For example, executing their head of food safety over taking bribes to ignore unsafe food for export instead of actually doing something to prevent the next guy from doing the same thing.
You don't think watching his predecessor die would be sufficiently effective?
I don't know about Australia, but if I correctly understood the information which came with my UK passport application our consular services are paid for specifically by taxes on passports. I'm not sure whether it adds up.
(As a point of interest, do US ex-pats get to vote in US elections? Just thinking of a certain revolutionary slogan...)
Implementations of algorithms differ between languages! News at eleven! But you admit that they're the same algorithms, so clearly it's not necessary to use pointers to understand them. (FWIW the algorithm book I have is CLR, which uses an imperative pseudocode).
Learn a little of the second language used in your city.
I can read it fairly well, and I can use a few words. You pick some stuff up without actually studying it. But I wouldn't put it on my CV. In fact, I don't even have French on my CV and I've got a certificate saying that I used to be able to communicate well in that.
In a similar way to French, I would say that I don't know C. I wrote a few small programs and one, as an intern during a university holiday, of a few kloc in it, and I could tell you when it's appropriate to use, but I'd have to do that basic study again before I could write anything in it now.
Ah the well known algorithm "swap". What, not an algorithm? Well, it must be a well-known data structure then. No? For reference (joke at no extra charge), the full sentence was
What you need to concern yourself with is the algorithms and data structures employed, to that end references are as good as pointers.
Even mediocre programmers can pick up the basics of any language quickly. The focus on just a core of languages, and often, just ONE language, which we often hear from job candidates and young posters on slashdot are a reflection of the many graduates coming out of CS departments these days who exhibit a distinct lack of talent.
I think you're being too absolutist. Mediocrity may be part of the reason, but it's also the case that to properly learn a language takes time and some (non-mediocre) people like to do things properly.
I live in a city where most people are bilingual, but neither of the two local languages is my native language. I've made a conscious decision to learn only one of them, because I'd rather try to speak one very well than both badly.
The same thing applies to programming languages. You can learn the syntax of a language in something between 5 minutes (LISP) and three days, but to learn all the corner cases of Java (including things like really understanding classloaders, generics, phantom references, and the synchronisation guarantees of the memory model) or C++ takes much longer.
In short: monolinguism can be the result of mediocrity, but it can also be the result of a conscious aim to know one language in as much depth as possible rather than lots of languages at a basic level.
Really? Every iPhone user is able to buy the game, and therefore a potential customer.
Not for a useful meaning of "potential customer". If I publish a Mario clone for iPhone my potential customers are iPhone owners who would consider playing a Mario clone or who fail to understand my description of the game and think they're buying something else. In talking about potential customers you have to think about the market of people who want your product.
But that's the entire point! The number of pirated copies is completely irrelevant when estimating the number of lost sales.
No, it isn't. If 80.000 people pirate my Mario clone then, ignoring publicity effects, the number of lost sales is somewhere between 0 and 80.000. So at least it gives an upper bound, which is more than knowing the number of people with an iPhone does.
There are 6 relevant figures:
A. The number of people with jailed phones who bought the product
B. The number with jailed phones who didn't buy
C. The number with jail-broken phones who bought
D. The number with jail-broken phones who pirated it but would buy it if they couldn't pirate (~= lost sales)
E. The number who pirated it but would never buy it
F. The number with jail-broken phones who neither bought nor pirated it.
We are given two figures: (A + B) / (C + D + E + F) ~= 9 ; (A + C) / (D + E) ~= 0.25. That is simply insufficient information to even estimate D.
An illegal download does not equal a lost sale.
I quite agree. But nor does the ability to purchase something equal the desire to.
The real implicit statement in TFS (and I presume in TFA too, but you never know with/.) is that "every iPhone user is a potential customer of your iPhone game". That's completely false.
In fact the analysis
Given that there are so few jailbroken phones, how can we explain that 80% of game copies are pirated? The answer is simple — the average pirate downloads a lot more games than the average customer buys. This means that even though games see that 80% of their copies are pirated, only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales.
seems even more flawed than the *AA claim. At least the *AA try take into account the number of pirated copies in computing the number of lost sales, whereas Random Blogger thinks he can get a figure solely from the number of jailbroken phones.
You may be correct that 10% is a better estimate than whatever the *AA estimate, but if so it's a case of reaching a good conclusion via dodgy reasoning, and GPP's "just as wrong" was attacking the reasoning rather than the final figure.
Depends. Typeface designs are protected in some countries, in particular the UK and Germany. IIRC in the UK typeface copyright lasts 25 years; I can't remember the term in Germany, but you can bet that really big companies which feel vulnerable to being sued in one of those countries pay lawyers to check that they're OK.
Yes, but that's not what GPP was talking about. Why on Earth would you assume that comments on/. would be on-topic, when that would require reading TFS?;)
Honestly, it is like a sibling breaking a window. Instead of apologizing and getting him to not do it again you say that he isn't representative of the family and anyone saying the family is bad can fuck off.
Isn't that what he just did? Why are you rebuking him for doing what you want him to do?
so did not have the same level of scrutiny as it would normally do
No, it was about the same. Under Blair the amount of scrutiny legislation receives was severely reduced, which allowed his government to push more of it through. He created a culture in which a minister only considers themselves successful if they get a Bill passed every eighteen months or so.
I believe EU law says that EU citizens living in an EU state have the right to vote in local and European elections, but doesn't give that right for national ones. As a Brit living in Spain I'm (in theory) able to vote in local and European elections, but not national ones. However, I have a postal vote in the UK elections; my ballot paper arrived today, and I intend to send it back tomorrow.
Sat guidance alone can never eliminate the need to solve #3 in some way - a missile going mach 3 covers a huge space in one second, so unless the sat can give the missile realtime target location with a latency of much less than a second there is no hope of getting a hit.
I don't follow your reasoning here. The missile may be going at mach 3 but the aircraft carrier is unlikely to be going at more than 20 knots (~10m/s), and probably can't even make significant course changes in the flight time of your missile.
I think I read that the manufacturers have now said that levels up to 2000mg / m^3 are safe, but I can't find a source to link to. Anyway, they didn't say that until a day or two ago, and the internationally agreed limit is zero.
Slashdot Mirror
can people live with loud bangs as a routine?
The evidence where I live (Valencia, Spain; a city addicted to pyrotechnics) is that yes, we can.
For example, executing their head of food safety over taking bribes to ignore unsafe food for export instead of actually doing something to prevent the next guy from doing the same thing.
You don't think watching his predecessor die would be sufficiently effective?
I can factor large prime numbers really easily.
I graduated from university 8 years ago and already some people were using laptops during lectures. Not just CompScis either.
In the one which is keenest to cover up the truth.
The relevant legislation. Sections 4 and 5 are the relevant ones.
It's also no coincidence that quite a few MPs in UKIP are ex-Tory.
Obviously a slip of the keyboard, but what did you actually mean here: MEPs or failed candidates in the general election?
I don't know about Australia, but if I correctly understood the information which came with my UK passport application our consular services are paid for specifically by taxes on passports. I'm not sure whether it adds up.
(As a point of interest, do US ex-pats get to vote in US elections? Just thinking of a certain revolutionary slogan...)
Implementations of algorithms differ between languages! News at eleven! But you admit that they're the same algorithms, so clearly it's not necessary to use pointers to understand them. (FWIW the algorithm book I have is CLR, which uses an imperative pseudocode).
Learn a little of the second language used in your city.
I can read it fairly well, and I can use a few words. You pick some stuff up without actually studying it. But I wouldn't put it on my CV. In fact, I don't even have French on my CV and I've got a certificate saying that I used to be able to communicate well in that.
In a similar way to French, I would say that I don't know C. I wrote a few small programs and one, as an intern during a university holiday, of a few kloc in it, and I could tell you when it's appropriate to use, but I'd have to do that basic study again before I could write anything in it now.
Ah the well known algorithm "swap". What, not an algorithm? Well, it must be a well-known data structure then. No? For reference (joke at no extra charge), the full sentence was
What you need to concern yourself with is the algorithms and data structures employed, to that end references are as good as pointers.
(My emphasis).
Even mediocre programmers can pick up the basics of any language quickly. The focus on just a core of languages, and often, just ONE language, which we often hear from job candidates and young posters on slashdot are a reflection of the many graduates coming out of CS departments these days who exhibit a distinct lack of talent.
I think you're being too absolutist. Mediocrity may be part of the reason, but it's also the case that to properly learn a language takes time and some (non-mediocre) people like to do things properly.
I live in a city where most people are bilingual, but neither of the two local languages is my native language. I've made a conscious decision to learn only one of them, because I'd rather try to speak one very well than both badly.
The same thing applies to programming languages. You can learn the syntax of a language in something between 5 minutes (LISP) and three days, but to learn all the corner cases of Java (including things like really understanding classloaders, generics, phantom references, and the synchronisation guarantees of the memory model) or C++ takes much longer.
In short: monolinguism can be the result of mediocrity, but it can also be the result of a conscious aim to know one language in as much depth as possible rather than lots of languages at a basic level.
That Onion article is absurd.
But it's the Onion! That's unpossible!
Really? Every iPhone user is able to buy the game, and therefore a potential customer.
Not for a useful meaning of "potential customer". If I publish a Mario clone for iPhone my potential customers are iPhone owners who would consider playing a Mario clone or who fail to understand my description of the game and think they're buying something else. In talking about potential customers you have to think about the market of people who want your product.
But that's the entire point! The number of pirated copies is completely irrelevant when estimating the number of lost sales.
No, it isn't. If 80.000 people pirate my Mario clone then, ignoring publicity effects, the number of lost sales is somewhere between 0 and 80.000. So at least it gives an upper bound, which is more than knowing the number of people with an iPhone does.
There are 6 relevant figures:
A. The number of people with jailed phones who bought the product
B. The number with jailed phones who didn't buy
C. The number with jail-broken phones who bought
D. The number with jail-broken phones who pirated it but would buy it if they couldn't pirate (~= lost sales)
E. The number who pirated it but would never buy it
F. The number with jail-broken phones who neither bought nor pirated it.
We are given two figures: (A + B) / (C + D + E + F) ~= 9 ; (A + C) / (D + E) ~= 0.25. That is simply insufficient information to even estimate D.
An illegal download does not equal a lost sale.
I quite agree. But nor does the ability to purchase something equal the desire to.
The real implicit statement in TFS (and I presume in TFA too, but you never know with /.) is that "every iPhone user is a potential customer of your iPhone game". That's completely false.
In fact the analysis
Given that there are so few jailbroken phones, how can we explain that 80% of game copies are pirated? The answer is simple — the average pirate downloads a lot more games than the average customer buys. This means that even though games see that 80% of their copies are pirated, only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales.
seems even more flawed than the *AA claim. At least the *AA try take into account the number of pirated copies in computing the number of lost sales, whereas Random Blogger thinks he can get a figure solely from the number of jailbroken phones.
You may be correct that 10% is a better estimate than whatever the *AA estimate, but if so it's a case of reaching a good conclusion via dodgy reasoning, and GPP's "just as wrong" was attacking the reasoning rather than the final figure.
Depends. Typeface designs are protected in some countries, in particular the UK and Germany. IIRC in the UK typeface copyright lasts 25 years; I can't remember the term in Germany, but you can bet that really big companies which feel vulnerable to being sued in one of those countries pay lawyers to check that they're OK.
Yes, but that's not what GPP was talking about. Why on Earth would you assume that comments on /. would be on-topic, when that would require reading TFS? ;)
Nah, you can do far better than that. "The character 'a' repeated Graham's number of times" is just a start...
Honestly, it is like a sibling breaking a window. Instead of apologizing and getting him to not do it again you say that he isn't representative of the family and anyone saying the family is bad can fuck off.
Isn't that what he just did? Why are you rebuking him for doing what you want him to do?
Different distros have different goals. If you want something with a long release cycle and good stability, look at Debian.
so did not have the same level of scrutiny as it would normally do
No, it was about the same. Under Blair the amount of scrutiny legislation receives was severely reduced, which allowed his government to push more of it through. He created a culture in which a minister only considers themselves successful if they get a Bill passed every eighteen months or so.
I believe EU law says that EU citizens living in an EU state have the right to vote in local and European elections, but doesn't give that right for national ones. As a Brit living in Spain I'm (in theory) able to vote in local and European elections, but not national ones. However, I have a postal vote in the UK elections; my ballot paper arrived today, and I intend to send it back tomorrow.
Sat guidance alone can never eliminate the need to solve #3 in some way - a missile going mach 3 covers a huge space in one second, so unless the sat can give the missile realtime target location with a latency of much less than a second there is no hope of getting a hit.
I don't follow your reasoning here. The missile may be going at mach 3 but the aircraft carrier is unlikely to be going at more than 20 knots (~10m/s), and probably can't even make significant course changes in the flight time of your missile.
If you want to grumble about the quality of the English in the summary, why not point out that 1981 didn't really see its heyday in the 1990s?
I think I read that the manufacturers have now said that levels up to 2000mg / m^3 are safe, but I can't find a source to link to. Anyway, they didn't say that until a day or two ago, and the internationally agreed limit is zero.