But meanwhile the tech has been pushed, the rest of the US solar industry was boosted by Solyndra's research, spending and signal to other investors about the domestic industry.
That's quite an amazing belief. You may be the first person I've heard suggest that the Solyndra experience has been a net positive for the industry.
Solyndra's cronies, chiefly the Walmart's Walton family via Bush, lost a lot of money - that was spent in the US economy on tech jobs. There's a lot worse effects we could expect - and can see elsewhere. Not just in the energy industry that is actually changing, under pressure from the US government against vast resistance from the minority Republican Party and its corporate sponsors (like the Koch billionaires).
Just for what it's worth, when reading posts like yours, tossing out the bolded terms above just really makes me take your points less seriously. Evil Walmart, Evil Bush, Evil Koch brothers--the trinity! You can talk about being non-partisan all you want, but you sure seem to have the talking points down!
I mean, show me your posts about the hundreds of times more waste, fraud and theft as it was revealed in Iraq, and I'll take your absolutist stance against all corruption more seriously. But it'll still be naive to think that we'll remove corruption before we dethrone the petrofuel industry, rather than far easier after we have.
I actually worked for the government, in intelligence, for several years during the Iraq war. It was pathetic. I quit. Your feeling is that the "petrofuel industry" has some kind of connection to Iraq...? Interestingly enough I was reading an article in Time today that was discussing how very little business American oil companies had gotten out of Iraq.
As for the "eco-industrial complex", the term modeled after the "military-industrial complex", there is no such thing
So you're the arbiter of which terms exist and which don't? The term was used, ergo it exists. I responded to its existence. I accept that you don't like the term and think it's silly, but that's different from denying its existence.
There is no system of giant ecology corps buying patronage locked into the US economy by the government as an institution
Strongly disagree. Having spent some time with some talking to an academic who works in ecology (and heck, reading news), it's very evident that there is a lot of money--both government and corporate being tossed around right now in the "green" industries. Heck, Solyndra alone is a perfect example--a company that never made a profit (and never had a timeline for making a profit) and that the DOE recommended against funding. Sure, eco-industry funding may not be on the scale of the military/defense industry, but what's the issue. A lot of technology comes out of defense research as well (and historically this has absolutely been the case). Why is funding solyndra good, funding research defense bad?
Republican corruption and incompetence is terminal for this country
Change that to "political corruption and incompetence" and you might have a point.
It's crony-capitalism. I'm personally against that in ALL of its many varied forms. I realize that those who are driven more solely by partisan interests want for interest only their pet projects funded.
And incidentally, tax breaks are not the same thing as cheap federal loans rushed through because of various highrolling fundraising bundlers.
In any case, in case you weren't following the thread...somebody said something about eco-industrial complex. Somebody else said everything that person said was made up. I disagreed and explained how eco-industrial complex is perfectly legitimate (if military-industrial complex is legitimate). Next thing you you're coming down on be for listening to "Rush Limbo" and my bunched panties. That's one thing I can't stand about so many partisans--the complete hypocrisy. Corruption should be rooted out in ALL of its forms, not just those that don't benefit my special interests.
If you mean you don't see the quote -- "Great, the "eco-industrial complex" and "Big Green."
If you mean you don't get it, I thought it was abundantly obvious? In English usage the phrase "Military-Industrial Complex" refers to the relationship between the military, industry, and politics (politicians). That is, how politicians and special interests funnel funds to companies that contract to the military.
Likewise, given the coined term "eco-industrial complex," special interests lobbied politicians to get funds funneled to companies that are producing "green" products.
In essence I agree with you (re: civility), but I honestly don't think anything I said was too harsh! Certainly nothing worse than came up in grad school discussions weekly. Ok, maybe calling his/her statement "the dumbest thing I've ever read on the Internet" was a bit harsh, but it might--literally!--just be the dumbest thing I've read on slashdot.
Your rebuttal is such that I believe you cannot respect the opinions of others
IMHO, opinions do not deserve respect. Opinions (and people) earn respect. Even more so on the anonymous Internet.
I also think you make a mistake -- the same one you accuse me of making -- "their remarks should not be taken out of context"). I've made this one as well. The mistake is thinking that you know somebody (or have some deep insight into their personality) from a post or two on slashdot. Everybody knows the rules of the Internet. If you don't want to be in a (possibly heated) discussion, don't post in the first place! Especially not with an aggressive (and ridiculously dumb -- the OP's that is) post.
Let me guess: you are European, which means you come from a culture that never invented the wheel, writing, civilization, base 10, gunpowder.
You know, when I specifically went out of my way to point out that I picked a selection of advancements from across the globe, it means you're not particularly clever for picking that point out! You're also wrong about writing and the wheel as well. (if not absolutely wrong, both are disputed)
And you are going to use that fact to judge an isolated culture trapped in a desert the size of the US that even today with modern technology still only maintains a population of a few million. How many hunters and gatherers did it support. Less than 1 million? A hundred thousand?
Ok, first let's clear up your misunderstandings. The population of Australia today is just shy of 22 million. That's hardly "a few million." We obviously don't know how many aborigines there were before European arrival, but hundreds of thousands definitely (probably short of a million). In many ways the climate in parts of Australia matches that of Mesopotamia, the Indus, Egypt, etc. Very dry climates where civilizations sprung up around water usage and what are in essence public works.
And you find it surprising that they didn't match the accomplishments of a continent that spans half the globe and today supports 4 billion people.
I don't think anybody expressed surprise. I was merely stating a fact--the Australian aborigines developed at a rate (and level) well behind that of most of the world. What are you so upset about? Do you disagree with my statement that Australian aboriginal culture is (was) considerably far behind many others globally?
Certainly possible that human agriculture helped lead to environmental shifts that made those areas less habitable... Having said that, all of those areas remain extremely fertile today. Sure, go 5 miles from the Nile and you'll be in the desert (in some places--some places it's a lot less than 5 miles!) but the banks are still very fertile and Egypt is very densely populated.
Salination of soil has been a problem as long as people have farmed, and will remain a problem as long people keep farming. It's a big problem, but one that is very possible to overcome! One relatively recent "macro" example I can think of is Zanj in Iraq (Zanj means "Black"). The Sassanid Empire had done a pretty good job of maintaining dams, large-scale irrigation structures, etc, and salination and general soil quality was kept under control. In the brief period of political void and chaos after the rise of Islam and the fall of the Sassanids, a lot of the infrastructure basically went to the crapper. Large parts of Iraq became highly salinated and unfarmable. So, the locals brought in huge numbers (think not tens, but hundreds of thousands) of black African slaves (the Zanj) to tend the land and clean up the topsoil. A big revolt ensued that last roughly a decade. Parallels have been formed between this and the American south!
Actually Africa was ahead in some key respects. The Iron Age began in East Africa, for instance.
That's highly speculative. It does seem that parts of sub-Saharan Africa (for "civilizational" usages, North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa are totally different) had iron smelting early on, but that's also an uncertain point. Secondly, when you say the "Iron Age began" I take it to mean that you belive iron technology spread from an initial invention in Africa to elsewhere? I don't think I've ever seen that claimed before? Where in East Africa are you talking about?
Most importantly, for the Eurocentric racist crowd, all the key technological developments that put Europe at the top of the heap came from elsewhere
I've always thought that the most important European technologies were forms of government and economics (specifically many of the banking innovations of the Italian traders and others such as the Dutch). It's not an accident that Venice and Genoa were at the center of so much action. The Printing Press was also of almost inestimable importance, and imho, a purely "indigenous" invention (if not purely indigenous, certainly purely indigenous in form and function--it's possible, though I believe highly unlikely, that the idea for movable type propagated from China). I also would put up the octant as one of the seminal inventions to come out of Europe. And clocks? All those things that made exploring the rest of the world possible (or at least, far more likely to succeed). And Calculus?
While Europeans were basically still at the "savage" stage, Mesopotomia, the Nile, the Indian subcontinent and China were spawning the first literate urban societies with the basic features of what we would call civilizations.
You're perhaps a bit out of date on your European historiography, but I would in essence agree with you.
It's a very good theory (I assume you're alluding to the 19th century Hydraulic Empires theory?) and one that imho goes a long way to explaining things, but are you really saying that sub-Saharan Africa doesn't have any great rivers akin to the other "cradles"? Any suitable areas for large-scale agriculture? Any areas where agriculture isn't more affective than being a hunter-gatherer? I don't think that's true at all and it also doesn't jibe with African history.
We know, for instance, that say 7000+ years ago, much of the area today that is the Sahara was substantially wetter than it is today. We know there was agriculture there. We know than since then, and up to the present, there has been indigenous agriculture in West Africa and farther south. The Bantu peoples and population movement are known to have relied on agriculture. Madagascar has had large scale agriculture. Traders--since the days of the Egyptians, the Romans, Arab traders, and most recently Europeans--have been a constant factor in the west and the east. Granted the interior of the African continent was pretty isolated from the rest of the world until very recently.
Why no sub-Saharan people ever developed a written language? I don't know. I don't have an explanation. Africa is a big continent and had (has) highly varying civilizations. When the Europeans explorers started systematically mapping and categorizing, they found both stone age (ie, nothing more advanced than stone tools) peoples and peoples with advanced agriculture, iron, etc.
Is it less advanced to live in sustainable balance with your environment than to rape and conquer it (and other cultures)?
Let's see how our "advanced" culture looks 75.000 years from now.
What an utterly stupid comment. I've read a lot of dumb comments on slashdot, but... wow, yours might just be the stupidest thing I've read on the Internet.
First, yes, a culture that never invented writing or the wheel is not advanced, and is markedly less advanced than ones that discovered electricity, writing, forms of societal representation beyond "tribe," compasses, sextants, printing presses, base 10, windmills, aqueducts, gunpowder (I'm trying to pick a wide range of innovations from around the globe here, in case it wasn't obvious) or ones that built pyramids, dams, palaces, walls, houses, etc. I honestly can't see how any remotely rational person would even try to claim otherwise.
Secondly, and what really makes your post stupid, what on earth makes you believe that the Australian aborigines "live[d] in sustainable balance with [their] enviromnent [and didn't] rape and conquered...other cultures"? It's widely believed that aborigines caused the extinction of many species! http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/990/aborigines-blamed-big-mammal-extinction! So much for sustainability! Likewise, not only was warfare between aboriginal peoples very common, so was cannibalism.
But really, why let facts stand in the way of your Green Religion that makes being an allegedly noble savage with a small carbon footprint the ideal human life?
Like I said, it completely depends on what your expectation of AI is.
I also think you're completely wrong in your characterizations of some of these technologies. If, for example, Roombas and the Roomba AI are just a "highschool science project" it just goes to show how far along robotics has come and what we take for granted in terms of autonomous capabilities. Voice recognition is hugely improved and a common features on cars and cell phones. Plenty of people fail at basic things like what country is XYZ in. The way you so easily trivialize some fantastic achievements shows how much more we've come to expect from AI. It's barely been 5 years that a computer was able to beat the best human at chess.
When it comes down to it, what is intelligence beyond "brute force calculation" and "pattern matching"?
The AI fantasies of the 60s/70s may not have panned out at all (eg, your reaction -- "computer intelligence doesn't look/sound to me like human intelligence and so, is a failure and never going to happen") but the foundations of AI have given up some really important technologies. AI is search! Marvin Minsky might possibly be disappointed today, but AI has been so important in so many areas.
Also seems ludicrous to say that because we haven't yet written a program (or invented a program that writes a program that develops into a program...) that meets a human-esque form of AI, that one will never exist.
I was at an amusement park years ago standing in line for a roller coaster. In front of me was a dad and a teenage son that appeared to be more or less your typical rednecks. Nascar shirts, kid had a rat tail, heavily accented, etc. They were having one hell of a nerdy conversation about a recent episode of TNG. Can't judge a book by its cover (ok, sometimes you can)...
Really has to do with what you mean by AI. If you mean general reasoning machine, no we're not anywhere close.
If you are talking about solving certain domains of knowledge, AI is around us every day and doing very well! Jeopardy playing, chess solving, spam classifying, robot vacuuming, voice recognition, etc., are all some of the more visible expressions of AI.
It's not really fair to call prototyping your functions a "workaround" -- that's how the language was designed. Personally, I do think that it's a good thing. Think of header files as defining the "interface." Wasn't pascal lauded as a language for requiring strict prototyping of functions and variables as an organizational requirement? Even if you absolutely hate that you're supposed to prototype your functions, at its absolute worst what does it cause? It adds one line of code. (and just so I'm clear, I'm talking primarily about C -- I do not consider myself a c++/stl/expert or even remotely-knowledgeable at all. I am, in fact not a C++ fan)
No doubt there are many cross-platform hacks that rely on macros...some ugly (some very ugly!)! I'm not sure that their existence proves how "brittle" the macro system is--perhaps the opposite?
Yes, C is an old language. The fact that it remains so successful--and extremely relevant today--is a testament to its design simplicity. Will people be using python in 40 years? I doubt it. Look at how fast perl has faded as a popular language. Will people still being using C in 40 years? I would bet a lot that they will! I've used perl, python, php, and C in recent projects. Python -- at the moment -- is probably my language of choice. C remains a classic.
Hi, I'm not sure this is entirely accurate. I've just tested the below code in gcc with -Wall. The order of the prototypes (I'm assuming that's what you mean when you say "empty declaration" ?) doesn't matter--nor do the order of the function bodies. As long as the functions are properly prototyped, the order doesn't seem to matter at all (within a single file).
I'm not sure how that stacks with the official C or C99 spec, but that seems to work fine in practice with gcc. If you both completely remove the prototypes AND reference a function before it's defined AND use the -Wall flag, gcc does pop the warning: "warning: implicit declaration of function ‘bar’" -- but compiles just fine.
Doesn't seem like that big a deal to me at all. As long as you keep code organized into headers and libraries, what's the problem? I guess it can be a little annoying to have a header file and a code file for every library/translational unit/functional unit/whatever the proper term is, but it seems to me that it could encourage good design. As I believe you said, people have been doing this for 40 years.
Sample:
#include<stdio.h>
int bar(int); int foo(int);
int foo(int input) {
bar(input);
return input; }
int bar(int input) {
printf("Hello World!\n");
return input; }
C99 does not require #include files (or other form of declaring symbols defined in other translation units)? So what do you use instead?
The way I read the GP's complaint was complaining about variable declaration being mandatory at the top of a function, and also complaining about #includes. C99 allows things like "for(int i=0; i5; ++i)". I should have been more explicit in what I meant.
I'm having trouble parsing your reply? "C99 does not require #include files?" huh?
A lot of the basic tradeoffs made in its design are based on assumptions that are no longer true. An example: C's need to have everything declared in the same functional unit before use and reliance on preprocessor #includes. In 1970, saving compiler effort and putting this burden on the programmer rather than having a more complex system for resolving symbols may have been an acceptable tradeoff; with modern machines it's ridiculous. Many other C design decisions have been shown to cause problems, confusions, and common security-problem-inducing bugs.
You're aware this is in the C99 standard?
All this time, we've been writing almost all our most critical software with the same language K&R designed 40 years ago, or with something like C++ which inherits all its problems and none of its simplicity.
I agree with everyone else who says you're absolutely wrong. In common (American at least) English usage if you say something like "Here's hoping!" or "Did you get the part? I hope so!" and cross your fingers it means you're hoping for an outcome.
If you have your fingers crossed for another type of statement (typically obscuring them), it means you're lying. Typically children's usage.
I'm not sure you're thinking in the right direction. I personally can't STAND it when I get linked to a site and I get redirected to a mobile site and lose the link. Or the mobile site is severely functionally limited in comparison with the normal site. Or the "back" button doesn't work properly on mobile sites. Or the viewport is set so that I can't zoom in. This covers almost all the "mobile" sites out there. I almost always try to just browse on the regular site, but zealous webmasters often don't make that easy. Why on earth would I want to view a WAP page?! By ActionScript I assume you mean Flash? Over than really terrible restaurant websites, I don't miss Flash.
And yes, the iPhone does support MMS and has for... 2 years? 1.5 years? Sure they lagged in support, but it seems a strange criticism today.
Slashdot Mirror
Cheers, good talking to you.
But meanwhile the tech has been pushed, the rest of the US solar industry was boosted by Solyndra's research, spending and signal to other investors about the domestic industry.
That's quite an amazing belief. You may be the first person I've heard suggest that the Solyndra experience has been a net positive for the industry.
Solyndra's cronies, chiefly the Walmart's Walton family via Bush, lost a lot of money - that was spent in the US economy on tech jobs. There's a lot worse effects we could expect - and can see elsewhere. Not just in the energy industry that is actually changing, under pressure from the US government against vast resistance from the minority Republican Party and its corporate sponsors (like the Koch billionaires).
Just for what it's worth, when reading posts like yours, tossing out the bolded terms above just really makes me take your points less seriously. Evil Walmart, Evil Bush, Evil Koch brothers--the trinity! You can talk about being non-partisan all you want, but you sure seem to have the talking points down!
I mean, show me your posts about the hundreds of times more waste, fraud and theft as it was revealed in Iraq, and I'll take your absolutist stance against all corruption more seriously. But it'll still be naive to think that we'll remove corruption before we dethrone the petrofuel industry, rather than far easier after we have.
I actually worked for the government, in intelligence, for several years during the Iraq war. It was pathetic. I quit. Your feeling is that the "petrofuel industry" has some kind of connection to Iraq...? Interestingly enough I was reading an article in Time today that was discussing how very little business American oil companies had gotten out of Iraq.
As for the "eco-industrial complex", the term modeled after the "military-industrial complex", there is no such thing
So you're the arbiter of which terms exist and which don't? The term was used, ergo it exists. I responded to its existence. I accept that you don't like the term and think it's silly, but that's different from denying its existence.
There is no system of giant ecology corps buying patronage locked into the US economy by the government as an institution
Strongly disagree. Having spent some time with some talking to an academic who works in ecology (and heck, reading news), it's very evident that there is a lot of money--both government and corporate being tossed around right now in the "green" industries. Heck, Solyndra alone is a perfect example--a company that never made a profit (and never had a timeline for making a profit) and that the DOE recommended against funding. Sure, eco-industry funding may not be on the scale of the military/defense industry, but what's the issue. A lot of technology comes out of defense research as well (and historically this has absolutely been the case). Why is funding solyndra good, funding research defense bad?
Republican corruption and incompetence is terminal for this country
Change that to "political corruption and incompetence" and you might have a point.
It's crony-capitalism. I'm personally against that in ALL of its many varied forms. I realize that those who are driven more solely by partisan interests want for interest only their pet projects funded.
And incidentally, tax breaks are not the same thing as cheap federal loans rushed through because of various highrolling fundraising bundlers.
In any case, in case you weren't following the thread...somebody said something about eco-industrial complex. Somebody else said everything that person said was made up. I disagreed and explained how eco-industrial complex is perfectly legitimate (if military-industrial complex is legitimate). Next thing you you're coming down on be for listening to "Rush Limbo" and my bunched panties. That's one thing I can't stand about so many partisans--the complete hypocrisy. Corruption should be rooted out in ALL of its forms, not just those that don't benefit my special interests.
If you mean you don't see the quote -- "Great, the "eco-industrial complex" and "Big Green."
If you mean you don't get it, I thought it was abundantly obvious? In English usage the phrase "Military-Industrial Complex" refers to the relationship between the military, industry, and politics (politicians). That is, how politicians and special interests funnel funds to companies that contract to the military.
Likewise, given the coined term "eco-industrial complex," special interests lobbied politicians to get funds funneled to companies that are producing "green" products.
Makes sense?
Example? I would say the Amish, but can you supply any others?
Yeah, you're probably right... let's just say I was in a more vinegar than honey mood at the time!
Sure, read the post I replied to -- "eco-industrial complex"
Maybe you haven't heard of Solyndra?
In essence I agree with you (re: civility), but I honestly don't think anything I said was too harsh! Certainly nothing worse than came up in grad school discussions weekly. Ok, maybe calling his/her statement "the dumbest thing I've ever read on the Internet" was a bit harsh, but it might--literally!--just be the dumbest thing I've read on slashdot.
Your rebuttal is such that I believe you cannot respect the opinions of others
IMHO, opinions do not deserve respect. Opinions (and people) earn respect. Even more so on the anonymous Internet.
I also think you make a mistake -- the same one you accuse me of making -- "their remarks should not be taken out of context"). I've made this one as well. The mistake is thinking that you know somebody (or have some deep insight into their personality) from a post or two on slashdot. Everybody knows the rules of the Internet. If you don't want to be in a (possibly heated) discussion, don't post in the first place! Especially not with an aggressive (and ridiculously dumb -- the OP's that is) post.
Let me guess: you are European, which means you come from a culture that never invented the wheel, writing, civilization, base 10, gunpowder.
You know, when I specifically went out of my way to point out that I picked a selection of advancements from across the globe, it means you're not particularly clever for picking that point out! You're also wrong about writing and the wheel as well. (if not absolutely wrong, both are disputed)
And you are going to use that fact to judge an isolated culture trapped in a desert the size of the US that even today with modern technology still only maintains a population of a few million. How many hunters and gatherers did it support. Less than 1 million? A hundred thousand?
Ok, first let's clear up your misunderstandings. The population of Australia today is just shy of 22 million. That's hardly "a few million." We obviously don't know how many aborigines there were before European arrival, but hundreds of thousands definitely (probably short of a million). In many ways the climate in parts of Australia matches that of Mesopotamia, the Indus, Egypt, etc. Very dry climates where civilizations sprung up around water usage and what are in essence public works.
And you find it surprising that they didn't match the accomplishments of a continent that spans half the globe and today supports 4 billion people.
I don't think anybody expressed surprise. I was merely stating a fact--the Australian aborigines developed at a rate (and level) well behind that of most of the world. What are you so upset about? Do you disagree with my statement that Australian aboriginal culture is (was) considerably far behind many others globally?
Certainly possible that human agriculture helped lead to environmental shifts that made those areas less habitable... Having said that, all of those areas remain extremely fertile today. Sure, go 5 miles from the Nile and you'll be in the desert (in some places--some places it's a lot less than 5 miles!) but the banks are still very fertile and Egypt is very densely populated.
Salination of soil has been a problem as long as people have farmed, and will remain a problem as long people keep farming. It's a big problem, but one that is very possible to overcome! One relatively recent "macro" example I can think of is Zanj in Iraq (Zanj means "Black"). The Sassanid Empire had done a pretty good job of maintaining dams, large-scale irrigation structures, etc, and salination and general soil quality was kept under control. In the brief period of political void and chaos after the rise of Islam and the fall of the Sassanids, a lot of the infrastructure basically went to the crapper. Large parts of Iraq became highly salinated and unfarmable. So, the locals brought in huge numbers (think not tens, but hundreds of thousands) of black African slaves (the Zanj) to tend the land and clean up the topsoil. A big revolt ensued that last roughly a decade. Parallels have been formed between this and the American south!
Actually Africa was ahead in some key respects. The Iron Age began in East Africa, for instance.
That's highly speculative. It does seem that parts of sub-Saharan Africa (for "civilizational" usages, North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa are totally different) had iron smelting early on, but that's also an uncertain point. Secondly, when you say the "Iron Age began" I take it to mean that you belive iron technology spread from an initial invention in Africa to elsewhere? I don't think I've ever seen that claimed before? Where in East Africa are you talking about?
Most importantly, for the Eurocentric racist crowd, all the key technological developments that put Europe at the top of the heap came from elsewhere
I've always thought that the most important European technologies were forms of government and economics (specifically many of the banking innovations of the Italian traders and others such as the Dutch). It's not an accident that Venice and Genoa were at the center of so much action. The Printing Press was also of almost inestimable importance, and imho, a purely "indigenous" invention (if not purely indigenous, certainly purely indigenous in form and function--it's possible, though I believe highly unlikely, that the idea for movable type propagated from China). I also would put up the octant as one of the seminal inventions to come out of Europe. And clocks? All those things that made exploring the rest of the world possible (or at least, far more likely to succeed). And Calculus?
While Europeans were basically still at the "savage" stage, Mesopotomia, the Nile, the Indian subcontinent and China were spawning the first literate urban societies with the basic features of what we would call civilizations.
You're perhaps a bit out of date on your European historiography, but I would in essence agree with you.
The AC is probably referring to something like the "Hydraulic Empires" theory.
Mesopotamia. The Indus valley. Ancient Egypt. Andean civilizations.
These are places that aren't exactly temperate -- in fact, they're deserts!
It's a very good theory (I assume you're alluding to the 19th century Hydraulic Empires theory?) and one that imho goes a long way to explaining things, but are you really saying that sub-Saharan Africa doesn't have any great rivers akin to the other "cradles"? Any suitable areas for large-scale agriculture? Any areas where agriculture isn't more affective than being a hunter-gatherer? I don't think that's true at all and it also doesn't jibe with African history.
We know, for instance, that say 7000+ years ago, much of the area today that is the Sahara was substantially wetter than it is today. We know there was agriculture there. We know than since then, and up to the present, there has been indigenous agriculture in West Africa and farther south. The Bantu peoples and population movement are known to have relied on agriculture. Madagascar has had large scale agriculture. Traders--since the days of the Egyptians, the Romans, Arab traders, and most recently Europeans--have been a constant factor in the west and the east. Granted the interior of the African continent was pretty isolated from the rest of the world until very recently.
Why no sub-Saharan people ever developed a written language? I don't know. I don't have an explanation. Africa is a big continent and had (has) highly varying civilizations. When the Europeans explorers started systematically mapping and categorizing, they found both stone age (ie, nothing more advanced than stone tools) peoples and peoples with advanced agriculture, iron, etc.
Is it less advanced to live in sustainable balance with your environment than to rape and conquer it (and other cultures)?
Let's see how our "advanced" culture looks 75.000 years from now.
What an utterly stupid comment. I've read a lot of dumb comments on slashdot, but ... wow, yours might just be the stupidest thing I've read on the Internet.
First, yes, a culture that never invented writing or the wheel is not advanced, and is markedly less advanced than ones that discovered electricity, writing, forms of societal representation beyond "tribe," compasses, sextants, printing presses, base 10, windmills, aqueducts, gunpowder (I'm trying to pick a wide range of innovations from around the globe here, in case it wasn't obvious) or ones that built pyramids, dams, palaces, walls, houses, etc. I honestly can't see how any remotely rational person would even try to claim otherwise.
Secondly, and what really makes your post stupid, what on earth makes you believe that the Australian aborigines "live[d] in sustainable balance with [their] enviromnent [and didn't] rape and conquered...other cultures"? It's widely believed that aborigines caused the extinction of many species! http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/990/aborigines-blamed-big-mammal-extinction! So much for sustainability! Likewise, not only was warfare between aboriginal peoples very common, so was cannibalism.
But really, why let facts stand in the way of your Green Religion that makes being an allegedly noble savage with a small carbon footprint the ideal human life?
Like I said, it completely depends on what your expectation of AI is.
I also think you're completely wrong in your characterizations of some of these technologies. If, for example, Roombas and the Roomba AI are just a "highschool science project" it just goes to show how far along robotics has come and what we take for granted in terms of autonomous capabilities. Voice recognition is hugely improved and a common features on cars and cell phones. Plenty of people fail at basic things like what country is XYZ in. The way you so easily trivialize some fantastic achievements shows how much more we've come to expect from AI. It's barely been 5 years that a computer was able to beat the best human at chess.
When it comes down to it, what is intelligence beyond "brute force calculation" and "pattern matching"?
The AI fantasies of the 60s/70s may not have panned out at all (eg, your reaction -- "computer intelligence doesn't look/sound to me like human intelligence and so, is a failure and never going to happen") but the foundations of AI have given up some really important technologies. AI is search! Marvin Minsky might possibly be disappointed today, but AI has been so important in so many areas.
Also seems ludicrous to say that because we haven't yet written a program (or invented a program that writes a program that develops into a program...) that meets a human-esque form of AI, that one will never exist.
I was at an amusement park years ago standing in line for a roller coaster. In front of me was a dad and a teenage son that appeared to be more or less your typical rednecks. Nascar shirts, kid had a rat tail, heavily accented, etc. They were having one hell of a nerdy conversation about a recent episode of TNG. Can't judge a book by its cover (ok, sometimes you can)...
Really has to do with what you mean by AI. If you mean general reasoning machine, no we're not anywhere close.
If you are talking about solving certain domains of knowledge, AI is around us every day and doing very well! Jeopardy playing, chess solving, spam classifying, robot vacuuming, voice recognition, etc., are all some of the more visible expressions of AI.
It's not really fair to call prototyping your functions a "workaround" -- that's how the language was designed. Personally, I do think that it's a good thing. Think of header files as defining the "interface." Wasn't pascal lauded as a language for requiring strict prototyping of functions and variables as an organizational requirement? Even if you absolutely hate that you're supposed to prototype your functions, at its absolute worst what does it cause? It adds one line of code. (and just so I'm clear, I'm talking primarily about C -- I do not consider myself a c++/stl/expert or even remotely-knowledgeable at all. I am, in fact not a C++ fan)
No doubt there are many cross-platform hacks that rely on macros...some ugly (some very ugly!)! I'm not sure that their existence proves how "brittle" the macro system is--perhaps the opposite?
Yes, C is an old language. The fact that it remains so successful--and extremely relevant today--is a testament to its design simplicity. Will people be using python in 40 years? I doubt it. Look at how fast perl has faded as a popular language. Will people still being using C in 40 years? I would bet a lot that they will! I've used perl, python, php, and C in recent projects. Python -- at the moment -- is probably my language of choice. C remains a classic.
Hi, I'm not sure this is entirely accurate. I've just tested the below code in gcc with -Wall. The order of the prototypes (I'm assuming that's what you mean when you say "empty declaration" ?) doesn't matter--nor do the order of the function bodies. As long as the functions are properly prototyped, the order doesn't seem to matter at all (within a single file).
I'm not sure how that stacks with the official C or C99 spec, but that seems to work fine in practice with gcc. If you both completely remove the prototypes AND
reference a function before it's defined AND use the -Wall flag, gcc does pop the warning: "warning: implicit declaration of function ‘bar’" -- but compiles just fine.
Doesn't seem like that big a deal to me at all. As long as you keep code organized into headers and libraries, what's the problem? I guess it can be a little annoying to have a header file and a code file for every library/translational unit/functional unit/whatever the proper term is, but it seems to me that it could encourage good design. As I believe you said, people have been doing this for 40 years.
Sample:
#include<stdio.h>
int bar(int);
int foo(int);
int foo(int input)
{
bar(input);
return input;
}
int bar(int input)
{
printf("Hello World!\n");
return input;
}
int main(void)
{
return foo(0);
}
I see what you're saying (and maybe the OP was originally saying!) thanks for helping to clear up my understanding.
C99 does not require #include files (or other form of declaring symbols defined in other translation units)? So what do you use instead?
The way I read the GP's complaint was complaining about variable declaration being mandatory at the top of a function, and also complaining about #includes. C99 allows things like "for(int i=0; i5; ++i)". I should have been more explicit in what I meant.
I'm having trouble parsing your reply? "C99 does not require #include files?" huh?
A lot of the basic tradeoffs made in its design are based on assumptions that are no longer true. An example: C's need to have everything declared in the same functional unit before use and reliance on preprocessor #includes. In 1970, saving compiler effort and putting this burden on the programmer rather than having a more complex system for resolving symbols may have been an acceptable tradeoff; with modern machines it's ridiculous. Many other C design decisions have been shown to cause problems, confusions, and common security-problem-inducing bugs.
You're aware this is in the C99 standard?
All this time, we've been writing almost all our most critical software with the same language K&R designed 40 years ago, or with something like C++ which inherits all its problems and none of its simplicity.
That seems rather dramatic.
I agree with everyone else who says you're absolutely wrong. In common (American at least) English usage if you say something like "Here's hoping!" or "Did you get the part? I hope so!" and cross your fingers it means you're hoping for an outcome.
If you have your fingers crossed for another type of statement (typically obscuring them), it means you're lying. Typically children's usage.
I'm not sure you're thinking in the right direction. I personally can't STAND it when I get linked to a site and I get redirected to a mobile site and lose the link. Or the mobile site is severely functionally limited in comparison with the normal site. Or the "back" button doesn't work properly on mobile sites. Or the viewport is set so that I can't zoom in. This covers almost all the "mobile" sites out there. I almost always try to just browse on the regular site, but zealous webmasters often don't make that easy. Why on earth would I want to view a WAP page?! By ActionScript I assume you mean Flash? Over than really terrible restaurant websites, I don't miss Flash.
And yes, the iPhone does support MMS and has for ... 2 years? 1.5 years? Sure they lagged in support, but it seems a strange criticism today.