As someone said to me, if you've never stepped though your code you don't really know what it's doing.
Funnily enough someone else dismissed this idea when I mentioned it to him, but stepping though his code in a Windows build crashed immediately because he messed up a pointer to a pointer dereference. On the embedded target where there was no MMU or debugging facilities it just silently corrupted random memory.
I think the post of Math teacher should not be appointed, rather based on a version of Open Challenge. So if you proved the Math teacher wrong, you would become Math teacher until someone proved you wrong.
So if you fire said steel pole out of a rail gun with a 10,000m/sec muzzle velocity the pole would come out -500 feet long?
No, you'd be trying to create a paradox. But the Universe would resolve this by having all matter explode into quarks travelling at the speed of light just before you pressed the fire button.
I don't believe that for a second. We don't understand it, but if you look at other bits of biology the more you understand the more you realise that they are probably perfect designs. Evolution doesn't need to understand effects in order to use them, unlike us.
So if for example quantum computers turn out to be useful, I'm sure people will find that neurons use quantum effects to squeeze a bit more processing power per unit volume of brain matter. And conversely if parts of biological systems seem a bit badly designed, it's most likely because we haven't figured them out yet.
An designer that thinks it's intelligent would call it spaghetti code, but evolution doesn't have any knowledge of such concepts. Or any concepts at all. It just does what works.
Wikipedia admins AStarIsBorn, Yentl and FunnyGirl keep saying it's Non Notable. And that Adelman promised her that he would crop the damn picture before releasing it.
Are you kidding? He's got the pictures of him looking goofy in drag for the left, and the pictures of him looking presidential in front of a smoking ruin for the right. Both sides may be a bit annoyed by the image that isn't aimed at them, but the image that is more than makes up for it. And I'm sure if I were part of a pro or anti anything group his PR people could find some speech that makes it sound as if he agrees with me.
There's an irony here. Government/Educational/Non profit types often say that people only disagree with them because it's in their interest not to believe. E.g. the most people that are skeptical of global warming have accepted cash from big oil, or people that want a more private NHS are in the pay of big business. Or that it's possible that people actually prefer Windows XP to Ubuntu. It's a sort of vulgar Marxist and extremely undemocratic idea that people's class and interest determines their politics. Partly it's a conspiracy theory, and and a bad explanation for why their pet ideas are not universally believed.
But it's also true in a lot of cases, since people have an endless capability for self delusion. It's easy to convince yourself that something is true if it happens to be in your interests that it be so. But they never seem to notice that this criticism applies to them too - e.g. public sector union leaders will always believe arguments that the private sector should be kept from competing with them because that competition is not in their interest. And open source activists will happily accept that the government should mandate that the public sector use their technology. And environmental NGOs would lose their raison d'etre if the environment was not in imminent danger of collapse.
The one that annoys me is when people say "Google it", especially when I know I could Google it, and presumably the programmer giving the answer could to, but I can tell that the user has such a minimal knowledge of the subject that they'd have no hope of doing so. If the user knew how to do it, they already would have.
It's like if you were in a math class and ask the teacher a question and they said "work it out". For a few hundred milliseconds more typing time you could say "here's how to find the answer using Google". The difference to the guy you're helping is immense. The "Google it" answer makes him think that he's an idiot or more likely that you're a jerk. The explanation of how to Google it makes him think he knows how to solve problems like this.
I suspect that most programmers come out of university with essentially zero skill and dealing with non technical people. In my experience they start off giving obnoxious non answers, then the customers complain about them to their boss and they gradually learn how to deal with people. What's sad is that if it weren't for the wider capitalist structure around them, they'd stay jerks.
I emailed the British Government when Tessa Jowell talked about changing ITC rules to allow prior restraint of programs like Brass Eye to tell them not to and got an email back, saying "the Secretary of State[Jowell] expressing her personal views as a viewer and parent and made it absolutely clear that the programme content and regulatory matters are for the regulators to deal with and not the Government". Which is sort of backing away from doing what I didn't want them to do.
Dude! I would so hit that. And then argue that the current push to democratise the Middle East is naive and the US should avoid direct conflict but try to trigger a Sunni/Shiite split analogous to the Sino/Soviet one. And then hit that again. Fuck yeah.
Whatever dude. I'd like to date a woman like this. We could argue about Prussian foreign policy in the 19th Century, then fuck like mink, then maybe write some code. Then argue about US Foreign policy, then watch some documentary on strategic bombing where I'd play devil's advocate to conventional wisdom, then argue a bit more and have great make up sex.
The level of ignorance about how the laws of the US function continues to amaze me.
Hey this is slashdot. We know whether someone is a bad person or a good person from gut feeling, so we don't need to know the truth about whether what they advocate is legal or illegal. We know the truthiness about legality from what sort of person they are.
I think that US and Asian taxes are much lower than the Northern European ones. Mind you, that weakens the guys case somewhat, since it means a greater proportion of them are used to pay for roads.
Incidentally in the Fuel Tax protests in the UK, I found out that something like 75% of the cost of fuel is tax. In which case a couple of possibilities occur to me.
One is that biofuel should have a low tax to increase usage but the tax should increase to in the long run the government doesn't lose too much cash. E.g while they are in minority the tax should be low, gradually rising as they take over from fossil fuel, but designed to still give and incentive to switch. If you could get both political parties to agree on this, people making fossil fuel and car manufacturers would have an incentitive to help the transition in return for knowing how the government would set fuel taxes.
The other thing is that you could easily use fuel tax to regulate oil prices. So the tax would rise and fall to compensate for oil costs. If you did both of these, you'd be remarkably insulated from evil terrorist petrostates as you took steps to completely cut off their influence.
Actually given that most of EU budget is spent on subsidizing farmers to grow nothing and that is hard to reform, you could keep spending the money but using it to subsidize production of various biofuel crops. So basically with a bit of planning the Middle Easy can go to hell in a handbasket over a couple of decades and it makes no difference.
For most singular nouns, the ending 's is added, e.g. the cat's whiskers.
If the word is plural and already ends in an s, then instead only an apostrophe is added, for example my nieces' weddings. (This does not apply to plurals that do not end in an s, for example the children's toys.)
Snip a bunch of exceptions
No apostrophe is used in the following possessive pronouns and adjectives: yours, his, hers, ours, its, theirs, and whose. (Very many people wrongly use it's for the possessive of it; but authorities are unanimous that it's can only properly be a contraction of it is or it has.) All other possessive pronouns ending in s do take an apostrophe: one's; everyone's; somebody's, nobody else's, etc. With plural forms, the apostrophe follows the s, as with nouns: the others' husbands (but compare They all looked at each other's husbands, in which both each and other are singular).
So its and whose are actually exceptions to the general form of possessive pronouns. Mind you his and hers are too and he's would look very wrong.
But English evolves, and maybe it's and who's will gradually take over from its and whose leaving his as the sole exception. Oh and there are no authorities in English, correct is whatever the majority use. So if the very many people who use it's instead of its became a majority they would also be right to do so.
Well it created chaos. But if you look at previous episodes of chaos, notably WWII and the cold war, the US had tended to increase its influence. I think it might be that the US has an advantage in dealing with chaos compared to its less democratic opponents.
You can think of it as a sort of anti 1984 world. In 1984, the world was dominated by tyrannies that could only survive because their peer competitors were also tyrannies and were unable to conquer them. Internally they were secure, it was only external conquest that could conceivably threaten them, much like Saddam was. It seems that the US as a predatory democracy (rather like Ancient Greece) should arrange for things to be as different as possible to this. Tyrannies are hopeless at responding to unexpected events like invasion compared to democracies - look at the behaviour or the Germans and Russians in WWII compared to the US/UK. So by destablising the international situation by starting wars and generally raising hell should disproportionately benefit the US and its relatively democratic allies in the long run as they out maneuver and destroy their less democratic competitors.
Invaiding Iraq was still dumb in retrospect but more subtle future administrations will likely exploit the resulting turmoil in the middle east better than their foreign enemies.
Time travel doesn't make sense unless there are alternative selves many worlds style. Otherwise you end up with paradoxes caused by time travellers changing the past in a way that caused them to never have existed.
Ok, it's possible that time travel is possible and paradoxes are not for some reason other than that the many worlds interpretation of QM is literally true. But it seems more likely that time travel is prevented by some unknown physical law.
First of all, I have no idea what 'treaty' those people are talking about, as there is not actually one.
Yeah, I suspected that since Googling turned up nothing and the name seems impossibly generic. As usual people are making up bogus legal arguments to support their prejudices.
First of all, I have no idea what 'treaty' those people are talking about, as there is not actually one. The US, as far as I know, is not really forbidden from issuing them by any law, unless the second Hague Convention is talking about that in section VII, which I don't think it is. However, issuing them is generally, for the last 100 years or so, been regarded as a war crime. Also, it's hard to see how issuing letters of marque against other countries not in a time of war would not constitute a violation of the UN charter by 'making war'.
Letters of marque are something that belong in a historical dustbin. Authorizing individuals to use force against others in other countries is something completely unneeded and unwanted in today's world.
They've never actually done what they were supposed to, anyway. Letter of Marque are supposed to, in theory, protect people captured who are holding them from being charged with piracy and/or murder, because they were operating under their legal authorization, and should be treated like POWs. However, this did not actually ever work...capturing forces always treated them as criminals. And all later treaties, like the Genevas, which set even more specific rules about the treatment of captured military forces, and the labeling of warships and military operations, completely ignored even the possibility of privateers. There's no nation in the world that would recognize John Q. Public standing over a dead body with a letter of marque against that person as anything but a murderer.
Actually, at this point it seems like even if I'm wrong about the desirability of Letters of Marque and privateers, that might not be a bad thing. I wonder if that argument would apply to terrorists then? If Letters or Marque and piracy are illegal and people that have them can are unprotected by inernational law doesn't that leave al Qaeda operatives pretty much screwed?
As non uniformed, non state actors who don't abide by the Geneva Convention it seems like they are have a weird status not unlike pirates used to have. So the US or its allies can just execute or detain them under some suitable domestic law. More to the point the US armed forces could probably prosecute them under the UCMJ, it much the same way the Royal Navy did with pirates and the like. That would then be legal under US and international law. Whether it's a good idea politically is a different question.
Any big company has patents of their own and usually patents that they exclusively license from competitors. E.g. consider Intel and AMD. Intel sued AMD for patent infringement and in the end there was a settlement. AMD has granted Intel an exclusive license to its patents and vice versa. AMD apparently ended up paying Intel since their portfolio was smaller. I realise that this is mostly hardware patents, but there are analogous cases with software patents I'm sure.
Now inside those companies, developers contribute to a GPL2 project where the patent licensing clause is not present but the "or later clause" is. When GPL3 is released their users can take the code an AMD developer contributed and opt to license it under GPL3 and demand AMD grant them a license to Intels's patents which they can't do without going back to court. Most likely this would be the end of AMD.
Do you see the problem? The original developer has unwittingly got his employer in a very difficult situation.
This case is very different from a developer trying to submarine patented code into a GPL2 project, which is the one GPL3 zealots use to justify the patent clauses.
If you license your code with a license that gives power to a third party, don't complain when that third party uses that power.
Yeah, don't use the GPL which a third party can change without asking you in a way that causes you to get sued into oblivion
If the developer didn't want to license their patent, they shouldn't have published it under GPLv3 (which they did when added the "or later" clause, which could have been omitted).
It's not their patent, it's a patent their company exclusively licensed from a competitor as part of a settlement in a patent lawsuit. The developer doesn't even know about it. And the GPL2 he agreed to didn't mention patents.
Damn, if they didn't want to license the patent, they shouldn't publish the code under GPLv2 either - GPL'ed code is meant to be shared and shared alike, not encumbered by patents.
They guy that wrote the code probably didn't know about the patent as I keep saying. His employer's legal department might have done, but since GPL2 doesn't mention patents and he probably didn't ask them, he thought he was doing everyone a favour with no downside. Actually, he's probably blown his job away once the legal department work out what he's done to them.
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As someone said to me, if you've never stepped though your code you don't really know what it's doing.
Funnily enough someone else dismissed this idea when I mentioned it to him, but stepping though his code in a Windows build crashed immediately because he messed up a pointer to a pointer dereference. On the embedded target where there was no MMU or debugging facilities it just silently corrupted random memory.
I think the post of Math teacher should not be appointed, rather based on a version of Open Challenge. So if you proved the Math teacher wrong, you would become Math teacher until someone proved you wrong.
So if you fire said steel pole out of a rail gun with a 10,000m/sec muzzle velocity the pole would come out -500 feet long?
No, you'd be trying to create a paradox. But the Universe would resolve this by having all matter explode into quarks travelling at the speed of light just before you pressed the fire button.
I don't believe that for a second. We don't understand it, but if you look at other bits of biology the more you understand the more you realise that they are probably perfect designs. Evolution doesn't need to understand effects in order to use them, unlike us.
So if for example quantum computers turn out to be useful, I'm sure people will find that neurons use quantum effects to squeeze a bit more processing power per unit volume of brain matter. And conversely if parts of biological systems seem a bit badly designed, it's most likely because we haven't figured them out yet.
Overlapping, independent sequences? It's quite obviously spaghetti code.
An designer that thinks it's intelligent would call it spaghetti code, but evolution doesn't have any knowledge of such concepts. Or any concepts at all. It just does what works.
Wikipedia admins AStarIsBorn, Yentl and FunnyGirl keep saying it's Non Notable. And that Adelman promised her that he would crop the damn picture before releasing it.
Are you kidding? He's got the pictures of him looking goofy in drag for the left, and the pictures of him looking presidential in front of a smoking ruin for the right. Both sides may be a bit annoyed by the image that isn't aimed at them, but the image that is more than makes up for it. And I'm sure if I were part of a pro or anti anything group his PR people could find some speech that makes it sound as if he agrees with me.
There's an irony here. Government/Educational/Non profit types often say that people only disagree with them because it's in their interest not to believe. E.g. the most people that are skeptical of global warming have accepted cash from big oil, or people that want a more private NHS are in the pay of big business. Or that it's possible that people actually prefer Windows XP to Ubuntu. It's a sort of vulgar Marxist and extremely undemocratic idea that people's class and interest determines their politics. Partly it's a conspiracy theory, and and a bad explanation for why their pet ideas are not universally believed.
But it's also true in a lot of cases, since people have an endless capability for self delusion. It's easy to convince yourself that something is true if it happens to be in your interests that it be so. But they never seem to notice that this criticism applies to them too - e.g. public sector union leaders will always believe arguments that the private sector should be kept from competing with them because that competition is not in their interest. And open source activists will happily accept that the government should mandate that the public sector use their technology. And environmental NGOs would lose their raison d'etre if the environment was not in imminent danger of collapse.
The one that annoys me is when people say "Google it", especially when I know I could Google it, and presumably the programmer giving the answer could to, but I can tell that the user has such a minimal knowledge of the subject that they'd have no hope of doing so. If the user knew how to do it, they already would have.
It's like if you were in a math class and ask the teacher a question and they said "work it out". For a few hundred milliseconds more typing time you could say "here's how to find the answer using Google". The difference to the guy you're helping is immense. The "Google it" answer makes him think that he's an idiot or more likely that you're a jerk. The explanation of how to Google it makes him think he knows how to solve problems like this.
I suspect that most programmers come out of university with essentially zero skill and dealing with non technical people. In my experience they start off giving obnoxious non answers, then the customers complain about them to their boss and they gradually learn how to deal with people. What's sad is that if it weren't for the wider capitalist structure around them, they'd stay jerks.
I'd hit that repeatedly and around the clock, like Operation Linebacker II.
I emailed the British Government when Tessa Jowell talked about changing ITC rules to allow prior restraint of programs like Brass Eye to tell them not to and got an email back, saying "the Secretary of State[Jowell] expressing her personal views as a viewer and parent and made it absolutely clear that the programme content and regulatory matters are for the regulators to deal with and not the
Government". Which is sort of backing away from doing what I didn't want them to do.
Dude! I would so hit that. And then argue that the current push to democratise the Middle East is naive and the US should avoid direct conflict but try to trigger a Sunni/Shiite split analogous to the Sino/Soviet one. And then hit that again. Fuck yeah.
Yeah, this stuff looks like it's been retconned to fit conventional wisdom.
Whatever dude. I'd like to date a woman like this. We could argue about Prussian foreign policy in the 19th Century, then fuck like mink, then maybe write some code. Then argue about US Foreign policy, then watch some documentary on strategic bombing where I'd play devil's advocate to conventional wisdom, then argue a bit more and have great make up sex.
The level of ignorance about how the laws of the US function continues to amaze me.
Hey this is slashdot. We know whether someone is a bad person or a good person from gut feeling, so we don't need to know the truth about whether what they advocate is legal or illegal. We know the truthiness about legality from what sort of person they are.
I think that US and Asian taxes are much lower than the Northern European ones. Mind you, that weakens the guys case somewhat, since it means a greater proportion of them are used to pay for roads.
Incidentally in the Fuel Tax protests in the UK, I found out that something like 75% of the cost of fuel is tax. In which case a couple of possibilities occur to me.
One is that biofuel should have a low tax to increase usage but the tax should increase to in the long run the government doesn't lose too much cash. E.g while they are in minority the tax should be low, gradually rising as they take over from fossil fuel, but designed to still give and incentive to switch. If you could get both political parties to agree on this, people making fossil fuel and car manufacturers would have an incentitive to help the transition in return for knowing how the government would set fuel taxes.
The other thing is that you could easily use fuel tax to regulate oil prices. So the tax would rise and fall to compensate for oil costs. If you did both of these, you'd be remarkably insulated from evil terrorist petrostates as you took steps to completely cut off their influence.
Actually given that most of EU budget is spent on subsidizing farmers to grow nothing and that is hard to reform, you could keep spending the money but using it to subsidize production of various biofuel crops. So basically with a bit of planning the Middle Easy can go to hell in a handbasket over a couple of decades and it makes no difference.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe#Possessiv
Snip a bunch of exceptions
So its and whose are actually exceptions to the general form of possessive pronouns. Mind you his and hers are too and he's would look very wrong.
But English evolves, and maybe it's and who's will gradually take over from its and whose leaving his as the sole exception. Oh and there are no authorities in English, correct is whatever the majority use. So if the very many people who use it's instead of its became a majority they would also be right to do so.
Fortunately, the options people have are a slight bit more subtle than that. There is a middle ground between apathy and packing up and moving out.
Yeah, armed insurgency is an option too.
Well it created chaos. But if you look at previous episodes of chaos, notably WWII and the cold war, the US had tended to increase its influence. I think it might be that the US has an advantage in dealing with chaos compared to its less democratic opponents.
You can think of it as a sort of anti 1984 world. In 1984, the world was dominated by tyrannies that could only survive because their peer competitors were also tyrannies and were unable to conquer them. Internally they were secure, it was only external conquest that could conceivably threaten them, much like Saddam was. It seems that the US as a predatory democracy (rather like Ancient Greece) should arrange for things to be as different as possible to this. Tyrannies are hopeless at responding to unexpected events like invasion compared to democracies - look at the behaviour or the Germans and Russians in WWII compared to the US/UK. So by destablising the international situation by starting wars and generally raising hell should disproportionately benefit the US and its relatively democratic allies in the long run as they out maneuver and destroy their less democratic competitors.
Invaiding Iraq was still dumb in retrospect but more subtle future administrations will likely exploit the resulting turmoil in the middle east better than their foreign enemies.
Time travel doesn't make sense unless there are alternative selves many worlds style. Otherwise you end up with paradoxes caused by time travellers changing the past in a way that caused them to never have existed.
i bility_of_paradoxes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel#The_poss
Ok, it's possible that time travel is possible and paradoxes are not for some reason other than that the many worlds interpretation of QM is literally true. But it seems more likely that time travel is prevented by some unknown physical law.
First of all, I have no idea what 'treaty' those people are talking about, as there is not actually one.
Yeah, I suspected that since Googling turned up nothing and the name seems impossibly generic. As usual people are making up bogus legal arguments to support their prejudices.
First of all, I have no idea what 'treaty' those people are talking about, as there is not actually one. The US, as far as I know, is not really forbidden from issuing them by any law, unless the second Hague Convention is talking about that in section VII, which I don't think it is. However, issuing them is generally, for the last 100 years or so, been regarded as a war crime. Also, it's hard to see how issuing letters of marque against other countries not in a time of war would not constitute a violation of the UN charter by 'making war'.
Letters of marque are something that belong in a historical dustbin. Authorizing individuals to use force against others in other countries is something completely unneeded and unwanted in today's world.
They've never actually done what they were supposed to, anyway. Letter of Marque are supposed to, in theory, protect people captured who are holding them from being charged with piracy and/or murder, because they were operating under their legal authorization, and should be treated like POWs. However, this did not actually ever work...capturing forces always treated them as criminals. And all later treaties, like the Genevas, which set even more specific rules about the treatment of captured military forces, and the labeling of warships and military operations, completely ignored even the possibility of privateers. There's no nation in the world that would recognize John Q. Public standing over a dead body with a letter of marque against that person as anything but a murderer.
Actually, at this point it seems like even if I'm wrong about the desirability of Letters of Marque and privateers, that might not be a bad thing. I wonder if that argument would apply to terrorists then? If Letters or Marque and piracy are illegal and people that have them can are unprotected by inernational law doesn't that leave al Qaeda operatives pretty much screwed?
As non uniformed, non state actors who don't abide by the Geneva Convention it seems like they are have a weird status not unlike pirates used to have. So the US or its allies can just execute or detain them under some suitable domestic law. More to the point the US armed forces could probably prosecute them under the UCMJ, it much the same way the Royal Navy did with pirates and the like. That would then be legal under US and international law. Whether it's a good idea politically is a different question.
Any big company has patents of their own and usually patents that they exclusively license from competitors. E.g. consider Intel and AMD. Intel sued AMD for patent infringement and in the end there was a settlement. AMD has granted Intel an exclusive license to its patents and vice versa. AMD apparently ended up paying Intel since their portfolio was smaller. I realise that this is mostly hardware patents, but there are analogous cases with software patents I'm sure.
Now inside those companies, developers contribute to a GPL2 project where the patent licensing clause is not present but the "or later clause" is. When GPL3 is released their users can take the code an AMD developer contributed and opt to license it under GPL3 and demand AMD grant them a license to Intels's patents which they can't do without going back to court. Most likely this would be the end of AMD.
Do you see the problem? The original developer has unwittingly got his employer in a very difficult situation.
This case is very different from a developer trying to submarine patented code into a GPL2 project, which is the one GPL3 zealots use to justify the patent clauses.
If you license your code with a license that gives power to a third party, don't complain when that third party uses that power.
Yeah, don't use the GPL which a third party can change without asking you in a way that causes you to get sued into oblivion
If the developer didn't want to license their patent, they shouldn't have published it under GPLv3 (which they did when added the "or later" clause, which could have been omitted).
It's not their patent, it's a patent their company exclusively licensed from a competitor as part of a settlement in a patent lawsuit. The developer doesn't even know about it. And the GPL2 he agreed to didn't mention patents.
Damn, if they didn't want to license the patent, they shouldn't publish the code under GPLv2 either - GPL'ed code is meant to be shared and shared alike, not encumbered by patents.
They guy that wrote the code probably didn't know about the patent as I keep saying. His employer's legal department might have done, but since GPL2 doesn't mention patents and he probably didn't ask them, he thought he was doing everyone a favour with no downside. Actually, he's probably blown his job away once the legal department work out what he's done to them.
Paul McCartney supports a call for copyright on music recordings to be extended from 50 years to 95 or even 'life plus 70 years'
"Will you still need me, will you still feed me
when I've been dead for 64 years" ?
Mailinator addresses are free and they don't expire. Which can be handy if you forget your password for some account you used them to sign up for
http://www.mailinator.com/
Don't worry. The Internet Police are easy to spot. They're overweight, dressed in fursuits and have Nazi armbands.