The question is, in context of the legal arguments taking place in places such as California currently, whether it is to society's best interest to extend tax and other benefits to gay pairings.
The question is not whether "gay marriage is somehow more favorable to gays than straight marriage", the question is is gay marriage a benefit to society?
I would argue that Justice is always in society's best interest. Likewise, ending unfair treatment before the law is a benefit to society. Is there really any argument against this?
I object to violence against anyone, as a general rule. I don't see where it makes a difference as to the skin color, gender, or any other component of the person on the receiving end of the violence.
Good, I'm glad to hear it. If you think about it a while, you'll probably realize that some of the worst situations gays have to endure right now don't involve physical violence per se, but just something more like abominable stupidity and pettiness. Consider the 25-year couple, one dying of cancer, who cannot even assume that they'll be able to be in the same room when death comes. That's where we're at today in the US, and if we want things to improve, we need to make it clear that when religion and bigotry oppose basic human decency, the latter should win out.
Whether [...] society has an interest (based on there being more good than harm, overall, to society) in the promotion of homosexual pairings.
Since no one is suggesting that we "promote" homosexual pairings, this question is entirely moot. (No, objecting to discrimination and violence against gays does not count as "promoting" homosexuality. Good grief.)
Actually, the problem is that "being gay" is really a choice
I have no idea why anyone thinks this matters. The reason that gays are A-OK with me is because they're not hurting anyone by their behavior and frankly, in my experience, even seem to be slightly nicer than the rest of us (on average).
something that society wants to promote and give benefits to (e.g. preferential treatment, tax benefits, etc)
Bzzt. Gays do not get preferential treatment or tax benefits for being gay, nor is anyone suggesting this ought to be done.
any more than someone who makes bad lifestyle choices and becomes obese
Now we've completely jumped the rails. Obesity has a significant inherited component. Go trawl NCBI.
there are a large number of parents that don't want their kids recruited to.
Perhaps you're thinking of Jehovah's Witnesses? (Maybe they have a "gay" branch, I dunno.)
not something the majority of society wants to see promoted.
Shouldn't the question here be whether or not a set of behaviors is harmful to society, rather than what "the majority of society wants to see promoted"?
if homosexuality were not a choice, why are the two most common insults directed at anyone who is against public promotion of homosexuality "well you must be in the closet" and "you must be afraid you'll try it and like it"?
Well, (a) one can be gay and in the closet. Doesn't really matter whether or not being gay is genetic. Duh. As for (b), we saw a study just this month that found that homophobic males are most likely to be turned on by gay porn. So, maybe fear of just that really is a significant component here.
Anyway, please take a deep breath. Gay acceptance isn't going to mean the fall of the republic or endanger the safety of your children. For those we have Neocons and motor vehicles, respectively.
P.S. Yeah, I know you're trolling. It was good for me anyway.;-)
This reminds me of a great April Fool's Day prank from the late 80s (IIRC--I cannot find a link). Someone posted a description of a wonderful new way to economize on backups, using UUCP. The idea was to create the backup and then uucp it back to oneself using a somewhat circuitous route, so that it would arrive back just when it might be needed (say, a fortnight hence). And thus no tape would be needed to hold the backup in the mean time.
(This was in fact an absurd suggestion, of course, since data transmission was very limited and expensive at the time, and the data would end up being temporarily stored anyway on the disks of one's neighbors.)
...because MS will use its desktop monopoly and control of protocols to limit the penetration of Linux servers.
Believe it. And it's not just squeezing Linux out but eviscerating the web as we know it. Already I have to deal with web apps at work that are just a pile of obscured javascript (often plus activex). Something like this can't be programmed, it can't be interacted with, can't be reasoned with, and it will absolutely not stop until you have learned to be absolutely helpless at Microsoft's feet...
If you hook up a scope to your outlet (don't be an idiot; to all the non-EE types, don't try this if you don't know how)
I'm pretty sure this is okay if you wet your fingers first and have a bucket of water nearby. Either that or it's putting out a candle—I can't recall...
P.S. I've read all of these posts and chapters in several books and I still don't understand this reactive power/power factor/phase/whatever sh*t...
At some point the Slashdot crowd is going to have to face up to the fact that content producers need to get paid if they are going to continue producing. Just like movies - it's easy to criticize the MPAA, but who is going to pay the millions of dollars to shoot a major movie if everyone simply copies content without paying for it?
There's a dramatic difference between these two cases: the MPAA has no good way to stop non-customers from consuming their material, and so they need to be rational, smart, and reasonable if they're going to survive (or possibly they can get the government to bludgeon their customers for them).
News media, on the other hand, can just cut their customers off--it's really no different than selling gasoline in this regard. That's not to say that the Internet hasn't changed the playing field, but newspapers are going to have to adapt, and since there will always be a market for news, the smart ones will survive.
This is dead on. NASA and the DoD pay serious money to be able to run 15-year-old hardware and software--unless you're made of money, you don't want to be doing this.
Best suggestion is to use the most Open Source software and commodity hardware that you can. Your proprietary software vendor may not be around in 14 years, and even if they are, they may no longer offer the software you need to replace/fix/etc.
[Yes, this means you, Microsoft. I designed my enterprise accounting system to run on Bob and I've been hearing about it ever since...]
As I tire of pointing out and people never tire of not understanding, lack of regulation does not mean free-for-all, might is right or whatever.
An unregulated nuclear industry does not mean plants can pour waste in other people's property. Since governments regulate commons they must either [A] take responsibility to ensure they are not destroyed or [B] privatize them to internalize the externalities.
Umm, actually A does mean regulation, contradicting your assumption, and B without regulation does mean a "might is right" free-for-all.
Are you sure you don't think the nuclear industry should have government oversight? Would you be willing to send your kids to a school next to a nuke plant owned by AIG and run by Enron?
we're gonna have to think up a new word for what its competitors are doing.
IBM's still on the list, but only because they have generally embraced Linux. Sun has been going "la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la" and it's been getting less and less convincing as time passes.
SunOS was really the Linux of its day at the end, and Solaris was the first clear misstep towards Sun's eventual demise.
I saw a pair of these on some guy's pickup's trailer hitch and I immediately thought of him as more manly. I think that this might work for your netbook as well.
GCC's libstdc++6-4.3 std::vector size() is computed by subtracting the end-begin ptrs. There is no size field!
Okay, but this amount to the same thing, right? (That is, you still need an extra pointer that's effectively encoding the size of the vector, and that field must be updated on every size change.)
Vector should be no slower than array, if it is, you are probably using it wrong. The only exception is if you constantly create arrays on the stack, those would be faster on most platforms than vector because constantly allocating vectors cause heap allocations.
I think this was at least part of what I was doing. If you allocate a vector of small, dynamically determined size in a function, and run that function millions of times, the difference in relative cost between doing it with a alloc'ed C array and a malloc'ed vector could be quite noticeable. The former is essentially free, and I was thinking/hoping that the compiler-plus-STL would optimize this away for the vector case, too, but apparently it's not that smart.
I "washed out" of a PhD CS with an MSCS, and I think most of the parent poster's advice is good. Definitely the bit about not changing after 30 or so. Especially if you get married (or whatever) and have kids, your priorities and possibilities will change radically towards finding one good position and staying there.
I got my BSCS from a department that happened to be outstanding at the moment I went through, even though you've never heard of it. I then foolishly searched for a great CS department to do a CS PhD, (i) without first verifying that I really wanted a PhD and that it would be useful in the kind of work I really enjoyed, and (ii) failing to realize that it's not the department that counts at the graduate level, it's all about the one or two mentors you will have. My grad school has a good enough rep that everyone recognizes it, but the general departmental strategy was "throw everyone in the water and see who doesn't drown". I'm sure that worked for some, but I was completely lost for several years. In retrospect, I'd have been much better off identifying one good person to learn from and studying with them, even if it's at BFE Tech.
Based on that, I'd say that first you should think long and hard about what kinds of positions you'd like to have. If you can pinpoint people who are doing what you'd like to be doing, try asking them for advice.
Second, as the parent said, try to be doing something serious now, and try to identify specific people you'd like to apprentice under at a graduate level.
Plus it seems like I can't really run memset on a vector's storage, which may cost me.
Of course you can.
I accept most of what you're saying, but this has got to be wrong. The only way this works is if the standard specifies that vector elements must be stored in a single, contiguous block of memory. Is this really the case?
Over and above that, what if the elements are objects? Sounds evil to me.
One of the problems with C++/STL is that it's much more difficult to see when you are implicitly asking more work to be done.
I've heard that remark for the last 10 years and it only rings true if you don't program in C++.
Well, judge for yourself if I'm any good, but I do program in C++, even though these days I try to avoid it.
I did at one time have a line-by-line familiarity with the ANSI C standard. My sense is that C++ is an order of magnitude more complex, and I've never personally met anyone that I felt had mastery of the language. I'm sure that such people exist, but the fact that I don't encounter them suggests to me that they are relatively rare--and that using a lot of C++ on a project isn't a good idea.
If your operations are large, or if the overhead is not per-operation, then small overheads elsewhere may be completely harmless.
For these cases, though, I'm probably just using Python instead. Where I'm using C++, it pretty much has to be as fast as C. When I started my project, I thought that there wouldn't be any difficultly getting the C++ to be as fast as C, but after living with it for a while, I'm seriously considering going back to straight C (albeit as much for its relative simplicity as for the speed).
Why? Should we apply the same standard to, say, vegetables?
Because we already have significant evidence that crabs can experience suffering: the fact that they act the way that we do when we're experiencing pain. Also, because suffering is by definition horrible and we should err on the side of safety.
The main counterargument that I'm aware of is that crabs may simply lack a nervous system that is sufficient to provide an experience of suffering. If this turns out to be true, then obviously that will trump other evidence.
(As for vegetables, since they have no real ability to act to avoid death, and seem to have no nervous system or information processing capability to speak of, I see little reason to believe that they can experience suffering.)
Slashdot Mirror
A scenario somewhat like this occurs in Crawford Killian's Empire of Time (which I enjoyed).
The question is, in context of the legal arguments taking place in places such as California currently, whether it is to society's best interest to extend tax and other benefits to gay pairings.
The question is not whether "gay marriage is somehow more favorable to gays than straight marriage", the question is is gay marriage a benefit to society?
I would argue that Justice is always in society's best interest. Likewise, ending unfair treatment before the law is a benefit to society. Is there really any argument against this?
I object to violence against anyone, as a general rule. I don't see where it makes a difference as to the skin color, gender, or any other component of the person on the receiving end of the violence.
Good, I'm glad to hear it. If you think about it a while, you'll probably realize that some of the worst situations gays have to endure right now don't involve physical violence per se, but just something more like abominable stupidity and pettiness. Consider the 25-year couple, one dying of cancer, who cannot even assume that they'll be able to be in the same room when death comes. That's where we're at today in the US, and if we want things to improve, we need to make it clear that when religion and bigotry oppose basic human decency, the latter should win out.
but W is still a jackass...
Whether [...] society has an interest (based on there being more good than harm, overall, to society) in the promotion of homosexual pairings.
Since no one is suggesting that we "promote" homosexual pairings, this question is entirely moot. (No, objecting to discrimination and violence against gays does not count as "promoting" homosexuality. Good grief.)
Actually, the problem is that "being gay" is really a choice
I have no idea why anyone thinks this matters. The reason that gays are A-OK with me is because they're not hurting anyone by their behavior and frankly, in my experience, even seem to be slightly nicer than the rest of us (on average).
something that society wants to promote and give benefits to (e.g. preferential treatment, tax benefits, etc)
Bzzt. Gays do not get preferential treatment or tax benefits for being gay, nor is anyone suggesting this ought to be done.
any more than someone who makes bad lifestyle choices and becomes obese
Now we've completely jumped the rails. Obesity has a significant inherited component. Go trawl NCBI.
there are a large number of parents that don't want their kids recruited to.
Perhaps you're thinking of Jehovah's Witnesses? (Maybe they have a "gay" branch, I dunno.)
not something the majority of society wants to see promoted.
Shouldn't the question here be whether or not a set of behaviors is harmful to society, rather than what "the majority of society wants to see promoted"?
if homosexuality were not a choice, why are the two most common insults directed at anyone who is against public promotion of homosexuality "well you must be in the closet" and "you must be afraid you'll try it and like it"?
Well, (a) one can be gay and in the closet. Doesn't really matter whether or not being gay is genetic. Duh. As for (b), we saw a study just this month that found that homophobic males are most likely to be turned on by gay porn. So, maybe fear of just that really is a significant component here.
Anyway, please take a deep breath. Gay acceptance isn't going to mean the fall of the republic or endanger the safety of your children. For those we have Neocons and motor vehicles, respectively.
P.S. Yeah, I know you're trolling. It was good for me anyway. ;-)
This reminds me of a great April Fool's Day prank from the late 80s (IIRC--I cannot find a link). Someone posted a description of a wonderful new way to economize on backups, using UUCP. The idea was to create the backup and then uucp it back to oneself using a somewhat circuitous route, so that it would arrive back just when it might be needed (say, a fortnight hence). And thus no tape would be needed to hold the backup in the mean time.
(This was in fact an absurd suggestion, of course, since data transmission was very limited and expensive at the time, and the data would end up being temporarily stored anyway on the disks of one's neighbors.)
...because MS will use its desktop monopoly and control of protocols to limit the penetration of Linux servers.
Believe it. And it's not just squeezing Linux out but eviscerating the web as we know it. Already I have to deal with web apps at work that are just a pile of obscured javascript (often plus activex). Something like this can't be programmed, it can't be interacted with, can't be reasoned with, and it will absolutely not stop until you have learned to be absolutely helpless at Microsoft's feet...
(hat tip to The Terminator :-)
If you hook up a scope to your outlet (don't be an idiot; to all the non-EE types, don't try this if you don't know how)
I'm pretty sure this is okay if you wet your fingers first and have a bucket of water nearby. Either that or it's putting out a candle—I can't recall...
P.S. I've read all of these posts and chapters in several books and I still don't understand this reactive power/power factor/phase/whatever sh*t...
Patents don't cover concepts. They only cover implementations.
You must be new here. (in the US)
At some point the Slashdot crowd is going to have to face up to the fact that content producers need to get paid if they are going to continue producing. Just like movies - it's easy to criticize the MPAA, but who is going to pay the millions of dollars to shoot a major movie if everyone simply copies content without paying for it?
There's a dramatic difference between these two cases: the MPAA has no good way to stop non-customers from consuming their material, and so they need to be rational, smart, and reasonable if they're going to survive (or possibly they can get the government to bludgeon their customers for them).
News media, on the other hand, can just cut their customers off--it's really no different than selling gasoline in this regard. That's not to say that the Internet hasn't changed the playing field, but newspapers are going to have to adapt, and since there will always be a market for news, the smart ones will survive.
Sure - five years to build a port. Then start on the next for when that port is drowned.
Well, yeah, if you're building serial ports. Try parallel ports for better throughput...
movie ticket. As a result, I don't go to the movies much any more--I don't like what they're doing with my money.
This is dead on. NASA and the DoD pay serious money to be able to run 15-year-old hardware and software--unless you're made of money, you don't want to be doing this.
Best suggestion is to use the most Open Source software and commodity hardware that you can. Your proprietary software vendor may not be around in 14 years, and even if they are, they may no longer offer the software you need to replace/fix/etc.
[Yes, this means you, Microsoft. I designed my enterprise accounting system to run on Bob and I've been hearing about it ever since...]
Government, get out of the way.
Yeah, let AIG run it! ;-)
As I tire of pointing out and people never tire of not understanding, lack of regulation does not mean free-for-all, might is right or whatever.
An unregulated nuclear industry does not mean plants can pour waste in other people's property. Since governments regulate commons they must either [A] take responsibility to ensure they are not destroyed or [B] privatize them to internalize the externalities.
Umm, actually A does mean regulation, contradicting your assumption, and B without regulation does mean a "might is right" free-for-all.
Are you sure you don't think the nuclear industry should have government oversight? Would you be willing to send your kids to a school next to a nuke plant owned by AIG and run by Enron?
This is just plain bad design, and not Congress' fault.
If this alarming system--with the same crappy design--had been "directly connected" to the controls, god knows what would have happened.
we're gonna have to think up a new word for what its competitors are doing.
IBM's still on the list, but only because they have generally embraced Linux. Sun has been going "la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la" and it's been getting less and less convincing as time passes.
SunOS was really the Linux of its day at the end, and Solaris was the first clear misstep towards Sun's eventual demise.
I saw a pair of these on some guy's pickup's trailer hitch and I immediately thought of him as more manly. I think that this might work for your netbook as well.
(Plus, first remove any Hello Kitty stickers...)
So in that respect it is exactly like Linux?
No, Microsoft will charge you US$269 to tell you that you're an idiot. ;-)
GCC's libstdc++6-4.3 std::vector size() is computed by subtracting the end-begin ptrs. There is no size field!
Okay, but this amount to the same thing, right? (That is, you still need an extra pointer that's effectively encoding the size of the vector, and that field must be updated on every size change.)
Vector should be no slower than array, if it is, you are probably using it wrong. The only exception is if you constantly create arrays on the stack, those would be faster on most platforms than vector because constantly allocating vectors cause heap allocations.
I think this was at least part of what I was doing. If you allocate a vector of small, dynamically determined size in a function, and run that function millions of times, the difference in relative cost between doing it with a alloc'ed C array and a malloc'ed vector could be quite noticeable. The former is essentially free, and I was thinking/hoping that the compiler-plus-STL would optimize this away for the vector case, too, but apparently it's not that smart.
I probably had other things going on as well.
You must be unlucky or the cause.
This would make a great slogan for Microsoft's new ad campaign:
I "washed out" of a PhD CS with an MSCS, and I think most of the parent poster's advice is good. Definitely the bit about not changing after 30 or so. Especially if you get married (or whatever) and have kids, your priorities and possibilities will change radically towards finding one good position and staying there.
I got my BSCS from a department that happened to be outstanding at the moment I went through, even though you've never heard of it. I then foolishly searched for a great CS department to do a CS PhD, (i) without first verifying that I really wanted a PhD and that it would be useful in the kind of work I really enjoyed, and (ii) failing to realize that it's not the department that counts at the graduate level, it's all about the one or two mentors you will have. My grad school has a good enough rep that everyone recognizes it, but the general departmental strategy was "throw everyone in the water and see who doesn't drown". I'm sure that worked for some, but I was completely lost for several years. In retrospect, I'd have been much better off identifying one good person to learn from and studying with them, even if it's at BFE Tech.
Based on that, I'd say that first you should think long and hard about what kinds of positions you'd like to have. If you can pinpoint people who are doing what you'd like to be doing, try asking them for advice.
Second, as the parent said, try to be doing something serious now, and try to identify specific people you'd like to apprentice under at a graduate level.
Good luck.
Plus it seems like I can't really run memset on a vector's storage, which may cost me.
Of course you can.
I accept most of what you're saying, but this has got to be wrong. The only way this works is if the standard specifies that vector elements must be stored in a single, contiguous block of memory. Is this really the case?
Over and above that, what if the elements are objects? Sounds evil to me.
One of the problems with C++/STL is that it's much more difficult to see when you are implicitly asking more work to be done.
I've heard that remark for the last 10 years and it only rings true if you don't program in C++.
Well, judge for yourself if I'm any good, but I do program in C++, even though these days I try to avoid it.
I did at one time have a line-by-line familiarity with the ANSI C standard. My sense is that C++ is an order of magnitude more complex, and I've never personally met anyone that I felt had mastery of the language. I'm sure that such people exist, but the fact that I don't encounter them suggests to me that they are relatively rare--and that using a lot of C++ on a project isn't a good idea.
If your operations are large, or if the overhead is not per-operation, then small overheads elsewhere may be completely harmless.
For these cases, though, I'm probably just using Python instead. Where I'm using C++, it pretty much has to be as fast as C. When I started my project, I thought that there wouldn't be any difficultly getting the C++ to be as fast as C, but after living with it for a while, I'm seriously considering going back to straight C (albeit as much for its relative simplicity as for the speed).
Why? Should we apply the same standard to, say, vegetables?
Because we already have significant evidence that crabs can experience suffering: the fact that they act the way that we do when we're experiencing pain. Also, because suffering is by definition horrible and we should err on the side of safety.
The main counterargument that I'm aware of is that crabs may simply lack a nervous system that is sufficient to provide an experience of suffering. If this turns out to be true, then obviously that will trump other evidence.
(As for vegetables, since they have no real ability to act to avoid death, and seem to have no nervous system or information processing capability to speak of, I see little reason to believe that they can experience suffering.)