Mexico is nothing like Iraq, and the cartels are nothing like organised militia. The situation has been greatly exaggerated over the border. They talk about paramilitary groups and insurrection and it's really nothing like that. These are gangs. They are surprisingly well armed gangs. But they are nothing but small fry. They like to be flashy, with beheadings and other scare tactics, but they lack staying power.
Their disproportional arsenal means that internal frictions get resolved much more violently, and with much more casualties than you would expect from gangs their size. Besides their own skirmishes they don't use their weapons much except for occasional displays of power. They have enough grenades and assault weapons to harass the local police departments, but immediately flee afterwards. They run and hide like roaches from La Armada and La Marina. The main thing that keeps them around is their ability to blend in with the population.
If you are as much of a war nut as I expect, I'm sure a different image is forming in your head: this is not militia, its guerilla! Except, no. Think smaller, yet smaller.
I've said it already. These are gangs. Large gangs, but just gangs. Think Al Capone with AK-47s and cell phones. During prohibition. It's not much of a metaphoric exercise, really.
Wanna deal with them? Drop the machete, put away the scalpel, we are talking chemo here. Part of the reason the police has been incapable of infiltrating these groups is that the average sicario is a 17yo punk living on 10 dollars a day. You can't fake being that dispossessed! How do you think you are going to get the jump on them? You know a gringo dolled up like G.I. won't make it past Laredo unnoticed, I don't have to tell you that, But unless you speak Mexicano and look Mexicano you won't be able to deviate from the tourist zones without sticking out like a pimple.
That burrito seller you just met in the street? That's the average cartel informant/pusher. Consider yourself located.
Your game is fire power, and good training, stick with it. Except you can't out-gun the cartels in the city without finding yourself in the receiving end of the Mexican Armada. And YOU cannot blend into the population. Enjoy becoming a puppet in the theatre of international drama. Kinda like the kids of Charlie Sheen.
I'm not saying, there is no piece of cake for your boys, but not in the urban scene. where the blackmailing and kidnapping occurs. The *mountain ranges* on the other hand, are an option. Plenty of underdeveloped and underpopulated space for your boys to roam around, taking names, harassing the crops of the drug cartels, and their distribution lines. But believe me, it's not going to be easy. Our army finds them by chopper, are you going to use a chopper? Good bye stealth. With good luck you can go undetected for months. Although it is possible to make your own luck, I'd have to see it getting done to believe it.
And of course there is the desert. More human trafficking than drugs but you don't have scruples do you? And with you I mean, the boyz, not you you. The battle hardened heroes who fought under the scorching sun of Afghanistan. Except this time no A/C for you, and no budget. Hell. You might as well join the border patrol and do this as a side job. Mind you, this happens already.
It is one of those mysterious, non-intuitive things about the subatomic world. You see, rather than ageing uniformly, atoms randomly decide whether to decay or not. Meaning that if you have a container filled with plutonium, after 24,100 years half of the atoms would have decayed, the supply in the container has decayed as a whole, but in reality half of the atoms there never decayed at all.
The result of the analogy is that every two years half of the programmers will be unmarketable (unless they acquire new skills) the other half however doesn't need to learn anything since their exact skill set is still in demand.
I'm somewhat amazed at so many people writing comments to the effect of "there will always be more work". History is filled with examples of humans exhausting resources. And for every resource there was people saying "There will always be more..."...
There will always be more oil. There will always be more water. There will always be more air. There will always be more trees.
And now "there will always be more work". Guess what? We now are suffering the consequences of deforestation and contamination, even the last 8 years of war have been a consequence of oil shortage in the US. Already there are entire fields of labour that can't get people out of the poverty line. Why are we supposed to believe that there will always be more jobs?
Ok so virtual properties are not real, that's the very definition of virtual. This has two implications. One, it means that when the company disappears so does your property. Two, it means that if you are the victim of robbery, you end up asking the police to help you get your pretend money back.
In both instances, the game company is the key factor in the reality of your property. In the former case, virtual robbery, it is the game company which has a stand to sue the thief, since the thief basically committed an unauthorised system access.
Also, and much more interesting, is that there isn't a reason why virtual property must evaporate when the game company closes shop. The game company may as well refund your investment in a variety of manners. While this might sound like financially unsound, it can actually have a huge marketing boost.
For instance, let say a popular game, like Team Fortress 2, is closing shop. You have bought a large number of items purported to be placed in the general area above yourself. Rather than just singing So long and thanks for all the fish, they may decide to give you a (similar but reduced) refund in the form of furniture for the The Sims. EA for its part, while seemingly losing money in the deal has basically acquired an entire user base of known-to-pay gamers.
So while I understand that you can't expect to get your money back, an smart company might decide to use virtual property as an asset before getting closed.
Most films make a profit at the box office while it's still in theatres, and most of the profits of a TV series are made on its first airing. And that's before it even gets released in DVD, from where the rips are taken to bittorrent, and that let's them make yet another profit.
Actually there is a connection between slashdot not allowing you to edit your comments and strong copyright protections.
The issue is sacrifice.
You can't really allow people to make minor corrections to their post without opening the chance that the comments will change meaning, which will make the discussion none sense since comments will me replying to words that no longer exist. To protect the conversation, you have to set it in stone, posts with mistakes are the sacrifice we make to achieve a consistent conversation.
In the same vein, to protect constantly increasing copyrights we have to make a lot of sacrifices, loss of privacy, loss of self determination, overreaching government surveillance and disproportional punishments.
The case to be made is that the sacrifice is not worth it.and the fruit is spoiled, we don't need "life of author+70 years" to protect innovation, and we don't need big brother to ensure profits.
I'd say some piracy is acceptable price for civil liberties, and sane copyright terms would go a long way to ensure copyright infringement goes down.
Apparently now that he's dead the reality distortion field is finally down.
Re:Ubuntu has has two lifes
on
Ubuntu Turns 7
·
· Score: 1
Actually they want the iPad user base, their response to the issue that they are alienating their users is that they need better users, which is despairing.
This is something that started happening since they started replacing the standard notification area with their "Indicator Applet" and which I identified when they changed the position of the window buttons. Basically, where they put the window buttons wasn't as important as the fact that they didn't care what the users tough about it, if the users didn't like it, the users were the problem.
That might be within Canonical's rights, but that doesn't mean it's not despairing for the current Linux user base.
Which could be the basis for abolishing patent law but then what about small inventors? How can an independent inventor sell some idea if he can't patent it?
Although I'm not convinced that they have a chance in the current legal environment either, but the general public thinks it is necessary for such cases.
This can't be stated clearly (and loudly) enough. we hate it because of real reasons unrelated to it being new.
Dismissing criticism as "new-hate" just blinds you to the fact that Gnome 3 and Gnome-Shell have many real disadvantages. For instance, and I'm trying very hard to restrict myself to just one example. I set up an Ubuntu box for my mother, you know, the Granny Greta user case. She hates password prompts but that's ok, I can apply updates remotely. She used to be able to suspend the computer by pressing the power button and bring it back up by pressing it again.
After upgrading to Oneric which uses Gnome 3 under Unity, this wasn't possible anymore. Pressing the power button brings up a dialog, waking it up asks for a password. This was configurable under Gnome 2, not Gnome 3.
Why isn't it free in perpetuity? Does "in perpetuity" mean all possible branches and ports?
If you are using my code I don't see why I can't expect it so. Replace "my" with "our" and "i" with "we" and you start to get a clearer picture.
BSD is mostly attractive for business which don't need contribution can afford competition, and want to keep the door open to move to closed source eventually.
GPL is attractive for independent, often non-profit projects that want contributions more than money, are really hurt by competition and don't have plans to eventually close the source code.
While the MIT/BSD license may not seem restrictive to you as an end user or end user product maker, surely you can understand why *contributors* may be suspicious and thrusting of contributing to BSD licensed projects.
I stopped using Gnome Shell because the open source driver overheats my system and catalyst wasn't compatible. Does this move implicates that the open source radeon driver doesn't suck anymore?
Indeed but none of the fanboys are going to accept that
Those who have succeeded at anything and don't mention luck are kidding themselves. ~Larry King
"Apple", would have happened with or without Steve. For all I know it could have been Xerox itself, from which Apple took quite a bit. He had the right vision at the right time and he was first there. From there he built on capital acquired from previous success to buy smarter people so he could be an asshole to them and get them to work 80 HRS/W.
I just can't quite get on the train and believe that the industry would be in a different place if someone else had been "the Jobs" instead. Obviously there would be differences, but a lot of his stuff was so trivial, aren't we dealing with this constantly in the patent world? The injustice of how independently discovered technology gets arbitrarily assigned to whoever files first? Or just think how people were inventing iphone features faster than Apple so much that Apple had to ban them so they could later claim to have invented these same features?
Unsurprising Most people are influenced by TV ads and web banners.
FTFOOTFY.
Firefox is losing because they don't have ads on TV, magazines and high traffic pages like YouTube and Google's search page. Mozilla had to start a whole campaign just to get two pages on the Times, meanwhile Google buys Super Bowl ads. If any, the only thing that is surprising is how much Firefox is resisting in the face of such marketing force.
Are you really trying to imply that C is a sane language to develop for? So after some reading it seems that you do get "NaN" or "inf" types if you include math.h and work with floats. Al the better reason to avoid C.
For 4 reasons. Though this is a Python thing, this is valid in every language: 1) Exceptions are consistent and unified way of checking for errors, otherwise you end up with lot's of ad hoc error checking code. == 0, != 0, !== null, type(foo) != 'undefined', if ('property' in foo), hasOwnProperty and any application specific isValid, hasThis, hasThat are bunch of different ways to test for the same sort of things. EFAP offers a consistent interface instead of a disparate API. 2) EFAP code looks like what it is trying to do, not like what it's trying not to do. 3) There really is no end to LFYL. If desired, you could make a language where all errors --including for amusement syntax errors-- return undefined. It's predictable! Also good luck trying to debug any code. It's your damn fault for not checking each one of dozens of easily verified conditions.
Except not even JS is that diabolical. You do get error messages for almost any mistake, NaN, Infinity and undefined being the glaring (un)exceptions. There is no reason for treating these cases differently, you are just defending JS for arguing sake. 4) Your VM/Interpreter is already guarding against exceptions. It's not like you are actually avoiding guarding against exceptions. No matter many times you call ('property' in foo) the browser still braces for impact in case foo.property doesn't exist. You are not optimising anything avoiding exceptions.
Slashdot Mirror
Who's trolling?
I feel like I owe you a deep explanations.
Mexico is nothing like Iraq, and the cartels are nothing like organised militia. The situation has been greatly exaggerated over the border. They talk about paramilitary groups and insurrection and it's really nothing like that. These are gangs. They are surprisingly well armed gangs. But they are nothing but small fry. They like to be flashy, with beheadings and other scare tactics, but they lack staying power.
Their disproportional arsenal means that internal frictions get resolved much more violently, and with much more casualties than you would expect from gangs their size. Besides their own skirmishes they don't use their weapons much except for occasional displays of power. They have enough grenades and assault weapons to harass the local police departments, but immediately flee afterwards. They run and hide like roaches from La Armada and La Marina. The main thing that keeps them around is their ability to blend in with the population.
If you are as much of a war nut as I expect, I'm sure a different image is forming in your head: this is not militia, its guerilla! Except, no. Think smaller, yet smaller.
I've said it already. These are gangs. Large gangs, but just gangs. Think Al Capone with AK-47s and cell phones. During prohibition. It's not much of a metaphoric exercise, really.
Wanna deal with them? Drop the machete, put away the scalpel, we are talking chemo here. Part of the reason the police has been incapable of infiltrating these groups is that the average sicario is a 17yo punk living on 10 dollars a day. You can't fake being that dispossessed! How do you think you are going to get the jump on them? You know a gringo dolled up like G.I. won't make it past Laredo unnoticed, I don't have to tell you that, But unless you speak Mexicano and look Mexicano you won't be able to deviate from the tourist zones without sticking out like a pimple.
That burrito seller you just met in the street? That's the average cartel informant/pusher. Consider yourself located.
Your game is fire power, and good training, stick with it. Except you can't out-gun the cartels in the city without finding yourself in the receiving end of the Mexican Armada. And YOU cannot blend into the population. Enjoy becoming a puppet in the theatre of international drama. Kinda like the kids of Charlie Sheen.
I'm not saying, there is no piece of cake for your boys, but not in the urban scene. where the blackmailing and kidnapping occurs. The *mountain ranges* on the other hand, are an option. Plenty of underdeveloped and underpopulated space for your boys to roam around, taking names, harassing the crops of the drug cartels, and their distribution lines. But believe me, it's not going to be easy. Our army finds them by chopper, are you going to use a chopper? Good bye stealth. With good luck you can go undetected for months. Although it is possible to make your own luck, I'd have to see it getting done to believe it.
And of course there is the desert. More human trafficking than drugs but you don't have scruples do you? And with you I mean, the boyz, not you you. The battle hardened heroes who fought under the scorching sun of Afghanistan. Except this time no A/C for you, and no budget. Hell. You might as well join the border patrol and do this as a side job. Mind you, this happens already.
I think you have been playing too much modern warfare, that's what I think.
And I find writing end end end end too much work too and a cascade of
}
}
}
}
}
Is not much better either, specially when you factor in the semicolon cancer. What year are you writing form that you don't have autoindenting editor?
Half-life is still a pretty damn good analogy.
It is one of those mysterious, non-intuitive things about the subatomic world. You see, rather than ageing uniformly, atoms randomly decide whether to decay or not. Meaning that if you have a container filled with plutonium, after 24,100 years half of the atoms would have decayed, the supply in the container has decayed as a whole, but in reality half of the atoms there never decayed at all.
The result of the analogy is that every two years half of the programmers will be unmarketable (unless they acquire new skills) the other half however doesn't need to learn anything since their exact skill set is still in demand.
I'm somewhat amazed at so many people writing comments to the effect of "there will always be more work". History is filled with examples of humans exhausting resources. And for every resource there was people saying "There will always be more..."...
There will always be more oil.
There will always be more water.
There will always be more air.
There will always be more trees.
And now "there will always be more work". Guess what? We now are suffering the consequences of deforestation and contamination, even the last 8 years of war have been a consequence of oil shortage in the US. Already there are entire fields of labour that can't get people out of the poverty line. Why are we supposed to believe that there will always be more jobs?
I don't know if it is the be all, but it will surely end all.
Ok so virtual properties are not real, that's the very definition of virtual. This has two implications. One, it means that when the company disappears so does your property. Two, it means that if you are the victim of robbery, you end up asking the police to help you get your pretend money back.
In both instances, the game company is the key factor in the reality of your property. In the former case, virtual robbery, it is the game company which has a stand to sue the thief, since the thief basically committed an unauthorised system access.
Also, and much more interesting, is that there isn't a reason why virtual property must evaporate when the game company closes shop. The game company may as well refund your investment in a variety of manners. While this might sound like financially unsound, it can actually have a huge marketing boost.
For instance, let say a popular game, like Team Fortress 2, is closing shop. You have bought a large number of items purported to be placed in the general area above yourself. Rather than just singing So long and thanks for all the fish, they may decide to give you a (similar but reduced) refund in the form of furniture for the The Sims. EA for its part, while seemingly losing money in the deal has basically acquired an entire user base of known-to-pay gamers.
So while I understand that you can't expect to get your money back, an smart company might decide to use virtual property as an asset before getting closed.
Turrets.
Turrets are for persuading, sentries are for sappin'
Most films make a profit at the box office while it's still in theatres, and most of the profits of a TV series are made on its first airing. And that's before it even gets released in DVD, from where the rips are taken to bittorrent, and that let's them make yet another profit.
Why should they get payed over and over for the next 70+ years? And why should I let the Italian government install a black box in my computer to prevent people from sharing cartoons from the 80's?
Digital information is unique as it can be copied again and again without loosing anything.
Actually there is a connection between slashdot not allowing you to edit your comments and strong copyright protections.
The issue is sacrifice.
You can't really allow people to make minor corrections to their post without opening the chance that the comments will change meaning, which will make the discussion none sense since comments will me replying to words that no longer exist. To protect the conversation, you have to set it in stone, posts with mistakes are the sacrifice we make to achieve a consistent conversation.
In the same vein, to protect constantly increasing copyrights we have to make a lot of sacrifices, loss of privacy, loss of self determination, overreaching government surveillance and disproportional punishments.
The case to be made is that the sacrifice is not worth it.and the fruit is spoiled, we don't need "life of author+70 years" to protect innovation, and we don't need big brother to ensure profits.
I'd say some piracy is acceptable price for civil liberties, and sane copyright terms would go a long way to ensure copyright infringement goes down.
Apparently now that he's dead the reality distortion field is finally down.
Actually they want the iPad user base, their response to the issue that they are alienating their users is that they need better users, which is despairing.
This is something that started happening since they started replacing the standard notification area with their "Indicator Applet" and which I identified when they changed the position of the window buttons. Basically, where they put the window buttons wasn't as important as the fact that they didn't care what the users tough about it, if the users didn't like it, the users were the problem.
That might be within Canonical's rights, but that doesn't mean it's not despairing for the current Linux user base.
Which could be the basis for abolishing patent law but then what about small inventors? How can an independent inventor sell some idea if he can't patent it?
Although I'm not convinced that they have a chance in the current legal environment either, but the general public thinks it is necessary for such cases.
This can't be stated clearly (and loudly) enough. we hate it because of real reasons unrelated to it being new.
Dismissing criticism as "new-hate" just blinds you to the fact that Gnome 3 and Gnome-Shell have many real disadvantages. For instance, and I'm trying very hard to restrict myself to just one example. I set up an Ubuntu box for my mother, you know, the Granny Greta user case. She hates password prompts but that's ok, I can apply updates remotely. She used to be able to suspend the computer by pressing the power button and bring it back up by pressing it again.
After upgrading to Oneric which uses Gnome 3 under Unity, this wasn't possible anymore. Pressing the power button brings up a dialog, waking it up asks for a password. This was configurable under Gnome 2, not Gnome 3.
WTF Gnome?
This. Data Mining is like spam, a technical solution is preferable than one that requires the cooperation of the offending parties.
Why isn't it free in perpetuity? Does "in perpetuity" mean all possible branches and ports?
If you are using my code I don't see why I can't expect it so. Replace "my" with "our" and "i" with "we" and you start to get a clearer picture.
BSD is mostly attractive for business which don't need contribution can afford competition, and want to keep the door open to move to closed source eventually.
GPL is attractive for independent, often non-profit projects that want contributions more than money, are really hurt by competition and don't have plans to eventually close the source code.
While the MIT/BSD license may not seem restrictive to you as an end user or end user product maker, surely you can understand why *contributors* may be suspicious and thrusting of contributing to BSD licensed projects.
I stopped using Gnome Shell because the open source driver overheats my system and catalyst wasn't compatible. Does this move implicates that the open source radeon driver doesn't suck anymore?
Indeed but none of the fanboys are going to accept that
Those who have succeeded at anything and don't mention luck are kidding themselves. ~Larry King
"Apple", would have happened with or without Steve. For all I know it could have been Xerox itself, from which Apple took quite a bit. He had the right vision at the right time and he was first there. From there he built on capital acquired from previous success to buy smarter people so he could be an asshole to them and get them to work 80 HRS/W.
I just can't quite get on the train and believe that the industry would be in a different place if someone else had been "the Jobs" instead. Obviously there would be differences, but a lot of his stuff was so trivial, aren't we dealing with this constantly in the patent world? The injustice of how independently discovered technology gets arbitrarily assigned to whoever files first? Or just think how people were inventing iphone features faster than Apple so much that Apple had to ban them so they could later claim to have invented these same features?
Motherfucking Sentry gun launcher! Fuck yeah! Would give all my scrap metal for it.
Unsurprising
Most people are influenced by TV ads and web banners.
FTFOOTFY.
Firefox is losing because they don't have ads on TV, magazines and high traffic pages like YouTube and Google's search page. Mozilla had to start a whole campaign just to get two pages on the Times, meanwhile Google buys Super Bowl ads. If any, the only thing that is surprising is how much Firefox is resisting in the face of such marketing force.
Are you really trying to imply that C is a sane language to develop for? So after some reading it seems that you do get "NaN" or "inf" types if you include math.h and work with floats. Al the better reason to avoid C.
But this being Valve I'd at expect to get a new hat.
For 4 reasons. Though this is a Python thing, this is valid in every language:
1) Exceptions are consistent and unified way of checking for errors, otherwise you end up with lot's of ad hoc error checking code.
== 0, != 0, !== null, type(foo) != 'undefined', if ('property' in foo), hasOwnProperty and any application specific isValid, hasThis, hasThat are bunch of different ways to test for the same sort of things.
EFAP offers a consistent interface instead of a disparate API.
2) EFAP code looks like what it is trying to do, not like what it's trying not to do.
3) There really is no end to LFYL. If desired, you could make a language where all errors --including for amusement syntax errors-- return undefined. It's predictable! Also good luck trying to debug any code. It's your damn fault for not checking each one of dozens of easily verified conditions.
Except not even JS is that diabolical. You do get error messages for almost any mistake, NaN, Infinity and undefined being the glaring (un)exceptions. There is no reason for treating these cases differently, you are just defending JS for arguing sake.
4) Your VM/Interpreter is already guarding against exceptions. It's not like you are actually avoiding guarding against exceptions. No matter many times you call ('property' in foo) the browser still braces for impact in case foo.property doesn't exist. You are not optimising anything avoiding exceptions.