Indeed, and the only people calling them so are the people who are making up this story or falling for it. The contract language refers to mechanical failures beyond SWA's control as one variety of force majeure, at the same level as "act of God." The actual language of the contract:
Force Majeure Event means any event outside of Carrier's control, including, without limitation, acts of God, meteorological events, such as storms, rain, wind, fire, fog, flooding, earthquakes, haze, volcanic eruption or any other event, including, without limitation, government action, disturbances or potentially volatile international conditions, civil commotions, riots, embargoes, wars, or hostilities, whether actual, threatened, or reported, strikes, work stoppage, slowdown, lockout or any other labor related dispute involving or affecting Carrier's service, mechanical difficulties, Air Traffic Control, the inability to obtain fuel, labor or landing facilities for the flight in question or any fact not reasonably foreseen, anticipated or predicted by Carrier.
Other people have commented at length about the role and importance of emergency communications in amateur radio, so I won't go into that. I also agree with several people that your tone here is much too negative.
I will say that you have made an important point that a lot of people have skipped over: an amateur radio rig is not a replacement for a cell phone. A cell phone, as long as you can reliably get a signal, is engineered to give you a reliable link to any phone user in the world, just as long as you enter the phone number; in addition, there are no restrictions on what you can use a cell phone form. Amateur radio, on the other hand, is very often about talking with people you randomly come across in the bands, and getting reliable communications between predetermined persons may require considerable communications skills and effort. Also, there are restrictions on what you can use amateur radio for.
So really, the asker needs to be more specific about what they're expecting to do with the radio and check carefully whether (a) they're allowed to, (b) whether the radio will meet their needs.
MOST of the problems I've come across have been people not thinking about error conditions.. they think A = B-C but don't bother to check that B or C is a value that can be used with -. you might see them check one usable value or think that the class with handle it - but they don't honestly think about it. Yes always consider inputs as bad until proven other wise but too many people think that it only applies to user inputs..
This philosophy leads to awful code. Yes, it is perfectly reasonable for a program core function that performs B-C to assume that B and C are valid values. This doesn't mean that programs should not take care about data integrity, but rather that data integrity checks should be segregated from problem-solving code in order to make the program easier to maintain. Otherwise, you end up with your complex computation functions being riddled with data integrity checks right in the middle, making all sorts of insanse assumptions about what should be done with invalid data. This makes the complex computational code not only harder to read, but also provides an incentive to writing that code badly.
My most hated example is folks who write functions that, upon reaching a demonstrably bad state from which the computation can no longer recover, instead of throwing an exception do something stupid and irresposible like returning 0, null, empty string, empty list or whatever to the caller, who then runs with it and then either gets an error or produces a wrong answer. Writing "defensive" code in the way you advocate basically empowers people to write code like that, since they get to assume that it's the caller's responsibility to verify that the function's output is valid.
So, the general architecture should be:
Front-end code that validates that the user inputs are within the valid range;
Internal code that assumes that input data is valid at all steps, and fails immediately if it would produce an invalid output.
The idea, well, it's just the basic good programming style thing that code should be written in terms of small reusable functions that do only one thing. So the main flaw of the original code there is that the details of spawning the thread and hooking it up to the Runnable and the observer are a common, reusable task that should go on its own spawnObservableThread() method.
There's really very little that can be done in terms of language features to make this code less verbose than what it is. The only things I can think of right away that would help would be lambdas and dependency injection.
Guess what guys? The reason programming is hard is because you must clearly and unambiguously state what you want to have happen.
Even though for most people that's the first hurdle (and one that they fail), I'm not sure that this is the main reason programming is hard. I know plenty of people who've mastered the basic mechanics of doing that, and yet still don't program too well because they can't make their problem-solving ability scale to larger, more complex problems. You can understand at a fairly low level every single step that will be carried out to execute your program, yet be completely unable to write a large, modular and maintainable software system.
The point of normalization has never been performance. The point of normalization is logical data integrity--primarily through the prevention of modification anomalies.
If anything, a normalized physical data layout on disk tends to hurt performance for any application that requires joins between the normalized tables.
By the same token, today's more powerful hardware, if anything, allows you to go for a normalized solution where yesterday you couldn't.
Thanks to views, normalization does not in general require code changes. Clients that execute queries against the old schema can be pointed at views that join the new normalized tables. The only cases where code changes are required are when there are clients that perform inserts or updates to a table that, after normalization, corresponds to a set of tables that are not in a a non-one-to-one relationship--which really just serves as a cautionary tale to try and get the schema right in the first place.
It's not uncommon for the chief of IT at a very early stage startup to be very technical and do a significant amount of coding in addition to management. At my company, the first chief of IT was one of the founders, along with two full-time programmers (though an extra two were hired a few months later). He coded less than the full-time coders, but he still wrote some key pieces of the early codebase, plus took care of a bunch of tasks like getting the first automated build system going so that the full-time developers could concentrate on other stuff.
Lawrence Summers, back when he was chief economist for the World Bank, wrote and infamous memo where he said he'd "always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City" (verbatim).
As his comments about gender and intelligence as President of Harvard demonstrate, the guy has a talent for sticking his foot in his mouth.
2) Broadcast is forbidden with a few exceptions. (Repeater IDs, for example. APRS is also kosher. Broadcasting anything like a "radio show" is not. In the digital age it's a bit grey, but in general sustained transmissions are not kosher, but brief bursts (IDing, position reports) are OK.
You're missing the one big exception to the "no broadcasts" rules--the ARRL (the US amateur radio operator organization) has special license from the FCC to run W1AW, their broadcast station, which transmits only on things that are of interest to hams: morse code practice, radio propagation bulletins, ham radio rules changes, etc.
What if two hams have a discussion about "that thing we did last weekend." You haven't said what "that thing" is. You're obscuring meaning. What if you talk in a language only two people on the planet understand? You're obscuring meaning.
"Obscuring meaning" doesn't mean having an exchange that some people don't understand. It means taking measures to prevent somebody who could understand the exchange from doing so. If we had it your way, two hams talking about theoretical physics would be "obscuring the meaning" of their conversation to everybody who didn't know that stuff.
So it says that if I put my penis in a vagina that is not attached to my wife, that somehow magically influences my commitment to my wife - but at the same time, it's not about sex?
Let's assume that, as it is the case in a typical marriage, your having sex with another woman is very nearly the last thing that your wife would like to happen. Let's further assume, again as is normal in a marriage, that she entered this relationship with you and continues it with the understanding that one of the conditions is that neither of you will have sex with somebody else.
Then, well, fuck yes, sticking your dick in another woman's vagina is a very severe breach of your commitment to the relationship. It's got nothing to do with magic--it's all about trust and expectations. She trusted you to meet certain expectations that she had of you, and you didn't meet them.
And guess what, if at that point you pulled out your self-centered "fucking doesn't do magic" argument, what you would demonstrate is that what your wife wants doesn't matter to you. It doesn't even matter if we assume that your attitudes toward sexual encounters are superior towards her, because you led her to understand that you'd meet her expectation of fidelity, and then just did whatever you wanted because you thought getting your rocks off was more important than what she wanted.
I for one like the fact that there is ALWAYS someone buying or selling EVERYTHING./
Other people have mentioned this in their replies, but I just thought it could be said a lot simpler. Your typical HFT scheme kicks in when there is already somebody buying and somebody selling the stock in question. If Joe's selling 1,000 shares of ACME, but there are no buyers, the HFT doesn't do anything. It doesn't kick in until Mary comes in with an order to buy ACME, and then it buys from Joe to sell to Mary.
The scheme presupposes that there already exist matched orders, i.e., that liquidity has already been provided. That provides absolutely no extra liquidity at all.
He was right that the government basically telling BP "Start coughing up without a being found guilty because we said so or we'll might start fining you/killing your licenses" should be illegal. Due process exists, and it should be followed. That's extortion.
I don't see any violation of due process, nor any obvious violations of anything. Oil drilling is regulated; the government does have authority to fine, issue and kill licenses for this kind of stuff within reason, and BP is involved in a huge environmental catastrophe. This is not very different from the fact that the government can take over insolvent banks from their owners.
And nobody forced BP to cough up the $20B. They were asked, not at all nicely, to do so, and they agreed. They could have refused and tried to take on the government--and that dispute would then be subject to due process.
He didn't give it to people, he put it in escrow. You can argue that this is still wrong, but at least accuse him of what he actually did. He didn't just hand out a bunch of money to whomever he wanted.
Um, even you are getting it wrong. Obama didn't "put" anything in escrow; he pressured and convinced BP to voluntarily put $20B in an independently-managed escrow fund to pay claims. There has been no taking of property at all (and thus no question of "due process"); BP gave the money.
Buffet style insurance is a huge part of the problem. People don't see the costs of their health care, and they're accustomed to getting as much as they want (not need) for a set amount of money, much of which is paid "magically", "somehow" by their employer.
I'm not saying this is the entire problem, but it's a huge part of it.
No, in fact, it's not.
The bottom 50% of the population accounts for something in the order 3% of the health costs, while the top 5% account for about 49% (US government data). The bulk of people who are partaking of this "buffet" don't really cost a lot to cover; the seriously sick few are vastly more expensive. Imposing the high-deductible nonsense has the most effect on that 50% of the population who uses 3% of the healthcare. Yeah, that's gonna help a lot.
The other thing you are missing (and other people who make your argument) is that the incidence and cost of expensive health episodes is reduced by preventive care. Allowing people to go to the doctor today for cheap means that more potentially serious health conditions are detected early and managed for less cost. This is why detractors' typical analogies to car insurance are misguided: a car insurer that paid for your gas would be making it more likely that you'd have an accident (by incentivizing you to drive more). A health insurer that pays for your routine visits is making it less likely that you'll have a major health episode.
Instead of debating about what "actual" Islam is, why don't you look at the way Islamic societies the world over behave? They're a bunch of nutjobs who think it's a good idea to cut off someone's hand for stealing a loaf of bread. They're barbarians and not worth the time of day.
How many Islamic countries have you visited? Have you ever been to, say, Senegal or the Gambia?
It's far easier to learn programming, and read physics textbooks, and read Dawkins/Hitchens, and other men bloviating about the evils of religion, when they don't even have any real expertise in theology to begin with (Dawkins is a BIOLOGIST).
OK, it is a deal if the religious people tear the "how mankind got there" chapter out of their story book. After all, they are not biologists.
Dawkins has two big religion-related fights that he engages in:
Evolution vs. creationism
Atheism vs. belief
The largest Christian denominations do not interpret Genesis as a literal account of the creation of the world, so they don't engage in the debate in (1); that's the province of fundamentalist American sects. So, your response about biology is irrelevant to debate (2) as conducted by the mainstream Christian sects. And Dawkins really, really likes to engage in (2) despite knowing jack about theology.
But what's to stop a criminal from possessing guns?
You know, in the USA, one of the reasons it's so easy for criminals to get guns is that even if your locality passes a law restricting gun purchases very severely, somebody can always drive to the next state over with the lax gun laws, buy a gazillion guns, then come back and sell them to criminals for inflated prices in a black market.
There are some pretty simple measures that, if implemented at the federal level, would make it significantly harder or more expensive for criminals to get guns:
Limits on how many guns a non-dealer may purchase in a given time period. E.g., one gun per month per adult household member.
Waiting periods on gun purchases. If you buy a gun today, you can't pick it up until a week from now.
Close the fucking gun show loophole already; make all gun sales require a background check of the buyer.
None of these would prevent law-abiding citizens from owning guns. But guess what? The NRA is rabidly opposed to all of them.
Most people who immigrate to an english speaking country take an english name, and give their children english names.
I don't know about the children part, but most immigrants to the USA are from Latin America, and they keep their Spanish names.
Immigrants' handling of names, however, is very dependent on ethnicity. Chinese who come to the USA very much do tend to take an English name; for their children, they tend to give them an English first name and a Chinese middle name, but they use that middle name as the child's first name in Chinese. Japanese and Koreans do this less in my experience, but it does happen. Indians with very long names that are hard for Americans tend to simplify the names, but they don't adopt English names.
Good thing that Pablo Picasso never had to get a Californian driver's license.
However, under the normal format for names in Spanish, the guy would be the perfectly manageable Pablo Ruiz Picasso, where Pablo is the first name and Ruiz Picasso are the last names. California issues drivers' licenses for names like these correctly--I know it because I have one.
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Laugh at Billy's daddy's willy, that's what, and speculation on who's Billy's true biological father.
Indeed, and the only people calling them so are the people who are making up this story or falling for it. The contract language refers to mechanical failures beyond SWA's control as one variety of force majeure, at the same level as "act of God." The actual language of the contract:
Read that carefully, at least three times.
It's a matter of who your audience is.
Other people have commented at length about the role and importance of emergency communications in amateur radio, so I won't go into that. I also agree with several people that your tone here is much too negative.
I will say that you have made an important point that a lot of people have skipped over: an amateur radio rig is not a replacement for a cell phone. A cell phone, as long as you can reliably get a signal, is engineered to give you a reliable link to any phone user in the world, just as long as you enter the phone number; in addition, there are no restrictions on what you can use a cell phone form. Amateur radio, on the other hand, is very often about talking with people you randomly come across in the bands, and getting reliable communications between predetermined persons may require considerable communications skills and effort. Also, there are restrictions on what you can use amateur radio for.
So really, the asker needs to be more specific about what they're expecting to do with the radio and check carefully whether (a) they're allowed to, (b) whether the radio will meet their needs.
I don't think they're blocked because of the word "sex." I think they're blocked because of the phrase "sex party."
This philosophy leads to awful code. Yes, it is perfectly reasonable for a program core function that performs B-C to assume that B and C are valid values. This doesn't mean that programs should not take care about data integrity, but rather that data integrity checks should be segregated from problem-solving code in order to make the program easier to maintain. Otherwise, you end up with your complex computation functions being riddled with data integrity checks right in the middle, making all sorts of insanse assumptions about what should be done with invalid data. This makes the complex computational code not only harder to read, but also provides an incentive to writing that code badly.
My most hated example is folks who write functions that, upon reaching a demonstrably bad state from which the computation can no longer recover, instead of throwing an exception do something stupid and irresposible like returning 0, null, empty string, empty list or whatever to the caller, who then runs with it and then either gets an error or produces a wrong answer. Writing "defensive" code in the way you advocate basically empowers people to write code like that, since they get to assume that it's the caller's responsibility to verify that the function's output is valid.
So, the general architecture should be:
See the Erlang Programming Rules and Conventions for some versions of these principles--in particular, aon't make assumptions about what the caller will do with the results of a function and do not program "defensively".
That's a really crappy way of writing that code. Here's a better, more readable one (I've taken the liberty of guessing on the class names):
ExecutionItem spawnObservableThread(Runnable executionTarget, ExecutionObserver observer) {
ExecutionItem result = ThreadFactory.getInstance();
result.setExecutionTarget(executionTarget);
result.addExecutionObserver(observer);
return result;
}
void runIt() {
Runnable executionTarget = new Runnable() {
public void run() {
doWhatIWant();
};
}
ExecutionItem exec = spawnObservableThread(executionTarget, ExcecutionItemObserverFactory.getInstance());
exec.start();
}
The idea, well, it's just the basic good programming style thing that code should be written in terms of small reusable functions that do only one thing. So the main flaw of the original code there is that the details of spawning the thread and hooking it up to the Runnable and the observer are a common, reusable task that should go on its own spawnObservableThread() method.
There's really very little that can be done in terms of language features to make this code less verbose than what it is. The only things I can think of right away that would help would be lambdas and dependency injection.
Even though for most people that's the first hurdle (and one that they fail), I'm not sure that this is the main reason programming is hard. I know plenty of people who've mastered the basic mechanics of doing that, and yet still don't program too well because they can't make their problem-solving ability scale to larger, more complex problems. You can understand at a fairly low level every single step that will be carried out to execute your program, yet be completely unable to write a large, modular and maintainable software system.
Basically, none of your comment is right.
It's not uncommon for the chief of IT at a very early stage startup to be very technical and do a significant amount of coding in addition to management. At my company, the first chief of IT was one of the founders, along with two full-time programmers (though an extra two were hired a few months later). He coded less than the full-time coders, but he still wrote some key pieces of the early codebase, plus took care of a bunch of tasks like getting the first automated build system going so that the full-time developers could concentrate on other stuff.
As his comments about gender and intelligence as President of Harvard demonstrate, the guy has a talent for sticking his foot in his mouth.
You're missing the one big exception to the "no broadcasts" rules--the ARRL (the US amateur radio operator organization) has special license from the FCC to run W1AW, their broadcast station, which transmits only on things that are of interest to hams: morse code practice, radio propagation bulletins, ham radio rules changes, etc.
"Obscuring meaning" doesn't mean having an exchange that some people don't understand. It means taking measures to prevent somebody who could understand the exchange from doing so. If we had it your way, two hams talking about theoretical physics would be "obscuring the meaning" of their conversation to everybody who didn't know that stuff.
Let's assume that, as it is the case in a typical marriage, your having sex with another woman is very nearly the last thing that your wife would like to happen. Let's further assume, again as is normal in a marriage, that she entered this relationship with you and continues it with the understanding that one of the conditions is that neither of you will have sex with somebody else.
Then, well, fuck yes, sticking your dick in another woman's vagina is a very severe breach of your commitment to the relationship. It's got nothing to do with magic--it's all about trust and expectations. She trusted you to meet certain expectations that she had of you, and you didn't meet them.
And guess what, if at that point you pulled out your self-centered "fucking doesn't do magic" argument, what you would demonstrate is that what your wife wants doesn't matter to you. It doesn't even matter if we assume that your attitudes toward sexual encounters are superior towards her, because you led her to understand that you'd meet her expectation of fidelity, and then just did whatever you wanted because you thought getting your rocks off was more important than what she wanted.
BP put that money voluntarily into the escrow fund. There's no reading of the rules that prevents this.
I don't see any violation of due process, nor any obvious violations of anything. Oil drilling is regulated; the government does have authority to fine, issue and kill licenses for this kind of stuff within reason, and BP is involved in a huge environmental catastrophe. This is not very different from the fact that the government can take over insolvent banks from their owners.
And nobody forced BP to cough up the $20B. They were asked, not at all nicely, to do so, and they agreed. They could have refused and tried to take on the government--and that dispute would then be subject to due process.
Um, even you are getting it wrong. Obama didn't "put" anything in escrow; he pressured and convinced BP to voluntarily put $20B in an independently-managed escrow fund to pay claims. There has been no taking of property at all (and thus no question of "due process"); BP gave the money.
No, in fact, it's not.
The bottom 50% of the population accounts for something in the order 3% of the health costs, while the top 5% account for about 49% (US government data). The bulk of people who are partaking of this "buffet" don't really cost a lot to cover; the seriously sick few are vastly more expensive. Imposing the high-deductible nonsense has the most effect on that 50% of the population who uses 3% of the healthcare. Yeah, that's gonna help a lot.
The other thing you are missing (and other people who make your argument) is that the incidence and cost of expensive health episodes is reduced by preventive care. Allowing people to go to the doctor today for cheap means that more potentially serious health conditions are detected early and managed for less cost. This is why detractors' typical analogies to car insurance are misguided: a car insurer that paid for your gas would be making it more likely that you'd have an accident (by incentivizing you to drive more). A health insurer that pays for your routine visits is making it less likely that you'll have a major health episode.
How many Islamic countries have you visited? Have you ever been to, say, Senegal or the Gambia?
Dawkins has two big religion-related fights that he engages in:
The largest Christian denominations do not interpret Genesis as a literal account of the creation of the world, so they don't engage in the debate in (1); that's the province of fundamentalist American sects. So, your response about biology is irrelevant to debate (2) as conducted by the mainstream Christian sects. And Dawkins really, really likes to engage in (2) despite knowing jack about theology.
Get a dealer to mediate the sale.
Localities that have these restrictions have special provisions for this.
You know, in the USA, one of the reasons it's so easy for criminals to get guns is that even if your locality passes a law restricting gun purchases very severely, somebody can always drive to the next state over with the lax gun laws, buy a gazillion guns, then come back and sell them to criminals for inflated prices in a black market.
There are some pretty simple measures that, if implemented at the federal level, would make it significantly harder or more expensive for criminals to get guns:
None of these would prevent law-abiding citizens from owning guns. But guess what? The NRA is rabidly opposed to all of them.
I don't know about the children part, but most immigrants to the USA are from Latin America, and they keep their Spanish names.
Immigrants' handling of names, however, is very dependent on ethnicity. Chinese who come to the USA very much do tend to take an English name; for their children, they tend to give them an English first name and a Chinese middle name, but they use that middle name as the child's first name in Chinese. Japanese and Koreans do this less in my experience, but it does happen. Indians with very long names that are hard for Americans tend to simplify the names, but they don't adopt English names.
However, under the normal format for names in Spanish, the guy would be the perfectly manageable Pablo Ruiz Picasso, where Pablo is the first name and Ruiz Picasso are the last names. California issues drivers' licenses for names like these correctly--I know it because I have one.