As a lawyer, I can tell you that civil suits require damages of some kind.
IAAS (I am a skeptic).
The parent poster claims he is a lawyer.
His website is listed as http://sethf.com/
On that website, he apologigizes for his HTML with "Quick navigation (I'm a server programmer, not a web-designer...)"
On that same page, he describes himself as "Seth Finkelstein - Anti-censorship activist and programmer Seth Finkelstein "
On that same page, he makes reference to, and links to, a whitepaper he co-wrote. The whitepaper lists its authors as "Seth Finkelstein, Consulting Programmer; Lee Tien, Senior Staff Attorney, EFF".
Now perhaps Mr. Finklestein, in addition to being a programmer, has received a J.D. so recently his personal web page hasn't yet been updated to note it.
Or perhaps the Slashdot poster is an imposter who links to the real Seth Finklestein's pages.
But it seems most likely that Mr. Finklestein, wanting to be able to make an argument from authority in his post, invented a credential for himself that he has not earned. (I hope not, and I hope Mr. Finklestein will clear this up.)
What's most disappointing about this is that, looking at his web site, Mr. Finkesteing has much to be proud of -- real accomplishments of real merit.
Or perhaps not: if he's willing to make up a J.D. just to bolster an argument, one must wonder how much his web page is to be believed. One must ask whether his whitepaper, co-written with a real lawyer from the EFF, can in fact be trusted.
That's the shame of this: one unconsidered lie taints the believability of everything the seemingly accomplished and thoughtful Mr. Finklestein might say in the future.
Hmm. I submitted this story yesterday, but it was rejected. I'm a little upset that it was accepted when somebody else submitted it. Here was my source, from newsday.com.
The Slashdot editors wanted to mix your submission with submissions of the same story from two women, but unfortunately, the resulting article's HTML failed to pass W3C Standards, and spontaneously aborted all open-source browsers. (IE managed to load it, as it will load all HTML abominations, but immediately installed Gator, and redirected to goatse.cx.)
Continued attempts to mix the article submissions of two women and one man were suspended when it was discovered that there are, in fact, only three Slashdot posters who are women, and in any case one of those is suspected of being a 14 year-old boy in real life.
(A) the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find, taking the material as a whole and with respect to minors, is designed to appeal to, or is designed to pander to, the prurient interest
And let's not forget it's the Federal prosecutor who gets to decide where to prosecute, and thus what community provides the jurors that apply the "standards".
It's no accident that the current Ashcroft prosecution against an "extreme" pornographer is taking place in the Western District of Pennsylvania, even though the porn is produced in, and sold from, California.
That's right, fellow Americans: what you have a right to view in the privacy of your own home is decided by "your" comminity, and "your community" just happens to be a jury pool in a conservative, rural Bible Belt/Rust Belt District.
It's a step up from having the congregation of John Ashcroft's church deciding for you, but not much of a step.
The point is not that pr0n is not legitimate..... But not for children. The point is that there are no safeguards in place to keep minors from accessing it....
When did we decide that parents no longer had responsibility to monitor their children?
When did we decide that, so parents could be lazy, we'd limit the right of every adult?
You don't want your kids to download porn? Put the computer in the room where your TV is, and keep an eye on what your kids are downloading.
Don't send Ashcroft into my house because you're unwilling to watch your kids in your house.
Just remmeber that person with the MBA knows a hell of alot more about business than you do.
Yeah, they really make a difference.
One explained how we could patent "saying good morning" so long as we appended "by means of a calculating device or computer netwwork" to it.
Once that was done, the other one explaned we could lay off all the creative and tech workers, hire a bunch of lawyers, and drive up our stock prices by suing the entire world for infrnging our patent.
Who has simulated the development of the eye and found the results you describe? What were the conditions of the simulation?
See "A Pessimistic Estimate Of The Time Required For An Eye To Evolve", D.-E. Nilsson and S. Pelger, Proceedings of the Royal Society London B, 1994, 256
Everything in the system is an Object reference. When all the references no longer point to an object, the object magically goes away.
(Well, your "magic" is my "serious overhead that makes real-time programming esentially impossible".)
But you are correct that I wrote "dangling" when I should have written "null".
However, I don't agree that a null pointer exception is "IS NOT a critical issue in Java like it is in C/C++)". Java's "deals with" unexpected null pointers by throwing an exception; a exception does (or should) signal a critical problem.
Part of the problem with Java is that run-time exceptions (which are expensive) are used far mmore causually than they ought to be, in some cases even taking the place on nominal program flow.
C++ and Java are two very different languages that just happens to share syntax. A good C++ programmer is not necessarily a good Java programmer and vice versa.
Well...
Java works very much like a (poor) subset of C++.
My own experience is that, having learned C++ well (and it is a steep learning curve), I was able to easily pass Sun's own Java certification before I had compiled a single Java program (Ok, I did one "Hello World"), because of the surface similarities of the languages.
One data point only, but either it says something about the similarity of the languages, or what Sun, at least according to its certification, expects of a Java programmer.
But you are right about the differences required in good programmers in the respective languages. Perhaps the biggest problems in Java are dangling pointers (null pointer exception) and pointer aliasing. The first Java deals with with a run-time exception -- and run time is too late, in my opinion. The second is dealt with by making most language/library objects (String, primitive wrappers (Integer, Boolean, etc.) immutable -- but while immutable objects dion't suffer from pointer aliasing, they're also not efficient (to "change" a value, you have to new up a new instance, and point all pointers to it, often not easy in Java because you can't pass a pointer-to-pointer), and most user objects aren't made immutable anayway.
C++, on the other hand, strives mightily to treat everything as a value object, even (especially?) when it's not a value object -- thus references, and smart pointers, and the handle-body idiom in general. A down-side can exist when what would be cheap and efficient on a primitive, such as pre-increment (++i) can be very inefficient on an object of class type (thus the C++ism of using post increment even for primitives in for loops, to strengthen the habit of only using pre-increment when trult needed.
More generally, C++ allows the programmer a great deal of freedom, and expects him to use it wisely (e.g., operator overloading); Java doesn't trust programmers but paradoxically allows dangling pointer problems and unecessary casts that C++ will catch at compile time.
The run-time versus compile-time costs are perhaps the biggest practical differences of the two languages: C++ requires much more of the compiler (think templates) and of the programmer (e.g, remember method overridding does not happen until an object is fully constructed) in order to endsure that as many costs as possible are paid once, at compile time and not at run-time; Java prefers to pay run-time costs, on the theory that machines are fast enough to pay the run-time costs and the benefit comes from easier, quicker coding. Which trade-off you prefer must really come down to where you fell you can best pay the costs; my take is that good C++ code will be more ribust in general, if robust is what you need.
it takes very little energy to create an array of 10 "things"
Well, see the first reply to your post -- the STL itsn't what any is used to from C, but it is consistent once you've taken teh trouble to learn it --, and, please recall that writing safe, non-exploitable code is never going to be easy or automatic.
No offense, but if your primary criterion is "what's easiest" you probably shouldn't be writing high-risk code that processes arbitrary-length buffers which could be prone to buffer overflow. Limit yourself to less risky projects, and limit your buffers to a fixed length, and document that fixed length.
Smart Clothing? Does this mean I won't get yelled at for my clothes not matching anymore?!
Imagine how smart clothing would have to be to make the typical Slashdotter look stylish.
I mean, I mean, we could solve the problem of frickin' world hunger with the intelligence required to make Joe Dances With Trolls In Mom's Basement look absolutely fab.
We're talking Seymour Cray Casual Pants. We're talking Deep Blue Denim Jeans, We're talking a Beowulf Cluster of neck Ties.
I just can't understand the insistance of so many online music retailers to go with WMA instead of a more popular and widespread format like MP3. It can't be because of a fear of pirating....
Of course it's the fear of pirating!
This is for sale in Australia. If an Australian pirates music and you convict him, where could you send him?!
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently SCO's bluff is working about as well as the threats from Anonymous Cowards to beat people up over their internet connections.
"Just you wait! I'll extend the introductory price another month, and I'll get you then!"
16 months for someone who was not guilty of a crime is too long.
Not according to Ashcroft.
Note to mods: despite appearences, the parent post should not be modded "+1 Funny"; it shoudl be modded "+1 Insightful".
As a lawyer, I can tell you that civil suits require damages of some kind.
...)"
IAAS (I am a skeptic).
The parent poster claims he is a lawyer.
His website is listed as http://sethf.com/
On that website, he apologigizes for his HTML with "Quick navigation (I'm a server programmer, not a web-designer
On that same page, he describes himself as "Seth Finkelstein - Anti-censorship activist and programmer Seth Finkelstein "
On that same page, he makes reference to, and links to, a whitepaper he co-wrote. The whitepaper lists its authors as "Seth Finkelstein, Consulting Programmer; Lee Tien, Senior Staff Attorney, EFF".
Now perhaps Mr. Finklestein, in addition to being a programmer, has received a J.D. so recently his personal web page hasn't yet been updated to note it.
Or perhaps the Slashdot poster is an imposter who links to the real Seth Finklestein's pages.
But it seems most likely that Mr. Finklestein, wanting to be able to make an argument from authority in his post, invented a credential for himself that he has not earned. (I hope not, and I hope Mr. Finklestein will clear this up.)
What's most disappointing about this is that, looking at his web site, Mr. Finkesteing has much to be proud of -- real accomplishments of real merit.
Or perhaps not: if he's willing to make up a J.D. just to bolster an argument, one must wonder how much his web page is to be believed. One must ask whether his whitepaper, co-written with a real lawyer from the EFF, can in fact be trusted.
That's the shame of this: one unconsidered lie taints the believability of everything the seemingly accomplished and thoughtful Mr. Finklestein might say in the future.
Hmm. I submitted this story yesterday, but it was rejected. I'm a little upset that it was accepted when somebody else submitted it. Here was my source, from newsday.com.
The Slashdot editors wanted to mix your submission with submissions of the same story from two women, but unfortunately, the resulting article's HTML failed to pass W3C Standards, and spontaneously aborted all open-source browsers. (IE managed to load it, as it will load all HTML abominations, but immediately installed Gator, and redirected to goatse.cx.)
Continued attempts to mix the article submissions of two women and one man were suspended when it was discovered that there are, in fact, only three Slashdot posters who are women, and in any case one of those is suspected of being a 14 year-old boy in real life.
For the record, as several other have said it:
If it's not MP3, it won't play on my portable player, and so it's useless to me at any price.
I'm not paying for DRM. If you can't trust me as a customer, you can't have me for a customer.
From xe.com, 0.99 CAD = 0.748332 USD
You can convert Canadian dollars to US dollars???
I always thought you could only convert Canadian dollars to whale blubber and beer.
(A) the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find, taking the material as a whole and with respect to minors, is designed to appeal to, or is designed to pander to, the prurient interest
And let's not forget it's the Federal prosecutor who gets to decide where to prosecute, and thus what community provides the jurors that apply the "standards".
It's no accident that the current Ashcroft prosecution against an "extreme" pornographer is taking place in the Western District of Pennsylvania, even though the porn is produced in, and sold from, California.
That's right, fellow Americans: what you have a right to view in the privacy of your own home is decided by "your" comminity, and "your community" just happens to be a jury pool in a conservative, rural Bible Belt/Rust Belt District.
It's a step up from having the congregation of John Ashcroft's church deciding for you, but not much of a step.
Well, here in the UK you have to be 18 to buy such items [e.g., dildos]
Remeber (sic), all the while, the age of consent in the UK is 16..
So a girl can have the real thing, and get preggers, two years before she can have the consolations of a safe plastic "friend"?
And they say the laws don't make sense.
The point is not that pr0n is not legitimate. .... But not for children. The point is that there are no safeguards in place to keep minors from accessing it....
When did we decide that parents no longer had responsibility to monitor their children?
When did we decide that, so parents could be lazy, we'd limit the right of every adult?
You don't want your kids to download porn? Put the computer in the room where your TV is, and keep an eye on what your kids are downloading.
Don't send Ashcroft into my house because you're unwilling to watch your kids in your house.
I've got a girlfriend. Since yesterday. Mbwahahaha. :p
Stole Mom's credit card again, huh?
How much is your "girlfriend" per hour?
Or did you go with the economy inflatable model?
Just remmeber that person with the MBA knows a hell of alot more about business than you do.
Yeah, they really make a difference.
One explained how we could patent "saying good morning" so long as we appended "by means of a calculating device or computer netwwork" to it.
Once that was done, the other one explaned we could lay off all the creative and tech workers, hire a bunch of lawyers, and drive up our stock prices by suing the entire world for infrnging our patent.
It's pure genius!
Hey Slashdot wimps!
Here's your chance to get back at all the bullies who harassed and mocked you!
With a bodyguard that runs linux!
Who has simulated the development of the eye and found the results you describe? What were the conditions of the simulation?
See "A Pessimistic Estimate Of The Time Required For An Eye To Evolve", D.-E. Nilsson and S. Pelger, Proceedings of the Royal Society London B, 1994, 256
Or a summary here.
IOW...When can I get some 3d pr0n
There's already a special application for producing and displaying 3D porn: it's called a girl (or for some models, a woman).
Sometimes they'll even allow you to touch their naughty bits.
Unfortunately, Slashdotters can't get one for $3299; in fact, most Slashdotters can't get one at any price.
Everything in the system is an Object reference. When all the references no longer point to an object, the object magically goes away.
(Well, your "magic" is my "serious overhead that makes real-time programming esentially impossible".)
But you are correct that I wrote "dangling" when I should have written "null".
However, I don't agree that a null pointer exception is "IS NOT a critical issue in Java like it is in C/C++)". Java's "deals with" unexpected null pointers by throwing an exception; a exception does (or should) signal a critical problem.
Part of the problem with Java is that run-time exceptions (which are expensive) are used far mmore causually than they ought to be, in some cases even taking the place on nominal program flow.
Longhorn!
With DRM and Hilary Rosen, Jack Valenti, and the Boston strangler in every box!
C++ and Java are two very different languages that just happens to share syntax. A good C++ programmer is not necessarily a good Java programmer and vice versa.
Well...
Java works very much like a (poor) subset of C++.
My own experience is that, having learned C++ well (and it is a steep learning curve), I was able to easily pass Sun's own Java certification before I had compiled a single Java program (Ok, I did one "Hello World"), because of the surface similarities of the languages.
One data point only, but either it says something about the similarity of the languages, or what Sun, at least according to its certification, expects of a Java programmer.
But you are right about the differences required in good programmers in the respective languages. Perhaps the biggest problems in Java are dangling pointers (null pointer exception) and pointer aliasing. The first Java deals with with a run-time exception -- and run time is too late, in my opinion. The second is dealt with by making most language/library objects (String, primitive wrappers (Integer, Boolean, etc.) immutable -- but while immutable objects dion't suffer from pointer aliasing, they're also not efficient (to "change" a value, you have to new up a new instance, and point all pointers to it, often not easy in Java because you can't pass a pointer-to-pointer), and most user objects aren't made immutable anayway.
C++, on the other hand, strives mightily to treat everything as a value object, even (especially?) when it's not a value object -- thus references, and smart pointers, and the handle-body idiom in general. A down-side can exist when what would be cheap and efficient on a primitive, such as pre-increment (++i) can be very inefficient on an object of class type (thus the C++ism of using post increment even for primitives in for loops, to strengthen the habit of only using pre-increment when trult needed.
More generally, C++ allows the programmer a great deal of freedom, and expects him to use it wisely (e.g., operator overloading); Java doesn't trust programmers but paradoxically allows dangling pointer problems and unecessary casts that C++ will catch at compile time.
The run-time versus compile-time costs are perhaps the biggest practical differences of the two languages: C++ requires much more of the compiler (think templates) and of the programmer (e.g, remember method overridding does not happen until an object is fully constructed) in order to endsure that as many costs as possible are paid once, at compile time and not at run-time; Java prefers to pay run-time costs, on the theory that machines are fast enough to pay the run-time costs and the benefit comes from easier, quicker coding. Which trade-off you prefer must really come down to where you fell you can best pay the costs; my take is that good C++ code will be more ribust in general, if robust is what you need.
1. Collect underwear
2. Self-collecting underwear
3. Profit!
it takes very little energy to create an array of 10 "things"
Well, see the first reply to your post -- the STL itsn't what any is used to from C, but it is consistent once you've taken teh trouble to learn it --, and, please recall that writing safe, non-exploitable code is never going to be easy or automatic.
No offense, but if your primary criterion is "what's easiest" you probably shouldn't be writing high-risk code that processes arbitrary-length buffers which could be prone to buffer overflow. Limit yourself to less risky projects, and limit your buffers to a fixed length, and document that fixed length.
try:
How about eliminating the buffer overflows?
std::vector already does this. How about using it?
Smart Clothing? Does this mean I won't get yelled at for my clothes not matching anymore?!
Imagine how smart clothing would have to be to make the typical Slashdotter look stylish.
I mean, I mean, we could solve the problem of frickin' world hunger with the intelligence required to make Joe Dances With Trolls In Mom's Basement look absolutely fab.
We're talking Seymour Cray Casual Pants. We're talking Deep Blue Denim Jeans, We're talking a Beowulf Cluster of neck Ties.
I just can't understand the insistance of so many online music retailers to go with WMA instead of a more popular and widespread format like MP3. It can't be because of a fear of pirating....
Of course it's the fear of pirating!
This is for sale in Australia. If an Australian pirates music and you convict him, where could you send him?!
(That is, until we have a penal colony on the moon.)
get a better mp3 player. hell my DVD PLAYER will do WMA....what have you got a 1st gen Nomad?
I've got an Archos Jukebox FM, with the open source Rockbox OS replacement, modded with a 60GB hardrive.
You got 60GB of music to carry in your pocket?
Despite that, VoIP still has one problem: voice is simply less flexible useful than text messaging, for most people.
Maybe for you. I don't type that fast. At two-finger hunt and peck, voice is much faster and easier.
And forget it when I'm typing one-handed. I mean, I can't even hit the shift key to type capital letters when I'm having cyber... Uh, nevermind.
Look, let me just say that there are just some situations that really call for a hands-free telephone, and leave it at that, ok?
(Did I mention that chicks reallyy dig my sexy deep voice? Ok, forget I said that.)