"People trafficking is a huge business with profits for organised crime of over $30billion."
I am going to go out on a limb here and say that, if we have learned anything from the War on Drugs, then the solution to this problem is probably not increased criminal penalties for prostitution.
Perhaps the solution is to educate people - both young women who are at-risk of getting caught up in human trafficking, as well as men who may be likely to pay for sex and may not be aware of the problem of human trafficking.
Ah, yes, I was suggesting that criminalising prostitution is a good idea.
In general I don't have a problem with people selling or buying sex. There are some people who need strong protections - anyone under age; anyone who's being coerced; anyone who's being trafficked. There could probably be strong laws made around those areas, with extra help and support for victims.
Then there's a bunch of public health stuff. People addicted to drugs; people with STDs; people engaging in risky ('bareback') behaviour; and so on. Education and support would be good for these. Unfortunately drug addicted sex workers are not a sympathetic vote winning crowd.
The law in the UK is a bit odd. Exchanging money for sex is okay, but you're not allowed to offer sex for money or to offer money for sex. And then there are some newer laws which are "strict liability offences" (it doesn't matter if you know or not; even if you made efforts to find out) covering women who are forced into sex working. (This covers drug addicts paying debts for drugs using sex work.)
The UK has a stricter definition of trafficked than the UN. A person can voluntarily be trafficked into the UK.
My feelings exactly. I would also like to know what it is that Internet Explorer 9+ "doesn't support" that is apparently such a showstopper as to merit dropping support entirely.
"Far too often things break between releases and/or upgrades."
I recently tried to upgrade my older 9.10 install to 10.4 LTS. I got a bunch of errors about x.org upon upgrade (I think maybe because I downloaded and installed Nvidia's Linux driver a while ago), and yep you guessed it - hosed system upon reboot.
These sort of showstopper problems should not be occurring - not in the year 2011. Totally inexcusable as far as I'm concerned.
"So basically, this is a compiler optimization implemented by having the programmer provide hints to the compiler."
I'm not entirely sure that's correct. I think Larry Wall (being a linguist originally) designed it that way because he thought that using context-sensitive sigils was more like regular speech where leading words indicate the number, i.e. 'a cup' vs. 'some cups'...
Having taken a class on linguistics, I have to say basing a computer language on it is a horrible idea.
Human languages are far more complex and verbose than is required for talking to computers. Consider that it takes years to master a spoken language. A computer language should be much easier to pick up once you already know how to use an existing language. Computer languages should attempt to reduce complexity and verbosity where possible.
Example: I picked up lua in a week. (javascript and ruby experience helped a lot) I'm not an expert by any means but I'm capable of writing usable applications. I doubt a person could pick up a new human language in a week.
Human languages are far more complex and verbose than is required for talking to computers.
This is mostly a quibble, but human languages are not more verbose than computer languages, generally. I can generally rely on you to allocate all the variables and present the result in a context-aware way when I ask you, "What is 3 + 5?" I'd generally have to allocate variables and tell the computer where to put the result if I were to ask it the same question.
What was, and still is, sort of magical about Perl is the degree to which it is aware of context and can use it to sort out meaning. If anything, the chief complaints against Perl, which stems from its similarity to natural languages (!), is its terseness and expressive power, these complaints being that it's indistinguishable from line noise and is a write-only language.
Well in the end, the only thing that really matters is programmer productivity... and ultimately the proof is in the pudding I think.
You're right in basically pointing out that if a new language can't communicate quantifiable productivity benefits, then what's the point of taking the time to learn it and switching over?
"Nobody likes seeing their money go to waste, especially to causes they dont agree with (ie union pensions for government employees that retire after 20 years of service)."
So the ultra rich obstruct attempts at making the system more efficient (i.e. getting rid of the for-profit healthcare industry in America which costs the average American more and delivers worse outcomes than other industrialized countries) and then use that as an excuse to not pay more taxes? That's a pretty good racket they got going there. The world's smallest violin must be playing for all those poor downtrodden multi-millionaire bankers...
I don't think he's trying to lecture anyone - probably speaking from personal feeling rather. I mean... life is ultimately kind of a Sisyphean existance when you think about it (as the philosopher Albert Camus once pointed out). Some people don't get bothered by that, but other people can get very down thinking about the existential nature of things. And that feeling can be the impetus to want to try something different with their lives that has more meaning to them. I don't see that as a bad thing...
I wonder... how many programmers have been exposed to enough different problem domains and languages to really make an accurate judgement on what is "the best programming language", if any such thing even exists (which I doubt).
Maybe the reason you hate some feature of a language because you've never been exposed to a problem domain where that feature would be required.
I mean how many of us can honestly say that we are experts in more than one or maybe two domains: i.e. web development, desktop/native apps, embedded systems, systems programming, 3d programming, mainframe programming, massive enterprise team projects, small one-person projects, in-between projects, etc...?
I say he who is versed in all of these cast the first stone... :)
I don't hate the features that are there, I hate the features that are missing. Most languages I know let you express vector<int> without an external library, but the libraries that ship with this language only let you express vector<"oh wait let me call that function/allocate a new object for you">, which is significantly different. It doesn't provide coroutines or continuations, while even C++ does.
I'm 7/9 on your list ("versed" if not necessarily "expert"), and I can honestly say that there's only one sweet spot for Java that I've been able to identify: cross-platform GUI work. And that's entirely down to the tooling.
I am going to go out on a limb here and say that, if we have learned anything from the War on Drugs, then the solution to this problem is probably not increased criminal penalties for prostitution.
Perhaps the solution is to educate people - both young women who are at-risk of getting caught up in human trafficking, as well as men who may be likely to pay for sex and may not be aware of the problem of human trafficking.