Of course, the problem with that is that then they start to profit from the broken system, and then desire to perpetuate the status quo to continue to profit from it, perhaps even lobbying to keep the status quo, or extending it. Don't get them sucking on that teat, or we'll lose an ally.
Same answer everyone is giving for the compiler: cross-compilation. I regularly use my Linux/AMD64 box to compile the OS for my x86 32-bit boxes, including kernels, because using distcc just makes it faster. Now, I don't actually do the linking on AMD64 due to the way that distcc works, but I'm pretty sure it works the same way, too.
You're right. There is no relation. At least, not scientifically. And therein lies the issue: far too many people look to science as a way to deny religion. They are manufacturing a discord when, apparently, even many top scientists don't have a problem doing both. It's pure bologna, and that's the entire point of the study.
The top scientists don't have a problem with religion. The most unscientific don't have a problem with religion. It's only those in the middle, those who think they know science but probably don't, which have a problem, statistically speaking. In other words, there shouldn't be a relationship. Any discord evidenced in public is purely manufactured.
Of course, I have to wonder who, or what group, started the manufacture. But that's another topic.
When I schedule an appointment for anything, whether it's the cable guys or delivery of some furniture, I point out that I work from home, so being home at the scheduled time won't be a problem. For some reason, I just don't have any problem with workmen lying about me not being home.
Of course, the fact that I really do work from home means I don't waste a full vacation day if they fix something without ever knocking on the door.
Regarding regexes, I've gone both ways: I've had my developers remove regexes where they were trying to use them, and I've had them add regexes where they were trying too hard to avoid them. Regexes aren't the answer, they're a single tool. You need to use them right. And the/x modifier in Perl helps a lot, allowing you to put useful whitespace and comments in the code (and a regex is code as much as any other language).
As for "as few lines as possible" - you need to do it right. When you span your code over 3 pages, that's not readable anymore. I harp on this with my developers all the time: SCOPE. Scope applies to variables, comments, and functions. The less I need to look at to understand what you're doing, the more likely it is I'm going to understand it. A huge 3-page if-elseif-elseif-else is going to be something I'm not going to understand, as I'll have forgotten all the conditionals by the time I get to the end to know really what scenarios are left - sequential access. A concise regex, on the other hand, is something that I can skim over just by moving my eyes - random access. These concerns aren't just valid for storage media (tape vs DVD/HD). Of course, 40 characters of regex special characters with no whitespace (either horizontal or vertical, preferably both) is generally going to overwhelm most readers, and is going stupid in the other direction.
Yes, readability trumps length of code. But sometimes that means to use a regex (or two or three - why make one big cryptic one when multiple simpler regexes can do the job?). And sometimes, that means avoiding them when what you really want to do is better done by another piece of code.
My favourite new-to-regex example recently has been someone trying to pull apart colon-delimited text with a regex. Woops - there are better language constructs for tokenisation, whether that's strtok in C or it's split in Perl (or better, Text::CSV_XS). Got rid of that regex in a hurry.
Denying holocast in Germany and a few other countries is a crime. It offends the victims, it has nothing to do with freedom of speech. Cartoons of Prophet Mohammed is akin to this, but no problem, who cares about these terrorists, freedom of speech must prevail, 1.6 billion be dammed.
First off, Germany probably doesn't have the free-speech ideals that the US has. I don't think anybody vigorously defends a near-absolute position on free-speech the way the US does. When you get a "Western" distaste for censorship, you may be getting a bias from the US.
Second, Germany doesn't have "denying the holocaust" as a crime to protect the victims of it. They have it as a crime to give them some way to lock up the wackos who would try to restart white/aryan supremacy political groups. These groups are perfectly legal in the US, as long as they don't actually harm anyone while espousing their stupidity. If you want to start a white-supremicist party in the US, you can. I doubt you'll get elected, but you can certainly start it and run.
The same country that so vigorously defends your right to run a white-supremicist party (as long as you don't physically harm anyone, or encourage others to physically harm someone) will also defend others' rights to create cartoons of anyone they feel like, whether that is their President, or your Prophet.
The same people who create cartoons of Mohammed will also create cartoons of Jesus. Judaism doesn't seem to have the central figure to pick on, so I've never really noticed cartoons of David or Elijah. However, to your 1.6 billion Muslims, I raise 300 million to 1.9 billion Christians to be offended. Jesus also preached against idolatry, and yet I've never heard an outcry calling for any cartoonist's death over their pictures. Respecting others' right to disagree, even if it's pathetic behaviour, is a good thing to have. Islam does have some problems here.
I like to think of myself as an educated person, a muslim who grew up in a western society, learning values of both. From what I see, the gap between west and Islam is only going to grow with stuff like cartoons of Mohammed, these guys are akin to suscide bombers of afghanistan, working towards inciting violence (which BTW is a crime in Canada).
It's rather offensive that you equate "cartoons" with "suicide bombers". One gives cause to offend, the other kills. That's not morally equivalent. If Islam teaches that it is, I will lose respect for that religion. I may need to dispose of the copy of the Qu'ran that I do have, since it won't be worth anything to me anymore.
Inciting violence is a crime in Canada, sure. But merely being offensive is not "inciting violence." If I hurl curses at your mother, even if you punch me for it, it is not a crime. Punching me would still be assault. Please be more reasonable in your analogies. These are simply not comparable.
No one should have a vested interest in a high recidivism rate, particularly not when large sums of money are involved. It does not serve society's interests. Further, I bet they're fine with high recidivism until a crime happens to them. Any such entity with vested interests like this is a parasite that feeds off the failing of others. These parasites are state-sponsored.
If the government was interested in a low recidivism rate, they would reward facilities for it. Look at averages for rates of return, and reward facilities that turn out better than that. As an example, if the average for a certain type of criminal is to have a 50% recidivism rate within 5 years, track the ex-prisoners, and give an actual cash award to the prison if they average 40% over 6 years. This opens the whole system back up to the private sector to resolve.
There would also be room in this environment for penalties for significantly worse than average results, where "significantly worse" is something I'm not defining here. There would be other changes likely also required (such as the inability to turn down a prisoner for anything other than overcrowding issues, so they don't bias their population only with those they think won't reoffend in the first place). I'm sure that if lowering the recidivism rate was really on any elected official's radar, it could be solved without socialising the industry.
There are some commons that I do think the government should not privatise. I also think that conflicts of interest need to be resolved (and, in the public sphere, I would generally also like to see appearances of conflicts of interest to be eliminated as well). However, I prefer to go for solutions with the smallest amount of delta to the status quo. Some people call that "conservative" (with a small "c"). I prefer to call it "the scientific method" - by reducing the delta to as small as possible to effect the change, we can be sure as to what we can attribute the change to, so others can replicate that success, or not duplicate that failure. Grand social experiments, I'm not so fond of. And, yes, it can be argued that privatising the prison industry was a grand social experiment. I wouldn't disagree. However, that's where the Americans are at the moment, so that's where you have to work from.
Remember: you can download tons of games, music, and movies each month not only legally, but with the blessing of the industry behind it (e.g., iTunes or other such online music store, NetFlix or other such video streaming service, etc.). And those aren't the only big things you can download. For a while, especially early in the release cycles, I was grabbing regular snapshots of KDE. That's about 300MB per snapshot. And I could be getting two, sometimes even three, a week. That doesn't take long to chew up real bandwidth. (I just downloaded and compiled 4.4.3 today.) And then, if a new release of OpenOffice comes out in a given month, that's another ~540MB.
Ok, so downloading KDE and OOo aren't normal-user activities. iTunes and NetFlix probably are.
I'm not sure if RIAA/MPAA are cheering on Bell's charges, or are opposed because it'll impact NetFlix's royalties among Bell customers. And in such a fight, who do we cheer for?
I didn't say "solely to run Linux". But I bet that if you include the number of people who were humming and hawing on whether to plunk down $300-$600 for the console, and bought it because additional promised features brought the value up to be worth it to them, such as the OtherOS option, the number might be much larger. Would it be significant? Hard to tell. But if it isn't, and Sony decides to sell OtherOS as an extra-cash add-on, I still think that's a win for everyone. Users who don't think it's worth the extra cash won't bother, and Sony will have been very explicit about selling an option, and will need to keep it supported. But maybe that's just me. I haven't even turned on my PS2 in years (though the SuperNintendo was turned on and played within the last month), nevermind bought a PS3. And I run Linux on my PCs. So it doesn't really affect me.
That way, people who only bought the PS3 because it advertised the Linux option would not have bought it, reducing the PS3's sales, which would have reduced their numbers that could be reported to shareholders. It would have been seen as less popular in your timeline than in reality, possibly snowballing into fewer sales even among those who weren't interested in the Linux feature. Even those who only bought it for the Linux feature likely bought a game or two (some may have even bought many games), each purchase involving a licensing fee back to Sony, which means that without the Linux feature, they probably would have sold fewer games (got less in license fees from other vendors' games). Heck, just with the lower sales figures, there may have been fewer games made and released for the PS3, since the market would have seemed (and been) smaller, and maybe not worth the risk of spending millions in development.
So, yes, they need to learn that when they develop something intended to increase marketshare, they need to deliver. And not take it away later.
Sometimes, staying neutral is pushing an agenda. It could be the agenda of making the almighty dollar at the expense of everything else. In this case, that agenda would be pushing the agenda of the Chinese government to oppress their own people. Google is merely saying that they cannot push their own agenda (of making money) if it also pushes an agenda they cannot agree to (censorship).
There is no neutral here. Either you support China's agenda by doing what they tell you, or you do not support China's agenda. Either one is an agenda.
Basically, support Google if you support their agenda. Do not support Google if you do not support their agenda. But don't complain that they, unlike most corporations, are blatantly obvious about their social agenda.
That seems rather bizarre. What's the point of invoking the fifth when you're only allowed to do it when you're actually guilty? That's basically saying, "Yeah, I'm guilty, and there's nothing you can do to get me to say so!"
If it's declining to respond "on the grounds that it may or may not incriminate me" then you have to be able to use it even if it won't incriminate you. Otherwise it's basically useless.
What is IBM making money on, the open source software or the hardware it runs on and supporting same?
Yes.
IBM makes money by selling the hardware that runs your open source software.
IBM makes money by deploying the hardware, and the open source software.
IBM makes money by upselling the open source software with proprietary versions (Apache -> Websphere, Jazz -> Rational Team Concert,...)
IBM makes money by selling entirely new applications based on open source frameworks (nearly anything based on Eclipse).
Oracle can sell their new hardware to run OSS. They can sell services to help deploy said hardware and OSS. They can sell their own versions of apps to complement OSS. They can use OSS to complement their proprietary apps (e.g., getting wikimedia to run on Oracle, though that might be a bad idea, I'm giving it as an example of the concept). Seriously, can't they just look at their competition to see what they're doing?
My personal favourite: "No repeating characters allowed." Super idea! Let's force users to weaken their passwords by eliminating the possibility of duplicate characters in strategic locations.
Which is weaker, no repeating characters or an environment where half the passwords are "aaaaaaaa"?
I suspect, despite the idiocy that encompasses password rules, this one is a net positive trade-off. Sure, for users who get security, no-repeating-characters will weaken their passwords. But, for the vast majority of users, this eliminates whole classes of extremely-weak passwords.
Of course, it doesn't eliminate other related classes of extremely-weak passwords, such as "12345" or "qwerty" (or "12345678" or "qwertyui" for minimum-8-character passwords). However, I suspect that if you did a full socio-security study taking into account all classes of users in most corporations, this rule would, at a minimum, be a wash, or, more likely, come out ahead for average overall/minimum security. Especially when you add in some of the bozos who think they know about security, but, in reality, don't know much about it at all.
And I'm not ruling out the possibility that I'm in the latter category.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't let the gun grabbers find that out though, they'll be trying to outlaw swimming pools next ;)
No they won't. They have swimming pools, and would kill anyone who tried to take that from them.
Educated?
Hey, look. You're free to watch your artsy-fartsy crap. Me? I'm going to keep watching Mythbusters. Blowing stuff up is AWESOME.
:-)
So, um, you want to raise the minimum age for getting a driver's license to at least 20?
And where, exactly, did you think the sensors go?
They just did. This article is on exactly that topic. :-P
17 year old girl!
But she said she was 18!
Of course, the problem with that is that then they start to profit from the broken system, and then desire to perpetuate the status quo to continue to profit from it, perhaps even lobbying to keep the status quo, or extending it. Don't get them sucking on that teat, or we'll lose an ally.
Depends on the topic. Female anatomy is millions of years old, but it would still count as news for nerds.
As long as you're referring to learning about it on the computer screen, then, no, I don't think that'd be new, either.
Same answer everyone is giving for the compiler: cross-compilation. I regularly use my Linux/AMD64 box to compile the OS for my x86 32-bit boxes, including kernels, because using distcc just makes it faster. Now, I don't actually do the linking on AMD64 due to the way that distcc works, but I'm pretty sure it works the same way, too.
I'm sure other platforms are about the same.
You're right. There is no relation. At least, not scientifically. And therein lies the issue: far too many people look to science as a way to deny religion. They are manufacturing a discord when, apparently, even many top scientists don't have a problem doing both. It's pure bologna, and that's the entire point of the study.
The top scientists don't have a problem with religion. The most unscientific don't have a problem with religion. It's only those in the middle, those who think they know science but probably don't, which have a problem, statistically speaking. In other words, there shouldn't be a relationship. Any discord evidenced in public is purely manufactured.
Of course, I have to wonder who, or what group, started the manufacture. But that's another topic.
When I schedule an appointment for anything, whether it's the cable guys or delivery of some furniture, I point out that I work from home, so being home at the scheduled time won't be a problem. For some reason, I just don't have any problem with workmen lying about me not being home.
Of course, the fact that I really do work from home means I don't waste a full vacation day if they fix something without ever knocking on the door.
Regarding regexes, I've gone both ways: I've had my developers remove regexes where they were trying to use them, and I've had them add regexes where they were trying too hard to avoid them. Regexes aren't the answer, they're a single tool. You need to use them right. And the /x modifier in Perl helps a lot, allowing you to put useful whitespace and comments in the code (and a regex is code as much as any other language).
As for "as few lines as possible" - you need to do it right. When you span your code over 3 pages, that's not readable anymore. I harp on this with my developers all the time: SCOPE. Scope applies to variables, comments, and functions. The less I need to look at to understand what you're doing, the more likely it is I'm going to understand it. A huge 3-page if-elseif-elseif-else is going to be something I'm not going to understand, as I'll have forgotten all the conditionals by the time I get to the end to know really what scenarios are left - sequential access. A concise regex, on the other hand, is something that I can skim over just by moving my eyes - random access. These concerns aren't just valid for storage media (tape vs DVD/HD). Of course, 40 characters of regex special characters with no whitespace (either horizontal or vertical, preferably both) is generally going to overwhelm most readers, and is going stupid in the other direction.
Yes, readability trumps length of code. But sometimes that means to use a regex (or two or three - why make one big cryptic one when multiple simpler regexes can do the job?). And sometimes, that means avoiding them when what you really want to do is better done by another piece of code.
My favourite new-to-regex example recently has been someone trying to pull apart colon-delimited text with a regex. Woops - there are better language constructs for tokenisation, whether that's strtok in C or it's split in Perl (or better, Text::CSV_XS). Got rid of that regex in a hurry.
Denying holocast in Germany and a few other countries is a crime. It offends the victims, it has nothing to do with freedom of speech. Cartoons of Prophet Mohammed is akin to this, but no problem, who cares about these terrorists, freedom of speech must prevail, 1.6 billion be dammed.
First off, Germany probably doesn't have the free-speech ideals that the US has. I don't think anybody vigorously defends a near-absolute position on free-speech the way the US does. When you get a "Western" distaste for censorship, you may be getting a bias from the US.
Second, Germany doesn't have "denying the holocaust" as a crime to protect the victims of it. They have it as a crime to give them some way to lock up the wackos who would try to restart white/aryan supremacy political groups. These groups are perfectly legal in the US, as long as they don't actually harm anyone while espousing their stupidity. If you want to start a white-supremicist party in the US, you can. I doubt you'll get elected, but you can certainly start it and run.
The same country that so vigorously defends your right to run a white-supremicist party (as long as you don't physically harm anyone, or encourage others to physically harm someone) will also defend others' rights to create cartoons of anyone they feel like, whether that is their President, or your Prophet.
The same people who create cartoons of Mohammed will also create cartoons of Jesus. Judaism doesn't seem to have the central figure to pick on, so I've never really noticed cartoons of David or Elijah. However, to your 1.6 billion Muslims, I raise 300 million to 1.9 billion Christians to be offended. Jesus also preached against idolatry, and yet I've never heard an outcry calling for any cartoonist's death over their pictures. Respecting others' right to disagree, even if it's pathetic behaviour, is a good thing to have. Islam does have some problems here.
I like to think of myself as an educated person, a muslim who grew up in a western society, learning values of both. From what I see, the gap between west and Islam is only going to grow with stuff like cartoons of Mohammed, these guys are akin to suscide bombers of afghanistan, working towards inciting violence (which BTW is a crime in Canada).
It's rather offensive that you equate "cartoons" with "suicide bombers". One gives cause to offend, the other kills. That's not morally equivalent. If Islam teaches that it is, I will lose respect for that religion. I may need to dispose of the copy of the Qu'ran that I do have, since it won't be worth anything to me anymore.
Inciting violence is a crime in Canada, sure. But merely being offensive is not "inciting violence." If I hurl curses at your mother, even if you punch me for it, it is not a crime. Punching me would still be assault. Please be more reasonable in your analogies. These are simply not comparable.
Because fucking a dog is just nas... hey, why are you looking at me like that?
No one should have a vested interest in a high recidivism rate, particularly not when large sums of money are involved. It does not serve society's interests. Further, I bet they're fine with high recidivism until a crime happens to them. Any such entity with vested interests like this is a parasite that feeds off the failing of others. These parasites are state-sponsored.
If the government was interested in a low recidivism rate, they would reward facilities for it. Look at averages for rates of return, and reward facilities that turn out better than that. As an example, if the average for a certain type of criminal is to have a 50% recidivism rate within 5 years, track the ex-prisoners, and give an actual cash award to the prison if they average 40% over 6 years. This opens the whole system back up to the private sector to resolve.
There would also be room in this environment for penalties for significantly worse than average results, where "significantly worse" is something I'm not defining here. There would be other changes likely also required (such as the inability to turn down a prisoner for anything other than overcrowding issues, so they don't bias their population only with those they think won't reoffend in the first place). I'm sure that if lowering the recidivism rate was really on any elected official's radar, it could be solved without socialising the industry.
There are some commons that I do think the government should not privatise. I also think that conflicts of interest need to be resolved (and, in the public sphere, I would generally also like to see appearances of conflicts of interest to be eliminated as well). However, I prefer to go for solutions with the smallest amount of delta to the status quo. Some people call that "conservative" (with a small "c"). I prefer to call it "the scientific method" - by reducing the delta to as small as possible to effect the change, we can be sure as to what we can attribute the change to, so others can replicate that success, or not duplicate that failure. Grand social experiments, I'm not so fond of. And, yes, it can be argued that privatising the prison industry was a grand social experiment. I wouldn't disagree. However, that's where the Americans are at the moment, so that's where you have to work from.
Remember: you can download tons of games, music, and movies each month not only legally, but with the blessing of the industry behind it (e.g., iTunes or other such online music store, NetFlix or other such video streaming service, etc.). And those aren't the only big things you can download. For a while, especially early in the release cycles, I was grabbing regular snapshots of KDE. That's about 300MB per snapshot. And I could be getting two, sometimes even three, a week. That doesn't take long to chew up real bandwidth. (I just downloaded and compiled 4.4.3 today.) And then, if a new release of OpenOffice comes out in a given month, that's another ~540MB.
Ok, so downloading KDE and OOo aren't normal-user activities. iTunes and NetFlix probably are.
I'm not sure if RIAA/MPAA are cheering on Bell's charges, or are opposed because it'll impact NetFlix's royalties among Bell customers. And in such a fight, who do we cheer for?
I didn't say "solely to run Linux". But I bet that if you include the number of people who were humming and hawing on whether to plunk down $300-$600 for the console, and bought it because additional promised features brought the value up to be worth it to them, such as the OtherOS option, the number might be much larger. Would it be significant? Hard to tell. But if it isn't, and Sony decides to sell OtherOS as an extra-cash add-on, I still think that's a win for everyone. Users who don't think it's worth the extra cash won't bother, and Sony will have been very explicit about selling an option, and will need to keep it supported. But maybe that's just me. I haven't even turned on my PS2 in years (though the SuperNintendo was turned on and played within the last month), nevermind bought a PS3. And I run Linux on my PCs. So it doesn't really affect me.
That'd be a perfect lesson to learn.
That way, people who only bought the PS3 because it advertised the Linux option would not have bought it, reducing the PS3's sales, which would have reduced their numbers that could be reported to shareholders. It would have been seen as less popular in your timeline than in reality, possibly snowballing into fewer sales even among those who weren't interested in the Linux feature. Even those who only bought it for the Linux feature likely bought a game or two (some may have even bought many games), each purchase involving a licensing fee back to Sony, which means that without the Linux feature, they probably would have sold fewer games (got less in license fees from other vendors' games). Heck, just with the lower sales figures, there may have been fewer games made and released for the PS3, since the market would have seemed (and been) smaller, and maybe not worth the risk of spending millions in development.
So, yes, they need to learn that when they develop something intended to increase marketshare, they need to deliver. And not take it away later.
Sometimes, staying neutral is pushing an agenda. It could be the agenda of making the almighty dollar at the expense of everything else. In this case, that agenda would be pushing the agenda of the Chinese government to oppress their own people. Google is merely saying that they cannot push their own agenda (of making money) if it also pushes an agenda they cannot agree to (censorship).
There is no neutral here. Either you support China's agenda by doing what they tell you, or you do not support China's agenda. Either one is an agenda.
Basically, support Google if you support their agenda. Do not support Google if you do not support their agenda. But don't complain that they, unlike most corporations, are blatantly obvious about their social agenda.
That seems rather bizarre. What's the point of invoking the fifth when you're only allowed to do it when you're actually guilty? That's basically saying, "Yeah, I'm guilty, and there's nothing you can do to get me to say so!"
If it's declining to respond "on the grounds that it may or may not incriminate me" then you have to be able to use it even if it won't incriminate you. Otherwise it's basically useless.
What is IBM making money on, the open source software or the hardware it runs on and supporting same?
Yes.
IBM makes money by selling the hardware that runs your open source software.
IBM makes money by deploying the hardware, and the open source software.
IBM makes money by upselling the open source software with proprietary versions (Apache -> Websphere, Jazz -> Rational Team Concert, ...)
IBM makes money by selling entirely new applications based on open source frameworks (nearly anything based on Eclipse).
Oracle can sell their new hardware to run OSS. They can sell services to help deploy said hardware and OSS. They can sell their own versions of apps to complement OSS. They can use OSS to complement their proprietary apps (e.g., getting wikimedia to run on Oracle, though that might be a bad idea, I'm giving it as an example of the concept). Seriously, can't they just look at their competition to see what they're doing?
My personal favourite: "No repeating characters allowed." Super idea! Let's force users to weaken their passwords by eliminating the possibility of duplicate characters in strategic locations.
Which is weaker, no repeating characters or an environment where half the passwords are "aaaaaaaa"?
I suspect, despite the idiocy that encompasses password rules, this one is a net positive trade-off. Sure, for users who get security, no-repeating-characters will weaken their passwords. But, for the vast majority of users, this eliminates whole classes of extremely-weak passwords.
Of course, it doesn't eliminate other related classes of extremely-weak passwords, such as "12345" or "qwerty" (or "12345678" or "qwertyui" for minimum-8-character passwords). However, I suspect that if you did a full socio-security study taking into account all classes of users in most corporations, this rule would, at a minimum, be a wash, or, more likely, come out ahead for average overall/minimum security. Especially when you add in some of the bozos who think they know about security, but, in reality, don't know much about it at all.
And I'm not ruling out the possibility that I'm in the latter category.
How the hell did this get ANY positive moderation???
How safe do you feel knowing that?
Answer 1: Perfectly safe. I keep my money in my mattress.
Answer 2: I feel much better about keeping my money in the stock market. Even during a crash.