So if an ad has racist tones it's ok for a company to post it in a country that doesn't have racial problems?
Looking at an ad and summarily concluding, "those people are racist", without examining the facts (such as the context surrounding the ad), is called prejudice.
Even if someone is paying me for support, they're already paying my hourly rate and they're not about pay an extra $15/hour (which is what it costs without the volume discount, which I'll never use). For the amount they charge, for what is essentially just NAT traversal and a fancy GUI for VNC, I can get the user to install VNC and select "Add new client..." (and I have done so). It's just not a competitive price for me.
How about syntax highlighting? I find sometimes that with highlighting a piece of code is easy to understand but with black-on-white text it's hard to tease out the logic or data structures.
That's true.
Do we start embedding highlighting rules in source code then?
No, and you can imagine why not.
Actually, it's not such a bad idea, if implemented correctly. We could create a standard syntax-highlighting description format, and embed the unique identifier of the format in a comment (à la vim:set filetype=...).
Which side of the argument are you coming down on then?
Whichever side satisfies that condition. From what I can tell, that means using ONLY tabs (i.e. no spaces for horizontal positioning ever) or spaces everywhre. Personally, I prefer spaces everywhere, since it's the least restrictive of those two options, and Vim's softtabstop setting lets me backspace them as if they were tabs.
As for "elastic tabstops", I haven't decided yet. If they become widely implemented in text editors (e.g. Vim, emacs, and I suppose TextPad), I could grow accustomed to them.
My ISP isn't a major telco, it's the local nonprofit cable company, and I guess their infrastructure was designed with TV in mind (who watches cable TV when the power is out, anyway?). They, by default, give you 2 static IP addresses, let you control the filtering level (i.e. you can run a mailserver if you want to, and they actually have an option to disable *all* port filtering), and they don't have one of those idiotic "no servers" policies. And this is in North America. I'm willing to forgive them for the lack of battery backup on their residential routers.
To everybody who is bashing copyright here, I want an answer to this simple question:
* What's your plan?
I have a better question: To everybody who says that the current or proposed abridgement of the freedom of individuals in a free society is acceptable, what is your justification? You'd better have a good answer, and it'd better be scientific, given that you've had the last century or so for experimentation.
So, since all you could do was pick one thing I said
Don't be ridiculous. Every point you made has been refuted dozens of times before, and I happen to know that you have been reading Slashdot long enough to know what those refutations are. In my estimation, you are trolling, and just like members of one class of society ("artists") are not entitled to anything special from anyone else, you are not entitled to yet another refutation of your tired arguments.
Misappropriating and/or "stealing" things that don't belong to you, or just flat out breaking the law (in some jurisdictions), is okay if in someone else's estimation it's actually "helping" them?
I love how there's always someone who will bring useless arguments like, "it's against the law", into a discussion about what the law should be.
As a boss who's come up the technical ranks, I want worst case estimates.
No you don't. You want 90%-95% confidence interval estimates. Worse-case estimates tend to be ridiculous.
I applaud you for recognizing the problems with "realistic estimates" (which are sometimes just an excuse for inexperienced management to refuse to accept the estimates given).
Keep detailed records of how long you spend on particular tasks. Better yet, at the start of the day/week/whatever, write down what you need to do that day/week/whatever, and write down an estimate of how long it will take you. Then, record how long it *actually* took you (even if there were unexpected problems), and compare. After a while, your estimates will improve.
Time estimates aren't really something you can "feel". You make the estimates based on past experience.
You have to know that that sounds like a terribly weak excuse. If the majority of the spiders you take outside will die, and you know this, but you don't know specifically which ones will die, does that make you a more moral person (if you think that killing the spiders is immoral)?
Theoretically, yes, but it would be interesting to see what would really happen. Nobody has declared the North American Free Trade Agreement to be dead, despite outright violation of it by the U.S. numerous times. Personally, I suspect that in this case, if the U.S. didn't force the issue, the treaty would survive in spite of this action.
Declaring something to be simple doesn't make it so. The reality is that tabs/spaces end up being used for horizontal alignment, as well as block indentation. You haven't addressed that at all.
Also, your example of font size is irrelevant, since changing the size of a monospaced font is not a lossy operation.
I would love to see that. That would be the most idiotic move that MS execs could make, ever. Let's speculate on the consequences:
MS execs who try to enter any of a several countries face arrest at the border.
The UK parliament (of "parliamentary supremacy" fame) passes a law seizing Microsoft's UK assets, revoking MS's copyrights, and allocating a bunch of money for developing a secure alternative to _all_ Microsoft software (noting that MS has no copyrights anymore, so not everything has to be written from scratch). Other countries follow suit. This may be unconstitutional in some countries, but by the time the court case finishes, it will be too late.
Within the span of a month, more money than MS has is devoted specifically to eliminating the "Microsoft Threat".
Confidence in Microsoft is completely lost worldwide. Game over.
Someone in Redmond yells, "Who the hell authorized that??".
At a company I worked for, the convention was to have "whitespace only" commits, and use those for fixing indentation problems (this was usually done by the QA guys). As for mucking up diffs, depending on the environment, it's not too difficult to get a whitespace-insensitive diff these days. (This is what was done at the aforementioned company.)
Slashdot Mirror
Looking at an ad and summarily concluding, "those people are racist", without examining the facts (such as the context surrounding the ad), is called prejudice.
Even if someone is paying me for support, they're already paying my hourly rate and they're not about pay an extra $15/hour (which is what it costs without the volume discount, which I'll never use). For the amount they charge, for what is essentially just NAT traversal and a fancy GUI for VNC, I can get the user to install VNC and select "Add new client..." (and I have done so). It's just not a competitive price for me.
That's true.
No, and you can imagine why not.
Actually, it's not such a bad idea, if implemented correctly. We could create a standard syntax-highlighting description format, and embed the unique identifier of the format in a comment (à la vim:set filetype=...).
Whichever side satisfies that condition. From what I can tell, that means using ONLY tabs (i.e. no spaces for horizontal positioning ever) or spaces everywhre. Personally, I prefer spaces everywhere, since it's the least restrictive of those two options, and Vim's softtabstop setting lets me backspace them as if they were tabs.
As for "elastic tabstops", I haven't decided yet. If they become widely implemented in text editors (e.g. Vim, emacs, and I suppose TextPad), I could grow accustomed to them.
Hmm... Coding in FrontPage...
/me shivers
My ISP isn't a major telco, it's the local nonprofit cable company, and I guess their infrastructure was designed with TV in mind (who watches cable TV when the power is out, anyway?). They, by default, give you 2 static IP addresses, let you control the filtering level (i.e. you can run a mailserver if you want to, and they actually have an option to disable *all* port filtering), and they don't have one of those idiotic "no servers" policies. And this is in North America. I'm willing to forgive them for the lack of battery backup on their residential routers.
As someone who understands the difference between copyright and copywriting, I couldn't agree more!
I have a better question: To everybody who says that the current or proposed abridgement of the freedom of individuals in a free society is acceptable, what is your justification? You'd better have a good answer, and it'd better be scientific, given that you've had the last century or so for experimentation.
Don't be ridiculous. Every point you made has been refuted dozens of times before, and I happen to know that you have been reading Slashdot long enough to know what those refutations are. In my estimation, you are trolling, and just like members of one class of society ("artists") are not entitled to anything special from anyone else, you are not entitled to yet another refutation of your tired arguments.
They do. They're called microcontrollers. However, they're not all that great in the ease-of-use department.
No thank you. It's way too friggin expensive.
Or it would have become very cold in that room.
I had that once, until I found out that the routers on the other side of my cable modem aren't battery backed-up.
Maybe it was running ClusterKnoppix?
I love how there's always someone who will bring useless arguments like, "it's against the law", into a discussion about what the law should be.
No you don't. You want 90%-95% confidence interval estimates. Worse-case estimates tend to be ridiculous.
I applaud you for recognizing the problems with "realistic estimates" (which are sometimes just an excuse for inexperienced management to refuse to accept the estimates given).
Time estimates aren't really something you can "feel". You make the estimates based on past experience.
You have to know that that sounds like a terribly weak excuse. If the majority of the spiders you take outside will die, and you know this, but you don't know specifically which ones will die, does that make you a more moral person (if you think that killing the spiders is immoral)?
Theoretically, yes, but it would be interesting to see what would really happen. Nobody has declared the North American Free Trade Agreement to be dead, despite outright violation of it by the U.S. numerous times. Personally, I suspect that in this case, if the U.S. didn't force the issue, the treaty would survive in spite of this action.
Declaring something to be simple doesn't make it so. The reality is that tabs/spaces end up being used for horizontal alignment, as well as block indentation. You haven't addressed that at all.
Also, your example of font size is irrelevant, since changing the size of a monospaced font is not a lossy operation.
There may be consequences, yes, but you are fundamentally wrong.
SI has its own problem... How to pronounce "giga-".
At this point, I don't think there's anything that SCO could say that would truly surprise anyone.
At a company I worked for, the convention was to have "whitespace only" commits, and use those for fixing indentation problems (this was usually done by the QA guys). As for mucking up diffs, depending on the environment, it's not too difficult to get a whitespace-insensitive diff these days. (This is what was done at the aforementioned company.)