Which makes you a better writer. Which is only important if reading is important (since the only thing writing can do is produce something to be read). We seem to have a circular argument here:). No, I just thought you were talking about something else. I was talking about the benefits of routinely reading for pleasure.
In addition to what you mentioned, I've read other things about reading doing good things for brain development, and helping abstract thought in general. Of course, part of that was someone complaining about blind people using screen readers all the time and not learning Braille anymore, so I'm not sure it's all that impartial.
If I answer, does that prove that it's not self-evident?
Anyway, reading anything that's professionally edited, no matter what it's about, improves your spelling and grammar instincts. Knowing the actual rules isn't that important if you see enough correct examples.
I find the thing that really makes code unreadible is inconsistency. I've inherited code from a dozen or two different programmers in eight different languages over the last ten years, and I've always found that inconsistent naming was absolutely inconsequential. Names that are way too short, all caps or just plain wrong are a problem, but otherwise, differences in how people think dwarf differences in how they name their variables.
The real reason I urge my fellow programmers to keep within 80 columns is that should I wish to print out the source code, I need only be sure that the font is 8 point courier. You can go up to 97 characters for that.
Which just goes to prove YOU DON'T NEED A CELL PHONE. Have you tried to find a pay phone lately? The last time I did, I ordered a cell phone the next day.
Remind me which side of the road is the "correct" side for driving. Driving on the right lets you operate the gearshift with your right hand. Of course, that's becoming nearly as obsolete a requirement as being about to weild your sword against oncoming traffic with your right hand, much as I may like driving a stickshift.
Most pop is more dependant on sound quality than most rock. The only exceptions I can think of (in basic rock -- some styles of metal have more) are Dire Straits and Yes. That's not saying anything about the songwriting quality, just how important it is to get a good clear tone.
The principles in Marbury represent the only reasonable reading of the Constitution in light of the legal framework out if which it was written. I don't think that's true. The constitutional framers realized they still had something missing, and Marbury v. Madison filled that in nicely. The constitution makes no provision for judicial review, though, and if that's what they had meant, it would only have taken a sentence or two to say so.
But if you're saying that that one man's opinion... should be just as foundational as the Constitution In principle, no. It should have taken a constitutional amendment to add judicial review, and I'm impressed that John Marshall got away with it through sheer force of persuasion. Two centuries later, however, it's not even controversial (or it wasn't until Alito came along), and the constitutional foundation of the government consists of the base constitution, the amendments, and Marbury v. Madison. Yes, the decision isn't technically part of the constitution, but The United Kingdom is referred to as a constitutional monarchy and they don't have a constitution at all.
If by "activist" you mean deciding cases according to the written law I mean judging laws based on constitutional principles.
When Judges usurp political power from the elected branches, they usurp it from the people. Good. The people are too stupid and too inclined to take away each other's rights to have completely unfettered access to the laws. That was the main point of republicanism (vs. pure democracy), and The Federalist Papers make that clear in talking about "The Tyranny of the Majority".
That same constitution... Yes, the constitution as written. Marbury v. Madison was decided in 1803, only 17 years later, and really needs to be considered just as central a foundation to our system of government as any section of the constitution. Before that case, we had The Sedition Act, which was a blatant violation of the first amendment, but there was nothing that could be done about it.
If you think prison has anything to do with "rehabilitation," That was the original idea, anyway. The Quakers of a few hundred years ago thought the proper way to deal with crimes was to put people in a cell to think about what they did for a few months. Pennitentiaries (sp?) were named after William Penn, a prominant Quaker who also founded Pennsylvania. I like and respect the Quakers, and if I were still a Christian, I'd probably be a Quaker, but they're not always the most realistic people around.
"Podcast" falls into that category too I'm much less annoyed by the term "podcast" than by the things themselves. I'll never understand why people are so determined to listen to text, rather than read it.
until high school I was really socially accepted and quite popular, but that changed and became quite the opposite How did you manage that? High school kids are normally far more accepting than Jr. High.
R means that people under 17 need someone to be there (an escort) Wait, so when I saw Dracula (the Gary Oldman version) in the theater when I was 16, I was supposed to hire a hooker?
I though you were not able to break the sound barrier over the US, either a special circumstance or I am just wrong. Flying at Mach 3 at 100,000 feet is not like flying Mach 1.1 at 30,000 feet. The shockwave has a much sharper angle, and it's a lot higher from the ground in the first place, so it's traveled something like 60 miles before it reaches the ground. That gives it a lot of time to dissapate.
The Flood story... what are we to get out of that? If you read The Gilgamesh Epic (later chapters, with his father), you get that the ancient Jews were shameless plagiarists.
I had to read the Bhagavad Gita for my mythology class last semester. It was far and away the most boring thing we read. 90 pages with five pages of content.
Now the Norse and Sumerian mythology, those were cool.
As for DirecTV, you know what they say about it going out in the rain? Well, it's true. Oh, it's not as big of a problem as their competitors' commercials make it out to be, but it does happen. It may not be an issue if you live in a dry state like Arizona, but I live in the northeast and we get some wicked thunderstorms in the summer. My in-laws in southern Arizona (Tombstone, roughly) regularly had their DirecTV out for hours at a time during the couple weeks a year it rains there. I live in Michigan and it never goes out.
I've been very happy with my DirecTivo service, but I have a 1080p TV now, and I'll be looking for an HD source when my contract runs out in February. I hear terrible things about the DirecTV HD quality, and I despise Comcast, so I'm not really sure what I'm going to do.
So, what's the story? Has the industry hit a wall? Yes. There was a big story about three years ago that when Intel got its first chips from some new process shrink (90 nm?), they were startled to find that they couldn't get them to run substantially faster than the previous version. Up until then, they'd always gotten a significant speedup from that with no design changes, but they did hit some sort of physical limit no one was expecting. I haven't heard anything since about whether they figured out what it was.
Basically immediately, the Pentium 4 line was ended, and they started planning to go back to the Pentium 3 design (P-6 architecture, introduced in 1995 on the Pentium Pro), which had been quietly improving as the Pentium M in the meantime.
even to the 4GHz levels that the old Pentium IVs were pushing The Pentium IV had a couple of really good ideas ("trace cache", off the top of my head -- the instruction cache was post-decode), but it was fundamentally a really dumb design. It was optimized for a clock speed number they could put on a label, even though it degraded performance by taking pipelining too far. It was really fast if you could keep the pipeline full, but the only common application that could do so was video encoding.
Are you aware that the separation of powers between the federal and state goverments is designed to prevent tyranny That doesn't mean it works. The real effect is just to ensure that you don't know what is and isn't legal in the jurisdiction you happen to be in, so you can pretty much be arrested for anything.
I'm not saying federalism is the only thing that makes that true, but it contributes a lot.
But you can't do too little either -- a whole if-else where a ternary would do takes *longer* to read. No.
I did actually start using the ternary operator a bit the last time I worked much in C++. I got in the habit of declaring most of my local variables as const, and the ternary operator lets you go further that direction.
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Don't forget starvation. If this is really, completely enforced, it's a death sentence.
Which makes you a better writer. Which is only important if reading is important (since the only thing writing can do is produce something to be read). We seem to have a circular argument here :).
No, I just thought you were talking about something else. I was talking about the benefits of routinely reading for pleasure.
In addition to what you mentioned, I've read other things about reading doing good things for brain development, and helping abstract thought in general. Of course, part of that was someone complaining about blind people using screen readers all the time and not learning Braille anymore, so I'm not sure it's all that impartial.
If I answer, does that prove that it's not self-evident?
Anyway, reading anything that's professionally edited, no matter what it's about, improves your spelling and grammar instincts. Knowing the actual rules isn't that important if you see enough correct examples.
I find the thing that really makes code unreadible is inconsistency.
I've inherited code from a dozen or two different programmers in eight different languages over the last ten years, and I've always found that inconsistent naming was absolutely inconsequential. Names that are way too short, all caps or just plain wrong are a problem, but otherwise, differences in how people think dwarf differences in how they name their variables.
Man, I miss those days of keyboard driven menus...
Actually, no. No I don't. Not even a little!
Do you at least miss "Show Codes". I know I do.
The real reason I urge my fellow programmers to keep within 80 columns is that should I wish to print out the source code, I need only be sure that the font is 8 point courier.
You can go up to 97 characters for that.
Which just goes to prove YOU DON'T NEED A CELL PHONE.
Have you tried to find a pay phone lately? The last time I did, I ordered a cell phone the next day.
Remind me which side of the road is the "correct" side for driving.
Driving on the right lets you operate the gearshift with your right hand. Of course, that's becoming nearly as obsolete a requirement as being about to weild your sword against oncoming traffic with your right hand, much as I may like driving a stickshift.
Most pop is more dependant on sound quality than most rock. The only exceptions I can think of (in basic rock -- some styles of metal have more) are Dire Straits and Yes. That's not saying anything about the songwriting quality, just how important it is to get a good clear tone.
The principles in Marbury represent the only reasonable reading of the Constitution in light of the legal framework out if which it was written.
I don't think that's true. The constitutional framers realized they still had something missing, and Marbury v. Madison filled that in nicely. The constitution makes no provision for judicial review, though, and if that's what they had meant, it would only have taken a sentence or two to say so.
But if you're saying that that one man's opinion... should be just as foundational as the Constitution
In principle, no. It should have taken a constitutional amendment to add judicial review, and I'm impressed that John Marshall got away with it through sheer force of persuasion. Two centuries later, however, it's not even controversial (or it wasn't until Alito came along), and the constitutional foundation of the government consists of the base constitution, the amendments, and Marbury v. Madison. Yes, the decision isn't technically part of the constitution, but The United Kingdom is referred to as a constitutional monarchy and they don't have a constitution at all.
If by "activist" you mean deciding cases according to the written law
I mean judging laws based on constitutional principles.
When Judges usurp political power from the elected branches, they usurp it from the people.
Good. The people are too stupid and too inclined to take away each other's rights to have completely unfettered access to the laws. That was the main point of republicanism (vs. pure democracy), and The Federalist Papers make that clear in talking about "The Tyranny of the Majority".
That same constitution...
Yes, the constitution as written. Marbury v. Madison was decided in 1803, only 17 years later, and really needs to be considered just as central a foundation to our system of government as any section of the constitution. Before that case, we had The Sedition Act, which was a blatant violation of the first amendment, but there was nothing that could be done about it.
Judges are supposed to be activist, too.
If you think prison has anything to do with "rehabilitation,"
That was the original idea, anyway. The Quakers of a few hundred years ago thought the proper way to deal with crimes was to put people in a cell to think about what they did for a few months. Pennitentiaries (sp?) were named after William Penn, a prominant Quaker who also founded Pennsylvania. I like and respect the Quakers, and if I were still a Christian, I'd probably be a Quaker, but they're not always the most realistic people around.
"Podcast" falls into that category too
I'm much less annoyed by the term "podcast" than by the things themselves. I'll never understand why people are so determined to listen to text, rather than read it.
until high school I was really socially accepted and quite popular, but that changed and became quite the opposite
How did you manage that? High school kids are normally far more accepting than Jr. High.
R means that people under 17 need someone to be there (an escort)
Wait, so when I saw Dracula (the Gary Oldman version) in the theater when I was 16, I was supposed to hire a hooker?
I though you were not able to break the sound barrier over the US, either a special circumstance or I am just wrong.
Flying at Mach 3 at 100,000 feet is not like flying Mach 1.1 at 30,000 feet. The shockwave has a much sharper angle, and it's a lot higher from the ground in the first place, so it's traveled something like 60 miles before it reaches the ground. That gives it a lot of time to dissapate.
The Flood story... what are we to get out of that?
If you read The Gilgamesh Epic (later chapters, with his father), you get that the ancient Jews were shameless plagiarists.
I had to read the Bhagavad Gita for my mythology class last semester. It was far and away the most boring thing we read. 90 pages with five pages of content.
Now the Norse and Sumerian mythology, those were cool.
As for DirecTV, you know what they say about it going out in the rain? Well, it's true. Oh, it's not as big of a problem as their competitors' commercials make it out to be, but it does happen. It may not be an issue if you live in a dry state like Arizona, but I live in the northeast and we get some wicked thunderstorms in the summer.
My in-laws in southern Arizona (Tombstone, roughly) regularly had their DirecTV out for hours at a time during the couple weeks a year it rains there. I live in Michigan and it never goes out.
I've been very happy with my DirecTivo service, but I have a 1080p TV now, and I'll be looking for an HD source when my contract runs out in February. I hear terrible things about the DirecTV HD quality, and I despise Comcast, so I'm not really sure what I'm going to do.
Maybe to programmers, but the hardware doesn't work that way.
So, what's the story? Has the industry hit a wall?
Yes. There was a big story about three years ago that when Intel got its first chips from some new process shrink (90 nm?), they were startled to find that they couldn't get them to run substantially faster than the previous version. Up until then, they'd always gotten a significant speedup from that with no design changes, but they did hit some sort of physical limit no one was expecting. I haven't heard anything since about whether they figured out what it was.
Basically immediately, the Pentium 4 line was ended, and they started planning to go back to the Pentium 3 design (P-6 architecture, introduced in 1995 on the Pentium Pro), which had been quietly improving as the Pentium M in the meantime.
even to the 4GHz levels that the old Pentium IVs were pushing
The Pentium IV had a couple of really good ideas ("trace cache", off the top of my head -- the instruction cache was post-decode), but it was fundamentally a really dumb design. It was optimized for a clock speed number they could put on a label, even though it degraded performance by taking pipelining too far. It was really fast if you could keep the pipeline full, but the only common application that could do so was video encoding.
The incident involved wiretapping a payphone booth
What's a payphone?
Are you aware that the separation of powers between the federal and state goverments is designed to prevent tyranny
That doesn't mean it works. The real effect is just to ensure that you don't know what is and isn't legal in the jurisdiction you happen to be in, so you can pretty much be arrested for anything.
I'm not saying federalism is the only thing that makes that true, but it contributes a lot.
Do your posts show up on their friends lists?
But you can't do too little either -- a whole if-else where a ternary would do takes *longer* to read.
No.
I did actually start using the ternary operator a bit the last time I worked much in C++. I got in the habit of declaring most of my local variables as const, and the ternary operator lets you go further that direction.