Just think about all the security flaws that could have been avoided if we used a language in which buffer overruns, format strings, pointer arithmetic, unsafe casts, and memory leaks just didn't exist.
Or if more programmers were, you know, competant.
C also suffers from lack of flexibility. Try implementing a Java-style class system in C; although you can make something that works the same, using it will always be more cumbersome. Because of this, C will always be pretty low-level, it is just not adaptable enough to be used for really high-level things.
This statement presumes that "high-level things" can only be easily implemented using a "Java-style class system." This indicates that it is you who suffers from a lack of flexibility, not the language.
Try writing properly tail recursive functions in C
You've never heard of 'goto'? Oh, that's right, you aren't "allowed" to use it because of something Dijkstra wrote in a paper decades ago (and which he wasn't even being 100% serious about). For dog's sake, you're talking about "low-level programming" here and you still forbid yourself the use of goto within a very specialized, well defined context?
And then there's the syntax of the language. Try writing a parser that can correctly parse any valid C program. Or try to write a program that does transformations on C programs, both reading and writing C code.
I'm just baffled by this comment. C is one of the simplest syntaxes among the popular compiled languages. A proper, complete recursive descent parser could be implemented in a day by a person versed in writing parsers. I'm curious as to what you think is so complex or hard about it.
I'm not sure about the economics, but one would think eventually it would be cheaper to grow meat in a vat than raise a few million animals, pay for their feed, clean their waste, and then spend the time and money shipping them off to the slaughter house.
If that were the case, I'd think the first uses of this technology would be in impoverished countries. But somehow I don't think that's going to happen. Cheaper? Maybe in a certain sense, but not the sense that really matters to starving people.
Yeah, I spent some time pondering it, too. If you cut the graph exactly in half, what reason would there be for one half to be more or less "the Internet" as the other? And if you can't reasonably say that one or the other is "the Internet," then where is the Internet?
Surely the network continues to function within the country, no? Basically, it sounds like the entire country has a single upstream connection to the 'net, and that got severed. Well, I work in an office with a TCP/IP based LAN, and if our uplink goes down, we can still use the LAN. Not everything grinds to a halt.
So maybe it isn't really accurate to say that they are off the Internet -- it's just that the number of hosts they are able to reach has been greatly reduced. Surely this shouldn't cripple domestic uses of the Internet, only international ones... (No more so than a broken uplink at the office interferes with me reaching the local file server.)
You make some good points, but this is just bullshit:
What a dork. Solar power is diffuse and feeble.
Solar power is the only power (aside from geothermal). It is our current collection methods which are "feeble," not the power itself.
A gas station/convenience store has 10,000 gallons of gasoline in underground tanks, and a building measuring 30 feet by 60 feet. If the roof of the convenience store were completely covered with solar panels that are 100% efficient and get 12 hours of bright sunshine every day, how long until they collect energy equivalent to the chemical energy in the 10,000 gallons of gasoline?
A completely ridiculous scenario, since there is no logical reason why a gas station should be expected to produce the same energy given a particular roof surface area. You need area to get power from sunlight, whether you're growing crops for ethanol or covering the land with solar cells. How much ethanol could you make by using that 30x60 foot roof to grow corn? I thought so.
Jesus christ, How do you go from someone having something stolen (especially something as desirable and easy to take as an ipod) to someone who is so carteless that she'll go out and get pregnant by the first guy she lays eyes on. Where do you get off on insulting a parent like that, are you stupid or juat a misogynist bastard.
What I am is a fellow who was in college only three years ago. If you doubt the existence of predatory males who target naive females on college campuses, you have your head up your ass. I suppose you're a parent too, from the tone of your sentiment, and let me tell you... You are in for one BIG fucking surprise.
You want to install a piece of software on your daughter's computer so you can always know where it (and by extension, she) is? Are you sure your true motivation is really preventing the theft of the laptop?
She lost the iPod because she wasn't careful. If she can't be responsible with that, I think you've got bigger problems. She might also lose, say, her status as a non-pregnant person.
If you paid for the laptop, and you think there's a large chance she'll allow it to be stolen, don't let her take it! If she paid for it herself, let her learn the painful lesson herself. Either way, I see no need for this tracking software.
Following her around and making sure she never makes a mistake is only going to hurt her, not help her.
For processing, since this corn is not for consumption I would imagine you could let it dry on the cobs, soak it down to sprout it, and then toss it into some kind of grinder to pulverise it into a very coarse mash. By sprouting it you allow the natural process to create mashing enzymes and sugar similar to barley malt.
Nope. Corn doesn't contain amylase or other starch-splitting enzymes, and none are produced by sprouting it, either. In brewing, corn must be mashed with a diastatic malt like barley or you don't get any saccharification.
In order to get the sugar from corn starch you must either add artificial enzymes, or more realistically, you hydrolyze it using sulfuric acid. I imagine the hydrolysis route would be the most economical and efficient, since amylase is incredibly slow-acting at lower temperatures.
If you want a true "bioreactor" kind of setup, you'd probably want to use an organism which can saccharify starch, like the koji culture used in making Japanese sake. Then the free sugars would be moved to a fermentation vessel. Again, chemical processes are much faster and possibly more efficient. The goal here is fuel, not a tasty beverage.
By your own admission, you knew that you were exploiting a bug, so you were cheating.
I didn't know it was a bug. It may have been. I've seen, and written, programs which exhibit fairly complex and unintentional behaviors that are not obviously bugs. Sometimes customers even come to depend on these bugs, and when you fix them people get ticked. The point is, it's hard to tell.
If you went to an ATM and it repeatedly dispensed $200 instead of the requested $20, the cheating would be called theft. If I am playing with you on what I believe is an equal basis, you are stealing something from me: my time.
You're comparing my actions on a MUD to theft? Such is the nature of Slashdot, I guess. We have certain reasonable expectations of reality. In reality, is it an intentional behavior of an ATM to dispense ten times the requested cash? Obviously not. In a fantasy land which is designed to help us forget reality, how can you ever be certain?
Besides, what possible pleasure is there in advancing in a game dishonorably? I would understand it if there was a financial advantage, but to "win" outside of your own efforts isn't winning at all.
To each his own. What I was doing didn't impact any other player, and my definition of what is fun doesn't have to align with yours.
If you, or anyone with enough practice, can do it, then it's not cheating. If you have to modify the client, or the datastream (in a netowork game) then thats cheating.
I don't follow. Yes, anybody can learn to rocket jump off their friend's shoulders. But it's just as easy for anybody to modify their game client. What you've said doesn't help whatsoever in determining which of these actions is right or wrong.
Simply put, if the game allows it, it is part of the gameplay. It may not be the most obvious way to play, nor may it be how the manual TELLS you to play. As far as I'm concerned, anything allowed by the engine is totally fair.
I remember playing a MUD long ago. Somehow I triggered a bug where my character couldn't take damage. After exploiting this to level up about 15 times, a god finally saw what was going on, erased my character, and banned my netblock.
I was sort of shocked.
Anyway, the point is, the game "allowed" me to do what I was doing, I didn't hack anything or apply a modification to something, but the behavior was buggy, and at least in that game it was considered cheating to take advantage of such a circumstance.
Which leads to the dilemma, how do you determine when a particular aspect of gameplay was intentional, or not intentional? For all I knew, some god had blessed me with invincibility for unknown reasons.
Why would credit card companies ever want to change? They PROFIT from fraud. They issue a charge-back to the merchant, along with its associated merchant fee, and they get to pocket the original commission as well.
Since the energy of the photon is inversely proportional to the frequency, does the frequency of the light change after it is reflected ?
Well where do you THINK the energy comes from, the magical Alterverse? Yes, the frequency of the photon changes. And the energy is directly proportional to the frequency, not inversely.
This post is a variation on a template, or proto-troll, if you will.
For example, see this post. Notice the startling similarities, particularly the reference to "office junior," the three paragraph format, and the unfortunate demise of the technology-using overling.
Whoever is posting these is putting an inexplicably large amount of effort into it. Don't fall for it. This is just troll bullshit, posted by some Luddite with an axe to grind.
I modded it "-1, Troll" then, and I would again, if I had mod points.
Why even play the game if everything is "balanced?"
The balancing force should be the PLAYER. The real world isn't balanced for our enjoyment, yet people thrive in it. This is due to intelligence and creativity. As long as sufficiency flexibility, and the ability to act creatively is provided to the players, they will balance the game all by themselves.
There are some game aspects (in poorly designed games) which are out-and-out unfair, which usually involve making some usually-limited resource unlimited to a particular class of players, but as long as these gross imbalances are corrected, the smaller things will all work themselves out. In fact, having a few things off-kilter can lead to fantastically creative solutions to basic problems which are far more fun to play out than if the answer had been simply, "Make sure you get weapon XYZ, that will balance you again class Foo."
My point is that "a formal framework and accredited degree program" and "home study" are not mutually exclusive. You can't argue against this successfully
Where does it say such a thing, or how have you come to that conclusion?
It says she wants to engage in a program of home study.
My point is that if her goal is to become a software engineer, CS is a waste of time. The only reasons a person would study it is because A) they have a passion for the topic regardless of any practical considerations, or B) they wish to advance into higher academia. A person who selects CS as a course of study to prepare for a career in software engineering is misguided.
That is what I meant when I said it's pointless to study CS outside of a formal program, at least in this person's context. If she's interested in it for its own sake, by all means she should study it. But that explicitly is not her intent.
Why? Because some people learn better in a nontraditionly setting.
I think you're missing the point. What REASON does a person have to study computer science? Certainly not to become a software engineer -- if that's the goal, then your effort is best directed toward that end rather than wading through the academic, intellectual muck of Computer Science. The only other reason a person might study CS is to get into academia, and that's IMPOSSIBLE with informal study. Let's see you get accepted to a graduate program with no undergraduate degree.
I was not saying that it's pointless to study CS on your own. If that's what she's into, by all means that's what she should do. But as a stepping stone toward becoming a software engineer, the academic details of CS are pretty much useless. It's a waste of time.
And then you have "The Bell Curve" and similar studies. That specific study is questionable (not wrong, but it has issues), but other studies have repeatedly confirmed that different ethnicities can have markedly differing average IQs. The differences are statistically significant (meaning that they're not attributable to mere chance), though they're probably not practically all that significant. And it's not like saying "I'm Chinese, you're African, therefore I'm smarter than you," it's just saying that Chinese people tend to be smarter.
I don't think so. Such a study shows that there are significant differences in performance between ethnicities on some specific, arbitrary intelligence test. The source of the disparity could lie within the test, not the people taking it.
It's pretty well known that IQ tests, the American SAT, etc. rely on unconscious social knowledge which non-natives may not possess, things like cultural metaphors and idioms. The SAT in particular is wrought with questions of the form: "The author of this passage would be most likely to agree with which of the following 5 statements." Being able to spot the "correct" answers to these questions often hinges on unconscious knowledge of social norms within a particular society.
So a Chinese person might perform better on a particular test than an African because the test is intrisically biased toward people who come from that social background.
Making objective judgments of the relative intelligence between ethnic groups is predicated on the existence of a perfectly objective test of intelligence. Such a thing doesn't exist.
The Magnificent Mile is a stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard that is home to super high-class financial firms, art and natural history museums, headquarters of Larry Flynt's empire, etc. It's just a cute name for a certain part of town.
I may be wrong about the actual street name. I don't live in Santa Monica but I was there recently and noticed the signs calling the particular area "The Magnificent Mile."
Slashdot Mirror
Or if more programmers were, you know, competant.
C also suffers from lack of flexibility. Try implementing a Java-style class system in C; although you can make something that works the same, using it will always be more cumbersome. Because of this, C will always be pretty low-level, it is just not adaptable enough to be used for really high-level things.
This statement presumes that "high-level things" can only be easily implemented using a "Java-style class system." This indicates that it is you who suffers from a lack of flexibility, not the language.
Try writing properly tail recursive functions in C
You've never heard of 'goto'? Oh, that's right, you aren't "allowed" to use it because of something Dijkstra wrote in a paper decades ago (and which he wasn't even being 100% serious about). For dog's sake, you're talking about "low-level programming" here and you still forbid yourself the use of goto within a very specialized, well defined context?
And then there's the syntax of the language. Try writing a parser that can correctly parse any valid C program. Or try to write a program that does transformations on C programs, both reading and writing C code.
I'm just baffled by this comment. C is one of the simplest syntaxes among the popular compiled languages. A proper, complete recursive descent parser could be implemented in a day by a person versed in writing parsers. I'm curious as to what you think is so complex or hard about it.
If that were the case, I'd think the first uses of this technology would be in impoverished countries. But somehow I don't think that's going to happen. Cheaper? Maybe in a certain sense, but not the sense that really matters to starving people.
Yeah, I spent some time pondering it, too. If you cut the graph exactly in half, what reason would there be for one half to be more or less "the Internet" as the other? And if you can't reasonably say that one or the other is "the Internet," then where is the Internet?
So maybe it isn't really accurate to say that they are off the Internet -- it's just that the number of hosts they are able to reach has been greatly reduced. Surely this shouldn't cripple domestic uses of the Internet, only international ones... (No more so than a broken uplink at the office interferes with me reaching the local file server.)
What a dork. Solar power is diffuse and feeble.
Solar power is the only power (aside from geothermal). It is our current collection methods which are "feeble," not the power itself.
A gas station/convenience store has 10,000 gallons of gasoline in underground tanks, and a building measuring 30 feet by 60 feet. If the roof of the convenience store were completely covered with solar panels that are 100% efficient and get 12 hours of bright sunshine every day, how long until they collect energy equivalent to the chemical energy in the 10,000 gallons of gasoline?
A completely ridiculous scenario, since there is no logical reason why a gas station should be expected to produce the same energy given a particular roof surface area. You need area to get power from sunlight, whether you're growing crops for ethanol or covering the land with solar cells. How much ethanol could you make by using that 30x60 foot roof to grow corn? I thought so.
What I am is a fellow who was in college only three years ago. If you doubt the existence of predatory males who target naive females on college campuses, you have your head up your ass. I suppose you're a parent too, from the tone of your sentiment, and let me tell you... You are in for one BIG fucking surprise.
You're right, it's been a few years. But even when I was there, they had these things called "computer labs." Are you saying these are now obsolete?
So refusing to replace every toy your child loses/breaks is equivalent to beating them? It's a laptop, not food and board.
She lost the iPod because she wasn't careful. If she can't be responsible with that, I think you've got bigger problems. She might also lose, say, her status as a non-pregnant person.
If you paid for the laptop, and you think there's a large chance she'll allow it to be stolen, don't let her take it! If she paid for it herself, let her learn the painful lesson herself. Either way, I see no need for this tracking software.
Following her around and making sure she never makes a mistake is only going to hurt her, not help her.
Nope. Corn doesn't contain amylase or other starch-splitting enzymes, and none are produced by sprouting it, either. In brewing, corn must be mashed with a diastatic malt like barley or you don't get any saccharification.
In order to get the sugar from corn starch you must either add artificial enzymes, or more realistically, you hydrolyze it using sulfuric acid. I imagine the hydrolysis route would be the most economical and efficient, since amylase is incredibly slow-acting at lower temperatures.
If you want a true "bioreactor" kind of setup, you'd probably want to use an organism which can saccharify starch, like the koji culture used in making Japanese sake. Then the free sugars would be moved to a fermentation vessel. Again, chemical processes are much faster and possibly more efficient. The goal here is fuel, not a tasty beverage.
For the record, I don't even play games. I just enjoy splitting hairs on Slashdot.
I didn't know it was a bug. It may have been. I've seen, and written, programs which exhibit fairly complex and unintentional behaviors that are not obviously bugs. Sometimes customers even come to depend on these bugs, and when you fix them people get ticked. The point is, it's hard to tell.
If you went to an ATM and it repeatedly dispensed $200 instead of the requested $20, the cheating would be called theft. If I am playing with you on what I believe is an equal basis, you are stealing something from me: my time.
You're comparing my actions on a MUD to theft? Such is the nature of Slashdot, I guess. We have certain reasonable expectations of reality. In reality, is it an intentional behavior of an ATM to dispense ten times the requested cash? Obviously not. In a fantasy land which is designed to help us forget reality, how can you ever be certain?
Besides, what possible pleasure is there in advancing in a game dishonorably? I would understand it if there was a financial advantage, but to "win" outside of your own efforts isn't winning at all.
To each his own. What I was doing didn't impact any other player, and my definition of what is fun doesn't have to align with yours.
I don't follow. Yes, anybody can learn to rocket jump off their friend's shoulders. But it's just as easy for anybody to modify their game client. What you've said doesn't help whatsoever in determining which of these actions is right or wrong.
I remember playing a MUD long ago. Somehow I triggered a bug where my character couldn't take damage. After exploiting this to level up about 15 times, a god finally saw what was going on, erased my character, and banned my netblock.
I was sort of shocked.
Anyway, the point is, the game "allowed" me to do what I was doing, I didn't hack anything or apply a modification to something, but the behavior was buggy, and at least in that game it was considered cheating to take advantage of such a circumstance.
Which leads to the dilemma, how do you determine when a particular aspect of gameplay was intentional, or not intentional? For all I knew, some god had blessed me with invincibility for unknown reasons.
What right is it, exactly? My right to not be poo-pooed by some news reporter? Boo fucking hoo.
So why should they care about minimizing fraud?
Well where do you THINK the energy comes from, the magical Alterverse? Yes, the frequency of the photon changes. And the energy is directly proportional to the frequency, not inversely.
For example, see this post. Notice the startling similarities, particularly the reference to "office junior," the three paragraph format, and the unfortunate demise of the technology-using overling.
Whoever is posting these is putting an inexplicably large amount of effort into it. Don't fall for it. This is just troll bullshit, posted by some Luddite with an axe to grind.
I modded it "-1, Troll" then, and I would again, if I had mod points.
The balancing force should be the PLAYER. The real world isn't balanced for our enjoyment, yet people thrive in it. This is due to intelligence and creativity. As long as sufficiency flexibility, and the ability to act creatively is provided to the players, they will balance the game all by themselves.
There are some game aspects (in poorly designed games) which are out-and-out unfair, which usually involve making some usually-limited resource unlimited to a particular class of players, but as long as these gross imbalances are corrected, the smaller things will all work themselves out. In fact, having a few things off-kilter can lead to fantastically creative solutions to basic problems which are far more fun to play out than if the answer had been simply, "Make sure you get weapon XYZ, that will balance you again class Foo."
Except that wasn't my point at all.
It says she wants to engage in a program of home study.
My point is that if her goal is to become a software engineer, CS is a waste of time. The only reasons a person would study it is because A) they have a passion for the topic regardless of any practical considerations, or B) they wish to advance into higher academia. A person who selects CS as a course of study to prepare for a career in software engineering is misguided.
That is what I meant when I said it's pointless to study CS outside of a formal program, at least in this person's context. If she's interested in it for its own sake, by all means she should study it. But that explicitly is not her intent.
I think you're missing the point. What REASON does a person have to study computer science? Certainly not to become a software engineer -- if that's the goal, then your effort is best directed toward that end rather than wading through the academic, intellectual muck of Computer Science. The only other reason a person might study CS is to get into academia, and that's IMPOSSIBLE with informal study. Let's see you get accepted to a graduate program with no undergraduate degree.
I was not saying that it's pointless to study CS on your own. If that's what she's into, by all means that's what she should do. But as a stepping stone toward becoming a software engineer, the academic details of CS are pretty much useless. It's a waste of time.
Maybe my point is too subtle...
Technology based on fiction. Now there's something I'd like to see.
I don't think so. Such a study shows that there are significant differences in performance between ethnicities on some specific, arbitrary intelligence test. The source of the disparity could lie within the test, not the people taking it.
It's pretty well known that IQ tests, the American SAT, etc. rely on unconscious social knowledge which non-natives may not possess, things like cultural metaphors and idioms. The SAT in particular is wrought with questions of the form: "The author of this passage would be most likely to agree with which of the following 5 statements." Being able to spot the "correct" answers to these questions often hinges on unconscious knowledge of social norms within a particular society.
So a Chinese person might perform better on a particular test than an African because the test is intrisically biased toward people who come from that social background.
Making objective judgments of the relative intelligence between ethnic groups is predicated on the existence of a perfectly objective test of intelligence. Such a thing doesn't exist.
I may be wrong about the actual street name. I don't live in Santa Monica but I was there recently and noticed the signs calling the particular area "The Magnificent Mile."