Sarcastic? Probably, though sceptic mostly. I don't think that meeting the problem head on is a solution. At least not in this way. If the intention is to bring stability to the Arab world (and I'm sceptic that this is the goal of the leaders of the free world), it takes at least a generation to get some initial effect. So I'm highly sceptical that founding a democracy in Iraq or any other Arab country is feasible before 2035. Reason for this is that a democracy depends on a well-off middle class that has at least some semblance of an education and is (thus?) capable of making valid choices.
The problem I tried to signal is that in the Arab world at large, fundamentalist education is the norm, not the exception and has been so for the last generation. This means that all people below 30 have been educated in a strict belief in the Koran, not in anything as tangible as critical thinking. This is not a good feeding ground for a democracy.
But okay, this is the Arab world at large. Iraq is a special case, as there religious fundamentalism was always least rampant. However, in that country, after a good start in the 60s and 70s, the war with Iran (the first gulf war), and the two following wars with the US has lead to another lost generation of people that have hardly any education at all.
This is what the US is fighting with now. The older generations are quite sensible, and all they want is a bit of security, but the generation that is supposed to build up the country has no education to speak off and can be thus be influenced by whomever makes most popular claims. So, if the US is serious about bringing democracy to the Arab world through Iraq, be prepared to be there with a large military presence for the next 30 years, and outright hostility during at the very least 10 years.
My guess is that it takes that amount of time to get a self-sustaining democracy going in such a land (note that both Germany and Japan had a middle class that had something to gain from a democracy). I am however sceptical as I don't see American politics being capable of swallowing continuous losses for the next 10 years, and pouring money into the country at the same time.
Oh no, you don't seem to understand. The first thing to do is to tell our friendly governments in the Arab world (this only excludes Syria and Lybia and possibly Tunisia at this point) that this whole idea of transforming actual education to a fundamentalist religious training was a tremendously bad idea of us.
We know, we've told them for thirty years that this was the only way to counter the socialist menace that was threatening peace, but we can change our minds, can't we?
Currently, the level of education in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, etc. is appalling. Students are required to spend more than half of their time studying the Koran, this includes technical education. This indeed to quell any thought of a fairer form of government (read: socialism). Unfortunately, this backfired, and now the Arab world is stuck with a generation of people that have no education whatsoever and are striving for the reformation of government based upon the principles of the Koran. Well, they did follow our suggestions.
Trouble is, even if we do start to educate, with a well educated population, they might want to try socialism again, because face it, USA style capitalism is not something most people want. At least, I do not know of any stable democracy that implements it even close to the American way.
typedef struct _list { int p;// no pointer! struct _list* next; } mylist;
and
pnew->p = i;
With your old version I got for the list (20000 items):
real 0m2.967s user 0m2.930s sys 0m0.000s
While for the vector I got:
real 0m0.714s user 0m0.700s sys 0m0.000s
While with the modifications above I get for the list:
real 0m0.549s user 0m0.490s sys 0m0.000s
Conclusion: a extra 20000 unneccesary allocations can hurt a lot! Indeed, if the list grows much larger than this, performance gets killed by the loop for traversing to the middle of the list, which is certainly slower than the buffered re-allocations and copies that the ustl vector needs to do (timings: 17 seconds for vector, 1 minute 12 for list). I also ran a test for inserting at the front (back for vector) and there the differences in speed are negligable with a slight advantage for the list.
Now for the counterexample: replace the 'int' data with 'struct block { char b[1000]; };' in your code. Thus both the vector and the list will manipulate 'block' instead of 'int' (*). For the limited number of iterations of 10000 I get the following timings:
list:
real 0m2.462s user 0m2.380s sys 0m0.050s
vector
real 0m52.467s user 0m50.360s sys 0m0.140s
And here the copying (purposefully made difficult for paging), kills the vector
So no, the conclusion that array are always better than linked lists is not warranted. You also might want to consider that in some applications you want to ensure that you can keep pointers to your elements that are not invalidated by insertions and deletions. This is a guarantee that (in general) a vector cannot give.
(*) Lamelessness filter dissallows me posting the actual code. It seems to contain to many junk characters. Hell! It wasn't even Perl!
I also don't think there's much wrong with the electoral vote, except the sillyness of giving all electoral vote to the winner only. As is done in two states now currently, simply distribute the votes proportional to the number of votes a candidate got. This maintains all the advantages of an electoral college and gets rid of the idea of 'swing states'. There would be quite a number of swing votes to fight for. With this, going out and voting for Kerry in Idaho would make sense, even though voting Bush in DC would be useless.
I live in a union with 20 odd sovereign nations that has 100 million more people than the US. None of them fuck up so badly as even your better states. Come on, election is not rocket science, there is no need whatsoever to have people waiting in line for hours other than out of sheer malice. You do not need foreign mailed in votes (just open up the embassy and do the counting there). You do not need a completely separate registration process to vote.
You definitively do not need provisional ballots with a simpler registration procedure. You do not need to vote for twenty things at the same time as the presidential election simply because you did so when people had to make a three day trip to vote. You can break with your tradition that was born in the 18th century, just use your brains.
I don't think the distinction is theoretical, but highly practical. Even with the most dumbed down voting process you will still encounter measurement error, and a fair election process (especially winner takes all) needs to take measurement error into consideration in some form. Even with perfect counting and a flawless election process, significant error rates are to be expected. Trying to bring such error rates to zero is impossible, making a sound decision in the presence of such error rates is.
The less than 1,000 vote difference in Florida, New Mexico and a few other states in the last election are more likely to be statistical flukes than an accurate measurement of the will of the people. The supreme court decided to go with the coin flip that was the vote count. That's the lazy way out.
By this reasoning, there is not a single democracy on the planet. There are republics (USA, France, China, Russia, Syria, North Korea, Iran, Lybia, Italy), monarchies (England, Netherlands, Denmark, Jordan, Saudi-Arabia, Marocco) and anarchies (Somalia, Iraq). That's it.
But also we have plenty of democracies (USA, France, England, Netherlands, Denmark), a few communists (North Korea), feudals (Saudi-Arabia, Marocco, Jordan), theocracies (Iran), basic dictatorships (Lybia, Syria), anarchies (Iraq, Somalia), and a new form I call media-cracies (made this one up to describe Italy and Russia. US might qualify here as well, but not sure.).
In any case, I live in a constitutional monarchy in which electoral power is given to the people and the decision making power is given to the elected officials. We call this a representative democracy, in contrast with a direct democracy (the ancient Greek ideal), not a republic, as our head of state is a queen, not a president.
As I tried to say somewhere else in this page, but hopefully a bit better this time, even without sampling error there are possibilities of error. The crucial thing to understand is that the vote count is a measurement of the voter's intention to support a candidate. As such it is subject to measurement error. This error is a function of voter's IQ, difficulty of the ballot, loud distracting noises, angry people queueing, stuff like that. This one is unavoidable, though can be minimized by good education of the voters, designing good ballots, and getting rid of as many distractions as possible. Even then there will be measurement error and differences that lie within it should not be taken.
What you're missing is that it's not the votes that are important. The votes are simply a reflection of the intention of the voter. In the process of making intention into a vote you have an error rate that is a function of the general IQ of the voters, the amount of time the voter has, the complexity of the ballot, the amount of loud music in the room, etc., etc., etc. This error is not effectively zero, so even thought the precision of counting votes can be effectively zero, there is still an error rate.
Nah, I doubt it. The world at that point was pretty racist. France for instance was just as much antisemite as Germany at that point, sometimes even more so. British ruling class was quite infatuated with the strong man Hitler. Also Times magazine elected Hitler as man of the year in 1938, a few months before the war broke out. All in all, there was too much admiration for the fascists in the western world to take decisive action, and quite a few subscribed to their view of the world.
This only changed when they started attacking anything non-German. There were plenty of people who saw the dangers quite clearly, but the rulers were definitely not among them.
[pedantic mode on]
That's a bit too generic: in the British parliamentary system this is generally true. In a proportional parliamentary system this is often but not necessarily always the case. There the prime minister is usually the leader of the largest party that forms the current coalition. With proportional voting only very seldomly a single party holds the majority, so the country is governed by two or even three parties. The British system is an exception as their vote is based on districts, where winner takes all. This usually ensures a majority for a single party.
[pedantic mode off].
Simple answer: new elections. Scrap the candidates that are definitely not elected and let the remaining candidates fight it out in another voting round. This until the margin is larger than the error rate.
In the Florida case (and New Mexico and a few others), it was clear that given the level of inaccuracy (dimpled chads, confusing ballots, people turned down at the voting booth, people too stupid to vote according to their intentions, machine trouble, counting troubles), the votes themselves were not
reliable enough to use as a decision. In such a situation recounting does not solve the issue, only another election round can.
Sorry, wrong example.
You seem to having the whole CO2 thing backwards. We first had a causal explanation how CO2 could lead to global warming (i.e., the greenhouse effect). I hope you're not questioning that this causal effect actually works in small scale -- an actual greenhouse -- as there seems to be quite a few greenhouses that use it to keep warm. Note that this is quite different from the game in question here, where the causative link still needs to be established.
The causal explanation on a global scale was first forwarded in in the late 19th century by Swedish chemist and 1903 Nobel Laureate Svante Arrhenius, largely as an attempt to explain ice ages. At the time his peers largely rejected his theory. So the hypothesis is about a century old, and the data on which the correlations are based is also a century old. You might want to try another example to make your point, because although there is still ground to question the validity of the greenhouse effect on a global scale (does the effect scale up?), there is currently more evidence (both statistical and causative) that points to the existence than to the non-existence of the effect. It's definitely not absolutely certain that it is the case, but probable enough to try to reduce CO2 emissions.
Once the economic power is gone, the military power will dwindle away soon as well. Unless of course you start a world war, but we're still a few decades away from that, I hope.
Not sure about that, I guess that if it moves it is already compiled, but maybe: if it moves, kill it, get the blueprint and recompile it with the wrong options, making sure it never speeds again.
Slash drug-prices, invest half of the earnings in University drug research; let companies use the outcome of drug research for free but without exclusivity. Problem solved.
Au contraire. With IP laws there is nothing stopping Microsoft/Compaq/IBM etc from taking your software/idea, and sell it (forget about them claiming it is theirs, they don't care). Imagine you have a small product, centered around your invention. Here comes the IBM lawyer, together with a truckload of patents you are violating (you're writing software, so you are neccessarily violating a couple of hundred of patents). The lawyer can instantly shut-down your business, or, if he's in a benevolent mood, suggest cross-licensing. There you are, small investor who paid a couple of thousand K for a patent, having nothing to show for it. How are you protected?
And silly me always thinking that you cannot protect ideas. You can protect expression (copyright), you can protect machine (patent), and you can protect name (trademark), however you can and should not be able to protect ideas. That's just silly.
That this is happening anyway is sad. Sadder still is that people are buying into it: "Hey, I thought of this first, it's mine, all mine!".
To figure out why owning ideas is bad is left as an exercise to the reader.
In TFA it was stated that the author died in 1949, international copyright expired in 1999, but US copyright (thanks to Bono act) will expire in 2019 or never (whichever has deeper pockets).
Oh, and I forgot. The outright treason of both the US and the UK after the first Gulf War where they first asked the Shiites to rebel and then allowed Saddam to put down the Shiite rebellion with massive force is obviously forgiven and forgotten.
As far as I can see, the South has more reasons to hate the occupants than the north.
Dear coward. I'm sorry, but you seem to be suggesting that the trouble the US occupation is in at this moment is caused by a desire of the Sunnite population to get Saddam back in power. That just doesn't swing, or is this liberation argument of your government a lie now as well?
So you claim there's no causation between the behaviour of occupying troups and the amount of resistance they will encounter? There's quite some historical evidence for that. Oh, here's a recent link.
The story is inspired by the request of the American troops for the British to take care of some territory for them while they attack Faluja. There's a whole lot of resistance in Britain for covering for 'incompetent assholes whose only sense of decency is to kick in doors instead of blowing them up'. Yes, this is a journalist describing the American troops (no link for this, local newspaper).
c) Teach them how to establish peace next to winning a war.
The most telling footage I saw about this was just a week after the open warfare ceased. On my network I first saw a British roadblock in Basra where the soldiers didn't wear helmets and had their guns on their back. The day after that I saw footage from an American roadblock in Bagdad with the soldiers in full army gear, wearing helmets and with their guns pointed at anyone who approached. That moment convinced me that the American troops were in considerable trouble as they didn't seem to have the slightest clue on how to approach a benevolent occupation. The British soldiers took the risk of being friendly, the Americans hid behind their firepower. Currently the Basra area is considerably less hostile than the Bagdad area.
You reap what you sow.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem I tried to signal is that in the Arab world at large, fundamentalist education is the norm, not the exception and has been so for the last generation. This means that all people below 30 have been educated in a strict belief in the Koran, not in anything as tangible as critical thinking. This is not a good feeding ground for a democracy.
But okay, this is the Arab world at large. Iraq is a special case, as there religious fundamentalism was always least rampant. However, in that country, after a good start in the 60s and 70s, the war with Iran (the first gulf war), and the two following wars with the US has lead to another lost generation of people that have hardly any education at all.
This is what the US is fighting with now. The older generations are quite sensible, and all they want is a bit of security, but the generation that is supposed to build up the country has no education to speak off and can be thus be influenced by whomever makes most popular claims. So, if the US is serious about bringing democracy to the Arab world through Iraq, be prepared to be there with a large military presence for the next 30 years, and outright hostility during at the very least 10 years. My guess is that it takes that amount of time to get a self-sustaining democracy going in such a land (note that both Germany and Japan had a middle class that had something to gain from a democracy). I am however sceptical as I don't see American politics being capable of swallowing continuous losses for the next 10 years, and pouring money into the country at the same time.
We know, we've told them for thirty years that this was the only way to counter the socialist menace that was threatening peace, but we can change our minds, can't we?
Currently, the level of education in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, etc. is appalling. Students are required to spend more than half of their time studying the Koran, this includes technical education. This indeed to quell any thought of a fairer form of government (read: socialism). Unfortunately, this backfired, and now the Arab world is stuck with a generation of people that have no education whatsoever and are striving for the reformation of government based upon the principles of the Koran. Well, they did follow our suggestions.
Trouble is, even if we do start to educate, with a well educated population, they might want to try socialism again, because face it, USA style capitalism is not something most people want. At least, I do not know of any stable democracy that implements it even close to the American way.
and
With your old version I got for the list (20000 items):
While for the vector I got:
While with the modifications above I get for the list:
Conclusion: a extra 20000 unneccesary allocations can hurt a lot! Indeed, if the list grows much larger than this, performance gets killed by the loop for traversing to the middle of the list, which is certainly slower than the buffered re-allocations and copies that the ustl vector needs to do (timings: 17 seconds for vector, 1 minute 12 for list). I also ran a test for inserting at the front (back for vector) and there the differences in speed are negligable with a slight advantage for the list.
Now for the counterexample: replace the 'int' data with 'struct block { char b[1000]; };' in your code. Thus both the vector and the list will manipulate 'block' instead of 'int' (*). For the limited number of iterations of 10000 I get the following timings:
list:
vector
And here the copying (purposefully made difficult for paging), kills the vector
So no, the conclusion that array are always better than linked lists is not warranted. You also might want to consider that in some applications you want to ensure that you can keep pointers to your elements that are not invalidated by insertions and deletions. This is a guarantee that (in general) a vector cannot give.
(*) Lamelessness filter dissallows me posting the actual code. It seems to contain to many junk characters. Hell! It wasn't even Perl!
I also don't think there's much wrong with the electoral vote, except the sillyness of giving all electoral vote to the winner only. As is done in two states now currently, simply distribute the votes proportional to the number of votes a candidate got. This maintains all the advantages of an electoral college and gets rid of the idea of 'swing states'. There would be quite a number of swing votes to fight for. With this, going out and voting for Kerry in Idaho would make sense, even though voting Bush in DC would be useless.
I live in a union with 20 odd sovereign nations that has 100 million more people than the US. None of them fuck up so badly as even your better states. Come on, election is not rocket science, there is no need whatsoever to have people waiting in line for hours other than out of sheer malice. You do not need foreign mailed in votes (just open up the embassy and do the counting there). You do not need a completely separate registration process to vote. You definitively do not need provisional ballots with a simpler registration procedure. You do not need to vote for twenty things at the same time as the presidential election simply because you did so when people had to make a three day trip to vote. You can break with your tradition that was born in the 18th century, just use your brains.
The less than 1,000 vote difference in Florida, New Mexico and a few other states in the last election are more likely to be statistical flukes than an accurate measurement of the will of the people. The supreme court decided to go with the coin flip that was the vote count. That's the lazy way out.
But also we have plenty of democracies (USA, France, England, Netherlands, Denmark), a few communists (North Korea), feudals (Saudi-Arabia, Marocco, Jordan), theocracies (Iran), basic dictatorships (Lybia, Syria), anarchies (Iraq, Somalia), and a new form I call media-cracies (made this one up to describe Italy and Russia. US might qualify here as well, but not sure.).
In any case, I live in a constitutional monarchy in which electoral power is given to the people and the decision making power is given to the elected officials. We call this a representative democracy, in contrast with a direct democracy (the ancient Greek ideal), not a republic, as our head of state is a queen, not a president.
As I tried to say somewhere else in this page, but hopefully a bit better this time, even without sampling error there are possibilities of error. The crucial thing to understand is that the vote count is a measurement of the voter's intention to support a candidate. As such it is subject to measurement error. This error is a function of voter's IQ, difficulty of the ballot, loud distracting noises, angry people queueing, stuff like that. This one is unavoidable, though can be minimized by good education of the voters, designing good ballots, and getting rid of as many distractions as possible. Even then there will be measurement error and differences that lie within it should not be taken.
What you're missing is that it's not the votes that are important. The votes are simply a reflection of the intention of the voter. In the process of making intention into a vote you have an error rate that is a function of the general IQ of the voters, the amount of time the voter has, the complexity of the ballot, the amount of loud music in the room, etc., etc., etc. This error is not effectively zero, so even thought the precision of counting votes can be effectively zero, there is still an error rate.
Good one, I've got another one for your list:
"Why didn't the Iraqi population try to understand the American hatred of them both in 1991 and 2003".
Nah, I doubt it. The world at that point was pretty racist. France for instance was just as much antisemite as Germany at that point, sometimes even more so. British ruling class was quite infatuated with the strong man Hitler. Also Times magazine elected Hitler as man of the year in 1938, a few months before the war broke out. All in all, there was too much admiration for the fascists in the western world to take decisive action, and quite a few subscribed to their view of the world. This only changed when they started attacking anything non-German. There were plenty of people who saw the dangers quite clearly, but the rulers were definitely not among them.
[pedantic mode on]
That's a bit too generic: in the British parliamentary system this is generally true. In a proportional parliamentary system this is often but not necessarily always the case. There the prime minister is usually the leader of the largest party that forms the current coalition. With proportional voting only very seldomly a single party holds the majority, so the country is governed by two or even three parties. The British system is an exception as their vote is based on districts, where winner takes all. This usually ensures a majority for a single party.
[pedantic mode off].
In the Florida case (and New Mexico and a few others), it was clear that given the level of inaccuracy (dimpled chads, confusing ballots, people turned down at the voting booth, people too stupid to vote according to their intentions, machine trouble, counting troubles), the votes themselves were not reliable enough to use as a decision. In such a situation recounting does not solve the issue, only another election round can.
You seem to having the whole CO2 thing backwards. We first had a causal explanation how CO2 could lead to global warming (i.e., the greenhouse effect). I hope you're not questioning that this causal effect actually works in small scale -- an actual greenhouse -- as there seems to be quite a few greenhouses that use it to keep warm. Note that this is quite different from the game in question here, where the causative link still needs to be established.
The causal explanation on a global scale was first forwarded in in the late 19th century by Swedish chemist and 1903 Nobel Laureate Svante Arrhenius, largely as an attempt to explain ice ages. At the time his peers largely rejected his theory. So the hypothesis is about a century old, and the data on which the correlations are based is also a century old. You might want to try another example to make your point, because although there is still ground to question the validity of the greenhouse effect on a global scale (does the effect scale up?), there is currently more evidence (both statistical and causative) that points to the existence than to the non-existence of the effect. It's definitely not absolutely certain that it is the case, but probable enough to try to reduce CO2 emissions.
Once the economic power is gone, the military power will dwindle away soon as well. Unless of course you start a world war, but we're still a few decades away from that, I hope.
Not sure about that, I guess that if it moves it is already compiled, but maybe: if it moves, kill it, get the blueprint and recompile it with the wrong options, making sure it never speeds again.
So all cities in the US have 100MB fiber to house?
Slash drug-prices, invest half of the earnings in University drug research; let companies use the outcome of drug research for free but without exclusivity. Problem solved.
Au contraire. With IP laws there is nothing stopping Microsoft/Compaq/IBM etc from taking your software/idea, and sell it (forget about them claiming it is theirs, they don't care).
Imagine you have a small product, centered around your invention. Here comes the IBM lawyer, together with a truckload of patents you are violating (you're writing software, so you are neccessarily violating a couple of hundred of patents). The lawyer can instantly shut-down your business, or, if he's in a benevolent mood, suggest cross-licensing. There you are, small investor who paid a couple of thousand K for a patent, having nothing to show for it. How are you protected?
That this is happening anyway is sad. Sadder still is that people are buying into it: "Hey, I thought of this first, it's mine, all mine!".
To figure out why owning ideas is bad is left as an exercise to the reader.
In TFA it was stated that the author died in 1949, international copyright expired in 1999, but US copyright (thanks to Bono act) will expire in 2019 or never (whichever has deeper pockets).
As far as I can see, the South has more reasons to hate the occupants than the north.
Dear coward. I'm sorry, but you seem to be suggesting that the trouble the US occupation is in at this moment is caused by a desire of the Sunnite population to get Saddam back in power. That just doesn't swing, or is this liberation argument of your government a lie now as well?
So you claim there's no causation between the behaviour of occupying troups and the amount of resistance they will encounter? There's quite some historical evidence for that. Oh, here's a recent link. The story is inspired by the request of the American troops for the British to take care of some territory for them while they attack Faluja. There's a whole lot of resistance in Britain for covering for 'incompetent assholes whose only sense of decency is to kick in doors instead of blowing them up'. Yes, this is a journalist describing the American troops (no link for this, local newspaper).
c) Teach them how to establish peace next to winning a war.
The most telling footage I saw about this was just a week after the open warfare ceased. On my network I first saw a British roadblock in Basra where the soldiers didn't wear helmets and had their guns on their back. The day after that I saw footage from an American roadblock in Bagdad with the soldiers in full army gear, wearing helmets and with their guns pointed at anyone who approached. That moment convinced me that the American troops were in considerable trouble as they didn't seem to have the slightest clue on how to approach a benevolent occupation. The British soldiers took the risk of being friendly, the Americans hid behind their firepower. Currently the Basra area is considerably less hostile than the Bagdad area. You reap what you sow.