Because we all know computers are terrible at doing arithmetic and solving simple equations
But they are. It's out of context, and it's much harder to make programs that are flexible like that. They're bringing a regular expression to an arithmetic party.
By doing exactly the wrong thing, and encouraging blatantly insecure behavior, you drive the metric that people are looking at through the floor (demonstrating your Epic Competence), and shove all the risk under the rug of the metric that everybody avoids looking at and politely doesn't mention!
Wait, are we talking about the banking system here?
It's also important to remember that it doesn't just apply to the rights described in the constitution, but also the ones that are not. The constitution explicitly states that it is not an enumeration of all rights enjoyed by citizens and other people in the USA. That's one of the absolutely best parts of the US constitution too.
Point of order: stack objects are not free, they're just very cheap. However, you still need to initialize (or were you going to use something without setting it to a known state?) and you need to bear in mind that stacks are generally considerably smaller than the heap. Yes, you can do things like resizing a stack or relocating it to another area of memory when you run out, but those are operations for the extremely brave. And they're expensive too. If I suspect that I even might need them, I just use the heap from the get go as that prevents my hair-loss (and I'll layer a few thread-bound pooled allocators in, which deal with most of the cost of heap usage when stack-based allocation was originally even a candidate in the first place).
Blame politicians and physics for that. Politicians because they can't leave timezones alone or use consistent rules, physics because the natural relevant time units we're stuck with are genuinely horrible.
In Italy, the SIAE (the local branch of the MAFIAA) routinely raids weddings to levy fines to anyone playing recorded music (most people hire live musicians instead nowadays, given how expensive the licence is).
I wonder what happens if they try raiding a (real) mafia wedding...
The real problem of tags is that there's usually fuck all useful semantics associated with them. There's only a benefit to using tags in the first place if many people use the same tagging system and consistently assign the same meaning to the tag as each other. Having just a tag is a bit like just having a scent marker on the information: not much use for saying more than "big primate was here, urinating on this data". There have been clear phases when slashdot tags were exactly on this level. (Does anyone remember when every last post was being tagged with "itsatrap"? It amused me to watch it unfurl, but it was less use than a chocolate bath plug.)
But where there's something more that, a way to get and debate the shared definition of the tag, to see what's been tagged, to be notified when something new receives the tag... that's when the tag acquires real value. There's an advantage to the tagger in using the tag "correctly" and so a fair chance that they will do that. The various stackexchange sites do quite a good job here.
Of course, there's a whole level of tagging above and beyond, with formal semantic tagging via RDF to build a Semantic Web. It would be ever so powerful, except it's really a PITA to work with and needs far more curation to be really useful than web content actually normally has. The very richness enabled by the advanced model they have with formal descriptions of the tags and so on renders it all far less useful precisely because it is so much less commonly used; I suspect a less formal system that has lots of actual data wins out as the semantics are more readily derived from network analysis rather than direct declaration. (I suspect not all my colleagues would agree...)
As long as our "representational" government is hijacked to represent the majority of dollars instead of people and of free speech, then we've completely strayed away from any sort of democracy at all. I don't know what you call it, but it ain't democracy.
The term for "rule by (virtue of) wealth" is "plutocracy". There's also "kleptocracy" which is "rule by thieves"; you might find that relevant.
The reasons you give are approximately the same ones as people give for preferring LaTeX; the differences seem to come down to whether people prefer angle brackets or backslashes. (Yeah, there are many more differences, but not so many that most authors actually care about.)
Something I read a while back and cannot recall now asserted that Java won most of their benchmarks except for those involving floating-point numbers. The reason being that C could use the processor's native FPU, but Java's "Write Once/Run Anyware" requirements forced it (unless overridden) to use IEEE Floating-point, which often had to be done in software.
IIRC, there's a way to change what Java does in that case which can get a reasonable speedup. Never needed it though; I don't write heavy numerics code.
More of an issue is that Java's evaluation order is much more strictly specified than C and C++'s. That rather strongly reduces the space of optimizations that can be applied. OTOH, Java's going to have fewer problems with aliasing; if two references say they're different, they really won't overlap. AIUI, that helps.
Then again, Sun made some really wretched design decisions. They're (as Oracle) now about to institute the third attempt to get dates, times, and calendars made easily usable. Although part of what made the first attempt so bad was that they DIDN'T over-engineer it. When you're programming for the World-Wide Web, you need support for multiple timezones and things like countries which use lunar calendars.
It doesn't help that dates and times are genuinely hard, and the more exactly you try to get them right, the harder they get. I know of someone who wrote his own date handling library from scratch simply because he was fed up with dealing with different bugs in strftime/strptime on each platform he was building on; better to have just his own bugs than everyone else's.
Sane Java programmers use Joda-Time and don't worry about what's going on in C.
It just has to be better than the majority of junior medical staff that do this sort of thing, especially freshman medics and nursing students. Yes, some more experienced staff will not be helped by this, but improving the level of care for most people is still a worthwhile goal.
While it's not that far north for Norway (where it's in the south of the country), it's still nearly 60N. In any reasonable terms, that's still a long way north; you have to go pretty much to the Antarctic peninsula to get an equivalent distance south. Heck, the axial diameter that far north is only half that of the equator...
I wish the civic duty sentiment were more common today
That bears repeating. A very large fraction of society's ills can be laid ultimately at its door; too many asses thinking only what the world can do for them.
You take the key, make a copy, have free access to other people's packages until you're caught.
And when you're caught, you get hammered by the courts as you'd be betraying the trust of your neighbors. That sort of thing makes sentences much harsher, and has done for hundreds of years.
Last year at Christmas time I had to replace a string of lights cause one went out and rather than search for the one of 150 I just purchased a new set, can I thank TVA engineers for that?
Unless someone who happens to work for the TVA was helping you out personally, no.
That said, the grid isn't a string of christmas lights. It's much more complex than that because you've got long transmission lines arranged in a mesh and many sources of power. Oh, and you critically need to keep the phases of the power sources synchronized or you cause even more damage. That makes your analogy suck. Sorry.
The principal reason the TVA has a better ability to respond to a cascading failure situation is precisely that they're not very efficient. The spare capacity meant that they had the capability to increase power output when the shit hit the fan when nobody else did. For the overall stability of the system, a public good that you clearly benefit from, not running everything as close to the edge as possible is required. But that in turn means that the short-term profit of the power producer is not maximized; if every producer is being forced to maximize short-term profit over everything else, that's most strongly enabled by pushing everything into the domain where nearly any unexpected problem causes total collapse. Think of it like cooling a liquid so that it becomes supercritical; the tiniest speck of dust can cause it to flash-freeze. You see similar effects in public transportation networks, road traffic, financial systems, etc. Focus too strongly on optimizing for the case where everything is doing fine and you'll get catastrophic failures more frequently as the system will have reduced ability to absorb random shocks (which happen all the time, even if most go unnoticed).
Which isn't to say that power production has to be government-run. It clearly doesn't. What it does have to be is somewhat over-provisioned so that the extra load of a squirrel self-immolating in a backwoods substation doesn't cause total systemic failure, and that over-provisioning has to be paid for somehow. Oh, and the regulator has to force this on providers; letting the shit hit the fan just to get one more quarter of increasing profits is too damaging. (Alternatively, you could regulate by lawsuit, but that also sucks...) Welcome to complex systems; the real solutions aren't always the ones you want.
Slashdot Mirror
Because we all know computers are terrible at doing arithmetic and solving simple equations
But they are. It's out of context, and it's much harder to make programs that are flexible like that. They're bringing a regular expression to an arithmetic party.
By doing exactly the wrong thing, and encouraging blatantly insecure behavior, you drive the metric that people are looking at through the floor (demonstrating your Epic Competence), and shove all the risk under the rug of the metric that everybody avoids looking at and politely doesn't mention!
Wait, are we talking about the banking system here?
In fact it applies to ANY Constitutional right.
It's also important to remember that it doesn't just apply to the rights described in the constitution, but also the ones that are not. The constitution explicitly states that it is not an enumeration of all rights enjoyed by citizens and other people in the USA. That's one of the absolutely best parts of the US constitution too.
Stack allocated objects are completely free.
Point of order: stack objects are not free, they're just very cheap. However, you still need to initialize (or were you going to use something without setting it to a known state?) and you need to bear in mind that stacks are generally considerably smaller than the heap. Yes, you can do things like resizing a stack or relocating it to another area of memory when you run out, but those are operations for the extremely brave. And they're expensive too. If I suspect that I even might need them, I just use the heap from the get go as that prevents my hair-loss (and I'll layer a few thread-bound pooled allocators in, which deal with most of the cost of heap usage when stack-based allocation was originally even a candidate in the first place).
What is the reason we can't talk about the subject of the polls anymore?
It doesn't matter; I won't vote in them when I can't discuss them.
Dates and timezones are needlessly complicated
Blame politicians and physics for that. Politicians because they can't leave timezones alone or use consistent rules, physics because the natural relevant time units we're stuck with are genuinely horrible.
Spoiler Alert: China does trade with regimes that routinely use torture and abuse human rights.
China trades with everyone. Even the USA.
Can they print really fine detail?
Yes. It all comes down to how finely you can position the print head, and how rapidly the plastic sets.
In Italy, the SIAE (the local branch of the MAFIAA) routinely raids weddings to levy fines to anyone playing recorded music (most people hire live musicians instead nowadays, given how expensive the licence is).
I wonder what happens if they try raiding a (real) mafia wedding...
Since when does Slashdot provide a private blogging platform on the front page?
That was what Rob Malda started it as...
(well, you can, but you're a dumbass of Jobsian proportions if you do)
Is that 17 centiBallmers or 8 nanoEllisons?
I like how the title/summary assumes you know what the fuck SFO means...
You mean you don't just learn these things for fun? What are you doing on this site anyway?
The real problem of tags is that there's usually fuck all useful semantics associated with them. There's only a benefit to using tags in the first place if many people use the same tagging system and consistently assign the same meaning to the tag as each other. Having just a tag is a bit like just having a scent marker on the information: not much use for saying more than "big primate was here, urinating on this data". There have been clear phases when slashdot tags were exactly on this level. (Does anyone remember when every last post was being tagged with "itsatrap"? It amused me to watch it unfurl, but it was less use than a chocolate bath plug.)
But where there's something more that, a way to get and debate the shared definition of the tag, to see what's been tagged, to be notified when something new receives the tag... that's when the tag acquires real value. There's an advantage to the tagger in using the tag "correctly" and so a fair chance that they will do that. The various stackexchange sites do quite a good job here.
Of course, there's a whole level of tagging above and beyond, with formal semantic tagging via RDF to build a Semantic Web. It would be ever so powerful, except it's really a PITA to work with and needs far more curation to be really useful than web content actually normally has. The very richness enabled by the advanced model they have with formal descriptions of the tags and so on renders it all far less useful precisely because it is so much less commonly used; I suspect a less formal system that has lots of actual data wins out as the semantics are more readily derived from network analysis rather than direct declaration. (I suspect not all my colleagues would agree...)
As long as our "representational" government is hijacked to represent the majority of dollars instead of people and of free speech, then we've completely strayed away from any sort of democracy at all. I don't know what you call it, but it ain't democracy.
The term for "rule by (virtue of) wealth" is "plutocracy". There's also "kleptocracy" which is "rule by thieves"; you might find that relevant.
Our congress isn't free.
Of course not. It takes a lot of money to buy a Representative, and even more to buy a Senator.
use DocBook XML and MathML to author your content
The reasons you give are approximately the same ones as people give for preferring LaTeX; the differences seem to come down to whether people prefer angle brackets or backslashes. (Yeah, there are many more differences, but not so many that most authors actually care about.)
I like Perl too but Perl5 has some bad stuff. You can't put the argument names in sub definitions, etc.
Still better than Perl4, which was completely demented in places.
Something I read a while back and cannot recall now asserted that Java won most of their benchmarks except for those involving floating-point numbers. The reason being that C could use the processor's native FPU, but Java's "Write Once/Run Anyware" requirements forced it (unless overridden) to use IEEE Floating-point, which often had to be done in software.
IIRC, there's a way to change what Java does in that case which can get a reasonable speedup. Never needed it though; I don't write heavy numerics code.
More of an issue is that Java's evaluation order is much more strictly specified than C and C++'s. That rather strongly reduces the space of optimizations that can be applied. OTOH, Java's going to have fewer problems with aliasing; if two references say they're different, they really won't overlap. AIUI, that helps.
Then again, Sun made some really wretched design decisions. They're (as Oracle) now about to institute the third attempt to get dates, times, and calendars made easily usable. Although part of what made the first attempt so bad was that they DIDN'T over-engineer it. When you're programming for the World-Wide Web, you need support for multiple timezones and things like countries which use lunar calendars.
It doesn't help that dates and times are genuinely hard, and the more exactly you try to get them right, the harder they get. I know of someone who wrote his own date handling library from scratch simply because he was fed up with dealing with different bugs in strftime/strptime on each platform he was building on; better to have just his own bugs than everyone else's.
Sane Java programmers use Joda-Time and don't worry about what's going on in C.
It just has to be better than the majority of junior medical staff that do this sort of thing, especially freshman medics and nursing students. Yes, some more experienced staff will not be helped by this, but improving the level of care for most people is still a worthwhile goal.
Rjukan isn't all that far to the North
While it's not that far north for Norway (where it's in the south of the country), it's still nearly 60N. In any reasonable terms, that's still a long way north; you have to go pretty much to the Antarctic peninsula to get an equivalent distance south. Heck, the axial diameter that far north is only half that of the equator...
I wish the civic duty sentiment were more common today
That bears repeating. A very large fraction of society's ills can be laid ultimately at its door; too many asses thinking only what the world can do for them.
You take the key, make a copy, have free access to other people's packages until you're caught.
And when you're caught, you get hammered by the courts as you'd be betraying the trust of your neighbors. That sort of thing makes sentences much harsher, and has done for hundreds of years.
Way too much/little is bad for you, but some salt is required.
OTOH, if you eat processed food you probably get sufficient without adding any.
Last year at Christmas time I had to replace a string of lights cause one went out and rather than search for the one of 150 I just purchased a new set, can I thank TVA engineers for that?
Unless someone who happens to work for the TVA was helping you out personally, no.
That said, the grid isn't a string of christmas lights. It's much more complex than that because you've got long transmission lines arranged in a mesh and many sources of power. Oh, and you critically need to keep the phases of the power sources synchronized or you cause even more damage. That makes your analogy suck. Sorry.
The principal reason the TVA has a better ability to respond to a cascading failure situation is precisely that they're not very efficient. The spare capacity meant that they had the capability to increase power output when the shit hit the fan when nobody else did. For the overall stability of the system, a public good that you clearly benefit from, not running everything as close to the edge as possible is required. But that in turn means that the short-term profit of the power producer is not maximized; if every producer is being forced to maximize short-term profit over everything else, that's most strongly enabled by pushing everything into the domain where nearly any unexpected problem causes total collapse. Think of it like cooling a liquid so that it becomes supercritical; the tiniest speck of dust can cause it to flash-freeze. You see similar effects in public transportation networks, road traffic, financial systems, etc. Focus too strongly on optimizing for the case where everything is doing fine and you'll get catastrophic failures more frequently as the system will have reduced ability to absorb random shocks (which happen all the time, even if most go unnoticed).
Which isn't to say that power production has to be government-run. It clearly doesn't. What it does have to be is somewhat over-provisioned so that the extra load of a squirrel self-immolating in a backwoods substation doesn't cause total systemic failure, and that over-provisioning has to be paid for somehow. Oh, and the regulator has to force this on providers; letting the shit hit the fan just to get one more quarter of increasing profits is too damaging. (Alternatively, you could regulate by lawsuit, but that also sucks...) Welcome to complex systems; the real solutions aren't always the ones you want.