Python 3 is barely different from Python 2. It is not backwards compatible, but I've ported Python 3 programs to Python 2 (when I realized I had to use SciPy or run the code on a system with only Python 2), and nearly the only changes I had to make were changes for// for integer division and required () for print -- and these changes were trivial if I could simply import from __future__. In contrast, Perl 6 is very different from Perl 5.
Yes, and by doing so the person who invented the thing gets rewarded for inventing it and for sharing the knowledge with everyone else. Without patents, we'd go back to trade secrets, where the inventor would profit but there would be no sharing of knowledge.
Yes, I agree that silly patents have been granted. Patents should be granted for ideas that are not obvious. You'll have to come up with a citation stating they're mostly used to extort license fees; that's what we call patent trolling, and few companies do it.
What will prevent him from selling the drugs the preclinical and clinical trials needed to get approval from the FDA. He needs to show that the drugs are a safe and effective treatment for cystic fibrosis in humans. That process costs many millions of dollars. That's why companies are allowed to get a patent on a drug. If they couldn't, they wouldn't be able to recoup the costs of developing the drug, because a generic drug maker could easily undercut them and profit. That's why we have patents -- to promote innovation and sharing of knowledge.
It isn't Moore's law, but speed of networking does follow an exponential trend, as does capacity of hard disks. Maybe if you make a logarithmic graph of when 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps, and 100 Gbps Ethernet appeared you could estimate when 1 Tbps Ethernet should appear.
I can't speak for others, but I am fully aware that many people who associate themselves with religions go through the motions and don't really know what their scriptures say. There are also fundamentalists of all religions, who take what their scriptures say literally or have a militant interpretation of them. I think as someone who doesn't associate strongly with one particular religion or against other religions, I can see how religion is practiced in the real world quite clearly. I'm a dispassionate observer and as such can see things as they are more clearly than someone who is emotional about one side or the other.
A large company can afford to hire many fresh graduates, even if a significant percentage of them turn out to be duds. I think the article was more about small companies, where they need programmers who can be productive the first week.
I was doing programming projects for years before I ever took any sort of computer class. If a potential programmer can't show any work they've done outside of the classroom, they're almost certainly not ready to code for a living.
If an interviewee really can't show any work, perhaps a good idea would be to give them a few simple Google Code Jam problems and have them pick one to solve. Just watching them write down some pseudocode would show whether they have the ability to think for themselves, and if they can actually write a working solution in a common programming language, or better yet, the language they'll be using on the job, then of course they can program!
Yes, the old God of the gaps idea. The trouble is, God keeps getting smaller and smaller as there are fewer gaps to put him in. I find it hilarious to watch religious people put God in the gaps, then get mad at scientists for invading their turf as they fill in the gaps. Talk about a losing strategy!
It's similar to the situation with floating point arithmetic. Who hasn't been caught off guard when 1/3 + 2/3 != 1? It's just something you need to know when you write programs -- floating point numbers are approximations of real numbers. Another thing programmers need to know is that pointers (or references) point to other entities.
You're arguing for value semantics (as in C++), as opposed to reference semantics (as in Java, Python, and JavaScript). In the latter languages, what many programmers think of as objects are really references to objects. In your code, myObj and newObj are two references that point to the same single object. Don't feel bad -- I talk to many Java programmers who still don't quite grasp this concept. Good old pointer diagrams make it clear; get a book that shows references as boxes with arrows that point to the objects they refer to.
I don't think anyone expected an immediate horrible crisis upon hitting peak oil. When we hit peak oil, we would see prices rise dramatically as supply cannot keep up with demand. Isn't that what we're seeing?
No, the AC's point was that if they were distributing child porn that they would be liable, so why wouldn't they be liable for distributing Limewire? In any case, the AC was clearly making a new point, not misrepresenting a point that someone else had made. If he had claimed that someone had said that no one should be held accountable for distributing illegal material, that would certainly be a straw man.
How is that a straw man? A straw man is when you misrepresent your opponent's position, then shoot down that position. For example, if I said the AC was a horrible person for suggesting that kiddie porn was okay. I'm misrepresenting what the AC said, because the AC never said kiddie porn was okay. The AC made a poor analogy, by suggesting that distributing content that is inherently illegal is similar to distributing software that isn't inherently illegal.
Generally once you have any polynomial time algorithm for a problem, a polynomial time algorithm with small coefficients and small powers is found soon afterwards. This is the justification for splitting problems into P and NP. Also, the smart money is on P!=NP, but we just don't know how to prove it yet.
P is the set of problems that can be solved quickly. NP is the set of problems for which a correct answer can be checked quickly. Multiplication is in P and NP. Factoring is in NP, because to check that a number was factored correctly you can multiply the numbers together quickly. The question is: Is factoring (and the other problems in NP for which we don't have a quick algorithm) in P? If someone could find a quick algorithm for factoring, some cryptosystems could be easily broken.
And yet many people who subscribe to a religion do indeed listen to interpretations by crazy fundamentalists. Christians and Muslims both have their fair share of crazy fundamentalists.
Yes, exactly. Take the reason for the crime away. If drugs are legal, drug trafficking will cease to be profitable. Drug users will be able to support their habit with a low-paying job, so they're productive members of society instead of needing to steal to get enough money for drugs. The drugs will also be safer because they're regulated, and with a small tax on legal drugs the government will make revenue instead of spending billions fighting them. Didn't we learn anything from prohibition?
There's probably a way to take the reason for war away, too, as opposed to fighting each attack with a counterattack which just creates more violence.
Slashdot Mirror
Python 3 is barely different from Python 2. It is not backwards compatible, but I've ported Python 3 programs to Python 2 (when I realized I had to use SciPy or run the code on a system with only Python 2), and nearly the only changes I had to make were changes for // for integer division and required () for print -- and these changes were trivial if I could simply import from __future__. In contrast, Perl 6 is very different from Perl 5.
Yes, and by doing so the person who invented the thing gets rewarded for inventing it and for sharing the knowledge with everyone else. Without patents, we'd go back to trade secrets, where the inventor would profit but there would be no sharing of knowledge.
Yes, I agree that silly patents have been granted. Patents should be granted for ideas that are not obvious. You'll have to come up with a citation stating they're mostly used to extort license fees; that's what we call patent trolling, and few companies do it.
What will prevent him from selling the drugs the preclinical and clinical trials needed to get approval from the FDA. He needs to show that the drugs are a safe and effective treatment for cystic fibrosis in humans. That process costs many millions of dollars. That's why companies are allowed to get a patent on a drug. If they couldn't, they wouldn't be able to recoup the costs of developing the drug, because a generic drug maker could easily undercut them and profit. That's why we have patents -- to promote innovation and sharing of knowledge.
It isn't Moore's law, but speed of networking does follow an exponential trend, as does capacity of hard disks. Maybe if you make a logarithmic graph of when 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps, and 100 Gbps Ethernet appeared you could estimate when 1 Tbps Ethernet should appear.
Ah, the good old "nature done it" explanation. At least it's a step up from the "God done it" explanation of intelligent design advocates.
I can't speak for others, but I am fully aware that many people who associate themselves with religions go through the motions and don't really know what their scriptures say. There are also fundamentalists of all religions, who take what their scriptures say literally or have a militant interpretation of them. I think as someone who doesn't associate strongly with one particular religion or against other religions, I can see how religion is practiced in the real world quite clearly. I'm a dispassionate observer and as such can see things as they are more clearly than someone who is emotional about one side or the other.
Then you could do a quick, small program right there at the interview, just as I described.
A large company can afford to hire many fresh graduates, even if a significant percentage of them turn out to be duds. I think the article was more about small companies, where they need programmers who can be productive the first week.
I was doing programming projects for years before I ever took any sort of computer class. If a potential programmer can't show any work they've done outside of the classroom, they're almost certainly not ready to code for a living.
If an interviewee really can't show any work, perhaps a good idea would be to give them a few simple Google Code Jam problems and have them pick one to solve. Just watching them write down some pseudocode would show whether they have the ability to think for themselves, and if they can actually write a working solution in a common programming language, or better yet, the language they'll be using on the job, then of course they can program!
Yes, the old God of the gaps idea. The trouble is, God keeps getting smaller and smaller as there are fewer gaps to put him in. I find it hilarious to watch religious people put God in the gaps, then get mad at scientists for invading their turf as they fill in the gaps. Talk about a losing strategy!
A survey has shown that atheists and agnostics know the most about religion. Atheists also tend to be more intelligent and obey the golden rule. This flies in the face of the idea behind the wedge strategy, that materialism leads to a decline in society.
It's similar to the situation with floating point arithmetic. Who hasn't been caught off guard when 1/3 + 2/3 != 1? It's just something you need to know when you write programs -- floating point numbers are approximations of real numbers. Another thing programmers need to know is that pointers (or references) point to other entities.
You're arguing for value semantics (as in C++), as opposed to reference semantics (as in Java, Python, and JavaScript). In the latter languages, what many programmers think of as objects are really references to objects. In your code, myObj and newObj are two references that point to the same single object. Don't feel bad -- I talk to many Java programmers who still don't quite grasp this concept. Good old pointer diagrams make it clear; get a book that shows references as boxes with arrows that point to the objects they refer to.
I don't think anyone expected an immediate horrible crisis upon hitting peak oil. When we hit peak oil, we would see prices rise dramatically as supply cannot keep up with demand. Isn't that what we're seeing?
No, the AC's point was that if they were distributing child porn that they would be liable, so why wouldn't they be liable for distributing Limewire? In any case, the AC was clearly making a new point, not misrepresenting a point that someone else had made. If he had claimed that someone had said that no one should be held accountable for distributing illegal material, that would certainly be a straw man.
How is that a straw man? A straw man is when you misrepresent your opponent's position, then shoot down that position. For example, if I said the AC was a horrible person for suggesting that kiddie porn was okay. I'm misrepresenting what the AC said, because the AC never said kiddie porn was okay. The AC made a poor analogy, by suggesting that distributing content that is inherently illegal is similar to distributing software that isn't inherently illegal.
The Trim-Slice has Ethernet and is small enough to carry around, but it's about as big as a smartphone.
No, but I think a Beowulf cluster of those posts would be absolutely hilarious!
Generally once you have any polynomial time algorithm for a problem, a polynomial time algorithm with small coefficients and small powers is found soon afterwards. This is the justification for splitting problems into P and NP. Also, the smart money is on P!=NP, but we just don't know how to prove it yet.
P is the set of problems that can be solved quickly. NP is the set of problems for which a correct answer can be checked quickly. Multiplication is in P and NP. Factoring is in NP, because to check that a number was factored correctly you can multiply the numbers together quickly. The question is: Is factoring (and the other problems in NP for which we don't have a quick algorithm) in P? If someone could find a quick algorithm for factoring, some cryptosystems could be easily broken.
Firefox doesn't have it built in because the vast majority of users never need it. Nearly all sites work with Firefox's default user agent string.
And yet many people who subscribe to a religion do indeed listen to interpretations by crazy fundamentalists. Christians and Muslims both have their fair share of crazy fundamentalists.
I think they still get their 70 virgins even if they're killed by robotic drones.
Yes, exactly. Take the reason for the crime away. If drugs are legal, drug trafficking will cease to be profitable. Drug users will be able to support their habit with a low-paying job, so they're productive members of society instead of needing to steal to get enough money for drugs. The drugs will also be safer because they're regulated, and with a small tax on legal drugs the government will make revenue instead of spending billions fighting them. Didn't we learn anything from prohibition?
There's probably a way to take the reason for war away, too, as opposed to fighting each attack with a counterattack which just creates more violence.