Not many realise this, but even today, the only thing on which the safety of the entire Western civilization rests is military superiority (which in turn is backed by economic superiority necessary to maintain the military).
Which is why offshoring will be he death of Western civilization. It's quickly bankrupting us and is the ultimate cause of the current economic meltdown. We're losing manufacturing and with it the base of our economy, while China is gaining strength at our expense. Something must be done about this and soon, if it's not late already.
I do see the latter as an improvement over the former, but I prefer a more participatory approach that breaks down the distinction between "people who provide security" and "people who need security".
Everyone needs security, the same way everyone needs something to eat. We've specialized farming to professionals, so why not security?
Something like an armed neighborhood watch for basic patrol stuff, with professionals undertaking only the more specialized roles (detectives, etc).
Maybe I'm crazy, but I'd rather just pay taxes to get relatively fair and impartial professionals - let's call them "police", for a lack of better term - to patrol the neighbourhood than having to patrol it myself and kiss the ass of my neighbours so they won't watch the other way as my home gets burglarized why I'm at work.
But luckily, there is a state which follows your ideal: Somalia.
Even the EU has more limits on speech than the US, and I fear that giving them more control over the internet will result in censorship.
The emphasis on the quote above is mine, and is the truly absurd part of this whole thing: the USA is quite unable to give anyone control of the Internet, since it only controls the part that's physically located inside the USA. ICANN is a committee that publishes data, not a special military force that storms every router that's not in compliance. Anyone and their dog - and even the EU - is able to start their own DNS system or assign IPs as they will; even I have done so for my home network. It's just that I would also ignore EU if they started their own "sensitive register" or whatever.
This same thing comes up time and again, and is just as ridiculous every time. The USA does not control the Internet, nor does ICANN; all ICANN does is maintain a database - the root DNS servers - which various people use out of their own free will.
Then again, this whole thing is perfectly in line with the usual idiocy coming from Brussels.
If you're going to be honest here Russia would never have been able to make the push into Nazi Germany if the western front hadn't been opened up on D-Day.
And if they would had succeeded, they'd simply captured the whole Europe rather than just the eastern part.
Going by AIDS - HIV doesn't kill you, it's the opportunistic diseases that would be otherwise controlled by the immune system that kills you.
Actually, HIV does kill you, if nothing else gets you first. It'll simply take long enough that the opportunistic diseases will usually finish you off first.
All of the successful high-earning sales people I have ever known do NOT use this tactic.
That's because they don't have to. They are already successful, after all. But if a significant portion - or perhaps all - income is dependent on making sales, and you simply don't have the skills to do that, what are you going to do? Why, you are going to panic and work harder in a desperate attempt to get a sale. Add in the cultural myth that hard work is the key to success, and you shouldn't be surprised if a number of people run around like headless chicken.
Brilliant. Your theory apparently is that all business exists to pay taxes and support government.
No, he merely asked why should we care where a business keeps its nominal headquarters if we don't benefit from it being here.
However, now that you mentioned it: yes, corporations exist to benefit the society around them. That's why we the people have special laws allowing for incorporation in the first place.
Pretty backwards, dude, and exactly why in 10 years our country will be producing even less than we are now.
For example, I believe security at our ports is abysmal. If someone wanted to sneak a nuke into the country, they could through our port system. Bush did not do enough to secure those.
To be fair, it wouldn't do any good. Simply package the nuke into a shipping container, then have it go off when it's unloaded at, say, New York Harbour. Congratulations, you've just wiped out a vital piece of infrastructure and most likely stopped all imports and exports, thereby crashing the economy.
Fascism simply means "government control over private companies".
No, that's Soviet-style communism. Fascism means that private companies control the government - you know, "Corporatism" as Mussolini put it.
Not that any form of corporation-government union is likely to produce healthy offspring, but still.
Chrysler. AIG. Hundreds of banks who received bailout, and are now controlled by the treasury secretary.
Yes, it is quite a problem. Letting huge corporations like these go bankrupt would cause a total economical chaos and be completely irresponsible, but on the other hand, keeping them alive rewards stupidity and cynical exploitation of the fact that they're "too big to fail" and risks perverting competition.
As long as there are companies that represent a significant chunk of the economy, the problem will persist. However, putting a ceiling on company size would cause real problems in many areas, such as microchip and car industries.
Just be thankful you're not being paid to watch necrophilia-based porn - that's dead boring.
So how would it be different from normal porn ?-)
In contrast, the incest related stuff is only relatively boring.
What if it has both. Say, siblings become zombies and, as we all know, zombies act on their primal instincts...
Coming to think of it, why haven't the zombie movies covered this? Sex drive is as primal, if not more so, than hunger. There was a short story with zombies going for girls in Books of Blood, and few demented poser pictures here and there, but "The Stink of Flesh" is the only film I recall showing zombie sex - and even that was not zombie-initiated.
Of course, Japanese have that short comic, "Cute Lovable Zombie Attack" ("Oops! My noodles fell off" is an instant classic as far as porn bloobers go), but even they haven't animated it... yet.
And yes, I believe that there was a zombie porn movie I once ran across while browsing the dark corners of the Net... I need to investigate further.
First of all, someone interested in 14-year old isn't a paedophile. A paedophile is someone who's interested in pre-pubescent children, not someone who's interested in teenagers.
That said, your entire argument basically boils down to "think of the children!" Now, I'm sick of thinking of children all the time, and having my rights trampled on just so some horrible paedophile has a little harder time viewing pictures or a video tape. So kindly take your International Internet Decency Board or whatever the Hell you had in mind, and stuff it where the Sun doesn't shine, then post the pictures online.
And while you're doing that, consider this: the Chinese outnumber every other country on Earth, so if you manage to get your international tribute or whatever, they will be able to outvote you. Given this, do you really think that someone seeing your precious little flower naked will cause more harm than having to live in a world where Chinese dictatorship can censor the whole Internet? Especially since she's never likely to even know that said video exists - it's not like it's the height of photographic skill, being shot in secret and all, and thus likely has the main actor unrecognisable.
Or did you simply mean that your country's laws should be enforced on the whole world? Probably; otherwise that other country could just as well demand that you lower your age of consent to match theirs, rather than they rising theirs to match yours. Let me guess: you're an American?
Either way, teach your kid to draw the curtains when she's having sex if she doesn't want to risk getting filmed, rather than try to force the rest of the world to engage in a witch hunt with you.
TL;DR: I'm a citizen of a free country and intend to keep it that way, so fuck you.
No, I'm stating that however you want to spin it, the above post was blatantly racist.
Perhaps. But automatically disbelieving any negative statement about a racial group because it's racist isn't any more sensible than believing such statements. This is even more true when the statement is about a culture of a particular group, rather than inherent properties.
For every African-American student that "rejects learning," I can find an "underprivileged" white kid that does the same.
Which says nothing, since blacks are a minority in the US. You'd have to compare the proportion of students who reject learning in white and black populations to spot any correlations.
Hell, even a lot of the privileged ones would rather be partying than learning anything.
That's probably true of any group. Heck, I'd rather post on Slashdot all day long than go to work. Party hard !-)
The "African-American culture rejects learning" argument is pure racist bullshit.
Maybe. Or it may be true. The "gangsta nigger" stereotype certainly seems to persist in popular culture, and it's quite plausible that some impressionable young people might adopt it as their identity.
In any case, I'd hope we'd get over this overly strict political correctness which has people crying "racist" as soon as anyone suggests that race or its associated (sub)culture might have some effect on the individual. Being unable to talk about some things has never led to anything good.
Sure, there are lots of bad ways to use frames, but in and of itself frames are not a bad thing.
Yes, they are. They waste precious screen space to keep visible a menu or some other content I don't need while I'm reading the page. The whole concept is flawed.
Just put menus into the top of the page where they belong.
It makes sense to consider the internet as an international entity for the sake of individual countries trying to uphold their laws within their own countries. Otherwise, it's a simple matter for people to move off-shore and continue what they're doing in a country that allows it.
So basically, in the current state of affairs I don't have to give a shit about what Chinese government thinks of what I post online. You wish to change this. Why?
You know what bothers me the most? That it's invariably people who don't give a shit about the "common flu" who go headless chicken over this craze.
Why should that bother you? Get some popcorn, sit back, and enjoy the farce. "The world was doomed, but it kept running anyway." -The Prince of Lies, by James Lowder
HS chem may be a fading memory but aren't hydrogen and oxygen gases? so why is water a liquid? so confused:(
Oxygen atoms have a larger nucleus than hydrogen atoms, so in water, the shared electrons spend more time on average near the oxygen end of the molecule than the hydrogen ends. Because of this, the oxygen end has a negative and the hydrogen ends have a positive electric charge. Consequently, nearby water molecules will form networks, with one of the hydrogen atoms in one molecule being attracted to the oxygen atoms in another. This attractive force keeps the molecules partially bonded to each other, the state we call "liquid", in surprisingly high temperatures relative to water's molecular weight.
Def #2 makes illegitimate copying theft pretty much by definition, but even if you want to interpret that as only "ideas" and not "intellectual property", then #3 will cover it with its fairly broad "to... get... insidiously".
#3 also seems to cover winning in lottery: "to... get... by chance".
So yes, copying is, in fact, theft. Maybe not in the same way as stealing a car is theft, but I don't see him saying it is.
That kinda reminds me of the radical feminist argument that all heterosexual sex is rape, because there is a power difference between the partners and therefore consent is not possible (which is not only a non-sequiter, but would also apply to any sexual relationship, but I guess radical feminism isn't really famous for logical coherence). Changing the meaning of words is a wonderful way of winning arguments.
e.g. for a software EULA that you proceed with the installation and use anyway instead of cancelling the install/uninstalling),
I already purchased the software (or the license to use it, or whatever). Me continuing with the install doesn't indicate that I accept the EULA; in fact, the EULA is likely not a valid contract anyway, since it doesn't include any consideration to me - it doesn't give me anything I wouldn't already be entitled to by an earlier contract, namely the purchase.
Still, I recognize that the entities who put EULAs into software products have more money than I do, and would thus likely win a legal battle. This is one of the reasons I nowadays use GPL'd or other FOSSed products exclusively. It's a lot less risky than reading a 50-page EULA, trying to find the catch (if it didn't have one why would it have 50 pages?), and finally guessing whether I would be sued for ignoring it, since I don't have money to take on a corporation in a court of law.
They follow a fully developed system of ethics does not have the same conclusions as our own.
Nazis had ethics, they simply had different conclusions than our own. This is clearly demonstrated by their mail exchange, where they discussed their moral duty of ridding the world of Jews and other undesirables, even if said duty was sometimes very hard for those performing it.
The scientist in question may be behaving ethically.
He is, if we consider his own personal ethics a yardstick. Is he behaving ethically by any other measure? Now that remains the question.
And if the scientist followed our ethical standards, he might be behaving unethically.
And if the concentration camp guards of Nazi Germany had let their prisoners escape, they'd been behaving unethically by Nazi ethics, despite following our ethical standards.
Any kind of behaviour can be justified by some ethical system. This makes the whole discussion of ethics pointless, since you can always counter any claim about the ethics of any action or inaction by pointing to a system that justifies or condemns it. Of course we could agree that only an ethical system in widespread acceptance in the culture can be used to judge actions within it, but that again makes Nazis shining pillars of ethical perfection, which is a ridiculous conclusion.
So, either there are universal ethics, which apply to everyone everywhere, or discussing ethics is pointless waste of time. One or the other.
And a few more examples of cargo-cultism, from people who were untrained to understand what they're doing, but someone thought it was ok because the Java standard library does it for them anyway.
I'm untrained (self-learned) too and I have no trouble understanding why these things are wrong. Someone willing to hire me?
I really wish people would explain when they mention these things. Some of us are just hobbyist programmers, and far from professionals, but we still want to know:).
If you know the set of values your string can take, you can compute a perfect hash (if you want).
Not if the hash is limited in length - it's a 32-bit integer, in Java's case. Since there's only a limited number of unique hashes, there's only a limited number of strings they can map to before a collision occurs. Not that that makes any difference to the function of a hash map, but still.
When performance starts to matter, and my profiling tool indicates that the sorting algorithm is to blame, then I'll consider using an alternate algorithm. But even then, there's a fair chance I'll leave it alone and buy more hardware -- see, the built-in sorting algorithm is in C. Therefore, to beat it, it has to be really inappropriate, or I have to also write that algorithm in C.
And this demonstrates grandparent's point nicely. If your sorting algorithm is the bottleneck, it's very likely that it's because it has reached the point where exponential growth in execution time starts really kicking in. If that's the case, throwing more hardware at it won't accomplish much, since you'll get rapidly diminishing returns from faster CPUs - and if the algorithm isn't multithreaded or fully distributed, you'll also hit the wall of current technology really fast.
For the same reason it doesn't really matter at all what language your sorting algorithm is implemented in. As soon as you feed it any significant data, the overhead from even the most overengineered monstrosity of a language is going to be diminished into utter insignificance compared to the inherent scalability of the algorithm. In modern multicore machines this is even more true, if the non-C implementation allows for multithreading and the C one won't.
Finally, won't someone please think of Assembly ?-)
It's far more important that I know the performance quirks of my language of choice -- for instance, string interpolation is faster than any sort of string concatenator, which is faster than straight-up string concatenation ('foo' + 'bar').
Actually, in C, wouldn't the last example run very fast and yield a memory address ?-) As long as the answer comes fast, it doesn't matter if it's correct, is the philosophy of C and Pentium designers;)...
Slashdot Mirror
Which is why offshoring will be he death of Western civilization. It's quickly bankrupting us and is the ultimate cause of the current economic meltdown. We're losing manufacturing and with it the base of our economy, while China is gaining strength at our expense. Something must be done about this and soon, if it's not late already.
Everyone needs security, the same way everyone needs something to eat. We've specialized farming to professionals, so why not security?
Maybe I'm crazy, but I'd rather just pay taxes to get relatively fair and impartial professionals - let's call them "police", for a lack of better term - to patrol the neighbourhood than having to patrol it myself and kiss the ass of my neighbours so they won't watch the other way as my home gets burglarized why I'm at work.
But luckily, there is a state which follows your ideal: Somalia.
The emphasis on the quote above is mine, and is the truly absurd part of this whole thing: the USA is quite unable to give anyone control of the Internet, since it only controls the part that's physically located inside the USA. ICANN is a committee that publishes data, not a special military force that storms every router that's not in compliance. Anyone and their dog - and even the EU - is able to start their own DNS system or assign IPs as they will; even I have done so for my home network. It's just that I would also ignore EU if they started their own "sensitive register" or whatever.
This same thing comes up time and again, and is just as ridiculous every time. The USA does not control the Internet, nor does ICANN; all ICANN does is maintain a database - the root DNS servers - which various people use out of their own free will.
Then again, this whole thing is perfectly in line with the usual idiocy coming from Brussels.
And if they would had succeeded, they'd simply captured the whole Europe rather than just the eastern part.
Actually, HIV does kill you, if nothing else gets you first. It'll simply take long enough that the opportunistic diseases will usually finish you off first.
That's because they don't have to. They are already successful, after all. But if a significant portion - or perhaps all - income is dependent on making sales, and you simply don't have the skills to do that, what are you going to do? Why, you are going to panic and work harder in a desperate attempt to get a sale. Add in the cultural myth that hard work is the key to success, and you shouldn't be surprised if a number of people run around like headless chicken.
No, he merely asked why should we care where a business keeps its nominal headquarters if we don't benefit from it being here.
However, now that you mentioned it: yes, corporations exist to benefit the society around them. That's why we the people have special laws allowing for incorporation in the first place.
Nope, exactly as it should be.
To be fair, it wouldn't do any good. Simply package the nuke into a shipping container, then have it go off when it's unloaded at, say, New York Harbour. Congratulations, you've just wiped out a vital piece of infrastructure and most likely stopped all imports and exports, thereby crashing the economy.
In Free Speech Zones.
No, that's Soviet-style communism. Fascism means that private companies control the government - you know, "Corporatism" as Mussolini put it.
Not that any form of corporation-government union is likely to produce healthy offspring, but still.
Yes, it is quite a problem. Letting huge corporations like these go bankrupt would cause a total economical chaos and be completely irresponsible, but on the other hand, keeping them alive rewards stupidity and cynical exploitation of the fact that they're "too big to fail" and risks perverting competition.
As long as there are companies that represent a significant chunk of the economy, the problem will persist. However, putting a ceiling on company size would cause real problems in many areas, such as microchip and car industries.
So how would it be different from normal porn ?-)
What if it has both. Say, siblings become zombies and, as we all know, zombies act on their primal instincts...
Coming to think of it, why haven't the zombie movies covered this? Sex drive is as primal, if not more so, than hunger. There was a short story with zombies going for girls in Books of Blood, and few demented poser pictures here and there, but "The Stink of Flesh" is the only film I recall showing zombie sex - and even that was not zombie-initiated.
Of course, Japanese have that short comic, "Cute Lovable Zombie Attack" ("Oops! My noodles fell off" is an instant classic as far as porn bloobers go), but even they haven't animated it... yet.
And yes, I believe that there was a zombie porn movie I once ran across while browsing the dark corners of the Net... I need to investigate further.
First of all, someone interested in 14-year old isn't a paedophile. A paedophile is someone who's interested in pre-pubescent children, not someone who's interested in teenagers.
That said, your entire argument basically boils down to "think of the children!" Now, I'm sick of thinking of children all the time, and having my rights trampled on just so some horrible paedophile has a little harder time viewing pictures or a video tape. So kindly take your International Internet Decency Board or whatever the Hell you had in mind, and stuff it where the Sun doesn't shine, then post the pictures online.
And while you're doing that, consider this: the Chinese outnumber every other country on Earth, so if you manage to get your international tribute or whatever, they will be able to outvote you. Given this, do you really think that someone seeing your precious little flower naked will cause more harm than having to live in a world where Chinese dictatorship can censor the whole Internet? Especially since she's never likely to even know that said video exists - it's not like it's the height of photographic skill, being shot in secret and all, and thus likely has the main actor unrecognisable.
Or did you simply mean that your country's laws should be enforced on the whole world? Probably; otherwise that other country could just as well demand that you lower your age of consent to match theirs, rather than they rising theirs to match yours. Let me guess: you're an American?
Either way, teach your kid to draw the curtains when she's having sex if she doesn't want to risk getting filmed, rather than try to force the rest of the world to engage in a witch hunt with you.
TL;DR: I'm a citizen of a free country and intend to keep it that way, so fuck you.
Perhaps. But automatically disbelieving any negative statement about a racial group because it's racist isn't any more sensible than believing such statements. This is even more true when the statement is about a culture of a particular group, rather than inherent properties.
Which says nothing, since blacks are a minority in the US. You'd have to compare the proportion of students who reject learning in white and black populations to spot any correlations.
That's probably true of any group. Heck, I'd rather post on Slashdot all day long than go to work. Party hard !-)
Maybe. Or it may be true. The "gangsta nigger" stereotype certainly seems to persist in popular culture, and it's quite plausible that some impressionable young people might adopt it as their identity.
In any case, I'd hope we'd get over this overly strict political correctness which has people crying "racist" as soon as anyone suggests that race or its associated (sub)culture might have some effect on the individual. Being unable to talk about some things has never led to anything good.
Yes, they are. They waste precious screen space to keep visible a menu or some other content I don't need while I'm reading the page. The whole concept is flawed.
Just put menus into the top of the page where they belong.
So basically, in the current state of affairs I don't have to give a shit about what Chinese government thinks of what I post online. You wish to change this. Why?
Why should that bother you? Get some popcorn, sit back, and enjoy the farce. "The world was doomed, but it kept running anyway." -The Prince of Lies, by James Lowder
Oxygen atoms have a larger nucleus than hydrogen atoms, so in water, the shared electrons spend more time on average near the oxygen end of the molecule than the hydrogen ends. Because of this, the oxygen end has a negative and the hydrogen ends have a positive electric charge. Consequently, nearby water molecules will form networks, with one of the hydrogen atoms in one molecule being attracted to the oxygen atoms in another. This attractive force keeps the molecules partially bonded to each other, the state we call "liquid", in surprisingly high temperatures relative to water's molecular weight.
#3 also seems to cover winning in lottery: "to ... get ... by chance".
That kinda reminds me of the radical feminist argument that all heterosexual sex is rape, because there is a power difference between the partners and therefore consent is not possible (which is not only a non-sequiter, but would also apply to any sexual relationship, but I guess radical feminism isn't really famous for logical coherence). Changing the meaning of words is a wonderful way of winning arguments.
I already purchased the software (or the license to use it, or whatever). Me continuing with the install doesn't indicate that I accept the EULA; in fact, the EULA is likely not a valid contract anyway, since it doesn't include any consideration to me - it doesn't give me anything I wouldn't already be entitled to by an earlier contract, namely the purchase.
Still, I recognize that the entities who put EULAs into software products have more money than I do, and would thus likely win a legal battle. This is one of the reasons I nowadays use GPL'd or other FOSSed products exclusively. It's a lot less risky than reading a 50-page EULA, trying to find the catch (if it didn't have one why would it have 50 pages?), and finally guessing whether I would be sued for ignoring it, since I don't have money to take on a corporation in a court of law.
Nazis had ethics, they simply had different conclusions than our own. This is clearly demonstrated by their mail exchange, where they discussed their moral duty of ridding the world of Jews and other undesirables, even if said duty was sometimes very hard for those performing it.
He is, if we consider his own personal ethics a yardstick. Is he behaving ethically by any other measure? Now that remains the question.
And if the concentration camp guards of Nazi Germany had let their prisoners escape, they'd been behaving unethically by Nazi ethics, despite following our ethical standards.
Any kind of behaviour can be justified by some ethical system. This makes the whole discussion of ethics pointless, since you can always counter any claim about the ethics of any action or inaction by pointing to a system that justifies or condemns it. Of course we could agree that only an ethical system in widespread acceptance in the culture can be used to judge actions within it, but that again makes Nazis shining pillars of ethical perfection, which is a ridiculous conclusion.
So, either there are universal ethics, which apply to everyone everywhere, or discussing ethics is pointless waste of time. One or the other.
I'm a theorist and I'd never design anything that'll freeze on IO fault.
I'm untrained (self-learned) too and I have no trouble understanding why these things are wrong. Someone willing to hire me?
So... Why was it faster?
I really wish people would explain when they mention these things. Some of us are just hobbyist programmers, and far from professionals, but we still want to know :).
Not if the hash is limited in length - it's a 32-bit integer, in Java's case. Since there's only a limited number of unique hashes, there's only a limited number of strings they can map to before a collision occurs. Not that that makes any difference to the function of a hash map, but still.
And this demonstrates grandparent's point nicely. If your sorting algorithm is the bottleneck, it's very likely that it's because it has reached the point where exponential growth in execution time starts really kicking in. If that's the case, throwing more hardware at it won't accomplish much, since you'll get rapidly diminishing returns from faster CPUs - and if the algorithm isn't multithreaded or fully distributed, you'll also hit the wall of current technology really fast.
For the same reason it doesn't really matter at all what language your sorting algorithm is implemented in. As soon as you feed it any significant data, the overhead from even the most overengineered monstrosity of a language is going to be diminished into utter insignificance compared to the inherent scalability of the algorithm. In modern multicore machines this is even more true, if the non-C implementation allows for multithreading and the C one won't.
Finally, won't someone please think of Assembly ?-)
Actually, in C, wouldn't the last example run very fast and yield a memory address ?-) As long as the answer comes fast, it doesn't matter if it's correct, is the philosophy of C and Pentium designers ;)...