WTF does this have to do with "bullying" anyone? The Iranians loved the Iran-Contra scheme. They got the parts they desperately needed for their airforce, and they still got to rail against the evil Americans in public.
The main problem w/ Iran-Contra was that the "Contra" part of it directly violated US law.
I can't speak for other people, but I'm about the worst speller I know, and misspellings account for probably only about 10-20% of the autocorrections my phone does on me. Most of the time it kicks in because the phone doesn't have the word I'm typing in the dictionary, or because the phone and my fingers had different opinions on what key was being pressed on my touchscreen's simulated keyboard. If it wasn't for the convenience of that last reason, I'd probably turn the damn autocorrect off.
My own personal worst experience was when I was tweeting that I had a 2 hour layover in DFW, and it decided I had meant "lover" instead of "layover". That one took some explaining, particularly to the wife...
That doesn't mean a whole lot, since a 1977 dollar was worth a whole lot more than a 2011 dollar.
To make the numbers actually mean something, you have to compare the debt to something else, like inflation-adjusted dollars or the GDP at the time.
In fact, one click away was a wiki page that does just that. It has all kinds of much more useful graphs, charts and tables. Looking over that, you find the general pattern has been that debt spiked during WWII, then slowly declined until President Ford took office. Then something changed and it started going up every year a Republican was in office and going down nearly every year a Democrat was in office.
Its not perfect, but it is clear which is the better party for you if you care about the debt.
I'm the last to defend the Sanctity of "Porky's 2", but it had an even worse continuity problem caused by editing. When shown on network TV (???) there was a scene that was so racy it was removed entirely, and all references to a certian male anatomical part replaced by "finger". That led to a bizzare scene where one teacher is angrilly demanding a manhunt for the owner of the "finger" while everyone else in the room is making "finger" jokes and laughing themselves sick.
Perhaps it wasn't a very worthwhile artistic vision, but the censorship completely destroyed it nonetheless.
What makes you think that the current holder wouldn't be delighted to "modernize" the wording if they thought it would make it sell better? The only thing that ensures us the ability to buy unmarred new copies of Huck Finn now is the fact that it is now out of copyright.
It is a reasonable point that Rodger Ebert being called either just doesn't mean the same thing as an actual black person being called them would. So his opinion on the matter isn't nearly as interesting as, say Bill Cosby's would be.
If you don't like it, go smack one of our ancestors around. It's all their fault.
Of course it was British Soldiers (in the War of 1812) that did that. Technically at the time "Canadians" were just another flavor of "British", so you could try to use the terms interchangably. However, there were some all-Canadian units in action in the War of 1812, and none of those served in that part of the campaign.
"The flu" is actually a series of related diseases (or "strains"). If you catch one of them (and survive) or get immunized against it, you will have a pretty good immunity against it, perhaps for life.
The way "the flu" combats this is that it has quite a few different strains to chose from, and obviously the one that went around last year isn't liable to go around again this year because many of the vulnerable victims are now immune to it. So a new strain will go around.
However, there are a limited number of them. So if you live long enough, and catch the flu enough, you will see years where the strains going around are ones you are already immune to.
Take last year's swine flu. It got a reputation for attacking kids rather than adults. Why? Because an essentially similar swine flu went around back in the '70s. Anyone exposed to it then (mostly folks over 40) has an immunity. That's also why it hit developing countries so much harder, they have a higher proportion of young people.
I'm the kind of person who catches diseases very easily. So usually I'm the second person in my house to get sick. However, I got it back in the 70's, and thus was the only person in my 5-person household to not get it last year. It was kinda weird.
I never said anything about casting. Aliasing is when one variable is actually an "alias" for another. So what is at issue here is C's over-relaince on pointers for everyday tasks like array element manipulation and parameter passing.
I know its an article of dogma among many that C is somehow inherently fast. That makes any inconvenient facts pointing otherwise kind of hard to swallow. Sorry. The dogma is wrong.
...still, where all your actual control flows are going doesn't seem to me to be nearly as clear when coded this way as if you just went ahead and used gotos.
It would be interesting to do as an experiement (I might even try it sometime), but for actual code that has to be debugged and some poor schlub has to maintain, I'd rather see gotos used.
Ahh. I see what you are saying. Yes, any goto pretty much by definition isn't coming back. To change to a web of routine calls, you'd still have to rearrange the way the state is coded (since again semanticly routines *do* come back), but I guess at worst that just means you put a "return" after every routine call.
And, I wish we had trains for long distance travel in the US. Traveling by car at 70mph for hours and hours is tiring and there is always the prospect of a problem with a car and being stuck somewhere. Airplane travel is marred by the security checks and delays and long wait times.
Err...we do. Americans just don't like to use it. Probably because once you get there, you will most likely need a car once again. One D.C. to Orlando route addresses this by tacking on some extra cars to carry your automobiles with you. Guess which is the one Amtrak train I've ever personally taken?
Of course if Americans *did* like to use it, then we'd probably have to add all those security checks like the airlines have. For example, in India everyone uses the train system, and it has been a primary terrorist target for decades.
That really only works if the "goto" always happens at the end of the state (rather than conditionally somewhere in the middle). The state machines I've written tended to have quite a few states with that property.
A very interesting idea though. It hadn't occurred to me to try to implement a state machine using a mutually-recursive web of routines.
That's not the point. The aliasing prevents the compiler from being able to safely hoist your variables up into registers without doing an expensive analysis of the entire program (all source files in extreme cases) to make sure its safe. Even then it might not be able to figure it out.
A theoreticaly really smart assembly programmer would know his inteded data flows, and if it is safe or not. A compiler has to figure it out mechanically (and often can't).
The problem is that C is a portable assembly language for 1970. Modern assembly has to worry about things like pipelines, predictive branching, multi-level caches of various sizes, etc. Only the most godlike of humans could hope to keep track of that in their heads. Languages that try to tell the compiler precisely what circa-1970 assembly instructions to generate have become an active menace. Its like an 8 year-old sitting the the back seat trying to tell you how to drive (because he as a tricycle and knows all about it).
Goto provides for the natural expression of a state-machine. The most common example of that is in lexical analysis. Look at the output from LEX sometime; it is chock full of gotos. Most lexical analyzers are done the same way. So every time you invoke your compiler, you probably are exercising goto-laden code.
Some of the more dogmatic try to get around it by using a case statement in a loop (with an enumeration or something controlling the current state). But really the internal structure of the code flow there has nothing whatsoever to do with that loop, and artificially imposing that on it just obscures the state machine underneath.
Actually, that's a bit of a myth with C. The truth is that its pseudo-low level nature, and particualy all the aliasing it supports (and encourages!) makes the optimizer's job way harder. With the same amount of effort, an Ada or Fortran compiler can do a much better job optimizing code.
Of course "the same amount of effort" is where the rub is. What really matters for speed is how much effort the compiler writers put into optimizations, not what language the compiler is for.
The main advantage C always had was that the language is so simple that it was fairly easy to write a compiler. That made it the first (and often only) compiler written for a new platform. C was generally "the right tool for the job" only because it is the only tool available for the job.
It took you 8 years to figure out that Rush lies? Inspiring and sad at the same time. I have to wonder how many years it will take you to figure out the same thing about Mr. Beck. I'll check back with you sometime around 2016 to see if you are on pace.
Only because those are the folks who have money to go seek mental health professionals and get diagnosed. The poor have the same problems, just different ways of dealing.
Ever hear of Suicide By Cop? How about all those junkies and winos who die every year? Think they were the picture of mental health before the evil chemicals got them?
Slashdot Mirror
OK. Here's a problem. Clearly a *whoosh* applies here somewhere, either to the parent, or to most of my sibling posts. But it is not clear which.
Is there an algorithm to solve this problem in polynomial time? If so, does this show that P=NP?
Iran Contra sound familiar?
WTF does this have to do with "bullying" anyone? The Iranians loved the Iran-Contra scheme. They got the parts they desperately needed for their airforce, and they still got to rail against the evil Americans in public.
The main problem w/ Iran-Contra was that the "Contra" part of it directly violated US law.
I can't speak for other people, but I'm about the worst speller I know, and misspellings account for probably only about 10-20% of the autocorrections my phone does on me. Most of the time it kicks in because the phone doesn't have the word I'm typing in the dictionary, or because the phone and my fingers had different opinions on what key was being pressed on my touchscreen's simulated keyboard. If it wasn't for the convenience of that last reason, I'd probably turn the damn autocorrect off.
My own personal worst experience was when I was tweeting that I had a 2 hour layover in DFW, and it decided I had meant "lover" instead of "layover". That one took some explaining, particularly to the wife...
That doesn't mean a whole lot, since a 1977 dollar was worth a whole lot more than a 2011 dollar.
To make the numbers actually mean something, you have to compare the debt to something else, like inflation-adjusted dollars or the GDP at the time.
In fact, one click away was a wiki page that does just that. It has all kinds of much more useful graphs, charts and tables. Looking over that, you find the general pattern has been that debt spiked during WWII, then slowly declined until President Ford took office. Then something changed and it started going up every year a Republican was in office and going down nearly every year a Democrat was in office.
Its not perfect, but it is clear which is the better party for you if you care about the debt.
Citation needed.
The first one I found said that in 2007 the top 1% owned 36% of the country's net wealth, and 42% of its financial wealth (subtract out primary residence values).
I always answer mine with a *wrong* answer, that is wrong in a way I will remember.
If this works, then Dick Cheney owes me big.
...and if you ever ran VS 6, you have used a prodcut that tries to use null pointers in many parts of is source.
I'm the last to defend the Sanctity of "Porky's 2", but it had an even worse continuity problem caused by editing. When shown on network TV (???) there was a scene that was so racy it was removed entirely, and all references to a certian male anatomical part replaced by "finger". That led to a bizzare scene where one teacher is angrilly demanding a manhunt for the owner of the "finger" while everyone else in the room is making "finger" jokes and laughing themselves sick.
Perhaps it wasn't a very worthwhile artistic vision, but the censorship completely destroyed it nonetheless.
What makes you think that the current holder wouldn't be delighted to "modernize" the wording if they thought it would make it sell better? The only thing that ensures us the ability to buy unmarred new copies of Huck Finn now is the fact that it is now out of copyright.
It is a reasonable point that Rodger Ebert being called either just doesn't mean the same thing as an actual black person being called them would. So his opinion on the matter isn't nearly as interesting as, say Bill Cosby's would be.
If you don't like it, go smack one of our ancestors around. It's all their fault.
Yeah, kinda stuck out at me too.
Of course it was British Soldiers (in the War of 1812) that did that. Technically at the time "Canadians" were just another flavor of "British", so you could try to use the terms interchangably. However, there were some all-Canadian units in action in the War of 1812, and none of those served in that part of the campaign.
Yes you can, sort of.
"The flu" is actually a series of related diseases (or "strains"). If you catch one of them (and survive) or get immunized against it, you will have a pretty good immunity against it, perhaps for life.
The way "the flu" combats this is that it has quite a few different strains to chose from, and obviously the one that went around last year isn't liable to go around again this year because many of the vulnerable victims are now immune to it. So a new strain will go around.
However, there are a limited number of them. So if you live long enough, and catch the flu enough, you will see years where the strains going around are ones you are already immune to.
Take last year's swine flu. It got a reputation for attacking kids rather than adults. Why? Because an essentially similar swine flu went around back in the '70s. Anyone exposed to it then (mostly folks over 40) has an immunity. That's also why it hit developing countries so much harder, they have a higher proportion of young people.
I'm the kind of person who catches diseases very easily. So usually I'm the second person in my house to get sick. However, I got it back in the 70's, and thus was the only person in my 5-person household to not get it last year. It was kinda weird.
I never said anything about casting. Aliasing is when one variable is actually an "alias" for another. So what is at issue here is C's over-relaince on pointers for everyday tasks like array element manipulation and parameter passing.
I know its an article of dogma among many that C is somehow inherently fast. That makes any inconvenient facts pointing otherwise kind of hard to swallow. Sorry. The dogma is wrong.
It would be interesting to do as an experiement (I might even try it sometime), but for actual code that has to be debugged and some poor schlub has to maintain, I'd rather see gotos used.
Ahh. I see what you are saying. Yes, any goto pretty much by definition isn't coming back. To change to a web of routine calls, you'd still have to rearrange the way the state is coded (since again semanticly routines *do* come back), but I guess at worst that just means you put a "return" after every routine call.
And, I wish we had trains for long distance travel in the US. Traveling by car at 70mph for hours and hours is tiring and there is always the prospect of a problem with a car and being stuck somewhere. Airplane travel is marred by the security checks and delays and long wait times.
Err...we do. Americans just don't like to use it. Probably because once you get there, you will most likely need a car once again. One D.C. to Orlando route addresses this by tacking on some extra cars to carry your automobiles with you. Guess which is the one Amtrak train I've ever personally taken?
Of course if Americans *did* like to use it, then we'd probably have to add all those security checks like the airlines have. For example, in India everyone uses the train system, and it has been a primary terrorist target for decades.
That really only works if the "goto" always happens at the end of the state (rather than conditionally somewhere in the middle). The state machines I've written tended to have quite a few states with that property.
A very interesting idea though. It hadn't occurred to me to try to implement a state machine using a mutually-recursive web of routines.
That's not the point. The aliasing prevents the compiler from being able to safely hoist your variables up into registers without doing an expensive analysis of the entire program (all source files in extreme cases) to make sure its safe. Even then it might not be able to figure it out.
A theoreticaly really smart assembly programmer would know his inteded data flows, and if it is safe or not. A compiler has to figure it out mechanically (and often can't).
The problem is that C is a portable assembly language for 1970. Modern assembly has to worry about things like pipelines, predictive branching, multi-level caches of various sizes, etc. Only the most godlike of humans could hope to keep track of that in their heads. Languages that try to tell the compiler precisely what circa-1970 assembly instructions to generate have become an active menace. Its like an 8 year-old sitting the the back seat trying to tell you how to drive (because he as a tricycle and knows all about it).
Goto provides for the natural expression of a state-machine. The most common example of that is in lexical analysis. Look at the output from LEX sometime; it is chock full of gotos. Most lexical analyzers are done the same way. So every time you invoke your compiler, you probably are exercising goto-laden code.
Some of the more dogmatic try to get around it by using a case statement in a loop (with an enumeration or something controlling the current state). But really the internal structure of the code flow there has nothing whatsoever to do with that loop, and artificially imposing that on it just obscures the state machine underneath.
...and in those cases you should probably be using Ada instead of C. The only time to use C is when there is no other compiler available.
Actually, that's a bit of a myth with C. The truth is that its pseudo-low level nature, and particualy all the aliasing it supports (and encourages!) makes the optimizer's job way harder. With the same amount of effort, an Ada or Fortran compiler can do a much better job optimizing code.
Of course "the same amount of effort" is where the rub is. What really matters for speed is how much effort the compiler writers put into optimizations, not what language the compiler is for.
The main advantage C always had was that the language is so simple that it was fairly easy to write a compiler. That made it the first (and often only) compiler written for a new platform. C was generally "the right tool for the job" only because it is the only tool available for the job.
It took you 8 years to figure out that Rush lies? Inspiring and sad at the same time. I have to wonder how many years it will take you to figure out the same thing about Mr. Beck. I'll check back with you sometime around 2016 to see if you are on pace.
Our universal unit of measure for unhealthyness in foods has long been "the Big Mac".
Only because those are the folks who have money to go seek mental health professionals and get diagnosed. The poor have the same problems, just different ways of dealing.
Ever hear of Suicide By Cop? How about all those junkies and winos who die every year? Think they were the picture of mental health before the evil chemicals got them?