That's not its only downfall. Its other downfalls include some miserable organization and bloated core, though much of this may be attributed to lack of namespace support - which is being remedied, but it's a bit late. There's still a lot of package_name_prefix_with_function_name functions, and I don't see them going away soon.
Beyond that, and the pervasive "make it easy to do the WRONG thing" un-philosophy, I still haven't heard about it getting lexical scope, closures, and anonymous functions. Of course, this only matters if you're a good programmer (as opposed to merely a Decently Adequate one).
By the same token, there is also absolutely no rational reason to think that at the present, of all times, people are going to suddenly stop coming up with new technologies of all sorts and ways to support more people on Earth. At no point in the past have we had this amount of technological progress, either.
TFA says "After the first activation, SecuROM requires that it re-check with the server within ten days (in case the CD Key has become public/warez'd and gets banned).". So, if some ne'er-do-well sees my CD key, or otherwise duplicates it, and it gets online, I can have my perfectly-legitimately-copy stop working? Mmm, that's no fun. Need to be careful with that thing.
Anyone else remember when "pollution" was stuff like sulfuric acid, low-level ozone, toxic chemicals, and stuff like that?
Carbon di-oxy-ide, who'da thunk, eh?
Wouldn't most new light rail implementations in the States probably be more like the lousy stuff we already have than any European goodness, though? (Barring massive changes in population layout, demographics, state-level and municipal politics and such, of course.)
Net savings: $3420/year. Time to pay off the difference: 4 years. Hold up, hold up! You forgot to pay opportunity cost. In more concrete terms: you still need to pay interest in that $14,000 difference, one way or another (through a loan, or through investing/saving less). That's going to be, oh, say, at 9% interest (paid or lost), $1260/yr, for a net savings of just $2160/yr, or 6.4 years to pay back the difference.
And maybe you can get better interest rates than that, maybe not. Maybe you have better things to do with your credit, maybe not. Either way the numbers don't look quite so rosy anymore.
You know, there's some light rail just south of me in San Jose. I've tried it and I wasn't impressed. You need to build most of the infrastructure of a heavy rail system, you can't take the things on the roads, the things are short and underused and expensive.
San Francisco, to the north, has these little things called "streetcars" (I'm on one now) that seem to work a lot better (they can actually share the road with cars when they need to without big ugly railroad crossings in the way, or you can run them along a right-of-way or underground too, so they can get to interesting places a lot more readily).
And then there are BUSES. Which are awesome because you don't need to build track. (Of course, if your traffic is already a mess, they'll be just as slow, but that's a separate issue from fuel efficiency now, innit?).
I would have thought that technically, the DOJ can kick Wikipedia's ass on this one, if they were serious enough about it. Are we going to reach the stage where Wikipedia has to roll over or find some kind of safe haven for its servers, a la Pirate Bay?
No, since the Wikipedia-editing was probably some random doofuses in the employ of the DOJ in some manner or other just coming over to edit it during lunch / while slacking off and avoiding work, and is likely not part of any concerted campaign of (dis)information.
I think the real story here isn't that Wikipedia has temporarily suspended the DOJ from article edits. The real story, at least to me, is that the DOJ has demonstrably been involved in a systematic effort to rewrite history. Many of us have been suspecting that the administration was doing that, but this is the kind of damning evidence that we've been looking for. I don't see these attacks being "systematic" in nature. If they really wanted to "rewrite history" they'd do a much better job of things; they have vast resources and could easily access any one of thousands of IP ranges worldwide. Furthermore, such a campaign presupposes that Wikipedia is some sort of authoritative place for recording History, which it's not. This is just some random partisan hacks in the DoJ goofing off (whether during work hours or over lunch or after-hours has not been established, though entertaining concerns about wasting time and taxpayer money is still perhaps worthwhile) and editing Wikipedia in an attempt to make it conform with their preconceived notions of Reality, a common occurrence worldwide.
(And the rest of your post is assorted political rambling of incidental importance, at best.)
It's not like the DOJ has some inherent right to access Wiki any more than anyone else. They're free to have their own policies, and if they include blocking certain contributors, tough. *grumbly-pedantic-mode on*
Don't call Wikipedia 'Wiki'. Call it WP if you're looking for something short, or maybe "the wiki" (since we have some context). There is more than one wiki out there, and Wikipedia isn't even the most wiki-ish site out there.
It's roughly equivalent to calling Slashdot "Blog". Wow, Blog sure has a bunch of dupes! The editors of Blog keep letting Blog-vertisements through, it's stupid! Look at all those anonymous cowards trolling Blog with Frirst Psoststs. (See? It sounds stupid.)
Feature-rich? You mean it has things like introspection, closures, functions as first-class objects, and objects by aggregation as well as inheritance? Seriously, JavaScript is chock full of neat features.
It's the two primary runtime environments' gross annoying differences, and weaknesses with little syntaxy things like variable declaration and adding strings - or did you mean integers? and how parseInt('08') blows up etc... things like THAT make it a pain.
First off, just about any company named E* isn't going to be a company worth doing business with. Didn't anybody learn anything from the dot-bomb bullshit just a few years ago? Right. I'll just withdraw my $N thousand dollars from my IRA and throw away my $MN thousands of dollars in unvested RSUs and stock options, because a company like E*Trade obviously isn't worth doing business with.:)
Carbon-based fuels such as oil and coal (and derivatives) release, um, carbon dioxide, rumored in certain circles to be some sort of a "greenhouse gas". This stuff apparently traps the daily dose of solar heat far in excess of the actual heat which is produced.
We're talking the Sun outputting ~174 petawatts here, people. Peta. (And not the "people eating tasty animals" PETA either). Fossil fuel waste heat is about 13 terawatts..007% It really hardly matters at all next to changes in the thermal permittivity of the atmosphere.
(Also note that incoming solar energy tends to be of forms and frequencies that pass the atmosphere more readily than the outgoing so don't worry that the effects will cancel out or anything.)
Therefore, an increase in ACC activity (which will happen in advance of the error occurring) correlates with an increase in likelihood of mistakes. I get distracted and make mistakes when I'm watching basketball games too.
I don't know. This research is more like predicting whether leaves will fall in six seconds... when it can tell a big breeze is six seconds away.
From TFS, it sounds like people are getting distracted and bored doing stupid mind-numbing tasks and when they do so, they make errors. As such, they have invented a bulky and expensive way to tell when you're drifting off (and that is fairly well correlated with making errors.)
Strange, all my broken clocks are correct twice a day. Do you do out of your way to purchase 24-hour clocks and break them? I thought my hobbies were weird.... Actually, sir, that's what my little shifty-eyes were about. I know they don't explicitly go out and say "I'm being mildly facetious here and I just KNOW someone is going to point out my deliberate error", so you'll just have to trust me on this one.
Because insurance companies manage their rates based on trackable probabilities and their claims history. Everyone should have genetic tests so they can see what sort of diseases might affect their health, and plan to prevent them.
So, if you take your genetic test and come up with some potential condition, you may have to pay more, because - hey - you're an actual risk. Presumably the savings will be offset by people who don't have to pay more, because they came up clean. (If not, then the insurance companies are in an uncompetitive industry and that is an entirely different problem that patching up laws about genetics can't address).
If you can save money by remaining ignorant about things that could affect your health in the future, then that's a serious bit of Moral Hazard for the insured, and a terrible set of incentives for society in general. This is a sign of Something Badly Wrong.
Some people will claim that this is not fair, that it will leave them without health insurance for future health conditions. They're right, but it is Life that is not fair, and life that placed them in the position, not insurance companies. When you get down to it, really, what people want is not insurance so much as someone else pays for my medical care. If that's the case, we should be up front about it instead of playing charades and calling it "insurance" when it really isn't. Moreover, don't fool yourself by thinking that you're sticking it to the Big Evil Insurance Companies; you're sticking it to every working man (/woman/family) who has a need for health insurance, and it's essentially a regressive tax.
A small (but nonzero) implication upgrade over them "only" having root on the server. (think "new spot to deploy a rootkit"). But at that point, you're already in deep trouble, so better avoid getting to that point to begin with.
I'm not the kind to diss a distro over most things, but does it actually ship with a beta web browser? (Or is that just an option the user can add?) There's a few things F3B5 just doesn't quite do yet (mostly relating to extensions). I wouldn't want it to be my only choice available via the package manager, or anything.
(Note that I don't use Ubuntu or plan to use it any time in the very near future, so I really have no idea how easy it'd be to swap things out.)
Seconded. Bazookas are fun in and of themselves, but exploding sheep and Holy Hand Grenades seal the deal. Plus all the roping around to try and drop dynamite on the other guy before your turn runs out.
Add the Yahoo! games, impending class action Vista Ready lawsuits, all they need now is one disgruntled employee to blow the whistle on nefarious dealings with the NSA regarding your web surfing habits and we can finally begin to smell the rot on the corpse that is MS. Whoa, hold up. I knew Yahoo! Games was pretty awful, but it's hardly Windows-specific. Last I checked you could run them in Firefox on Linux too, if you really want to. So it's not exactly fair to call out Windows on this "flaw".
I swear, the anti-Microsoft Slashdot groupthink gets worse by the day.
But would the world really be a better place if we had stuck to using horse drawn carts?
Hmm, I guess that depends. What's the fuel economy on a horse-drawn cart these days? I guess we'd have to ask the Amish. Plus the emissions are much more manageable I take it you've never shoveled out a stable of horse manure, now, have you?
Slashdot Mirror
It's not the lack of modules that people complain about. PHP is excessively convenient, if nothing else. :)
Beyond that, and the pervasive "make it easy to do the WRONG thing" un-philosophy, I still haven't heard about it getting lexical scope, closures, and anonymous functions. Of course, this only matters if you're a good programmer (as opposed to merely a Decently Adequate one).
Good and simple. >.>
By the same token, there is also absolutely no rational reason to think that at the present, of all times, people are going to suddenly stop coming up with new technologies of all sorts and ways to support more people on Earth. At no point in the past have we had this amount of technological progress, either.
Anyone else remember when "pollution" was stuff like sulfuric acid, low-level ozone, toxic chemicals, and stuff like that? Carbon di-oxy-ide, who'da thunk, eh?
Wouldn't most new light rail implementations in the States probably be more like the lousy stuff we already have than any European goodness, though? (Barring massive changes in population layout, demographics, state-level and municipal politics and such, of course.)
And maybe you can get better interest rates than that, maybe not. Maybe you have better things to do with your credit, maybe not. Either way the numbers don't look quite so rosy anymore.
San Francisco, to the north, has these little things called "streetcars" (I'm on one now) that seem to work a lot better (they can actually share the road with cars when they need to without big ugly railroad crossings in the way, or you can run them along a right-of-way or underground too, so they can get to interesting places a lot more readily).
And then there are BUSES. Which are awesome because you don't need to build track. (Of course, if your traffic is already a mess, they'll be just as slow, but that's a separate issue from fuel efficiency now, innit?).
I would have thought that technically, the DOJ can kick Wikipedia's ass on this one, if they were serious enough about it. Are we going to reach the stage where Wikipedia has to roll over or find some kind of safe haven for its servers, a la Pirate Bay?
No, since the Wikipedia-editing was probably some random doofuses in the employ of the DOJ in some manner or other just coming over to edit it during lunch / while slacking off and avoiding work, and is likely not part of any concerted campaign of (dis)information.
I don't see these attacks being "systematic" in nature. If they really wanted to "rewrite history" they'd do a much better job of things; they have vast resources and could easily access any one of thousands of IP ranges worldwide. Furthermore, such a campaign presupposes that Wikipedia is some sort of authoritative place for recording History, which it's not. This is just some random partisan hacks in the DoJ goofing off (whether during work hours or over lunch or after-hours has not been established, though entertaining concerns about wasting time and taxpayer money is still perhaps worthwhile) and editing Wikipedia in an attempt to make it conform with their preconceived notions of Reality, a common occurrence worldwide.
(And the rest of your post is assorted political rambling of incidental importance, at best.)
*grumbly-pedantic-mode on*
Don't call Wikipedia 'Wiki'. Call it WP if you're looking for something short, or maybe "the wiki" (since we have some context). There is more than one wiki out there, and Wikipedia isn't even the most wiki-ish site out there.
It's roughly equivalent to calling Slashdot "Blog". Wow, Blog sure has a bunch of dupes! The editors of Blog keep letting Blog-vertisements through, it's stupid! Look at all those anonymous cowards trolling Blog with Frirst Psoststs. (See? It sounds stupid.)
It's the two primary runtime environments' gross annoying differences, and weaknesses with little syntaxy things like variable declaration and adding strings - or did you mean integers? and how parseInt('08') blows up etc... things like THAT make it a pain.
We're talking the Sun outputting ~174 petawatts here, people. Peta. (And not the "people eating tasty animals" PETA either). Fossil fuel waste heat is about 13 terawatts. .007% It really hardly matters at all next to changes in the thermal permittivity of the atmosphere.
(Also note that incoming solar energy tends to be of forms and frequencies that pass the atmosphere more readily than the outgoing so don't worry that the effects will cancel out or anything.)
From TFS, it sounds like people are getting distracted and bored doing stupid mind-numbing tasks and when they do so, they make errors. As such, they have invented a bulky and expensive way to tell when you're drifting off (and that is fairly well correlated with making errors.)
So, if you take your genetic test and come up with some potential condition, you may have to pay more, because - hey - you're an actual risk. Presumably the savings will be offset by people who don't have to pay more, because they came up clean. (If not, then the insurance companies are in an uncompetitive industry and that is an entirely different problem that patching up laws about genetics can't address).
If you can save money by remaining ignorant about things that could affect your health in the future, then that's a serious bit of Moral Hazard for the insured, and a terrible set of incentives for society in general. This is a sign of Something Badly Wrong.
Some people will claim that this is not fair, that it will leave them without health insurance for future health conditions. They're right, but it is Life that is not fair, and life that placed them in the position, not insurance companies. When you get down to it, really, what people want is not insurance so much as someone else pays for my medical care . If that's the case, we should be up front about it instead of playing charades and calling it "insurance" when it really isn't. Moreover, don't fool yourself by thinking that you're sticking it to the Big Evil Insurance Companies; you're sticking it to every working man (/woman/family) who has a need for health insurance, and it's essentially a regressive tax.
A small (but nonzero) implication upgrade over them "only" having root on the server. (think "new spot to deploy a rootkit"). But at that point, you're already in deep trouble, so better avoid getting to that point to begin with.
<.<
(Note that I don't use Ubuntu or plan to use it any time in the very near future, so I really have no idea how easy it'd be to swap things out.)
Seconded. Bazookas are fun in and of themselves, but exploding sheep and Holy Hand Grenades seal the deal. Plus all the roping around to try and drop dynamite on the other guy before your turn runs out.
I swear, the anti-Microsoft Slashdot groupthink gets worse by the day.