40-60% is total childhood mortality in primitive societies. Most of the reduction in childhood mortality since then is probably due to better sanitation, better treatment of diarrhea, and the use of antibiotics, not vaccinations.
I'm surprised authors would agree to terms not allowing them to share articles with others in their field and journalists.
What choice do they have? Publishing is highly competitive and academic authors need citations. Academics would give away their firstborn to get into a highly ranked journal.
Rent is two-thirds my income; half the rest has gone for transportation - and two-thirds of that for medical appointments. At 80% of poverty level,
FWIW, I don't spend more per month than you seem to be spending (I save the rest). Are you saying you're working, earning 80% of poverty level, and not receiving any government assistance? Or are you not working and entirely on disability payments? Why would you be spending that much money on rent? And why would you be having so many medical appointments?
I don't understand what assumptions you want to reexamine, or what you think "our masters" are doing to you. How do you feel the rest of society has violated its social contract with you? What do you think the rest of society is obligated to, or even could, do to make your life better?
No, C++'s template system is nothing like Lisp macros. Lisp macros were straightforward tree rewrites. C++'s template system interacts in very complicated ways with overloading, inheritance, and other language features.
As for STL, its basic notions of containers, iterators, and algorithms exist in most languages and predate it by a couple of decades. STL is bloated and complex in comparison. The justification for the additional complexity in STL was efficiency, but STL isn't actually significantly better than simpler designs.
I have decidedly mixed feelings about the template system. C++'s implementation of templates is a bit brute force but very efficient, and that's nice to have around.
But I think neither its template system nor the STL are particularly well designed.
I've held going back fifty years that we need to start by examining our assumptions. What do we value and why, and how do we put a price on it. We use dollars as a yardstick
Who is this "we" you are talking about? I know what I value and why, and it isn't money. That's why I have lived frugally and saved money. Many who talk about about needing to reevaluate what "we" value are really saying that they want a whole bunch of free stuff, and they want others to "value" their money less so that others pay for it.
They irony of that is that it hits those particularly hard who actually do live responsibly and frugally. I've paid my mortgage on a small home in a cheap neighborhood, and the thanks I get is that I get to bail out people who took on too much mortgage. I have a high deductible health insurance and keep in shape, and the thanks I get is that Obamacare now forces me to subsidize obese pill poppers and the drug companies.
I'm concluding that living frugally and not valuing money simply isn't possible anymore. Living frugally and saving money just doesn't leave enough safety margin for 100% increases in health insurance premiums or several percent increases in income tax to pay for other people's crap that I don't want in the first place. With all these progressive social programs, the way to have what I value, namely freedom and being able to decide my own destiny, is increasingly to become so wealthy that I don't have to worry about all the stupid stuff I don't want but that I'm increasingly forced to pay for.
and now it's spying on all its citizens just like the Stasi did in the DDR
That analogy is wrong. US spying on its own citizens is the same kind of spying that has been going on in France, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, and other Western democracies for decades; it is wrong and should be stopped everywhere. However, none of them are doing what made the Stasi so particularly offensive, namely the recruiting of large numbers of civilians to spy on their neighbors and relatives.
The US is absolutely an imperialist superpower
Yes, but I don't mind that. What I mind is that the US over the last couple of decades has adopted European-style government intrusion into the private lives of its citizens, and that needs to stop.
Let me explain, since you seem to have a bit of trouble with the history and usage. C++ has never been a strict superset of C as a language; there have always been C programs that were not valid C++ programs. Therefore, when C++ programmers say that "C++ is a superset of C", it always means that you can take any C program and with only small modifications turn it into a valid C++ program that works and links the same way as the C program you started with.
EVERYTHING is a bad choice for some application. Only a small child with a hammer - or a silver-bullet seeking PHB - thinks that one tool can solve all problems.
True, but that doesn't mean that every language design is equally good. Java has some serious design problems that could have been fixed without making it more complex and without affecting its utility for its current user population. In addition, Java ended up not being used for the purpose it was designed and intended for.
The last time I needed to talk outside the JVM was in the last century. That's because I'm not presently writing device drivers, Interrupt Service routines or other functions outside the scope of general web business apps.
Indeed: Java has become a specialty language for web applications. It failed at its original aspirations of becoming a language for general purpose desktop computing or for secure, sandboxed computing.
I Java it costs you mothing to make a native call. And in fact there is a special instruction for that.
When wrapping native code libraries in Java, there usually needs to be glue code. That glue code needs to be written in C, since there is no JVM support for unsafe instructions. That means for every function in the native library, there are two C function calls involved: one from Java to the glue code, one from the glue code to the actual library. If one could write the glue code in Java using JVM instructions, the glue code would get compiled to native code by the JIT and the overall overhead for calling a function in a native code library would be just one function call, not two. Yes, this matters in practice. In addition to the speed advantage, writing the glue code in Java would also make it more portable and make it easier to deploy, which matters even more.
I think one misdemeanor count of accessing a computer without authorization is defensible for downloading a DDoS attack tool and deliberately participating in a DDoS attack.
However, the $183000 in restitution seems excessive; a reasonable person wouldn't run out and spend $183000 on a consultant for a 15 minute DDoS attack (how do you even do that?), so that loss is really the fault of the site owner.
They're trying to save you from yourself, or from the most inept programmer you have
Yes, a lot of bad design decisions in Java are driven by ineffective attempts to keep programmers from doing bad things. What keeps my most inept programmer from writing a bad JNI module?
A simple and effective approach, which other languages use, is to have anything that's unsafe include "unsafe" in their name
That's good, but there's one more thing: the compiler and runtime need to keep track of which modules use unsafe primitives and expose that both to the language and the loader. That is, an unsafe Java module should be treated like a JNI module, except that it's more portable and written in a language Java programmers already understand.
There's a reason. Java wasn't designed to be unsafe.
If you need to call native code, JNI is even less safe than providing unsafe primitives in the Java language itself would be. That makes Java's design either poor, or it is a feeble attempt to discourage the use of unsafe modules by making them cumbersome or inefficient.
If these features are an impediment, Java isn't the best platform to be using.
Yes, and that makes Java a bad choice for lots of applications.
On the other hand, general function call overhead is higher in Python than in Java (for various good reasons!) so arguably what's actually happening is that you're just having to introduce the cost in Java that was there all along in a higher-level language.
No, that's not what is "really happening" at all. Supporting direct native calls in the JVM would impose no cost on Java calls at all; it would be completely separate instructions.
If you're really worried about the cost of calling, measure it and see whether it really matters.
I didn't find JNI a massive barrel of laughs, but I didn't find it notably worse than other native bindings (e.g. CPython,...).
In Python and other HLLs, you can do all the C binding in the HLL itself, allowing you to call most shared libraries directly. In Java, you always have an extra function call overhead and you need to distribute an extra native code library.
They made the right choice here
Really? For every single feature in the language that's unspecified, leaving it unspecified and up to the implementation was the right choice, across the board? Let me bow before your awesome omniscience! Why didn't they come to you in the first place when designing the language?
Back in reality, there are some features that should have been left unspecified as they were, and there are others that probably should have been specified in the interest of interoperability, among other things because every major implementation implements it the same way anyway. It's understandable they made the choices they did back then, but the world has changed pretty significantly, and much of what we see in C++ is there for backwards compatibility, not because it's the best choice.
Let me spell it out for you since you seem to be too dumb to figure it out for yourself from my slightly sloppy formulation: places like Massachusetts do well on education because they successfully attract parents who themselves have high educational attainment.
And, as another poster noted, it's not as if Massachusetts is completely filled with
Yeah, and it's not like the differences between the nations and states are that big either. What there is is more than adequately explained by differences in parental educational attainment.
I mean, are you seriously trying to claim that the differences in PISA study results between states are not caused by the differences in parental educational attainment? If not, what exactly is it you are trying to say?
I am careful about such claims, having used native code interfaces since long before JNI was even conceived. Dealing with resource management and relocating garbage collection isn't rocket science, and JNI does it poorly.
Part of the problem is that Java refuses to provide unsafe primitives in the Java language itself, for no good reason. That means that all the heavy lifting needs to be done in C. Most native code calling shouldn't require writing any wrappers; a little preparation in the HLL followed by a direct call to a native function in a shared library should be enough. And unlike Java, where you pay at least two function call overheads (one from JNI to the C wrapper, a second from the C wrapper to the actual library function), such a scheme can compile and inline all the preparatory code using a JIT and then pay only for a single native function call into the shared library.
So, the Java JNI forces you to expend the effort to write native code wrappers for native libraries. Then you need to compile, package, and install these on every platform, making distribution and packaging a major headache. And to add insult to injury, the end result has higher overhead than if you could write the glue code in Java and just call the shared library directly.
C++ is a superset of C, and none of C++'s runtime features interfere with cross-language interoperability unless you actually use them and expose them. So, you're never worse off using C++, since you can always write your code the same way you would have done so in C and use C++ features only in a way that don't alter interfaces.
The only real disadvantage of C++ over C is the enormous complexity of C++. Functionally, it is superior in pretty much every way.
I don't even know why anyone would even bother with c++. If it's a good fit, just use c.
Because C++ lets people automate resource management and error handling, things that in C are manual and error prone. C++ also provides standards for abstraction, encapsulation, and substitutability, something that in C is not standardized and handled differently by every library. Despite C++'s many flaws and unnecessary complexity, it still is a better language than C for many projects.
The fault here lies specifically with Java and C++. Java's JNI is poorly designed and makes no serious attempt to make interoperability easy because it is against Java's philosophy. C++'s runtime is deliberately completely implementation dependent because C++'s designers thought that might let implementors squeeze out a little bit of performance.
Nevertheless, tools like Swig make even Java/C++ interoperation fairly easy, and many other languages try to accommodate C++ well (cf. Boost::Python).
"They also have greater economic freedoms..." At the expense of those freedoms that matter to most people:
Hong Kong and Singapore have a large degree of economic freedom and low taxes despite being politically unfree, a pattern that is common also in Western history; the increasingly wealthy population then demands political freedoms and has the power to get it. If you look at the Index of Economic Freedom, you'll see that the countries after Hong Kong and Singapore are such "totalitarian hellholes" as Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Canada, and Denmark. The US used to be right at the top of the Index of Economic Freedom. There simply is no tradeoff between economic freedom and political freedom. The degree of intellectual dishonesty and ignorance with which people like you defend failing economic policies is just astounding.
There is a relationship between totalitarian control and places like Singapore and Hong Kong: they still have government run social programs like singe payer health care and nationalized retirement plans. They can make those work because the government has enough power to force people to participate, and because their economy is working well enough that they can have those plans despite having low taxes.
History is fairly consistent: totalitarian nations become free nations by liberalizing the economy and getting wealthy; political freedoms follow. And generally, free nations become totalitarian nations by excessive taxation to finance welfare schemes, destroying their economies, and finally ending up in economic and political chaos. Singapore and Hong Kong are currently on the path to more political freedoms, while we (and much of the West) are at the declining stage. It's not historically inevitable if we choose to turn around, however.
Slashdot Mirror
40-60% is total childhood mortality in primitive societies. Most of the reduction in childhood mortality since then is probably due to better sanitation, better treatment of diarrhea, and the use of antibiotics, not vaccinations.
That is "recent" as in "about half a century old"?
What choice do they have? Publishing is highly competitive and academic authors need citations. Academics would give away their firstborn to get into a highly ranked journal.
Because Elsevier demands it. And they can demand it because academics need citations and Elsevier provides them.
FWIW, I don't spend more per month than you seem to be spending (I save the rest). Are you saying you're working, earning 80% of poverty level, and not receiving any government assistance? Or are you not working and entirely on disability payments? Why would you be spending that much money on rent? And why would you be having so many medical appointments?
I don't understand what assumptions you want to reexamine, or what you think "our masters" are doing to you. How do you feel the rest of society has violated its social contract with you? What do you think the rest of society is obligated to, or even could, do to make your life better?
No, C++'s template system is nothing like Lisp macros. Lisp macros were straightforward tree rewrites. C++'s template system interacts in very complicated ways with overloading, inheritance, and other language features.
As for STL, its basic notions of containers, iterators, and algorithms exist in most languages and predate it by a couple of decades. STL is bloated and complex in comparison. The justification for the additional complexity in STL was efficiency, but STL isn't actually significantly better than simpler designs.
If the law makes source code illegal, it's a bad law.
I have decidedly mixed feelings about the template system. C++'s implementation of templates is a bit brute force but very efficient, and that's nice to have around.
But I think neither its template system nor the STL are particularly well designed.
Who is this "we" you are talking about? I know what I value and why, and it isn't money. That's why I have lived frugally and saved money. Many who talk about about needing to reevaluate what "we" value are really saying that they want a whole bunch of free stuff, and they want others to "value" their money less so that others pay for it.
They irony of that is that it hits those particularly hard who actually do live responsibly and frugally. I've paid my mortgage on a small home in a cheap neighborhood, and the thanks I get is that I get to bail out people who took on too much mortgage. I have a high deductible health insurance and keep in shape, and the thanks I get is that Obamacare now forces me to subsidize obese pill poppers and the drug companies.
I'm concluding that living frugally and not valuing money simply isn't possible anymore. Living frugally and saving money just doesn't leave enough safety margin for 100% increases in health insurance premiums or several percent increases in income tax to pay for other people's crap that I don't want in the first place. With all these progressive social programs, the way to have what I value, namely freedom and being able to decide my own destiny, is increasingly to become so wealthy that I don't have to worry about all the stupid stuff I don't want but that I'm increasingly forced to pay for.
That analogy is wrong. US spying on its own citizens is the same kind of spying that has been going on in France, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, and other Western democracies for decades; it is wrong and should be stopped everywhere. However, none of them are doing what made the Stasi so particularly offensive, namely the recruiting of large numbers of civilians to spy on their neighbors and relatives.
Yes, but I don't mind that. What I mind is that the US over the last couple of decades has adopted European-style government intrusion into the private lives of its citizens, and that needs to stop.
If passwords are stolen via key loggers and break-ins into online sites anyway, why should people even bother picking secure passwords?
Let me explain, since you seem to have a bit of trouble with the history and usage. C++ has never been a strict superset of C as a language; there have always been C programs that were not valid C++ programs. Therefore, when C++ programmers say that "C++ is a superset of C", it always means that you can take any C program and with only small modifications turn it into a valid C++ program that works and links the same way as the C program you started with.
True, but that doesn't mean that every language design is equally good. Java has some serious design problems that could have been fixed without making it more complex and without affecting its utility for its current user population. In addition, Java ended up not being used for the purpose it was designed and intended for.
Indeed: Java has become a specialty language for web applications. It failed at its original aspirations of becoming a language for general purpose desktop computing or for secure, sandboxed computing.
When wrapping native code libraries in Java, there usually needs to be glue code. That glue code needs to be written in C, since there is no JVM support for unsafe instructions. That means for every function in the native library, there are two C function calls involved: one from Java to the glue code, one from the glue code to the actual library. If one could write the glue code in Java using JVM instructions, the glue code would get compiled to native code by the JIT and the overall overhead for calling a function in a native code library would be just one function call, not two. Yes, this matters in practice. In addition to the speed advantage, writing the glue code in Java would also make it more portable and make it easier to deploy, which matters even more.
I think one misdemeanor count of accessing a computer without authorization is defensible for downloading a DDoS attack tool and deliberately participating in a DDoS attack.
However, the $183000 in restitution seems excessive; a reasonable person wouldn't run out and spend $183000 on a consultant for a 15 minute DDoS attack (how do you even do that?), so that loss is really the fault of the site owner.
Yes, a lot of bad design decisions in Java are driven by ineffective attempts to keep programmers from doing bad things. What keeps my most inept programmer from writing a bad JNI module?
That's good, but there's one more thing: the compiler and runtime need to keep track of which modules use unsafe primitives and expose that both to the language and the loader. That is, an unsafe Java module should be treated like a JNI module, except that it's more portable and written in a language Java programmers already understand.
If you need to call native code, JNI is even less safe than providing unsafe primitives in the Java language itself would be. That makes Java's design either poor, or it is a feeble attempt to discourage the use of unsafe modules by making them cumbersome or inefficient.
Yes, and that makes Java a bad choice for lots of applications.
No, that's not what is "really happening" at all. Supporting direct native calls in the JVM would impose no cost on Java calls at all; it would be completely separate instructions.
Yes, it really matters.
In Python and other HLLs, you can do all the C binding in the HLL itself, allowing you to call most shared libraries directly. In Java, you always have an extra function call overhead and you need to distribute an extra native code library.
Really? For every single feature in the language that's unspecified, leaving it unspecified and up to the implementation was the right choice, across the board? Let me bow before your awesome omniscience! Why didn't they come to you in the first place when designing the language?
Back in reality, there are some features that should have been left unspecified as they were, and there are others that probably should have been specified in the interest of interoperability, among other things because every major implementation implements it the same way anyway. It's understandable they made the choices they did back then, but the world has changed pretty significantly, and much of what we see in C++ is there for backwards compatibility, not because it's the best choice.
Let me spell it out for you since you seem to be too dumb to figure it out for yourself from my slightly sloppy formulation: places like Massachusetts do well on education because they successfully attract parents who themselves have high educational attainment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_educational_attainment
Yeah, and it's not like the differences between the nations and states are that big either. What there is is more than adequately explained by differences in parental educational attainment.
I mean, are you seriously trying to claim that the differences in PISA study results between states are not caused by the differences in parental educational attainment? If not, what exactly is it you are trying to say?
I am careful about such claims, having used native code interfaces since long before JNI was even conceived. Dealing with resource management and relocating garbage collection isn't rocket science, and JNI does it poorly.
Part of the problem is that Java refuses to provide unsafe primitives in the Java language itself, for no good reason. That means that all the heavy lifting needs to be done in C. Most native code calling shouldn't require writing any wrappers; a little preparation in the HLL followed by a direct call to a native function in a shared library should be enough. And unlike Java, where you pay at least two function call overheads (one from JNI to the C wrapper, a second from the C wrapper to the actual library function), such a scheme can compile and inline all the preparatory code using a JIT and then pay only for a single native function call into the shared library.
So, the Java JNI forces you to expend the effort to write native code wrappers for native libraries. Then you need to compile, package, and install these on every platform, making distribution and packaging a major headache. And to add insult to injury, the end result has higher overhead than if you could write the glue code in Java and just call the shared library directly.
C++ is a superset of C, and none of C++'s runtime features interfere with cross-language interoperability unless you actually use them and expose them. So, you're never worse off using C++, since you can always write your code the same way you would have done so in C and use C++ features only in a way that don't alter interfaces.
The only real disadvantage of C++ over C is the enormous complexity of C++. Functionally, it is superior in pretty much every way.
Because C++ lets people automate resource management and error handling, things that in C are manual and error prone. C++ also provides standards for abstraction, encapsulation, and substitutability, something that in C is not standardized and handled differently by every library. Despite C++'s many flaws and unnecessary complexity, it still is a better language than C for many projects.
The fault here lies specifically with Java and C++. Java's JNI is poorly designed and makes no serious attempt to make interoperability easy because it is against Java's philosophy. C++'s runtime is deliberately completely implementation dependent because C++'s designers thought that might let implementors squeeze out a little bit of performance.
Nevertheless, tools like Swig make even Java/C++ interoperation fairly easy, and many other languages try to accommodate C++ well (cf. Boost::Python).
Hong Kong and Singapore have a large degree of economic freedom and low taxes despite being politically unfree, a pattern that is common also in Western history; the increasingly wealthy population then demands political freedoms and has the power to get it. If you look at the Index of Economic Freedom, you'll see that the countries after Hong Kong and Singapore are such "totalitarian hellholes" as Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Canada, and Denmark. The US used to be right at the top of the Index of Economic Freedom. There simply is no tradeoff between economic freedom and political freedom. The degree of intellectual dishonesty and ignorance with which people like you defend failing economic policies is just astounding.
There is a relationship between totalitarian control and places like Singapore and Hong Kong: they still have government run social programs like singe payer health care and nationalized retirement plans. They can make those work because the government has enough power to force people to participate, and because their economy is working well enough that they can have those plans despite having low taxes.
History is fairly consistent: totalitarian nations become free nations by liberalizing the economy and getting wealthy; political freedoms follow. And generally, free nations become totalitarian nations by excessive taxation to finance welfare schemes, destroying their economies, and finally ending up in economic and political chaos. Singapore and Hong Kong are currently on the path to more political freedoms, while we (and much of the West) are at the declining stage. It's not historically inevitable if we choose to turn around, however.