Raising the drinking age to 21 is probably a good idea. Laws are supposed to benefit society. Reducing fetal alcohol syndrome and damage to the brains of our developing youth - you know, the future... well, it sounds like a good idea to me.
Except for the problem that making something illegal doesn't always decrease it's usage in a productive way. Increasing the drinking age causes more un-checked underaged drinking. If one wanted a drinking age that actually decreased abuse then it should be reduced to 12 or so.. at which point children are introduced to alcohol early, learn to moderate, and do it all under parental supervision.
By having such high age limits you essentially completely remove the ability of parents to interact with teens on the issue and teach moderation legally. In other words, high drinking age limits are designed to make sure that the drinking experinee is as catastrophic as possible.. which fits in quite well with MADD's 'booze is bad!' mentality.
It's a bit like those 'abstinence only' organizations... by removing concerceptive options they make sure the people who DO have sex suffer as much as possible because they didn't follow the group's solution.
So in short.. MADD is a scummy organization trying to make the problem worse so they can ride into the rescue with extreme solutions. I would wager that at this stage more people have died because of MADD then have been helped.
MADD has very little to do with drunk driving or parents at this stage. Even their original founder (who DID loose a child to a drunk driver) is disgusted with them at this point.
The modern version of MADD is more about making money (mmm.. corrupt fundraising) and trying to push neo-prohibition based of iffy 'science'
Under unix at least you can't really do predictable lookups on C++ functions, so loadable modules are MUCH harder to write. You end up having to write a C wrapper around the C++ code.
C++, while more convient, is less predictable. If you look at a ANSI C program and a C++ program you generally have a much better chance of seeing what the C program is _actually_ doing.
C++ tends to be more readable for understanding what it is conceptually doing.
An example is operator overloading. when you write A+B=C in C, you generally know what all those operators are doing and know that it will not be jumping to any functions or have other side effects. In C++ those operators could be doing anything.
Same with constructors and destructors. You have an idea of when they will run and where they are inserted into the code, but you can't always be sure. So if such details actually matter then C is safer to use.
C++ also throws all sorts of (potential) junk in the static initialization space, so you never know what might execute before main() runs. In C you have to mark things explicitly.
I actually use both depending on the situation. They both have strengths and weaknesses. When I want ease of use I tend to use C++. When I want safty and predictiblity (important for low level code and drives) then I go with C.
You realize that someone out there somewhere is no thinking 'hmmm, I've been looking for a project.. I wonder if you could write an OS in intercal?'
damn you;p
But yeah, one of the reasons people revert to C in other languages is to interface with OS components that are written in C.
vtables are often implemented via a symbolic lookup table rather then offsets so calling a function can often involve traversing the list to find the right one.
Even with delegates and interfaces, true you can get some degree of runtime polymorphism, but these add some non-trivial redirections and can clog up both your call stack and symbol table.
I admit there are not huge gains in C OOP nor are they things that can't be done in other languages with some work around, but they do require some significant additional complexity to do it.
Yet you can do more true OOP in C then in C++...
OOP in C is easy, you just don't have the 'work done for you' that you get in other languages. But C's runtime polymorphism is lighter and more powerful then Java or C++.
I could actually see C++ slowly going away over the next decade as it is replaced by other languages that fill the same needs but better.
C on the other hand is probably going to be around for a long, long time.
While it is true that both GPLv2 and GPLv3 are 'activist', GPLv3 made the jump from software activism to software related activism. So it is a bit of a conceptual leap (since it now restricts hardware behavior for instance)
This is the type of situation the darwin awards were developed for. Doing something stupid and dangerous will occasionally get you killed. Yes it is tragic and things could have been done to prevent the situation, but ultmiatly the guy and his friend's poor behavior led to the actual events. Crow, if the other two had not been drinking the zoo staff might have actually believed their drunk panicked ramblings and they wouldn't have gotten mauled... but again, they made some stupid decisions and it cost them.
Deserved to die? No. But does death change the fact he had a hand in his own fate here? No again.
I actually agree that there is no equivalence, but I would put the tiger at the higher value.
Humans are dirt cheap to produce, we have more then we know what to do with already and could easily survive a 90% population drop. Tigers are pretty rare and are relatively close to a 'point of no return' population drop.
To clarify... the Tivo Loophole was NOT about companies not giving back.. Tivo did so. The 'loophole' was punishing embedded companies that needed a locked down environment for connecting to their network since people want to 'play' with their devices.
OK, I didn't know that. So why did it take until the impending release of the iPhone for some OSS coders and hardware hackers to look at such a neat technology and say, "Let's do that, but with freedom!"?
I can answer part of that. Price and availability of multitouch devices. One can code all one likes but if the hardware to play with isn't easily available then it is kinda pointless. Most small touchscreens you can get in the states (that don't come from some shady website in broken english) are single touch only.
I'm not following. How do bones in the antarctic effect theories around climate change? If nothing else it is an example of (massive climate change) == (most stuff really dead)
To a significant extent chance to re-offend is related to what and why exactly the first offense happened. The is the problem with stereotyped lists... knowing who is a real risk and who isn't is pretty difficult.
It should also be noted that spending 20 years behind bars gives someone a great deal of time to think and potentially change. In addition, many crimes are committed in youth when one is rash and feeling untouchable (or simply hasn't developed the maturity to control their emotions), this is something that often does change with both age and a reality check.
Regardless, while I can understand a parent feeling protective of their daughter, the list is still a very poor tool to do this. 'Sex Offender' is such a pointless term, you might as well just have a list of all felons in an area and keep your kid away from ALL of them. After all, someone who is prone to, say, fits of rage and eventually killed someone is much more of a danger to a kid then someone who was arrested for, say, date rape.
I'm not seeing anything in the OP about repeat offenses. He raped one 37 year old woman in 1987. He was not 15 at the time.
In other words, you did what the killer did.. misunderstood the crime and lept to assumption that this person was much worse then they are.
I view this Oliver as a far worse human being.... based off guesses and the excuse 'but my child was abused once!' this person is justifying murdering someone. And the sad, sick thing is many will probably agree with him and call him a hero (or even justified) when in reality he was a dangerous idiot who needs to be kept behind bars for a LONG time.
A rape is a terrible thing, but the guy was not sentenced to death for it,.... some yokle in a tailer park does NOT have the right to second guess the justice system and kill the guy anyway.
Except when some random admin desices some bit of physics they have never personally heard of (or can tell apart from some other concept) desides to delete it as unnotable or redundant ^_^;
Actually, just looking through today's quicklist, I'm seeing lots of deletions by a fairly small number of people with plenty of comments along the lines of "I don't know much about this topic, but it seems un-notable to me" For instance, the 'on-line games' catagory is marked for merging into 'on-line multiplayer games' since single player games are being considered un-notable. Granted the person requesting the merge even flat out says that they didn't even know single player games exist but a quick look at yahoo was all they needed to decide.
You have people who don't actually know anything about a topic deciding for that group how important their stuff is.
Slashdot Mirror
As much as I hate pointing there, wikipedia has a pretty good basic writeup of MADD and their founder leaving.
Raising the drinking age to 21 is probably a good idea. Laws are supposed to benefit society. Reducing fetal alcohol syndrome and damage to the brains of our developing youth - you know, the future... well, it sounds like a good idea to me.
Except for the problem that making something illegal doesn't always decrease it's usage in a productive way. Increasing the drinking age causes more un-checked underaged drinking. If one wanted a drinking age that actually decreased abuse then it should be reduced to 12 or so.. at which point children are introduced to alcohol early, learn to moderate, and do it all under parental supervision.
By having such high age limits you essentially completely remove the ability of parents to interact with teens on the issue and teach moderation legally. In other words, high drinking age limits are designed to make sure that the drinking experinee is as catastrophic as possible.. which fits in quite well with MADD's 'booze is bad!' mentality.
It's a bit like those 'abstinence only' organizations... by removing concerceptive options they make sure the people who DO have sex suffer as much as possible because they didn't follow the group's solution.
So in short.. MADD is a scummy organization trying to make the problem worse so they can ride into the rescue with extreme solutions. I would wager that at this stage more people have died because of MADD then have been helped.
MADD has very little to do with drunk driving or parents at this stage. Even their original founder (who DID loose a child to a drunk driver) is disgusted with them at this point.
The modern version of MADD is more about making money (mmm.. corrupt fundraising) and trying to push neo-prohibition based of iffy 'science'
There is that too.
Under unix at least you can't really do predictable lookups on C++ functions, so loadable modules are MUCH harder to write. You end up having to write a C wrapper around the C++ code.
C++, while more convient, is less predictable. If you look at a ANSI C program and a C++ program you generally have a much better chance of seeing what the C program is _actually_ doing.
C++ tends to be more readable for understanding what it is conceptually doing.
An example is operator overloading. when you write A+B=C in C, you generally know what all those operators are doing and know that it will not be jumping to any functions or have other side effects. In C++ those operators could be doing anything.
Same with constructors and destructors. You have an idea of when they will run and where they are inserted into the code, but you can't always be sure. So if such details actually matter then C is safer to use.
C++ also throws all sorts of (potential) junk in the static initialization space, so you never know what might execute before main() runs. In C you have to mark things explicitly.
I actually use both depending on the situation. They both have strengths and weaknesses. When I want ease of use I tend to use C++. When I want safty and predictiblity (important for low level code and drives) then I go with C.
You realize that someone out there somewhere is no thinking 'hmmm, I've been looking for a project.. I wonder if you could write an OS in intercal?' damn you ;p
But yeah, one of the reasons people revert to C in other languages is to interface with OS components that are written in C.
or C#, or ObjC, or some other unnammed successor. C++ tries too hard to keep it's C roots to be truly viable long term.
vtables are often implemented via a symbolic lookup table rather then offsets so calling a function can often involve traversing the list to find the right one. Even with delegates and interfaces, true you can get some degree of runtime polymorphism, but these add some non-trivial redirections and can clog up both your call stack and symbol table. I admit there are not huge gains in C OOP nor are they things that can't be done in other languages with some work around, but they do require some significant additional complexity to do it.
Yet you can do more true OOP in C then in C++... OOP in C is easy, you just don't have the 'work done for you' that you get in other languages. But C's runtime polymorphism is lighter and more powerful then Java or C++.
I could actually see C++ slowly going away over the next decade as it is replaced by other languages that fill the same needs but better. C on the other hand is probably going to be around for a long, long time.
While it is true that both GPLv2 and GPLv3 are 'activist', GPLv3 made the jump from software activism to software related activism. So it is a bit of a conceptual leap (since it now restricts hardware behavior for instance)
Ahm, because in _PART_ it was his fault?
This is the type of situation the darwin awards were developed for. Doing something stupid and dangerous will occasionally get you killed. Yes it is tragic and things could have been done to prevent the situation, but ultmiatly the guy and his friend's poor behavior led to the actual events. Crow, if the other two had not been drinking the zoo staff might have actually believed their drunk panicked ramblings and they wouldn't have gotten mauled... but again, they made some stupid decisions and it cost them.
Deserved to die? No. But does death change the fact he had a hand in his own fate here? No again.
Heh.
I actually agree that there is no equivalence, but I would put the tiger at the higher value.
Humans are dirt cheap to produce, we have more then we know what to do with already and could easily survive a 90% population drop.
Tigers are pretty rare and are relatively close to a 'point of no return' population drop.
Depends on your target.
If you are developing embedded stuff, which is what GPLv3 address, then that 90% really does not matter one way or the other.
To clarify... the Tivo Loophole was NOT about companies not giving back.. Tivo did so.
The 'loophole' was punishing embedded companies that needed a locked down environment for connecting to their network since people want to 'play' with their devices.
And before not to long, KDE.
Which means KDE is going OFF my system once it integrates the new libraries.
Not quite.
You can not dynamically link to GPL code. You can dynamically link to LGPL code, but you still can not statically link.
OK, I didn't know that. So why did it take until the impending release of the iPhone for some OSS coders and hardware hackers to look at such a neat technology and say, "Let's do that, but with freedom!"?
I can answer part of that. Price and availability of multitouch devices. One can code all one likes but if the hardware to play with isn't easily available then it is kinda pointless. Most small touchscreens you can get in the states (that don't come from some shady website in broken english) are single touch only.
Exactly.
Having worked on games with and without a producer.... yeah, they earn their paycheck (and this is coming from one of the software engineers)
I'm not following. How do bones in the antarctic effect theories around climate change? If nothing else it is an example of (massive climate change) == (most stuff really dead)
ahm, how so? The Antarctic used to be in a warmer region so it should have all sorts of remnants on it.
To a significant extent chance to re-offend is related to what and why exactly the first offense happened. The is the problem with stereotyped lists... knowing who is a real risk and who isn't is pretty difficult.
It should also be noted that spending 20 years behind bars gives someone a great deal of time to think and potentially change. In addition, many crimes are committed in youth when one is rash and feeling untouchable (or simply hasn't developed the maturity to control their emotions), this is something that often does change with both age and a reality check.
Regardless, while I can understand a parent feeling protective of their daughter, the list is still a very poor tool to do this. 'Sex Offender' is such a pointless term, you might as well just have a list of all felons in an area and keep your kid away from ALL of them. After all, someone who is prone to, say, fits of rage and eventually killed someone is much more of a danger to a kid then someone who was arrested for, say, date rape.
I'm not seeing anything in the OP about repeat offenses. He raped one 37 year old woman in 1987. He was not 15 at the time.
In other words, you did what the killer did.. misunderstood the crime and lept to assumption that this person was much worse then they are.
I view this Oliver as a far worse human being.... based off guesses and the excuse 'but my child was abused once!' this person is justifying murdering someone. And the sad, sick thing is many will probably agree with him and call him a hero (or even justified) when in reality he was a dangerous idiot who needs to be kept behind bars for a LONG time.
A rape is a terrible thing, but the guy was not sentenced to death for it,.... some yokle in a tailer park does NOT have the right to second guess the justice system and kill the guy anyway.
Except when some random admin desices some bit of physics they have never personally heard of (or can tell apart from some other concept) desides to delete it as unnotable or redundant ^_^;
Actually, just looking through today's quicklist, I'm seeing lots of deletions by a fairly small number of people with plenty of comments along the lines of "I don't know much about this topic, but it seems un-notable to me" For instance, the 'on-line games' catagory is marked for merging into 'on-line multiplayer games' since single player games are being considered un-notable. Granted the person requesting the merge even flat out says that they didn't even know single player games exist but a quick look at yahoo was all they needed to decide.
You have people who don't actually know anything about a topic deciding for that group how important their stuff is.