The TSA is going to open your bags no matter what. They will cut any non-TSA lock, and simply having such a lock I'm sure guarantees a search. The TSA lock is to keep your bag from being opened by thieves hanging out at the airport, so it does actually serve some purpose.
And they pass whatever they pay directly along to the consumers.
So we should probably lower the corporate tax rate, right?
When Morgan Chase was able to buy Bear Stearns with the 29 billion that the government gave them
The pensions and 401k's of the "working class" are all tied up in the market. If the government doesn't bail out these companies, you'd complain that they did nothing while the retirement funds were being wiped out.
George Bush has presided over the greatest transfer of wealth in our history: from the working class to the rich.
That's why the number of millionaires is increasing at an increasing rate. 1 out of 10 households earn over six figures. This is upward mobility.
There IS basically ZERO students loans programs in the US.
Those taxpayer-funded government-mandated available-to-everyone student loans I've been using to pay for tuition the last five years must be imaginary. Same goes for all my strictly need-based financial aid.
Not a single black person I know has ever said "African-American." They say "black." They will actually laugh at you if you say "that African-American guy" instead of "that black guy."
Libertarians would not have used taxes to pay for all the wires these companies now use.
These companies are descendants of a government-granted monopoly, using taxpayer-funded infrastructure. (in America) They don't operate in the free market, and unless they give back all those tax dollars, they are subject to regulation.
This could give people more reason to want private information stored centrally.
We've got three candidates for Presidential candidates with, as far as opposing voters are concerned, questionable pasts. It's media-fueled. Barack may be a closet Muslim, Hillary has a role in Clinton administration conspiracy theory, and McCain could be fudging his military service ala Kerry and Bush. The more info, the better, right?
"Transparency" is a hot issue. People may welcome this, especially since it's not their information being mined. Why should Presidential candidates have anything to hide? I'd bet most people think they should be scrutinized more than regular citizens are. People will accept, then demand, that candidates should have less privacy than average folks.
Then they'll think that about anyone running for office. Then teachers and anyone working with children. Then doctors, power plant employees, stock brokers, garbage collectors, and finally all the way down to you and me.
It actually kind of annoys me that people expect their parents to pay for college.
Who else is going to pay for it? A decent parent with the financial means should pay their child's tuition. That's kind of the whole point of being a parent. Parents accumulate wealth to provide their children with more opportunity than they had. There's nothing wrong with that, and to do otherwise is ridiculous.
So, the original poster presents only the names of the bills as sufficient evidence that the guy makes bad decisions. If they can't bother to find out the reasons why he voted against those bills, why can't I suggest that perhaps, as is often the case, there were things in the bill not relevant to the names of the bills.
I'm allowed to be suspicious of people saying things like, "you voted against the Save our Children bill?! you're bad!"
Choice of language is the only thing that optimizes programmer-time. Algorithm development? Try learning or implementing the Unification algorithm without at least some exposure to Prolog.
The things you mention are important, especially for an EE guy. I assume that most of the software you need to write is strictly C or assembly. So yeah, if you need to trade off, you probably won't need to learn Haskell.
The original post was assuming there's no point at all to learning new languages.
Yes, I guess all programming languages are 'design patterns,' but a 'design pattern' is simply a way to abstract. A programming language is an abstraction. All of mathematics is abstraction.
The suggestion was that there is nothing gained from understanding an unfamiliar abstraction - that it's all just 'mindless' syntax. That's equivalent to saying the only thing a programming language is good for is saving time, or LOC, since that's really the only thing we can empirically measure.
But if you've ever gained new insight into the nature of 'process' while learning a new programming language, you know that is absolutely false. I mean, seriously, if you've ever studied any math you know this is false!
if you can think up a new language that is design-pattern-neutral without drowning the user in parentheses, you may be onto something.
What does 'design-pattern-neutral' mean? 'Abstraction-neutral?' That's like wanting an abstraction-free math. Lisp, which I assume you're talking about, is not 'abstraction-neutral' because it is an implementation of the abstraction for studying process known as the Lambda Calculus.
All syntax are methods of abstraction. You could author a very long Turing tape, or let a Haskell compiler do that for you. Which of these two activities could be considered 'functional programming?'
When people get together to invent a programming language they choose what they believe is the best syntax, so it's not 'arbitrary' in the sense that there is no reason for favoring one syntax over another.
Learning syntax is different from comprehending an abstraction. If one believes that learning a programming language is simply memorizing a syntax, the whole process becomes 'arbitrary' and that person appears 'mindless.'
The fact that you think "mindless syntax" is the only difference between lisp, haskell, and c shows that you should probably learn one of these languages.
See, what we did here is hand over a bunch of tax dollars to the telcos when they promised to build all these fat pipes in the early 90s. Then they didn't build the fat pipes.
Gotta get that whole don't-pay-for-a-product-that-don't-exist-yet thing right next time.
While you're continually writing programs to demonstrate your new theories, you become a good programmer. Theorists don't need to take a "best practices" class, or whatever.
Now, I know this is not what you meant, but:
Where does this "theorists can't program!" myth come from? If you're going to study theory, it's just assumed that you can program in like, twenty languages. And if you don't know a language, you can pick it up in a day or two. And you can write good programs in functional style one day and imperative the next without saying stuff like, "Lisp is soooo weird!" or "what is Haskell?"
If there comes a time when the US government starts acting like China (having people tortured and killed because of their political views), we can take care of it with something called an "election".
Elections are usually taken away before the torturing starts.
Slashdot Mirror
If you can't charge for drugs, nobody makes them, and everybody dies. Perfect system huh?
The TSA is going to open your bags no matter what. They will cut any non-TSA lock, and simply having such a lock I'm sure guarantees a search. The TSA lock is to keep your bag from being opened by thieves hanging out at the airport, so it does actually serve some purpose.
So we should probably lower the corporate tax rate, right?
The pensions and 401k's of the "working class" are all tied up in the market. If the government doesn't bail out these companies, you'd complain that they did nothing while the retirement funds were being wiped out.
That's why the number of millionaires is increasing at an increasing rate. 1 out of 10 households earn over six figures. This is upward mobility.
In America, in 2005:
the richest 1% paid 39% of the income taxes
the richest 5% paid 60%
the richest 10% paid 70%
the bottom 50% of households paid ONLY 3% of total income taxes
you are WRONG.
(source: Wall Street Journal Dec 17, 2007)
All of the early computer pioneers never even touched a computer until they got to college.
Not a single black person I know has ever said "African-American." They say "black." They will actually laugh at you if you say "that African-American guy" instead of "that black guy."
Libertarians would not have used taxes to pay for all the wires these companies now use.
These companies are descendants of a government-granted monopoly, using taxpayer-funded infrastructure. (in America) They don't operate in the free market, and unless they give back all those tax dollars, they are subject to regulation.
I'm a Libertarian.
...if in exchange we quit passing laws intended to save children from the internet.
And each of those is a reason, although certainly ridiculous, for some voter to believe they need that information.
This could give people more reason to want private information stored centrally.
We've got three candidates for Presidential candidates with, as far as opposing voters are concerned, questionable pasts. It's media-fueled. Barack may be a closet Muslim, Hillary has a role in Clinton administration conspiracy theory, and McCain could be fudging his military service ala Kerry and Bush. The more info, the better, right?
"Transparency" is a hot issue. People may welcome this, especially since it's not their information being mined. Why should Presidential candidates have anything to hide? I'd bet most people think they should be scrutinized more than regular citizens are. People will accept, then demand, that candidates should have less privacy than average folks.
Then they'll think that about anyone running for office. Then teachers and anyone working with children. Then doctors, power plant employees, stock brokers, garbage collectors, and finally all the way down to you and me.
Better to know who's living next door, right?
So, the original poster presents only the names of the bills as sufficient evidence that the guy makes bad decisions. If they can't bother to find out the reasons why he voted against those bills, why can't I suggest that perhaps, as is often the case, there were things in the bill not relevant to the names of the bills.
I'm allowed to be suspicious of people saying things like, "you voted against the Save our Children bill?! you're bad!"
So he voted against some feel-goodly named bills. There are often things unrelated to say, "clean air," in such a bill.
Choice of language is the only thing that optimizes programmer-time. Algorithm development? Try learning or implementing the Unification algorithm without at least some exposure to Prolog. The things you mention are important, especially for an EE guy. I assume that most of the software you need to write is strictly C or assembly. So yeah, if you need to trade off, you probably won't need to learn Haskell. The original post was assuming there's no point at all to learning new languages.
The suggestion was that there is nothing gained from understanding an unfamiliar abstraction - that it's all just 'mindless' syntax. That's equivalent to saying the only thing a programming language is good for is saving time, or LOC, since that's really the only thing we can empirically measure.
But if you've ever gained new insight into the nature of 'process' while learning a new programming language, you know that is absolutely false. I mean, seriously, if you've ever studied any math you know this is false!
What does 'design-pattern-neutral' mean? 'Abstraction-neutral?' That's like wanting an abstraction-free math. Lisp, which I assume you're talking about, is not 'abstraction-neutral' because it is an implementation of the abstraction for studying process known as the Lambda Calculus.
All syntax are methods of abstraction. You could author a very long Turing tape, or let a Haskell compiler do that for you. Which of these two activities could be considered 'functional programming?'
When people get together to invent a programming language they choose what they believe is the best syntax, so it's not 'arbitrary' in the sense that there is no reason for favoring one syntax over another.
Learning syntax is different from comprehending an abstraction. If one believes that learning a programming language is simply memorizing a syntax, the whole process becomes 'arbitrary' and that person appears 'mindless.'
The fact that you think "mindless syntax" is the only difference between lisp, haskell, and c shows that you should probably learn one of these languages.
See, what we did here is hand over a bunch of tax dollars to the telcos when they promised to build all these fat pipes in the early 90s. Then they didn't build the fat pipes. Gotta get that whole don't-pay-for-a-product-that-don't-exist-yet thing right next time.
While you're continually writing programs to demonstrate your new theories, you become a good programmer. Theorists don't need to take a "best practices" class, or whatever.
Now, I know this is not what you meant, but:
Where does this "theorists can't program!" myth come from? If you're going to study theory, it's just assumed that you can program in like, twenty languages. And if you don't know a language, you can pick it up in a day or two. And you can write good programs in functional style one day and imperative the next without saying stuff like, "Lisp is soooo weird!" or "what is Haskell?"
information is entertainment. entertainment is information.