I think most countries plan to try not to be invaded rather than plan for being invaded.
I know that's the case here in the UK, we generally focus our efforts on keeping invaders out rather than worrying about them getting in.
But I guess we have the benefit of being an island which means we have a somewhat better natural protection against invasion which makes that easier I suppose.
Yes. Then airplanes, trains, and motor vehicles were invented and it became irrelevant.
Seriously, I know someone who got a speeding ticket about 3 months after they got home from Switzerland and they never paid it because it was also written in German which seems a stupid thing to send to someone living in the UK.
Then we looked at going on holiday through a few European countries, and despite wanting to visit those surrounding nations avoiding Switzerland for our travels really added very little extra time.
Even if you want to go to cities in neighbouring countries on opposing sides of Switzerland then simply going around it only adds 2 - 4 hours to your journey by land. Hardly a big deal.
I'm sure either way it doesn't matter. If it's anything like public sector in the UK (where I worked for a few years) then anyone who feels aggrieved whether something small such as working through their lunch, or something larger like not being paid for something they'll find a way to work it back and more.
Whether that's fiddling their time sheets if they work flexi time to make it look like they're owe more time than they are, through to simply taking unpaid sick leave when they're not sick, through to fiddling expenses by adding in extra mileage or whatever I imagine most people will recoup what they didn't get and then some one way or the other.
This was always rife here in the UK public sector (in fact it's part the reason I quit, I have too much of a conscience to do as they were doing and got fed up of carrying others when they took the piss!) and ultimately means the cheapest option is to probably not just leave anyone feeling like they lost out in the first place no matter what they're actually owed else they'll just cost you more overall anyway.
Well, that or actually have a competent structure for dealing with piss-takers, but I know that's the least likely thing to ever happen in public sector.
"Protecting your wealth is paranoia resulting from a bad conscience? Like if you earned it 100% legitimately you'd feel great about letting people take it? "
That's the problem. Switzerland hasn't earnt it legitimately. From holding gold and riches stolen by the Nazis from the Jews in the 30s and 40s through to acting as a haven for modern day tax evasion and other criminal enterprises, much of Switzerland's stored wealth doesn't belong to it or the people who have stored it there.
If someone hacked into your bank and stole all your money and transferred it to an account in Switzerland and the Swiss authorities refused to hand it back to you and the Swiss banks then used it in investments to make themselves richer would you honestly suggest they'd obtained that wealth legitimately? Because that's exactly the historical (and to a lesser degree current) situation with Switzerland's wealth.
This is why the Swiss have that un-admitted element of guilt and paranoia of someone coming to take it their wealth from them. Because they know most of their wealth doesn't belong to them in the first place.
They are improving, they are helping with some financial crimes, but historically they've gotten wealthy off of crime elsewhere and they still have a long way to go to become more responsible like most other countries in the world in this respect.
No it wasn't. A lot of money in Swiss banks is money held by the owners illegally, we're not talking about tax avoidance here, we're talking about out and out tax evasion.
Switzerland has gotten rich by allowing criminally obtained money to be stored in it's banks and then refusing to cooperate with the authorities of nations from where it was obtained illegally.
We're talking literally billions of dollars that do not belong to the people Switzerland is letting keep it being held in Swiss banks which the Swiss banks, like pretty much all banks, then use to invest and make themselves wealthier.
Switzerland has very much gotten rich off the back of illegally obtained money. This is the problem with most tax havens and especially Switzerland - it's not just that they act as a low tax place for tax avoiders to stash billions, it's the fact that they also allow tax evaders to store money that does not belong to them.
The fact is that if Switzerland wasn't complicit in supporting criminality in just about every other nation in the world it wouldn't be even close to as wealthy as it is now, and that's what the GP was referring to - that the Swiss know full well if shit went down financially then people are going to come knocking and demand the Swiss hand back all that illegally held money and hence the reason they come up with such scenarios is because they know full well they're guilty and hold such illegally obtained funds in the first place.
I found Swype excellent when I used the beta, but now I've got the real thing on Android it seems shit and your post is an example why.
I've found it buggy in that sometimes you'll be typing and it jumps to a previous place you had the cursor and overwrites shit there. I find it gets it's guesses as to what you meant wrong 90% of the time but then under the suggestions what you meant is highlighted as if it knew what you fucking meant but wanted to annoy you by being intentionally stupid.
It actually seems to have gotten worse in it's journey from beta to release.
Re:"We believed we knew better what customers need
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How BlackBerry Blew It
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I find it quite scary that someone responded to you saying "I hope to god you're never put in charge of a large project." and got modded up.
It's disturbing how many people on Slashdot really have no idea what the fuck they're on about. They really don't understand that failure to separate concerns is why complex projects, especially in the IT world, have had such a historically high failure rate?
Separation of concerns is essential for large project success, so someone suggesting anyone who claims someone who gets that shouldn't be working on large projects is themselves showing a complete and utter lack of clue about handling large projects successfully. GP is an example of why so many IT projects fail.
They held out longer in the European market too. Nokia's flagship devices (i.e. the N95) alone were outselling the iPhone in Europe for at least the first two iterations, and I believe even the first three.
I don't understand your comment about the iPhone being more functional at launch then using examples such as maps. The original iPhone didn't even have GPS, so no it wasn't more functional at launch when it came to ease of use of things like maps, not by any measure - did it even have a mapping application given the lack of GPS?. The fact it didn't have 3G support also means that browsing was also pretty painful compared to the competition. The competition also had installable apps, MMS, and much better e-mail support.
By the time the 3G and especially the 3GS came out I'd tend to agree with you but at the iPhone's launch? It was far from functional - that was the key problem, it was missing so many features that people simply expected at that point. Perhaps you've written out the original iPhone from your mind because it was actually shit (although better than most other things on the US market as the US didn't get most of Europe and Japan's high end devices) and were referring to the launch of the 3G/3GS? If so then your comment makes much more sense - especially by the time the iPhone had an app store, MMS support, GPS, better accelerometers, then it definitely became more functional in practice - like you say web browsing used to be brutal, I rarely used the mobile web on my Nokia 7650 back in 2002. I used it a little more in the years following on my iPaq etc. but touch with 3G support on the 3G and Android devices definitely made it far less painful.
It was only by about the time the 3GS came about that it was clear the iPhone was ahead of all of the older school devices in terms of user preference (because that's how long it took to get features some people deemed essential) and by the time the 4 came out that it was absolutely destroying the old school competitors in sales, but that was the point at which it started to have to begin it's real fight against a growing Android.
"If it were regulated and legal, this entire class of overdose deaths would be eliminated."
Because no one has ever died from alcohol poisoning?
Unfortunately contrary to your apparent belief, legalisation doesn't eliminate human stupidity. People will still be stupid enough to OD.
It may decrease the problem, but it may also increase the problem. I don't know why so many people think legalisation is a magical cure. It may well improve things, that's a perfectly possible outcome, but it may also make things worse (just as we have major issues with alcohol abuse), the fact is we don't know, anyone pretending to know either way whether legalisation would improve or make things worse is talking shit.
It's a big unknown and THAT is the problem with legalisation - no politician wants to risk being the guy that introduced a whole new set of problems so none will risk it. We need research that looks at the bigger picture and not just small facets (i.e. those that show a reduction in crime from removing the black market, or an increase in schizophrenia from some drugs). Until we can weigh up all the benefits and negatives it's going to be difficult to get any kind of change.
It's not easy - it's like global warming, we can easily model and prove different sub-elements of the climate, but modelling the whole thing to prove with a high degree of certainty that man is to blame is fucking difficult and requires a LOT of resources.
FWIW I think carefully regulated legalisation would probably be a net benefit, but I'm not even going to pretend that I know that with any degree of certainty, it's just gut feeling based on the pros and cons that I'm personally aware of.
"Well...it took many years and millions of dollars to get Bin Laden."
Right, but they had to find him and that's nothing to do with having guns.
"His arms certainly made it harder."
How? dealing with armed people in the building was probably the smallest problem they had to deal with.
"Sure, they were still able to execute him, but they weren't able to indefinitely imprison and torture him."
They didn't want to. They wanted to get in there, verify it was him, and execute him. If they wanted to capture him alive they had many non-lethal options ranging from gas to tasers but they didn't even seem to even bother to take these options on mission with them.
But during the Iraq and Afghanistan years US and British forces alike have carried out many night raids, abducting people as they sleep, sometimes killing militants with silenced weapons before they even wake up and know they're about to die. Weapons haven't helped these people.
We're talking about some guy in America by himself or with a family. Someone without a network of agents mingling with the civilian population, sometimes having fellow Afghans inside military bases feeding information back to them, even in these cases the military get their man so what chance do you think someone genuinely has if they don't have their own private army and intelligence network, even if they have a massive arsenal of fire power?
There are plenty of examples both recent and throughout history where armed populace have had no benefit from their arms when government forces or otherwise come and abduct them in the night before they even know what's happening.
And that's why the folks who say "They could never take me because I have my gun!" are living in fantasy land. Even if they don't take you whilst you sleep, they'll wear you out with a siege or simply incapacitate you with non-lethal force. Either way they'll get you and there isn't shit your weapons will be able to do about it.
"To summarize: I own a gun not because I expect to use it against the goverment but because I want the goverment to know that if it becomes to unjust it can't just cart me of in the middle of the night...."
You actually believe that don't you?
If they can kill and grab Osama Bin Laden deep inside a foreign nation when he was surrounded by a few armed family members and Pakistan would have put a stop to it if they had chance then your piddly little firearm by itself isn't going to do anything to protect you.
If they want to grab you then you wont even know they're coming. They'll have their gloved hand over your mouth and a gun to your head before you can even think about your weapon.
I swear Americans have bought way too much into the whole Hollywood thing. Everyone seems to think they're an action hero, a one man army that could single handedly take down the state.
The only thing protecting you is the fact that you just don't matter to them.
"Groups don't use terror to change personal opinions or to ingratiate themselves with their victims! They do it to force concessions (usually political or territorial) or to enforce submission, usually as a tactic in a wider strategy."
And how do you think that is done? Through violence, that's the very definition of terrorism. But as those attacks make the very people you're trying to get submission or concession out of then you just make them even less likely to agree with you, which is exactly the point.
"One obvious example: the 2004 Madrid bombings. A vicious mass murder of non-combatants by an Al Qaeda cell contributed to huge political upheaval, a change of government, and very soon afterwards the withdrawal of Spanish forces from Afghanistan."
As I said elsewhere this is probably one of the closest examples there is to it having any effect, though even here it was more the governments response in initially blaming ETA and hence pissing off major sections of Spain that sympathise with their separatist views. Even in this case there's no evidence the Spanish people said "Oh no!, Al Qaeda bombed us, let's vote for someone else". Even if they did this contradicts your previous assertion that terrorism has nothing to do with changing individual's minds through violence because that's what you're now claiming happened.
"Think about it for two seconds and then consider again if it is actually the case that terrorists care if people agree with them or like them."
I never said they do care, but given that the very definition of terrorism is to enact political change through violence then it inherently means you have to be able to get people to support you through committing violent acts, and committing violence against someone and then expecting them to support you is contradictory.
"Lenin and his Bolsheviks unleashed terror on their own population and by doing so destroyed all serious opposition and the party gained absolute power for 70 years without any further serious internal challenge. Mao's party in China exterminated many millions in subduing the population and has never lost power. In modern times it showed itself perfectly willing to kill thousands of civilians for simply protesting. Western forces in counter insurgency campaigns in Malaysia, Kenya,S.E. Asia, Afghanistan and elsewhere destroyed villages and tortured and murdered civilians, en masse on occasion, in campaigns which we prefer to term pacification but which are no different to what armies have always done - terrorizing a hostile or indifferent population while denying the enemy resources and support."
Ignoring the fact for now that you're bringing states into the discussion which including state sponsored campaigns of violence is rather a stretch of the modern understanding of terrorism for the moment, I'll address your examples:
For your former examples I think it's a bit of a stretch to class civil war as terrorism even using a more broad definition of the term, terror was no doubt used but ultimately in a war it's not the deciding factor, it's about simple weakening the opposition to the point where they physically can't challenge you, but just because you defeat them doesn't mean you'll change their minds. That's why to this day China has a massive problem with dissidents - the state sponsored violence didn't do anything to change the minds of opposition, that opposition is still very much thriving all these years on. Fundamentally they got their way because they won a civil war and killed enough of the opposition to hold majority support.
As for your latter examples, are you seriously suggesting that Western killings in Afghanistan and so forth have somehow helped the West's cause? These have been key factors in Iraq, Afghanistan and in fact even the Vietnam wars being complete failures. Atrocities and shock and awe campaigns committed in Afghanistan by Western forces have been perhaps the single most key factor in bolstering the Taliban as villagers now see the Taliban as less bad than the West because the Taliban don't accidentally drive a 500lb into their neighbours house.
"Many modern newly established or re-established post colonial states have been founded or governed by people who were at one time, by any definition, terrorists. Just look at the history of Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Israel for examples."
I spoke of these in another post, but there's no evidence terrorism was the reason for change - as I said before there are many other states that also broke free from their imperialist pasts peacefully both before, in between, and after these states. Decolonisation was on the table regardless so to suggest it was terrorism that was effective in achieving that change seems silly.
But here's a counter-argument based on such examples, if you believe say, the state of Israel was created because of terrorism and that that wouldn't have happened anyway, then how given Hamas and Hezbollah's far more prolonged and far broader campaigns does the state of Israel still exist? the Palestinians have broader international support, they've mounted more prolonged and more harmful terrorist campaigns yet nothing has changed, in fact, they've been weakened. No matter how many terrorist acts they commit they're not going to weaken the resolve of Israel and it's allies to get rid of the state. The only thing that could do that is broad international agreement which happens with or without terrorism being involved and that's exactly how Israel was created, that's exactly how South Africa and Rhodesia's apartheid regimes fell and so forth.
The problem is that you're confusing success of causes which had terrorist groups on their side with the idea that the terrorism was somehow the determining factor in effecting that specific change. That's simply not the case, there's re
Well it kind of has to an extent. A couple of terrorists to date have used the likes of Go Pro to record the incidents. That guy in France who killed a few soldiers and kids for example.
I think some of the mass shooters in the US have too, the Aurora shootings perhaps?
The only problems they had is that they weren't live, so got picked up by the police and locked well away before it got out though IIRC one of them was leaked at least.
But does that ever happen? Here in the UK when the 21/7 bombers got away they were on the lose a while before getting caught but I don't think there was any real hysteria, in fact, I caught a plane from Heathrow when they were all still on the run and whilst there were a few more police walking around I don't think anyone was particularly more scared.
I think even if they escape, or even the al-Shabab managed to defeat Kenyan forces and push into Somalia it wouldn't do anything to further their cause, it'd just leave Kenya with more allies working to protect them and defeat al-Shabab.
This is basically what happened in Mali, where the Islamist did threaten the capital, and all that did was piss off a sleeping dragon - France, to come and blow the living shit out of them.
About the only example I can think of of terrorism possibly working was the Madrid train bombings resulting in a different government getting into Spain and pulling out of Iraq, but there's still a question as to whether the Spanish people would've wanted that anyway.
There's a certain irony to it all though, terrorism tends to happen when people feel disempowered to affect real political change in the way they feel is at least an acceptable compromise, but all it does is give the victims of terrorism that exact same feeling turning them against the terrorists with even more zeal. If someone blows up your family, you don't say "Okay I give in, I'll give you everything you want", you instead pursue policies or actual physical revenge that makes the terrorists even more powerless than they were before they turned to terrorism, it ultimately creates a cycle where the terrorists are always the disadvantaged and become ever more so as the cycle progresses to the point they're either crushed or forced to pursue their agenda peaceful through politics.
The IRA, the Tamil Tigers, and now FARC and the PKK. It's always the same. It'll happen to the likes of al Shabab eventually one way or the other too.
I can't see live video making the blindest bit of difference.
If someone's radicalised then they're radicalised. They may be egged on by a video of someone doing something horrible but they'll be egged on by that live or not.
FWIW I don't see what it has to do with Islam either. Last I checked live reporting of terror events isn't something that only muslims would ever possibly be able to do.
I'm sure the likes of the IRA if they weren't now just a bunch of angry chavs without much competence would equally like to do this.
It already happened earlier this year pretty much with the killing of Lee Rigby in London but I don't think standing there ranting like a lunatic covered in another guy's blood to some middle aged woman really did much to glorify or help their cause.
I agree the Visual C++ portion of Visual Studio is lagging a little compared to the likes of it's C# support for what it's worth, but even there I think it's still better than the alternatives.
It does need a bit of love though but I think part of the difficulty is that C# and.NET have been built in parallel with Visual Studio so they've been able to make the two work together rather seamlessly (an obvious example being code regions), whereas C++ isn't their bitch so they have a harder time making it all play nice.
I think the Westgate attack has simply strengthened Kenya's resolve to sort out Somalia, and has turned even more people against the militants.
If they start doing live feeds and start "controlling" reporting of the events they'll just make even more people hate them and make people even more determined to defeat them.
Sure it sounds like most your problems are because you want to use VS in ways it was never intended to be used but I think there's a tradeoff in what you're asking.
Visual Studio is good because it specifically does focus on working well with specific technology stacks and sure if you want to step outside of that and use unsupported stacks then something like Eclipse may well be better, but I'd argue that's also why Eclipse's Intellisense is frankly fucking appalling, and the IDE is slow - because it's designed to do everything that has a cost.
So yes, Eclipse is absolutely the best option for your use case because you get maximum benefit from the things it offers relative to the sacrifices it makes whilst Visual Studio is less helpful because the sacrifices it makes (i.e. support for arbitrary frameworks and stacks) are what makes it great for the stacks it does support.
I don't know if you've used 2012 but the unit testing tools do now support 3rd party offerings such as NUnit. The ORM tools are only tied to MS tech in so far as you tend to use an MS framework as the ORM framework but the underlying database can be anything that has a.NET connector which is just about every database worth mentioning.
But I think most people who use VS like it above other IDEs because they are using it with the Microsoft stack. I've built large (18month+ projects) MVC applications using Java/Spring/Spring Tool Suite version of Eclipse, PHP/Zend/NetBeans and PHP/Zend/Zend's version of Eclipse, and also Microsoft/ASP.NET MVC/Visual Studio. If you use an IDE designed for the stack in question I still think Visual Studio by far comes out on top and that's the sort of metric I'm referring to for judging my preference - the normal use case for each specific IDE.
If we can host on Windows and I have the choice I'll normally default to VS + ASP.NET MVC w/C# for this reason. I just know I can lead a team to get the job done much faster, my second choice would normally be Java with Spring MVC. I'll tend to use as much of the same stack as possible throughout the project, i.e. for a.NET project I'll normally use WCF for web services for example and SQL server for persistence.
Yes, I think this is a bigger problem with schooling in general. The problem, at least here in the UK, is that you have to follow these subjects for years, even if they're worthless to a particular kid because they have zero interest in them and nothing will get them interested in them at that age.
I learnt nothing from music, drama (acting), French, German, and English literature when I was a kid, they were complete and utter wastes of my time.
Schools should be allowed to spot kids that have zero interest in a topic and allow them to study something else in that time instead.
This isn't to say I view topics as useless, particularly French and German I'd love to spend a bit of time to learn them now, but then they were completely pointless because I was so uninterested in them it was just wasted time. I'd have been better off repeating say maths or science to reinforce knowledge in those subjects rather than wasting time in subjects I found so uninteresting I'd learn nothing.
If a kid has no interest in Music, or PE, or English Literature or whatever then they should be moved to something that does interest them during the periods those classes would otherwise be or even simply allowed to sit in the library or whatever studying something of their choosing. This would be way more beneficial for kids.
It's one thing to give them a year or two year introductory course in each topic so they can figure out what they do like, but after that if they've got no interest in the topic they shouldn't be forced into it for another 8 - 10 years or whatever.
I bet you anything this would also cut rates of kids skipping class, and if kids aren't skipping class then they're also less likely to get in trouble or pick up bad habits because they wont be hiding behind the bike sheds smoking, or jumping over into neighbouring gardens or whatever whilst they avoid subjects they outright hate.
"And other stuff like LINQ and Entity Data Model stuff have their own problems, mostly in their attempts to be smarter than the developer. Spoiler: it's not, and when it tries, it stops being useful."
Can you expand on this? I'm not sure you really understand LINQ. There are different flavours of it (LINQ to objects, LINQ to SQL, LINQ to XML and so forth) so it seems odd to paint LINQ in general like that. LINQ isn't particularly magical anyway, LINQ to objects for example is just a bunch of extension methods applied to IEnumerable for the most part. The fancy syntax is little more than a shortcut for calling those methods and those methods don't do anything particularly exciting or overly complex.
The entity framework suffers the same pitfalls all ORM frameworks do so that shouldn't be surprising. Using ORM is like using anything, every once in a while it'll fit, but it's not a magical solution to all database access like some pretend.
Slashdot Mirror
I think most countries plan to try not to be invaded rather than plan for being invaded.
I know that's the case here in the UK, we generally focus our efforts on keeping invaders out rather than worrying about them getting in.
But I guess we have the benefit of being an island which means we have a somewhat better natural protection against invasion which makes that easier I suppose.
Yes. Then airplanes, trains, and motor vehicles were invented and it became irrelevant.
Seriously, I know someone who got a speeding ticket about 3 months after they got home from Switzerland and they never paid it because it was also written in German which seems a stupid thing to send to someone living in the UK.
Then we looked at going on holiday through a few European countries, and despite wanting to visit those surrounding nations avoiding Switzerland for our travels really added very little extra time.
Even if you want to go to cities in neighbouring countries on opposing sides of Switzerland then simply going around it only adds 2 - 4 hours to your journey by land. Hardly a big deal.
I'm sure either way it doesn't matter. If it's anything like public sector in the UK (where I worked for a few years) then anyone who feels aggrieved whether something small such as working through their lunch, or something larger like not being paid for something they'll find a way to work it back and more.
Whether that's fiddling their time sheets if they work flexi time to make it look like they're owe more time than they are, through to simply taking unpaid sick leave when they're not sick, through to fiddling expenses by adding in extra mileage or whatever I imagine most people will recoup what they didn't get and then some one way or the other.
This was always rife here in the UK public sector (in fact it's part the reason I quit, I have too much of a conscience to do as they were doing and got fed up of carrying others when they took the piss!) and ultimately means the cheapest option is to probably not just leave anyone feeling like they lost out in the first place no matter what they're actually owed else they'll just cost you more overall anyway.
Well, that or actually have a competent structure for dealing with piss-takers, but I know that's the least likely thing to ever happen in public sector.
"Protecting your wealth is paranoia resulting from a bad conscience? Like if you earned it 100% legitimately you'd feel great about letting people take it? "
That's the problem. Switzerland hasn't earnt it legitimately. From holding gold and riches stolen by the Nazis from the Jews in the 30s and 40s through to acting as a haven for modern day tax evasion and other criminal enterprises, much of Switzerland's stored wealth doesn't belong to it or the people who have stored it there.
If someone hacked into your bank and stole all your money and transferred it to an account in Switzerland and the Swiss authorities refused to hand it back to you and the Swiss banks then used it in investments to make themselves richer would you honestly suggest they'd obtained that wealth legitimately? Because that's exactly the historical (and to a lesser degree current) situation with Switzerland's wealth.
This is why the Swiss have that un-admitted element of guilt and paranoia of someone coming to take it their wealth from them. Because they know most of their wealth doesn't belong to them in the first place.
They are improving, they are helping with some financial crimes, but historically they've gotten wealthy off of crime elsewhere and they still have a long way to go to become more responsible like most other countries in the world in this respect.
No it wasn't. A lot of money in Swiss banks is money held by the owners illegally, we're not talking about tax avoidance here, we're talking about out and out tax evasion.
Switzerland has gotten rich by allowing criminally obtained money to be stored in it's banks and then refusing to cooperate with the authorities of nations from where it was obtained illegally.
We're talking literally billions of dollars that do not belong to the people Switzerland is letting keep it being held in Swiss banks which the Swiss banks, like pretty much all banks, then use to invest and make themselves wealthier.
Switzerland has very much gotten rich off the back of illegally obtained money. This is the problem with most tax havens and especially Switzerland - it's not just that they act as a low tax place for tax avoiders to stash billions, it's the fact that they also allow tax evaders to store money that does not belong to them.
The fact is that if Switzerland wasn't complicit in supporting criminality in just about every other nation in the world it wouldn't be even close to as wealthy as it is now, and that's what the GP was referring to - that the Swiss know full well if shit went down financially then people are going to come knocking and demand the Swiss hand back all that illegally held money and hence the reason they come up with such scenarios is because they know full well they're guilty and hold such illegally obtained funds in the first place.
I found Swype excellent when I used the beta, but now I've got the real thing on Android it seems shit and your post is an example why.
I've found it buggy in that sometimes you'll be typing and it jumps to a previous place you had the cursor and overwrites shit there. I find it gets it's guesses as to what you meant wrong 90% of the time but then under the suggestions what you meant is highlighted as if it knew what you fucking meant but wanted to annoy you by being intentionally stupid.
It actually seems to have gotten worse in it's journey from beta to release.
I find it quite scary that someone responded to you saying "I hope to god you're never put in charge of a large project." and got modded up.
It's disturbing how many people on Slashdot really have no idea what the fuck they're on about. They really don't understand that failure to separate concerns is why complex projects, especially in the IT world, have had such a historically high failure rate?
Separation of concerns is essential for large project success, so someone suggesting anyone who claims someone who gets that shouldn't be working on large projects is themselves showing a complete and utter lack of clue about handling large projects successfully. GP is an example of why so many IT projects fail.
They held out longer in the European market too. Nokia's flagship devices (i.e. the N95) alone were outselling the iPhone in Europe for at least the first two iterations, and I believe even the first three.
I don't understand your comment about the iPhone being more functional at launch then using examples such as maps. The original iPhone didn't even have GPS, so no it wasn't more functional at launch when it came to ease of use of things like maps, not by any measure - did it even have a mapping application given the lack of GPS?. The fact it didn't have 3G support also means that browsing was also pretty painful compared to the competition. The competition also had installable apps, MMS, and much better e-mail support.
By the time the 3G and especially the 3GS came out I'd tend to agree with you but at the iPhone's launch? It was far from functional - that was the key problem, it was missing so many features that people simply expected at that point. Perhaps you've written out the original iPhone from your mind because it was actually shit (although better than most other things on the US market as the US didn't get most of Europe and Japan's high end devices) and were referring to the launch of the 3G/3GS? If so then your comment makes much more sense - especially by the time the iPhone had an app store, MMS support, GPS, better accelerometers, then it definitely became more functional in practice - like you say web browsing used to be brutal, I rarely used the mobile web on my Nokia 7650 back in 2002. I used it a little more in the years following on my iPaq etc. but touch with 3G support on the 3G and Android devices definitely made it far less painful.
It was only by about the time the 3GS came about that it was clear the iPhone was ahead of all of the older school devices in terms of user preference (because that's how long it took to get features some people deemed essential) and by the time the 4 came out that it was absolutely destroying the old school competitors in sales, but that was the point at which it started to have to begin it's real fight against a growing Android.
I was under the impression from comments in the news that it's not guaranteed that you get back-paid?
I don't know the details but perhaps in the Clinton era shut down they simply opted to? It doesn't mean they will this time from what I understand.
"If it were regulated and legal, this entire class of overdose deaths would be eliminated."
Because no one has ever died from alcohol poisoning?
Unfortunately contrary to your apparent belief, legalisation doesn't eliminate human stupidity. People will still be stupid enough to OD.
It may decrease the problem, but it may also increase the problem. I don't know why so many people think legalisation is a magical cure. It may well improve things, that's a perfectly possible outcome, but it may also make things worse (just as we have major issues with alcohol abuse), the fact is we don't know, anyone pretending to know either way whether legalisation would improve or make things worse is talking shit.
It's a big unknown and THAT is the problem with legalisation - no politician wants to risk being the guy that introduced a whole new set of problems so none will risk it. We need research that looks at the bigger picture and not just small facets (i.e. those that show a reduction in crime from removing the black market, or an increase in schizophrenia from some drugs). Until we can weigh up all the benefits and negatives it's going to be difficult to get any kind of change.
It's not easy - it's like global warming, we can easily model and prove different sub-elements of the climate, but modelling the whole thing to prove with a high degree of certainty that man is to blame is fucking difficult and requires a LOT of resources.
FWIW I think carefully regulated legalisation would probably be a net benefit, but I'm not even going to pretend that I know that with any degree of certainty, it's just gut feeling based on the pros and cons that I'm personally aware of.
"Well...it took many years and millions of dollars to get Bin Laden."
Right, but they had to find him and that's nothing to do with having guns.
"His arms certainly made it harder."
How? dealing with armed people in the building was probably the smallest problem they had to deal with.
"Sure, they were still able to execute him, but they weren't able to indefinitely imprison and torture him."
They didn't want to. They wanted to get in there, verify it was him, and execute him. If they wanted to capture him alive they had many non-lethal options ranging from gas to tasers but they didn't even seem to even bother to take these options on mission with them.
But during the Iraq and Afghanistan years US and British forces alike have carried out many night raids, abducting people as they sleep, sometimes killing militants with silenced weapons before they even wake up and know they're about to die. Weapons haven't helped these people.
We're talking about some guy in America by himself or with a family. Someone without a network of agents mingling with the civilian population, sometimes having fellow Afghans inside military bases feeding information back to them, even in these cases the military get their man so what chance do you think someone genuinely has if they don't have their own private army and intelligence network, even if they have a massive arsenal of fire power?
There are plenty of examples both recent and throughout history where armed populace have had no benefit from their arms when government forces or otherwise come and abduct them in the night before they even know what's happening.
And that's why the folks who say "They could never take me because I have my gun!" are living in fantasy land. Even if they don't take you whilst you sleep, they'll wear you out with a siege or simply incapacitate you with non-lethal force. Either way they'll get you and there isn't shit your weapons will be able to do about it.
But on the flip side I didn't have to use up energy to click a link to the actual article and deal with ads in my face.
"To summarize: I own a gun not because I expect to use it against the goverment but because I want the goverment to know that if it becomes to unjust it can't just cart me of in the middle of the night...."
You actually believe that don't you?
If they can kill and grab Osama Bin Laden deep inside a foreign nation when he was surrounded by a few armed family members and Pakistan would have put a stop to it if they had chance then your piddly little firearm by itself isn't going to do anything to protect you.
If they want to grab you then you wont even know they're coming. They'll have their gloved hand over your mouth and a gun to your head before you can even think about your weapon.
I swear Americans have bought way too much into the whole Hollywood thing. Everyone seems to think they're an action hero, a one man army that could single handedly take down the state.
The only thing protecting you is the fact that you just don't matter to them.
"Groups don't use terror to change personal opinions or to ingratiate themselves with their victims! They do it to force concessions (usually political or territorial) or to enforce submission, usually as a tactic in a wider strategy."
And how do you think that is done? Through violence, that's the very definition of terrorism. But as those attacks make the very people you're trying to get submission or concession out of then you just make them even less likely to agree with you, which is exactly the point.
"One obvious example: the 2004 Madrid bombings. A vicious mass murder of non-combatants by an Al Qaeda cell contributed to huge political upheaval, a change of government, and very soon afterwards the withdrawal of Spanish forces from Afghanistan."
As I said elsewhere this is probably one of the closest examples there is to it having any effect, though even here it was more the governments response in initially blaming ETA and hence pissing off major sections of Spain that sympathise with their separatist views. Even in this case there's no evidence the Spanish people said "Oh no!, Al Qaeda bombed us, let's vote for someone else". Even if they did this contradicts your previous assertion that terrorism has nothing to do with changing individual's minds through violence because that's what you're now claiming happened.
"Think about it for two seconds and then consider again if it is actually the case that terrorists care if people agree with them or like them."
I never said they do care, but given that the very definition of terrorism is to enact political change through violence then it inherently means you have to be able to get people to support you through committing violent acts, and committing violence against someone and then expecting them to support you is contradictory.
"Lenin and his Bolsheviks unleashed terror on their own population and by doing so destroyed all serious opposition and the party gained absolute power for 70 years without any further serious internal challenge. Mao's party in China exterminated many millions in subduing the population and has never lost power. In modern times it showed itself perfectly willing to kill thousands of civilians for simply protesting. Western forces in counter insurgency campaigns in Malaysia, Kenya ,S.E. Asia, Afghanistan and elsewhere destroyed villages and tortured and murdered civilians, en masse on occasion, in campaigns which we prefer to term pacification but which are no different to what armies have always done - terrorizing a hostile or indifferent population while denying the enemy resources and support."
Ignoring the fact for now that you're bringing states into the discussion which including state sponsored campaigns of violence is rather a stretch of the modern understanding of terrorism for the moment, I'll address your examples:
For your former examples I think it's a bit of a stretch to class civil war as terrorism even using a more broad definition of the term, terror was no doubt used but ultimately in a war it's not the deciding factor, it's about simple weakening the opposition to the point where they physically can't challenge you, but just because you defeat them doesn't mean you'll change their minds. That's why to this day China has a massive problem with dissidents - the state sponsored violence didn't do anything to change the minds of opposition, that opposition is still very much thriving all these years on. Fundamentally they got their way because they won a civil war and killed enough of the opposition to hold majority support.
As for your latter examples, are you seriously suggesting that Western killings in Afghanistan and so forth have somehow helped the West's cause? These have been key factors in Iraq, Afghanistan and in fact even the Vietnam wars being complete failures. Atrocities and shock and awe campaigns committed in Afghanistan by Western forces have been perhaps the single most key factor in bolstering the Taliban as villagers now see the Taliban as less bad than the West because the Taliban don't accidentally drive a 500lb into their neighbours house.
"Many modern newly established or re-established post colonial states have been founded or governed by people who were at one time, by any definition, terrorists. Just look at the history of Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Israel for examples."
I spoke of these in another post, but there's no evidence terrorism was the reason for change - as I said before there are many other states that also broke free from their imperialist pasts peacefully both before, in between, and after these states. Decolonisation was on the table regardless so to suggest it was terrorism that was effective in achieving that change seems silly.
But here's a counter-argument based on such examples, if you believe say, the state of Israel was created because of terrorism and that that wouldn't have happened anyway, then how given Hamas and Hezbollah's far more prolonged and far broader campaigns does the state of Israel still exist? the Palestinians have broader international support, they've mounted more prolonged and more harmful terrorist campaigns yet nothing has changed, in fact, they've been weakened. No matter how many terrorist acts they commit they're not going to weaken the resolve of Israel and it's allies to get rid of the state. The only thing that could do that is broad international agreement which happens with or without terrorism being involved and that's exactly how Israel was created, that's exactly how South Africa and Rhodesia's apartheid regimes fell and so forth.
The problem is that you're confusing success of causes which had terrorist groups on their side with the idea that the terrorism was somehow the determining factor in effecting that specific change. That's simply not the case, there's re
I don't think Mandela or Ghandi's lot won because of terrorism. They won because it was inevitable.
Many other countries in their exact predicament broke away from their imperialist past both before and after them without the need for terrorism.
It's just the way things were heading anyway.
Well it kind of has to an extent. A couple of terrorists to date have used the likes of Go Pro to record the incidents. That guy in France who killed a few soldiers and kids for example.
I think some of the mass shooters in the US have too, the Aurora shootings perhaps?
The only problems they had is that they weren't live, so got picked up by the police and locked well away before it got out though IIRC one of them was leaked at least.
But does that ever happen? Here in the UK when the 21/7 bombers got away they were on the lose a while before getting caught but I don't think there was any real hysteria, in fact, I caught a plane from Heathrow when they were all still on the run and whilst there were a few more police walking around I don't think anyone was particularly more scared.
I think even if they escape, or even the al-Shabab managed to defeat Kenyan forces and push into Somalia it wouldn't do anything to further their cause, it'd just leave Kenya with more allies working to protect them and defeat al-Shabab.
This is basically what happened in Mali, where the Islamist did threaten the capital, and all that did was piss off a sleeping dragon - France, to come and blow the living shit out of them.
About the only example I can think of of terrorism possibly working was the Madrid train bombings resulting in a different government getting into Spain and pulling out of Iraq, but there's still a question as to whether the Spanish people would've wanted that anyway.
There's a certain irony to it all though, terrorism tends to happen when people feel disempowered to affect real political change in the way they feel is at least an acceptable compromise, but all it does is give the victims of terrorism that exact same feeling turning them against the terrorists with even more zeal. If someone blows up your family, you don't say "Okay I give in, I'll give you everything you want", you instead pursue policies or actual physical revenge that makes the terrorists even more powerless than they were before they turned to terrorism, it ultimately creates a cycle where the terrorists are always the disadvantaged and become ever more so as the cycle progresses to the point they're either crushed or forced to pursue their agenda peaceful through politics.
The IRA, the Tamil Tigers, and now FARC and the PKK. It's always the same. It'll happen to the likes of al Shabab eventually one way or the other too.
I can't see live video making the blindest bit of difference.
If someone's radicalised then they're radicalised. They may be egged on by a video of someone doing something horrible but they'll be egged on by that live or not.
FWIW I don't see what it has to do with Islam either. Last I checked live reporting of terror events isn't something that only muslims would ever possibly be able to do.
I'm sure the likes of the IRA if they weren't now just a bunch of angry chavs without much competence would equally like to do this.
It already happened earlier this year pretty much with the killing of Lee Rigby in London but I don't think standing there ranting like a lunatic covered in another guy's blood to some middle aged woman really did much to glorify or help their cause.
I agree the Visual C++ portion of Visual Studio is lagging a little compared to the likes of it's C# support for what it's worth, but even there I think it's still better than the alternatives.
It does need a bit of love though but I think part of the difficulty is that C# and .NET have been built in parallel with Visual Studio so they've been able to make the two work together rather seamlessly (an obvious example being code regions), whereas C++ isn't their bitch so they have a harder time making it all play nice.
I think the Westgate attack has simply strengthened Kenya's resolve to sort out Somalia, and has turned even more people against the militants.
If they start doing live feeds and start "controlling" reporting of the events they'll just make even more people hate them and make people even more determined to defeat them.
Terrorism is about as effective as torture.
I'm sure it can ineffectively, but it isn't.
You claimed the UK already implements arbitrary filtering already on every provider. That couldn't be further from the truth.
Sure it sounds like most your problems are because you want to use VS in ways it was never intended to be used but I think there's a tradeoff in what you're asking.
Visual Studio is good because it specifically does focus on working well with specific technology stacks and sure if you want to step outside of that and use unsupported stacks then something like Eclipse may well be better, but I'd argue that's also why Eclipse's Intellisense is frankly fucking appalling, and the IDE is slow - because it's designed to do everything that has a cost.
So yes, Eclipse is absolutely the best option for your use case because you get maximum benefit from the things it offers relative to the sacrifices it makes whilst Visual Studio is less helpful because the sacrifices it makes (i.e. support for arbitrary frameworks and stacks) are what makes it great for the stacks it does support.
I don't know if you've used 2012 but the unit testing tools do now support 3rd party offerings such as NUnit. The ORM tools are only tied to MS tech in so far as you tend to use an MS framework as the ORM framework but the underlying database can be anything that has a .NET connector which is just about every database worth mentioning.
But I think most people who use VS like it above other IDEs because they are using it with the Microsoft stack. I've built large (18month+ projects) MVC applications using Java/Spring/Spring Tool Suite version of Eclipse, PHP/Zend/NetBeans and PHP/Zend/Zend's version of Eclipse, and also Microsoft/ASP.NET MVC/Visual Studio. If you use an IDE designed for the stack in question I still think Visual Studio by far comes out on top and that's the sort of metric I'm referring to for judging my preference - the normal use case for each specific IDE.
If we can host on Windows and I have the choice I'll normally default to VS + ASP.NET MVC w/C# for this reason. I just know I can lead a team to get the job done much faster, my second choice would normally be Java with Spring MVC. I'll tend to use as much of the same stack as possible throughout the project, i.e. for a .NET project I'll normally use WCF for web services for example and SQL server for persistence.
Yes, I think this is a bigger problem with schooling in general. The problem, at least here in the UK, is that you have to follow these subjects for years, even if they're worthless to a particular kid because they have zero interest in them and nothing will get them interested in them at that age.
I learnt nothing from music, drama (acting), French, German, and English literature when I was a kid, they were complete and utter wastes of my time.
Schools should be allowed to spot kids that have zero interest in a topic and allow them to study something else in that time instead.
This isn't to say I view topics as useless, particularly French and German I'd love to spend a bit of time to learn them now, but then they were completely pointless because I was so uninterested in them it was just wasted time. I'd have been better off repeating say maths or science to reinforce knowledge in those subjects rather than wasting time in subjects I found so uninteresting I'd learn nothing.
If a kid has no interest in Music, or PE, or English Literature or whatever then they should be moved to something that does interest them during the periods those classes would otherwise be or even simply allowed to sit in the library or whatever studying something of their choosing. This would be way more beneficial for kids.
It's one thing to give them a year or two year introductory course in each topic so they can figure out what they do like, but after that if they've got no interest in the topic they shouldn't be forced into it for another 8 - 10 years or whatever.
I bet you anything this would also cut rates of kids skipping class, and if kids aren't skipping class then they're also less likely to get in trouble or pick up bad habits because they wont be hiding behind the bike sheds smoking, or jumping over into neighbouring gardens or whatever whilst they avoid subjects they outright hate.
"And other stuff like LINQ and Entity Data Model stuff have their own problems, mostly in their attempts to be smarter than the developer. Spoiler: it's not, and when it tries, it stops being useful."
Can you expand on this? I'm not sure you really understand LINQ. There are different flavours of it (LINQ to objects, LINQ to SQL, LINQ to XML and so forth) so it seems odd to paint LINQ in general like that. LINQ isn't particularly magical anyway, LINQ to objects for example is just a bunch of extension methods applied to IEnumerable for the most part. The fancy syntax is little more than a shortcut for calling those methods and those methods don't do anything particularly exciting or overly complex.
The entity framework suffers the same pitfalls all ORM frameworks do so that shouldn't be surprising. Using ORM is like using anything, every once in a while it'll fit, but it's not a magical solution to all database access like some pretend.