It's illegal in the states to charge someone a different price for any item using a credit card instead of cash, so the merchant eats that.
Er... do you have a cite for this being illegal? I know it violates the merchant agreement, but I'm not aware of any "federal rule" against charging different prices for credit cards vs. cash.
In fact, IIRC, even the merchant agreements allow you to give a discount for cash, as long as the advertised price is honored for credit cards.
Everyone knows, a FPS can't be enjoyed on a console, but for some strange reason, we keep wanting to tolerate it some more.
You seem to have misread: I said players tolerate the controls. Halo is still enjoyable as a game overall, although it's more enjoyable on PC where the controls are more than just tolerable.
Seriously folks, why in god's name would a company help you take away business from them? Why?
Because they get a cut of every app sold through the app store. Third party business is their business too.
If you want to force every company to actually expend time and energy making sure they create ways for other companies to compete with them, then you're going to have to get some legislation written up and passed to do that, because no company on earth wants to spend their money on making sure other people make money.
That's funny, because no one had to pass legislation for game consoles. Microsoft sells Halo, but they don't stop other companies from putting out games that might compete with Halo. Nintendo sells Mario Kart, but they don't stop third parties from making their own go-kart games. They're confident enough in the quality of their games that they allow them to compete on the merits.
A lot of people would argue that the Halo games don't "work well on a console" either. Halo's accomplishment in that regard, IMO, was just to show that players can tolerate console controls for an FPS if there's enough aiming assistance.
BTW, Quake III on PS2 had the same dual analog control scheme.
Yes, you're right. I made the mistake of thinking we were talking about industries here on present-day Earth, rather than industries in Star Trek's futuristic post-scarcity utopia. My bad.
All it takes to create industry is ingenuity and drive, the money comes (should come, rather) later.
How do you propose to buy equipment, rent office/factory/warehouse space, etc. without any money? Suppliers and landlords won't take "ingenuity and drive" as payment. If the subject of your ingenuity is something that's expensive to make, you'll probably need investors (i.e. a loan) to make it happen.
Umm.. how exactly is kids being interested in politics a good thing?
Because we can't expect kids to suddenly pick up a full set of political knowledge and opinions on their 18th birthdays. If they start being interested sooner, they'll be better prepared when they're finally able to vote, and we'll hopefully see higher turnout among young adults.
It's the same reason that kids who start drinking at a younger age, with their parents' supervision, end up with healthier attitudes toward alcohol. The ones who have no experience with alcohol before turning 21 (or moving out of the house) are the ones who turn into binge drinkers as soon as they have the chance.
Being that children can't vote, and no-one cares about their political opinions,
It's unfortunate that no one cares about their political opinions, because minors are certainly affected by political decisions. Recall that one of the reasons the USA split away from Britain was that it was being affected by decisions it had no power over ("no taxation without representation").
Still, for the health of our democracy, we should encourage kids to think about political issues before they start voting. That way, when the time comes, they'll be more likely to make a decision based on substance instead of treating it like American Idol.
Anyway, it would be good to let the free market sort this out. The fact that it hasn't implies that the cellular market is not free.
Not necessarily; free markets won't solve every problem.
For another telecom example, look at rural phone service, which basically wouldn't exist without government intervention. It's not profitable to run wires out to a tiny community: it costs a lot to build the network, but there aren't enough potential customers to pay for it at the standard rates, and the customers that are there aren't willing to pay rates high enough to justify the cost of building. So the free market says "Sorry, no phone service for you," and the reason phone service does exist in rural areas is that we-the-people decided it was important enough to build even if it isn't profitable.
In this case, it could be the opposite problem: perhaps text messaging is more profitable than it should be, simply because customers (e.g. teenagers with lots of disposable income) are willing to pay this much for it, and because the cost of switching carriers outweighs the savings from cheaper SMS.
Now, one might argue that the high costs of switching carriers mean that the cellular market isn't "free". But those costs aren't regulatory, and many of them aren't even contractual: if I switch from Verizon to T-Mobile, I have to invest in a bunch of new equipment and accessories because the networks use different technology, not to mention the intangible cost of dealing with new interfaces, new customer service, new price plan structures, new coverage maps and signal strength, etc. It's no less "free" than the market for computers or video games: sure, there are multiple operating systems and consoles, but they aren't perfect substitutes for each other.
First, it looks like there was an HTML problem with your comment, so I don't know what the subject of your analogy is supposed to be. Let's call it a widget.
You plan to bring [the widget] to market and use the proceeds to provide for you and your family - keep a roof over their heads, food on the table, clothes on their back, education, etc... You look, but your [widget] is still there. The neighbor explains that it was a new kind of "theft" that doesn't cause you to lose the "stolen" item. As he's saying this your neighbor is walking back into his house carrying a brand new [widget] under his arm. [...] Would you feel robbed?
No, I wouldn't feel robbed, and I don't think many people would. In your analogy, just like in mine, nothing has been lost: I still have everything after this supposed "theft" that I had before it.
I might feel disappointed or upset that my plans to sell widgets wouldn't come to pass, certainly. But not everything that makes a person disappointed or upset has to be called theft.
But let's try an alternate analogy. Suppose no one made a copy of my widget in the first place: let's say I finished developing it, manufactured it, and brought it to market... and still nobody bought one. They didn't get widgets for free without my permission; they just didn't want any.
Would I feel robbed? No, of course not, for exactly the same reason as above.
Would I feel disappointed and upset? Yes, for exactly the same reason as above: because I had invested all this time and effort into a plan that didn't pay off.
In other words, as the widget producer, I'm not worried about whether people get widgets for free; I'm worried about whether I make money from them. If I'm not making money, then I'm disappointed, no matter what the reason is.
To most people, theft is taking what you didn't pay for. That's exactly what file sharing someone else's IP is - you have something you didn't pay for, even if nobody else "lost" it as a consequence.
No, I don't think that's true. To most people, theft is taking something away from its rightful owner: the fact that someone "lost" it isn't just an irrelevant detail, it's the most important part.
Go ahead, ask someone, or just try a thought experiment. Suppose your neighbor told you they saw someone "stealing" your car, but then you looked in the driveway and your car was still there. The neighbor explained that it was a new kind of "theft" that doesn't cause you to lose the "stolen" item.
Would you feel robbed?
I doubt you'd care at all, and I'm certain that most people wouldn't care. Most people consider theft bad because of its impact on the victim, not because the thief gets something for free.
What you don't seem to get is that if Obama actually tries to disconnect the military-industrial-congressional complex like JFK tried to do, they will simply have some "lone nut" blow his brains out
Come on, don't tell me you believe in that "lone nut" theory. Ever wonder why you never saw Winston Churchill, Elvis Presley, Earl Warren, and Lee Harvey Oswald in the same room together? HMMMMM.....
Follow the trail, man. It's all there. It all ties back to the Harvard Law Review, a publication of which Obama just happened to be the president, just long enough to get noticed. He saw what was coming and, with the wisdom of a grandmaster, preempted it before anyone else had a clue. They can't touch one of their own.
It's not that since the First Amendment pertains to government, then companies can squelch speech. It's that nothing GIVES companies the right to do it.
Just like nothing GIVES users the right to post on anyone else's web site. The site can choose to allow you to post, and they can put conditions on that decision. If you don't agree to those conditions, you're free to find somewhere else to post.
There might be moral or ethical principles saying that the site shouldn't "squelch speech", but there's no law saying they can't. And if it isn't illegal, it's legal by default.
That's perhaps the most naive thing I've read in months.
I'm sorry you have so little understanding of our political system that you think it's naive.
You're ascribing a lot of weight to this election, but seem to be woefully short on specifics.
If you want specifics, look at the candidates' web sites, or read some political blogs. You'd have to have lived under a rock all year to not be aware of the major issues, and the differences between the candidates are clear.
However your assertion that Gore would have prevented the flooding in New Orleans tells me how unserious you really are.
I made no such assertion. If you want to appear "serious", try responding to what I actually wrote, rather than the strawman argument you wish I had written instead.
What I said was "New Orleans might be in much better shape today". You do recall what a disaster Bush's FEMA appointment turned out to be, don't you? Had 2000 gone differently, we might have had someone who was qualified to respond to a hurricane, rather than a horse lawyer who happened to be the president's buddy.
I said that C-based languages (of which ObjC is one) are more common than Java, and that by learning Objective-C, you would gain skills that are more broadly deployable because it is based on C. I stand by that statement.
That's not what I asked. I asked whether you still stand by your description of Java as "a language that almost nobody in the industry actually uses".
Looking at it more closely, it looks to me like C# extensions affect all classes. That's a pretty gross hack, as it doesn't allow you do define different methods to extend different classes except through object introspection, and IMHO, any time you have to introspect an object to determine behavior, it's a sure sign that either the language or your own design is wrong....
C# extensions can differentiate between classes at compile time, the same way any other statically bound method can: through overloading. When you define "public static T Dequeue<T>(this List<T> list)", it'll be matched by a call to.Dequeue() on a List<T> or subclass thereof, but not any other class.
My point also remains that in order to truly understand what's going on in your system, you need to understand pointers, so teaching in Java leaves students lacking critical skills [...] Thus, someone who learns a complex C-based language like ObjC++or C# is in a much better position than someone who learns Java.
Most C# programmers will never use pointers, since they're rarely necessary and they make the code unverifiable.
Indeed, referring to C# as a C-based language is disingenuous; parts of the syntax are closer to C than the Java equivalents, and it brings back a handful of C concepts (like goto), but overall it's certainly closer to Java than to C. Compare C/C++ and C#'s treatment of arrays, or declaration syntax ("int * p, q;" means two different things), or templates vs. generics, or the construction sequence and its effect on type identity, or destructors vs. finalizers, or the meaning of a "class" type, or the meaning of "const"...
Once again, you twist my words. [...] I said your job prospects if you were good at either were much better in Objective-C than Java because the candidate pool for the limited jobs is so much smaller.
But you said Java is "a language that almost nobody in the industry actually uses", so surely you can't mean that there are actually more people using Java than Objective-C, right? Or are you ready to retract that hilariously wrong statement yet?
The fact is, there are more Java jobs, more Java programs, and more Java programmers. It's used far more than ObjC is. If your point is that you'd rather be a big fish in a small pond, then just say that, but don't expect everyone to agree (perhaps they'd like a choice of several employers instead of being stuck with the one ObjC job in their region). What you're saying instead is basically "No one goes there anymore, it's too crowded."
Java doesn't have categories or anything like it, so therefore Java doesn't use dynamic bindings to nearly the degree of C# or ObjC.
C# doesn't have dynamic binding, except for virtual methods and reflection. Extension methods are syntactical sugar that take effect at compile time, not runtime -- static bindings, not dynamic.
C# provides the same thing with language extensions. This is a very powerful concept that AFAIK is completely alien to Java. For example, say I'm writing a piece of code that uses a library that maintains an ordered list. Let's say that there's another library I have that allocates lots of these lists for me and I want to be able to manipulate those resulting lists as queues. Let's say that both of those libraries are provided by a third party and I can't change them. What do I do? I can either rewrite all my code to immediately wrap those lists with some wrapper class and make a real mess of things or I can just create a category that blows those functions into every instance of the class. Done. Now, when I need those methods, they are there.
Again, this is not an example of dynamic binding. If you add a "Dequeue" method to the list type, then every time you call "list.Dequeue()" it's nothing but a syntactic shortcut for "MyExtensions.Dequeue(list)" -- you're calling a static method whose identity is known at compile time. It saves you a bit of typing, that's all. (Extension methods provide a more tangible benefit when the compiler is looking for a method with a particular name, e.g. when you're using LINQ, but the call is still bound at compile time.)
You'd have to have been living under a rock for the last year to think that the only commercial software package written in ObjC is iLife....
Just like you'd have to have been living under a rock to think that Objective-C skills are in higher demand than Java skills.
I don't know where to begin arguing with you. They both have everything descending from a single core type (object in C#, id in ObjC), they both have basically the same function declaration syntax (ObjC methods notwithstanding), they both have extensions to support variable length arrays (albeit with very different syntax), they both have properties (variables with built-in getters and setters) with at least somewhat similar syntax, they both have the concept of interfaces, both have categories (though C# calls them "language extensions"), they both have dynamic bindings (optional in C#), etc.
1. "id" in ObjC is closer to Java's Object type than C#'s, since -- correct me if I'm wrong -- ObjC has a dichotomy between primitive and object types, just like Java, while in C# every value type (including primitives like int) descends from System.Object.
2. Java has the same function declaration syntax, the concept of interfaces, and the same kind of "dynamic bindings" as C# (i.e. reflection). It also has "extensions to support variable length arrays", although if you're ignoring the syntax differences, that's true of just about every high level language.
Syntactically, the Objective-C extensions look very different from their C# counterparts, but conceptually, I can't imagine how you could claim that the only similarity is garbage collection unless you know nothing whatsoever about ObjC 2.0....
I can't imagine how you could claim that C# has those similarities but Java doesn't, unless you know nothing whatsoever about Java. Considering that you referred to Java as a language no one uses, maybe that's the problem.
I can't think of a single (end user) commercial software package used outside of IT shops that is written in Java.
Ah yes, unlike all those commercial software packages written in Objective-C. You know, like, um... iLife!
There's more to being a professional developer than writing commercial applications. For instance, there are plenty of jobs that involve writing Java for web sites.
And from ObjC 2.0, C# is trivial, as they are based on a lot of similar concepts.
Not even close. If you want to learn C# by studying another language, you're much better off choosing Java. ObjC 2.0 has garbage collection, but that's where the similarities stop.
don't fall into the trap of using Java as your core language. [...] the result is a bunch of students who [...] only know how to program in a language that almost nobody in the industry actually uses,
[...]
If you have access to a Mac lab, you might consider teaching them Objective-C.
The outcome of every election has a notable impact on millions of people.
Yes, thanks for reinforcing my point. Elections matter.
If you believe that if one person gets elected that the country will go to shit, but if the other one wins there will be gumdrops and rainbows, you're deluded.
If you use those words, perhaps. But the outcome of an election can have a major impact on the direction the country takes and how well it does in the future. If 2000 had gone differently, for instance, we might not have spent $500 billion (and all our credibility) in Iraq, New Orleans might be in much better shape today.. hell, we might've even prevented the 9/11 attacks by following through on the intelligence we had.
Americans directly elect 537 people in Washington D.C. There are 3,000,000 federal employees and untold lobbyists and media. Your vote isn't going to change much.
A single vote rarely changes much, that's true. But the outcome of the election can change a lot. It's incorrect to draw any conclusions from the proportion of elected officials to other employees: the elected ones give the orders, the rest just carry them out. Even the lobbyists and media have to work within a framework built by elected officials.
The only thing a credit rating is good for is getting into debt.
No, credit ratings are also good for renting an apartment, buying insurance, signing up for phone service or other utilities, getting a government security clearance, etc.
You can immediately cash you paycheck and never use a bank account.
Sure, if you don't mind paying a fee each time. Some banks won't even cash their own checks for non-customers for free.
The signature is not a security feature. Unless you want to train tens of millions of clerks in precision handwriting analysis techniques.
Actually, they don't need serious training. Most credit cards will be deactivated quickly after they're lost or stolen, and forging a signature is harder than it sounds, when you consider that the clerk is supposed to watch the customer sign. A typical credit card thief isn't going to be able to forge your signature that convincingly the day after stealing your card.
Well, for one thing, Obama is far less reliant on large donations than McCain is.
But also, keep in mind that every special interest group gives money to one side or the other, or both. That doesn't mean anyone's obligated to do what they want.
Slashdot Mirror
It's illegal in the states to charge someone a different price for any item using a credit card instead of cash, so the merchant eats that.
Er... do you have a cite for this being illegal? I know it violates the merchant agreement, but I'm not aware of any "federal rule" against charging different prices for credit cards vs. cash.
In fact, IIRC, even the merchant agreements allow you to give a discount for cash, as long as the advertised price is honored for credit cards.
Everyone knows, a FPS can't be enjoyed on a console, but for some strange reason, we keep wanting to tolerate it some more.
You seem to have misread: I said players tolerate the controls. Halo is still enjoyable as a game overall, although it's more enjoyable on PC where the controls are more than just tolerable.
Seriously folks, why in god's name would a company help you take away business from them? Why?
Because they get a cut of every app sold through the app store. Third party business is their business too.
If you want to force every company to actually expend time and energy making sure they create ways for other companies to compete with them, then you're going to have to get some legislation written up and passed to do that, because no company on earth wants to spend their money on making sure other people make money.
That's funny, because no one had to pass legislation for game consoles. Microsoft sells Halo, but they don't stop other companies from putting out games that might compete with Halo. Nintendo sells Mario Kart, but they don't stop third parties from making their own go-kart games. They're confident enough in the quality of their games that they allow them to compete on the merits.
A lot of people would argue that the Halo games don't "work well on a console" either. Halo's accomplishment in that regard, IMO, was just to show that players can tolerate console controls for an FPS if there's enough aiming assistance.
BTW, Quake III on PS2 had the same dual analog control scheme.
Yes, you're right. I made the mistake of thinking we were talking about industries here on present-day Earth, rather than industries in Star Trek's futuristic post-scarcity utopia. My bad.
Or you work hard to earn the money.
Ah yes. If you can save $5000 a year, it'll only take you 200 years before you can afford to open a million-dollar factory. Good luck!
Either way, that's not financial industry, if you care to read and understand my original post.
I read it, but I have no idea what you mean by this. Loans and investments are what the financial industry is all about.
All it takes to create industry is ingenuity and drive, the money comes (should come, rather) later.
How do you propose to buy equipment, rent office/factory/warehouse space, etc. without any money? Suppliers and landlords won't take "ingenuity and drive" as payment. If the subject of your ingenuity is something that's expensive to make, you'll probably need investors (i.e. a loan) to make it happen.
Umm.. how exactly is kids being interested in politics a good thing?
Because we can't expect kids to suddenly pick up a full set of political knowledge and opinions on their 18th birthdays. If they start being interested sooner, they'll be better prepared when they're finally able to vote, and we'll hopefully see higher turnout among young adults.
It's the same reason that kids who start drinking at a younger age, with their parents' supervision, end up with healthier attitudes toward alcohol. The ones who have no experience with alcohol before turning 21 (or moving out of the house) are the ones who turn into binge drinkers as soon as they have the chance.
Being that children can't vote, and no-one cares about their political opinions,
It's unfortunate that no one cares about their political opinions, because minors are certainly affected by political decisions. Recall that one of the reasons the USA split away from Britain was that it was being affected by decisions it had no power over ("no taxation without representation").
Still, for the health of our democracy, we should encourage kids to think about political issues before they start voting. That way, when the time comes, they'll be more likely to make a decision based on substance instead of treating it like American Idol.
Anyway, it would be good to let the free market sort this out. The fact that it hasn't implies that the cellular market is not free.
Not necessarily; free markets won't solve every problem.
For another telecom example, look at rural phone service, which basically wouldn't exist without government intervention. It's not profitable to run wires out to a tiny community: it costs a lot to build the network, but there aren't enough potential customers to pay for it at the standard rates, and the customers that are there aren't willing to pay rates high enough to justify the cost of building. So the free market says "Sorry, no phone service for you," and the reason phone service does exist in rural areas is that we-the-people decided it was important enough to build even if it isn't profitable.
In this case, it could be the opposite problem: perhaps text messaging is more profitable than it should be, simply because customers (e.g. teenagers with lots of disposable income) are willing to pay this much for it, and because the cost of switching carriers outweighs the savings from cheaper SMS.
Now, one might argue that the high costs of switching carriers mean that the cellular market isn't "free". But those costs aren't regulatory, and many of them aren't even contractual: if I switch from Verizon to T-Mobile, I have to invest in a bunch of new equipment and accessories because the networks use different technology, not to mention the intangible cost of dealing with new interfaces, new customer service, new price plan structures, new coverage maps and signal strength, etc. It's no less "free" than the market for computers or video games: sure, there are multiple operating systems and consoles, but they aren't perfect substitutes for each other.
First, it looks like there was an HTML problem with your comment, so I don't know what the subject of your analogy is supposed to be. Let's call it a widget.
You plan to bring [the widget] to market and use the proceeds to provide for you and your family - keep a roof over their heads, food on the table, clothes on their back, education, etc... You look, but your [widget] is still there. The neighbor explains that it was a new kind of "theft" that doesn't cause you to lose the "stolen" item. As he's saying this your neighbor is walking back into his house carrying a brand new [widget] under his arm. [...] Would you feel robbed?
No, I wouldn't feel robbed, and I don't think many people would. In your analogy, just like in mine, nothing has been lost: I still have everything after this supposed "theft" that I had before it.
I might feel disappointed or upset that my plans to sell widgets wouldn't come to pass, certainly. But not everything that makes a person disappointed or upset has to be called theft.
But let's try an alternate analogy. Suppose no one made a copy of my widget in the first place: let's say I finished developing it, manufactured it, and brought it to market... and still nobody bought one. They didn't get widgets for free without my permission; they just didn't want any.
Would I feel robbed? No, of course not, for exactly the same reason as above.
Would I feel disappointed and upset? Yes, for exactly the same reason as above: because I had invested all this time and effort into a plan that didn't pay off.
In other words, as the widget producer, I'm not worried about whether people get widgets for free; I'm worried about whether I make money from them. If I'm not making money, then I'm disappointed, no matter what the reason is.
To most people, theft is taking what you didn't pay for. That's exactly what file sharing someone else's IP is - you have something you didn't pay for, even if nobody else "lost" it as a consequence.
No, I don't think that's true. To most people, theft is taking something away from its rightful owner: the fact that someone "lost" it isn't just an irrelevant detail, it's the most important part.
Go ahead, ask someone, or just try a thought experiment. Suppose your neighbor told you they saw someone "stealing" your car, but then you looked in the driveway and your car was still there. The neighbor explained that it was a new kind of "theft" that doesn't cause you to lose the "stolen" item.
Would you feel robbed?
I doubt you'd care at all, and I'm certain that most people wouldn't care. Most people consider theft bad because of its impact on the victim, not because the thief gets something for free.
What you don't seem to get is that if Obama actually tries to disconnect the military-industrial-congressional complex like JFK tried to do, they will simply have some "lone nut" blow his brains out
Come on, don't tell me you believe in that "lone nut" theory. Ever wonder why you never saw Winston Churchill, Elvis Presley, Earl Warren, and Lee Harvey Oswald in the same room together? HMMMMM.....
Follow the trail, man. It's all there. It all ties back to the Harvard Law Review, a publication of which Obama just happened to be the president, just long enough to get noticed. He saw what was coming and, with the wisdom of a grandmaster, preempted it before anyone else had a clue. They can't touch one of their own.
It's not that since the First Amendment pertains to government, then companies can squelch speech. It's that nothing GIVES companies the right to do it.
Just like nothing GIVES users the right to post on anyone else's web site. The site can choose to allow you to post, and they can put conditions on that decision. If you don't agree to those conditions, you're free to find somewhere else to post.
There might be moral or ethical principles saying that the site shouldn't "squelch speech", but there's no law saying they can't. And if it isn't illegal, it's legal by default.
Prison isn't about getting to do the things you love with free room and board.
Nor is it about harming society by preventing criminals from making meaningful contributions, just to spite them.
Sounds like a great idea for an annoyingly cute TV series.
That's perhaps the most naive thing I've read in months.
I'm sorry you have so little understanding of our political system that you think it's naive.
You're ascribing a lot of weight to this election, but seem to be woefully short on specifics.
If you want specifics, look at the candidates' web sites, or read some political blogs. You'd have to have lived under a rock all year to not be aware of the major issues, and the differences between the candidates are clear.
However your assertion that Gore would have prevented the flooding in New Orleans tells me how unserious you really are.
I made no such assertion. If you want to appear "serious", try responding to what I actually wrote, rather than the strawman argument you wish I had written instead.
What I said was "New Orleans might be in much better shape today". You do recall what a disaster Bush's FEMA appointment turned out to be, don't you? Had 2000 gone differently, we might have had someone who was qualified to respond to a hurricane, rather than a horse lawyer who happened to be the president's buddy.
I said that C-based languages (of which ObjC is one) are more common than Java, and that by learning Objective-C, you would gain skills that are more broadly deployable because it is based on C. I stand by that statement.
That's not what I asked. I asked whether you still stand by your description of Java as "a language that almost nobody in the industry actually uses".
Looking at it more closely, it looks to me like C# extensions affect all classes. That's a pretty gross hack, as it doesn't allow you do define different methods to extend different classes except through object introspection, and IMHO, any time you have to introspect an object to determine behavior, it's a sure sign that either the language or your own design is wrong....
C# extensions can differentiate between classes at compile time, the same way any other statically bound method can: through overloading. When you define "public static T Dequeue<T>(this List<T> list)", it'll be matched by a call to .Dequeue() on a List<T> or subclass thereof, but not any other class.
My point also remains that in order to truly understand what's going on in your system, you need to understand pointers, so teaching in Java leaves students lacking critical skills [...] Thus, someone who learns a complex C-based language like ObjC++or C# is in a much better position than someone who learns Java.
Most C# programmers will never use pointers, since they're rarely necessary and they make the code unverifiable.
Indeed, referring to C# as a C-based language is disingenuous; parts of the syntax are closer to C than the Java equivalents, and it brings back a handful of C concepts (like goto), but overall it's certainly closer to Java than to C. Compare C/C++ and C#'s treatment of arrays, or declaration syntax ("int * p, q;" means two different things), or templates vs. generics, or the construction sequence and its effect on type identity, or destructors vs. finalizers, or the meaning of a "class" type, or the meaning of "const"...
Once again, you twist my words. [...] I said your job prospects if you were good at either were much better in Objective-C than Java because the candidate pool for the limited jobs is so much smaller.
But you said Java is "a language that almost nobody in the industry actually uses", so surely you can't mean that there are actually more people using Java than Objective-C, right? Or are you ready to retract that hilariously wrong statement yet?
The fact is, there are more Java jobs, more Java programs, and more Java programmers. It's used far more than ObjC is. If your point is that you'd rather be a big fish in a small pond, then just say that, but don't expect everyone to agree (perhaps they'd like a choice of several employers instead of being stuck with the one ObjC job in their region). What you're saying instead is basically "No one goes there anymore, it's too crowded."
Java doesn't have categories or anything like it, so therefore Java doesn't use dynamic bindings to nearly the degree of C# or ObjC.
C# doesn't have dynamic binding, except for virtual methods and reflection. Extension methods are syntactical sugar that take effect at compile time, not runtime -- static bindings, not dynamic.
C# provides the same thing with language extensions. This is a very powerful concept that AFAIK is completely alien to Java. For example, say I'm writing a piece of code that uses a library that maintains an ordered list. Let's say that there's another library I have that allocates lots of these lists for me and I want to be able to manipulate those resulting lists as queues. Let's say that both of those libraries are provided by a third party and I can't change them. What do I do? I can either rewrite all my code to immediately wrap those lists with some wrapper class and make a real mess of things or I can just create a category that blows those functions into every instance of the class. Done. Now, when I need those methods, they are there.
Again, this is not an example of dynamic binding. If you add a "Dequeue" method to the list type, then every time you call "list.Dequeue()" it's nothing but a syntactic shortcut for "MyExtensions.Dequeue(list)" -- you're calling a static method whose identity is known at compile time. It saves you a bit of typing, that's all. (Extension methods provide a more tangible benefit when the compiler is looking for a method with a particular name, e.g. when you're using LINQ, but the call is still bound at compile time.)
You'd have to have been living under a rock for the last year to think that the only commercial software package written in ObjC is iLife....
Just like you'd have to have been living under a rock to think that Objective-C skills are in higher demand than Java skills.
I don't know where to begin arguing with you. They both have everything descending from a single core type (object in C#, id in ObjC), they both have basically the same function declaration syntax (ObjC methods notwithstanding), they both have extensions to support variable length arrays (albeit with very different syntax), they both have properties (variables with built-in getters and setters) with at least somewhat similar syntax, they both have the concept of interfaces, both have categories (though C# calls them "language extensions"), they both have dynamic bindings (optional in C#), etc.
1. "id" in ObjC is closer to Java's Object type than C#'s, since -- correct me if I'm wrong -- ObjC has a dichotomy between primitive and object types, just like Java, while in C# every value type (including primitives like int) descends from System.Object.
2. Java has the same function declaration syntax, the concept of interfaces, and the same kind of "dynamic bindings" as C# (i.e. reflection). It also has "extensions to support variable length arrays", although if you're ignoring the syntax differences, that's true of just about every high level language.
Syntactically, the Objective-C extensions look very different from their C# counterparts, but conceptually, I can't imagine how you could claim that the only similarity is garbage collection unless you know nothing whatsoever about ObjC 2.0....
I can't imagine how you could claim that C# has those similarities but Java doesn't, unless you know nothing whatsoever about Java. Considering that you referred to Java as a language no one uses, maybe that's the problem.
I can't think of a single (end user) commercial software package used outside of IT shops that is written in Java.
Ah yes, unlike all those commercial software packages written in Objective-C. You know, like, um... iLife!
There's more to being a professional developer than writing commercial applications. For instance, there are plenty of jobs that involve writing Java for web sites.
And from ObjC 2.0, C# is trivial, as they are based on a lot of similar concepts.
Not even close. If you want to learn C# by studying another language, you're much better off choosing Java. ObjC 2.0 has garbage collection, but that's where the similarities stop.
don't fall into the trap of using Java as your core language. [...] the result is a bunch of students who [...] only know how to program in a language that almost nobody in the industry actually uses,
[...]
If you have access to a Mac lab, you might consider teaching them Objective-C.
You're joking, right?
The outcome of every election has a notable impact on millions of people.
Yes, thanks for reinforcing my point. Elections matter.
If you believe that if one person gets elected that the country will go to shit, but if the other one wins there will be gumdrops and rainbows, you're deluded.
If you use those words, perhaps. But the outcome of an election can have a major impact on the direction the country takes and how well it does in the future. If 2000 had gone differently, for instance, we might not have spent $500 billion (and all our credibility) in Iraq, New Orleans might be in much better shape today.. hell, we might've even prevented the 9/11 attacks by following through on the intelligence we had.
Americans directly elect 537 people in Washington D.C. There are 3,000,000 federal employees and untold lobbyists and media. Your vote isn't going to change much.
A single vote rarely changes much, that's true. But the outcome of the election can change a lot. It's incorrect to draw any conclusions from the proportion of elected officials to other employees: the elected ones give the orders, the rest just carry them out. Even the lobbyists and media have to work within a framework built by elected officials.
The only thing a credit rating is good for is getting into debt.
No, credit ratings are also good for renting an apartment, buying insurance, signing up for phone service or other utilities, getting a government security clearance, etc.
You can immediately cash you paycheck and never use a bank account.
Sure, if you don't mind paying a fee each time. Some banks won't even cash their own checks for non-customers for free.
The signature is not a security feature. Unless you want to train tens of millions of clerks in precision handwriting analysis techniques.
Actually, they don't need serious training. Most credit cards will be deactivated quickly after they're lost or stolen, and forging a signature is harder than it sounds, when you consider that the clerk is supposed to watch the customer sign. A typical credit card thief isn't going to be able to forge your signature that convincingly the day after stealing your card.
Well, for one thing, Obama is far less reliant on large donations than McCain is.
But also, keep in mind that every special interest group gives money to one side or the other, or both. That doesn't mean anyone's obligated to do what they want.