Oh, and I just got a 500cc motorcycle - 60mpg and good for commuting. Wonder how that compares to the bus.
About the same, if Finland is any indication. (That's the only place where I could find stats.) An average of 18 commuters on a bus with a capacity of 80. At around 4 miles per gallon, that's about 72 passenger miles per gallon. So you're slightly worse, but not that much, really. And that's if you get an average of 18 commuters per bus. In the U.K., it's 9.2 passengers per bus, so you'd be much more efficient---heck, my Rav4 without any additional passengers would be almost as efficient. I don't have U.S. numbers, but I'd guess it's probably somewhere in the middle. Busses reduce congestion on roads somewhat, but as public transit goes, they are miserably inefficient.
I have two cars. My old one was having enough issues that I didn't want it to be my only car, and the amount I'd get on trade-in was maybe a grand, so it's not like it has much value left to lose. The cost of licensing and insurance was less than my parents paid to rent a car when they come to visit me, so instead of paying Enterprise, they pay for my old car's license and insurance. And because that puts the new vehicle under 7,500 miles per year, it actually ends up being significantly cheaper to keep both cars than to just keep the new one.
The problem with that idea is that people change jobs. What was once a short commute suddenly isn't a short commute anymore. Do you A. sell your house at a huge loss, or B. take it on the chin and commute? Most reasonable people would not pick A. And even with lots of public transit, if you travel very far at all, the best public transit in the world doesn't do much good.
Public transit makes sense in these situations:
Where you can take a single bus or train for less than 15 minutes. Much more than that, and the time penalty for taking public transit starts to become excessive. Most people would choose a ten minute car trip over a 30 minute public transit ride in an instant.
Where traffic is so heavy that driving is impractical (e.g. Manhattan certain times of day).
Where parking is difficult to find near one or both endpoints (again, Manhattan comes to mind).
Where you can take a single long haul express ride for an hour or more and arrive within walking distance of your destination (and even this one is dubious).
In anything approaching normal urban density (NOT Manhattan), as soon as you have to do two transfers, ride a non-express train/bus more than 20 minutes, etc., public transit starts to break down pretty badly in efficiency. A couple of extra hours per day adds up to huge numbers of wasted days over the course of a year.
My regular commute takes me from Cupertino to UC Santa Cruz (55 minutes), then on to Sunnyvale (60 minutes). To travel by public transit:
Cupertino to Mountain View Caltrain by shuttle: 15 minutes.
Wait at station: 15-45 mintues
Travel to San Jose: 28 minutes
Wait at San Jose: about 30 minutes
Highway 17 express to downtown Santa Cruz: 53 minutes
City bus to UCSC: 14-22 minutes
Walk: 5-10 minutes
In total, about 3 hours, 23 minutes. One way.
The reverse trip would be similar---about 3:18 if everything works. If the bus gets caught in the construction delays, though (which it probably would right now), you get bumped to a whopping 4:14 for a trip that takes about an hour by car.
What is interesting to note is that these routes only go approx. 15 miles farther than I'd go by car. If I took a similar route by car, it would take about 1 hour, 19 minutes. So the route isn't very inefficient at all. The problems are:
Busses are slow. They travel 35 MPH over the mountains, 50-55 in the flat areas. Cars go 50 or 65, respectively. Once you add in the extra ten minutes to get off the highway and wait to pick up people in Scotts Valley, the Highway 17 express takes an hour to go the same distances as a car would go in about 40 minutes.
Busses stop a lot. The extra stops on the other bus add 4-12 minutes.
Light rails are really, really slow compared with a car on the freeway, and they stop a lot. Between the extra stops and running so slowly, this turns a 9 minute trip into about 29 minutes even though the two paths basically parallel each other a block apart.
And that's why I don't use public transportation. That would be an extra five hours of my live 3-4 times per week, for a total loss of 15-20 hours per week, about 1200 hours per year. In 24-hour days, that's 50 days per year. Or if you think about it in terms of usable hours (16 per day), it's the equivalent of losing 75 days per year. That's how much I would lose by taking public transit for the equivalent of that 15,000 miles per year. And given that this is as close to direct routes as you can get, this is probably close to a lower bound on the inefficiency of public transit for someone driving that distance per year.
Except that such a device would only destroy the electronics (and the heads and motors if you are lucky). A drive recovery service could still fairly easily swap the platters to a new drive mechanism and clone it to a fresh drive. Whether the RIAA would be willing to spend the $1000 to do so or not, of course, is another question. Given that they probably lose money almost universally in these cases and are only filing them at all for the show value, I don't see why you think the need to pay a drive recovery service would be a hindrance to their litigation.
No, there's nothing preventing you from including that header file multiple times for different types. That's the beauty of token gluing. It concatenates the base type as part of the name of the derived array type, so you can create arbitrary numbers of them for arbitrary types. And unlike the template class, whenever you use the resulting type, it just looks like an ordinary C++ class instance with no need for template parameters. Thus, when you actually use the class, you just use "Array_int *foo" or whatever. Outside the syntax in the header file itself (which I'll admit isn't pretty), the usage syntax is cleaner this way.
Regarding the amount of code, in terms of file length, the C preprocessor version will generally be shorter in the long run. You only have to build the classes once, included from one file. Everywhere else, you just use an opaque forward reference to the class, e.g. "class Array_int;". The header for defining the class also is shorter; although you have the extra couple of macros up front, you save at least as many bytes over the course of the file by not having to litter it with template parameters everywhere. Ditto for the other source files.
And in terms of code generation, it's exactly the same amount of compiled code; the C++ compiler is generating separate classes under the hood for each of those base types. The only difference is that with preprocessor macros, you create the class explicitly up front with its own name so the instantiation syntax is cleaner.
No, a soldering iron would be pretty obvious destruction of evidence. You'd have to do something more subtle like shake the drive vigorously to scar the heck out of the drive surface and shred the drive heads while randomly seeking all over the disk. If you are still in possession of the machine, of course.
Or you could just do a security erase of the offending files, ending by renaming them to a long string of garbage characters followed by renaming it to something short and innocuous (but the sort of thing that you would legitimately need to do a secure erase on, e.g. something with a work-related name) to thoroughly obliterate any trace of the offending directory entry. Oh, and if your OS records actual creation dates, be sure to set the creation dates on the files to something different from the original dates just in case they are comparing file creation dates to some server log somewhere....
There's nothing preventing a native foreach notation built into the language instead of glued on. They just didn't do it that way, and they should have.
would you explain how you implement a generic container using the preprocessor
Sure. It's pretty easy. You just define two macros (e.g. BASE_TYPE and ARRAY_TYPE) and then #include a header.
}
class ARRAY_PTRTYPENAME
{
ARRAY_PTRTYPE[MAX_SIZE];
}
And simultaneously create two classes, one for pointers to the type, one for the bare type. About the only place where this wouldn't work is if BASE_TYPE is "void" (since that makes no sense as a nonpointer type), and you can fix that with a simple preprocessor test.
C++ has those things, but they use a very non-C-like syntax. They are also nowhere near as well integrated into the language as PHP arrays are. For example, in PHP, I can write:
foreach ($arrayB as $value) {
printf("The value is %d\n", $value);
}
In STL:
void printValue(const int &i) {
printf("The value is %d\n", i);// or use cout
} ...
I guess this will get cleaner if/when something approaching closures are supported universally, but for now, it's a mess. If you want to write it without polluting your namespace with an extra function, you can't use for_each, so you get an even uglier mess:
for (map<string,int>::iterator i = arrayB.begin(); i != arrayB.end(); i++)
{
cout << "The value is " << i->second << endl;
}
PHP is much, much closer to C than C++ with truckloads of STL piled on top. Ask a C programmer to comprehend that mess and you'll likely have a suicide on your hands. It is very un-C-like. The point is that the PHP syntax for arrays is very nearly identical in behavior and syntax to C, just with lots of extra functionality (variable length associative array). I never said that C++ couldn't do those things, but as far as I've seen, when you do it in C++, you're generally way off the deep end as far as being syntactically familiar to C programmers.
I guess what it comes down to is this: if you think templates are elegant, then we will never agree about what makes a good language design. From my perspective, templates are what happens when somebody forgets that we have a perfectly good C preprocessor and decides to reinvent the wheel with a clumsy syntax that doesn't provide anything more than what C preprocessing could already provide, wedging the concept into the language itself for no apparent reason. It is anathema. It is absolutely the antithesis of good language design.
As for OO in PHP, I don't see why you think dynamic typing decreases the value of object-oriented programming. If you really are mostly using the same code with different underlying types, then there's little point in doing OO, but in my experience, that's the exception rather than the rule. Most of the situations where I've used OO with polymorphism, I've had polymorphism, but the underlying implementation has differed substantially, and the only thing similar was the method name (and the general concept for what the function does).
Also, it is nice to use classes even when you don't need polymorphism. This reduces pollution of the global function namespace. It also makes it easy to create complex data structures that make life easier. (PHP doesn't have the notion of a struct, so you have to either use a class or an associative array.)
Finally PHP is still very much a typed language. It's not like there is no notion of types and everything is polymorphic with everything. The type of a variable is determined when the variable is assigned, and some types can be coerced into other types in certain use cases, but it isn't universal. I can't do if ($arrayA < $scalarB), for example. PHP even has the notion of casting to force type conversion just like you do in C. For example:
function myfunc($mynumber) {
$mynumber = (int)$mynumber; ...
}
Dynamic typing doesn't mean the types aren't there. If you call a method on an object that doesn't exist on that object, it is still an error. And so on. Dynamic typing just makes it a little easier to shoot yourself in the foot by not throwing up an error when you make the assignment or function call in the first place.:-)
Because it's syntactically similar to C. It's remarkably close to what C++ should have been---C with classes, integrated hashes, variable-length arrays, and usable string manipulation. Thus, for long-time C programmers, it's a very natural language to pick.
The problem is that the courts don't interpret noncompete clauses that way. If the companies compete, even if your position within that company would not cause you to directly compete, it's still a problem. That means that if you had a noncompete from some large company like Sony, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, etc. that produces products in a wide range of industries, you'd be hard pressed to find employment anywhere in the industry that wouldn't violate the terms of your noncompete.
That's why they are generally illegal in California for individual contributors and lower level management. People high enough up to be bound by one in California also generally have golden parachutes to provide for them while they are bound by the noncompete.
But it does undergo decarboxylation. It has been shown in multiple studies, including one by the FDA, that sodium benzoate does, in fact, turn into benzene when acidic products use it as a preservative. The amount of benzene depends on temperature and light (e.g. refrigerated cans would have lower levels than room temperature clear plastic bottles). Several soft drinks over the years have shown levels of benzene that were well outside even the most lax exposure limits for benzene in drinking water.
Oh, and on the citric acid thing, according to that article, it isn't believed to cause it in significant amounts, but it can accelerate decarboxylation in the presence of ascorbic or erythorbic acid.
And don't get anywhere near your car, gasoline can contain up to 1% benzene.
Don't drink gasoline. Thanks for the tip. I'll keep that in mind.:-D
You're right that it reacts with ascorbic acid. I've also read that it breaks down in the presence of citric acid, but IANAC, so I can't be 100% certain that this is correct. Either way, the ingredient to avoid is the sodium benzoate, not the citric acid.:-)
There have been a couple of breaks in that area. IIRC, there were some preserved tissue samples, and about two years ago, they dug up someone who was buried in permafrost who died from it, so they have a pretty good idea what the 1918 flu looked like at this point. They also tested it on macaque monkeys and got a cytokine storm. (Source: BBC) Also, a few months ago, they took some antibodies from still-living survivors and injected the antibodies into mice. Scientists were surprised to find that the antibodies were still effective even after nearly a century. (Source: bio-medicine.org) The scientist described them as some of the most potent antibodies ever isolated.
So yeah, they have a pretty good idea what the 1918 flu was, and the CDC says that this strain doesn't have the genes that made the 1918 strain particularly potent, at least for now. There's always a risk that it could acquire that gene from people or animals infected with H5N1, as that's presumably still running around somewhere, but I'd imagine the odds of that are about the same as the odds of the seasonal flu doing so. In short, this is probably a Shakespearean pandemic---full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. That said, I sure would like to know why there were so many fatalities in Mexico (and among young, presumably healthy adults at that). That's more than just a little disconcerting.
The parent post does seem to be a troll, and I don't agree at all with the conclusion---halting trade is absolutely backwards---but ironically there is a kernel of truth in there. The health conditions in Mexico did play a significant role in creating this mess, and we have only ourselves to blame for that.
The health of the poorest, most third-world country affects the health of everyone in the world. This is why we should have more trade with these countries and do everything we can to bring up the standards of living among the poor, homeless, etc. to tolerable levels. Allowing people to live in unsanitary conditions, allowing people to remain destitute, etc. is the best possible way to guarantee these sorts of outbreaks in the future. At least in the long run, our best hope of survival is in opening the borders more, not less. NAFTA was a start, but it really isn't enough.
We as a society have to learn that our planet is not a bunch of countries. No man is an island. We are all connected in a giant worldwide ecosystem, and what happens to the poorest and the lowliest among us happens in part to all of us. The closed nature of the U.S./Mexico border is a significant cause of this crisis, not a solution, and instead of paranoid protectionist policies, we should be asking how we can help.
Complete and utter crap. The AC posted the same garbage in another thread. I'll repost my comments on the subject.
Most of what you are saying is flat out wrong.... In the same (very bizarre) order as the parent:
0. The presence of mercury in vaccines is a red herring. We're talking about 62.5 micrograms per dose. You get that much mercury from eating a typical portion of tuna. An average adult gets nearly that much every week from dental fillings alone. This theory for the cause of autism seems pretty implausible. Further, these days, vaccines intended for children are available in a thimerosal-free variant specifically for this purpose, making this argument against vaccines utterly moot.
7. This is a clear case of correlation being confused with causation.... A pH level of 7.4 is considered normal in humans. So basically you are saying that most humans cannot get viruses or cancer. This is clearly not correct.... The normal range is 7.35 to 7.45. If you are outside that range, it is likely indicative of illness. Bringing your pH into that range doesn't kill viruses. Killing viruses brings it into that range.
1. That is just freaking disgusting.
2. Avoiding dairy is unnecessary unless you are lactose intolerant. I can certainly understand trying to avoid BGH, but there are BGH-free dairies that you can get your milk from. And in the grand scheme of things, it's really not that big a risk.
3. No thoughts about the safety of drinking carbonated beverages (at least as far as the CO2 is concerned). I would note that fibromyalgia, as far as I can tell, is similar to dementia in that it is basically a catch-all diagnosis that means "We don't know what's wrong." Thus attributing it to any single cause seems dubious to me, but....
4. Bleaching flour does reduce the health benefits, but not all white flour is bleached. Ultragrain(R), for example, is a white flour that is not bleached.
Salt (at least salt that is safe for human consumption) is naturally clearish-white, including the sea salt you promote. Be afraid of any salt that is not white. As far as health goes, you should to be really careful using sea salt to ensure that you get enough iodine. It is not recommended as a substitute for table salt unless you either consume lots of citrus fruit or just enjoy goiter.:-)
White sugar is just brown sugar with the molasses separated out. I'm not convinced that avoiding white sugar is a very good idea. AFAICT, the alternatives are all much worse for you. The things you need to avoid are high fructose corn syrup and any sugar substitutes (not just aspartane). Artificial sweeteners cause the human body to crave the calories that it is expecting, and when those calories don't follow, this causes you to consume more food than you otherwise would. This is why studies have shown diet drinks tend to cause weight gain in the long term, not weight loss. HFCS does the same thing, just to a lesser degree. You're much better off with cane sugar.
5. I think my comments on #4 mostly covered this. Avoiding citric acid probably isn't necessary. It is relatively harmless. Avoiding other preservatives, though, yes. In particular, avoid sodium benzoate. When combined with citric acid, it releases benzene, which is really nasty stuff.
6. I assume you mean oxalic acid. If so, you should not increase your consumption of those foods---at least not without cooking them to destroy the oxalic acid. In the long term, excessive consumption of oxalic acid can cause a number of nutritional deficiencies including osteoporosis.
I also assume you mean nitrilosides, e.g. amygdalin. I would caution again that excessive consumption of these substances (particularly in the form of oral supplements) is toxic. Specifically, it releases cyanide when ingested....
Also, the whole locavore thing has some advantages in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but it really isn't doing your body any favors health-wise. There are lots of
Most of what you are saying is flat out wrong.... In the same (very bizarre) order as the parent:
0. The presence of mercury in vaccines is a red herring. We're talking about 62.5 micrograms per dose. You get that much mercury from eating a typical portion of tuna. An average adult gets nearly that much every week from dental fillings alone. This theory for the cause of autism seems pretty implausible. Further, these days, vaccines intended for children are available in a thimerosal-free variant specifically for this purpose, making this argument against vaccines utterly moot.
7. This is a clear case of correlation being confused with causation.... A pH level of 7.4 is considered normal in humans. So basically you are saying that most humans cannot get viruses or cancer. This is clearly not correct.... The normal range is 7.35 to 7.45. If you are outside that range, it is likely indicative of illness. Bringing your pH into that range doesn't kill viruses. Killing viruses brings it into that range.
1. That is just freaking disgusting.
2. Avoiding dairy is unnecessary unless you are lactose intolerant. I can certainly understand trying to avoid BGH, but there are BGH-free dairies that you can get your milk from. And in the grand scheme of things, it's really not that big a risk.
3. No thoughts about the safety of drinking carbonated beverages (at least as far as the CO2 is concerned). I would note that fibromyalgia, as far as I can tell, is similar to dementia in that it is basically a catch-all diagnosis that means "We don't know what's wrong." Thus attributing it to any single cause seems dubious to me, but....
4. Bleaching flour does reduce the health benefits, but not all white flour is bleached. Ultragrain(R), for example, is a white flour that is not bleached.
Salt (at least salt that is safe for human consumption) is naturally clearish-white, including the sea salt you promote. Be afraid of any salt that is not white. As far as health goes, you should to be really careful using sea salt to ensure that you get enough iodine. It is not recommended as a substitute for table salt unless you either consume lots of citrus fruit or just enjoy goiter.:-)
White sugar is just brown sugar with the molasses separated out. I'm not convinced that avoiding white sugar is a very good idea. AFAICT, the alternatives are all much worse for you. The things you need to avoid are high fructose corn syrup and any sugar substitutes (not just aspartane). Artificial sweeteners cause the human body to crave the calories that it is expecting, and when those calories don't follow, this causes you to consume more food than you otherwise would. This is why studies have shown diet drinks tend to cause weight gain in the long term, not weight loss. HFCS does the same thing, just to a lesser degree. You're much better off with cane sugar.
5. I think my comments on #4 mostly covered this. Avoiding citric acid probably isn't necessary. It is relatively harmless. Avoiding other preservatives, though, yes. In particular, avoid sodium benzoate. When combined with citric acid, it releases benzene, which is really nasty stuff.
6. I assume you mean oxalic acid. If so, you should not increase your consumption of those foods---at least not without cooking them to destroy the oxalic acid. In the long term, excessive consumption of oxalic acid can cause a number of nutritional deficiencies including osteoporosis.
I also assume you mean nitrilosides, e.g. amygdalin. I would caution again that excessive consumption of these substances (particularly in the form of oral supplements) is toxic. Specifically, it releases cyanide when ingested....
Also, the whole locavore thing has some advantages in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but it really isn't doing your body any favors health-wise. There are lots of areas where little or no food can be grown usefully, and most parts of the world can't feasibly
I might be willing to pay a few cents per episode for avoiding ads. Not for short clips. If I'm watching a short clip, it's because somebody sent it to me to watch or because I'm looking for a particular clip to link into a Slashdot comment on some subject, and it just isn't worth paying anything for a quick punch line.
A short clip is either fair use or it isn't. If it is, there's no reason to charge for it apart from ad revenue to cover bandwidth. If it isn't, then it should be because such short clips have to real value apart from social value.
No, what really sucks is that the people who choose to avoid vaccines because of these far-fetched and thoroughly debunked fantasies provide hosts for these viruses and thus provide an opportunity for them to mutate into new strains that the vaccines do not protect against.
I'm not saying that flu would be eradicated if everyone got vaccinated, but it would be greatly diminished, and more to the point, the rise of unexpected new strains would be much more easily detected if everyone were largely immune to the predicted primary seasonal strains.
This new flu strain would almost certainly not have become a pandemic if we had near-universal flu vaccination. The first person would have shown flu-like symptoms and doctors would have quickly studied it to figure out what they were dealing with rather than assuming it was just seasonal flu until after several weeks of unusual death rates.
That multi-week delay in realizing that there was an emergent strain is the sole reason that containment was impossible. Had this been detected quickly and mandatory quarantines been put into effect within 24 hours after the emergence of the strain, there is every reason to believe that the outbreak could have been contained at worst to a single country, and in all likelihood, to a small region within that country. Thus, the lack of vaccination for seasonal flu is the primary cause of this pandemic in spite of the fact that it doesn't confer any protection against this strain itself.
They're giving illegal campaign contributions under the table to the Democrats. Quick! We have to bust them or they might win the next election. Time to wiretap half the U.S.
But seriously, this doesn't tell us that they have problems. It tells us that all the wiretapping in the world probably wouldn't have helped significantly with the terrorism problems, which suggests that unless the Bush administration's members were all incredibly dumb, the wiretapping probably had some other real purpose. I'll leave it to others to speculate about what that purpose might have been.
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About the same, if Finland is any indication. (That's the only place where I could find stats.) An average of 18 commuters on a bus with a capacity of 80. At around 4 miles per gallon, that's about 72 passenger miles per gallon. So you're slightly worse, but not that much, really. And that's if you get an average of 18 commuters per bus. In the U.K., it's 9.2 passengers per bus, so you'd be much more efficient---heck, my Rav4 without any additional passengers would be almost as efficient. I don't have U.S. numbers, but I'd guess it's probably somewhere in the middle. Busses reduce congestion on roads somewhat, but as public transit goes, they are miserably inefficient.
I have two cars. My old one was having enough issues that I didn't want it to be my only car, and the amount I'd get on trade-in was maybe a grand, so it's not like it has much value left to lose. The cost of licensing and insurance was less than my parents paid to rent a car when they come to visit me, so instead of paying Enterprise, they pay for my old car's license and insurance. And because that puts the new vehicle under 7,500 miles per year, it actually ends up being significantly cheaper to keep both cars than to just keep the new one.
The problem with that idea is that people change jobs. What was once a short commute suddenly isn't a short commute anymore. Do you A. sell your house at a huge loss, or B. take it on the chin and commute? Most reasonable people would not pick A. And even with lots of public transit, if you travel very far at all, the best public transit in the world doesn't do much good.
Public transit makes sense in these situations:
In anything approaching normal urban density (NOT Manhattan), as soon as you have to do two transfers, ride a non-express train/bus more than 20 minutes, etc., public transit starts to break down pretty badly in efficiency. A couple of extra hours per day adds up to huge numbers of wasted days over the course of a year.
My regular commute takes me from Cupertino to UC Santa Cruz (55 minutes), then on to Sunnyvale (60 minutes). To travel by public transit:
In total, about 3 hours, 23 minutes. One way.
The reverse trip would be similar---about 3:18 if everything works. If the bus gets caught in the construction delays, though (which it probably would right now), you get bumped to a whopping 4:14 for a trip that takes about an hour by car.
What is interesting to note is that these routes only go approx. 15 miles farther than I'd go by car. If I took a similar route by car, it would take about 1 hour, 19 minutes. So the route isn't very inefficient at all. The problems are:
And that's why I don't use public transportation. That would be an extra five hours of my live 3-4 times per week, for a total loss of 15-20 hours per week, about 1200 hours per year. In 24-hour days, that's 50 days per year. Or if you think about it in terms of usable hours (16 per day), it's the equivalent of losing 75 days per year. That's how much I would lose by taking public transit for the equivalent of that 15,000 miles per year. And given that this is as close to direct routes as you can get, this is probably close to a lower bound on the inefficiency of public transit for someone driving that distance per year.
Except that such a device would only destroy the electronics (and the heads and motors if you are lucky). A drive recovery service could still fairly easily swap the platters to a new drive mechanism and clone it to a fresh drive. Whether the RIAA would be willing to spend the $1000 to do so or not, of course, is another question. Given that they probably lose money almost universally in these cases and are only filing them at all for the show value, I don't see why you think the need to pay a drive recovery service would be a hindrance to their litigation.
Now an EMP generator (not recommended) and/or a hard drive grade degausser might do the trick....
Like I said, "If you are still in possession of the machine, of course." I think we adequately covered that caveat.
No, there's nothing preventing you from including that header file multiple times for different types. That's the beauty of token gluing. It concatenates the base type as part of the name of the derived array type, so you can create arbitrary numbers of them for arbitrary types. And unlike the template class, whenever you use the resulting type, it just looks like an ordinary C++ class instance with no need for template parameters. Thus, when you actually use the class, you just use "Array_int *foo" or whatever. Outside the syntax in the header file itself (which I'll admit isn't pretty), the usage syntax is cleaner this way.
Regarding the amount of code, in terms of file length, the C preprocessor version will generally be shorter in the long run. You only have to build the classes once, included from one file. Everywhere else, you just use an opaque forward reference to the class, e.g. "class Array_int;". The header for defining the class also is shorter; although you have the extra couple of macros up front, you save at least as many bytes over the course of the file by not having to litter it with template parameters everywhere. Ditto for the other source files.
And in terms of code generation, it's exactly the same amount of compiled code; the C++ compiler is generating separate classes under the hood for each of those base types. The only difference is that with preprocessor macros, you create the class explicitly up front with its own name so the instantiation syntax is cleaner.
No, a soldering iron would be pretty obvious destruction of evidence. You'd have to do something more subtle like shake the drive vigorously to scar the heck out of the drive surface and shred the drive heads while randomly seeking all over the disk. If you are still in possession of the machine, of course.
Or you could just do a security erase of the offending files, ending by renaming them to a long string of garbage characters followed by renaming it to something short and innocuous (but the sort of thing that you would legitimately need to do a secure erase on, e.g. something with a work-related name) to thoroughly obliterate any trace of the offending directory entry. Oh, and if your OS records actual creation dates, be sure to set the creation dates on the files to something different from the original dates just in case they are comparing file creation dates to some server log somewhere....
There's nothing preventing a native foreach notation built into the language instead of glued on. They just didn't do it that way, and they should have.
Sure. It's pretty easy. You just define two macros (e.g. BASE_TYPE and ARRAY_TYPE) and then #include a header.
#define BASE_TYPE uint64_t *
#define ARRAY_TYPE uint64_t_pointer
#include <CustomArray.h>
And in CustomArray.h>:
#define MAX_SIZE 32
class ARRAY_TYPE
{
BASE_TYPE[MAX_SIZE];
}
This is, of course, a trivial example. If you really want to get fancy, you can take advantage of token gluing.
#include <NewCustomArray.h>
And in that header:
#define MAX_SIZE 32
#define ARRAY_TYPE Array_##BASE_TYPE
#define ARRAY_PTRTYPENAME Array_##BASE_TYPE##_ptr
#define ARRAY_PTRTYPE Array_##BASE_TYPE *
class ARRAY_TYPE
{
BASE_TYPE[MAX_SIZE];
}
class ARRAY_PTRTYPENAME
{
ARRAY_PTRTYPE[MAX_SIZE];
}
And simultaneously create two classes, one for pointers to the type, one for the bare type. About the only place where this wouldn't work is if BASE_TYPE is "void" (since that makes no sense as a nonpointer type), and you can fix that with a simple preprocessor test.
C++ has those things, but they use a very non-C-like syntax. They are also nowhere near as well integrated into the language as PHP arrays are. For example, in PHP, I can write:
foreach ($arrayB as $value) {
printf("The value is %d\n", $value);
}
In STL:
void printValue(const int &i) { // or use cout
...
printf("The value is %d\n", i);
}
for_each(arrayB.begin(), arrayB.end(), printValue);
I guess this will get cleaner if/when something approaching closures are supported universally, but for now, it's a mess. If you want to write it without polluting your namespace with an extra function, you can't use for_each, so you get an even uglier mess:
for (map<string,int>::iterator i = arrayB.begin(); i != arrayB.end(); i++)
{
cout << "The value is " << i->second << endl;
}
It just gets uglier from there.
PHP is much, much closer to C than C++ with truckloads of STL piled on top. Ask a C programmer to comprehend that mess and you'll likely have a suicide on your hands. It is very un-C-like. The point is that the PHP syntax for arrays is very nearly identical in behavior and syntax to C, just with lots of extra functionality (variable length associative array). I never said that C++ couldn't do those things, but as far as I've seen, when you do it in C++, you're generally way off the deep end as far as being syntactically familiar to C programmers.
I guess what it comes down to is this: if you think templates are elegant, then we will never agree about what makes a good language design. From my perspective, templates are what happens when somebody forgets that we have a perfectly good C preprocessor and decides to reinvent the wheel with a clumsy syntax that doesn't provide anything more than what C preprocessing could already provide, wedging the concept into the language itself for no apparent reason. It is anathema. It is absolutely the antithesis of good language design.
As for OO in PHP, I don't see why you think dynamic typing decreases the value of object-oriented programming. If you really are mostly using the same code with different underlying types, then there's little point in doing OO, but in my experience, that's the exception rather than the rule. Most of the situations where I've used OO with polymorphism, I've had polymorphism, but the underlying implementation has differed substantially, and the only thing similar was the method name (and the general concept for what the function does).
Also, it is nice to use classes even when you don't need polymorphism. This reduces pollution of the global function namespace. It also makes it easy to create complex data structures that make life easier. (PHP doesn't have the notion of a struct, so you have to either use a class or an associative array.)
Finally PHP is still very much a typed language. It's not like there is no notion of types and everything is polymorphic with everything. The type of a variable is determined when the variable is assigned, and some types can be coerced into other types in certain use cases, but it isn't universal. I can't do if ($arrayA < $scalarB), for example. PHP even has the notion of casting to force type conversion just like you do in C. For example:
function myfunc($mynumber) {
...
$mynumber = (int)$mynumber;
}
Dynamic typing doesn't mean the types aren't there. If you call a method on an object that doesn't exist on that object, it is still an error. And so on. Dynamic typing just makes it a little easier to shoot yourself in the foot by not throwing up an error when you make the assignment or function call in the first place. :-)
Seems pretty fishy to me.
Because it's syntactically similar to C. It's remarkably close to what C++ should have been---C with classes, integrated hashes, variable-length arrays, and usable string manipulation. Thus, for long-time C programmers, it's a very natural language to pick.
The problem is that the courts don't interpret noncompete clauses that way. If the companies compete, even if your position within that company would not cause you to directly compete, it's still a problem. That means that if you had a noncompete from some large company like Sony, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, etc. that produces products in a wide range of industries, you'd be hard pressed to find employment anywhere in the industry that wouldn't violate the terms of your noncompete.
That's why they are generally illegal in California for individual contributors and lower level management. People high enough up to be bound by one in California also generally have golden parachutes to provide for them while they are bound by the noncompete.
But it does undergo decarboxylation. It has been shown in multiple studies, including one by the FDA, that sodium benzoate does, in fact, turn into benzene when acidic products use it as a preservative. The amount of benzene depends on temperature and light (e.g. refrigerated cans would have lower levels than room temperature clear plastic bottles). Several soft drinks over the years have shown levels of benzene that were well outside even the most lax exposure limits for benzene in drinking water.
If you want citations, just see the Wikipedia article on sodium benzoate or the more specific article benzene in soft drinks.
Oh, and on the citric acid thing, according to that article, it isn't believed to cause it in significant amounts, but it can accelerate decarboxylation in the presence of ascorbic or erythorbic acid.
Don't drink gasoline. Thanks for the tip. I'll keep that in mind. :-D
These jokes really get my goat.
Or FA1ULL if you really want to draw it out.
You're right that it reacts with ascorbic acid. I've also read that it breaks down in the presence of citric acid, but IANAC, so I can't be 100% certain that this is correct. Either way, the ingredient to avoid is the sodium benzoate, not the citric acid. :-)
There have been a couple of breaks in that area. IIRC, there were some preserved tissue samples, and about two years ago, they dug up someone who was buried in permafrost who died from it, so they have a pretty good idea what the 1918 flu looked like at this point. They also tested it on macaque monkeys and got a cytokine storm. (Source: BBC) Also, a few months ago, they took some antibodies from still-living survivors and injected the antibodies into mice. Scientists were surprised to find that the antibodies were still effective even after nearly a century. (Source: bio-medicine.org) The scientist described them as some of the most potent antibodies ever isolated.
So yeah, they have a pretty good idea what the 1918 flu was, and the CDC says that this strain doesn't have the genes that made the 1918 strain particularly potent, at least for now. There's always a risk that it could acquire that gene from people or animals infected with H5N1, as that's presumably still running around somewhere, but I'd imagine the odds of that are about the same as the odds of the seasonal flu doing so. In short, this is probably a Shakespearean pandemic---full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. That said, I sure would like to know why there were so many fatalities in Mexico (and among young, presumably healthy adults at that). That's more than just a little disconcerting.
The parent post does seem to be a troll, and I don't agree at all with the conclusion---halting trade is absolutely backwards---but ironically there is a kernel of truth in there. The health conditions in Mexico did play a significant role in creating this mess, and we have only ourselves to blame for that.
The health of the poorest, most third-world country affects the health of everyone in the world. This is why we should have more trade with these countries and do everything we can to bring up the standards of living among the poor, homeless, etc. to tolerable levels. Allowing people to live in unsanitary conditions, allowing people to remain destitute, etc. is the best possible way to guarantee these sorts of outbreaks in the future. At least in the long run, our best hope of survival is in opening the borders more, not less. NAFTA was a start, but it really isn't enough.
We as a society have to learn that our planet is not a bunch of countries. No man is an island. We are all connected in a giant worldwide ecosystem, and what happens to the poorest and the lowliest among us happens in part to all of us. The closed nature of the U.S./Mexico border is a significant cause of this crisis, not a solution, and instead of paranoid protectionist policies, we should be asking how we can help.
Complete and utter crap. The AC posted the same garbage in another thread. I'll repost my comments on the subject.
Most of what you are saying is flat out wrong.... In the same (very bizarre) order as the parent:
0. The presence of mercury in vaccines is a red herring. We're talking about 62.5 micrograms per dose. You get that much mercury from eating a typical portion of tuna. An average adult gets nearly that much every week from dental fillings alone. This theory for the cause of autism seems pretty implausible. Further, these days, vaccines intended for children are available in a thimerosal-free variant specifically for this purpose, making this argument against vaccines utterly moot.
7. This is a clear case of correlation being confused with causation.... A pH level of 7.4 is considered normal in humans. So basically you are saying that most humans cannot get viruses or cancer. This is clearly not correct.... The normal range is 7.35 to 7.45. If you are outside that range, it is likely indicative of illness. Bringing your pH into that range doesn't kill viruses. Killing viruses brings it into that range.
1. That is just freaking disgusting.
2. Avoiding dairy is unnecessary unless you are lactose intolerant. I can certainly understand trying to avoid BGH, but there are BGH-free dairies that you can get your milk from. And in the grand scheme of things, it's really not that big a risk.
3. No thoughts about the safety of drinking carbonated beverages (at least as far as the CO2 is concerned). I would note that fibromyalgia, as far as I can tell, is similar to dementia in that it is basically a catch-all diagnosis that means "We don't know what's wrong." Thus attributing it to any single cause seems dubious to me, but....
4. Bleaching flour does reduce the health benefits, but not all white flour is bleached. Ultragrain(R), for example, is a white flour that is not bleached.
Salt (at least salt that is safe for human consumption) is naturally clearish-white, including the sea salt you promote. Be afraid of any salt that is not white. As far as health goes, you should to be really careful using sea salt to ensure that you get enough iodine. It is not recommended as a substitute for table salt unless you either consume lots of citrus fruit or just enjoy goiter. :-)
White sugar is just brown sugar with the molasses separated out. I'm not convinced that avoiding white sugar is a very good idea. AFAICT, the alternatives are all much worse for you. The things you need to avoid are high fructose corn syrup and any sugar substitutes (not just aspartane). Artificial sweeteners cause the human body to crave the calories that it is expecting, and when those calories don't follow, this causes you to consume more food than you otherwise would. This is why studies have shown diet drinks tend to cause weight gain in the long term, not weight loss. HFCS does the same thing, just to a lesser degree. You're much better off with cane sugar.
5. I think my comments on #4 mostly covered this. Avoiding citric acid probably isn't necessary. It is relatively harmless. Avoiding other preservatives, though, yes. In particular, avoid sodium benzoate. When combined with citric acid, it releases benzene, which is really nasty stuff.
6. I assume you mean oxalic acid. If so, you should not increase your consumption of those foods---at least not without cooking them to destroy the oxalic acid. In the long term, excessive consumption of oxalic acid can cause a number of nutritional deficiencies including osteoporosis.
I also assume you mean nitrilosides, e.g. amygdalin. I would caution again that excessive consumption of these substances (particularly in the form of oral supplements) is toxic. Specifically, it releases cyanide when ingested....
Also, the whole locavore thing has some advantages in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but it really isn't doing your body any favors health-wise. There are lots of
Most of what you are saying is flat out wrong.... In the same (very bizarre) order as the parent:
0. The presence of mercury in vaccines is a red herring. We're talking about 62.5 micrograms per dose. You get that much mercury from eating a typical portion of tuna. An average adult gets nearly that much every week from dental fillings alone. This theory for the cause of autism seems pretty implausible. Further, these days, vaccines intended for children are available in a thimerosal-free variant specifically for this purpose, making this argument against vaccines utterly moot.
7. This is a clear case of correlation being confused with causation.... A pH level of 7.4 is considered normal in humans. So basically you are saying that most humans cannot get viruses or cancer. This is clearly not correct.... The normal range is 7.35 to 7.45. If you are outside that range, it is likely indicative of illness. Bringing your pH into that range doesn't kill viruses. Killing viruses brings it into that range.
1. That is just freaking disgusting.
2. Avoiding dairy is unnecessary unless you are lactose intolerant. I can certainly understand trying to avoid BGH, but there are BGH-free dairies that you can get your milk from. And in the grand scheme of things, it's really not that big a risk.
3. No thoughts about the safety of drinking carbonated beverages (at least as far as the CO2 is concerned). I would note that fibromyalgia, as far as I can tell, is similar to dementia in that it is basically a catch-all diagnosis that means "We don't know what's wrong." Thus attributing it to any single cause seems dubious to me, but....
4. Bleaching flour does reduce the health benefits, but not all white flour is bleached. Ultragrain(R), for example, is a white flour that is not bleached.
Salt (at least salt that is safe for human consumption) is naturally clearish-white, including the sea salt you promote. Be afraid of any salt that is not white. As far as health goes, you should to be really careful using sea salt to ensure that you get enough iodine. It is not recommended as a substitute for table salt unless you either consume lots of citrus fruit or just enjoy goiter. :-)
White sugar is just brown sugar with the molasses separated out. I'm not convinced that avoiding white sugar is a very good idea. AFAICT, the alternatives are all much worse for you. The things you need to avoid are high fructose corn syrup and any sugar substitutes (not just aspartane). Artificial sweeteners cause the human body to crave the calories that it is expecting, and when those calories don't follow, this causes you to consume more food than you otherwise would. This is why studies have shown diet drinks tend to cause weight gain in the long term, not weight loss. HFCS does the same thing, just to a lesser degree. You're much better off with cane sugar.
5. I think my comments on #4 mostly covered this. Avoiding citric acid probably isn't necessary. It is relatively harmless. Avoiding other preservatives, though, yes. In particular, avoid sodium benzoate. When combined with citric acid, it releases benzene, which is really nasty stuff.
6. I assume you mean oxalic acid. If so, you should not increase your consumption of those foods---at least not without cooking them to destroy the oxalic acid. In the long term, excessive consumption of oxalic acid can cause a number of nutritional deficiencies including osteoporosis.
I also assume you mean nitrilosides, e.g. amygdalin. I would caution again that excessive consumption of these substances (particularly in the form of oral supplements) is toxic. Specifically, it releases cyanide when ingested....
Also, the whole locavore thing has some advantages in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but it really isn't doing your body any favors health-wise. There are lots of areas where little or no food can be grown usefully, and most parts of the world can't feasibly
I might be willing to pay a few cents per episode for avoiding ads. Not for short clips. If I'm watching a short clip, it's because somebody sent it to me to watch or because I'm looking for a particular clip to link into a Slashdot comment on some subject, and it just isn't worth paying anything for a quick punch line.
A short clip is either fair use or it isn't. If it is, there's no reason to charge for it apart from ad revenue to cover bandwidth. If it isn't, then it should be because such short clips have to real value apart from social value.
No, what really sucks is that the people who choose to avoid vaccines because of these far-fetched and thoroughly debunked fantasies provide hosts for these viruses and thus provide an opportunity for them to mutate into new strains that the vaccines do not protect against.
I'm not saying that flu would be eradicated if everyone got vaccinated, but it would be greatly diminished, and more to the point, the rise of unexpected new strains would be much more easily detected if everyone were largely immune to the predicted primary seasonal strains.
This new flu strain would almost certainly not have become a pandemic if we had near-universal flu vaccination. The first person would have shown flu-like symptoms and doctors would have quickly studied it to figure out what they were dealing with rather than assuming it was just seasonal flu until after several weeks of unusual death rates.
That multi-week delay in realizing that there was an emergent strain is the sole reason that containment was impossible. Had this been detected quickly and mandatory quarantines been put into effect within 24 hours after the emergence of the strain, there is every reason to believe that the outbreak could have been contained at worst to a single country, and in all likelihood, to a small region within that country. Thus, the lack of vaccination for seasonal flu is the primary cause of this pandemic in spite of the fact that it doesn't confer any protection against this strain itself.
They're giving illegal campaign contributions under the table to the Democrats. Quick! We have to bust them or they might win the next election. Time to wiretap half the U.S.
But seriously, this doesn't tell us that they have problems. It tells us that all the wiretapping in the world probably wouldn't have helped significantly with the terrorism problems, which suggests that unless the Bush administration's members were all incredibly dumb, the wiretapping probably had some other real purpose. I'll leave it to others to speculate about what that purpose might have been.