But without regulations, corporations can be just as oppressive and destructive - driving smaller competitors out of business with underhanded tactics or using exclusive deals to prevent entry into the market, suppressing any activity that harms their profits, manipulating academia with selective funding or threats of legal action to distort science in their favor, damaging the environment and silencing anyone who speaks out with frivolous lawsuits that cost millions to defend against.
It isn't a simple matter of 'government is evil, and should be as small as possible.' It's about recognizing that sometimes the only thing that can keep a dangerously powerful organization is check is another dangerously powerful organization. The problems really come from trying to keep one from seizing control of the other.
Some of us like unsafe languages. They let you carry out ridiculous abuses for performance reasons. Like treating pixels in a bitmap as an array 64-bit ints so you can carry out boolean operations quickly, or as an array of chars for arithmatic operations - whichever works best at the time. This sort of low-level, unsafe stuff is why C and similar languages remain the fastest around.
I've used both - arduino for a password manager and a humidity-operated fan, and PIC for an electronic die and a coin crusher. A lot of things people use arduinos for, PICs can do cheaper and smaller - if you put in the coding time.
The coin crusher as fun. If you think EMI-proofing is difficult, try making a microcontroller unit that sits next to a 200-kiloamp spark gap. The reset timer is your friend.
If you are three levels of brackets deep before your important code even starts, you're doing it wrong.
I think my personal record is 27 layers of curve-and-angle brackets in, while doing some intricate bitmap manipulation - but that's largely because I like to make sure all my arithmatic is unambiguous even for those who can't follow the order of operations. I often end up with something like total+=bitmap[(x+offx+(width*(y+yoff)))*3]+bitmap[((x+offx+(width*(y+yoff)))*3)+1]+bitmap[((x+offx+(width*(y+yoff)))*3)+2]. It's pretty ugly.
It's human nature to crave certain things which were vital to our primitive ancestors. High-energy scarcities like fat and sugar were of vital importance when you could never be sure of catching a daily meal, especially when winter came and the plant supplies dried up. When you put someone evolved as a hunter-gatherer into a supermarket, the old instincts are just inappropriate.
People tend to seek advice they wish to hear. That's why every Christmas you'll start to see a few stories in the media along the lines of 'Scientists show chocolate is good for you.' The science hasn't changed - just that some writer has been assigned to write the standard seasonal piece reassuring readers that it's allowable to pig out for a month, and gone on a quest for some paper they can misreport.
The sugar lobby is a powerful force in US politics - fructose is produced from corn. The government is going to be very reluctant to upset the agricultural industry - not only are they a major source of campaign contributions, but some of the swing states have substantial agricultural industries employing a lot of people.
Recursion makes stack handling magically work - with looping the programmer has to keep track of the resulting mess, usually involving arrays of a size not known until after the algorithm completes. Complicated code invites bugs.
I've had trouble before with EMP - one of the few here who can honestly say it was a true EMP, not just RFI. The device producing the EMP was a four-kilovolt capacitor bank used for creatively imploding aluminium cans and launching metal objects at quite dangerous velocities. It can put out enough of a pulse to crash a camera - all the control circuits are especially hardened against it.
Inefficient hardware is sometimes justified by development time.
You can spend many days hand-coding an ideal program for a PIC in ASM. Or you can use an arduino, which takes more power, more space and more money, but can be programmed in a tenth the time by anyone who knows C without needing any esoteric knowledge of harvard architecture and tables of port numbers. If you're doing things a bit more complicated like image processing or networking, the same applies to arduino vs pi: The arduino may be able to do your task if you'll put in the days of programming, but with the pi you're dealing with a familiar linux environment and all the classic libraries are there.
Cool. The linear reg on the previous models worked perfectly, but was rather less than ideally efficient - 5V power in, but almost all the power consumed goes via the 3.3V rail.
One of my favorite cases was a brief panic at a financial hub when all email communication regarding canola prices and futures was blocked by the spam filter - canola is more often known as 'rapeseed oil' outside of the US and Canada. The name canola'was only introduced in the 1970s, because a number of Canadian executives found it too uncomfortable to describe themselves as 'in the rape industry.'
If I ever encounter child abuse images on the internet (I havn't yet), I am not going to report it. I don't want to get involved. I don't want to have the police come around and interrogate me, asking what I was doing in the vicinity of such sites. I don't want to see my career ended because I work in education, a field so paranoid that the slightest hint of suspicion disqualifies a person for life. I don't want the police to sieze all my computers as part of an investigation, as has happened to some people in the past. So I'd just close the site, wipe the browser history, and pretend I'd seen nothing.
I've spent a great deal of time around the shady side of the internet for reasons of piracy. I've seen a ton of porn both distributed and advertising. Were child pornography* at all common, I imagine I'd have encountered it by now.
*I really don't like that term, but I know well enough not to try to change the language.
Humans have gut bacteria. These bacteria are required for the gut to function properly. In some cases a person can lose theirs following a course of really powerful antibiotics - they'll kill whatever's causing their disease, but kill all the required bacteria in their gut too. This is a bad thing: Gut without bacteria doesn't work very well and, though it's not fatal, is going to leave the patient suffering a number of unpleasant conditions. The solution is very simple though. Just take someone with a healthy bacterial ecosystem in their gut, extract a handy lump of bacteria, insert it into the unhealthy patient. The ready-made bacterial colony then takes hold there and returns things to a healthy balance. It sounds disgusting and, well, it is. But it works.
They are a fair bit better with HTML5. The available offline and responsive issues can be solved easily enough if the web-dev gives some thought to those matters, though not all do so.
There are some pirates devoting their time to collect and index 'all the data.' It's like stamp collecting. It's just a hobby. You can find most things if you search hard enough.
Slashdot Mirror
But without regulations, corporations can be just as oppressive and destructive - driving smaller competitors out of business with underhanded tactics or using exclusive deals to prevent entry into the market, suppressing any activity that harms their profits, manipulating academia with selective funding or threats of legal action to distort science in their favor, damaging the environment and silencing anyone who speaks out with frivolous lawsuits that cost millions to defend against.
It isn't a simple matter of 'government is evil, and should be as small as possible.' It's about recognizing that sometimes the only thing that can keep a dangerously powerful organization is check is another dangerously powerful organization. The problems really come from trying to keep one from seizing control of the other.
No need. Libraries are already in decline.
The PICs, I mean. The arduinos were in good old C.
Library? I did those things in asm.
Some of us like unsafe languages. They let you carry out ridiculous abuses for performance reasons. Like treating pixels in a bitmap as an array 64-bit ints so you can carry out boolean operations quickly, or as an array of chars for arithmatic operations - whichever works best at the time. This sort of low-level, unsafe stuff is why C and similar languages remain the fastest around.
Arduinos are for those who cannot handle PICs.
I've used both - arduino for a password manager and a humidity-operated fan, and PIC for an electronic die and a coin crusher. A lot of things people use arduinos for, PICs can do cheaper and smaller - if you put in the coding time.
The coin crusher as fun. If you think EMI-proofing is difficult, try making a microcontroller unit that sits next to a 200-kiloamp spark gap. The reset timer is your friend.
If you are three levels of brackets deep before your important code even starts, you're doing it wrong.
I think my personal record is 27 layers of curve-and-angle brackets in, while doing some intricate bitmap manipulation - but that's largely because I like to make sure all my arithmatic is unambiguous even for those who can't follow the order of operations. I often end up with something like total+=bitmap[(x+offx+(width*(y+yoff)))*3]+bitmap[((x+offx+(width*(y+yoff)))*3)+1]+bitmap[((x+offx+(width*(y+yoff)))*3)+2]. It's pretty ugly.
int abs(int x) {
if (x >= 0) return x;
else return -x;
}
Still no gotos! And it's about as simple and readable as it can get.
It's human nature to crave certain things which were vital to our primitive ancestors. High-energy scarcities like fat and sugar were of vital importance when you could never be sure of catching a daily meal, especially when winter came and the plant supplies dried up. When you put someone evolved as a hunter-gatherer into a supermarket, the old instincts are just inappropriate.
People tend to seek advice they wish to hear. That's why every Christmas you'll start to see a few stories in the media along the lines of 'Scientists show chocolate is good for you.' The science hasn't changed - just that some writer has been assigned to write the standard seasonal piece reassuring readers that it's allowable to pig out for a month, and gone on a quest for some paper they can misreport.
The sugar lobby is a powerful force in US politics - fructose is produced from corn. The government is going to be very reluctant to upset the agricultural industry - not only are they a major source of campaign contributions, but some of the swing states have substantial agricultural industries employing a lot of people.
I don't think many people have. It wasn't a very widely-red publication.
Recursion makes stack handling magically work - with looping the programmer has to keep track of the resulting mess, usually involving arrays of a size not known until after the algorithm completes. Complicated code invites bugs.
Every time you search a filesystem, it's probably recursion underneath.
There's a reason filesystems have directory nesting limits.
I've had trouble before with EMP - one of the few here who can honestly say it was a true EMP, not just RFI. The device producing the EMP was a four-kilovolt capacitor bank used for creatively imploding aluminium cans and launching metal objects at quite dangerous velocities. It can put out enough of a pulse to crash a camera - all the control circuits are especially hardened against it.
Inefficient hardware is sometimes justified by development time.
You can spend many days hand-coding an ideal program for a PIC in ASM. Or you can use an arduino, which takes more power, more space and more money, but can be programmed in a tenth the time by anyone who knows C without needing any esoteric knowledge of harvard architecture and tables of port numbers. If you're doing things a bit more complicated like image processing or networking, the same applies to arduino vs pi: The arduino may be able to do your task if you'll put in the days of programming, but with the pi you're dealing with a familiar linux environment and all the classic libraries are there.
Cool. The linear reg on the previous models worked perfectly, but was rather less than ideally efficient - 5V power in, but almost all the power consumed goes via the 3.3V rail.
One of my favorite cases was a brief panic at a financial hub when all email communication regarding canola prices and futures was blocked by the spam filter - canola is more often known as 'rapeseed oil' outside of the US and Canada. The name canola'was only introduced in the 1970s, because a number of Canadian executives found it too uncomfortable to describe themselves as 'in the rape industry.'
If I ever encounter child abuse images on the internet (I havn't yet), I am not going to report it. I don't want to get involved. I don't want to have the police come around and interrogate me, asking what I was doing in the vicinity of such sites. I don't want to see my career ended because I work in education, a field so paranoid that the slightest hint of suspicion disqualifies a person for life. I don't want the police to sieze all my computers as part of an investigation, as has happened to some people in the past. So I'd just close the site, wipe the browser history, and pretend I'd seen nothing.
I've spent a great deal of time around the shady side of the internet for reasons of piracy. I've seen a ton of porn both distributed and advertising. Were child pornography* at all common, I imagine I'd have encountered it by now.
*I really don't like that term, but I know well enough not to try to change the language.
Doesn't work as satire, as it doesn't make any point. It's just shoving random offensive images together.
Exactly what it sounds like.
Humans have gut bacteria. These bacteria are required for the gut to function properly. In some cases a person can lose theirs following a course of really powerful antibiotics - they'll kill whatever's causing their disease, but kill all the required bacteria in their gut too. This is a bad thing: Gut without bacteria doesn't work very well and, though it's not fatal, is going to leave the patient suffering a number of unpleasant conditions. The solution is very simple though. Just take someone with a healthy bacterial ecosystem in their gut, extract a handy lump of bacteria, insert it into the unhealthy patient. The ready-made bacterial colony then takes hold there and returns things to a healthy balance. It sounds disgusting and, well, it is. But it works.
No, he just got it backwards. That's the number going *out* from the NSA facility, not coming in.
They are a fair bit better with HTML5. The available offline and responsive issues can be solved easily enough if the web-dev gives some thought to those matters, though not all do so.
There are some pirates devoting their time to collect and index 'all the data.' It's like stamp collecting. It's just a hobby. You can find most things if you search hard enough.