Admittedly Finland's debt to GDP is better than the US, but that's not saying much. In the past 30 years it has grown from 10% of GDP to over 60%. Socialism always looks nice until you run our of other people's money (then it looks like Venezuela). Still, enjoy it while it lasts.
I have a different WTF - WTF is the EU flag doing as the Slashdot icon for a story about Norway? Norway isn't part of the EU - precisely because it has all that wonderful cash from oil exports.
Norway is the only country I've ever seem where socialism is sustainable - forever spending more than your tax revenue works great if you have another source of revenue to make up the difference! (If only Iraq had been set up with the same model - thongs might have gone very differently there.) Of course, they won't have a bright future if everyone stops buying that oil.
I'm old enough to have gone through this three times: once going from eight to sixteen bit; next from sixteen to thirty two and then finally thirty-two to sixty-four. I think it's pretty safe to say that I won't ever have to go through another power-of-two word size shift though:)
Sort of. The current "64-bit" platform only supports 48-bit addressing. (Deja-vu, since I learned on 32-nit machines that only supported 24-bit addressing). There are servers now with 2 TB of memory - 41 bits. I suspect we'll see 512 TB servers in my lifetime, especially if SSDs get so fast that memory-mapped files become the common architecture.
Will it be a non-trivial port to move to real 64-bit addressing? I doubt it - I'm sure there's already lots of code that assumes pointers are really only 48 bits for one efficiency optimization or another.
The debugger is msvsmon.exe. It has a 64-bit version, which runs automatically when you configure the project to be 64-bit. Visual studio just wraps a handy GUI around that. Something's wrong in your project settings if you can't debug a running app with lots of memory.
The only problem I've ever had with large source trees is that Intellisense shits itself beyond some point - but I somehow doubt it's (only) a memory issue.
It was not stupid at all in the domain for which is was invented. Simonyi (the eponymous Hungarian) was apparently appalled at what it became.
The original idea was to decorate objects of the same type, but different semantics, so that you wouldn't confuse them: specifically rows and columns int the Excel codebase. You could tell instantly that rwFoo - coBar was a bug, even though they were both ints and the compiler was fine with it. It's a fundamental weakness of C and C++ through today that's there's no way to make efficient, disjoint integral types.
It can also be useful to distinguish between types that typedef to the same type on one platform, but might typedef to different types on another, but IMO it's not worth the clutter.
There's no requirement in the standard that sizeof(long) == sizeof(void *) (and they're not he same on Windows, due to choices made long ago to make 16-32 bit ports easy).
There's no requirement in the sizeof(long *) == sizeof(void *) either. I don't think I've ever seen a non-trivial codebase that didn't make that assumption throughout, but there used to be architectures where a char* was bigger then an int*.
Also keep in mind that $2000 more in taxes while no longer needing to spend $4000/year on health insurance actually gives the middle class more money.
Fantasy and fairy dust. We can't afford medicare as it is -- the unfunded liability is something like $240,000 per taxpayer already, no way we're paying that -- "medicare for everyone" is a fiscal non-starter.
No, there's a middle ground, where we have somewhat less government and somewhat lower taxes. That's what we should be seeking.
The only way the tax system can actually be fair is a flat tax, but with the current convoluted nonsense the only rational approach is to pay as little as you legally can. Suggesting you should pay more than you have to suggests you desire a bigger government, so much that you're willingly throwing money at it so that it can do more. Call that whichever kind of totalitarianism you like, whether communism or some other -ism.
What value is there in movie theaters these days? Why maximize revenue for that outdated distribution chain? Nostalgia? Release worldwide the same day on DVD, streaming, and theaters, and then shut up and take my money. If the theaters aren't adding enough value to stay in business, clearly we're not losing much.
Trump is indirectly stealing from everyone else, because if he pays less taxes, other people have to pay more.
Spoken like a true communist. The other possibility, that we don't need so much government and with less money the government might tighten its belt, that idea can't even fit in your head, can it?
The stock market is not the economy. The economy is not the stock market. That may not be the single most important lesson in investing, but it's up there.
What Musk is saying is akin to any other religion out there and his 'proof' is as good as a 'burning bush' or a talking snake.
A burning bush is actually damn good proof if you're the one it's talking too (and you don't otherwise have such episodes). A story about a burning bush is very different.
Similarly, you might discover you're in a simulation if the folks running the simulation decide to prove it to you, but you'd find it impossible to prove it others who didn't observe the same events. Not that I think Musk experienced any such thing, mind you, but it's important to distinguish between stories and direct observation.
If the universe were being run right now in debug mode with frequent pauses and on-the-fly bugfix-and-continue changes... would you know? There'd be no evidence in-universe after all.
If you've ever owned a house, you know that the relationship between the actual value of property and the government-assessed value of property is arbitrary at best, and often seems outright malicious. Ultimately, the only time property has a specific objective value is the moment it's sold (now if you're selling it to yourself at a false value, that is fraud). Pay the least taxes you legally can - there are far better charities than the government if you're charitably inclined.
And nothing will ever engender the least sympathy in me for the banks. You sound like a big fan of both taxes and banks, so are you a fan then of bank bailouts? That combines the best of both worlds, right?
Sure, science without observation to kill off the bad hypotheses is barely science. Witness string theory. But that's not cosmology, for the most part (though there is actually a lot of theories-based-on-theories around inflation, simply because so much time has passed without any new data to cull the herd).
However, most of the stuff that laymen insist can't be true, and scientists are just making crazy stuff up, is very much based on observations, and it's the universe itself that seems to be making crazy stuff up. Relativity, quantum mechanics, dark matter, dark energy: all of these started with crazy-seeming but undeniable observations, not stoned creative writing by bored scientists as so many/. armchair scientists seem to think. We end up with the crazy-seeming theories because all the less-crazy hypotheses failed.
A large chunk of science relies on observations not tied to controlled experiments. That doesn't make it any less "science". Regardless of your experiment, after all, what you end up with is only "observations". Heck, for particle physics you get statistical analysis of observations 3 steps removed from the event of interest.
"A conclusion we came to was wrong because we jumped to it for no reason"
You believe that's what cosmologists do in peer-reviewed papers, just to conclusions for no reason? Somehow I think random/. armchair experts know less than they think.
No one understands what dark energy actually is - that's what the "dark" part means. The continuing, accelerating expansion of the universe is an observation seeking explanation. People propose hypotheses, and when we get new data many of those are falsified. That's called "science".
There's only about 10% as much printed currency as there is value in bank accounts (including CDs etc). That wouldn't change if we used gold coins instead of printed paper. Money would still be just a number in a computer, not backed by any specific bit of gold or bitcoin or whatever.
capitalism in a free market would not allow paper money to exist as a concept because nobody would take that money.
So you'd buy a house with a wheelbarrow full of gold, instead of a mortgage? That sounds like a dismal economy, as so few would ever manage to save that much.
And of course the gold currency would eventually be debased, so any transaction would involve lengthy haggling over the purity of each individual coin - what fun.
We don't need any change in our currency to end bank bailouts- that's entirely a political corruption problem, not a "what do we base out currency on" problem.
however no government can print gold and actually get away with it
You might consider that we moved away from gold coins because "printing money" was better than the alternative: the king sends his troops around to seize all the gold, or the economy collapses for lack of enough cash to mediate barter.
None of which matters if you have fractional reserve banking, of course, and that's not going away so the actual physical currency is almost meaningless.
How to fix the unbearable inflation? Well, get back to recognizing that gold is money
We certainly had inflation while we were technically on the gold standard. We certainly had fractional reserve banking, and thus the ability for the Fed to manipulate the money supply, while we were on the gold standard.
Gold is as arbitrary as anything else to assign value to as a currency, and historically has never prevented a government from watering down the currency, even when actual gold coins were used (which often became gold-ish coins over time).
Slashdot Mirror
Or maybe it's a crime to possess enough money for the police to want to confiscate it for their own use?/quote
Well, that's certainly how it works in the US, at least if that money is currency you're driving around with.
You can only keep borrowing until people stop believing you'll pay them back. One year's GDP is about the point where people start questioning that.
Admittedly Finland's debt to GDP is better than the US, but that's not saying much. In the past 30 years it has grown from 10% of GDP to over 60%. Socialism always looks nice until you run our of other people's money (then it looks like Venezuela). Still, enjoy it while it lasts.
I have a different WTF - WTF is the EU flag doing as the Slashdot icon for a story about Norway? Norway isn't part of the EU - precisely because it has all that wonderful cash from oil exports.
Norway is the only country I've ever seem where socialism is sustainable - forever spending more than your tax revenue works great if you have another source of revenue to make up the difference! (If only Iraq had been set up with the same model - thongs might have gone very differently there.) Of course, they won't have a bright future if everyone stops buying that oil.
I'm old enough to have gone through this three times: once going from eight to sixteen bit; next from sixteen to thirty two and then finally thirty-two to sixty-four. I think it's pretty safe to say that I won't ever have to go through another power-of-two word size shift though:)
Sort of. The current "64-bit" platform only supports 48-bit addressing. (Deja-vu, since I learned on 32-nit machines that only supported 24-bit addressing). There are servers now with 2 TB of memory - 41 bits. I suspect we'll see 512 TB servers in my lifetime, especially if SSDs get so fast that memory-mapped files become the common architecture.
Will it be a non-trivial port to move to real 64-bit addressing? I doubt it - I'm sure there's already lots of code that assumes pointers are really only 48 bits for one efficiency optimization or another.
The debugger is msvsmon.exe. It has a 64-bit version, which runs automatically when you configure the project to be 64-bit. Visual studio just wraps a handy GUI around that. Something's wrong in your project settings if you can't debug a running app with lots of memory.
The only problem I've ever had with large source trees is that Intellisense shits itself beyond some point - but I somehow doubt it's (only) a memory issue.
It was not stupid at all in the domain for which is was invented. Simonyi (the eponymous Hungarian) was apparently appalled at what it became.
The original idea was to decorate objects of the same type, but different semantics, so that you wouldn't confuse them: specifically rows and columns int the Excel codebase. You could tell instantly that rwFoo - coBar was a bug, even though they were both ints and the compiler was fine with it. It's a fundamental weakness of C and C++ through today that's there's no way to make efficient, disjoint integral types.
It can also be useful to distinguish between types that typedef to the same type on one platform, but might typedef to different types on another, but IMO it's not worth the clutter.
There's no requirement in the standard that sizeof(long) == sizeof(void *) (and they're not he same on Windows, due to choices made long ago to make 16-32 bit ports easy).
There's no requirement in the sizeof(long *) == sizeof(void *) either. I don't think I've ever seen a non-trivial codebase that didn't make that assumption throughout, but there used to be architectures where a char* was bigger then an int*.
Also keep in mind that $2000 more in taxes while no longer needing to spend $4000/year on health insurance actually gives the middle class more money.
Fantasy and fairy dust. We can't afford medicare as it is -- the unfunded liability is something like $240,000 per taxpayer already, no way we're paying that -- "medicare for everyone" is a fiscal non-starter.
Well fuck me. Apparently Slashdot is now so far left that suggesting that people can hate Obama for reasons other than "he's Black" makes me a troll.
It's one thing to disagree with those reasons, but it's borderline insane to assert that no one holds them sincerely.
No, there's a middle ground, where we have somewhat less government and somewhat lower taxes. That's what we should be seeking.
The only way the tax system can actually be fair is a flat tax, but with the current convoluted nonsense the only rational approach is to pay as little as you legally can. Suggesting you should pay more than you have to suggests you desire a bigger government, so much that you're willingly throwing money at it so that it can do more. Call that whichever kind of totalitarianism you like, whether communism or some other -ism.
Which has nothing really to do with actual assembly language, in terms of either syntax or performance.
What value is there in movie theaters these days? Why maximize revenue for that outdated distribution chain? Nostalgia? Release worldwide the same day on DVD, streaming, and theaters, and then shut up and take my money. If the theaters aren't adding enough value to stay in business, clearly we're not losing much.
Trump is indirectly stealing from everyone else, because if he pays less taxes, other people have to pay more.
Spoken like a true communist. The other possibility, that we don't need so much government and with less money the government might tighten its belt, that idea can't even fit in your head, can it?
The burning bush in the story had a lengthy conversation (well, an angel inside it did), which was the point of the story after all.
The stock market is not the economy. The economy is not the stock market. That may not be the single most important lesson in investing, but it's up there.
What Musk is saying is akin to any other religion out there and his 'proof' is as good as a 'burning bush' or a talking snake.
A burning bush is actually damn good proof if you're the one it's talking too (and you don't otherwise have such episodes). A story about a burning bush is very different.
Similarly, you might discover you're in a simulation if the folks running the simulation decide to prove it to you, but you'd find it impossible to prove it others who didn't observe the same events. Not that I think Musk experienced any such thing, mind you, but it's important to distinguish between stories and direct observation.
If the universe were being run right now in debug mode with frequent pauses and on-the-fly bugfix-and-continue changes ... would you know? There'd be no evidence in-universe after all.
If you've ever owned a house, you know that the relationship between the actual value of property and the government-assessed value of property is arbitrary at best, and often seems outright malicious. Ultimately, the only time property has a specific objective value is the moment it's sold (now if you're selling it to yourself at a false value, that is fraud). Pay the least taxes you legally can - there are far better charities than the government if you're charitably inclined.
And nothing will ever engender the least sympathy in me for the banks. You sound like a big fan of both taxes and banks, so are you a fan then of bank bailouts? That combines the best of both worlds, right?
Sure, science without observation to kill off the bad hypotheses is barely science. Witness string theory. But that's not cosmology, for the most part (though there is actually a lot of theories-based-on-theories around inflation, simply because so much time has passed without any new data to cull the herd).
However, most of the stuff that laymen insist can't be true, and scientists are just making crazy stuff up, is very much based on observations, and it's the universe itself that seems to be making crazy stuff up. Relativity, quantum mechanics, dark matter, dark energy: all of these started with crazy-seeming but undeniable observations, not stoned creative writing by bored scientists as so many /. armchair scientists seem to think. We end up with the crazy-seeming theories because all the less-crazy hypotheses failed.
A large chunk of science relies on observations not tied to controlled experiments. That doesn't make it any less "science". Regardless of your experiment, after all, what you end up with is only "observations". Heck, for particle physics you get statistical analysis of observations 3 steps removed from the event of interest.
"A conclusion we came to was wrong because we jumped to it for no reason"
You believe that's what cosmologists do in peer-reviewed papers, just to conclusions for no reason? Somehow I think random /. armchair experts know less than they think.
No one understands what dark energy actually is - that's what the "dark" part means. The continuing, accelerating expansion of the universe is an observation seeking explanation. People propose hypotheses, and when we get new data many of those are falsified. That's called "science".
There's only about 10% as much printed currency as there is value in bank accounts (including CDs etc). That wouldn't change if we used gold coins instead of printed paper. Money would still be just a number in a computer, not backed by any specific bit of gold or bitcoin or whatever.
capitalism in a free market would not allow paper money to exist as a concept because nobody would take that money.
So you'd buy a house with a wheelbarrow full of gold, instead of a mortgage? That sounds like a dismal economy, as so few would ever manage to save that much.
And of course the gold currency would eventually be debased, so any transaction would involve lengthy haggling over the purity of each individual coin - what fun.
We don't need any change in our currency to end bank bailouts- that's entirely a political corruption problem, not a "what do we base out currency on" problem.
however no government can print gold and actually get away with it
You might consider that we moved away from gold coins because "printing money" was better than the alternative: the king sends his troops around to seize all the gold, or the economy collapses for lack of enough cash to mediate barter.
None of which matters if you have fractional reserve banking, of course, and that's not going away so the actual physical currency is almost meaningless.
How to fix the unbearable inflation? Well, get back to recognizing that gold is money
We certainly had inflation while we were technically on the gold standard. We certainly had fractional reserve banking, and thus the ability for the Fed to manipulate the money supply, while we were on the gold standard.
Gold is as arbitrary as anything else to assign value to as a currency, and historically has never prevented a government from watering down the currency, even when actual gold coins were used (which often became gold-ish coins over time).