The reasons they were privatized and the like was that the other wasn't sustainable
Get a clue before you enter a discussion. Many of the companies that were privatized were doing as good or even better than the private companies that replace them today. That doesn't always mean they are or were profitable - for some things such as public transport or universities or garbage collection maybe the benefit to society should be the important factor and not ROI and shareholder value.
You are repeating the ignorant blabbering of typical right-wing americans who think that anything that's not cut-throat capitalism is automatically communism. The thought that a world inbetween the extremes could exist has never crossed your mind, has it?
The strange truth is that the very america that had McCarthyism was very interested in and actively promoting the social market economy model of western europe, because they realized that if they had attempted to install the no-hold-barred brutality of pure US capitalism, most of post-WW2 europe would have become communist by free choice.
That economic model was the synthesis (to use philosophy terms) between the two equally wrong extremes. It gave us all the advantages of free markets, free choice of jobs, private companies and competition while at the same time protecting those areas where pure capitalism does more harm than good, like health care, public transportation or natural monopolies.
Sadly, the two competing extremes didn't fail at the same time to the same degree, so we've now been janked towards the "winner", and all the advantages are slowly evaporating in favor of higher stock prices and an economy based on bubbles and bullshit.
I'm not in favour of communism at all - had capitalism failed first, the same would have happened in the other direction and we'd be equally bad of. But on almost every metric you choose, western Europe was in a better condition 30 years ago.
Who said anything about redoing the cabling every time you change providers you complete fucking retard?
I did, because that's what your ignorant argument would lead to.
Situation now, in almost all homes: There is one cable going to the nearest street node. This is the famous "last mile".
You want that cable owned by the ISP, which means for every home where the inhabitants are not customers of the current cable owner, either the new ISP needs to buy the cable, or put down a new one, since these are the only two ways in which he can be owner of the last mile.
If they switch ISP again, this repeats.
If a new ISP company wants to enter the market, suddenly the barriers to entry are much, much higher than they are now. Goodbye free market.
And let's talk about multi-story houses with a dozen or a hundred flats, and lots of different ISPs serving different flats...
Instead of admitting your argument was stupid, let's insult people around you who put you straight.
Going through the streets, you have a similar situation.
Not at all. The office building example is at the other end of the last mile. We're talking about the cable connecting the (office or whatever) building to the telco network in the street. Completely different things.
Right, because there is no other possible way to lay cable then the way they've always laid cable.
If you actually could re-invent the cable-putting industry, you'd not be posting in/., you'd be busy making your first billion. (you'd already have your first million)
Any place that had frequent changes to the cabling would either have an accessible conduit system or run the cables on poles.
You'd have to install the conduits first, which means digging up all the streets. A hunch tells me that is even less likely to happen in the near future.
Poles are not really practical in the places that the majority of the population in the west lives in. These places are called "cities". Cities are where the money is in telecommunications, so if your solution can't work in cities, it's dead in the water.
Disclaimer: I've actually worked in the telecommunications industry for 10 years.
Energy companies - privatized. Prices have gone up, service is still good mostly because of government regulations, the market is now largely dominated by less than 5 big energy companies. Only recently thanks to renewable energy have smaller, local players re-emerged.
Public transport - long distance privatized. Service down, delays up, lots of smaller stations have been closed and lines discontinued, government subsidizes the whole thing still.
Telecommunications - privatized. Looked like a success for many years, but now that the old monopolist has stopped being a dominant player (it wasn't broken down like AT&T), service is going down the drain and prices are secretly climbing (base fees are low, nobody dares being the first to raise them, but they're all adding all kinds of additional charges, reducing service for the base fee so you have to buy a higher contract for the same, etc.)
Pensions - being dismantled as we look. We had a great state pension system. It survived both world wars and managed to pay out pensions even when the rest of Germany was flat broke. Heck, even in the few years after WW2 when Germany didn't exist at all and it was just an occupied zone. Now the state pension system is being systematically dismantled by politics while private pension funds and insurances work hard to convince you that you absolutely need them or you'll be poor when you are old.
The examples go on and on and on. In the end, it is quite clear that what my old philosophy teacher in school said was right: capitalism, communism, fascism, extremism, islamism, doesn't matter, be aware of everything that ends with -ism.
The free market is a cute idea and it works great for trade. But don't make it a religion. Many human endeavours are not trade and not suitable to be treated like that. I hope we all agree that things like art and love fall into that category, so we should be open to at least discussing if health, transportation and communications might fall into it as well.
The same is true for communism. The idea that every is equal is great for politics, and a lot of what's wrong in the west today is caused by our hidden abolishing of the "one vote per citizen" rule by allowing campaign financing to dominate the results instead of votes. But again there are lots of areas where treating everyone the same is not the right approach. Education, science, sports and business are all places where it's good if people start out with equal chances, but as their talents and abilities emerge, they need to be treated differently. And planned economy has been pretty much proved to be a disaster, too.
In every other -ism you will always find at least one small grain of truth. Maybe even ISIS has a right idea in its idiology somewhere. The problem is always if you think you can explain the whole world by one truth, one interpretation, one approach. But religion doesn't built space ships, and science doesn't write operas, and capitalism doesn't create families.
I agree that there's the difference of book or not, but frankly speaking, most christians known only the summary version of their holy book and never actually read it, so the difference is, again mostly semantical.
That christians today don't want to kill unbelievers and heretics anymore has little to do with christianity itself and a lot with the enlightenment and the secularisation of society and politics.
I've heard that so often, it's time to burn the strawman.
In "such situations" (red flag right there - vague specification), only the pre-planned, very bad guys with proper resources and connections are armed like the military.
Most bad guys are lacking either the resources or the connections or the patience to jump through all the hoops that you need to jump through to acquire, say, an assault rifle illegally. In my country, which has strict gun controls, very few crimes involve weapons of any kind, and in those that do the weapon is almost always either a knife or a pistol. That means regular police can engage the criminal.
That's probably because Christianity does not require believers to spread the faith
Semantically correct, but the step is so thin it's not a surprise so many christians throughout history thought otherwise.
If you know (not suspect or think, but know by divine message from the creator himself) that everyone who doesn't join your faith is doomed to eternal suffering in this world and the next, and their children and their children as well, you either feel a strong impulse to teach them the "truth", or you're not really serious about it.
Or maybe someone should just fork islam and create a non-violent branch that kicks out all the "kill them for..." parts. OTOH, that is also long overdue for christianity.
That's half a joke, and half true. In some circles, you are considered an extremist if you are rude to others while addressing whatever the issue is. In other circles, you're not an extremist if you kill people over the issue, only if, say, they were children.
They may or may not be cowards, but unless they are stupid, they would simply choose a different target - a day care center or a school, for example.
If you think guns make you more safe, you're an idiot. The numbers are in and the differences between comparable countries are tiny. The main factors in safety have nothing to do with gun ownership.
It is apparently normal that organisations for social change attract extremists, and many of these organisations fail to guard against the takeover by people who are just more fanatical, and thus dedicated. I've witnessed the same with the german Pirate Party, which used to be about digital rights, and nobody cared. Then it got a few percents at some elections and appeared on the radar. These days, it is about feminism, drug policy, political refugees, city planning and whatever other pet topic some troll pushed through.
Greenpeace always had this activism thing and at the time when the public largely didn't care about the environment, that was probably the right thing to do, to get attention. But as with all things, you have to continuously make it bigger to get headlines again, especially if you have reached your goal and people do pay attention already. And if you go more and more extreme, sooner or later something will break. People die (already happened), or things like this.
The errors that can be caught at compile time are almost always uninteresting typos
What an opportunity to give the unnecessary ad hominem back. The key-word was "experiment". The point is not that this is how software development be, but that teaching people to think first, then design correctly, then implement is the proper approach instead of the "tinkerer" one where you write down what comes to mind and then tinker with it until the compiler is happy.
That, exactly, is how all these errors that the compiler doesn't catch happen.
The experiment is not about avoiding compiler errors. If you thought it was, you didn't understand it one bit.
How does it handle dynamic sites? If the answer is "not at all" as with previous projects of this kind, it's dead on arrival.
Most of the web is dynamic today, and almost all of the interesting sites are. How many of us would be reading/. if it didn't have comments and moderation?
It never changed except for one thing â" the ads. More and more ads were filling the site, and somehow when it felt unimaginable to make these ads more distasteful, they somehow ended up even worse.
There were ads on TPB? Fuck, now I can't even turn off ABE to check it out.
This. I can't remember the last time I downloaded music from a torrent site. It's more convenient these days to buy it on iTunes, and prices are fair.
When the same can be said for movies, and the MPAA stops this staggered release bullshit, I'll start buying movies again the same way I bought a lot of DVDs back when that was the most convenient way to get movies.
Religious views, put forward as religious views, are summarily shot down,
Which world is that you live in? Religion still carries much more credit than its performance record justifies. The pope is invited to parliaments and international diplomacy as if he was somehow especially smart or important. Even the Dalai Lama is given special respect for purely religious reasons. Churches enjoy special priviledges in many countries, with tax exemption being just the tip of the iceberg.
The simple fact is that the human brain and psychology has evolved little from tribal society and we believe or disbelieve a lot of things not due to facts or evidence, but due to group pressure, conformity, tales, authority as well as shortcuts in thinking, heuristical approaches and so on. Religion is just one example of that, superstition also still exists even though religion has already tried to root it out for a thousand years.
Finding and squashing this kind of bugs in a huge project is a bitch.
Which is why you should learn to write code that compiles and works correctly on the first try. We know how to do it, computer science wasn't invented yesterday. But thanks to dot-com and startup craze and the desire to churn out pseudo-programmers fast, fast, fast, programming isn't taught correctly.
If you want army style, I suggest this experiment: Teach students to code in a simple text editor and a special compiler that gives them one chance at compiling the program. If the compile fails, it deletes the code and they can start from scratch.
The more monkey-proof, the better.
Only if you hire monkeys to do your programming for you.
may look like the easy road to profit, but it's not a long term strategy.
It depends on the environment. If other people are good and willing to defend their values, the bad guys will be in trouble. But if they manage to convince the majority to be either lethargic or even respect them, then the good people are the dumb losers.
And we are in that situation. Wake up, man! We admire rich people simply because they are rich, not for the ways they became so. We increasingly believe the war-talk of neo-con propaganda that unemployed people just need to be forced more strongly to want to work, and that benefits need to be cut because the poor are parasites. There was no blood in the streets when our governments bailed out the finance sector with so much money that it's hard to visualize while at the same time cutting budgets in education, health care and practically everything else.
You forget that the unethical (actually, "differently ethical" is correct here, because they believe themselves to be ethical, I'm sure) people also have long-term strategies. And they're winning.
There are a number of car dealers I will NEVER go back to
Are they still in business? If so, your rant is meaningless.
The rules exist in C as well, just the enforcement differs. In your average recently developed language, the IDE or the compiler will tell you that you're a bad boy and shouldn't be doing this shit. In C, the compiler will tell you to fuck off and come back when you understand what you did wrong or the system will just shoot your program and put it out of its misery.
Having to figure out what went wrong instead of this tinkerer approach of "let's compile and see what the errors tell us to fix" is a good lesson in writing it right the first time.
I've seen students who learn programming in Java very recently. Their approach has nothing of regular or army, it's amateurish "let's try this and see what happens". It's pathetic that they teach people programming like that, and it explains a lot about what's wrong with software.
All my life, yes. The crucial point a lot of us more idealistic people miss is that all those who run countries or corporations whom we think belong into jail do not see themselves as bad people, because ethics is also subjective and personal. Those who are successful in the shark tank of the business world are so, because they've been brought up or trained themselves to the right ethics, the one where screwing over someone is right because you can convince yourself that he's weak and can use the lesson and besides it's the right of the strong people (i.e. you) to lord above his kind.
I implore you to not go down this road, it will destroy you and others in the end.
What's destroying humanity is good people who are unable to pick up a weapon when the bad people attack. In this the sharks are right: If you can't bite, you are prey. Sadly, too many of us have taken a deep sip from the poison well and now our children will have to fight the same fights that our grandchildren already fought, because for example we destroyed the power of the unions by not joining and not creating an IT union.
Show me a single argument that's not from either an anarchist or an idiot that explains how to run a country with zero taxation (ignore the tiny minority of countries that can run entirely on oil exports or such, we're talking the general case).
Regardless, you have to explain what "lawful" means.
No, I don't. That word is in the dictionary and its definition is in no way disputed.
I don't care [...] Because morally,
So you're asking me to explain "lawful" only to say that it actually doesn't matter?
Other than 400 years ago, we did it with swords and gallows and dungeons and now we've made it a bit cleaner.
You need to get your head out of your ass and into a history book. The rule of law is at least 2000 years old and while governments have always had the option of force, its actual use is comparatively rare. Especially compared to mob rule. Today, 100 or 1000 years ago - you can clearly see that when the government breaks down, violence and crimes increase dramatically.
Morally, the difference between a "noble" passing a law that he can rape your wife on the first night of your marriage and then take your money for the rest of your life, is exactly the same as changing the US constitution to allow the state to tax in like manner.
Firstly, you really need to study history. While ius primae noctis makes for a great legend, historians today are not convinced it ever actually existed, and even if it did there are no confirmed cases of it ever being actually used.
Secondly, you should explain whether you are ok with the general principle of a society or not. In this context, "society" means that a group of people can make rules for themselves and enforce them. The details (nobility, democracy, segregation of powers, etc.) are unimportant as long as you make a covert argument that basically calls anything except pure anarchy immoral. So please come out of hiding behind phrases and state your position clearly. Do you think that people should be able to form societies and enforce their rules on each other or not?
With a MORAL argument
Humans are social animals by nature. A society can only function if it can enforce its rules. Laws are basically moral rules written down. Therefore, I don't see a principal difference between legal and moral arguments.
The difference is that everyone thinks they understand moral, but few people understand law. And yes, not all laws are codified ethics, that's true. Many are of administrative nature, for example.
Is there no room in this world for morals?
Morals differ, even from person to person. That's why a society needs a common set of values.
anyone who found you could just steal, rape, kill at will?
Look around you. What's happening in Syria and Iraq? What's happening in parts of Africa? Yes, my idealistic friend, this is exactly what happens when government breaks down and societies fail. Sure, it is morally wrong, but it happens.
So in fantasy lalaland, where everyone is perfectly moral and also shares the same morals, you don't need governments, taxation and all this shit. In the real world, where real humans with all their mistakes live, you do.
I won't ask you to describe how a world based purely on morals and without government "interference" would work. Greater minds have failed at that task.
and the people who do use C are not interested either since they tend not to be language fetishists.
This. Half of the newer high-level languages today are just the mental masturbations of someone who either thinks he can make the wheel more round or the result of a "not invented here" mindset. There's so much crap out there forking a perfectly good language because someone thinks it should be a =+ b; instead of a += b;
It's sickening, and a good reason to stay away from all this shit, because five years down the road someone will fork the fork and you can throw all your code away because support and development just stops as all the ADD kids jump at the new toy. That'll never happen with your C code.
Perhaps C's greatest weakness is that it places too much trust in the coder, where other languages don't.
I consider this its greatest strength. If you want a training wheels language, there are probably 200 to choose from. If you want a language for adults, there aren't all that many choices.
Slashdot Mirror
The reasons they were privatized and the like was that the other wasn't sustainable
Get a clue before you enter a discussion. Many of the companies that were privatized were doing as good or even better than the private companies that replace them today. That doesn't always mean they are or were profitable - for some things such as public transport or universities or garbage collection maybe the benefit to society should be the important factor and not ROI and shareholder value.
You are repeating the ignorant blabbering of typical right-wing americans who think that anything that's not cut-throat capitalism is automatically communism. The thought that a world inbetween the extremes could exist has never crossed your mind, has it?
The strange truth is that the very america that had McCarthyism was very interested in and actively promoting the social market economy model of western europe, because they realized that if they had attempted to install the no-hold-barred brutality of pure US capitalism, most of post-WW2 europe would have become communist by free choice.
That economic model was the synthesis (to use philosophy terms) between the two equally wrong extremes. It gave us all the advantages of free markets, free choice of jobs, private companies and competition while at the same time protecting those areas where pure capitalism does more harm than good, like health care, public transportation or natural monopolies.
Sadly, the two competing extremes didn't fail at the same time to the same degree, so we've now been janked towards the "winner", and all the advantages are slowly evaporating in favor of higher stock prices and an economy based on bubbles and bullshit.
I'm not in favour of communism at all - had capitalism failed first, the same would have happened in the other direction and we'd be equally bad of. But on almost every metric you choose, western Europe was in a better condition 30 years ago.
Who said anything about redoing the cabling every time you change providers you complete fucking retard?
I did, because that's what your ignorant argument would lead to.
Situation now, in almost all homes: There is one cable going to the nearest street node. This is the famous "last mile".
You want that cable owned by the ISP, which means for every home where the inhabitants are not customers of the current cable owner, either the new ISP needs to buy the cable, or put down a new one, since these are the only two ways in which he can be owner of the last mile.
If they switch ISP again, this repeats.
If a new ISP company wants to enter the market, suddenly the barriers to entry are much, much higher than they are now. Goodbye free market.
And let's talk about multi-story houses with a dozen or a hundred flats, and lots of different ISPs serving different flats...
Instead of admitting your argument was stupid, let's insult people around you who put you straight.
Going through the streets, you have a similar situation.
Not at all. The office building example is at the other end of the last mile. We're talking about the cable connecting the (office or whatever) building to the telco network in the street. Completely different things.
Right, because there is no other possible way to lay cable then the way they've always laid cable.
If you actually could re-invent the cable-putting industry, you'd not be posting in /., you'd be busy making your first billion. (you'd already have your first million)
Any place that had frequent changes to the cabling would either have an accessible conduit system or run the cables on poles.
You'd have to install the conduits first, which means digging up all the streets. A hunch tells me that is even less likely to happen in the near future.
Poles are not really practical in the places that the majority of the population in the west lives in. These places are called "cities". Cities are where the money is in telecommunications, so if your solution can't work in cities, it's dead in the water.
Disclaimer: I've actually worked in the telecommunications industry for 10 years.
Second all of that from Germany.
Energy companies - privatized. Prices have gone up, service is still good mostly because of government regulations, the market is now largely dominated by less than 5 big energy companies. Only recently thanks to renewable energy have smaller, local players re-emerged.
Public transport - long distance privatized. Service down, delays up, lots of smaller stations have been closed and lines discontinued, government subsidizes the whole thing still.
Telecommunications - privatized. Looked like a success for many years, but now that the old monopolist has stopped being a dominant player (it wasn't broken down like AT&T), service is going down the drain and prices are secretly climbing (base fees are low, nobody dares being the first to raise them, but they're all adding all kinds of additional charges, reducing service for the base fee so you have to buy a higher contract for the same, etc.)
Pensions - being dismantled as we look. We had a great state pension system. It survived both world wars and managed to pay out pensions even when the rest of Germany was flat broke. Heck, even in the few years after WW2 when Germany didn't exist at all and it was just an occupied zone. Now the state pension system is being systematically dismantled by politics while private pension funds and insurances work hard to convince you that you absolutely need them or you'll be poor when you are old.
The examples go on and on and on. In the end, it is quite clear that what my old philosophy teacher in school said was right: capitalism, communism, fascism, extremism, islamism, doesn't matter, be aware of everything that ends with -ism.
The free market is a cute idea and it works great for trade. But don't make it a religion. Many human endeavours are not trade and not suitable to be treated like that. I hope we all agree that things like art and love fall into that category, so we should be open to at least discussing if health, transportation and communications might fall into it as well.
The same is true for communism. The idea that every is equal is great for politics, and a lot of what's wrong in the west today is caused by our hidden abolishing of the "one vote per citizen" rule by allowing campaign financing to dominate the results instead of votes. But again there are lots of areas where treating everyone the same is not the right approach. Education, science, sports and business are all places where it's good if people start out with equal chances, but as their talents and abilities emerge, they need to be treated differently. And planned economy has been pretty much proved to be a disaster, too.
In every other -ism you will always find at least one small grain of truth. Maybe even ISIS has a right idea in its idiology somewhere. The problem is always if you think you can explain the whole world by one truth, one interpretation, one approach.
But religion doesn't built space ships, and science doesn't write operas, and capitalism doesn't create families.
Mostly because it is almost impossible to lay the last mile of cable from a regulation stand point.
Mostly because it makes a fucking lot of sense to not dig up the street every time someone switches to a new ISP.
I agree that there's the difference of book or not, but frankly speaking, most christians known only the summary version of their holy book and never actually read it, so the difference is, again mostly semantical.
That christians today don't want to kill unbelievers and heretics anymore has little to do with christianity itself and a lot with the enlightenment and the secularisation of society and politics.
I've heard that so often, it's time to burn the strawman.
In "such situations" (red flag right there - vague specification), only the pre-planned, very bad guys with proper resources and connections are armed like the military.
Most bad guys are lacking either the resources or the connections or the patience to jump through all the hoops that you need to jump through to acquire, say, an assault rifle illegally. In my country, which has strict gun controls, very few crimes involve weapons of any kind, and in those that do the weapon is almost always either a knife or a pistol. That means regular police can engage the criminal.
That's probably because Christianity does not require believers to spread the faith
Semantically correct, but the step is so thin it's not a surprise so many christians throughout history thought otherwise.
If you know (not suspect or think, but know by divine message from the creator himself) that everyone who doesn't join your faith is doomed to eternal suffering in this world and the next, and their children and their children as well, you either feel a strong impulse to teach them the "truth", or you're not really serious about it.
This.
Or maybe someone should just fork islam and create a non-violent branch that kicks out all the "kill them for..." parts. OTOH, that is also long overdue for christianity.
Extremism is bad and causes people to do irrational things. Your brand of extremism is as bad as any other.
Like it or not, there are different types of extremism.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6ccC...
That's half a joke, and half true. In some circles, you are considered an extremist if you are rude to others while addressing whatever the issue is. In other circles, you're not an extremist if you kill people over the issue, only if, say, they were children.
They may or may not be cowards, but unless they are stupid, they would simply choose a different target - a day care center or a school, for example.
If you think guns make you more safe, you're an idiot. The numbers are in and the differences between comparable countries are tiny. The main factors in safety have nothing to do with gun ownership.
It is apparently normal that organisations for social change attract extremists, and many of these organisations fail to guard against the takeover by people who are just more fanatical, and thus dedicated. I've witnessed the same with the german Pirate Party, which used to be about digital rights, and nobody cared. Then it got a few percents at some elections and appeared on the radar. These days, it is about feminism, drug policy, political refugees, city planning and whatever other pet topic some troll pushed through.
Greenpeace always had this activism thing and at the time when the public largely didn't care about the environment, that was probably the right thing to do, to get attention. But as with all things, you have to continuously make it bigger to get headlines again, especially if you have reached your goal and people do pay attention already. And if you go more and more extreme, sooner or later something will break. People die (already happened), or things like this.
The errors that can be caught at compile time are almost always uninteresting typos
What an opportunity to give the unnecessary ad hominem back. The key-word was "experiment". The point is not that this is how software development be, but that teaching people to think first, then design correctly, then implement is the proper approach instead of the "tinkerer" one where you write down what comes to mind and then tinker with it until the compiler is happy.
That, exactly, is how all these errors that the compiler doesn't catch happen.
The experiment is not about avoiding compiler errors. If you thought it was, you didn't understand it one bit.
How does it handle dynamic sites? If the answer is "not at all" as with previous projects of this kind, it's dead on arrival.
Most of the web is dynamic today, and almost all of the interesting sites are. How many of us would be reading /. if it didn't have comments and moderation?
It never changed except for one thing â" the ads. More and more ads were filling the site, and somehow when it felt unimaginable to make these ads more distasteful, they somehow ended up even worse.
There were ads on TPB? Fuck, now I can't even turn off ABE to check it out.
This. I can't remember the last time I downloaded music from a torrent site. It's more convenient these days to buy it on iTunes, and prices are fair.
When the same can be said for movies, and the MPAA stops this staggered release bullshit, I'll start buying movies again the same way I bought a lot of DVDs back when that was the most convenient way to get movies.
Religious views, put forward as religious views, are summarily shot down,
Which world is that you live in? Religion still carries much more credit than its performance record justifies. The pope is invited to parliaments and international diplomacy as if he was somehow especially smart or important. Even the Dalai Lama is given special respect for purely religious reasons. Churches enjoy special priviledges in many countries, with tax exemption being just the tip of the iceberg.
The simple fact is that the human brain and psychology has evolved little from tribal society and we believe or disbelieve a lot of things not due to facts or evidence, but due to group pressure, conformity, tales, authority as well as shortcuts in thinking, heuristical approaches and so on. Religion is just one example of that, superstition also still exists even though religion has already tried to root it out for a thousand years.
Finding and squashing this kind of bugs in a huge project is a bitch.
Which is why you should learn to write code that compiles and works correctly on the first try. We know how to do it, computer science wasn't invented yesterday. But thanks to dot-com and startup craze and the desire to churn out pseudo-programmers fast, fast, fast, programming isn't taught correctly.
If you want army style, I suggest this experiment: Teach students to code in a simple text editor and a special compiler that gives them one chance at compiling the program. If the compile fails, it deletes the code and they can start from scratch.
The more monkey-proof, the better.
Only if you hire monkeys to do your programming for you.
This is a very famous article about how to do programming right. Note their error count. Compare it to pretty much everything else on the market.
But programming this way isn't sexy, or macho or whatever else you want to call it. It's real work.
may look like the easy road to profit, but it's not a long term strategy.
It depends on the environment. If other people are good and willing to defend their values, the bad guys will be in trouble. But if they manage to convince the majority to be either lethargic or even respect them, then the good people are the dumb losers.
And we are in that situation. Wake up, man! We admire rich people simply because they are rich, not for the ways they became so. We increasingly believe the war-talk of neo-con propaganda that unemployed people just need to be forced more strongly to want to work, and that benefits need to be cut because the poor are parasites. There was no blood in the streets when our governments bailed out the finance sector with so much money that it's hard to visualize while at the same time cutting budgets in education, health care and practically everything else.
You forget that the unethical (actually, "differently ethical" is correct here, because they believe themselves to be ethical, I'm sure) people also have long-term strategies. And they're winning.
There are a number of car dealers I will NEVER go back to
Are they still in business? If so, your rant is meaningless.
The rules exist in C as well, just the enforcement differs. In your average recently developed language, the IDE or the compiler will tell you that you're a bad boy and shouldn't be doing this shit. In C, the compiler will tell you to fuck off and come back when you understand what you did wrong or the system will just shoot your program and put it out of its misery.
Having to figure out what went wrong instead of this tinkerer approach of "let's compile and see what the errors tell us to fix" is a good lesson in writing it right the first time.
I've seen students who learn programming in Java very recently. Their approach has nothing of regular or army, it's amateurish "let's try this and see what happens". It's pathetic that they teach people programming like that, and it explains a lot about what's wrong with software.
If you write in the subset of C++ that has these cute features, you're effectively writing C with objects.
I doubt any C++ code compiles to "much faster" machine code than well-written C, but you're welcome to prove me wrong with an actual example.
you have totally missed the point.
All my life, yes. The crucial point a lot of us more idealistic people miss is that all those who run countries or corporations whom we think belong into jail do not see themselves as bad people, because ethics is also subjective and personal. Those who are successful in the shark tank of the business world are so, because they've been brought up or trained themselves to the right ethics, the one where screwing over someone is right because you can convince yourself that he's weak and can use the lesson and besides it's the right of the strong people (i.e. you) to lord above his kind.
I implore you to not go down this road, it will destroy you and others in the end.
What's destroying humanity is good people who are unable to pick up a weapon when the bad people attack. In this the sharks are right: If you can't bite, you are prey. Sadly, too many of us have taken a deep sip from the poison well and now our children will have to fight the same fights that our grandchildren already fought, because for example we destroyed the power of the unions by not joining and not creating an IT union.
Oh so basically you've bounded the debate?
Show me a single argument that's not from either an anarchist or an idiot that explains how to run a country with zero taxation (ignore the tiny minority of countries that can run entirely on oil exports or such, we're talking the general case).
Regardless, you have to explain what "lawful" means.
No, I don't. That word is in the dictionary and its definition is in no way disputed.
I don't care [...] Because morally,
So you're asking me to explain "lawful" only to say that it actually doesn't matter?
Other than 400 years ago, we did it with swords and gallows and dungeons and now we've made it a bit cleaner.
You need to get your head out of your ass and into a history book. The rule of law is at least 2000 years old and while governments have always had the option of force, its actual use is comparatively rare. Especially compared to mob rule. Today, 100 or 1000 years ago - you can clearly see that when the government breaks down, violence and crimes increase dramatically.
Morally, the difference between a "noble" passing a law that he can rape your wife on the first night of your marriage and then take your money for the rest of your life, is exactly the same as changing the US constitution to allow the state to tax in like manner.
Firstly, you really need to study history. While ius primae noctis makes for a great legend, historians today are not convinced it ever actually existed, and even if it did there are no confirmed cases of it ever being actually used.
Secondly, you should explain whether you are ok with the general principle of a society or not. In this context, "society" means that a group of people can make rules for themselves and enforce them. The details (nobility, democracy, segregation of powers, etc.) are unimportant as long as you make a covert argument that basically calls anything except pure anarchy immoral. So please come out of hiding behind phrases and state your position clearly. Do you think that people should be able to form societies and enforce their rules on each other or not?
With a MORAL argument
Humans are social animals by nature.
A society can only function if it can enforce its rules.
Laws are basically moral rules written down.
Therefore, I don't see a principal difference between legal and moral arguments.
The difference is that everyone thinks they understand moral, but few people understand law. And yes, not all laws are codified ethics, that's true. Many are of administrative nature, for example.
Is there no room in this world for morals?
Morals differ, even from person to person. That's why a society needs a common set of values.
anyone who found you could just steal, rape, kill at will?
Look around you. What's happening in Syria and Iraq? What's happening in parts of Africa? Yes, my idealistic friend, this is exactly what happens when government breaks down and societies fail. Sure, it is morally wrong, but it happens.
So in fantasy lalaland, where everyone is perfectly moral and also shares the same morals, you don't need governments, taxation and all this shit. In the real world, where real humans with all their mistakes live, you do.
I won't ask you to describe how a world based purely on morals and without government "interference" would work. Greater minds have failed at that task.
and the people who do use C are not interested either since they tend not to be language fetishists.
This. Half of the newer high-level languages today are just the mental masturbations of someone who either thinks he can make the wheel more round or the result of a "not invented here" mindset. There's so much crap out there forking a perfectly good language because someone thinks it should be a =+ b; instead of a += b;
It's sickening, and a good reason to stay away from all this shit, because five years down the road someone will fork the fork and you can throw all your code away because support and development just stops as all the ADD kids jump at the new toy. That'll never happen with your C code.
Perhaps C's greatest weakness is that it places too much trust in the coder, where other languages don't.
I consider this its greatest strength. If you want a training wheels language, there are probably 200 to choose from. If you want a language for adults, there aren't all that many choices.