then-Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson pushed gave legal protection to intercept activities. The NSA was created two tears later in a secret memo from President Truman, but it wasn't until 1959 that it was named in legislation.
Privacy dies and Truman only shed TWO tears? Hell Jefferson rolled over in his grave more than that. Truman probably didn't even get misty-eyed nuking all those Japs...
"Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I got spare time. But for now, for your customer's sake, for your daughter's sake, ya might wanna think about buying a quality product"
There are dozens of AMD boards that are much cheaper than the Intel boards, with more variety of chipsets and designs. And the companies that make them have to prove themselves. They can't just rely on their good name while shipping a POS (such as Intel's Atom mb).
in a year and a half, when one of them breaks, I find that the manufacturer can't provide an exact replacement, won't replace unless I pay shipping both ways, has an utterly broken RMA process (coughAsuscough) or doesn't even have an office in the USA. The CPU might be $15 cheaper and the motherboard might be $20 cheaper, but I'm still not going through that through another generation of the machines I have to support.
While you say $20 cheaper, you could also say $20 instead of $40, or 'half the price'. You could buy twice as many as you need for the same cost as buying Intel. Do you really expect half of the AMD mb's to fail? That seems outrageous to me.
By arguing for exact replacement parts, warranties, "I have to support", etc, I take it you are in an organization and have some kind of specific requirements. Basically your reasons are the same as why people bought $200 Sun keyboards... For most people, it's cheaper and easier to just buy a new, better mb 1.5 years later, should the old one die, than it is to get an exact replacement.
First, Intel didn't have better price/performance until recently. Certainly well into core 2 duo period the AMD Athlon 64, X2, etc were much better price/performance.
That Sempron is much faster than that Celeron. Atom is cheap for the processor, but the other parts cost more and use a lot of power (%50 of total power, 15 watts for chipset on Intel's Atom mITX board). Why do you think netbooks only get ~3hrs with 4 watt processor? Because the rest of the intel chipsets suck.
Now lets think about this, AMD has matched Intel in price/performance despite a 2x larger process. What does that say about the respective merits for AMD and Intel designs? If Intel stumbles in advancing the process they are going to fail, because AMD has clearly better designs and engineers.
Re:Why does nobody ask Google anything today?
on
Googling Security
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· Score: 1
Forget the what-if-we-knew-x-years-ago supposition : why does nobody - no regulatory body that is - demand that Google explain exactly what data they collect and what the heck they do with it?
More to the point, saying "we collect ip addresses from google-analytics and our ad partners" is way different from saying "and by correlating that data we know 98% of every page each person visits on the internet". Companies say they don't collect any personally-identifiable information... and then proceed to correlate that with personally identifiable information from other sources.
The way it should work is that if a company ever creates a profile on an individual (even for a split second, even for a one-time query, even for court orders, etc) then the existence of that profile has to be recorded at a government public database. People can then access this database to see what companies have a profile on them, and can demand a copy of the profile from the company, and can demand correction be made to the profile for incorrect data.
Yes, this is a bit more overhead for companies if they create profiles on individuals. Instead, they'll create generic profiles not directly linked to you. For instance, google will drop 'name' and 'address' from their records of the web sites you visit since that will cost less than people knowing just how invasive google is.
It's a long time since Emacs has really been slow, but the jokes have long memories.
Performance jokes are never garbage collected -- it would take too many cycles. Performance jokes are never garbage collected -- there's always a weak reference to them.
I'll be here all week... or until tuesday if the alternate pickup schedule is in effect due to holiday or inclement weather.
'Moral' as in the 'essential character', an honest look at the traffic, at the big picture.
In some cases, when you have a stylized button for instance, the 'up' and 'down' are sent to the server once and the application tells the server to display the up or down image as appropriate. But increasingly, the toolkit renders the 'up' or 'down' locally into a memory buffer and then sends the image to the server each time. This can be because the toolkit was not written directly with X windows in mind, or the concepts don't map directly (flash), or the program set a custom paint callback and the toolkit doesn't know that it's just going to draw an image. Or the toolkit uses it's own rendering pipeline since maybe X doesn't have right blending or scaling algorithm. Whatever the reasons, this happens a LOT in modern X applications.
X11 does not blit the entire damn window across the network. Its a client/server architecture and what is passed across the network are requests by the client to ask the server to draw , where was envisaged as a mostly abstract entity
If you look at what this guys is saying in context, I think it actually makes sense. By not having the user interface be the subject of the network layer, what ends up happening is the interface draws the window on the 'client' side then copies (blitz) the contents to the server over the network, as a pixmap. This is doubly true because the primitives that X has are not suitable for making a modern UI.
So while it's technically true that the protocol is creating windows, sending pixmaps, sending commands to draw etc rather than 'blitting' the window, it's morally true that the X11 protocol causes the whole window to be blitted. Another poster gave mplayer as an example. Java also blits the window into pixmaps then sends commands to draw these... the same is true for any number of other modern apps.
Going back to what the original poster said, what if the core protocol were an interface protocol and Qt, Gnome, etc were extensions to the server instead of the really low-level extensions we have now like 'keyboard' and 'debug' and 'shape'? You could have consistency across applications and a network protocol that didn't blit.... oh yeah, they did this and it was called NeWS. People didn't like it because it was from Sun and they had 'too much power' at the time.
Since getting your coworkers to learn Navajo is probably out of reach, I suggest Pig Latin.
Or if that's too oringbay maybe 'Ruddfuckers'... that's where you pranstose the first tetler of pomcound words with the next part (also words with frepixes). It takes a while to gifure it out though...
It's still wrong though, "cent" is the same "cent" as in "centimeter" or "percent" and means 1/100. The unit is the dollar, so 0x1 dollar = one dollar.
So if you point out this error to Knuth... do you get a check for $0x1 or $2.56?
I daresay the answer is most liberals want someone else taxed at a higher rate to support their ideas of right and wrong.
The ones I know want people to be taxed fairly, based on some form of disposable income. The difference in how much you could save after necessities like basic food, clothing, shelter is something to factor into taxes.
Say basic living costs $20k. If you make N per year you can make this much saving at 5% interest for 5 years (for example): * $30k: 10k disposable --> 3k interest * $60k: 40k disposable --> 11k interest * $120k: 100k disposable --> 28k interest
At 60k you are paid twice as much as the person at 30k but get 4x the benefits. Since the value of money is linear (twice the money buys twice the product) this means that wages and benefits are not directly proportional. Or in other words, in terms of benefits for work done the people at the bottom are getting really screwed because they are paid less, and not due to the value of their work. It's a catch-22 for them that isn't fair.
And the question for liberals is if you believe that greater taxation will lead to the alleviation of society's ills, why haven't you filled out the box on your W2 labeled "additional contribution" with a number that is a considerable percentage of your income?
Because liberals believe in fairness, so them donating more to red state (who get the lion's share of government handouts) while conservatives donate to expand their social networks (ie churches) is not a fair system. You're asking something like 'well why don't you shoot yourself in the foot if you believe that we should all walk in other people's shoes?' Your question makes about as much sense, and frankly it's pretty juvenile; it's not a serious question.
First, charity is something you give of your own free will. Conservatives do a lot of this (in fact, studies have shown they give more to charity than liberals).
Charity can be something individuals give of their own free will and it also can be something collectively given. Or do you not count activities done by Churches (organized groups, like government) to help people as charity?!
Also, most accounts of charitable giving don't often include things like pbs or public radio, which conservatives give much less to.
We're generally all for giving temporary assistance to get someone through a tough time... oppose handouts for folks who are not working but could... axpayer funding for a "right to live" limited to food, clothing, very basic medical care, and shelter... right to live does not equate to a right to live well on the public dole.
Then I don't think there is any substantive difference between what conservative and liberals stand for on this matter. Although, the impression I get from conservatives is that they don't agree with what you said.
Preventing starvation in old age was the original intent of the program. However, people now live much longer (thus withdrawing more from Social Security than they used to), but we haven't redefined "old age" to mean the same level of ability to work as it meant back then.
So what? What does that have to do with whether social security should be maintaining your social circle after you retire? When you say ss shouldn't be progressive, you are saying it should be there to maintain the same social status you had before retiring.
The retirement age should be raised AND social security should be progressive.
I will vote for McCain. I don't trust the Dems not to raise taxes on everyone.
...because higher taxes is bad how exactly? Taxes don't matter, what matters is how the money is spent and how wasteful it is for the country, whether that is you buying something useless for the country like say you buying lottery tickets or tobacco, or the govt building a bridge to nowhere. People assume that the government is always wasteful, but that is not always and does not need to be the case.
The last thing this country needs is having the top 3 spots in the hands of Obama, Reed, and Pelosi, I have trouble imagining anything worse.
...because why? You don't like how they spell their names?
Seriously you just wrote a whole supposedly 'informative' post and gave zero actual reasons why you are voting for McCain -- just like your candidate giving no reasons to vote for him. What actual reasons are there for your vote for McCain?
I'm against Obama's plan to give tax rebates to people that do not pay federal income taxes. I'm sorry, but, if you get a rebate for something you didn't pay for, that isn't a rebate, it is welfare and income redistribution.
Ultimately the questions for conservatives is whether they believe that people have an inherent right to live, even if at the lowest standards of living, or if people that can work or can find work do have that right. Because if they do have a right to live, then we must be prepared to give those people some amount of charity.
I don't like how Obama is planning to turn Social Security into a progressive pay system like income taxes.
The 'social' in social security means 'the people' as in no matter what happens people shouldn't starve to death or freeze out in the cold in their old age. It does NOT mean 'your social status' as in what circles you can afford to hang out in and what diamond jewelry you can afford to wear. That's why a progressive 'social' security system makes a lot of sense.
Why can't they just cut wasteful, federal spending....and let ALL tax payers keep more of their own money?
Because MANY taxpayers get their money from military work, which would be the first thing cut if actually ridding the government of wasteful spending. They would keep more of their money anyway by falling into a lower tax bracket.
Sorry to say that CVS has some nice points, mostly being faster than SVN but thats basically it, everything else is way better done by SVN, especially tagging and branching!
What I miss about CVS was that you could tag something and be done with it. With subversion you tag something by making a 'copy' of it and then that copy is its own 'entity' just like everything else, and you have to segregate it into folders that you just declare meaningful, like 'tags' or 'branches' or 'mytags' or whatever chaos. And if you use externals (shudder) you have to separately tag externals too, and ensure your tagged version uses the right external version. Until recently it was then a total PITA to not have your repository checked out dozens or hundreds of times because of tags (now it's just annoying to set the 'don't fetch this folder'). In CVS you couldn't 'see' what tags there were very easily, but that was a blessing and a curse.
The biggest indictment for subversion is that it's taken them over what, 8 years?, to get rid of the mess it spews all over your filesystem as.svn folders. They are seriously annoying, confusing to people when they copy a folder and it's 'already' check in (but under the old path), and it's a well-known deficiency. The fact that the system is so inflexible that it's taken years to do something like this that should be simple tells me that their system is a dead-end. Hell it's taken years to get a simple flag that doesn't check out a subfolder recursively, and how easy is that?!
IMO mercurial should be the future. Just open a source file at random and it's usually fairly obvious what's going on. So it's easy to modify, and easy changes get added in minutes instead of years. Maybe git will be the future, powered by Linus and his crew of wizards, but mercurial and git will be #1 and #2.
Subversion does work, but if you're choosing a tech you might as well go with one that works and has a future.
I'm guessing when your native language isn't English then the so-called awful bar probably rocks, since you can type in your native language to go to a site instead of using some western URL name. Maybe Mozilla just has their actual users in mind... iirc the majority of the net are not English speakers now.
Apparently/.'s unicode sucks... I can't make it say "Aweful" bar even with funky Latin characters.
Your argument does not really hold a candle. A complex GUI can be slow in scripting languages.
So lets examine the parts of a bittorrent gui:
* URL field (optional) * Start button (optional) * Progress bar * Cancel button
A good bittorrent UI could be done in logo.
The programs you list are solutions searching for a problem. They're like gentoo users and gcc's -Oawesome option, and discussions about them will be just about as rational.
However, if I wrote any sort of interactive application, a scripting language would not be my first choice. To me, it basically boils down to this: a "job" that cranks off, does it's own thing, and then ends, is a very good candidate for a scripted language. For an "application", I'm probably going to crack out C or C++ to tackle that one.
And I completely disagree about GUIs. The only requirement on language choice for an application is that user interaction happen in ~0.1 seconds or less, and on today's computers scripting languages can do this easily. So with that out of the way the choice is on how easy it is to write, how nice it looks, how reliable it is, etc. And in these categories scripting owns C, C++.
A lot of great programs are being written in JavaScript or Python these days. For instance, MusicBrainz' Picard is written in python, but you would never know it from using it. Even ones that are supposed to be 'fast'... users don't notice a performance difference between mercurial (python) and svn (c), but mercurial is already light-years better because people can understand the code (svn sourcecode is an absolute disaster re: readability).
I would go so far as to say that the primary reason to write most GUIs nowadays in C or C++ is just so they can't be reverse engineered.
All handcounts are done under public video surveillance from multiple angles done by multiple sources (eg. web based camera, cspan camera, government run camera, 2 LOCAL news station cameras, and 2 national news station cameras.)
What you are talking about is a centrally tallied vote. That's totally unnecessary and inefficient, and opens the door for fraud as the votes are moved.
Hand counts should be done independently at each polling location. Anybody that voted at that location can stay around to monitor the count in person. The total vote is then printed later by the state with breakdown of each polling location's total. Totally foolproof counting... everybody can verify their own location, everybody knows that the other locations are correct because there are people in those locations verifying the totals.
You COULD have a cctv of the count if a lot of people show up to watch, but that's not likely.
To spread, a virus has to infect from older to younger people faster than they grow old and die. This is especially pronounced for an std, with far less chances to spread than say a flu.
I bet there's some correlation between how long a being lives and how good its immune system is at fighting off new viruses. What I mean is, creatures like sharks, the crock family, turtles(?) have such fierce immune systems (ie molecular acid for blood) that they can afford to live basically forever.
There's probably some noise from wall street types saying 'bail us out'. But, yeah, the bailout is completely ridiculous so the vast majority are against it. Aside from the companies that made bad investments and will go bankrupt (good), the thing the say they are worried about is liquidity drying up. Lets look at this by analogy... I think this is fairly accurate:
Say you have a $10,000 credit limit on your credit card. Due to the economy the company is concerned if you can repay, so they reduce your limit to $1,000. That's fine if you pay off your debt every month, but if you already have $6000 on it then you are completely screwed -- you have to pay $5k on your next month's bill, and you obviously don't have it.
So the Paulson plan is basically to buy off that $5k of debt so companies don't just go bankrupt right away.
Ok, well that's dumb because those companies are operating in the red anyway. They aren't healthy companies making profits, so they are just going to deficit spend again once some of their debt is lifted off. Instead, the lenders should rewrite the mortgages, either by the government leaning on them or by mandate... take the amount people owe on a mortgage and let them pay it over twice as many years, make it fixed rate, etc. Then the bailout can be paying lenders part of the difference.
Problem solved for homeowners (who eventually refinance into a shorter mortgage once prices come back), problem solved for banks, problem solved for everything derivative from mortgages.
Don't worry... what they didn't report was the cause of the leak -- and why no matter how much caulk they put over it the hole just won't go away. In fact, it seems to grow with every attempt to seal it.
Slashdot Mirror
then-Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson pushed gave legal protection to intercept activities. The NSA was created two tears later in a secret memo from President Truman, but it wasn't until 1959 that it was named in legislation.
Privacy dies and Truman only shed TWO tears? Hell Jefferson rolled over in his grave more than that. Truman probably didn't even get misty-eyed nuking all those Japs...
"Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I got spare time. But for now, for your customer's sake, for your daughter's sake, ya might wanna think about buying a quality product"
There are dozens of AMD boards that are much cheaper than the Intel boards, with more variety of chipsets and designs. And the companies that make them have to prove themselves. They can't just rely on their good name while shipping a POS (such as Intel's Atom mb).
in a year and a half, when one of them breaks, I find that the manufacturer can't provide an exact replacement, won't replace unless I pay shipping both ways, has an utterly broken RMA process (coughAsuscough) or doesn't even have an office in the USA. The CPU might be $15 cheaper and the motherboard might be $20 cheaper, but I'm still not going through that through another generation of the machines I have to support.
While you say $20 cheaper, you could also say $20 instead of $40, or 'half the price'. You could buy twice as many as you need for the same cost as buying Intel. Do you really expect half of the AMD mb's to fail? That seems outrageous to me.
By arguing for exact replacement parts, warranties, "I have to support", etc, I take it you are in an organization and have some kind of specific requirements. Basically your reasons are the same as why people bought $200 Sun keyboards... For most people, it's cheaper and easier to just buy a new, better mb 1.5 years later, should the old one die, than it is to get an exact replacement.
First, Intel didn't have better price/performance until recently. Certainly well into core 2 duo period the AMD Athlon 64, X2, etc were much better price/performance.
Second, on the low end:
AMD Sempron 1150 2ghz: $22
Intel Celeron 430 1.8ghz: $39
That Sempron is much faster than that Celeron. Atom is cheap for the processor, but the other parts cost more and use a lot of power (%50 of total power, 15 watts for chipset on Intel's Atom mITX board). Why do you think netbooks only get ~3hrs with 4 watt processor? Because the rest of the intel chipsets suck.
Combos:
AMD Sempron 3000: $50
AMD Sempron LE1150: $60
Intel Atom: $70
Prices from newegg.
Now lets think about this, AMD has matched Intel in price/performance despite a 2x larger process. What does that say about the respective merits for AMD and Intel designs? If Intel stumbles in advancing the process they are going to fail, because AMD has clearly better designs and engineers.
Forget the what-if-we-knew-x-years-ago supposition : why does nobody - no regulatory body that is - demand that Google explain exactly what data they collect and what the heck they do with it?
More to the point, saying "we collect ip addresses from google-analytics and our ad partners" is way different from saying "and by correlating that data we know 98% of every page each person visits on the internet". Companies say they don't collect any personally-identifiable information... and then proceed to correlate that with personally identifiable information from other sources.
The way it should work is that if a company ever creates a profile on an individual (even for a split second, even for a one-time query, even for court orders, etc) then the existence of that profile has to be recorded at a government public database. People can then access this database to see what companies have a profile on them, and can demand a copy of the profile from the company, and can demand correction be made to the profile for incorrect data.
Yes, this is a bit more overhead for companies if they create profiles on individuals. Instead, they'll create generic profiles not directly linked to you. For instance, google will drop 'name' and 'address' from their records of the web sites you visit since that will cost less than people knowing just how invasive google is.
It's a long time since Emacs has really been slow, but the jokes have long memories.
Performance jokes are never garbage collected -- it would take too many cycles.
Performance jokes are never garbage collected -- there's always a weak reference to them.
I'll be here all week... or until tuesday if the alternate pickup schedule is in effect due to holiday or inclement weather.
You can't fix government interference in the economy with increased interference.
You also can't fight fire with fire... oh wait...
'Moral' as in the 'essential character', an honest look at the traffic, at the big picture.
In some cases, when you have a stylized button for instance, the 'up' and 'down' are sent to the server once and the application tells the server to display the up or down image as appropriate. But increasingly, the toolkit renders the 'up' or 'down' locally into a memory buffer and then sends the image to the server each time. This can be because the toolkit was not written directly with X windows in mind, or the concepts don't map directly (flash), or the program set a custom paint callback and the toolkit doesn't know that it's just going to draw an image. Or the toolkit uses it's own rendering pipeline since maybe X doesn't have right blending or scaling algorithm. Whatever the reasons, this happens a LOT in modern X applications.
X11 does not blit the entire damn window across the network. Its a client/server architecture and what is passed across the network are requests by the client to ask the server to draw , where was envisaged as a mostly abstract entity
If you look at what this guys is saying in context, I think it actually makes sense. By not having the user interface be the subject of the network layer, what ends up happening is the interface draws the window on the 'client' side then copies (blitz) the contents to the server over the network, as a pixmap. This is doubly true because the primitives that X has are not suitable for making a modern UI.
So while it's technically true that the protocol is creating windows, sending pixmaps, sending commands to draw etc rather than 'blitting' the window, it's morally true that the X11 protocol causes the whole window to be blitted. Another poster gave mplayer as an example. Java also blits the window into pixmaps then sends commands to draw these... the same is true for any number of other modern apps.
Going back to what the original poster said, what if the core protocol were an interface protocol and Qt, Gnome, etc were extensions to the server instead of the really low-level extensions we have now like 'keyboard' and 'debug' and 'shape'? You could have consistency across applications and a network protocol that didn't blit. ... oh yeah, they did this and it was called NeWS. People didn't like it because it was from Sun and they had 'too much power' at the time.
Since getting your coworkers to learn Navajo is probably out of reach, I suggest Pig Latin.
Or if that's too oringbay maybe 'Ruddfuckers'... that's where you pranstose the first tetler of pomcound words with the next part (also words with frepixes). It takes a while to gifure it out though...
It's still wrong though, "cent" is the same "cent" as in "centimeter" or "percent" and means 1/100. The unit is the dollar, so 0x1 dollar = one dollar.
So if you point out this error to Knuth... do you get a check for $0x1 or $2.56?
I daresay the answer is most liberals want someone else taxed at a higher rate to support their ideas of right and wrong.
The ones I know want people to be taxed fairly, based on some form of disposable income. The difference in how much you could save after necessities like basic food, clothing, shelter is something to factor into taxes.
Say basic living costs $20k. If you make N per year you can make this much saving at 5% interest for 5 years (for example):
* $30k: 10k disposable --> 3k interest
* $60k: 40k disposable --> 11k interest
* $120k: 100k disposable --> 28k interest
At 60k you are paid twice as much as the person at 30k but get 4x the benefits. Since the value of money is linear (twice the money buys twice the product) this means that wages and benefits are not directly proportional. Or in other words, in terms of benefits for work done the people at the bottom are getting really screwed because they are paid less, and not due to the value of their work. It's a catch-22 for them that isn't fair.
And the question for liberals is if you believe that greater taxation will lead to the alleviation of society's ills, why haven't you filled out the box on your W2 labeled "additional contribution" with a number that is a considerable percentage of your income?
Because liberals believe in fairness, so them donating more to red state (who get the lion's share of government handouts) while conservatives donate to expand their social networks (ie churches) is not a fair system. You're asking something like 'well why don't you shoot yourself in the foot if you believe that we should all walk in other people's shoes?' Your question makes about as much sense, and frankly it's pretty juvenile; it's not a serious question.
First, charity is something you give of your own free will. Conservatives do a lot of this (in fact, studies have shown they give more to charity than liberals).
Charity can be something individuals give of their own free will and it also can be something collectively given. Or do you not count activities done by Churches (organized groups, like government) to help people as charity?!
Also, most accounts of charitable giving don't often include things like pbs or public radio, which conservatives give much less to.
We're generally all for giving temporary assistance to get someone through a tough time ... oppose handouts for folks who are not working but could ... axpayer funding for a "right to live" limited to food, clothing, very basic medical care, and shelter ... right to live does not equate to a right to live well on the public dole.
Then I don't think there is any substantive difference between what conservative and liberals stand for on this matter. Although, the impression I get from conservatives is that they don't agree with what you said.
Preventing starvation in old age was the original intent of the program. However, people now live much longer (thus withdrawing more from Social Security than they used to), but we haven't redefined "old age" to mean the same level of ability to work as it meant back then.
So what? What does that have to do with whether social security should be maintaining your social circle after you retire? When you say ss shouldn't be progressive, you are saying it should be there to maintain the same social status you had before retiring.
The retirement age should be raised AND social security should be progressive.
I will vote for McCain. I don't trust the Dems not to raise taxes on everyone.
...because higher taxes is bad how exactly? Taxes don't matter, what matters is how the money is spent and how wasteful it is for the country, whether that is you buying something useless for the country like say you buying lottery tickets or tobacco, or the govt building a bridge to nowhere. People assume that the government is always wasteful, but that is not always and does not need to be the case.
The last thing this country needs is having the top 3 spots in the hands of Obama, Reed, and Pelosi, I have trouble imagining anything worse.
...because why? You don't like how they spell their names?
Seriously you just wrote a whole supposedly 'informative' post and gave zero actual reasons why you are voting for McCain -- just like your candidate giving no reasons to vote for him. What actual reasons are there for your vote for McCain?
I'm against Obama's plan to give tax rebates to people that do not pay federal income taxes. I'm sorry, but, if you get a rebate for something you didn't pay for, that isn't a rebate, it is welfare and income redistribution.
Ultimately the questions for conservatives is whether they believe that people have an inherent right to live, even if at the lowest standards of living, or if people that can work or can find work do have that right. Because if they do have a right to live, then we must be prepared to give those people some amount of charity.
I don't like how Obama is planning to turn Social Security into a progressive pay system like income taxes.
The 'social' in social security means 'the people' as in no matter what happens people shouldn't starve to death or freeze out in the cold in their old age. It does NOT mean 'your social status' as in what circles you can afford to hang out in and what diamond jewelry you can afford to wear. That's why a progressive 'social' security system makes a lot of sense.
Why can't they just cut wasteful, federal spending....and let ALL tax payers keep more of their own money?
Because MANY taxpayers get their money from military work, which would be the first thing cut if actually ridding the government of wasteful spending. They would keep more of their money anyway by falling into a lower tax bracket.
Is it poor coding practices
Yes, poor coding.
Are the touch sensitive screens too sensitive?
Yes, cheap touch screens are error-prone.
Is it just user failure, where they're dragging the stylus
Yes, users press the screen with their palm, other hand, and generally 'fat finger' it.
Is it an evil conspiracy?
Yes, an evil conspiracy.
Occam's razor would tell us differently. Probably option #3 is the correct answer.
The simplest answer is all of the above.
Sorry to say that CVS has some nice points, mostly being faster than SVN but thats basically it, everything else is way better done by SVN, especially tagging and branching!
What I miss about CVS was that you could tag something and be done with it. With subversion you tag something by making a 'copy' of it and then that copy is its own 'entity' just like everything else, and you have to segregate it into folders that you just declare meaningful, like 'tags' or 'branches' or 'mytags' or whatever chaos. And if you use externals (shudder) you have to separately tag externals too, and ensure your tagged version uses the right external version. Until recently it was then a total PITA to not have your repository checked out dozens or hundreds of times because of tags (now it's just annoying to set the 'don't fetch this folder'). In CVS you couldn't 'see' what tags there were very easily, but that was a blessing and a curse.
The biggest indictment for subversion is that it's taken them over what, 8 years?, to get rid of the mess it spews all over your filesystem as .svn folders. They are seriously annoying, confusing to people when they copy a folder and it's 'already' check in (but under the old path), and it's a well-known deficiency. The fact that the system is so inflexible that it's taken years to do something like this that should be simple tells me that their system is a dead-end. Hell it's taken years to get a simple flag that doesn't check out a subfolder recursively, and how easy is that?!
IMO mercurial should be the future. Just open a source file at random and it's usually fairly obvious what's going on. So it's easy to modify, and easy changes get added in minutes instead of years. Maybe git will be the future, powered by Linus and his crew of wizards, but mercurial and git will be #1 and #2.
Subversion does work, but if you're choosing a tech you might as well go with one that works and has a future.
I'm guessing when your native language isn't English then the so-called awful bar probably rocks, since you can type in your native language to go to a site instead of using some western URL name. Maybe Mozilla just has their actual users in mind... iirc the majority of the net are not English speakers now.
Apparently /.'s unicode sucks... I can't make it say "Aweful" bar even with funky Latin characters.
Obviously, you haven't used any bittorrent client.
Case in point...
Your argument does not really hold a candle. A complex GUI can be slow in scripting languages.
So lets examine the parts of a bittorrent gui:
* URL field (optional)
* Start button (optional)
* Progress bar
* Cancel button
A good bittorrent UI could be done in logo.
The programs you list are solutions searching for a problem. They're like gentoo users and gcc's -Oawesome option, and discussions about them will be just about as rational.
However, if I wrote any sort of interactive application, a scripting language would not be my first choice. To me, it basically boils down to this: a "job" that cranks off, does it's own thing, and then ends, is a very good candidate for a scripted language. For an "application", I'm probably going to crack out C or C++ to tackle that one.
And I completely disagree about GUIs. The only requirement on language choice for an application is that user interaction happen in ~0.1 seconds or less, and on today's computers scripting languages can do this easily. So with that out of the way the choice is on how easy it is to write, how nice it looks, how reliable it is, etc. And in these categories scripting owns C, C++.
A lot of great programs are being written in JavaScript or Python these days. For instance, MusicBrainz' Picard is written in python, but you would never know it from using it. Even ones that are supposed to be 'fast'... users don't notice a performance difference between mercurial (python) and svn (c), but mercurial is already light-years better because people can understand the code (svn sourcecode is an absolute disaster re: readability).
I would go so far as to say that the primary reason to write most GUIs nowadays in C or C++ is just so they can't be reverse engineered.
Not quite, the votes ARE tallied onsite, and tallied AGAIN centrally.
The central tally is irrelevant. It can be done by a 3rd grader as long as the per-location totals are published.
Nothing is going to be fullproof.
Quite a different statement from 'nothing can be foolproof'. We can have foolproof counting in our elections, with negligible cost, if we want it.
All handcounts are done under public video surveillance from multiple angles done by multiple sources (eg. web based camera, cspan camera, government run camera, 2 LOCAL news station cameras, and 2 national news station cameras.)
What you are talking about is a centrally tallied vote. That's totally unnecessary and inefficient, and opens the door for fraud as the votes are moved.
Hand counts should be done independently at each polling location. Anybody that voted at that location can stay around to monitor the count in person. The total vote is then printed later by the state with breakdown of each polling location's total. Totally foolproof counting... everybody can verify their own location, everybody knows that the other locations are correct because there are people in those locations verifying the totals.
You COULD have a cctv of the count if a lot of people show up to watch, but that's not likely.
To spread, a virus has to infect from older to younger people faster than they grow old and die. This is especially pronounced for an std, with far less chances to spread than say a flu.
I bet there's some correlation between how long a being lives and how good its immune system is at fighting off new viruses. What I mean is, creatures like sharks, the crock family, turtles(?) have such fierce immune systems (ie molecular acid for blood) that they can afford to live basically forever.
There's probably some noise from wall street types saying 'bail us out'. But, yeah, the bailout is completely ridiculous so the vast majority are against it. Aside from the companies that made bad investments and will go bankrupt (good), the thing the say they are worried about is liquidity drying up. Lets look at this by analogy... I think this is fairly accurate:
Say you have a $10,000 credit limit on your credit card. Due to the economy the company is concerned if you can repay, so they reduce your limit to $1,000. That's fine if you pay off your debt every month, but if you already have $6000 on it then you are completely screwed -- you have to pay $5k on your next month's bill, and you obviously don't have it.
So the Paulson plan is basically to buy off that $5k of debt so companies don't just go bankrupt right away.
Ok, well that's dumb because those companies are operating in the red anyway. They aren't healthy companies making profits, so they are just going to deficit spend again once some of their debt is lifted off. Instead, the lenders should rewrite the mortgages, either by the government leaning on them or by mandate... take the amount people owe on a mortgage and let them pay it over twice as many years, make it fixed rate, etc. Then the bailout can be paying lenders part of the difference.
Problem solved for homeowners (who eventually refinance into a shorter mortgage once prices come back), problem solved for banks, problem solved for everything derivative from mortgages.
Tell me where I'm wrong.
Don't worry... what they didn't report was the cause of the leak -- and why no matter how much caulk they put over it the hole just won't go away. In fact, it seems to grow with every attempt to seal it.