How did they take your "free software"? Isn't that still available? People here like to point out that you can't steal bits, so the bits of your "free software" must still be in your possession.
The GP never said anyone "took" his software. He said that when
someone else comes along and entangles it with their own proprietary software and adds their own restrictions, then the part that is my contribution is no longer free.
Go back and read the post you're replying to, unless your intent is to attack your own strawman.
I've been running Ubuntu Netbook Remix for over a year, and until this story was posted, I had not realized the minimize and maximize buttons were gone. Everything is maximized by default (although I turned that off), and if I want to see the desktop, I click the Ubuntu icon in the upper-left. I'm freaked out by this, actually; the thought, "But where are the min/max buttons?!" had never crossed my mind until this point.
He's saying that there are other ways to perform public-key encryption without using NP-complete problems, so we could work around P=NP, if that were the case.
Also, it does matter that integer factorization (not "prime factorization"; where did you get that term?) is not known to be NP-complete - since it's just known to be NP-hard, it might or might not be discovered to be feasible if P=NP. Or it might be harder.
A lot of people have the opinion that the ACLU is only about shutting down the speech of Christians/Whites/Men/*insert majority group here.*
Except for when the ACLU protected the rights of Nazis to march through Skokie, IL in 1977, a town populated by numerous Holocaust survivors. I'm sure there are other examples. You may be right, but I can't fathom why people would have that opinion of the ACLU.
If you set the metal detector off it's never a "oh, must be your shoes, you can go." It's always, take whatever you have on off, and if you set it off a 2nd time you get the full pat down.
I had a different experience flying out of Dulles last month. It was 5am, and I was barely awake. I set the metal detector off three times - once I forgot the belt, then the coins in my pockets, then for no particular reason whatsoever. I was so tired, I seriously remember thinking, "Remember not to act like a terrorist in airport security." So the red-mustached (I swear to God) man guarding the thing said,
"Sir! I want you to listen and pay very careful attention to what I say."
I nodded. His mustache twitched.
"I want you to hold your hands out straight in front of you," and he helpfully demonstrated. "Now lower them to your thighs and pinch your trousers firmly, and walk through."
So I pinched them up about half an inch with all fingers, then looked up dumbfounded, since there was no way this was what he was talking about. But he nods, and I walk through. I spent the rest of the flight wondering what on Earth the exercise accomplished. Probably my hands blocked a rogue penny in my pockets, but I remember being pretty sure I got everything out.
Actually, he probably realized no terrorist would be stupid enough to try (and fail) to get through a metal detector three times. A terrorist would have passed the dumbass test, and I failed it.
A professor I had last quarter, Joseph Phillips, at DePaul University in Chicago teaches a course called "The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence" as a Liberal Studies credit. Tuesdays and Thursdays in the Loop, apparently. Despite being ostensibly a Catholic university, DePaul's actually pretty liberal like that.
Were the pilots a bit gung-ho? Yes, they were. That's how you get a soldier past the fact that they're chopping up other human beings. It's a part of soldiering.
Apparently they've gotten past the fact they're chopping up civilians, too. I wish that every soldier felt their heart ripped out every time they opened fire on another human; their only solace coming from a gut-deep knowledge that such an atrocity had to be done. Mindless murder is not a part of soldiering; soldering simply attracts the sort of people who enjoy mindless murder. And those people should be thrown out of boot camp before being ever handed a weapon.
As for the van? Once again, you miss the context. Insurgents in Iraq often arrived in vans to collect wounded, weapons, and ammo to make any dead appear to be innocent civilians. This was well known to the Apache pilot, the gunner, and their chain of command.
I was unaware that making the U.S. Army look bad was justification for murder.
They didn't just "fire wildly" at the van. If you listen to the unedited video, they repeatedly ask their chain of command for a clear to fire. Their commanders were watching the video from two Apache helicopters and a UAV and made the decision that this appeared to be an insurgent group retrieving their wounded and weapons, and gave the order to fire.
Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions bans the killing of medical personnel who are treating the wounded and bans "killing those who no longer pose a threat due to their injuries". (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2010/04/the-wikileaks-video-and-the-rules-of-engagement.html). The van is obviously a makeshift ambulance, even to those in the chopper. They never, ever even try to claim that the van is a threat. Yet they're practically begging for permission to fire on it!
The two men who attempt to load the guy into the van came from the same place the other insurgents had come from, not from the van itself. The guy in the van clearly knew who they were, knew he was in a combat zone (watch him trying to move the van to line it up for a getaway once they were loaded, almost running one of them over) and he made the choice to be there and to put his kids in danger.
"Coming from the same place" is not positive identification of an enemy combatant. And the fact that kids were in the van signifies he never expected a chopper to fire on a van picking up the wounded - mind you, the chopper only fires after the driver has started dragging one of the wounded by the shoulders.
Once the soldiers arrive, they continue to come under small arms fire, even while trying to rescue the wounded.
It's a war, hard decisions are made, and "under fire" doesn't necessarily mean they're shooting at you but it could mean your friends are taking fire.
So if your friends are taking fire at location A, you can fire at a makeshift ambulance at location B. It all makes sense now.
Everyone knows this isn't true. Why do you think Comcast still has customers?
Because I live in a 100-year-old building on the north side of Chicago where my options are either Comcast or leaching off the guy who thinks "ismokerocks" is a funny SSID. The cable runs bare along the outside of my building until it punches through a hole that was drilled straight into the original brick. I'm scared to jerry-rig anything else. And yet...
I have had every conceivable problem with their service. They repeatedly charge me for equipment that's been installed for months, they double-charge me for the same equipment, they send me bills on random days of the month, their technician was on Facebook on my connection on my time, they charged me for residential and "business-class" Internet simultaneously after being repeatedly assured that it would not happen (I foresaw this and made sure to ask)...
Know what I can't do? Take my business to a competitor. Is there a reason Comcast isn't being forced to lease out its infrastructure, like AT&T was?
You scare me a little, because of how knowledgeable you seem to a layman and yet how wrong you are.
At the molecular scale, water molecules don't just decide to break up and go their own way willy-nilly...
Yes, they do, and it's called equilibrium. This probably the most fundamental concept of high school chemistry. Water molecules continually break into H+ and OH- ions and reform themselves from those ions. You'll find that when perfect equilibrium is reached, the product of their molarities (that's the moles solute per liter solvent) is 10^-7. That's where we get the neutral pH 7 from. Look it up here. Fascinating stuff.
...not the least because both elements involved (hydrogen and oxygen) really don't like being alone (the two hydrogen atoms can go off on their own merry way as a diatomic molecule, but the oxygen will be lonely).
Please stop pretending to know what you're talking about; you clearly have no concept of even ionic bonding. Water would never split that way unless you run a hydrolysis reaction (running an electric current through the water). Water ALWAYS splits into H+ and OH- ions. Read that sentence again; it's important. They are IONIC BONDS. You seem to think they are covalent. When water dissociates (that means splits, see equilibrium above), those ions HAVE to stay in solution. H+ DOES NOT bond with another H+ to form H2. Neither does the oxygen.
Breaking molecular bonds in water takes energy
Really? Then why does salt dissolve in water? EQUILIBRIUM.
Cracking water is endothermic, but so is making it
AARGH. Then water would not exist! The heat of formation is ALWAYS the opposite of the heat of decomposition. Please, I'm begging you, take a chemistry course. Your sophomore one does not count, but you obviously slept through it anyway.
and a net change in the number of water molecules, of zero.
YES! Good job! That's perfect equilibrium. The grandparent had the right idea about equilibrium, although he failed to realize that since there is a net change of zero, the mass also does not change. Ions do not leave solution, nor does their mass magically disappear.
Corrosiveness
Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
Compressibility
This is a fundamental property of water - it is INCOMPRESSIBLE. See here. You know nothing about chemistry. Stop, stop, stop.
Last, but not least: evaporation
Last, but not least: sealed container.
Very easy, actually; the problem is maintaining its purity after it cools down from superheated steam.
Solutes dissolve MORE in superheated water.
I don't know who you are. I don't know much about you. But I do know that you know nothing about chemistry. I know this is/., but STOP. STOP. STOP. People might actually believe you.
A theory is only a step behind a scientific law. Incorrect. A theory encompasses many scientific facts and laws into one cohesive unit; it is neither a step behind nor a step ahead. From Wikipedia: "A theory may contain a set of laws, or a theory maybe [sic] implied from an empirically determined law." For a simplified example, the "law of gravity" says that objects are attracted to one another according to a specific mathematical formula. The "theory of gravity" says that objects are attracted to each other because of curves and ripples in spacetime, that time itself is stretched by gravity, that black holes are caused by gravitational collapse, that a spinning irregularly-shaped object emits gravitational waves, etc.
Umm, you are showing your own lack of knowledge by assuming a theory is not fact. [...] I am using the PROPER usage of the term here. Then please look it up before you make a fuss of correcting someone else; I would not have corrected you if you hadn't made such a point of it. I do not claim to be perfect; in fact, there may be several mistakes here. But I will not insult you for making a mistake that I, as a layman like the grandparent poster, was just as likely to have made.
By the way, Batavia, IL isn't exactly a poor area. I bet most of the families in that Chicago suburb could afford the $150 expense. I live in that town (although I go to school in the one next door), and I can tell you that the neighborhood I live in is NOT a rich one. We have trailer parks, abandoned houses and reduced-price lunches too. And "most" of the families? That's easy to say when you're one of the families that can afford it. Therefore, the rich families can pay their way through their children's education, and the poor ones... well, guess you should've sent 'em to a private school! Can't afford that either? Oops.
The DA is granted the right to select which cases are prosecuted and which are not.
Yes, he/she can. But only when it's a matter of whether or not they have a case or not; whether the law is just as it applies to a particular case is not up to a DA to decide. It's up to a judge or jury to decide if the law should be changed. (Or the lawmakers, but I'll be damned if they won't cry, "Think of the children!" and drown out the cries of reason.)
Here's a list of the various court officers' functions:
Defense attorney - represents the defendant to the best of his/her ability. Does not decide for him/herself whether or not the defendant is actually guilty.
District attorney - represents the state (the law, as it currently stands) to the best of his/her ability. Also does not decide for him/herself whether or not the defendant is actually guilty. They represent THE LAW, even if they personally don't believe in it. They chose their own career. (I know I switched pronouns.)
Judge/Jury - decides whether or not the defendant is guilty.
The DA does not get to decide who to prosecute based on his/her interpretation of the law, just as a defense attorney doesn't get to decide who to defend. (I understand that in our system, private attorneys do get to decide, but if all we had were public defenders, they would be two sides of the same coin.)
Selective enforcement is worse than full enforcement or zero enforcement. It opens the door to racism, sexism, all sorts of other -isms on the part of the state, and turns DAs into the judge and jury. (Extortion, too. Think about it.)
Think the law is unjust? Change it! Take it to the Supreme Court, or petition your lawmakers. I know that it's a very imperfect system, but it's better than the alternative. I'm not cynical yet.
in most cases if the work is any any way related to his work domain it's theirs even if they _didn't_ provide any resources
So if I work for a tax company, and I write a tax program on my own time, with my own resources, my employer can claim rights to it (take it from me, essentially), simply because I happen to work for that company?
There is no way to prove that something is random - what would the test look like? We don't have an algorithm for producing truly random numbers, so how could we test if a set of numbers are random? However, no one has ever been able to find a pattern to the digits of pi, which is as close as one can come to proving randomness.
Also, (I could be wrong on this, but) since pi is irrational, it can't have a pattern. Having a pattern would mean that it could be expressed in the form a/b where b!=0, which would make it rational.
3) go over the fine print with every customer to make sure they understand it.
That's why you sign something that says, "I certify that I have read and understand the Terms and Conditions (a.k.a the fine print)". That part is certainly readable by everyone. And everyone knows what signing a piece of paper means. No further explanation necessary - if you didn't understand the document, then why are you signing your name as though you do?
"What we have developed is a way to construct magnetic fields so that when you travel round the magnetic fields, starting and stopping at the same position, you have gained energy," McCarthy said.
Moving around in circles to gather energy, what a neat idea! Um, where do we get the energy to run around in circles? Sounds like that net forces thing, the sum of all forces acting upon my car at the moment are zero, but if I could just remove those coming from one direction, it should move in that direction, right?
You have a point, but I think that this guy McCarthy actually is referring to net energy. Maybe he's saying that you have more energy overall that you started with. But it is pretty ambiguous.
I agree with your assertion in general that high-level languages are better for GUI development, but:
GUIs are a fluid, flexible, dynamic, change-on-the-fly, subject-to-change, feedback-driven kind of feature.
You're absolutely right, despite being a bit redundant. As someone who has used many languages myself, I can tell you that I can implement just that kind of GUI in almost language that I know. But just because you might pick Python over C++ because it's a high-level language doesn't mean that Python can magically "adapt" better to varying user input. Nor is C++ worse at being dynamic, or more concrete, simply because it compiles to native code. Programming languages are not adaptable that way, because no language is sentient. The programmer still has to tell the language what to do in each situation the program might encounter. Building a dynamic, feedback-driven GUI has less to do with what language you choose and much more to do with your programming skill.
The rest of this is just semantics:
you don't want to be saddled with a language which requires you to think about every malloc()
I definitely wouldn't want malloc anywhere in a well-constructed GUI. But I might be wrong here.
to manipulate strings of characters as bytes
So use C++'s string class. As for C, well, you get used to it. It's really not that bad, if you know what you're doing. (I'd recommend against using C for GUI work, though.)
to set up event handler callback routines
I've never seen a GUI toolkit that doesn't use event handlers (although they may exist). Qt uses them, Tk uses them, GTK uses them, Swing and Awk use them, even Javascript uses them. You can't get much higher-level than that.
to call methods on layout-bag-grid-column junk
If you take the time to understand it (it's not hard, and there's plenty of documentation), container-based layouts work beautifully. Many high-level language GUI toolkits use them. Or you could use something like WinForms. To each his own.
You want to build up that layout graphically
Huh? You mean by drawing it out first? UML? Using one of those drag-and-drop GUI generators?
name the elements appropriately
That has absolutely nothing to do with what language you use.
Slashdot Mirror
How did they take your "free software"? Isn't that still available? People here like to point out that you can't steal bits, so the bits of your "free software" must still be in your possession.
The GP never said anyone "took" his software. He said that when
someone else comes along and entangles it with their own proprietary software and adds their own restrictions, then the part that is my contribution is no longer free.
Go back and read the post you're replying to, unless your intent is to attack your own strawman.
I've been running Ubuntu Netbook Remix for over a year, and until this story was posted, I had not realized the minimize and maximize buttons were gone. Everything is maximized by default (although I turned that off), and if I want to see the desktop, I click the Ubuntu icon in the upper-left. I'm freaked out by this, actually; the thought, "But where are the min/max buttons?!" had never crossed my mind until this point.
He's saying that there are other ways to perform public-key encryption without using NP-complete problems, so we could work around P=NP, if that were the case.
Also, it does matter that integer factorization (not "prime factorization"; where did you get that term?) is not known to be NP-complete - since it's just known to be NP-hard, it might or might not be discovered to be feasible if P=NP. Or it might be harder.
A lot of people have the opinion that the ACLU is only about shutting down the speech of Christians/Whites/Men/*insert majority group here.*
Except for when the ACLU protected the rights of Nazis to march through Skokie, IL in 1977, a town populated by numerous Holocaust survivors. I'm sure there are other examples. You may be right, but I can't fathom why people would have that opinion of the ACLU.
Create a "tail" branch. Hopefully it'll be merged with master in a couple million years. Insert further distributed project management jokes here.
If you set the metal detector off it's never a "oh, must be your shoes, you can go." It's always, take whatever you have on off, and if you set it off a 2nd time you get the full pat down.
I had a different experience flying out of Dulles last month. It was 5am, and I was barely awake. I set the metal detector off three times - once I forgot the belt, then the coins in my pockets, then for no particular reason whatsoever. I was so tired, I seriously remember thinking, "Remember not to act like a terrorist in airport security." So the red-mustached (I swear to God) man guarding the thing said,
"Sir! I want you to listen and pay very careful attention to what I say."
I nodded. His mustache twitched.
"I want you to hold your hands out straight in front of you," and he helpfully demonstrated. "Now lower them to your thighs and pinch your trousers firmly, and walk through."
So I pinched them up about half an inch with all fingers, then looked up dumbfounded, since there was no way this was what he was talking about. But he nods, and I walk through. I spent the rest of the flight wondering what on Earth the exercise accomplished. Probably my hands blocked a rogue penny in my pockets, but I remember being pretty sure I got everything out.
Actually, he probably realized no terrorist would be stupid enough to try (and fail) to get through a metal detector three times. A terrorist would have passed the dumbass test, and I failed it.
A professor I had last quarter, Joseph Phillips, at DePaul University in Chicago teaches a course called "The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence" as a Liberal Studies credit. Tuesdays and Thursdays in the Loop, apparently. Despite being ostensibly a Catholic university, DePaul's actually pretty liberal like that.
Were the pilots a bit gung-ho? Yes, they were. That's how you get a soldier past the fact that they're chopping up other human beings. It's a part of soldiering.
Apparently they've gotten past the fact they're chopping up civilians, too. I wish that every soldier felt their heart ripped out every time they opened fire on another human; their only solace coming from a gut-deep knowledge that such an atrocity had to be done. Mindless murder is not a part of soldiering; soldering simply attracts the sort of people who enjoy mindless murder. And those people should be thrown out of boot camp before being ever handed a weapon.
As for the van? Once again, you miss the context. Insurgents in Iraq often arrived in vans to collect wounded, weapons, and ammo to make any dead appear to be innocent civilians. This was well known to the Apache pilot, the gunner, and their chain of command.
I was unaware that making the U.S. Army look bad was justification for murder.
They didn't just "fire wildly" at the van. If you listen to the unedited video, they repeatedly ask their chain of command for a clear to fire. Their commanders were watching the video from two Apache helicopters and a UAV and made the decision that this appeared to be an insurgent group retrieving their wounded and weapons, and gave the order to fire.
Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions bans the killing of medical personnel who are treating the wounded and bans "killing those who no longer pose a threat due to their injuries". (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2010/04/the-wikileaks-video-and-the-rules-of-engagement.html). The van is obviously a makeshift ambulance, even to those in the chopper. They never, ever even try to claim that the van is a threat. Yet they're practically begging for permission to fire on it!
The two men who attempt to load the guy into the van came from the same place the other insurgents had come from, not from the van itself. The guy in the van clearly knew who they were, knew he was in a combat zone (watch him trying to move the van to line it up for a getaway once they were loaded, almost running one of them over) and he made the choice to be there and to put his kids in danger.
"Coming from the same place" is not positive identification of an enemy combatant. And the fact that kids were in the van signifies he never expected a chopper to fire on a van picking up the wounded - mind you, the chopper only fires after the driver has started dragging one of the wounded by the shoulders.
Once the soldiers arrive, they continue to come under small arms fire, even while trying to rescue the wounded. It's a war, hard decisions are made, and "under fire" doesn't necessarily mean they're shooting at you but it could mean your friends are taking fire.
So if your friends are taking fire at location A, you can fire at a makeshift ambulance at location B. It all makes sense now.
Everyone knows this isn't true. Why do you think Comcast still has customers?
Because I live in a 100-year-old building on the north side of Chicago where my options are either Comcast or leaching off the guy who thinks "ismokerocks" is a funny SSID. The cable runs bare along the outside of my building until it punches through a hole that was drilled straight into the original brick. I'm scared to jerry-rig anything else. And yet... I have had every conceivable problem with their service. They repeatedly charge me for equipment that's been installed for months, they double-charge me for the same equipment, they send me bills on random days of the month, their technician was on Facebook on my connection on my time, they charged me for residential and "business-class" Internet simultaneously after being repeatedly assured that it would not happen (I foresaw this and made sure to ask)... Know what I can't do? Take my business to a competitor. Is there a reason Comcast isn't being forced to lease out its infrastructure, like AT&T was?
You scare me a little, because of how knowledgeable you seem to a layman and yet how wrong you are. At the molecular scale, water molecules don't just decide to break up and go their own way willy-nilly... Yes, they do, and it's called equilibrium. This probably the most fundamental concept of high school chemistry. Water molecules continually break into H+ and OH- ions and reform themselves from those ions. You'll find that when perfect equilibrium is reached, the product of their molarities (that's the moles solute per liter solvent) is 10^-7. That's where we get the neutral pH 7 from. Look it up here. Fascinating stuff.
...not the least because both elements involved (hydrogen and oxygen) really don't like being alone (the two hydrogen atoms can go off on their own merry way as a diatomic molecule, but the oxygen will be lonely).
/., but STOP. STOP. STOP. People might actually believe you.
Please stop pretending to know what you're talking about; you clearly have no concept of even ionic bonding. Water would never split that way unless you run a hydrolysis reaction (running an electric current through the water). Water ALWAYS splits into H+ and OH- ions. Read that sentence again; it's important. They are IONIC BONDS. You seem to think they are covalent. When water dissociates (that means splits, see equilibrium above), those ions HAVE to stay in solution. H+ DOES NOT bond with another H+ to form H2. Neither does the oxygen.
Breaking molecular bonds in water takes energy
Really? Then why does salt dissolve in water? EQUILIBRIUM.
Cracking water is endothermic, but so is making it AARGH. Then water would not exist! The heat of formation is ALWAYS the opposite of the heat of decomposition. Please, I'm begging you, take a chemistry course. Your sophomore one does not count, but you obviously slept through it anyway.
and a net change in the number of water molecules, of zero. YES! Good job! That's perfect equilibrium. The grandparent had the right idea about equilibrium, although he failed to realize that since there is a net change of zero, the mass also does not change. Ions do not leave solution, nor does their mass magically disappear.
Corrosiveness
Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
Compressibility
This is a fundamental property of water - it is INCOMPRESSIBLE. See here. You know nothing about chemistry. Stop, stop, stop.
Last, but not least: evaporation
Last, but not least: sealed container.
Very easy, actually; the problem is maintaining its purity after it cools down from superheated steam.
Solutes dissolve MORE in superheated water.
I don't know who you are. I don't know much about you. But I do know that you know nothing about chemistry. I know this is
Umm, you are showing your own lack of knowledge by assuming a theory is not fact. [...] I am using the PROPER usage of the term here. Then please look it up before you make a fuss of correcting someone else; I would not have corrected you if you hadn't made such a point of it. I do not claim to be perfect; in fact, there may be several mistakes here. But I will not insult you for making a mistake that I, as a layman like the grandparent poster, was just as likely to have made.
saddening to see such a massive amount of resources and time and energy spent on those issues, rather than everything else that should be done.
Yes, it's sad. That's why I quit giving AOL my money.
Congratulations! You have completely missed his point.
Yes, he/she can. But only when it's a matter of whether or not they have a case or not; whether the law is just as it applies to a particular case is not up to a DA to decide. It's up to a judge or jury to decide if the law should be changed. (Or the lawmakers, but I'll be damned if they won't cry, "Think of the children!" and drown out the cries of reason.)
Here's a list of the various court officers' functions:
The DA does not get to decide who to prosecute based on his/her interpretation of the law, just as a defense attorney doesn't get to decide who to defend. (I understand that in our system, private attorneys do get to decide, but if all we had were public defenders, they would be two sides of the same coin.)
Selective enforcement is worse than full enforcement or zero enforcement. It opens the door to racism, sexism, all sorts of other -isms on the part of the state, and turns DAs into the judge and jury. (Extortion, too. Think about it.)
Think the law is unjust? Change it! Take it to the Supreme Court, or petition your lawmakers. I know that it's a very imperfect system, but it's better than the alternative. I'm not cynical yet.
Read all of the article.
...The technology could increase the striking range of U.S. Navy ships more than tenfold...
...the gun uses electricity and not gunpowder to fire projectiles, it's safer...
...the railgan will... strike a target that far away in six minutes. A Tomahawk missile covers that same distance in eight minutes...
..."A Tomahawk is about a million dollars a shot," McGettigan said. ... railgun projectiles will cost less than $1,000 each...
..."the response to target is much quicker from call to fire to actual impact"...
It's times like this that I wish I had Accelerated My Life(tm). And I'm not sure if that 10-a-day rate is per ship or per gun, can someone clarify?
the people who would stand to gain from this kind of fraud aren't limited to people named George.
Even "George" is too broad, too common. Who knows how many people in the Bush administration are named George?
Limit it to people named "Condoleeza", though... now you're getting somewhere.
http://www.google.com/search?q=google+web+statisti cs
Oh, the irony...
in most cases if the work is any any way related to his work domain it's theirs even if they _didn't_ provide any resources
So if I work for a tax company, and I write a tax program on my own time, with my own resources, my employer can claim rights to it (take it from me, essentially), simply because I happen to work for that company?
Sounds a lot like... slavery.
Or maybe to stupid to understand what rounding means.
Or two stupid too spell?
There is no way to prove that something is random - what would the test look like? We don't have an algorithm for producing truly random numbers, so how could we test if a set of numbers are random? However, no one has ever been able to find a pattern to the digits of pi, which is as close as one can come to proving randomness.
Also, (I could be wrong on this, but) since pi is irrational, it can't have a pattern. Having a pattern would mean that it could be expressed in the form a/b where b!=0, which would make it rational.
3) go over the fine print with every customer to make sure they understand it.
That's why you sign something that says, "I certify that I have read and understand the Terms and Conditions (a.k.a the fine print)". That part is certainly readable by everyone. And everyone knows what signing a piece of paper means. No further explanation necessary - if you didn't understand the document, then why are you signing your name as though you do?
Moving around in circles to gather energy, what a neat idea! Um, where do we get the energy to run around in circles? Sounds like that net forces thing, the sum of all forces acting upon my car at the moment are zero, but if I could just remove those coming from one direction, it should move in that direction, right?
You have a point, but I think that this guy McCarthy actually is referring to net energy. Maybe he's saying that you have more energy overall that you started with. But it is pretty ambiguous.
I agree with your assertion in general that high-level languages are better for GUI development, but:
GUIs are a fluid, flexible, dynamic, change-on-the-fly, subject-to-change, feedback-driven kind of feature.
You're absolutely right, despite being a bit redundant. As someone who has used many languages myself, I can tell you that I can implement just that kind of GUI in almost language that I know. But just because you might pick Python over C++ because it's a high-level language doesn't mean that Python can magically "adapt" better to varying user input. Nor is C++ worse at being dynamic, or more concrete, simply because it compiles to native code. Programming languages are not adaptable that way, because no language is sentient. The programmer still has to tell the language what to do in each situation the program might encounter. Building a dynamic, feedback-driven GUI has less to do with what language you choose and much more to do with your programming skill.
The rest of this is just semantics:
you don't want to be saddled with a language which requires you to think about every malloc()
I definitely wouldn't want malloc anywhere in a well-constructed GUI. But I might be wrong here.
to manipulate strings of characters as bytes
So use C++'s string class. As for C, well, you get used to it. It's really not that bad, if you know what you're doing. (I'd recommend against using C for GUI work, though.)
to set up event handler callback routines
I've never seen a GUI toolkit that doesn't use event handlers (although they may exist). Qt uses them, Tk uses them, GTK uses them, Swing and Awk use them, even Javascript uses them. You can't get much higher-level than that.
to call methods on layout-bag-grid-column junk
If you take the time to understand it (it's not hard, and there's plenty of documentation), container-based layouts work beautifully. Many high-level language GUI toolkits use them. Or you could use something like WinForms. To each his own.
You want to build up that layout graphically
Huh? You mean by drawing it out first? UML? Using one of those drag-and-drop GUI generators?
name the elements appropriately
That has absolutely nothing to do with what language you use.
No, right before you hit the border you'll find the universal scrollbar.
The nurses know that there are int counts[i] of char* objects[i] for each of the different objects.
I think you mean char** objects[i]. Lord knows we don't want a buffer overflow during a vasectomy.