I disagree that this is about hatred; in fact, I think you have to be calling many people blatant liars to make it about hatred. Granted, on either side there are likely some who are driven by hatred, but that's always going to be the case. It seems that many (and probably the vast majority) of people on both sides are pretty normal people who genuinely feel the way they say they do. Trying to vilify people on one side or the other doesn't help and is disingenuous.
Personally I can see merit in both sides and I bet if you give each argument and fair chance you would too. And that's why the issue is such a difficult one. It's only through setting up absurd strawman arguments that you can really dismiss the whole debate.
On the one side, it looks like we're dealing with discrimination all over again. As with racial discrimination, it seems wrong to avoid doing business with people just because of their sexual orientation. Separate but equal never worked and simply wasn't right.
On the other side, it seems like you have the government forcing people not just to tolerate - but to actively celebrate - something that is deeply abhorrent to them. They would otherwise be inclined to let people live their own lives how they want but when forced to be involved they honestly feel wrong, deeply wrong, about being forced to tacitly condone things like same sex marriage.
Both sides sincerely feel like the other side is taking away their rights and feel the others' suggested way to deal with it is unfair. Hatred isn't necessarily a part of the equation at all.
Hooray, maybe now we'll finally get to see Spiderman's backstory - like how he came to be and how Uncle Ben died - instead of always seeing him later on in his super hero career when he has moved past teenage angst and settled into his role.
Funny you should mention Blender, as that's exactly the app I had in mind when I said I used the middle button/wheel all the time without any problems.:)
FWIW I use some Logitech mouse and this discussion made me notice that the wheel has a ton of subtle, discrete "stops" or positions rather than being a completely fluid or smooth spin. That might be why the middle button doesn't tend to register accidental scroll events.
Can you share details on what the problems are with the clickable middle wheel? You mentioned it's "inadequate", but what makes it so? Just wondering because I use the middle-button/wheel all the time and it seems to work as well as the other buttons - no discomfort, no extra thought, etc.
Ooh, I love this game. My turn! (BTW you didn't give me a starting point so I'll just go with your/. handle, but on future turns please give me a subject to start with)
Ok. 'greenwow'... let's see. Well, 'green' is like the Jolly Green Giant, who is big, as was Andre the Giant. He was French. The French sold us a lot of land in the Louisiana Purchase. Louisiana has a really high rate of obesity. Why do you support pediatric heart disease, you monster???
Stuff like this makes me want to be their customer all the more. They promised they'd do something and are following through, and that something targets some of the big concerns about owning a battery-powered car. And no surprise that at first it's going to be less than ideal; the fact that they're moving forward is great and over time the technology and the processes will of course improve.
Instead of trying to make this be regulated and overtly forcing people to get vaccinated, it could be much more effective to try to address this via social pressure.
Somehow in some places getting vaccinated has fallen out of favor - or at least not vaccinating is no longer seen as being a really bad idea. A coordinated campaign to change public opinion could do the trick, a combination of celebrity endorsements, news reports on how lack of vaccination is hurting the children, social media campaigns that get people to brag that their kids are vaccinated, etc.
If you make it cool/positive to be vaccinated and backwards/dumb to not be vaccinated, the majority of this problem will go away. You'll always have the exceptions, sure, but I'd bet that with them you'd still be well above the herd immunity threshold, so who cares.
We try to solve too many problems via regulation, and having the government force stuff on people comes with its own set of downsides, not the least of which is that people naturally resist anything you try to force them to do.
Good points. Yeah, I don't know if we've just been really lucky or what, but I haven't seen the tech worker shortage (despite all of the yelling about it).
Please read my other posts - not only did I not complain about a shortage, I went so far as to say that I don't really think there is a shortage.
Regardless, I think you're missing my point: my position is that some people, no matter how good their skills are, are a *net negative*, because tech skills are only a part of the equation (an equation that includes things like interpersonal skills), and that people/teams/companies that don't properly weigh that part of the equation end up paying the price for a long time to come and end being worse off than had they not hired that person. So, no, it's not a good idea to hire people just on the basis of technical qualifications.
Put another way, if someone is applying for a dev job at my company and they have really poor interpersonal skills, I'd argue they aren't qualified for the job. They're at best partially qualified, so we don't hire them.
And it's not the "easy route", not by a long shot. It's actually harder, especially up front, but you do it because you know it's better in the long run.
But is it putting an emphasis on people who are easy to manage? Absolutely. Anything else is insanity. I run a business, not some volunteer organization where you work with whatever you've got.
I turn away people who are qualified (in terms of technical skill) but don't pass the personality test *all the time*.
In the past month alone I've passed on 2 candidates who were very technically competent, but one could barely carry on a conversation and the other was obnoxiously arrogant and smug.
OTOH in the past 4-5 months I've hired about a dozen developers who have a variety of skill levels but are just great to be around and to work with - they have a good work-life balance, they aren't easily offended, they're personable and team-oriented.
It's not at all about finding a "perfect" fit but is about weighing all factors that matter, and things like communicating, being personable, and other social skills are *crucial* to success. Of course it doesn't mean you hire people that are fun to be around but are lousy developers, but it also doesn't mean that you jeopardize the team and/or the business by bringing on someone you have to constantly "deal with" in some way or another. Everyone has their quirks and off days, I'm not talking about that, but people that have to be coddled or who are hyper-sensitive or contentious or can't articulate thoughts or have a normal discussion - it's nearly impossible for really good technical skill to outweigh those kinds of drawbacks.
And for the record, while I agree that there are oodles of crummy candidates out there, I'm also skeptical there is some sort of widespread shortage - we don't seem to have trouble finding candidates that range from "very good" to "superstar" and everything in between.
Oh, it's not on a whim at all. It's the realization that the degree to which a person can work well with, communicate with, interact with, etc. (basically, "fit in with") others is massively important, so much so that if a person is too lacking in those areas then it's better for your team and for your business to not hire them, no matter how good they look on paper.
*sigh* I wasn't. Read the article, then the parent subject line. I was saying that the more general issue is finding people who can be the right fit for a team, regardless of their skill level.
So that disqualifies various sets of people - those who are so extremely introverted that they can't interact with the rest of the team very well, those who are poor communicators, those who are prima donnas, and those who have poor reading comprehension.
Nah, you can be/somewhat/ introverted and still do well. But the fact of the matter is that social skills *are* crucial. It's not discriminatory, it's business, and a person who can't communicate well, who can't interact well, is a net negative, no matter how awesome a coder they are. It's not fair to the business and it's not fair to the rest of the team to have to "deal" with the guy or gal who just can't mesh with the team.
I've wasted so much time dealing with prima donnas and socially inept "geniuses" that I don't hire either these days. The very first interview is always a personality interview, and if I struggle seeing the person fitting in with the rest of the team, I don't even bother moving on to a technical/skills phase of the interview.
That doesn't mean we don't hire people that just geek out on tech, but they are people who are passionate but also kind of laid back, people with a good sense of humor, people who can express themselves clearly and can communicate well, people who don't get offended when someone disagrees with them, people just cocky enough to take some risks but who aren't arrogant - they have individual humility while still being very bullish on what they can do to help the team.
If a candidate doesn't have these qualities, then I genuinely don't care if they are the greatest developer in the history of the world - without the right personality type, they are just too much of a hassle and I pass on them and let them be some other company's problem.
Do asteroids really have a defined legal status? I mean, clearly the US owns the moon (what with its flag being there and all), but I didn't know that ownership of the asteroids had been sorted out yet.
This is exactly right. Others have noted that this agent thing is similar to realtors and there's good evidence to suggest that realtors don't really have much incentive to find the highest bidder for your home (see e.g. http://curbed.com/archives/201...) but have more incentive to get rid of your home quickly.
Nah, I think the goal can be a bit broader than just that.
The larger goal is getting people and cargo to and from space cheaply, reliably, and downright commonplace. Getting the private sector involved is almost certainly a key to making that happen.
In the short term it might have a lot to do with low-orbit tourism and profits and losses, but that's ok. That's part of what it takes to get the money spent, that's part of what will lead to making it economically feasible, it's what will (hopefully) lead to greater interest by the public, and a lot of the technology and discoveries that make it all work well will move things forward towards the big picture goal.
Taking the reference to the Empire State Building: you can look at the construction of that building purely in terms of the economics and the time period or whatever. But regardless of whatever motives caused it to be built, it pushed the envelope of large scale construction and now, nearly a century later, a new building of that size is hardly noteworthy because now there are structures over twice as tall. Similarly, I hope companies like Virgin Galactic do the same thing for the space travel industry, regardless of what their publicly stated goals are.
Also, I'm betting that many (most?) of the people involved aren't putting their lives on the line just because of a paycheck, but because they really want to advance the space travel industry.
This whole field is interesting to me and so I'm glad to see research being done. That said, for me the place where I most want driverless cars is on the open highway. The problem with driving on the open highway is that it's just complex enough to require some of your attention, but not interesting enough to keep you mentally engaged, so it's really easy to get bored or sleepy or just plain distracted. In other words, it's a perfect candidate for automation.
In an urban environment I have no problem staying focused/because of/ all the chaos these researchers are dealing with. It seems like all of the times I've come close to a serious auto accident have been on freeway / high speed roads and have let myself lose focus. In urban environments I've rarely come close to a major accident both because I'm so much more focused on driving and because the speeds are significantly lower.
Long term I hope we get to driverless cars in all environments, but I hope that sometime sooner we can get driverless cars on the freeway that switch over to human control as you approach the off-ramp or enter a more urban area.
Maybe, but I read it it slightly differently. 'Disproportionate' means 'too large or too small in comparison with something else'.
So I took it to mean that someone who got two percentage points higher on their test ended up being promoted at a much higher rate than would generally be expected for that small of a difference in scores.
As a made up example, if you scored two percentage points higher on your final than me, and all else equal, as a result over the course of your career that single test caused you to get promoted at a rate that was double the rate at which I got promoted, then one could realistically say that the rate of promotion is disproportionately higher than expected because in many cases a two percentage point difference would not be statistically significant while a doubling would be. The two are so different that it doesn't seem unreasonable to call them disproportionate. To be clear, those aren't the numbers from the article, but the article was just suggesting that there was that type of mismatch - small test score difference leading to a large, long term difference.
And that long term effect is key because it magnifies the issue: a very small difference in a score on one test you take early in your career has large ramifications for potentially decades? That creates a large incentive to cheat. And that's just it - I'm not arguing what's fair or unfair or what's right or wrong in this scenario, just saying that it sounds like there were some pretty big incentives to cheat.
L3's blog still has a summary blurb, but the link to the actual post gets a 404 - did they take it down or did they just link it wrong? Anybody have a cached copy?
No thanks. The watch is just another device on the long list of separate things that got consolidated into my phone (mp3 player, camera, calendar, ebook reader, flashlight, GPS, alarm clock, etc.). As with all those other things, the version on my phone is so far into the "good enough" range that having a separate device for the same functionality just doesn't offer much appeal.
Too many of the smart watches seem to try to move functionality back off the phone, which seems pretty pointless (until at such time as it could completely replace everything on my phone, which case I might be interested. You know, some sort of holographic magic screen that replaces the need for a large physical screen, or maybe interfaces with some futuristic contact lenses that project a HUD that only I can see).
Anyway, that seems to be the core problem - these watches just don't do anything worthwhile compared to what I'll already be carrying with me. I don't want a watch as a status symbol, I don't need a watch to just tell time, and I don't need/want a watch to do a bunch of stuff my phone already does.
An exception would be for highly niche purposes. I have a kid with type I diabetes. If he could have a watch that could monitor is blood sugar levels and dispense insulin, I'd buy it.
Native code, for example, refers to code in its binary (processor-specific) form. No processor that I'm aware of knows how to run C code natively - it has to first be taken from its portable format and translated into native (assembly and then machine) code. It's not a matter of when or how that translation happens; processors simply don't speak C.
You still don't get it.
Actually I/do/ get it. I'm really quite familiar with how Python works, as well as how C, assembly, and machine language work. I'm not debating one is the other, nor that VM vs not is better than the other. What I *am* saying, however, is that the thing you're talking about is not the same thing as a processor supporting such and such a language natively. "Natively" means something specific, and what you're talking about isn't it.
I'm not saying that Python does or doesn't require a runtime, a virtual machine, etc. (even though there are some versions that don't). What I/am/ saying is that I don't know of any processor that runs C natively. Make up a different term for the concept you're talking about, because "natively" already has a meaning in this context, and how C works is definitely not native.
Claiming that hardware can run C natively is quite a reach. Your definition of what it means to run a language natively is so broad that it encompasses a large number of programming languages (if not all of them).
It's not about the number of passes of the compiler or if a language is supposed to be portable or not, but about the "virtual machine" abstraction a language is assuming, and how far is that from what typical hardware has to offer.
So, by your definition, most modern machines run Pascal natively? All I'm pointing out is that this is a pretty atypical use of the term "natively". Native code, for example, refers to code in its binary (processor-specific) form. No processor that I'm aware of knows how to run C code natively - it has to first be taken from its portable format and translated into native (assembly and then machine) code. It's not a matter of when or how that translation happens; processors simply don't speak C.
The abstraction of a virtual machine is definitely interesting, it just has nothing to do with whether or not processors can run C natively.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree that this is about hatred; in fact, I think you have to be calling many people blatant liars to make it about hatred. Granted, on either side there are likely some who are driven by hatred, but that's always going to be the case. It seems that many (and probably the vast majority) of people on both sides are pretty normal people who genuinely feel the way they say they do. Trying to vilify people on one side or the other doesn't help and is disingenuous.
Personally I can see merit in both sides and I bet if you give each argument and fair chance you would too. And that's why the issue is such a difficult one. It's only through setting up absurd strawman arguments that you can really dismiss the whole debate.
On the one side, it looks like we're dealing with discrimination all over again. As with racial discrimination, it seems wrong to avoid doing business with people just because of their sexual orientation. Separate but equal never worked and simply wasn't right.
On the other side, it seems like you have the government forcing people not just to tolerate - but to actively celebrate - something that is deeply abhorrent to them. They would otherwise be inclined to let people live their own lives how they want but when forced to be involved they honestly feel wrong, deeply wrong, about being forced to tacitly condone things like same sex marriage.
Both sides sincerely feel like the other side is taking away their rights and feel the others' suggested way to deal with it is unfair. Hatred isn't necessarily a part of the equation at all.
Hooray, maybe now we'll finally get to see Spiderman's backstory - like how he came to be and how Uncle Ben died - instead of always seeing him later on in his super hero career when he has moved past teenage angst and settled into his role.
Funny you should mention Blender, as that's exactly the app I had in mind when I said I used the middle button/wheel all the time without any problems. :)
FWIW I use some Logitech mouse and this discussion made me notice that the wheel has a ton of subtle, discrete "stops" or positions rather than being a completely fluid or smooth spin. That might be why the middle button doesn't tend to register accidental scroll events.
Can you share details on what the problems are with the clickable middle wheel? You mentioned it's "inadequate", but what makes it so? Just wondering because I use the middle-button/wheel all the time and it seems to work as well as the other buttons - no discomfort, no extra thought, etc.
Ooh, I love this game. My turn! (BTW you didn't give me a starting point so I'll just go with your /. handle, but on future turns please give me a subject to start with)
Ok. 'greenwow'... let's see. Well, 'green' is like the Jolly Green Giant, who is big, as was Andre the Giant. He was French. The French sold us a lot of land in the Louisiana Purchase. Louisiana has a really high rate of obesity. Why do you support pediatric heart disease, you monster???
Your turn. Subject is 'turnips'.
Stuff like this makes me want to be their customer all the more. They promised they'd do something and are following through, and that something targets some of the big concerns about owning a battery-powered car. And no surprise that at first it's going to be less than ideal; the fact that they're moving forward is great and over time the technology and the processes will of course improve.
Instead of trying to make this be regulated and overtly forcing people to get vaccinated, it could be much more effective to try to address this via social pressure.
Somehow in some places getting vaccinated has fallen out of favor - or at least not vaccinating is no longer seen as being a really bad idea. A coordinated campaign to change public opinion could do the trick, a combination of celebrity endorsements, news reports on how lack of vaccination is hurting the children, social media campaigns that get people to brag that their kids are vaccinated, etc.
If you make it cool/positive to be vaccinated and backwards/dumb to not be vaccinated, the majority of this problem will go away. You'll always have the exceptions, sure, but I'd bet that with them you'd still be well above the herd immunity threshold, so who cares.
We try to solve too many problems via regulation, and having the government force stuff on people comes with its own set of downsides, not the least of which is that people naturally resist anything you try to force them to do.
Good points. Yeah, I don't know if we've just been really lucky or what, but I haven't seen the tech worker shortage (despite all of the yelling about it).
Thanks for the discussion!
Please read my other posts - not only did I not complain about a shortage, I went so far as to say that I don't really think there is a shortage.
Regardless, I think you're missing my point: my position is that some people, no matter how good their skills are, are a *net negative*, because tech skills are only a part of the equation (an equation that includes things like interpersonal skills), and that people/teams/companies that don't properly weigh that part of the equation end up paying the price for a long time to come and end being worse off than had they not hired that person. So, no, it's not a good idea to hire people just on the basis of technical qualifications.
Put another way, if someone is applying for a dev job at my company and they have really poor interpersonal skills, I'd argue they aren't qualified for the job. They're at best partially qualified, so we don't hire them.
And it's not the "easy route", not by a long shot. It's actually harder, especially up front, but you do it because you know it's better in the long run.
But is it putting an emphasis on people who are easy to manage? Absolutely. Anything else is insanity. I run a business, not some volunteer organization where you work with whatever you've got.
This post is excellent. You captured what I was trying to say and expressed it much better than I did, thank you!
I turn away people who are qualified (in terms of technical skill) but don't pass the personality test *all the time*.
In the past month alone I've passed on 2 candidates who were very technically competent, but one could barely carry on a conversation and the other was obnoxiously arrogant and smug.
OTOH in the past 4-5 months I've hired about a dozen developers who have a variety of skill levels but are just great to be around and to work with - they have a good work-life balance, they aren't easily offended, they're personable and team-oriented.
It's not at all about finding a "perfect" fit but is about weighing all factors that matter, and things like communicating, being personable, and other social skills are *crucial* to success. Of course it doesn't mean you hire people that are fun to be around but are lousy developers, but it also doesn't mean that you jeopardize the team and/or the business by bringing on someone you have to constantly "deal with" in some way or another. Everyone has their quirks and off days, I'm not talking about that, but people that have to be coddled or who are hyper-sensitive or contentious or can't articulate thoughts or have a normal discussion - it's nearly impossible for really good technical skill to outweigh those kinds of drawbacks.
And for the record, while I agree that there are oodles of crummy candidates out there, I'm also skeptical there is some sort of widespread shortage - we don't seem to have trouble finding candidates that range from "very good" to "superstar" and everything in between.
Oh, it's not on a whim at all. It's the realization that the degree to which a person can work well with, communicate with, interact with, etc. (basically, "fit in with") others is massively important, so much so that if a person is too lacking in those areas then it's better for your team and for your business to not hire them, no matter how good they look on paper.
*sigh* I wasn't. Read the article, then the parent subject line. I was saying that the more general issue is finding people who can be the right fit for a team, regardless of their skill level.
So that disqualifies various sets of people - those who are so extremely introverted that they can't interact with the rest of the team very well, those who are poor communicators, those who are prima donnas, and those who have poor reading comprehension.
Nah, you can be /somewhat/ introverted and still do well. But the fact of the matter is that social skills *are* crucial. It's not discriminatory, it's business, and a person who can't communicate well, who can't interact well, is a net negative, no matter how awesome a coder they are. It's not fair to the business and it's not fair to the rest of the team to have to "deal" with the guy or gal who just can't mesh with the team.
I've wasted so much time dealing with prima donnas and socially inept "geniuses" that I don't hire either these days. The very first interview is always a personality interview, and if I struggle seeing the person fitting in with the rest of the team, I don't even bother moving on to a technical/skills phase of the interview.
That doesn't mean we don't hire people that just geek out on tech, but they are people who are passionate but also kind of laid back, people with a good sense of humor, people who can express themselves clearly and can communicate well, people who don't get offended when someone disagrees with them, people just cocky enough to take some risks but who aren't arrogant - they have individual humility while still being very bullish on what they can do to help the team.
If a candidate doesn't have these qualities, then I genuinely don't care if they are the greatest developer in the history of the world - without the right personality type, they are just too much of a hassle and I pass on them and let them be some other company's problem.
Actually it was just meant as a joke, but thanks for the link and info anyway! :)
Do asteroids really have a defined legal status? I mean, clearly the US owns the moon (what with its flag being there and all), but I didn't know that ownership of the asteroids had been sorted out yet.
This is exactly right. Others have noted that this agent thing is similar to realtors and there's good evidence to suggest that realtors don't really have much incentive to find the highest bidder for your home (see e.g. http://curbed.com/archives/201...) but have more incentive to get rid of your home quickly.
Nah, I think the goal can be a bit broader than just that.
The larger goal is getting people and cargo to and from space cheaply, reliably, and downright commonplace. Getting the private sector involved is almost certainly a key to making that happen.
In the short term it might have a lot to do with low-orbit tourism and profits and losses, but that's ok. That's part of what it takes to get the money spent, that's part of what will lead to making it economically feasible, it's what will (hopefully) lead to greater interest by the public, and a lot of the technology and discoveries that make it all work well will move things forward towards the big picture goal.
Taking the reference to the Empire State Building: you can look at the construction of that building purely in terms of the economics and the time period or whatever. But regardless of whatever motives caused it to be built, it pushed the envelope of large scale construction and now, nearly a century later, a new building of that size is hardly noteworthy because now there are structures over twice as tall. Similarly, I hope companies like Virgin Galactic do the same thing for the space travel industry, regardless of what their publicly stated goals are.
Also, I'm betting that many (most?) of the people involved aren't putting their lives on the line just because of a paycheck, but because they really want to advance the space travel industry.
This whole field is interesting to me and so I'm glad to see research being done. That said, for me the place where I most want driverless cars is on the open highway. The problem with driving on the open highway is that it's just complex enough to require some of your attention, but not interesting enough to keep you mentally engaged, so it's really easy to get bored or sleepy or just plain distracted. In other words, it's a perfect candidate for automation.
In an urban environment I have no problem staying focused /because of/ all the chaos these researchers are dealing with. It seems like all of the times I've come close to a serious auto accident have been on freeway / high speed roads and have let myself lose focus. In urban environments I've rarely come close to a major accident both because I'm so much more focused on driving and because the speeds are significantly lower.
Long term I hope we get to driverless cars in all environments, but I hope that sometime sooner we can get driverless cars on the freeway that switch over to human control as you approach the off-ramp or enter a more urban area.
Weird - works on my Note 2. Playback stutters some so far but not too bad.
Maybe, but I read it it slightly differently. 'Disproportionate' means 'too large or too small in comparison with something else'.
So I took it to mean that someone who got two percentage points higher on their test ended up being promoted at a much higher rate than would generally be expected for that small of a difference in scores.
As a made up example, if you scored two percentage points higher on your final than me, and all else equal, as a result over the course of your career that single test caused you to get promoted at a rate that was double the rate at which I got promoted, then one could realistically say that the rate of promotion is disproportionately higher than expected because in many cases a two percentage point difference would not be statistically significant while a doubling would be. The two are so different that it doesn't seem unreasonable to call them disproportionate. To be clear, those aren't the numbers from the article, but the article was just suggesting that there was that type of mismatch - small test score difference leading to a large, long term difference.
And that long term effect is key because it magnifies the issue: a very small difference in a score on one test you take early in your career has large ramifications for potentially decades? That creates a large incentive to cheat. And that's just it - I'm not arguing what's fair or unfair or what's right or wrong in this scenario, just saying that it sounds like there were some pretty big incentives to cheat.
L3's blog still has a summary blurb, but the link to the actual post gets a 404 - did they take it down or did they just link it wrong? Anybody have a cached copy?
No thanks. The watch is just another device on the long list of separate things that got consolidated into my phone (mp3 player, camera, calendar, ebook reader, flashlight, GPS, alarm clock, etc.). As with all those other things, the version on my phone is so far into the "good enough" range that having a separate device for the same functionality just doesn't offer much appeal.
Too many of the smart watches seem to try to move functionality back off the phone, which seems pretty pointless (until at such time as it could completely replace everything on my phone, which case I might be interested. You know, some sort of holographic magic screen that replaces the need for a large physical screen, or maybe interfaces with some futuristic contact lenses that project a HUD that only I can see).
Anyway, that seems to be the core problem - these watches just don't do anything worthwhile compared to what I'll already be carrying with me. I don't want a watch as a status symbol, I don't need a watch to just tell time, and I don't need/want a watch to do a bunch of stuff my phone already does.
An exception would be for highly niche purposes. I have a kid with type I diabetes. If he could have a watch that could monitor is blood sugar levels and dispense insulin, I'd buy it.
You still don't get it.
Actually I /do/ get it. I'm really quite familiar with how Python works, as well as how C, assembly, and machine language work. I'm not debating one is the other, nor that VM vs not is better than the other. What I *am* saying, however, is that the thing you're talking about is not the same thing as a processor supporting such and such a language natively. "Natively" means something specific, and what you're talking about isn't it.
I'm not saying that Python does or doesn't require a runtime, a virtual machine, etc. (even though there are some versions that don't). What I /am/ saying is that I don't know of any processor that runs C natively. Make up a different term for the concept you're talking about, because "natively" already has a meaning in this context, and how C works is definitely not native.
It's not about the number of passes of the compiler or if a language is supposed to be portable or not, but about the "virtual machine" abstraction a language is assuming, and how far is that from what typical hardware has to offer.
So, by your definition, most modern machines run Pascal natively? All I'm pointing out is that this is a pretty atypical use of the term "natively". Native code, for example, refers to code in its binary (processor-specific) form. No processor that I'm aware of knows how to run C code natively - it has to first be taken from its portable format and translated into native (assembly and then machine) code. It's not a matter of when or how that translation happens; processors simply don't speak C.
The abstraction of a virtual machine is definitely interesting, it just has nothing to do with whether or not processors can run C natively.