I thought about this for five seconds in pseudo assembler, then my brain started leaking...
Leaking is especially apropos, because you should be thinking about encapsulation -- keeping implementation details from leaking --, not inheritance.
I actually did a toy program or two -- very toy, class assignments -- in assembly after I knew C++, and consciously employed an Object Oriented outlook in designing the programs.
This really is easier than it might seem at first: the second biggest hurdle -- and the most important first step -- to OO design is to always think of the entities in your program as objects with responsibilities.
(The biggest hurdle is discovering -- and I use the word "discovering" intentionally, because it's a iterative process of exploring your problem domain -- where to "carve nature at the joints", or where one object ends and the next starts. Alas, a further discussion of this hurdle is beyond the scope of this comment.)
Given that you keep in mind that you're dealing with objects, and that OO requires you to do so polymorphically, -- that is, you want to be able to do the same sorts of things with objects of different sizes and shapes -- you'll quickly find that you need a level of indirection, some stand-in for the actual object, a proxy that is itself the same size and shape for every kind of different object. In C (and C++ and Java) that "same-ness" proxy is a pointer; in perl, it's a hash, which the language conveniently handles the pointing to; in assembly it's a pointer too, or given assembly's inherent weak typing, a memory address.
Just as the real first parameter to every C++ member function is the (hidden and implicit) this pointer, any object-oriented assembly is going to have to pass an object pointer to any functions called on that object. The object pointer will be the address of the actual object, and the object's state, instead of residing in numerous functions -- as you'd do in non-OO structural programming -- will reside in the object, at that pointed to memory.
Finally, and most tedious, is the need for one function called on the object to access other member functions of the object. Essentially, we need a way to determine which of several possible functions foos should be the foo called for a particular object. C++ generally implements this as an array of pointers to function, perl by means of a hash map. Implementation details are implementation details, but essentially you need to specify some ordered list of (address of) functions when the object is created. A naive (and inefficient) implementation that would look like very late binding (and weak typing) to a C++ programmer would be simply to have each object include in its state an array of address; better solution would, as usual in computer science, involve a few more levels of indirection.
The point I'm trying to make is this: Object Orientation isn't so much a property of one language or another -- although some languages support it far better than do others --, as it is a property of the way you think about the problem domain and about programming in general. It's an outlook, a mindset, a world-view, and it's maintaining that world-view, much more than worrying about the implementation details, that matters.
Good Object Oriented programmers can -- and do -- write OO code regardless of the language they're writing in. Programmers who still don't get OO will write bad, pointless OO even in languages that support OO the best. And really good programmers know when to use OO, what parts of it to use, and when not to use OO.
(B) You are lying and you don't want anyone to check out your credentials.
He's lying, but with such an obvious red-herring that it's certain he's trolling:
"I'd recommend you study the recently released win2k source or the FreeBSD source, whose legality is more established."
He's suggesting that people avoid legal liability by avoiding linux source, but encouraging those same people to study the clearly proprietary Windows source. Its looking at the Windows source, not the linux source, that could put them in the position of being accused of violating copyright, in this case Microsoft's.
The busines about being a Harvard grad student is just window dressing.
One simple thing average users can do is to give people they communicate with some special keyword they should always add to messages they send you with an attachment. It doesn't have to be anything special - even a company name would d
I tried that but it didn't work for me.
Do you think I shouldn't have chosen the word "Pwned"?
I distinctly remember being very surprised by some information I got in my Michigan law class [about the admissibility of evidence obtained through illegal acts by actors who were neither government agents not acting under the color of law].
This shouldn't be too surprising: evidence becomes inadmissible if it is obtained in violation of the law -- in particular the 4th Amendment, which is applied to the several States through the due-process clause of the 14th Amendment.
But the 4th Amendment -- like the rest of the Bill of Rights -- is a set of restrictions -- limits -- on the government. (That's why, for instance, it's not a violation of the 1st Amendment -- or censorship per se -- if a wholly private entity refuses publish your speech.)
Since, in your examples, there no action by the government (or its agents) in violation of the law, why should the evidence be tainted?
The motivation for the first ten Amendments -- the "Bill of Rights" -- is to prevent the government from being tyrannous, and to protect the citizen from his own government. The motivation is not, as it's frequently misunderstood by critics of civil liberties, to "coddle criminals" -- or even to give criminals a "fair shake" -- every one of those Amendments was at its core designed to prevent the government from itself becoming a threat to liberty.
This is particularly true of the 5th Amendment clause against self-incrimination: the motivation was to remove any incentive for the government to torture a suspect -- a reaction to the ubiquity of forced confessions (and often false confession) brought about by torture by the English Court of Star Chamber and the Spanish Inquisition.
We let the occasional criminal go free as the price we pay for our liberty.
Since 9-11, in this Ashcroft era (and, frankly, during the Clinton/Reno era too -- remember Ruby Ridge!), we've been told so often that we must fear "the terrorists" and the "axis of evil" that we've forgotten that the Founding Fathers' greatest fear was not the Gauls at the borders, but Caesar himself in Rome.
Which is why Patrick Henry is almost as famous for being cut off for courting treason when he told the Virginia House of Burgesses that "Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell, and George the Third... may profit by their example" as he is for "Give me liberty or give me death!"
Contra Shakespeare's Marc Antony, Brutus really was an honorable man.
I work inside SCO. Mike Anderer hasn't had anything to do with the company since June 2003. This is a clear and simple forgery. I lend it no credence. I'd suggest ignoring it.
Yeess, Darl. When you wave your hands like that I realize these are not the droids I'm looking for.
When you run the executable (er... it's Java or C# and runs in a sandbox... feel any better?) it asks you to type in a capcha... something like that. If you do it right it decrypts the attached file.
In general a computer could not decrypt the file without a person or a really good AI to do some work.
"Hello, Mumbai Outsourcing?
"Yeah, this is Cary Sherman, at the RIAA. How many Vijays can we get to do some downloadin' for us?
"Great, so $100 an hour for 100 of 'em, and you pay bandwidth? Ok, get started right now, and just send us the invoice.
"Cool, we can pay for this out of the settlement with one twelve year old girl!"
There's something about trusting the mechanics to tell me when my car's broken that I don't really like...
And not only that. From the article
The car should be programmed to discover any problems under the bonnet, then send a message to the garage to let them know.
The mechanics would then contact the women directly to invite them over.
This manages to condescend to women, imply that men who are uninterested in auto repair are "unmanly", and be as creepy as a those Microsoft ads where "the computer knows", all in two sentences. A masterpiece of brevity and disdain for the customer!
I know that I don't want a mechanic contacting me; were I a woman I'd find in it a worrisome potential for stalking as well.
Robert Heinlein -- whose work always featured competent women who could take care of themselves not to mention their own car repairs --, in his excellent novel The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress features a sentient computer that takes advantage of the Moon's tyrannical government's over-reliance on it to foment revolution. Interestingly, one of the computer's co-conspirators comments, of his family farm, that they would never be so foolish as to completely automate it -- instead, every critical piece of machinery had a manual override (indeed, the character making this observation is named Manny), in case of emergency.
(For another Heinlein allusion, I'll copy my current sig here: "No new stem cells, anti-gay marriage amendment, Inquisitor Ashcroft, Judge Roy Moore. Is Reverend Nehemiah Scudder next?")
What if I don't want to give another corporation information about what I'm trading... [And several other, equally valid points]
I want to expand on this, just a bit, to highlight the problem here.
It seems highly unlikely that the RIAA would allow the end-user to download their database of "song signatures" or hashes or whatever implements this, so that the end-user could filter songs locally, deleting unauthorized songs on the honor system. After all, if the RIAA trusted its customers -- and if the customers were trustworthy -- but that's all water over the dam, isn't it?
So clearly this means uploading either the whole song, or some derived signature, to RIAA, every time you want to trade the file. This means uploading not just music, but any traded file.
And this introduces a chilling effect on free speech. Because the files I might be trading -- or the samizdat that secret Falun Gong supporter Won Ma might be sending to his fellow Chinese dissidents -- might not belong to the RIAA, but might invite government scrutiny for being unpopular dissent.
Would a government employee or contractor, worried about maintaining a security clearance, feel as free to engage in lawful and even patriotic dissent if he was worried his bosses might be able to monitor the his trading, from his home, excerpts from the documentary Guns & Mothers to which the he had added his own commentary defending his Second Amendment rights? Of course he'd worry -- and thus be discouraged from exercising his constitutional rights under not only the Second but the First Amendment as well!
Having any central server aware of all file trading gives whoever controls -- or can subvert the security of -- that central server a far too broad window into the demographics, politics, proclivities, and beliefs of anyone trading files. While this would be a boon to marketeers, governments, and anyone else whose goal is manipulation and control, it must be anathema to anyone who values privacy and liberty -- from left wing "hippie" to right wing "gun-nut", from closted homosexual to crypto-Christian.
Whatever your politics, whether you trade files or not -- and, no, I don't --, this is something you must oppose, for it threatens the liberty of all of us.
However, [articles like these] *should* fall under the YRO category and not gaming.
This isn't technically about rights: Infinium would have a point, if they'd really been libeled; but since it seems pretty clear from HardOCP's response that any claim of libel is laughable, it seems to me to be a case of barratry on Infinium's part.
Slashdot needs a couple of new categories: "Dubious Business Practices" and "Abuses of the Legal System". And let's admit it, we may be geeks, we may be nerds, but such stories matter to us as much -- if not more -- than the release of a new console game, OSS product, or RFC.
DC does not get electoral college votes. Only states do.
What part of the 23rd amendment do you not understand?
Hold on, I'll quote it:
Section 1. The District constituting the seat of government of the United States shall appoint in such manner as the Congress may direct:
A number of electors of President and Vice President equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives in Congress to which the District would be entitled if it were a state, but in no event more than the least populous state; they shall be in addition to those appointed by the states, but they shall be considered, for the purposes of the election of President and Vice President, to be electors appointed by a state; and they shall meet in the District and perform such duties as provided by the twelfth article of amendment.
Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
The 23rd Amendment was ratified in 1961.
Perhaps you've confused DC's electoral vote with its Congressional representation: while DC gets three electoral votes, it has not voting Representative or Senators (it has a non-voting Delegate to the House, just like Puerto Rico).
Oh, and as perceptive readers of the Amendment above will note, while the 23rd gives DC electoral votes proportional to D.C.'s population, it limits the votes to be no more than the "least populous state"; in other words, if D.C.'s population entitled it to four electoral votes, but Montana, due to its population only got three, D.C.'s population in excess of Montana's would be effectively disenfranchised. Note that this is despite the qual protection clause of the 14th Amendment, because one Amendment can't "override" another.
Is depriving U.S. citizens living in D.C. of representation fair? No.
Is it taxation without representation? Sure is; D.C., residents not only pay Federal taxes, the laws passed by their duly elected City Council can be overridden -- and frequently are overridden -- by Congress.
Wasn't taxation without representation and arbitrary laws made by Britain's Parliament among the justification for the American Revolution? Sure were.
That was the coolest fucking post I have seen on Slashdot in a year. I really hope you didn't copy & paste that from somewhere.... It reminds me why I liked Slashdot in the first place.
Thanks.
And no, it's not plagiarized; all my posts are original, ex tempore and ex cathedra from my navel (ok, the "ex cathedra from my navel" bit is a paraphrase of Robert Heinlein).
You can tell my posts are original -- or at least not taken from a polished web source -- because my typing is terrible. I spell check (with MicroSpell -- one of the very few non-Free software products I use, because of its extremely efficient interface), but the spell checker doesn't catch mis-capitalizations. In my paragraph six (or paragraph seven if the quoted portion of the original post is included), you'll notice both "america" and "district of Columbia". Despite normally doing several previews per post, I invariably miss these.
Worse yet, I fat finger the "s" and "d" keys; since third person singular verbs and past tense verbs often differ only by "s" or "d" (he cares, he cared) these verbs will often get spelled-checked to the wrong form. You'll also see stuff like the misspelled "strong" -- probably typed as strng -- in the 3rd (4th) paragraph getting spell checked into "string".
I do "research" the posts when I need to -- Google and Wikipedia are my friends -- but I'm proud to say all the posts in this thread to day were off the top of my head except the last three paragraphs of this post, which explained the origin 17th Amendment. (19th Century history I remember pretty well -- as I ought to, having focused on it for my degree --, but I have a bit of a blind spot for early 20th through the 1920's, especially for the Progressive era.) I'm especially happy since the last time I studied comparative voting systems and legislative organizations was 1988 or 1989 at the latest.
I get a lot of +5 mods -- nine in my last 24 posts, four today, two yesterday, and three Monday, and another nine +3s or +4s in that 24, but I do work pretty conscientiously to provide good copy, and I also get my share of Flamebait and Offtopic mods too -- which I'm sure this post will attract.;)
But it's funny: the post I was happiest with this week only got a 3, probably because it's rather long and involves some abstruse and speculative ruminations on biology and evolutionary psychology ending with some rather mean-spirited advocacy for atheism.
That was the coolest fucking post I have seen on Slashdot in a year. I really hope you didn't copy & paste that from somewhere.
Thanks.
And no, it's not plagiarized; all my posts are original, ex tempore and ex cathedra from my navel (ok, the "ex cathedra from my navel" bit is a paraphrase of Robert Heinlein).
You can tell my posts are original -- or at least not taken from a polished web source -- because my typing is terrible. I spell check (with MicroSpell -- one of the non-Free software products I use, because it has an extremely efficient interface), but the spell checker doesn't catch mis-capitalizations. In my paragraph six (or paragraph seven if the quoted portion of the original post is included), you'll notice that both "america" and "district of Columbia". Despite normally doing several previews per post, I invariably miss these.
Worse yet, I fat finger the "s" and "d" keys; since third person singular verbs and past tense verbs often differ only by "s" or "d" (he cares, he cared) these verbs will often get spelled-checked to the wrong form. You'll also see stuff like the misspelled "strong" -- probably typed as strng -- in the 3rd (4th) paragraph getting spell checked into "string".
I do research the posts when I have too -- Google and Wikipedia are my fr
Do you know the reason why the U.S. did not go with a proportional style of choosing rep's.... I'm also curious why state legislatures no longer select their Senators.
Fortunately, these are related questions.
Remember that after the American Revolution, the American Colonies -- now States -- organized themselves under the Articles of Confederation. The reason that we still refer to the administrative subdivisions of the U.S. as "States" is that each considered itself, at the time, as a sovereign Nation-state -- tantamount to a separate country.
It was only in the face of a great deal of resistance -- resistance that was only placated by the "Bill of Rights" as the first ten Amendments to the U.S. Constitution are known, and notably the 9th and 10th Amendments that restricted the rights of the Federal government -- that the U.S. Constitution and its Federal system was accepted by the several States. Even then, in 1814, in 1828, and in 1861 the various States considered it within their rights to secede from the Federal government and go there own way. While neither the Hartford Convention nor the Nullification Crisis actually resulted in secession, 1861 saw the Southern States leave the Union until forcibly repatriated in the U.S. Civil War.
So proportional representation across state boundaries would simply not have been conceivable to most of the Founders, and acceptable to even fewer. Proportional representation might have been acceptable within a state, but much as the several States were jealous and wary of the Federal power, counties within the States were often desirous to maintain direct representation in the state legislature -- as they do to this day in each State. This was even more feasible then, given the relative smallness of the electorate, it being limited to property-holding white males over 21 years of age.
But it was to protect the interests of the States -- especially the less populous States -- that the Constitution created a two House legislature, one -- the House of Representatives -- with seats apportioned by population (knowledgeable readers will whisper "3/5ths Compromise" at this point), and one -- the Senate -- with two seats per state, regardless of a State's population. To further protect the interests of (even the small) States, votes for President were apportioned to the States according to the sum of their seats in the House and Senate, resulting in even the smallest States having three votes in the Electoral College.
Now, before I'm accused of rambling, here's the answer to your second question: yet another protection of State interests was to have state legislatures select a State's Senators: the Senators, under this plan, can almost be though of as diplomats, or better, plenipotentiaries sent by each State to the Federal government, deputized to negotiate as agents of their respective state legislatures.
But after the Civil War, the notion that the States were sovereign nations only voluntarily submitting to a Federal government was a dead letter, disproven by the slaughter at Gettysburg and in the torching of Atlanta. Furthermore, the period after the Civil War saw the opening of the Middle West (California had already been settled) and the knitting together of the country by the railroads, the common time zones that the railroads used to synchronize their timetables, and the rapidly growing industry that both built and prospered because of the railroads.
As the country became more closely knit by technology and the greater commerce that that technology fostered, further growth became increasingly dependent on regularizing certain things across state lines and across the country as a whole; these included standard weights and measure, the afore-mentioned time zones -- and especially laws regulating commerce. This was accomplished in a number of ways, but notably through the Commerce Clause of the Constitution; the upshot was to further weaken the 10th Amendment, which reserved to the
So what's to stop the faithful of one party from simply acting as spoilers for another's best candidate (by voting for a less likely candidate) ?
Nothing.;)
That's a legitimate worry, and it often does happen: "Hey I'm going to go vote for the most extreme candidate in the other party, to ensure that mainstream voters must vote for the candidate of my party!"
That's why some states don't allow open primaries, and many leave the choice to open the primary to the party.
However, also consider states (or counties, districts, etc.) where one party claims such a super-majority of the voters that that party's candidate invariably or almost invariably wins the General Election.
Such states would have included most of the American South for the century from 1880 until the 1980s, when the effective disenfranchisement of blacks (until the 1960s) and the long tradition of white Southern resentment of the Party of Lincoln (that is, the Republican Party) ensured that the Democratic candidate always won the General Election. Any Republican minority would then be forced either to abandon the Republic Party (thus ensuring it would never grow) or to be effectively disenfranchised, unable to vote in the Democratic Primary, the only election that really counted.
(Today, Republicans are ironically the majority in most of the South, as Southern whites left the Democratic Party in the 1930s, under Franklin Roosevelt and in the 1960s, under Lyndon Johnson, in large part because of the Democratic Party's embrace of Black voters and Civil Rights legislation (yes, even as early as Franklin Roosevelt, with Roosevelt's executive orders requiring equal compensation of black factory works, forced on him by black activists threatening strikes that might have crippled the war effort, and Eleanor Roosevelt's support for such things as the Tuskegee Airmen)-- which conversely means that few blacks vote for Lincoln's Party of Emancipation anymore.)
Another example is the nation's Capital, the District of Columbia. While its residents are not given voting representation in Congress, the 23rd Amendment finally gave District residents a vote in Presidential elections, and Congressional legislation grudgingly allowed the District to elect its own mayor by 1971. The District, in part by virtue of being 55% black, and in part because of a large proportion of Federal workers among its residents, almost always votes Democrat (its City Council includes two Republicans out of 13, one of whom, Catania, is gay, the other, Schwartz, a Jewish woman, neither representative of the Republican mainstream). As a result, one of its residents, the arch-conservative columnist Robert Novak, is a registered Democrat, simply in order to have a vote in the primary races in the city.
Why is chosing [sic] the person that stands as a candidate for the Democrats the business of the states? Why is it the business of anyone except the Democratic party in that state? Why doesn't the party decide - how come it gets the states to run elections for it?
Because America political parties are not as cohesive as European political parties, and a big part of the reason for that is that America has neither a Parliamentary system -- where the executive is a member of the legislature -- and because America doesn't have proportional voting.
For America readers: most European governments are Parliamentary system, so the leader of the government is the leader of the party in power, and the party in power is the party with a majority (or plurality and a coalition) in the legislature. As such it's impossible to have a situation in which the legislature is controlled by one party and the executive is controlled by another party. This allows the government to be less dead-locked, and it was precisely for this reason that America's founding Fathers rejected such an arrangement.
Realizing the tyrannical potential of string central governments -- having just won independence from Britain -- and wishing to ensure the power of individual states under the Federal Constitution, the Founders made sure that it was possible for the legislature -- Congress - to be controlled by a different party than the party of the executive -- the President. This was consciously engineered by the Founders to promote either dead-lock or moderation of opinion and vote trading, in either case keeping the central government weak except in those cases where there existed a true consensus of all parties. (Other features of American constitutional structure also reflect this desire to obtain dead-lock or consensus: the original provision of selection of senators by state legislatures rather than popular vote, allowing filibusters in the Senate, and the requirements of super-majorities in both the national legislature and a super-majority of state legislatures in order to amend the constitution).
Another feature, perhaps less consciously built into the american plan was a weakening of the Party system itself. In European countries (and Israel, but not Britain) with the system of proportional representation, political parties, prior to an election, make an ordered list of all their candidates. Voters vote for the party, not any particular candidate, and the party seats a number of candidates proportional to their vote, starting from their most visible candidates at the front of their lists. So if the legislature has 100 seats, and the Green Party gets 5% of the total vote, the Green party gets to fill five seats, and it must fill those seats with the first five persons on the (previously published) Green party list. The party has a lot of control over candidates in this system, as it can simply tell a candidate to tow the line or be put at the bottom of the list -- or taken off the list altogether.
America fills the legislature by geographically bound Districts, with the winner in each District the candidate with a plurality (except in Louisiana) of the vote -- Europeans frequently refer to this as "First Past the Post" voting, because the first candidate to get enough votes -- like a racehorse nosing out its opponents -- wins. In America, especially in the last ten years, most Districts are generally crafted to contain a majority of voters sympathetic to one party or the other, making most seats relatively uncontested. But the corollary of that is that one district can be a sure thing for one party, the District next to it a sure thing for the other Party.
As a consequence, America elections are decided more locally, and the Party has less power to control the candidate. Indeed, the candidate may depart from his Party's ideology in order to get elected in a District more congenial to the other party, and his Party will be able to do little, as it wants the seat in order to
Only Republicans vote for the Republican Party candidate and only Democrats vote for the Democratic Party candidate.
In some states.
Other states may hold what are known as "open" primaries -- possibly, depending on state law, at the discretion of the party holding the primary --, in which voters are allowed to vote in the party's primary regardless of their registration.
This year, Wisconsin's Democratic primary was open to all voters, and it was the votes of Republicans and independents voting in the Democrat primary that gave Senator Edwards of North Carolina a much closer second place in Wisconsin than in most other states. This edge by Edwards among non-Democrats was argued by his campaign to be evidence that he would fare better against Bush in the General Election than would Senator Kerry of Massachusetts.
I'm sorry but who cares if this artical [sic] [by computer scientist and election judge Avi Rubin, questioning the trustworthiness of e-voting] got slashdoted [sic]...
I'm going to guess that
you're not yet of voting age;
and that when you do reach voting age, you won't bother to exercise the franchise;
and that your voluntary departure from the voting pool will -- oddly enough and for different reasons -- likely be appreciated both by politicians hoping for more passive, indolent "sheeple" and by those of us citizens who work hard to ensure a representative and responsive government.
But by then you'll probably have ended up joining the Army for lack of better prospects in Bush's economy, so that you can lay down your life ostensibly to protect democracy in Iraq, and surely to protect Halliburton's contracts there.
While I'm sure that somewhere Mr. Jefferson is cringing at your example, please don't feel too bad: Fascists everywhere rely on people just like you; without you they'd never get beyond the Bier-Hall Putsch.
The students at Copenhagen's new IT University will soon be guided by invisible, but talkative digital agents, known as ghosts or Disembodied Location-specific Conversational Agents.
This just in: Darl McBride and David Boies will team up with JK Rowling to sue IT University for using "Harry Potter Intellectual Property".
They are asking for "injunctive relief against IT University's further use or copying of any part of JK Rowling's copyrighted "Hogwarts" and "Harry Potter" materials and also [requesting] damages as a result of these muggles' infringement in an amount to be proven at trial."
Slashdot Mirror
It'll be sad to see such an icon of the 'old scifi' go
It turns out that the CNN mistranslated the Japanese; Godzilla is not retiring.
He's just changing his name to "Firebird", I mean, "Firefox".
I thought about this for five seconds in pseudo assembler, then my brain started leaking...
Leaking is especially apropos, because you should be thinking about encapsulation -- keeping implementation details from leaking --, not inheritance.
I actually did a toy program or two -- very toy, class assignments -- in assembly after I knew C++, and consciously employed an Object Oriented outlook in designing the programs.
This really is easier than it might seem at first: the second biggest hurdle -- and the most important first step -- to OO design is to always think of the entities in your program as objects with responsibilities.
(The biggest hurdle is discovering -- and I use the word "discovering" intentionally, because it's a iterative process of exploring your problem domain -- where to "carve nature at the joints", or where one object ends and the next starts. Alas, a further discussion of this hurdle is beyond the scope of this comment.)
Given that you keep in mind that you're dealing with objects, and that OO requires you to do so polymorphically, -- that is, you want to be able to do the same sorts of things with objects of different sizes and shapes -- you'll quickly find that you need a level of indirection, some stand-in for the actual object, a proxy that is itself the same size and shape for every kind of different object. In C (and C++ and Java) that "same-ness" proxy is a pointer; in perl, it's a hash, which the language conveniently handles the pointing to; in assembly it's a pointer too, or given assembly's inherent weak typing, a memory address.
Just as the real first parameter to every C++ member function is the (hidden and implicit) this pointer, any object-oriented assembly is going to have to pass an object pointer to any functions called on that object. The object pointer will be the address of the actual object, and the object's state, instead of residing in numerous functions -- as you'd do in non-OO structural programming -- will reside in the object, at that pointed to memory.
Finally, and most tedious, is the need for one function called on the object to access other member functions of the object. Essentially, we need a way to determine which of several possible functions foos should be the foo called for a particular object. C++ generally implements this as an array of pointers to function, perl by means of a hash map. Implementation details are implementation details, but essentially you need to specify some ordered list of (address of) functions when the object is created. A naive (and inefficient) implementation that would look like very late binding (and weak typing) to a C++ programmer would be simply to have each object include in its state an array of address; better solution would, as usual in computer science, involve a few more levels of indirection.
The point I'm trying to make is this: Object Orientation isn't so much a property of one language or another -- although some languages support it far better than do others --, as it is a property of the way you think about the problem domain and about programming in general. It's an outlook, a mindset, a world-view, and it's maintaining that world-view, much more than worrying about the implementation details, that matters.
Good Object Oriented programmers can -- and do -- write OO code regardless of the language they're writing in. Programmers who still don't get OO will write bad, pointless OO even in languages that support OO the best. And really good programmers know when to use OO, what parts of it to use, and when not to use OO.
I played movieoke once.
All was well until my friends got too drunk and suggested we perform a scene from "Debbie Does Dallas".
Um. I hate to break it to you, but the movie with the line "I bet you can squeal like a pig" isn't actually Debbie Does Dallas.
But it sure sounds like you have some great "friends".
He's lying, but with such an obvious red-herring that it's certain he's trolling:
He's suggesting that people avoid legal liability by avoiding linux source, but encouraging those same people to study the clearly proprietary Windows source. Its looking at the Windows source, not the linux source, that could put them in the position of being accused of violating copyright, in this case Microsoft's.
The busines about being a Harvard grad student is just window dressing.
Cheers,
The Co.uk team http://www.co.uk
Ha ha! Everybody knows that "co.uk" is a made up domain name!
That's just doubleplus ungood crimethink.
Quickwise be goodthinkful and duckspeak the real name: airstrip.one.com
One simple thing average users can do is to give people they communicate with some special keyword they should always add to messages they send you with an attachment. It doesn't have to be anything special - even a company name would d
I tried that but it didn't work for me.
Do you think I shouldn't have chosen the word "Pwned"?
I distinctly remember being very surprised by some information I got in my Michigan law class [about the admissibility of evidence obtained through illegal acts by actors who were neither government agents not acting under the color of law].
... may profit by their example" as he is for "Give me liberty or give me death!"
This shouldn't be too surprising: evidence becomes inadmissible if it is obtained in violation of the law -- in particular the 4th Amendment, which is applied to the several States through the due-process clause of the 14th Amendment.
But the 4th Amendment -- like the rest of the Bill of Rights -- is a set of restrictions -- limits -- on the government. (That's why, for instance, it's not a violation of the 1st Amendment -- or censorship per se -- if a wholly private entity refuses publish your speech.)
Since, in your examples, there no action by the government (or its agents) in violation of the law, why should the evidence be tainted?
The motivation for the first ten Amendments -- the "Bill of Rights" -- is to prevent the government from being tyrannous, and to protect the citizen from his own government. The motivation is not, as it's frequently misunderstood by critics of civil liberties, to "coddle criminals" -- or even to give criminals a "fair shake" -- every one of those Amendments was at its core designed to prevent the government from itself becoming a threat to liberty.
This is particularly true of the 5th Amendment clause against self-incrimination: the motivation was to remove any incentive for the government to torture a suspect -- a reaction to the ubiquity of forced confessions (and often false confession) brought about by torture by the English Court of Star Chamber and the Spanish Inquisition.
We let the occasional criminal go free as the price we pay for our liberty.
Since 9-11, in this Ashcroft era (and, frankly, during the Clinton/Reno era too -- remember Ruby Ridge!), we've been told so often that we must fear "the terrorists" and the "axis of evil" that we've forgotten that the Founding Fathers' greatest fear was not the Gauls at the borders, but Caesar himself in Rome.
Which is why Patrick Henry is almost as famous for being cut off for courting treason when he told the Virginia House of Burgesses that "Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell, and George the Third
Contra Shakespeare's Marc Antony, Brutus really was an honorable man.
Do I smell another visit to the DoJ?
I love the Department of Justice smell of Crisco and calico cat repellant in the morning!
(At the DoJ morning Bible Study, of course, not in Vietnam where you love the smell of napalm in the morning -- John Ashcroft, and George Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Trent Lott, Tom DeLay, Dennis Hastert, Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, and Russ Limbaugh, were all eligible to serve in Vietnam, but somehow never did.)
I work inside SCO. Mike Anderer hasn't had anything to do with the company since June 2003. This is a clear and simple forgery. I lend it no credence. I'd suggest ignoring it.
Yeess, Darl. When you wave your hands like that I realize these are not the droids I'm looking for.
When you run the executable (er... it's Java or C# and runs in a sandbox... feel any better?) it asks you to type in a capcha... something like that. If you do it right it decrypts the attached file.
In general a computer could not decrypt the file without a person or a really good AI to do some work.
"Hello, Mumbai Outsourcing?
"Yeah, this is Cary Sherman, at the RIAA. How many Vijays can we get to do some downloadin' for us?
"Great, so $100 an hour for 100 of 'em, and you pay bandwidth? Ok, get started right now, and just send us the invoice.
"Cool, we can pay for this out of the settlement with one twelve year old girl!"
And not only that. From the article
This manages to condescend to women, imply that men who are uninterested in auto repair are "unmanly", and be as creepy as a those Microsoft ads where "the computer knows", all in two sentences. A masterpiece of brevity and disdain for the customer!
I know that I don't want a mechanic contacting me; were I a woman I'd find in it a worrisome potential for stalking as well.
Robert Heinlein -- whose work always featured competent women who could take care of themselves not to mention their own car repairs --, in his excellent novel The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress features a sentient computer that takes advantage of the Moon's tyrannical government's over-reliance on it to foment revolution. Interestingly, one of the computer's co-conspirators comments, of his family farm, that they would never be so foolish as to completely automate it -- instead, every critical piece of machinery had a manual override (indeed, the character making this observation is named Manny), in case of emergency.
(For another Heinlein allusion, I'll copy my current sig here: "No new stem cells, anti-gay marriage amendment, Inquisitor Ashcroft, Judge Roy Moore. Is Reverend Nehemiah Scudder next?")
Fear is the mind-killer...
My job as Emperor was out-sourced to an adopted Fremen worm-rider, and all I got was this lousy Gom Jabbar!
What if I don't want to give another corporation information about what I'm trading... [And several
other, equally valid points]
I want to expand on this, just a bit, to highlight the problem here.
It seems highly unlikely that the RIAA would allow the end-user to download their database of "song signatures" or hashes or whatever implements this, so that the end-user could filter songs locally, deleting unauthorized songs on the honor system. After all, if the RIAA trusted its customers -- and if the customers were trustworthy -- but that's all water over the dam, isn't it?
So clearly this means uploading either the whole song, or some derived signature, to RIAA, every time you want to trade the file. This means uploading not just music, but any traded file.
And this introduces a chilling effect on free speech. Because the files I might be trading -- or the samizdat that secret Falun Gong supporter Won Ma might be sending to his fellow Chinese dissidents -- might not belong to the RIAA, but might invite government scrutiny for being unpopular dissent.
Certainly, knowing that everything that was traded, from bootleg Pete Seeger protest songs to homemade iMovies juxtaposing images of George Bush and chimpanzees to recordings of parody songs about John Ashcroft's resemblance to Darth Vader, was reported to a central repository -- the RIAA copyright detecting server -- could make that repository an irresistible target of monitoring by unscrupulous government agencies interested in tracking dissent -- whether those agencies are in Beijing or Washington D.C.
Would a government employee or contractor, worried about maintaining a security clearance, feel as free to engage in lawful and even patriotic dissent if he was worried his bosses might be able to monitor the his trading, from his home, excerpts from the documentary Guns & Mothers to which the he had added his own commentary defending his Second Amendment rights? Of course he'd worry -- and thus be discouraged from exercising his constitutional rights under not only the Second but the First Amendment as well!
Might a closeted homosexual worry that trading documentary films about Mattachine Society founder Harry Hay could reveal his sexual orientation and make him subject to blackmail?
Might Christians living in a Muslim theocracy fear persecution for trading Bibles or Christian devotional music?
Having any central server aware of all file trading gives whoever controls -- or can subvert the security of -- that central server a far too broad window into the demographics, politics, proclivities, and beliefs of anyone trading files. While this would be a boon to marketeers, governments, and anyone else whose goal is manipulation and control, it must be anathema to anyone who values privacy and liberty -- from left wing "hippie" to right wing "gun-nut", from closted homosexual to crypto-Christian.
Whatever your politics, whether you trade files or not -- and, no, I don't --, this is something you must oppose, for it threatens the liberty of all of us.
However, [articles like these] *should* fall under the YRO category and not gaming.
This isn't technically about rights: Infinium would have a point, if they'd really been libeled; but since it seems pretty clear from HardOCP's response that any claim of libel is laughable, it seems to me to be a case of barratry on Infinium's part.
Slashdot needs a couple of new categories: "Dubious Business Practices" and "Abuses of the Legal System". And let's admit it, we may be geeks, we may be nerds, but such stories matter to us as much -- if not more -- than the release of a new console game, OSS product, or RFC.
You write "confused", but perceptive readers know you mean "intrigued" or "curious".
:)
What part of the 23rd amendment do you not understand?
Hold on, I'll quote it:
The 23rd Amendment was ratified in 1961.
Perhaps you've confused DC's electoral vote with its Congressional representation: while DC gets three electoral votes, it has not voting Representative or Senators (it has a non-voting Delegate to the House, just like Puerto Rico).
Oh, and as perceptive readers of the Amendment above will note, while the 23rd gives DC electoral votes proportional to D.C.'s population, it limits the votes to be no more than the "least populous state"; in other words, if D.C.'s population entitled it to four electoral votes, but Montana, due to its population only got three, D.C.'s population in excess of Montana's would be effectively disenfranchised. Note that this is despite the qual protection clause of the 14th Amendment, because one Amendment can't "override" another.
Is depriving U.S. citizens living in D.C. of representation fair? No.
Is it taxation without representation? Sure is; D.C., residents not only pay Federal taxes, the laws passed by their duly elected City Council can be overridden -- and frequently are overridden -- by Congress.
Wasn't taxation without representation and arbitrary laws made by Britain's Parliament among the justification for the American Revolution? Sure were.
Hypocrisy? You betcha!
That was the coolest fucking post I have seen on Slashdot in a year. I really hope you didn't copy & paste that from somewhere.... It reminds me why I liked Slashdot in the first place.
;)
Thanks.
And no, it's not plagiarized; all my posts are original, ex tempore and ex cathedra from my navel (ok, the "ex cathedra from my navel" bit is a paraphrase of Robert Heinlein).
You can tell my posts are original -- or at least not taken from a polished web source -- because my typing is terrible. I spell check (with MicroSpell -- one of the very few non-Free software products I use, because of its extremely efficient interface), but the spell checker doesn't catch mis-capitalizations. In my paragraph six (or paragraph seven if the quoted portion of the original post is included), you'll notice both "america" and "district of Columbia". Despite normally doing several previews per post, I invariably miss these.
Worse yet, I fat finger the "s" and "d" keys; since third person singular verbs and past tense verbs often differ only by "s" or "d" (he cares, he cared) these verbs will often get spelled-checked to the wrong form. You'll also see stuff like the misspelled "strong" -- probably typed as strng -- in the 3rd (4th) paragraph getting spell checked into "string".
I do "research" the posts when I need to -- Google and Wikipedia are my friends -- but I'm proud to say all the posts in this thread to day were off the top of my head except the last three paragraphs of this post, which explained the origin 17th Amendment. (19th Century history I remember pretty well -- as I ought to, having focused on it for my degree --, but I have a bit of a blind spot for early 20th through the 1920's, especially for the Progressive era.) I'm especially happy since the last time I studied comparative voting systems and legislative organizations was 1988 or 1989 at the latest.
I get a lot of +5 mods -- nine in my last 24 posts, four today, two yesterday, and three Monday, and another nine +3s or +4s in that 24, but I do work pretty conscientiously to provide good copy, and I also get my share of Flamebait and Offtopic mods too -- which I'm sure this post will attract.
But it's funny: the post I was happiest with this week only got a 3, probably because it's rather long and involves some abstruse and speculative ruminations on biology and evolutionary psychology ending with some rather mean-spirited advocacy for atheism.
That was the coolest fucking post I have seen on Slashdot in a year. I really hope you didn't copy & paste that from somewhere.
Thanks.
And no, it's not plagiarized; all my posts are original, ex tempore and ex cathedra from my navel (ok, the "ex cathedra from my navel" bit is a paraphrase of Robert Heinlein).
You can tell my posts are original -- or at least not taken from a polished web source -- because my typing is terrible. I spell check (with MicroSpell -- one of the non-Free software products I use, because it has an extremely efficient interface), but the spell checker doesn't catch mis-capitalizations. In my paragraph six (or paragraph seven if the quoted portion of the original post is included), you'll notice that both "america" and "district of Columbia". Despite normally doing several previews per post, I invariably miss these.
Worse yet, I fat finger the "s" and "d" keys; since third person singular verbs and past tense verbs often differ only by "s" or "d" (he cares, he cared) these verbs will often get spelled-checked to the wrong form. You'll also see stuff like the misspelled "strong" -- probably typed as strng -- in the 3rd (4th) paragraph getting spell checked into "string".
I do research the posts when I have too -- Google and Wikipedia are my fr
Do you know the reason why the U.S. did not go with a proportional style of choosing rep's.... I'm also curious why state legislatures no longer select their Senators.
Fortunately, these are related questions.
Remember that after the American Revolution, the American Colonies -- now States -- organized themselves under the Articles of Confederation. The reason that we still refer to the administrative subdivisions of the U.S. as "States" is that each considered itself, at the time, as a sovereign Nation-state -- tantamount to a separate country.
It was only in the face of a great deal of resistance -- resistance that was only placated by the "Bill of Rights" as the first ten Amendments to the U.S. Constitution are known, and notably the 9th and 10th Amendments that restricted the rights of the Federal government -- that the U.S. Constitution and its Federal system was accepted by the several States. Even then, in 1814, in 1828, and in 1861 the various States considered it within their rights to secede from the Federal government and go there own way. While neither the Hartford Convention nor the Nullification Crisis actually resulted in secession, 1861 saw the Southern States leave the Union until forcibly repatriated in the U.S. Civil War.
So proportional representation across state boundaries would simply not have been conceivable to most of the Founders, and acceptable to even fewer. Proportional representation might have been acceptable within a state, but much as the several States were jealous and wary of the Federal power, counties within the States were often desirous to maintain direct representation in the state legislature -- as they do to this day in each State. This was even more feasible then, given the relative smallness of the electorate, it being limited to property-holding white males over 21 years of age.
But it was to protect the interests of the States -- especially the less populous States -- that the Constitution created a two House legislature, one -- the House of Representatives -- with seats apportioned by population (knowledgeable readers will whisper "3/5ths Compromise" at this point), and one -- the Senate -- with two seats per state, regardless of a State's population. To further protect the interests of (even the small) States, votes for President were apportioned to the States according to the sum of their seats in the House and Senate, resulting in even the smallest States having three votes in the Electoral College.
Now, before I'm accused of rambling, here's the answer to your second question: yet another protection of State interests was to have state legislatures select a State's Senators: the Senators, under this plan, can almost be though of as diplomats, or better, plenipotentiaries sent by each State to the Federal government, deputized to negotiate as agents of their respective state legislatures.
But after the Civil War, the notion that the States were sovereign nations only voluntarily submitting to a Federal government was a dead letter, disproven by the slaughter at Gettysburg and in the torching of Atlanta. Furthermore, the period after the Civil War saw the opening of the Middle West (California had already been settled) and the knitting together of the country by the railroads, the common time zones that the railroads used to synchronize their timetables, and the rapidly growing industry that both built and prospered because of the railroads.
As the country became more closely knit by technology and the greater commerce that that technology fostered, further growth became increasingly dependent on regularizing certain things across state lines and across the country as a whole; these included standard weights and measure, the afore-mentioned time zones -- and especially laws regulating commerce. This was accomplished in a number of ways, but notably through the Commerce Clause of the Constitution; the upshot was to further weaken the 10th Amendment, which reserved to the
So what's to stop the faithful of one party from simply acting as spoilers for another's best candidate (by voting for a less likely candidate) ?
;)
Nothing.
That's a legitimate worry, and it often does happen: "Hey I'm going to go vote for the most extreme candidate in the other party, to ensure that mainstream voters must vote for the candidate of my party!"
That's why some states don't allow open primaries, and many leave the choice to open the primary to the party.
However, also consider states (or counties, districts, etc.) where one party claims such a super-majority of the voters that that party's candidate invariably or almost invariably wins the General Election.
Such states would have included most of the American South for the century from 1880 until the 1980s, when the effective disenfranchisement of blacks (until the 1960s) and the long tradition of white Southern resentment of the Party of Lincoln (that is, the Republican Party) ensured that the Democratic candidate always won the General Election. Any Republican minority would then be forced either to abandon the Republic Party (thus ensuring it would never grow) or to be effectively disenfranchised, unable to vote in the Democratic Primary, the only election that really counted.
(Today, Republicans are ironically the majority in most of the South, as Southern whites left the Democratic Party in the 1930s, under Franklin Roosevelt and in the 1960s, under Lyndon Johnson, in large part because of the Democratic Party's embrace of Black voters and Civil Rights legislation (yes, even as early as Franklin Roosevelt, with Roosevelt's executive orders requiring equal compensation of black factory works, forced on him by black activists threatening strikes that might have crippled the war effort, and Eleanor Roosevelt's support for such things as the Tuskegee Airmen)-- which conversely means that few blacks vote for Lincoln's Party of Emancipation anymore.)
Another example is the nation's Capital, the District of Columbia. While its residents are not given voting representation in Congress, the 23rd Amendment finally gave District residents a vote in Presidential elections, and Congressional legislation grudgingly allowed the District to elect its own mayor by 1971. The District, in part by virtue of being 55% black, and in part because of a large proportion of Federal workers among its residents, almost always votes Democrat (its City Council includes two Republicans out of 13, one of whom, Catania, is gay, the other, Schwartz, a Jewish woman, neither representative of the Republican mainstream). As a result, one of its residents, the arch-conservative columnist Robert Novak, is a registered Democrat, simply in order to have a vote in the primary races in the city.
Why is chosing [sic] the person that stands as a candidate for the Democrats the business of the states? Why is it the business of anyone except the Democratic party in that state? Why doesn't the party decide - how come it gets the states to run elections for it?
Because America political parties are not as cohesive as European political parties, and a big part of the reason for that is that America has neither a Parliamentary system -- where the executive is a member of the legislature -- and because America doesn't have proportional voting.
For America readers: most European governments are Parliamentary system, so the leader of the government is the leader of the party in power, and the party in power is the party with a majority (or plurality and a coalition) in the legislature. As such it's impossible to have a situation in which the legislature is controlled by one party and the executive is controlled by another party. This allows the government to be less dead-locked, and it was precisely for this reason that America's founding Fathers rejected such an arrangement.
Realizing the tyrannical potential of string central governments -- having just won independence from Britain -- and wishing to ensure the power of individual states under the Federal Constitution, the Founders made sure that it was possible for the legislature -- Congress - to be controlled by a different party than the party of the executive -- the President. This was consciously engineered by the Founders to promote either dead-lock or moderation of opinion and vote trading, in either case keeping the central government weak except in those cases where there existed a true consensus of all parties. (Other features of American constitutional structure also reflect this desire to obtain dead-lock or consensus: the original provision of selection of senators by state legislatures rather than popular vote, allowing filibusters in the Senate, and the requirements of super-majorities in both the national legislature and a super-majority of state legislatures in order to amend the constitution).
Another feature, perhaps less consciously built into the american plan was a weakening of the Party system itself. In European countries (and Israel, but not Britain) with the system of proportional representation, political parties, prior to an election, make an ordered list of all their candidates. Voters vote for the party, not any particular candidate, and the party seats a number of candidates proportional to their vote, starting from their most visible candidates at the front of their lists. So if the legislature has 100 seats, and the Green Party gets 5% of the total vote, the Green party gets to fill five seats, and it must fill those seats with the first five persons on the (previously published) Green party list. The party has a lot of control over candidates in this system, as it can simply tell a candidate to tow the line or be put at the bottom of the list -- or taken off the list altogether.
America fills the legislature by geographically bound Districts, with the winner in each District the candidate with a plurality (except in Louisiana) of the vote -- Europeans frequently refer to this as "First Past the Post" voting, because the first candidate to get enough votes -- like a racehorse nosing out its opponents -- wins. In America, especially in the last ten years, most Districts are generally crafted to contain a majority of voters sympathetic to one party or the other, making most seats relatively uncontested. But the corollary of that is that one district can be a sure thing for one party, the District next to it a sure thing for the other Party.
As a consequence, America elections are decided more locally, and the Party has less power to control the candidate. Indeed, the candidate may depart from his Party's ideology in order to get elected in a District more congenial to the other party, and his Party will be able to do little, as it wants the seat in order to
Only Republicans vote for the Republican Party candidate and only Democrats vote for the Democratic Party candidate.
In some states.
Other states may hold what are known as "open" primaries -- possibly, depending on state law, at the discretion of the party holding the primary --, in which voters are allowed to vote in the party's primary regardless of their registration.
This year, Wisconsin's Democratic primary was open to all voters, and it was the votes of Republicans and independents voting in the Democrat primary that gave Senator Edwards of North Carolina a much closer second place in Wisconsin than in most other states. This edge by Edwards among non-Democrats was argued by his campaign to be evidence that he would fare better against Bush in the General Election than would Senator Kerry of Massachusetts.
I'm going to guess that
But by then you'll probably have ended up joining the Army for lack of better prospects in Bush's economy, so that you can lay down your life ostensibly to protect democracy in Iraq, and surely to protect Halliburton's contracts there.
While I'm sure that somewhere Mr. Jefferson is cringing at your example, please don't feel too bad: Fascists everywhere rely on people just like you; without you they'd never get beyond the Bier-Hall Putsch.
The students at Copenhagen's new IT University will soon be guided by invisible, but talkative digital agents, known as ghosts or Disembodied Location-specific Conversational Agents.
This just in: Darl McBride and David Boies will team up with JK Rowling to sue IT University for using "Harry Potter Intellectual Property".
They are asking for "injunctive relief against IT University's further use or copying of any part of JK Rowling's copyrighted "Hogwarts" and "Harry Potter" materials and also [requesting] damages as a result of these muggles' infringement in an amount to be proven at trial."
Hell, Slashdot is already full of "ghosts" competing for mod points.
Of course, it would be rediculus to expect the Slashdot "ghosts" to loose their limited vocabularies.
And none of us really expect to ever have the ability, let alone the opportunity, to reproduce.