The problem with comments is that you now have two things to maintain, the code and the comments.
The problem with NO comments is that debugging can not determine wither code is correct - it can only find whether two representations of a solution are equivalent. "The code is the documentation" means the only thing that can be tested is the compiler.
This is because what is correct varies, depending on what the job is. (You may have written a bug free version of "cat". But it's very badly broken if you intended to write "ls".)
So a good programmer writes TWO versions of his program - in representations as different as possible. (Preferably one optimized for automated translation, one for human readability.) That way he's thinking in different mindsets, greatly reducing the likelihood of making identical errors in both representations.)
Don't you know that there is no circumstance under which use of goto is acceptable?
Only if you raise structured programming to the status of a religion.
Gotos tend to cause problems by tying code into incomprehensible (and thus undebuggable) knots. The main battle in programming is to limit the scope you must think about simultaneously to the cardinality of your short-term memory. Gotos tend to suck in side-effects from all over the place and create a mental overflow.
Limiting yourself to concatenation, alternation, and iteration does a fine job of limiting the scope you must think about to the capacity of a human mind. But it does have a cost: It doesn't gracefully handle error escapes from deep nesting. Gotos handle that VERY well, while shoehorning error escapes in via conditionals and the like pollutes the code in the intermediate levels with information properly the subject of just the endpoints of the escape.
So IMHO goto has exactly one proper place in programming: Graceful error escape from deep nesting.
(Of course a goto escape doesn't handle the side-effects on the intermediate levels of code. Which is why object-oriented languages encapsulate these into the construction and destruction of local objects and do error escape with first-class constructs like catch/throw, which lets the compiler and programmer conspire to insure that intermediate-level cleanup is properly handled on the way out.)
at least that's how it went in _Day of the Triffids_ by Brian Aldiss
Brian Aldiss stole the plot of John Wyndham's novel, and he didn't even change the name? What a git!
Oops! I misread the start of the Wikipedia article. It mentioned a Brian Aldiss characterization of Windham's catastrophe before it mention's Windham and I cut-and-pasted the wrong author's name. B-(
Because if you do that, you can't trust the access times in case of a crash.... One solution to the problem, might be to write the atimes to the journal, and then just update it once in a while, or perhaps even link the atimes to some seperate part of the disk, so the atimes can be written in one go somehow.
Another might be a "weakatime" option, to update the atimes in the inode cache but mark them as something weaker than "dirty" ("sumdged"?) when the data is re-read from cache. Opening, last closing, or reading more data to the cache would still dirty the inode. "Smudged" inodes would be written:
- If something else really dirtied the inode (i.e. updating wtime or last close of the file).
- The next time there is a sync that is the result of a command or has to write an actually dirty sector (so you won't spin up a laptop disk at periodic sync time just to update atimes)
- Just before the file system is unmounted.
A weaker version yet would be "wimpyatime", in which additional reads to cache after the open would "smudge" rather than "dirty" the inode. (This would be equivalent to "weakatime" with a file system that cached the entire file on open.)
But caching the atimes in memory is a recipe for disaster and inconsistency!
Not completely. They'd be updated on disk when the file is opened and (except for "wimpyatime") when new sectors are read into cache. You'd just delay the continual updating on the hard disk when an already open file is examined further. There'd be more inconsistency if the system crashed rather than shutting down gracefully, but you'd still be able to see that the file had been open.
So every time a file is used, it has to write an entry on the HDD, slowing performance,... so I have the noatime line in my fstab.
I have noatime set on my laptop.
Writing atime to the disk every time data is read from the cache keeps the disk spinning, burning battery power. "noatime" means the disk can shut down much of the time, spinning up only when writes must be synced or data not yet in cache must be read.
The gamble loses if sun cannot produce a better chip next year than brand x.
It's even better for sun than that.
Even if Sun doesn't produce a better chip next year, it's still a win if they make more money as a result of opening than they would have if they'd stayed closed.
As another poster has pointed out: You build a core with multiple copies of the register set and replicate (or take turns on) the associated instruction-dispatching logic.
But these multiple CPUs share a common set of arithmetic/logic execution units, along with arbitration logic. Different threads will be doing different things at any given instant, and thus using different sections of the ALU.
The arbitration logic decides which thread gets which hunk of ALU at any given moment. And some threads will be stalled waiting for data and won't need any ALU function at all. Of course when more threads want a particular kind of execution unit than are available, one or more of them must stall. But by having the right number of copies of the commonly-used types of execution units you can keep a number of threads running at or near full speed most of the time and the ALU components mostly busy, with much less silicon than if each thread had a full-blown CPU and most of the ALU logic was idle at any given moment. With less silicon logic you can put things closer together and speed it up still more.
This approach has been around since Cray was at Control Data.
If Sun's open-sourcing of this chip leads to a big boost for them, just IMAGINE what an argument that will be against the utility of the government-enforced monopoly in the patent reform debate. B-)
It actually matters a lot because Sun probably owns a lot of patents.
Too true.
If I've got this right: Under GPL3 anybody with foundry access could make the chip or a derivative, with no more patent issues than Sun itself would have. But under GPL2 they might have to enter separate license agreements to actually implement it.
= = = =
Presuming this release does make the chip open to anybody absent further licensing, it will be interesting to see how it affects Sun's future.
On one hand it means any company that wants to could build the chip and sell it in competition with Sun (which has borne the development costs on the SPARC series - but recouped much of them already).
On the other hand, they have a number of advantages: Already up and fabbing, deep understanding of the chip, etc.
Further, one big source of resistance to adoption of their chips is the concern for what happens if Sun abandons the line, stops developing it, goes belly-up, or closes up again. With a perpetual license to others to build this chip and make improvements on it, that's no longer an issue. Even if Sun went belly-up and left them with no other sources, a big enough company with a product based on this chip could even commission the fabrication of its own chips, rather than twisting in the wind for lack of supplies. So such a company can design this chip into their product line and buy it from Sun without betting their own company on a possibly weak supplier.
Let's see Intel or AMD compete with that that. B-)
(For instance, one of the best has been the University of Washington, located in an area with one of the highest densities and species count of botulism spores.)
Correction: That's Oregon State and the "botulism belt" is the Willamette valley.
They're probably referring to pulse repetition rate (1/frequency) when they say "wavelength".
Right after a neuron fires it "rearms" the membrane by pumping ions across it. In time sequence its sensitivity varies smoothly through:
- The absolute refractory period: Nothing can fire it.
- The negative afterpotential: It can be fired but it takes extra stimulus.
- The positive afterpotential: It takes LESS than the usual amount of stimulus to fire it. Then it returns to its normal, resting, sensitivity.
The sensitivity slope may be an artifact of the ion pumps and channels, but it appears to function as a mechanism for encoding the strength of a stimulus as a pulse rate.
This has a side effect: If a nerve is given short pulses of stimulation with a spacing corresponding to the length of time between a stimulus that fires it and the peak of the positive afterpotential, once it fires once it will tend to continue to fire in synchrony with the pulses from then on. If you have a bundle of such nerves with similar timing and all affected by the stimulus, each additional pulse picks up additional nerves and phase-locks them to the stimulus. Within a few pulses most of the fibers in the bundle tend to be firing rapidly and in unison.
You can see this with a strobe light with a variable repetition rate. Run it slow and you see distinct pulses - a flicker. Run it fast and you see a continuous light - the pulses have fused into a continuous response. But run it near the "flicker fusion rate" boundary and you get a lot of weird visual effects - notably flickering rainbow colors across the neighboring (or entire) visual field that tend to enhance and obscure the actual image with a flickering, undecipherable, psychedelic-poster version of itself.
You get colors other than those of the actual source (if it is colored rather than white) and effects in other parts of the visual field than the actual strobing light and things it is illuminating. This is because nerves for parts of the eye that would not normally be stimulated enough to trigger by this light (if it were non-strobing) still become entrained when they happen to be in a positive afterpotential period when a blink occurs.
(By the way: Don't try this if you're epileptic. It can produce a seizure. Indeed: Some people discover they're epileptic when they are exposed to such flickering lights.)
One speculation about the hypothetical "brown note" was that infrasound at a positive-afterpotential repetition rate matching that of nerves controlling the intestines might force peristalsis in the colon or trigger the appropriate reflexes for defecation. (It might be interesting to retry the debunking experiments with a train of narrow high-pressure pulses, approximating impulses, rather than a sine wave. B-) )
This flashlight appears to be attempting a variation of the same effect. By entraining the nerves of the visual processing responsible for locating onself in space and/or ones motion, it could create a visual illusion of movement that doesn't match the signals from the inner ear and the muscle-position sensors. A mismatch among these three systems produces motion sickness, nausea, and vomiting.
This reflex appears to be a defense against ingestion of neurotoxic poisons (such as those in some mushrooms and food-poisoning bacteria), using their disruption of the complex navigation system as an early warning and attempting to eliminate them from the digestive system before enough are absorbed to disable a critical system and kill the victim.
Scientific approaches to gastronomy and other aspects of food preparation are NOT new. It just doesn't impinge on the attention of the nerd community very often.
Basic and advanced degrees in "food science" - including biochemistry, microbiology, science of taste, safe canning (home and industrial), cooking at all scales and with special requirements (home, restaurant, bakery, hospital, large institution, military base,...), management of kitchen crews, operations, and fincancing, design of industrial food and design and operation of its processing plants, and so on have been available for generations from prestigious universities, which (as is typical of universities) also do extensive research to advance the science and art.
The departments are sometimes referred to as "home economics" - which is another source of confusion for people whose only exposure to food science is awareness of the "home economics" classes at their local high school. These classes bear about the same relationship to the food science departments at such a university as the "science" classes do to a nuclear physics department, or "auto shop" to the entire mechanical engineering department (including the factory automation specialization).
Another source of confusion is that, as with agriculture schools, some of the best schools in this specialty tend to be sited in rural and food-producing parts of the country - especially those with special problems. (For instance, one of the best has been the University of Washington, located in an area with one of the highest densities and species count of botulism spores.) So (as with agriculture, forestry, or much of the guts of medicine) you don't hear a lot about it in your engineering department or your Ivy League Ivory Tower.
So let's not assume, every time food science rears its head, that it's some new invention. Yes there are new inventions and new approaches in it all the time - just as with other technologies. But what's new is not the entire application of science to the subject, but a flash of visibility of this application to the inorganic "hi tech" community.
Red Hat created a logo and posters recently to help spread ODF.
I don't think the slogan "Liberate your documents" is going to go over well with businesses. The image it evokes is security leaks and industrial espionage.
Wow, you disproved your statement in the same sentence. I'm impressed.;) Sure, you said "move in the right direction" but I think they'd prefer taxes over "socialism". ("Wealth to the people? SCREAM!!")
Some (Ll)ibertarians will take any piece of their agenda they can get, regardless of whether the effect of taking one piece makes things worse for getting the others (i.e. for freedom). Others are aware how the order of taking the steps from statism to libertarianism affects both your chances of getting there and whether things improve monotonically on the way.
Example: You need to gut the welfare state before opening the borders. Otherwise things get worse - in ways most voters can understand, which means that your candidates don't get elected.
I call the latter sort "Law 'n Order Anarchists": They want to repeal all the LAWS, but IN a correct ORDER. (Make that "Law 'n Order Minarchists" if they think there is some residual proper function for a government.)
Ron Paul is one (of the minarchist stripe - currently calling himself a "Constitutionalist"). I'm another.
The government PAYS people that live in Alaksa to live there.
Seriously ?
Seriously.
The money collected from other sources (notably north slope oil pumping and transport) are far more than the state government needs for its own function.
Rather than finding new ways to waste it, the more-than-slightly libertarian-leaning politicians decided to do away with other taxes - notably income and property tax.
But they still had a big surplus. So they decided to distribute it to the citizens. Even a libertarian can support this as a move in the right direction, since most of the money comes from selling off a resource "owned in common by the citizens of the state". If the government sells it, the citizen-owners should each get their share of the proceeds, right?
2) Does the person have an expectation of privacy? For instance, a closed telephone booth is in a public place, but grants a person an expectation of privacy and law enforcement thus needs a warrant to record a conversation therein.
The expectation of privacy is why it's illegal in Michigan (not sure if it's local or national) to use directional microphones to pick up conversations, even in public places, when there is no obvious listener within normal hearing range.
DO ordinary citizens have an expectation that the whereabouts of their car is private when there is no cop watching? Do they have an expectation that, even if a cop IS watching, after a month or so he won't remember every license plate that went by without something special to make it "stick in his mind" or end up on a report (like a car involved in an infraction or a plate on a "be on the lookout" list)?
If they do, the case could go for the ACLU on the same grounds. Maybe so far that the recording of the data would be prohibited without a warrant or a B.O.L.
Which is why the ACLU defended neo-nazis. Riiiight.
A Jewish friend of mine was happy with the ACLU suit over the denial of the NAZIs' request for a permit for a parade through the largely Jewish Chicago suburb of Skokie.
She thought the NAZIs should have the right to show the people how strong their movement really was. And that the people of the suburb - especially the concentration camp survivors - should know who the American NAZIs were - and have the opportunity to personally hit them with umbrellas and baseball bats.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with comments is that you now have two things to maintain, the code and the comments.
The problem with NO comments is that debugging can not determine wither code is correct - it can only find whether two representations of a solution are equivalent. "The code is the documentation" means the only thing that can be tested is the compiler.
This is because what is correct varies, depending on what the job is. (You may have written a bug free version of "cat". But it's very badly broken if you intended to write "ls".)
So a good programmer writes TWO versions of his program - in representations as different as possible. (Preferably one optimized for automated translation, one for human readability.) That way he's thinking in different mindsets, greatly reducing the likelihood of making identical errors in both representations.)
no goto, same structure, nicer all round: best of both worlds.
Adds function overhead (which the compiler may not be able to optimize away).
May require ugly return value status coding.
Error escapes from multiple depths can require additional layers of functions.
Don't you know that there is no circumstance under which use of goto is acceptable?
Only if you raise structured programming to the status of a religion.
Gotos tend to cause problems by tying code into incomprehensible (and thus undebuggable) knots. The main battle in programming is to limit the scope you must think about simultaneously to the cardinality of your short-term memory. Gotos tend to suck in side-effects from all over the place and create a mental overflow.
Limiting yourself to concatenation, alternation, and iteration does a fine job of limiting the scope you must think about to the capacity of a human mind. But it does have a cost: It doesn't gracefully handle error escapes from deep nesting. Gotos handle that VERY well, while shoehorning error escapes in via conditionals and the like pollutes the code in the intermediate levels with information properly the subject of just the endpoints of the escape.
So IMHO goto has exactly one proper place in programming: Graceful error escape from deep nesting.
(Of course a goto escape doesn't handle the side-effects on the intermediate levels of code. Which is why object-oriented languages encapsulate these into the construction and destruction of local objects and do error escape with first-class constructs like catch/throw, which lets the compiler and programmer conspire to insure that intermediate-level cleanup is properly handled on the way out.)
at least that's how it went in _Day of the Triffids_ by Brian Aldiss
Brian Aldiss stole the plot of John Wyndham's novel, and he didn't even change the name? What a git!
Oops! I misread the start of the Wikipedia article. It mentioned a Brian Aldiss characterization of Windham's catastrophe before it mention's Windham and I cut-and-pasted the wrong author's name. B-(
"Based on past showers, there should be up to 200 bright meteors visible per hour, and they may have an unusual blue-green colour."
After which all who watched the pretty green meteors will be blind and the experimental carnivorous plants will eat them.
(Or at least that's how it went in _Day of the Triffids_ by Brian Aldiss.)
Because if you do that, you can't trust the access times in case of a crash. ... One solution to the problem, might be to write the atimes to the journal, and then just update it once in a while, or perhaps even link the atimes to some seperate part of the disk, so the atimes can be written in one go somehow.
Another might be a "weakatime" option, to update the atimes in the inode cache but mark them as something weaker than "dirty" ("sumdged"?) when the data is re-read from cache. Opening, last closing, or reading more data to the cache would still dirty the inode. "Smudged" inodes would be written:
- If something else really dirtied the inode (i.e. updating wtime or last close of the file).
- The next time there is a sync that is the result of a command or has to write an actually dirty sector (so you won't spin up a laptop disk at periodic sync time just to update atimes)
- Just before the file system is unmounted.
A weaker version yet would be "wimpyatime", in which additional reads to cache after the open would "smudge" rather than "dirty" the inode. (This would be equivalent to "weakatime" with a file system that cached the entire file on open.)
But caching the atimes in memory is a recipe for disaster and inconsistency!
Not completely. They'd be updated on disk when the file is opened and (except for "wimpyatime") when new sectors are read into cache. You'd just delay the continual updating on the hard disk when an already open file is examined further. There'd be more inconsistency if the system crashed rather than shutting down gracefully, but you'd still be able to see that the file had been open.
So every time a file is used, it has to write an entry on the HDD, slowing performance,... so I have the noatime line in my fstab.
I have noatime set on my laptop.
Writing atime to the disk every time data is read from the cache keeps the disk spinning, burning battery power. "noatime" means the disk can shut down much of the time, spinning up only when writes must be synced or data not yet in cache must be read.
The gamble loses if sun cannot produce a better chip next year than brand x.
It's even better for sun than that.
Even if Sun doesn't produce a better chip next year, it's still a win if they make more money as a result of opening than they would have if they'd stayed closed.
[ Yes, I am an alumni of OSU. ]
Are you an alumnUS? Or are you siamese twins?
what's the hardware meaning of a thread?
As another poster has pointed out: You build a core with multiple copies of the register set and replicate (or take turns on) the associated instruction-dispatching logic.
But these multiple CPUs share a common set of arithmetic/logic execution units, along with arbitration logic. Different threads will be doing different things at any given instant, and thus using different sections of the ALU.
The arbitration logic decides which thread gets which hunk of ALU at any given moment. And some threads will be stalled waiting for data and won't need any ALU function at all. Of course when more threads want a particular kind of execution unit than are available, one or more of them must stall. But by having the right number of copies of the commonly-used types of execution units you can keep a number of threads running at or near full speed most of the time and the ALU components mostly busy, with much less silicon than if each thread had a full-blown CPU and most of the ALU logic was idle at any given moment. With less silicon logic you can put things closer together and speed it up still more.
This approach has been around since Cray was at Control Data.
Oh, yes:
If Sun's open-sourcing of this chip leads to a big boost for them, just IMAGINE what an argument that will be against the utility of the government-enforced monopoly in the patent reform debate. B-)
Nothing that it matter... [is it] GNU GPL 2 or 3?
It actually matters a lot because Sun probably owns a lot of patents.
Too true.
If I've got this right: Under GPL3 anybody with foundry access could make the chip or a derivative, with no more patent issues than Sun itself would have. But under GPL2 they might have to enter separate license agreements to actually implement it.
= = = =
Presuming this release does make the chip open to anybody absent further licensing, it will be interesting to see how it affects Sun's future.
On one hand it means any company that wants to could build the chip and sell it in competition with Sun (which has borne the development costs on the SPARC series - but recouped much of them already).
On the other hand, they have a number of advantages: Already up and fabbing, deep understanding of the chip, etc.
Further, one big source of resistance to adoption of their chips is the concern for what happens if Sun abandons the line, stops developing it, goes belly-up, or closes up again. With a perpetual license to others to build this chip and make improvements on it, that's no longer an issue. Even if Sun went belly-up and left them with no other sources, a big enough company with a product based on this chip could even commission the fabrication of its own chips, rather than twisting in the wind for lack of supplies. So such a company can design this chip into their product line and buy it from Sun without betting their own company on a possibly weak supplier.
Let's see Intel or AMD compete with that that. B-)
How many cores does this chip have?
8 cores, 8 threads each.
(For instance, one of the best has been the University of Washington, located in an area with one of the highest densities and species count of botulism spores.)
Correction: That's Oregon State and the "botulism belt" is the Willamette valley.
They're probably referring to pulse repetition rate (1/frequency) when they say "wavelength".
Right after a neuron fires it "rearms" the membrane by pumping ions across it. In time sequence its sensitivity varies smoothly through:
- The absolute refractory period: Nothing can fire it.
- The negative afterpotential: It can be fired but it takes extra stimulus.
- The positive afterpotential: It takes LESS than the usual amount of stimulus to fire it.
Then it returns to its normal, resting, sensitivity.
The sensitivity slope may be an artifact of the ion pumps and channels, but it appears to function as a mechanism for encoding the strength of a stimulus as a pulse rate.
This has a side effect: If a nerve is given short pulses of stimulation with a spacing corresponding to the length of time between a stimulus that fires it and the peak of the positive afterpotential, once it fires once it will tend to continue to fire in synchrony with the pulses from then on. If you have a bundle of such nerves with similar timing and all affected by the stimulus, each additional pulse picks up additional nerves and phase-locks them to the stimulus. Within a few pulses most of the fibers in the bundle tend to be firing rapidly and in unison.
You can see this with a strobe light with a variable repetition rate. Run it slow and you see distinct pulses - a flicker. Run it fast and you see a continuous light - the pulses have fused into a continuous response. But run it near the "flicker fusion rate" boundary and you get a lot of weird visual effects - notably flickering rainbow colors across the neighboring (or entire) visual field that tend to enhance and obscure the actual image with a flickering, undecipherable, psychedelic-poster version of itself.
You get colors other than those of the actual source (if it is colored rather than white) and effects in other parts of the visual field than the actual strobing light and things it is illuminating. This is because nerves for parts of the eye that would not normally be stimulated enough to trigger by this light (if it were non-strobing) still become entrained when they happen to be in a positive afterpotential period when a blink occurs.
(By the way: Don't try this if you're epileptic. It can produce a seizure. Indeed: Some people discover they're epileptic when they are exposed to such flickering lights.)
One speculation about the hypothetical "brown note" was that infrasound at a positive-afterpotential repetition rate matching that of nerves controlling the intestines might force peristalsis in the colon or trigger the appropriate reflexes for defecation. (It might be interesting to retry the debunking experiments with a train of narrow high-pressure pulses, approximating impulses, rather than a sine wave. B-) )
This flashlight appears to be attempting a variation of the same effect. By entraining the nerves of the visual processing responsible for locating onself in space and/or ones motion, it could create a visual illusion of movement that doesn't match the signals from the inner ear and the muscle-position sensors. A mismatch among these three systems produces motion sickness, nausea, and vomiting.
This reflex appears to be a defense against ingestion of neurotoxic poisons (such as those in some mushrooms and food-poisoning bacteria), using their disruption of the complex navigation system as an early warning and attempting to eliminate them from the digestive system before enough are absorbed to disable a critical system and kill the victim.
I wonder who they will hire...to clean up all the puke at the borders?
Probably those same people who put up the friendly warnings when somebody PISOs on the MOHADO.
Scientific approaches to gastronomy and other aspects of food preparation are NOT new. It just doesn't impinge on the attention of the nerd community very often.
...), management of kitchen crews, operations, and fincancing, design of industrial food and design and operation of its processing plants, and so on have been available for generations from prestigious universities, which (as is typical of universities) also do extensive research to advance the science and art.
Basic and advanced degrees in "food science" - including biochemistry, microbiology, science of taste, safe canning (home and industrial), cooking at all scales and with special requirements (home, restaurant, bakery, hospital, large institution, military base,
The departments are sometimes referred to as "home economics" - which is another source of confusion for people whose only exposure to food science is awareness of the "home economics" classes at their local high school. These classes bear about the same relationship to the food science departments at such a university as the "science" classes do to a nuclear physics department, or "auto shop" to the entire mechanical engineering department (including the factory automation specialization).
Another source of confusion is that, as with agriculture schools, some of the best schools in this specialty tend to be sited in rural and food-producing parts of the country - especially those with special problems. (For instance, one of the best has been the University of Washington, located in an area with one of the highest densities and species count of botulism spores.) So (as with agriculture, forestry, or much of the guts of medicine) you don't hear a lot about it in your engineering department or your Ivy League Ivory Tower.
So let's not assume, every time food science rears its head, that it's some new invention. Yes there are new inventions and new approaches in it all the time - just as with other technologies. But what's new is not the entire application of science to the subject, but a flash of visibility of this application to the inorganic "hi tech" community.
"Here Here!"
Don't you mean "Hear, hear!"?
As in "Listen, listen!" implying "Pay close attention to the preceding statement, it made a good point."?
(Homonyms are a bitch to spell when nobody ever explains which word was meant.)
Whatever happened...to TeX? It has a steep learning curve, ...
I think you answered your own question. B-)
But we're talking about document storage and exchange file formats. That implies the tools are the only thing that need to "learn" them at all.
Have you considered writing a plugin or mod for OOo to read/write TeX files? Get that right and you might change the whole debate. B-)
Red Hat created a logo and posters recently to help spread ODF.
I don't think the slogan "Liberate your documents" is going to go over well with businesses. The image it evokes is security leaks and industrial espionage.
Please don't confuse the citizens of AL with their congresscritters.
Wow, you disproved your statement in the same sentence. I'm impressed. ;) Sure, you said "move in the right direction" but I think they'd prefer taxes over "socialism". ("Wealth to the people? SCREAM!!")
Some (Ll)ibertarians will take any piece of their agenda they can get, regardless of whether the effect of taking one piece makes things worse for getting the others (i.e. for freedom). Others are aware how the order of taking the steps from statism to libertarianism affects both your chances of getting there and whether things improve monotonically on the way.
Example: You need to gut the welfare state before opening the borders. Otherwise things get worse - in ways most voters can understand, which means that your candidates don't get elected.
I call the latter sort "Law 'n Order Anarchists": They want to repeal all the LAWS, but IN a correct ORDER. (Make that "Law 'n Order Minarchists" if they think there is some residual proper function for a government.)
Ron Paul is one (of the minarchist stripe - currently calling himself a "Constitutionalist"). I'm another.
The government PAYS people that live in Alaksa to live there.
Seriously ?
Seriously.
The money collected from other sources (notably north slope oil pumping and transport) are far more than the state government needs for its own function.
Rather than finding new ways to waste it, the more-than-slightly libertarian-leaning politicians decided to do away with other taxes - notably income and property tax.
But they still had a big surplus. So they decided to distribute it to the citizens. Even a libertarian can support this as a move in the right direction, since most of the money comes from selling off a resource "owned in common by the citizens of the state". If the government sells it, the citizen-owners should each get their share of the proceeds, right?
2) Does the person have an expectation of privacy? For instance, a closed telephone booth is in a public place, but grants a person an expectation of privacy and law enforcement thus needs a warrant to record a conversation therein.
The expectation of privacy is why it's illegal in Michigan (not sure if it's local or national) to use directional microphones to pick up conversations, even in public places, when there is no obvious listener within normal hearing range.
DO ordinary citizens have an expectation that the whereabouts of their car is private when there is no cop watching? Do they have an expectation that, even if a cop IS watching, after a month or so he won't remember every license plate that went by without something special to make it "stick in his mind" or end up on a report (like a car involved in an infraction or a plate on a "be on the lookout" list)?
If they do, the case could go for the ACLU on the same grounds. Maybe so far that the recording of the data would be prohibited without a warrant or a B.O.L.
Which is why the ACLU defended neo-nazis. Riiiight.
A Jewish friend of mine was happy with the ACLU suit over the denial of the NAZIs' request for a permit for a parade through the largely Jewish Chicago suburb of Skokie.
She thought the NAZIs should have the right to show the people how strong their movement really was. And that the people of the suburb - especially the concentration camp survivors - should know who the American NAZIs were - and have the opportunity to personally hit them with umbrellas and baseball bats.