The person who is in risk of getting in trouble is the candidate's campaign, not you. The purpose of the form is to officially declare if your words are financially part of the candidate's campaign or not.
Both FEC and FCC are government agencies. Therefore by mentioning that he was talking of a government agency, the poster you replied to was NOT switching context from FEC to FCC. You were.
The last time I dealt with any gui development suite (it wasn't visual studio so I don't know what it does) the project file format was binary, not text. Therefore you HAD to use the suite every time you added or removed a source file from the project. There wasn't any way to glue together some scripting means to write the project file yourself.
You can start with the man at the top - the PM. Rumors are not enough to say that you know with certainty (which is what both bush and blair did) that the WMDs exist.
There is a signifigant difference between levels of certainty. "I know" implies a level a hell of a lot closer to certainty than what those lying politicians had to go on.
There were good reasons to go into Iraq. Then there were the reasons that were told to the public. They don't intersect, and that's inexcusable.
The problem is that when subtle sarcasm fails, it's not becuase the listener is deficient. It's because the subject being imitated has such a low level of respect given to it that you can't assume an apparent proponent of it is joking just because it doesn't sound very intelligent. For example, trying to satirize young-earth creationists never really works because you just can't sound sillier than the real thing no matter how hard you try.
It's been my experience that the viewpoint you describe comes more from people who are religious in politics themselves than people who are secular in politics. It's a case of "We want more religion in politics here in the USA, so we'd better not condemn other countries for being theocracies or that would look bad." And that comes more from the right than from the left (although there are some like that in both camps.)
Do you have any better ideas for getting information out of suspected terrorists that is likely to work?
Yes, and that better idea is - don't bother trying in the first place if it cannot be done ethically. Besides, "bay guy" interrogation techniques have the huge flaw that they give the person incentive to just make stuff up to tell the interrogator what they think he wants to hear to get him to stop. Therefore you can't really trust the information you gain from it.
True. Oh, wait, was that a failed attempt at sarcasm? Campaign Finance Reform puts a cap on individual contributions from one company or one person. Running a blog will fall well below that cap.
Don't be condescending if you don't know the situation. The programming environment is often dictated by others such that not doing it their way is treated with the same disdain (and labels you a troublemaker) as, say, refusing to fill out timesheets, or not following the company dress code, or other such stuff. The solutions you describe are wonderful for the situation where the programmer has that much control over what he writes, but in a typical project where there are multiple programmers with their hands in the same code, the programmer doesn't have that level of choice.
When someone attempts (and fails) to tell a funny joke, they often condescendingly ascribe the failure to a deficiency in the listener's sense of humor. Why does nobody admit that the failure is on the teller's end?
(It's the same thing with trollers who blame the listener for not detecting sarcasm - wrong, wrong, wrong - good sarcasm is meant to be detectable as sarcasm. If it fails to be detected, then the speaker failed. On the other hand, if it was not intended to be recognized as sarcasm, but instead was intended to be mistaken for honest stupidity, and it succeeded at that, then the speaker hasn't really done anything impressive in the slightest - just successfully lied - a trivially easy thing to do.)
the choice of programming tools strikes me as a very silly reason to leave a perfectly good job
That's true, but leaving a job that is no longer "perfectly good" is not silly, and choice of programming tools can easily shift a job out of the "perfectly good" category.
Just because a car salesman officially declares his business to have the name "Honest Joes" doesn't mean I am obligated to agree that he is honest. And just because a group calls itself "open" in its name doesn't mean I am obligated to agree that it is open.
How you turned that around into implying I was thinking that OSS is the only allowed source of the definition I have no clue.
It also helps detail what the program is supposed to do
Not when it's written by the same person who can't write good code. Then it just helps detail misinformation about what the program is supposed to do, and makes things harder to figure out.
The greater the percentage of lines in the source were written by a good programmer, the easier to understand it becomes. So good programmers writing good comments helps. But bad programmers writing bad comments to accompany the bad code is actually worse than bad programmers writing just bad code and leaving the comments untouched, becuase it increases the percentage of misleading stuff in the code.
In general, when I'm using a language with embedded documentation features (like Java's javadoc, or "doc++" that does exactly the same thing for C++ comments), I prefer to write the specs using the embedded doc tool itself (write out the spec for a java class by writing out the methods as do-nothing stub routines and then describe what they will do by prepending a javadoc comment to them - then when you generate your javadocs, you have the spec - and since they render into HTML, you can actually make the specs with a lot of complex formatting and all that, just the way the bosses like it. Thus my spec is also the skeleton of the code to be filled in. This approach works better, I think, because it makes it easier to keep the spec up to date when you discover a problem during the coding phase that requires a spec change.
Alas, of late I've been dealing with stuff that doesn't have embedded comment docs and so I haven't been able to do that as much.
That doesn't fix anything because in general I have observed that the same author who would write impossible to understand code will also write impossible to understand comments that actually mislead you more often than they help you. People who are bad at explaining a precise algorithm's details in an elegant form using Java, C, Perl, or Python are also bad at explaining it in an elegant form using English, for the exact same reasons. They're just not good at communicating carefully and clearly in general.
I know the distinction is important from the legal point, but the problem is that there are now two different meanings - the legal one (It's called UNIX if the (anti-)open group says so, which essentially ends up meaing that at least a small fraction of the code base is derived from the original AT&T, even if, as in the case of BSD, a gigantic portion of it was totally redone afterward.) and the actual one people use (it behaves just like all the other unix systems, regardless of whether the source code is 100% new, or has a tiny percentage of the old AT&T code in it). The fact that one definition includes Linux and the other does not is the basis behind an awful lot of FUD and confusion. I really wish the now-meaningless trademark would die already and go the way of "Kleenex", becoming a generic non-trademarked name.
Does anyone know what the legal status is right now on the official Unix name? Is it SCO that owns it (I know they own the rights to the AT&T-derived code, but I don't know if they own the trademark as well)?
The reason I ask is that frankly I'm really getting sick and tired of all the trade rags the PHB's read, with the way they are using the term "UNIX" as if it was a totally seperate entity from Linux. This leads to all sorts of FUD-able obfuscation (like MS comparing the cost of MS to the cost of UNIX, and never explicitly mentioning that they are only talking about commercial UNIXes, hoping the reader will also associate the findings with Linux.)
Slashdot Mirror
The person who is in risk of getting in trouble is the candidate's campaign, not you. The purpose of the form is to officially declare if your words are financially part of the candidate's campaign or not.
McCain-Feingold was one of the most brilliantly crafted pieces of suppressive legislation out there.
The place you live sounds terrible. I'm glad I'm still on Planet Earth instead of wherever you're talking abaout.
Both FEC and FCC are government agencies. Therefore by mentioning that he was talking of a government agency, the poster you replied to was NOT switching context from FEC to FCC. You were.
The last time I dealt with any gui development suite (it wasn't visual studio so I don't know what it does) the project file format was binary, not text. Therefore you HAD to use the suite every time you added or removed a source file from the project. There wasn't any way to glue together some scripting means to write the project file yourself.
You can start with the man at the top - the PM. Rumors are not enough to say that you know with certainty (which is what both bush and blair did) that the WMDs exist.
So, filling out a form amounts to censorship?
No, didn't think so.
Yes, it does help to read the posts. That's why I know yours was the first in the chain of posts up to the root that brought up the FCC.
There is a signifigant difference between levels of certainty. "I know" implies a level a hell of a lot closer to certainty than what those lying politicians had to go on.
There were good reasons to go into Iraq. Then there were the reasons that were told to the public. They don't intersect, and that's inexcusable.
The problem is that when subtle sarcasm fails, it's not becuase the listener is deficient. It's because the subject being imitated has such a low level of respect given to it that you can't assume an apparent proponent of it is joking just because it doesn't sound very intelligent. For example, trying to satirize young-earth creationists never really works because you just can't sound sillier than the real thing no matter how hard you try.
Saying "I know X is true" is still a lie if the truth is merely "I suspect there is a chance X is true".
It's been my experience that the viewpoint you describe comes more from people who are religious in politics themselves than people who are secular in politics. It's a case of "We want more religion in politics here in the USA, so we'd better not condemn other countries for being theocracies or that would look bad." And that comes more from the right than from the left (although there are some like that in both camps.)
Do you have any better ideas for getting information out of suspected terrorists that is likely to work?
Yes, and that better idea is - don't bother trying in the first place if it cannot be done ethically. Besides, "bay guy" interrogation techniques have the huge flaw that they give the person incentive to just make stuff up to tell the interrogator what they think he wants to hear to get him to stop. Therefore you can't really trust the information you gain from it.
It can't possibly apply to us as well!
True. Oh, wait, was that a failed attempt at sarcasm? Campaign Finance Reform puts a cap on individual contributions from one company or one person. Running a blog will fall well below that cap.
True. They have. Now what does that have to do with this article? Here's a free clue: The letter "C" and the letter "E" are two different things.
Don't be condescending if you don't know the situation. The programming environment is often dictated by others such that not doing it their way is treated with the same disdain (and labels you a troublemaker) as, say, refusing to fill out timesheets, or not following the company dress code, or other such stuff. The solutions you describe are wonderful for the situation where the programmer has that much control over what he writes, but in a typical project where there are multiple programmers with their hands in the same code, the programmer doesn't have that level of choice.
When someone attempts (and fails) to tell a funny joke, they often condescendingly ascribe the failure to a deficiency in the listener's sense of humor. Why does nobody admit that the failure is on the teller's end?
(It's the same thing with trollers who blame the listener for not detecting sarcasm - wrong, wrong, wrong - good sarcasm is meant to be detectable as sarcasm. If it fails to be detected, then the speaker failed. On the other hand, if it was not intended to be recognized as sarcasm, but instead was intended to be mistaken for honest stupidity, and it succeeded at that, then the speaker hasn't really done anything impressive in the slightest - just successfully lied - a trivially easy thing to do.)
the choice of programming tools strikes me as a very silly reason to leave a perfectly good job
That's true, but leaving a job that is no longer "perfectly good" is not silly, and choice of programming tools can easily shift a job out of the "perfectly good" category.
Just because a car salesman officially declares his business to have the name "Honest Joes" doesn't mean I am obligated to agree that he is honest. And just because a group calls itself "open" in its name doesn't mean I am obligated to agree that it is open.
How you turned that around into implying I was thinking that OSS is the only allowed source of the definition I have no clue.
It also helps detail what the program is supposed to do
Not when it's written by the same person who can't write good code. Then it just helps detail misinformation about what the program is supposed to do, and makes things harder to figure out.
The greater the percentage of lines in the source were written by a good programmer, the easier to understand it becomes. So good programmers writing good comments helps. But bad programmers writing bad comments to accompany the bad code is actually worse than bad programmers writing just bad code and leaving the comments untouched, becuase it increases the percentage of misleading stuff in the code.
All that is required is to pass the Single Unix Specification conformance tests, and to pay your dues to the Open Group.
if you don't feel that the OSS movement has a monopoly on the allowed meanings of a single English word.
If you believe that companies should be allowed to buy mandatorily enforced language propaganda, then I have no respect for you.
In general, when I'm using a language with embedded documentation features (like Java's javadoc, or "doc++" that does exactly the same thing for C++ comments), I prefer to write the specs using the embedded doc tool itself (write out the spec for a java class by writing out the methods as do-nothing stub routines and then describe what they will do by prepending a javadoc comment to them - then when you generate your javadocs, you have the spec - and since they render into HTML, you can actually make the specs with a lot of complex formatting and all that, just the way the bosses like it. Thus my spec is also the skeleton of the code to be filled in. This approach works better, I think, because it makes it easier to keep the spec up to date when you discover a problem during the coding phase that requires a spec change.
Alas, of late I've been dealing with stuff that doesn't have embedded comment docs and so I haven't been able to do that as much.
That doesn't fix anything because in general I have observed that the same author who would write impossible to understand code will also write impossible to understand comments that actually mislead you more often than they help you. People who are bad at explaining a precise algorithm's details in an elegant form using Java, C, Perl, or Python are also bad at explaining it in an elegant form using English, for the exact same reasons. They're just not good at communicating carefully and clearly in general.
I know the distinction is important from the legal point, but the problem is that there are now two different meanings - the legal one (It's called UNIX if the (anti-)open group says so, which essentially ends up meaing that at least a small fraction of the code base is derived from the original AT&T, even if, as in the case of BSD, a gigantic portion of it was totally redone afterward.) and the actual one people use (it behaves just like all the other unix systems, regardless of whether the source code is 100% new, or has a tiny percentage of the old AT&T code in it). The fact that one definition includes Linux and the other does not is the basis behind an awful lot of FUD and confusion. I really wish the now-meaningless trademark would die already and go the way of "Kleenex", becoming a generic non-trademarked name.
Does anyone know what the legal status is right now on the official Unix name? Is it SCO that owns it (I know they own the rights to the AT&T-derived code, but I don't know if they own the trademark as well)?
The reason I ask is that frankly I'm really getting sick and tired of all the trade rags the PHB's read, with the way they are using the term "UNIX" as if it was a totally seperate entity from Linux. This leads to all sorts of FUD-able obfuscation (like MS comparing the cost of MS to the cost of UNIX, and never explicitly mentioning that they are only talking about commercial UNIXes, hoping the reader will also associate the findings with Linux.)
For example "x y", or " !ptr "
(correction, that should be "x < y" or " !ptr " -- HTML ate my less-than)