Say he fired a cruise missile at the whitehouse from the UK (not that far fetched in this day and age) should he be tried in the UK?
I would say getting hold of a £500000 ICBM is still pretty far fetched. We have gun laws in the UK.. maybe the Americans can buy them in walmart, but we don't have the second amendment here:-)
That depends if you're trying to make money, or save money and more importantly fulfill your mandate to save lives, and this all depends on whether you're a drugs company or a national health service
This came up a couple of years ago in the UK when an American drugs company came up with a treatment (can't remember the name) for various types of cancers which had a 20% chance of prolonging the life or a patient for between 6 and 18 month for the paltry sum of £50000/year per patient, not to mention the rather unpleasant side-effects. They were denied the treatment on the NHS (except nobody was stopping them buying it privately except personal wealth, or digging into the inheritance funds).
The documentary cut to footage of crying relatives angrily talking about how their children missed out on another year of being able to see their grandparent because the NHS which they had paid for through national insurance all of their lives had denied them this drug ("if they'd just had the XYZ then they could have seen them for longer!"), etc.
It then cuts to an NHS funds manager talking about budget and how they have the highest level of pregnancy deaths in the country and the treatment for many of those incidents which could save the entire life of a child is much cheaper. The NHS budget is calculated according to its effect on quality of life, scored as "QUALS". These guys are the ones whom Sarah Palin refers to as the "death squads". Could have been worse.. under a private healthcare scheme, the insurance company death squads would probably have let the babies die for the sake of the 6 months of a bed-bound terminal cancer patient.
It then cuts to the manufacturers of this drug, in their massive marble-sided Chicago skyscraper, having a massive champagne-fueled banquet, handing out awards to eachother for their "life-saving" work in creating this rather ineffectual drug.
One might wonder what the first family would have thought if the reason for their children not seeing their grandparent was because it was the CHILDREN who were ill, who couldn't get treatment because the NHS had just spaffed £50000 on a drug which just made someone ill for an extra 6 months. And what about the 70 year old who is going to live for another 15 years and would love to spend those 15 years being able to walk properly after receiving an expensive hip-replacement operation? Nah.. cancer is like the poster boy of illnesses. The old "why aren't you curing cancer?" poke at the ignoble awards is getting tiresome.
So from where I stand, I've not got cancer, or MS, or Parkinsons (dementia is VERY badly funded.. all the charity money goes to breast cancer these days), or anything else.. YET, but I'm hedging my bets by saying that I hope that my national insurance money is going towards what is most likely to save me the most grief, rather than paying for more champagne and marble skyscrapers. In that respect, a CHEAP cure for cancer sounds bloody brilliant, and I hope the NHS invest heavily in it. In the long run, that will free up more money to research all the other horrible diseases we might get.
There is huge incentive for the NHS to invest in cheap drugs, because that's their job. Private healthcare doesn't really have this moral obligation.
This is coming from a man taking time off admiring his nazi gold to mis-educate Africans on condoms. If I was going to censor the internet, he'd be the first on my list, through my criteria of "not publishing mis-information" but since I'm against censorship, I'll allow the paedophile-hugging homophobic cunt to speak, sadly in the knowledge that some people will actually listen to him.
The fact that he's speaking at all about anything other than the fact that his entire institution is rampant with child buggery which they have shown no interest in doing anything about disgusts me. Last time I heard, they were trying to blame paedophilia on homosexuality in spite of huge evidence to the contrary.
Next this guy whose closest contact with sex is having his bollocks felt by a congregation of yes-men will be telling me that Jesus actually existed... Oi,Benedict.. you realise that you are NOT holy, right?
If you wanted something that looked or behaved like Windows then you would be looking at KDE
This statement was true back in the days of KDE1.0 because they had the audacity to have a start menu. If I wanted something to behave like windows I'll boot into windows. Right now, I'm happy with KDE.
The problem is DRM. A lot of BBC programs are made in conjunction with other companies, etc. "Life" was made with the discovery channel (apparently Oprah Winfrey narrates the US/Discovery version.. jesus.. they replaced a paleontologist with a chat show host. What the hell was wrong with Attenborough?).
Part of the licensing therefore involves the Discovery channel enforcing DRM on the BBC, which means open-source is out. The alternative is to stop working with Discovery which would mean half the budget. Decisions, decisions.
As a recovering alcoholic, they needn't have bothered. Alcohol/ethanol, after being processed by the liver into ethene at much expense of your vitamin B suppplies amongst other things acts as an inhibitory neurotransmitter to the brain, ie. it shuts down certain brain functions by binding to receptors normally associated with dopamine. It also blocks the production of seratonine, which does the opposite.
After years of abuse, through the natural process of brain cells naturally dying and being re-cultivated, you start to overproduce excitatory emitters and underproduce inhibitory emitters. Eventually, your brain goes mental, and after going cold-turkey you feel like you want to crawl up into a ball and hide somewhere dark and quiet. In worse cases, alcohol withdrawal can kill you.
Brain cells last a long time. I spent 6 months with a neurological illness after 10 years of abuse.
All I can say is that the smell of the stuff now makes me feel physically sick. Poisoning it to harm people who never had a problem is just going to make even more people ill.
Then again, neuroscience wasn't really the world's strong point in the 20s.
Compared to C and C++, it's a different kettle of fish. If you're using C++ where you would normally use python, then you shouldn't be using C++. I guess the only crossover between the two is that python has some excellent libraries that allow you to get almost dirty with system functions, as well as things like opengl and audio libraries, so if you're tweaking filedescriptors or writing a game and don't need a compiled language, then I guess there is a little grey area. Incidentally, there's "weave" which allows you to embed c/c++ code into python and compile it on the fly, so you can get the best of both worlds in some cases.
Compared to perl, I spend far less time looking in the python manual than I do in the perl manual when I'm using the same scripting language for the same task. Compared to perl's "there's more than one way to do it" motto, python has the philosophy of "there should be at least one obvious way to do it".
With this in mind, you achieve the same tasks in a different manner. Perl's workhorse is its built-in regular expressions. Python has them, but you tend to use them as a last resort.. its splitting, joining, globbing and list comprehension features are more than sufficient for the same tasks, and look less like, well.. ~=/^[^(.*|)+?(xyzzy)/gS
It also has more of a tendency to push you towards functional logic or use of iterators rather than getting bogged down with if/then/else type stuff.
Finally (from me.. there's probably more, but I'll stop now:-)) it has proper classes with proper constructors, destructors, typed exception handling, inheritance, etc. without all of that "bless" nonsense. Yeah, you can do classes in perl, but it's so much hassle, people tend only to use it for libraries and bigger programs. You don't think twice about using a class in python where appropriate.
Compared to java, although the syntax is a world apart, the grammar is actually very similar, and feature-for-feature, the language behaves in similar ways, except of course that java is a compiled language.
As for fortran, I guess fortran is a bit specialised. Python has things like complex numbers, but they're worlds apart really.
It took me about a day to learn python, and about 3 weeks to get confident with perl. The python language and library is designed by a quite slow moving, but very careful committee. Python has equivalents to CPAN, but CPAN is like doing a recursive wget on freshmeat and seeing what you get. The core library in python is so good and geared towards its users that you rarely (certainly as a sysadmin) have to bring in 3rd party modules except for specialist environments.
If it doesn't, file a bug report with $VENDOR, and they might fix it.
I've had the worst of both worlds. My company uses paid up redhat! We get tech support! Redhat 5.3 uses kernel 2.6.18 (the one without the new scheduler.. performance is a big problem for us.. just being able to log in to a fork-bombed machine would be a bonus), and they backport security fixes in the kernel to that version, rather that just give us a new fucking kernel.
They sent a sales team round. I had various questions like "We have directories with 10000 files in them (not my fault).. when can we have ext4?". They had no answer but tried to sell us "satellite". We're doing fine with puppet. We don't need satellite
I'll say we're doing fine with puppet.. we can downgrade rpms! centos allows you to do this, but redhat doesn't. presumably so when you phone them for help, the "are you running the latest packages?" question will go away. We're making our own packages. Some of them don't work. We need to roll back.
The reason we're doing fine is because after working out why the "allowdowngrade" module for yum didn't work on redhat, I hacked yum and installed my own version.
So there we have it. Our company wants to pay money for a support contract with a company which is effectively useless and just wants to sell us stuff, while I have to hack around modifying their software just so we can do our jobs.
The support contract actually got a kernel developer to talk to us over an NFS issue between linux and solaris. We patched solaris and the problem prevailed. dmesg had a shitload of issues. Alas, we're not a big bank and we only give about 300000 pounds a year to redhat, so they never fixed our problem. We worked around it.
1) Visit vendor's website. Find out cost
2) Since the cost is rarely listed on website, phone up for a "quote"
3) Spend 10 minutes trying to extract information from salesman's bullshit
4) Explain that it's not you that buys the software
5) Ascertain whether you need the standard edition or the "pro" edition, and which support contract you need.
5) Write up proposal to purchase $APP for $PRICE
6) Pass to boss for assessment.
7) Boss passes to budget controller to evaluate
8) Budget controller rubber-stamps it
9) Arrange invoice with vendor
10) CD arrives in post
11) Insert CD into desktop. scp image across to server where it is to be installed.
12) Invoice arrives in accounts department
13) Accounts department phones to query what the invoice is for
14) Money gets spent
15) Phone tech support to ask if there's a way to install the software anywhere other than $hard_coded_path
16) etc..
I'm surprised it's not 3 months ago and lower. Nice round number there! Next week we'll have one saying "OpenOffice tops 22.135% in Germany". Couldn't they have done this when they hit 20?
well, if you have a quick look through Larry Wall's definitive o'reilly guide on perl, you will find him joculantly using the words "laziness is a virtue of a programmer". He's just being virtuous.
Memory usage and load times with library linkage. It always amuses me when on certain systems, as a result of downloading KDE, it pulls in libraries which are linked against other libraries, which in turn are compiled with GTK support. I don't use GTK anywhere, and yet I have its code sitting in my memory, needlessly. If you compile it yourself, you don't have these needless dependencies.
That said, the difference in loading times is negligible, and I haven't had an OCD approach to software installation for a while. I also trust the likes of $DISTRO's packagers to have a lot more experience in compiling software than I have, since, er, that's what they do all day.
It took me a lot longer to learn English than it took me to learn C. Then again, it also took me ages to figure out how to use Oracle, and I *always* have to refer to the manual to figure out the syntax.
"cp $control/var/backups/controlfile" is a lot easier to remember than "copy control file from $path1 to $path2 autosomebollocks.. can't remember it.. doh!"
Programming in English is a total fallacy.
The among the $700000 damages being sought are the costs of making their system secure. If a burglar broke down your door, you would charge them for the door. If you didn't have a door in the first place, you shouldn't be charging to have one installed.
As if this guy has $700000 anyway.. what does anybody stand to gain from this? a pat on the back and the incarceration of a disturbed individual?
Slashdot Mirror
I would say getting hold of a £500000 ICBM is still pretty far fetched. We have gun laws in the UK.. maybe the Americans can buy them in walmart, but we don't have the second amendment here :-)
That depends if you're trying to make money, or save money and more importantly fulfill your mandate to save lives, and this all depends on whether you're a drugs company or a national health service
This came up a couple of years ago in the UK when an American drugs company came up with a treatment (can't remember the name) for various types of cancers which had a 20% chance of prolonging the life or a patient for between 6 and 18 month for the paltry sum of £50000/year per patient, not to mention the rather unpleasant side-effects. They were denied the treatment on the NHS (except nobody was stopping them buying it privately except personal wealth, or digging into the inheritance funds).
The documentary cut to footage of crying relatives angrily talking about how their children missed out on another year of being able to see their grandparent because the NHS which they had paid for through national insurance all of their lives had denied them this drug ("if they'd just had the XYZ then they could have seen them for longer!"), etc.
It then cuts to an NHS funds manager talking about budget and how they have the highest level of pregnancy deaths in the country and the treatment for many of those incidents which could save the entire life of a child is much cheaper. The NHS budget is calculated according to its effect on quality of life, scored as "QUALS". These guys are the ones whom Sarah Palin refers to as the "death squads". Could have been worse.. under a private healthcare scheme, the insurance company death squads would probably have let the babies die for the sake of the 6 months of a bed-bound terminal cancer patient.
It then cuts to the manufacturers of this drug, in their massive marble-sided Chicago skyscraper, having a massive champagne-fueled banquet, handing out awards to eachother for their "life-saving" work in creating this rather ineffectual drug.
One might wonder what the first family would have thought if the reason for their children not seeing their grandparent was because it was the CHILDREN who were ill, who couldn't get treatment because the NHS had just spaffed £50000 on a drug which just made someone ill for an extra 6 months. And what about the 70 year old who is going to live for another 15 years and would love to spend those 15 years being able to walk properly after receiving an expensive hip-replacement operation? Nah.. cancer is like the poster boy of illnesses. The old "why aren't you curing cancer?" poke at the ignoble awards is getting tiresome.
So from where I stand, I've not got cancer, or MS, or Parkinsons (dementia is VERY badly funded.. all the charity money goes to breast cancer these days), or anything else.. YET, but I'm hedging my bets by saying that I hope that my national insurance money is going towards what is most likely to save me the most grief, rather than paying for more champagne and marble skyscrapers. In that respect, a CHEAP cure for cancer sounds bloody brilliant, and I hope the NHS invest heavily in it. In the long run, that will free up more money to research all the other horrible diseases we might get.
There is huge incentive for the NHS to invest in cheap drugs, because that's their job. Private healthcare doesn't really have this moral obligation.
It's fusion alright.
They've managed to fuse horseshit with bullshit, and now they're feeding it to the starving masses!
Damn you! I hate it when some wang ka leeches my next connection.
This is coming from a man taking time off admiring his nazi gold to mis-educate Africans on condoms. If I was going to censor the internet, he'd be the first on my list, through my criteria of "not publishing mis-information" but since I'm against censorship, I'll allow the paedophile-hugging homophobic cunt to speak, sadly in the knowledge that some people will actually listen to him.
The fact that he's speaking at all about anything other than the fact that his entire institution is rampant with child buggery which they have shown no interest in doing anything about disgusts me. Last time I heard, they were trying to blame paedophilia on homosexuality in spite of huge evidence to the contrary.
Next this guy whose closest contact with sex is having his bollocks felt by a congregation of yes-men will be telling me that Jesus actually existed... Oi,Benedict.. you realise that you are NOT holy, right?
And Amiga did full pre-emptive multitasking before any other home computer! mid 90s? pah!
This statement was true back in the days of KDE1.0 because they had the audacity to have a start menu. If I wanted something to behave like windows I'll boot into windows. Right now, I'm happy with KDE.
The problem is DRM. A lot of BBC programs are made in conjunction with other companies, etc. "Life" was made with the discovery channel (apparently Oprah Winfrey narrates the US/Discovery version.. jesus.. they replaced a paleontologist with a chat show host. What the hell was wrong with Attenborough?).
Part of the licensing therefore involves the Discovery channel enforcing DRM on the BBC, which means open-source is out. The alternative is to stop working with Discovery which would mean half the budget. Decisions, decisions.
I will reduce your entire post down to one famous sentence :-)
Three wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
Yes they do. There is a word for it. "cultivation".
As a recovering alcoholic, they needn't have bothered. Alcohol/ethanol, after being processed by the liver into ethene at much expense of your vitamin B suppplies amongst other things acts as an inhibitory neurotransmitter to the brain, ie. it shuts down certain brain functions by binding to receptors normally associated with dopamine. It also blocks the production of seratonine, which does the opposite.
After years of abuse, through the natural process of brain cells naturally dying and being re-cultivated, you start to overproduce excitatory emitters and underproduce inhibitory emitters. Eventually, your brain goes mental, and after going cold-turkey you feel like you want to crawl up into a ball and hide somewhere dark and quiet. In worse cases, alcohol withdrawal can kill you.
Brain cells last a long time. I spent 6 months with a neurological illness after 10 years of abuse.
All I can say is that the smell of the stuff now makes me feel physically sick. Poisoning it to harm people who never had a problem is just going to make even more people ill.
Then again, neuroscience wasn't really the world's strong point in the 20s.
You missed one:
* Not having to hold it
You just unfold it and put it on the desk. Dunno about you, but I type with both hands, and not just with my thumbs.
Compared to C and C++, it's a different kettle of fish. If you're using C++ where you would normally use python, then you shouldn't be using C++. I guess the only crossover between the two is that python has some excellent libraries that allow you to get almost dirty with system functions, as well as things like opengl and audio libraries, so if you're tweaking filedescriptors or writing a game and don't need a compiled language, then I guess there is a little grey area. Incidentally, there's "weave" which allows you to embed c/c++ code into python and compile it on the fly, so you can get the best of both worlds in some cases.
Compared to perl, I spend far less time looking in the python manual than I do in the perl manual when I'm using the same scripting language for the same task. Compared to perl's "there's more than one way to do it" motto, python has the philosophy of "there should be at least one obvious way to do it".
With this in mind, you achieve the same tasks in a different manner. Perl's workhorse is its built-in regular expressions. Python has them, but you tend to use them as a last resort.. its splitting, joining, globbing and list comprehension features are more than sufficient for the same tasks, and look less like, well.. ~= /^[^(.*|)+?(xyzzy)/gS
It also has more of a tendency to push you towards functional logic or use of iterators rather than getting bogged down with if/then/else type stuff.
Finally (from me.. there's probably more, but I'll stop now :-)) it has proper classes with proper constructors, destructors, typed exception handling, inheritance, etc. without all of that "bless" nonsense. Yeah, you can do classes in perl, but it's so much hassle, people tend only to use it for libraries and bigger programs. You don't think twice about using a class in python where appropriate.
Compared to java, although the syntax is a world apart, the grammar is actually very similar, and feature-for-feature, the language behaves in similar ways, except of course that java is a compiled language.
As for fortran, I guess fortran is a bit specialised. Python has things like complex numbers, but they're worlds apart really.
It took me about a day to learn python, and about 3 weeks to get confident with perl. The python language and library is designed by a quite slow moving, but very careful committee. Python has equivalents to CPAN, but CPAN is like doing a recursive wget on freshmeat and seeing what you get. The core library in python is so good and geared towards its users that you rarely (certainly as a sysadmin) have to bring in 3rd party modules except for specialist environments.
Then tie your brain up in knots trying to do it in OcaML :-)
careful which one you pull. I tried that once and there was a fish on the end of it
If it doesn't, file a bug report with $VENDOR, and they might fix it.
I've had the worst of both worlds. My company uses paid up redhat! We get tech support! Redhat 5.3 uses kernel 2.6.18 (the one without the new scheduler.. performance is a big problem for us.. just being able to log in to a fork-bombed machine would be a bonus), and they backport security fixes in the kernel to that version, rather that just give us a new fucking kernel.
They sent a sales team round. I had various questions like "We have directories with 10000 files in them (not my fault).. when can we have ext4?". They had no answer but tried to sell us "satellite". We're doing fine with puppet. We don't need satellite
I'll say we're doing fine with puppet.. we can downgrade rpms! centos allows you to do this, but redhat doesn't. presumably so when you phone them for help, the "are you running the latest packages?" question will go away. We're making our own packages. Some of them don't work. We need to roll back.
The reason we're doing fine is because after working out why the "allowdowngrade" module for yum didn't work on redhat, I hacked yum and installed my own version.
So there we have it. Our company wants to pay money for a support contract with a company which is effectively useless and just wants to sell us stuff, while I have to hack around modifying their software just so we can do our jobs.
The support contract actually got a kernel developer to talk to us over an NFS issue between linux and solaris. We patched solaris and the problem prevailed. dmesg had a shitload of issues. Alas, we're not a big bank and we only give about 300000 pounds a year to redhat, so they never fixed our problem. We worked around it.
Installing an open-source application:
1) apt-get install $APPLICATION
time taken: 1 minute
Installing a proprietary application:
1) Visit vendor's website. Find out cost
2) Since the cost is rarely listed on website, phone up for a "quote"
3) Spend 10 minutes trying to extract information from salesman's bullshit
4) Explain that it's not you that buys the software
5) Ascertain whether you need the standard edition or the "pro" edition, and which support contract you need.
5) Write up proposal to purchase $APP for $PRICE
6) Pass to boss for assessment.
7) Boss passes to budget controller to evaluate
8) Budget controller rubber-stamps it
9) Arrange invoice with vendor
10) CD arrives in post
11) Insert CD into desktop. scp image across to server where it is to be installed.
12) Invoice arrives in accounts department
13) Accounts department phones to query what the invoice is for
14) Money gets spent
15) Phone tech support to ask if there's a way to install the software anywhere other than $hard_coded_path
16) etc..
time taken: 2 months.
More expensive, my arse.
I'm surprised it's not 3 months ago and lower. Nice round number there! Next week we'll have one saying "OpenOffice tops 22.135% in Germany". Couldn't they have done this when they hit 20?
bah.
Hitler was pretty influential.
The politically correct name is "Perl Monks".
well, if you have a quick look through Larry Wall's definitive o'reilly guide on perl, you will find him joculantly using the words "laziness is a virtue of a programmer". He's just being virtuous.
surely Chuck Norris
Memory usage and load times with library linkage. It always amuses me when on certain systems, as a result of downloading KDE, it pulls in libraries which are linked against other libraries, which in turn are compiled with GTK support. I don't use GTK anywhere, and yet I have its code sitting in my memory, needlessly. If you compile it yourself, you don't have these needless dependencies.
That said, the difference in loading times is negligible, and I haven't had an OCD approach to software installation for a while. I also trust the likes of $DISTRO's packagers to have a lot more experience in compiling software than I have, since, er, that's what they do all day.
It took me a lot longer to learn English than it took me to learn C. Then again, it also took me ages to figure out how to use Oracle, and I *always* have to refer to the manual to figure out the syntax. "cp $control /var/backups/controlfile" is a lot easier to remember than "copy control file from $path1 to $path2 autosomebollocks.. can't remember it.. doh!"
Programming in English is a total fallacy.
The among the $700000 damages being sought are the costs of making their system secure. If a burglar broke down your door, you would charge them for the door. If you didn't have a door in the first place, you shouldn't be charging to have one installed. As if this guy has $700000 anyway.. what does anybody stand to gain from this? a pat on the back and the incarceration of a disturbed individual?