Naked kids!?!? That's absolutely horrible! No child should ever be naked, because the naked human body is a disgusting, vile thing.
I know what you mean, I've seen pictures of myself taking a bath as a baby.
BTW, I still have those pictures; does that make me guilty of possessing child porn ? Or, more generally: can you get punished for possessing child pornography if the child in question is yourself - a somewhat plausible scenario if we go by the theory that abused children tend to abuse others when they grow up ? And if yes, what's the logic ?
Just one of those things that come to mind after not sleeping well the previous night...
Might I remind you that the founding politicians of America were violating many English laws and guilty of leading revolts against the British Crown... punishable by death if I'm not mistaken.
And every one of them is dead now. I guess that goes to show that crime does not pay.
If only they had listened to their mothers and stayed away from the life of crime, they might have accomplished something, become something. Take George Washington, for example: he could have become a military leader, maybe even a politician of some renown. Instead he'll go down in history as a rebel leader. Such waste...
We've been dealing with that since The Three Stooges. Just natural selection at work, nothing to worry about.
And in a few hundred years, when natural selection has done its job, weeding out the adventurous and active types and only couch potatoes and cowards are left, then will schematicNc worry ?
Just because a process is natural does not mean it is beneficial or desirable. Better think long and hard how to keep alive the future generation of astronauts, explorers, and other risk-takers who drive human race - it would really suck if they all died before reaching the age where they can figure out how to do the seemingly impossible.
I love being reminded of this 20th Century mindset. Do you really think the public is going to allow healthcare to continue under a service-oriented business model for the next 10, 20 years??
I have no idea what American public is going to allow, altought I'd say "anything" if I had to guess. I was simply pointing out that the parents claim that healthcare doesn't build value is equally valid for everything except manufacturing and research.
If you REALLY think that Healthcare is going to sustain as a service-oriented business model, a capitalistic one, then I suggest you move to the back of the line and let the rest of America move forward.
I'm not an American. And performing surgery is by definition providing service. Whether this service is currently or will be in the future provided by capitalism or sosialism I have no idea, nor does it have anything to do with my argument.
A strong economy can be had with trade if the two nations have comparative advantage in trade. In real life there's rare examples of it existing only between two countries (usually more are involved), but it is an essential concept given that 28% of the global GDP was from exports.
Please go back and read my post. I'm not arguing that you can't profit from trading with another country; I'm arguing that if you depend on trade with another country, your economy could collapse because of events in that country which disrupt said trade.
Maybe I should have used the word "stable" instead of "strong".
Restricting trade between countries (so there are no imports/exports) would only affect pricing/availability of goods within a country. For example, if you were unfortunate enough to live in a country without a rich oil supply, then all sorts of products that are created from that supply would either be extremely expensive or non-existant (plastics, fuel, etc).
Funny you should mention oil, considering what happens to world economy every time there's a war in the Middle East. Kinda proves my point;).
And even if you were to restrice trade to "free trade partners" (as you reference),
I was referring to the constant complaints here on Slashdot that these countries are no longer fully sovereign, but rather pass laws because US demands it, and are therefore under its control to some extent. This, in turn, can be used by the US to stop any developments in these countries that would disturb trade.
Re:But healthcare doesn't make value.....
on
The Engine of US Jobs
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· Score: 2, Insightful
A really strong economy is built on building value. That is, some function is performed that creates value and thereby money(makes stuff, sells services or stuff overseas and brings in money).
No, a really strong economy is both self-sufficient and self-sustaining. In other words, in order to have a really strong economy, you must depend on neither exports nor imports. If you depend on foreign trade, your economy could collapse because of events in foreign lands, which you can't control (I'm assuming that those are sovereign countries, not US free trade partners).
Healthcare does not really build value. Nothing has been made because Aunty Tilly got a $20,000 bypass instead of a $5 bottle of asprin.
Nothing has been made because Aunty Tilly got a massage or haircut either. Healthcare is a service industry, and if selling services is a valid business model, then healthcare is a valid business model.
I tend to disagree. A loudspeaker is a big deal - it's a way for the government to talk to you, to force their views on you, to disturb you - without you even having a chance to talk back. I know in Britain people don't meekly accept whatever a policeman says - in this case however there is no way to respond, no way to say "this is none of your business, I don't care what looks suspicious to you I'm a free man".
Of course you can respond and say so, the same way you just said it here: write it down and show it to the camera. Whether that's the smart thing to do is another matter; it might be better to just ignore the disembodied voice. And remember, just because it tells you that you or someone else is evil doesnt' make it so;).
You're just going to have to wait until the typical x86 system becomes as fast as... well, as fast as it needs to be to make the overhead of those hideous parodies acceptable.
It isn't, ever. The faster processors become, the more overhead various desktop environments add. And since programs require these toolkits and libraries to run, you can't really opt out.
Granted, a sophisticated graphical environment is resource-intensive by nature, but I can't help believing that a little more work spent on optimization for speed would make a big difference.
It's not even lack of optimization that's the problem, it's the countless layers of indirection that causes it - things like GnomeVFS, XUL, etc. Even if every layer was written in hand-optimized assembler, add enough of them and performance will be eaten away by the collective effect.
Both Gnome and KDE are in effect operating systems running on top of the native system, virtualizing the already-virtual native systems. Of course Gnome and KDE programs are going to be slow; there's no way to make this situation efficient.
So that Gnome applications are portable wherever Gnome VFS exists, and gain the benefit of working with whatever GnomeVFS works with?
Ah, I see. It's a bit like Java, but not as well designed nor as efficent.
I like how my desktop works pretty well over SFTP/SMB/FTP (and I guess WebDAV but I've never used that) without me caring what protocol the bits are going over. Gnome is a framework in additon to being a desktop.
Which is why it's so slow. There is no problem that can't be solved by adding a layer of redirection, but every layer adds overhead and increases reaction time. And why the heck does a desktop need to work over FTP ?
Sometimes I'd love to use apps that were designed to be fast and small, instead of each requiring its own hideous parody of a virtual machine in the quest for complete flexibility and portability...
You didn't actually address anything of the issue raised about Slashdot covering IE security issues more than Firefox issues, instead you went off on a wild tangent about how IE is integrated into the system.
Slashdot covers IE security issues more often than Firefox security issues because IE gets new exploits much more often than Firefox, and since IE is used in a lot more machines than Firefox, IE security issues have far more potential for destruction than Firefox security issues, making them more newsworthy.
It's a bit like why forest fires in Amazon jungles get reported more often than forest fires in Antarctica.
I have to completely agree. My gut feeling is that the main cause of this may be the GTK toolkit. It's a great library but they need to concentrate I think on two main things: speed and appearance. It still feels sluggish compared to Windows and it just doesn't look quite right or polished as Windows.
In other words, GTK is a great UI library except it's slow and looks bad:). But no, I don't think that GTK is the problem. I have a gtk-gnutella instance running in a 200MHz box, accessed over XVNC, and it reacts just fast even when the machine is under load. No, I think that the real culprit is that Gnome apps typically use a hundred libs each and Firefox has its interface rewritten in XUL. All this adds layers of abstraction that increase reaction time and decrease speed.
Gnome has its own virtual file system driver, for crying out loud ! WTF does a desktop need a file system driver for ?!?
I think a payroll tax, not to be confused with an income tax, would be the best way to pay for this. I figure since education in turn helps the economy (hopefully), this is justified for those working and plan on going to college and those who are the employers or coworkers of to-be-educated persons.
Employers will benefit since increased supply of workforce drives down wages and allows for more outrageous employment contracts - non-compete agreements and such - as well as lets them abuse the employees more since it will be harder for them to find another job. Employees will be harmed for the same reason, and have added insult of being forced to pay for something that will harm them, at least in the short term.
The problem, nowadays, is that "benefits economy" does not mean "benefits people" but "benefits the rich".
Don't confuse Adobe's somewhat bloated PDF reader's sluggish speed with the format being "slow." Try any of the third-party document readers (xpdf, etc). They are blazingly fast.
30 seconds to show the next page in a 1GHz machine with xpdf.
PDF does something to bitmap images that makes large ones unbelievably slow to display. I don't know what, but it's definitely a very slow format in that respect.
Shigeru Miyamoto's masterwork Super Mario Brothers is truly a classic work of modern literature; borrowing heavily from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and an obvious inspiration for Trainspotting, SMB shows the initial joy but the eventual mental and moral decline due to drugs.
Like in classic Greek drama, much of the story is implied. Because the setting is not a part of our common mythos, however, it comes with a small supplemental text which fills in the history for the reader: the evil dragon Bowser Koopa (a metaphor for a kingpin) has invaded a once-prosperous kingdom, and those residents who did not join him and become goombas (the local slang for dealers) were turned into blocks - that is, they were embedded in concrete, to sleep with the fishes, as it were.
Enter Mario, the fallen hero. At the very outset of his adventure, he is doomed, as almost right away he steals a dealer's mushroom (obviously mixed with peyote) and begins to hallucinate, that he is big, that he is powerful. As though on PCP, he finds it easy to break solid bricks by punching it and does not perceive the pain; however, when dealers, pushers (personified by turtles much like Thompson's literal lounge lizards), and other minions of the kingpin cause him pain (in retaliation for his original drug theft), he immediately loses the empowering effects of the peyote, and in fact, seems very small and vulnerable, and must desperately seek out another hit. When he is not seeking out a hit of peyote, he is seeking out much more powerful stuff indeed - a flower (the opium-giving poppy) or a star (a hit of LSD), both of which further his delusions of being strong and powerful.
Right after he has apparently slid down a flagpole (a strong reference to receiving anal sex), he finds himself in the proverbial sewers, already feeling a deep low from his initial hits wearing off. But after more anal sex, he is high in the mountains, which psychedelically appear as gigantic mushrooms, an obvious result of his hallucinatory state. And then, after even more anal sex, he finds himself in a castle, but it is of his own imagination, built up of his drug-induced isolation, for at the end he thinks he has confronted the kingpin Koopa, but he quickly finds that it is but another hallucination, merely a pusher goomba, though he only discovers this after, in a drug-crazed rage, he kills this apparition of his nemesis.
His trials and travails continue along his slide into dementia, with such powerful imagery as being underwater (drowning in desperation) and along a long suspension bridge with flying fish (skirting death at every corner). After chapter 3, which describes a night of terrors, and chapter 4, another full day, he finds himself in another castle delusion, but this time he is so hopelessly lost in his mind that it appears to him as a maze, where if he does not climb the correct stairs in the right order, he is trapped and seems to endlessly repeat the pathway.
Much more of the same continues, showing the repetition and mental deadness of a drug-induced haze, with some intermediate powerful imagery as a landscape so bleak and gray that it appears to be frozen, causing our fallen hero to psychosomatically slip on what seems to be ice. At many points, he is also unwittingly caught up in drug-related urban warfare, bullets careening across the landscape, although in Mario's stupor, the inanimate metal slugs appear to be living, almost sentient things.
Finally, he enters a final castle which appears to be real, but it is quickly apparent that it is not, for it is filled with all of his prior hallucinations, but twisted into much more nightmarish images, again arranged in a maze as some of the castle-hallucination-nightmares before (although this time with the strong symbolism of the magic number 3), and at the end, when he finally destroys what he believes to be the kingpin Koopa and rescues who he believes to be the princess, it becomes obvious to the reader (though not to Mario, still in a state of dementia) that he
But living down to abyssmal expectations when handling telecomm policy is important news. Especially when the Republican Congress is facing losing reelection in only 7 weeks, on November 7, 2006. It's your chance to surprise them for a change.
A question: if Republicans lose that election, then do you think that whoever wins them will be any different ? I'm not trying to flamebait, I'm honestly curious on whether Americans (I'm not one) think that elections make a difference.
No way, we *really* would stand to gain from some Marxist critiques of Katamari.
"When you roll over items and get bigger, that's like how capitalism squashes the little guy and gets bigger and more powerful..."
Hmm... You work like crazy to keep from being squashed like a bug, and if you work really hard, your reward is to get to work even harder. Yeah, sounds like capitalism (or at least the Marxist view of it) to me.
Oh, and see how the King of the Cosmos is a direct reference to both monarchy and religion ? And the prince makes large round things out of random crap - pills ? Opium ! And when you've worked your ass off and done drugs, you'll get to make a star - a clear allegory for the entertainment industry !
So... Who's in for providing a Marxist analysis of The Legend of Zelda ?
Two, you don't need a rad-hardened processor if you can wrap the whole computing unit in a rad-hardened box. Same goes for putting ice cubes in your freezer; if the fridge's materials and power units can withstand a thermal bombardment from the outside, the ice cube inside will remain solid.
There's an important difference between an ice cube and a microprocessor. You see, if a single energetic photon happens to enter the box, and melts a little bit ice, it refreezes almost immediately and you'll never know it melted in the first place. However, if an energetic photon enters the processor and, say, causes one transistor to let current through when it shouldn't... Crash. Or, if you're unlucky, silent malfunction that's only revealed when the probe crashes to ground because of a navigational error.
He's the one you voted for last election cause he promised interest rates wouldn't go up if you did. He lied of course, but that's what politicians do.
Yeah. That's the reason for low voter attendance rates: people know perfectly well that whoever they vote for will turn around and screw them. What you need to get those rates up is not advertizements or slogans, but simply candidates worth voting for. This is true, more and more, for all countries with elections, not just USA (or Australia).
Yeah, that's all we need, a honest, benevolent, honorable politician. In other words, we're screwed.
but the Canadians should haved asked for much more... they already give their record industry per-cd and other media stipends as compensation for "piracy". Sony taking extra, invasive, illegal, restrictions in addition to the consideration they already get is gross contempt for the Canadian People, eh.
Well, to be fair, how much respect would you have for someone who pays you tribute ?
Strife and Discord were two very prominent characters in many of the Xena episodes. Usually associated with Ares, the God of War who of course already has his own planet, Mars (the Roman version). The trio is united!
Really ? Do you have links to pictures ? That should be a bigger boom than the Shoemaker affair:).
No. Astronomy, like everything else, needs either barely clothed girls or the ability to kill lots of people to get funding. Why do you think they named it Xena in the first place ?
OO code was developed by people who think in calculus and set theory. It seems natural to them. Most people don't know calculus and never will. The opinions of math majors are immaterial; people don't need calculus, matrix algebra, set theory, information theory, all that you need to even begin to write good code in OO languages.
I disagree. The main problem with learning OO code is that people overcomplicate it. Objects let you write spaghetti code that makes worst GOTO jungles turn green in envy. Based on code I've seen, that's what often also happens. However, this is not an inherent feature of OO; Java, for example, is no more difficult that C to get started with, and in many ways a lot easier (automatic memory management, built-in thread and GUI subsystems), but most Java projects seem to develop seemingly infinite layers of abstraction; everything gets turned into an interface or subclassed in weird ways, leading to a situation where it's impossible to tell what code is actually being executed at a given point. Add the fact that using threads and not sticking to Java Memory Model (which seems to be too bloody difficult to most people) leads to mysterious random NullPointerExceptions, presumably since the JVM rearranges code with the assumption that JMM has been followed.
The problem is not OO itself, but rather that people have no idea what problem it was designed to solve (the same is true for procedural programming, but it's a lot simpler so it doesn't show as much). Consequently we get code like I wrote: it looks OO, the same way random letters and spaces look intelligent text, but is completely inane.
I still say as I've always said: teach people programming techniques in the order they were invented. Start with line-number basic; when programs grow complex enough that subroutines start needing parameters and to call each other, introduce a stack made from an array and a pointer to its current position; then show that the computer can manage the stack itself (procedural languages, like C), and proceed from there. Let the students hit a problem first before showing a solution (and preferably let them work it out themselves); that way they have some idea why and where to use the solution.
Starting programming studies with a good dose of proper OO techniques (or any "good programming habits", even commenting) produces a programmer that has no idea why he should follow them, and consequently won't bother.
I guess the next thing to do (if I'm so clever) would be to develop a simple, usable language for non-CS students. I kinda think someone did it already, many times. But no students will ever see it.
Bash ?-) It has a simple syntax and allows you to use hundreds of specialized programs for solving particular problems. Sure, it's no good for graphical UI, but for automatic background jobs it's supreme.
Slashdot Mirror
I know what you mean, I've seen pictures of myself taking a bath as a baby.
BTW, I still have those pictures; does that make me guilty of possessing child porn ? Or, more generally: can you get punished for possessing child pornography if the child in question is yourself - a somewhat plausible scenario if we go by the theory that abused children tend to abuse others when they grow up ? And if yes, what's the logic ?
Just one of those things that come to mind after not sleeping well the previous night...
Oh yes it was. Netscape Communicator 4 was truly horrible in every respect, and a huge step backwards from Navigator 3.
And every one of them is dead now. I guess that goes to show that crime does not pay.
If only they had listened to their mothers and stayed away from the life of crime, they might have accomplished something, become something. Take George Washington, for example: he could have become a military leader, maybe even a politician of some renown. Instead he'll go down in history as a rebel leader. Such waste...
And in a few hundred years, when natural selection has done its job, weeding out the adventurous and active types and only couch potatoes and cowards are left, then will schematicNc worry ?
Just because a process is natural does not mean it is beneficial or desirable. Better think long and hard how to keep alive the future generation of astronauts, explorers, and other risk-takers who drive human race - it would really suck if they all died before reaching the age where they can figure out how to do the seemingly impossible.
So, who would make best Beowulf: Schwarzenegger, Diesel or Stallone ?-)
I have no idea what American public is going to allow, altought I'd say "anything" if I had to guess. I was simply pointing out that the parents claim that healthcare doesn't build value is equally valid for everything except manufacturing and research.
I'm not an American. And performing surgery is by definition providing service. Whether this service is currently or will be in the future provided by capitalism or sosialism I have no idea, nor does it have anything to do with my argument.
Please go back and read my post. I'm not arguing that you can't profit from trading with another country; I'm arguing that if you depend on trade with another country, your economy could collapse because of events in that country which disrupt said trade.
Maybe I should have used the word "stable" instead of "strong".
Funny you should mention oil, considering what happens to world economy every time there's a war in the Middle East. Kinda proves my point ;).
I was referring to the constant complaints here on Slashdot that these countries are no longer fully sovereign, but rather pass laws because US demands it, and are therefore under its control to some extent. This, in turn, can be used by the US to stop any developments in these countries that would disturb trade.
No, a really strong economy is both self-sufficient and self-sustaining. In other words, in order to have a really strong economy, you must depend on neither exports nor imports. If you depend on foreign trade, your economy could collapse because of events in foreign lands, which you can't control (I'm assuming that those are sovereign countries, not US free trade partners).
Nothing has been made because Aunty Tilly got a massage or haircut either. Healthcare is a service industry, and if selling services is a valid business model, then healthcare is a valid business model.
Of course you can respond and say so, the same way you just said it here: write it down and show it to the camera. Whether that's the smart thing to do is another matter; it might be better to just ignore the disembodied voice. And remember, just because it tells you that you or someone else is evil doesnt' make it so ;).
It isn't, ever. The faster processors become, the more overhead various desktop environments add. And since programs require these toolkits and libraries to run, you can't really opt out.
It's not even lack of optimization that's the problem, it's the countless layers of indirection that causes it - things like GnomeVFS, XUL, etc. Even if every layer was written in hand-optimized assembler, add enough of them and performance will be eaten away by the collective effect.
Both Gnome and KDE are in effect operating systems running on top of the native system, virtualizing the already-virtual native systems. Of course Gnome and KDE programs are going to be slow; there's no way to make this situation efficient.
Ah, I see. It's a bit like Java, but not as well designed nor as efficent.
Which is why it's so slow. There is no problem that can't be solved by adding a layer of redirection, but every layer adds overhead and increases reaction time. And why the heck does a desktop need to work over FTP ?
Sometimes I'd love to use apps that were designed to be fast and small, instead of each requiring its own hideous parody of a virtual machine in the quest for complete flexibility and portability...
Slashdot covers IE security issues more often than Firefox security issues because IE gets new exploits much more often than Firefox, and since IE is used in a lot more machines than Firefox, IE security issues have far more potential for destruction than Firefox security issues, making them more newsworthy.
It's a bit like why forest fires in Amazon jungles get reported more often than forest fires in Antarctica.
In other words, GTK is a great UI library except it's slow and looks bad :). But no, I don't think that GTK is the problem. I have a gtk-gnutella instance running in a 200MHz box, accessed over XVNC, and it reacts just fast even when the machine is under load. No, I think that the real culprit is that Gnome apps typically use a hundred libs each and Firefox has its interface rewritten in XUL. All this adds layers of abstraction that increase reaction time and decrease speed.
Gnome has its own virtual file system driver, for crying out loud ! WTF does a desktop need a file system driver for ?!?
Employers will benefit since increased supply of workforce drives down wages and allows for more outrageous employment contracts - non-compete agreements and such - as well as lets them abuse the employees more since it will be harder for them to find another job. Employees will be harmed for the same reason, and have added insult of being forced to pay for something that will harm them, at least in the short term.
The problem, nowadays, is that "benefits economy" does not mean "benefits people" but "benefits the rich".
30 seconds to show the next page in a 1GHz machine with xpdf.
PDF does something to bitmap images that makes large ones unbelievably slow to display. I don't know what, but it's definitely a very slow format in that respect.
Shigeru Miyamoto's masterwork Super Mario Brothers is truly a classic work of modern literature; borrowing heavily from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and an obvious inspiration for Trainspotting, SMB shows the initial joy but the eventual mental and moral decline due to drugs.
Like in classic Greek drama, much of the story is implied. Because the setting is not a part of our common mythos, however, it comes with a small supplemental text which fills in the history for the reader: the evil dragon Bowser Koopa (a metaphor for a kingpin) has invaded a once-prosperous kingdom, and those residents who did not join him and become goombas (the local slang for dealers) were turned into blocks - that is, they were embedded in concrete, to sleep with the fishes, as it were.
Enter Mario, the fallen hero. At the very outset of his adventure, he is doomed, as almost right away he steals a dealer's mushroom (obviously mixed with peyote) and begins to hallucinate, that he is big, that he is powerful. As though on PCP, he finds it easy to break solid bricks by punching it and does not perceive the pain; however, when dealers, pushers (personified by turtles much like Thompson's literal lounge lizards), and other minions of the kingpin cause him pain (in retaliation for his original drug theft), he immediately loses the empowering effects of the peyote, and in fact, seems very small and vulnerable, and must desperately seek out another hit. When he is not seeking out a hit of peyote, he is seeking out much more powerful stuff indeed - a flower (the opium-giving poppy) or a star (a hit of LSD), both of which further his delusions of being strong and powerful.
Right after he has apparently slid down a flagpole (a strong reference to receiving anal sex), he finds himself in the proverbial sewers, already feeling a deep low from his initial hits wearing off. But after more anal sex, he is high in the mountains, which psychedelically appear as gigantic mushrooms, an obvious result of his hallucinatory state. And then, after even more anal sex, he finds himself in a castle, but it is of his own imagination, built up of his drug-induced isolation, for at the end he thinks he has confronted the kingpin Koopa, but he quickly finds that it is but another hallucination, merely a pusher goomba, though he only discovers this after, in a drug-crazed rage, he kills this apparition of his nemesis.
His trials and travails continue along his slide into dementia, with such powerful imagery as being underwater (drowning in desperation) and along a long suspension bridge with flying fish (skirting death at every corner). After chapter 3, which describes a night of terrors, and chapter 4, another full day, he finds himself in another castle delusion, but this time he is so hopelessly lost in his mind that it appears to him as a maze, where if he does not climb the correct stairs in the right order, he is trapped and seems to endlessly repeat the pathway.
Much more of the same continues, showing the repetition and mental deadness of a drug-induced haze, with some intermediate powerful imagery as a landscape so bleak and gray that it appears to be frozen, causing our fallen hero to psychosomatically slip on what seems to be ice. At many points, he is also unwittingly caught up in drug-related urban warfare, bullets careening across the landscape, although in Mario's stupor, the inanimate metal slugs appear to be living, almost sentient things.
Finally, he enters a final castle which appears to be real, but it is quickly apparent that it is not, for it is filled with all of his prior hallucinations, but twisted into much more nightmarish images, again arranged in a maze as some of the castle-hallucination-nightmares before (although this time with the strong symbolism of the magic number 3), and at the end, when he finally destroys what he believes to be the kingpin Koopa and rescues who he believes to be the princess, it becomes obvious to the reader (though not to Mario, still in a state of dementia) that he
A question: if Republicans lose that election, then do you think that whoever wins them will be any different ? I'm not trying to flamebait, I'm honestly curious on whether Americans (I'm not one) think that elections make a difference.
Hmm... You work like crazy to keep from being squashed like a bug, and if you work really hard, your reward is to get to work even harder. Yeah, sounds like capitalism (or at least the Marxist view of it) to me.
Oh, and see how the King of the Cosmos is a direct reference to both monarchy and religion ? And the prince makes large round things out of random crap - pills ? Opium ! And when you've worked your ass off and done drugs, you'll get to make a star - a clear allegory for the entertainment industry !
So... Who's in for providing a Marxist analysis of The Legend of Zelda ?
There's an important difference between an ice cube and a microprocessor. You see, if a single energetic photon happens to enter the box, and melts a little bit ice, it refreezes almost immediately and you'll never know it melted in the first place. However, if an energetic photon enters the processor and, say, causes one transistor to let current through when it shouldn't... Crash. Or, if you're unlucky, silent malfunction that's only revealed when the probe crashes to ground because of a navigational error.
Yeah. That's the reason for low voter attendance rates: people know perfectly well that whoever they vote for will turn around and screw them. What you need to get those rates up is not advertizements or slogans, but simply candidates worth voting for. This is true, more and more, for all countries with elections, not just USA (or Australia).
Yeah, that's all we need, a honest, benevolent, honorable politician. In other words, we're screwed.
Well, to be fair, how much respect would you have for someone who pays you tribute ?
Really ? Do you have links to pictures ? That should be a bigger boom than the Shoemaker affair :).
No. Astronomy, like everything else, needs either barely clothed girls or the ability to kill lots of people to get funding. Why do you think they named it Xena in the first place ?
Which means that Neptune hasn't cleared its orbit, since Pluto crosses it twice, and is therefore not a planet. Two down, seven to go >:].
I disagree. The main problem with learning OO code is that people overcomplicate it. Objects let you write spaghetti code that makes worst GOTO jungles turn green in envy. Based on code I've seen, that's what often also happens. However, this is not an inherent feature of OO; Java, for example, is no more difficult that C to get started with, and in many ways a lot easier (automatic memory management, built-in thread and GUI subsystems), but most Java projects seem to develop seemingly infinite layers of abstraction; everything gets turned into an interface or subclassed in weird ways, leading to a situation where it's impossible to tell what code is actually being executed at a given point. Add the fact that using threads and not sticking to Java Memory Model (which seems to be too bloody difficult to most people) leads to mysterious random NullPointerExceptions, presumably since the JVM rearranges code with the assumption that JMM has been followed.
The problem is not OO itself, but rather that people have no idea what problem it was designed to solve (the same is true for procedural programming, but it's a lot simpler so it doesn't show as much). Consequently we get code like I wrote: it looks OO, the same way random letters and spaces look intelligent text, but is completely inane.
I still say as I've always said: teach people programming techniques in the order they were invented. Start with line-number basic; when programs grow complex enough that subroutines start needing parameters and to call each other, introduce a stack made from an array and a pointer to its current position; then show that the computer can manage the stack itself (procedural languages, like C), and proceed from there. Let the students hit a problem first before showing a solution (and preferably let them work it out themselves); that way they have some idea why and where to use the solution.
Starting programming studies with a good dose of proper OO techniques (or any "good programming habits", even commenting) produces a programmer that has no idea why he should follow them, and consequently won't bother.
Bash ?-) It has a simple syntax and allows you to use hundreds of specialized programs for solving particular problems. Sure, it's no good for graphical UI, but for automatic background jobs it's supreme.