio show and say blacks and jews are causing an increase in crime and disease and should be thrown in jails.
That slope is very slippery and it's not going to stop right where you want it to. Take your example: there are loads of data showing that blacks commit violent crimes at higher frequencies than whites. Criminalize "racist" speech and you'll stop people from mentioning or researching things like that for fear of prosecution, which will also stifle attempts at finding ways to improve things.
that's just the nextstep classes (NS*). none of cocoa.
The OpenStep classes are a large portion of Cocoa, and GNUstep is adding many of Apple's new ObjC APIs. Some recent additions like bindings and CoreImage aren't supported, but you can write nontrivial programs that work on both OS X and GNUstep.
Unfortunately, Apple is no longer developing Java/Cocoa.
Not unfortunate at all. Java was never a good fit for Cocoa because it's insufficiently dynamic. (For example, every ObjC method had to be manually exposed as a Java native method, because Java has no way to intercept unknown method calls at runtime and forward them to other objects). Check out PyObjC which gives you full access to Cocoa from Python.
The Safari bundle is 20 MB and is without doubt Objective-C, at least for the most part.
Actually it's mostly non-code resources. The Safari executable itself (Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari) is 1.1MB, and the WebCore binary at (WebKit.framework/Frameworks/WebCore.framework/Ver sions/Current/WebCore) is 5.3MB.
In the same way, Ruby (and Smalltalk) also do not make compromises. They say 'everything is an object' even though that means computations are 20x slower even after decades of optimization.
And considering our computers are *way* more than 20x faster than they were when Smalltalk was created, this shouldn't be an issue. But everybody likes to make pretty graphs out of benchmarks and forget that programmer time is much more expensive than CPU time.
They say 'no type checking' (if it acts like a duck it is) even though it is pretty much a necessity for large or reliable systems.
Apple and other OS X developers seem to do pretty well with Objective-C.
it was the first language with reflection designed into its core, and it was the first language to bring OOP, Virtual Machine, and cross-platform capabilities together into a workable package.
So tell me, why would you prefer the first over the second?
The first can be reused when you're searching something other than a SQL database, for example an in-memory array. Also, the first is easier to parameterize since you don't have to manually build SQL query strings.
Teaching it, learning it, believing it is protected by the constitution.
Sure. You can believe in whatever creation myths you want and teach them to your kids. But public schools (i.e. government institutions) cannot teach religion fraudulently masquerading as science.
This will give Bill O'reilly a whole show's worth of material.
It most certainly is. If somebody found a dinosaur fossil from 20,000 years ago, or a modern human from 500 million years ago, evolution would need to be rethought.
Why do you believe in evolution? You have no real proof it happend, you have to take it on faith that it did.
Do you believe the nation of Ethiopia exists? Ever been there, or do you just take it on "faith"?
I believe evolution is religion because it is the only scientific theory in the mass public's mind that has been trying to be prooved scientifically for last hundred+ years, with _no_ credible results
Ah, so you're just a liar. Thanks for clearing that up.
Bull-cocky. He explicitly referred to intrinsic -- meaning biological -- differences in aptitude being dominant over social and discriminatory factors.
That was the second of his three reasons. The first, which he placed the most weight on, was differing levels of desire to work in "high-powered jobs". He also specifically mentions differences in preferences relevant to engineering positions.
in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude
In many traits, including IQ, men appear to have a higher standard deviation than women. (This makes sense if you think about it; there are fundamental evolutionary reasons why it's better for nature to "gamble" with males than with females). So if you're looking at Nobel prize candidates, you may be 4 standard deviations out for males, but 5 for females. If you want to dispute the premises that's fine, but Summers's conclusions follow directly from them. (And if you do reject the premises, I hope you it's for a better reason than not liking the consequences). And again, this does not mean that any specific woman is incapable of being at the top of any field, nor does it justify sex discrimination.
Sure, "around", but how about "competing for promotions"?
Why would it be worse to compete with females than males for promotions?
Is the Dean of a major university saying exactly that not overt enough for you?
If you're referring to Larry Summers, that's a misrepresentation of what he said. His claim was that *on average*, men are more interested in technical fields, and there's strong evidence that this is true. (Whether it's due to biological or social issues is a separate matter). That in no way implies that any particular woman is unqualified for technical work, only that a disparity in gender ratios is not automatic proof of discrimination.
The only part of the gender gap that "may or may not be simply the nature of things"* is the tendency of a privileged group to feel threatened by and try to exclude another group from joining and possibly stealing their privilege.
I'm pretty sure the majority of male IT workers would be quite happy to have a higher percentage of females around.
I'm starting to think that the entire libertarian/Libertarian movement/party was secretly funded by Fortune 500 companies
Unlikely. Big companies *like* regulation, because it raises barriers to entry and makes them more of an oligopoly. And many companies have found it profitable to bribe Congress to enforce their business models at gunpoint.
So if prices are high it's because of gouging, and if they're low it's because workers are being exploited. I'm sensing just a tiny bit of preconceived notions here.
What Apple has to be scared shitless about, however, is Microsoft killing Office for OS X.
I'd be surprised if Apple doesn't have a skunkworks office suite under development (quite possibly based on OpenOffice), which could be released in a matter of weeks if MS dumps Office.
As I was thinking about this, I realized that this is like MS-DOS on steroids.
Well yeah, in the same sense that Unix is DOS on steroids.
I know this analogy is not entirely correct, but wasn't the point of Win9x that it put the gui INTO the kernel?
No. The point of Win9x was to look like Mac OS. Moving the GUI into the kernel was a poorly thought out premature optimization. Microsoft is doing the right thing by changing that.
Yes they are, coding in Ruby or Python is actually geniuinely fun and rewarding. Not having the language go in the way and prevent you from thinking about the program (the forest) because you have to think about the code (the tree) is like discovering programmation over again.
This is absolutely true. After wanting to take a look at Python for a while, I finally wrote my first program in it this weekend. It's a simple script that finds all words in a Boggle grid. (Useful for cheating here). It took maybe an hour of looking up the proper syntax for reading files and creating lists and such (all of which are intuitive and easy to remember, unlike Perl), and it worked perfectly on the first run. It was only then that I realized how little code it had taken and how *pretty* it was: Java would have had loads of redundant code with classes and casts and explicit list creation and copying, and Perl would have had about the same line count but peppered with inane "@$" prefixes for the lists of lists.
Python is good. Check it out, even if you think the significant whitespace is silly. (I'm still undecided; I don't like being at the mercy of how text editors interpret spacing, but it does improve readability somewhat).
Re:The real 90s versus outdated 00s software
on
Java Is So 90s
·
· Score: 1
and compare this: File f=new File("file.foo"); BufferedInputSTream bis=new BufferedInputStream(new FileInputStream(f)); while( (br.readLine()!=null)... or open (FILE, "file.foo"); @f=; foreach(@f){
Right. And that's why I'm starting to really like Python: f = open("file.foo","r"); for line in f.readlines():
blah(line)
Only slightly more verbose than Perl, but far more readable.
I get identical results running the "exploit" on OS X 10.4.2. Taking a sample of Firefox when it relaunches confirms that it's spending a lot of time in nsGlobalHistory::OpenDB(), and ultimately in memory allocations and frees as it reads the huge entry. It does eventually finish and then behaves normally. This isn't a security hole, and it's only a DOS in the sense that Javascript of "while (1) {}" is.
Slashdot Mirror
If I choose to make a posting on my own blog, or here on Slashdot, or (fill in the blank), of course that should be my right, political or not-and it is. No one's stopping me, and no one's stopping you either.
Considering McCain-Feingold, that is far from clear. Do you pay hosting fees for your blog? Aha, that's "money" and not "speech". And what about the time you spend blogging when you could be working? The opportunity cost of your time is obviously equivalent to a cash donation. (Don't laugh; that's not much of a stretch from what the IRS does with "imputed income").
If I'm wrong, when was your last visit from the FEC?
Random bloggers are probably safe, just like downloading a few songs probably won't get you sued. But there's massive potential for abuse via selective enforcement. Think Bush vs democraticunderground or Hillary vs freerepublic.
However, maybe if we stopped allowing whites to publically slur other races sooner, we could have ended segregation sooner, prevented Japanese Americans from being sent to internment camps, and prevented our own ethnic crimes from being committed in Tuskeegee.
All of those travesties were committed by racist governments. Such governments are not going to pass racist speech laws (at least not laws they intend to enforce), and non-racist governments aren't going to commit such actions regardless of whether racist speech is illegal. In terms of the effect of those laws on the general public, as you said we can look at Europe, and when we do we find lots of racism still. It may be swept under the table more than it is in the US, but that's worse.
You can't cry fire in a crowded theater
That "speech" has no expressive content; its only purpose is to cause chaos and destruction. "Race X is evil" may be intended to cause chaos, but it doesn't do so in the immediate situation, and also expresses an (almost certainly moronic, but usually sincere) opinion.
you can't call Bush a baby killer without proof
Sure you can, otherwise there would be a whole lot of leftists in prison. (That's because "public figures" have less protection against libel and slander than ordinary citizens, which is necessary so that political debates don't end up with everyone involved being arrested).
you should not be able to go onto a radio show and say blacks and jews are causing an increase in crime and disease and should be thrown in jails.
That slope is very slippery and it's not going to stop right where you want it to. Take your example: there are loads of data showing that blacks commit violent crimes at higher frequencies than whites. Criminalize "racist" speech and you'll stop people from mentioning or researching things like that for fear of prosecution, which will also stifle attempts at finding ways to improve things.
that's just the nextstep classes (NS*). none of cocoa.
The OpenStep classes are a large portion of Cocoa, and GNUstep is adding many of Apple's new ObjC APIs. Some recent additions like bindings and CoreImage aren't supported, but you can write nontrivial programs that work on both OS X and GNUstep.
Unfortunately, Apple is no longer developing Java/Cocoa.
Not unfortunate at all. Java was never a good fit for Cocoa because it's insufficiently dynamic. (For example, every ObjC method had to be manually exposed as a Java native method, because Java has no way to intercept unknown method calls at runtime and forward them to other objects). Check out PyObjC which gives you full access to Cocoa from Python.
try porting an osx objc application to win32/linux? no chance in hell.
Not necessarily.
The Safari bundle is 20 MB and is without doubt Objective-C, at least for the most part.
r sions/Current/WebCore) is 5.3MB.
Actually it's mostly non-code resources. The Safari executable itself (Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari) is 1.1MB, and the WebCore binary at (WebKit.framework/Frameworks/WebCore.framework/Ve
I don't understand why people hate pointers. Is it the fear of memory math? What's going on?
It's the nondeterministic bugs when you read or write to invalid pointers, and the risk of security holes via buffer overruns.
Function pointers are probably my favorite thing about low-level languages
Any decent high-level language has equivalent or superior functionality.
In the same way, Ruby (and Smalltalk) also do not make compromises. They say 'everything is an object' even though that means computations are 20x slower even after decades of optimization.
And considering our computers are *way* more than 20x faster than they were when Smalltalk was created, this shouldn't be an issue. But everybody likes to make pretty graphs out of benchmarks and forget that programmer time is much more expensive than CPU time.
They say 'no type checking' (if it acts like a duck it is) even though it is pretty much a necessity for large or reliable systems.
Apple and other OS X developers seem to do pretty well with Objective-C.
it was the first language with reflection designed into its core, and it was the first language to bring OOP, Virtual Machine, and cross-platform capabilities together into a workable package.
Smalltalk.
So tell me, why would you prefer the first over the second?
The first can be reused when you're searching something other than a SQL database, for example an in-memory array. Also, the first is easier to parameterize since you don't have to manually build SQL query strings.
Teaching it, learning it, believing it is protected by the constitution.
Sure. You can believe in whatever creation myths you want and teach them to your kids. But public schools (i.e. government institutions) cannot teach religion fraudulently masquerading as science.
This will give Bill O'reilly a whole show's worth of material.
No doubt several.
No they aren't, it's not falsifiable.
It most certainly is. If somebody found a dinosaur fossil from 20,000 years ago, or a modern human from 500 million years ago, evolution would need to be rethought.
Why do you believe in evolution? You have no real proof it happend, you have to take it on faith that it did.
Do you believe the nation of Ethiopia exists? Ever been there, or do you just take it on "faith"?
I believe evolution is religion because it is the only scientific theory in the mass public's mind that has been trying to be prooved scientifically for last hundred+ years, with _no_ credible results
Ah, so you're just a liar. Thanks for clearing that up.
But it's not science (and in many ways is the opposite of science), and doesn't belong in ANY science classes.
Actually I think it should be mentioned in science class, as an example of what science is *not*.
Bull-cocky. He explicitly referred to intrinsic -- meaning biological -- differences in aptitude being dominant over social and discriminatory factors.
That was the second of his three reasons. The first, which he placed the most weight on, was differing levels of desire to work in "high-powered jobs". He also specifically mentions differences in preferences relevant to engineering positions.
in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude
In many traits, including IQ, men appear to have a higher standard deviation than women. (This makes sense if you think about it; there are fundamental evolutionary reasons why it's better for nature to "gamble" with males than with females). So if you're looking at Nobel prize candidates, you may be 4 standard deviations out for males, but 5 for females. If you want to dispute the premises that's fine, but Summers's conclusions follow directly from them. (And if you do reject the premises, I hope you it's for a better reason than not liking the consequences). And again, this does not mean that any specific woman is incapable of being at the top of any field, nor does it justify sex discrimination.
Sure, "around", but how about "competing for promotions"?
Why would it be worse to compete with females than males for promotions?
It's geeks like that who ruin it for us girl geeks. Marrying non-techies, shame on you ;)
Supply and demand is still way in your favor. Whether any of the supply appeals to you is another matter.
Is the Dean of a major university saying exactly that not overt enough for you?
If you're referring to Larry Summers, that's a misrepresentation of what he said. His claim was that *on average*, men are more interested in technical fields, and there's strong evidence that this is true. (Whether it's due to biological or social issues is a separate matter). That in no way implies that any particular woman is unqualified for technical work, only that a disparity in gender ratios is not automatic proof of discrimination.
The only part of the gender gap that "may or may not be simply the nature of things"* is the tendency of a privileged group to feel threatened by and try to exclude another group from joining and possibly stealing their privilege.
I'm pretty sure the majority of male IT workers would be quite happy to have a higher percentage of females around.
I'm starting to think that the entire libertarian/Libertarian movement/party was secretly funded by Fortune 500 companies
Unlikely. Big companies *like* regulation, because it raises barriers to entry and makes them more of an oligopoly. And many companies have found it profitable to bribe Congress to enforce their business models at gunpoint.
So if prices are high it's because of gouging, and if they're low it's because workers are being exploited. I'm sensing just a tiny bit of preconceived notions here.
The only real solution is to overthrow the capitalist giants
Those advocating the destruction of consumers' rights are not capitalists; they are rent-seeking corporatists.
What Apple has to be scared shitless about, however, is Microsoft killing Office for OS X.
I'd be surprised if Apple doesn't have a skunkworks office suite under development (quite possibly based on OpenOffice), which could be released in a matter of weeks if MS dumps Office.
As I was thinking about this, I realized that this is like MS-DOS on steroids.
Well yeah, in the same sense that Unix is DOS on steroids.
I know this analogy is not entirely correct, but wasn't the point of Win9x that it put the gui INTO the kernel?
No. The point of Win9x was to look like Mac OS. Moving the GUI into the kernel was a poorly thought out premature optimization. Microsoft is doing the right thing by changing that.
Yes they are, coding in Ruby or Python is actually geniuinely fun and rewarding. Not having the language go in the way and prevent you from thinking about the program (the forest) because you have to think about the code (the tree) is like discovering programmation over again.
This is absolutely true. After wanting to take a look at Python for a while, I finally wrote my first program in it this weekend. It's a simple script that finds all words in a Boggle grid. (Useful for cheating here). It took maybe an hour of looking up the proper syntax for reading files and creating lists and such (all of which are intuitive and easy to remember, unlike Perl), and it worked perfectly on the first run. It was only then that I realized how little code it had taken and how *pretty* it was: Java would have had loads of redundant code with classes and casts and explicit list creation and copying, and Perl would have had about the same line count but peppered with inane "@$" prefixes for the lists of lists.
Python is good. Check it out, even if you think the significant whitespace is silly. (I'm still undecided; I don't like being at the mercy of how text editors interpret spacing, but it does improve readability somewhat).
and compare this: File f=new File("file.foo"); BufferedInputSTream bis=new BufferedInputStream(new FileInputStream(f)); while( (br.readLine()!=null) ... or open (FILE, "file.foo"); @f=; foreach(@f){
Right. And that's why I'm starting to really like Python:
f = open("file.foo","r");
for line in f.readlines():
blah(line)
Only slightly more verbose than Perl, but far more readable.
I get identical results running the "exploit" on OS X 10.4.2. Taking a sample of Firefox when it relaunches confirms that it's spending a lot of time in nsGlobalHistory::OpenDB(), and ultimately in memory allocations and frees as it reads the huge entry. It does eventually finish and then behaves normally. This isn't a security hole, and it's only a DOS in the sense that Javascript of "while (1) {}" is.
I think the self checkouts cause more problems than they solve.
No question. A couple of grocery stores in my area installed them a few years ago but ended up removing them. Good idea, lousy implementation.