The only reason you can equate the two lengths x+5 and 2x-3 is if they are in fact equal. They are only equal if the diagonals of a rhombus bisect one another. This was one of the multiple choice answers available. It may help if you actually bother to read the question properly.
Assuming they do this the way public schools in the USA teach programming, don't bother. They've managed to suck all creativity and wonder from the process by making every activity copying code from a textbook without teaching the theory behind it, or mentioning the possible applications.
Sounds exactly like how they teach mathematics. And, indeed, many other subjects. It's par for the course -- get over it. The real problem is that the teachers tasked with teaching this stuff often have little or no real knowledge and appreciation for the subject themselves (I recall reading that well under 50% of math teachers in California were actually qualified to teach math) so they do it by rote grind from a textbook because that's all they've got.
they not only removed the option for unix keybindings from the GUI, but actually went to the extent of deliberately sabotaging things at a deeper level so that it could not even be restored with gconf or the like.
In GConf set desktop/gnome/interface/gtk-key-theme to Emacs and you'll have standard UNIX keybindings in all GTK apps. I presume other options, such as Vi exist, but I've never tried them (I'm an Emacs user). This has worked, without change, in every version on GNOME I've used since 2.0. Yes, it's in GConf, but it isn't hard to find if you bother to look, and they've never messed with it.
I always wondered what devout free market libertarians actually think the world would be like in a purely "let the consumer vote with their dollar" approach.
I imagine it something like this: you would wake up at 5:00 in the morning and start checking the internet and newspapers for any and all scraps of information about companies you may purchase products from. Perhaps your fruit suppliers are now using unethical labour practices (it's up to you the consumer to police that and stop buying from them of course). Perhaps its been found that your lunch meat supplier is occasionally a little lax in their packaging plants and there is potentially contaminated meat out there (we can't give the government powers to regulate that sort of thing). You'll probably also have to check in on any and all processed foods you might want to buy -- it's not like they will publish their ingredients (or if they do, there's no reason to assume they aren't just lying) -- who knows, maybe your favourite brand of peanut butter has realised that lacing their product with opium for that extra addictive quality really helps sales.
Of course you can't just do a casual read to find these things out; large companies with plenty of money can run effective disinformation campaigns in the mainstream media, or otherwise cover up such incidents. You'll have to dig deep through pages of personal consumer reports, spot and ignore the paid industry shills, and so on.
You'll probably be done with that around midday -- presuming you do it every morning to keep up to date and are fairly practiced and know where to hunt down the right information. Now it's time to work on the second order issues: are companies you wish to buy from aiding, funding, abetting, or buying from any companies you have deemed unethical, or inappropriate to support? This is, of course, a bigger task again. Not only do you have the problems tracking down information as before, you have an order of magnitude more companies to work through, and complex supply chains (which you can be sure will use all sorts of subsidiaries, front companies, and other misdirections) to dig through. If you're lucky you might get done all of that before midnight.
That leaves you just enough time to go to bed safe in the knowledge that you are using the money you no longer have the time to earn to make informed consumer choices buying products that you no longer have the time to purchase. And even better, you get to do it all again tomorrow.
. Parks can be managed by the states they are located in - all of them have recreation departments of their own. The same is true of monuments. Public education is already managed by states. There is no need for any federal bureaucracy there AT ALL. Low income housing doesn't disappear because a federal government disappears. Let the housing be managed by each state where it resides. Let states fix roads and bridges directly with the gas tax. And so on and so on.
In other words, push all the work currently being done by these federal departments down to the state level. Fine. Except the state will have to pay to do that -- it isn't free. Just because the state has their own parks department doesn't mean they can assume the work of maintaining all the federal parks at no extra cost. Likewise for road maintenance, low income housing, etc.
So what will happen? The states will be forced to raise taxes to cover all of these items. But worse, each state will have to have its own independent bureaucracy to oversee all the new work they've taken on -- what was centralised now needs to be duplicated in each state.
So what you're really taking about is a massive tax hike, you just get to offload the blame to the individual states. You haven't made anything more efficient, or cheaper, but rather more expensive.
I'm sorry -- what exactly are you trying to do? I've been writing OO code in ANSI C for a good 18 months without having to do any contortions like that.
Okay, if this is the case, why is Wayland ignoring network transparency? Fine, the X rendering layer isn't used anymore and should go away; maybe the entirety of X should go away; why does it immediately follow that network transparency should go away? Don't throw out the baby with the bath water.
I don't think that's what they've done. From what I've read Wayland is simply not bothering to implement the network transparency -- the framework allows for it, and supports using X to do it, and could presumably have a different network only plugin to do the same or similar.
Yes, and it works just fine; the only issues would be if I got my placement wrong via poor layout/blocking or I neglected to upc_memget something that I needed intense access to but for some reason couldn't make local in the initial layout. Neither of those require much forethought at all to avoid.
And it's not on Linux? Only when you limit yourself to the "distro-specific app store, a.k.a. apt" do you get system-wide updates. Just like I do if I limit myself to MS software. I choose not to.
I have plenty of third party sources (e.g for Google to get Google earth, Chrome, etc. auto-updated) in apt -- you don't have to limit yourself to one vendor.
The more important question is, how exactly does one "choose" a green energy source. I don't know about other parts of the world, but up here in Canada we generally only have one choice of power provider. We don't get to shop around for which power plant we want to produce our power.
Usually it isn't feasible to direct power from a specific power plant to a specific home. That doesn't mean you don't have options. In Canada you can sign up with Bullfrog Power. You continue recieving electricity as per normal, but pay a small premium and have Bullfrog deal with the electricity providers to ensure an amount equal to your usage is injected into the system from green sources. It is available all over Canada and costs around $1 per day for an average residential home. Thus, while you don't change electricity providers, you do ensure that your usage is effectively from green sources.
Read what I quoted of the parent. we're taliing a delta of 10 degrees, and as soon as we have a delta we eliminate the linear constant in conversion (if you want to get technical, we have a torsor).
The Fahrenheit scale in particular is extremely good for weather in most of the world, much better than C. 10 degrees F seems to roughly correlate to a unit of comfort for most people (60-cool, 70-just right, 80-warm, 90-hot).
That's just because you are usede to it. Look, at a conversion rate of 5/9 you get 10 degrees F roughly equal to 5 degres C. Which makes 5 degrees C roughly correlate to a unit of comfort for most people -- which really seems no more onerous.
Now, just to give you an example that perfectly reasonable arguments can be made the other way: How much temeperature change ina room does it take before you can really notice the difference at all? Most people can tell if a room goes from 20 C to 21C, but only just. The much finer gradations of Fahrenheit just aren't needed. I mean, do you really care if it is 81 F or 82 F? While a degree C does make a difference.
The point being you can make silly arguments either way, neither of which caryy much real weight. It is simply what you are used to that you judge as more natural.
Also arguably, this was more useful to me than rote-learning the proof of the quadratic formula.
More valuable still would be to know the general idea of completing the square (which is obvious once you've seen it once) and be able to re-derive the proof of the quadratic formula at whim. But really understanding things is far over-rated. far better to memorize things, or simply cheat.
Particularly when it's written in Python. I mean... jesus. If you've managed to have a problem with your *web application* written in Python, because the scheduler is different? Get out of coding.
If you read his CV you'll see that the application involved realtime reporting. Now, if he's writing a C module for python (not out of the question) and dealing with hard realtime constraints, then yes, subtleties of the scheduler can indeed matter a great deal.
Special relativity doesnt require calculus. It is most algebraic geometry.
Not so much -- you might want to check what algebraic geometry actually is (hint: it's not high school algebra, nor is it analytic geometry). While algebraic geometry doesn't require calculus per se, it can be helpful to understand things. It is also very advanced highly abstract mathematics (at least since Grothendieck recast everything in terms of categories and sheaves) that is quite irrelevant to special relativity.
I'd kill for C with scope guards on language level, so that I could write something like
char *s = malloc(n); on_scope_exit { free(s); } ... if (errno) return; ... if (errno) return; ... </tt></quote>
Actually, if you are using gcc you sort of can. You see gcc supports special cleanup attributes that let you specify a function to be run if a variable goes out of scope. Thus you can do things like:
This example being pointless, but hopefully gives you the idea. A few #defines to make things pretty and you can thus do whatever RAII style thing you wish.
Considering there was looting, rape, and murder in Haiti as well as numerous reports of looting and other issues in New Zealand, maybe it's not so silly.
There was essentially no looting or other such issues in New Zealand. A few people got arrested for attempted looting, but we're talking a few people out of a city of 400,000, who got caught and dealt with by local police before they even managed to do anything. I don't really see that as a problem worthy of significant concern.
Every other power that isn't listed is supposed to be handled by the States.
As we can see, that idea didn't last very long. I think it hardly made it to 100 years.
Barely made it 100 years? If you want to go with your somewhat narrow interpretation it didnt even make it 17 years*! Jefferson was well aware that there was no provision in the constitution allowing the federal government to acquire territory, but he went right ahead with the Louisiana purchase anyway. So it seems even the founding fathers couldn't hew to the constitution to the degree you desire even a mere couple of decades after they wrote it. Oops.
* There are probably even earlier examples, but the Lousiana purchase is very blatant and should suffice to make the point.
What I'd like to see (or rather hear), is that we can have access to the individual tracks of each song, so that we can remix stuff. Kind of like the open-source of audio.
It's been done occasionally. See, for example, the bottom of this page which provides links to raw multitrack files (distributed as torrents) for multiple songs.
You'll want to look into JML and ESC/Java2 which supplies DbC syntax and static checking via theorem provers. It's been around for quite some time and is fairly powerful.
One of the best ones was the DEC Extended Static Checker for Java in the late 1990s. That project died after Compaq acquired DEC and shut down research. But it formed part of Microsoft's efforts for Spec#, which has a formal verification system.
ESC/Java lives on as ESC/Java2 which uses the JML language for annotation. This makes it significantlymore powerful than ESC/Java since you also get the entire JML toolchain as well. ESC/Java2 also has excellent IDE support via Eclipse plugins now. If you like that sort of thing it is well worth looking into.
And how about his butchery of Bad Taste (a.k.a. Braindead)?
Bad taste and Braindead are very different films. Bad taste was Peter Jacksons first film for which the production crew, film crew, and cast were pretty much the same small group of people. It is a wonderful piece of exceptionally low-budget schlock. Braindead was made considerably later (after Meet the Feebles) for considerably more money and is a wonderful piece of mid-budget schlock.
Seriously, think about what you just said. "Even hundreds of years ago".. as in.. before there were licensed medical professionals. Obviously there are social mechanisms that do not involve government regulation.
Yes, and those social mechanisms worked well for a small populace where such information as to who you could trust was readily transmitted throughout the populace. The problem is those social mechanisms don't scale well to large populaces such as we have now. Of course as populations grew we came up with better mechanisms that scaled better. They're not perfect, but they work better than poorly scaling social mechanisms. Those mechanisms are licensing and regulation.
Exactly. The biggest problem in mathematics today is that nobody bothers to show practical uses for it. It is much easier to learn something when you explain what it is for and what you can use.
You know, I would say that one of the biggest problems in mathematics teaching today is that they try too hard to show practical uses for it. This ends up with textbooks in a tangle to present "practical" problems for the kids to solve with the resulting emphasis being a meat-grinder approach to problem solving, where you just dump whatever you have in one end, turn the handle, and hope for the best, with little or no understanding of what the hell is going on. Mathematics is about abstraction, generalisation, and logic. A lot of mathematics is about solving a problem not because it presented any practical interest, but simply because it seemed interesting in its own right. By pandering to students need for practicality all you are really doing is killing their mathematical curiousity. They don't actually learn any mathematics, just a bunch of formulas and a hodge podge selection of tools for solving problems with little or no ability to generalise those tools to any problem outside the neatly defined box. Worse, they don't ever actually learn that mathematics is anything other than bunch of formulas and a hodge podge selection of tools for solving specific arbitrary problems.
So yes, some practical examples can help at times, but that is in no way the problem with mathematics teaching right now.
Slashdot Mirror
The only reason you can equate the two lengths x+5 and 2x-3 is if they are in fact equal. They are only equal if the diagonals of a rhombus bisect one another. This was one of the multiple choice answers available. It may help if you actually bother to read the question properly.
Assuming they do this the way public schools in the USA teach programming, don't bother. They've managed to suck all creativity and wonder from the process by making every activity copying code from a textbook without teaching the theory behind it, or mentioning the possible applications.
Sounds exactly like how they teach mathematics. And, indeed, many other subjects. It's par for the course -- get over it. The real problem is that the teachers tasked with teaching this stuff often have little or no real knowledge and appreciation for the subject themselves (I recall reading that well under 50% of math teachers in California were actually qualified to teach math) so they do it by rote grind from a textbook because that's all they've got.
they not only removed the option for unix keybindings from the GUI, but actually went to the extent of deliberately sabotaging things at a deeper level so that it could not even be restored with gconf or the like.
In GConf set desktop/gnome/interface/gtk-key-theme to Emacs and you'll have standard UNIX keybindings in all GTK apps. I presume other options, such as Vi exist, but I've never tried them (I'm an Emacs user). This has worked, without change, in every version on GNOME I've used since 2.0. Yes, it's in GConf, but it isn't hard to find if you bother to look, and they've never messed with it.
I always wondered what devout free market libertarians actually think the world would be like in a purely "let the consumer vote with their dollar" approach.
I imagine it something like this: you would wake up at 5:00 in the morning and start checking the internet and newspapers for any and all scraps of information about companies you may purchase products from. Perhaps your fruit suppliers are now using unethical labour practices (it's up to you the consumer to police that and stop buying from them of course). Perhaps its been found that your lunch meat supplier is occasionally a little lax in their packaging plants and there is potentially contaminated meat out there (we can't give the government powers to regulate that sort of thing). You'll probably also have to check in on any and all processed foods you might want to buy -- it's not like they will publish their ingredients (or if they do, there's no reason to assume they aren't just lying) -- who knows, maybe your favourite brand of peanut butter has realised that lacing their product with opium for that extra addictive quality really helps sales.
Of course you can't just do a casual read to find these things out; large companies with plenty of money can run effective disinformation campaigns in the mainstream media, or otherwise cover up such incidents. You'll have to dig deep through pages of personal consumer reports, spot and ignore the paid industry shills, and so on.
You'll probably be done with that around midday -- presuming you do it every morning to keep up to date and are fairly practiced and know where to hunt down the right information. Now it's time to work on the second order issues: are companies you wish to buy from aiding, funding, abetting, or buying from any companies you have deemed unethical, or inappropriate to support? This is, of course, a bigger task again. Not only do you have the problems tracking down information as before, you have an order of magnitude more companies to work through, and complex supply chains (which you can be sure will use all sorts of subsidiaries, front companies, and other misdirections) to dig through. If you're lucky you might get done all of that before midnight.
That leaves you just enough time to go to bed safe in the knowledge that you are using the money you no longer have the time to earn to make informed consumer choices buying products that you no longer have the time to purchase. And even better, you get to do it all again tomorrow.
Fun, fun fun.
. Parks can be managed by the states they are located in - all of them have recreation departments of their own. The same is true of monuments. Public education is already managed by states. There is no need for any federal bureaucracy there AT ALL. Low income housing doesn't disappear because a federal government disappears. Let the housing be managed by each state where it resides. Let states fix roads and bridges directly with the gas tax. And so on and so on.
In other words, push all the work currently being done by these federal departments down to the state level. Fine. Except the state will have to pay to do that -- it isn't free. Just because the state has their own parks department doesn't mean they can assume the work of maintaining all the federal parks at no extra cost. Likewise for road maintenance, low income housing, etc.
So what will happen? The states will be forced to raise taxes to cover all of these items. But worse, each state will have to have its own independent bureaucracy to oversee all the new work they've taken on -- what was centralised now needs to be duplicated in each state.
So what you're really taking about is a massive tax hike, you just get to offload the blame to the individual states. You haven't made anything more efficient, or cheaper, but rather more expensive.
I'm sorry -- what exactly are you trying to do? I've been writing OO code in ANSI C for a good 18 months without having to do any contortions like that.
Okay, if this is the case, why is Wayland ignoring network transparency? Fine, the X rendering layer isn't used anymore and should go away; maybe the entirety of X should go away; why does it immediately follow that network transparency should go away? Don't throw out the baby with the bath water.
I don't think that's what they've done. From what I've read Wayland is simply not bothering to implement the network transparency -- the framework allows for it, and supports using X to do it, and could presumably have a different network only plugin to do the same or similar.
Have you tried it off-node?
Yes, and it works just fine; the only issues would be if I got my placement wrong via poor layout/blocking or I neglected to upc_memget something that I needed intense access to but for some reason couldn't make local in the initial layout. Neither of those require much forethought at all to avoid.
What did you find awful about UPC? I've foudn it very pleasant to work with.
And it's not on Linux? Only when you limit yourself to the "distro-specific app store, a.k.a. apt" do you get system-wide updates. Just like I do if I limit myself to MS software. I choose not to.
I have plenty of third party sources (e.g for Google to get Google earth, Chrome, etc. auto-updated) in apt -- you don't have to limit yourself to one vendor.
The more important question is, how exactly does one "choose" a green energy source. I don't know about other parts of the world, but up here in Canada we generally only have one choice of power provider. We don't get to shop around for which power plant we want to produce our power.
Usually it isn't feasible to direct power from a specific power plant to a specific home. That doesn't mean you don't have options. In Canada you can sign up with Bullfrog Power. You continue recieving electricity as per normal, but pay a small premium and have Bullfrog deal with the electricity providers to ensure an amount equal to your usage is injected into the system from green sources. It is available all over Canada and costs around $1 per day for an average residential home. Thus, while you don't change electricity providers, you do ensure that your usage is effectively from green sources.
Read what I quoted of the parent. we're taliing a delta of 10 degrees, and as soon as we have a delta we eliminate the linear constant in conversion (if you want to get technical, we have a torsor).
The Fahrenheit scale in particular is extremely good for weather in most of the world, much better than C. 10 degrees F seems to roughly correlate to a unit of comfort for most people (60-cool, 70-just right, 80-warm, 90-hot).
That's just because you are usede to it. Look, at a conversion rate of 5/9 you get 10 degrees F roughly equal to 5 degres C. Which makes 5 degrees C roughly correlate to a unit of comfort for most people -- which really seems no more onerous.
Now, just to give you an example that perfectly reasonable arguments can be made the other way: How much temeperature change ina room does it take before you can really notice the difference at all? Most people can tell if a room goes from 20 C to 21C, but only just. The much finer gradations of Fahrenheit just aren't needed. I mean, do you really care if it is 81 F or 82 F? While a degree C does make a difference.
The point being you can make silly arguments either way, neither of which caryy much real weight. It is simply what you are used to that you judge as more natural.
Also arguably, this was more useful to me than rote-learning the proof of the quadratic formula.
More valuable still would be to know the general idea of completing the square (which is obvious once you've seen it once) and be able to re-derive the proof of the quadratic formula at whim. But really understanding things is far over-rated. far better to memorize things, or simply cheat.
Particularly when it's written in Python. I mean... jesus. If you've managed to have a problem with your *web application* written in Python, because the scheduler is different? Get out of coding.
If you read his CV you'll see that the application involved realtime reporting. Now, if he's writing a C module for python (not out of the question) and dealing with hard realtime constraints, then yes, subtleties of the scheduler can indeed matter a great deal.
Special relativity doesnt require calculus. It is most algebraic geometry.
Not so much -- you might want to check what algebraic geometry actually is (hint: it's not high school algebra, nor is it analytic geometry). While algebraic geometry doesn't require calculus per se, it can be helpful to understand things. It is also very advanced highly abstract mathematics (at least since Grothendieck recast everything in terms of categories and sheaves) that is quite irrelevant to special relativity.
I'd kill for C with scope guards on language level, so that I could write something like
Actually, if you are using gcc you sort of can. You see gcc supports special cleanup attributes that let you specify a function to be run if a variable goes out of scope. Thus you can do things like:
This example being pointless, but hopefully gives you the idea. A few #defines to make things pretty and you can thus do whatever RAII style thing you wish.
Considering there was looting, rape, and murder in Haiti as well as numerous reports of looting and other issues in New Zealand, maybe it's not so silly.
There was essentially no looting or other such issues in New Zealand. A few people got arrested for attempted looting, but we're talking a few people out of a city of 400,000, who got caught and dealt with by local police before they even managed to do anything. I don't really see that as a problem worthy of significant concern.
Every other power that isn't listed is supposed to be handled by the States.
As we can see, that idea didn't last very long. I think it hardly made it to 100 years.
Barely made it 100 years? If you want to go with your somewhat narrow interpretation it didnt even make it 17 years*! Jefferson was well aware that there was no provision in the constitution allowing the federal government to acquire territory, but he went right ahead with the Louisiana purchase anyway. So it seems even the founding fathers couldn't hew to the constitution to the degree you desire even a mere couple of decades after they wrote it. Oops.
* There are probably even earlier examples, but the Lousiana purchase is very blatant and should suffice to make the point.
What I'd like to see (or rather hear), is that we can have access to the individual tracks of each song, so that we can remix stuff. Kind of like the open-source of audio.
It's been done occasionally. See, for example, the bottom of this page which provides links to raw multitrack files (distributed as torrents) for multiple songs.
You'll want to look into JML and ESC/Java2 which supplies DbC syntax and static checking via theorem provers. It's been around for quite some time and is fairly powerful.
One of the best ones was the DEC Extended Static Checker for Java in the late 1990s. That project died after Compaq acquired DEC and shut down research. But it formed part of Microsoft's efforts for Spec#, which has a formal verification system.
ESC/Java lives on as ESC/Java2 which uses the JML language for annotation. This makes it significantlymore powerful than ESC/Java since you also get the entire JML toolchain as well. ESC/Java2 also has excellent IDE support via Eclipse plugins now. If you like that sort of thing it is well worth looking into.
And how about his butchery of Bad Taste (a.k.a. Braindead)?
Bad taste and Braindead are very different films. Bad taste was Peter Jacksons first film for which the production crew, film crew, and cast were pretty much the same small group of people. It is a wonderful piece of exceptionally low-budget schlock. Braindead was made considerably later (after Meet the Feebles) for considerably more money and is a wonderful piece of mid-budget schlock.
Seriously, think about what you just said. "Even hundreds of years ago" .. as in .. before there were licensed medical professionals. Obviously there are social mechanisms that do not involve government regulation.
Yes, and those social mechanisms worked well for a small populace where such information as to who you could trust was readily transmitted throughout the populace. The problem is those social mechanisms don't scale well to large populaces such as we have now. Of course as populations grew we came up with better mechanisms that scaled better. They're not perfect, but they work better than poorly scaling social mechanisms. Those mechanisms are licensing and regulation.
Exactly. The biggest problem in mathematics today is that nobody bothers to show practical uses for it. It is much easier to learn something when you explain what it is for and what you can use.
You know, I would say that one of the biggest problems in mathematics teaching today is that they try too hard to show practical uses for it. This ends up with textbooks in a tangle to present "practical" problems for the kids to solve with the resulting emphasis being a meat-grinder approach to problem solving, where you just dump whatever you have in one end, turn the handle, and hope for the best, with little or no understanding of what the hell is going on. Mathematics is about abstraction, generalisation, and logic. A lot of mathematics is about solving a problem not because it presented any practical interest, but simply because it seemed interesting in its own right. By pandering to students need for practicality all you are really doing is killing their mathematical curiousity. They don't actually learn any mathematics, just a bunch of formulas and a hodge podge selection of tools for solving problems with little or no ability to generalise those tools to any problem outside the neatly defined box. Worse, they don't ever actually learn that mathematics is anything other than bunch of formulas and a hodge podge selection of tools for solving specific arbitrary problems.
So yes, some practical examples can help at times, but that is in no way the problem with mathematics teaching right now.