Shoot title cards of the text onto BW film which is flammable nitrate stock. Mix in with scenes of people acting in early 20th century costume. The actual film may not last, and might burn your house down; but if anybody ever finds it they'll do their best to transfer it to something else.
Oh, the danger of spitballing code online. About an hour later I'm watching TV and thinking about my last post. Then I recall that the order of evaluation in C is unspecified.
Thus, even if you did try to write C in prefix style, the order in which things are evaluated is potentially botched. In a pure functional language this doesn't matter. Either that, or Lisp specifies an order of evaluation even if you might have side effects. I think. I'd better shut my mouth before I look any more stupid; but the original point stands--C doesn't lend itself to that kind of thing. It's a "portable assembler". One thing happens. Then another, then another, etc...
The C equivalent would be print (eval (read (STDIN)));
Hmmmm... In C print isn't standard. printf is printf(char *fmt,...). Your eval function would have to return the result as a string of some kind. You could have it be a pointer to a chunk of memory that holds the string, but then it wouldn't be thread safe (forgetting for a moment that threads aren't spec'd out in C, let's say were POSIX for sake of argument). So if it's thread safe you could return a string, but then how do you free it?
Because of these problems, C sort of forces you into something like:
The sequence of events is obvious, even if it's because of memory management issues as opposed to C's designer's forcing us to pay attention to chronology.
Of course I know you could probably whip up some contrived C that was a valid program in a very prefix oriented style. Heck, there's obfuscated C out there like a ray-tracer shaped like a big ASCII Teapot. In both cases it's not normal C style. In any sane C style, the chronology tends to be obvious. To reiterate, I think it's more accident than design. You'd have to ask K and R though...
It's the best thing for crazy people since Blue Tooth headsets. Those allowed us to assume that you're talking to another person, even if you're talking to the elves who shine your shoes.
Now when you hear voices on the train, that'll be perfectly normal too.
I can't wait to have Monsters Inc (C) projected onto my retinas at inopportune times. Then spontaneous startled reactions and screaming for no apparent reason will be socially acceptable behavior.
I believe this is all part of some UN Convention and/or the Americans with Disabilities Act. It's a conspiracy and if you don't believe that you're a sheeple. Yep. The Internet's part of it too. This paragraph is perfectly normal on the Internet. 2nd best thing for crazy people, ever.
People always say it's the parens, but it's not. It's the prefix notation. The first thing that your program does is buried way down in the tree. IMHO, that's why most people find it hard to analyze non-trivial Lisp functions.
(print (eval (read)))
OK, easy. You gotta read, then evaluate, then print the result. In this regard, Lisp is like Forth--not too hard to understand if you write simple, meaningful functions and combine them. I think more Forth programmers are aware of the problem though. Lisp programmers will happily write 20 lines that they understand, but you're chasing through a rats nest to find that ever-elusive first thing the program does
Now I'm not saying S-expressions are never good. When the hierarchy is what you care about, fine. When chronological sequence is being modeled though... wheew. Fuggedaboutit. Maybe I can turn myself into the kind of a person that quickly finds the proper chronology in the code; but why bother when there are much more readable ways to express it?
Ah, yeah. I skimmed it and missed the part where you said Congress was complicit. In that case the generals probably are too. That's how it was in Germany. They didn't find anything remotely resembling a conscience until it looked certain the war couldn't be won. Then they did nothing parliamentary, they tried an assassination and botched it. God only knows how many lives might have been saved if that had worked. So. Egyptian generals don't have to assassinate the president. Dissolving their Constitution actually seems rather orderly by comparison...
Under your USA "President Hitler with Congress compliant" scenario... I don't see how any parliamentary procedure, including dissolving the Constitution would work. The military here has shown a tendency to go along with Congress. That seems reassuring when Congress follows the will of the people, and alarming when it doesn't. Who knows? Maybe the Egyptians will come up with some kind of system where the military has a formal role in the system. Maybe they'll draft a Constitution where the military has the explicit right to unseat the president and force an election, subject to some reasonable constraints such as a six month immunity, etc.
Impeach. VP Goebbels? Impeach. Rinse, lather, repeat until you have a POTUS that doesn't want to become dictator of the world.
Impeachment is fully Constitutional. The generals would have to be insubordinate to the commander-in-chief during the proceedings; but they would most likely be pardoned by the next POTUS. There's no need that I can see to tear up the Constitution under that scenario.
As usual, we just have to read it and follow it. That's the hard part...
Any novel "ultra durable" technology will not be ubiquitous. Pre-digital age technology (aka, paper books) will be everywhere. Even though they are slowly deteriorating, just 0.1% preservation of such material will preserve a lot of knowledge because it was so widely disseminated. That's just my guess though. You can't predict the outcome of a dark age any better than you can plan it.
I'm sooooo thrilled that we're using Stalin as our standard of comparison. How about Churchill? I'd like us to be equal or better than Great Britain under him. Now there's a decent standard.
This won't bring eternal life. If we can implant prosthetic neurons into the brain, gradually replacing cellular neurons with artificial ones, that seems more likely to lead towards indefinite life. Perpetual is out of the question because the machine can still get burned up in a fire or something. Once you can download your "essence" into a machine, back it up, save it, etc. Then it gets more interesting. The trouble is, what happens when you make copies? If my "last known good" image was backed up to a remote server and then loaded into good hardware after the aforementioned fire "my" experience would be that I ran a backup and then suddenly got transported to the backup facility. Is it the real me though?
It's not actually a city, it's more like a long series of 80s era malls which have been reworked to house Trader Joes and suchlike.
Anybody who complains that Si Valley is too suburban has not lived in Northern Virginia. The Peninsula and the corridor down to San Jose has lots of little cities with smallish but eclectic centers strung like pearls along El Camino, 101 and Caltrain. Compared to the Beltway's endless fields full of asphalt and cookie-cutter tracts, it's a walkable urban paradise.
drag their sorry asses through middle America to see the seeds they have sown
It is really, Really, REALLY hard to convince the people who believe in Free Trade. They were taught the theory in school. Often they were taught it or had it reinforced in Comm school while getting an MBA. I had an argument about this with somebody taking Comm school while I was an undergrad. This was back in the 90s, when Perot was running. It was all "why should I listen to an undergrad. What do you know?" and I was like, "our grandchildren are going to hate us". It looks more like our children will hate us. I had no idea how fast it would happen.
Finally, a lot of these guys are doing well for themselves. Even if they see other people doing badly, they still buy into the "they're just not working hard enough and smart enough" meme. It's waaaay too easy to believe something when you're paid to believe it. The people who are doing well are often paid to believe in Free Trade.
Finally, the middle class can indeed get a temporary boost from Free Trade. It's the macro economic version of selling your house and using the money to take trips and throw parties. We sell our production capability, the middle class gets $20 microwaves at Wal Mart for a few years, while ignoring the relatively small number of people who used to work at the microwave factory. Then, we cut another trade deal.
Eventually we run out of new trade deals to cut, just as you run out of possessions to sell. Then the party is over.
why do companies that go under the market, get bought by private equity and then come back into the market and get valued highly?
Because all companies hit rough spots, and when a company looks vulnerable PE vultures will do anything they can to put their talons in. This might include back room deals for another investing house to short the stock and make it look bad. Another tactic would be to seat board members who will make "poor decisions" in running the company while preserving what the vultures want (real estate, patents, etc.). Then the vultures take the company into their lair, beat it into submission, and rape it. After that they pump just enough silicone into the boobs to make her look pretty for a few months. They then sell it back to the public market as a virgin beauty queen.
That sounds familiar. It's lucky the one at Myrtle Beach wasn't that big. I've never been able to find any information about it. It sounds like the kind of thing the local chamber of commerce doesn't exactly want to tout. "Come to our broad sandy beaches, and subject yourself to a 1:20000 chance of being terrified out of your mind by something powerful enough to knock you over and drown your baby".
Maybe it's sitting there on some local librarian's microfiche though. OK... confession time. You're looking for summer of 1972. Most likely August. Yes. I'm that old.
So...let me see if I got this straight. Two kids lost a yellow plastic shovel at Myrtle Beach, SC?
From this, I'm pretty sure
I can infer
that you are her.
One of my earliest memories
on
Was That A Tsunami?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I was four years old. We were at Myrtle Beach, SC. We were on dry sand, quite far back. I seem to recall the waves being large and clean, with very little chop; but not threatening to people up on the beach. A wave charged in, all the way to the boardwalk. The beach is relatively flat there, so the actual depth was only about a foot. My mother picked me up. My sister and my father were large enough to fend for themselves. I have no idea if anybody was hurt. The beach cleared. In the panic, my yellow plastic shovel was lost; but I spied it from up on the balcony of the motel. "Mommy, can you pllllleeeeease get it?". She went down, but another wave or a person must have taken it.
Since then, I've heard of at least one other incident like this. I think it was in Florida.
COBOL is plainly superior... from an evolutionary standpoint. It propagated and survived. Nevermind that it feeds on the souls of developers. That's irrelevant. Evolution only cares about propagation and survival.
No surprise here, who wants to have equipment that can be killed from the thousands miles away
When I was a lowly dial-up support tech in the 90s, we used to make fun of angry callers who exlaimed, "my business depends on the Internet!". They should have had more than one ISP, we chided. Today there are many businesses that depend on the Internet intrinsically. It seems more forgivable now; but perhaps the mockery is still apropos. Perhaps the idea of any business depending on the Internet is still just as silly. Perhaps the Internet itself is silly, except for the small core of researchers that were using it back in the day. I can haz exabytes of stupidity, archiving a brief moment in history when we naively disgorged all our information at the speed of light..
If you subscribe to the generational theory of Strauss-Howe, it might be because the generation that would employ the "take to the streets" tactic hasn't quite been born yet. The previous iteration of that (Baby Boomers) is aging. The generations currently in power or rising to power are likely to pursue less ostentatious (but no less effective) strategies.
Of course theories like this may be complete bunk; but it's an interesting starting point. Generation X and forward are sick and tired of hearing their parents and grandparents reminisce about how they marched at Berkeley, and are jaded because all of that (in their minds) didn't really accomplish very much even if they did manage to stop Vietnam and end the draft. What have you done for us lately? There's more than one way to skin a cat. Either that, or it has to get bad, really rotten... just in time for the next generation of marchers to storm the gates.
Maybe picking employees is like picking stocks. Sure that guy has been doing well the past 10 years. He's from a top school. Then his wife leaves him and he hits the crack pipe. You have no way of predicting that.
Conversely, the next candidate is from Podunk U and slid by with a C average. He's got a passion for coding though and was going through a lot of teenage shit in school. A few years out, the open source projects he worked on in his free time taught him a lot and he's just entering what will turn out to be 15 years of solid coding performance that vault him into the top 1% of programmers. You can't see that coming either; because his resume looks like shit.
Finally, between these two extremes you have a lot of average people. Even with all the right bullet-points, they still fit a bell curve and you can't predict where they fit. The coin isn't heads or tails until you... hire it and find Shroedinger's cat stinking up the cubicle or purring contently.
Slashdot Mirror
Shoot title cards of the text onto BW film which is flammable nitrate stock. Mix in with scenes of people acting in early 20th century costume. The actual film may not last, and might burn your house down; but if anybody ever finds it they'll do their best to transfer it to something else.
Oh, the danger of spitballing code online. About an hour later I'm watching TV and thinking about my last post. Then I recall that the order of evaluation in C is unspecified.
Thus, even if you did try to write C in prefix style, the order in which things are evaluated is potentially botched. In a pure functional language this doesn't matter. Either that, or Lisp specifies an order of evaluation even if you might have side effects. I think. I'd better shut my mouth before I look any more stupid; but the original point stands--C doesn't lend itself to that kind of thing. It's a "portable assembler". One thing happens. Then another, then another, etc...
Hmmmm... In C print isn't standard. printf is printf(char *fmt,...). Your eval function would have to return the result as a string of some kind. You could have it be a pointer to a chunk of memory that holds the string, but then it wouldn't be thread safe (forgetting for a moment that threads aren't spec'd out in C, let's say were POSIX for sake of argument). So if it's thread safe you could return a string, but then how do you free it?
Because of these problems, C sort of forces you into something like:
The sequence of events is obvious, even if it's because of memory management issues as opposed to C's designer's forcing us to pay attention to chronology.
Of course I know you could probably whip up some contrived C that was a valid program in a very prefix oriented style. Heck, there's obfuscated C out there like a ray-tracer shaped like a big ASCII Teapot. In both cases it's not normal C style. In any sane C style, the chronology tends to be obvious. To reiterate, I think it's more accident than design. You'd have to ask K and R though...
They're geniuses.
It's the best thing for crazy people since Blue Tooth headsets. Those allowed us to assume that you're talking to another person, even if you're talking to the elves who shine your shoes.
Now when you hear voices on the train, that'll be perfectly normal too.
I can't wait to have Monsters Inc (C) projected onto my retinas at inopportune times. Then spontaneous startled reactions and screaming for no apparent reason will be socially acceptable behavior.
I believe this is all part of some UN Convention and/or the Americans with Disabilities Act. It's a conspiracy and if you don't believe that you're a sheeple. Yep. The Internet's part of it too. This paragraph is perfectly normal on the Internet. 2nd best thing for crazy people, ever.
Good Will Hunting
Skimmed and didn't see anybody else posting it. Kinda surprising.
People always say it's the parens, but it's not. It's the prefix notation. The first thing that your program does is buried way down in the tree. IMHO, that's why most people find it hard to analyze non-trivial Lisp functions.
(print (eval (read)))
OK, easy. You gotta read, then evaluate, then print the result. In this regard, Lisp is like Forth--not too hard to understand if you write simple, meaningful functions and combine them. I think more Forth programmers are aware of the problem though. Lisp programmers will happily write 20 lines that they understand, but you're chasing through a rats nest to find that ever-elusive first thing the program does
Now I'm not saying S-expressions are never good. When the hierarchy is what you care about, fine. When chronological sequence is being modeled though... wheew. Fuggedaboutit. Maybe I can turn myself into the kind of a person that quickly finds the proper chronology in the code; but why bother when there are much more readable ways to express it?
Obligatory: New Cuyama
Ah, yeah. I skimmed it and missed the part where you said Congress was complicit. In that case the generals probably are too. That's how it was in Germany. They didn't find anything remotely resembling a conscience until it looked certain the war couldn't be won. Then they did nothing parliamentary, they tried an assassination and botched it. God only knows how many lives might have been saved if that had worked. So. Egyptian generals don't have to assassinate the president. Dissolving their Constitution actually seems rather orderly by comparison...
Under your USA "President Hitler with Congress compliant" scenario... I don't see how any parliamentary procedure, including dissolving the Constitution would work. The military here has shown a tendency to go along with Congress. That seems reassuring when Congress follows the will of the people, and alarming when it doesn't. Who knows? Maybe the Egyptians will come up with some kind of system where the military has a formal role in the system. Maybe they'll draft a Constitution where the military has the explicit right to unseat the president and force an election, subject to some reasonable constraints such as a six month immunity, etc.
Impeach. VP Goebbels? Impeach. Rinse, lather, repeat until you have a POTUS that doesn't want to become dictator of the world.
Impeachment is fully Constitutional. The generals would have to be insubordinate to the commander-in-chief during the proceedings; but they would most likely be pardoned by the next POTUS. There's no need that I can see to tear up the Constitution under that scenario.
As usual, we just have to read it and follow it. That's the hard part...
There were laser pointers.
Any novel "ultra durable" technology will not be ubiquitous. Pre-digital age technology (aka, paper books) will be everywhere. Even though they are slowly deteriorating, just 0.1% preservation of such material will preserve a lot of knowledge because it was so widely disseminated. That's just my guess though. You can't predict the outcome of a dark age any better than you can plan it.
I'm sooooo thrilled that we're using Stalin as our standard of comparison. How about Churchill? I'd like us to be equal or better than Great Britain under him. Now there's a decent standard.
This won't bring eternal life. If we can implant prosthetic neurons into the brain, gradually replacing cellular neurons with artificial ones, that seems more likely to lead towards indefinite life. Perpetual is out of the question because the machine can still get burned up in a fire or something. Once you can download your "essence" into a machine, back it up, save it, etc. Then it gets more interesting. The trouble is, what happens when you make copies? If my "last known good" image was backed up to a remote server and then loaded into good hardware after the aforementioned fire "my" experience would be that I ran a backup and then suddenly got transported to the backup facility. Is it the real me though?
It's not actually a city, it's more like a long series of 80s era malls which have been reworked to house Trader Joes and suchlike.
Anybody who complains that Si Valley is too suburban has not lived in Northern Virginia. The Peninsula and the corridor down to San Jose has lots of little cities with smallish but eclectic centers strung like pearls along El Camino, 101 and Caltrain. Compared to the Beltway's endless fields full of asphalt and cookie-cutter tracts, it's a walkable urban paradise.
drag their sorry asses through middle America to see the seeds they have sown
It is really, Really, REALLY hard to convince the people who believe in Free Trade. They were taught the theory in school. Often they were taught it or had it reinforced in Comm school while getting an MBA. I had an argument about this with somebody taking Comm school while I was an undergrad. This was back in the 90s, when Perot was running. It was all "why should I listen to an undergrad. What do you know?" and I was like, "our grandchildren are going to hate us". It looks more like our children will hate us. I had no idea how fast it would happen.
Finally, a lot of these guys are doing well for themselves. Even if they see other people doing badly, they still buy into the "they're just not working hard enough and smart enough" meme. It's waaaay too easy to believe something when you're paid to believe it. The people who are doing well are often paid to believe in Free Trade.
Finally, the middle class can indeed get a temporary boost from Free Trade. It's the macro economic version of selling your house and using the money to take trips and throw parties. We sell our production capability, the middle class gets $20 microwaves at Wal Mart for a few years, while ignoring the relatively small number of people who used to work at the microwave factory. Then, we cut another trade deal.
Eventually we run out of new trade deals to cut, just as you run out of possessions to sell. Then the party is over.
Bits coming through the cable would sound warmer.
why do companies that go under the market, get bought by private equity and then come back into the market and get valued highly?
Because all companies hit rough spots, and when a company looks vulnerable PE vultures will do anything they can to put their talons in. This might include back room deals for another investing house to short the stock and make it look bad. Another tactic would be to seat board members who will make "poor decisions" in running the company while preserving what the vultures want (real estate, patents, etc.). Then the vultures take the company into their lair, beat it into submission, and rape it. After that they pump just enough silicone into the boobs to make her look pretty for a few months. They then sell it back to the public market as a virgin beauty queen.
Any other silly questions?
That sounds familiar. It's lucky the one at Myrtle Beach wasn't that big. I've never been able to find any information about it. It sounds like the kind of thing the local chamber of commerce doesn't exactly want to tout. "Come to our broad sandy beaches, and subject yourself to a 1:20000 chance of being terrified out of your mind by something powerful enough to knock you over and drown your baby".
Maybe it's sitting there on some local librarian's microfiche though. OK... confession time. You're looking for summer of 1972. Most likely August. Yes. I'm that old.
So...let me see if I got this straight. Two kids lost a yellow plastic shovel at Myrtle Beach, SC?
From this, I'm pretty sure
I can infer
that you are her.
I was four years old. We were at Myrtle Beach, SC. We were on dry sand, quite far back. I seem to recall the waves being large and clean, with very little chop; but not threatening to people up on the beach. A wave charged in, all the way to the boardwalk. The beach is relatively flat there, so the actual depth was only about a foot. My mother picked me up. My sister and my father were large enough to fend for themselves. I have no idea if anybody was hurt. The beach cleared. In the panic, my yellow plastic shovel was lost; but I spied it from up on the balcony of the motel. "Mommy, can you pllllleeeeease get it?". She went down, but another wave or a person must have taken it.
Since then, I've heard of at least one other incident like this. I think it was in Florida.
COBOL is plainly superior... from an evolutionary standpoint. It propagated and survived. Nevermind that it feeds on the souls of developers. That's irrelevant. Evolution only cares about propagation and survival.
No surprise here, who wants to have equipment that can be killed from the thousands miles away
When I was a lowly dial-up support tech in the 90s, we used to make fun of angry callers who exlaimed, "my business depends on the Internet!". They should have had more than one ISP, we chided. Today there are many businesses that depend on the Internet intrinsically. It seems more forgivable now; but perhaps the mockery is still apropos. Perhaps the idea of any business depending on the Internet is still just as silly. Perhaps the Internet itself is silly, except for the small core of researchers that were using it back in the day. I can haz exabytes of stupidity, archiving a brief moment in history when we naively disgorged all our information at the speed of light..
If you subscribe to the generational theory of Strauss-Howe, it might be because the generation that would employ the "take to the streets" tactic hasn't quite been born yet. The previous iteration of that (Baby Boomers) is aging. The generations currently in power or rising to power are likely to pursue less ostentatious (but no less effective) strategies.
Of course theories like this may be complete bunk; but it's an interesting starting point. Generation X and forward are sick and tired of hearing their parents and grandparents reminisce about how they marched at Berkeley, and are jaded because all of that (in their minds) didn't really accomplish very much even if they did manage to stop Vietnam and end the draft. What have you done for us lately? There's more than one way to skin a cat. Either that, or it has to get bad, really rotten... just in time for the next generation of marchers to storm the gates.
Maybe picking employees is like picking stocks. Sure that guy has been doing well the past 10 years. He's from a top school. Then his wife leaves him and he hits the crack pipe. You have no way of predicting that.
Conversely, the next candidate is from Podunk U and slid by with a C average. He's got a passion for coding though and was going through a lot of teenage shit in school. A few years out, the open source projects he worked on in his free time taught him a lot and he's just entering what will turn out to be 15 years of solid coding performance that vault him into the top 1% of programmers. You can't see that coming either; because his resume looks like shit.
Finally, between these two extremes you have a lot of average people. Even with all the right bullet-points, they still fit a bell curve and you can't predict where they fit. The coin isn't heads or tails until you... hire it and find Shroedinger's cat stinking up the cubicle or purring contently.