I should quote now where a unix manual talks about wildcards, right?
The Bible is not the Unix Manual, and never once mentions wildcards, and specifically not in the passages you mentioned. And I still have no idea why Jesus cursing a fruitless fig tree would lead to God hating homosexuals.
Slashdot hates Java because they hate anything that isn't Pure GNU open source.
No, the good programmers hate Java because it prevents the largest class of programming errors (buffer overflows) by removing some control form the user at the cost of some performance and certain C++isms, and the mediocre programmers hate Java because they have delusions of being good programmers. And of course plenty of programmers hate anything that makes programming easier out of fear that it'll devalue their skills.
Its mathematically impossible for everyone to pay off all debt in the system that we currently have now
People keep on saying this, yet I've never seen any proof of it, and intuitively a single one-dollar bill should be capable of paying off any amount of debt, it simply needs to make enough rounds around the economy. So, proof?
This is called "The Broken Window Fallacy", but is essentially a cornerstone of alot of economic policy, because rebuilding things (that were destroyed) creates jobs.
The Broken Window Fallacy makes the assumption that resources would be put to optimum (or at least some) use without the window being broken. It assumes that replacing the broken window wastes the precious time from the already full schedule of busy glassmakers; in other words, it assumes that the main economic problem is producing as much as possible.
But that's not true of our current societies. We are producing plenty. The problem we face is that of distribution: as automation advances, less and less human labour is needed to produce the same output. At the same time our incentive structure is designed to reward work and penalize not working. As the amount of jobs steadily decreases, the system ends up penalizing people for not doing work that's not available.
The long-term solution requires rethinking our values, especially our dislike of people getting things without working for them (which is hypocritical anyway, since we are just fine with "investors" getting the rewards from other people's work). In the short term, however, breaking windows works as an emergency measure: it wastes resources, but gives the otherwise unemployed glassmakers something to lose besides their chains.
Just because the government was able to implement a Keynesian solution to that economic problem, does not mean that it holds the solution to every economic problem, for instance one that involves post - peak natural resource production.
However, governments have dealt with this particular problem - scarcity - before through rationing.
Also, to put it bluntly, the choice is between the government or the same bunch of monsters who brought us this latest economic meltdown to line their own pockets; in other words, incompetence or malice. Competence is no good if it's working against common good; a blind chicken makes for a better ally than a hungry lion.
Nobody really likes the government, but the alternative is even worse.
You may, indeed, be inappropriately pedantic; he referred to "crashes or hangs", he did not explicitly say that the entire machine hung or crashed. Perhaps they were Safari (or Firefox or $OTHER_BROWSER_THAT_HAS_A_FLASH_PLUGIN) hangs or crashes.
A browser shouldn't crash either even if a plugin does. Run them in a separate process, and better yet, run every tab in a separate process.
I think the key here is that the punishment for violating the C standard isn't that your program fails in an obvious fashion, it fails in a somewhat random fashion.
That's the price you pay for programming in a non-managed language. I certainly agree with you in that memcpy() should check it's arguments and invoke memmove() (and print a nasty message to the console) in necessary, but ultimately, in a language like C, you can always put the runtime into an undefined state easily.
"Republic" means a form of government that is controlled by its subjects. In other words, it's pretty much synonymous with democracy.
- be specific. It's a representative democracy, which is an attempt to prevent mobocracy, which always leads to tyranny.
When people say "democracy", they mean representative democracy, not ancient Atheian direct democracy. Also, please explain the difference between representative democracy and mobocracy?
Examples are plenty, if you are American, you are living in one.
Yet the people living in America are neither censored nor imprisoned for voicing such opinions in public.
And saying "examples are plentiful" isn't actually providing any.
But as I said, I am not reinventing a bicycle here.
Plato wanted rule by "philosopher kings", in other words a dictatorship with himself at the helm. If you so dislike tyranny, then perhaps you shouldn't take your cues from him.
Of-course unlike all other Republics before it, USA is quite unique in the artificial way that it started its existence. Roman Republic was created on the ruins of the overthrown monarchy, and it ended with Caesar, Sulla and later Pompey - dictators.
It takes a bit of time, but it looks like all republics turn into democracies and then dictatorships.
It's interesting that you should argue that when you mention subversion in the very preceding paragraph: Roman Republic didn't collapse, it became an empire due to a military takeover. It never was a democracy, and the whole thing had nothing to do with economics.
The height of economic development is achieved during the time the nation is a republic, then of-course, as the nation is very rich BECAUSE it is so free as a republic, that it develops huge appetite for various government programs - too many people are not actually producing anything of value, but they want their bread and circuses, and the politicos deliver.
Of-course this stuff doesn't come from vacuum, it's stolen from those, who actually produce, and it's given away to the mob (but probably mostly to preferred contractors in form of wars - military contracts), and the democracy lives this way until it exhausts the riches acquired by the republic.
And by "the mob" you presumably mean the great majority of people who actually work for a living? Because almost all government programs are targeted to benefit them.
Sure, we have a bunch of parasites who produce nothing except problems, but I'd hardly call 1% a mob, unless you meant a capital-M Mob.
Then, as the society collapses because the wealth is inevitably squandered, and the gov't inflates money because it can't really steal anything from anybody anymore, the people 'elect' a dictator (or one comes to power somehow), and that's the unfortunate cycle that gets repeated over and over.
You have yet to show a single example of this cycle, much less that it is repeating over and over again. And that would be quite difficult indeed, seeing how modern democracies are only a few hundred years old at most, and are still going strong, current problems nonwithstanding - after all, they were caused by deregulation (loosening government control) and resulting abuses by the rich.
There has been so much supposedly outraged talk about Fukushima Daiichi, about how anybody could expose the people to such risks, that it is grotesque that nobody is talking about the risk that was there, that was obvious, that killed people.
Those killed by a tsunami don't make for good propaganda for anti-nuclear lobby.
You are right, I am NOT keen on democracy. USA had it correct - it wasn't built as a democracy, it was built as a republic.
"Republic" means a form of government that is controlled by its subjects. In other words, it's pretty much synonymous with democracy.
Also, the alternative to rule by many is rule by few, also known as dictatorship. Those aren't famous for maintaining people's freedoms either.
Democracy always leads to tyranny, not to freedom.
People keep on saying this, yet the only instances I know of where this actually happened were countries still unstable after a revolution, where democracy was killed before it could take root. Stabilized democracies seem remarkably resilient against would-be tyrants, even when said wannabes are backed by corporate overlords.
Even if the machine cannot assess whether your argument is complete nonsense?
Yes. Rhetoric is a subject separate from philosophy or logic. Also, if the contents are taken into account, the temptation for a teacher to start pushing their personal political or other views will be quite severe. Students should be able to focus on honing their skill on writing without worrying about whether the teacher happens to agree with them or not.
This sounds very much like the "form over function" stupidity that has caused so much damage.
All the more reason to ensure the students don't confuse them, then.
The only way to make teaching better is to get better teachers. Everything else is just window-dressing at the expense of the students.
The argument here is that an automaton is a better teacher for this particular subject, at least on low levels of skill.
This is one area where automatic grading will cause massive skill decrease, as no auto-grader can actually assess contents.
Which is a good thing. The purpose of practicing writing is to learn representation. Teachers are humans and thus unable to keep the ideas expressed from interfering with their assesment of how those ideas are presented, yet it's the latter which should matter. A soulless automaton incapable of caring if you're arguing that the Holocaust was a good thing since it delayed overpopulation is exactly the right machine for the job.
Being harsh is a desirable goal for a certain type of person. It makes them feel righteous/tough on crime/responsible/committed/martyrs willing to bear burdens of conscience others are too weak to/whatever. There are people who are simply never happy as long as someone isn't suffering; when you understand this, many things in life will start making a lot more sense.
Of course, there is plenty of precedent for restricting students rights both on and off campus,
And that is a problem. Why should a school or any other institution have anything to say - or even any interest in - what you do when you're not on their grounds?
They can enforce the rules as they wish (just like employers). Student should have used a private ISP, instead of the government-owned school network.
Hold it. What's this about a government-owned network? Because I seem to recall something about some document that specifically forbid the government from enforcing certain kind of rules, such as punishing people for saying things.
That's because Chrome doesn't seem to add any user-facing features in its upgrades, just javascript speedups. You'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference between Chrome v4 and v18 (just came out) even by USING the damn thing.
So you're telling that anyone who knows Chrome v4 will feel right at home with Chrome v18? Awesome!
The thing is, I'm not using Firefox, I'm using Slashdot. Firefox is analogous to the display, keyboard and mouse here: it's a necessary evil that ideally stays in the background as much as possible. Any new and innovative features are more likely to get in the way than be helpful, especially if they happen in the UI.
Or even better analogy: browser UI is like inept political propaganda the author just couldn't stop himself from inserting into an otherwise decent book: it's there and you can't do anything but skim over it hoping to get back to the good parts soon.
And the new features being added to Firefox of course are no reason to keep updating it.
What new features? As it happens, another side effect of version spam is that people stop paying attention to changelogs, since most of the time they have nothing important. That's another reason most programs do multi-part version numbering: bugfix releases are just that, minor releases might have some tweaks or enhancements to existing features, and major versions contain major new features you should take time to explore.
If an organization sprung up to commit systematic violence against the wealthy, would we hesitate to call them a terrorist organization?
Semi-historical precedent suggest that we'd call them "Merry Men" and cheer them on. For which the modern heirs to the Sheriff of Nottingham - the 1% - only have themselves to blame.
He should get kicked out of school, sure, because the school doesn't want to be affiliated with someone who does that shit. But a criminal sentence for saying something? You do realize that it isn't a very big step between that, and a criminal sentence for saying anything a majority of people don't like, right?
Spending less than two months in a jail is far less of a punishment than not being allowed to finish schooling. Let's stop with this weird fantasy that a court is the only entity capable of preventing you from excersizing your rights already.
Can't have a democratic government without freedom of speech, and that includes the right to say hateful things, for good or for ill.
But you don't have that freedom. Sure, you can say whatever you like, but the consequences will make your life unlivable, which is really not all that different from any dictatorship ever. And of course as Mr. McCarthy famously demonstrated, once private entities such as schools or businesses are capable of punishing you for attempting to excersize your rights, a government is more than happy to use them in place of jackbooted thugs.
So, if freedom of speech is really so important to us, we need to guarantee everyone a basic (livable) income, which can never be revoked for any reason. If we don't, then we need to admit that freedom of speech is at best a second priority over economic idealism. Either way, we need to decide whether people have rights and freedoms or mere liberties in our society.
So why blame the voting system on the outcome? "Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain."
What is necessary is to take power from the hands of party leaders and give it to the people. The parties may present a list, but citizens must be able to choose which candidate to vote, and whether someone is voted in or not must not depend on the position on the ballot list but only on the received votes.
Have parties (and unaligned people who can get enough signatures) present a set of candidates. People vote for a specific candidate, not the set itself. After voting, each set is ordered into a list based on the votes each candidate received. Next, each candidate in a list gets effective votes based on their position in the list and the sum of votes for all the candidates in the set - the one who got most votes gets the total number of votes, the next gets one half that, the third one third, and so on. Finally, sort all the candidates in the election by the effective votes, and pick the top X ones.
The only time a reference ever got tapped was when someone on the hiring committee knew them.
Which is perfectly reasonable. What would getting a complete strangers opinion on another complete stranger accomplish, especially when the former was chosen by the latter?
Private phone calls, otoh, should be a stoning offense in any cattle car situation. Fuck everyone that does this. There isn't a single good reason for you to be annoying to everyone crammed in around you.
There isn't a single good reason for your desire for silence to trump over someone else's desire to make a phone call, either. Especially since you can simply wear earplugs if it really bothers you that much.
Slashdot Mirror
The Bible is not the Unix Manual, and never once mentions wildcards, and specifically not in the passages you mentioned. And I still have no idea why Jesus cursing a fruitless fig tree would lead to God hating homosexuals.
I'm afraid you need to be more specific.
No, the good programmers hate Java because it prevents the largest class of programming errors (buffer overflows) by removing some control form the user at the cost of some performance and certain C++isms, and the mediocre programmers hate Java because they have delusions of being good programmers. And of course plenty of programmers hate anything that makes programming easier out of fear that it'll devalue their skills.
Jesus curses a fruitless fig tree, therefore God hates homosexuals. WTF?
People keep on saying this, yet I've never seen any proof of it, and intuitively a single one-dollar bill should be capable of paying off any amount of debt, it simply needs to make enough rounds around the economy. So, proof?
The Broken Window Fallacy makes the assumption that resources would be put to optimum (or at least some) use without the window being broken. It assumes that replacing the broken window wastes the precious time from the already full schedule of busy glassmakers; in other words, it assumes that the main economic problem is producing as much as possible.
But that's not true of our current societies. We are producing plenty. The problem we face is that of distribution: as automation advances, less and less human labour is needed to produce the same output. At the same time our incentive structure is designed to reward work and penalize not working. As the amount of jobs steadily decreases, the system ends up penalizing people for not doing work that's not available.
The long-term solution requires rethinking our values, especially our dislike of people getting things without working for them (which is hypocritical anyway, since we are just fine with "investors" getting the rewards from other people's work). In the short term, however, breaking windows works as an emergency measure: it wastes resources, but gives the otherwise unemployed glassmakers something to lose besides their chains.
However, governments have dealt with this particular problem - scarcity - before through rationing.
Also, to put it bluntly, the choice is between the government or the same bunch of monsters who brought us this latest economic meltdown to line their own pockets; in other words, incompetence or malice. Competence is no good if it's working against common good; a blind chicken makes for a better ally than a hungry lion.
Nobody really likes the government, but the alternative is even worse.
A browser shouldn't crash either even if a plugin does. Run them in a separate process, and better yet, run every tab in a separate process.
That's the price you pay for programming in a non-managed language. I certainly agree with you in that memcpy() should check it's arguments and invoke memmove() (and print a nasty message to the console) in necessary, but ultimately, in a language like C, you can always put the runtime into an undefined state easily.
When people say "democracy", they mean representative democracy, not ancient Atheian direct democracy. Also, please explain the difference between representative democracy and mobocracy?
Yet the people living in America are neither censored nor imprisoned for voicing such opinions in public.
And saying "examples are plentiful" isn't actually providing any.
Plato wanted rule by "philosopher kings", in other words a dictatorship with himself at the helm. If you so dislike tyranny, then perhaps you shouldn't take your cues from him.
It's interesting that you should argue that when you mention subversion in the very preceding paragraph: Roman Republic didn't collapse, it became an empire due to a military takeover. It never was a democracy, and the whole thing had nothing to do with economics.
And by "the mob" you presumably mean the great majority of people who actually work for a living? Because almost all government programs are targeted to benefit them.
Sure, we have a bunch of parasites who produce nothing except problems, but I'd hardly call 1% a mob, unless you meant a capital-M Mob.
You have yet to show a single example of this cycle, much less that it is repeating over and over again. And that would be quite difficult indeed, seeing how modern democracies are only a few hundred years old at most, and are still going strong, current problems nonwithstanding - after all, they were caused by deregulation (loosening government control) and resulting abuses by the rich.
Those killed by a tsunami don't make for good propaganda for anti-nuclear lobby.
"Republic" means a form of government that is controlled by its subjects. In other words, it's pretty much synonymous with democracy.
Also, the alternative to rule by many is rule by few, also known as dictatorship. Those aren't famous for maintaining people's freedoms either.
People keep on saying this, yet the only instances I know of where this actually happened were countries still unstable after a revolution, where democracy was killed before it could take root. Stabilized democracies seem remarkably resilient against would-be tyrants, even when said wannabes are backed by corporate overlords.
Care to give some examples?
Yes. Rhetoric is a subject separate from philosophy or logic. Also, if the contents are taken into account, the temptation for a teacher to start pushing their personal political or other views will be quite severe. Students should be able to focus on honing their skill on writing without worrying about whether the teacher happens to agree with them or not.
All the more reason to ensure the students don't confuse them, then.
The argument here is that an automaton is a better teacher for this particular subject, at least on low levels of skill.
Which is a good thing. The purpose of practicing writing is to learn representation. Teachers are humans and thus unable to keep the ideas expressed from interfering with their assesment of how those ideas are presented, yet it's the latter which should matter. A soulless automaton incapable of caring if you're arguing that the Holocaust was a good thing since it delayed overpopulation is exactly the right machine for the job.
Being harsh is a desirable goal for a certain type of person. It makes them feel righteous/tough on crime/responsible/committed/martyrs willing to bear burdens of conscience others are too weak to/whatever. There are people who are simply never happy as long as someone isn't suffering; when you understand this, many things in life will start making a lot more sense.
And that is a problem. Why should a school or any other institution have anything to say - or even any interest in - what you do when you're not on their grounds?
Hold it. What's this about a government-owned network? Because I seem to recall something about some document that specifically forbid the government from enforcing certain kind of rules, such as punishing people for saying things.
So you're telling that anyone who knows Chrome v4 will feel right at home with Chrome v18? Awesome!
The thing is, I'm not using Firefox, I'm using Slashdot. Firefox is analogous to the display, keyboard and mouse here: it's a necessary evil that ideally stays in the background as much as possible. Any new and innovative features are more likely to get in the way than be helpful, especially if they happen in the UI.
Or even better analogy: browser UI is like inept political propaganda the author just couldn't stop himself from inserting into an otherwise decent book: it's there and you can't do anything but skim over it hoping to get back to the good parts soon.
What new features? As it happens, another side effect of version spam is that people stop paying attention to changelogs, since most of the time they have nothing important. That's another reason most programs do multi-part version numbering: bugfix releases are just that, minor releases might have some tweaks or enhancements to existing features, and major versions contain major new features you should take time to explore.
With Firefox it's just an unstructured mess.
One where people are aware of the concept of sock puppets?
Nice work of rephrasing something in a way that makes it look different than what was meant, BTW.
Semi-historical precedent suggest that we'd call them "Merry Men" and cheer them on. For which the modern heirs to the Sheriff of Nottingham - the 1% - only have themselves to blame.
Spending less than two months in a jail is far less of a punishment than not being allowed to finish schooling. Let's stop with this weird fantasy that a court is the only entity capable of preventing you from excersizing your rights already.
But you don't have that freedom. Sure, you can say whatever you like, but the consequences will make your life unlivable, which is really not all that different from any dictatorship ever. And of course as Mr. McCarthy famously demonstrated, once private entities such as schools or businesses are capable of punishing you for attempting to excersize your rights, a government is more than happy to use them in place of jackbooted thugs.
So, if freedom of speech is really so important to us, we need to guarantee everyone a basic (livable) income, which can never be revoked for any reason. If we don't, then we need to admit that freedom of speech is at best a second priority over economic idealism. Either way, we need to decide whether people have rights and freedoms or mere liberties in our society.
So why blame the voting system on the outcome? "Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain."
Have parties (and unaligned people who can get enough signatures) present a set of candidates. People vote for a specific candidate, not the set itself. After voting, each set is ordered into a list based on the votes each candidate received. Next, each candidate in a list gets effective votes based on their position in the list and the sum of votes for all the candidates in the set - the one who got most votes gets the total number of votes, the next gets one half that, the third one third, and so on. Finally, sort all the candidates in the election by the effective votes, and pick the top X ones.
But not to worry, our modern robber barons looting the entire world economy showed that we're still the unbeaten champions.
Which is perfectly reasonable. What would getting a complete strangers opinion on another complete stranger accomplish, especially when the former was chosen by the latter?
There isn't a single good reason for your desire for silence to trump over someone else's desire to make a phone call, either. Especially since you can simply wear earplugs if it really bothers you that much.