"all the people unfortunate enough to have bought the stock in the last 24 hrs have to sit on their hands while anybody who bought the stock over 24 hrs ago is able to sell it? It seems completely arbitrary" Alright, fine let's allow INSTANT trades.
You just bought company X stock and you hear on the news that they're going belly up 10 hours from now. Who the fuck is going to buy it? No one has to wait to buy or sell but you're out of your god damn mind if you think that anyone is going to invest in a company that they know is going to go to hell at some definite point in the future. Doesn't matter if you have to wait one millisecond or one day, no one with that stock is going to be in a good situation.
Those events take HOURS or DAYS. Sure, the CEO takes a second to die, but it's not as if the company's stock price is hooked up to his heart rate monitor. The rest of the company management then has to go decide how they're going to run the company. Based on these decisions (that take hours to make) it's possible that not a lot will change with the company.
Natural disasters require time to asses. See what was destroyed, can production be picked up at another location to compensate?
Evidence of fraud. Again, takes time to asses. The company has to go to trial, etc.
The problem with all these factors is that they're purely emotional. People are making trades based on their emotions which results in bad decisions. That might be fine for a private citizen where his actions don't affect other people. The problem is that the market affects everyone and allowing a handful of emotional people to destroy the livelihoods of literally the entire country is simply asking for trouble.
For crying out loud this isn't a damned circuit, this is the stock market. Yes, if you're trying to stabilize the speed of a wheel being driven by a motor then yes, you need a small delay.
What we're talking about here is people trading. I fail to see how limiting information to people trading could possibly result in a better outcome. You're asking people to trade based on LESS INFORMATION.
"You just bought Ford stock an hour ago, and now you just learned that the company is declaring bankruptcy effective 5 o'clock today."
Any company that could be functioning fine one minute and declaring bankruptcy within 24 hours is a company that's obviously high-risk to begin with because there's no way in hell a well established company couple possibly do what you just described.
You're stretching this too far. "Given the hundreds of millions of events that occur every second" Yeah, sure, if you're counting things like a butterfly flapping its wings off the coast of Africa. The air currents it generates (etc.) causes a hurricane in Florida and destroys a building that was owned by a subsidiary of a company (etc.) and the stock looses some value.
Of course, you're failing to account for knowledge of these events. Let's say that a company does something, how the hell does anyone know about it milliseconds later? Think about this, light will travel about 300 km over one millisecond. There is no way you can hear about a company in California doing something in the New York stock exchange in one millisecond. It isn't physically possible.
So even if these events do occur at this speed (which they don't) you can't find out about them until minutes later.
And even once you hear about them you still have to analyze them. A computer can't decide that a hurricane in flordia means that you should sell stock for company X and buy stock for company Y. These computers doing these millisecond trades are doing it based off of a bunch of mathematical algorithms. (e.x. if stock X value is greater than A and stock Y value is less than B then buy stock N (etc.)) That's not trading, that's gambling, pure and simple.
"Consider this: if millisecond trades are possible, and make sense, then why not microsecond trades? Nanoseconds?..."
The reason is simply because technology hasn't progressed to the point where that's practical (although this definition of "practical" might be a little odd). It will get to that point eventually. I don't think there's any reason that it will stop because your idea, somewhat akin to common sense, isn't ever going to happen unfortunately. Just try telling big companies that they can't make money by gambling in the stock market and you'll meet more resistance than you thought possible.
The only companies that might agree with you are the ones that go out of business in the course of a week or less because of these kinds of trades. Of course they can't fight for your cause because they're already out of business.
"The science PROVES it - along with several other things"
No, damnit, science does not prove anything. Furthermore, science cannot prove OR disprove a damn thing that happens in the bible. Scientific theories are basically educated guesses that are tested through experimentation and thus can only be disproved by an experiment in which the hypothesis does not hold. It doesn't matter how many experiments are consistent with the hypothesis, it is never PROVEN because there's the possibility that an experiment will disprove it in the future. Thus, things like gravity are technically "theories". (A scientific "law" is really a theory with a lot of evidence to support it. Seriously, go look it up.) There still exists the possibility that we'll find a part of the universe in which gravity doesn't work like we think it does. We haven't found such a place yet, but real scientists aren't so naive as to think we've encountered 100% of every possible situation in the entire fucking universe.
The thing about religion is that it isn't science. You cannot disprove religion through any experiment because the results of the experiment could have been fabricated by "god" regardless of whatever the fuck actually happened.
Religion and science are two entirely separate things. No, they cannot be allies. If I were to make a "god-o-meter" that detected the presence of a god, turned it on, and the display said "there is no god" then the counter argument is "god does exist and he made the machine display that anyway". Religion demands blind faith, science demands evidence. The two are diametrically opposed.
So, to address your point. IF there was a god then it is entirely possible that he got Mary pregnant without the use of his dick. Again, science can't disprove it. "So, I need to put my brain in the trash bin to have a religion?" Yes, because believing in any religion requires believing in things with no evidence to support their existence, which is stupid.
"(a) that is the view that defines the law" What defines the law is what the population will put up with. If no one will put up with the lawyer's bullshit view then it's unenforceable.
"(b) it seems far less ridiculous after one studies the history of copyright law beginning in the 1500s."
It doesn't seem any less ridiculous, you can just see how something so stupid came from lots of smaller less stupid decisions. Doesn't matter how it got to where it is now, it's still fucking stupid.
You know what, I think that's exactly what was going on.
The teacher I had was a complete moron and didn't even understand the code I was trying to show her that had this problem. I eventually was able to fix it because of my knowledge of C.
I'll admit I think that class gave me a negative view of python. Perhaps I'll go reconsider my opinion.
This should not be modded flamebait, kdawson is pushing his opinion into the main post rather than in a comment like everyone else. Clearly, he's a biased editor, this isn't a discussion, it's a fact. You can not, BY DEFINITION, put your opinion into an article and NOT be biased.
Anyway, why shouldn't we use the nuclear option to control the oil leak? This is an ENGINEERING problem, not a fucking moral one. Let the engineers decide of a nuclear bomb would best control the oil leak.
Nonsense statements like "nuclear weapons are always bad" don't help anyone. According to the previous article on slashdot the Russians have used nuclear blasts five times to control things like this with an 80% success rate. Obviously, there are risks and problems, just like there are with every option. If the ENGINEERS (not idiots that think "nuclear ANYTHING is ALWAYS bad") decide that a nuclear blast is the best option then we should go for it.
Tell me, kdawson, where did you get your degree in nuclear engineering? You don't have one? Well then how about your degree in environmental engineering? No? Then how can you say that the nuclear option is a bad idea before trained scientists that actually know what they're doing have even evaluated the situation?
"Imagine that you run a coffee shop. You want your customers to use the space in front of the shop while in the shop, and you don't want someone who works across the street to hog the space for 8 hours straight. So to keep the spaces open for customers, you restrict parking time to how long it takes to buy and consume coffee and a sandwich."
That'd be great except that you, as the coffee shop owner, do NOT own that road. That road belongs to the taxpayers. You have no right to restrict who parks on the PUBLIC street. It would be a different story if YOU owned the road. Of course, that would mean that YOU have to pay to build the road in the first place. If you're willing to pay for it, then be my guest, you have every right to charge for use of the road.
What the real issue here is that the coffee shop owner wants to take PRIVATE control of PUBLIC property. I might as well try and claim ownership of the police station down the street and charge everyone who works there for use of the building.
How can a screwdriver do serious harm? Sure, if you stab a guy with it. But you know what, you can kick people with shoes, punch people with fists, strangle them with your belt, etc. Should those be illegal too?
I'm not a CS major, I'm a mechanical engineering major and I just wanted to learn how to program as a hobby. I found it a lot easier to learn C than anything else I tried.
I'm not going to pretend to know how to program very well but I thought that because C didn't do very much for you that it gave a better foundation for learning other languages. I did learn a bit of python, but it was easier after learning C because you know what's going on "behind the scenes" so to speak.
For example, I had this weird ass problem in python where, for some reason, it was treating an integer value as a string. In C you have to specify variable types when you declare them. Because I knew about different variable types I knew that I had to look up how to explicitly declare variables as certain types in python. In C, you have to learn things like variable types, casting, pointers, etc. just to make a program that does anything at all. Languages like python are taught such that you completely gloss over these subjects and just assume that the computer magically knows what you're trying to tell it to do. When you run into a problem you can't fix it because you don't know what's actually going on.
I suggest that introductory programming classes use C rather than other things. The counter argument I generally get is "We want the students to make a program that actually does something so that they can write some programs after only a couple lectures". This loosely translates to "we want to entertain the students rather than teach them."
Although perhaps there's a middle ground. For non-CS majors, teach a language like python. Python allows for quick programs that, while not amazingly efficient, don't really need to be. For example, formatting a file with a shitload of data from a strain gauge. This might have to be done a total of, say, two times and thus efficiency really isn't an issue. Furthermore, non-CS majors (like mechanical and electrical engineers) don't have to understand the very basics of programming, they don't have much relevance to their field. For CS majors, start off with languages like C because their job is to understand the very very basics.
Why is this modded informative? This should be modded troll.
"2. Parking like this is stupid and wears down the tires unevenly and too fast." Obviously the point isn't that this is an efficient parking method, it's that it's a fucking awesome method that's being performed by a ROBOT. Of course you can't do this on problematic conditions, that ain't the fucking point in the first place.
Let's see, the government is blaming people that are IN FAVOR of the 18+ rating for the government's lack of action regarding implementing the said rating.
The government is telling people that by voicing their opinions they are actually harming their own cause. I can't imagine a greater way of suppressing political dissent. I'd be surprised if this had anything to do with video games at all. More likely it's the government using this as an issue that many people are passionate about to try and start discouraging people from expressing their opinions.
"Your car has to be registered and insured, and you have to follow a long list of rules while driving."
Hold on a second there. You don't have to have your car registered or insured or follow any laws if you're on private property. You're free to do whatever the fuck you want in private. But when you bring your car onto PUBLIC roads, you don't have the same rights. That road isn't yours, it's the taxpayers'.
He's obviously referring to the generation and sale of these for purposes other than research. You should read his post more carefully, it's obvious that research into finding a cure for disease (which generally requires having some of the disease) does not apply to the proposed restrictions.
That's exactly what the police and the legal system were created for. The kid calls the police, the police arrest the kids who did this for assault. The school expels the students convicted of assault as they assaulted another student on school grounds. The kid then sues the kids who did this in civil court and he gets a free college education at their expense.
"On the one hand, I hate not being able to copy my music across devices. I hate having to be connected to the internet to be able to play a certain game. On the other hand, people who create useful/entertaining/valuable things should be compensated for it, if they so wish."
The problems you describe have NOTHING to do with the creators wishing to be compensated. Payment does NOT necessitate absurd DRM.
Slashdot Mirror
"all the people unfortunate enough to have bought the stock in the last 24 hrs have to sit on their hands while anybody who bought the stock over 24 hrs ago is able to sell it? It seems completely arbitrary"
Alright, fine let's allow INSTANT trades.
You just bought company X stock and you hear on the news that they're going belly up 10 hours from now. Who the fuck is going to buy it? No one has to wait to buy or sell but you're out of your god damn mind if you think that anyone is going to invest in a company that they know is going to go to hell at some definite point in the future. Doesn't matter if you have to wait one millisecond or one day, no one with that stock is going to be in a good situation.
Those events take HOURS or DAYS. Sure, the CEO takes a second to die, but it's not as if the company's stock price is hooked up to his heart rate monitor. The rest of the company management then has to go decide how they're going to run the company. Based on these decisions (that take hours to make) it's possible that not a lot will change with the company.
Natural disasters require time to asses. See what was destroyed, can production be picked up at another location to compensate?
Evidence of fraud. Again, takes time to asses. The company has to go to trial, etc.
The problem with all these factors is that they're purely emotional. People are making trades based on their emotions which results in bad decisions. That might be fine for a private citizen where his actions don't affect other people. The problem is that the market affects everyone and allowing a handful of emotional people to destroy the livelihoods of literally the entire country is simply asking for trouble.
For crying out loud this isn't a damned circuit, this is the stock market.
Yes, if you're trying to stabilize the speed of a wheel being driven by a motor then yes, you need a small delay.
What we're talking about here is people trading. I fail to see how limiting information to people trading could possibly result in a better outcome. You're asking people to trade based on LESS INFORMATION.
"You just bought Ford stock an hour ago, and now you just learned that the company is declaring bankruptcy effective 5 o'clock today."
Any company that could be functioning fine one minute and declaring bankruptcy within 24 hours is a company that's obviously high-risk to begin with because there's no way in hell a well established company couple possibly do what you just described.
You're stretching this too far. "Given the hundreds of millions of events that occur every second" Yeah, sure, if you're counting things like a butterfly flapping its wings off the coast of Africa. The air currents it generates (etc.) causes a hurricane in Florida and destroys a building that was owned by a subsidiary of a company (etc.) and the stock looses some value.
Of course, you're failing to account for knowledge of these events. Let's say that a company does something, how the hell does anyone know about it milliseconds later? Think about this, light will travel about 300 km over one millisecond. There is no way you can hear about a company in California doing something in the New York stock exchange in one millisecond. It isn't physically possible.
So even if these events do occur at this speed (which they don't) you can't find out about them until minutes later.
And even once you hear about them you still have to analyze them. A computer can't decide that a hurricane in flordia means that you should sell stock for company X and buy stock for company Y. These computers doing these millisecond trades are doing it based off of a bunch of mathematical algorithms. (e.x. if stock X value is greater than A and stock Y value is less than B then buy stock N (etc.)) That's not trading, that's gambling, pure and simple.
"Consider this: if millisecond trades are possible, and make sense, then why not microsecond trades? Nanoseconds? ..."
The reason is simply because technology hasn't progressed to the point where that's practical (although this definition of "practical" might be a little odd). It will get to that point eventually. I don't think there's any reason that it will stop because your idea, somewhat akin to common sense, isn't ever going to happen unfortunately. Just try telling big companies that they can't make money by gambling in the stock market and you'll meet more resistance than you thought possible.
The only companies that might agree with you are the ones that go out of business in the course of a week or less because of these kinds of trades. Of course they can't fight for your cause because they're already out of business.
"If having the information off the phone helps them capture counterfeiters and helps to uncover terroristic plots against US dignitaries, fine by me."
The ends justify the means. Brilliant. That never goes wrong.
"The science PROVES it - along with several other things"
No, damnit, science does not prove anything. Furthermore, science cannot prove OR disprove a damn thing that happens in the bible. Scientific theories are basically educated guesses that are tested through experimentation and thus can only be disproved by an experiment in which the hypothesis does not hold. It doesn't matter how many experiments are consistent with the hypothesis, it is never PROVEN because there's the possibility that an experiment will disprove it in the future. Thus, things like gravity are technically "theories". (A scientific "law" is really a theory with a lot of evidence to support it. Seriously, go look it up.) There still exists the possibility that we'll find a part of the universe in which gravity doesn't work like we think it does. We haven't found such a place yet, but real scientists aren't so naive as to think we've encountered 100% of every possible situation in the entire fucking universe.
The thing about religion is that it isn't science. You cannot disprove religion through any experiment because the results of the experiment could have been fabricated by "god" regardless of whatever the fuck actually happened.
Religion and science are two entirely separate things. No, they cannot be allies. If I were to make a "god-o-meter" that detected the presence of a god, turned it on, and the display said "there is no god" then the counter argument is "god does exist and he made the machine display that anyway". Religion demands blind faith, science demands evidence. The two are diametrically opposed.
So, to address your point. IF there was a god then it is entirely possible that he got Mary pregnant without the use of his dick. Again, science can't disprove it.
"So, I need to put my brain in the trash bin to have a religion?" Yes, because believing in any religion requires believing in things with no evidence to support their existence, which is stupid.
"nor are they actively suppressing the truth, they're just... withholding certain facts"
Facts are, by definition, true. (You can't have false facts, that would be fiction)
Withholding the facts is, BY DEFINITION, suppressing the truth.
You never had the book in the first place. You have always had a dislike of Georgy Orwell, otherwise you would have the book in your kindle.
"(a) that is the view that defines the law"
What defines the law is what the population will put up with. If no one will put up with the lawyer's bullshit view then it's unenforceable.
"(b) it seems far less ridiculous after one studies the history of copyright law beginning in the 1500s."
It doesn't seem any less ridiculous, you can just see how something so stupid came from lots of smaller less stupid decisions. Doesn't matter how it got to where it is now, it's still fucking stupid.
You know what, I think that's exactly what was going on.
The teacher I had was a complete moron and didn't even understand the code I was trying to show her that had this problem. I eventually was able to fix it because of my knowledge of C.
I'll admit I think that class gave me a negative view of python. Perhaps I'll go reconsider my opinion.
This should not be modded flamebait, kdawson is pushing his opinion into the main post rather than in a comment like everyone else. Clearly, he's a biased editor, this isn't a discussion, it's a fact. You can not, BY DEFINITION, put your opinion into an article and NOT be biased.
Anyway, why shouldn't we use the nuclear option to control the oil leak? This is an ENGINEERING problem, not a fucking moral one. Let the engineers decide of a nuclear bomb would best control the oil leak.
Nonsense statements like "nuclear weapons are always bad" don't help anyone. According to the previous article on slashdot the Russians have used nuclear blasts five times to control things like this with an 80% success rate. Obviously, there are risks and problems, just like there are with every option. If the ENGINEERS (not idiots that think "nuclear ANYTHING is ALWAYS bad") decide that a nuclear blast is the best option then we should go for it.
Tell me, kdawson, where did you get your degree in nuclear engineering? You don't have one? Well then how about your degree in environmental engineering? No? Then how can you say that the nuclear option is a bad idea before trained scientists that actually know what they're doing have even evaluated the situation?
"Imagine that you run a coffee shop. You want your customers to use the space in front of the shop while in the shop, and you don't want someone who works across the street to hog the space for 8 hours straight. So to keep the spaces open for customers, you restrict parking time to how long it takes to buy and consume coffee and a sandwich."
That'd be great except that you, as the coffee shop owner, do NOT own that road. That road belongs to the taxpayers. You have no right to restrict who parks on the PUBLIC street. It would be a different story if YOU owned the road. Of course, that would mean that YOU have to pay to build the road in the first place. If you're willing to pay for it, then be my guest, you have every right to charge for use of the road.
What the real issue here is that the coffee shop owner wants to take PRIVATE control of PUBLIC property. I might as well try and claim ownership of the police station down the street and charge everyone who works there for use of the building.
I'm sorry, what?
How can a screwdriver do serious harm? Sure, if you stab a guy with it. But you know what, you can kick people with shoes, punch people with fists, strangle them with your belt, etc. Should those be illegal too?
I'm not a CS major, I'm a mechanical engineering major and I just wanted to learn how to program as a hobby. I found it a lot easier to learn C than anything else I tried.
I'm not going to pretend to know how to program very well but I thought that because C didn't do very much for you that it gave a better foundation for learning other languages. I did learn a bit of python, but it was easier after learning C because you know what's going on "behind the scenes" so to speak.
For example, I had this weird ass problem in python where, for some reason, it was treating an integer value as a string. In C you have to specify variable types when you declare them. Because I knew about different variable types I knew that I had to look up how to explicitly declare variables as certain types in python. In C, you have to learn things like variable types, casting, pointers, etc. just to make a program that does anything at all. Languages like python are taught such that you completely gloss over these subjects and just assume that the computer magically knows what you're trying to tell it to do. When you run into a problem you can't fix it because you don't know what's actually going on.
I suggest that introductory programming classes use C rather than other things. The counter argument I generally get is "We want the students to make a program that actually does something so that they can write some programs after only a couple lectures". This loosely translates to "we want to entertain the students rather than teach them."
Although perhaps there's a middle ground. For non-CS majors, teach a language like python. Python allows for quick programs that, while not amazingly efficient, don't really need to be. For example, formatting a file with a shitload of data from a strain gauge. This might have to be done a total of, say, two times and thus efficiency really isn't an issue. Furthermore, non-CS majors (like mechanical and electrical engineers) don't have to understand the very basics of programming, they don't have much relevance to their field.
For CS majors, start off with languages like C because their job is to understand the very very basics.
Why is this modded informative? This should be modded troll.
"2. Parking like this is stupid and wears down the tires unevenly and too fast."
Obviously the point isn't that this is an efficient parking method, it's that it's a fucking awesome method that's being performed by a ROBOT. Of course you can't do this on problematic conditions, that ain't the fucking point in the first place.
Let's see, the government is blaming people that are IN FAVOR of the 18+ rating for the government's lack of action regarding implementing the said rating.
The government is telling people that by voicing their opinions they are actually harming their own cause. I can't imagine a greater way of suppressing political dissent. I'd be surprised if this had anything to do with video games at all. More likely it's the government using this as an issue that many people are passionate about to try and start discouraging people from expressing their opinions.
"Your car has to be registered and insured, and you have to follow a long list of rules while driving."
Hold on a second there. You don't have to have your car registered or insured or follow any laws if you're on private property. You're free to do whatever the fuck you want in private. But when you bring your car onto PUBLIC roads, you don't have the same rights. That road isn't yours, it's the taxpayers'.
He's obviously referring to the generation and sale of these for purposes other than research. You should read his post more carefully, it's obvious that research into finding a cure for disease (which generally requires having some of the disease) does not apply to the proposed restrictions.
Against selling it, no. Against assaulting someone, yes. That's exactly what you're doing.
That's exactly what the police and the legal system were created for. The kid calls the police, the police arrest the kids who did this for assault. The school expels the students convicted of assault as they assaulted another student on school grounds. The kid then sues the kids who did this in civil court and he gets a free college education at their expense.
Final authority on MORALS, not ETHICS. There's a difference.
"On the one hand, I hate not being able to copy my music across devices. I hate having to be connected to the internet to be able to play a certain game. On the other hand, people who create useful/entertaining/valuable things should be compensated for it, if they so wish."
The problems you describe have NOTHING to do with the creators wishing to be compensated. Payment does NOT necessitate absurd DRM.
I completely agree, but what ISP are you using that credits you for downtime?