The lack of evidence for dark matter is becoming kind of embarrassing to the theory. Anything that should provide direct evidence doesn't - dark matter is seemingly only necessary to explain large-scale gravitational behavior, but is not otherwise in evidence.
For me, as a layman, dark matter was never persuasive: "there's this stuff that only has an effect way out there where we need it, but has no local effect where it would screw up our nice models". Sure there is. There are other theories that seem to be at least as reasonable. For example, what if the speed of light is not a constant across all time and space? This could dramatically change the behavior of the universe on large scales. I'm no cosmologist, but I understand that there are other theories as well.
I teach computer science. No one will be surprised to hear that most of our students are men. This is a problem, at least, we are continually told that it is.
The news yesterday had a report on schools that train people to become small-animal veterinarians here in Switzerland. They happened to mention that 80% of the students are women. This is apparently fine; there is no outcry to find more male veterinary students.
My son works in professional child care, where women are something like 95% of the workforce. No one seems terribly concerned by this, even though the lack of male role models for young boys is arguably an actual, genuine problem.
Personally, I am very tired of articles like this. Why the continual one-way focus on women? Why can't we just let individuals be individuals, and do whatever they want? Ensure that there are no artificial barriers due to gender (or skin color, or hair color, or whatever), stop pushing people in directions they don't want to go, and just let people choose whatever career they want.
the majority of Swiss GDP is bank fees on off shore accounts
Nice stereotype you have there, but it doesn't have a lot to do with reality.
The Swiss financial sector in total is around 11% of our GDP; of that, banks are a bit more than half. Take out domestic banking services, and offshore banking is well under 5% of our GDP. Pharmaceuticals, biotechnology and medical devices are far more important, as are other industry sectors.
Writing as a Swiss, in my view there are two parts to the Swiss watch market. Apple doesn't threaten either one of them.
First, we have the market where Swatch succeeded: the inexpensive fashion accessory. $30 bucks and you had something cool to wear. Apple's products are a hell of a lot more expensive, so they aren't addressing this market.
Second, we have the really expensive Swiss watches. They are also fashion accessories, but they are almost exclusively mechanical watches. I don't see a digital watch gaining any traction among people who spend thousands and sometimes millions for what is essentially mechanical artwork.
Where Apply may succeed is among young professionals: people far enough along to have some disposable income - past the Swatch age - but not in the market to spend crazy amounts of money for a status symbol. The thing is: people in this market have already stopped wearing watches, because their smart phones show the time. Maybe Apple will get them to wear a fancy bracelet again - and maybe not. Either way, it's pretty irrelevant to the watch manufacturers.
Of course, I never have understood the Apple Koolaid. Slick marketing gets people to buy overpriced products that don't work any better than those of the competition. Why?
Desired feature for any browser, failing that a plugin: Something that really restricts the information the browser sends to the server, to prevent fingerprinting. There are UI switchers and the like, but I have yet to find one that just bloody stops the browser from sending identifying information.
A website that isn't trying to be bleeding edge has no need to know my OS, my browser version, what plugins I have installed, what fonts are on my system, or indeed anything at all about my system and setup. Send me standards-compliant HTML and CSS, and let my browser worry about the representation.
It seems to me that this should be a standard setting, right next to "prohibit 3rd party cookies". Why isn't it available in (afaik) any browser at all?
Brilliant. Have some amateur develop it, instead of using an established product written by an expert. Great idea.
Reminds me of the time (no joke) a Secret Service agent asked me to get data off of a PC that had been used for a credit-card scam. At the time I was (iirc) a college freshman or maybe sophomore, majoring in EE, who happened to program as a hobby. At the time I felt pretty flattered - only in retrospect did I realize how crazy this was. I had full, unfettered access to the PC, there was no copy, and I was programming directly on the box I was extracting evidence from. Granted, that was a long time ago, but it serves as an anecdote to show the level of professionalism these agencies demonstrate. I'm sure they have real experts, but too often the field offices seem to be playing Keystone Cops.
So here we have some field office taking down a whole data center. They're probably pretty impressed with themselves, they get some neat toys to play with, and they get headlines for their heroic crime-fighting efforts. Who cares about the collateral damage they've done to thousands of innocent people using the file-sharing service? At first glance, this reminds me of the Mega-debacle in the US, where they also took down an entire data center with very shaky justifications.
Prediction: The whole case will fall apart. Either because it was all a mistake and there is no evidence, or because they screw up whatever evidence they do have. Nonetheless, the customers will be out their data and the data-center will be driven to bankruptcy. Nonetheless, the officers involved will receive commendations.
Unless you have an enemy with obvious logistical targets, airstrikes are pretty useless. Great, you blew up a jeep with a machine gun on it. The cost of your bomb plus the flight time of the drone is probably more than the jeep was worth. Oh, by the way, which side was that jeep on? With intermingled and fluid borders, and little direct intelligence, it's kind of hard to be sure...
Anyway, as others have pointed out, all US intervention has accomplished since 9/11 (and before, but that's a different discussion) is to make bad situations even worse. What's the saying? "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result". US interventions are not working. It's time for the US to mind it's own business, and let the Middle East sort itself out.
Electronic copying has made music and video copyrights almost meaningless - anybody can download just about anything. 3D printing will make patents on simple mechanical objects equally meaningless. If I need a new kitchen widget or a new plastic doohickey, why not just print one? There ought to be endless online libraries, provided by manufacturers or created by end users.
Of course, industry will fight this tooth and nail. Patenting differently-shaped measuring spoons or the plastic feet on a chair may make no sense at all - but manufacturers will never admit this. They would rather spend millions defending their worthless patents.
Homeland security is now an expert on computer security? Will they do as wonderful a job here as they've done at airports? Will Americans soon have to flash their national IDs at the computers before being allowed on the Internet?
What the devil is Homeland Security doing issuing such a statement? Mission creep to the nth degree...
Key bits from the article: "the score for the January 8 inspection is listed as of 1 out of five with the comment: 'major improvement necessary'." and "one of only 19 out of 1,659 food outlets in the City to receive an 'A hazardous' rating".
This sounds pretty damning and pretty embarrassing. That said, there are some odd things. One of the complaints was mold on aging beef, but - depending on what you are doing - mold is part-and-parcel of the process (and the butchery claims that this was the case). Another funny point: the butchery voluntarily closed following the inspection to fix the issues mentioned. It reopened "several hours" later. If the issues could be fixed in a few hours, they were pretty much cosmetic problems.
So what to think? I figure it's 50/50 whether there were real problems, or whether this was a politically motivated inspection. Or maybe the inspector didn't get his free steak.
My wife has a small company that accepts credit cards. As the parent comment points out, the credit cards want to push liability for fraud onto the merchants. This has two aspects
- First, the physical card: Chip and pin is standard here, which would be fine, but don't think your fees go down when they hand you the liability. My wife has, to my knowledge, never had a case a fraud in 20 years, but that doesn't matter either. Mastercard/Visa are completely in collusion, there is no competition, they can demand whatever fees they want.
- Second, the Internet: I wrote her first web-shops, including the payment processing. This has become completely impossible. The credit card companies impose ever more impossible rules. Ultimately, if you handle credit card numbers electronically, they began insisting on quarterly audits of your IT infrastructure. We used an ISP - so they were going to insist on auditing the ISP infrastructure. Our ISP was - shockingly - actually ok with this, but the whole nightmare just got too complicated. In the end, the rules appear to be nothing but a way of forcing you to use their approved payment processors - yet another way to suck money out of merchants.
Will some Internet payment service please, please spring up and actually give Mastercard/Visa some real competition? Paypal has been largely co-opted, Bitcoin is a joke - we need something that your average Joe can and will use. So far, nothing...
- First, Java is needlessly wordy - consider the necessity of explicity writing getters/setters for any class where you want access control. What a pile of code for nothing.
- Second, you can write cryptic code or you can write understandable code. Understandable code involves a few more newlines, so what?
- Lastly, depending on your developers, yes, you can have overly long code. Someone who re-implements the same functionality 10 times instead of defining an abstract class and implementing it once - such developers exist. if you have one in your team, I do feel sorry for you. How prevalent is this? No idea...
Of course, TFA wasn't really about any of this. It is about a semantic analysis that determines the number of unique concepts in a method, reducing it to a "minset" which is no longer executable. This is an interesting theoretical analysis, but doesn't have a lot to do with real programs designed to actually perform actions with those concepts. Some methods are wordy because you want them to be clear, others are wordy because of what you are doing, and still others are wordy because of characteristics of the language you are working in.
"[Apple] powers all of its data centers with renewable energy"
Solar makes lots of sense in the California desert. However, I find statements like the above really annoying. In the night, solar provides zilch. On calm days, the same for wind. Apple's data centers hang off the grid like anyone else, and the great weakness of all renewables is irregular production and lack of storage.
The data comes from the Swiss subsidiary, but HSBC is actually a British bank. And you have to love this bit from TFA:
"The man in charge of HSBC at the time, Stephen Green, was made a Conservative peer and appointed to the government. Lord Green was made a minister eight months after HMRC had been given the leaked documents from his bank. He served as a minister of trade and investment until 2013."
The little fish will be prosecuted, while the big fish are made peers of the realm. Business as usual for all of the big banks.
Yes, it is a test question. Yes, if you understand recursion, you can answer the question. However, it is poor code, because the recursion is not tail-recursive; anyone who uses recursion with unknown values ('n' in this case) will write a tail-recursive function.
Since it's a totally artificial question, there is no reason that they couldn't have used a tail-recursive function. Lots of students won't know the difference, but crappy code like this is a stumbling block exactly for the students who really do understand what's going on.
I would use recursion a lot more frequently if compilers supported tail recursion. Not for simple iteration, perhaps, but there are plenty of cases where recursion is a better solution that a loop. For example, recursion is often be appropriate when working through some sort of data structure.
The problem is: The most common languages don't optimize for tail recursion. This means that even shallow recursion will eat memory. If the depth of the recursion is unknown, then the lack of optimization for tail-recursion means that your program may run out of memory - not because of any programming error, but due to a defect in the compiler.
There is nothing inherently difficult about handling tail recursion. Scala does it just fine, running on the JVM. I can only imagine that those responsible for mainstream languages figure no one will use it. Well, we, can't, because your compilers don't support it properly...
Most of the comments are technically correct, but everyone seems to have accepted the elephant in the room: We have no decent archival solution for the digital age. The bookkeeping done by monks 600 years ago can still be read today, as long as you can make out their handwriting. Accounts from 19th century companies were kept in ledgers. Barring fire, flood or other disaster, any ledgers someone thought were were keeping are still legible today. Some readers may recall that UBS got in trouble for trying to destroy bank records from WWII - but those records still existed with no effort whatsoever other than having them stacking in some storage closet for 70 years.
Yet without a serious and sustained effort, digital data self-destructs. No commonly used media has a storage life of more than a few years. We have all accepted this as fact, but it is actually a problem in serious need of a solution. As more and more records are kept online - business records, governmental records, personal records - the danger of serious data loss increases.
Want a recent example? In the US, the IRS lost important emails from personal mail accounts, because they had no archival strategy. If they were lying (which I personally tend to suspect), then it was an entirely plausible lie, which still serves to make the point. Just as with security, archival is an overhead expense that management doesn't really want to spend money on.
Somebody is selling snake oil again. Testosterone may have subjectively beneficial short-term effects (virility, muscle tone, etc), but all current evidence is that it shortens your lifespan.
When will people learn that measures like this promote discrimination.
As soon as you force schools to have more girls in the classes, one of two things will happen: (1) They will forbid interested boys from taking the classes, or (2) they will put uninterested girls into the classes, which will screw up the classes for those who really do want to learn.
Reminds me of the (entirely unofficial, but entirely real) quota systems I have seen in certain schools and companies. Because some women were admitted/hired despite being unqualified, all women in the program were regarded with suspicion. This was utterly unfair to those women who were, in fact, qualified. It encourages discrimination, because everyone assumes that all girls/women are there due to the quota rather than their personal capabilities.
The right approach: Encourage anyone interested to take the classes; ensure that the instructors and administrators are not discouraging anyone because of their gender.
The thing is: The money this tax is aimed at is not in the US and - by international law - was not earned in the US. To impose such a tax, the US must do some combination of violating signed treaties and forcing foreign jurisdictions to subject themselves to US domestic law. The US might have been able to pull something like that off, say, during the Cold War. Now? After the 2008 banking crisis? After the total muck the US has made of the Middle East? After Snowdon and the NSA revelations? Forget it, the US has lost too much credibility for such a naked power/cash grab to ever work.
Option a: The current US administration really is this clueless. Sadly, a real possibility, given the other idiocies they have shown.
Option b: This is a distraction. Just like a magician - attracts your attention with one hand, while, the other hand...someone is getting his pocket picked.
The US is bloody bankrupt, with current debt approaching $20 trillion and unfunded liabilities of around ten times that amount. It's all about cash, to keep paying for the bread and circuses, so that the political elite can put off the inevitable reckoning just a little bit longer.
I expect than anyone looking at the complete article, with all of the various tables and breakdowns will find at least one item that shocks them. In my case, two examples:
- 45% of Americans view the IRS positively, vs. 48% negatively. To me, this is shocking, because I know that the IRS is a power unto itself. If someone in the IRS decides they want to nail you, you are nailed. Appeal to a court? Sure, but only a court run by the IRS. They can empty your bank accounts, repossess your house, all without any review by any external party. Why anyone would trust an agency with this much power, or view it in a positive light is beyond me.
- More Democrats than Republicans view the DoD positively. Huh?
For me, many of the results are pretty surprising. The point of my comment here: I'll bet that's true for you too. We all live in echo chambers, mostly reading articles that reinforce our beliefs and talking with people who think much the same as we do. Really kind of scary, if you think about it...
"The money will be used to fund FirstNet, the government agency tasked with creating the nation's first interoperable broadband network..."
You could just as well put the money in a pile and burn it. Heck, given the inevitable follow-on costs, burning it would be cheaper...
"...contribute over $20 billion to deficit reduction". Meaning it's going into the general fund, where it will be promptly spent three or four times over, each time with the justification that the expenditure has already been paid for by the wireless auction.
I don't use Calc or Excel much, but I ran into two such limitations just recently. So, for anyone looking for concrete examples, here are two:
- Column limitation. A student of mine wrote a Java program that exported data into a spreadsheet, using some library or other (don't remember which). Now, I was impressed that this automatically started up Calc, when my student had clearly used Excel. However, as an initial step, the program created a zillion columns. Crash - max columns exceeded. Why should there be any sort of limit, other than exhausting all memory in the computer?
- Macros. I have a small spreadsheet that counts up the students' points and curves them into final course grades. The actual curving is done by a function I defined and attached to the spreadsheet. In Calc, if I alter the points, the sheet doesn't recalculate - I have to save and reload the sheet. No idea why - everything ought to work (and does in Excel).
There are similar irritations in all of the applications. Writer and Impress are the ones I use the most, and sometimes it's damned frustrating. I obviously haven't tried version 4.4 yet - here's hoping that they did more than fiddle with the UI.
Slashdot Mirror
The lack of evidence for dark matter is becoming kind of embarrassing to the theory. Anything that should provide direct evidence doesn't - dark matter is seemingly only necessary to explain large-scale gravitational behavior, but is not otherwise in evidence.
For me, as a layman, dark matter was never persuasive: "there's this stuff that only has an effect way out there where we need it, but has no local effect where it would screw up our nice models". Sure there is. There are other theories that seem to be at least as reasonable. For example, what if the speed of light is not a constant across all time and space? This could dramatically change the behavior of the universe on large scales. I'm no cosmologist, but I understand that there are other theories as well.
I teach computer science. No one will be surprised to hear that most of our students are men. This is a problem, at least, we are continually told that it is.
The news yesterday had a report on schools that train people to become small-animal veterinarians here in Switzerland. They happened to mention that 80% of the students are women. This is apparently fine; there is no outcry to find more male veterinary students.
My son works in professional child care, where women are something like 95% of the workforce. No one seems terribly concerned by this, even though the lack of male role models for young boys is arguably an actual, genuine problem.
Personally, I am very tired of articles like this. Why the continual one-way focus on women? Why can't we just let individuals be individuals, and do whatever they want? Ensure that there are no artificial barriers due to gender (or skin color, or hair color, or whatever), stop pushing people in directions they don't want to go, and just let people choose whatever career they want.
the majority of Swiss GDP is bank fees on off shore accounts
Nice stereotype you have there, but it doesn't have a lot to do with reality.
The Swiss financial sector in total is around 11% of our GDP; of that, banks are a bit more than half. Take out domestic banking services, and offshore banking is well under 5% of our GDP. Pharmaceuticals, biotechnology and medical devices are far more important, as are other industry sectors.
Writing as a Swiss, in my view there are two parts to the Swiss watch market. Apple doesn't threaten either one of them.
First, we have the market where Swatch succeeded: the inexpensive fashion accessory. $30 bucks and you had something cool to wear. Apple's products are a hell of a lot more expensive, so they aren't addressing this market.
Second, we have the really expensive Swiss watches. They are also fashion accessories, but they are almost exclusively mechanical watches. I don't see a digital watch gaining any traction among people who spend thousands and sometimes millions for what is essentially mechanical artwork.
Where Apply may succeed is among young professionals: people far enough along to have some disposable income - past the Swatch age - but not in the market to spend crazy amounts of money for a status symbol. The thing is: people in this market have already stopped wearing watches, because their smart phones show the time. Maybe Apple will get them to wear a fancy bracelet again - and maybe not. Either way, it's pretty irrelevant to the watch manufacturers.
Of course, I never have understood the Apple Koolaid. Slick marketing gets people to buy overpriced products that don't work any better than those of the competition. Why?
Desired feature for any browser, failing that a plugin: Something that really restricts the information the browser sends to the server, to prevent fingerprinting. There are UI switchers and the like, but I have yet to find one that just bloody stops the browser from sending identifying information.
A website that isn't trying to be bleeding edge has no need to know my OS, my browser version, what plugins I have installed, what fonts are on my system, or indeed anything at all about my system and setup. Send me standards-compliant HTML and CSS, and let my browser worry about the representation.
It seems to me that this should be a standard setting, right next to "prohibit 3rd party cookies". Why isn't it available in (afaik) any browser at all?
While it is written specifically for the US, the EFF article Defending Privacy at the U.S. Border: A Guide for Travelers Carrying Digital Devices nonetheless provides a good discussion of your options in cases like this. It also discusses the various ways you can prepare your devices and data for the situation.
"Developed password-cracking software in-house"
Brilliant. Have some amateur develop it, instead of using an established product written by an expert. Great idea.
Reminds me of the time (no joke) a Secret Service agent asked me to get data off of a PC that had been used for a credit-card scam. At the time I was (iirc) a college freshman or maybe sophomore, majoring in EE, who happened to program as a hobby. At the time I felt pretty flattered - only in retrospect did I realize how crazy this was. I had full, unfettered access to the PC, there was no copy, and I was programming directly on the box I was extracting evidence from. Granted, that was a long time ago, but it serves as an anecdote to show the level of professionalism these agencies demonstrate. I'm sure they have real experts, but too often the field offices seem to be playing Keystone Cops.
So here we have some field office taking down a whole data center. They're probably pretty impressed with themselves, they get some neat toys to play with, and they get headlines for their heroic crime-fighting efforts. Who cares about the collateral damage they've done to thousands of innocent people using the file-sharing service? At first glance, this reminds me of the Mega-debacle in the US, where they also took down an entire data center with very shaky justifications.
Prediction: The whole case will fall apart. Either because it was all a mistake and there is no evidence, or because they screw up whatever evidence they do have. Nonetheless, the customers will be out their data and the data-center will be driven to bankruptcy. Nonetheless, the officers involved will receive commendations.
Unless you have an enemy with obvious logistical targets, airstrikes are pretty useless. Great, you blew up a jeep with a machine gun on it. The cost of your bomb plus the flight time of the drone is probably more than the jeep was worth. Oh, by the way, which side was that jeep on? With intermingled and fluid borders, and little direct intelligence, it's kind of hard to be sure...
Anyway, as others have pointed out, all US intervention has accomplished since 9/11 (and before, but that's a different discussion) is to make bad situations even worse. What's the saying? "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result". US interventions are not working. It's time for the US to mind it's own business, and let the Middle East sort itself out.
Electronic copying has made music and video copyrights almost meaningless - anybody can download just about anything. 3D printing will make patents on simple mechanical objects equally meaningless. If I need a new kitchen widget or a new plastic doohickey, why not just print one? There ought to be endless online libraries, provided by manufacturers or created by end users.
Of course, industry will fight this tooth and nail. Patenting differently-shaped measuring spoons or the plastic feet on a chair may make no sense at all - but manufacturers will never admit this. They would rather spend millions defending their worthless patents.
Why, thank you! I had no idea you cared!
Homeland security is now an expert on computer security? Will they do as wonderful a job here as they've done at airports? Will Americans soon have to flash their national IDs at the computers before being allowed on the Internet?
What the devil is Homeland Security doing issuing such a statement? Mission creep to the nth degree...
Jamie Oliver's butcher's forced to close after hygiene inspection
Key bits from the article: "the score for the January 8 inspection is listed as of 1 out of five with the comment: 'major improvement necessary'." and "one of only 19 out of 1,659 food outlets in the City to receive an 'A hazardous' rating".
This sounds pretty damning and pretty embarrassing. That said, there are some odd things. One of the complaints was mold on aging beef, but - depending on what you are doing - mold is part-and-parcel of the process (and the butchery claims that this was the case). Another funny point: the butchery voluntarily closed following the inspection to fix the issues mentioned. It reopened "several hours" later. If the issues could be fixed in a few hours, they were pretty much cosmetic problems.
So what to think? I figure it's 50/50 whether there were real problems, or whether this was a politically motivated inspection. Or maybe the inspector didn't get his free steak.
My wife has a small company that accepts credit cards. As the parent comment points out, the credit cards want to push liability for fraud onto the merchants. This has two aspects
- First, the physical card: Chip and pin is standard here, which would be fine, but don't think your fees go down when they hand you the liability. My wife has, to my knowledge, never had a case a fraud in 20 years, but that doesn't matter either. Mastercard/Visa are completely in collusion, there is no competition, they can demand whatever fees they want.
- Second, the Internet: I wrote her first web-shops, including the payment processing. This has become completely impossible. The credit card companies impose ever more impossible rules. Ultimately, if you handle credit card numbers electronically, they began insisting on quarterly audits of your IT infrastructure. We used an ISP - so they were going to insist on auditing the ISP infrastructure. Our ISP was - shockingly - actually ok with this, but the whole nightmare just got too complicated. In the end, the rules appear to be nothing but a way of forcing you to use their approved payment processors - yet another way to suck money out of merchants.
Will some Internet payment service please, please spring up and actually give Mastercard/Visa some real competition? Paypal has been largely co-opted, Bitcoin is a joke - we need something that your average Joe can and will use. So far, nothing...
Three things:
- First, Java is needlessly wordy - consider the necessity of explicity writing getters/setters for any class where you want access control. What a pile of code for nothing.
- Second, you can write cryptic code or you can write understandable code. Understandable code involves a few more newlines, so what?
- Lastly, depending on your developers, yes, you can have overly long code. Someone who re-implements the same functionality 10 times instead of defining an abstract class and implementing it once - such developers exist. if you have one in your team, I do feel sorry for you. How prevalent is this? No idea...
Of course, TFA wasn't really about any of this. It is about a semantic analysis that determines the number of unique concepts in a method, reducing it to a "minset" which is no longer executable. This is an interesting theoretical analysis, but doesn't have a lot to do with real programs designed to actually perform actions with those concepts. Some methods are wordy because you want them to be clear, others are wordy because of what you are doing, and still others are wordy because of characteristics of the language you are working in.
"[Apple] powers all of its data centers with renewable energy"
Solar makes lots of sense in the California desert. However, I find statements like the above really annoying. In the night, solar provides zilch. On calm days, the same for wind. Apple's data centers hang off the grid like anyone else, and the great weakness of all renewables is irregular production and lack of storage.
The data comes from the Swiss subsidiary, but HSBC is actually a British bank. And you have to love this bit from TFA:
"The man in charge of HSBC at the time, Stephen Green, was made a Conservative peer and appointed to the government. Lord Green was made a minister eight months after HMRC had been given the leaked documents from his bank. He served as a minister of trade and investment until 2013."
The little fish will be prosecuted, while the big fish are made peers of the realm. Business as usual for all of the big banks.
Talk about a field with a diversity problem: In the US, 87% of the teachers are female. In my own country of Switzerland, it's 82%. What a scandal!
Yes, it is a test question. Yes, if you understand recursion, you can answer the question. However, it is poor code, because the recursion is not tail-recursive; anyone who uses recursion with unknown values ('n' in this case) will write a tail-recursive function.
Since it's a totally artificial question, there is no reason that they couldn't have used a tail-recursive function. Lots of students won't know the difference, but crappy code like this is a stumbling block exactly for the students who really do understand what's going on.
I would use recursion a lot more frequently if compilers supported tail recursion. Not for simple iteration, perhaps, but there are plenty of cases where recursion is a better solution that a loop. For example, recursion is often be appropriate when working through some sort of data structure.
The problem is: The most common languages don't optimize for tail recursion. This means that even shallow recursion will eat memory. If the depth of the recursion is unknown, then the lack of optimization for tail-recursion means that your program may run out of memory - not because of any programming error, but due to a defect in the compiler.
There is nothing inherently difficult about handling tail recursion. Scala does it just fine, running on the JVM. I can only imagine that those responsible for mainstream languages figure no one will use it. Well, we, can't, because your compilers don't support it properly...
Most of the comments are technically correct, but everyone seems to have accepted the elephant in the room: We have no decent archival solution for the digital age. The bookkeeping done by monks 600 years ago can still be read today, as long as you can make out their handwriting. Accounts from 19th century companies were kept in ledgers. Barring fire, flood or other disaster, any ledgers someone thought were were keeping are still legible today. Some readers may recall that UBS got in trouble for trying to destroy bank records from WWII - but those records still existed with no effort whatsoever other than having them stacking in some storage closet for 70 years.
Yet without a serious and sustained effort, digital data self-destructs. No commonly used media has a storage life of more than a few years. We have all accepted this as fact, but it is actually a problem in serious need of a solution. As more and more records are kept online - business records, governmental records, personal records - the danger of serious data loss increases.
Want a recent example? In the US, the IRS lost important emails from personal mail accounts, because they had no archival strategy. If they were lying (which I personally tend to suspect), then it was an entirely plausible lie, which still serves to make the point. Just as with security, archival is an overhead expense that management doesn't really want to spend money on.
Somebody is selling snake oil again. Testosterone may have subjectively beneficial short-term effects (virility, muscle tone, etc), but all current evidence is that it shortens your lifespan.
Studies of eunuchs have shown that they live substantially longer than non-castrated men. That's just one link; anyone with a bit of Google-fu will find others. For example, higher levels of testosterone are thought to be a reason that men have shorter lifespans than women.
When will people learn that measures like this promote discrimination.
As soon as you force schools to have more girls in the classes, one of two things will happen: (1) They will forbid interested boys from taking the classes, or (2) they will put uninterested girls into the classes, which will screw up the classes for those who really do want to learn.
Reminds me of the (entirely unofficial, but entirely real) quota systems I have seen in certain schools and companies. Because some women were admitted/hired despite being unqualified, all women in the program were regarded with suspicion. This was utterly unfair to those women who were, in fact, qualified. It encourages discrimination, because everyone assumes that all girls/women are there due to the quota rather than their personal capabilities.
The right approach: Encourage anyone interested to take the classes; ensure that the instructors and administrators are not discouraging anyone because of their gender.
The thing is: The money this tax is aimed at is not in the US and - by international law - was not earned in the US. To impose such a tax, the US must do some combination of violating signed treaties and forcing foreign jurisdictions to subject themselves to US domestic law. The US might have been able to pull something like that off, say, during the Cold War. Now? After the 2008 banking crisis? After the total muck the US has made of the Middle East? After Snowdon and the NSA revelations? Forget it, the US has lost too much credibility for such a naked power/cash grab to ever work.
Option a: The current US administration really is this clueless. Sadly, a real possibility, given the other idiocies they have shown.
Option b: This is a distraction. Just like a magician - attracts your attention with one hand, while, the other hand...someone is getting his pocket picked.
The US is bloody bankrupt, with current debt approaching $20 trillion and unfunded liabilities of around ten times that amount. It's all about cash, to keep paying for the bread and circuses, so that the political elite can put off the inevitable reckoning just a little bit longer.
I expect than anyone looking at the complete article, with all of the various tables and breakdowns will find at least one item that shocks them. In my case, two examples:
- 45% of Americans view the IRS positively, vs. 48% negatively. To me, this is shocking, because I know that the IRS is a power unto itself. If someone in the IRS decides they want to nail you, you are nailed. Appeal to a court? Sure, but only a court run by the IRS. They can empty your bank accounts, repossess your house, all without any review by any external party. Why anyone would trust an agency with this much power, or view it in a positive light is beyond me.
- More Democrats than Republicans view the DoD positively. Huh?
For me, many of the results are pretty surprising. The point of my comment here: I'll bet that's true for you too. We all live in echo chambers, mostly reading articles that reinforce our beliefs and talking with people who think much the same as we do. Really kind of scary, if you think about it...
"The money will be used to fund FirstNet, the government agency tasked with creating the nation's first interoperable broadband network..."
You could just as well put the money in a pile and burn it. Heck, given the inevitable follow-on costs, burning it would be cheaper...
"...contribute over $20 billion to deficit reduction". Meaning it's going into the general fund, where it will be promptly spent three or four times over, each time with the justification that the expenditure has already been paid for by the wireless auction.
I don't use Calc or Excel much, but I ran into two such limitations just recently. So, for anyone looking for concrete examples, here are two:
- Column limitation. A student of mine wrote a Java program that exported data into a spreadsheet, using some library or other (don't remember which). Now, I was impressed that this automatically started up Calc, when my student had clearly used Excel. However, as an initial step, the program created a zillion columns. Crash - max columns exceeded. Why should there be any sort of limit, other than exhausting all memory in the computer?
- Macros. I have a small spreadsheet that counts up the students' points and curves them into final course grades. The actual curving is done by a function I defined and attached to the spreadsheet. In Calc, if I alter the points, the sheet doesn't recalculate - I have to save and reload the sheet. No idea why - everything ought to work (and does in Excel).
There are similar irritations in all of the applications. Writer and Impress are the ones I use the most, and sometimes it's damned frustrating. I obviously haven't tried version 4.4 yet - here's hoping that they did more than fiddle with the UI.