As a tech, duckduckgo isn't fantastic. I'm still hunting for a search engine that at least *sometimes* returns more than 2 relevant results (especially since the first 2 results usually aren't what I need).
As a tech, duckduckgo returns whatever bing returns:) It's just an anonymizing front end to bing.
Skype runs fine on G-Tablet. It's one of the few Android devices, other than the few officially blessed HTC phones, which can run the Netflix app (you need to replace stock ROM with Cyanogen, but Cyanogen is by far superior ROM anyway).
Yes, you are. Or you fly through your own airport. I had my bag lost at Los Angeles airport on the way there and on the way back, on the same trip. Both times the airline delivered it about a day later.
If you give me a piece of code under a license, and I didn't do anything to terminate my rights under the license, I have my rights. It's not a contract, you can't terminate it. You still hold the copyright, so your next version can be under any license you want, GPL binds everyone except the copyright holder.
The only exception would be if you didn't have the right to give me that code in the first place (like the already mentioned AOL deal). If you grab someone else's code and slap GPL on it, this does not make the code suddenly free for all.
'It really needs to have really detailed explanations of what the legal expectations are for storing your info.'
You've given Google your data, they can look at it all they want. Simple enough? They will certainly have the service agreement you have to accept when you use the service, with things like how much your copyright on your works protects you and what license you explicitly grant them by uploading copyrighted works to their storage, things like that. But basically, you stored your data on their disk, assume it's their data now. If you don't like it, well, disk space is pretty cheap now, order few disks from Newegg.
Now, protecting the data from 3rd parties is just good business sense for Google: they plan to make money somehow by analyzing the data, if anyone can see the data then anyone can do whatever Google plans to do and take a portion of that money.
Actually, both statements are true in a way: it's difficult to change DC voltage, so we either have to have 10kV in the house, or transmit 110V long-distance. Transmitting low voltage long distance is very inefficient because of wire losses.
Random and uncorrelated are different things. If they randomly select 50% of passengers who fly one way and 0.1% of passengers who fly round-trip, this is a random selection. It happens to be strongly correlated with some other property but it's just as random as the one where they flip a coin every time a passenger walks through.
At the time the world's fastest supercomputer *that you knew about* was being used primarily by climate scientists. There were probably dozens of supercomputers whose existence you never even suspected which were doing weapons research, code breaking, and other stuff for the armed forces and intelligence agencies. Including, but not limited to, those of the USA.
Actually, they do tell oil companies how much to charge for gas: "whatever you change the other guy". Filling in lawn mower and Ford Ranger costs the same, per galon. You end up paying more for the Ranger, because it uses more. So I see nothing wrong with the government telling cable and phone companies the same thing, they can charge whatever they want per mmegabyte whether it's Google or C-list blog.
Finally an intelligent comment on Katrina. C'mon people, if you live ain a city below sea level, you are dealing with a *predictable* disaster. Not only you know it'll one day happen, you know exactly what will happen. Every building should have a red line drawn on it with a sign "this will be the water level if levies fail". Every city office, police, firefighters, school bus drivers, should have emergency plans for what to do when the city floods, and the first thing they should do every morning when they come to work is to make sure they remember what it the first thing they should do when the levies break.
I understand getting surprized by an unpredictable disaster, like an earthquake (you don't know what exactly will fail) but if a city needs federal government to tell them to drive school buses to a higher ground when flood comes in, then perhaps it should be flooded and washed away.
If you consider murder to be morally acceptable, humanity would quickly cease to exist. We would simply destroy each other as a species.
This point of view (and the imperative) certainly is logical, but I don't think its interpretation is as straightforward as you make it. For example, if it were morally acceptable for men to kill other men to take their women, or for women to do the same in a female-dominated society, we might end up with a social structure similar to lions' pride or wolfs' pack. Neither species exterminated themselves, and neither would we. Now, if we considered morally acceptable to murder for fun, that's another story. But there is a more general argument I can make against your interpretation of the imperative: you assume total symmetry and equality, that if it's moral for me to murder someone else the reverse must be true as well. That system leads to annihilation indeed. But what about a system where it's moral to murder children born with severe defects? The old and senile? The crippled? Are you sure that system would not benefit its practitioners, overall? The surviving ones would be stronger and more adopted to life. Or what about a system where it's moral to murder those of opposing views? That's clearly a more shaky case, but even then I'm not 100% sure that there can't be a moral system which will strenghten the overall group at the expense of some of its members.
As no human is demonstrably omniscient, it follows that no single human is capable of knowing what is best for all other people... it is impossible for one man to command the life of another in order for him to maximize his potential. Therefore, it is only reasonable to conclude that any system of morality that is to be most conducive to humanity's prosperity must rest on the moral imperative of man as a self-owning being.
You just assumed that the way to maximize the sum is to maximize each term in the sum. While I certainly can't maximixe humanity's prosperity if I ran the whole world, could it be that the overall humanity's prosperity is somewhat higher if I own just one person, as opposed to me and that person both owning themselves?
However, a sufficiently large group of armed, like-minded people who wished to passively resist the mandates of the state until such time as the state chose to use force against them has a chance of succeeding. History (including recent) is hardly without precedent of a motivated resistance holding off a well-armed force with superior numbers.
Very true. I could say that the key to being a revolutionary is a sense of timing. It makes the difference between guaranteed death in vain and likely death in advancement of a cause. Now I'm swtiching from logical arguments to empirical, of course, but my own sense of timing strongly tells me that now is not a good time to start a revolution:)
We seem to be operating on two different definitions of "rights" here. I could walk next door and shoot my neighbor, steal her belongings, and feed her corpse to starving pigs. My ability to do so, however, does not impart a right to do so... I was refering to rights in the sense of natural rights, not the ability to engage in an action regardless of its moral bearing.
And where do those rights come from? What makes them "natural"? I see a few choices (I might be missing some, of course):
God (or any other being of considerably higher power): can't argue with that one, except to say that I'm free not to believe in such source of rights, and let him enforce those rights if he cares. You *may* refrain from murdering your neighbor for such reason, but if she does not share your faith, watch out for starving pigs.
Universal moral norms. Is no such thing. Even this country is split almost 50-50 on some very basic moral questions, and that's before we take a broader look and include people with really different ideas of morality. Again, *your* moral norms may define murder as unacceptable, but that does not make it universal or natural (large number of people in this country share this norm, of course, but not all, and in some parts of the world it's no big deal)
Constitution or law. This is a right only as long as it's backed up by the power of the government, i.e. people with guns. If you did murder your neighbor, you would have a good chance to meet some of them, and that threat adds to your own moral norms and in most cases is enough to keep your neighbor safe from starving pigs. Note that this reason really boils down to "because you can", people with guns make sure that you can't (if you want to nitpick, you can, taking the word literally, but most people would classify a death threat as "can't").
Now, that's personal rights. Things change a bit when we are dealing with "rights" of whole countries. If there is a God, he stays rather quiet on the subject. There is definitely nothing universally accepted. And there is no world government with enough power to send people with guns to enforce actions of states. So we're back to "because you can", only now the participant states are also people with guns.
As to having an option other than the three you listed (first-strike action against the state, voting, or/. bitching), I sure do. Self-defense isn't murder.
Ignore my quip about using morder against murder, that's not really my point. My point was what I said after that - if you choose this option you will end up dead. I'm not making any moral judgements here, you can be a righteous saintly dead or a criminal deserving dead, my opinion on the subject is not really relevant. So it's an option only for a little while, and then you're really out of options.
Note that I'm not pronouncing any moral judgements here, not using attributes like "good" and "bad". Whether I think that you're a nutjob or speak profound truth is completely irrelevant to this conversation, as is my opinion on whether or not there is a God, and whether the state of the affairs we currently have is good or bad. I'm just going over the facts and their logical consequences, and I still see only 3 options for you to try and change what you don't like.
By what right does the US launch an aggressive military invasion of another country without first being attacked by said country's political state?
The only right one country ever needed to invade another: because it can. I'm not saying it's a good thing, I'm just saying that's how it is. Sure, you can try to change it, which brings us to the next question...
As for voting for candidates who don't support the war, that's an useless solution.
Well, I can see 3 options for you: 1) Vote, 2) Fight, 3) Bitch on Slashdot. You've given up on 1. As for 2, it would be rather ironic if you took up arms and committed murder to defend your right not to partake in a murder, but stranger things happened. More to the point, it's likely that people who don't shy away from violence are better at it than you. That leaves 3, which brings us back to "you can try to change it". Sorry, option 3 ain't it. So you don't like the world you live in and can't change it. Unless you see an option I missed..?
The media is supposed to be independent from the state. A state that uses the media to distribute lies is a mortal danger to freedom, and needs to be deposed, quickly.
The media of the targeted state is supposed to be intependent, yes. The state which targets said state (in this case, US), will try to make the media not independent. If the target state cannot keep media from being used to distribute lies to its population, it will fail. That's the idea of waging a war.
Combined with their planned propoganda campaign, they're looking to completely exclude targeted populations from recieving accurate and timely information.
A great first step in a war against another country.
You may not like the idea of war, any war or a particular war. That's your right. Don't like it - don't fight it and vote for those who think like you, that's your right again. But I expect people whose job it is to make sure my country is ready for war to do the best job they possibly can. I may support some war or not support it, but if it breaks out I want it won as effectively as possible. If military strategists believe that this is a viable way of waging war, they owe it to the citizens of the USA to make sure the army is ready for it (of course, the rest of the world is under no obligation to roll over and in fact other governments owe it to their citizens to do the same).
What ended the DC-vs-AC "war" was not some house wiring but long-range transmission. Simply put, there are no DC transformers (now there are, but they are less efficient and much more complex). That 48V DC power comes into the house through some high-voltage lines. If it was 48V DC all the way from power plant, it would all dissipate in the transmission lines.
Wiring house or data center to DC is really a local issue which has nothing to do with what Edison was fighting Tesla for. My low-voltage garden lights are DC, my model railroad is DC, the data center is the same thing on somewhat larger scale. Think "low-voltage lights in a large park". The scale is about the same, the power consumption is similar, but fewer buzz words so less shock factor.
That's because the phone raises its power output as needed to maintain connection with cell towers (up to certain limit, of course). If you go someplace where you have no signal your battery will drain just as fast.
They waive restocking fees if there's any reason other than you just don't want the part. I ordered a sound card once, they shipped one with the same model name but slightly different model number (in the two days from the time I ordered to the time I got it they also replaced the item number on their web site, same price). Unfortunately, slightly different model number translated into completely different chip, and I wanted the other one. I called, explained that when I ordered they displayed a different model and I specifically wanted that one and no other. They did not ask why, did not argue that the new model is better, just gave me full refund.
Not necessarily. While it makes getting accurate information more complex, the fact that it was edited and the changes are perhaps even more valuable than the content at any moment of time (and Wikipedia keeps a full record of changes!)
May be Wikipedia could do a better job alerting the reader to such changes, so he is less likely to overlook all the extra information. May be if there was a minor edit keep the words highlighted and an easy link see what they were before, and if there was a major change put an alert up on the page. May be not for all articles but only those specially flagged (like they flag articles for vandalism).
Also, as a response to such edits when they are discovered (and may be even automatically for some IPs) Wikipedia could somehow convert the article to the change history, going along with the idea than in this case change is more informative than the content itself. Then edits like removing all mention of the term limit promise are inherently self-defeating.
decltype keyword, which does essentially what typeof would do, was considered for the addition to the standard. I'm not sure if the fact that Bjarne does not mention it means that it was dropped from the proposed changes or it's still in play.
Why decltype and not typeof, you might ask? Several compilers implemented the typeoff extension, but in a slightly different way (for example, GCC did it so typeof(int&) is int, someone else made a typeof which preserves refs). The Standards Committee just could not "endorse" someone's version of typeof for the fear of offending everybody else who had one, so they chose the "equitable solution". Amazing how otherwise reasonable people can become childish and petty when they form a committee.
This being said, your example can actually be solved with auto, and even easier. But there are cases when full typeof is necessary.
ONE innocent will die either way. If you execute people, an innocent will eventually be executed. If you don't execute them, a criminal you failed to execute will eventually kill an innocent. So all plans are flawed and it becomes the question of what's flawed less, and answering this question requires a metric.
For me, the metric is this: I don't want to die from violence. I have a chance to be wrongly executed, and a chance to be killed by a criminal who could have been executed but wasn't. I consider both equally bad, so I want to minimize my total chance of being killed.
From the amount of repeated crime and the amount of anecdotal evidence of certain criminals getting freed for various technical reasons, I suspect that if we biased the system *slightly* toward convicting and executing people easier, my chances of survival would go up. But I have no statistical data or research to confirm or disprove this assumption.
What this guy built is an extension ring, not a macro lens. He used an existing lens, he chose non-macro lens, a macro lens would provide more precise focusing and flat focal plane but otherwise would work the same.
What he built is called extension ring, it fits between the camera and the lens and allows extremely close focusing of any lens. Extension rings go for $20-$40, sometimes you can find them used for less, or you can by a set of 3 for around $100. Factory-made rings usually preserve automatic functions of the lens, at least aperture control, sometimes even autofocus. They are usually much shorter than the pringles can, anywhere from 9mm to 45mm (and you can stack them).
So this little contraption does save you some bucks, just not as much as you might have hoped if you read the title and priced a macro lens.
Re:GCC is important, but what about progress in C+
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'Typeof' and 'auto' are completely different things: 'auto' would be used in place of a type in variable declarations. For example: auto var = 1 + 2;
G++ allows this: typeof(1 + 2) var = 1 + 2; Not as convenient as auto, but until auto becomes part of the standard, juggling non-standard extensions hardly seems justified.
If it is hard, than make it not hard: why should destructors be executed deterministically? manual memory management will still be there for that reason.
Because a language in which destructors are not executed deterministically is not C++, and G++ is a C++ compiler. Does it mean that such language is "bad"? Of course not. C++ has several strengths, and the standard committee watches above all that any new language features to not destroy those strengths. If you're willing to trade some of these strengths for other features you want, you're looking for a different language. C++ should not try to be the one language to end all languages (we already tried that, remember PL/1?)
The only one I know of is the Boehm's collector, which is a very great hack
There are others, but they are compiler-specific: while not part of the compiler itself, they use the internal knowledge of how a particular compiler, and usually a particular C library, handle memory allocations. Which is exactly what you asked for, a compiler-specific GC.
TR1 offers many goodies, and boost even more, but a modern app needs quite a lot more.
Perhaps modern app, at least the one you're writing, needs a different language then?
why? just because the C++ commitee is so stubborn? hello? 2005 called and said that a modern language needs modern libraries.
And what do you expect G++ developers to do about that? Putting together a library which is even larger than Boost is enormous amount of work, and can only end up one of three ways: nobody uses it, it becomes an standalone project like Boost (because at this point it really has very little to do with the compiler, thus no reason to keep the two projects tied together), or it supplants the standard. The first is a waste of effort, the second is a very worthwhile project but G++ developers are already busy working on one, and the third... let's just say that if someone knew how to do that, we'd have a larger standard library by now.
Re:GCC is important, but what about progress in C+
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GCC 4.1 Released
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1) type inference and the 'auto' keyword, as it was suggested a while back.
Not part of the standard (yet) and may change before it becomes standard. G++ already has 'typeof' keyword, no reason to replace one extension by another extension until the standard is finished.
2) real garbage collection.
Again not part of the standard, furthermore it's pretty hard to reconsile the standard's requirements that destructors must execute deterministically with any garbage collection. Standard may be extended to include GC in the future, but for now you have to use a 3rd-party GC, there are several for C++.
3) a standard library that goes beyond collections, algorithms and files
G++ includes TR1 libraries, which is a likely next standard for C++ standard library. Beyond that, you can try Boost for a larger library, but don't expect any compiler to include a library which goes far beyond the standard.
While it's certainly true that there is no way to disprove Intelligent Design, I don't see how you can disprove the alternative either. And I don't mean the evolution of species, that you could disprove. I mean the creation of the first life. The theory, basically, says, that in some organics-rich goo the first DNA formed essentially by accident, at random. What experiment or observation would convince you that this theory is wrong? Another theory is that it was brought from the outer space, but that's really no better, it just moves the location of the first goo elsewhere, besides, this theory is also impossible to disprove.
Even if we reproduced the exact conditions on Earth a billion years ago or so, create a goo of plausible composition, and found that DNA formed in the lab (and then proteins and cell membranes), all that would do is make the theory plausible, even likely. But it does not make it falsifiable! So, what would you need to see, with your own eyes, that would force you to logically conclude that the theory of spontaneous life creation is wrong?
Slashdot Mirror
As a tech, duckduckgo isn't fantastic. I'm still hunting for a search engine that at least *sometimes* returns more than 2 relevant results (especially since the first 2 results usually aren't what I need).
As a tech, duckduckgo returns whatever bing returns :) It's just an anonymizing front end to bing.
Skype runs fine on G-Tablet. It's one of the few Android devices, other than the few officially blessed HTC phones, which can run the Netflix app (you need to replace stock ROM with Cyanogen, but Cyanogen is by far superior ROM anyway).
Yes, you are. Or you fly through your own airport. I had my bag lost at Los Angeles airport on the way there and on the way back, on the same trip. Both times the airline delivered it about a day later.
If you give me a piece of code under a license, and I didn't do anything to terminate my rights under the license, I have my rights. It's not a contract, you can't terminate it. You still hold the copyright, so your next version can be under any license you want, GPL binds everyone except the copyright holder.
The only exception would be if you didn't have the right to give me that code in the first place (like the already mentioned AOL deal). If you grab someone else's code and slap GPL on it, this does not make the code suddenly free for all.
You've given Google your data, they can look at it all they want. Simple enough? They will certainly have the service agreement you have to accept when you use the service, with things like how much your copyright on your works protects you and what license you explicitly grant them by uploading copyrighted works to their storage, things like that. But basically, you stored your data on their disk, assume it's their data now. If you don't like it, well, disk space is pretty cheap now, order few disks from Newegg.
Now, protecting the data from 3rd parties is just good business sense for Google: they plan to make money somehow by analyzing the data, if anyone can see the data then anyone can do whatever Google plans to do and take a portion of that money.
Actually, both statements are true in a way: it's difficult to change DC voltage, so we either have to have 10kV in the house, or transmit 110V long-distance. Transmitting low voltage long distance is very inefficient because of wire losses.
Random and uncorrelated are different things. If they randomly select 50% of passengers who fly one way and 0.1% of passengers who fly round-trip, this is a random selection. It happens to be strongly correlated with some other property but it's just as random as the one where they flip a coin every time a passenger walks through.
At the time the world's fastest supercomputer *that you knew about* was being used primarily by climate scientists. There were probably dozens of supercomputers whose existence you never even suspected which were doing weapons research, code breaking, and other stuff for the armed forces and intelligence agencies. Including, but not limited to, those of the USA.
Actually, they do tell oil companies how much to charge for gas: "whatever you change the other guy". Filling in lawn mower and Ford Ranger costs the same, per galon. You end up paying more for the Ranger, because it uses more. So I see nothing wrong with the government telling cable and phone companies the same thing, they can charge whatever they want per mmegabyte whether it's Google or C-list blog.
Finally an intelligent comment on Katrina. C'mon people, if you live ain a city below sea level, you are dealing with a *predictable* disaster. Not only you know it'll one day happen, you know exactly what will happen. Every building should have a red line drawn on it with a sign "this will be the water level if levies fail". Every city office, police, firefighters, school bus drivers, should have emergency plans for what to do when the city floods, and the first thing they should do every morning when they come to work is to make sure they remember what it the first thing they should do when the levies break.
I understand getting surprized by an unpredictable disaster, like an earthquake (you don't know what exactly will fail) but if a city needs federal government to tell them to drive school buses to a higher ground when flood comes in, then perhaps it should be flooded and washed away.
We had one. That's why we won't elect another one, at least until the last person who remembers the gas station lines is dead.
This point of view (and the imperative) certainly is logical, but I don't think its interpretation is as straightforward as you make it. For example, if it were morally acceptable for men to kill other men to take their women, or for women to do the same in a female-dominated society, we might end up with a social structure similar to lions' pride or wolfs' pack. Neither species exterminated themselves, and neither would we. Now, if we considered morally acceptable to murder for fun, that's another story. But there is a more general argument I can make against your interpretation of the imperative: you assume total symmetry and equality, that if it's moral for me to murder someone else the reverse must be true as well. That system leads to annihilation indeed. But what about a system where it's moral to murder children born with severe defects? The old and senile? The crippled? Are you sure that system would not benefit its practitioners, overall? The surviving ones would be stronger and more adopted to life. Or what about a system where it's moral to murder those of opposing views? That's clearly a more shaky case, but even then I'm not 100% sure that there can't be a moral system which will strenghten the overall group at the expense of some of its members.
As no human is demonstrably omniscient, it follows that no single human is capable of knowing what is best for all other people ... it is impossible for one man to command the life of another in order for him to maximize his potential. Therefore, it is only reasonable to conclude that any system of morality that is to be most conducive to humanity's prosperity must rest on the moral imperative of man as a self-owning being.
You just assumed that the way to maximize the sum is to maximize each term in the sum. While I certainly can't maximixe humanity's prosperity if I ran the whole world, could it be that the overall humanity's prosperity is somewhat higher if I own just one person, as opposed to me and that person both owning themselves?
However, a sufficiently large group of armed, like-minded people who wished to passively resist the mandates of the state until such time as the state chose to use force against them has a chance of succeeding. History (including recent) is hardly without precedent of a motivated resistance holding off a well-armed force with superior numbers.
Very true. I could say that the key to being a revolutionary is a sense of timing. It makes the difference between guaranteed death in vain and likely death in advancement of a cause. Now I'm swtiching from logical arguments to empirical, of course, but my own sense of timing strongly tells me that now is not a good time to start a revolution :)
And where do those rights come from? What makes them "natural"? I see a few choices (I might be missing some, of course):
God (or any other being of considerably higher power): can't argue with that one, except to say that I'm free not to believe in such source of rights, and let him enforce those rights if he cares. You *may* refrain from murdering your neighbor for such reason, but if she does not share your faith, watch out for starving pigs.
Universal moral norms. Is no such thing. Even this country is split almost 50-50 on some very basic moral questions, and that's before we take a broader look and include people with really different ideas of morality. Again, *your* moral norms may define murder as unacceptable, but that does not make it universal or natural (large number of people in this country share this norm, of course, but not all, and in some parts of the world it's no big deal)
Constitution or law. This is a right only as long as it's backed up by the power of the government, i.e. people with guns. If you did murder your neighbor, you would have a good chance to meet some of them, and that threat adds to your own moral norms and in most cases is enough to keep your neighbor safe from starving pigs. Note that this reason really boils down to "because you can", people with guns make sure that you can't (if you want to nitpick, you can, taking the word literally, but most people would classify a death threat as "can't").
Now, that's personal rights. Things change a bit when we are dealing with "rights" of whole countries. If there is a God, he stays rather quiet on the subject. There is definitely nothing universally accepted. And there is no world government with enough power to send people with guns to enforce actions of states. So we're back to "because you can", only now the participant states are also people with guns.
As to having an option other than the three you listed (first-strike action against the state, voting, or
Ignore my quip about using morder against murder, that's not really my point. My point was what I said after that - if you choose this option you will end up dead. I'm not making any moral judgements here, you can be a righteous saintly dead or a criminal deserving dead, my opinion on the subject is not really relevant. So it's an option only for a little while, and then you're really out of options.
Note that I'm not pronouncing any moral judgements here, not using attributes like "good" and "bad". Whether I think that you're a nutjob or speak profound truth is completely irrelevant to this conversation, as is my opinion on whether or not there is a God, and whether the state of the affairs we currently have is good or bad. I'm just going over the facts and their logical consequences, and I still see only 3 options for you to try and change what you don't like.
The only right one country ever needed to invade another: because it can. I'm not saying it's a good thing, I'm just saying that's how it is. Sure, you can try to change it, which brings us to the next question...
As for voting for candidates who don't support the war, that's an useless solution.
Well, I can see 3 options for you: 1) Vote, 2) Fight, 3) Bitch on Slashdot. You've given up on 1. As for 2, it would be rather ironic if you took up arms and committed murder to defend your right not to partake in a murder, but stranger things happened. More to the point, it's likely that people who don't shy away from violence are better at it than you. That leaves 3, which brings us back to "you can try to change it". Sorry, option 3 ain't it. So you don't like the world you live in and can't change it. Unless you see an option I missed..?
The media of the targeted state is supposed to be intependent, yes. The state which targets said state (in this case, US), will try to make the media not independent. If the target state cannot keep media from being used to distribute lies to its population, it will fail. That's the idea of waging a war.
Combined with their planned propoganda campaign, they're looking to completely exclude targeted populations from recieving accurate and timely information.
A great first step in a war against another country.
You may not like the idea of war, any war or a particular war. That's your right. Don't like it - don't fight it and vote for those who think like you, that's your right again. But I expect people whose job it is to make sure my country is ready for war to do the best job they possibly can. I may support some war or not support it, but if it breaks out I want it won as effectively as possible. If military strategists believe that this is a viable way of waging war, they owe it to the citizens of the USA to make sure the army is ready for it (of course, the rest of the world is under no obligation to roll over and in fact other governments owe it to their citizens to do the same).
What ended the DC-vs-AC "war" was not some house wiring but long-range transmission. Simply put, there are no DC transformers (now there are, but they are less efficient and much more complex). That 48V DC power comes into the house through some high-voltage lines. If it was 48V DC all the way from power plant, it would all dissipate in the transmission lines.
Wiring house or data center to DC is really a local issue which has nothing to do with what Edison was fighting Tesla for. My low-voltage garden lights are DC, my model railroad is DC, the data center is the same thing on somewhat larger scale. Think "low-voltage lights in a large park". The scale is about the same, the power consumption is similar, but fewer buzz words so less shock factor.
That's because the phone raises its power output as needed to maintain connection with cell towers (up to certain limit, of course). If you go someplace where you have no signal your battery will drain just as fast.
They waive restocking fees if there's any reason other than you just don't want the part. I ordered a sound card once, they shipped one with the same model name but slightly different model number (in the two days from the time I ordered to the time I got it they also replaced the item number on their web site, same price). Unfortunately, slightly different model number translated into completely different chip, and I wanted the other one. I called, explained that when I ordered they displayed a different model and I specifically wanted that one and no other. They did not ask why, did not argue that the new model is better, just gave me full refund.
Not necessarily. While it makes getting accurate information more complex, the fact that it was edited and the changes are perhaps even more valuable than the content at any moment of time (and Wikipedia keeps a full record of changes!)
May be Wikipedia could do a better job alerting the reader to such changes, so he is less likely to overlook all the extra information. May be if there was a minor edit keep the words highlighted and an easy link see what they were before, and if there was a major change put an alert up on the page. May be not for all articles but only those specially flagged (like they flag articles for vandalism).
Also, as a response to such edits when they are discovered (and may be even automatically for some IPs) Wikipedia could somehow convert the article to the change history, going along with the idea than in this case change is more informative than the content itself. Then edits like removing all mention of the term limit promise are inherently self-defeating.
decltype keyword, which does essentially what typeof would do, was considered for the addition to the standard. I'm not sure if the fact that Bjarne does not mention it means that it was dropped from the proposed changes or it's still in play.
Why decltype and not typeof, you might ask? Several compilers implemented the typeoff extension, but in a slightly different way (for example, GCC did it so typeof(int&) is int, someone else made a typeof which preserves refs). The Standards Committee just could not "endorse" someone's version of typeof for the fear of offending everybody else who had one, so they chose the "equitable solution". Amazing how otherwise reasonable people can become childish and petty when they form a committee.
This being said, your example can actually be solved with auto, and even easier. But there are cases when full typeof is necessary.
ONE innocent will die either way. If you execute people, an innocent will eventually be executed. If you don't execute them, a criminal you failed to execute will eventually kill an innocent. So all plans are flawed and it becomes the question of what's flawed less, and answering this question requires a metric.
For me, the metric is this: I don't want to die from violence. I have a chance to be wrongly executed, and a chance to be killed by a criminal who could have been executed but wasn't. I consider both equally bad, so I want to minimize my total chance of being killed.
From the amount of repeated crime and the amount of anecdotal evidence of certain criminals getting freed for various technical reasons, I suspect that if we biased the system *slightly* toward convicting and executing people easier, my chances of survival would go up. But I have no statistical data or research to confirm or disprove this assumption.
What this guy built is an extension ring, not a macro lens. He used an existing lens, he chose non-macro lens, a macro lens would provide more precise focusing and flat focal plane but otherwise would work the same.
What he built is called extension ring, it fits between the camera and the lens and allows extremely close focusing of any lens. Extension rings go for $20-$40, sometimes you can find them used for less, or you can by a set of 3 for around $100. Factory-made rings usually preserve automatic functions of the lens, at least aperture control, sometimes even autofocus. They are usually much shorter than the pringles can, anywhere from 9mm to 45mm (and you can stack them).
So this little contraption does save you some bucks, just not as much as you might have hoped if you read the title and priced a macro lens.
G++ allows this: typeof(1 + 2) var = 1 + 2; Not as convenient as auto, but until auto becomes part of the standard, juggling non-standard extensions hardly seems justified.
If it is hard, than make it not hard: why should destructors be executed deterministically? manual memory management will still be there for that reason.
Because a language in which destructors are not executed deterministically is not C++, and G++ is a C++ compiler. Does it mean that such language is "bad"? Of course not. C++ has several strengths, and the standard committee watches above all that any new language features to not destroy those strengths. If you're willing to trade some of these strengths for other features you want, you're looking for a different language. C++ should not try to be the one language to end all languages (we already tried that, remember PL/1?)
The only one I know of is the Boehm's collector, which is a very great hack
There are others, but they are compiler-specific: while not part of the compiler itself, they use the internal knowledge of how a particular compiler, and usually a particular C library, handle memory allocations. Which is exactly what you asked for, a compiler-specific GC.
TR1 offers many goodies, and boost even more, but a modern app needs quite a lot more.
Perhaps modern app, at least the one you're writing, needs a different language then?
why? just because the C++ commitee is so stubborn? hello? 2005 called and said that a modern language needs modern libraries.
And what do you expect G++ developers to do about that? Putting together a library which is even larger than Boost is enormous amount of work, and can only end up one of three ways: nobody uses it, it becomes an standalone project like Boost (because at this point it really has very little to do with the compiler, thus no reason to keep the two projects tied together), or it supplants the standard. The first is a waste of effort, the second is a very worthwhile project but G++ developers are already busy working on one, and the third ... let's just say that if someone knew how to do that, we'd have a larger standard library by now.
Not part of the standard (yet) and may change before it becomes standard. G++ already has 'typeof' keyword, no reason to replace one extension by another extension until the standard is finished.
2) real garbage collection.
Again not part of the standard, furthermore it's pretty hard to reconsile the standard's requirements that destructors must execute deterministically with any garbage collection. Standard may be extended to include GC in the future, but for now you have to use a 3rd-party GC, there are several for C++.
3) a standard library that goes beyond collections, algorithms and files
G++ includes TR1 libraries, which is a likely next standard for C++ standard library. Beyond that, you can try Boost for a larger library, but don't expect any compiler to include a library which goes far beyond the standard.
While it's certainly true that there is no way to disprove Intelligent Design, I don't see how you can disprove the alternative either. And I don't mean the evolution of species, that you could disprove. I mean the creation of the first life. The theory, basically, says, that in some organics-rich goo the first DNA formed essentially by accident, at random. What experiment or observation would convince you that this theory is wrong? Another theory is that it was brought from the outer space, but that's really no better, it just moves the location of the first goo elsewhere, besides, this theory is also impossible to disprove.
Even if we reproduced the exact conditions on Earth a billion years ago or so, create a goo of plausible composition, and found that DNA formed in the lab (and then proteins and cell membranes), all that would do is make the theory plausible, even likely. But it does not make it falsifiable! So, what would you need to see, with your own eyes, that would force you to logically conclude that the theory of spontaneous life creation is wrong?