Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re: Prefer support (Score 1) 286

It isn't like any polynesians had a navy capable of transporting the people and resources needed to conquer the islands. Nor was there economic value in such an endeavor. Refugees and explorers showing up and assimilating? Absolutely. A conquering force? Not a chance.

Maori didn't quite conquer New Zealand that way (there was no-one to conquer it from), but they definitely did assemble a fleet large enough to be an invasion force.

Comment Re:The nature of any polygamous religion (Score 1) 1097

Historically, it's actually the other way around - the reason why Islam (and other religions and cultures similar in that respect) has provisions for polygamy in the first place is because it started as a rather warlike religion with inevitable casualties among the young males who shoulder the burden of the war. It's also why polygamy is not generally encouraged in Islam, and was originally promoted by Muhammad as a means to ensure that all those widowed females have a caretaker. Of course, over time it simply evolved into more wives for richer people, but that's a different conversation.

Comment Re:Oh come on. (Score 1) 250

The main reason why people recommend it is because of what happens if you mix signed and unsigned. If they are of the same size (e.g. signed int and unsigned int), then according to the spec, the result will be unsigned. So you divide, say, -2 by 1u, and get something very unexpected. If you always use the same signedness, then you can dodge this problem, and in general you do want to represent negative numbers every now and then, hence the default is signed.

In practice it doesn't work so well simply because so much of the language and the standard library uses unsigned anyway. For example, sizeof is unsigned, and so is strlen(), and in C++, size() on all the standard container types, including string. So if you want to write C or C++, you have to deal with signed/unsigned mismatch anyway.

Comment Re:Sanders amazes me (Score 1) 395

You want to play this game? Fine. I'm well within the 1% of US by income, and while the majority of my income isn't from capital gains, they are a sizable contribution due to stock bonuses and such. I'm quite okay with making personal income tax more progressive, and raising capital gains tax to match personal income, even though that would mean more money taken out of my pocket every year. Why? Well, perhaps because I don't want another Baltimore in my neighborhood?

Slashdot Top Deals

The hardest part of climbing the ladder of success is getting through the crowd at the bottom.

Working...