W. RIchard Stevens had a pretty good approach to error-handling in "Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment". In most cases, he wrapped system calls or library calls in wrappers that would test for errors and abort with an error message on failure. These wrappers meant that the main program could forget about error-checking.
In the relatively rare cases in which the main program felt it could recover from an error, it would call the system call directly and handle the error itself. This led to pretty clean but still very safe code.
Naturally, this approach is inappropriate for authors of library code, but it's great for the main body of an application.
Here in Canada, POTS service is still quite heavily regulated and the phone company has to provide reliability guarantees. As in Britain, broadband is "best-effort" and too bad for you if it's down for a few hours.
I haven't worked anywhere this century where the office phones have not been VoIP.
We use Asterisk and IP phones internally, but our connections to the outside world (we're a small company) are still POTS. That's because any affordable DSL connection for a small company totally sucks for doing VoIP and our POTS lines never go down. Ever.
The amount we'd save by switching away from POTS is so tiny in the big scheme of things that it's just not worth it.
I'm 46, run my own company, and still do the lion's share of development on our products. My experience with hiring programmers is that most people under about 30 are more work to train than their older peers. They haven't had the work experience to develop into disciplined and experienced programmers.
Still, it's good to know that geezers like Linus Torvalds are two years past their prime and poor old Alan Cox is four years into his decline.
And I think you'll find that there wasn't much attention over the Syrian government, because most members of hacking groups (that we hear of in the western press, anyway, Anon is one example) are from the west
So? What has anon done lately about China, a nations that is of supreme importance to the West, that violates human rights to a shocking degree and that controls Internet access (something anon alledgedly cares about)?
And once again it's the fucking victim bullshit. They're Jewish, therefore it must be antisemitism. Oh, but when it's a secular or Christian government that's being targetted, suddenly that logic doesn't apply? Where were you screaming about "Anon advocating the genocide of Christians" when US govt sites get taken down? Get your head out of your ass.
Antisemitism has been a major force in the world since the beginning of Christianity and it got another boost by Islam. To deny that there's any connection whatsoever between antisemitism and the knee-jerk condemnation of Israel by many is idiotic.
Secondly, I never once claimed Anon advocates genocide. I claim that Hamas does.
Maybe if you learned read what I wrote (and to write English without spicing your sentences with profanity) you'd be taken more seriously.
And taking Israel's side is a wiser choice because....?
Because Israel is a secular democracy. Despite the noise of Jewish religious extremists, their positions are not widely shared in Israel.
Because Israel's basic laws do not contain a call to genocide the way the Hamas charter quotes religious texts calling for the killing of Jews.
We in the West should let these pathetic little people kill one another off and we should keep our noses out of it.
Yes. The West and everyone else should let Israel defend itself without having to worry about outside interference and without anti-Israel rhetoric being spewed at the UN and elsewhere.
Do you deny that Israel has been expanding into Palestinian land ever since it was originally created?
It seems to me that in 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza and gave the Palestinians self-rule there. This was a test of the Palestinians and they failed spectacularly.
Given how the Palestinians conducted themselves in Gaza following 2005, the Israelis would be suicidal to contemplate withdrawal from the West Bank. The simple fact is that Palestinian politics is a total mess with extremists taking over from so-called moderates at every turn. IMO, there is no chance for peace with the Palestinians for the next generation or several generations and the best we can hope for is to keep the lid on the situation until the Palestinians mature politically, give up their bullshit religious extremism and take a more realistic attitude.
I am an Anarchist. I've heard nothing close to "blame the jews", but a fair bit of "blame Israel".
And why do you suppose you're hearing that? Put things in perspective: Hamas has fired several hundred rockets at Israel (even before this latest offensive) and Israel did almost nothing. As soon as it moved to defend itself, we heard howls of outrage and blame.
Meanwhile, Anonymous and their ilk stay perfectly silent while 30,000+ people are killed in Syria. Why is that? Is it because the people doing the shooting in Syria are not Jewish?
Yes, really. Most leftist organizations and peace [sic] groups outside Israel are pretty much uniformly against Israel. You may be leftist and not against Israel, but that's going against the official positions of most leftist groups. Just look at the official stances of rabble.ca, cupe.ca, the "BDS" movement, etc.
And self-styled anarchists like the bozos behind AdBusters are very anti-Israel.
no leftists are in favor of the combined arab aggression that wishes israel off the map (more accurately, all jews dead).
I wish that were the case, but many leftist groups rally in support of Hamas and even Hezbollah, despite the enormous cognitive dissonance that should cause. I'd post links, but all you need to do is a Google search or searches on the sites I mentioned above.
Anonymous are a bunch of losers. They just want to revel in the limelight and taking the Palestinian side against Israel happens to be cool among leftists, anarchists, and other spoiled children with too much time and money and not enough wisdom.
The best approach to anonymous is to ignore them. If they don't get the attention they seek, they'll go back to wanking off to online porn in their moms' basements.
Calling all religious believers "delusional" by definition, meets your criteria fully.
So it's not a delusion to claim that Eve was created from Adam's rib? Or that Mohammed ascended to the heavens on a magical horse? Or that when you drink wine in the Communion rite, it's actually the blood of Christ entering your body?
As for "beheading", can you name something within Darwinian Naturalism that argues against it, if it increases the propagation of the behead-ers DNA?
Natural selection is an explanation of biological evolution. It's not a system for morality; it's simply the way the universe works.
It is not the job of government to 'change behavior in the general population' in free countries
It is, sometimes. That's why we have public health announcements. It's why we're encouraged to recycle and use less energy. It's why some governments (eg, that of Canada) offer tax breaks for putting your kids in sports or exercise programs.
It is exactly the job of the government to build a better society, and if that means encouraging people to change their behavior, then that's the government's mandate. Note carefully that I wrote encouraging and not forcing. I would never support a ban on sweetened drinks, but limiting serving sizes is entirely reasonable.
Plus, why could I not then just drink multiple ones?
You could, but you probably wouldn't. Human psychology is such that we often consume everything in the serving we're given. So if you have larger servings, you tend to consume more.
Do you honestly think the corporations wouldn't be fighting tooth and nail against this law unless they thought it would reduce the consumption of unhealthy sweetened drinks?
so the answer to coporate tyranny is what? government tyranny on top of/next to it?
In a democracy, the government is accountable to the people. A corporation is only accountable to its shareholders.
As unpopular as this opinion may be in the USA, I'd rather have the government making these sorts of rules rather than leaving it up to the private sector. At least you get a chance to vote out the government every few years.
The New York law is a very sensible public health measure that is (alas) doomed to failure because of corporate power and the inability of the US system of government in recent times to actually achieve anything worthwhile.
anyone who believes that people who believe differently than they do are fundamentally and typically irredeemably evil
That describes Islam perfectly. Please note: I am NOT saying Muslims are evil. I've mentioned that several times. Muslims are people just like any other people: A few very good, most basically good, and a small number rotten.
I'm talking about Islam, the religion and philosophy. I contend that Islam itself is fundamentally bad and I've show quotes from the Quran to support my point of view.
Christianity is a blight on humanity. That doesn't make Islam OK. And IMO at the current time, Islam is far more of a problem than Christianity. I don't believe the Westboro Baptist Church nutjobs have been able to mobilize tens of thousands of rioters in cities across the globe.
Slashdot Mirror
W. RIchard Stevens had a pretty good approach to error-handling in "Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment". In most cases, he wrapped system calls or library calls in wrappers that would test for errors and abort with an error message on failure. These wrappers meant that the main program could forget about error-checking.
In the relatively rare cases in which the main program felt it could recover from an error, it would call the system call directly and handle the error itself. This led to pretty clean but still very safe code.
Naturally, this approach is inappropriate for authors of library code, but it's great for the main body of an application.
Here in Canada, POTS service is still quite heavily regulated and the phone company has to provide reliability guarantees. As in Britain, broadband is "best-effort" and too bad for you if it's down for a few hours.
We use Asterisk and IP phones internally, but our connections to the outside world (we're a small company) are still POTS. That's because any affordable DSL connection for a small company totally sucks for doing VoIP and our POTS lines never go down. Ever.
The amount we'd save by switching away from POTS is so tiny in the big scheme of things that it's just not worth it.
And in case anyone else wants to test, the password is: s!a@m#n$p%c
I'm 46, run my own company, and still do the lion's share of development on our products. My experience with hiring programmers is that most people under about 30 are more work to train than their older peers. They haven't had the work experience to develop into disciplined and experienced programmers.
Still, it's good to know that geezers like Linus Torvalds are two years past their prime and poor old Alan Cox is four years into his decline.
I guess you didn't hear about Israel giving scholarships to 55 tibetan students or Israeli Friends of the TIbetan People or that the Dalai Lama has visited Israel at least four times.
Darn those facts. So inconvenient.
So? What has anon done lately about China, a nations that is of supreme importance to the West, that violates human rights to a shocking degree and that controls Internet access (something anon alledgedly cares about)?
Antisemitism has been a major force in the world since the beginning of Christianity and it got another boost by Islam. To deny that there's any connection whatsoever between antisemitism and the knee-jerk condemnation of Israel by many is idiotic.
Secondly, I never once claimed Anon advocates genocide. I claim that Hamas does.
Maybe if you learned read what I wrote (and to write English without spicing your sentences with profanity) you'd be taken more seriously.
Because Israel is a secular democracy. Despite the noise of Jewish religious extremists, their positions are not widely shared in Israel.
Because Israel's basic laws do not contain a call to genocide the way the Hamas charter quotes religious texts calling for the killing of Jews.
Yes. The West and everyone else should let Israel defend itself without having to worry about outside interference and without anti-Israel rhetoric being spewed at the UN and elsewhere.
It seems to me that in 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza and gave the Palestinians self-rule there. This was a test of the Palestinians and they failed spectacularly.
Given how the Palestinians conducted themselves in Gaza following 2005, the Israelis would be suicidal to contemplate withdrawal from the West Bank. The simple fact is that Palestinian politics is a total mess with extremists taking over from so-called moderates at every turn. IMO, there is no chance for peace with the Palestinians for the next generation or several generations and the best we can hope for is to keep the lid on the situation until the Palestinians mature politically, give up their bullshit religious extremism and take a more realistic attitude.
Please go onto the web sites of leftist and anarchist organizations and search for their positions on the Israeli-Arab conflict. Then report back.
And why do you suppose you're hearing that? Put things in perspective: Hamas has fired several hundred rockets at Israel (even before this latest offensive) and Israel did almost nothing. As soon as it moved to defend itself, we heard howls of outrage and blame.
Meanwhile, Anonymous and their ilk stay perfectly silent while 30,000+ people are killed in Syria. Why is that? Is it because the people doing the shooting in Syria are not Jewish?
Yes, really. Most leftist organizations and peace [sic] groups outside Israel are pretty much uniformly against Israel. You may be leftist and not against Israel, but that's going against the official positions of most leftist groups. Just look at the official stances of rabble.ca, cupe.ca, the "BDS" movement, etc.
And self-styled anarchists like the bozos behind AdBusters are very anti-Israel.
I wish that were the case, but many leftist groups rally in support of Hamas and even Hezbollah, despite the enormous cognitive dissonance that should cause. I'd post links, but all you need to do is a Google search or searches on the sites I mentioned above.
Anonymous are a bunch of losers. They just want to revel in the limelight and taking the Palestinian side against Israel happens to be cool among leftists, anarchists, and other spoiled children with too much time and money and not enough wisdom.
The best approach to anonymous is to ignore them. If they don't get the attention they seek, they'll go back to wanking off to online porn in their moms' basements.
Unless the non-religious happen to live in a country where repudiating the religion is a capital offense.
So it's not a delusion to claim that Eve was created from Adam's rib? Or that Mohammed ascended to the heavens on a magical horse? Or that when you drink wine in the Communion rite, it's actually the blood of Christ entering your body?
Natural selection is an explanation of biological evolution. It's not a system for morality; it's simply the way the universe works.
The protesters there were religious, no, even if the state is not a theocracy?
There certainly were protests in Iran with Iran's supreme leader calling the making of the film "a criminal act".
I don't know if the parent post was supposed to be humorous or if the OP is ignorant. The host of Family Feud was Richard Dawson, not Richard Dawkins.
... but it's time you learned a new slogan:
Google is Great
Punished?? Being unable to buy 700mL of soda in one container instead of two is punishment?
Don't be ridiculous.
It is, sometimes. That's why we have public health announcements. It's why we're encouraged to recycle and use less energy. It's why some governments (eg, that of Canada) offer tax breaks for putting your kids in sports or exercise programs.
It is exactly the job of the government to build a better society, and if that means encouraging people to change their behavior, then that's the government's mandate. Note carefully that I wrote encouraging and not forcing. I would never support a ban on sweetened drinks, but limiting serving sizes is entirely reasonable.
You could, but you probably wouldn't. Human psychology is such that we often consume everything in the serving we're given. So if you have larger servings, you tend to consume more.
Do you honestly think the corporations wouldn't be fighting tooth and nail against this law unless they thought it would reduce the consumption of unhealthy sweetened drinks?
In a democracy, the government is accountable to the people. A corporation is only accountable to its shareholders.
As unpopular as this opinion may be in the USA, I'd rather have the government making these sorts of rules rather than leaving it up to the private sector. At least you get a chance to vote out the government every few years.
The New York law is a very sensible public health measure that is (alas) doomed to failure because of corporate power and the inability of the US system of government in recent times to actually achieve anything worthwhile.
On the contrary, to deny any connection between the religion itself and the actions of those who claim to represent it is naive in the extreme.
That describes Islam perfectly. Please note: I am NOT saying Muslims are evil. I've mentioned that several times. Muslims are people just like any other people: A few very good, most basically good, and a small number rotten.
I'm talking about Islam, the religion and philosophy. I contend that Islam itself is fundamentally bad and I've show quotes from the Quran to support my point of view.
Christianity is a blight on humanity. That doesn't make Islam OK. And IMO at the current time, Islam is far more of a problem than Christianity. I don't believe the Westboro Baptist Church nutjobs have been able to mobilize tens of thousands of rioters in cities across the globe.