It also comes down to what you see as the role of the school system. You get into a dilemma when you have a kid who does so badly in the beginning he pretty much has no chance of catching up later on. On the one hand, you could tell him, "sorry kid, you blew it", and he will likely neglect the rest of the class as he has no chance of passing it anyway. Or you could say, "you have done horribly so far, but if you put in a lot of effort and show great improvement during the rest of the class, I might still pass you", and he will be more likely to at least try. The first approach is more fair if you simply see school as a way to assess students' abilities (though it doesn't account for late bloomers, students going through hard times, badly designed tests with respect to score variance, etc.). The latter approach might be better for optimizing learning across the board.
The problem is that many major legacy applications depend on undocumented behavior because they make sloppy use of the Windows API (e.g. by assuming that a particular function will not segfault when passed a bad argument). For those to keep working, newer revisions of the API implementation must have the same undocumented behavior, which causes a maintenance nightmare.
Regardless of whether you're dealing with someone who isn't very bright or not, calling that person an idiot usually isn't a very productive thing to do (and not very bright).
It seems to have become an unwritten rule of geekdom that you are to bash those who are less competent than you every chance you get. This often turns highly ironic on technical forums where people accuse (read "insult") others of lowering the quality of the conversation by asking stupid questions, yet start endless flamewars themselves by acting like assholes.
What saddens me is that some people seem to take the whole "a company exists only to make a profit" mantra and use it as an excuse for antisocial corporate behaviour.
People need to realize that a stated purpose can never justify anything. If I start a club centered around putting babies on spikes (excuse the Eddie Izzard ripoff), the fact that the club has a clearly stated purpose does not in any way justify the actions of its members.
It might be that a perfectly "Good" company could never survive amidst competition from less scrupulous companies, but that's a very different thing.
Better yet would be to artificially grow meat or create a substitute with the same nutritional content. I wonder how far the technology is into the future..
Sites like junkscience.com take great care to mention only those few "prominent" scientists who share their view, while ignoring the distribution of views among researchers in the field. In reality, there's practically consensus that the recent global warming is a man-made phenomenon ( http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/570 2/1686 ).
Always do a background check on authors when hearing controversial claims.
I suggest that you go find some real scientists of the climate sciences and ask them for their opinion on the causes of global warming. There's practically consensus ( http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/570 2/1686 ) among workers in the field that the recent global warming is a man-made phenomenon.
That so many have begun questioning this is a testimony to the effectiveness of recent PR campaigns from those who'd suffer from regulations.
Please don't just take my word for it though. Do the research yourself. Find workers in the field and ask them for their opinion. Find web pages and articles that discredit the theory that humans caused global warming and DO BACKGROUND RESEARCH ON THE AUTHORS. That last point cannot be stressed well enough, as it will reveal a disturbing pattern of vested interests and hidden sponsors.
I guess it's because "water tap" is such a common noun (or not, judging from other responses;). Those words would be "vattenkran", "oljekran" and "chokladkran" in Swedish.
If "water" was an adjective, you'd be able to use it with other objects to describe the same property. You can say that "the chair is green", or even that "the chair is drunk" (it's only non-sensical in a non-grammatical sense), but if you say "the chair is water", it takes on a different kind of meaning. "Water" is not a property. It's only "water tap" instead of "foobar tap" because "water" is a nicer mnemonic than "foobar" for what kind of tap it is.
Often a noun "foo bar" is understood intuitively as "a bar of foo", or "a bar that deals with foo", and meaning can be deduced from context. It's still just a single noun though.
Yes, I was using terms loosely, and meant "weird" as in weird among germanic languages, and only in just that respect (spaces in nouns). AANAL, but I hope I got the point across =)
Massförstörelsevapen is the swedish word, literally "massdestructionweapons". Adding the customary spaces, you get "mass destruction weapons", which I guess makes sense in English as well..
Yeah, I agree that's probably the best approach. Swedish only does that for words with "names" in them, like Duracell-batteri and Ikea-stol (Ikea chair).
Actually, I'd say it's the english rules that are the strange ones. The rule in Swedish, and I believe in most germanic languages, is simply: do not put spaces in nouns, adjectives or verbs (or in any other "word" for that matter).
Think about the english noun "water tap". Notice that it's just that - a noun. If "water" was an adjective, then it would be an adjective and a noun; but it isn't, since if it was, it would make sense to say things like "the tap is water". The first word in "rusty tap", however, Is an adjective.
Though English puts spaces in nouns, it doesn't usually put spaces in adjectives (it's written "able-bodied man" instead of "able bodied man"). I guess that would just be too confusing..
To sum it up, English puts spaces in its nouns. Most other germanic languages don't. Who's being weird? =)
Considering that nearly everyone agrees that code should be indented for readability, it seems stupid for a language not to use the information inherent in the indentation.
In a sense, you say the same thing twice in languages that require delimiters: a block in C is both indented and sorrounded by braces. The problem is that braces alone don't make for readable code, while indentation does. By making the language construct the same as the mnemonic device used by most people, you eliminate needless clutter.
Slashdot Mirror
It also comes down to what you see as the role of the school system. You get into a dilemma when you have a kid who does so badly in the beginning he pretty much has no chance of catching up later on. On the one hand, you could tell him, "sorry kid, you blew it", and he will likely neglect the rest of the class as he has no chance of passing it anyway. Or you could say, "you have done horribly so far, but if you put in a lot of effort and show great improvement during the rest of the class, I might still pass you", and he will be more likely to at least try. The first approach is more fair if you simply see school as a way to assess students' abilities (though it doesn't account for late bloomers, students going through hard times, badly designed tests with respect to score variance, etc.). The latter approach might be better for optimizing learning across the board.
/Ulf
I think you missed the point.
The problem is that many major legacy applications depend on undocumented behavior because they make sloppy use of the Windows API (e.g. by assuming that a particular function will not segfault when passed a bad argument). For those to keep working, newer revisions of the API implementation must have the same undocumented behavior, which causes a maintenance nightmare.
Regardless of whether you're dealing with someone who isn't very bright or not, calling that person an idiot usually isn't a very productive thing to do (and not very bright).
It seems to have become an unwritten rule of geekdom that you are to bash those who are less competent than you every chance you get. This often turns highly ironic on technical forums where people accuse (read "insult") others of lowering the quality of the conversation by asking stupid questions, yet start endless flamewars themselves by acting like assholes.
What saddens me is that some people seem to take the whole "a company exists only to make a profit" mantra and use it as an excuse for antisocial corporate behaviour.
People need to realize that a stated purpose can never justify anything. If I start a club centered around putting babies on spikes (excuse the Eddie Izzard ripoff), the fact that the club has a clearly stated purpose does not in any way justify the actions of its members.
It might be that a perfectly "Good" company could never survive amidst competition from less scrupulous companies, but that's a very different thing.
Ulf
My initials are UM :(
As well as in Sweden (socialen) :)
Honestly, how much market research did they put into this one?
Better yet would be to artificially grow meat or create a substitute with the same nutritional content. I wonder how far the technology is into the future..
*swoosh*
I for one am glad it's HJKL, as ; to the right of L is unique to english keyboard layouts, iirc. Then again, it's pretty easy to remap keys.
Ulf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnfe7Cnwfm4
There you go.
I'm not looking to make an ad hominem argument here, but please take anything that comes out of junkscience.com with a huge grain of salt. Steven Milloy, the site's creator, has a long history of paid-for punditry, primarily for the tobacco industry ( http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/2000Q3/junkman.ht ml , http://www.trwnews.net/Documents/Dow/junkscicom.ht m ).
0 2/1686 ).
Sites like junkscience.com take great care to mention only those few "prominent" scientists who share their view, while ignoring the distribution of views among researchers in the field. In reality, there's practically consensus that the recent global warming is a man-made phenomenon ( http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/57
Always do a background check on authors when hearing controversial claims.
Ulf Magnusson
I suggest that you go find some real scientists of the climate sciences and ask them for their opinion on the causes of global warming. There's practically consensus ( http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/570 2/1686 ) among workers in the field that the recent global warming is a man-made phenomenon.
n _climate_change#Survey_of_US_state_climatologists, the only "against" I could find on that page. A quick background check reveals http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Citizen s_for_a_Sound_Economy.
That so many have begun questioning this is a testimony to the effectiveness of recent PR campaigns from those who'd suffer from regulations.
Please don't just take my word for it though. Do the research yourself. Find workers in the field and ask them for their opinion. Find web pages and articles that discredit the theory that humans caused global warming and DO BACKGROUND RESEARCH ON THE AUTHORS. That last point cannot be stressed well enough, as it will reveal a disturbing pattern of vested interests and hidden sponsors.
As an example, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_o
I recommend the book "Trust Us, We're Experts" to anyone wanting to get insight into how the modern PR industry operates.
Ulf Magnusson
I guess it's because "water tap" is such a common noun (or not, judging from other responses ;). Those words would be "vattenkran", "oljekran" and "chokladkran" in Swedish.
If "water" was an adjective, you'd be able to use it with other objects to describe the same property. You can say that "the chair is green", or even that "the chair is drunk" (it's only non-sensical in a non-grammatical sense), but if you say "the chair is water", it takes on a different kind of meaning. "Water" is not a property. It's only "water tap" instead of "foobar tap" because "water" is a nicer mnemonic than "foobar" for what kind of tap it is.
Often a noun "foo bar" is understood intuitively as "a bar of foo", or "a bar that deals with foo", and meaning can be deduced from context. It's still just a single noun though.
Oh, never mind, I misread your translation =)
Yes, I was using terms loosely, and meant "weird" as in weird among germanic languages, and only in just that respect (spaces in nouns).
AANAL, but I hope I got the point across =)
Massförstörelsevapen is the swedish word, literally "massdestructionweapons". Adding the customary spaces, you get "mass destruction weapons", which I guess makes sense in English as well..
Yeah, I agree that's probably the best approach. Swedish only does that for words with "names" in them, like Duracell-batteri and Ikea-stol (Ikea chair).
Actually, I'd say it's the english rules that are the strange ones. The rule in Swedish, and I believe in most germanic languages, is simply: do not put spaces in nouns, adjectives or verbs (or in any other "word" for that matter).
Think about the english noun "water tap". Notice that it's just that - a noun. If "water" was an adjective, then it would be an adjective and a noun; but it isn't, since if it was, it would make sense to say things like "the tap is water". The first word in "rusty tap", however, Is an adjective.
Though English puts spaces in nouns, it doesn't usually put spaces in adjectives (it's written "able-bodied man" instead of "able bodied man"). I guess that would just be too confusing..
To sum it up, English puts spaces in its nouns. Most other germanic languages don't. Who's being weird? =)
Considering that nearly everyone agrees that code should be indented for readability, it seems stupid for a language not to use the information inherent in the indentation. In a sense, you say the same thing twice in languages that require delimiters: a block in C is both indented and sorrounded by braces. The problem is that braces alone don't make for readable code, while indentation does. By making the language construct the same as the mnemonic device used by most people, you eliminate needless clutter.
We dön't use thöse here in Sweden.
Nöt everyöne in euröpe speäks like thåt yöu knöw..