If you keep reading that paragraph and put GP's quote into the full context, you'll see GP saying "The issues you bring up did not first appear under Bush" which is entirely false. The domestic spying that Obama is getting blamed for is a program that was started by Bush. It was fruit borne from the Patriot Act. Or weren't you paying attention to the information that was released in the Snowden leaks?
Despite your idiotic knee jerk reaction, I'm not defending the Obama administration. I'm simply stating that both sides are equally in the wrong. The blame for this problem cannot be laid at the feet of one party. Both parties share blame.
My post was correcting the person who laid all of the blame on one party and not on the other.
Sadly, the American public went back to their reality TV shows and all-you-can-eat buffets shortly after the Snowden leaks. They just don't have the attention span to pay attention for more than a couple of weeks at most. A little distraction on social issues in the mean time and when it comes time to vote, they dutifully line up to vote for the very politicians who are bending them over.
It's interesting that you only provide facts that defend one side while conveniently ignoring everything else.
Under which administration did all of the domestic surveillance get started? Under W Bush, a Republican. What did Obama do? Kept going with business as usual. BOTH parties are guilty of letting the NSA run amok. It doesn't matter under what circumstances it was created. Hell, the two parties in this day and age are nothing like they were even back in the 80's, much less the 40's and 50's when the Republicans were desegregating while the Democrats were fighting it. If someone like Reagan were to run today he would be crucified for compromising with the other side and run out of the race in the Iowa caucuses.
Quite frankly, trying to pin all of the problems with domestic spying on one party or the other is just ignorant. The fact of the matter is that both sides are equally to blame.
You say that as if the same kind of crap doesn't go on under the other party's watch. I mean, it's not like the Bush administration started all of the domestic spying that the Obama administration decided to continue.
You're missing the fees that are collected by the organizations that facilitate the transaction. CC companies don't want to split the take they're already getting with someone else and retail organizations don't want to increase the percentage they have to pay for adding the cell phone company to the line of people with their hand out. So teaming up between phone companies and CC companies isn't going to happen. So Apple and now Google show up with a scheme to bypass the CC companies and divert the entire percentage to their accounts. Google can't do it without the cell phone companies and stores don't want to have one different system for each brand of cell phone provider. Together, Google and the phone companies working together can act as one entity, simplifying the POS transaction and taking a cut out of the CC company pie.
That's all well and good but there's far too many parents out there who won't put forth the effort to be involved in parenting their kids. They just want someone to hand them a "kid safe" thing so they can feel better about themselves while they plug their kid in and don't have to deal with it any more. Making a "kid safe" Youtube probably won't actually be kid safe and it certainly won't motivate parents to be more involved in keeping track of what their kids watch. It simply fails to solve the problem. But when it comes to lazy parents, there's likely nothing that can really be done in the real world to solve that problem. These parents will send their kids off to the "kid safe" youtube and pat themselves on the back for being responsible parents when in all reality, the kids are no better off than before this showed up.
I'm sure they'll block plenty of things that are just fine for kids while exposing them to all kinds of stuff they probably shouldn't be exposed to.
Care to expand on this? It sounds like complaining just for the virtue of hearing yourself talk.
I'm not sure if you're slow on the uptake or deliberately obtuse. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and amplify my point.
There is no shortage of people who want to manipulate what children are exposed to in order to indoctrinate them to a particular way of thinking. Pick any topic that even hints at controversial and you'll find people on both sides who desperately want to coerce young minds to their point of view. Churches would love to see kids raised to be unquestioning zombies showing up to donate to the collection plate. Moral majority types want to force feed the next generation all kinds of false information about "the dangers of straying from the path of righteousness" (my paraphrasing). But it's not just the political right that is foaming at the mouth to indoctrinate kids. Other people want to cram every kid's heads full of questioning gender identity. Radical environmentalism (rather than reasonable conservation) is shoved down kid's throats at every opportunity. The whole "no winners or losers" type self esteem crap (which I don't think is necessarily left or right wing, just stupid) is also propagated at every opportunity.
In my not so humble opinion, none of this kind of nonsense indoctrination is appropriate for children yet they're bombarded with it every single day. Kids grow up with a complete misunderstanding of how the real world works and are not prepared to deal with life because they were wrongly shielded from the things they needed to be exposed to as well as having their heads filled with all kinds of nonsense they should have been shielded from.
As with so many "kid friendly" things, I have to wonder what the threshold is for varying types of content and who decides it's appropriate.
If it's like anything else, what they block and, more importantly, what they show is probably motivated more by religiousness and/or political correctness than by an honest assessment of what's appropriate for kids. I'm sure they'll block plenty of things that are just fine for kids while exposing them to all kinds of stuff they probably shouldn't be exposed to. But I'm sure the sucker moms... sorry, soccer moms who are too busy driving around with a latte in one hand and a makeup brush in the other will be happy to have yet another consumer device to plug their kid into so they don't have to be bothered to actually be a parent.
GM cars seem to be relatively rare in my neck of the woods. For college students, Kias, Hyundas, VWs and Mazdas have that market, with the Toyota models after that.
I really don't like GM's ability to disable any vehicle, anywhere. I'm reminded of an Austin dealer which installed devices to disable vehicles if the buyer didn't pay their loan payment... and a disgruntled ex-employee logged on as a valid employee, disabled all vehicles in the system and set them to honk until the batteries went dead. Wasn't a relatively big thing... but if someone did hack GM, the damage they could do with OnStar could be tremendous... for example, if there is a forest fire, hurricane or a disaster causing an evacuation, killing all GM vehicles in that area can turn the disaster into a catastrophe with extreme loss of life, just because the GM cars stalled would prevent movement of everything else.
Trouble is, every automaker is going the same direction. If not now, they are working on it for the future. They may not have all the bells and whistles as OnStar but tracking vehicles through the various methods of GPS, navigation traffic feed, satellite radio, and cell phone integration is going to become a lot more commonplace. There's just too much money to be made tracking you. The only way to really prevent that kind of intrusion into your privacy is to get completely off the grid and live in the back woods with no electronic devices of any kind. But who wants to live their life like that?
There are ways to disable OnStar, even when it has to be plugged in to the car's wiring system for the car to run. And as long as it uses antennas and transmitters to communicate via radio waves, there will always be a way to defeat it whether GM wants you to or not. The trouble is, most people don't care that OnStar can disable your vehicle or turn on the cell phone to listen in on your conversations. So they don't demand a way to permanently disable the system. Without that demand, GM has no incentive to do anything but keep making the system more laborious to defeat. For that reason (and so many others including the generally poor quality of their vehicles), I have chosen to never give my business to GM in the future.
Apparently you can open up the onstar box and remove the connector from the main board to the radio board. You kill onstar without killing your car. And since it's just a simple connector, it's easy to reverse the procedure any time you want. A more drastic measure is to find the wire that goes to the antenna, cut it and properly terminate the wire to kill all radio signals going in and out of the box.
So the government wants you to accept an application built by them, including giving it permissions to operate on your phone. You don't even need to hand your unlocked phone to a cop to have them looking around in your personal business. The app can do that all by itself any time it wants. Thanks but no thanks.
There's one reason it's considered nondeterministic. Memory leaks. If you have a task that has a bug that leaks memory, the system will eventually run out of space and that will impact normal function. That's not a huge issue on a desktop that's running Word, Excel, and solitaire. You can just kill the offending application and restart it. But you absolutely can't do that in a safety critical embedded system. You can't just reboot the flight control software on an airplane in mid flight. You can't just reboot the heart-lung machine in the middle of an operation. It has to work. Period.
By preallocating what each individual function needs ahead of time and forcing it to remain within the confines of that space, you eliminate any chance of a rogue function taking the whole system with it as well as being able to more easily build functions that can recover from a failure. It's about reducing risk and reducing the damage caused by failure. "Oh, my allocation of some memory failed? Let me scan the little bit of what's set aside for me to make sure I disposed of everything properly or if I really am overflowing my constraints and need to follow the prescribed method for recovering from that overflow."
Science denial is probably more strongly correlated with politics/emotions not intelligence level. The left and the right merely have different things they are in denial about, different things that touch on their politics and their emotions. And emotions lead people to stand by their beliefs regardless of rational thought and evidence, both on the left and the right.
I disagree. Having spent a lifetime around pig headed engineers (including myself), this is my reasoning:
I think it has everything to do with intelligence, or, at least self perceived intelligence. The smarter someone thinks they are, the less likely they are to listen to others who they think are somehow less intelligent. They consider it a personal affront that someone else would tell them they're wrong about vaccines. They consider only the superiority of their own intellect when deciding that they will either accept or reject the established science. That kind of hubris is concentrated in certain professions, many of which are concentrated in Silicon Valley. Politics doesn't enter into it at all. This kind of self righteous thinking permeates the self declared intellectual elite in every party, including the independents who tend to be the most effete among them ("anyone who is dumb enough to let a party tell them how to think is inferior"). They have considered whatever they consider to be important in their own mind and have come to a conclusion that you dare not question.
Exactly. Anti-science brought on by a superiority complex, thinking that they are smarter than the scientists who have done huge amounts of research. I can see exactly why this type of thinking is predominate in an area like Silicon Valley. "Don't bother me with the research. I'm smart enough to know everything I need to know already."
That's one way to do it. But when you're working on big classes with huge copy constructors (or even just big arrays or structures), it's not as practical. Maybe making a structure full of pointers could work better. But it's still a lot of overhead that increases complexity for no real gain. You'd quickly hit the point of diminishing returns. I would say that if you get to the point where you need a structure to hold all of those parameters, you've gone well past the point where the GOTO is appropriate, more efficient and easier to read.
I'm really not a fan of the GOTO but if you're spending a dollar to save a dime, you're better off just using the GOTO.
That's very likely. But sometimes there's only so much you can reduce a problem and there's just too much data interacting that you can't simplify it further. And realistically, sometimes you have to work in an environment where the data models haven't been created to be very elegant at handling the intended use of the data. I don't think I've ever worked on any system with more than trivial complexity that couldn't stand to have it's data models refactored.
In all of the avionics systems I worked on, we had a rule against recursion (direct or indirect), variable argument lists, etc. Every task had a static analysis performed on it to determine maximum stack usage. The stacks were fitted to the usage. Without recursion or any other goofy stuff like that, it wasn't hard to do a call trace and add up all of the parameters in the calls to ensure you always had enough stack space. And that code is flying all over the world with not one stack overflow.
Now, if you actually have use of the full language to do as you want when developing the software, stack analysis very quickly becomes difficult or harder. But when you're writing code that has to work or the plane hits the ground and people die, they get a little picky about how you do it.
So much for proofreading. The ( && ) construct got cut out by the HTML parser. I'll retype it. It should read "the very common place ((NULL != ptr) && (-insert some user of the pointer here-)).
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If you keep reading that paragraph and put GP's quote into the full context, you'll see GP saying "The issues you bring up did not first appear under Bush" which is entirely false. The domestic spying that Obama is getting blamed for is a program that was started by Bush. It was fruit borne from the Patriot Act. Or weren't you paying attention to the information that was released in the Snowden leaks?
Despite your idiotic knee jerk reaction, I'm not defending the Obama administration. I'm simply stating that both sides are equally in the wrong. The blame for this problem cannot be laid at the feet of one party. Both parties share blame.
My post was correcting the person who laid all of the blame on one party and not on the other.
Pretty much. The Bush administration started it and expanded it. The Obama administration kept going with business as usual.
Sadly, the American public went back to their reality TV shows and all-you-can-eat buffets shortly after the Snowden leaks. They just don't have the attention span to pay attention for more than a couple of weeks at most. A little distraction on social issues in the mean time and when it comes time to vote, they dutifully line up to vote for the very politicians who are bending them over.
It's interesting that you only provide facts that defend one side while conveniently ignoring everything else.
Under which administration did all of the domestic surveillance get started? Under W Bush, a Republican. What did Obama do? Kept going with business as usual. BOTH parties are guilty of letting the NSA run amok. It doesn't matter under what circumstances it was created. Hell, the two parties in this day and age are nothing like they were even back in the 80's, much less the 40's and 50's when the Republicans were desegregating while the Democrats were fighting it. If someone like Reagan were to run today he would be crucified for compromising with the other side and run out of the race in the Iowa caucuses.
Quite frankly, trying to pin all of the problems with domestic spying on one party or the other is just ignorant. The fact of the matter is that both sides are equally to blame.
You say that as if the same kind of crap doesn't go on under the other party's watch. I mean, it's not like the Bush administration started all of the domestic spying that the Obama administration decided to continue.
Oh... Wait...
It's all about the money.
You're missing the fees that are collected by the organizations that facilitate the transaction. CC companies don't want to split the take they're already getting with someone else and retail organizations don't want to increase the percentage they have to pay for adding the cell phone company to the line of people with their hand out. So teaming up between phone companies and CC companies isn't going to happen. So Apple and now Google show up with a scheme to bypass the CC companies and divert the entire percentage to their accounts. Google can't do it without the cell phone companies and stores don't want to have one different system for each brand of cell phone provider. Together, Google and the phone companies working together can act as one entity, simplifying the POS transaction and taking a cut out of the CC company pie.
That's all well and good but there's far too many parents out there who won't put forth the effort to be involved in parenting their kids. They just want someone to hand them a "kid safe" thing so they can feel better about themselves while they plug their kid in and don't have to deal with it any more. Making a "kid safe" Youtube probably won't actually be kid safe and it certainly won't motivate parents to be more involved in keeping track of what their kids watch. It simply fails to solve the problem. But when it comes to lazy parents, there's likely nothing that can really be done in the real world to solve that problem. These parents will send their kids off to the "kid safe" youtube and pat themselves on the back for being responsible parents when in all reality, the kids are no better off than before this showed up.
I'm sure they'll block plenty of things that are just fine for kids while exposing them to all kinds of stuff they probably shouldn't be exposed to. Care to expand on this? It sounds like complaining just for the virtue of hearing yourself talk.
I'm not sure if you're slow on the uptake or deliberately obtuse. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and amplify my point.
There is no shortage of people who want to manipulate what children are exposed to in order to indoctrinate them to a particular way of thinking. Pick any topic that even hints at controversial and you'll find people on both sides who desperately want to coerce young minds to their point of view. Churches would love to see kids raised to be unquestioning zombies showing up to donate to the collection plate. Moral majority types want to force feed the next generation all kinds of false information about "the dangers of straying from the path of righteousness" (my paraphrasing). But it's not just the political right that is foaming at the mouth to indoctrinate kids. Other people want to cram every kid's heads full of questioning gender identity. Radical environmentalism (rather than reasonable conservation) is shoved down kid's throats at every opportunity. The whole "no winners or losers" type self esteem crap (which I don't think is necessarily left or right wing, just stupid) is also propagated at every opportunity.
In my not so humble opinion, none of this kind of nonsense indoctrination is appropriate for children yet they're bombarded with it every single day. Kids grow up with a complete misunderstanding of how the real world works and are not prepared to deal with life because they were wrongly shielded from the things they needed to be exposed to as well as having their heads filled with all kinds of nonsense they should have been shielded from.
As with so many "kid friendly" things, I have to wonder what the threshold is for varying types of content and who decides it's appropriate.
If it's like anything else, what they block and, more importantly, what they show is probably motivated more by religiousness and/or political correctness than by an honest assessment of what's appropriate for kids. I'm sure they'll block plenty of things that are just fine for kids while exposing them to all kinds of stuff they probably shouldn't be exposed to. But I'm sure the sucker moms... sorry, soccer moms who are too busy driving around with a latte in one hand and a makeup brush in the other will be happy to have yet another consumer device to plug their kid into so they don't have to be bothered to actually be a parent.
GM cars seem to be relatively rare in my neck of the woods. For college students, Kias, Hyundas, VWs and Mazdas have that market, with the Toyota models after that.
I really don't like GM's ability to disable any vehicle, anywhere. I'm reminded of an Austin dealer which installed devices to disable vehicles if the buyer didn't pay their loan payment... and a disgruntled ex-employee logged on as a valid employee, disabled all vehicles in the system and set them to honk until the batteries went dead. Wasn't a relatively big thing... but if someone did hack GM, the damage they could do with OnStar could be tremendous... for example, if there is a forest fire, hurricane or a disaster causing an evacuation, killing all GM vehicles in that area can turn the disaster into a catastrophe with extreme loss of life, just because the GM cars stalled would prevent movement of everything else.
Trouble is, every automaker is going the same direction. If not now, they are working on it for the future. They may not have all the bells and whistles as OnStar but tracking vehicles through the various methods of GPS, navigation traffic feed, satellite radio, and cell phone integration is going to become a lot more commonplace. There's just too much money to be made tracking you. The only way to really prevent that kind of intrusion into your privacy is to get completely off the grid and live in the back woods with no electronic devices of any kind. But who wants to live their life like that?
There are ways to disable OnStar, even when it has to be plugged in to the car's wiring system for the car to run. And as long as it uses antennas and transmitters to communicate via radio waves, there will always be a way to defeat it whether GM wants you to or not. The trouble is, most people don't care that OnStar can disable your vehicle or turn on the cell phone to listen in on your conversations. So they don't demand a way to permanently disable the system. Without that demand, GM has no incentive to do anything but keep making the system more laborious to defeat. For that reason (and so many others including the generally poor quality of their vehicles), I have chosen to never give my business to GM in the future.
Apparently you can open up the onstar box and remove the connector from the main board to the radio board. You kill onstar without killing your car. And since it's just a simple connector, it's easy to reverse the procedure any time you want. A more drastic measure is to find the wire that goes to the antenna, cut it and properly terminate the wire to kill all radio signals going in and out of the box.
I don't see too many hipsters driving GM cars.
So the government wants you to accept an application built by them, including giving it permissions to operate on your phone. You don't even need to hand your unlocked phone to a cop to have them looking around in your personal business. The app can do that all by itself any time it wants. Thanks but no thanks.
You see that a lot in 3rd parties and among the independents. It's not something that's tied to any "side".
There's one reason it's considered nondeterministic. Memory leaks. If you have a task that has a bug that leaks memory, the system will eventually run out of space and that will impact normal function. That's not a huge issue on a desktop that's running Word, Excel, and solitaire. You can just kill the offending application and restart it. But you absolutely can't do that in a safety critical embedded system. You can't just reboot the flight control software on an airplane in mid flight. You can't just reboot the heart-lung machine in the middle of an operation. It has to work. Period.
By preallocating what each individual function needs ahead of time and forcing it to remain within the confines of that space, you eliminate any chance of a rogue function taking the whole system with it as well as being able to more easily build functions that can recover from a failure. It's about reducing risk and reducing the damage caused by failure. "Oh, my allocation of some memory failed? Let me scan the little bit of what's set aside for me to make sure I disposed of everything properly or if I really am overflowing my constraints and need to follow the prescribed method for recovering from that overflow."
Science denial is probably more strongly correlated with politics/emotions not intelligence level. The left and the right merely have different things they are in denial about, different things that touch on their politics and their emotions. And emotions lead people to stand by their beliefs regardless of rational thought and evidence, both on the left and the right.
I disagree. Having spent a lifetime around pig headed engineers (including myself), this is my reasoning:
I think it has everything to do with intelligence, or, at least self perceived intelligence. The smarter someone thinks they are, the less likely they are to listen to others who they think are somehow less intelligent. They consider it a personal affront that someone else would tell them they're wrong about vaccines. They consider only the superiority of their own intellect when deciding that they will either accept or reject the established science. That kind of hubris is concentrated in certain professions, many of which are concentrated in Silicon Valley. Politics doesn't enter into it at all. This kind of self righteous thinking permeates the self declared intellectual elite in every party, including the independents who tend to be the most effete among them ("anyone who is dumb enough to let a party tell them how to think is inferior"). They have considered whatever they consider to be important in their own mind and have come to a conclusion that you dare not question.
Exactly. Anti-science brought on by a superiority complex, thinking that they are smarter than the scientists who have done huge amounts of research. I can see exactly why this type of thinking is predominate in an area like Silicon Valley. "Don't bother me with the research. I'm smart enough to know everything I need to know already."
I prefer to keep the gluttons away from my lunches as well. It's hard to deal with gluten intolerance when they're eating all of my food.
That's one way to do it. But when you're working on big classes with huge copy constructors (or even just big arrays or structures), it's not as practical. Maybe making a structure full of pointers could work better. But it's still a lot of overhead that increases complexity for no real gain. You'd quickly hit the point of diminishing returns. I would say that if you get to the point where you need a structure to hold all of those parameters, you've gone well past the point where the GOTO is appropriate, more efficient and easier to read.
I'm really not a fan of the GOTO but if you're spending a dollar to save a dime, you're better off just using the GOTO.
That's very likely. But sometimes there's only so much you can reduce a problem and there's just too much data interacting that you can't simplify it further. And realistically, sometimes you have to work in an environment where the data models haven't been created to be very elegant at handling the intended use of the data. I don't think I've ever worked on any system with more than trivial complexity that couldn't stand to have it's data models refactored.
I'm guessing with the short distances this is a replacement for radio frequency near field communication rather than a substitute for wifi.
Exactly how do you mean?
In all of the avionics systems I worked on, we had a rule against recursion (direct or indirect), variable argument lists, etc. Every task had a static analysis performed on it to determine maximum stack usage. The stacks were fitted to the usage. Without recursion or any other goofy stuff like that, it wasn't hard to do a call trace and add up all of the parameters in the calls to ensure you always had enough stack space. And that code is flying all over the world with not one stack overflow.
Now, if you actually have use of the full language to do as you want when developing the software, stack analysis very quickly becomes difficult or harder. But when you're writing code that has to work or the plane hits the ground and people die, they get a little picky about how you do it.
So much for proofreading. The ( && ) construct got cut out by the HTML parser. I'll retype it. It should read "the very common place ((NULL != ptr) && (-insert some user of the pointer here-)).