And thinking about it, I now understand the bias in my own thought process. I think of the process of computation as, evaluate the statement and assign to a temporary, increment i, perform the assignment from the temporary. But someone else might look at that and read it as, evaluate the statement, perform the assignment, increment i, which would result in i == 1, not 0.
"Order of operations applies, the assignment will always take place after the increment."
Umm, what? The post-increment operator is defined as being performed after the statement is computed. See for yourself. Go run:
i = 0; j = i++;
Hey, look, j == 0! Switching j for i shouldn't change that behaviour, except that the standard contains an exception thanks to optimization complications.
Because the definition of the post-increment operator is that it be performed after the existing value of i is used in the statement. For the same reason that:
i = 0; j = i++;
Results in j == 0, I would naturally expect that:
i = 0; i = i++;
Would result in i == 0. The fact that this isn't the case is a weird exception to the standard, IMHO, and definitely qualifies as a piece of esoteric trivia.
So would you prefer a wrong answer over "I am not a C programmer"? I consider myself a fairly competent programmer, but my guess on the answer to that question was simply wrong. And why? Because, understanding how the post-increment operator works, I didn't realize there was an exception in the standard thanks to optimization details. So does that make it a good answer, because I applied existing knowledge to a new problem, or a bad answer because I assumed certain behaviour?
I'm sorry, but questions like that are simply ridiculous. In the end they're simply pointless bits of minutiae, trivia that tell you nothing about the real skill level of the employee. I'd much rather have a developer who understood proper software architecture, design, and test, over one who knows a few clever facts about C, and those traits *can* be tested for in a way that doesn't involve nifty little programming riddles and tricky gotchas.
Comparative religion, where else? Your school doesn't offer such a course? Well, then try to get the curriculum changed. Given the rise of the middle east and asia, we in the western world could do with more awareness of the various major religions and their roles in history.
Creationism is not a scientific theory. I repeat, creationism is *not a scientific theory*. Your attempt to draw a parallel between Lamarckism, a valid, falsifiable scientific theory, and creationism, is not just wrong, it's misleading. I just can't tell if you're being misleading out of ignorance or malice.
Not only does it work, but it works incredibly well. That funky beak-like thing is actually a sensory organ that lets it detect pray through their electrical field, much like similar abilities in other species, such as sharks. Pretty damn cool if you ask me, even if it looks a little goofy.
All the complaints come down to something like "I type 's', and I expect Slashdot to come up, not all URLs that contain an 's'". Personally, I love the awesomebar, but I see what they're getting at.
Why should it follow that an open design leads to no profit
Uhh, he didn't say that. Weird, you got modded insightful for it. I guess the mods fell for your strawman. What he said was "If openness coincides sufficiently well with developer self-interest, then openness may win out as well." Given MS's success in software, which is far *far* from open, I'd say he's absolutely right.
But breaking into a computer system - well I don't do any kind of hacking (I know zilch about security), but I can at least imagine the challenge to be rewarding in a geeky way.
What the hell difference does it make? It's still wrong, whether or not it's fun. I'm sure figuring out how to foil home or car security systems is "fun" (and if you read carefully, you'll note the metaphor I used never implied theft... you keep injecting that thanks to your own personal bias), but we as a society don't find that terribly acceptable, either.
Heck, there are people who, as a hobby, enjoy learning how to pick locks. But I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that they don't start tampering with their neighbour's doors just to see if they can. Moreover, I doubt the cops would be terribly interested in a justification based on boredom or curiosity.
Except that the administration has shot itself in the foot. Since the credit crunch began the administration has encouraged $20 billion of investment, much of it foreign, to prop up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. However, since the two companies were nationalized last week the investors have lost all their money.
Yes, stockholders of F&F definitely got hurt in the transaction. But the MBS holders have *far* more money at stake. Compared to that money, $20 billion is chump change.
Basically, there was no perfect solution. But nationalizing F&F was the best of a set of bad and worse options.
I'm sorry, when did I say I was planning to steal those cars? Like you said, I was just bored and wanted to break the system! That makes it okay, right?
And that he was bored, and wanted the challenge, and it grew from something very small, and grew into determination to break the system (not for any malicious intent but just for the challenge sake, and to help them in the end)?
Yeah, me too! I got bored and so I decided to try and break the security systems of all the cars in my neighbourhood. Strangely enough, the cops wouldn't listen when I tried to explain that I was just trying to help the owners out...
For the same reason the investors need to be protected. Let every delinquent mortgage go under and the drag on the economy will be enormous. Now, that's not to say the homeowners should have their mortgages paid for them or anything. But wherever possible, the banks need to work with homeowners to modify loans in any way they can to ensure that the can continue to make the payments.
Of course, there will always be a percentage of mortgages that are unsalvagable (the percentage of mortgages that are currently under water is frankly staggering), but where possible, the homeowners need to be supported in their efforts to stay afloat.
That's a lovely diatribe (and ironically, I happen to agree, corporatism is no better than totalitarianism in my humble opinion), but I noticed you didn't disprove anything I said.
To be clear, I don't think the US government should make a habit of catering to corporations or bailing out failing businesses. But damnit, sometimes, you gotta compromise your ideals... otherwise you're just cutting off your nose to spite your face. And right now, the only logical thing to do, like it or not, is to protect those investors.
And no, there is no "fixing" this mess save for a fundamental overhaul of the entire delusion of "global free market"
Umm... huh? Fixing the problem is simple. Either eliminate the secondary mortgage market entirely, or institute regulation to prevent bad mortgages from being issued in the first place. And it'd also be worth scrutinizing those firms who's jobs are to rate investment vehicles.
The fact is, the "global free market" has nothing to do with it, although it does make a fun scapegoat, as your post illustrates. The US government is fundamentally responsible for the shitstorm that's sweeping the nation thanks to the hands-off approach they took to market management, and it's the US government that must be responsible for fixing it.
Why, pray tell, should your sexual habits remain private from your spouse?? As a married man, that just seems really odd to me. I mean, I typically choke the chicken on my own time, but I don't hide the fact that I do it from my wife, or that porn is part of the equation.
The bigger concern is having to hide them from your neighbour as they're looking over your shoulder while you're typing in an address in the awesomebar and it decides to start completing for you...
Now my taxes are going to bail out all those who lent money and/or took out adjustable loan rates?
Yup, and it sucks, doesn't it? But it sucks a lot less than a depression.
Again, I'm not saying that the processes by which the US economy reached this point was excusable. It wasn't. But at this point, the best the government can do is to shore up the dam and try to ensure the current recession doesn't spiral out of control. And the F&F purchase is part of that equation, as is a policy that will help homeowners continue to service their debts.
How does allowing bad management, and then not letting the market punish this sort of behavior, keep others from recklessly fucking up even more of the economy because, hey, their company is also too big to fail?
It doesn't. Learning from the mistakes of the past and instituting regulation and market reform to prevent this from happening again does, though. Which should really be the end-game. Do what you can, now, to keep the market from imploding, then institute market reforms.
As for the rest, I completely agree. The US government seriously dropped the ball when they took a hands-off approach to the financial industry. But the bailout of F&F is not a continuation of those same failed policies. It's an attempt to stave off further damage caused by those terrible, terrible mistakes, so that the US will continue to have a functioning economy that the government can begin to regulate appropriately.
Note that bailing out the loan shark does nothing whatsoever for the economy as the home-"owners" will still go under in massive numbers and thus their purchasing power will be reduced to near zero
How wrong you are. If you don't backstop the investors, all that delicious foreign capital the US has become addicted to would evaporate overnight as they went running for the hills. And given the US economy has been running on credit for, what, 20 or 30 years? means that the US economy would basically grind to a halt if that happened.
Incidentally, I agree, they absolutely need to provide some sort of relief to homeowners (hence rumours that the fed might ask F&F to halt foreclosures for 90 days... although that's just putting a finger in the dam), but there's no way they can afford to prop up every failing mortgage that's out there.
And to answer your question, it's because your government values said corporations more than it values you or your tax dollars.
Actually, in the case of Freddie and Fannie, it's because the government values you not having to live through an economic recession to rival the great depression.
*But*, the government absolutely fucked up by letting F&F get so big... having such a large single point of failure in the economy was absolutely ridiculous. But trust me, the way things are now, you'd rather the government stepped in to save F&F... the consequences to the alternative would've been devastating.
Bribes? But in the US, money == speech! Sure, that means they get to talk a lot louder than you or I, but that's the price you pay when you subscribe to such an astoundingly ridiculous notion.
Explain to me how 2 years of ineffective government is a good thing.
It's a great thing! Anything that passes must, by definition, involve compromise, which means it'll be more representative of everyone's interests (the way it stands, at least one other party must agree to a piece of legislation in order for it to pass). Meanwhile, a hamstrung government is one that can't fuck things up as badly. Case in point, twice this DMCA-like copyright legislation has hit the house, and twice now nothing has happened with it.
Meanwhile, your view of things seems to largely contradict everything I've read. Last I heard, recently it's been the conservatives that have been gunning for an election, while the Liberals have been trying to delay because they realize they're in a weak position, politically.
Slashdot Mirror
And thinking about it, I now understand the bias in my own thought process. I think of the process of computation as, evaluate the statement and assign to a temporary, increment i, perform the assignment from the temporary. But someone else might look at that and read it as, evaluate the statement, perform the assignment, increment i, which would result in i == 1, not 0.
Interesting... :)
"Order of operations applies, the assignment will always take place after the increment."
Umm, what? The post-increment operator is defined as being performed after the statement is computed. See for yourself. Go run:
i = 0;
j = i++;
Hey, look, j == 0! Switching j for i shouldn't change that behaviour, except that the standard contains an exception thanks to optimization complications.
Because the definition of the post-increment operator is that it be performed after the existing value of i is used in the statement. For the same reason that:
i = 0;
j = i++;
Results in j == 0, I would naturally expect that:
i = 0;
i = i++;
Would result in i == 0. The fact that this isn't the case is a weird exception to the standard, IMHO, and definitely qualifies as a piece of esoteric trivia.
So would you prefer a wrong answer over "I am not a C programmer"? I consider myself a fairly competent programmer, but my guess on the answer to that question was simply wrong. And why? Because, understanding how the post-increment operator works, I didn't realize there was an exception in the standard thanks to optimization details. So does that make it a good answer, because I applied existing knowledge to a new problem, or a bad answer because I assumed certain behaviour?
I'm sorry, but questions like that are simply ridiculous. In the end they're simply pointless bits of minutiae, trivia that tell you nothing about the real skill level of the employee. I'd much rather have a developer who understood proper software architecture, design, and test, over one who knows a few clever facts about C, and those traits *can* be tested for in a way that doesn't involve nifty little programming riddles and tricky gotchas.
Comparative religion, where else? Your school doesn't offer such a course? Well, then try to get the curriculum changed. Given the rise of the middle east and asia, we in the western world could do with more awareness of the various major religions and their roles in history.
Creationism is not a scientific theory. I repeat, creationism is *not a scientific theory*. Your attempt to draw a parallel between Lamarckism, a valid, falsifiable scientific theory, and creationism, is not just wrong, it's misleading. I just can't tell if you're being misleading out of ignorance or malice.
Not only does it work, but it works incredibly well. That funky beak-like thing is actually a sensory organ that lets it detect pray through their electrical field, much like similar abilities in other species, such as sharks. Pretty damn cool if you ask me, even if it looks a little goofy.
It's different. *shrug*
All the complaints come down to something like "I type 's', and I expect Slashdot to come up, not all URLs that contain an 's'". Personally, I love the awesomebar, but I see what they're getting at.
Why should it follow that an open design leads to no profit
Uhh, he didn't say that. Weird, you got modded insightful for it. I guess the mods fell for your strawman. What he said was "If openness coincides sufficiently well with developer self-interest, then openness may win out as well." Given MS's success in software, which is far *far* from open, I'd say he's absolutely right.
But breaking into a computer system - well I don't do any kind of hacking (I know zilch about security), but I can at least imagine the challenge to be rewarding in a geeky way.
What the hell difference does it make? It's still wrong, whether or not it's fun. I'm sure figuring out how to foil home or car security systems is "fun" (and if you read carefully, you'll note the metaphor I used never implied theft... you keep injecting that thanks to your own personal bias), but we as a society don't find that terribly acceptable, either.
Heck, there are people who, as a hobby, enjoy learning how to pick locks. But I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that they don't start tampering with their neighbour's doors just to see if they can. Moreover, I doubt the cops would be terribly interested in a justification based on boredom or curiosity.
Except that the administration has shot itself in the foot. Since the credit crunch began the administration has encouraged $20 billion of investment, much of it foreign, to prop up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. However, since the two companies were nationalized last week the investors have lost all their money.
Yes, stockholders of F&F definitely got hurt in the transaction. But the MBS holders have *far* more money at stake. Compared to that money, $20 billion is chump change.
Basically, there was no perfect solution. But nationalizing F&F was the best of a set of bad and worse options.
I'm sorry, when did I say I was planning to steal those cars? Like you said, I was just bored and wanted to break the system! That makes it okay, right?
And that he was bored, and wanted the challenge, and it grew from something very small, and grew into determination to break the system (not for any malicious intent but just for the challenge sake, and to help them in the end)?
Yeah, me too! I got bored and so I decided to try and break the security systems of all the cars in my neighbourhood. Strangely enough, the cops wouldn't listen when I tried to explain that I was just trying to help the owners out...
For the same reason the investors need to be protected. Let every delinquent mortgage go under and the drag on the economy will be enormous. Now, that's not to say the homeowners should have their mortgages paid for them or anything. But wherever possible, the banks need to work with homeowners to modify loans in any way they can to ensure that the can continue to make the payments.
Of course, there will always be a percentage of mortgages that are unsalvagable (the percentage of mortgages that are currently under water is frankly staggering), but where possible, the homeowners need to be supported in their efforts to stay afloat.
That's a lovely diatribe (and ironically, I happen to agree, corporatism is no better than totalitarianism in my humble opinion), but I noticed you didn't disprove anything I said.
To be clear, I don't think the US government should make a habit of catering to corporations or bailing out failing businesses. But damnit, sometimes, you gotta compromise your ideals... otherwise you're just cutting off your nose to spite your face. And right now, the only logical thing to do, like it or not, is to protect those investors.
And no, there is no "fixing" this mess save for a fundamental overhaul of the entire delusion of "global free market"
Umm... huh? Fixing the problem is simple. Either eliminate the secondary mortgage market entirely, or institute regulation to prevent bad mortgages from being issued in the first place. And it'd also be worth scrutinizing those firms who's jobs are to rate investment vehicles.
The fact is, the "global free market" has nothing to do with it, although it does make a fun scapegoat, as your post illustrates. The US government is fundamentally responsible for the shitstorm that's sweeping the nation thanks to the hands-off approach they took to market management, and it's the US government that must be responsible for fixing it.
Why, pray tell, should your sexual habits remain private from your spouse?? As a married man, that just seems really odd to me. I mean, I typically choke the chicken on my own time, but I don't hide the fact that I do it from my wife, or that porn is part of the equation.
The bigger concern is having to hide them from your neighbour as they're looking over your shoulder while you're typing in an address in the awesomebar and it decides to start completing for you...
Now my taxes are going to bail out all those who lent money and/or took out adjustable loan rates?
Yup, and it sucks, doesn't it? But it sucks a lot less than a depression.
Again, I'm not saying that the processes by which the US economy reached this point was excusable. It wasn't. But at this point, the best the government can do is to shore up the dam and try to ensure the current recession doesn't spiral out of control. And the F&F purchase is part of that equation, as is a policy that will help homeowners continue to service their debts.
How does allowing bad management, and then not letting the market punish this sort of behavior, keep others from recklessly fucking up even more of the economy because, hey, their company is also too big to fail?
It doesn't. Learning from the mistakes of the past and instituting regulation and market reform to prevent this from happening again does, though. Which should really be the end-game. Do what you can, now, to keep the market from imploding, then institute market reforms.
As for the rest, I completely agree. The US government seriously dropped the ball when they took a hands-off approach to the financial industry. But the bailout of F&F is not a continuation of those same failed policies. It's an attempt to stave off further damage caused by those terrible, terrible mistakes, so that the US will continue to have a functioning economy that the government can begin to regulate appropriately.
The current system isn't one that can be maintained for ever. Propping it up isn't going to change that.
No, but it'll give time to fix it. The alternative is an economic collapse. Which do you think is the better scenario?
Note that bailing out the loan shark does nothing whatsoever for the economy as the home-"owners" will still go under in massive numbers and thus their purchasing power will be reduced to near zero
How wrong you are. If you don't backstop the investors, all that delicious foreign capital the US has become addicted to would evaporate overnight as they went running for the hills. And given the US economy has been running on credit for, what, 20 or 30 years? means that the US economy would basically grind to a halt if that happened.
Incidentally, I agree, they absolutely need to provide some sort of relief to homeowners (hence rumours that the fed might ask F&F to halt foreclosures for 90 days... although that's just putting a finger in the dam), but there's no way they can afford to prop up every failing mortgage that's out there.
This isn't capitalism this is corporate welfare. Which is basically a form of command economy called socialism.
No, it's called fascism. Honestly, the least you could do is get your political systems right.
And believe it or not, most of the western world operates under some form of socialism... and they seem to be doing a lot better. Interesting, that...
And to answer your question, it's because your government values said corporations more than it values you or your tax dollars.
Actually, in the case of Freddie and Fannie, it's because the government values you not having to live through an economic recession to rival the great depression.
*But*, the government absolutely fucked up by letting F&F get so big... having such a large single point of failure in the economy was absolutely ridiculous. But trust me, the way things are now, you'd rather the government stepped in to save F&F... the consequences to the alternative would've been devastating.
Bribes? But in the US, money == speech! Sure, that means they get to talk a lot louder than you or I, but that's the price you pay when you subscribe to such an astoundingly ridiculous notion.
Explain to me how 2 years of ineffective government is a good thing.
It's a great thing! Anything that passes must, by definition, involve compromise, which means it'll be more representative of everyone's interests (the way it stands, at least one other party must agree to a piece of legislation in order for it to pass). Meanwhile, a hamstrung government is one that can't fuck things up as badly. Case in point, twice this DMCA-like copyright legislation has hit the house, and twice now nothing has happened with it.
Meanwhile, your view of things seems to largely contradict everything I've read. Last I heard, recently it's been the conservatives that have been gunning for an election, while the Liberals have been trying to delay because they realize they're in a weak position, politically.