Good on the French - they are doing it right!

We protest stuff in "free speech zones" and our media ignores the people who are championing the average Joe unless someone walks buy in a sequin dress and clown make-up -- THAT GUY they interview. Ratings magic!

The French kidnap a CEO and nobody goes to jail. Maybe instead of making fun of them, we are the suckers, because we go for decade to decade with our prospects and power diminishing, and eventually we wake up being greeters at WalMart with no retirement savings.

We'll be complaining about the same things in a decade, likely.

In 5 years, there will be self-driving cars replacing the Uber AND the Taxi drivers.

Does anyone have a plan for this?

It's fine to say; "Well, just learn something new" when it's not you with a family and a tight budget having to jump into the marketplace and retrain while competing with people who've done that task their entire life -- but not everyone is as superior as the average person on Slashdot.

What do we do for the 'average person' when there isn't an easy alternative?

If they had the South on their side, that number changes.

Also, they controlled India with a larger population, estimated as being around 100 million for 1600 to 1881; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The Brits were supporting the South for their financial and political gain -- so basically, they would be handing us back over to British rule because they didn't like the system they were in.

I think this is revisionist history as seen through the lens of the .1% and I figure the Tea Baggers of today will tell the same story about the poor billionaires trying to make a global market and do-gooders and environmentalists stopping them from creating a paradise one banking collapse after another.

OK, you are going to need to have citations here.

I'm not saying it is impossible, but it seems to twist and turn history to make the plantation owners look like the heroes. The KKK probably couldn't invent better "lenses to see the world."

"It was fought to keep Brittan from reconquering the US."
Well, if the South had won, that would have been possible, because they'd be in debt to Britain and annexed. The Southern elite were throwing their lot in with the Crown. So are you saying they SHOULD have become part of Britain?

"Lincoln didn't free the slaves because he's a nice guy. Lincoln proclaimed emancipation to make the British government's support of slave-owning confederates EXTREMELY unpopular with the British people,"
Economically, today as it was back then, it's cheaper to use Capitalism to keep people poor -- rather than slavery. THEY have to go about feeding themselves anyway, and housing, and you don't have to guard people. Irish were probably cheaper in the North than slaves in the South -- I'll agree with that. But emancipation happened. If the South was unpopular for slavery and it wasn't that great an economic engine -- why the Hell did they keep people in slavery? The people who tried to abolish slavery did so at great risk. Whether you think Lincoln was a "nice guy" or not -- this is a self inflicted wound of the South.

The fact is; the Southern plantations had slaves. It had to have an economic or social reason so they were either profiting or being a bunch of dicks. I'm not seeing the nobility just based on the broad, inconvertible facts of history.

The UK didn't abandon the South because of the slavery issue -- they were blockaded and their ships kept from bringing in supplies. Whether or not it was popular, the crown had all kinds of operations around the world exploiting people. Local opinions didn't seem to matter when it came to making money.

"There were white people working the fields right next to the slaves" -- I never heard that before.

I had been confused on this very topic by learning that people of means in the South were claiming their issue was with imports; they wanted to import goods from anyone they wanted to, and not pay taxes. On recent re-examination with the Tea Party having such a strong correlation to so much of the complaints of the "owner class" of the South. I think I finally understood; the South wanted to get cheaper goods and not pay what would be required to employ FREE CITIZENS of the USA.

And think about it; why would the average, non-rich Southerner have to gain from slavery or cheap imports other than a WalMart discount? Their labor would be undermined while the profits of the wealthy maintained.

So when you look at the Southern argument as an issue of "free trade" -- it was really all about economic slavery all over again. And Tea Baggers today are just as in the dark as the average Southerner fighting to make sure the estate owners got to live like kings.

People should be able to fly the "protest flag" of the South, but they should have to give up 20% of all income to education for someone else's kid for the privilege -- because the education would be wasted on them.

The Civil war was fought for the .1% of the South.

I'm just wondering if "Gender Reassignment" would count for the access to programming?

I can understand "Ladies Night" at a bar, because men will spend to get access to the ladies.

But what happens when people get gender reassignment for "the opportunities"? It might also be convenient for ladies night. Don't be judging.

"Freedom of Speech" is nothing without access to information. If a person cannot get to the Internet, they are confined to commercial forms of information.

In my opinion, if a person could only be informed by CNN, Fox and a Newspaper, they'd be better off not having an opinion at all.

And have you TRIED dealing with any kind of public service or support system without the Internet these days? Paying utility bills?

I think the concept some people have about going without the Internet is pretty old fashioned. You are shut out of a good portion of opportunity, access and "reality."

The algorithm doesn't need "fixing" -- it works perfectly.

Computers are constantly animating objects based on the position of the mouse -- there are 4 points crossing the cartesian axis (immediately right or left, up or down), and we USED to, add a small value to the Zero figure and test if it's in quadrant [1,1 ; 1,-1 ; -1,-1; -1, 1] -- now it's automatic in a lot of programming languages -- at least as far as animation goes.

The problem I'm seeing here is people who know a lot of math theories, but aren't seeing that Divide by Zero comes up a lot in the real world and we deal with it -- it used to be with error handling, but now it might be with a min/max limiter and store the negative and positive. Or with a test of ranges above and below the value.

I wanted some input if "this was correct" from programmers.

You are technically correct but IMHO practically wrong. I'm talking about "real use" such as in animation, graphing and financial.

An equation that uses Divide by zero might go to "max limit" or to zero (in practical terms), based on preceding values. It will not suddenly say; "Sorry, the resultant value is indeterminable".

Graphs pass the zero mark all the time without a "NAN".

We just run to the limits of Math as an abstract concept but we do indeed KNOW that the value is either really big or really small -- we just lack the mathematical proof.

Until then, a lot of us are going to have to use a handler for divide by zero -- but a lot of scripts and programs already allow for it.

I think the people who suggest Russia or China has somehow gotten some "amazing secrets" from Snowden need to check some Wikileaks document dumps about how the 3rd party contractors are selling this data.

I was going to make a great quip with the name of the company, but Google is giving me nothing but popular results right now. Couldn't find the right terms to "NSA independent contractor." It told me the wages were up 25% however, so now is the time to sell out -- but with Patriotism.

Actually, I'd say I prefer the MS Office Suite from a decade ago.

I too hate the ribbon. And I'm thinking hate is not strong enough of a word. I use this UI device as a handy example of what you should not do in a User Interface -- but likely, now that UI is a "professional field" nobody with common sense or aesthetics need apply. The interface is more important than your content, and you'd understand that if you were TRAINED.

But we have to use the current MS Office, just like we have to use the current Adobe Edge, and Google Libraries in our web code.

I can just imagine saving a web page today, and trying to look at it in ten years. It's going to be like a Rubik's cube of long-dead self-organizing links.

"The JavaScript Lib you are trying to reach has collapsed into a dimensional rift. Would you like to use MS-Doc View? MS-Doc View no longer exists,"

If your algorithm treats it as a valid number, your algorithm is wrong.

I'm curious if your detractor here has written code.

I don't think a mathematician has "SHEER" stupidity, it's the problem with people who are smart, who think everything within the subset of their domain is figured out.

I imagine security experts have this problem with hackers; "But I read the entire manual and what you did is not possible."

Hacker; "Well, that's like, our opinion man."

Cyber Security; "You are an idiot. You have no command of the lexical jargon."

Hacker; "Hey, wasn't Lexical the name of your first pet?"

I think this is a RULE we want to follow, but in the real world, like all those "corporate guidelines" that come from Human Resources -- nobody can actually follow all of them and get their job done.

I can think of a lot of situations where I HAVE TO GIVE an answer when a value becomes Zero and I'm dividing with it.

Animation, bank accounts and artificial intelligence to name a few.
Dude; "Like if I have no money, so I give all of that to you but you have zero dinero change, and you've got zero patience with that, well, like that's your problem man."
AI; "Does not compute, divide by zero, shutting down."
Dude; "I can always get free nachos at the robo drive-thru this way."

I think your math skills and clear understanding of the rules is awesome.

However,... if I were programming an animation and it's following a path y= 2/x, I'm going to have a smooth motion along screen at position 2 until I get to Zero.

So do we handle it as an error? Undefined of course means undefined but do I have my animated plane just blink "undefined" at a random location and then suddenly re-appear on the screen?

In this case, I'd imagine that having the prior two locations and next (estimate) would be handy to determine what y is when x = 0.

Or perhaps we have a built-in exception handler if x = 0 BEFORE we calculate when we have x in a division statement. For instance, if we have a point on the screen and try and follow the mouse, there are 4 points where one of our numbers reaches 0.

Consider this script;
this.rotation = Math.atan2((object.y - mouse.y), (object.x - mouse.x)) * 180 / Math.PI;
These days -- that code will work. Likely because someone at Adobe built in a handler just for these cartesian dilemmas to figure out at which quadrant X and Y were pointing to.

Does it make practical sense that if X = 0, then X = .0000001 will get you a reasonable facsimile of what should occur with X?

That solves the need to test for "undefined" -- even though more programming environments might be robust with regard to divide by zero errors.

I think the POINT here is to add a; "Don't let the Citizen be able to do what we do, and don't let the citizen EVER have an opportunity to do something back."

We are ruled by mutual consent. NOT asymmetrically ability of CorpGov to crush us.

I'm not a fan of private citizens having arsenals and what chaos might ensue when an idiot adds a rocket launcher on a repurposed drone. But that idiot can also just use the stupid rocket launcher.

But I'm going to say; "I want that fool with a rocket launcher on my team if and when you guys in charge get out of hand."

Banning what people do with drones while having NO LIMITS to what those in power get to do with data, drones, genetic modification of monster carrots (for example) is not something I'm in favor of.

Feinstein is a crass, self-serving politician and it's embarrassing she's happens to be a Democrat -- or that I once defended her election (but hey, there was another crass, self-serving politico on the other team).

I'm sure her thought process was; "I'm not sure what a drone is, nor if these people are lying to me, but there are some really nice Zeros on this check they sent me."