Welcome to modern object-oriented serious software development. I have done it professionally for six(6) years now and while it can be difficult at times to hit the sweet spot (particularly on the first iteration) a lot of what is done in modern software development would just not be feasible for most business applications using more primitive languages such as C (note that I said NOT feasible, I didn't say impossible).
Actually, I'm increasingly coming to think that object-oriented programming makes it harder, not easier, to maintain programs. The words C spaghetti code I've ever seen is simple compared to the horror of trying to figure out just what an object-oriented overgrown jungle is doing. Simply figuring out what code path is actually being followed can be nigh-impossible, thanks to interfaces and function overloading.
Of course, C++ is in a class of its own here, with code splattered around the header and source files here and there. I've been trying to debug a COM problem (specifically, being unable to create a session) in VirtualBox which keeps it from working on my machine, but simply figuring out what the Hell the various ifdefs reduce to is a nightmare. Oh well, time to take up the old machete and go hacking;).
It is easy to blame Microsoft for looking into the future and envisioning a world where web browsers are the central application on the computer. They rushed blindly into it and unleased things like ActiveX on the world. At the core, their intention was right.. they wanted to make it easy to execute code in a distributed environment like the internet. Yet the implementation sucked and it seems like they didn't pay any attention to security.
Microsoft saw a future where the browser was the central application on the computer, and it terrified them, because a browser is not platform-specific. In panic they released ActiveX with the intent of tying the Web into Windows. It's just another of their attempts of lock-in, and just as evil in intent as all other such attempts; but thankfully, this time they failed.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish - this is Microsoft's standard strategy. I'd hate to have had the Web extinguished.
"Tell you what," says one social worker to the other, "I'll take care of this guy. You go find the person who did it and make sure he never does it again."
"I'll find out what's wrong with this person that got him beat up. You go find the person who did this and tell him that it's not his fault."
But you don't need a permit to bear arms. You have two of them attached to your shoulder, right ? Or if you don't, that's unlikely to be the Government's fault. Second Amandment has thus not been violated.
Besides, your arms consume nutrition which affects your need for food, which in turn affects local commerce, which affects interstate commerce, which allows the Congress to regulate your arms. And don't let me even start on the potential economic impact of any work you might do with them ! Clearly, your arms are subject to regulation.
A large number of people seem to be confused on this issue. For some reason people think a bracketed tax screws over the people making more money, when in actuality it is designed based on the idea of decreasing returns on income utility.
I suspect that at least some of them are purposefully spreading misinformation. Progressive taxation is, after all, contrary to the ideology and perceived or real interests of both plutocrats and John Galt wannabes of this world.
Remember, equality is seen as bad by those who think they'd be the 500-pound gorillas in a jungle.
I have no problem with making inmates work or charging them for their living expenses.
Keeping someone in chains and telling him "work for me or die" is slavery, which is illegal, and good riddance. Charging someone for "room and board" you forced on them is outrageously unconscionable, especially since it essentially adds a huge hidden fine to the sentence.
Besides, if there's a cost to keeping people locked up, maybe "though on crime" idiots won't be so quick to send harmless people to jail. I wonder how many of them would still demand that pot smokers get jailed if they knew that every smoker so imprisoned put an upward pressure onto their taxes ?
Prisons should be an investment in our future, not an investment for a financial return.
Prisons aren't an investment any more than landfills are an investment: they're nasty but sadly necessary places until a better solution can be found.
Only thing I can't figure out, why the hell it takes 4 seconds to execute such simple code. Must be perl or java, maybe network latency.
No, it's just that it takes a while to get the XML from a database, parse it into source files, compile them, run all the regression tests and finally run the code itself.
Heck, I'm still quite a few years from 40 and still played cops and robbers, watched "violent" roadrunner cartoons, and pretended to "shoot" people with my finger in elementary school. All things that supposedly that are "harmful" yet i'm a productive member of society, don't do drugs, have a steady job, good education...and so on.
I'm not:(. But maybe it's not too late yet; I'm sure these things must be stashed on P2P somewhere !
But seriously, Road Runner cartoons are great at driving home the point that people who do stupid things with hazardous devices often have unpleasant things happen to them;). I still remember the one where the Coyote was attempting to unstuck a ton of rocks - from beneath ! "What the heck am I doing ?" indeed. And if this guy had seen it, maybe he would still be with us.
Maybe that's the real problem with today's youth - they haven't seen enough blood, so they haven't formed the association "goes kaboom -> danger". If you look at those old fairy- and folk tales, they all spend a great deal of time showing how people who don't think things through get the shaft. It makes me wonder if all the hysteria about children seeing sex or violence isn't actually increasing the chances that they'll grow up violent perverts.
Even if you consider the "automation" of mining and resource gathering, you still need real, manufactured wealth to perform that automation.
Actually, if the automatons can be build by fabbers, and fabbers can also build more fabbers, then you only need to manufacture a single fabber and enough raw materials for a single automaton to get started. After that it all runs itself and expands its capacities exponentially with no more labour required by humans.
The grandparent poster forgot to discuss the energy needs of the device, thought.
The fundamental problem with basing an economy on ideas is that ideas are not economically scarce resources.
Seeing how the whole point of economy is to manage scarce resources, the lack of scarcity is a problem to economy in the same way than the lack of crime is a problem to a police department: it makes it unnecessary.
Another way of looking at this is that if everyone can simply manufacture anything they need or want at will, the whole concept of wealth becomes obsolete, because everyone has limitless amounts of it.
If you made the subtle change to an economy based on the ability to create ideas, then I'd say you have a sustainable economy, because the ability to create ideas is a scarce resource.
Given leisure time, humans create. This has been proven time and again; the whole Internet is full of everything from art to music to books created by hobbyists and uploaded for all to use for free. In a post-scarcity world, I'd imagine that these activities would be further accelerated.
It's not the ability to create which is scarce, for all have it; no, what is scarce is the patience to hone the skill to the point where one can create something worthwhile.
I would guess that there are at least a couple of million people employed in the art of getting the current paper based medical information into patient accounting systems.
In that case it's high time to get this thing rolling. Using nearly a percent of your workforce to hand-copy information around in the age of computers is simply insane. People need to move to more productive endeavours, and there needs to be a proper social security system - complete with nationalized healthcare - in place so that such moves become opportunities rather than personal disasters.
We also have to keep in mind that telegraph wires back then weren't protected like power lines are now.
Modern power lines aren't protected at all. They are naked steel cables. Of course that also means that they are unlikely to be damaged unless actually heated red-hot, but the transformers ? Each and every one of them will get the equivalent of a lightning strike simultaneously.
Oh, and of course a solar storm might continue for a while, making the magnetic field go back and forth, so make that multiple lightning strikes - a virtual thunderstorm.
But instead of individual hackers cleaning up the mess, why not have the government of a country pass a law that machines within its jurisdiction may be cleaned if found to be a zombie?
Well, for starters, how would you go about defining "zombie computer" so that the definition is neither ripe for abuse nor easy to circumvent by the bot authors ? A computer is a zombie if the printer test page reads "Cores, Coreeeessss...." ?-)
A guy from F-secure in Finland has been calling for the formation of an "internetpol" for exactly these reasons. I think he's right because otherwise international net crime will continue unabated, since nobody is in charge of combating it. An international body designed to coordinate.crime policing efforts is sorely needed.
International Internet crime - like, say, running a Tor node that lets Chinese to bypass their Government's censorship ?
Remember, in a zombie plague, the biggest threat comes from your fellow humans.
So Darl is going to basically sell off most of what the company has to continue a lawsuit he has no hope of winning? What the HELL is wrong with this guy? Worst. CEO. EVAR.
On the contrary, McBride managed to rise the stock price of his company with all of this nonsense. Of course the company was utterly destroyed as a result, but for a few moments any stockholder could get a fantastic return on investment (assuming he bought the stock on their pre-lawsuit low point). Since enchanting stockholder value for any price is the job of the CEO, that would make McBride a fantastic and extremely successful CEO.
I'm starting to think that high liquidity is actually undesirable for a stock market. In such a market, your best bet is to loot the company of anything valuable and sell the stock onward before the price crumbles. It encourages sacrificing long-term value for short-term profits, because, after all, you can take those short-term profits, run, and repeat the process with another company. There doesn't seem to be any built-in mechanism to discourage such psychopathic behaviour, or am I missing something ?
Re:No nationalized insurance without eugenics!
on
My Genome, My Self?
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· Score: 1
It's kind of a wacky argument because the logical conclusion is that all possible sperm should be used to fertilize all possible eggs - after all, each fertilized egg is a potential human and we should allow them all life, right?
I think I see a plot for a japanese hentai manga here:). After all, all the eggs of those young schoolgirls which go to waste need help, so enter... The Fertilizer !
Seriously, it would make more sense than most of those plots;).
Imagine how this conflict would go if the Palestinian's weren't so cowardly and instead used non-violent protests. You know, like Gandhi.
The British didn't simply kill Gandhi and everyone following him. Israel, on the other hand, would simply bomb such a protest and assassinate the leader with a cruise missile shot into a residential area, or - if they were being uncharacteristically nice - would merely keep Gaza blockaded until everyone inside starved.
Non-violent protest only works if your opponent is a basically decent human being with a conscience you appeal to. It doesn't work if he's a kind of being who bombs a school. In that case, it's a suicide.
If they don't want their kids getting killed they shouldn't be firing rockets and mortars from schoolyards. The calculus is pretty simple on this one.
And if Israel doesn't want people pissed enough at them to blow themselves up just to take a few jews with them, they shouldn't bomb the school their children were in. And if the Arabs don't want further invasions, they shouldn't blow themselves up just to take a few jews with them. And so on and so on.
There will be peace in Middle-East when every last living thing there is dead. Until then, someone will always have a blood feud with someone else they just have to kill, starting the whole damn thing all over again. Gotta hand it to Hitler, thought: few leaders can say their death toll is still increasing sixty years after they're dead. Of course Sharon, Arafat and all the other past and present shitheads in the area are all too willing to help, so they should get some credit too.
*Can* one adequately capacity plan for that hunk of crap?
More importantly, if there's insufficient capacity, a server shouldn't just crash. It should simply stop accepting new work until gets the current work done.
Having a mail server crash because it couldn't handle the amount of mail going through it is pretty pathetic, even for Microsoft.
It can easily be argued that there is no evidence to support that the universe lacking -any- aspect of logic or computability has any bearing on thought or concept at all. Even more, the term feature complete could be argued as a quality relating to the universe itself.
All that's saying that the Universe is "feature complete" really means is that Universe has as many features as it has. If it lacked some feature, how would you know ? You could never demonstrate the missing feature within the Universe since the Universe would lack it.
To me however, the term seems to be a non sequitur, as the brain itself does -not- operate upon logic or computability any more than a banana does,
Both the brain and the banana operate upon the laws of physics, which in turn operate upon the laws of logic.
and while a Turing machine does operate upon these principles, general emulations of aspects of the physical universe have mostly just taken more time to execute than reality itself.
That means nothing for creatures within that Turing machine. If the Universe is actually a computer, we have no way of knowing how long one second of our time is taking relative to the outside time.
You are responding to me as though I advocated a test of political viewpoints. What I pictured, and in fact what I said, was a civics test and not a political alignment test. There is a significant difference between the two.
Actually, no there isn't. Not when you start including questions about the role of government; at that point it has become a purely political test.
In the USA a civics test would include things like knowledge of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the purpose and original intent behind the Amendments including the powers that government does and does not possess under the Constitution, the concept of separation of powers and the purpose and role of the three branches of federal government, the concept of checks and balances and how the three branches of government are intended to accomplish this, things of that nature.
All of these things are open to interpretation, and in fact are often used in political arguments. For example: does the Constitution give the Government right of taxation ? A libertarian would argue no. Does it give the Government right to institute social security ? Well that depends entirely on how you interpret the "general welfare" clause. And so on.
Your test will find the ones whose views on these things coincide with the test-maker. It's a political alignment test. It's even worse when you start talking about the intentions of people long dead; at that point it slips into outright propaganda: "Admit that the founders really meant this or we don't let you vote".
This is most definitely not an assessment of political views. You can be liberal or you can be conservative or anything in-between and a thorough understanding of the Constitution should not change that.
A liberal and a conservative often differ in their interpretation of the Constitution. As soon as you ask what it means, you've branched into politics.
Furthermore, one could ask: what the heck does it matter ? The voter isn't the one making the law. He is choosing someone to represent him. He doesn't need to know the Constitution to decide who he trusts to look after his interests; he isn't sitting in the Government, after all. Why would he be declined representation because he doesn't know every law which has to do with the job of actually doing that representation ?
If you are worried that it would, then I don't know what else to call that except to say that I sincerely question why you are insecure in your beliefs (I would compare it to how the Church felt about Galileo's telescope).
I'm more worried about being Galileo, actually.
If what "got you" was me saying that this may eliminate certain views that are based on faulty beliefs, I simply meant that if you seriously study i.e. the Constitution and find out that you were misinformed about what it says and does not say, and if this results in a change to your political views, then they needed to change anyway. There is nothing wrong with that unless you believe that acquiring new knowledge and evaluating your beliefs in light of the new knowledge is somehow a bad thing.
No, what "gets me" is that it would decline a waste number of people representation, thus being a move towards a dictatorship.
I fail to see how my political views should have anything to do with the Constitution. The Founders were not gods, and the Constitution is not an unchanging word of one. It even includes an amendment mechanism for changing it. Or did you perhaps mean that any political view contradictory to the Constitution needs to be silenced ? In that case you have proven my fears correct.
I don't mean this as a personal attack, but many times I post ideas to Slashdot and I choose my words carefully, making sure I do not say anything I did not intend to say. I do this and
Yes, the rate of growth will slow, but the economic growth that has already taken place is not going to magically disappear when those jobs move elsewhere. Were that the case, what would have happened to the United States by now, given all the jobs that have already been outsourced from it?
It would run up a tremendous debt, invade various countries around the world in a panicked attempt to try to keep up the flow of goods, and finally have its economy crash.
Yes, because unions have never been corrupted. Unions have never grown into entities more concerned with their own survival than looking out for the wellbeing of their membership.
If switching unions was easy, as the grandparent said is a necessary condition, then any corruption would be rewarded by the members fleeing.
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Actually, I'm increasingly coming to think that object-oriented programming makes it harder, not easier, to maintain programs. The words C spaghetti code I've ever seen is simple compared to the horror of trying to figure out just what an object-oriented overgrown jungle is doing. Simply figuring out what code path is actually being followed can be nigh-impossible, thanks to interfaces and function overloading.
Of course, C++ is in a class of its own here, with code splattered around the header and source files here and there. I've been trying to debug a COM problem (specifically, being unable to create a session) in VirtualBox which keeps it from working on my machine, but simply figuring out what the Hell the various ifdefs reduce to is a nightmare. Oh well, time to take up the old machete and go hacking ;).
Microsoft saw a future where the browser was the central application on the computer, and it terrified them, because a browser is not platform-specific. In panic they released ActiveX with the intent of tying the Web into Windows. It's just another of their attempts of lock-in, and just as evil in intent as all other such attempts; but thankfully, this time they failed.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish - this is Microsoft's standard strategy. I'd hate to have had the Web extinguished.
"I'll find out what's wrong with this person that got him beat up. You go find the person who did this and tell him that it's not his fault."
But you don't need a permit to bear arms. You have two of them attached to your shoulder, right ? Or if you don't, that's unlikely to be the Government's fault. Second Amandment has thus not been violated.
Besides, your arms consume nutrition which affects your need for food, which in turn affects local commerce, which affects interstate commerce, which allows the Congress to regulate your arms. And don't let me even start on the potential economic impact of any work you might do with them ! Clearly, your arms are subject to regulation.
I suspect that at least some of them are purposefully spreading misinformation. Progressive taxation is, after all, contrary to the ideology and perceived or real interests of both plutocrats and John Galt wannabes of this world.
Remember, equality is seen as bad by those who think they'd be the 500-pound gorillas in a jungle.
Keeping someone in chains and telling him "work for me or die" is slavery, which is illegal, and good riddance. Charging someone for "room and board" you forced on them is outrageously unconscionable, especially since it essentially adds a huge hidden fine to the sentence.
Besides, if there's a cost to keeping people locked up, maybe "though on crime" idiots won't be so quick to send harmless people to jail. I wonder how many of them would still demand that pot smokers get jailed if they knew that every smoker so imprisoned put an upward pressure onto their taxes ?
Prisons aren't an investment any more than landfills are an investment: they're nasty but sadly necessary places until a better solution can be found.
No, it's just that it takes a while to get the XML from a database, parse it into source files, compile them, run all the regression tests and finally run the code itself.
I'm not :(. But maybe it's not too late yet; I'm sure these things must be stashed on P2P somewhere !
But seriously, Road Runner cartoons are great at driving home the point that people who do stupid things with hazardous devices often have unpleasant things happen to them ;). I still remember the one where the Coyote was attempting to unstuck a ton of rocks - from beneath ! "What the heck am I doing ?" indeed. And if this guy had seen it, maybe he would still be with us.
Maybe that's the real problem with today's youth - they haven't seen enough blood, so they haven't formed the association "goes kaboom -> danger". If you look at those old fairy- and folk tales, they all spend a great deal of time showing how people who don't think things through get the shaft. It makes me wonder if all the hysteria about children seeing sex or violence isn't actually increasing the chances that they'll grow up violent perverts.
Actually, if the automatons can be build by fabbers, and fabbers can also build more fabbers, then you only need to manufacture a single fabber and enough raw materials for a single automaton to get started. After that it all runs itself and expands its capacities exponentially with no more labour required by humans.
The grandparent poster forgot to discuss the energy needs of the device, thought.
Seeing how the whole point of economy is to manage scarce resources, the lack of scarcity is a problem to economy in the same way than the lack of crime is a problem to a police department: it makes it unnecessary.
Another way of looking at this is that if everyone can simply manufacture anything they need or want at will, the whole concept of wealth becomes obsolete, because everyone has limitless amounts of it.
Given leisure time, humans create. This has been proven time and again; the whole Internet is full of everything from art to music to books created by hobbyists and uploaded for all to use for free. In a post-scarcity world, I'd imagine that these activities would be further accelerated.
It's not the ability to create which is scarce, for all have it; no, what is scarce is the patience to hone the skill to the point where one can create something worthwhile.
Congratulations, you passed the test and have a great personality.
Disregard that, you failed, you irredeemable sociopath. A shame, you got so close :(. A little bit of extra effort and you can ace it the next time !
In that case it's high time to get this thing rolling. Using nearly a percent of your workforce to hand-copy information around in the age of computers is simply insane. People need to move to more productive endeavours, and there needs to be a proper social security system - complete with nationalized healthcare - in place so that such moves become opportunities rather than personal disasters.
Modern power lines aren't protected at all. They are naked steel cables. Of course that also means that they are unlikely to be damaged unless actually heated red-hot, but the transformers ? Each and every one of them will get the equivalent of a lightning strike simultaneously.
Oh, and of course a solar storm might continue for a while, making the magnetic field go back and forth, so make that multiple lightning strikes - a virtual thunderstorm.
Well, for starters, how would you go about defining "zombie computer" so that the definition is neither ripe for abuse nor easy to circumvent by the bot authors ? A computer is a zombie if the printer test page reads "Cores, Coreeeessss...." ?-)
International Internet crime - like, say, running a Tor node that lets Chinese to bypass their Government's censorship ?
Remember, in a zombie plague, the biggest threat comes from your fellow humans.
On the contrary, McBride managed to rise the stock price of his company with all of this nonsense. Of course the company was utterly destroyed as a result, but for a few moments any stockholder could get a fantastic return on investment (assuming he bought the stock on their pre-lawsuit low point). Since enchanting stockholder value for any price is the job of the CEO, that would make McBride a fantastic and extremely successful CEO.
I'm starting to think that high liquidity is actually undesirable for a stock market. In such a market, your best bet is to loot the company of anything valuable and sell the stock onward before the price crumbles. It encourages sacrificing long-term value for short-term profits, because, after all, you can take those short-term profits, run, and repeat the process with another company. There doesn't seem to be any built-in mechanism to discourage such psychopathic behaviour, or am I missing something ?
Nobody is, assuming there's more than 1 of them.
I think I see a plot for a japanese hentai manga here :). After all, all the eggs of those young schoolgirls which go to waste need help, so enter... The Fertilizer !
Seriously, it would make more sense than most of those plots ;).
The British didn't simply kill Gandhi and everyone following him. Israel, on the other hand, would simply bomb such a protest and assassinate the leader with a cruise missile shot into a residential area, or - if they were being uncharacteristically nice - would merely keep Gaza blockaded until everyone inside starved.
Non-violent protest only works if your opponent is a basically decent human being with a conscience you appeal to. It doesn't work if he's a kind of being who bombs a school. In that case, it's a suicide.
And if Israel doesn't want people pissed enough at them to blow themselves up just to take a few jews with them, they shouldn't bomb the school their children were in. And if the Arabs don't want further invasions, they shouldn't blow themselves up just to take a few jews with them. And so on and so on.
There will be peace in Middle-East when every last living thing there is dead. Until then, someone will always have a blood feud with someone else they just have to kill, starting the whole damn thing all over again. Gotta hand it to Hitler, thought: few leaders can say their death toll is still increasing sixty years after they're dead. Of course Sharon, Arafat and all the other past and present shitheads in the area are all too willing to help, so they should get some credit too.
More importantly, if there's insufficient capacity, a server shouldn't just crash. It should simply stop accepting new work until gets the current work done.
Having a mail server crash because it couldn't handle the amount of mail going through it is pretty pathetic, even for Microsoft.
All that's saying that the Universe is "feature complete" really means is that Universe has as many features as it has. If it lacked some feature, how would you know ? You could never demonstrate the missing feature within the Universe since the Universe would lack it.
Both the brain and the banana operate upon the laws of physics, which in turn operate upon the laws of logic.
That means nothing for creatures within that Turing machine. If the Universe is actually a computer, we have no way of knowing how long one second of our time is taking relative to the outside time.
Actually, no there isn't. Not when you start including questions about the role of government; at that point it has become a purely political test.
All of these things are open to interpretation, and in fact are often used in political arguments. For example: does the Constitution give the Government right of taxation ? A libertarian would argue no. Does it give the Government right to institute social security ? Well that depends entirely on how you interpret the "general welfare" clause. And so on.
Your test will find the ones whose views on these things coincide with the test-maker. It's a political alignment test. It's even worse when you start talking about the intentions of people long dead; at that point it slips into outright propaganda: "Admit that the founders really meant this or we don't let you vote".
A liberal and a conservative often differ in their interpretation of the Constitution. As soon as you ask what it means, you've branched into politics.
Furthermore, one could ask: what the heck does it matter ? The voter isn't the one making the law. He is choosing someone to represent him. He doesn't need to know the Constitution to decide who he trusts to look after his interests; he isn't sitting in the Government, after all. Why would he be declined representation because he doesn't know every law which has to do with the job of actually doing that representation ?
I'm more worried about being Galileo, actually.
No, what "gets me" is that it would decline a waste number of people representation, thus being a move towards a dictatorship.
I fail to see how my political views should have anything to do with the Constitution. The Founders were not gods, and the Constitution is not an unchanging word of one. It even includes an amendment mechanism for changing it. Or did you perhaps mean that any political view contradictory to the Constitution needs to be silenced ? In that case you have proven my fears correct.
As someone who was once fooled into becoming a Dell customer I really don't see why one would wish that.
It would run up a tremendous debt, invade various countries around the world in a panicked attempt to try to keep up the flow of goods, and finally have its economy crash.
I guess you just proved the grandparent's theory.
If switching unions was easy, as the grandparent said is a necessary condition, then any corruption would be rewarded by the members fleeing.