Driving tests do not help with any of these issues. Here in Brazil the driving tests are very difficult to master if you're not a somewhat decent driver (it's very common to hear people failing 7 or 8 times and then just giving up).
All of this doesn't help to make the traffic any better at all. People will just "train" for the exam and then after they pass, they just unlearn most of it.
Also, you can't safely test highway driving abilities as a bad driver would endanger the other drivers around and whoever is doing the evaluation. So you have a chicken and egg problem. People usually only drive on highways around here after some experience "in the city" and usually avoid heavy traffic until they're comfortable.
The only good formula is common sense. No amount of regulation will fix it. While I do agree that the driving exam in the US is a joke, a good exame would only improve things by a very very small amount.
Google is doing the exact opposite of "ending net neutrality". NYT seriously screwed up this time. For a moment, I thought all hope was lost but, thankfully, they're still not evil.
You can see in the charts something like 98% piracy in South America. This happens because... there's no way to buy applications if you're in South America. So, anyone with a paid application here *has* to pirate it.
Perl has an extensibility philosophy. The very fact that Perl *allows* you to use a different object system illustrates this as few/no other languages allow it.
It seems like the current way to be hip in developer circles is to make fun of Perl.
I really want to understand this phenomenon as I doubt most of these people bashing Perl have never even seen any Perl code written in the last 4 years. Hell, I could bet that a lot of people have never seen any *real* Perl code at all.
Perl 6 is a different language but shares a lot of the common minds behind all these awesome Perl 5 tools. However, even if you don't like Perl 5 for whatever reason keep in mind that Rakudo Star is a completely different thing (as a matter of fact, the name "Perl 6" should probably be dropped in favor of Rakudo - to avoid all this cargo-cult).
There was a French online RPG called The 4th Coming (T4C) which had free-form conversations with NPCs. It never gained a lot of popularity though, but there still are some online servers for it (google at your will).
And it has been so for a long time so, unfortunately, there isn't much of a freelance IT industry around here.
The problem people from countries such as the US and the UK don't seem to understand is that setting up an actual company in Brazil (and I imagine Ukraine to be similar) is that it's a HUGE hassle. By that I mean it's a 2-3 month process, involving more than 10 different government institutions you need to visit in person. You need to get a proper "commercial address", which can't be your home (unless you re-register it as a commercial building, which is another hassle and pays much higher property taxes).
When I worked as a freelancer, I did the math and I would pay about 25% of my earnings in fees and accounting. Then, I would pay income tax (progressive scale which tops at 27.5%) on the remaining 75%. Also, as a freelancer, I would need to pay 20% to social security instead of the regular 11%.
In short, I would end up with roughly ~50% of what I earned. Then I would proceed to buy goods which were already taxed to hell and my purchasing power would be effectively cut in half again (the cheapest Honda Civic here costs US$37K).
I just restricted to working only to foreign companies. The pay was better *and* I wouldn't need to register myself as a company to do that, as the tax code has general provisions for "money from foreign countries". The consequence is that it was very difficult to prove my income whenever needed (home financing, etc), as everything here requires a "regular" proof of earnings.
From my personal experience, I can say that, yes, this is bad news for Ukrainians.
Agreed. This is the worst "feature" ever. Luckily, there are Chrome and Firefox extensions which remove it. But it feels very odd whenever I use someone else's computer and I see that hideous sidebar thing. Just scrap it, really.
I don't mean to troll or anything like that (considering I think Gish is an awesome game and I've bought the Humble Indie Bundle) but... are there any indie games out there that were actually coded in a well-thought manner?
I mean, looking at the Gish source code, it's honestly a mess. You seem to ALWAYS find stuff such as magic numbers, hard-coded level information (ala, if (level == 15) do this different behavior). I've looked at the source for other games and they all seemed to share such "features".
Anyone knows if the non-indie titles also follow this pattern? Maybe it's just an industry thing.
This is a reminder that lawyers just can't be trusted not be complete assholes when aiming for selfish profit.
People are usually fond of class-action lawsuits because most of the times the companies are actually being evil (i.e. Sony). So it's easy to forget or ignore the fact that class-action lawsuit do nothing substantial which benefits the consumer / end-user - they just enrich lawyers.
Now we can see that they just don't care and will even try to paint as evil a company which is disclosing information purely on good will. No one asked them to do it and they could have hidden this information and no one would know. Yet, they disclosed it and now are being screwed over this. What do you think Google or other companies will do the next time around?
So society gets a little bit worse, once again, thanks to the lawyers.
The only thing which keeps me from switching to Chrome is that Firefox still has a non-sucky UI (after some extensions such as LastTab). If Firefox will look the same as Chrome, I'll just switch as Chrome is way faster.
They're just too eager to jump into the "me too" bandwagon and will lose market share because of it, by betraying their loyal users. They've done it once with the "awesome bar" and are doing it again now. No wonder its market share is currently stagnated.
This is marketing which probably only really appeals to geeks. Most companies these days are much more worries about the "casual" audience at large. Google remains true to its origins and is proud of it.
So, yeah, you can say this is all a plan to become the big brother, bring profit to their shareholders or whatever. To me it's just plain neat and I'm glad we have Google around to make sure the other players are kept in check.
Seriously, get your act together. Google almost only makes money off Google ads (and I think more than half of that on Google's own search page).
They've been trialing YouTube and Orkut ads but it doesn't nearly cover the costs as has been reported in the media several times - you can Google it if you're interested, I won't waste any additional time with you.
And how exactly is Google making any profit whatsoever off the user's post? Care to enlighten me?
It's widely known that Google social services such as Youtube and Orkut are basically profit sinks, with Youtube alone generating 500 million / year losses.
Brazil doesn't have any sort of safe harbor provision for providers. So no "carrier immunity" for you. It's "shoot the messenger, unless he tells us who sent the message and where that person is located".
So, yeah, unemployment rates might be going up but you should still be glad you live in an otherwise decent country.
Either way, the mere fact that anonymous speech is forbidden should be attacked. This effectively makes it impossible to have real free speech and the pressure should come from outside as, unfortunately, Brazilian citizens don't give a damn about this.
Keep in mind this can potentially affect all of you, as Brazil and BRIC countries in general are gaining momentum in the post-crisis economic scenario.
In a previous story, I commented about how censorship in Brazil should get more international attention.
This is a perfect example of what I was talking about. In Brazil there are no safe harbor provisions for ISPs and judges just refuse to acknowledge the fact that Google Brazil is a subsidiary and might not have any control about Orkut, which is hosted in US ground.
If you think about it, it's actually worse than China in some aspects: it's as if China ordered companies to censor information outside of China, i.e., not even someone in America would be able to search for information regarding the Tiananmen Square massacre. Otherwise, they would fine these companies.
These issues should be brought to the table when considering requests coming from Brazil and the other BRIC countries for additional power in groups such as G20. Our economy might withstand crisis such as the last one better than yours, however, this comes at cost of severily reduced civil liberties.
Make sure this is the example you and your leaders want to follow before praising Brazilian efforts.
You're suggesting sites which use AJAX heavily have never been slashdotted?
I didn't mention using AJAX or not using AJAX a single time in my original comment. You can use have a "real" AJAX site using plain-old CGI, I've done that myself. Hell, you can even run full-blown MVC frameworks such as Perl's Catalyst using CGI - it will just be slow as hell, but you can run it.
CGI is only the interface and my point is that forking a process for each request sucks.
Your site can still be Slashdotted even if you're using something like FastCGI, mod_xxxx and so on. But instead of being Slashdotted with a few requests per second, it will potentially handle maybe a hundred per second or even more.
And this is the reason why you shouldn't use CGI scripts these days - the interface sucks and forking a process for each request is very expensive.
By the way, before any Perl-bashing trolls come around: they're CGI scripts written in Python (How shocking, huh? Anything sucks when you're using plain old CGI).
Slashdot Mirror
It's very nice the Perl bindings were updated and are now included in KDE. :)
It makes me itch to start playing with KDE again.
Driving tests do not help with any of these issues. Here in Brazil the driving tests are very difficult to master if you're not a somewhat decent driver (it's very common to hear people failing 7 or 8 times and then just giving up).
All of this doesn't help to make the traffic any better at all. People will just "train" for the exam and then after they pass, they just unlearn most of it.
Also, you can't safely test highway driving abilities as a bad driver would endanger the other drivers around and whoever is doing the evaluation. So you have a chicken and egg problem. People usually only drive on highways around here after some experience "in the city" and usually avoid heavy traffic until they're comfortable.
The only good formula is common sense. No amount of regulation will fix it. While I do agree that the driving exam in the US is a joke, a good exame would only improve things by a very very small amount.
Google is doing the exact opposite of "ending net neutrality". NYT seriously screwed up this time.
For a moment, I thought all hope was lost but, thankfully, they're still not evil.
You can see in the charts something like 98% piracy in South America.
This happens because... there's no way to buy applications if you're in South America. So, anyone with a paid application here *has* to pirate it.
Well, this is a feature which I appreciate. Keep in mind that if you do:
my $i = "aaa" + 10;
It will complain (if you're coding using the best practices). So I can't see what's the issue.
Perl has an extensibility philosophy. The very fact that Perl *allows* you to use a different object system illustrates this as few/no other languages allow it.
Would you mind saying why you think it sucks? And what other languages do it better?
It seems like the current way to be hip in developer circles is to make fun of Perl.
I really want to understand this phenomenon as I doubt most of these people bashing Perl have never even seen any Perl code written in the last 4 years. Hell, I could bet that a lot of people have never seen any *real* Perl code at all.
Perl 5 is a modern language which has the features of other currently more trendy dynamic languages and more. We have modern web frameworks. We have robust database bindings and state-of-the-art ORM libraries. We have have a well-tested modern object-system with optional declarative syntax. Perl is used by several high profile sites which, at this point, everyone already knows (BBC, DuckDuckGo, Slashdot, etc).
Perl 6 is a different language but shares a lot of the common minds behind all these awesome Perl 5 tools. However, even if you don't like Perl 5 for whatever reason keep in mind that Rakudo Star is a completely different thing (as a matter of fact, the name "Perl 6" should probably be dropped in favor of Rakudo - to avoid all this cargo-cult).
Drive-by-wire steering is allowed in Europe and is used in most vehicles from French manufacturers such as Citröen.
There was a French online RPG called The 4th Coming (T4C) which had free-form conversations with NPCs. It never gained a lot of popularity though, but there still are some online servers for it (google at your will).
And it has been so for a long time so, unfortunately, there isn't much of a freelance IT industry around here.
The problem people from countries such as the US and the UK don't seem to understand is that setting up an actual company in Brazil (and I imagine Ukraine to be similar) is that it's a HUGE hassle. By that I mean it's a 2-3 month process, involving more than 10 different government institutions you need to visit in person. You need to get a proper "commercial address", which can't be your home (unless you re-register it as a commercial building, which is another hassle and pays much higher property taxes).
When I worked as a freelancer, I did the math and I would pay about 25% of my earnings in fees and accounting. Then, I would pay income tax (progressive scale which tops at 27.5%) on the remaining 75%. Also, as a freelancer, I would need to pay 20% to social security instead of the regular 11%.
In short, I would end up with roughly ~50% of what I earned. Then I would proceed to buy goods which were already taxed to hell and my purchasing power would be effectively cut in half again (the cheapest Honda Civic here costs US$37K).
I just restricted to working only to foreign companies. The pay was better *and* I wouldn't need to register myself as a company to do that, as the tax code has general provisions for "money from foreign countries". The consequence is that it was very difficult to prove my income whenever needed (home financing, etc), as everything here requires a "regular" proof of earnings.
From my personal experience, I can say that, yes, this is bad news for Ukrainians.
Brazil is in South America, you know... just sayin'...
Agreed. This is the worst "feature" ever.
Luckily, there are Chrome and Firefox extensions which remove it. But it feels very odd whenever I use someone else's computer and I see that hideous sidebar thing. Just scrap it, really.
I don't mean to troll or anything like that (considering I think Gish is an awesome game and I've bought the Humble Indie Bundle) but... are there any indie games out there that were actually coded in a well-thought manner?
I mean, looking at the Gish source code, it's honestly a mess. You seem to ALWAYS find stuff such as magic numbers, hard-coded level information (ala, if (level == 15) do this different behavior). I've looked at the source for other games and they all seemed to share such "features".
Anyone knows if the non-indie titles also follow this pattern? Maybe it's just an industry thing.
This is a reminder that lawyers just can't be trusted not be complete assholes when aiming for selfish profit.
People are usually fond of class-action lawsuits because most of the times the companies are actually being evil (i.e. Sony). So it's easy to forget or ignore the fact that class-action lawsuit do nothing substantial which benefits the consumer / end-user - they just enrich lawyers.
Now we can see that they just don't care and will even try to paint as evil a company which is disclosing information purely on good will. No one asked them to do it and they could have hidden this information and no one would know. Yet, they disclosed it and now are being screwed over this. What do you think Google or other companies will do the next time around?
So society gets a little bit worse, once again, thanks to the lawyers.
The only thing which keeps me from switching to Chrome is that Firefox still has a non-sucky UI (after some extensions such as LastTab).
If Firefox will look the same as Chrome, I'll just switch as Chrome is way faster.
They're just too eager to jump into the "me too" bandwagon and will lose market share because of it, by betraying their loyal users. They've done it once with the "awesome bar" and are doing it again now. No wonder its market share is currently stagnated.
But this is seriously cool stuff.
This is marketing which probably only really appeals to geeks. Most companies these days are much more worries about the "casual" audience at large.
Google remains true to its origins and is proud of it.
So, yeah, you can say this is all a plan to become the big brother, bring profit to their shareholders or whatever. To me it's just plain neat and I'm glad we have Google around to make sure the other players are kept in check.
Seriously, get your act together. Google almost only makes money off Google ads (and I think more than half of that on Google's own search page).
They've been trialing YouTube and Orkut ads but it doesn't nearly cover the costs as has been reported in the media several times - you can Google it if you're interested, I won't waste any additional time with you.
And how exactly is Google making any profit whatsoever off the user's post? Care to enlighten me?
It's widely known that Google social services such as Youtube and Orkut are basically profit sinks, with Youtube alone generating 500 million / year losses.
Brazil doesn't have any sort of safe harbor provision for providers. So no "carrier immunity" for you.
It's "shoot the messenger, unless he tells us who sent the message and where that person is located".
So, yeah, unemployment rates might be going up but you should still be glad you live in an otherwise decent country.
Either way, the mere fact that anonymous speech is forbidden should be attacked.
This effectively makes it impossible to have real free speech and the pressure should come from outside as, unfortunately, Brazilian citizens don't give a damn about this.
Keep in mind this can potentially affect all of you, as Brazil and BRIC countries in general are gaining momentum in the post-crisis economic scenario.
In a previous story, I commented about how censorship in Brazil should get more international attention.
This is a perfect example of what I was talking about. In Brazil there are no safe harbor provisions for ISPs and judges just refuse to acknowledge the fact that Google Brazil is a subsidiary and might not have any control about Orkut, which is hosted in US ground.
If you think about it, it's actually worse than China in some aspects: it's as if China ordered companies to censor information outside of China, i.e., not even someone in America would be able to search for information regarding the Tiananmen Square massacre. Otherwise, they would fine these companies.
These issues should be brought to the table when considering requests coming from Brazil and the other BRIC countries for additional power in groups such as G20. Our economy might withstand crisis such as the last one better than yours, however, this comes at cost of severily reduced civil liberties.
Make sure this is the example you and your leaders want to follow before praising Brazilian efforts.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Brazilian, living in Brazil)
You're suggesting sites which use AJAX heavily have never been slashdotted?
I didn't mention using AJAX or not using AJAX a single time in my original comment. You can use have a "real" AJAX site using plain-old CGI, I've done that myself. Hell, you can even run full-blown MVC frameworks such as Perl's Catalyst using CGI - it will just be slow as hell, but you can run it.
CGI is only the interface and my point is that forking a process for each request sucks.
Your site can still be Slashdotted even if you're using something like FastCGI, mod_xxxx and so on. But instead of being Slashdotted with a few requests per second, it will potentially handle maybe a hundred per second or even more.
I'm talking about plain-old CGI, specifically.
FastCGI is great and I've deployed several Perl applications using it.
Site is Slashdotted.
And this is the reason why you shouldn't use CGI scripts these days - the interface sucks and forking a process for each request is very expensive.
By the way, before any Perl-bashing trolls come around: they're CGI scripts written in Python (How shocking, huh? Anything sucks when you're using plain old CGI).