The contents of the handbook would probably not be binding on the student even at a private university. In any case, this is a state university, which means that the 1st amendment applies, so any provisions in the handbook or in university regulations contrary to the 1st amendment are null and void. FIRE has established an excellent record of winning such cases.
You might want to look up the definition of democracy before calling others morons. In fact, you're wrong. The US is a democracy. It is not a direct democracy, but representative systems fall within the definition of democracy. For starters, try this explanation. Here's a definition by the US State Department. And here is the Wikipedia article. All of these sources include representative systems as a subtype of democracy.
By the way, "representative republic" is not a word; it's a phrase. You might want to learn a bit about grammar along with improving your vocabulary.
In Burlington, I'm pretty sure that Cliff Street is steeper than Main
Street.
Re:RTFM 'against' OOXML
on
RTF Vs. OOXML
·
· Score: 3, Informative
That's not an accurate description. The point that article makes about the spreadsheet is that OOXML distributes information all over the place so that to make the simple change of replacing a formula in a cell with a constant it is necessary to edit multiple files. The problem is not that you can't make changes inconsistent with the schema - it is that the schema is poorly designed.
Furthermore, the spreadsheet example is only one of several cases discussed, so even if you were to rebut it
successfully the article would still contain a valid critique.
That's interesting. I didn't find Tcl substitution very difficult to Grok. On the other hand, although I appreciate its typographic quality, I find the TeX macro language very difficult both to read and write and don't understand why such an abortion has not been replaced. (Yes, I know about lout, which is much like Tex but with a dialect of Lisp as the language, but it hasn't caught on very widely.)
I remember first seeing these in an old movie, which I remember as being in black-and-white. It may have been an old version of The Count of Monte Cristo.
The -something options are ugly, in addition to a potential gotcha, because if you have something like "switch $var" everything will work fine until the content of var is, say, "-glob".
With regard to ugliness, I guess tastes vary, but the potential gotcha is well known, addressed in the documentation, and easily avoided. There is a special "--" argument
to "switch" which indicates that the remaining arguments are not options and that
any leading hyphens are therefore to be taken literally. Experienced Tcl programmers
therefore write any switch that doesn't operate on restricted input as: "switch -- $var".
Re:Tcl language vs. Tcl environment
on
Tcl/Tk 8.5.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
a lot of experienced people are fans of obscure antique technologies, because that's what they specialized on and they don't want to learn some "new-fangled" substitute from the start.
That is true, but I don't think that it explains the popularity of Tcl within the Tcl community. There are plenty of people who have come to Tcl recently after long experience with other languages. I am one of them. I started programming in Fortran, on punch cards, in 1973.
I first used Tcl in 2003, at which point I used mostly C, AWK, and Python. My initial reason for using Tcl was that I needed to write a GUI, had done no graphics programming for quite some time, and had heard that Tcl/Tk was good. I tried it, and indeed my initial reaction was that Tk was really nice but that for programs of some complexity I didn't really like Tcl. With greater experience, though, Tcl grew on me, to the point that it has almost completely replaced both AWK and Python.
To clarify a little, the Tcl comment character is not actually treated exactly like
a procedure that does nothing. If it were, procedure calls embedded in the comment
would be executed, which is not the case. So, it is parsed like ordinary code, but
it has some special properties rather than simply being a no-op.
Most languages strip comments and then parse what remains. In Tcl, everything is parsed; the comment marker is actually a procedure whose argument is the remainder of the line, which it discards. This has the result that comments must be syntactically well-formed or they will screw up the parse. This is one of the few things that I don't like about the language because it makes it impossible to place comments as freely as I would like to. However, I don't think that it is unique. As I recall, some dialects of LISP work this way. Isn't this the way the Scheme used in The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs works? I don't have my copy to hand, but I think that I remember a discussion of how this feature can be used to advantage by redefining comments as functions that do something other than discard their arguments.
If you want LISP, use LISP. You have my blessing. I think of Tcl as a variant of LISP with about the right amount of syntactic sugar. The use of {} and [] provides a useful amount of visual structure that makes Tcl much more readable than LISP.
Tcl 8.5 eliminates the most common situation in which upvar used to be necessary. The problem was that Tcl (associative) arrays were not first class objects and could not be passed by value, so if you wanted to manipulate an array in a procedure, you had to pass the name of the array and use upvar to make it accessible within the procedure, like this:
proc foo {bar} { upvar \#0 $bar baz ... }
This makes baz an alias for the array whose name is contained in the variable bar. Within the procedure, bar is a variable whose value is the name of an
array in the caller's environment, so there is no way to access its members. upvar
is essentially a way to provide dynamic scope in a language whose default is local lexical scope.
This was indeed a bit of a wart on the language. You shouldn't need to mess with scoping mechanisms just to access an array from within a procedure. Tcl 8.5 adds dicts, which are similar to the old arrays but are first class objects and are passed by value. From now on, upvar should become much less frequent and be needed only for relatively sophisticated tasks. Most programmers won't need it.
Yes, but to run Windows in a VM you need a copy of Windows. If you buy a machine on which to run Windows, Microsoft only gets the relatively small amount they charge the OEMs. If you buy a copy of Windows retail to run in your VM, Microsoft makes more. So if your goal is to minimize the amount you give to Microsoft, buying a separate Windows machine is actually the better choice, isn't it?
Evidence that would be inadmissible if obtained under the same conditions by a police officer is admissible when obtained by a private party only if the court is satisfied that the private party was truly private and not acting as an agent of the police. If the police ask the private party to search, the resulting evidence will not be admissible. This gives a reasonable amount of protection against the police getting around the fourth amendment.
There are two issues here that need to be distinguished. One is whether the techs had any business going through the guy's files. The other is whether the state can use what they discovered against him. To the first, I would say that although it isn't safe to assume that the techs won't go through your files, they don't have any business doing so except to the generally limited extent that it is necessary for their work. Obviously if you have a problem with corrupted files they're going to want to look at the files, and they may well need to look at various kinds of system files and config files, but most of the time there is no good reason for them to look at other files. If they want to test a DVD burner, they can perfectly well use a file that they keep for that purpose.
On the second issue I am surprised at the trial court's ruling. As a rule, the state is entitled to use evidence whether or not it was legally obtained so long as it wasn't the state that broke the rules. If the person who obtains evidence is a police officer or is acting as an agent of the state, the evidence must be excluded if there was no search warrant and it does not fall under one of the exceptions to the need for a warrant. If, however, the evidence is obtained by a private party acting on his own, not at the behest of the police, it is generally admissible even if the private party had no right to do what it did. The principle is that the state should not be penalized for actions outside of its control. The Fourth Amendment constraints government action, not that of other parties.
Okay, so he's not a guru, but still, that's better than a lot of manager types.
Replacing null-terminated strings is indeed easy so long as the replacement is no longer. I've done that in Unix binaries. (Not for nefarious purposes. In one case, I paid the small fee for a useful piece of shareware, then lost the registered version.
The only difference was that the unregistered version would tell you with irritating frequency that it was unregistered, so I just edited the string "Unregistered" to read "Registered".)
Those of us who live in places like Red Lodge, Montana don't want the hell of New York City to come to us. Once these things become cheap, you think they won't start putting them in other places? Heck, if they can focus the beam well enough they might start zapping people from low-flying drones.:)
In general "moral rights" do not exist in the US because they conflict with the tradition of exclusive rights in Anglo-American law. (If one person owns a painting and therefore the copyright in the painting, while the moral rights remain with the artist, the rights to the painting are split between two owners.) The Visual Artists Rights Act confers some moral rights, but only on visual art.
Anybody know what the fuel efficiency of these things is, and in particular, how it compares to that of current subsonic commercial jets? Is it decent, or is this another way for the rich to waste fossil fuel?
Slashdot Mirror
The contents of the handbook would probably not be binding on the student even at a private university. In any case, this is a state university, which means that the 1st amendment applies, so any provisions in the handbook or in university regulations contrary to the 1st amendment are null and void. FIRE has established an excellent record of winning such cases.
I don't suppose there's a chance of a Linux port of SimLife? I really liked it, but it isn't available anymore on any platform.
You might want to look up the definition of democracy before calling others morons. In fact, you're wrong. The US is a democracy. It is not a direct democracy, but representative systems fall within the definition of democracy. For starters, try this explanation. Here's a definition by the US State Department. And here is the Wikipedia article. All of these sources include representative systems as a subtype of democracy.
By the way, "representative republic" is not a word; it's a phrase. You might want to learn a bit about grammar along with improving your vocabulary.
In Burlington, I'm pretty sure that Cliff Street is steeper than Main Street.
That's not an accurate description. The point that article makes about the spreadsheet is that OOXML distributes information all over the place so that to make the simple change of replacing a formula in a cell with a constant it is necessary to edit multiple files. The problem is not that you can't make changes inconsistent with the schema - it is that the schema is poorly designed.
Furthermore, the spreadsheet example is only one of several cases discussed, so even if you were to rebut it successfully the article would still contain a valid critique.
It's mundane, but you can never have too many electrical outlets. Install lots of them, at different levels so you always have one accessible.
That's interesting. I didn't find Tcl substitution very difficult to Grok. On the other hand, although I appreciate its typographic quality, I find the TeX macro language very difficult both to read and write and don't understand why such an abortion has not been replaced. (Yes, I know about lout, which is much like Tex but with a dialect of Lisp as the language, but it hasn't caught on very widely.)
Yes, that's it then. I knew it was in the book, which I read as an adult, but wasn't sure what movie that was as I saw it so long ago.
I remember first seeing these in an old movie, which I remember as being in black-and-white. It may have been an old version of The Count of Monte Cristo.
With regard to ugliness, I guess tastes vary, but the potential gotcha is well known, addressed in the documentation, and easily avoided. There is a special "--" argument to "switch" which indicates that the remaining arguments are not options and that any leading hyphens are therefore to be taken literally. Experienced Tcl programmers therefore write any switch that doesn't operate on restricted input as: "switch -- $var".
That is true, but I don't think that it explains the popularity of Tcl within the Tcl community. There are plenty of people who have come to Tcl recently after long experience with other languages. I am one of them. I started programming in Fortran, on punch cards, in 1973. I first used Tcl in 2003, at which point I used mostly C, AWK, and Python. My initial reason for using Tcl was that I needed to write a GUI, had done no graphics programming for quite some time, and had heard that Tcl/Tk was good. I tried it, and indeed my initial reaction was that Tk was really nice but that for programs of some complexity I didn't really like Tcl. With greater experience, though, Tcl grew on me, to the point that it has almost completely replaced both AWK and Python.
To clarify a little, the Tcl comment character is not actually treated exactly like a procedure that does nothing. If it were, procedure calls embedded in the comment would be executed, which is not the case. So, it is parsed like ordinary code, but it has some special properties rather than simply being a no-op.
Most languages strip comments and then parse what remains. In Tcl, everything is parsed; the comment marker is actually a procedure whose argument is the remainder of the line, which it discards. This has the result that comments must be syntactically well-formed or they will screw up the parse. This is one of the few things that I don't like about the language because it makes it impossible to place comments as freely as I would like to. However, I don't think that it is unique. As I recall, some dialects of LISP work this way. Isn't this the way the Scheme used in The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs works? I don't have my copy to hand, but I think that I remember a discussion of how this feature can be used to advantage by redefining comments as functions that do something other than discard their arguments.
If you want LISP, use LISP. You have my blessing. I think of Tcl as a variant of LISP with about the right amount of syntactic sugar. The use of {} and [] provides a useful amount of visual structure that makes Tcl much more readable than LISP.
Tcl 8.5 eliminates the most common situation in which upvar used to be necessary. The problem was that Tcl (associative) arrays were not first class objects and could not be passed by value, so if you wanted to manipulate an array in a procedure, you had to pass the name of the array and use upvar to make it accessible within the procedure, like this:
This makes baz an alias for the array whose name is contained in the variable bar. Within the procedure, bar is a variable whose value is the name of an array in the caller's environment, so there is no way to access its members. upvar is essentially a way to provide dynamic scope in a language whose default is local lexical scope.
This was indeed a bit of a wart on the language. You shouldn't need to mess with scoping mechanisms just to access an array from within a procedure. Tcl 8.5 adds dicts, which are similar to the old arrays but are first class objects and are passed by value. From now on, upvar should become much less frequent and be needed only for relatively sophisticated tasks. Most programmers won't need it.
Yes, but to run Windows in a VM you need a copy of Windows. If you buy a machine on which to run Windows, Microsoft only gets the relatively small amount they charge the OEMs. If you buy a copy of Windows retail to run in your VM, Microsoft makes more. So if your goal is to minimize the amount you give to Microsoft, buying a separate Windows machine is actually the better choice, isn't it?
Evidence that would be inadmissible if obtained under the same conditions by a police officer is admissible when obtained by a private party only if the court is satisfied that the private party was truly private and not acting as an agent of the police. If the police ask the private party to search, the resulting evidence will not be admissible. This gives a reasonable amount of protection against the police getting around the fourth amendment.
There are two issues here that need to be distinguished. One is whether the techs had any business going through the guy's files. The other is whether the state can use what they discovered against him. To the first, I would say that although it isn't safe to assume that the techs won't go through your files, they don't have any business doing so except to the generally limited extent that it is necessary for their work. Obviously if you have a problem with corrupted files they're going to want to look at the files, and they may well need to look at various kinds of system files and config files, but most of the time there is no good reason for them to look at other files. If they want to test a DVD burner, they can perfectly well use a file that they keep for that purpose.
On the second issue I am surprised at the trial court's ruling. As a rule, the state is entitled to use evidence whether or not it was legally obtained so long as it wasn't the state that broke the rules. If the person who obtains evidence is a police officer or is acting as an agent of the state, the evidence must be excluded if there was no search warrant and it does not fall under one of the exceptions to the need for a warrant. If, however, the evidence is obtained by a private party acting on his own, not at the behest of the police, it is generally admissible even if the private party had no right to do what it did. The principle is that the state should not be penalized for actions outside of its control. The Fourth Amendment constraints government action, not that of other parties.
What did Prescott Bush ever have to do with IBM? He never ran IBM.
Okay, so he's not a guru, but still, that's better than a lot of manager types. Replacing null-terminated strings is indeed easy so long as the replacement is no longer. I've done that in Unix binaries. (Not for nefarious purposes. In one case, I paid the small fee for a useful piece of shareware, then lost the registered version. The only difference was that the unregistered version would tell you with irritating frequency that it was unregistered, so I just edited the string "Unregistered" to read "Registered".)
Hunh? I thought I was being humorous, except for the part about not wanting NYC to come to us.
Those of us who live in places like Red Lodge, Montana don't want the hell of New York City to come to us. Once these things become cheap, you think they won't start putting them in other places? Heck, if they can focus the beam well enough they might start zapping people from low-flying drones.:)
In general "moral rights" do not exist in the US because they conflict with the tradition of exclusive rights in Anglo-American law. (If one person owns a painting and therefore the copyright in the painting, while the moral rights remain with the artist, the rights to the painting are split between two owners.) The Visual Artists Rights Act confers some moral rights, but only on visual art.
If your boss can hack a binary then, although one may question his ethics, at least he isn't a PHB.
Anybody know what the fuel efficiency of these things is, and in particular, how it compares to that of current subsonic commercial jets? Is it decent, or is this another way for the rich to waste fossil fuel?