Same can be said of ANY language that evolves. I am currently battling an app parts of which require Python 2.3, parts 2.4 and parts 2.5.
The real issue is whether we're talking about forwards or backwards compatibility. For example, if your Python code actually requires >= 2.3, >= 2.4, and >= 2.5, that's no problem: just use >= 2.5. But if your code required = 2.5 (or some other similar permutation), then the language designer screwed up by breaking backward compatibility.
For my money, C/C++/Java/ObjC are where it's at. None are interpreted languages, none have dynamic types (unless pointers can be thought of as such), and they all can be packaged as binaries.
Java's generics are sort of dynamic... and that's quite good enough!
I recently ran across this problem at my job: we maintain compilers for several(!) in-house languages, and I recently re-wrote the one for the most simple of them, changing it from a collection of three separate utilities (the most complicated of which was written in FORTRAN, which is generally horrible for manipulating text) into a Lex/Yacc/C (or rather, Flex/Bison/C) compiler.
I chose Lex and Yacc not because they were good, but because they're (in my opinion) very likely to be around 50 years from now. Are there any other compiler generators (such as possibly ANTLR) that might also meet this criteria, and would have been a better choice?
Google bought Sketch Up in order to drive people to Google Maps. Although it's technically true that you don't have to use Google Maps with Sketch Up, Google's goal is to make you want to.
Who said anything about soldiers? I was comparing Bush and Bin Laden: they both gave orders that resulted in thousands of people dying, for political reasons.
Does the law say 'All people in America shall assimilate'?
Fuck, no! I said that, and you need to get yourself some damn reading comprehension skills so that next time you won't make an ass out of yourself by trying to put words in other people's mouths!
[Sanctimonious deconstruction of a claim I didn't actually make via Constitutional argument]
Here's why your entire post is bullshit: nothing in the Constitution says we have to let them in in the first place! Sure, they can do whatever the fuck they want once they get here -- I don't have a problem with that. The way to control the issue is simply to limit the number of people of any single ethnic group who can get in, so that the incumbent culture doesn't get overwhelmed.
Also, by the way, WTF does the Constitution have to do with people immigrating to Britain or China, or any other non-U.S. country in the world? My post was a general statement about all immigration, not on specific U.S. policy.
I've heard rumors that W takes commands directly from God.
What does that have to do with my post? I did not quote or reference Bush in any way. I'm guessing you are unable to come up with a valid retort so you are attempting to distract from the content
I think he was trying to imply that Bush is similar to a religious terrorist. After all, more people have died by his orders than by Bin Laden's...
Is this supposed to imply you'd EXPECT such behaviour from those of us with no belief in a higher power?! Or even consider it to be more likely?
Atheists are, in general, far LESS likely to tend towards extreme terrorist acts than religious people, for the simple fact that we are pretty well convinced that when we die it's GAME OVER - no afterlife - NOTHING is worth dying for. Plus of course, we are in general a more intelligent bunch (on the average... there are smart religious people, and dumb atheists, but averaged out, we're smarter) and fully realise that any kind of behaviour like this is pretty likely to get us killed, even if it's not a suicide attack specifically.
Apparently, you've forgotten about the Soviets and Chinese, who committed plenty of atrocities in the name of atheism over the past half century or so.
African immigrants to the U.S. are *the* highest performing minority, above even any asian group, and even with the negative impact of African-American culture. Indeed, look who's running for president.
WTF are you talking about? Obama was born in Hawaii; he's not an immigrant (indeed, if he were an immigrant, he couldn't be running for President!). Barack Obama has as much in common with the average African immigrant as I do with Ronald McDonald!
After all, you're saying they're behaving exactly the same as the Italians, the Polish, the Irish, and every other previous group of immigrants who came to America behaved when they arrived. They all wanted to keep their culture, too. And they all did, in fact. "Assimilation" into to America has never meant not keeping your culture, it's always been making your culture a part of America.
That's true, but you also have to realize it all depends on proportion. The children of those immigrants had to learn to speak English because no single immigrant ethnic group was dominant over the others or the incumbent population. With the current situation, however, there are so many Mexican immigrants that there's a real danger that huge swaths of the country could become predominantly Mexican, which is bad because then they'd never assimilate and we'd have the same sort of problems as Quebec or Yugoslavia.
Who wouldn't be when much of the population consists of vitriolic nativists who call you a "cultural enemy" and consider you dangerous simply because of where you're from...
But immigrants are demonstratively dangerous to British culture, by the fact that they're resisting assimilation. That's the point: the immigrants have no right to be angry because they should have realized they'd be expected to assimilate, rather than import their old culture. If they wanted to remain in a traditional Muslim community, they should have stayed home!
And that goes for all immigrants, everywhere: Muslims in Britain should become [culturally] British, Mexicans in the U.S. should become American (or more precisely "USian," but that's not really a word), Americans in China should become Chinese (disregarding the fact that relatively few Americans immigrate), etc. Expecting the incumbent culture to accommodate you, as a newcomer, is disgustingly arrogant!
My dad was almost exactly the same age. And that's exactly the point: to get rid of them before they became eligible for a lot of the benefits, which may kick in before retirement. For example, a person might become eligible for pension after working at the company for 25 years, regardless of how old he was when he started, and regardless of how many years he continued before he retired. So even though a 45-year-old might still be 10 or more years away from retirement, if they started when they were 20 they have to be laid off immediately for the company to avoid owing them a big pension whenever they finally do go.
To prevent criminal identity theft, we need legislation to provide security freezes on your criminal record. So nobody will be able to modify or read it without your permission.
That'd be real convenient for criminals: "No, police, you are not allowed to add this offense that I've just been convicted of to my record!"
Anyway, due to office politics, he pretty much got the boot because one of the higher ups didn't like him. (You know, how easy it is to fire someone if you really want). He had been working there for nearly 20 years...
Are you sure it was office politics? A similar thing happened to my dad too, except that it was more a case of him getting close to qualifying for a sizable pension, and the bank wanting to screw him (and all the other employees in the same situation) out of it.
Preventing someone from using it just because they are not the original owner of it is contrary to the first-sale doctrine.
See, I really disagree with this, as it basically implies that "any contract you ever sign is bullshit."
No it doesn't, because an EULA is not a valid contract. Why would rejection of an invalid contract imply rejection of valid ones, when the latter are in an entirely different category by virtue of being valid?
If you install a piece of software, you click through an agreement. You are party to a contract(-ish thing, to get technical).
That "technical" bit provides the essential difference!
Don't give me bullshit about how you didn't see the license until you bought the software, because you can still return the software if it's not been installed yet. It's the law.
That's not "bullshit," that's reality. The EULA is not valid because you received no valuable consideration when "signing" it. You already owned the software and thus already had the right to use it; therefore you get nothing in return for agreeing to it.
In my opinion, clicking a button that only incidentally happens to be labeled "I Agree" is merely a technical requirement to install the software, in exactly the same way that clicking the icon to run the installer is a technical requirement, and equally [not] legally binding.
I just got done with a software licenses class at my law school (wrote my paper on open source licenses, actually), and while I may not like the terms of these clickware license agreements, in my opinion they are valid and we should follow them or stop buying the software / return it and let the companies we don't like how they do business.
Despite being a law student, you don't understand the issue. There's a fundamental difference between EULAs and open source licenses: the latter are valid because they only apply to distribution of copies. You have no prior right to distribute copies, so adding that privilege constitutes consideration. Attempting to apply a license like the GPL as an EULA (e.g. like OpenOffice does) is wrong because the user is not required to agree to the GPL in order to merely use the software. Conversely, EULAs are invalid because they try to restrict rights that the owner of the copy already has without giving anything in return.
Now, I have to admit that some lawyers realize all this and believe EULAs are valid anyway. Their reasoning is that the act of installing and running the program constitutes making copies (e.g. from the installation media to the hard drive, from the hard drive to RAM) and that the EULA is the only thing that gives you that right. Now that's bullshit, because those incidental copies are consequences of the requirements of the technology, and thus don't count. And even if they did count, then they would be Fair Use.
Except it isn't a change in usage that I'm complaining about. In fact, he's using the word exactly the way it's traditionally used! The problem is that he has no fucking clue how to spell it, probably because he's only ever heard it said, not seen it written.
Now, if you really want me to be pedantic about usage, we'll take a look at your sig:
For the sake of brevity I leave out examples and exceptions, but I will be glad to do so on request.
"To do so" refers back to "leave out," so you're saying that you'll be glad to leave out the examples and exceptions twice, rather than saying that you will be glad to provide them on request. Either you don't realize that you actually accidentally said the same thing twice, or you're trying to be very subtly witty.
I ordered a Tunderbird 900mhz when they were "the big thing." The guy who was building it fried 6 CPUs and 4 motherboards before he figured out that it wasn't a good idea to bench-test them without a cpu fan.
I built myself a 500MHz Athlon system back when they first came out, and a few years later I happened to have the case open and noticed that I had never plugged the fan in!
Slashdot Mirror
The real issue is whether we're talking about forwards or backwards compatibility. For example, if your Python code actually requires >= 2.3, >= 2.4, and >= 2.5, that's no problem: just use >= 2.5. But if your code required = 2.5 (or some other similar permutation), then the language designer screwed up by breaking backward compatibility.
Java's generics are sort of dynamic... and that's quite good enough!
Quite right; sorry!
I recently ran across this problem at my job: we maintain compilers for several(!) in-house languages, and I recently re-wrote the one for the most simple of them, changing it from a collection of three separate utilities (the most complicated of which was written in FORTRAN, which is generally horrible for manipulating text) into a Lex/Yacc/C (or rather, Flex/Bison/C) compiler.
I chose Lex and Yacc not because they were good, but because they're (in my opinion) very likely to be around 50 years from now. Are there any other compiler generators (such as possibly ANTLR) that might also meet this criteria, and would have been a better choice?
Google bought Sketch Up in order to drive people to Google Maps. Although it's technically true that you don't have to use Google Maps with Sketch Up, Google's goal is to make you want to.
Like what?
No, seriously: as far as I can tell, nothing Google does is unrelated to data mining. What am I missing?
Who said anything about soldiers? I was comparing Bush and Bin Laden: they both gave orders that resulted in thousands of people dying, for political reasons.
Fuck, no! I said that, and you need to get yourself some damn reading comprehension skills so that next time you won't make an ass out of yourself by trying to put words in other people's mouths!
Here's why your entire post is bullshit: nothing in the Constitution says we have to let them in in the first place! Sure, they can do whatever the fuck they want once they get here -- I don't have a problem with that. The way to control the issue is simply to limit the number of people of any single ethnic group who can get in, so that the incumbent culture doesn't get overwhelmed.
Also, by the way, WTF does the Constitution have to do with people immigrating to Britain or China, or any other non-U.S. country in the world? My post was a general statement about all immigration, not on specific U.S. policy.
I think he was trying to imply that Bush is similar to a religious terrorist. After all, more people have died by his orders than by Bin Laden's...
Apparently, you've forgotten about the Soviets and Chinese, who committed plenty of atrocities in the name of atheism over the past half century or so.
What I remember is that they had a chance to change, and didn't. That indicates to me that the dumbass majority actually approves of this bullshit.
WTF are you talking about? Obama was born in Hawaii; he's not an immigrant (indeed, if he were an immigrant, he couldn't be running for President!). Barack Obama has as much in common with the average African immigrant as I do with Ronald McDonald!
That's proof that they have assimilated, since they don't do that in Ireland!
That's true, but you also have to realize it all depends on proportion. The children of those immigrants had to learn to speak English because no single immigrant ethnic group was dominant over the others or the incumbent population. With the current situation, however, there are so many Mexican immigrants that there's a real danger that huge swaths of the country could become predominantly Mexican, which is bad because then they'd never assimilate and we'd have the same sort of problems as Quebec or Yugoslavia.
But immigrants are demonstratively dangerous to British culture, by the fact that they're resisting assimilation. That's the point: the immigrants have no right to be angry because they should have realized they'd be expected to assimilate, rather than import their old culture. If they wanted to remain in a traditional Muslim community, they should have stayed home!
And that goes for all immigrants, everywhere: Muslims in Britain should become [culturally] British, Mexicans in the U.S. should become American (or more precisely "USian," but that's not really a word), Americans in China should become Chinese (disregarding the fact that relatively few Americans immigrate), etc. Expecting the incumbent culture to accommodate you, as a newcomer, is disgustingly arrogant!
Maybe, I don't know. But generally, age discrimination is extremely hard to prove.
My dad was almost exactly the same age. And that's exactly the point: to get rid of them before they became eligible for a lot of the benefits, which may kick in before retirement. For example, a person might become eligible for pension after working at the company for 25 years, regardless of how old he was when he started, and regardless of how many years he continued before he retired. So even though a 45-year-old might still be 10 or more years away from retirement, if they started when they were 20 they have to be laid off immediately for the company to avoid owing them a big pension whenever they finally do go.
That'd be real convenient for criminals: "No, police, you are not allowed to add this offense that I've just been convicted of to my record!"
Are you sure it was office politics? A similar thing happened to my dad too, except that it was more a case of him getting close to qualifying for a sizable pension, and the bank wanting to screw him (and all the other employees in the same situation) out of it.
No it doesn't, because an EULA is not a valid contract. Why would rejection of an invalid contract imply rejection of valid ones, when the latter are in an entirely different category by virtue of being valid?
That "technical" bit provides the essential difference!
That's not "bullshit," that's reality. The EULA is not valid because you received no valuable consideration when "signing" it. You already owned the software and thus already had the right to use it; therefore you get nothing in return for agreeing to it.
In my opinion, clicking a button that only incidentally happens to be labeled "I Agree" is merely a technical requirement to install the software, in exactly the same way that clicking the icon to run the installer is a technical requirement, and equally [not] legally binding.
Despite being a law student, you don't understand the issue. There's a fundamental difference between EULAs and open source licenses: the latter are valid because they only apply to distribution of copies. You have no prior right to distribute copies, so adding that privilege constitutes consideration. Attempting to apply a license like the GPL as an EULA (e.g. like OpenOffice does) is wrong because the user is not required to agree to the GPL in order to merely use the software. Conversely, EULAs are invalid because they try to restrict rights that the owner of the copy already has without giving anything in return.
Now, I have to admit that some lawyers realize all this and believe EULAs are valid anyway. Their reasoning is that the act of installing and running the program constitutes making copies (e.g. from the installation media to the hard drive, from the hard drive to RAM) and that the EULA is the only thing that gives you that right. Now that's bullshit, because those incidental copies are consequences of the requirements of the technology, and thus don't count. And even if they did count, then they would be Fair Use.
I would hope that Autodesk would then be sued for it and lose, for exactly the same reason they lost this lawsuit!
There's a huge difference between "mostly compatible" and "fully compatible."
Except it isn't a change in usage that I'm complaining about. In fact, he's using the word exactly the way it's traditionally used! The problem is that he has no fucking clue how to spell it, probably because he's only ever heard it said, not seen it written.
Now, if you really want me to be pedantic about usage, we'll take a look at your sig:
"To do so" refers back to "leave out," so you're saying that you'll be glad to leave out the examples and exceptions twice, rather than saying that you will be glad to provide them on request. Either you don't realize that you actually accidentally said the same thing twice, or you're trying to be very subtly witty.
It's voilà, damnit!
I built myself a 500MHz Athlon system back when they first came out, and a few years later I happened to have the case open and noticed that I had never plugged the fan in!