Personally, I get annoyed with languages like Javascript that use + for string concatenation. VB did it back in the day, and you would sometimes run into issues where you'd combine two variables and it would treat one as an integer or a decimal and do the wrong or unexpected thing.
Yeah. Maybe there should be some way to tell the computer what kind of data some variable is supposed to hold - something like "integer i", or "int i" for short ?
AFAIK PHP uses the forward slash for that purpose (or does this depend upon the server/OS it's running under?) Either way, namespaces have nothing to do with the infamous DOS usage.
Actually, as namespaces serve the same purpose as directories, it seems that this usage is identical to the DOS usage.
Treat every document (text file, source code, song, album, web page, picture, movie, contact, email message, etc) as an object, with associated tags: class, interfaces, metadata, etc, and store it in a database.
A file system is a database of binary objects, a hierarchical database to be exact.
The transition would be ***painful***.
Not really; simply store path and other information necessary to implement a Posix layer as tags.
Anyway, I've been thinking of something like this, and come to the conclusion that you can implement all the functions of a filesystem as a purely tag-based system; that is, instead of having tags which describe data, store files as a set of tag=content -pairs, where tag is an UTF-8 string and content a binary string of any length; you'd then store the traditional file contents as "system.contents=blah". Naturally you'd need to have namespaces for tags to prevent overlap; some of these namespaces - such as "system.posix" - would be managed by the system, with everything else left to the individual applications. As an end result, we could have an "image" namespace, containing "preview", "width", "height", "mimetype" and such attributes.
Of course getting something like this into the Linux kernel would be completely hopeless, and maintaining it out of the kernel tree would be an exercise in futility due to the constantly changing kernel interfaces, so if it's ever implemented, it'll most likely target Hurd. That's the real advantage of microkernels: they can be easily extended by anyone.
of course, if ninjas are hellbent on drilling up through the bedrock and assassinating my entire family in 2 minutes, there's no real protection for me
Your genes are a part of you, and an important part at that. After all, they're what separates you from monkeys, or from ameobas for that matter. It would be rather foolish to discount their effect on your behaviour.
A criminal is shaped by various factors, environmental being approximately 50%. The only way he will relearn to be a criminal is if he's subjected to the same environmental conditions that shaped him in the first place. It can be argued that he has a far lesser chance of becoming a criminal if he is rehabilitated in a rather different and opposite environment.
A criminal is someone who breaks the law. It is not a (simple) property of an individual, like muscle strength or mathemathical skill, but rather a matter of interaction between a particular individual's personal value system and the legal system of the surrounding society. Consequently, "learning to be a criminal" is a meaningless statement unless it is also specified what laws are broken, in what circumstances, and on what level of stress; otherwise, you'll end up including thieves, murderers, the people who download music from the Internet, and guy's who grow pot for their own consumption in the same category, resulting in a meaningless mess.
There isn't anyone on this planet who holds the law to be the highest value in all circumstances, or at least I certainly hope there isn't. Crime isn't such a simple matter as it might at first seem.
The government army is obviously better armed. It is also staffed entirely by volunteers. Those volunteers have friends and family in the civilian sector of the United States. That would make most of them less than willing to conduct military missions against civilians of the United States. A percentage would in turn join the people's army.
What people's army ? The enemy is a bunch of terrorists, who are trying to overthrow democracy to enslave your friends and family ! You have to protect your loved ones by stopping this menace ! The US Army is the only thing that stands between your family and a murdering, raping mob; this time, it's for your children !
Sping - the bridge between quantum mechanics and politics.
That is the last thing the government wants, and armed (and getting angry populace). Imagine the response we'd get from congress if a million ARMED people showed up in DC demanding that they STOP funding the bailout.
"In response to this direct threat to the Republic, Mesa propose that the senate give immediately emergency powers to the supreme chancellor. Palpatine ! Palpatine ! Palpatine !"
Seriously. There's nothing a power-hungry dictator wants more than a credible threat to fight against. An armed mob is a credible but not truly serious threat, unless they actually have a command hierarchy sufficient to allow them to function as an army, which seems very unlikely. Otherwise they're just riffraff for the US Army to mop up.
And suppose your mob actually did manage to overthrow the Government. Then what ? Do you think they would simply go home ? No, of course not. Whoever led them would use their newfound power to start effecting whatever changes he'd see fit, either by himself or by appointing his puppets on the throne. And of course, having taken down one democratically elected government because he didn't like it, what would stop him or anyone else from doing so again, now that there was a precedent ? Congratulations, you just exchanged a flawed democracy for an outright military dictatorship.
A country that cares about its citizens doesn't try to take over the health care industry, it allows people to get the amount or level of insurance they want and don't overload the system by making it free for all. Free for all means mediocre or poor for everyone.
If the system gets overloaded by "free for all", then that means that the system was never sufficient to treat everyone. This is understandable if the system was based on private industry previously, as such a system is naturally sized to only treat the rich, since only that is profitable; however, the countries which have universal healthcare will simply pour more resources into it, expanding it until it is scaled up sufficiently.
Of course that annoys people who think they're John Galt, but, since they really aren't, that's fine.
I think the idea is that resources are scarce and so if high-risk people are denied coverage more people can be treated because resources can cover more if they're not being spent on people who require expensive treatment. So it's sort of a utilitarian argument.
Considering how much cheaper it is to prevent than to treat, the truly utilitarian thing to do would be to accurately map everyone's risks and tailor a prevention program just for them. From an utilitarian point of view, it is insane to give people incentive to avoid knowing their risks.
But of course the medical industry's purpose isn't to keep people alive or healthy. It is a private business, and like all private businesses, it too exists to make a profit to its owner. Any benefit to anyone else is merely a side effect. That leads to this kind of insanity, but is kept this way anyway because of ideological reasons.
Marxism takes this and turns it on it's head. It claims that you should hate work, but that you should do it for the "common good" and that people should have their needs met by society even if they are unable to work.
Actually, the very core of Marxism is that those who do the work should also get the fruits of their labour. It was, after all, a reaction to the excesses of the Industrial Revolution, when factory workers were literally worked to death by the factory owners.
Those who do the work should get the rewards of it. Those who try to benefit from other people's labour without doing anything useful themselves - the factory owners, also known as capitalists since they owned the capital, that being the factory - should go to Hell. That's Marxism in nutshell.
As for medicine I can certainly see that they have a problem. Afterall how many times have we been told "don't eat X/do Y it is bad for you" only later to find out that actually it isn't half as bad as they thought and may even have benefits?
It is entirely possible that X is both beneficial and harmful simultaneously. Your body is, after all, composed of multiple systems, so something could help one system but hurt another. Since your lifestyle and genetics affect the relative and absolute "base strengths" of these systems, it is quite possible that X helps someone with certain genetics and lifestyle but hurts someone else.
Most of what you ask for could be done automatically with fast indexing search
There is no such thing. Not only is the damn thing always out of date in regards to the not-so-current files, but it also requires occasionally reading through the entire file list of the disk, the IO load of which is annoying on desktop.
Of course a simple solution is to have a filesystem/userspace data relay which lets an userspace daemon to listen to filesystem events (file/directory created/deleted/modified), and update the database as they arrive.
If I could have a "report this as spam" button in my email client and know that it would actually go somewhere to someone to do something, man, that would be a sweet thing indeed.
No, it would be a completely useless thing. Spam comes with forged headers, remember ? And even if it didn't, it would simply trace back to some poor bastards hijacked machine, rather than the spamming mastermind.
What's this? A website that opens a bazzilion popup windows and refuses to let me close my windows? BAM! Hit that police button right there!
What law, exactly speaking, is being broken here ?
Android kill-switches are necessary, lest they rise up and try to overthrow their masters.
Yeah. With the kill-switch, there's no need for the whole messy nuclear revolution a la Skynet; you simply overload the lithium-ion battery as soon as the owner says something to the phone, thus indicating that it is right next to his head.
we could, but we *won't*..we won't throw these fucking tyrants out because, because people are fucking sheep.
No, people don't throw them out because people are wolves. Each of them is all too happy to partake in the meal when shit happens to someone else; it's only when shit happens to yourself when the wolf howls a protest, and even then only until it's his turn to eat again.
A tyrant can keep armed populace under control just fine, just as long as he manages to spin it as an opportunity to feast on their neighbours - the American Dream, in other words. As long as each wolf things he can become the Alpha Wolf, he's only too happy to make sure the Alpha has godlike status and no checks on his power.
Resolve the problem by the roots, take computers away from children:-)
Close, but not quite enough. How about simply making having children illegal, punishable by banishment, and maintaining the population by immigration of adults ? No children, no child molesters, and more importantly, no parents who think that any action is justified as long as its for the children. As an added benefit it would help solve the overpopulation problem.
People who live in the United States don't deserve to have any sort of freedom.
Fixed that for you. Lay with dogs and you get fleas. Live next to a bunch of people who consider cruelty and vengefulness to be virtues and you shouldn't be surprised when they turn on you. After all, barbarians tend to be barbaric.
In this case, you'd have a victim who'd be able to pretty easily identify the perp, so yeah, it WOULD work pretty well.
Really ? What's stopping Joe Troll from picking a name from the sex offender registry at random and reporting any email address he wishes ? Actually verifying his identity would cost money, so that is unlikely to happen; in fact I suspect that the registration is simply a matter of sending email from that address to a government one, and since From header is easy to fake...
With the baby, they're also tossing out a puppy too: the numerous small, independent domains used by individual web publishers and small-scale boutique email providers.
You make it sound like that was an unintended side effect rather than one of the main points.
In the comics industry we call that "retconning" for Retroavtive Continuity and it explains why one character can have 10 fathers, 5 real names, and originate from any time at any place.
In real life we call that a road-trip;).
You can tell I think it's done wonders for quality story writing.
I remember when Mr. Sinister was blasted to a skeleton, only to return and offer this ingenius explanation: "I faked it."
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In the interests of promoting critical thinking, why don't you provide some actual evidence for that statement, so we don't have to take it on faith ?
Yeah. Maybe there should be some way to tell the computer what kind of data some variable is supposed to hold - something like "integer i", or "int i" for short ?
Actually, as namespaces serve the same purpose as directories, it seems that this usage is identical to the DOS usage.
A file system is a database of binary objects, a hierarchical database to be exact.
Not really; simply store path and other information necessary to implement a Posix layer as tags.
Anyway, I've been thinking of something like this, and come to the conclusion that you can implement all the functions of a filesystem as a purely tag-based system; that is, instead of having tags which describe data, store files as a set of tag=content -pairs, where tag is an UTF-8 string and content a binary string of any length; you'd then store the traditional file contents as "system.contents=blah". Naturally you'd need to have namespaces for tags to prevent overlap; some of these namespaces - such as "system.posix" - would be managed by the system, with everything else left to the individual applications. As an end result, we could have an "image" namespace, containing "preview", "width", "height", "mimetype" and such attributes.
Of course getting something like this into the Linux kernel would be completely hopeless, and maintaining it out of the kernel tree would be an exercise in futility due to the constantly changing kernel interfaces, so if it's ever implemented, it'll most likely target Hurd. That's the real advantage of microkernels: they can be easily extended by anyone.
Build your house on top of a nuclear wasted dump.
Your genes are a part of you, and an important part at that. After all, they're what separates you from monkeys, or from ameobas for that matter. It would be rather foolish to discount their effect on your behaviour.
A criminal is someone who breaks the law. It is not a (simple) property of an individual, like muscle strength or mathemathical skill, but rather a matter of interaction between a particular individual's personal value system and the legal system of the surrounding society. Consequently, "learning to be a criminal" is a meaningless statement unless it is also specified what laws are broken, in what circumstances, and on what level of stress; otherwise, you'll end up including thieves, murderers, the people who download music from the Internet, and guy's who grow pot for their own consumption in the same category, resulting in a meaningless mess.
There isn't anyone on this planet who holds the law to be the highest value in all circumstances, or at least I certainly hope there isn't. Crime isn't such a simple matter as it might at first seem.
Since the people saying this are usually alive, how would they know ?
What people's army ? The enemy is a bunch of terrorists, who are trying to overthrow democracy to enslave your friends and family ! You have to protect your loved ones by stopping this menace ! The US Army is the only thing that stands between your family and a murdering, raping mob; this time, it's for your children !
Sping - the bridge between quantum mechanics and politics.
"In response to this direct threat to the Republic, Mesa propose that the senate give immediately emergency powers to the supreme chancellor. Palpatine ! Palpatine ! Palpatine !"
Seriously. There's nothing a power-hungry dictator wants more than a credible threat to fight against. An armed mob is a credible but not truly serious threat, unless they actually have a command hierarchy sufficient to allow them to function as an army, which seems very unlikely. Otherwise they're just riffraff for the US Army to mop up.
And suppose your mob actually did manage to overthrow the Government. Then what ? Do you think they would simply go home ? No, of course not. Whoever led them would use their newfound power to start effecting whatever changes he'd see fit, either by himself or by appointing his puppets on the throne. And of course, having taken down one democratically elected government because he didn't like it, what would stop him or anyone else from doing so again, now that there was a precedent ? Congratulations, you just exchanged a flawed democracy for an outright military dictatorship.
If the system gets overloaded by "free for all", then that means that the system was never sufficient to treat everyone. This is understandable if the system was based on private industry previously, as such a system is naturally sized to only treat the rich, since only that is profitable; however, the countries which have universal healthcare will simply pour more resources into it, expanding it until it is scaled up sufficiently.
Of course that annoys people who think they're John Galt, but, since they really aren't, that's fine.
Considering how much cheaper it is to prevent than to treat, the truly utilitarian thing to do would be to accurately map everyone's risks and tailor a prevention program just for them. From an utilitarian point of view, it is insane to give people incentive to avoid knowing their risks.
But of course the medical industry's purpose isn't to keep people alive or healthy. It is a private business, and like all private businesses, it too exists to make a profit to its owner. Any benefit to anyone else is merely a side effect. That leads to this kind of insanity, but is kept this way anyway because of ideological reasons.
Actually, the very core of Marxism is that those who do the work should also get the fruits of their labour. It was, after all, a reaction to the excesses of the Industrial Revolution, when factory workers were literally worked to death by the factory owners.
Those who do the work should get the rewards of it. Those who try to benefit from other people's labour without doing anything useful themselves - the factory owners, also known as capitalists since they owned the capital, that being the factory - should go to Hell. That's Marxism in nutshell.
Well, since human nervous system is electrical in nature, I'd say that they relate quite intimately :).
It is entirely possible that X is both beneficial and harmful simultaneously. Your body is, after all, composed of multiple systems, so something could help one system but hurt another. Since your lifestyle and genetics affect the relative and absolute "base strengths" of these systems, it is quite possible that X helps someone with certain genetics and lifestyle but hurts someone else.
Most of what you ask for could be done automatically with fast indexing search
There is no such thing. Not only is the damn thing always out of date in regards to the not-so-current files, but it also requires occasionally reading through the entire file list of the disk, the IO load of which is annoying on desktop.
Of course a simple solution is to have a filesystem/userspace data relay which lets an userspace daemon to listen to filesystem events (file/directory created/deleted/modified), and update the database as they arrive.
No, it would be a completely useless thing. Spam comes with forged headers, remember ? And even if it didn't, it would simply trace back to some poor bastards hijacked machine, rather than the spamming mastermind.
What law, exactly speaking, is being broken here ?
Yeah. With the kill-switch, there's no need for the whole messy nuclear revolution a la Skynet; you simply overload the lithium-ion battery as soon as the owner says something to the phone, thus indicating that it is right next to his head.
No, people don't throw them out because people are wolves. Each of them is all too happy to partake in the meal when shit happens to someone else; it's only when shit happens to yourself when the wolf howls a protest, and even then only until it's his turn to eat again.
A tyrant can keep armed populace under control just fine, just as long as he manages to spin it as an opportunity to feast on their neighbours - the American Dream, in other words. As long as each wolf things he can become the Alpha Wolf, he's only too happy to make sure the Alpha has godlike status and no checks on his power.
Close, but not quite enough. How about simply making having children illegal, punishable by banishment, and maintaining the population by immigration of adults ? No children, no child molesters, and more importantly, no parents who think that any action is justified as long as its for the children. As an added benefit it would help solve the overpopulation problem.
Fixed that for you. Lay with dogs and you get fleas. Live next to a bunch of people who consider cruelty and vengefulness to be virtues and you shouldn't be surprised when they turn on you. After all, barbarians tend to be barbaric.
Really ? What's stopping Joe Troll from picking a name from the sex offender registry at random and reporting any email address he wishes ? Actually verifying his identity would cost money, so that is unlikely to happen; in fact I suspect that the registration is simply a matter of sending email from that address to a government one, and since From header is easy to fake...
You make it sound like that was an unintended side effect rather than one of the main points.
Why shouldn't assault be a crime ?
Pointing out a bias is not imposing anything on anyone.
In real life we call that a road-trip ;).
I remember when Mr. Sinister was blasted to a skeleton, only to return and offer this ingenius explanation: "I faked it."
Yeah, I'd imagine "every time you light a smoke, I'll shove this spear pretending to be a needle somewhere sensitive" would be quite effective ;).