Javascript is that really ugly bastard thing we're stuck with because nothing better is as widely implemented, not because it was well designed.
Nothing that is widely implemented stays well designed. The more users there are, the more bad code depending on weird corner case behavior there will be, and the more such legacy cruft the implementations need to support because an implementation thats supports it has a competitive advantage over one which doesn't. At the same time technology marches on, adding new concepts and paradigms on top of the older ones in a merry chaos. And finally, user needs change so what was once a good fit won't be that anymore. And of course the mere fact that there are many users means that there are a lot of conflicting needs.
And all that assumes that anyone actually cares about design at all, rather than winning marketshare.
I don't understand why this one is such a big deal and causing all the talk about restricting legal gun rights vs the other shootings.
Perhaps people realized that news of a crazy gunman going on a rampage and murdering lots of people have become so commonplace that they are not "such a big deal" anymore, and this implies that there is a serious problem?
To be fair, it's only insecure if they're lying about it.
It's insecure either way. Them actively lying about it makes them liars too, but even not lying is meaningless if the information is buried somewhere in an EULA bloated by legalese to the point where no non-lawyer can be expected to read or understand it.
Can someone point me to a REAL nerd site where the above aliterate Anonymous Jock who doesn't give two shits about learning doesn't go?
You wouldn't be welcome on such a site, given your attitude to questions - which, after all, are a prerequisite to learning.
WE'RE NERDS. We understand most scientific and medical terms. When you say "LEO" we don't think "cop" we think "low Earth orbit."
First, medicine is a science, thus the expression "most scientific and medical terms" is redundant. Second, no one understands most scientific terms. "Science" refers to the entire body of human knowledge, which not only is far too vast for any one person to know most of, but also grows faster than you can learn it - even if your learning capacity was unlimited, the bandwidth of your senses is simply not enough.
Finally, "nerd" doesn't necessarily refer to someone interested in either science in general or medicine in specific. People who are enthusiastic about programming, or matemathics, or 19th century French poetry could all be called nerds without necessarily knowing what "GI" refers to in a medical context - assuming it actually refers to just one thing and isn't reused anywhere. On the other hand, "LEO" is usually used with sufficient context to conclude that we are talking about some kind of satellite orbit or at the very least a space trajectory.
If you don't understand scientific or medical terminology, maybe you should just stay away from slashdot?
Perhaps you wouldn't have such issues with jocks if you changed your attitude a little? Because I can certainly see why a jock - or, really, anyone - might not like you.
They don't like you because you're an arrogant twat, just in case you didn't get that already.
Knew when I saw the title, there would be posts praising HP for their blunder. Look, welfare needs reform, no one (sane) doubts that, but to end the whole system indiscriminately is both counterproductive and inhumane.
There are plenty of people who are calling its end precisely because that's inhumane. Being willing to make "hard decisions" lets people feel like they are tough without actually being personally inconvenienced. It's an interesting, if disgusting, aspect of human psyche.
Secretaries, accountants, managers, and IT personnel also dont produce "actual goods", though-- like banks-- they do provide services.
And no one speaks of "secretary industry". Because those are all supporting roles to actual production. In fact, an overabundance of management relative to actual production is one of classic signs of inefficiency.
Banks have been necessary for a long time, because the service of "provides a stable place to store wealth" has been fairly important for a long time. If you dont feel theres any value there, you could always store your money under your mattress.
I said "That it's been allowed to grow into the size and complexity it has" is the problem because the size of financial economy relative to real economy has made the system unstable. I never said we should get rid of banks entirely, just trim them down in size and complexity of allowed operations. Do you have trouble with reading comprehension, or were you trying to set up a strawman?
Also, me storing my money under my mattress doesn't help any if a financial instrument or investment scheme thought up by some financial genius leads to an economic meltdown. So, unfortunately, giving banks the freedom to do stupid things affects me, even if I avoid dealing with them personally. Thus, my options are to either kiss my economic security goodbye or try to get enough support for strict regulations to get them through.
That's the problem with global economy: any problem anywhere is everyone's problem.
The free market kills broken companies. That is a feature, not a bug.
Companies don't exist in a vacuum, and simply letting them die will affect more than just their owners. In the case of banks, the results would be quite terrible due to domino effect - and I'm pretty sure that's not an accident.
And free market is a self-contradicting abstraction: it cannot exist without some body enforcing the rules, and it also can't exist with some body regulating it (enforcing the rules).
The banking system is, and has been, so non-free market it isn't even funny. It is the most subsidized industry in the world.
The banking system isn't an industry, it's a money management system. It doesn't produce anything. That it's been allowed to grow into the size and complexity it has is one of the biggest problems in economy right now: all those imaginary fortunes aren't connected to actual goods or services so they can appear or disappear overnight, leading to a total chaos.
Add ever more complicated financial instruments with ever more tenuous connection to reality, and the general tendency to treat the stock market as a game of hot potato, and it's hard to not think of the finance as a kind of parasitic tumour on the real economy.
RAII is not only C++'s concept, it's very important when dealing with open files, connections or memory on graphics card. You want to know *exactly* when these resources are released because you often have global limit on them and/or need to guarantee the order of operations.
You can explicitly manage such external resources in Java by wrapping them in try - finally -blocks. It's simply less pretty than the C++ way.
Lets say top end rates go back to some of the historically high ones that have existed.. say 70% to 90% on income above $X, what possible incentive would there be to earn that money in the US?
Greed? 10-30% of $X is still money, you know.
Someone with the ability to earn that money will choose to do it in a region where its not taxed like that.
While it's certainly possible to play games with accounting, the fact is that you aren't going to be making a fortune in a place that doesn't tax its highest earners heavily because such places either tax their low earners to poverty or have primitive an untrustworthy legal and physical infrastructure.
Look at Google, Starbucks, etc, that are doing just that by taking that income in places like Ireland. So no they dont say "I just wont make more", they do it outside the US where they dont pay taxes on it and that money leaves our economy.
They are, actually, making money in the US, so simply tax it there before allowing it to leave the country. Shady accounting practices are not unchangeable laws of nature, they're simply shenigans you're letting companies get away with.
I think you have way too much confidence in the automated systems. When it meets a temporary closed lane with a road worker holding a handheld stop/slow sign (a weekly occurrence here), a human better be able to take over.
And the human isn't able to take over because there simply isn't enough time to get up to speed on what's happening, so the automated system must be able to deal with such situations by itself. Which isn't that difficult, BTW - one of the basic low-level functions would be to determine what areas are drivable.
Even if it can figure 9ut one or two of the above, there are no counting and programming for any and all possible scenarios a driver has to be able to handle.
All of them boil down to "Obey traffick laws, don't hit anything, and if you must try to cause the least damage". Driving isn't complex.
Also, the very reason things like ABS exists is because humans are extremely bad at dealing with scenarios outside of their everyday experience in a hurry. Demanding perfection from automation before it's allowed to take over a job from humans is foolish; all it needs to be is at least as good as what it's replacing, and that's not a high bar at all.
No, because for the foreseeable future, the requirements for these cars is going to be that a licensed driver is at hand to take over.
Which is foolish, because the "driver" is unable to do so - he'll be daydreming, watching the scenery, working, or simply sleeping. And if he regularly uses a self-driving car, he'll be out of practice too.
Since forever, with the exception of communist countries and Nixon's wage-price freeze in the seventies, and imminent domain. I can charge what I want. That doesn't mean you'll pay it, though.
Actually, you could simply refuse to work in communist countries too. You would then starve, just like you do in capitalist countries too, but you could.
Information should be free. The container should not.
Perhaps "information should be free, while the container may or may not be"? Because the Internet is full of content released for free by their authors, and because of Sturgeon's law's reverse quite a bit of them are quite epic.
Err, why are my needs likely to differ greatly with the goals of the company?
A company wants you to buy new hardware as often as possible, while users want their hardware to work as long as possible. Forced obsolescence is directly opposed to durability.
I'm not arguing that open source isn't good, only that it should be the least of our concerns if we're evaluating driver quality.
As long as graphics drivers run at Ring 0, they need to be trustworthy, and that requires them to be open for inspection - in other words, open source. If they aren't, that's a glaring weakness in the whole system. And it would be foolish to ignore such side effects when evaluating driver quality.
The rule of law and flawed individuals given near infinite power (aka the police) are two different things. Lots of people do not trust them, and they have many logical reasons not to.
The police do not have near infinite power, they have power strictly regulated by the law. That they are often untrustworthy is because when one oversteps his authority, the rest don't want to snitch on him. So a corrupt police force would be a perfect example of an anti-snitch culture.
And anarchy is different than the understanding that you just do not rat to the police.
Of course it is: anarchy is the idea that a society doesn't need a power structure of any kind. This very discussion proves it wrong: even if everyone is benevolent, some people are still stupid as Hell and will endanger everyone with reckless stupidity such as drunk driving.
Everyone does something illegal once in a while, reasonable people do not go running to the police everything they see a minor offence.
Driving drunk is not a minor offense. I'ts an offense that has pretty good chances of getting innocent people killed.
Getting neighbor to rat on neighbor is the first sign of fascism. It happened in Germany, and it happened in Babylon 5; To name a few.
And not ratting on your neighbour is what happened in Catholic Church and every other corrupt organization ever. We don't need no police here, we'll just reassign the priest who molested children to a new flock. We wouldn't want to snitch on him, after all.
"People who deal with Sony"? God damn, I didn't know that buying the best-selling current-generation console (In EU anyway) were making a political statement?
It's not, any more than buying a used car from Honest All's Totally Fraud-Free Used Car Yard would be. That doesn't mean that it can't turn out to have been a far worse deal than it at first seems.
Give it a rest, I know it's/. and circlejerking is pretty much what people are supposed to do, but seriously... live in the real world for a second there.
In real world, talking of "political statements" and "circlejerking" doesn't make dealing with companies known for screwing over their customers any less stupid.
I would like any food prepared in a plant that is reputed to be haunted (built on a burial ground, or had any particularly gristly deaths on premises,) to be labeled as such. There's no harm in doing so, and that way I can at least make an informed decision whether to put that into my body.
A food label catering specifically to goths? But naturally, you'd need the food to look appropriately spooky too.
Some people actually have a backbone. There are entire cultures of people who would not rat someone out to the police if they actively hated them.
And as a result, these cultures tend to pretty violent and horrible places to live - after all, they still need to settle disputes and keep the members in line. The Mafia is a good example. So are honour killings. Stoning rape victims to death is also a great manifestation of these noble, straight-backed cultures, where justice is whatever the guy with the biggest gang of thugs says it is.
The rule of law is a good thing, even if every law is not good, because the only alternative is tyranny. And the laws against drunk driving happen to be amongst the good ones.
Not even driving while intoxicated is, of itself, a criminal act, since it's entirely possible to do so without actually maiming or killing anyone or even violating traffic laws.
By the same logic shooting blindly at random directions should also be legal, because you don't necessarily hit anyone. In fact, ignoring any and all traffic laws or simply driving with your eyes closed should be just fine because you don't necessarily hit anyone.
Reckless endangerment of other people is a crime, and should be a crime because otherwise those other people have little choice but to go vigilante in the name of self-protection.
I don't hear any Libertarians crying foul about that.
Libertarianism is about the freedom to commit financial homicide, not ethanol assisted vehicular homicide.
It's called learning from mistakes. If nobody's hurt and you paid for the damages then there's no point in getting a criminal record if you've learned your lesson and aren't going to do it again.
Maybe you did, maybe you didn't. Time will tell, and until it has the rest of us have a good reason to not trust you, which is the point of the record.
Also, why should no one getting hurt be a factor? All it means is that you got lucky. And if anything, the lack of corpses makes it less likely that you "learned your lesson".
People are allowed to pay cash at gas stations, you know.
Cash is anonymous. Only terrorists require anonymity. Therefore, require gas stations - and all other places of business - to inform the police whenever someone pays with cash. And since gas stations already have security cameras to catch fuel thiefs, it would be a simple matter to forward the record to the police whenever this happens - after all, otherwise the owner is a participant to a criminal conspiracy, and can be sued for that even on the off chance that it was not a terrorist after all.
Your anonymous physical currency can no longer hide you from the eyes of the American eagle, criminal scum! Why do you hate freedom so much?
So basically Sony want to do pretty much what Steam already does on the PC and people are saying "it doesn't work". Well guess what. It *does* work and chances are you're already using a service where you simply cannot resell games.
And consequently, Steam is constantly running discounts. Also, Steam is exactly what you said: a service. It allows games to be downloaded and installed to hard disk without the hassle of going to a store or using physical disks. The Sonyscheme doesn't offer anything, so the only thing it can compete on is lower prices - but the next generation of consoles will bring with them even higher development costs, so...
Not that I really care. At this point, the people who still deal with Sony can't possibly be ignorant of its nature, so it's hard to feel sorry for them.
More guns could cause problems in a crowded area, but a great deal of people who might be at those conventions are probably trained and experienced in the use of firearms and they wouldn't necessarily be unable to do threat identification.
Would an unknown person with a gun in his hand constitute a threat? Also, skill and experience with a firearm doesn't equate combat training, so unless the majority of gun convention visitors are actually active members of some sort of paramilitary organization (or actual military or law enforcement organization), I really don't see it as doing anything useful.
If you want it to cover every detail you might have too.
Works converted from one media to another are called adaptations because they're supposed to adapt, not carbon-copy, the work, because different medias have different strengths. This means that some parts get expanded, others cut, and the viewpoint is often different. A director who wants to cover every detail is not doing his job.
I'd like to respectfully disagree about insulting HP for this. When you're trimming a department, you sometimes have contractual obligations that require you to retain _some_ of the department or group, to support existing services.
And I'd like to respectfully point out that that is your problem. If you treat employees like gears in a machine you can get rid of at your convenience, you'd better make sure they really are easily replacable. Like always in (honest) business, risk goes together with profit - and that means you can actually end up being on the losing side.
When they all leave en masse, it can put a very large hole in your infrastructure: when someone leaving poaches from their former group, it's usually a contract violation, written into the contract _precisely_ to protect assets a company has invested in and built up over time.
Ah, assets. There lays the heart of the problem: insisting that employees should be loyal to their employer, yet also allow the employer to show none to them. You can't have it both ways. You can't fire people to increase profits then start whining when some of the remaining decide to jump ship to increase theirs. It's one or the other, and HP has made their choice and doesn't get to change that just because it happens to convenient.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing that is widely implemented stays well designed. The more users there are, the more bad code depending on weird corner case behavior there will be, and the more such legacy cruft the implementations need to support because an implementation thats supports it has a competitive advantage over one which doesn't. At the same time technology marches on, adding new concepts and paradigms on top of the older ones in a merry chaos. And finally, user needs change so what was once a good fit won't be that anymore. And of course the mere fact that there are many users means that there are a lot of conflicting needs.
And all that assumes that anyone actually cares about design at all, rather than winning marketshare.
Perhaps people realized that news of a crazy gunman going on a rampage and murdering lots of people have become so commonplace that they are not "such a big deal" anymore, and this implies that there is a serious problem?
It's insecure either way. Them actively lying about it makes them liars too, but even not lying is meaningless if the information is buried somewhere in an EULA bloated by legalese to the point where no non-lawyer can be expected to read or understand it.
You wouldn't be welcome on such a site, given your attitude to questions - which, after all, are a prerequisite to learning.
First, medicine is a science, thus the expression "most scientific and medical terms" is redundant. Second, no one understands most scientific terms. "Science" refers to the entire body of human knowledge, which not only is far too vast for any one person to know most of, but also grows faster than you can learn it - even if your learning capacity was unlimited, the bandwidth of your senses is simply not enough.
Finally, "nerd" doesn't necessarily refer to someone interested in either science in general or medicine in specific. People who are enthusiastic about programming, or matemathics, or 19th century French poetry could all be called nerds without necessarily knowing what "GI" refers to in a medical context - assuming it actually refers to just one thing and isn't reused anywhere. On the other hand, "LEO" is usually used with sufficient context to conclude that we are talking about some kind of satellite orbit or at the very least a space trajectory.
Perhaps you wouldn't have such issues with jocks if you changed your attitude a little? Because I can certainly see why a jock - or, really, anyone - might not like you.
They don't like you because you're an arrogant twat, just in case you didn't get that already.
There are plenty of people who are calling its end precisely because that's inhumane. Being willing to make "hard decisions" lets people feel like they are tough without actually being personally inconvenienced. It's an interesting, if disgusting, aspect of human psyche.
And no one speaks of "secretary industry". Because those are all supporting roles to actual production. In fact, an overabundance of management relative to actual production is one of classic signs of inefficiency.
I said "That it's been allowed to grow into the size and complexity it has" is the problem because the size of financial economy relative to real economy has made the system unstable. I never said we should get rid of banks entirely, just trim them down in size and complexity of allowed operations. Do you have trouble with reading comprehension, or were you trying to set up a strawman?
Also, me storing my money under my mattress doesn't help any if a financial instrument or investment scheme thought up by some financial genius leads to an economic meltdown. So, unfortunately, giving banks the freedom to do stupid things affects me, even if I avoid dealing with them personally. Thus, my options are to either kiss my economic security goodbye or try to get enough support for strict regulations to get them through.
That's the problem with global economy: any problem anywhere is everyone's problem.
Companies don't exist in a vacuum, and simply letting them die will affect more than just their owners. In the case of banks, the results would be quite terrible due to domino effect - and I'm pretty sure that's not an accident.
And free market is a self-contradicting abstraction: it cannot exist without some body enforcing the rules, and it also can't exist with some body regulating it (enforcing the rules).
The banking system isn't an industry, it's a money management system. It doesn't produce anything. That it's been allowed to grow into the size and complexity it has is one of the biggest problems in economy right now: all those imaginary fortunes aren't connected to actual goods or services so they can appear or disappear overnight, leading to a total chaos.
Add ever more complicated financial instruments with ever more tenuous connection to reality, and the general tendency to treat the stock market as a game of hot potato, and it's hard to not think of the finance as a kind of parasitic tumour on the real economy.
You can explicitly manage such external resources in Java by wrapping them in try - finally -blocks. It's simply less pretty than the C++ way.
Greed? 10-30% of $X is still money, you know.
While it's certainly possible to play games with accounting, the fact is that you aren't going to be making a fortune in a place that doesn't tax its highest earners heavily because such places either tax their low earners to poverty or have primitive an untrustworthy legal and physical infrastructure.
They are, actually, making money in the US, so simply tax it there before allowing it to leave the country. Shady accounting practices are not unchangeable laws of nature, they're simply shenigans you're letting companies get away with.
And the human isn't able to take over because there simply isn't enough time to get up to speed on what's happening, so the automated system must be able to deal with such situations by itself. Which isn't that difficult, BTW - one of the basic low-level functions would be to determine what areas are drivable.
All of them boil down to "Obey traffick laws, don't hit anything, and if you must try to cause the least damage". Driving isn't complex.
Also, the very reason things like ABS exists is because humans are extremely bad at dealing with scenarios outside of their everyday experience in a hurry. Demanding perfection from automation before it's allowed to take over a job from humans is foolish; all it needs to be is at least as good as what it's replacing, and that's not a high bar at all.
Which is foolish, because the "driver" is unable to do so - he'll be daydreming, watching the scenery, working, or simply sleeping. And if he regularly uses a self-driving car, he'll be out of practice too.
Actually, you could simply refuse to work in communist countries too. You would then starve, just like you do in capitalist countries too, but you could.
Perhaps "information should be free, while the container may or may not be"? Because the Internet is full of content released for free by their authors, and because of Sturgeon's law's reverse quite a bit of them are quite epic.
A company wants you to buy new hardware as often as possible, while users want their hardware to work as long as possible. Forced obsolescence is directly opposed to durability.
As long as graphics drivers run at Ring 0, they need to be trustworthy, and that requires them to be open for inspection - in other words, open source. If they aren't, that's a glaring weakness in the whole system. And it would be foolish to ignore such side effects when evaluating driver quality.
The police do not have near infinite power, they have power strictly regulated by the law. That they are often untrustworthy is because when one oversteps his authority, the rest don't want to snitch on him. So a corrupt police force would be a perfect example of an anti-snitch culture.
Of course it is: anarchy is the idea that a society doesn't need a power structure of any kind. This very discussion proves it wrong: even if everyone is benevolent, some people are still stupid as Hell and will endanger everyone with reckless stupidity such as drunk driving.
Driving drunk is not a minor offense. I'ts an offense that has pretty good chances of getting innocent people killed.
And not ratting on your neighbour is what happened in Catholic Church and every other corrupt organization ever. We don't need no police here, we'll just reassign the priest who molested children to a new flock. We wouldn't want to snitch on him, after all.
It's not, any more than buying a used car from Honest All's Totally Fraud-Free Used Car Yard would be. That doesn't mean that it can't turn out to have been a far worse deal than it at first seems.
In real world, talking of "political statements" and "circlejerking" doesn't make dealing with companies known for screwing over their customers any less stupid.
A food label catering specifically to goths? But naturally, you'd need the food to look appropriately spooky too.
And as a result, these cultures tend to pretty violent and horrible places to live - after all, they still need to settle disputes and keep the members in line. The Mafia is a good example. So are honour killings. Stoning rape victims to death is also a great manifestation of these noble, straight-backed cultures, where justice is whatever the guy with the biggest gang of thugs says it is.
The rule of law is a good thing, even if every law is not good, because the only alternative is tyranny. And the laws against drunk driving happen to be amongst the good ones.
By the same logic shooting blindly at random directions should also be legal, because you don't necessarily hit anyone. In fact, ignoring any and all traffic laws or simply driving with your eyes closed should be just fine because you don't necessarily hit anyone.
Reckless endangerment of other people is a crime, and should be a crime because otherwise those other people have little choice but to go vigilante in the name of self-protection.
Libertarianism is about the freedom to commit financial homicide, not ethanol assisted vehicular homicide.
Maybe you did, maybe you didn't. Time will tell, and until it has the rest of us have a good reason to not trust you, which is the point of the record.
Also, why should no one getting hurt be a factor? All it means is that you got lucky. And if anything, the lack of corpses makes it less likely that you "learned your lesson".
Cash is anonymous. Only terrorists require anonymity. Therefore, require gas stations - and all other places of business - to inform the police whenever someone pays with cash. And since gas stations already have security cameras to catch fuel thiefs, it would be a simple matter to forward the record to the police whenever this happens - after all, otherwise the owner is a participant to a criminal conspiracy, and can be sued for that even on the off chance that it was not a terrorist after all.
Your anonymous physical currency can no longer hide you from the eyes of the American eagle, criminal scum! Why do you hate freedom so much?
And consequently, Steam is constantly running discounts. Also, Steam is exactly what you said: a service. It allows games to be downloaded and installed to hard disk without the hassle of going to a store or using physical disks. The Sonyscheme doesn't offer anything, so the only thing it can compete on is lower prices - but the next generation of consoles will bring with them even higher development costs, so...
Not that I really care. At this point, the people who still deal with Sony can't possibly be ignorant of its nature, so it's hard to feel sorry for them.
Would an unknown person with a gun in his hand constitute a threat? Also, skill and experience with a firearm doesn't equate combat training, so unless the majority of gun convention visitors are actually active members of some sort of paramilitary organization (or actual military or law enforcement organization), I really don't see it as doing anything useful.
Works converted from one media to another are called adaptations because they're supposed to adapt, not carbon-copy, the work, because different medias have different strengths. This means that some parts get expanded, others cut, and the viewpoint is often different. A director who wants to cover every detail is not doing his job.
And I'd like to respectfully point out that that is your problem. If you treat employees like gears in a machine you can get rid of at your convenience, you'd better make sure they really are easily replacable. Like always in (honest) business, risk goes together with profit - and that means you can actually end up being on the losing side.
Ah, assets. There lays the heart of the problem: insisting that employees should be loyal to their employer, yet also allow the employer to show none to them. You can't have it both ways. You can't fire people to increase profits then start whining when some of the remaining decide to jump ship to increase theirs. It's one or the other, and HP has made their choice and doesn't get to change that just because it happens to convenient.
TL;DR: show loyalty yourself if you want any.