No, the latter is certainly easier and simpler. The effort needed to destroy (and consequently, prevent destruction) is much, much less than the effort needed to create or recreate. The former would be more effective though.
I think that teachers that meet similar criteria (there are plenty of former military teachers) should be able to carry a concealed pistol to school.
While I generally agree with you, I'm not so sure about that one. Yes, teachers may have gone through the proper training. But the numerous students that go in and out of the school won't. The challenge of bringing a gun to school becomes securing the weapon from the students, rather than from an adult like the teacher or the teacher's peers.
At that point, it'd be more useful and less risky to have a throwing knife than to have a gun. While a gun can do a hell of a lot of damage very quickly in unskilled hands, doing the same kind of damage in the same amount of time with a knife would require a hell of a lot of skill. Most students won't have that skill, while trained adults will. The worst that'll happen with a knife is one student will stab one person or cut up a lot of people.
It's purely my opinion, but if somebody was about to shoot up a public place near me, I'd rather have a knife tucked away in my boot than a gun on my belt. This is especially true if the shooting hadn't actually started yet.
You're always safer when you're in control. A gun (or the bullet coming out of the end) is very, very hard to control. If you have the proper training on owning guns, you're safer with one than not. If you don't have such training (like the millions who go out to buy one because they feel "safer" just having one around), then you're less safe.
There already are such laws. Good luck getting them to apply to the police in addition to the common people.
As Andrew Jackson said, "[The SCOTUS] has made his decision; now let him enforce it!"
Typically, such things now fall under the jurisdiction of a Federal agency like the FBI. But who's watching the FBI? How many people have gotten served with a National Security Letter again?
Not only that, but taxi drivers don't hide behind a code that prevents the "good" ones from outing the "bad" ones.
There are no good cops. There are only those who comply with the law, and those who don't. That the "good" ones cover for each other or refuses to make a stand against the "bad" ones makes all of them bad.
Also note that Tivoization is not non-free from a software perspective. It's non-free from a hardware perspective, which makes the overall package non-free.
Jobs success isn't in "designing elegant jails." His success (and where praise should be directed) is in his vision of a usable computing device, and of a usable portable computing device.
The jails are a part of his idiosyncracy. Geniuses tend to be controlling. They view their ideas as theirs and theirs alone, and that it is your privilege and honor that you were able to share in their genius.
The "jails" work interface design-wise. IBM (and Microsoft) did this for their UI. Restricting how the UI works just improves user experience. But the walled garden is where free software advocates have a problem. The inability to sideload (and the very need to call it sideload) is the biggest issue. The inaccessibility of the hardware is also a problem, but to a lesser extent, I suspect.
I just wrote a large post about accessibility under the Windows RT story (it digresses into other things, but accessibility is the jist of the post). In truth, the average user doesn't care much about accessibility. They care about functionality, which is only loosely related to accessibility. But developers do. And I suspect as Android continues to gain ground, developers will move away from developing iOS applications, especially those that "duplicate" Apple's functionality. The Google Maps debacle has already soured some people to iOS, and another such incident or two may turn out to be the straw. History has already shown that Apple's business model doesn't work when there's a legitimate competitor. It will happen again.
Accessibility by definition grants extra ability to those who have less or no skill.
There's nothing wrong with accessibility in general. But it incurs a cost. By granting the unskilled extra power that they have no skill in weilding, accessibility makes the landscape that much more dangerous. There are those who are willing and able to become skilled, and through an increase in accessibility, there will be an increase in these people. But this happens at the cost of having to deal with everybody else, who are not interested in such things and willingly accept the collateral damage.
It's like guns (which I mention because it is a popular topic being debated), or vehicles (which I mention because this is Slashdot, and a car analogy is necessary). Accessibility to guns or cars makes the landscape that much more dangerous for the very same reason. For cars, it's getting into accidents. For guns, it's hitting an innocent bystander (or oneself). Accidents are fairly frequent. Bystanders getting shot happens less so, but occasionally when police start firing into a crowded area (individuals are not bystanders when they are the target).
One can argue that in the hands of a skilled operator, a gun would be that much more dangerous for everyone. There certainly is merit to this argument. But that particular argument comes with a presumption of a self-destructive actor, which in all cases would be equally devastating (within context). The same self-destructive actor in a car analogy would drive a car just to ram other people's cars off a cliff road, or a semi just to T-bone a full schoolbus. There are such actors, these events are impossible to stop irrespective of overall population skill (though one can argue that a skilled operator has a small chance of preventing such actions). A better, more effective method of prevention would be to attack the self-destructive impulse itself, and operating skill does not factor into this at all.
I don't support strictly regulating computer usage the way that cars are (albeit loosely) regulated. But I do understand where companies are having trouble finding that middle ground, the spot where they can offer a powerful product to everybody such that anyone with skill can make full use of it, but where they can also limit the unskilled to very specific abilities. Companies are at both the mercy of the consumer who can choose to use a competing product, and of the 3rd party vendor who can choose to develop for a competing product.
Android, I think, comes very close to this, but there are still numerous destructive (within context) things unskilled individuals can inadvertantly do with an Android device. For starters, surrendering habits and other personal information to Google or other companies, and allowing and encouraging this behavior, constitutes dangerous behavior, though possessing a cell phone effectively amounts to having a 24/7 tracking device so the point is moot for many pieces of information.
Windows, stemming from the computing paradigm of yore, did not control the users actions at all, which resulted in the mess that is Windows. Developers and users alike made a mess of the ecosystem. Meanwhile iOS and Windows RT is a bit too controlling, resulting in developers' annoyance for the former and full abandonment for the latter. There are other problems with Windows RT (and Windows 8) from the user interface side. but that I leave for a separate discussion.
(As for gun control, there are certain measures which I support, in particular, focusing the control on bullets and taking the mental health (history) of a gun buyer into account, but there are other measures I oppose on the grounds of being ineffective, draconian, or both. But that is neither here nor there.)
Object-oriented is good for projects that need to be maintained. But it comes with additional complexity that programmers need to learn and track. It's only feasible for very large projects with multiple developers working on multiplel branches of development, and even then, it requires a very good maintainer, or it's too easy to fuck everything up. The infrastructure necessary to do good OO quickly gets as expensive and as complex as the problem the OO paradigm is trying to solve.
Procedural is the simpliest. It's not the fanciest, but it works in most cases. It handles code reuse more than adequately, which is all that a programmer really is looking to minimize (less duplication means less typing). And it's quick.
With Java now in Oracle's hands, it's not surprising C is making a comeback.
What? All these were the providence of the middle and upper classes back in the 80's. Poor people had the arcade, but that's where a lot of the violence happened too.
It's not the games themselves that made people violent (or less so). It's the physical proximity. Separate them with a wall and some anonymity, and they're suddenly not as violent anymore. They'll trash talk and curse, but they won't be trying to make new holes in one another.
Actually, nobody in the city gives a crap. Only the tourists care, and even then, only the American ones.
Yes, freedom, blah blah. Nobody's banning individuals from purchasing a 2L bottle of soda at a supermarket. Nor is the ban on individuals from purchasing 64oz of soft drink in two separate 32oz cups. The limitation is to companies, specifically restaurants (though it's a bit unfair that someone like 7-11, which is a grocery store and a fountain soda vendor gets a pass).
The real opposition? Restaurant industry is opposed to it on principle, but the soft drink industry is the one that's making the most noise. And I, for one, am not sympathetic to their cause at all.
The domestic manufacturing industry in the UK does not exactly compare with the one in the US. That having been said, since the US exports so much manufacturing equipment, one would think that manufacturing in metric is just as big as manufacturing in imperial.
That having been said, the manufacturing argument is a straw man. There are many parts of the U.S. government that has already converted to metric, and any manufacturing for the government (e.g. military) should have switched for all but the user interface.
The major things (and do-able things) still left in imperial units are the public-facing things like street signs and government reports. Once the populace is mentally converted, the manufacturing industry will naturally shift over to metric.
Obesity can be fixed by eating less corn. It's amazing what one substitute compound (fructose) can do to a whole society.
I'd say that increasing population density also helps, but there's a lot of not-fat people in the rural parts of other civilized nations. The key ingredient is corn.
The reason big things (galactic clusters) spin is because little things (subatomic particles) spin. Nobody really know why the little things spin, but the perfection that's associated with the circle (and its 3D extension, the real projective plane), including the transcendental nature of pi, may have something to do with it.
The universe could very well have a spin. But you'd need an observer standing "outside" of the universe to determine this. Otherwise, the best that you can do is postulate a spin and try to match your observations to it.
It was bound to happen. We all know it. Every startup begins with benign intentions (maybe with the exception of Microsoft, but their rise was IBM's fault), with the ideal that they'd remake the world. The moment they become the industry leader, they do everything in their power to remain that way, including stifling competition.
0 C - point at which water freezes, 100 C - point at which water boils.
You're not telling the whole story.
0C is the point at with 1 cubic mL of water freezes in 1 second. 100C is the point at which 1 cubic mL of water boils in 1 second.
It's semi-arbitrary. Quite a bit less so than say, the imperial system, but still semi-arbitrary. If it wasn't arbitrary, we'd be starting at 0 Kelvin (with a different method of subdivision).
It's not the $1 bill that's the problem. There've been tons of problems with $1 coins, including their size (too similar to the quarter) and their weight (too heavy).
The problem is pennies. It's time to round to the nearest 5 cents, or better yet, to the nearest 10 cents. Once pennies (and nickles) are gone, we can move to $1, $2, and $5 coins like the rest of the inflated world.
There's a certain resistance to change in the U.S. that's both the mark of individual sovereignty and social conservatism. Change doesn't (and in many cases, wisely shouldn't) happen within one generation, or sometimes even two, but three or four. Certainly, there are periodic revolutions (industrial, digital, etc.), but with these revolutions comes massive problems that are not so quickly or easily resolved. And when it comes to public welfare and safety, that's not something to toy with.
The best way to initiate a change to metric is to mandate that all imperial units are printed with their metric equivalents in parentheses (this is already so in many places, but it's not nearly prevalent enough to be useful). The next iteration say, ten years later, units would be printed in metric with the imperial units in parentheses. Only after people are comfortable with metric units of measurment would the actual measurements move to metric units (e.g. instead of "308m (1000ft)", "500m (1640ft)", instead of "1.98L (1/2gal)", "2L (0.52gal)" ). The final iteration would be to remove the imperial units entirely. But that would only happen 40, 50 years into the future.
This makes me wonder why, when Bush wanted to go to Mars, he didn't restart this project. There might be something else going on behind the scenes that made this project not viable. For example, it may be against our general stance of nuclear non-proliferation. Or for the more conspiracy-inclined, it may have been weaponized and the technology made classified by the military.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the latter is certainly easier and simpler. The effort needed to destroy (and consequently, prevent destruction) is much, much less than the effort needed to create or recreate. The former would be more effective though.
They only really come into their own when at ranges greater than a few feet.
I believe it is 21 feet. But that includes the time necessary to draw the gun.
I think that teachers that meet similar criteria (there are plenty of former military teachers) should be able to carry a concealed pistol to school.
While I generally agree with you, I'm not so sure about that one. Yes, teachers may have gone through the proper training. But the numerous students that go in and out of the school won't. The challenge of bringing a gun to school becomes securing the weapon from the students, rather than from an adult like the teacher or the teacher's peers.
At that point, it'd be more useful and less risky to have a throwing knife than to have a gun. While a gun can do a hell of a lot of damage very quickly in unskilled hands, doing the same kind of damage in the same amount of time with a knife would require a hell of a lot of skill. Most students won't have that skill, while trained adults will. The worst that'll happen with a knife is one student will stab one person or cut up a lot of people.
It's purely my opinion, but if somebody was about to shoot up a public place near me, I'd rather have a knife tucked away in my boot than a gun on my belt. This is especially true if the shooting hadn't actually started yet.
You're always safer when you're in control. A gun (or the bullet coming out of the end) is very, very hard to control. If you have the proper training on owning guns, you're safer with one than not. If you don't have such training (like the millions who go out to buy one because they feel "safer" just having one around), then you're less safe.
Being safe requires effort. News at 11.
There already are such laws. Good luck getting them to apply to the police in addition to the common people.
As Andrew Jackson said, "[The SCOTUS] has made his decision; now let him enforce it!"
Typically, such things now fall under the jurisdiction of a Federal agency like the FBI. But who's watching the FBI? How many people have gotten served with a National Security Letter again?
Not only that, but taxi drivers don't hide behind a code that prevents the "good" ones from outing the "bad" ones.
There are no good cops. There are only those who comply with the law, and those who don't. That the "good" ones cover for each other or refuses to make a stand against the "bad" ones makes all of them bad.
Also note that Tivoization is not non-free from a software perspective. It's non-free from a hardware perspective, which makes the overall package non-free.
Jobs success isn't in "designing elegant jails." His success (and where praise should be directed) is in his vision of a usable computing device, and of a usable portable computing device.
The jails are a part of his idiosyncracy. Geniuses tend to be controlling. They view their ideas as theirs and theirs alone, and that it is your privilege and honor that you were able to share in their genius.
The "jails" work interface design-wise. IBM (and Microsoft) did this for their UI. Restricting how the UI works just improves user experience. But the walled garden is where free software advocates have a problem. The inability to sideload (and the very need to call it sideload) is the biggest issue. The inaccessibility of the hardware is also a problem, but to a lesser extent, I suspect.
I just wrote a large post about accessibility under the Windows RT story (it digresses into other things, but accessibility is the jist of the post). In truth, the average user doesn't care much about accessibility. They care about functionality, which is only loosely related to accessibility. But developers do. And I suspect as Android continues to gain ground, developers will move away from developing iOS applications, especially those that "duplicate" Apple's functionality. The Google Maps debacle has already soured some people to iOS, and another such incident or two may turn out to be the straw. History has already shown that Apple's business model doesn't work when there's a legitimate competitor. It will happen again.
Accessibility by definition grants extra ability to those who have less or no skill.
There's nothing wrong with accessibility in general. But it incurs a cost. By granting the unskilled extra power that they have no skill in weilding, accessibility makes the landscape that much more dangerous. There are those who are willing and able to become skilled, and through an increase in accessibility, there will be an increase in these people. But this happens at the cost of having to deal with everybody else, who are not interested in such things and willingly accept the collateral damage.
It's like guns (which I mention because it is a popular topic being debated), or vehicles (which I mention because this is Slashdot, and a car analogy is necessary). Accessibility to guns or cars makes the landscape that much more dangerous for the very same reason. For cars, it's getting into accidents. For guns, it's hitting an innocent bystander (or oneself). Accidents are fairly frequent. Bystanders getting shot happens less so, but occasionally when police start firing into a crowded area (individuals are not bystanders when they are the target).
One can argue that in the hands of a skilled operator, a gun would be that much more dangerous for everyone. There certainly is merit to this argument. But that particular argument comes with a presumption of a self-destructive actor, which in all cases would be equally devastating (within context). The same self-destructive actor in a car analogy would drive a car just to ram other people's cars off a cliff road, or a semi just to T-bone a full schoolbus. There are such actors, these events are impossible to stop irrespective of overall population skill (though one can argue that a skilled operator has a small chance of preventing such actions). A better, more effective method of prevention would be to attack the self-destructive impulse itself, and operating skill does not factor into this at all.
I don't support strictly regulating computer usage the way that cars are (albeit loosely) regulated. But I do understand where companies are having trouble finding that middle ground, the spot where they can offer a powerful product to everybody such that anyone with skill can make full use of it, but where they can also limit the unskilled to very specific abilities. Companies are at both the mercy of the consumer who can choose to use a competing product, and of the 3rd party vendor who can choose to develop for a competing product.
Android, I think, comes very close to this, but there are still numerous destructive (within context) things unskilled individuals can inadvertantly do with an Android device. For starters, surrendering habits and other personal information to Google or other companies, and allowing and encouraging this behavior, constitutes dangerous behavior, though possessing a cell phone effectively amounts to having a 24/7 tracking device so the point is moot for many pieces of information.
Windows, stemming from the computing paradigm of yore, did not control the users actions at all, which resulted in the mess that is Windows. Developers and users alike made a mess of the ecosystem. Meanwhile iOS and Windows RT is a bit too controlling, resulting in developers' annoyance for the former and full abandonment for the latter. There are other problems with Windows RT (and Windows 8) from the user interface side. but that I leave for a separate discussion.
(As for gun control, there are certain measures which I support, in particular, focusing the control on bullets and taking the mental health (history) of a gun buyer into account, but there are other measures I oppose on the grounds of being ineffective, draconian, or both. But that is neither here nor there.)
Object-oriented is good for projects that need to be maintained. But it comes with additional complexity that programmers need to learn and track. It's only feasible for very large projects with multiple developers working on multiplel branches of development, and even then, it requires a very good maintainer, or it's too easy to fuck everything up. The infrastructure necessary to do good OO quickly gets as expensive and as complex as the problem the OO paradigm is trying to solve.
Procedural is the simpliest. It's not the fanciest, but it works in most cases. It handles code reuse more than adequately, which is all that a programmer really is looking to minimize (less duplication means less typing). And it's quick.
With Java now in Oracle's hands, it's not surprising C is making a comeback.
What? All these were the providence of the middle and upper classes back in the 80's. Poor people had the arcade, but that's where a lot of the violence happened too.
It's not the games themselves that made people violent (or less so). It's the physical proximity. Separate them with a wall and some anonymity, and they're suddenly not as violent anymore. They'll trash talk and curse, but they won't be trying to make new holes in one another.
So instead of dropping bombs, the enemy will just drop disco balls. That ought to be fun.
I've not seen ... pounds ... used in years.
You poor, poor thing. /ducks
Actually, nobody in the city gives a crap. Only the tourists care, and even then, only the American ones.
Yes, freedom, blah blah. Nobody's banning individuals from purchasing a 2L bottle of soda at a supermarket. Nor is the ban on individuals from purchasing 64oz of soft drink in two separate 32oz cups. The limitation is to companies, specifically restaurants (though it's a bit unfair that someone like 7-11, which is a grocery store and a fountain soda vendor gets a pass).
The real opposition? Restaurant industry is opposed to it on principle, but the soft drink industry is the one that's making the most noise. And I, for one, am not sympathetic to their cause at all.
The domestic manufacturing industry in the UK does not exactly compare with the one in the US. That having been said, since the US exports so much manufacturing equipment, one would think that manufacturing in metric is just as big as manufacturing in imperial.
That having been said, the manufacturing argument is a straw man. There are many parts of the U.S. government that has already converted to metric, and any manufacturing for the government (e.g. military) should have switched for all but the user interface.
The major things (and do-able things) still left in imperial units are the public-facing things like street signs and government reports. Once the populace is mentally converted, the manufacturing industry will naturally shift over to metric.
Forget the pint. I want the liter to be the standard measurment for beer.
Obesity can be fixed by eating less corn. It's amazing what one substitute compound (fructose) can do to a whole society.
I'd say that increasing population density also helps, but there's a lot of not-fat people in the rural parts of other civilized nations. The key ingredient is corn.
The reason big things (galactic clusters) spin is because little things (subatomic particles) spin. Nobody really know why the little things spin, but the perfection that's associated with the circle (and its 3D extension, the real projective plane), including the transcendental nature of pi, may have something to do with it.
The universe could very well have a spin. But you'd need an observer standing "outside" of the universe to determine this. Otherwise, the best that you can do is postulate a spin and try to match your observations to it.
It was bound to happen. We all know it. Every startup begins with benign intentions (maybe with the exception of Microsoft, but their rise was IBM's fault), with the ideal that they'd remake the world. The moment they become the industry leader, they do everything in their power to remain that way, including stifling competition.
Sorry, Bing is not competitive. It's still an inferior search engine to Google.
I like to use DuckDuckGo. But typing that name out (and enunciating it) sucks.
0 C - point at which water freezes, 100 C - point at which water boils.
You're not telling the whole story.
0C is the point at with 1 cubic mL of water freezes in 1 second. 100C is the point at which 1 cubic mL of water boils in 1 second.
It's semi-arbitrary. Quite a bit less so than say, the imperial system, but still semi-arbitrary. If it wasn't arbitrary, we'd be starting at 0 Kelvin (with a different method of subdivision).
It's not the $1 bill that's the problem. There've been tons of problems with $1 coins, including their size (too similar to the quarter) and their weight (too heavy).
The problem is pennies. It's time to round to the nearest 5 cents, or better yet, to the nearest 10 cents. Once pennies (and nickles) are gone, we can move to $1, $2, and $5 coins like the rest of the inflated world.
There's a certain resistance to change in the U.S. that's both the mark of individual sovereignty and social conservatism. Change doesn't (and in many cases, wisely shouldn't) happen within one generation, or sometimes even two, but three or four. Certainly, there are periodic revolutions (industrial, digital, etc.), but with these revolutions comes massive problems that are not so quickly or easily resolved. And when it comes to public welfare and safety, that's not something to toy with.
The best way to initiate a change to metric is to mandate that all imperial units are printed with their metric equivalents in parentheses (this is already so in many places, but it's not nearly prevalent enough to be useful). The next iteration say, ten years later, units would be printed in metric with the imperial units in parentheses. Only after people are comfortable with metric units of measurment would the actual measurements move to metric units (e.g. instead of "308m (1000ft)", "500m (1640ft)", instead of "1.98L (1/2gal)", "2L (0.52gal)" ). The final iteration would be to remove the imperial units entirely. But that would only happen 40, 50 years into the future.
It's just a way to force your eyes to stay open after you inadvertently click on a goatse link.
This makes me wonder why, when Bush wanted to go to Mars, he didn't restart this project. There might be something else going on behind the scenes that made this project not viable. For example, it may be against our general stance of nuclear non-proliferation. Or for the more conspiracy-inclined, it may have been weaponized and the technology made classified by the military.
really? i do that too but i hold the shift key down whenever i type