Lawsuits and the threat of lawsuits can have a significant positive effect. First there are the obvious ones like Brown v. Board of Education. Then there are the not so obvious ones.
Let's say you're a businessman in a company that makes widgets. There is a change you can make to the widget process that saves money, but is dangerous to the consumer. Without the threat of a class action lawsuit that would be tempting. With the threat, there's a very real chance someone's going to sue the pants off of your company for that decision.
I'm just waiting for all of the stories of "unschooling" kids either (a) being highly intelligent/successful/nice or (b) being poorly educated, completely lacking social skills, sheltered, and closed minded. Personally, I've heard and seen stories of both from general homeschooling. Neither has given me a good picture of what's happening.
"We passed onerous environmental and labor laws encouraging companies to abandon the US."
Those 'onerous' environmental laws are keeping us quite a bit cleaner than China. In Beijing a bright sunny day can look like a dark foggy evening. The US has serious issues but at least the worst we get is a bit of haziness.
I sometimes do a bit of gaming with a group of Thai students at my university. Thai is, of course, the dominate language, though they switch randomly between Thai and English. One amusing thing that I've noticed is how strongly English has influenced gamer culture in other languages. There's just something funny about hearing a stream of incomprehensible Thai with the occasional 'noob' or 'rematch!'
Incidentally, I love fish fillets (French), have to fix glitches in my code (Yiddish), use wikis (Hawaiian), love quesadillas with salsa (Spanish), have family in Seattle (name of Native American chief), live near the Willamette River (Chinook), use Ubuntu Linux (Bantu), and regularly drink tea (Chinese).
I hate to be pedantic but Macromedia, not Adobe, is the originator of Flash. There have been changes since December '06 but I doubt there has been a rewrite.
You don't need to use a character to terminate it. Just carry around the length of the string.
typedef struct {
int length;
char *str;
} string;
D basically does this, except the length is part of the array itself.
Go look it up and read how it was and WHY the Founding Fathers set it up that way...
Be careful not to idolize the Founding Fathers and framers of the US Constitution. When the US Constitution was written only white male property owners were allowed to vote (~15% of the population). Now we have voter registration drives to get as many eligible people to vote as is possible. Besides, election by state legislatures makes cronyism even more of a problem than it is now.
There's a least one benefit to patent trolls like these guys. They unify companies that normally are fierce competitors. Or, as Psycho Dave from Kuro5hin describe another group:
"...what common ground does pretty much every person regardless of their political or religious beliefs have? They all hate the Westboro Baptist Church."
Agreed. K-12 teachers already have enough on their plates. Spending a great deal of time trying to explain a linked list to a classroom of children who generally have little aptitude or use for the subject wastes valuable time. On the other hand, I would like to see students who have some aptitude/interest in CS encouraged to pursue it. Guidance councillors? Yes. Core curriculum? No.
Is this even that big of an issue? I know that that state owned computers shouldn't be used for political purposes, but it's not like there's lasting damage. The vandalism probably disappeared within a few minutes (tip of the hat to counter-vandals). This looks like making a mountain out of a mole hill.
It's a lot more than half the population. Women currently have a much greater tendency to not go into computer science for a variety of reasons, but it doesn't follow that most men find CS appealing.
Ah, but there's another side to that. There is almost no chance that Wyoming will go to a Democrat. Same with Texas, despite its large population. So what if Wyoming has one more electoral vote. That's out of what, 538 votes. Candidates can safely small states and non-swing states, just like they do now. Compare that to a system where a few more votes in Wyoming actually count toward the greater election. Think back to the Democratic primary. Barack & Hillary were traveling everywhere. If they could get another delegate out of a county then they were there. Right now candidates in the general election concentrate on swing states with large population.
The basic problem is this: It's not really important if an extremely small state gets one more vote in the electoral college. What matters is how many swing voters there are in the state. In a popular election every voter counts. It doesn't matter if they're in Wyoming or Texas. All that matters is if they have a vote that can go to either candidate.
The biggest problem that I see with a direct democracy is that the general population doesn't have the time or (in most cases) intelligence to deal with all legislative issues. Here in Oregon our ballot initiative process is routinely abused and dominated by Bill Sizemore. Pretty titles are attached to stupid initiatives. The other problem is efficiency. It takes long enough for a bill to get through Congress. Think about if every law had to come up for a public vote.
Apparently Google's algorithms are withstanding the force of this Google Bomb. The articles aren't moving up in the search result list anymore; they're slowly sliding down.
As Sweeney pointed out, Scientologists' comparison of psychology to Nazism is disgusting. That's why I wish Godwin's Law could be extended to the beyond the [forum|usenet|chat] world. Abusive display at a conference? You loose!
Galileo's persecution was fundamentally different, even ignore that the heretic accusation didn't come from other scientists. He was introducing a radically new concept. Minority "dissidents" in global warming aren't introducing new concepts. They're just going against a well proven theory.
If I remember correctly, the alleged incident with the Qur'an being tossed down the toilet was done by a US government employee (a soldier) on the job (in Guantanamo Bay). That's not a hate crime, but it's certainly not in line with the ethics the American people expect of their government employees.
Harassing the school officials isn't going to help anything. They don't need to have every Slashdotter with a phone, boredom, and too much time on their hands "explaining" the situation to them. Leave the talking to people who know more about the situation than just reading a news article.
To expand on that, applications such as Kontact (KDE's PIM) could relatively easily ported to Windows. For dual booters (such as myself), using Kontact on Linux and Windows using a shared set of data files would make using Kontact much more tantalizing.
Slashdot Mirror
Lawsuits and the threat of lawsuits can have a significant positive effect. First there are the obvious ones like Brown v. Board of Education. Then there are the not so obvious ones.
Let's say you're a businessman in a company that makes widgets. There is a change you can make to the widget process that saves money, but is dangerous to the consumer. Without the threat of a class action lawsuit that would be tempting. With the threat, there's a very real chance someone's going to sue the pants off of your company for that decision.
Nike?
I'm just waiting for all of the stories of "unschooling" kids either (a) being highly intelligent/successful/nice or (b) being poorly educated, completely lacking social skills, sheltered, and closed minded. Personally, I've heard and seen stories of both from general homeschooling. Neither has given me a good picture of what's happening.
...419 Eater. My favorite is the Harry Potter handwriting scambait (search in the page for "after the call").
In this case, one of the threatening letters explicitly said:
These are highly sensitive confidential information from Kaupthings bank hf. loan book regarding the banks clients subject to bank secrecy in Iceland.
I take this to mean that the documents are legit.
Personally, I prefer the simplicity and elegance of the MacBook Wheel. No keyboard, just a scroll wheel and a mouse.
"We passed onerous environmental and labor laws encouraging companies to abandon the US."
Those 'onerous' environmental laws are keeping us quite a bit cleaner than China. In Beijing a bright sunny day can look like a dark foggy evening. The US has serious issues but at least the worst we get is a bit of haziness.
I sometimes do a bit of gaming with a group of Thai students at my university. Thai is, of course, the dominate language, though they switch randomly between Thai and English. One amusing thing that I've noticed is how strongly English has influenced gamer culture in other languages. There's just something funny about hearing a stream of incomprehensible Thai with the occasional 'noob' or 'rematch!'
Incidentally, I love fish fillets (French), have to fix glitches in my code (Yiddish), use wikis (Hawaiian), love quesadillas with salsa (Spanish), have family in Seattle (name of Native American chief), live near the Willamette River (Chinook), use Ubuntu Linux (Bantu), and regularly drink tea (Chinese).
I hate to be pedantic but Macromedia, not Adobe, is the originator of Flash. There have been changes since December '06 but I doubt there has been a rewrite.
You don't need to use a character to terminate it. Just carry around the length of the string.
typedef struct {
int length;
char *str;
} string;
D basically does this, except the length is part of the array itself.
Go look it up and read how it was and WHY the Founding Fathers set it up that way...
Be careful not to idolize the Founding Fathers and framers of the US Constitution. When the US Constitution was written only white male property owners were allowed to vote (~15% of the population). Now we have voter registration drives to get as many eligible people to vote as is possible. Besides, election by state legislatures makes cronyism even more of a problem than it is now.
There's a least one benefit to patent trolls like these guys. They unify companies that normally are fierce competitors. Or, as Psycho Dave from Kuro5hin describe another group:
"...what common ground does pretty much every person regardless of their political or religious beliefs have? They all hate the Westboro Baptist Church."
Agreed. K-12 teachers already have enough on their plates. Spending a great deal of time trying to explain a linked list to a classroom of children who generally have little aptitude or use for the subject wastes valuable time. On the other hand, I would like to see students who have some aptitude/interest in CS encouraged to pursue it. Guidance councillors? Yes. Core curriculum? No.
Is this even that big of an issue? I know that that state owned computers shouldn't be used for political purposes, but it's not like there's lasting damage. The vandalism probably disappeared within a few minutes (tip of the hat to counter-vandals). This looks like making a mountain out of a mole hill.
It's a lot more than half the population. Women currently have a much greater tendency to not go into computer science for a variety of reasons, but it doesn't follow that most men find CS appealing.
Ah, but there's another side to that. There is almost no chance that Wyoming will go to a Democrat. Same with Texas, despite its large population. So what if Wyoming has one more electoral vote. That's out of what, 538 votes. Candidates can safely small states and non-swing states, just like they do now. Compare that to a system where a few more votes in Wyoming actually count toward the greater election. Think back to the Democratic primary. Barack & Hillary were traveling everywhere. If they could get another delegate out of a county then they were there. Right now candidates in the general election concentrate on swing states with large population. The basic problem is this: It's not really important if an extremely small state gets one more vote in the electoral college. What matters is how many swing voters there are in the state. In a popular election every voter counts. It doesn't matter if they're in Wyoming or Texas. All that matters is if they have a vote that can go to either candidate.
The biggest problem that I see with a direct democracy is that the general population doesn't have the time or (in most cases) intelligence to deal with all legislative issues. Here in Oregon our ballot initiative process is routinely abused and dominated by Bill Sizemore. Pretty titles are attached to stupid initiatives. The other problem is efficiency. It takes long enough for a bill to get through Congress. Think about if every law had to come up for a public vote.
Apparently Google's algorithms are withstanding the force of this Google Bomb. The articles aren't moving up in the search result list anymore; they're slowly sliding down.
Firefox also uses XUL (an XML dialect) for its entire interface. Dozens of DOM trees has got to hurt.
As Sweeney pointed out, Scientologists' comparison of psychology to Nazism is disgusting. That's why I wish Godwin's Law could be extended to the beyond the [forum|usenet|chat] world. Abusive display at a conference? You loose!
Galileo's persecution was fundamentally different, even ignore that the heretic accusation didn't come from other scientists. He was introducing a radically new concept. Minority "dissidents" in global warming aren't introducing new concepts. They're just going against a well proven theory.
If I remember correctly, the alleged incident with the Qur'an being tossed down the toilet was done by a US government employee (a soldier) on the job (in Guantanamo Bay). That's not a hate crime, but it's certainly not in line with the ethics the American people expect of their government employees.
Harassing the school officials isn't going to help anything. They don't need to have every Slashdotter with a phone, boredom, and too much time on their hands "explaining" the situation to them. Leave the talking to people who know more about the situation than just reading a news article.
And people complain about bloat...
To expand on that, applications such as Kontact (KDE's PIM) could relatively easily ported to Windows. For dual booters (such as myself), using Kontact on Linux and Windows using a shared set of data files would make using Kontact much more tantalizing.