And of that tiny percentage how many were Windows users taking the fairly safe bet that the ad didn't do what it said? This is what I've been thinking. I would have no problem going to a link that says, "Click here for a virus." Because I know that simply going to a website is not going to give me a virus. I would have to go to the site, then click another link with a download or something of that nature. It could be a zero-day exploit, but those aren't all that common and I could just as easily get bitten by this going to any website.
I feel like this is an example of someone getting results then not being willing to think the situation through because he is so fond of the one explanation he has (ie that people are stupid).
With regard to that, you have failed to make any reasonable presentation of your position. There's a difference between failing and not bothering. I have chosen the latter. I am quite capable of making a cogent argument, I just have no interest doing so. If you don't believe me, I encourage you to read other comments I have posted or read my blog.
Once again, I refer to option #3. If a crazy person comes up to me on the street and claims that the world is going to explode in 5 minutes, my refusal to deign to respond does not imply that he is correct or that I have no rebuttal. It simply implies that I have no interest in carrying on a dialogue with said persona. If you weren't such a douche, I might consider continuing this conversation. I have already wasted far too much of my life talking with you as it is.
Seriously though, as a friendly note, you come off as a huge jerk. It doesn't matter if you're right or not, but when you talk in the way that you have, you alienate people and no one wants engage you in discussion, unless that person is also a jerk. I imagine in real life you are actually a very nice person, but if you truly wish to share your ideas with other people, you need to allow at least a small portion of that niceness to shine through. Your writing style is very pompous and confrontational. Telling someone that by not replying they are implying their agreement is simply ridiculous. It really is a shame because I would have liked to engage you in discussion. In fact, I even suppose that we would agree on quite a few things. For example, I am very alarmed by recent examples of the suspension of habeas corpus. But the caustic nature of your writing style is repulsive to me. I imagine you'll probably disregard this but know that this last sentence was written in an earnest attempt to give some honest advice. Sorry if I have offended.
You wrote that you had been overseas and that you had consequently observed that other governments were various degrees of "bad", which observation you then inverted to claim that our government is "good." More specifically you said, in response to my post which pointed out some of our government's shortcomings: I did not claim that other governments being bad makes our government good. I just stated that we should be grateful for what we have. To put it another way, imagine that you have a cold and your neighbor has cholera. You're grateful that you're better off than your neighbor, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't get treatment. Just as with your analogy, yes, a murderer is better than a mass-murderer. I have yet to claim that we shouldn't fix the problems we have here in the US.
Now, if you'd like to discuss any of the above issues, I'm more than willing. Failing such discussion and subsequent successful argument against my assertions on these points, I will assume that you either agree with the above accusations, or do not understand them in each of the above indicated illegitimate actions of the state and federal governments of the USA. I'll take option #3: I don't feel like wasting my time perpetuating an irrelevant correspondence with a pompous douche.
I will also assume that you now understand that perceived faults of other governments and nations do not in any way excuse any fault of the government of our nation. Seriously, do you read this stuff before you write it? I choose option #3 again.
Please explain, in as much detail as you can, how it can be a good thing that the government is operating outside its constitutionally derived authority. My explanation is that I like how things are here in the United States. Apparently a lot of other people do as well. Oh yeah, and I would like to invoke option #3 again.
I was saying that your analogy was absurd. It was a complete logic fallacy. Now you are trying to take my reply to your analogy and apply it to your other views. Thusly you are trying to imply that I said absurd to all sorts of things that I did not.
Secondly, I do not have blind faith in the government. I have never said that. I like America; I like our government. I have not said that they are flawless though. They've got plenty of problems. I want those problems to be fixed. But, overall, our government does a pretty good job. Tell me of a government that did not have any corruption in the past, or that had less than we have now. I don't think you can, because corruption has always gone hand-in-hand with governmental authority. The beauty of our day-and-age is that corruption is less than in previous times. Our corruption is far less rampant than most countries and I don't see that corruption increasing, I see it decreasing. Look at some of the things Bush has tried to do, and we just won't allow it. I don't think you would have seen the same things happen 100 years ago when the country was in the fierce grips of the political machine. My first comment was a comment of optimism, not ignorance.
Lastly, once again, I never denied that the government is operating outside its constitutionally derived authority. The place where you and I would disagree is in regards to whether or not that is a good thing. I personally believe that one of the strengths of the constitution is its ambiguity on many points. Let's face it, the constitution was not a very precise document. It defined the government in fairly broad strokes. This is not a weakness, but a strength. Because the framers designed the SCOTUS to actively interpret the constitution (I'm sure we'll disagree on that last point, oh well, let the firestorm begin) as times change. The founding fathers could not have anticipated cars, the internet, air-flight, and so on. So clauses were left vague so that later generations could interpret them as befits that day-and-age. That is my view at least, though I have no doubt that you find this ridiculous and absurd.
That all said, I am interested to hear what you think to be examples of "the government... operating outside its constitutionally derived authority." I highly doubt I will agree with you, but I am interested in hearing what you think to be a problem. In fact, that really underscores the difficulty that you, and others like you, have in fixing these so-called "problems." I am someone who will probably fight against these "problems." I believe that one of the biggest problems with America is that it doesn't have socialized medicine. Of course, I doubt you would agree with me on that issue. And that's what makes our country so great. The end result is influenced by a bunch of disjoint viewpoints. I like that.
People on Slashdot seem to be pretty anti-government as a whole. People are always claiming how corrupt our government is and so on and so forth. I encourage any of these people to go visit some countries outside of the US. That certainly opened my eyes to how effective and not-corrupt our government is here in the US. Sure, there are problems, but as a whole I think our government does a pretty good job. We all, for the most part, live a comfortable, safe, prosperous life. Because of these laws that everyone hates so much and because of these congressmen that are so awful, we have roads, universities, freedoms, and so on. God bless America. It's a great place to live. It could be better. And that's the great thing about this country is that we are the ones who can make it better.
This is so true. Although generics give Java/C# a similar tool, they are very different. C++ templates actually create entirely different chunks of assembly code. C++ templates provide compile-time type-checking but they also provide run-time binaries. This makes C++ templates very fast and able to create extremely optimized code for each type used. This may surprise you, because you've heard from people with no C++ knowledge that templates are slow. People who say that are not familiar with templates in the least. On the other hand, generics simply provide compile-time type-checking. They do nothing more. So, as you can see, they are quite different from C++ templates.
I am in favor of impeachment or censure. I am not in favor of these options because I think Cheney would be better than Bush. Rather, I think it is important that we send a strong message to future presidents and, more importantly, to the whole world that we don't stand for this sort of garbage.
The truth is, that sometimes you need to just let a fire burn itself out. Sure, it might cause damage, but you can then take that time and install measures to prevent problems from becoming fires. There is the problem: people's unwillingness to accept triage and define acceptable damage levels. So, for example, if letting something go completely fubar costs you one client, but that same time spent elsewhere can ensure you five new/happy clients, well it's not hard to determine which is the best investment for your time.
Even bigger BS is expecting a big company like Dell to spend a lot of money to go after a ridiculously small market. Is anyone here so deep into their geekdom as to believe that Dell would make a lot of money selling Linux boxes? I think this article makes a lot of sense with its explanation.
Sorry, your response to my comment is exactly correct. This was meant to be a response to a different comment (your grandparent actually). That said, I agree fully with everything you stated in your comment. Sorry again.
So you're implying that the reason that we haven't had suicide bombers hitting the US since 9/11 is the Patriot Act? On what grounds can you make that claim? I may not have enough proof to show that to be false, but you definitely don't have enough proof to show it to be true. Of course, your answer will be that we haven't had an attack since 9/11, well we didn't have one before either. We didn't have the Patriot Act before 9/11 and we defended ourselves just fine. Also, Al Queda's hatred for us is not a new thing that started on 9/11.
Basically I'm just trying to say that the Patriot Act may or may not have improved our security. The data that I have is pretty inconclusive. That said, the data that I have showing how the Patriot Act is a violation of my freedoms as an American is pretty conclusive.
I don't know if you exactly understood what I was saying. I was not saying that atheists group me with the "Christian Right." I was saying that the "Christian Right" assumes that if you believe in God, you must believe in their crazy ideas as well. I have never had an atheist accuse me of being a fundamentalist simply because I believe in God. I have found that atheists are generally very respectful of my beliefs as long as I don't try to push my beliefs on them.
I hate it that every seems to assume that if you believe in God, you must also believe that we should have prayer in schools, that evolution should not be taught, and all sorts of other "religious" ideas. I am a religious person, very religious. Nevertheless, I rarely agree with the "Christian Right." I believe that the state needs to maintain a hands-off policy towards religion. So, even though the country 90+% religious, it doesn't mean that the country is 90+% bigoted or 90+% fanatic or 90+% completely out of our mind.
The answer to every why question about Apple's DRM is the same exact response: "To sell iPods." Apple doesn't make their money off the music store. The purpose of the music store is drive sales of the iPod. Why didn't we see video content on iTunes until the video iPod? You can't tell me they didn't have the technology to serve video. No, they just didn't want to bother serving something that didn't push sales of the iPod. If Apple opens its DRM, then people don't need to buy an iPod anymore. The DRM locks people in. I know that one reason I have continued to purchase iPods is that I don't want to lose access to a bunch of my music.
The previous few posts caused me to also open up the code. Wow! What a ride! I decided that I wanted to add a few things I found as well.
I loved that he referred to his use of the short pointer as a "cool pointer hack to avoid shifts and ifs!!!" To begin with, if we have to call that a "cool hack" then the requirements for coolness have definitely dropped a bit. I am also confused as to how this helps avoid shifts and ifs. As far as I can tell, it avoids one shift. I'd love to see the code without the "cool hack" because I'm intrigued as to how he uses an if statement to remove the higher bits.
As stated before, I am also fond of his use of an array of size 65535 rather than 65536. I surprised he didn't run into any segmentation faults. I know that I can give him a test case that will seg fault pretty easily.
I also question whether he understands the purpose of a header file, as the entire source for his BitSort is contained within a header file. I guess it would sort of make sense if the function was declared inline, but it isn't.
Another fun element is how non-modular his code is. Everything is hard-coded, even though it would have been easy to declare a few constants or even make the function a template.
Lastly though, why the crap did this article get through the editors. It is, as has been stated over and over, a radix sort and nothing different. I know that he claims it is different because it is in-place, but that is such an obvious simple change that it does not warrant a whole new algorithm. Regardless of the content, the article is so poorly written with some of the worst grammar I have read in quite some time. Slashdot really needs to improve its article standards.
Thank you. This is exactly what I have been saying for years. It's interesting to see that the environmentalists are starting to come around to nuclear finally. I wish they hadn't freaking killed the industry 20 years ago with their propaganda. We might not have the problem that we do today with Global Warming had it not been for their illogical, ridiculous FUD against nuclear.
Now, is "crapload" the metric unit? It is, but the more common unit is the "kilacrapload". The "crapload" is too small for rocketry calculations. It's nice that NASA has finally moved to the metric system so that we can switch from the previous unit of "dookies" which was a pain in the butt to convert.
...wouldn't that fall into the same category as "Don't put that information up there in the first place"? No. Making your profile, or particular data private is not the same as not putting the information there in the first place. While I may want my friends to know what my calendar holds, I probably don't want perfect strangers to know. Therefore, I put the data as private. That way my friends know and others don't. It makes perfect sense to me.
I remember watching Minority Report and having the opposite response. The UI seemed very plausible. If we are talking about writing up word documents, then no. But if we are talking about video editing and imaging, it seemed very realistic. In fact, it was so realistic that someone created a set of input devices very similar to those in the movie. I remember there being an article here about it a few months ago. Someone was playing warcraft.
Very good point. I hate MS as much as the next guy, but I don't like them being attacked for things they have no business being attacked for. We do this a lot as humans. We take a group that has done something legitimately wrong. We then blame them and accuse them of every other wrong thing in the world regardless of their connection. MS has done and is doing a lot of bad things, but, apart from saber-rattling, they have been largely innocent in the patent wars of late.
I guess loud is the wrong choice of words. Sound just doesn't travel very well. I think it has something to do with the pressurization and all of the obstructions (high back seats).
Slashdot Mirror
I feel like this is an example of someone getting results then not being willing to think the situation through because he is so fond of the one explanation he has (ie that people are stupid).
Once again, I refer to option #3. If a crazy person comes up to me on the street and claims that the world is going to explode in 5 minutes, my refusal to deign to respond does not imply that he is correct or that I have no rebuttal. It simply implies that I have no interest in carrying on a dialogue with said persona. If you weren't such a douche, I might consider continuing this conversation. I have already wasted far too much of my life talking with you as it is.
Seriously though, as a friendly note, you come off as a huge jerk. It doesn't matter if you're right or not, but when you talk in the way that you have, you alienate people and no one wants engage you in discussion, unless that person is also a jerk. I imagine in real life you are actually a very nice person, but if you truly wish to share your ideas with other people, you need to allow at least a small portion of that niceness to shine through. Your writing style is very pompous and confrontational. Telling someone that by not replying they are implying their agreement is simply ridiculous. It really is a shame because I would have liked to engage you in discussion. In fact, I even suppose that we would agree on quite a few things. For example, I am very alarmed by recent examples of the suspension of habeas corpus. But the caustic nature of your writing style is repulsive to me. I imagine you'll probably disregard this but know that this last sentence was written in an earnest attempt to give some honest advice. Sorry if I have offended.
I was saying that your analogy was absurd. It was a complete logic fallacy. Now you are trying to take my reply to your analogy and apply it to your other views. Thusly you are trying to imply that I said absurd to all sorts of things that I did not. Secondly, I do not have blind faith in the government. I have never said that. I like America; I like our government. I have not said that they are flawless though. They've got plenty of problems. I want those problems to be fixed. But, overall, our government does a pretty good job. Tell me of a government that did not have any corruption in the past, or that had less than we have now. I don't think you can, because corruption has always gone hand-in-hand with governmental authority. The beauty of our day-and-age is that corruption is less than in previous times. Our corruption is far less rampant than most countries and I don't see that corruption increasing, I see it decreasing. Look at some of the things Bush has tried to do, and we just won't allow it. I don't think you would have seen the same things happen 100 years ago when the country was in the fierce grips of the political machine. My first comment was a comment of optimism, not ignorance. Lastly, once again, I never denied that the government is operating outside its constitutionally derived authority. The place where you and I would disagree is in regards to whether or not that is a good thing. I personally believe that one of the strengths of the constitution is its ambiguity on many points. Let's face it, the constitution was not a very precise document. It defined the government in fairly broad strokes. This is not a weakness, but a strength. Because the framers designed the SCOTUS to actively interpret the constitution (I'm sure we'll disagree on that last point, oh well, let the firestorm begin) as times change. The founding fathers could not have anticipated cars, the internet, air-flight, and so on. So clauses were left vague so that later generations could interpret them as befits that day-and-age. That is my view at least, though I have no doubt that you find this ridiculous and absurd. That all said, I am interested to hear what you think to be examples of "the government... operating outside its constitutionally derived authority." I highly doubt I will agree with you, but I am interested in hearing what you think to be a problem. In fact, that really underscores the difficulty that you, and others like you, have in fixing these so-called "problems." I am someone who will probably fight against these "problems." I believe that one of the biggest problems with America is that it doesn't have socialized medicine. Of course, I doubt you would agree with me on that issue. And that's what makes our country so great. The end result is influenced by a bunch of disjoint viewpoints. I like that.
Chuck Norris's toe nail clippings?
What the?! How did I suddenly get teleported into Barrens chat?
One word: absurd
People on Slashdot seem to be pretty anti-government as a whole. People are always claiming how corrupt our government is and so on and so forth. I encourage any of these people to go visit some countries outside of the US. That certainly opened my eyes to how effective and not-corrupt our government is here in the US. Sure, there are problems, but as a whole I think our government does a pretty good job. We all, for the most part, live a comfortable, safe, prosperous life. Because of these laws that everyone hates so much and because of these congressmen that are so awful, we have roads, universities, freedoms, and so on. God bless America. It's a great place to live. It could be better. And that's the great thing about this country is that we are the ones who can make it better.
This is so true. Although generics give Java/C# a similar tool, they are very different. C++ templates actually create entirely different chunks of assembly code. C++ templates provide compile-time type-checking but they also provide run-time binaries. This makes C++ templates very fast and able to create extremely optimized code for each type used. This may surprise you, because you've heard from people with no C++ knowledge that templates are slow. People who say that are not familiar with templates in the least. On the other hand, generics simply provide compile-time type-checking. They do nothing more. So, as you can see, they are quite different from C++ templates.
I am in favor of impeachment or censure. I am not in favor of these options because I think Cheney would be better than Bush. Rather, I think it is important that we send a strong message to future presidents and, more importantly, to the whole world that we don't stand for this sort of garbage.
The truth is, that sometimes you need to just let a fire burn itself out. Sure, it might cause damage, but you can then take that time and install measures to prevent problems from becoming fires. There is the problem: people's unwillingness to accept triage and define acceptable damage levels. So, for example, if letting something go completely fubar costs you one client, but that same time spent elsewhere can ensure you five new/happy clients, well it's not hard to determine which is the best investment for your time.
Even bigger BS is expecting a big company like Dell to spend a lot of money to go after a ridiculously small market. Is anyone here so deep into their geekdom as to believe that Dell would make a lot of money selling Linux boxes? I think this article makes a lot of sense with its explanation.
Sorry, your response to my comment is exactly correct. This was meant to be a response to a different comment (your grandparent actually). That said, I agree fully with everything you stated in your comment. Sorry again.
So you're implying that the reason that we haven't had suicide bombers hitting the US since 9/11 is the Patriot Act? On what grounds can you make that claim? I may not have enough proof to show that to be false, but you definitely don't have enough proof to show it to be true. Of course, your answer will be that we haven't had an attack since 9/11, well we didn't have one before either. We didn't have the Patriot Act before 9/11 and we defended ourselves just fine. Also, Al Queda's hatred for us is not a new thing that started on 9/11.
Basically I'm just trying to say that the Patriot Act may or may not have improved our security. The data that I have is pretty inconclusive. That said, the data that I have showing how the Patriot Act is a violation of my freedoms as an American is pretty conclusive.
I don't know if you exactly understood what I was saying. I was not saying that atheists group me with the "Christian Right." I was saying that the "Christian Right" assumes that if you believe in God, you must believe in their crazy ideas as well. I have never had an atheist accuse me of being a fundamentalist simply because I believe in God. I have found that atheists are generally very respectful of my beliefs as long as I don't try to push my beliefs on them.
I hate it that every seems to assume that if you believe in God, you must also believe that we should have prayer in schools, that evolution should not be taught, and all sorts of other "religious" ideas. I am a religious person, very religious. Nevertheless, I rarely agree with the "Christian Right." I believe that the state needs to maintain a hands-off policy towards religion. So, even though the country 90+% religious, it doesn't mean that the country is 90+% bigoted or 90+% fanatic or 90+% completely out of our mind.
The answer to every why question about Apple's DRM is the same exact response: "To sell iPods." Apple doesn't make their money off the music store. The purpose of the music store is drive sales of the iPod. Why didn't we see video content on iTunes until the video iPod? You can't tell me they didn't have the technology to serve video. No, they just didn't want to bother serving something that didn't push sales of the iPod. If Apple opens its DRM, then people don't need to buy an iPod anymore. The DRM locks people in. I know that one reason I have continued to purchase iPods is that I don't want to lose access to a bunch of my music.
The previous few posts caused me to also open up the code. Wow! What a ride! I decided that I wanted to add a few things I found as well.
I loved that he referred to his use of the short pointer as a "cool pointer hack to avoid shifts and ifs!!!" To begin with, if we have to call that a "cool hack" then the requirements for coolness have definitely dropped a bit. I am also confused as to how this helps avoid shifts and ifs. As far as I can tell, it avoids one shift. I'd love to see the code without the "cool hack" because I'm intrigued as to how he uses an if statement to remove the higher bits.
As stated before, I am also fond of his use of an array of size 65535 rather than 65536. I surprised he didn't run into any segmentation faults. I know that I can give him a test case that will seg fault pretty easily.
I also question whether he understands the purpose of a header file, as the entire source for his BitSort is contained within a header file. I guess it would sort of make sense if the function was declared inline, but it isn't.
Another fun element is how non-modular his code is. Everything is hard-coded, even though it would have been easy to declare a few constants or even make the function a template.
Lastly though, why the crap did this article get through the editors. It is, as has been stated over and over, a radix sort and nothing different. I know that he claims it is different because it is in-place, but that is such an obvious simple change that it does not warrant a whole new algorithm. Regardless of the content, the article is so poorly written with some of the worst grammar I have read in quite some time. Slashdot really needs to improve its article standards.
Thank you. This is exactly what I have been saying for years. It's interesting to see that the environmentalists are starting to come around to nuclear finally. I wish they hadn't freaking killed the industry 20 years ago with their propaganda. We might not have the problem that we do today with Global Warming had it not been for their illogical, ridiculous FUD against nuclear.
...wouldn't that fall into the same category as "Don't put that information up there in the first place"? No. Making your profile, or particular data private is not the same as not putting the information there in the first place. While I may want my friends to know what my calendar holds, I probably don't want perfect strangers to know. Therefore, I put the data as private. That way my friends know and others don't. It makes perfect sense to me.I remember watching Minority Report and having the opposite response. The UI seemed very plausible. If we are talking about writing up word documents, then no. But if we are talking about video editing and imaging, it seemed very realistic. In fact, it was so realistic that someone created a set of input devices very similar to those in the movie. I remember there being an article here about it a few months ago. Someone was playing warcraft.
Very good point. I hate MS as much as the next guy, but I don't like them being attacked for things they have no business being attacked for. We do this a lot as humans. We take a group that has done something legitimately wrong. We then blame them and accuse them of every other wrong thing in the world regardless of their connection. MS has done and is doing a lot of bad things, but, apart from saber-rattling, they have been largely innocent in the patent wars of late.
Patent on the wheel can't be long in coming.
That would save the trouble of having to re-invent it.
I guess loud is the wrong choice of words. Sound just doesn't travel very well. I think it has something to do with the pressurization and all of the obstructions (high back seats).