Breaking even a single operation into smaller blocks it a good thing, if it spans hundreds of lines.
I miss nested functions - they were very useful for just that sort of thing. It also clarifies that nested function g() exists only to implement something in enclosing function f(), which is often the case when breaking thinks up for clarity rather than trying to write reusable functions. Since a nested function can access the locals of its enclosing function, it also often avoids having to pass very long argument lists.
Nested functions were a standard feature of Algol family languages, but unfortunately died w/ C (though gcc supports nested functions as an extension). These days many people seem unaware that there even is such a thing as nested functions.
Don't forget Mark Twain and Winston Churchill. When in doubt (and often when not) quotes are attributed to one of the big 4: Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein and Yogi Berra. Occasionally Will Rogers gets an honorable mention.
The NFL player Arron Hernandez was just arrested and charged with murder based primarily on texts, surveillance video (some from his own home) and cell tower records.
The question is how many serious crimes are solved this way that couldn't have been solved otherwise. You can find an anecdote to justify anything, but it means nothing.
The idea being, people who break little laws, also tend to break big ones.
Yes. I've occasionally let my car's inspection sticker expire, so it's likely that I'm a terrorist. Please learn the difference between P(A|B) and P(B|A).
a bunch of "poor and misunderstood Asians" who were on route to blow up an EDL rally only got caught, because they had a bad tax disc
But the next time the terrorists might come on foot, so you should add mandatory pedestrian stops with the classic "papers please". They might also swim ashore so you should ensure that people carry their ID when swimming too.
Heaven forbid a government agency try to do something with efficiency and accuracy. Too many people complain about this because then they would have to stop telling jokes about government being too slow and too dumb.
Nonsense. I've always admired the efficiency and thoroughness of the Stasi.
Courtesy of a death camp he'd once resided in, my neighbor across the street from where I grew up in the US had one of those on his forearm in big characters (they weren't some little unobtrusive thing). Just seeing that growing up left a lasting impression.
It is illegal to have a car on the UK road if it doesn't have an MOT (stringent annual vehicle safety and emissions inspection), road tax and insurance. Many people try to skirt the system by skipping a month or two and hoping not to get caught. The result is that they are no longer insured.
Of course the panopticon state is only looking out for our welfare. What government policy isn't strictly concerned with that? Of course the fines going into the treasury don't hurt, but I'd be thrilled if that was the worse that could come of this.
Perhaps you need to learn English, your post makes zero sense.
You're right, assuming the reader is oblivious to anything other than plain literal statements that don't rely on context.
-1 for PP? At least one mod has gone completely off the deep end. Forget disagreeing w/ the mod down, I can't even imaging why it would be modded down. Full text is:
In the car industry, a large proportion of the traditional handwork has been robotised in the last half century. This has led to much better build quality, more affordable cars with more luxury features and it has allowed high-wage countries to remain competitive with lower wage countries. The number of people that work in the car industry hasn't decreased significantly as a result; instead more people are now involved in development and production of features and accessories that would not have been feasible in an average price car without robotisation.
I strongly suspect that most manufacturing industries would benefit from more robotisation. Overall, it is just more efficient and it allows skilled workers to do other useful things.
Instead of possibly slowly moving production of electronics back to the US, we'd already have a large cost-efficient automated electronic production industry if we hadn't embraced the ideology and political agenda of so-called free trade. People talk as though robotic assembly were the hot new thing, but it's 1980's tech! In the 80's and early-mid 90's automating electronic assembly and designing things so they could easily be assembled by robots were the hot things. Then we threw that know-how and that industry in the trash by moving everything offshore. Now China is automating assembly - like we were doing 20-30 years ago - and we're left with a decimated industry and no advantage from so-called free trade.
That this would happen was obvious to anybody back in the day that wasn't brainwashed by free trade ideology. Looking at trade in terms of comparative advantage makes sense if you're looking at factors that can't quickly change. Notice that early examples of how free trade could be beneficial, like Smith's talk about growing bananas in Scotland or Ricardo's classic wine and wool example, are about agricultural products that depend on unchanging factors like soil and climate. Manufacturing, and all the engineering work that inevitably follows it, can be done anywhere in the world. What matters is know-how and experience, and having clusters where sub-contractors feed manufacturers. These can be replicated anywhere, but there is friction. Hence it's easier to move it to (what was) a very low cost place like China (especially with the help of government subsidies and currency manipulation), but much harder to move it back to the US even when US costs reach parity with Chinese costs. Contrary to the fantasies of economists, whole industries do not magically appear and disappear in a country overnight, and certainly not without friction.
Societies are prey of people ignorant of science.... Look at the catastrophes that marxism and monetarism had produced.
I've never found STEM people to be less susceptible to ideology than others. In fact some types, like extreme forms of libertarianism, seem to be more popular amongst them. To my everlasting regret, human society runs on bullshit. Rant all you want, force people to take all the STEM courses you want, but it's not going to change. STEM makes a nice hobby though.
reading and writing. While I admit that these skills rarely come naturally to engineering students
That surprises me, but since you're not biased against engineering students, I'll take your word for it. Many engineers I know like to joke about enGineerz being semi-literate Neanderthals, but it's not the case in my experience. Like everyone else though my perceptions are biased. I do agree that good reading and writing skills are, if not essential, then certainly useful in engineering.
I would love to see the humanities take courses in things like basic geology, math, physics, logic, infrastructure, costing, or logic.
Revenge? I feel that way sometimes too, though I'm not too bitter since I didn't have a foreign language requirement (or is it "other language" in Canada if you take French or English). Actually I enjoyed most of my humanities and social science requirements, and they were sometimes a nice break from my technical courses. This whole idea of a "liberal education" though is mostly pretentious nonsense. Taking a few courses is not going to turn somebody into a thinking person if they don't want to be, and there are far less expensive (I had to pay American style tuition) ways to learn, like the public library.
Until a few years ago, university was about humanities (including pure science and math)
Defining math and science as part of the humanities? A standard disingenuous rhetorical trick is to redefine terms to suit your argument, but this is too obvious.
Relatively few went to university, and those that did mostly weren't doing it to make money (a few profession, like law and medicine being obvious exceptions; their specialized training came later.)
That was probably true in the middle ages, but for several centuries before the post-WWII university boom, most students were sons of the wealthy in search of an excuse to party for a few years (hardly a 20th century invention) and get a sheepskin that was "prestigious" (at least in the sense of indicating you were part of the upper crud, er, I mean crust). The students who were satisfied with a gentleman's 'C' served a purpose though, as their tuition, and the endowments given by their parents to get their none too bright or hardworking offspring into the right school, helped pay for the education of scholarship students and for the work of professors who were actual scholars.
If a high proportion of executives and leaders had college degrees, it was about being able to think, understand the past, and hold an intelligent conversation, NOT about being trained in their job.
Were you able to keep a straight face while writing that? That might have been the theory, but in reality an educated idiot is still an idiot. For most "executives and leaders" the value was making contacts with fellow members of the upper crud, and maybe learning a few pretentious Latin phrases.
The joy of English is that it often makes little sense, even to its native speakers (like me). Your understanding of 'moot' is the most common usage, but it can also mean to debate, and a bunch of other vaguely related things.
On the other hand, I get extremely frustrated when I see my customers waste taxpayer money with pretty much no oversight and no regards to the effectiveness of the truck so long as it wins trophies in the parade, but that's another debate...
If you get frustrated with that about fire trucks, be very very glad you're not working for the military industrial complex. Been there, done that, and am happily back in commercial/industrial work.
Slashdot Mirror
Breaking even a single operation into smaller blocks it a good thing, if it spans hundreds of lines.
I miss nested functions - they were very useful for just that sort of thing. It also clarifies that nested function g() exists only to implement something in enclosing function f(), which is often the case when breaking thinks up for clarity rather than trying to write reusable functions. Since a nested function can access the locals of its enclosing function, it also often avoids having to pass very long argument lists.
Nested functions were a standard feature of Algol family languages, but unfortunately died w/ C (though gcc supports nested functions as an extension). These days many people seem unaware that there even is such a thing as nested functions.
Don't forget Mark Twain and Winston Churchill. When in doubt (and often when not) quotes are attributed to one of the big 4: Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein and Yogi Berra. Occasionally Will Rogers gets an honorable mention.
The NFL player Arron Hernandez was just arrested and charged with murder based primarily on texts, surveillance video (some from his own home) and cell tower records.
The question is how many serious crimes are solved this way that couldn't have been solved otherwise. You can find an anecdote to justify anything, but it means nothing.
The idea being, people who break little laws, also tend to break big ones.
Yes. I've occasionally let my car's inspection sticker expire, so it's likely that I'm a terrorist. Please learn the difference between P(A|B) and P(B|A).
a bunch of "poor and misunderstood Asians" who were on route to blow up an EDL rally only got caught, because they had a bad tax disc
But the next time the terrorists might come on foot, so you should add mandatory pedestrian stops with the classic "papers please". They might also swim ashore so you should ensure that people carry their ID when swimming too.
Heaven forbid a government agency try to do something with efficiency and accuracy. Too many people complain about this because then they would have to stop telling jokes about government being too slow and too dumb.
Nonsense. I've always admired the efficiency and thoroughness of the Stasi.
yeah the nazis did that
Those numbers were Hollerith codes - thanks IBM!.
Courtesy of a death camp he'd once resided in, my neighbor across the street from where I grew up in the US had one of those on his forearm in big characters (they weren't some little unobtrusive thing). Just seeing that growing up left a lasting impression.
There was a joke circling in Poland a couple years ago: http://i.pinger.pl/pgr456/3d49724c000eb4404b01224d worth a try ;)
What makes you think that was a joke?
The saving grace is that you can also see the pastor's wife.
It is illegal to have a car on the UK road if it doesn't have an MOT (stringent annual vehicle safety and emissions inspection), road tax and insurance. Many people try to skirt the system by skipping a month or two and hoping not to get caught. The result is that they are no longer insured.
Of course the panopticon state is only looking out for our welfare. What government policy isn't strictly concerned with that? Of course the fines going into the treasury don't hurt, but I'd be thrilled if that was the worse that could come of this.
Perhaps you need to learn English, your post makes zero sense.
You're right, assuming the reader is oblivious to anything other than plain literal statements that don't rely on context.
Great, the UK is becoming a panopticon state even faster than the US. As an American, I'm not petty enough to welcome the company.
-1 for PP? At least one mod has gone completely off the deep end. Forget disagreeing w/ the mod down, I can't even imaging why it would be modded down. Full text is:
In the car industry, a large proportion of the traditional handwork has been robotised in the last half century. This has led to much better build quality, more affordable cars with more luxury features and it has allowed high-wage countries to remain competitive with lower wage countries. The number of people that work in the car industry hasn't decreased significantly as a result; instead more people are now involved in development and production of features and accessories that would not have been feasible in an average price car without robotisation.
I strongly suspect that most manufacturing industries would benefit from more robotisation. Overall, it is just more efficient and it allows skilled workers to do other useful things.
RoboOverseer instead of RoboCop? Doesn't sound all that interesting to me, but Hollywood does all kinds of crazy remakes.
Instead of possibly slowly moving production of electronics back to the US, we'd already have a large cost-efficient automated electronic production industry if we hadn't embraced the ideology and political agenda of so-called free trade. People talk as though robotic assembly were the hot new thing, but it's 1980's tech! In the 80's and early-mid 90's automating electronic assembly and designing things so they could easily be assembled by robots were the hot things. Then we threw that know-how and that industry in the trash by moving everything offshore. Now China is automating assembly - like we were doing 20-30 years ago - and we're left with a decimated industry and no advantage from so-called free trade.
That this would happen was obvious to anybody back in the day that wasn't brainwashed by free trade ideology. Looking at trade in terms of comparative advantage makes sense if you're looking at factors that can't quickly change. Notice that early examples of how free trade could be beneficial, like Smith's talk about growing bananas in Scotland or Ricardo's classic wine and wool example, are about agricultural products that depend on unchanging factors like soil and climate. Manufacturing, and all the engineering work that inevitably follows it, can be done anywhere in the world. What matters is know-how and experience, and having clusters where sub-contractors feed manufacturers. These can be replicated anywhere, but there is friction. Hence it's easier to move it to (what was) a very low cost place like China (especially with the help of government subsidies and currency manipulation), but much harder to move it back to the US even when US costs reach parity with Chinese costs. Contrary to the fantasies of economists, whole industries do not magically appear and disappear in a country overnight, and certainly not without friction.
Even worse, rogue waves are not just a sailor's tall tale. One 115ft wave on your ship can ruin your whole day.
No, you don't use wine, you use Manischewitz.
Why? The whole idea was to escape from the suffering in Egypt. There are actually some decent kosher wines.
A girl is a woman in pupae form.
What's a "woman"?
Societies are prey of people ignorant of science. ... Look at the catastrophes that marxism and monetarism had produced.
I've never found STEM people to be less susceptible to ideology than others. In fact some types, like extreme forms of libertarianism, seem to be more popular amongst them. To my everlasting regret, human society runs on bullshit. Rant all you want, force people to take all the STEM courses you want, but it's not going to change. STEM makes a nice hobby though.
Machinery only exists to serve people.
You're not a real engineer.
reading and writing. While I admit that these skills rarely come naturally to engineering students
That surprises me, but since you're not biased against engineering students, I'll take your word for it. Many engineers I know like to joke about enGineerz being semi-literate Neanderthals, but it's not the case in my experience. Like everyone else though my perceptions are biased. I do agree that good reading and writing skills are, if not essential, then certainly useful in engineering.
I would love to see the humanities take courses in things like basic geology, math, physics, logic, infrastructure, costing, or logic.
Revenge? I feel that way sometimes too, though I'm not too bitter since I didn't have a foreign language requirement (or is it "other language" in Canada if you take French or English). Actually I enjoyed most of my humanities and social science requirements, and they were sometimes a nice break from my technical courses. This whole idea of a "liberal education" though is mostly pretentious nonsense. Taking a few courses is not going to turn somebody into a thinking person if they don't want to be, and there are far less expensive (I had to pay American style tuition) ways to learn, like the public library.
Take your nose out of the clouds.
Until a few years ago, university was about humanities (including pure science and math)
Defining math and science as part of the humanities? A standard disingenuous rhetorical trick is to redefine terms to suit your argument, but this is too obvious.
Relatively few went to university, and those that did mostly weren't doing it to make money (a few profession, like law and medicine being obvious exceptions; their specialized training came later.)
That was probably true in the middle ages, but for several centuries before the post-WWII university boom, most students were sons of the wealthy in search of an excuse to party for a few years (hardly a 20th century invention) and get a sheepskin that was "prestigious" (at least in the sense of indicating you were part of the upper crud, er, I mean crust). The students who were satisfied with a gentleman's 'C' served a purpose though, as their tuition, and the endowments given by their parents to get their none too bright or hardworking offspring into the right school, helped pay for the education of scholarship students and for the work of professors who were actual scholars.
If a high proportion of executives and leaders had college degrees, it was about being able to think, understand the past, and hold an intelligent conversation, NOT about being trained in their job.
Were you able to keep a straight face while writing that? That might have been the theory, but in reality an educated idiot is still an idiot. For most "executives and leaders" the value was making contacts with fellow members of the upper crud, and maybe learning a few pretentious Latin phrases.
I won't argue with that, my dad bought it once for a joke during Passover.
Now you know why you use wine for a seder.
The joy of English is that it often makes little sense, even to its native speakers (like me). Your understanding of 'moot' is the most common usage, but it can also mean to debate, and a bunch of other vaguely related things.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/moot
That's called bad engineering. A few humanities course won't fix that.
On the other hand, I get extremely frustrated when I see my customers waste taxpayer money with pretty much no oversight and no regards to the effectiveness of the truck so long as it wins trophies in the parade, but that's another debate...
If you get frustrated with that about fire trucks, be very very glad you're not working for the military industrial complex. Been there, done that, and am happily back in commercial/industrial work.