The python gc is reference counted (by default. A 'true' gc can be programmatically enabled). This means that the destructor is called at predictable spots, namely whenever the last instance of the object goes out of scope. Because it is predictable it can actually be useful to define it, for instance to manage resources. Caveat: when the program ends, no destructors are called. Caveat 2: a less-deterministic gc can be enabled at any spot in the code. Conclusion: destructors are of limited use, yet in some circumstances they do allow correct resource management using object scope instead of having to program that manually, something you need to do in languages with a full gc.
Then and now: Microsoft sucks because they use file extensions and if that doesn't execute they use file content and otherwise mime type.
MS seems to puts real effort into executing everything that you throw at it: "hmm, it doesn't end in.exe,.com,.bat,.pif, or what you may have. Ah, maybe it's a Word macro, let's try that. No that didn't work, but wait, let's see if it's a.wmf in drag and execute any code in that. Hmm, it still won't execute, I give up. " I'm really curious what people will come up next time around. Apart from binary files, batch files, scripts, html, word processing documents, spreadsheets and images: what other stuff could conceivably execute aribitrary code automatically under Windows?
You must be from the Java school of OO-thought. If you indeed get into the situation that much of your code is setter functions (getter functions don't matter, these don't hurt), you should seriously consider if you shouldn't actually be using structs instead of classes and a library of functions to manipulate these structs. I.e., write C-code instead of classes with members. Personally I use classes sparingly, usually in two cases: (a) when there is a clear invariant that needs to be maintained for the data. Member functions are supposed to hold this invariant, which means that setters are in general dissallowed. (b) for functors, even though C++ structs can do them as well. In the end, about 30% of my code ends up being class based code, the rest is algorithmic code: simple functions that use these classes (some of this algorithmic code does end up in a functor, but I don't really think that counts: the functor is a workaround for not having real closures.).
When I for instance look at the code 'window.width = 50', the principle of least surprise is violated (as is too often the case in C++ already). With properties I have to look at the header file to see if actually this action means that the window will be resized, or that it will happen after some 'window.update()' function is called. 'setwidth()' or 'width()' (or preferably, 'resize()') doesn't have this problem, I can safely assume that the window is resized. With properties in the mix this is not clear, as practically every assignment can actually mean a function call. This is the main issue with properties: with these floating around it becomes even less obvious what a piece of code does. I don't think they provide an improvement in syntax as they really obscure what is going on.
Ah, you mean that you have public variables in your classes?? And want the language to help you to dig yourself deeper in that hole? Good luck with programming, you need it.
class C {
T var_;
public:
const T& var() const;/* getter */
void var(const T&);/* setter */
};
All that this differs from properties is that instead of saying 'a = c.var;' you need to say 'a = c.var();', and instead of 'c.var = a;', you need to say 'c.var(a)'. Not much more typing and it's clear in the code that you're actually calling a member function.
Just a brief situation sketch. Microsoft has countless times used their monopoly in the OS market to gain a monopoly in a particular desktop applications market. This is illegal both according to US and EU law. They got convicted for this in an US court, but strangely enough only a token punishment was handed out. Because the US dropped the ball, the EU now demands from Microsoft that they make the interoperability specifications open so that a competition on the Windows desktop application market is possible. According to the current US administration, a free market on the Windows desktop is apparently not important. The EU thinks otherwise.
The funny thing is that if this were the US government handing out this exact punishment for this exact same reason, all boys here would applaud and say that it doesn't go far enough. Now it's a foreign government that does it and everyone screams that these bloody foreigners should keep their hands of 'their' company. Silly, but predictably patriotic.
Nah, what the EU wants is simply that non-MS desktop applications that run on windows have a level playing ground against MS desktop applications. Opening up the APIs is a first step to make that happen. The only strange thing is that the traditionally anti-trust and pro free market US doesn't seem to be interested in it anymore.
Let's fine pharmaceuticals that make price arrangements.
Let's fine former telecom monopolies for not opening up their network.
Let's fine rental corporations for abusing their position.
These, and much more of such fines are being put in place by the EU all the time to remove the trusts and government monopolies that have been plaguing the EU for a long time. Fining a random IT monopolist for leveraging its OS monopoly to kill the competition in the applications market is small fry. But necessary.
In this particular case, the US dropped the ball, and current policy suggest that the US has stopped pursuing free markets in favour of capitalism. This is not a contradiction, whatever the propaganda says. Free markets are extremely great, but easily disrupted, both by government and by business.
Indeed, it's not a capitalist move, it's a move to recreate a free market that is obliterated by capitalism. Capitalism is both a necessary condition and a big threat to a free market economy. It needs to be kept in check. The socialist governments of the EU and in particular that of the US (*) recognize this and therefore there is anti-trust legislation.
(*) well at least the previous 20 US administrations did.
Although I have compiled a kernel numerous time and I'm even quite proficient at C, I have never ever had to use my leet C skillz to be able to compile the kernel. There's this kernel howto that describes the exact steps and commands to type in, and for the rest it's just a matter of point and click at the features you want or don't want in the kernel. It's not rocket science, and arguably by far the most difficult thing to do on Linux.
The original meaning of Democracy is simply 'government by the people'. The ancient Athenians are the only ones that took this to the extreme and established a 'direct government by the people' (direct Democracy). This was indeed a powerful idea, but I fail to see why this would make any other form of government by the people an oxymoron. 'Government by representatives of the people', aka representative democracy, still qualifies as a democracy, as long as the representatives are elected and can be removed from power through an act of the people. Given that currently all democracies in the world are representative democracies, the Athenian sense of the word needs the "direct" qualification, while the standard meaning is understood to be "representative".
On the other hand, the first meaning of Republic in most (American) dictionaries is simply 'having an elected head of state'. Only the second lemma speaks of that particular meaning Americans are so fond of (took this from Merriam-Webster).
In the rest of the world, you know, there were monarchs still do exist, the first meaning is the one people understand as not just the main meaning, but the "only" meaning. My particular Dutch dictionary doesn't mention this second meaning for "republiek" (The Dutch had a (non-democratic) republic well before the US existed. But now we have a queen, sigh.).
It's kind of funny that you use the particular form of direct democracy that was implemented as the canonical 'Democracy', making all other forms an oxymoron, while you ignore that the canonical form of the 'Republic' was either the Platonic one (not representative), or the actual Roman Republic (also not representative).
Many countries in constitutional monarchies have republican movements, and those sure don't strive to establish a representative democracy there, simply because we already have one. I am also pretty sure the Queen of my country would be surprised to hear that she's the head of a republic. Now there's an oxymoron for you: a republican monarchy. According to your logic, they exist, and I live in one.
Even the US itself does not exclusively use this meaning: I'm pretty sure the Democratic party does not intend to establish a direct democracy in the US, and 'bringing democracy to the Middle-East' doesn't really mean that the US strives to establish an Athenian-style democracy there, right? Note that Saddam was head of a republic.
You do realize that Madison, to qualify his point, contrast his Republic idea with a 'pure Democracy'. He needs to qualify that as even in that time other type of democracies apparently were considered possible. Madison is excused however, as at that point it time there the concept of a non-absolute (i.e., constitutional) monarchy didn't exist. That came later. I'm pretty sure that Madison didn't even consider that a monarchy could *ever* become democratic. It has happened however and
ignoring that is a bit silly. My remarks are mainly to point out that when you use the word Republic in this particular (American) second sense for an international audience, they might actually not understand what you're saying. If you say: "The US is a republic, not a democracy," you might make an (pedantic) point to an American audience, yet a non-American will be confused as logically the only conclusion would be that you're stating that the US has become a dictatorship. This might be true, but is not really your intention, right?
That's the sloppiness:
expecting that the audience shares the exact background, while their meaning of the concept doesn't even include this secondary meaning of yours. With the rise of constitutional monarchies, this second meaning has become confusing and an oxymoron when applied to such forms of state. You'll be be better off to let this 18th century interpretation behind and enter the 21st where democracy in its representative form is firmly entrenched and even has overcome absolute monarchies.
As often, the Wiki is close enough to be useful, yet provides information that is just not quite there. Maybe I'll go ahead and change it, but from our side of the pond, with constitutional monarchies everywhere, we have resolved this issue a long time ago. "Our" political sciences simply speak of the form of government as a "Representative Democracy", which covers this particular meaning of 'Republic' without confusing it with the role of the head of state. All constitutional monarchies as well as democratic republics fall under the term.
"Representative Democracy" is often abbreviated to "Democracy", simply because there is no other form of Democracy that is currently in use on this earth. It seems to be an American thing to use "Republic" to mean "Representative Democracy". Sloppy.
Yours will work fine when you are dealing with a simple matrix stored in contiguous memory. The proxy is necessary if you want to cater for triangular matrices, diagonal matrices, and/or sparse matrices, and only want to store the (possibly) non-zero numbers.
class SmartArray { class SmartArrayProxy { SmartArray& data; int row; double operator[](int col);/* now we have row and col and can do our smart stuff */ };
Try making people more like computers, that would be a greater achievment, wouldnt it be nice to be part of a logical rational society ?
I think we're almost half-way there. The other day I asked our head office to burn an ISO on a CD for a customer and indeed, the customer got a CD with on it a single file: the aforementioned ISO. Rational behaviour at its finest.
That's always the issue, right? Wait and see, or doing something about a perceived threat. Was the y2k flop caused by an ill-conceived threat, or did the billions that were pumped into it actually do the trick? We will never find out. One thing is for sure though, once you see people in the US dropping left and right from this, you're too late and with a good chance (2.5-5%, see Spanish flu), you will die from it soon.
Re:Surely high lethality makes for SLOWER contagio
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 1
Maybe read up on the Spanish flu. If the thing gets airborne, it doesn't need large incubation times, a day or so is enough. Estimates are that the Spanish flu of 1918 killed 2.5-5% of the global population. People went to bed healthy and never woke up.
Just curious. Can you DO get out of the infinite regression that ID entails? I mean without saying: that's supernatural and thus cannot be understood? Or DO you mean that humans shuffling genes are supernatural too?
The problem is not that scientist conflicts with religion as a spiritual view of the world, but that it conflicts heavily with religion as a factual view of the world. This is where the conflict comes from. Science *is* about the factual view of the world, and anything inconsistent with the scientific view is deemed, duh, inconsistent and therefore most probably wrong.
Biblical literalism in particular presents such a blatantly naive and anti-scientific view of the world that confronted with that, many scientists will lapse into a dogmatic stance as it is clear that reason is beyond the adversary. There is no chance in hell that a literal view of the bible as a collection of facts can be made consistent with everything we know about physics, chemistry and biology. So anyone that claims that the Noah's ark was a historical fact is either ridiculed or ignored, and with good reason, as it is inconsistent with how we know stuff works.
It is important to note here that in the absence of truth, science does not lapse into faith, but lapses into the quest for consistency. Science can be wrong, and can be internally conflicting. Making it consistent again is called scientific progress. Marrying relativistic gravity and quantum mechanics into a consistent whole is one of the big open questions in physics. This speculative string-theory is an attempt. As biblical literalism doesn't seem to share the goals of consistency (as there is faith), there is no discourse possible between the two. Hence the battlefront. Science does not accept a competing theory of the world that does not abide the consistency rule, and biblical literalism doesn't accept a factual view of the world without faith in the big creator that made it all happen and the stories surrounding that creator.
Slashdot Mirror
And don't forget: Americorp produces the best democracy money can buy.
The python gc is reference counted (by default. A 'true' gc can be programmatically enabled). This means that the destructor is called at predictable spots, namely whenever the last instance of the object goes out of scope. Because it is predictable it can actually be useful to define it, for instance to manage resources. Caveat: when the program ends, no destructors are called. Caveat 2: a less-deterministic gc can be enabled at any spot in the code. Conclusion: destructors are of limited use, yet in some circumstances they do allow correct resource management using object scope instead of having to program that manually, something you need to do in languages with a full gc.
Wow, a hyperintelligent shade of blue! I'm impressed.
MS seems to puts real effort into executing everything that you throw at it: "hmm, it doesn't end in .exe, .com, .bat, .pif, or what you may have. Ah, maybe it's a Word macro, let's try that. No that didn't work, but wait, let's see if it's a .wmf in drag and execute any code in that. Hmm, it still won't execute, I give up. " I'm really curious what people will come up next time around. Apart from binary files, batch files, scripts, html, word processing documents, spreadsheets and images: what other stuff could conceivably execute aribitrary code automatically under Windows?
zandzeepsodemineraalwatersteenstralen
Doesn't really beat that Finnish jewel from parent in length, but makes up with it in meaning. It simply says: "get lost".
Other Dutch jewels:
Eight consonants in a row: angstschreeuw (cry of fear)
Seven vowels in a row: papagaaieieren (parrot eggs).
This last one might have gained an extra 'n' somewhere in some recent spelling reform.
When I for instance look at the code 'window.width = 50', the principle of least surprise is violated (as is too often the case in C++ already). With properties I have to look at the header file to see if actually this action means that the window will be resized, or that it will happen after some 'window.update()' function is called. 'setwidth()' or 'width()' (or preferably, 'resize()') doesn't have this problem, I can safely assume that the window is resized. With properties in the mix this is not clear, as practically every assignment can actually mean a function call. This is the main issue with properties: with these floating around it becomes even less obvious what a piece of code does. I don't think they provide an improvement in syntax as they really obscure what is going on.
Ah, you mean that you have public variables in your classes?? And want the language to help you to dig yourself deeper in that hole? Good luck with programming, you need it.
class C { T var_; public: const T& var() const; /* getter */
void var(const T&); /* setter */
};
All that this differs from properties is that instead of saying 'a = c.var;' you need to say 'a = c.var();', and instead of 'c.var = a;', you need to say 'c.var(a)'. Not much more typing and it's clear in the code that you're actually calling a member function.
Consider yourself arrested.
The funny thing is that if this were the US government handing out this exact punishment for this exact same reason, all boys here would applaud and say that it doesn't go far enough. Now it's a foreign government that does it and everyone screams that these bloody foreigners should keep their hands of 'their' company. Silly, but predictably patriotic.
Nah, what the EU wants is simply that non-MS desktop applications that run on windows have a level playing ground against MS desktop applications. Opening up the APIs is a first step to make that happen. The only strange thing is that the traditionally anti-trust and pro free market US doesn't seem to be interested in it anymore.
Let's fine pharmaceuticals that make price arrangements.
Let's fine former telecom monopolies for not opening up their network.
Let's fine rental corporations for abusing their position.
These, and much more of such fines are being put in place by the EU all the time to remove the trusts and government monopolies that have been plaguing the EU for a long time. Fining a random IT monopolist for leveraging its OS monopoly to kill the competition in the applications market is small fry. But necessary.
In this particular case, the US dropped the ball, and current policy suggest that the US has stopped pursuing free markets in favour of capitalism. This is not a contradiction, whatever the propaganda says. Free markets are extremely great, but easily disrupted, both by government and by business.
(*) well at least the previous 20 US administrations did.
Now hacking the registry! That's brave!
On the other hand, the first meaning of Republic in most (American) dictionaries is simply 'having an elected head of state'. Only the second lemma speaks of that particular meaning Americans are so fond of (took this from Merriam-Webster). In the rest of the world, you know, there were monarchs still do exist, the first meaning is the one people understand as not just the main meaning, but the "only" meaning. My particular Dutch dictionary doesn't mention this second meaning for "republiek" (The Dutch had a (non-democratic) republic well before the US existed. But now we have a queen, sigh.).
It's kind of funny that you use the particular form of direct democracy that was implemented as the canonical 'Democracy', making all other forms an oxymoron, while you ignore that the canonical form of the 'Republic' was either the Platonic one (not representative), or the actual Roman Republic (also not representative).
Many countries in constitutional monarchies have republican movements, and those sure don't strive to establish a representative democracy there, simply because we already have one. I am also pretty sure the Queen of my country would be surprised to hear that she's the head of a republic. Now there's an oxymoron for you: a republican monarchy. According to your logic, they exist, and I live in one.
Even the US itself does not exclusively use this meaning: I'm pretty sure the Democratic party does not intend to establish a direct democracy in the US, and 'bringing democracy to the Middle-East' doesn't really mean that the US strives to establish an Athenian-style democracy there, right? Note that Saddam was head of a republic.
You do realize that Madison, to qualify his point, contrast his Republic idea with a 'pure Democracy'. He needs to qualify that as even in that time other type of democracies apparently were considered possible. Madison is excused however, as at that point it time there the concept of a non-absolute (i.e., constitutional) monarchy didn't exist. That came later. I'm pretty sure that Madison didn't even consider that a monarchy could *ever* become democratic. It has happened however and ignoring that is a bit silly. My remarks are mainly to point out that when you use the word Republic in this particular (American) second sense for an international audience, they might actually not understand what you're saying. If you say: "The US is a republic, not a democracy," you might make an (pedantic) point to an American audience, yet a non-American will be confused as logically the only conclusion would be that you're stating that the US has become a dictatorship. This might be true, but is not really your intention, right?
That's the sloppiness: expecting that the audience shares the exact background, while their meaning of the concept doesn't even include this secondary meaning of yours. With the rise of constitutional monarchies, this second meaning has become confusing and an oxymoron when applied to such forms of state. You'll be be better off to let this 18th century interpretation behind and enter the 21st where democracy in its representative form is firmly entrenched and even has overcome absolute monarchies.
As often, the Wiki is close enough to be useful, yet provides information that is just not quite there. Maybe I'll go ahead and change it, but from our side of the pond, with constitutional monarchies everywhere, we have resolved this issue a long time ago. "Our" political sciences simply speak of the form of government as a "Representative Democracy", which covers this particular meaning of 'Republic' without confusing it with the role of the head of state. All constitutional monarchies as well as democratic republics fall under the term.
"Representative Democracy" is often abbreviated to "Democracy", simply because there is no other form of Democracy that is currently in use on this earth. It seems to be an American thing to use "Republic" to mean "Representative Democracy". Sloppy.
I'm sorry, but I live in a constitutional monarchy where our Queen is the head of state. Are you telling me I live in a republic?
Yours will work fine when you are dealing with a simple matrix stored in contiguous memory. The proxy is necessary if you want to cater for triangular matrices, diagonal matrices, and/or sparse matrices, and only want to store the (possibly) non-zero numbers.
Not true, check my previous post. With that, you can simply use a[i][j] as usual, and have your sparse operations as if it was a single function.
I think we're almost half-way there. The other day I asked our head office to burn an ISO on a CD for a customer and indeed, the customer got a CD with on it a single file: the aforementioned ISO. Rational behaviour at its finest.
That's always the issue, right? Wait and see, or doing something about a perceived threat. Was the y2k flop caused by an ill-conceived threat, or did the billions that were pumped into it actually do the trick? We will never find out. One thing is for sure though, once you see people in the US dropping left and right from this, you're too late and with a good chance (2.5-5%, see Spanish flu), you will die from it soon.
Maybe read up on the Spanish flu. If the thing gets airborne, it doesn't need large incubation times, a day or so is enough. Estimates are that the Spanish flu of 1918 killed 2.5-5% of the global population. People went to bed healthy and never woke up.
Just curious. Can you DO get out of the infinite regression that ID entails? I mean without saying: that's supernatural and thus cannot be understood? Or DO you mean that humans shuffling genes are supernatural too?
Biblical literalism in particular presents such a blatantly naive and anti-scientific view of the world that confronted with that, many scientists will lapse into a dogmatic stance as it is clear that reason is beyond the adversary. There is no chance in hell that a literal view of the bible as a collection of facts can be made consistent with everything we know about physics, chemistry and biology. So anyone that claims that the Noah's ark was a historical fact is either ridiculed or ignored, and with good reason, as it is inconsistent with how we know stuff works.
It is important to note here that in the absence of truth, science does not lapse into faith, but lapses into the quest for consistency. Science can be wrong, and can be internally conflicting. Making it consistent again is called scientific progress. Marrying relativistic gravity and quantum mechanics into a consistent whole is one of the big open questions in physics. This speculative string-theory is an attempt. As biblical literalism doesn't seem to share the goals of consistency (as there is faith), there is no discourse possible between the two. Hence the battlefront. Science does not accept a competing theory of the world that does not abide the consistency rule, and biblical literalism doesn't accept a factual view of the world without faith in the big creator that made it all happen and the stories surrounding that creator.
Faith or consistency, that's the real choice.