Not at all. Apart from 'export' keyword (which was, in hindsight a mistake), there have been many very high quality compilers available for quite a while now.
Unfortunately most of them are not available for the Windows platform, but that is more a fault with the platform's manufacturer, rather than the compiler writers themselves. The DEC/Compaq compiler for Alpha is excellent, so was the KAI compiler (now subsumed by the Intel compiler, also available on Windows), and the KAI compiler existed for many platforms. The SGI compiler was lagging behind a bit but now seems to have caught up. g++ 3 is good, versions prior were a bit patchy (especially standard library issues).
But, if you are free to choose your compiler, then almost every platform has had a high quality C++ compiler available for ages.
No, the parent was correct. The name C++0x has been around for several years, at least. It signifies the intent to ratify the next version of the ISO standard sometime in this decade.
Really? Do you have any idea what the EU is actually like? Remembrr also it is a collection of rather different cultures & languages, there is much more diversity in culture and politics than there is in the USA by orders of magnitude.
What a troll! How is this different if the application was written in C, or C++, or Python, or any other language with a portable (+POSIX) standard?
And why on earth would Linux be declared 'illegal'? It isn't merely unlikely, it is not concievable. Even if SCO won their suit against IBM (unlikely), and even if some offending code was shown to be in the mainstream Linux kernel (even more unlikely), then the absolute worst that can happen is that the offending code gets 'rolled back' to before IBM's involvement. So, some parts of the SMP support (for example) get rolled back to as they were in Linux 2.2, and then Linux development moves on from there. Big deal! Hardly the same as making Linux 'illegal'.
Re:Here's an interesting quote
on
Open Source Law
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· Score: 1
You mean just like how you have to pay royalties for all the copyrighted works you cite in a paper?
In what field(s) does that occur? It is certainly unheard-of in academia. Or was it a joke?
Don't forget that without strong intellectual property laws, the GPL would not exist
This is silly. The GPL only needs to exist because of strong (and stupid) "intellectual property" laws. The ideal situation would be where GPL-like responsibilities were the default, and anything else had to be an explicit contract between the author and user.
That the GPL depends on copyright law to succeed is mrely an example of bypassing the 'system' using the 'system' itself.
I agree in principle with your post, but I'm not so sure about this bit:
Oh, and we need to abolish age limits for tobacco, alcohol, porn, and anything else that is restricted by age.
Porn, yes. I think there is little doubt that the relatively large rate of unplanned teenage pregnancies in the USA is an immediate consequence of the religous inspired "abstination" type laws, coupled with natural teenage rebelliousness. Same with tobacco and alcohol, BUT, tobacco (like all drugs for smoking) is not very good for you medically at any age, and there are also very good medical reasons why you should not drink alcohol before 18 or so (there are some chemical changes in the body at around that age that make alcohol less damaging). As for guns, cars, things like that, the ideal solution would be some kind of maturity test: how likely is it that the person is going to do something stupid if put in charge of this implement? There is no political or technical ability to implement this, so an age restriction, while not ideal, is a sensible compromise.
I would prefer to recognize that smoking (not just tobacco), alcohol, unplanned/misguided pregnancies (I refuse to accept that sex itself is bad), untrained drivers on the roads, etc etc is undesirable and treat them as problems to be minimized. Simply making them illegal doesn't necessarily help - it can (and obviously does, in many cases) make it worse.
I am not convinced that the majority of people below the age of 18 (and I recognize that particular age cutoff is rather arbitrary) have the political maturity to decide the future of the country. The real problem is that minors simply arn't treated with respect by the law. Simply reducing the voting age wouldn't necessarily even fix that - not unless the number of young voters was enough to make a difference (which it wouldn't be - especially since the average minor has no capacity to make campaign donations).
I am not a citizen of the Netherlands, but I am a resident. I know for a fact that drug use in the Netherlands is among the lowest in Europe (and less than half that of the USA).
Yeah, there are some "dope-fiends" around, but fewer than you think. Actually, they are mostly the tourists! But (outside of Amsterdam, where they are a medical case, not so much a threat [except to your unpadlocked bicycle!]) there are basically NO crack-fiends, or heroin-fiends, or whatever else you care to name that litters the streets of all big American cities.
I, for one, know where I am much safer, and prefer to live.
My guess would be that congress is interpreting this as OR, all the way through. That is, or public danger is enough by itself to justify the patriot act.
If you want to dispute this interpretation, go right ahead. But remember, questioning the legitimacy of the government is itself an unPATRIOTic act. After all, public safety is at stake here.
Basically as I understand it it boils down to you can not extradite a US citizen from the United States.
Yes, this is how I understand the law too. It basically makes US citizens immune to all overseas law, as long as they can escape to the US before they are caught.
The USA is the only country that I know of with such a law. Well, surely there are some 3rd world despots who share a commonality, but off hand I do not know which. Anyway if it wanted to, the USA could excert enough diplomatic/military pressure that, in a sufficiently important case, the local law would be irrelevant.
It is an interesting contrast with a European law that has a very different viewpoint: It is illegal to extradite someone (of ANY nationality) from the EU if they would face the death penalty.
Some parts of the world have a different conception of "civilized" to other parts.
Laws (or constitutions, or treaties, or whatever) mean only what the relevant powers interpret them to mean. I didn't quite understand the implications of this when I was younger; I used to think "yeah, the bill of rights, the constitution, these are good things to have, put it all down in writing and make it concrete. No room for ambiguity."
The opposing situation is countries with no [explicit] bill of rights, rather some form of unwritten convention (even 'ideal'? Is that word too embarrasing to use in the 21st century?). This I think covers most other countries, where the constitution has less prominance (I am Australian, and I can confidently say that *no one* has any more than a vague notion of what it says - for good reason actually, it is a very boring document mostly talking about how Queen Victoria of England agrees to delegate Her power to the Australian Parliament), and there is no explicit "bill of rights" as such, rather the notions are embodied across a much wider scope, and it can't really be pinned down to one place. It is not uncommon to see stories of USA school students complaining to someone (headmaster, school board, whatever) that something that is imposed upon them violates their rights under the constitution[footnote]. The notion of involving the constitution in such a matter is actually quite ludicrous to an Australian (any Aussies out there, please argue the case if you think I am wrong). Not because those rights don't exist, but because they exist at more levels of society. Call it a sense of "fair play" or whatever you will, but it is far more important than the Constitution.
The point is this (and maybe this is even irony - until the last week I thought I had a fair idea what that meant, but I don't think so anymore): Having an explicit, legally intepretable document only allows the lawyers the excuse "we were only following the law" when they come up with some narrow interpretation that flies against the popular notion of what the spirit meant.
On the other hand, if there is no such written document, there is no room for argument over the interpretation, the only guide is the *spirit*.
The real question is, which system is more open to long-term abuse? Unfortunately I cannot predict the answer to that. The answer to the question of which system suffers more short/medium term abuse is, I think, obvious.
[footnote] (and I think this is *real* irony) Undoubtably, Australian minors have more actual rights than US minors.
Don't read the parent post! It is all CRIMESPEAK! Thinkpol are listening....
On a more serious note, why should there be a direct link between freedom and crime? Or even any link at all? I have never seen any evidence that crime (in all its forms) is significantly less with, eg totalitarian governments.
Hey gimme a break, I mean as a precentage of his net worth, his donations to charity are pretty small.
Now, if my MS "taxes" are going to help fund medical research or 3rd world education or whatever, then good. But such a small proportion of that money actually ends up in the right hands, no one in their right mind would use that as an excuse to buy Microsoft.
95mil * 1 / 0.08 = 1187.5mil = 1.1875 billion. Not so far away from 1.13 billion, and I believe he's been selling stock recently. So 1.13 is quite plausible.
From Gates' actions, and his general disinterest in charities (rught up until the US government took him to court), I don't believe he has any interest in anything other than increasing his own power. The money that he does donate is (1) small change (to him!), (2) probably instigated by his wife, by twisting his arm very hard, and (3) often clearly to the benefit of Microsoft - albeit indirectly.
PS When was the last time you bought a laptop without an OS? Or even an OS other than Windows?
The interesting thing is, in most parts of the EU (I think the UK is an exception), Australian wine is cheaper than it is in Australia. Less than 5 euros would get you a quite drinkable wine, 10 euros would give you something very very good. Restraunt prices are insane though.
Yeah you are right, but only if you remain in orbit. I was distracted by some of the sci-fi suggestions that this could be used to get out of solar orbit (and back in again), and that is the case I was thinking of. Surely, if you get in a hyperbolic orbit travelling away from the sun, there is no sail angle that will help.
Of course, it would be a hopelessly useless method of propulsion that far away from the sun anyway, so its not really a serious failing...;)
The relativistic mass is gamma * m (nowdays, it is not so common to use a separate symbol for relativistic mass so there is no need for m_0 versus m. m is the rest mass, and gamma * m is the relativistic mass).
Gamma is the contraction factor = 1 / sqrt(1 - v^2 / c^2)
This is strictly infinite when the velocity approaches the speed of light (would be division by zero). The reason why this is not a problem with the theory is that the rest mass is also strictly zero, so multiplication infinity * zero is undefined, rather than infinite. The alternate formula, E^2 = c^2 p^2 + m^2 c^4 has no such problems.
Now, I guess you can simply 'define' m = E/c^2, but I have never seen this done before and I do not see the physical relevance. It is the mass equivalent of the energy of the photon, but it is not the same as actually having a mass (even if it acts similarly in some situations). There is an equivalence between sound energy and heat energy too, but that doesn't mean it makes sense to attribute a temperature to the sound coming from a Metallica convert!
It is true: photons lose energy as they move away from a massive body for exactly the same reason a tennis ball thrown into the air slows down. The gravitational potential energy is increased, and therefore to conserve total enerby, the kinetic energy must decrease. In the case of a photon, this means that E = h f (plank * frequency) is decreasing. (but of course the photon is travelling much faster than escape velocity, so unlike the tennis ball it never actually reverses direction).
Err, if you angle the sail at 45 degrees to the sun, isn't the net momentum transfer then still perpendicular to the sail? ie, 45 degrees off, but still away from the sun?
Nice idea, but it doesn't really work: you cannot do a Lorentz transform to a reference frame which is moving at the speed of light (ie, the reference frame of the photon). And even if you did (as a hand-waving argument), the rest frame of a photon looks nothing like a newtonian mass.... eg, the length contraction of the rest of the universe is infinite, and the proper time for any event to occur (eg, the universe ending:-) shrinks to zero.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I think you overplayed it a bit, and didn't leave enough remenants of reality to argue over. Even on first glance, it is 100% troll.
Unfortunately most of them are not available for the Windows platform, but that is more a fault with the platform's manufacturer, rather than the compiler writers themselves. The DEC/Compaq compiler for Alpha is excellent, so was the KAI compiler (now subsumed by the Intel compiler, also available on Windows), and the KAI compiler existed for many platforms. The SGI compiler was lagging behind a bit but now seems to have caught up. g++ 3 is good, versions prior were a bit patchy (especially standard library issues).
But, if you are free to choose your compiler, then almost every platform has had a high quality C++ compiler available for ages.
No, the parent was correct. The name C++0x has been around for several years, at least. It signifies the intent to ratify the next version of the ISO standard sometime in this decade.
Really? Do you have any idea what the EU is actually like? Remembrr also it is a collection of rather different cultures & languages, there is much more diversity in culture and politics than there is in the USA by orders of magnitude.
And why on earth would Linux be declared 'illegal'? It isn't merely unlikely, it is not concievable. Even if SCO won their suit against IBM (unlikely), and even if some offending code was shown to be in the mainstream Linux kernel (even more unlikely), then the absolute worst that can happen is that the offending code gets 'rolled back' to before IBM's involvement. So, some parts of the SMP support (for example) get rolled back to as they were in Linux 2.2, and then Linux development moves on from there. Big deal! Hardly the same as making Linux 'illegal'.
In what field(s) does that occur? It is certainly unheard-of in academia. Or was it a joke?
This is silly. The GPL only needs to exist because of strong (and stupid) "intellectual property" laws. The ideal situation would be where GPL-like responsibilities were the default, and anything else had to be an explicit contract between the author and user.
That the GPL depends on copyright law to succeed is mrely an example of bypassing the 'system' using the 'system' itself.
Although, I guess I didn't make that very clear ... ;)
Oh, and we need to abolish age limits for tobacco, alcohol, porn, and anything else that is restricted by age.
Porn, yes. I think there is little doubt that the relatively large rate of unplanned teenage pregnancies in the USA is an immediate consequence of the religous inspired "abstination" type laws, coupled with natural teenage rebelliousness. Same with tobacco and alcohol, BUT, tobacco (like all drugs for smoking) is not very good for you medically at any age, and there are also very good medical reasons why you should not drink alcohol before 18 or so (there are some chemical changes in the body at around that age that make alcohol less damaging). As for guns, cars, things like that, the ideal solution would be some kind of maturity test: how likely is it that the person is going to do something stupid if put in charge of this implement? There is no political or technical ability to implement this, so an age restriction, while not ideal, is a sensible compromise.
I would prefer to recognize that smoking (not just tobacco), alcohol, unplanned/misguided pregnancies (I refuse to accept that sex itself is bad), untrained drivers on the roads, etc etc is undesirable and treat them as problems to be minimized. Simply making them illegal doesn't necessarily help - it can (and obviously does, in many cases) make it worse.
I am not convinced that the majority of people below the age of 18 (and I recognize that particular age cutoff is rather arbitrary) have the political maturity to decide the future of the country. The real problem is that minors simply arn't treated with respect by the law. Simply reducing the voting age wouldn't necessarily even fix that - not unless the number of young voters was enough to make a difference (which it wouldn't be - especially since the average minor has no capacity to make campaign donations).
I am not a citizen of the Netherlands, but I am a resident. I know for a fact that drug use in the Netherlands is among the lowest in Europe (and less than half that of the USA).
Yeah, there are some "dope-fiends" around, but fewer than you think. Actually, they are mostly the tourists! But (outside of Amsterdam, where they are a medical case, not so much a threat [except to your unpadlocked bicycle!]) there are basically NO crack-fiends, or heroin-fiends, or whatever else you care to name that litters the streets of all big American cities.
I, for one, know where I am much safer, and prefer to live.
If you want to dispute this interpretation, go right ahead. But remember, questioning the legitimacy of the government is itself an unPATRIOTic act. After all, public safety is at stake here.
Yes, this is how I understand the law too. It basically makes US citizens immune to all overseas law, as long as they can escape to the US before they are caught.
The USA is the only country that I know of with such a law. Well, surely there are some 3rd world despots who share a commonality, but off hand I do not know which. Anyway if it wanted to, the USA could excert enough diplomatic/military pressure that, in a sufficiently important case, the local law would be irrelevant.
It is an interesting contrast with a European law that has a very different viewpoint: It is illegal to extradite someone (of ANY nationality) from the EU if they would face the death penalty.
Some parts of the world have a different conception of "civilized" to other parts.
I would type it here, but you deserve the moderation and I don't.
The opposing situation is countries with no [explicit] bill of rights, rather some form of unwritten convention (even 'ideal'? Is that word too embarrasing to use in the 21st century?). This I think covers most other countries, where the constitution has less prominance (I am Australian, and I can confidently say that *no one* has any more than a vague notion of what it says - for good reason actually, it is a very boring document mostly talking about how Queen Victoria of England agrees to delegate Her power to the Australian Parliament), and there is no explicit "bill of rights" as such, rather the notions are embodied across a much wider scope, and it can't really be pinned down to one place. It is not uncommon to see stories of USA school students complaining to someone (headmaster, school board, whatever) that something that is imposed upon them violates their rights under the constitution[footnote]. The notion of involving the constitution in such a matter is actually quite ludicrous to an Australian (any Aussies out there, please argue the case if you think I am wrong). Not because those rights don't exist, but because they exist at more levels of society. Call it a sense of "fair play" or whatever you will, but it is far more important than the Constitution.
The point is this (and maybe this is even irony - until the last week I thought I had a fair idea what that meant, but I don't think so anymore): Having an explicit, legally intepretable document only allows the lawyers the excuse "we were only following the law" when they come up with some narrow interpretation that flies against the popular notion of what the spirit meant.
On the other hand, if there is no such written document, there is no room for argument over the interpretation, the only guide is the *spirit*.
The real question is, which system is more open to long-term abuse? Unfortunately I cannot predict the answer to that. The answer to the question of which system suffers more short/medium term abuse is, I think, obvious.
[footnote] (and I think this is *real* irony) Undoubtably, Australian minors have more actual rights than US minors.
On a more serious note, why should there be a direct link between freedom and crime? Or even any link at all? I have never seen any evidence that crime (in all its forms) is significantly less with, eg totalitarian governments.
Now, if my MS "taxes" are going to help fund medical research or 3rd world education or whatever, then good. But such a small proportion of that money actually ends up in the right hands, no one in their right mind would use that as an excuse to buy Microsoft.
95mil * 1 / 0.08 = 1187.5mil = 1.1875 billion. Not so far away from 1.13 billion, and I believe he's been selling stock recently. So 1.13 is quite plausible.
PS When was the last time you bought a laptop without an OS? Or even an OS other than Windows?
The interesting thing is, in most parts of the EU (I think the UK is an exception), Australian wine is cheaper than it is in Australia. Less than 5 euros would get you a quite drinkable wine, 10 euros would give you something very very good. Restraunt prices are insane though.
Tooheys old is nice too but its hard to get in tassie (or was).
Of course, it would be a hopelessly useless method of propulsion that far away from the sun anyway, so its not really a serious failing... ;)
The relativistic mass is gamma * m (nowdays, it is not so common to use a separate symbol for relativistic mass so there is no need for m_0 versus m. m is the rest mass, and gamma * m is the relativistic mass).
Gamma is the contraction factor = 1 / sqrt(1 - v^2 / c^2)
This is strictly infinite when the velocity approaches the speed of light (would be division by zero). The reason why this is not a problem with the theory is that the rest mass is also strictly zero, so multiplication infinity * zero is undefined, rather than infinite. The alternate formula, E^2 = c^2 p^2 + m^2 c^4 has no such problems.
Now, I guess you can simply 'define' m = E/c^2, but I have never seen this done before and I do not see the physical relevance. It is the mass equivalent of the energy of the photon, but it is not the same as actually having a mass (even if it acts similarly in some situations). There is an equivalence between sound energy and heat energy too, but that doesn't mean it makes sense to attribute a temperature to the sound coming from a Metallica convert!
It is true: photons lose energy as they move away from a massive body for exactly the same reason a tennis ball thrown into the air slows down. The gravitational potential energy is increased, and therefore to conserve total enerby, the kinetic energy must decrease. In the case of a photon, this means that E = h f (plank * frequency) is decreasing. (but of course the photon is travelling much faster than escape velocity, so unlike the tennis ball it never actually reverses direction).
Err, if you angle the sail at 45 degrees to the sun, isn't the net momentum transfer then still perpendicular to the sail? ie, 45 degrees off, but still away from the sun?
Nice idea, but it doesn't really work: you cannot do a Lorentz transform to a reference frame which is moving at the speed of light (ie, the reference frame of the photon). And even if you did (as a hand-waving argument), the rest frame of a photon looks nothing like a newtonian mass.... eg, the length contraction of the rest of the universe is infinite, and the proper time for any event to occur (eg, the universe ending :-) shrinks to zero.