Give me a break. You feel the obsessive need to "fix" your professors code, but bitch about Python gracefully handling code with different styles.
Here's a hint: Every programming language has both requirements and recommendations. For example, the style guide for Java says to enclose EVERY code block in braces.
Yet:
if (true)
doStuff();
is perfectly valid code. Personally I'm grateful that this particular standard is not enforced, because I find those braces ugly. I don't give a damn that this is a common source for errors, because my code is unit tested.
Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you expect is an old networking adage. That means that not all standards are enforced.
Here's my reasoning: Once in a while, an article covers a subject that I am knowledgeable about. Almost always, I will find something wrong in the article. Sometimes it's just a minor mistake or a gross over-simplification. More often than not, however, the article gets it hopelessly wrong and completely misinforms the reader.
I can only conclude that the same happens in articles that cover stuff I know nothing about.
So, I pulled the number in the headline out of my ass. Kinda like the average newspaper author.
And then there are people who know that modern VMs may run code actually faster than C, because over time the VM has the opportunity to profile actual usage pattern and can do aggressive optimizations that no C compiler could dream of.
The most popular way of indenting Python is with spaces only. The second-most popular way is with tabs only. Code indented with a mixture of tabs and spaces should be converted to using spaces exclusively. When invoking the Python command line interpreter with the -t option, it issues warnings about code that illegally mixes tabs and spaces. When using -tt these warnings become errors. These options are highly recommended!
For new projects, spaces-only are strongly recommended over tabs. Most editors have features that make this easy to do.
Well, Time Machine is close to what I want, except it's broken when you use it together with FileVault. Not only do you have to log out to backup your user data, you can't use the GUI to restore files.
So you only get versioning for system data. How useless is that?
I've gotten used to shutdown my Macbook before I go to bed each night to backup my home folder, but I'd rather leave it running all the time as I did before Leopard.
Time Machine is a great advancement for OS X. But technically it's an ugly hack, no matter how impressive.
By your logic, if I wear sunglasses then I can see you, but you can't see me, right?
And no, the children are most definitely not onto something. This behavior is a classic tell-tale that the child's cognitive development is in a pre-operational phase and that it cannot distinguish between itself and the world around it. It supposes that every person sees the world just like the child itself does and has access to the same data. That assumption is obviously wrong, because the child, just like every other person, has a unique perspective on its own thoughts and feelings.
Explicit saving is a crutch based on limitations of early computers when disk space was expensive. Unfortunately, people are so used to it that they think it's a good idea. Kinda link having to reboot Windows every while so it doesn't slow down. (I know that it's not true anymore.)
Think about it, when I create a document in the analog world with a pencil I don't have to save it. Every change is committed to paper.
You're right, of course, the added value with digital documents is that I can go back to previous versions. But again, it's implemented using a crutch, namely Undo and Redo. Automatic file versioning is the obvious answer.
Having many intermediate versions lying around is a non-problem. First of all, only deltas have to be saved with a complete version saved once in a while to minimize the chance of corruption. Secondly, just as with backups, the older the version is the less intermediate versions you need. Say one version every minute for the last hour. Then one version every hour for the last day before that. One version every day for the last week before that. And so on.
A filesystem that supports transparent automatic versioning is such a no-brainer from a usability standpoint that I can't figure out why nobody has done it already. I guess it must be really hard.
BTW, an explicit save can be simulated on a system with continuous saving by creating named snapshots.
Same reason why people don't believe in climate change. The potential risk is so mind-boggling, it's psychologically healthier to pretend it's not there.
Think of kids that cover their eyes and then reason that you cannot see them, because they cannot see you.
The book is out of print, so obviously the publisher has no interest in commercial exploitation of the work. Why should a third party profit? In fact, if you were to buy a book on the used market just to satisfy your morals and pirate the ebook for practical reasons, the merchant is exploiting your needs without providing any value/service whatsoever.
If you feel like it, you can send a donation to the author/publisher.
Copyright was meant as an incentive for the creator of a work not to protect an arbitrary business model that has sprung up around those works.
Oh yeah, the disclosure part: Born in the early 80s and a hobbyist photographer with the goal to make that my primary business.
I saved your first link and will read it first thing tomorrow when I'm at the uni. Right now, it's behind a subscription firewall.
Regarding stuffed ballot boxes: At the beginning of the day the box is publicly checked that it is empty and whenever somebody puts his vote into the box, a volunteer marks off an increasing count. When voting is finished, the number of ballots in the box has to match the number that the volunteer is at. This is how we do things in Germany. No ballot-stuffing possible.
Regarding making sure that my vote is counted: After I put my vote in the box, I can stay at the polling place as an observer. I can also observe the actual counting of the vote.
The key point I was trying to make is that with paper-and-pencil voting, everybody can watch the ENTIRE process of voting and judge for himself whether he trusts the results or not.
Still doesn't solve the trust issue: As a voter it's no good for me that some mathematician guarantees the integrity of the vote. That's only marginally better than a corperation's guarantee.
And even if I'm in the minority that understands the underlying mathematics, I still have to trust that there are no bugs in the implementation or that nobody has tampered with the hardware.
With paper-and-pencil ballots I can see for myself.
Because counting is not the issue (we all agree that computers are good at counting), but trusting the result is.
The key ingredient that gives confidence to paper-and-pencil ballots is the PUBLIC counting of the ballots. Every citizen can watch that process and compare the tally to the results published in the local paper. At the end of the day, he can be confident that there were no shenanigans under his watch.
You can't watch a computer counting. Well you can, but then the one reason why officials are pushing voting machines -- a speedy count -- is gone.
It boils down to the question: Can you trust a computer? That you have no control over?
The difference is that you can monitor the counting process to watch out for any shenanigans. In Germany you can even volunteer to do the counting. At the end you write down the total and compare it the next day with the results for your precinct that are published in the paper. The more people do that, the higher the public confidence.
The simple truth is, that with paper-and-pencil ballots the public has the ability to monitor EVERY SINGLE STEP of the voting process, except of course the casting of the vote. There's no way to achieve the same transparency with voting machines.
I agree completely. What people forget is that the PUBLIC counting of the secret ballot is what gives confidence to paper-and-pencil ballots. You simply can't do that with computers.
I understand that lazy bureaucrats think that voting machines are the best thing since sliced bread, because in their mind sacrifycing an evening every four years to ensure the integrity of the vote is simply too much to ask for.
But every computer scientist who thinks that voting machines are a good idea should read Ken Thompson's paper on trusting computers (the C compiler with a backdoor without it being present in the source for the compiler).
While Germany has fewer elected officials a ballot can still be non-trivial with Bundestag, state and community elections all on the same day. Popular initiatives are on the rise in recent years and several states have complicated their ballot (IRV and a process we call Kumulieren/Panaschieren), so the ballot will get larger with time.
The argument that one needs voting machines, because of the many elections is a total non sequitur to the complaint that people don't trust machines to count their vote. And rightly so. The only good reason for voting machines is helping disabled people that have problems with a paper ballot. Even then a print-out of the vote should be counted manually.
Just throw more hardware, err, I mean man-power at the problem if the number of ballots is too large. There's also no reason that local, state and federal elections have to be on the same day. Having state initiatives on the ballot with a federal election is suspect as well. Spread them out throughout the year and the system will scale better.
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Give me a break. You feel the obsessive need to "fix" your professors code, but bitch about Python gracefully handling code with different styles.
Here's a hint: Every programming language has both requirements and recommendations. For example, the style guide for Java says to enclose EVERY code block in braces.
Yet:
if (true)
doStuff();
is perfectly valid code. Personally I'm grateful that this particular standard is not enforced, because I find those braces ugly. I don't give a damn that this is a common source for errors, because my code is unit tested.
Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you expect is an old networking adage. That means that not all standards are enforced.
Here's my reasoning: Once in a while, an article covers a subject that I am knowledgeable about. Almost always, I will find something wrong in the article. Sometimes it's just a minor mistake or a gross over-simplification. More often than not, however, the article gets it hopelessly wrong and completely misinforms the reader.
I can only conclude that the same happens in articles that cover stuff I know nothing about.
So, I pulled the number in the headline out of my ass. Kinda like the average newspaper author.
No problem, and I take back my insult above. I posted it before I read your second reply.
All is good.
Reading comprehension is not your forte, eh?
I said, a web site gets more traffic from legit users than from teh Google.
First of all, the traffic a web site gets from Google's spider is dwarfed by the the traffic it gets from legit users.
Secondly, if it weren't for Google's spider the web site wouldn't receive a lot of user traffic anyway.
Finally, Google pays the telcos (but not the web site) for the spider traffic it generates on its end.
Yes, but it's produced by the NSA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selinux
From the same page as above, the standard is 4 spaces.
Python doesn't care how much whitespace you use to indent a code block, but obviously it has to be consistent for each individual code block.
This will work:
def myFun():
print "4 spaces"
def coworkerFun():
print "6 spaces"
This will not:
def myFun():
print "4 spaces"
print "6 spaces"
And then there are people who know that modern VMs may run code actually faster than C, because over time the VM has the opportunity to profile actual usage pattern and can do aggressive optimizations that no C compiler could dream of.
There's a standard: It's spaces.
From http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/:
North Korea can hit the US with a nuke right now! All it takes is a container shipped into the New York harbor.
Assuming, of course, that NK actually has any nukes after their "test."
I think Iran and North Korea are simply the easiest threats to scare the public with right now.
There, fixed that for you.
According to the WaPo article, the program has cost $100 billion since 1999. With a budget like this, failure is not an option.
What a waste.
Well, Time Machine is close to what I want, except it's broken when you use it together with FileVault. Not only do you have to log out to backup your user data, you can't use the GUI to restore files.
So you only get versioning for system data. How useless is that?
I've gotten used to shutdown my Macbook before I go to bed each night to backup my home folder, but I'd rather leave it running all the time as I did before Leopard.
Time Machine is a great advancement for OS X. But technically it's an ugly hack, no matter how impressive.
By your logic, if I wear sunglasses then I can see you, but you can't see me, right?
And no, the children are most definitely not onto something. This behavior is a classic tell-tale that the child's cognitive development is in a pre-operational phase and that it cannot distinguish between itself and the world around it. It supposes that every person sees the world just like the child itself does and has access to the same data. That assumption is obviously wrong, because the child, just like every other person, has a unique perspective on its own thoughts and feelings.
Some further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_cognitive_development and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Piaget
But thanks for playing.
Explicit saving is a crutch based on limitations of early computers when disk space was expensive. Unfortunately, people are so used to it that they think it's a good idea. Kinda link having to reboot Windows every while so it doesn't slow down. (I know that it's not true anymore.)
Think about it, when I create a document in the analog world with a pencil I don't have to save it. Every change is committed to paper.
You're right, of course, the added value with digital documents is that I can go back to previous versions. But again, it's implemented using a crutch, namely Undo and Redo. Automatic file versioning is the obvious answer.
Having many intermediate versions lying around is a non-problem. First of all, only deltas have to be saved with a complete version saved once in a while to minimize the chance of corruption. Secondly, just as with backups, the older the version is the less intermediate versions you need. Say one version every minute for the last hour. Then one version every hour for the last day before that. One version every day for the last week before that. And so on.
A filesystem that supports transparent automatic versioning is such a no-brainer from a usability standpoint that I can't figure out why nobody has done it already. I guess it must be really hard.
BTW, an explicit save can be simulated on a system with continuous saving by creating named snapshots.
The fact that they are redistributing an (allegedly) patched OS X.
Same reason why people don't believe in climate change. The potential risk is so mind-boggling, it's psychologically healthier to pretend it's not there.
Think of kids that cover their eyes and then reason that you cannot see them, because they cannot see you.
The book is out of print, so obviously the publisher has no interest in commercial exploitation of the work. Why should a third party profit? In fact, if you were to buy a book on the used market just to satisfy your morals and pirate the ebook for practical reasons, the merchant is exploiting your needs without providing any value/service whatsoever.
If you feel like it, you can send a donation to the author/publisher.
Copyright was meant as an incentive for the creator of a work not to protect an arbitrary business model that has sprung up around those works.
Oh yeah, the disclosure part: Born in the early 80s and a hobbyist photographer with the goal to make that my primary business.
I saved your first link and will read it first thing tomorrow when I'm at the uni. Right now, it's behind a subscription firewall.
Regarding stuffed ballot boxes: At the beginning of the day the box is publicly checked that it is empty and whenever somebody puts his vote into the box, a volunteer marks off an increasing count. When voting is finished, the number of ballots in the box has to match the number that the volunteer is at. This is how we do things in Germany. No ballot-stuffing possible.
Regarding making sure that my vote is counted: After I put my vote in the box, I can stay at the polling place as an observer. I can also observe the actual counting of the vote.
The key point I was trying to make is that with paper-and-pencil voting, everybody can watch the ENTIRE process of voting and judge for himself whether he trusts the results or not.
Still doesn't solve the trust issue: As a voter it's no good for me that some mathematician guarantees the integrity of the vote. That's only marginally better than a corperation's guarantee.
And even if I'm in the minority that understands the underlying mathematics, I still have to trust that there are no bugs in the implementation or that nobody has tampered with the hardware.
With paper-and-pencil ballots I can see for myself.
How is that for a solution: Paper-and-pencil ballots with a full manual count.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Because counting is not the issue (we all agree that computers are good at counting), but trusting the result is.
The key ingredient that gives confidence to paper-and-pencil ballots is the PUBLIC counting of the ballots. Every citizen can watch that process and compare the tally to the results published in the local paper. At the end of the day, he can be confident that there were no shenanigans under his watch.
You can't watch a computer counting. Well you can, but then the one reason why officials are pushing voting machines -- a speedy count -- is gone.
It boils down to the question: Can you trust a computer? That you have no control over?
The difference is that you can monitor the counting process to watch out for any shenanigans. In Germany you can even volunteer to do the counting. At the end you write down the total and compare it the next day with the results for your precinct that are published in the paper. The more people do that, the higher the public confidence.
The simple truth is, that with paper-and-pencil ballots the public has the ability to monitor EVERY SINGLE STEP of the voting process, except of course the casting of the vote. There's no way to achieve the same transparency with voting machines.
I agree completely. What people forget is that the PUBLIC counting of the secret ballot is what gives confidence to paper-and-pencil ballots. You simply can't do that with computers.
I understand that lazy bureaucrats think that voting machines are the best thing since sliced bread, because in their mind sacrifycing an evening every four years to ensure the integrity of the vote is simply too much to ask for.
But every computer scientist who thinks that voting machines are a good idea should read Ken Thompson's paper on trusting computers (the C compiler with a backdoor without it being present in the source for the compiler).
While Germany has fewer elected officials a ballot can still be non-trivial with Bundestag, state and community elections all on the same day. Popular initiatives are on the rise in recent years and several states have complicated their ballot (IRV and a process we call Kumulieren/Panaschieren), so the ballot will get larger with time.
The argument that one needs voting machines, because of the many elections is a total non sequitur to the complaint that people don't trust machines to count their vote. And rightly so. The only good reason for voting machines is helping disabled people that have problems with a paper ballot. Even then a print-out of the vote should be counted manually.
Just throw more hardware, err, I mean man-power at the problem if the number of ballots is too large. There's also no reason that local, state and federal elections have to be on the same day. Having state initiatives on the ballot with a federal election is suspect as well. Spread them out throughout the year and the system will scale better.