Wouldn't it be wiser to spend that effort working on a project that makes C# more open source friendly, rather than simply rewriting any/all projects that use it?
Unfortunately if you are using one of the dozens of 32 bit processor architectures out there which are not x86, Power, ARM, or MIPS, then you are likely using a non-mainstream compiler.
That's okay. The differences between endianess, width of various data types, etc etc. would get you anyway if you try to simply reuse nontrivial x86 C/C++ code non-trivial on other architechtures.
C and C++ are too low-level to be easily portable. That's the price of doing things close to hardware, besides undefined behavior if you make any mistakes of course.
Yet it somehow manages to miss having seats, a steering wheel, or the ability to go anywhere in time other than that embarrassing moment when you first tried to kiss Suzzy Sue and instead managed to throw up on her.
For some of us that would count as the high point of our love life, you insensitive clod !
I think MS screwed up by launching vista so soon before the hardware was really ready for it. Many people may say it does nothing to improve computing, but I just think its a little before its time... (probably a first for MS anyway.)
That's not the worst problem, actually. What is the worst problem is that they released Vista before it's emulation layer was complete; that is, before it could run old programs reliably. They tend to crash on Vista no matter what compatibility options are used.
And of course there's the constant barrage of notifications the OS bothers the user with about cleaning the desktop or such nonsense, but that's normal for Windows.
All that's good for is filling balloons at the fairground.
I disagree. This plant would be based on ground level. Since helium is lighter than air, and thus rises up, helium at ground level has potential energy, just like a rock at the altitude of 1000 meters would have (to be exact, it's the air the helium displaced upwards that has potential energy).
You could simply release helium under a container roof with a chimney. Being lighter than air, helium would rise upwards, and all you'd need to extract power would be a turbine in the chimney.
I'm voting Libertarian when I can and then voting against the incumbent - regardless of what party he belongs to. We need term limits in Congress.
There ought to be a law about it !
But seriously, isn't the current monopolization of power only the natural result of the Free Market the Libertarians so love applied to politics ? Surely more regulation can't be the answer when it helps the Libertarians if it isn't that at other times ?
Unfortunately, the reality is that compilers outside of the mainstream ones like Visual C++ or GCC have only reached the level of support required for much of the wizardry in Boost relatively recently. If you're working on portable code and your project is more than a couple of years old, you are unlikely to have been able to use Boost when you started it.
It is always risky using a non-mainstream compiler for a low-level language like C or C++. The advantage of such languages is that you get good control over details of program execution (such as memory management), but that also means that you have to take said details into account, and that in turn means that any differences between compilers are going to cause problems rather than be invisible implementation details.
C is a bunch of macros over assembler. C++ is a bunch of macros over C. That's not flamebait, it's their whole point and the very reason they're still being used - well, the rational reason; but sadly, I've seen comments to the effect of "real men manage their own memory" offered as reasons to use low-level languages in things they're ill-suited to, such as network-facing servers/clients.
The next stage is to flood the internet with random data. It is not encrypted but they will not be able to tell the difference without expending considerable effort. They will then have to introduce a law forbidding the transfer of data which appears to be encrypted.
Nah. They simply make it a finable, not jailable, offense to not provide decryption keys on request. Then your civil disobedience campaign simply turns into a revenue generator.
Okay, that vehicle you're in control of is several tonnes of mass,
1300 kg maximum total mass, actually. Which is a pretty good incentive to drive carefully. Maybe the punishment for speeding should be to be only allowed to drive a car made of cardboard ?-)
Myopia is not a survival benefit, but since the invention of spectacles it has risen to be so common that good vision is considered somewhat rare. Perhaps it is our society that has led this to occur, and not a possible survival benefit.
More likely, with spectacles cheaper relative to average income than in the past, and reading so extremely important in today's society compared to pre-industrial agrarian one, people simply don't put up with the level of myopia they did in the past instead of getting spectacles.
When I read it, I figured that was his point - that the intersection (the part that contains people meeting both criteria) contained the VAST majority of the set called "Flat Earthers", such that the Flat Earthers were all but a subset of the Creationists. In other words, he was saying that the intersection of the creationists and the Flat Earthers may not equal the union of the same two groups, but it comes pretty close.
In order for the union and intersection of groups A and B be same, A and B need to be the same group. It isn't sufficient for nearly all flatters to be creationists, but nearly all creationists must be flatters as well.
Does anyone have any statistical data about the prevalence of Flat Earth hypothesis amongst creationists ?
Why waste your time playing a game that isn't worth your money?
Better yet: why waste your time on a game that isn't worth it ? Indeed, dear Game Developer, you shouldn't be worried about piracy, you should be worried about me who no longer bothers even pirating.
Hold pirates like precious and fragile flowers in your hand, because their lukewarm interest is the last dying ember between you and the chill of oblivion. It's been a while since any game has captured my interest enough to pirate, much less buy; and your development costs can only ever rise, thanks to the advancing state of the art 3D graphics you use to sell the same crap again and again.
Seriously, I knew it was all over when I heard they're making Fallout 3 and my first thought was: "I wonder how they will fuck this up ? Oh yeah, they'll remove drugs, sex and a large gaming area but make up by adding photorealistic 3D gore to make it suitable for children."
Not intended as a troll or flamebait; that was my honest first thought. Game industry plays it safe, has to play it safe since it takes tens of millions of dollars to make a game in the age of 3D; but that also makes sure that the final product is as exiting as a McDonald's hamburger. It simply isn't worth the money they're asking for it; and frankly, it's gotten to the point where it isn't worth anything, not even to pick it up for free. Not that the game industry should be blamed; just remember the Hot Coffee fiasco.
Basically, I guess I'm trying to say that it just isn't fun playing any more. Small games aren't worth the bother of pirating or buying, and large games are megalomaniacal slaughterfests. Doom's done already, come up with something new. Hell, it should say something that the most fun I've had with a game for a while was with X-Change 3 - which is a "choose your own adventure" porn slideshow, for crying out loud - just because the utterly ludicrous scenario caused the "let's see what happens next" reaction.
Libertarians oppose the power corporations wield. Many corporations got their power by monopoly and Libertarians oppose monopolies.
Corporate power derives mainly from the sheer amount of resources even a small corporation controls in relation to individuals. An organization of two or more people is inherently more powerful than a single individual (on average). As the size of the organization goes up, the power divide becomes orders of magnitude.
Since corporations are inherently more powerful than individuals, and utterly amoral on top of that, they need to be kept in tight leash. Libertarian campaign of anti-government would remove this leash, at which point there would be nothing to stop them from abusing their power at will. Dissolving monopolies wouldn't help at all, since by the time a corporation is in a position to abuse even a local monopoly, it is already beyond ordinary people's ability to defend against.
Corporations also offer stockholders limited liability, and Libertarians would end that thus making stockholders liable for actions the corporations take.
While this sound fine on the surface, it would make investing an unacceptably high risk activity for anyone who can't watch the company full-time. This, of course, means anyone who works for a living, as opposed to having enough capital to support themselves through investing alone. In other words, it would make the problem worse.
It's Democrats, and others, who spread such lies that Libertarians would allow corporations to get away with whatever they want.
The core libertarian principle of removing government control would allow powerful entities to get away with whatever they want, because with government power gone, who's going to stop them ? This may or may not be the outcome desired by the average libertarian; however, it is the one that would happen.
Libertarianism would lead to the return of feudalism, which was, after all, rule by those who owned the land and could thus afford to hire armies to enforce their will, since the king was too weak to stop them. It was the growth of central governmental power that ended feudalism; removing that would return us to it. Libertarians don't get voted much because most people realize that in such a system they would be the serfs, so it is contrary to their interests.
I personally live in Canada so what happens in the USA does have a certain effect on me, at least until we can get that idiot Harper out and fine a government with the balls to stand up for itself.
But if you do, you're within easy reach from the US, and you have oil. Just saying.
And i agree, what the woman did was 'wrong' but she didn't hand the girl a gun and force her to do anything.
If this goes thru all we will do is breed a world of sissies who cant deal with having their feelings hurt over every day life. Life isn't fair and people suck, and the sooner people figure that out the happier they will be.
If life isn't fair, then what do you care whether Lori Drew is actually guilty or not ? Execute her to appease the mob and leave the discussion on guilt to philosophers.
What the grown lady did was wrong, but, the death wasn't her fault...who knows what would have pushed this girl to the edge. Words on a screen aren't going to kill a normal person. The girl needed help apparently WAY before this incident.
Getting stung by bees doesn't kill a normal person. If you throw a beehive on someone, and they turn out to be allergic, does that mean that their death is not your fault ?
Having your kneecaps broken doesn't kill a normal person. If you break someone's kneecaps, and they get a fat embolism and die, are you blameless ?
Being knocked unconscious doesn't kill a normal person. If you mug someone and leave them unconscious, and they die from exposure as the temperature suddenly drops, do you have no fault at that ?
Besides, Lori Drew was a neighbour of her victim. I find it very hard to believe that she knew her well enough to know just what buttons to push, but was nonetheless ignorant of her supposed instability. No, this was a deliberate campaign to harm, very likely a deliberate - and succesful - attempt to murder, and should be judged as such.
You could say that about many things in life. eg: How do you define a car? Is an SUV a car? What about a pickup - they're more or less the same size? Is a pickup really a truck? What is a truck anyway? Whats the difference between a house and a mansion?
If any of that has any relevance to a case, then I'd certainly hope that the court either looks up the definition in a dictionary or whatever, or defines it for the purposes of the case, and any future case uses the same definition unless there's a good reason to change it. After all, it's kinda hard to judge a case correctly if you don't even know what, exactly speaking, the case is.
I believe the point of teapot examples is that there are an infinite number of improvable supernatural claims, so the the probability that any one is the "right" one is 1/infinity.
Nitpick: improvable conflicting supernatural claims. Furthermore, this claim assumes that all are equally probable/improbable, which is likely unprovable in itself - how do you calculate the odds when you're talking about something which, by definition, is not subject to the laws of nature ?
In fact, to split hairs, something truly supernatural wouldn't be subject to any laws, since a proper view of nature should explain all phenomena, so the existence of, say, ghosts would merely mean that the current set of natural laws are incomplete, prompting the addition of equations describing the interactions of poltergeists with matter to the set;). Taking that view, the only an omnipotent entity would be truly supernatural, because anything that falls short of that has limits by definition, and thus it is possible to derive laws describing it.
I can just see a thesis work for the future: "Poltergeist field effects in accelerating relational frames - by Johnny b. Good and his great-great-grandmother";).
Therefore, the natural, empirical world view is meaningful, while the supernatural view is impossible.
This is incorrect. It is the equivalent of saying that because there are infinite possible choices, of which at most one can be true, it is impossible for any of them to be correct. That's clearly nonsensical; in fact, if nature is fundamentally analogical, then the universe itself is a counterexample, since it has an infinite number of possible states. And of course all this is ignoring the question whether there really is an infinite number of possible different conflicting supernatural beliefs.
I don't know what you mean by "meaningful"; you seem to be implying that supernatural beliefs don't have this quality, while nature does, however most religious systems certainly qualify for the literal interpretation of "meaningful". Did you perhaps mean something in the line of "useful" or "verifiable" ?
Why didn't he take the most basic steps to anonymize himself until he knew just who he was dealing with?
Logically speaking, if both parties take this approach, the relationship never moves beyond one Anonymous Coward messaging another. Which, of course, doesn't make it any less foolish to trust strangers; but if you want to find company over the Internet, you have to.
Seriously, people need to get a clue and exercise an ounce of common sense, rather than whine because they were too foolish to take the most basic precautions when dealing with a complete stranger on Craigslist.
True. However, the troll in question also needs to grow a backbone and take what's coming to him, rather than whine. You can't get your fun by humiliating people and expect to never have to face consequences. He should be thankful that the consequence seems to be legal action, rather than being hunted down and gruesomely killed; the latter is a very real possibility in cases like this.
Ah, but even then it was not perfect. If you recall, the knight was so weak when Indy showed up that he could barely manage more than a single swing of his sword.
Of course, this is the same knight who's apparently not the least bit bothered to wear a chain mail constantly, so it's quite possible that he pretended.
And of course, he must have also been the one to keep all the traps in a working order. There's no way the blade thing wouldn't have gotten rusted and jammed otherwise...
Empirical observations about the universe directly contradict most of the supernatural claims made in most religions. People can't live in whales, for example.
Sure they can, given suitable protection; for example, an omnipotent being intent on seeing them through:). So your statement "People can't live in whales" is only true if one assumes the non-existence of supernatural a priori; as such, it can't be used as a proof of said non-existence, since that would be circular reasoning.
No observation about the universe - the natural world - can ever contradict a claim about supernatural. How could it ? You have only observed that nature works in a certain way when left alone; your observations do absolutely nothing to prove that there isn't anything that can interfere with said functioning.
This is, IMHO, the atheist equivalent of a religious nutcase: someone who makes nonsensical claims to back up their belief, such as "Science has prove that there is no God" - it hasn't, and it never will, because it is logically impossible to prove it - or "I have empirical evidence that contradict the existence of supernatural" - no you don't, you simply have evidence that nothing supernatural was observed at a certain place at a certain time.
Oh well. Likely I get in return stories about teapots orbiting Venus, Flying Spaghetti Monster, Pink Unicorn or some other sign that the point has once again been missed; and the point, of course, is that you can't prove the non-existence of any of those, with the possible exception of teapot (assuming that a teapot you can't interact with wouldn't count as a teapot any more, since you couldn't use it to prepare tea). You don't have evidence that any of those things don't exist; you can believe they don't for whatever reason, but that belief is not based on "empirical observations" but to lack of them.
The US is hardly a federation. Each state is held hostage under threat of arms. In 1860 our southern states tried to opt out and 500,000 died on the battlefield when the US proved by force that states have no right to disassociate at all.
According to Wikipedia, the US Civil War began when Confederate forces attacked a US military installation, rather than when it was created. If so, I'd say that they were asking for it.
And let's not forget that the southern states seceded over slavery. I'd say it's poetic justice to be denied the right of disassociation when your reason to disassociate in the first place is to maintain the ability to deny others such right. Offhand, I can't think of anything that would evoke my sympathy less than a nation of slave holders losing some of their political sovereignty in a war they began over their right to enslave others.
Slashdot Mirror
You should be a politician. The way you make mockery of law is just artful.
Better yet, don't use C#, use Java.
That's okay. The differences between endianess, width of various data types, etc etc. would get you anyway if you try to simply reuse nontrivial x86 C/C++ code non-trivial on other architechtures.
C and C++ are too low-level to be easily portable. That's the price of doing things close to hardware, besides undefined behavior if you make any mistakes of course.
Yup, it's pretty scary I got modded Insightful... Then again, I might have a bridge to sell in New York ;).
For some of us that would count as the high point of our love life, you insensitive clod !
That's not the worst problem, actually. What is the worst problem is that they released Vista before it's emulation layer was complete; that is, before it could run old programs reliably. They tend to crash on Vista no matter what compatibility options are used.
And of course there's the constant barrage of notifications the OS bothers the user with about cleaning the desktop or such nonsense, but that's normal for Windows.
I disagree. This plant would be based on ground level. Since helium is lighter than air, and thus rises up, helium at ground level has potential energy, just like a rock at the altitude of 1000 meters would have (to be exact, it's the air the helium displaced upwards that has potential energy).
You could simply release helium under a container roof with a chimney. Being lighter than air, helium would rise upwards, and all you'd need to extract power would be a turbine in the chimney.
For what ?
There ought to be a law about it !
But seriously, isn't the current monopolization of power only the natural result of the Free Market the Libertarians so love applied to politics ? Surely more regulation can't be the answer when it helps the Libertarians if it isn't that at other times ?
It is always risky using a non-mainstream compiler for a low-level language like C or C++. The advantage of such languages is that you get good control over details of program execution (such as memory management), but that also means that you have to take said details into account, and that in turn means that any differences between compilers are going to cause problems rather than be invisible implementation details.
C is a bunch of macros over assembler. C++ is a bunch of macros over C. That's not flamebait, it's their whole point and the very reason they're still being used - well, the rational reason; but sadly, I've seen comments to the effect of "real men manage their own memory" offered as reasons to use low-level languages in things they're ill-suited to, such as network-facing servers/clients.
Nah. They simply make it a finable, not jailable, offense to not provide decryption keys on request. Then your civil disobedience campaign simply turns into a revenue generator.
I've missed my true calling as a politician >:).
1300 kg maximum total mass, actually. Which is a pretty good incentive to drive carefully. Maybe the punishment for speeding should be to be only allowed to drive a car made of cardboard ?-)
More likely, with spectacles cheaper relative to average income than in the past, and reading so extremely important in today's society compared to pre-industrial agrarian one, people simply don't put up with the level of myopia they did in the past instead of getting spectacles.
In order for the union and intersection of groups A and B be same, A and B need to be the same group. It isn't sufficient for nearly all flatters to be creationists, but nearly all creationists must be flatters as well.
Does anyone have any statistical data about the prevalence of Flat Earth hypothesis amongst creationists ?
Better yet: why waste your time on a game that isn't worth it ? Indeed, dear Game Developer, you shouldn't be worried about piracy, you should be worried about me who no longer bothers even pirating.
Hold pirates like precious and fragile flowers in your hand, because their lukewarm interest is the last dying ember between you and the chill of oblivion. It's been a while since any game has captured my interest enough to pirate, much less buy; and your development costs can only ever rise, thanks to the advancing state of the art 3D graphics you use to sell the same crap again and again.
Seriously, I knew it was all over when I heard they're making Fallout 3 and my first thought was: "I wonder how they will fuck this up ? Oh yeah, they'll remove drugs, sex and a large gaming area but make up by adding photorealistic 3D gore to make it suitable for children."
Not intended as a troll or flamebait; that was my honest first thought. Game industry plays it safe, has to play it safe since it takes tens of millions of dollars to make a game in the age of 3D; but that also makes sure that the final product is as exiting as a McDonald's hamburger. It simply isn't worth the money they're asking for it; and frankly, it's gotten to the point where it isn't worth anything, not even to pick it up for free. Not that the game industry should be blamed; just remember the Hot Coffee fiasco.
Basically, I guess I'm trying to say that it just isn't fun playing any more. Small games aren't worth the bother of pirating or buying, and large games are megalomaniacal slaughterfests. Doom's done already, come up with something new. Hell, it should say something that the most fun I've had with a game for a while was with X-Change 3 - which is a "choose your own adventure" porn slideshow, for crying out loud - just because the utterly ludicrous scenario caused the "let's see what happens next" reaction.
Corporate power derives mainly from the sheer amount of resources even a small corporation controls in relation to individuals. An organization of two or more people is inherently more powerful than a single individual (on average). As the size of the organization goes up, the power divide becomes orders of magnitude.
Since corporations are inherently more powerful than individuals, and utterly amoral on top of that, they need to be kept in tight leash. Libertarian campaign of anti-government would remove this leash, at which point there would be nothing to stop them from abusing their power at will. Dissolving monopolies wouldn't help at all, since by the time a corporation is in a position to abuse even a local monopoly, it is already beyond ordinary people's ability to defend against.
While this sound fine on the surface, it would make investing an unacceptably high risk activity for anyone who can't watch the company full-time. This, of course, means anyone who works for a living, as opposed to having enough capital to support themselves through investing alone. In other words, it would make the problem worse.
The core libertarian principle of removing government control would allow powerful entities to get away with whatever they want, because with government power gone, who's going to stop them ? This may or may not be the outcome desired by the average libertarian; however, it is the one that would happen.
Libertarianism would lead to the return of feudalism, which was, after all, rule by those who owned the land and could thus afford to hire armies to enforce their will, since the king was too weak to stop them. It was the growth of central governmental power that ended feudalism; removing that would return us to it. Libertarians don't get voted much because most people realize that in such a system they would be the serfs, so it is contrary to their interests.
But if you do, you're within easy reach from the US, and you have oil. Just saying.
If life isn't fair, then what do you care whether Lori Drew is actually guilty or not ? Execute her to appease the mob and leave the discussion on guilt to philosophers.
Hey, I feel happier already ;).
Getting stung by bees doesn't kill a normal person. If you throw a beehive on someone, and they turn out to be allergic, does that mean that their death is not your fault ?
Having your kneecaps broken doesn't kill a normal person. If you break someone's kneecaps, and they get a fat embolism and die, are you blameless ?
Being knocked unconscious doesn't kill a normal person. If you mug someone and leave them unconscious, and they die from exposure as the temperature suddenly drops, do you have no fault at that ?
Besides, Lori Drew was a neighbour of her victim. I find it very hard to believe that she knew her well enough to know just what buttons to push, but was nonetheless ignorant of her supposed instability. No, this was a deliberate campaign to harm, very likely a deliberate - and succesful - attempt to murder, and should be judged as such.
If any of that has any relevance to a case, then I'd certainly hope that the court either looks up the definition in a dictionary or whatever, or defines it for the purposes of the case, and any future case uses the same definition unless there's a good reason to change it. After all, it's kinda hard to judge a case correctly if you don't even know what, exactly speaking, the case is.
Nitpick: improvable conflicting supernatural claims. Furthermore, this claim assumes that all are equally probable/improbable, which is likely unprovable in itself - how do you calculate the odds when you're talking about something which, by definition, is not subject to the laws of nature ?
In fact, to split hairs, something truly supernatural wouldn't be subject to any laws, since a proper view of nature should explain all phenomena, so the existence of, say, ghosts would merely mean that the current set of natural laws are incomplete, prompting the addition of equations describing the interactions of poltergeists with matter to the set ;). Taking that view, the only an omnipotent entity would be truly supernatural, because anything that falls short of that has limits by definition, and thus it is possible to derive laws describing it.
I can just see a thesis work for the future: "Poltergeist field effects in accelerating relational frames - by Johnny b. Good and his great-great-grandmother" ;).
This is incorrect. It is the equivalent of saying that because there are infinite possible choices, of which at most one can be true, it is impossible for any of them to be correct. That's clearly nonsensical; in fact, if nature is fundamentally analogical, then the universe itself is a counterexample, since it has an infinite number of possible states. And of course all this is ignoring the question whether there really is an infinite number of possible different conflicting supernatural beliefs.
I don't know what you mean by "meaningful"; you seem to be implying that supernatural beliefs don't have this quality, while nature does, however most religious systems certainly qualify for the literal interpretation of "meaningful". Did you perhaps mean something in the line of "useful" or "verifiable" ?
Logically speaking, if both parties take this approach, the relationship never moves beyond one Anonymous Coward messaging another. Which, of course, doesn't make it any less foolish to trust strangers; but if you want to find company over the Internet, you have to.
True. However, the troll in question also needs to grow a backbone and take what's coming to him, rather than whine. You can't get your fun by humiliating people and expect to never have to face consequences. He should be thankful that the consequence seems to be legal action, rather than being hunted down and gruesomely killed; the latter is a very real possibility in cases like this.
Of course, this is the same knight who's apparently not the least bit bothered to wear a chain mail constantly, so it's quite possible that he pretended.
And of course, he must have also been the one to keep all the traps in a working order. There's no way the blade thing wouldn't have gotten rusted and jammed otherwise...
Sure they can, given suitable protection; for example, an omnipotent being intent on seeing them through :). So your statement "People can't live in whales" is only true if one assumes the non-existence of supernatural a priori; as such, it can't be used as a proof of said non-existence, since that would be circular reasoning.
No observation about the universe - the natural world - can ever contradict a claim about supernatural. How could it ? You have only observed that nature works in a certain way when left alone; your observations do absolutely nothing to prove that there isn't anything that can interfere with said functioning.
This is, IMHO, the atheist equivalent of a religious nutcase: someone who makes nonsensical claims to back up their belief, such as "Science has prove that there is no God" - it hasn't, and it never will, because it is logically impossible to prove it - or "I have empirical evidence that contradict the existence of supernatural" - no you don't, you simply have evidence that nothing supernatural was observed at a certain place at a certain time.
Oh well. Likely I get in return stories about teapots orbiting Venus, Flying Spaghetti Monster, Pink Unicorn or some other sign that the point has once again been missed; and the point, of course, is that you can't prove the non-existence of any of those, with the possible exception of teapot (assuming that a teapot you can't interact with wouldn't count as a teapot any more, since you couldn't use it to prepare tea). You don't have evidence that any of those things don't exist; you can believe they don't for whatever reason, but that belief is not based on "empirical observations" but to lack of them.
According to Wikipedia, the US Civil War began when Confederate forces attacked a US military installation, rather than when it was created. If so, I'd say that they were asking for it.
And let's not forget that the southern states seceded over slavery. I'd say it's poetic justice to be denied the right of disassociation when your reason to disassociate in the first place is to maintain the ability to deny others such right. Offhand, I can't think of anything that would evoke my sympathy less than a nation of slave holders losing some of their political sovereignty in a war they began over their right to enslave others.