He wasn't convicted because of this ONE piece of evidence. He was convicted based on lots of pieces of evidence, all of which taken as a whole convinced the jury beyond a reasonable doubt. Real life isn't like Slashdot where every piece of evidence has to be fully and completely damning in and of itself.
Is your country any different? Will your country refuse to prosecute just because the murderer disposed of the body? I haven't seen all of the evidence, so I can't comment on Reiser's guilt or innocence, but I do know from reading the article that there was MORE evidence than just the car seat coincidence.
This isn't rural Mississippi (which is noted for criminal justice shenanigans) but Oakland California. The prosecutors would never have brought the case forward unless they thought there was enough evidence to get a jury in Alameda County to convict. Forget about the rumours you've heard of ultra-violent Oakland. This jurisdiction covers Berkeley, Livermore, and Pleasanton as well. They're an educated bunch.
He's right about unit tests... sort of. Just as most coders shouldn't be designing interfaces, most coders don't know how to test. It can often be more work writing the unit tests than writing the code.
If you have a function that multiplies two integers, most coders will write a test that multiplies two numbers. That's not good enough. You need to consider boundary conditions. For example, can you multiply MAX_INT by MAX_INT? MAX_INT by -MAX_INT? Etc. With real world functions you are going to have boundaries up the whazoo. In addition, if you have a function that takes data coming from the user, check for invalid cases even if another function is validating. Check for null or indeterminate values. Write tests that you expect to fail.
Sometimes programmers want control over their programs. C and C++ give you that. An example is garbage collection. If something else manages your deletions, you're not in control. If you slap together a web front end to a database, then garbage collection is fine. But when you write a video driver you want absolute control over your memory.
C and C++ are "on the honor system". If you don't have the moral fibre to properly manage the memory you allocate, then find a 12-step program, and stop blaming the language.
It's not just laptops. You can find 4:3 LCD monitors online, but it's nearly impossible to find them in a retail store. Last year I went to three local large computer outlets, and found only one, which was a floor model. I was told by all of them that their buyers simply stopped ordering them. At one store (Best Buy) I was told that the Samsung 204bw (1680 x 1050 native) had a larger screen area than the Samsung 204b (1600x1200 native). Not even a calculator could convince him otherwise.
but in general economists have a bad reputation every time there is an attempt to assert itself as a science.
True. But not all schools of economics try to make themselves a science. It's a difference in methodology. The Austrian School is a notable example, because they specifically reject scientific positivism. The Neoclassicists are obsessed with deriving mathematical formulas, and the Monetarists are obsessed with scientific predictability.
I sympathize with the Austrians, but realize that the Neoclassicists have a point. It's like population biology. You can derive population curves all you want, but you will still not be able to exactly predict the population of caribou. There are simply far too many variables to account for, plus a whole truckload of randomness. In addition, as Hayek noted, it is impossible to know many of these variables before hand.
But some of the formulas are very useful. The demand curve, for example. As long as you know that its a simplified representation of an ever-changing aggregate of a single price in a continuum of prices, then it is useful. But once you start treating it as an objective reality, then you start making horrible economic mistakes (Marx and Keynes spring to mind).
Austrians do tend to be, more than other economists, political ideologues. But their rejection of mathematics in favor of individual human action has led to two of the greatest insights in economics: marginal utility and time preference.
Yes, it is related to the price and availability of barley. But since barley is mostly fungible [look it up], a decrease in barley acreage worldwide (in preference to corn, soybeans, etc) will affect your local prices.
Climate change isn't impacting brewing, stupid environmentalists lobbying biofuels to stupid politicians are impacting brewing. Subsidizing these high yield crops not only siphons your taxes to big agribusiness, it also incentivizes the third world poor into plowing under the rainforests. Dr. Evil couldn't have come up with a more dastardly plan.
p.s. Yeah, I know, not all environmentalists lobbied for the enviro-unfriendly biofuels. But they sure kept their mouths shut when this was going down. Hindsight is 20/20, and mine tells me that environmentalist are much more interested in getting into a politician's pants than in protecting the environment.
I first used AIM when it was rolled out more than a decade ago. I thought it was cool the first week. Then I had to turn it off to get any work done. It's like an internet doorbell that anyone can push. It is only now that I am starting to get back into them slightly, with Jabber and Skype. But at least there you can set them to "do not disturb".
I just blow a chunk of ham sandwish through my nose laughing at this! Unfortunately for the Macanistas, after looking at the image the designer ends up sounding as absurd as Kevin Costner did. There was gunman on the grassy knoll and the apple wasn't ripped off from Apple.
I wonder what Stephenson will do with the premise. For many people, the assumption is that the people in the monastery are the people with the answers. But will it be so? Oftentimes the dumbest people are the most educated. Sometimes they become so knowledgable in their narrow interest that they start to imagine that they know more than they do in other fields. Or they become disdainful of the common man that they divorce themselves from reality. Most universities are overflowing with these two types.
The term "Nanny State" refers to government treating its citizens like children. It is a contrast to the Daddy State that punishes you if you've been bad, and the Mommy State that shields you from the consequences of your actions. A Nanny State is one that is overly protective. All three assert that adults are too immature to run their own lives and that government must run their lives for them.
Cry me a river! If you think you're inconvenienced now, wait until your Mac gets stolen! I expect your company will take reasonable steps to keep your Mac safe, but if it does get stolen, then it will be your fault and not theirs.
My answer to the original question remains the same. If you do not trust your company to keep your personal property safe, then don't bring your personal property to work. Duh!
The internet is in no way like the tradegy of the commons. I am paying for my road, and every else is paying for their roads.
You're paying for an onramp. Your internet bill is wholly unrelated to your usage, because you're only paying for an access point and not for an end-to-end route. If all you did was download one email a month, you would still pay the same price. We don't have a big problem with this now, but when congestion becomes greater then it won't matter what speed you connect with because your packets will still be stuck in traffic out there somewhere.
If the ISPs want to further restrict the width of my road, OK. But I expect the contract to clearly state any restrictions so that I can compare ISPs. Informed consumers are vital to a functioning market economy.
I absolutely agree! You should know exactly what you are buying when you buy it, and if the terms change you need to know before they change. But the vast majority of ISPs are only providing you an onramp. Producers are also consumers, and various ISPs and networks purchasing rights to use each others infrastructure is also a market. They need to be free to negotiate with each other in a free market. Net Neutrality destroys this ability, and will only bring the equivalent of traffic jams.
Also, making restriction based on what I am transporting on my road shouldn't be allowed if you want to call yourself an ISP. How much, yes. At which time of the day, yes. What, no. I have to disagree. It's up the ISP. If you do not like their terms you are free to take your business elsewhere. If the market "decides" that all packets are qualitatively equal, then the pricing for them will be uniform. But maybe the market will decide something else. Maybe it demands that SMTP not be priced the same as VOIP. The great thing about a market is that it is NOT one size fits all. The technology can easily handle several concurrent pricing schemes. So you can choose which you want. But if the government is put in charge it will be one size fits all.
Simple solution: Don't bring your personal computer or electronic devices to work. If your company's security is such that company property disappears, then that is the company's problem. In real life, this is not a big problem. With the exception of lunches in the refrigerator, coworkers are not going to steal your stuff in a healthy work culture. But to be save, don't leave your personal devices laying around. If it is your own personal computer, however, then get the company to provide you with a company computer.
"Dominant market position" is a nearly meaningless term. It all depends on how narrowly you define the market. Apple has a dominant market position for Macs and iPods. Try as you might, you cannot buy Mac OSX Leopard 10.5 from Sun. And while Microsoft has a huge share of the desktop OS market for x86 based PCs, it's not quite so large for servers or embedded systems.
But even if they are dominant, so what? I haven't booted into Windows on my home system in over a year. My next system won't even have a partition for Windows on it. Microsoft cannot dictate to me the product I buy. The only time a "dominant" market share is dangerous, is when it can prevent entry into the field. Microsoft clearly cannot do that. We have today commercial Linux distros that are as powerful and easy to use as Windows. We also have Apple continuing to grow.
I'm trying to rack my brain thinking of a entry-preventing monopoly that didn't get that way through special government privilege. The railroad barons are one example, who lobbied congress to regulate their competitors out of business. But Microsoft is not one of them (unless you count the same copyright privilege that Apple enjoys). They got their current market share using the same techniques employed by IBM, Apple, Sun, etc.
Bigness in and of itself does not scare me. Without help from the government, all Microsoft can do to make money is to sell a product to voluntary consumers.
p.s. Is Apple's auto-installing Safari unethical? I'm not sure, but I do know that the answer is unrelated to the size of Apple's market share. If it's wrong for Apple, then the same action would be wrong for Opera or Mozilla, and if it's ethical for Apple then it's also ethical for Microsoft.
Actually, under US antitrust law, whether a company is large or small is extremely relevant.
Legislation is not synonymous with morality or ethics. The fact that there is a law does not imply that it is a good or necessary law. Morality is about what you do, not who you are.
California is the Big Government state. I seriously doubt it will tell the Feds to take a flying leap. I'm not trusting them to keep the Surveillance State at bay. I have to do a lot of flying between the Bay Area and Southern California. Regardless if my California driver's license is Real ID or not, I will start driving instead of flying. The less the state or Feds can track me, the better. I've got nothing to hide, it's just none of their damned business.
The internet is more like a network of roads. We know what causes congestion on roads, the lack of a market price. It's a network of commons all tragically interconnected. Without a price mechanism to signal drivers that they ought to use different routes, it's all hit or miss hoping that everyone else will take a different way to work than we do. Adding more lanes (bandwidth) helps a tiny bit in the short term, but exacerbates the problem in the long term.
Privatized roads are politically unfeasible, but a private internet is not. We are getting congestion because there is no real market price structure. We pay for access, but not for usage. Since it costs us exactly the same whether we download a HD movie or a single email, we end up downloading our movies during peak hours. Adding bandwidth won't help, because it will only encourage more people to download during peak hours. It's perfectly sensible to charge certain users more than others. I'll probably get kicked out of the geek club for saying so, but Net Neutrality is a bad idea. It's socialism for networks. Pure Marxist socialism/communism doesn't work precisely because it doesn't have market prices. It leads to gross over-production in some areas and under-production in others.
There are certainly problems, but the solution isn't big bungling government. Get the government OUT of the internet and allow networks to charge for how they wish to charge, whether that be for access or usage or something else. Let them charge more for certain uses. Let them charge more during peak movie download times. Whatever. Router protocols can handle it. They can get you the cheapest routes. Or fastest if that's what you want. Or a balance of the two.
Yet again another example of big government causing problems. Why is it that the solutions suggested are always more big government? Bill and George have given us a presidency with absolute power, but must of us are so naive we think John, Barack, or Hillary will be immune to its corruption. Hah.
Apple has ALWAYS behaved like Microsoft. Worse in some ways. But it is Microsoft who always gets hauled into court, not Apple. Thus the corruption of the modern legal system: Lady Justice does not ask what you have done, but who you are. Apple can get away with this as long as they are perceived to be small. (Which is completely irrelevant to whether this practice in itself should be legal or not.)
You don't need a "distro". Just install the latest GNOME on FreeBSD. Done. While I am a huge KDE fanboy myself, the FreeBSD/GNOME team has done some amazing work.
Slashdot Mirror
You let Microsoft test your code? Holy crap!
He wasn't convicted because of this ONE piece of evidence. He was convicted based on lots of pieces of evidence, all of which taken as a whole convinced the jury beyond a reasonable doubt. Real life isn't like Slashdot where every piece of evidence has to be fully and completely damning in and of itself.
Is your country any different? Will your country refuse to prosecute just because the murderer disposed of the body? I haven't seen all of the evidence, so I can't comment on Reiser's guilt or innocence, but I do know from reading the article that there was MORE evidence than just the car seat coincidence.
This isn't rural Mississippi (which is noted for criminal justice shenanigans) but Oakland California. The prosecutors would never have brought the case forward unless they thought there was enough evidence to get a jury in Alameda County to convict. Forget about the rumours you've heard of ultra-violent Oakland. This jurisdiction covers Berkeley, Livermore, and Pleasanton as well. They're an educated bunch.
And do you actually use such a generator on every function you write? No, I didn't think so.
Conclusion: Knuth is somewhat right, in that most unit tests written by coders are useless. But unit tests themselves are not.
He's right about unit tests... sort of. Just as most coders shouldn't be designing interfaces, most coders don't know how to test. It can often be more work writing the unit tests than writing the code.
If you have a function that multiplies two integers, most coders will write a test that multiplies two numbers. That's not good enough. You need to consider boundary conditions. For example, can you multiply MAX_INT by MAX_INT? MAX_INT by -MAX_INT? Etc. With real world functions you are going to have boundaries up the whazoo. In addition, if you have a function that takes data coming from the user, check for invalid cases even if another function is validating. Check for null or indeterminate values. Write tests that you expect to fail.
Sometimes programmers want control over their programs. C and C++ give you that. An example is garbage collection. If something else manages your deletions, you're not in control. If you slap together a web front end to a database, then garbage collection is fine. But when you write a video driver you want absolute control over your memory.
C and C++ are "on the honor system". If you don't have the moral fibre to properly manage the memory you allocate, then find a 12-step program, and stop blaming the language.
It's not just laptops. You can find 4:3 LCD monitors online, but it's nearly impossible to find them in a retail store. Last year I went to three local large computer outlets, and found only one, which was a floor model. I was told by all of them that their buyers simply stopped ordering them. At one store (Best Buy) I was told that the Samsung 204bw (1680 x 1050 native) had a larger screen area than the Samsung 204b (1600x1200 native). Not even a calculator could convince him otherwise.
True. But not all schools of economics try to make themselves a science. It's a difference in methodology. The Austrian School is a notable example, because they specifically reject scientific positivism. The Neoclassicists are obsessed with deriving mathematical formulas, and the Monetarists are obsessed with scientific predictability.
I sympathize with the Austrians, but realize that the Neoclassicists have a point. It's like population biology. You can derive population curves all you want, but you will still not be able to exactly predict the population of caribou. There are simply far too many variables to account for, plus a whole truckload of randomness. In addition, as Hayek noted, it is impossible to know many of these variables before hand.
But some of the formulas are very useful. The demand curve, for example. As long as you know that its a simplified representation of an ever-changing aggregate of a single price in a continuum of prices, then it is useful. But once you start treating it as an objective reality, then you start making horrible economic mistakes (Marx and Keynes spring to mind).
Austrians do tend to be, more than other economists, political ideologues. But their rejection of mathematics in favor of individual human action has led to two of the greatest insights in economics: marginal utility and time preference.
Yes, it is related to the price and availability of barley. But since barley is mostly fungible [look it up], a decrease in barley acreage worldwide (in preference to corn, soybeans, etc) will affect your local prices.
Climate change isn't impacting brewing, stupid environmentalists lobbying biofuels to stupid politicians are impacting brewing. Subsidizing these high yield crops not only siphons your taxes to big agribusiness, it also incentivizes the third world poor into plowing under the rainforests. Dr. Evil couldn't have come up with a more dastardly plan.
p.s. Yeah, I know, not all environmentalists lobbied for the enviro-unfriendly biofuels. But they sure kept their mouths shut when this was going down. Hindsight is 20/20, and mine tells me that environmentalist are much more interested in getting into a politician's pants than in protecting the environment.
I first used AIM when it was rolled out more than a decade ago. I thought it was cool the first week. Then I had to turn it off to get any work done. It's like an internet doorbell that anyone can push. It is only now that I am starting to get back into them slightly, with Jabber and Skype. But at least there you can set them to "do not disturb".
I just blow a chunk of ham sandwish through my nose laughing at this! Unfortunately for the Macanistas, after looking at the image the designer ends up sounding as absurd as Kevin Costner did. There was gunman on the grassy knoll and the apple wasn't ripped off from Apple.
I wonder what Stephenson will do with the premise. For many people, the assumption is that the people in the monastery are the people with the answers. But will it be so? Oftentimes the dumbest people are the most educated. Sometimes they become so knowledgable in their narrow interest that they start to imagine that they know more than they do in other fields. Or they become disdainful of the common man that they divorce themselves from reality. Most universities are overflowing with these two types.
The term "Nanny State" refers to government treating its citizens like children. It is a contrast to the Daddy State that punishes you if you've been bad, and the Mommy State that shields you from the consequences of your actions. A Nanny State is one that is overly protective. All three assert that adults are too immature to run their own lives and that government must run their lives for them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanny_state
Cry me a river! If you think you're inconvenienced now, wait until your Mac gets stolen! I expect your company will take reasonable steps to keep your Mac safe, but if it does get stolen, then it will be your fault and not theirs.
My answer to the original question remains the same. If you do not trust your company to keep your personal property safe, then don't bring your personal property to work. Duh!
The internet is in no way like the tradegy of the commons. I am paying for my road, and every else is paying for their roads.
You're paying for an onramp. Your internet bill is wholly unrelated to your usage, because you're only paying for an access point and not for an end-to-end route. If all you did was download one email a month, you would still pay the same price. We don't have a big problem with this now, but when congestion becomes greater then it won't matter what speed you connect with because your packets will still be stuck in traffic out there somewhere.
If the ISPs want to further restrict the width of my road, OK. But I expect the contract to clearly state any restrictions so that I can compare ISPs. Informed consumers are vital to a functioning market economy.
I absolutely agree! You should know exactly what you are buying when you buy it, and if the terms change you need to know before they change. But the vast majority of ISPs are only providing you an onramp. Producers are also consumers, and various ISPs and networks purchasing rights to use each others infrastructure is also a market. They need to be free to negotiate with each other in a free market. Net Neutrality destroys this ability, and will only bring the equivalent of traffic jams.
Also, making restriction based on what I am transporting on my road shouldn't be allowed if you want to call yourself an ISP. How much, yes. At which time of the day, yes. What, no.
I have to disagree. It's up the ISP. If you do not like their terms you are free to take your business elsewhere. If the market "decides" that all packets are qualitatively equal, then the pricing for them will be uniform. But maybe the market will decide something else. Maybe it demands that SMTP not be priced the same as VOIP. The great thing about a market is that it is NOT one size fits all. The technology can easily handle several concurrent pricing schemes. So you can choose which you want. But if the government is put in charge it will be one size fits all.
Simple solution: Don't bring your personal computer or electronic devices to work. If your company's security is such that company property disappears, then that is the company's problem. In real life, this is not a big problem. With the exception of lunches in the refrigerator, coworkers are not going to steal your stuff in a healthy work culture. But to be save, don't leave your personal devices laying around. If it is your own personal computer, however, then get the company to provide you with a company computer.
"Dominant market position" is a nearly meaningless term. It all depends on how narrowly you define the market. Apple has a dominant market position for Macs and iPods. Try as you might, you cannot buy Mac OSX Leopard 10.5 from Sun. And while Microsoft has a huge share of the desktop OS market for x86 based PCs, it's not quite so large for servers or embedded systems.
But even if they are dominant, so what? I haven't booted into Windows on my home system in over a year. My next system won't even have a partition for Windows on it. Microsoft cannot dictate to me the product I buy. The only time a "dominant" market share is dangerous, is when it can prevent entry into the field. Microsoft clearly cannot do that. We have today commercial Linux distros that are as powerful and easy to use as Windows. We also have Apple continuing to grow.
I'm trying to rack my brain thinking of a entry-preventing monopoly that didn't get that way through special government privilege. The railroad barons are one example, who lobbied congress to regulate their competitors out of business. But Microsoft is not one of them (unless you count the same copyright privilege that Apple enjoys). They got their current market share using the same techniques employed by IBM, Apple, Sun, etc.
Bigness in and of itself does not scare me. Without help from the government, all Microsoft can do to make money is to sell a product to voluntary consumers.
p.s. Is Apple's auto-installing Safari unethical? I'm not sure, but I do know that the answer is unrelated to the size of Apple's market share. If it's wrong for Apple, then the same action would be wrong for Opera or Mozilla, and if it's ethical for Apple then it's also ethical for Microsoft.
Legislation is not synonymous with morality or ethics. The fact that there is a law does not imply that it is a good or necessary law. Morality is about what you do, not who you are.
California is the Big Government state. I seriously doubt it will tell the Feds to take a flying leap. I'm not trusting them to keep the Surveillance State at bay. I have to do a lot of flying between the Bay Area and Southern California. Regardless if my California driver's license is Real ID or not, I will start driving instead of flying. The less the state or Feds can track me, the better. I've got nothing to hide, it's just none of their damned business.
The internet is more like a network of roads. We know what causes congestion on roads, the lack of a market price. It's a network of commons all tragically interconnected. Without a price mechanism to signal drivers that they ought to use different routes, it's all hit or miss hoping that everyone else will take a different way to work than we do. Adding more lanes (bandwidth) helps a tiny bit in the short term, but exacerbates the problem in the long term.
Privatized roads are politically unfeasible, but a private internet is not. We are getting congestion because there is no real market price structure. We pay for access, but not for usage. Since it costs us exactly the same whether we download a HD movie or a single email, we end up downloading our movies during peak hours. Adding bandwidth won't help, because it will only encourage more people to download during peak hours. It's perfectly sensible to charge certain users more than others. I'll probably get kicked out of the geek club for saying so, but Net Neutrality is a bad idea. It's socialism for networks. Pure Marxist socialism/communism doesn't work precisely because it doesn't have market prices. It leads to gross over-production in some areas and under-production in others.
There are certainly problems, but the solution isn't big bungling government. Get the government OUT of the internet and allow networks to charge for how they wish to charge, whether that be for access or usage or something else. Let them charge more for certain uses. Let them charge more during peak movie download times. Whatever. Router protocols can handle it. They can get you the cheapest routes. Or fastest if that's what you want. Or a balance of the two.
Yet again another example of big government causing problems. Why is it that the solutions suggested are always more big government? Bill and George have given us a presidency with absolute power, but must of us are so naive we think John, Barack, or Hillary will be immune to its corruption. Hah.
Apple has ALWAYS behaved like Microsoft. Worse in some ways. But it is Microsoft who always gets hauled into court, not Apple. Thus the corruption of the modern legal system: Lady Justice does not ask what you have done, but who you are. Apple can get away with this as long as they are perceived to be small. (Which is completely irrelevant to whether this practice in itself should be legal or not.)
You don't need a "distro". Just install the latest GNOME on FreeBSD. Done. While I am a huge KDE fanboy myself, the FreeBSD/GNOME team has done some amazing work.