That section of code has a bug: either I wrote the conditional wrong or I typo-ed something like using = instead of ==. Either way I want to know about it so I can fix my code.
And what if the warning isn't coming from your code, but rather from code within a template in an STL header file? From a template that is in fact correct, but due to the particular template type-arguments you're instantiating it with, the compiler has deduced that certain code branches can never happen?
In that case, you'll either have to put up with lots of spurious warnings every time you compile your program, or stop using -Wall. Neither of which is a satisfactory solution.
My point was that there really is no difference in quality from an Apple Macbook and say a Dell, or Lenovo, or even a high quality Asus.
Probably the biggest difference is that you can run MacOS/X on an Apple MacBook. (No, "Hackintoshes" don't count; for serious work you can't rely on an unsupported/untested/illegal platform)
Had Motorola focussed on giving Apple what it needed in terms of low power CPUs, as well as trying to proliferate the portable markets
On the plus side, now that Macs run on x86 code, a Mac can run just about any modern OS at full speed. That makes them work very well as development machines.
The stray atoms and molecules wandering around are not space. They are matter. Space is the region between those atoms, and it is completely transparent.
Would you have guessed that helmets and seatbelts could be mandated? Fuel economy?
Sure -- those things don't impose any significant constraints on anyone. Telling someone they're not allowed to drive anymore, OTOH, would likely piss them off. The ability to drive is seen as a signifier for independence and adulthood.
I'm pretty sure most people won't be as cavalier about death as you are when there is a solution on hand.
I don't recall mentioning my opinion on the topic, only how I think the rest of the population will react.
But don't take my word for it, ask your friends and family whether they would consider a ban on non-automated driving acceptable. I think their responses would be illuminating.
The moment it hits the brakes it transmit an emergency network STOP code to cars behind it. They are "bumper to bumper", or within 1 meter of each other. Every car in the chain behind will apply maximum braking force the very moment it receives the STOP code, bringing the entire chain of cars to a smooth halt.
While the above could work, I wonder if it will be actually implemented in practice.
For one thing, it shouldn't be necessary: every autonomous car should be able to detect the slowing of the car in front of it and respond within a few milliseconds anyway. So why tell the car behind you something that it pretty much already knows?
For another thing, it would open the door to abuse. You can imagine what would happen as soon as some sociopathic teenagers/hackers/terrorists/what-have-you figured out how to hack their car's firmware to send the STOP code at the press of a dashboard button. Mass annoyance at the very least, plus brake damage and whiplash injuries if the engineering isn't perfect (which, if history is any guide, it won't be).
You actually believe an existing bureaucracy (personal fief) will get SMALLER???
Isn't that what the Libertarians (and Tea Partiers) have been lobbying for?
It's not inconceivable that they might someday succeed; especially if technology has evolved to the point where significant amounts of government beuracracy can actually be replaced by cheap automation. That would be ideal, as then people could have their government services and their tax cuts as well, without running a deficit.
He didn't cause 30,000 deaths, but the system in place that lets him have such freedom most certainly did.
It's kind of a moot point, because the chances of manual driving being outlawed within our lifetime are approximately zero.
Consider this: smoking kills four times as many people per year as auto accidents do, and serves no practical purpose -- and yet after 60+ years of knowing the health costs of smoking, we have yet to make tobacco illegal.
Maybe it's conceivable that in some countries it would be politically possible to outlaw manual driving, but I'm certain that the population of the USA wouldn't stand for that.
How can they get a patent on this? Wasn't pretty much the same thing done in Snow Crash, albeit for a different reason?
Are you suggesting that Google is building a prototype depleted-uranium railgun? If so, this is going to be awesome... Redmond will never know what hit them.
There are more lines of code in Healthcare.gov (500m!) than Google Chrome, the Linux kernel, XP, Facebook, Mac OS, and the Debian 5 packages combined:
You're looking at the wrong metric, because not all of those 500m lines of code have to work perfectly before the site is minimally usable.
The correct metric to look at would be the number of lines of code that are (a) currently broken, (b) actually executed in the common cases, and (c) cause painful or fatal consequences to the process. Those are the parts that actually need to be fixed sooner than later, and it's likely that that number is significantly smaller than 500m.
I've worked on a number of projects that seemed hopelessly buggy; the only thing to do is keep on diagnosing and fixing the next bug, and sometimes you find out that that one bug was causing a massive cascade of errors, and now that it's fixed, a whole swath of other symptoms that you thought were unrelated go away with it. The magnitude of the symptoms is often uncorrelated to the difficulty of fixing the bug.
That might not be the case, here, but then again it might.
To sum up, it doesn't need to be perfect in the next few weeks, just good enough. Once the flaws are reduced to a level where people can reasonably put up with them, there will be more time to polish out the rest.
As someone rightly pointed out above, the current problem with hydrogen is not technical, not safety, not environmental, it's economic
Speaking of which, IIRC one of the problems with fuel cells is that they're expensive. Have things improved on that front since the last time I checked, or are the research fuel-cell cars I occasionally see driving around still costing their manufacturers $500,000 each? (Because I don't think they will ever sell very many at that price;))
No, the previous poster was asking "Can we afford ACA?" It's disingenuous to conflate the providing of health care with a particular piece of bad law.
That's a fair point. I believe we can, but if not, then the appropriate response will be to improve the ACA until it becomes workable and affordable.
However, that is not at all what the Republicans have been trying to do. They ran (and lost) on "repeal and replace", but they've never offered any serious proposals on what they would replace it with. All they've offered is the "repeal" part, which would mean an unacceptable return to the pre-ACA status quo of people being unable to obtain health insurance and other people getting screwed by their insurance companies when they got sick.
I'd genuinely love to see Republicans participating in a thoughtful and constructive way towards making the ACA work better; maybe in a year or two they'll come around.
6) Republicans have spent the last 20 years telling people that "government is the problem, not the solution" -- that is, that the government can't do anything to help them. If some dude now comes along and sets up a government health insurance program that actually does help people, the Republican Party gets badly discredited. Better to keep everything broken than to risk that!
(the fact that what the dude got passed is almost exactly what Republicans themselves were proposing in the 1990's only makes it worse -- those proposals were never meant to be taken seriously, they were only put out there as a way to stop HillaryCare, and were supposed to be forgotten immediately after that was accomplished)
Would it make sense to trim your spending to borrow less?
It would, but if given the choice I'd also like to get a raise, and use the additional income to help pay down the debt and reduce the necessary size (and therefore pain) of the spending cuts. The one thing I definitely wouldn't do is go to my boss and demand that my salary be reduced -- that would be counterproductive.
Can we afford ACA?
Are you asking, can we afford to provide health care to our citizens? As a first world nation, the answer is definitely yes. Every other first world nation manages to do that without going bankrupt, so there's no reason the "greatest nation on Earth" can't do it too. It's not rocket science. The only question is whether we have the will and self-confidence to make it work, or whether the conservatives have demoralized people to the point that they don't think our nation is capable of it.
If you have a choice between housing and insurance, which will you drop? Between food and insurance?
Conservatives, for some reason, have come to the conclusion that health care is a luxury. It is not, it is a necessity, that's why it is illegal for emergency rooms to turn people away. So the only remaining question is, who pays for it? Under the old system, health care for the uninsured is paid for either by the insured (in the form of inflated premiums) or by the taxpayer. Under the ACA, people are for the first time required to take personal responsibility to plan for their own (inevitable) health care costs, rather than foisting them on to the rest of us, and somehow conservatives think that is a bad thing. Which is odd, because it was their idea in the first place.
Welcom to the welfare state. You voted for it.
Yes, and I'll continue to vote for it. I prefer civilization to social darwinism.
Who know who doesn't get bullied? Kids with backbones. Because it's no fun to bully kids who stand up for themselves.
Granting for the sake of argument that the above is true, how does one "stand up for oneself" against a flood of anonymous or pseudonymous nasty comments posted on the Internet?
You fool! That code is critical, it's the speedup loop. For the v2.0 release you delete some of those loops, and presto, your app is significantly faster -- everybody will think you're an optimizing genius.
Be careful to include some calls to rand() or similar in your loops, though, otherwise the optimizer in your compiler might screw you over by removing the loops in v1.0, denying you your speedup in the new version.
Depression is a mental disorder caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, and should not be trivialized.
A negative outlook, on the other hand, is a habit, and like any bad habit, it can be recognized as such and changed.
Mental health issues aside, there are people out there who make themselves unhappy to no good purpose, e.g. by having unrealistic expectations. For those people, an attitude adjustment is a good idea, as it will make them both happier and more successful.
Web applications run fine, but anything else requires the platform owner's digital signature.
I'm still trying to figure out what magic there is in JavaScript that makes it an acceptably safe way to run unsigned code. Yes, it's an interpreted language running in a sandbox, but then so is Java, and Java applets (seemingly) went from "perfectly safe to run in your web browser" to "disabled by default because they're a big security hole" in the span of about a year. What's to stop something similar from happening to JavaScript (and really, to any Turing-complete language that becomes popular enough for the hackers to start spending time on)?
Unless you are on the first floor and can walk across a courtyard a ring is really a long building looped so the ends connect. It seems very inefficient to me.
They're building it this way so they can host the Segway 500.
I have to wonder about a company who has lost 30% of it's stock price in the last year building a $5B headquarters.
When you're sitting on $147 billion in cash, $5 billion for new headquarters is quite affordable... whether or not it's the best possible use of that money, I don't know, but it's definitely not going to bankrupt Apple.
No, now you have $600M spent and you STILL don't have a website that works. This amounts to treason you know.
Hardly. Incompetence, maybe. Treason has a specific meaning, not just "someone doing something I disapprove of".
Keep in mind that $600M is about 25% of the cost of a single B-2 bomber, and the nation is going to get a hell of a lot more benefit out of this web site then they will from the 21 B-2's that we built to mostly gather dust.
Slashdot Mirror
That section of code has a bug: either I wrote the conditional wrong or I typo-ed something like using = instead of ==. Either way I want to know about it so I can fix my code.
And what if the warning isn't coming from your code, but rather from code within a template in an STL header file? From a template that is in fact correct, but due to the particular template type-arguments you're instantiating it with, the compiler has deduced that certain code branches can never happen?
In that case, you'll either have to put up with lots of spurious warnings every time you compile your program, or stop using -Wall. Neither of which is a satisfactory solution.
My point was that there really is no difference in quality from an Apple Macbook and say a Dell, or Lenovo, or even a high quality Asus.
Probably the biggest difference is that you can run MacOS/X on an Apple MacBook. (No, "Hackintoshes" don't count; for serious work you can't rely on an unsupported/untested/illegal platform)
Had Motorola focussed on giving Apple what it needed in terms of low power CPUs, as well as trying to proliferate the portable markets
On the plus side, now that Macs run on x86 code, a Mac can run just about any modern OS at full speed. That makes them work very well as development machines.
If we're going to be real, then let's be real.
Oh goody, time to split hairs!
The stray atoms and molecules wandering around are not space. They are matter. Space is the region between those atoms, and it is completely transparent.
As long as people are modifying GPL code, they're obliged to contribute those modifications back.
The above isn't true -- it's perfectly legal to modify GPL code all you want and never contribute your modifications to anyone.
What you can't do is distribute the resulting binaries without also giving the modified source code code to the recipients of those binaries.
The problem with the BSD license is, as soon as Apple feels they have the market sewn up, those patches are going to stop flowing
I doubt it, but even if they did, so what? Someone else could (and would) continue development where Apple left off.
Would you have guessed that helmets and seatbelts could be mandated? Fuel economy?
Sure -- those things don't impose any significant constraints on anyone. Telling someone they're not allowed to drive anymore, OTOH, would likely piss them off. The ability to drive is seen as a signifier for independence and adulthood.
I'm pretty sure most people won't be as cavalier about death as you are when there is a solution on hand.
I don't recall mentioning my opinion on the topic, only how I think the rest of the population will react.
But don't take my word for it, ask your friends and family whether they would consider a ban on non-automated driving acceptable. I think their responses would be illuminating.
The moment it hits the brakes it transmit an emergency network STOP code to cars behind it. They are "bumper to bumper", or within 1 meter of each other. Every car in the chain behind will apply maximum braking force the very moment it receives the STOP code, bringing the entire chain of cars to a smooth halt.
While the above could work, I wonder if it will be actually implemented in practice.
For one thing, it shouldn't be necessary: every autonomous car should be able to detect the slowing of the car in front of it and respond within a few milliseconds anyway. So why tell the car behind you something that it pretty much already knows?
For another thing, it would open the door to abuse. You can imagine what would happen as soon as some sociopathic teenagers/hackers/terrorists/what-have-you figured out how to hack their car's firmware to send the STOP code at the press of a dashboard button. Mass annoyance at the very least, plus brake damage and whiplash injuries if the engineering isn't perfect (which, if history is any guide, it won't be).
You actually believe an existing bureaucracy (personal fief) will get SMALLER???
Isn't that what the Libertarians (and Tea Partiers) have been lobbying for?
It's not inconceivable that they might someday succeed; especially if technology has evolved to the point where significant amounts of government beuracracy can actually be replaced by cheap automation. That would be ideal, as then people could have their government services and their tax cuts as well, without running a deficit.
He didn't cause 30,000 deaths, but the system in place that lets him have such freedom most certainly did.
It's kind of a moot point, because the chances of manual driving being outlawed within our lifetime are approximately zero.
Consider this: smoking kills four times as many people per year as auto accidents do, and serves no practical purpose -- and yet after 60+ years of knowing the health costs of smoking, we have yet to make tobacco illegal.
Maybe it's conceivable that in some countries it would be politically possible to outlaw manual driving, but I'm certain that the population of the USA wouldn't stand for that.
How can they get a patent on this? Wasn't pretty much the same thing done in Snow Crash, albeit for a different reason?
Are you suggesting that Google is building a prototype depleted-uranium railgun? If so, this is going to be awesome... Redmond will never know what hit them.
When an entire country's population relies upon your tech to even stay alive, you make sure your shit works. [...] What's their fucking excuse?
Nobody relies on Mac Mail to even stay alive?
There are more lines of code in Healthcare.gov (500m!) than Google Chrome, the Linux kernel, XP, Facebook, Mac OS, and the Debian 5 packages combined:
You're looking at the wrong metric, because not all of those 500m lines of code have to work perfectly before the site is minimally usable.
The correct metric to look at would be the number of lines of code that are (a) currently broken, (b) actually executed in the common cases, and (c) cause painful or fatal consequences to the process. Those are the parts that actually need to be fixed sooner than later, and it's likely that that number is significantly smaller than 500m.
I've worked on a number of projects that seemed hopelessly buggy; the only thing to do is keep on diagnosing and fixing the next bug, and sometimes you find out that that one bug was causing a massive cascade of errors, and now that it's fixed, a whole swath of other symptoms that you thought were unrelated go away with it. The magnitude of the symptoms is often uncorrelated to the difficulty of fixing the bug.
That might not be the case, here, but then again it might.
To sum up, it doesn't need to be perfect in the next few weeks, just good enough. Once the flaws are reduced to a level where people can reasonably put up with them, there will be more time to polish out the rest.
30 minutes more sleeping?
30 minutes more sleep would also make people more productive -- so either way it's a win.
As someone rightly pointed out above, the current problem with hydrogen is not technical, not safety, not environmental, it's economic
Speaking of which, IIRC one of the problems with fuel cells is that they're expensive. Have things improved on that front since the last time I checked, or are the research fuel-cell cars I occasionally see driving around still costing their manufacturers $500,000 each? (Because I don't think they will ever sell very many at that price ;))
No, the previous poster was asking "Can we afford ACA?" It's disingenuous to conflate the providing of health care with a particular piece of bad law.
That's a fair point. I believe we can, but if not, then the appropriate response will be to improve the ACA until it becomes workable and affordable.
However, that is not at all what the Republicans have been trying to do. They ran (and lost) on "repeal and replace", but they've never offered any serious proposals on what they would replace it with. All they've offered is the "repeal" part, which would mean an unacceptable return to the pre-ACA status quo of people being unable to obtain health insurance and other people getting screwed by their insurance companies when they got sick.
I'd genuinely love to see Republicans participating in a thoughtful and constructive way towards making the ACA work better; maybe in a year or two they'll come around.
Don't forget
6) Republicans have spent the last 20 years telling people that "government is the problem, not the solution" -- that is, that the government can't do anything to help them. If some dude now comes along and sets up a government health insurance program that actually does help people, the Republican Party gets badly discredited. Better to keep everything broken than to risk that!
(the fact that what the dude got passed is almost exactly what Republicans themselves were proposing in the 1990's only makes it worse -- those proposals were never meant to be taken seriously, they were only put out there as a way to stop HillaryCare, and were supposed to be forgotten immediately after that was accomplished)
And nothing of value was lost. Or gained.
Approximately $24 billion was lost.
Would it make sense to trim your spending to borrow less?
It would, but if given the choice I'd also like to get a raise, and use the additional income to help pay down the debt and reduce the necessary size (and therefore pain) of the spending cuts. The one thing I definitely wouldn't do is go to my boss and demand that my salary be reduced -- that would be counterproductive.
Can we afford ACA?
Are you asking, can we afford to provide health care to our citizens? As a first world nation, the answer is definitely yes. Every other first world nation manages to do that without going bankrupt, so there's no reason the "greatest nation on Earth" can't do it too. It's not rocket science. The only question is whether we have the will and self-confidence to make it work, or whether the conservatives have demoralized people to the point that they don't think our nation is capable of it.
If you have a choice between housing and insurance, which will you drop? Between food and insurance?
Conservatives, for some reason, have come to the conclusion that health care is a luxury. It is not, it is a necessity, that's why it is illegal for emergency rooms to turn people away. So the only remaining question is, who pays for it? Under the old system, health care for the uninsured is paid for either by the insured (in the form of inflated premiums) or by the taxpayer. Under the ACA, people are for the first time required to take personal responsibility to plan for their own (inevitable) health care costs, rather than foisting them on to the rest of us, and somehow conservatives think that is a bad thing. Which is odd, because it was their idea in the first place.
Welcom to the welfare state. You voted for it.
Yes, and I'll continue to vote for it. I prefer civilization to social darwinism.
Who know who doesn't get bullied? Kids with backbones. Because it's no fun to bully kids who stand up for themselves.
Granting for the sake of argument that the above is true, how does one "stand up for oneself" against a flood of anonymous or pseudonymous nasty comments posted on the Internet?
You fool! That code is critical, it's the speedup loop. For the v2.0 release you delete some of those loops, and presto, your app is significantly faster -- everybody will think you're an optimizing genius.
Be careful to include some calls to rand() or similar in your loops, though, otherwise the optimizer in your compiler might screw you over by removing the loops in v1.0, denying you your speedup in the new version.
Depression is a mental disorder caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, and should not be trivialized.
A negative outlook, on the other hand, is a habit, and like any bad habit, it can be recognized as such and changed.
Mental health issues aside, there are people out there who make themselves unhappy to no good purpose, e.g. by having unrealistic expectations. For those people, an attitude adjustment is a good idea, as it will make them both happier and more successful.
Web applications run fine, but anything else requires the platform owner's digital signature.
I'm still trying to figure out what magic there is in JavaScript that makes it an acceptably safe way to run unsigned code. Yes, it's an interpreted language running in a sandbox, but then so is Java, and Java applets (seemingly) went from "perfectly safe to run in your web browser" to "disabled by default because they're a big security hole" in the span of about a year. What's to stop something similar from happening to JavaScript (and really, to any Turing-complete language that becomes popular enough for the hackers to start spending time on)?
Unless you are on the first floor and can walk across a courtyard a ring is really a long building looped so the ends connect. It seems very inefficient to me.
They're building it this way so they can host the Segway 500.
I have to wonder about a company who has lost 30% of it's stock price in the last year building a $5B headquarters.
When you're sitting on $147 billion in cash, $5 billion for new headquarters is quite affordable... whether or not it's the best possible use of that money, I don't know, but it's definitely not going to bankrupt Apple.
No, now you have $600M spent and you STILL don't have a website that works. This amounts to treason you know.
Hardly. Incompetence, maybe. Treason has a specific meaning, not just "someone doing something I disapprove of".
Keep in mind that $600M is about 25% of the cost of a single B-2 bomber, and the nation is going to get a hell of a lot more benefit out of this web site then they will from the 21 B-2's that we built to mostly gather dust.