There is no action that is immoral for an individual, that becomes right when done by a collective.
Well, in that case the solution is simple: just repeal all the laws, since they are immoral anyway - after all, it is immoral for you to enforce your will on me, so it can't be moral for the collective either - and let all the libertarians have the heaven on Earth they crave, also known as Somalia.
Or would it be more effective to simply ship all of you there ? Then again, Somalis already have enough problems...
If I take losses in the stock market, I have no right to rob you to make up what I lost.
One might argue that the very existence of a stock market is already robbing me of something, since the limited liability corporations traded there typically make their profit by using that limited liability in ways that would send anyone not shielded by it to the electric chair post-haste. In fact one might argue that this whole financial crisis, which is affecting me too, was caused by letting some cretins get the benefits of an organized society while trying to avoid any responsibility and justifying this by crying: "Taxation is thievery! BAAWWW!!!".
Really. What kind of true believer does it take to keep on parroting that line even as the latest achievement of deregulation hasn't even reached it's terminal velocity on its fall straight to Hell yet ?
I find it especially ironic that you are preaching your message of the evils of taxation on the Internet, which was built with tax money and is an earth-shattering success by almost any metric.
Everybody owes the United States money and the United States owes everybody money. That means a U.S. recession will be a global problem for a very, very long time.
Which is a good reason to oppose globalization. In a world where every economic system is tied to every other, any problem anywhere will cause cascade effects everywhere.
Here, YOU take the map and YOU find another route to the ancient temple which contains the mysterious artifact that will destroy the source of the evil overlord's dark power.
Actually, couldn't you just spread a rumour that you're going to the temple to retrieve the artefact, thus luring the evil overlord to the death zone while you're busy drinking and laughing it up at the inn ? If you want to be really clever, you could even have the party's rogue follow him, to learn of any secret route he might know.
Put all your points to Bluff, and you'll never need to lift a finger.
People who are given billions in government bailouts when their latest stupid scheme goes to Hell, so they can get some bonuses for work well done, while their employees are laid off and die from easily treatable illnesses due to not being able to afford medical insurance. This is known as Free Market Capitalism, and is the core of tenet of the economic religions known as Libertarianism and Objectivism.
Or, alternatively, someone who's managed to get enough money (capital) to qualify as part of modern aristocracy, and wants the government to get out of his way so he can freely use his superior resources to oppress his less fortunate fellow men for fun and profit. This evil practice is made to seem noble and good by appealing to the above-mentioned philosophies, a process known as "turd polishing".
Either way, they tend to be every bit as despicable assholes as politicians, and for the exact same reasons.
You contradict yourself here. JIT is one way to perform emulation. Either JIT isn't as fast as native code or emulation isn't horrible for performance, you can't have it both ways!
Sure you can. The key here is to understand that the lower level the input code is, the harder it is for the compiler (JIT or otherwise) to separate platform-specific details and optimizations from description of algorithm. In other words, it is more difficult to compile efficient native code from some other (real) platforms assembly than from Java bytecode. And the more different that source platform is from the target one, the more difficult this becomes.
Compilation typically loses information, and the more information a compiler has available, the better job it can do. However, even some emulators nowadays include JIT compilers, since even sub-optimal native code is faster than running every instructor through a parser as it's executed by the emulator.
The second problem is that while Java, and now even Javascript, have been pretty well optimized on non-x86 hardware, I've yet to see a x86 bytecode emulator perform as well.
Modern x86-compatible processors are actually emulating the instruction set on processor-specific microcode. They could thus be considered x86 machine code emulators:).
Earlier in the thread someone pointed out how JIT-compiled languages are now about 50% as efficient as natively compiled languages.
Seeing how JIT-compilation means that the code is compiled to native code just before being executed, this is clearly rubbish. JIT-compilation results in native code, just like any other compilation; the program is simply stored in some intermediate form (bytecode) rather than in the final compiled form.
My experience with emulation is a bit underwhelming. My G5 Mac can emulate an x86 processor using Virtual PC, but it's slow enough that anything beyond Windows 98 is pretty annoying. I'd hate to see performance of x86 emulation on a phone!
Yes, this is true. Emulation is horrible for performance. This whole idea is ludicrous.
Other than, say the ability to drop a UAV bomb on government buildings or open markets from hundreds of kilometers away ?
Ah, that explains it then. Cruise missiles and other long-range delivery methods are easy and cheap to obtain, while a GPS navigator is the nigh-legendary top-secret techical marvel only rumoured to exist...
GPS + terrorists = disaster.
GPS + terrorists = terrorists who can locate themselves.
Most countries do not have the capability of even detecting the thing in-flight (and with the bomb light enough, flying close to buildings the us does not have that capability either).
Most countries don't have the capability of detecting bombs taped into the bottom of a random car, set up to go off during rush hour.
An iphone 3g (or any gps device, but iphone 3g is sturdy, cheap and available) controlling a low flying bomb would be a terrorist's dream weapon.
Yeah. And with a GPS-enabled phone, all they are lacking is the flying bomb.
I truly hope you are trolling. Otherwise I'm starting to get a bit scared, and not of terrorists. Maybe we should start a war on stupidity next ?
Ah, but do you not see? The only explanation must be that God's malloc is buggy. It must be picking up different data each time, otherwise there would be no point in the comparison.
As malloc is not required to clear the memory it returns, it not doing so does not make it buggy. If it was calloc, then yes, it would be buggy; but for malloc, the only requirement is that the returned memory chunk has the size given to malloc.
And no, there is no point in the comparison. The code is buggy, as it relies on undocumented (and unlikely) assumptions about how malloc works.
We can deduce from this that God's computer not only has a buggy C library but also poor memory protection between kernel and user space. Things have certainly improved in the past 6000 years!
But we're still using C, and enjoying all the "clever" hacks l33t c0d3rs come up with to avoid writing a few lines of code:(.
Why do they need to confine Canadian websites to having a certain amount Canadian content when it's a global community. The content shouldn't be limited because of the location the domain is in.
Luckily this is easy to work around: simply have Canadian webmasters compose an archive of free Canadian content, have everyone who puts up a website get it via a torrent, put it into a subdirectory somewhere in their website, and link to it from the main page with "Canadian content mandated by law" as a link text. If you agree on some standard CSS class to use with the link (such as "a:stupid_law_link"), the more knowledgeable users can even filter the link out automatically with a custom CSS style sheet.
That's the nice thing about the Web over radio: since it's pull technology, mandatory content doesn't need to interfere with the actual one. It just sits there and takes up some hard disk space.
And of course the hosting services could put the archive into a read-only (to the client) device, allowing hosted websites to link it in without needing to waste space storing it over and over.
Shouldn't you be filling man with data at some point ? I mean, with this design, there's no guarantee that it won't simply allocate/free the same memory block at each iteration, making no changes to the contents, leading to an infinite loop.
If you read the article you'd understand there is a cyber war and it isn't just script kiddies or digital anarchists attacking secure computer systems. Secure NASA systems were rooted by a guy who sent 30 gigabytes of data to a location in Taiwan, where it probably was sent to China. That's not anarchy; it's an attempt to steal confidential data.
It's espionage. It has nothing to do with "cyber" anything, unless the spying was done through the Internet, in which case whatever laserbrain connected a machine containing top sekreet data to a global network should get demoted to sufficiently low position that he can't cause any more harm. And it isn't any kind of war, since there doesn't seem to be any fighting involved.
There may be attacks that are pointless, but that doesn't mean there aren't highly targeted attacks meant to steal confidential information about space missions just as the world is re-entering the Space Race (China going to space, Indians to the moon, Americans to the moon and Mars, etc.)
Yes, well, in that case I hope whatever was stolen is going to be helpful to China, India or whoever got it. The US sat on its ass for 40 years after the Moon missions, and Europe isn't really any better; I'd rather that someone builds an empire in the sky than no one. It would be nice if it was an allied country, but failing that, I'll root for the humanity.
So how long before Anime is child porn down there? Oversexed adolescents are the typical fare so it probably is fodder for these guys.
Undersexed. Those teenagers talk a lot but never seem to get down to action, despite constantly running into each other naked. That's not very believable, IMHO.
You might avoid reading Negima there openly, thought.
It is a cartoon, no one real was harmed, so now inanimate objects have rights
Which is more than what us animated ones can say, apparently.
or is that entirely dependent on what they represent?
No, it's dependent on whether a judge happens to find it offensive or not.
But really, what did you expect, in a penal colony run by the exiled prisoners ? Especially when you remember that these were the people even Great "'voluntary' censorship of Wikipedia pages" Britain wanted to get rid of.
Since there is such a low density of people per land, let's *take away the land from those paying customers who pay for maintenance fees for their server space to do what they like with* and let's *forcibly turn it over to people on free accounts*. Would that work for you? It's called "Bolshevism".
Actually, such forcible action usually happens when those who have land or other resource refuse to pay for the maintenance of the social or other infrastructure which allows them to own it ("taxation is thievery"), and start instead claiming their ownership is a God-given right everyone must respect above all because only a communist wouldn't. In other words, it's a reaction to libertarianism, a bit like fever, swelling and pain are reactions to an infection.
Anyway, to get back to topic, giving everyone some land to play with might help getting more users. It doesn't require removing any from existing users, though, because land is not a finite resource in a virtual world. However, storage space for objects is, so you'd need to limit free accounts on the number of objects they can create, and some way to keep some jackass from creating an endless stream of new accounts for de facto unlimited storage.
The brass here also thinks SL might be big some day, and that distance education will happen via SL. I think they're bonkers and should be focusing on video-phone type software instead.
If you think about it for a moment, SL (and virtual worlds in general) is a video-phone type software. Oh sure, it will probably go belly-up eventually, just like early attempts at something usually do; but it still pays to experiment with virtual worlds now that they're still in their infancy. It's better to get your beginner mistakes done with when there's still relatively few people watching, and you can blame it on flaky technology;).
Virtual worlds, from Worlds of Warcraft to Habbo Hotel, are a rising trend. We humans are a social species and as such find talking to people rewarding. Slashdot itself is a testament to that: the articles are simply an excuse to get the discussion started. Virtual worlds are chat clients with more or less chrome and shiny bits bolted on; of course they are popular. And those shiny bits make it possible to appeal to other human drives too, such as desire for sex (SL) or power (WoW), so they are going to get ever more popular.
The only things missing is a general, open protocol allowing multiple compatible clients, and a decentralized (P2P) server, which can be ran without big bucks. Once those bits are filled in, we'll get a cyberspace.
I think you may have missed the point (AKA ridiculous sex fantasy simulator) if you're concerning yourself with the engine.
Sex is actually bloody difficult to simulate well or even adequately. It usually involves two or more bodies in close contact, which means that you need collision detection and deformations for two soft bodies with complex internal structure. This is, of course, completely ignoring the need for controls which would be both useful and powerful or simulating unconscious reactions. Oh, and the end result would need to have sufficient visual quality to be closer to interactive porn than a puppet show.
In fact it's so bloody difficult I've never seen it done in an interactive manner. Adult games typically use either pre-recorded cutscenes, which may or may not allow you to change the tempo, and then lets you change between them. Now that I think of it, it's really a very interesting problem...
Even a minor increase in 3.0 adoption would be worth it, as the phishing detection won't matter once google turns it off. I think Mozilla is doing well by making one last effort to move people towards Firefox 3.
How about fixing the bugs in Firefox 3 instead ? I'm not going to move to FF3 until this is fixed. Attempts to force the issue will, at most, result in me moving into another browser entirely.
Really, if you are having such problems moving your users to a new version, maybe it might be a sign that the new version sucks.
No matter what language you choose, it all ends up as assembly language. If you want to do debugging, you will have to learn it anyway.
No you don't. Higher-level languages typically catch and represent errors in a manner relevant to that higher-level code. Even with C, you'll likely end up using a debugger which shows things in terms of C code (variables with their names etc). The only time you'd want to examine the assembly the compiler spat out is when you suspect there's an error in the compiler itself. Besides, even if you do find the error from the assembly code, what are you going to do ? Fix it by hand after every recompile ?
Besides, my preferred method of debugging is sprinkle the code with the equivalent of "print 'got here'" statements - Real Men don't use debuggers, they debug by reading their code and thinking about it;). Which is a skill you'll need to learn anyway to debug synchronization problems in multithreaded code.
While they may sound evil, it's an industry body that works with ISPs and the police and by existing and tackling child pornography through industry best practices it negates the need for Government interference and censorship of the net.
So basically it is outsourced evil.
I'm willing to put up with the odd image being wrongly classified (especially if that classification can be reversed) if it avoids Government mandated censorship. Although we're probably already suffering that anyway:(
How the Hell is "voluntary" censorship any better than mandatory ? If anything, it's worse, since with "voluntary" censorship the Government can counter all complaints by claiming that it is not forcing anyone to censor anything. Besides, "voluntary" censorship will likely be tighter than mandatory because an industry body cannot lose votes by censoring too much - there is no competition, after all - while political party can.
Just look at Comics Code to know how bad "self-regulating industry boards" can get. And it isn't comic books at stake this time.
If you want to see it, go down to your local record shop. The image is a CD cover, and is openly on sale.
But then that could be used as evidence against him as well. After all, he went to the record store to view an image of a naked child. While the act was innocent, the intent was criminal, a thought crime. A non-paedophile wouldn't be guilty of anything looking at the album cover, but a paedophile would, just like a paedophile passing a park would clearly be there to peek on kids instead of just passing by, and a paedophile living near a school would only do so to have easy access to kids rather than because residential areas usually have schools built next to them. Oh, and any use of cryptography, such as Tor, is because he is trying to hide he's looking at child porn.
It kinda reminds me of a trial in a movie version of Ivanhoe I once saw. A woman was accused of witchcraft, and her accuser told the court how she had killed a dog and eaten pieces of it raw. The judge then asked if the accuser meant the entirely healthy dog which was sniffing around in the courtroom, to which the accuser answered that the witch had healed it with her magic powers, thus further proving that she was a witch.
If someone accuses you of being a paedophile, everything you do can be used as evidence of not only that but also of your intent to molest kids. It's just a modern-day witch hunt. Give it a few decades and the howling mob will go after the next target, just like they switched from hunting witches to communists to paedophiles. Not that it'll do any good to their victims, of course; but such is life, and a howling mob of self-righteous vigilantes on a witch hunt is really not all that different from child molesters: they take their enjoyment from whom they will, and the victim can go to hell for all they care.
It is depressing that we haven't gotten any better since the Dark Ages, but that too is life, I guess.
When it comes to something that may seriously harm your child, whether it be vaccines or the illnesses the vaccines prevent against, it is your responsibility as a parent to not go off half-cocked and to make extremely sure that you have all the facts before you make a decision regarding the welfare of your child.
Unless you happen to be a medical expert of sufficient calibre to run the experiments yourself, you rely on others to supply you accurate knowledge about the subject. Unless you are an expert in every subject, there are bound to be potential decisions regarding the welfare of your child where you have little choice but to go off half-cocked, since you simply have no way to know for sure what the results of each choice might be, and at what probability.
If you're not up to that responsibility, then you shouldn't have custody of your kids. Plain and simple.
No one is up to that responsibility. Nothing short of a god could possibly be. But don't let logic get in the way of making grandiose declarations - in the name of the children, of course.
*Father*
Ah yes, that would explain it. There's something about children which seems to turn people's brains off, allowing them to both spout and believe unbelievably stupid statements without recognizing them as such. Must be some kind of hormonal thing.
Re:Net Neutrality: Gov't regulation for the Intern
on
Who Protects the Internet?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I hope you don't support Net Neutrality, because that is the Trojan Horse for government regulation of the Internet.
And the opposition to it is led by those companies who want to be the looters instead. However, as commonly known, the government is inefficient; so it is also inefficient in censoring the Internet. Thus, government control is preferable to corporate control, because it is less likely to be effective.
Cooled to absolute zero, no deterioration would take place.
Cooled to absolute zero would mean that we'd know the velocity of each particle exactly (zero), which in turn would make their place entirely undetermined, which would basically disintegrate the matter they formed.
Furthermore, even ignoring quantum mechanics for a while, cosmic rays would still cause deterioration at any temperature. A cosmic ray hitting a structure will knock the particle it hit loose. Given enough time, the damage accumulates to the point where resumption of metabolism fails.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, in that case the solution is simple: just repeal all the laws, since they are immoral anyway - after all, it is immoral for you to enforce your will on me, so it can't be moral for the collective either - and let all the libertarians have the heaven on Earth they crave, also known as Somalia.
Or would it be more effective to simply ship all of you there ? Then again, Somalis already have enough problems...
One might argue that the very existence of a stock market is already robbing me of something, since the limited liability corporations traded there typically make their profit by using that limited liability in ways that would send anyone not shielded by it to the electric chair post-haste. In fact one might argue that this whole financial crisis, which is affecting me too, was caused by letting some cretins get the benefits of an organized society while trying to avoid any responsibility and justifying this by crying: "Taxation is thievery! BAAWWW!!!".
Really. What kind of true believer does it take to keep on parroting that line even as the latest achievement of deregulation hasn't even reached it's terminal velocity on its fall straight to Hell yet ?
I find it especially ironic that you are preaching your message of the evils of taxation on the Internet, which was built with tax money and is an earth-shattering success by almost any metric.
Which is a good reason to oppose globalization. In a world where every economic system is tied to every other, any problem anywhere will cause cascade effects everywhere.
Actually, couldn't you just spread a rumour that you're going to the temple to retrieve the artefact, thus luring the evil overlord to the death zone while you're busy drinking and laughing it up at the inn ? If you want to be really clever, you could even have the party's rogue follow him, to learn of any secret route he might know.
Put all your points to Bluff, and you'll never need to lift a finger.
People who are given billions in government bailouts when their latest stupid scheme goes to Hell, so they can get some bonuses for work well done, while their employees are laid off and die from easily treatable illnesses due to not being able to afford medical insurance. This is known as Free Market Capitalism, and is the core of tenet of the economic religions known as Libertarianism and Objectivism.
Or, alternatively, someone who's managed to get enough money (capital) to qualify as part of modern aristocracy, and wants the government to get out of his way so he can freely use his superior resources to oppress his less fortunate fellow men for fun and profit. This evil practice is made to seem noble and good by appealing to the above-mentioned philosophies, a process known as "turd polishing".
Either way, they tend to be every bit as despicable assholes as politicians, and for the exact same reasons.
Sure you can. The key here is to understand that the lower level the input code is, the harder it is for the compiler (JIT or otherwise) to separate platform-specific details and optimizations from description of algorithm. In other words, it is more difficult to compile efficient native code from some other (real) platforms assembly than from Java bytecode. And the more different that source platform is from the target one, the more difficult this becomes.
Compilation typically loses information, and the more information a compiler has available, the better job it can do. However, even some emulators nowadays include JIT compilers, since even sub-optimal native code is faster than running every instructor through a parser as it's executed by the emulator.
Modern x86-compatible processors are actually emulating the instruction set on processor-specific microcode. They could thus be considered x86 machine code emulators :).
Seeing how JIT-compilation means that the code is compiled to native code just before being executed, this is clearly rubbish. JIT-compilation results in native code, just like any other compilation; the program is simply stored in some intermediate form (bytecode) rather than in the final compiled form.
Yes, this is true. Emulation is horrible for performance. This whole idea is ludicrous.
Ah, that explains it then. Cruise missiles and other long-range delivery methods are easy and cheap to obtain, while a GPS navigator is the nigh-legendary top-secret techical marvel only rumoured to exist...
GPS + terrorists = terrorists who can locate themselves.
Most countries don't have the capability of detecting bombs taped into the bottom of a random car, set up to go off during rush hour.
Yeah. And with a GPS-enabled phone, all they are lacking is the flying bomb.
I truly hope you are trolling. Otherwise I'm starting to get a bit scared, and not of terrorists. Maybe we should start a war on stupidity next ?
As malloc is not required to clear the memory it returns, it not doing so does not make it buggy. If it was calloc, then yes, it would be buggy; but for malloc, the only requirement is that the returned memory chunk has the size given to malloc.
And no, there is no point in the comparison. The code is buggy, as it relies on undocumented (and unlikely) assumptions about how malloc works.
But we're still using C, and enjoying all the "clever" hacks l33t c0d3rs come up with to avoid writing a few lines of code :(.
Luckily this is easy to work around: simply have Canadian webmasters compose an archive of free Canadian content, have everyone who puts up a website get it via a torrent, put it into a subdirectory somewhere in their website, and link to it from the main page with "Canadian content mandated by law" as a link text. If you agree on some standard CSS class to use with the link (such as "a:stupid_law_link"), the more knowledgeable users can even filter the link out automatically with a custom CSS style sheet.
That's the nice thing about the Web over radio: since it's pull technology, mandatory content doesn't need to interfere with the actual one. It just sits there and takes up some hard disk space.
And of course the hosting services could put the archive into a read-only (to the client) device, allowing hosted websites to link it in without needing to waste space storing it over and over.
Shouldn't you be filling man with data at some point ? I mean, with this design, there's no guarantee that it won't simply allocate/free the same memory block at each iteration, making no changes to the contents, leading to an infinite loop.
It's espionage. It has nothing to do with "cyber" anything, unless the spying was done through the Internet, in which case whatever laserbrain connected a machine containing top sekreet data to a global network should get demoted to sufficiently low position that he can't cause any more harm. And it isn't any kind of war, since there doesn't seem to be any fighting involved.
Yes, well, in that case I hope whatever was stolen is going to be helpful to China, India or whoever got it. The US sat on its ass for 40 years after the Moon missions, and Europe isn't really any better; I'd rather that someone builds an empire in the sky than no one. It would be nice if it was an allied country, but failing that, I'll root for the humanity.
Undersexed. Those teenagers talk a lot but never seem to get down to action, despite constantly running into each other naked. That's not very believable, IMHO.
You might avoid reading Negima there openly, thought.
Which is more than what us animated ones can say, apparently.
No, it's dependent on whether a judge happens to find it offensive or not.
But really, what did you expect, in a penal colony run by the exiled prisoners ? Especially when you remember that these were the people even Great "'voluntary' censorship of Wikipedia pages" Britain wanted to get rid of.
Actually, such forcible action usually happens when those who have land or other resource refuse to pay for the maintenance of the social or other infrastructure which allows them to own it ("taxation is thievery"), and start instead claiming their ownership is a God-given right everyone must respect above all because only a communist wouldn't. In other words, it's a reaction to libertarianism, a bit like fever, swelling and pain are reactions to an infection.
Anyway, to get back to topic, giving everyone some land to play with might help getting more users. It doesn't require removing any from existing users, though, because land is not a finite resource in a virtual world. However, storage space for objects is, so you'd need to limit free accounts on the number of objects they can create, and some way to keep some jackass from creating an endless stream of new accounts for de facto unlimited storage.
If you think about it for a moment, SL (and virtual worlds in general) is a video-phone type software. Oh sure, it will probably go belly-up eventually, just like early attempts at something usually do; but it still pays to experiment with virtual worlds now that they're still in their infancy. It's better to get your beginner mistakes done with when there's still relatively few people watching, and you can blame it on flaky technology ;).
Virtual worlds, from Worlds of Warcraft to Habbo Hotel, are a rising trend. We humans are a social species and as such find talking to people rewarding. Slashdot itself is a testament to that: the articles are simply an excuse to get the discussion started. Virtual worlds are chat clients with more or less chrome and shiny bits bolted on; of course they are popular. And those shiny bits make it possible to appeal to other human drives too, such as desire for sex (SL) or power (WoW), so they are going to get ever more popular.
The only things missing is a general, open protocol allowing multiple compatible clients, and a decentralized (P2P) server, which can be ran without big bucks. Once those bits are filled in, we'll get a cyberspace.
Sex is actually bloody difficult to simulate well or even adequately. It usually involves two or more bodies in close contact, which means that you need collision detection and deformations for two soft bodies with complex internal structure. This is, of course, completely ignoring the need for controls which would be both useful and powerful or simulating unconscious reactions. Oh, and the end result would need to have sufficient visual quality to be closer to interactive porn than a puppet show.
In fact it's so bloody difficult I've never seen it done in an interactive manner. Adult games typically use either pre-recorded cutscenes, which may or may not allow you to change the tempo, and then lets you change between them. Now that I think of it, it's really a very interesting problem...
Here's one.
How about fixing the bugs in Firefox 3 instead ? I'm not going to move to FF3 until this is fixed. Attempts to force the issue will, at most, result in me moving into another browser entirely.
Really, if you are having such problems moving your users to a new version, maybe it might be a sign that the new version sucks.
No you don't. Higher-level languages typically catch and represent errors in a manner relevant to that higher-level code. Even with C, you'll likely end up using a debugger which shows things in terms of C code (variables with their names etc). The only time you'd want to examine the assembly the compiler spat out is when you suspect there's an error in the compiler itself. Besides, even if you do find the error from the assembly code, what are you going to do ? Fix it by hand after every recompile ?
Besides, my preferred method of debugging is sprinkle the code with the equivalent of "print 'got here'" statements - Real Men don't use debuggers, they debug by reading their code and thinking about it ;). Which is a skill you'll need to learn anyway to debug synchronization problems in multithreaded code.
So basically it is outsourced evil.
How the Hell is "voluntary" censorship any better than mandatory ? If anything, it's worse, since with "voluntary" censorship the Government can counter all complaints by claiming that it is not forcing anyone to censor anything. Besides, "voluntary" censorship will likely be tighter than mandatory because an industry body cannot lose votes by censoring too much - there is no competition, after all - while political party can.
Just look at Comics Code to know how bad "self-regulating industry boards" can get. And it isn't comic books at stake this time.
I think it's quite obvious by now that Johnny English will bend over quietly whenever told to. Only a terrorist child molester wouldn't.
But then that could be used as evidence against him as well. After all, he went to the record store to view an image of a naked child. While the act was innocent, the intent was criminal, a thought crime. A non-paedophile wouldn't be guilty of anything looking at the album cover, but a paedophile would, just like a paedophile passing a park would clearly be there to peek on kids instead of just passing by, and a paedophile living near a school would only do so to have easy access to kids rather than because residential areas usually have schools built next to them. Oh, and any use of cryptography, such as Tor, is because he is trying to hide he's looking at child porn.
It kinda reminds me of a trial in a movie version of Ivanhoe I once saw. A woman was accused of witchcraft, and her accuser told the court how she had killed a dog and eaten pieces of it raw. The judge then asked if the accuser meant the entirely healthy dog which was sniffing around in the courtroom, to which the accuser answered that the witch had healed it with her magic powers, thus further proving that she was a witch.
If someone accuses you of being a paedophile, everything you do can be used as evidence of not only that but also of your intent to molest kids. It's just a modern-day witch hunt. Give it a few decades and the howling mob will go after the next target, just like they switched from hunting witches to communists to paedophiles. Not that it'll do any good to their victims, of course; but such is life, and a howling mob of self-righteous vigilantes on a witch hunt is really not all that different from child molesters: they take their enjoyment from whom they will, and the victim can go to hell for all they care.
It is depressing that we haven't gotten any better since the Dark Ages, but that too is life, I guess.
Unless you happen to be a medical expert of sufficient calibre to run the experiments yourself, you rely on others to supply you accurate knowledge about the subject. Unless you are an expert in every subject, there are bound to be potential decisions regarding the welfare of your child where you have little choice but to go off half-cocked, since you simply have no way to know for sure what the results of each choice might be, and at what probability.
No one is up to that responsibility. Nothing short of a god could possibly be. But don't let logic get in the way of making grandiose declarations - in the name of the children, of course.
Ah yes, that would explain it. There's something about children which seems to turn people's brains off, allowing them to both spout and believe unbelievably stupid statements without recognizing them as such. Must be some kind of hormonal thing.
And the opposition to it is led by those companies who want to be the looters instead. However, as commonly known, the government is inefficient; so it is also inefficient in censoring the Internet. Thus, government control is preferable to corporate control, because it is less likely to be effective.
Cooled to absolute zero would mean that we'd know the velocity of each particle exactly (zero), which in turn would make their place entirely undetermined, which would basically disintegrate the matter they formed.
Furthermore, even ignoring quantum mechanics for a while, cosmic rays would still cause deterioration at any temperature. A cosmic ray hitting a structure will knock the particle it hit loose. Given enough time, the damage accumulates to the point where resumption of metabolism fails.
Slashdot is a discussion forum and has nothing to do with either journalism or "journalism".