I asked for links not because I found it inconceivable that US would meddle with elections, but because I wanted to see how it is done. USA absolutely attempts to affect Russian politics. E.g. they imposed sanctions to change Russian policy on Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Influencing other policies of other countries is called diplomacy.
What I expected from guruevi was to give examples of US state sponsored troll factories, that derail forum conversations, helping gathering compromising information on Putin and United Russia and releasing such info to public shortly before elections, coordinating election campaign with Alexei Navalny or something of this sort.
if the elections have really been hacked, why not void them and have a do over?
And what organization would be the arbiter? CIA can't call new elections. Congress can impeach, but that is a political decision, not a technical one. Any other?
Your question was indeed rhetorical, but not for the reason you named.
And the shorthand worked perfectly. Everyone undersood what everyone else meant.
It worked like shit. Networking and storage always had MB = 1000 KB. For some weird reason Windows decided to report disk size in MiB and GiB sizes, while calling it MB and GiB and to this day I hear people complain that disk manufacturers are conning them. The only place where MB = 1024 KB ever made any sense is CPU, RAM and cache, since they really use powers of 2 in storage sizes. Disk sizes, file sizes, network speed have nothing to do with powers of 2, so they don't use them. OS X and Linux have switched back to correct units long ago.
Said gold is hoarded to be exchanged in times of need, and others should find it valuable when the crisis hits. Ideally you would store canned food, fuel, guns/ammo, iron, timber and whatnot, but those things have limited life and much more expensive to store, and they actually are stored to some extent.
Normally countries store reserve currencies and bonds, but if the whole world goes to hell, they will not be much of use, so governments and rich folk make a bet that at those times gold will be able to buy at least something, even if the worth drops 20 times.
So, the question is this: if the world order collapses and nobody trusts anyone, will bitcoin have any value?
What you are saying is also true for any managed-memory language
C++ memory management has an added benefit that it frees memory deterministically (that is, as soon as leaving scope or reference cont reaching 0 in case of shared_ptr), not when runtime feels like it.
C++ smart pointers [...] still represent a (performance) cost.
Not necessarily. unique_ptr should be about as fast as properly managed raw pointers.
I want that program to be as quick as possible
Fair enough. C++ is built with speed in mind. Given that compilers can do some crazy optimizations and even assembly code is gets interpreted by the CPU, it's nigh impossible to judge performance just by reading code. Perhaps your memory management code has is better that that of std::string since you have intimate knowledge of the input data, but maybe std::string authors thought of neat performance trick you didn't know. Try some benchmarking with various optimization flags (people usually settle on -02 as default optimization level) and see which is better for your needs.
Since I write C++, I'm not sure I can comment if this approach is wrong in the context of C language. From C++ perspective I see some risks:
Since object ownership is managed by convention (function call with "_m" suffix), it is up to the programmer to remember to clean up. With C++ unique_ptr the clean-up would happen when the pointer is nulled or goes out of scope.
If the//do all what is required with StringVariable block contains return statements, free() must be called before that. If there are several such allocated strings, programmer must pay close attention to which such strings must be freed. In more complex code I have seen functions ending with clean-up blocks, which is a neat idiom, but still is error prone. C++ smart pointers do that automatically.
That code does essentially the same thing that std::string does. The C++ string implementation has been tested to death and probably has fewer bugs.
we can afford to try and inflict our domestic laws on people in Prague
Not sure what you mean. Extradition implies that a person has committed crimes in another country and is if he is extradited, he will be tried in that country, not in Czechia.
C compatibility gives C++ and advantage to become C replacement, since it provides a clear migration path:
0) write unit / integration tests and retest after each step,
1) compile project with c++ compiler, fix compiler errors and warnings,
2) find all mallocs / frees and replace with smart pointers,
3) [doing whole bunch of other modernizing stuff]
Even only doing steps up to (2) opens possibilities to write new code in a safer manner. Of course, if the existing code base is horrible mess and rewrite from scratch is a better option, then cool new languages are just as good, but lack of manpower is a persistent problem in open source world anyway.
Any rational arguments aside, if people just don't like C++, they won't write software in C++.
Disclaimer: I work with software that is written in C/C++ and I would rather see it all moved to modern C++.
Nice bit of free speech you have there, just don't try to use it because it will get you in trouble.
Since when is text removal from repos a free speech issue? Software and features get removed all the time and not once has it been seen as freedom of speech violation. BSD community is not under moral obligation to publish quotes by Hitler. Removing these quotes itself is an exercise of freedom of speech, since it is demonstrating that FreeBSD does not support views of those who commit crimes against humanity.
So that means the reader gets to determine what is allowed to be said
More like publisher gets to determine what they will publish, and publisher can take into consideration the readers. For example, Disney doesn't publish pornography and that is not a violation of free speech.
I am offended by your goat fucker statement, so I demand that it be removed.
I'm afraid I can't do that. As slashdot editors. If they do that, fair enough. In the mean time, did you know that slashdot has a friend or foe system?
They should have their algorithm and let the chips fall where they may.
Was the algorithm given by the God almighty himself and any tinkering with it is desecration? No. Ever since the early days people have tired to game The Algorithm and it had to be tweaked to counter it. All those tweaks are manual, be it in the algorithm itself or blacklisting. Do you really want to return back to the days where page relevance was determined only by how many other pages referenced it?
too much of a population who are intellectually unable to understand sarcasm
Sarcasm rarely works in text format, and never without context. Take this quote:
Success is the sole earthly judge of right and wrong.
-- Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf"
Imagine this text shown on a wall in a holocaust museum. This is obviously a cautionary text. Put the same text on a placard in a neo-Nazi rally and it becomes a inspirational quote.
Fortune cookies have no context, therefore these quotes could be sarcasm, trolling, warning to others or just Nazi propaganda distribution (Mein Kampf was Nazi propaganda material). Given that there are plenty of people who believe Nazis “did nothing wrong”, why do you think that the quotes were not put there by a Nazi sympathizers? And even if the authors were staunch Nazi haters, this might as well be read as an inspirational quote, especially given that Hitler is a symbol of evil only in the West and not much where else.
To provide a quote to live by:
If you fuck goats ironically, you are still a goat fucker.
This is a free speech issue. I mean if players can get banned for this “cheating” where does it stop? First they came for aimbots, but I didn't speak up, because I didn't use aimbot. You know where this poem is going. Besides, if a service can use it's arbitrary power, they can go after you for whatever reason!
What about chicken catchers, how is programming useful to them ? [...]
This is why I didn't say that programming is useful for every kind of job, but for fields “fields”. In this case, is programming useful for farming? I'm not sure how modern animal husbandry works exactly, but automation in agriculture is a big deal and programming skills can give an edge. But to address your point head on — yes, not every job needs programming skills, but in this case I don't see how anything past the fourth grade could be of use.
Hell, I know people who actually have a BsC from a 4 year CS program who can't code to save their lives.
I agree that such people exist, but just because they have been taught programming and it failed doesn't meant that they can't be successfully taught programming. If we are trading anecdotes, I have seen several examples of people who at school were rubbish at mathematics and physics for years. But after changing teachers or getting tutors they just suddenly got decent at it. I'm not sure why I haven't seen this phenomena in adults. My guess is that they either find jobs where they don't have to do the things they don't know, or are too busy with real life to be able to say “Ok, I know nothing, lets spend a year to learn this thing properly”. But again, these are just guesses and until I see actual studies, I will not believe the “most people just can't learn coding” speculation.
answer is that the world is full of people who will never understand function derivatives no matter how hard they try
This statement is nearly meaningless. Sure, people with severe learning disabilities might not be able to, and maybe by your understanding “world is full of them”, in which case you may be right. Your claims are at best truthiness.
The point Tim Cook is making is that in school teaching coding has more benefits than teaching English as a second language. He does not claim that students should avoid English. In fact, [technical] English will be learned while learning coding.
School curriculum is filled with stuff that will not be useful to everyone. Did you have physics and chemistry in school? Do you use it now in any capacity? These subjects are included in schools to either prepare future specialists in STEM fields or providing basic insight on how the “real world” works. Programming is both useful for future carriers and for understanding the “real world”.
Furthermore, programming skills are useful for whatever field the student goes into. Either making models in physics or economy, creating art or managing office supplies in spreadsheets. In my university physicists, biologists and mathematicians are taught programming (I haven't looked into other fields), and for a good reason. To make matters worse, those people will program, whether you or they like it or not. If they will have to code, better teach them to do it in a less awful manner.
I assure you that the world has a very high population of people who cannot grasp the intricacies of spreadsheets.
I believe that there are many, who do not grasp the intricacies of spreadsheets, but it is courageous to say that they cannot. Ask yourself, how many hours does a student have to spend learning mathematics (starting from basic arithmetic) until they can understand function derivatives? Now, how many hours are spent teaching spreadsheets? Anyway, to show that a very high population of people who cannot grasp the intricacies of spreadsheets you would have to a) get rid of the weasel words, b) get a random sample of people, c) teach them spreadsheets with the state of the art teaching methodologies, d) motivate them to want to learn. Unless I see a study that looks remotely like this, I will not believe any claims about what people can't do.
You wouldn't complain if we said not everyone can be a doctor or a physicist, but coding? Anyone can do that! It's easy.
I did not claim that it is easy. But I haven't heard anyone making claims that a person must have a special kind of personality to be a doctor or a physicist. Although I have heard that being a psychopath helps doctors, but even that skill can be learned.
But if you want to talk about “coding is easy”, sometimes it is. Just look at spreadsheets. Imagine it as a programming language, where you have several two dimensional pointer arrays with always-on visual debugger. Where sum(A1:A10) is a neater way to say std::accumulate(A1,A10,*A11). The some IDEs (Excel, Calc) have IntelliSense. This is programming. Yes, it's horrid, not debugable, no hope for version control, painfully slow, bloated and whatnot, but it IS programming. And people do it. Now tell me with a straight face that you need to be a “math geek” to use Excel.
Slashdot Mirror
We don't need troll factories. We have the world's largest propaganda machine.
Which one is that? “Voice of America” or “Marvel Studios”?
I asked for links not because I found it inconceivable that US would meddle with elections, but because I wanted to see how it is done. USA absolutely attempts to affect Russian politics. E.g. they imposed sanctions to change Russian policy on Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Influencing other policies of other countries is called diplomacy.
What I expected from guruevi was to give examples of US state sponsored troll factories, that derail forum conversations, helping gathering compromising information on Putin and United Russia and releasing such info to public shortly before elections, coordinating election campaign with Alexei Navalny or something of this sort.
just like the US does in Russia
Link? Preferably reputable sources.
if the elections have really been hacked, why not void them and have a do over?
And what organization would be the arbiter? CIA can't call new elections. Congress can impeach, but that is a political decision, not a technical one. Any other?
Your question was indeed rhetorical, but not for the reason you named.
Nothing created, nothing destroyed, a simple redistribution of money.
There is a loss in the system — electricity bills, hardware purchase and time invested.
Do you always keep your gas tank at least half full in case of disaster? If infrastructure goes down, fuel shortages will be an issue anyway.
And the shorthand worked perfectly. Everyone undersood what everyone else meant.
It worked like shit. Networking and storage always had MB = 1000 KB. For some weird reason Windows decided to report disk size in MiB and GiB sizes, while calling it MB and GiB and to this day I hear people complain that disk manufacturers are conning them. The only place where MB = 1024 KB ever made any sense is CPU, RAM and cache, since they really use powers of 2 in storage sizes. Disk sizes, file sizes, network speed have nothing to do with powers of 2, so they don't use them. OS X and Linux have switched back to correct units long ago.
Unlikely? Indeed. This is why countries tend not to grow their gold reserves or even reducing them.
Said gold is hoarded to be exchanged in times of need, and others should find it valuable when the crisis hits. Ideally you would store canned food, fuel, guns/ammo, iron, timber and whatnot, but those things have limited life and much more expensive to store, and they actually are stored to some extent.
Normally countries store reserve currencies and bonds, but if the whole world goes to hell, they will not be much of use, so governments and rich folk make a bet that at those times gold will be able to buy at least something, even if the worth drops 20 times.
So, the question is this: if the world order collapses and nobody trusts anyone, will bitcoin have any value?
People use bare pointers all the time: "this".
Parent specifically said that people don't use bare pointers for creating and deleting objects. Of course, people still do it, but shouldn't.
What you are saying is also true for any managed-memory language
C++ memory management has an added benefit that it frees memory deterministically (that is, as soon as leaving scope or reference cont reaching 0 in case of shared_ptr), not when runtime feels like it.
C++ smart pointers [...] still represent a (performance) cost.
Not necessarily. unique_ptr should be about as fast as properly managed raw pointers.
I want that program to be as quick as possible
Fair enough. C++ is built with speed in mind. Given that compilers can do some crazy optimizations and even assembly code is gets interpreted by the CPU, it's nigh impossible to judge performance just by reading code. Perhaps your memory management code has is better that that of std::string since you have intimate knowledge of the input data, but maybe std::string authors thought of neat performance trick you didn't know. Try some benchmarking with various optimization flags (people usually settle on -02 as default optimization level) and see which is better for your needs.
[..] what might be wrong with that approach [...]
Since I write C++, I'm not sure I can comment if this approach is wrong in the context of C language. From C++ perspective I see some risks:
we can afford to try and inflict our domestic laws on people in Prague
Not sure what you mean. Extradition implies that a person has committed crimes in another country and is if he is extradited, he will be tried in that country, not in Czechia.
C compatibility gives C++ and advantage to become C replacement, since it provides a clear migration path:
0) write unit / integration tests and retest after each step,
1) compile project with c++ compiler, fix compiler errors and warnings,
2) find all mallocs / frees and replace with smart pointers,
3) [doing whole bunch of other modernizing stuff]
Even only doing steps up to (2) opens possibilities to write new code in a safer manner. Of course, if the existing code base is horrible mess and rewrite from scratch is a better option, then cool new languages are just as good, but lack of manpower is a persistent problem in open source world anyway.
Any rational arguments aside, if people just don't like C++, they won't write software in C++.
Disclaimer: I work with software that is written in C/C++ and I would rather see it all moved to modern C++.
Nice bit of free speech you have there, just don't try to use it because it will get you in trouble.
Since when is text removal from repos a free speech issue? Software and features get removed all the time and not once has it been seen as freedom of speech violation. BSD community is not under moral obligation to publish quotes by Hitler. Removing these quotes itself is an exercise of freedom of speech, since it is demonstrating that FreeBSD does not support views of those who commit crimes against humanity.
So that means the reader gets to determine what is allowed to be said
More like publisher gets to determine what they will publish, and publisher can take into consideration the readers. For example, Disney doesn't publish pornography and that is not a violation of free speech.
I am offended by your goat fucker statement, so I demand that it be removed.
I'm afraid I can't do that. As slashdot editors. If they do that, fair enough. In the mean time, did you know that slashdot has a friend or foe system?
They should have their algorithm and let the chips fall where they may.
Was the algorithm given by the God almighty himself and any tinkering with it is desecration? No. Ever since the early days people have tired to game The Algorithm and it had to be tweaked to counter it. All those tweaks are manual, be it in the algorithm itself or blacklisting. Do you really want to return back to the days where page relevance was determined only by how many other pages referenced it?
too much of a population who are intellectually unable to understand sarcasm
Sarcasm rarely works in text format, and never without context. Take this quote:
Imagine this text shown on a wall in a holocaust museum. This is obviously a cautionary text. Put the same text on a placard in a neo-Nazi rally and it becomes a inspirational quote.
Fortune cookies have no context, therefore these quotes could be sarcasm, trolling, warning to others or just Nazi propaganda distribution (Mein Kampf was Nazi propaganda material). Given that there are plenty of people who believe Nazis “did nothing wrong”, why do you think that the quotes were not put there by a Nazi sympathizers? And even if the authors were staunch Nazi haters, this might as well be read as an inspirational quote, especially given that Hitler is a symbol of evil only in the West and not much where else.
To provide a quote to live by:
pump several gigatons of sulphur into the atmosphere
thus solving the problem once and for all!
instead get their own plan at an insurance company
What are the premium costs on those private plans? How do they compare with workplace insurance or ACA?
The OMG Ubuntu site has a pretty good overview.
This is a free speech issue. I mean if players can get banned for this “cheating” where does it stop? First they came for aimbots, but I didn't speak up, because I didn't use aimbot. You know where this poem is going. Besides, if a service can use it's arbitrary power, they can go after you for whatever reason!
I'm sorry for trolling.
What about chicken catchers, how is programming useful to them ? [...]
This is why I didn't say that programming is useful for every kind of job, but for fields “fields”. In this case, is programming useful for farming? I'm not sure how modern animal husbandry works exactly, but automation in agriculture is a big deal and programming skills can give an edge. But to address your point head on — yes, not every job needs programming skills, but in this case I don't see how anything past the fourth grade could be of use.
Hell, I know people who actually have a BsC from a 4 year CS program who can't code to save their lives.
I agree that such people exist, but just because they have been taught programming and it failed doesn't meant that they can't be successfully taught programming. If we are trading anecdotes, I have seen several examples of people who at school were rubbish at mathematics and physics for years. But after changing teachers or getting tutors they just suddenly got decent at it. I'm not sure why I haven't seen this phenomena in adults. My guess is that they either find jobs where they don't have to do the things they don't know, or are too busy with real life to be able to say “Ok, I know nothing, lets spend a year to learn this thing properly”. But again, these are just guesses and until I see actual studies, I will not believe the “most people just can't learn coding” speculation.
answer is that the world is full of people who will never understand function derivatives no matter how hard they try
This statement is nearly meaningless. Sure, people with severe learning disabilities might not be able to, and maybe by your understanding “world is full of them”, in which case you may be right. Your claims are at best truthiness.
Again, you have missed the mark completely
Perhaps. I'll try to make my case clearer.
The point Tim Cook is making is that in school teaching coding has more benefits than teaching English as a second language. He does not claim that students should avoid English. In fact, [technical] English will be learned while learning coding.
School curriculum is filled with stuff that will not be useful to everyone. Did you have physics and chemistry in school? Do you use it now in any capacity? These subjects are included in schools to either prepare future specialists in STEM fields or providing basic insight on how the “real world” works. Programming is both useful for future carriers and for understanding the “real world”.
Furthermore, programming skills are useful for whatever field the student goes into. Either making models in physics or economy, creating art or managing office supplies in spreadsheets. In my university physicists, biologists and mathematicians are taught programming (I haven't looked into other fields), and for a good reason. To make matters worse, those people will program, whether you or they like it or not. If they will have to code, better teach them to do it in a less awful manner.
I assure you that the world has a very high population of people who cannot grasp the intricacies of spreadsheets.
I believe that there are many, who do not grasp the intricacies of spreadsheets, but it is courageous to say that they cannot. Ask yourself, how many hours does a student have to spend learning mathematics (starting from basic arithmetic) until they can understand function derivatives? Now, how many hours are spent teaching spreadsheets? Anyway, to show that a very high population of people who cannot grasp the intricacies of spreadsheets you would have to a) get rid of the weasel words, b) get a random sample of people, c) teach them spreadsheets with the state of the art teaching methodologies, d) motivate them to want to learn. Unless I see a study that looks remotely like this, I will not believe any claims about what people can't do.
You wouldn't complain if we said not everyone can be a doctor or a physicist, but coding? Anyone can do that! It's easy.
I did not claim that it is easy. But I haven't heard anyone making claims that a person must have a special kind of personality to be a doctor or a physicist. Although I have heard that being a psychopath helps doctors, but even that skill can be learned.
But if you want to talk about “coding is easy”, sometimes it is. Just look at spreadsheets. Imagine it as a programming language, where you have several two dimensional pointer arrays with always-on visual debugger. Where sum(A1:A10) is a neater way to say std::accumulate(A1,A10,*A11). The some IDEs (Excel, Calc) have IntelliSense. This is programming. Yes, it's horrid, not debugable, no hope for version control, painfully slow, bloated and whatnot, but it IS programming. And people do it. Now tell me with a straight face that you need to be a “math geek” to use Excel.