Except we ignore here that blind forces of nature cause orders of magnitude more damage than terrorist attacks.
You do know what sparked the first World War, do you ? For that matter, Nazis used a terror attack (likely done by themselves), the burning of Reichstadt, to consolidate their power.
And frankly, the malicious intelligence of terrorists often isn't that intelligent. Witness, for example, Al Qaeda's US-based strategy of trying spectucular attacks over more modest but collectively more damaging attacks.
This far the spectacular attacks have caused two wars (with more on the horizon) and about a hundred thousand deaths, not to mention damaged US's reputation, likely beyond repair. They have also given the US adminstration a perfect excuse to tighten its grip on its citizens and suppressing their rights in the name of War on Terror, therefore feeding distrust and resentment amongst said citizens towards their government and allowing corruption to grow ever stronger in the government.
I'd say they were bloody effective attacks with pure evil genius behind them.
Even worse, this conflict isn't about some radical guerillas, with innocent people caught in the middle. The people have actually elected these guerillas (Hamas and Hezbollah) to their governments, so that means the people actually back these groups' stated intentions of terrorism and destruction of Israel. Therefore, the people in these countries are perfectly acceptable targets for attack and destruction.
The American people have elected George W. Bush to be their leader. George W. Bush has declared a War on Terror and stated his intention of destroying terrorists. Does this mean that American civilian population is now an acceptable target for terrorists to attack and destroy ?
Either the civilian population is an acceptable target in a war or it is not. If it isn't, then it can't suddenly become acceptable because it's convenient and you don't like the people in question; if it is, then don't complain when you and your family are the ones targeted - after all, I'm sure there's someone in the world with a grudge against your nation.
Not that any of this matters. Israel is simply going to keep on bombarding Lebanon and committing atrocities, and their victims are going to commit more atrocities in revenge, and Israel is then going to avenge that, and so on. It's going to go on until the bloodthirsty morons get tired of bleeding, and there's no sign of that happening, especially when both sides think that God is on their side.
so, you want to steal my money, thanks a lot asshole.
No, I want that, if it gets to that, my life will be protected before your wallet. Maybe that makes me an asshole, I don't know... But please note that I also advocate putting your life before my wallet.
You are jumping into the conclusion that I currently need social security. I don't. I'm simply thinking ahead and considering the scenario where I might need it for my very survival. I'm quite happy to pay for it, in the form of taxes, in the meantime.
you will be the stain since you obviously can't take care of yourself.
No one can take care of themselves in every possible circumstances. That's why I want a safety net. It won't save me from every possible bad thing, but it substantially lessens the propability of a scenario where I starve to death. This actually benefits the society in the long run: since my basic sustenance is assured, I'm more likely to take risks like starting a company, instead of always considering everything just from the perspective of survival.
And I think that I'm taking care of myself quite well, by advocating social security; after all, the ability to think and plan ahead and prepare for possible trouble beforehand is the primary survival advantage of the human race. People who rely on their own strength to the point of being disdainfull of the very thought of needing help are the ones who need us planners around to keep them from getting killed, not the other way around. After all, the whole society is build around the idea of helping one another; arrogant pridefull fools depend on it every bit as much as everyone else, even if they don't admit it. Possibly they depend on it even more, since it's considerably harder to survive on your own if you have serious mental blind spots to hinder your judgement. And delusions of omnipotence and invincibility, as well as the need to prove your independence and worth as a human being by denying even the possibility of weakness and failure, are among the most destructive such blind spots.
Her computer is also an old Pentium 75MHz which might make running X-windows slow as hell (I don't know for sure though).
It won't. Yust avoid running Gnome or other fancy "desktop environments", and you'll be fine.
Windows, on the other hand, will be slow as a turtle.
It might be possible to do it that way but after getting disconnected a few times I probably would go back to just explaining it to her over the phone.
VNC doesn't care about disconnections, just connect back and continue what you were doing, and with SSH you can use "screen" for a similar effect.
And if her phone line is bad enough to constantly disconnect the modem, you propably don't want to try to explain technical procedures to a 90-year old (propably half-deaf) grandmother over it:).
They don't realize or care that there are other OS's available, as long as they can surf the web, check their e-mail, use MS Office applications, and play their games what incentive do they have to move to anything else?
Isn't this whole story about how they can't surf the net on Windows, since they'll pick up malfare which turns their machines into advertizing bazookas ?
Oh, sounds a lot like linux (although it has gotten better recently). I am not a fan of how Windows goes about these things either, but I must say that I have had much more frustrating times with dependency and package management problems on linux than on any Windows machine. On Windows it usually goes like this:
1) Try and install upgrade to software.
2) It doesn't work.
3) Uninstall software package completely.
4) Reinstall software.
5) It magically works.
Yes, it is horrible that a lot of upgrades work that way but at least that is usually all that is needed.
In Debian Linux it goes like this:
Write "su" and press enter. Give the root password when asked.
Write "apt-get install programname" and press enter. If you don't know the program name, you can write "apt-cache search keyword" to get a list of potential candidates.
Apt-get makes a list of everything that needs to be installed in order for the program to work. If there's any such requisites, it shows you the list and total install size and asks you for confirmation. Simply press "y" and press enter.
Wait while apt-get downloads and installs the program and all the libraries and possible other things it requires.
Write "exit" and press enter. You're done.
Now, there are all kind of wrappers, both text-based and graphical, that can be used to do this instead, but I prefer to work with apt-get rather than play around with them.
Oh, but you said update, not install. My bad.
Write "su", press enter, and give the root password when asked.
Write "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" and press enter.
Apt-get gets the list of newest program versions, and if there's anything newer than you have installed, gives you a list and asks for confirmation. Simply press enter to give the default answer ("y").
Write "exit" and press enter. You're done; all programs have been updated.
With linux on the otherhand I have literally had to spend days sometimes trying to get packages upgraded/working properly, even with Yum and other package handlers.
Was that more or less painfull than trying to clean the remains of a failed install from Windows registry with regedit so that the install program lets you try again ?
If I had to direct my 91 year old grandmother over the phone how to install some software I would much prefer she be running Windows than linux.
If she used Linux, I wouldn't need to direct her over the phone, I could simply use ssh or vnc to do it myself remotely. I would also likely have to do maintenance a lot less often than in Windows...
It would be great if everyone ran linux but I think you are getting ahead of yourself if you honestly believe that it is easier to use than Windows.
As both Windows and Linux are used in the same way - point and click, and occasionally type text with the keyboard - I fail to see how this could be the case.
Linux is also not immune to having stock applications that have security holes and need to be patched right away, Windows is not alone at all in that regard either. After freshly installing either Windows or linux I have to go through the process of applying the needed patches on both.
Actually, since I install Debian as a network install, it simply downloads the latest program ve
Given that the EU is kicking them upside the head and given that they're in trouble the minute their buddy leaves the White House,
No reason to worry, US has no shortage of corrupt politicians.
I'm astounded that they haven't done a little more soul searching and behaviour modification.
Microsoft, being legal fiction and therefore not really existing except in people's imagination, does not have a soul.
It's pretty ingenious, actually, the way corporation works: the old "It's not my fault, the Devil made me do it!" defense codified into legal framework. "It's not our fault, the good of the corporation demands it!" Microsoft employees do evil deeds in Microsofts name, the shareholders get the profits, and Microsoft, by the virtue of not really existing, bears the blame without shame. It's a pretty sick society that actually allows this kind of clearly absurd logic in its legal system...
...Which is pathetically ironic given that people here don't get laid.
Hah! A real master nerd is never unprepared. I'll watch the whole run of Nuku-Nuku for inspiration and build myself a catgirl android lover, and we'll make dozens of cyborg kittens together.
Breaking news: Chairman Moa is doing 3,500 RPM in his grave.
and in other news Chairman Mao is doing 75,00RPM in his urn.
Just attach wires and magnets and you have the energy crisis solved;). Urns make nice portable generators, too...
And here I thought that various administrations were just incompetent, stupid and treacherous, but now I realize that they're just doing their part in developing alternative energy sources for the world after peak oil !
I think there's a wee bit of safety difference between exploring dark alleys at 3am and surfing the net.
Physical safety, yes. However, there's a very real chance of getting used to being a spy, and that have the potential to lead to doing very nasty things indeed. Besides, once you'll get known as a snitch, who would want anything to do with you ?
So you're saying that you'll teach your children to ignore any crimes they see and just bury their head in the sand? If they see a little old lady being beaten, they should just stay out of it and not "rat" to the government on the criminal? I'm sure your children will turn out to be fine citizens.
Copyright infringement is illegal. Beating up little old ladies (or anyone else for that matter) is wrong. Don't confuse the two. Wrongs should be righted, if it's possible to do so without more harm, while merely illegal things should usually be ignored, since it's far too easy to realize one day that you've committed a wrong - busted someone for doing something that shouldn't be a crime, like, say, criticizing the state (this is China we're talking about, remember ?) - if you start hunting for "criminals".
So I'll teach my children to call the cops if it's neccessary, if, for example, someone is getting beaten up or some place has people carrying stuff out through a broken window; but not when they witness something that is illegal but not wrong, such as copyright infringement.
Either communist or facist, either way it is a recipe for disaster. Remember the Hitler Youth, they were instructed to do similar actions with rating out people who didn't agree with the Third Reich
It's funny how copyright enforcement seems to create more and more such parallels, isn't it ? Kinda makes me wonder if we don't regard the Copyright Lobby in 50 years the same way we regard Nazi Party now.
Yeah, copyright Nazi. Nazi copyright. Copyright mass murder Hitler Stalin terrorism evil RIAA MPAA DMCA DRM. Eat it up, googlebot:).
Yeah, that is pretty funny. I just watched a show on the science channel where the repaired a mouses spinal cord. Thing is, you never hear about human trials. Maybe mice are just really good at re-growing spinal cords.
No, they're just really bad at calling lawyers if something goes wrong.
This problem exists without inlining: libSDL changed the interior of the SDL_SysWMinfo structure- a structure that's designed to be interacted with directly. Programs that did so, when libSDL was upgraded, crashed..
If the structure is meant to be interacted with directly by the program using the library, then it's not an internal data structure for the library, now is it ? Internal data structure would be something that the program doesn't even know exists.
In practice this can't happen because the OpenGL library doesn't bind directly to the HAL. If the dynamic linker did this (on the other hand) we might have more of an issue.
At least in Linux OpenGL library is part of the display driver package, and gets updated with the driver, and the new version may differ internally from the old (optimization, utilizing a new internal interface to the kernel driver, etc). So, as far as I can tell, if you inline functions from it you may run into very serious problems when it gets updated.
For US$50, I can get an amazing meal that gets around most of the regulations of the restaurant-restrictions placed. I can smoke, the chef can cook foods in ways that restaurants often can't, and I pay less than 1/3rd of the usual fee.
Your local restaurants usually charge $150 for a meal ?-) Or what did you mean ?
Some dinner clubs include great wine, and the service is top notch. The chef doesn't worry about income taxes or permits or paying off the local zoning authority and health agency -- and I have yet to hear of anyone getting sick or the like.
I'm sure that the chefs will inform all their customers as soon as anyone will. No way would they try to keep such a thing hidden.
Good for me, good for the chef, bad for the State.
Bad for the chef, too, when the State weakens and the Mafia steps in to fill the power vacuum. Because, you know, restaurants have all this hot oil, so it would make sense to pay for fire "protection" - it would be a real shame if it would all burn to ground, no ? Also bad when the people supplying that oil decide that they can make more money by fixing the prices, dividing the customers between each other and not competing with each other - too bad the State and it's anti-racketeering laws aren't there anymore to stop them.
Yeah, there's plenty of business opportunities once State is gone. However, you don't like the consequences most of them have once implemented. That's why they're illegal currently.
That's not true. The compiler can load the libraries, and remove the prolog and epilog of the function call and insert it directly into the object. I've written compilers that do this, it's not even very hard.
But is it a good idea ? Suppose a compiler did this, and then the library got updated. The user thinks that the program is using the new library, but in reality at least some of the functions used - the inlined ones - are from the old library. It's even more fun if the inlined functions handled some datatype internal to the library, and that datatype got changed during the update, resulting in memory getting randomly corrupted without any sensible reason. Even better, suppose that the library in question is really a hardware access layer like OpenGL, and the compiler inlines some functions from it - do you need to recompile all OpenGL programs because you updated the display driver ?-)
Ironically enough, Java (or any other interpreted language which can be JIT compiled) can do this kind of optimization easily and without risks, since it's done at runtime, not compile time.
Weis and Hickman haven't lost complete control (yet), so let's reserve judgement untill we start seeing more material.
W&H have, however, clearly lost something, judging by the later Dragonlance books. Not that it's entirely their fault, but the various authors retconning each others works back and forth got out of hand at some point.
"Takhisis, Paladine and Gilean created the world!" "No, it was actually Chaos who created it!" "No, Chaos was just delusional!" "Takhisis suffered some kind of stroke and became a neurotic obsessive-compulsive control freak, and BTW, we could have just beaten her any time we wanted by stripping her of her powers!" "Dragon highlords got big and strong by eating other dragons!" "No, they're actually from some other world!"
It's starting to make Marvel continuity look stable and well-planned in comparison. I'm not sure anyone really knows what Krynn's history actually supposed to be. Or cares, for that matter, so the retcons will continue. This, in turn, removes any sense of drama and suspension from any of the new books, since any significant event may simply be retconned away. And reducing the gods of Krynn into glorified janitors like in Forgotten Realms finishes turning the once-proud fantasy world into an RPG version of the Batman live action show minus the humor. Sorry, but there's just no sense of fantasy like there once was.
It's basically what happened with Feist's Midkemia: once, the Valheru were a mystical nigh-invincible enemy, then they became nothing but pawns in a chessboard.
If you actually wrote this code without learning about smart pointers, unprofessionnal. If you know but won't mention it, trollish.
Actually, this seems more like playing pointer games. Take a known address (NULL), add a given value (whatever CreateInstance parses to) to it and call the function in the resulting memory address. It's a bit like accessing data in a shared memory segment: you add the pointer value to the start address of the segment. Only in this case the start address has been hardcoded to zero.
I'm not fluent in C++ so this can be simply some perversion of the language - actually, with #define and operator overloading this could propably do almost anything - but if this is what "smart" pointers look like, then I'm happy I've never had to use such things.
Oh well. I'll keep using Java - Sun's documentation lies through its teeth, at least as far as Swing is concerned, but at least I don't have to try to parse and debug pointer math by l33t br1ll14nt programmers:).
Neelie Kroes doesn't seem to understand the fundamentals of business. If the EU fines MS $357M, MS can simply raise the price of their European software by $357M. The net effect is that the European consumers pay the fine rather than MS itself.
It seems that you don't understand the fundamentals of business. Microsoft's goal is to make as much money as possible. This means that it's already squeezing every penny it can possible get out of Europe. If it was possible for Microsoft to make $357M more just by readjusting its prices, it would do so, whether it had been hit with a fine or not.
I haven't even read Dragonlance for over a decade, but I'm stoked.
I have, and I'm scared:(.
The Chronicles were good, as were the Legends, but after that quality went down faster than a dragon that's been turned to stone mid-flight, and the ending of "War of Souls" had to set some kind of record in sheer stupidity. Constant retcons didn't help either. Or maybe it was because Dragonlance gods were turned into glorified janitors a la Forgotten Realms that it got a bit difficult to take the whole thing seriously. Takhisis, especially, became truly pathetic, in more ways than one... Oh well, another cash cow milked to death and beyond.
So, this movie might be good, but more likely it's a thinly veiled commercial that sucks harder than the whirpool of the Blood Sea.
Even if speech itself is considered inalienable and cannot be legally prevented by a contract (as is my view), the contract can certainly impose fines for specific kinds of speech, because property is alienable. The fine is merely a conditional transfer of property rights; the condition can be anything the other party will agree to.
I would like to point out that a contract can't actually prevent anything; all it can do is assign penalties for certain actions. A piece of paper is completely unable to stop anyone from yelling "FIRE", unless it's physically glued over his mouth. Therefore, a contract that orders a fine for an action has, in effect, forbidden you from excersizing your right to that action, therefore removing the right; concentrating on whether it outright states this or not is hair-splitting for the purposes of deception.
Besides, your argument that "speech is unalienable but there is consequences for it" is completely absurd. In Soviet Russia during Stalin's reign you could go to the Red Square, piss on Lenin's statue (I'm sure there was one there) and shout "Down with Stalin! Down with Lenin! Communism stinks!". You would go to Siberia or get shot for it, but you could do it. Does this mean that Soviet Russia during Stalin's reign gave unalienable right to free speech to its citizens ?
A right to do something means that you can do so without being punished, claiming that "you have an unalienable right to do this but you'll be fined if you use it" is pure nonsense. If you'll get fines for an action, then clearly your right for that action has, in effect, been removed.
Not anymore - they finally did a release about a month ago. (A year between releases is far too long in the open-source world - Gentoo gave up and started using their own CVS snapshots of mplayer...)
You mean that Gentoo doesn't just pull the newest files from CVS ?-o
And here I thought I'd switch from my current RH9 into an up-to-date distro...
Terrorism isn't magically more harmful than cyclones or earthquakes, for example.
No, it is more harmfull than blind forces of nature for a simple nonmagical reason: there's a malicious intelligence behind the events, guiding them so they cause maximum damage, and which will likely strike again.
Sure, the companies that were in the WTC and lost huge amounts of people and equipment have probably laid out some plans. Some other people have probably been wise and seen the mistakes of others and laid their own plans. But largely, nobody has done anything to change they way of doing business. (Remember the proverb that says: "A smart man learns from his mistakes. A wise man learns from the mistakes of others.")
How much does a disaster recovery plan cost ? Or, to put it another way: from a shareholders point of view, which will likely result in larger return of investment, spending resources on making and implementing a disaster recovery plan or to not make one ?
Remember, companies are not people. Self-preservation is not an inherent priority for them. Sure, it's usually in shareholders best interest that the company can keep on functioning and making money; but if ensuring that it can costs so much money (and thereby cuts profits) that the shareholder would likely be better off by taking the risk, the company's management should take it. Sure, it means that sometimes a company becomes defunct when it could have survived by having a proper disaster recovery plan, but the increased profits from the rest of the companies more than make up for that loss, leading to an increased total profits for the shareholder - assuming, of course, that he was smart and invested into more than one company.
So, not making a disaster recovery plan is not neccessarily a sign of stupidity, it can be the logical decision based on a cost-benefit analysis and propability math. Risking a human beings life is monstrous, but risking a corporations "life" can be a smart and sound business decision with nothing shamefull whatsoever about it, assuming of course that the shareholders are properly informed about the decision and the reasons for it.
So a question: Where in the world is politically stable, economically stable, is free (so far) of catastrophic natural disasters and as a bonus has a decent climate?
The Nordic countries - Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland - are politically stable, have a steady economy (even if it is steadily deteriorating, thanks to our idiotic leaders insisting on globalization and free-market ideology) and the worst natural disasters in memory are winter storms, which typically cause rural areas to lose electricity for a few weeks each year.
Unfortunately, here in Finland we've had a string of extremely incompetent leaders lately, so I can't say how much longer the country will remain stable. Our economy never really recovered from the last depression, with unemployment and short-term jobs for the masses, constant pay rises for the representatives and ministers, and general deterioration of public sector combine to create an increasingly hatefull atmosphere, which is not helped by lack of skill in our political leaders. It's not really serious yet, but I suspect it's going to be a decade or so on the line.
On the good side, our broadband is unmetered, and there's several service providers available at most locations, so there's a healthy competition going on. On the bad side, Tanja Karpela recently forced a new copyright legislation through, leading to a situation where even the government that made the law is incapable of telling exactly what it allows and forbids.
It's also a warning to defacers of content that there is the potential for being targeted if you piss off the right people.
I doubt very much that defacing Wikipedia would make you responsible for the embarrasment or monetary losses suffered by people who took that information at face value and didn't bother to check it, even in Legalistic America.
But, just to be safe: I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. And, since I felt the need to say that, one might wonder if I believe in my own advice either...
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You do know what sparked the first World War, do you ? For that matter, Nazis used a terror attack (likely done by themselves), the burning of Reichstadt, to consolidate their power.
This far the spectacular attacks have caused two wars (with more on the horizon) and about a hundred thousand deaths, not to mention damaged US's reputation, likely beyond repair. They have also given the US adminstration a perfect excuse to tighten its grip on its citizens and suppressing their rights in the name of War on Terror, therefore feeding distrust and resentment amongst said citizens towards their government and allowing corruption to grow ever stronger in the government.
I'd say they were bloody effective attacks with pure evil genius behind them.
The American people have elected George W. Bush to be their leader. George W. Bush has declared a War on Terror and stated his intention of destroying terrorists. Does this mean that American civilian population is now an acceptable target for terrorists to attack and destroy ?
Either the civilian population is an acceptable target in a war or it is not. If it isn't, then it can't suddenly become acceptable because it's convenient and you don't like the people in question; if it is, then don't complain when you and your family are the ones targeted - after all, I'm sure there's someone in the world with a grudge against your nation.
Not that any of this matters. Israel is simply going to keep on bombarding Lebanon and committing atrocities, and their victims are going to commit more atrocities in revenge, and Israel is then going to avenge that, and so on. It's going to go on until the bloodthirsty morons get tired of bleeding, and there's no sign of that happening, especially when both sides think that God is on their side.
No, I want that, if it gets to that, my life will be protected before your wallet. Maybe that makes me an asshole, I don't know... But please note that I also advocate putting your life before my wallet.
You are jumping into the conclusion that I currently need social security. I don't. I'm simply thinking ahead and considering the scenario where I might need it for my very survival. I'm quite happy to pay for it, in the form of taxes, in the meantime.
No one can take care of themselves in every possible circumstances. That's why I want a safety net. It won't save me from every possible bad thing, but it substantially lessens the propability of a scenario where I starve to death. This actually benefits the society in the long run: since my basic sustenance is assured, I'm more likely to take risks like starting a company, instead of always considering everything just from the perspective of survival.
And I think that I'm taking care of myself quite well, by advocating social security; after all, the ability to think and plan ahead and prepare for possible trouble beforehand is the primary survival advantage of the human race. People who rely on their own strength to the point of being disdainfull of the very thought of needing help are the ones who need us planners around to keep them from getting killed, not the other way around. After all, the whole society is build around the idea of helping one another; arrogant pridefull fools depend on it every bit as much as everyone else, even if they don't admit it. Possibly they depend on it even more, since it's considerably harder to survive on your own if you have serious mental blind spots to hinder your judgement. And delusions of omnipotence and invincibility, as well as the need to prove your independence and worth as a human being by denying even the possibility of weakness and failure, are among the most destructive such blind spots.
It won't. Yust avoid running Gnome or other fancy "desktop environments", and you'll be fine.
Windows, on the other hand, will be slow as a turtle.
VNC doesn't care about disconnections, just connect back and continue what you were doing, and with SSH you can use "screen" for a similar effect.
And if her phone line is bad enough to constantly disconnect the modem, you propably don't want to try to explain technical procedures to a 90-year old (propably half-deaf) grandmother over it :).
Isn't this whole story about how they can't surf the net on Windows, since they'll pick up malfare which turns their machines into advertizing bazookas ?
In Debian Linux it goes like this:
Now, there are all kind of wrappers, both text-based and graphical, that can be used to do this instead, but I prefer to work with apt-get rather than play around with them.
Oh, but you said update, not install. My bad.
Was that more or less painfull than trying to clean the remains of a failed install from Windows registry with regedit so that the install program lets you try again ?
If she used Linux, I wouldn't need to direct her over the phone, I could simply use ssh or vnc to do it myself remotely. I would also likely have to do maintenance a lot less often than in Windows...
As both Windows and Linux are used in the same way - point and click, and occasionally type text with the keyboard - I fail to see how this could be the case.
Actually, since I install Debian as a network install, it simply downloads the latest program ve
No reason to worry, US has no shortage of corrupt politicians.
Microsoft, being legal fiction and therefore not really existing except in people's imagination, does not have a soul.
It's pretty ingenious, actually, the way corporation works: the old "It's not my fault, the Devil made me do it!" defense codified into legal framework. "It's not our fault, the good of the corporation demands it!" Microsoft employees do evil deeds in Microsofts name, the shareholders get the profits, and Microsoft, by the virtue of not really existing, bears the blame without shame. It's a pretty sick society that actually allows this kind of clearly absurd logic in its legal system...
Hah! A real master nerd is never unprepared. I'll watch the whole run of Nuku-Nuku for inspiration and build myself a catgirl android lover, and we'll make dozens of cyborg kittens together.
Take that, natural selection!
Just attach wires and magnets and you have the energy crisis solved ;). Urns make nice portable generators, too...
And here I thought that various administrations were just incompetent, stupid and treacherous, but now I realize that they're just doing their part in developing alternative energy sources for the world after peak oil !
Physical safety, yes. However, there's a very real chance of getting used to being a spy, and that have the potential to lead to doing very nasty things indeed. Besides, once you'll get known as a snitch, who would want anything to do with you ?
Copyright infringement is illegal. Beating up little old ladies (or anyone else for that matter) is wrong. Don't confuse the two. Wrongs should be righted, if it's possible to do so without more harm, while merely illegal things should usually be ignored, since it's far too easy to realize one day that you've committed a wrong - busted someone for doing something that shouldn't be a crime, like, say, criticizing the state (this is China we're talking about, remember ?) - if you start hunting for "criminals".
So I'll teach my children to call the cops if it's neccessary, if, for example, someone is getting beaten up or some place has people carrying stuff out through a broken window; but not when they witness something that is illegal but not wrong, such as copyright infringement.
Yeah, and let's not forget the East Germany snitch network.
It's funny how copyright enforcement seems to create more and more such parallels, isn't it ? Kinda makes me wonder if we don't regard the Copyright Lobby in 50 years the same way we regard Nazi Party now.
Yeah, copyright Nazi. Nazi copyright. Copyright mass murder Hitler Stalin terrorism evil RIAA MPAA DMCA DRM. Eat it up, googlebot :).
No, they're just really bad at calling lawyers if something goes wrong.
If the structure is meant to be interacted with directly by the program using the library, then it's not an internal data structure for the library, now is it ? Internal data structure would be something that the program doesn't even know exists.
At least in Linux OpenGL library is part of the display driver package, and gets updated with the driver, and the new version may differ internally from the old (optimization, utilizing a new internal interface to the kernel driver, etc). So, as far as I can tell, if you inline functions from it you may run into very serious problems when it gets updated.
Your local restaurants usually charge $150 for a meal ?-) Or what did you mean ?
I'm sure that the chefs will inform all their customers as soon as anyone will. No way would they try to keep such a thing hidden.
Bad for the chef, too, when the State weakens and the Mafia steps in to fill the power vacuum. Because, you know, restaurants have all this hot oil, so it would make sense to pay for fire "protection" - it would be a real shame if it would all burn to ground, no ? Also bad when the people supplying that oil decide that they can make more money by fixing the prices, dividing the customers between each other and not competing with each other - too bad the State and it's anti-racketeering laws aren't there anymore to stop them.
Yeah, there's plenty of business opportunities once State is gone. However, you don't like the consequences most of them have once implemented. That's why they're illegal currently.
But is it a good idea ? Suppose a compiler did this, and then the library got updated. The user thinks that the program is using the new library, but in reality at least some of the functions used - the inlined ones - are from the old library. It's even more fun if the inlined functions handled some datatype internal to the library, and that datatype got changed during the update, resulting in memory getting randomly corrupted without any sensible reason. Even better, suppose that the library in question is really a hardware access layer like OpenGL, and the compiler inlines some functions from it - do you need to recompile all OpenGL programs because you updated the display driver ?-)
Ironically enough, Java (or any other interpreted language which can be JIT compiled) can do this kind of optimization easily and without risks, since it's done at runtime, not compile time.
W&H have, however, clearly lost something, judging by the later Dragonlance books. Not that it's entirely their fault, but the various authors retconning each others works back and forth got out of hand at some point.
"Takhisis, Paladine and Gilean created the world!" "No, it was actually Chaos who created it!" "No, Chaos was just delusional!" "Takhisis suffered some kind of stroke and became a neurotic obsessive-compulsive control freak, and BTW, we could have just beaten her any time we wanted by stripping her of her powers!" "Dragon highlords got big and strong by eating other dragons!" "No, they're actually from some other world!"
It's starting to make Marvel continuity look stable and well-planned in comparison. I'm not sure anyone really knows what Krynn's history actually supposed to be. Or cares, for that matter, so the retcons will continue. This, in turn, removes any sense of drama and suspension from any of the new books, since any significant event may simply be retconned away. And reducing the gods of Krynn into glorified janitors like in Forgotten Realms finishes turning the once-proud fantasy world into an RPG version of the Batman live action show minus the humor. Sorry, but there's just no sense of fantasy like there once was.
It's basically what happened with Feist's Midkemia: once, the Valheru were a mystical nigh-invincible enemy, then they became nothing but pawns in a chessboard.
Actually, this seems more like playing pointer games. Take a known address (NULL), add a given value (whatever CreateInstance parses to) to it and call the function in the resulting memory address. It's a bit like accessing data in a shared memory segment: you add the pointer value to the start address of the segment. Only in this case the start address has been hardcoded to zero.
I'm not fluent in C++ so this can be simply some perversion of the language - actually, with #define and operator overloading this could propably do almost anything - but if this is what "smart" pointers look like, then I'm happy I've never had to use such things.
Oh well. I'll keep using Java - Sun's documentation lies through its teeth, at least as far as Swing is concerned, but at least I don't have to try to parse and debug pointer math by l33t br1ll14nt programmers :).
It seems that you don't understand the fundamentals of business. Microsoft's goal is to make as much money as possible. This means that it's already squeezing every penny it can possible get out of Europe. If it was possible for Microsoft to make $357M more just by readjusting its prices, it would do so, whether it had been hit with a fine or not.
Now combine this with a picture of Balmer and you get a truly disturbing mental image...
Firefox is a naked woman, you insensitive clod ! And a very cute one too :).
Beat that, IE !
I have, and I'm scared :(.
The Chronicles were good, as were the Legends, but after that quality went down faster than a dragon that's been turned to stone mid-flight, and the ending of "War of Souls" had to set some kind of record in sheer stupidity. Constant retcons didn't help either. Or maybe it was because Dragonlance gods were turned into glorified janitors a la Forgotten Realms that it got a bit difficult to take the whole thing seriously. Takhisis, especially, became truly pathetic, in more ways than one... Oh well, another cash cow milked to death and beyond.
So, this movie might be good, but more likely it's a thinly veiled commercial that sucks harder than the whirpool of the Blood Sea.
I would like to point out that a contract can't actually prevent anything; all it can do is assign penalties for certain actions. A piece of paper is completely unable to stop anyone from yelling "FIRE", unless it's physically glued over his mouth. Therefore, a contract that orders a fine for an action has, in effect, forbidden you from excersizing your right to that action, therefore removing the right; concentrating on whether it outright states this or not is hair-splitting for the purposes of deception.
Besides, your argument that "speech is unalienable but there is consequences for it" is completely absurd. In Soviet Russia during Stalin's reign you could go to the Red Square, piss on Lenin's statue (I'm sure there was one there) and shout "Down with Stalin! Down with Lenin! Communism stinks!". You would go to Siberia or get shot for it, but you could do it. Does this mean that Soviet Russia during Stalin's reign gave unalienable right to free speech to its citizens ?
A right to do something means that you can do so without being punished, claiming that "you have an unalienable right to do this but you'll be fined if you use it" is pure nonsense. If you'll get fines for an action, then clearly your right for that action has, in effect, been removed.
You mean that Gentoo doesn't just pull the newest files from CVS ?-o
And here I thought I'd switch from my current RH9 into an up-to-date distro...
No, it is more harmfull than blind forces of nature for a simple nonmagical reason: there's a malicious intelligence behind the events, guiding them so they cause maximum damage, and which will likely strike again.
How much does a disaster recovery plan cost ? Or, to put it another way: from a shareholders point of view, which will likely result in larger return of investment, spending resources on making and implementing a disaster recovery plan or to not make one ?
Remember, companies are not people. Self-preservation is not an inherent priority for them. Sure, it's usually in shareholders best interest that the company can keep on functioning and making money; but if ensuring that it can costs so much money (and thereby cuts profits) that the shareholder would likely be better off by taking the risk, the company's management should take it. Sure, it means that sometimes a company becomes defunct when it could have survived by having a proper disaster recovery plan, but the increased profits from the rest of the companies more than make up for that loss, leading to an increased total profits for the shareholder - assuming, of course, that he was smart and invested into more than one company.
So, not making a disaster recovery plan is not neccessarily a sign of stupidity, it can be the logical decision based on a cost-benefit analysis and propability math. Risking a human beings life is monstrous, but risking a corporations "life" can be a smart and sound business decision with nothing shamefull whatsoever about it, assuming of course that the shareholders are properly informed about the decision and the reasons for it.
The Nordic countries - Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland - are politically stable, have a steady economy (even if it is steadily deteriorating, thanks to our idiotic leaders insisting on globalization and free-market ideology) and the worst natural disasters in memory are winter storms, which typically cause rural areas to lose electricity for a few weeks each year.
Unfortunately, here in Finland we've had a string of extremely incompetent leaders lately, so I can't say how much longer the country will remain stable. Our economy never really recovered from the last depression, with unemployment and short-term jobs for the masses, constant pay rises for the representatives and ministers, and general deterioration of public sector combine to create an increasingly hatefull atmosphere, which is not helped by lack of skill in our political leaders. It's not really serious yet, but I suspect it's going to be a decade or so on the line.
On the good side, our broadband is unmetered, and there's several service providers available at most locations, so there's a healthy competition going on. On the bad side, Tanja Karpela recently forced a new copyright legislation through, leading to a situation where even the government that made the law is incapable of telling exactly what it allows and forbids.
I doubt very much that defacing Wikipedia would make you responsible for the embarrasment or monetary losses suffered by people who took that information at face value and didn't bother to check it, even in Legalistic America.
But, just to be safe: I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. And, since I felt the need to say that, one might wonder if I believe in my own advice either...