If your C++ environment has an std::vector implemented with buckets, then blame your specific C++ environment that violates the standard.
I wasn't blaming anyone or anything in particular. Just relating my experience, which agreed with the original poster. You're saying something is impossible, but it happened to both of us. If you think I should blame my "specific C++ environment", well that's fine with me, but I'm not sure what you're trying to defend right now, I'm not trying to attack anyone or anything, I just don't think that the original poster was necessarily bullshitting about their experience.
The stream of bullshit never ends.
Just because you are confident of your own correctness doesn't mean everyone else is lying about their experience. You can suggest alternate explanations for those experiences without insulting everybody and saying everyone who has seen this issue is bullshitting (and again... why would we be bullshitting about this? What could there possibly be to gain by tricking people about something like that?)
Or, more succinctly: Just because you think you're right, doesn't mean you have to be a jerk.
I smell bullshit. There is no overhead from using STL containers.
Ehm... that's a nice theory, but I second GP's experience in finding otherwise in practice. I don't know the specific reasons -- maybe there were memory fragmentation issues and it wasn't really STL's "fault" -- but I was doing some large-for-my-laptop (with 3GB ram) data processing, and initially used vectors for everything. I eventually had to give up and rewrite it all with arrays just like GP, because I kept having difficult-to-debug and impossible-to-fix memory issues as a result.
Really, why would someone bother "bullshitting" about something like this? He was pointing out a peculiarity of the overheads one particular program he worked with, I don't think he was doing it with some sort of anti-STL agenda or anything...
If you used an std::vector, you couldn't have a bottleneck, for the simple reason that the std::vector is an array.
There might be systems on which this is true, but not on the c++ libraries on my mac. When I was trying to figure out what was going wrong with my vector-based program, I got to look at a lot of vectors from within gdb, and they have a neat bucket system going on that I'm sure is very fancy and clever, but let me tell you, it is not just an array, and good luck figuring out from the data alone what is stored in it unless you already know an awful lot about the underlying implementation...
I think I mostly agree with you, and a lot of the differences in what we're saying now are a question of precisely how you define your terms -- you seem to define "fact" in a very abstract sense that means you can never claim to know any specific facts, whereas I'm very comfortable in saying, based on the evidence in front of me, that it is a solid fact that I'm sitting at my table replying to a slashdot post right now. In your terminology, that's just shorthand, and there needs to be an implied asterisk saying "subject to the collection of additional data"... well, fair enough, in a philosophical sense I see what you mean, but I don't see the advantage in adding these disclaimers to "evolution is a fact" when, insofar as anything is a fact, evolution can be said to be one, so the absolutist terminology is unlikely to lead to ambiguity.
Where I strongly disagree with you though is in your original claim I responded to: responding to "evolution is a fact," you said "welcome to the same intellectual territory as the creationists." No. You can say that, in your opinion, there needs to be a qualification there, since there is always more data to discover, and in a very abstract, formal sense you'd be right. But when one person is saying "X is a fact, and here is a mountain of evidence that shows it" and another is saying "Y is a fact despite mountains of evidence, because I have a book that says so," the two are not in the same intellectual territory. If you want to say the first person should be slightly more precise, that's fair, though I disagree with you on the utility of such precision in a forum like this (and with your claim that to do otherwise is a threat to science)...
I never mentioned Dawkins! I do think he represents a danger to science, though
I know you didn't mention Dawkins, I brought him up because he seemed to exemplify some of the traits you were criticizing, and because I don't like him very much;) But really, if Dawkins is actually a "danger to science," then "science" deserves to fail because it is manifestly too weak to deal with even the slightest threat to its integrity. The most I think you can say is that Dawkins, and people like him, are a short-term danger to science education. And even then, I don't think they're as much of a danger to science education as people who want to put creationism in science textbooks -- despite his rhetoric, I don't think Dawkins has much chance of adding a "How we know God does not exist" section to high school biology texts...
I believe that the evidence for both is incredibly well established, and I firmly believe in both. But it's absolutely fundamental to the scientific method that no amount of confirmation moves a theory to the realm of "fact"
But that's just the distinction people are trying to make here -- in talking about facts, I, and GP, weren't talking about the theory. Theory is something that tries to explain a given set of observations. But those observations still exist as independent facts. It is a fact that there was a volcanic eruption in Alaska a few days ago. There is abundant theory to explain exactly why and how it happened (and to make predictions about the eruptions in advance). But claiming the volcanic eruption is a fact in retrospect does not endanger "science."
But if you're going to push things to the point where if I say "it is a fact that the Earth goes around the sun" and you say that's dogma, not data -- and that's something we can actually observe happening, every year -- then I don't think you will ever be content referring to common descent as a fact, no matter what the evidence...
I think that at the moment science is as much under threat from those misrepresenting it in order to defend against creationism as it is from those misrepresenting it in order to promote creationism.
I think this shows a lack of perspective. Dawkins is a jerk who should stay out of metaphysics, but he's no danger to "science" even though he sometimes misrepresents it. I don't think there's any biologist who would not be thrilled to find some new, even better explanation for common descent than is currently known, or convincing evidence that common descent is not actually a fact. If evolutionary theory was merely "dogma", any such possibility would be suppressed instead. There would likely have been a pretty bad reaction if in the early 20th century you tried to claim the sun goes around the Earth, but the imposition of that "dogma" didn't prevent the acceptance of relativity when the evidence was there to back it up...
Ehm... why do people keep responding to my post pointing out pedantic exceptions that I already specifically talked about? I said "you can play semantic games where you reconstruct the laws of gravity in a rotating reference frame and there is nothing but Occam to say you're wrong in doing that", which is basically your post except without the devil's-advocate perspective. At the end of the day, we still don't want our science teachers telling our kids that the sun goes around the Earth. Would my original point have been clearer if I used a car analogy?
The universe in centered on the sun? Good to know....
You've left me in the rare (well, maybe not so rare...) position that I can respond simply by cut-and-pasting from my original comment:
For reasonable definitions of "fact" -- yes, the sun itself revolves around other things, and you can play semantic games where you reconstruct the laws of gravity in a rotating reference frame and there is nothing but Occam to say you're wrong in doing that. But in reality, the Earth still goes around the sun.
So, I actually explicitly addressed what you're being pedantic and deliberately missing my point over. And I explicitly have as my conclusion "the Earth still goes around the sun", not "the sun is the center of the universe." But thanks for the random sarcasm. Maybe next time read past the first sentence...
You've just moved from the realm of science to the realm of dogma. Welcome to the same intellectual territory as the creationists.
No. Heliocentrism is a fact(*), gravity is a theory. Evolution, that is, the claim that species evolve into other species, and that all the species we know of have descended from a common ancestor, is fact. Natural selection is a theory. (Evolution is also a theory, in the scientific sense, but that term is so abused that it's useful to distinguish the specific facts, i.e. common descent, on which that theory is based.)
I can say heliocentrism is a fact and you will probably not claim I have entered the realm of dogma. Logically that is no different than saying the same about evolution, except that you seem to believe the evidence for that fact is not as well established. Which is true in a sense, just because heliocentrism is so very, very, very well established. But evolution is still a fact.
(*) For reasonable definitions of "fact" -- yes, the sun itself revolves around other things, and you can play semantic games where you reconstruct the laws of gravity in a rotating reference frame and there is nothing but Occam to say you're wrong in doing that. But in reality, the Earth still goes around the sun.
Yeah, but wouldn't the first thing you'd do in the system API design of any non-null language be, the creation of a singleton object instance of the superclass of all objects, named 'null' ?
No. That doesn't really make sense even in a lot of OO languages, anyway -- if my class Foo extends Object, and my function expects a Foo, then in a strongly-typed language you can't pass me an Object.
In languages where this would be possible, it would nonetheless be very evil to start with a language that is designed to guarantee the presence of a valid reference wherever one is expected, and then impose conventions that require runtime type checking substituted for null-checking every time we access any value.
Also, apart from 'null' there are loads of parameters than can have illegal ranges and must be checked to be proper.
Of course the claim isn't that removing null would avoid the need for all range checking, or eliminate all resulting errors. But I think a pretty good case can be made that null pointer/reference errors have historically been the majority of such errors -- and if not, certainly the plurality. Same answer for your C enum example -- they may be terrible and may cause a lot of errors, but I think null caused even more...
The rebuke comes from AppleInsider. How partial can it be?
Good point. If only it cited its sources, thus allowing some way for its claims to be verified.
Come on now. This story is about blatant journalistic fraud. They give explicit documentation on how Wired completely fabricated important facts in order to make a sensational-sounding story. If their claim was "The iPhone is the best thing evar and EVERYONE LOVES IT", you'd have a point, but the article is mostly about how Wired repeatedly lied in its article, and then they present data to basically argue "the iPhone is doing pretty okay in Japan". They aren't making particularly inflated claims...
...which apparently didn't include TFA. Wired fabricated a quote about how the iPhone is lame compared to Japanese phones, and tried to attach it to two separate Japanese "authorities" on the subject, and both of those people then repudiated Wired's attribution and said that actually the iPhone is their favorite phone. The whole point of the article is that the iPhone is doing fairly well and people like it a lot over there -- the main thing holding it back is its carrier, which is sort of an underdog. And it turns out the iPhone is primarily responsible for major growth in that carrier anyway.
So, you're basically repeating the same myths that the entire article was written to refute, since the article explicitly responds to most of your points... but by referring to "everything you've read", you still got modded informative. Oh well...
what are you going to do with your DRM-less AAC files that you paid extra for if you decide to switch from an iPod to a less encumbered device?
Where to begin?
First, nice question-begging there. GP's whole point was that the iPod ( / Kindle) isn't "encumbered" because it supports standard non-DRM formats. So saying that he's wrong because he can't switch to a "less encumbered" device doesn't make any sense unless you actually give some reason to think the iPod is particularly encumbered compared to other players.
Second, people (such as yourself) who are exaggeratedly upset over DRMed AAC files even after the DRM has now been removed from the store don't actually have to "pay extra" -- since in your outrage you doubtless boycotted the DRMed files, and since the non-DRM files by and large cost the same amount as before, you will be buying music for the first time without any extra cost.
Third, "How are you going to get your MP3 files onto the iPod without iTunes"... I guess you have a moderate point there, but I'm not sure why you think it's so important. Lots of consumer devices require that you use their software to operate them, and while that might be annoying if you have particularly strong feelings about what program you use to copy music to your player, you don't have to actually use iTunes in any other context, so I don't see how this is some huge "lock-down".
But you can shove your ignorant sarcasm right up your ass.
Geez, if only he could be as rational and well-mannered as you...
Yeah, people are so intelligent that they have been buying DRMed files for years on iTunes while CDs exist for a similar price.
And Then they are again so intelligent that some pay premium to strip the DRM from their old iTunes tracks instead of downloading these from another source.
Yeah, people are not completely stupid...
Good point. If most of humanity has different priorities than you, that probably means they're completely stupid.
Hint: Most people spend money in iTMS for the simplicity and convenience. Both for the original DRMed files, and for the 30% "premium" to strip the DRM and double the bitrate. The fact that it would be possible to purchase CDs (often for more money) and then spend hours tagging and encoding the music fails to outweigh that convenience for a lot of people. As for "downloading these from another source", I don't know what sites you use but not since the glory days of Napster have I been able to reliably search for an arbitrary album and immediately download a high-quality copy. The number of hours I'd need to spend actually finding good copies of all that music could be better spent elsewhere.
SSL encryption isn't as secure as online businesses would like us to think.
What? I mean, are online businesses down in their underground lairs, laughing at the misinformation perpetrated on an unsuspecting public? "Hah! They believe that SSL encryption is secure!"....
Maybe it should be "...isn't as secure as online businesses would like it to be." I think that it is in the interests of businesses as well as their customers for SSL transactions to remain secure. We can address incompetently implemented security protocols without treating it like a conspiracy on the part of the sites...
Did you seriously just accuse BILL GATES of being Socialist?
Seriously, would you like to take some time here to also complain about all the libraries, universities and charities that benefited from the philanthropic work of the great American Socialist, Andrew Carnegie? What the hell do you think Socialism is if Bill Gates qualifies?
Holy shit, I just read another of your responses -- the $4000 is what you're paying after insurance, and because that much money isn't a big deal to you, you think that's proof that births aren't expensive? Geez. 1. Not everyone has or can obtain insurance (and in fact for some people it is literally impossible to get health insurance at any price -- depends on where you live and what job you can qualify for). 2. For a lot of people, $4000 is a lot all by itself.
So, your argument is "I'm rich and have health insurance, and I can afford a birth just fine by planning ahead for a year. Therefore, birth is not expensive." Wow.
My wife is having a baby next month and the whole thing will be about $4000...
As someone whose wife just had a baby last month, I'd like to know where you got that kind of a deal without insurance. Unless your reference to "negotiated rates" means the lower rates negotiated by insurers, in which case guess what -- people who can't afford insurance have to pay more than that, often several times more.
A "normal" birth (which these days includes about a 1/3 chance of c-section) can easily cost from $10-20K. If anything serious goes wrong, it can jump up into the hundreds. Unless you feel that people who cannot afford health insurance should be forcibly sterilized, you are incorrect in dismissing the accurate claim that births can be very expensive.
I agree with the responses that are calling you on your "Americans will drop $5k on a 60" hdtv".... -- a vanishingly small fraction of americans will ever spend $5k on a television. Like, 0.01% maybe. Some people may get extravagant and spend as much as $1k, but the vast majority are well below even that. And the fact that the remaining $3000 of your medical expenses is "not even a blip on your financial radar" means you're doing quite well for yourself -- we could afford our birth expenses (there are some our insurance is still refusing to cover, isn't the free market great?), but we had been saving for it for several years. So maybe you should be more aware of the fact that to some people, $3000 is a lot of money.
Other replies have talked about the obvious implausibilities in your son's story. But I think the specific way it's implausible is an interesting example of one (mostly religious) strain of conservative thought. (Not that anything in your story is explicitly religious... just that this is the sort of mindset / rhetoric I've mostly see in Evangelical circles).
The basic issue is that you assume that everyone who disagrees with you already knows you are right and is just refusing to admit it.
That's the only way that:
He said that as he understood it, the Harvard dean was a poor example of sexism, since all he stated was that there was possibly may be some physical difference in brain development between the genders that lead to the male preponderance in hard sciences.
The teacher turned red, started to stammer...
could even be remotely plausible. It is your belief that the Larry Summers issue begins and ends as it is stated here, and that this is a completely accurate summary of the story. But what "The teacher turned red, started to stammer..." shows is that you think that the teacher also believes this is a completely accurate summary of the story.
If the teacher didn't think that, it would be easy to respond with further details showing that that summary is an oversimplification. It would be possible to do this even if the teacher was wrong since, you may have noticed, people who believe wrong things nonetheless have (sometimes incorrect) facts and (sometimes faulty) reasoning behind their beliefs. Or are you used to having debates about these kinds of issues where you brilliantly state the simple facts and all your opponents are stunned into silence?
But you / your son can still work up in your minds these fantasies where this occurs, because you really fundamentally just don't believe that people disagree with you because of an honest difference of interpretation -- you believe that this teacher secretly knew the Summers case was simple and in no way demonstrated sexism, but 1. was trying to argue the opposite anyway, and 2. would have absolutely no answer if this falsehood was pointed out.
Anyway. You won't like or believe what I'm saying right now, I expect, but you should realize that I'm saying it because I actually think it's true, based on the evidence of what you've said (and extrapolating some from similar fantasy narratives I heard growing up Evangelical, and the mindset behind those). I don't secretly know you're right and live in fear that you will point out my obvious duplicity. Assuming the teacher in the story exists in some form, I imagine the same is true of them...
Then what school are you at where you have 200-student classes throughout your 4-year degree? And where you are at no point able to get real time with your professors outside of class?
If those are really problems you're facing, then they aren't evidence that formal (non-self-taught) education is worthless, but that your school is terrible and you should get out if you still can.
I expect our shiny new government is going to start taxing us on carbon soon. They are throwing money at failing businesses by the billions
Err... while you are probably right that the bailouts will continue beyond all rationality, if "they" is the "shiny new government" then you should realize that they haven't actually taken office yet...
Well, but that's part of the issue: not everyone has, or can have, the kind of high school experience we did. College needs to get you started with at least low-level theory early on to prepare you, but if we artificially push it to the extreme of being only math and low-level engineering, it will push people out of the major when they could have been very happy there given a more motivating introduction. I'm not advocating dumbing things down, the courses should be hard, but the students should understand why they are doing the hard work, and that requires at least some hands-on applications early on.
I also speak from the frustration of having had to teach CS stuff in certain contexts where I could be asked "can you give examples of where we would use this stuff?" and having no good answer, because I wasn't crazy about the curriculum myself (and I say this as a theoretician)... and from observations of how much better some students "get it" when they are able to apply even simple abstract concepts to code they write that actually does something. Not everyone learns the same way, but it should be possible for someone entering the discipline to find something they can get excited about right away, even if there are other parts they don't like as much...
I'm quite sure he was simplifying things and assumed a using statement was present.
Ah -- you mean, he was concealing details that will be explained later? Like he was criticizing the Java version for doing?
I wasn't being a smart-ass, I was pointing out a legitimate contradiction in his complaints. The C++ version concealed namespaces, functions, the whole mess of chaining applications via overloaded operators, and for God's sake, references (which are much worse in C++ than in Java). To me, that looks a lot worse than what he's objecting to...
Dijkstra's comments were right on the mark, and fairly obvious to people outside of CS. They were only contentious within the field, for some odd reason.
Err, did you see the part where he talks about how bad it is that calculus is taught by giving example problems from people's chosen field so they see how it's relevant? And how this just conceals how drastically new a tool calculus is, and it should be studied by itself in isolation, not as it is applied? I'm pretty sure there are people outside of CS who might disagree with that.
I'm a fan of Dijkstra's research, but not so much his teaching philosophy...
There is nothing more fascinating than learning how computers really work.
I'm now working on a PhD in theoretical computer science, and am interested in how computers work (although that's not exactly my primary interest). But long before I knew any CS theory or systems programming or anything, what got me interested in computers was the neat things I could make them do. In high school I spent years making games and neat little graphics demos and things. As I understood more of what I was doing, I was able to work at a deeper level, modify kernels, mess with assembly, and generally learn "how computers really work".
But if someone had started me out that way, teaching me from the transistors up how computers worked while never talking about what I can do with them right now, I would have given it up and done something more interesting. I'm glad you weren't my teacher in high school, because these days I'm quite happy with my chosen field, and you're essentially saying (in your other response below) that because I learned about it in a way I found interesting, somehow this is illegitimate and I shouldn't really be in computer science at all.
I agree with you that it is vital that computer scientists learn how computers really work. But it isn't vital that this knowledge is forced on them before they have ever produced a running program, or before their interest has been piqued by other aspects of the field.
almost at the end of their Computer Science degree, and who didn't understand why their code was crashing with "null references" when "Java was supposed to get rid of all that memory stuff!".
If they can almost finish a degree and still be surprised when Java dies with a null reference, then the problem isn't that they were taught to program using Java, it's that they were taught Java very badly...
Slashdot Mirror
If your C++ environment has an std::vector implemented with buckets, then blame your specific C++ environment that violates the standard.
I wasn't blaming anyone or anything in particular. Just relating my experience, which agreed with the original poster. You're saying something is impossible, but it happened to both of us. If you think I should blame my "specific C++ environment", well that's fine with me, but I'm not sure what you're trying to defend right now, I'm not trying to attack anyone or anything, I just don't think that the original poster was necessarily bullshitting about their experience.
The stream of bullshit never ends.
Just because you are confident of your own correctness doesn't mean everyone else is lying about their experience. You can suggest alternate explanations for those experiences without insulting everybody and saying everyone who has seen this issue is bullshitting (and again... why would we be bullshitting about this? What could there possibly be to gain by tricking people about something like that?)
Or, more succinctly: Just because you think you're right, doesn't mean you have to be a jerk.
I smell bullshit. There is no overhead from using STL containers.
Ehm... that's a nice theory, but I second GP's experience in finding otherwise in practice. I don't know the specific reasons -- maybe there were memory fragmentation issues and it wasn't really STL's "fault" -- but I was doing some large-for-my-laptop (with 3GB ram) data processing, and initially used vectors for everything. I eventually had to give up and rewrite it all with arrays just like GP, because I kept having difficult-to-debug and impossible-to-fix memory issues as a result.
Really, why would someone bother "bullshitting" about something like this? He was pointing out a peculiarity of the overheads one particular program he worked with, I don't think he was doing it with some sort of anti-STL agenda or anything...
If you used an std::vector, you couldn't have a bottleneck, for the simple reason that the std::vector is an array.
There might be systems on which this is true, but not on the c++ libraries on my mac. When I was trying to figure out what was going wrong with my vector-based program, I got to look at a lot of vectors from within gdb, and they have a neat bucket system going on that I'm sure is very fancy and clever, but let me tell you, it is not just an array, and good luck figuring out from the data alone what is stored in it unless you already know an awful lot about the underlying implementation...
I think I mostly agree with you, and a lot of the differences in what we're saying now are a question of precisely how you define your terms -- you seem to define "fact" in a very abstract sense that means you can never claim to know any specific facts, whereas I'm very comfortable in saying, based on the evidence in front of me, that it is a solid fact that I'm sitting at my table replying to a slashdot post right now. In your terminology, that's just shorthand, and there needs to be an implied asterisk saying "subject to the collection of additional data"... well, fair enough, in a philosophical sense I see what you mean, but I don't see the advantage in adding these disclaimers to "evolution is a fact" when, insofar as anything is a fact, evolution can be said to be one, so the absolutist terminology is unlikely to lead to ambiguity.
Where I strongly disagree with you though is in your original claim I responded to: responding to "evolution is a fact," you said "welcome to the same intellectual territory as the creationists." No. You can say that, in your opinion, there needs to be a qualification there, since there is always more data to discover, and in a very abstract, formal sense you'd be right. But when one person is saying "X is a fact, and here is a mountain of evidence that shows it" and another is saying "Y is a fact despite mountains of evidence, because I have a book that says so," the two are not in the same intellectual territory. If you want to say the first person should be slightly more precise, that's fair, though I disagree with you on the utility of such precision in a forum like this (and with your claim that to do otherwise is a threat to science)...
I never mentioned Dawkins! I do think he represents a danger to science, though
I know you didn't mention Dawkins, I brought him up because he seemed to exemplify some of the traits you were criticizing, and because I don't like him very much ;) But really, if Dawkins is actually a "danger to science," then "science" deserves to fail because it is manifestly too weak to deal with even the slightest threat to its integrity. The most I think you can say is that Dawkins, and people like him, are a short-term danger to science education. And even then, I don't think they're as much of a danger to science education as people who want to put creationism in science textbooks -- despite his rhetoric, I don't think Dawkins has much chance of adding a "How we know God does not exist" section to high school biology texts...
I believe that the evidence for both is incredibly well established, and I firmly believe in both. But it's absolutely fundamental to the scientific method that no amount of confirmation moves a theory to the realm of "fact"
But that's just the distinction people are trying to make here -- in talking about facts, I, and GP, weren't talking about the theory. Theory is something that tries to explain a given set of observations. But those observations still exist as independent facts. It is a fact that there was a volcanic eruption in Alaska a few days ago. There is abundant theory to explain exactly why and how it happened (and to make predictions about the eruptions in advance). But claiming the volcanic eruption is a fact in retrospect does not endanger "science."
But if you're going to push things to the point where if I say "it is a fact that the Earth goes around the sun" and you say that's dogma, not data -- and that's something we can actually observe happening, every year -- then I don't think you will ever be content referring to common descent as a fact, no matter what the evidence...
I think that at the moment science is as much under threat from those misrepresenting it in order to defend against creationism as it is from those misrepresenting it in order to promote creationism.
I think this shows a lack of perspective. Dawkins is a jerk who should stay out of metaphysics, but he's no danger to "science" even though he sometimes misrepresents it. I don't think there's any biologist who would not be thrilled to find some new, even better explanation for common descent than is currently known, or convincing evidence that common descent is not actually a fact. If evolutionary theory was merely "dogma", any such possibility would be suppressed instead. There would likely have been a pretty bad reaction if in the early 20th century you tried to claim the sun goes around the Earth, but the imposition of that "dogma" didn't prevent the acceptance of relativity when the evidence was there to back it up...
Ehm... why do people keep responding to my post pointing out pedantic exceptions that I already specifically talked about? I said "you can play semantic games where you reconstruct the laws of gravity in a rotating reference frame and there is nothing but Occam to say you're wrong in doing that", which is basically your post except without the devil's-advocate perspective. At the end of the day, we still don't want our science teachers telling our kids that the sun goes around the Earth. Would my original point have been clearer if I used a car analogy?
The universe in centered on the sun? Good to know....
You've left me in the rare (well, maybe not so rare...) position that I can respond simply by cut-and-pasting from my original comment:
For reasonable definitions of "fact" -- yes, the sun itself revolves around other things, and you can play semantic games where you reconstruct the laws of gravity in a rotating reference frame and there is nothing but Occam to say you're wrong in doing that. But in reality, the Earth still goes around the sun.
So, I actually explicitly addressed what you're being pedantic and deliberately missing my point over. And I explicitly have as my conclusion "the Earth still goes around the sun", not "the sun is the center of the universe." But thanks for the random sarcasm. Maybe next time read past the first sentence...
Three Republicans on the school board who favor the teaching of evolution have come under enormous pressure to reform their ways.
Well then, we can infer that within a few generations their descendants will exhibit a tendency not to believe in evolution....
Evolution is a FACT.
You've just moved from the realm of science to the realm of dogma. Welcome to the same intellectual territory as the creationists.
No. Heliocentrism is a fact(*), gravity is a theory. Evolution, that is, the claim that species evolve into other species, and that all the species we know of have descended from a common ancestor, is fact. Natural selection is a theory. (Evolution is also a theory, in the scientific sense, but that term is so abused that it's useful to distinguish the specific facts, i.e. common descent, on which that theory is based.)
I can say heliocentrism is a fact and you will probably not claim I have entered the realm of dogma. Logically that is no different than saying the same about evolution, except that you seem to believe the evidence for that fact is not as well established. Which is true in a sense, just because heliocentrism is so very, very, very well established. But evolution is still a fact.
(*) For reasonable definitions of "fact" -- yes, the sun itself revolves around other things, and you can play semantic games where you reconstruct the laws of gravity in a rotating reference frame and there is nothing but Occam to say you're wrong in doing that. But in reality, the Earth still goes around the sun.
No. That doesn't really make sense even in a lot of OO languages, anyway -- if my class Foo extends Object, and my function expects a Foo, then in a strongly-typed language you can't pass me an Object.
In languages where this would be possible, it would nonetheless be very evil to start with a language that is designed to guarantee the presence of a valid reference wherever one is expected, and then impose conventions that require runtime type checking substituted for null-checking every time we access any value.
Of course the claim isn't that removing null would avoid the need for all range checking, or eliminate all resulting errors. But I think a pretty good case can be made that null pointer/reference errors have historically been the majority of such errors -- and if not, certainly the plurality. Same answer for your C enum example -- they may be terrible and may cause a lot of errors, but I think null caused even more...
Good point. If only it cited its sources, thus allowing some way for its claims to be verified.
Come on now. This story is about blatant journalistic fraud. They give explicit documentation on how Wired completely fabricated important facts in order to make a sensational-sounding story. If their claim was "The iPhone is the best thing evar and EVERYONE LOVES IT", you'd have a point, but the article is mostly about how Wired repeatedly lied in its article, and then they present data to basically argue "the iPhone is doing pretty okay in Japan". They aren't making particularly inflated claims...
...which apparently didn't include TFA. Wired fabricated a quote about how the iPhone is lame compared to Japanese phones, and tried to attach it to two separate Japanese "authorities" on the subject, and both of those people then repudiated Wired's attribution and said that actually the iPhone is their favorite phone. The whole point of the article is that the iPhone is doing fairly well and people like it a lot over there -- the main thing holding it back is its carrier, which is sort of an underdog. And it turns out the iPhone is primarily responsible for major growth in that carrier anyway.
So, you're basically repeating the same myths that the entire article was written to refute, since the article explicitly responds to most of your points... but by referring to "everything you've read", you still got modded informative. Oh well...
Where to begin?
First, nice question-begging there. GP's whole point was that the iPod ( / Kindle) isn't "encumbered" because it supports standard non-DRM formats. So saying that he's wrong because he can't switch to a "less encumbered" device doesn't make any sense unless you actually give some reason to think the iPod is particularly encumbered compared to other players.
Second, people (such as yourself) who are exaggeratedly upset over DRMed AAC files even after the DRM has now been removed from the store don't actually have to "pay extra" -- since in your outrage you doubtless boycotted the DRMed files, and since the non-DRM files by and large cost the same amount as before, you will be buying music for the first time without any extra cost.
Third, "How are you going to get your MP3 files onto the iPod without iTunes"... I guess you have a moderate point there, but I'm not sure why you think it's so important. Lots of consumer devices require that you use their software to operate them, and while that might be annoying if you have particularly strong feelings about what program you use to copy music to your player, you don't have to actually use iTunes in any other context, so I don't see how this is some huge "lock-down".
Geez, if only he could be as rational and well-mannered as you...
Of course, some things will always be free...
Good point. If most of humanity has different priorities than you, that probably means they're completely stupid.
Hint: Most people spend money in iTMS for the simplicity and convenience. Both for the original DRMed files, and for the 30% "premium" to strip the DRM and double the bitrate. The fact that it would be possible to purchase CDs (often for more money) and then spend hours tagging and encoding the music fails to outweigh that convenience for a lot of people. As for "downloading these from another source", I don't know what sites you use but not since the glory days of Napster have I been able to reliably search for an arbitrary album and immediately download a high-quality copy. The number of hours I'd need to spend actually finding good copies of all that music could be better spent elsewhere.
...like... posting on slashdot.... damn.
What? I mean, are online businesses down in their underground lairs, laughing at the misinformation perpetrated on an unsuspecting public? "Hah! They believe that SSL encryption is secure!"....
Maybe it should be "...isn't as secure as online businesses would like it to be." I think that it is in the interests of businesses as well as their customers for SSL transactions to remain secure. We can address incompetently implemented security protocols without treating it like a conspiracy on the part of the sites...
Did you seriously just accuse BILL GATES of being Socialist?
Seriously, would you like to take some time here to also complain about all the libraries, universities and charities that benefited from the philanthropic work of the great American Socialist, Andrew Carnegie? What the hell do you think Socialism is if Bill Gates qualifies?
Holy shit, I just read another of your responses -- the $4000 is what you're paying after insurance, and because that much money isn't a big deal to you, you think that's proof that births aren't expensive? Geez. 1. Not everyone has or can obtain insurance (and in fact for some people it is literally impossible to get health insurance at any price -- depends on where you live and what job you can qualify for). 2. For a lot of people, $4000 is a lot all by itself.
So, your argument is "I'm rich and have health insurance, and I can afford a birth just fine by planning ahead for a year. Therefore, birth is not expensive." Wow.
As someone whose wife just had a baby last month, I'd like to know where you got that kind of a deal without insurance. Unless your reference to "negotiated rates" means the lower rates negotiated by insurers, in which case guess what -- people who can't afford insurance have to pay more than that, often several times more.
A "normal" birth (which these days includes about a 1/3 chance of c-section) can easily cost from $10-20K. If anything serious goes wrong, it can jump up into the hundreds. Unless you feel that people who cannot afford health insurance should be forcibly sterilized, you are incorrect in dismissing the accurate claim that births can be very expensive.
I agree with the responses that are calling you on your "Americans will drop $5k on a 60" hdtv".... -- a vanishingly small fraction of americans will ever spend $5k on a television. Like, 0.01% maybe. Some people may get extravagant and spend as much as $1k, but the vast majority are well below even that. And the fact that the remaining $3000 of your medical expenses is "not even a blip on your financial radar" means you're doing quite well for yourself -- we could afford our birth expenses (there are some our insurance is still refusing to cover, isn't the free market great?), but we had been saving for it for several years. So maybe you should be more aware of the fact that to some people, $3000 is a lot of money.
If I can just philosophize a bit here...
Other replies have talked about the obvious implausibilities in your son's story. But I think the specific way it's implausible is an interesting example of one (mostly religious) strain of conservative thought. (Not that anything in your story is explicitly religious... just that this is the sort of mindset / rhetoric I've mostly see in Evangelical circles).
The basic issue is that you assume that everyone who disagrees with you already knows you are right and is just refusing to admit it.
That's the only way that:
could even be remotely plausible. It is your belief that the Larry Summers issue begins and ends as it is stated here, and that this is a completely accurate summary of the story. But what "The teacher turned red, started to stammer..." shows is that you think that the teacher also believes this is a completely accurate summary of the story.
If the teacher didn't think that, it would be easy to respond with further details showing that that summary is an oversimplification. It would be possible to do this even if the teacher was wrong since, you may have noticed, people who believe wrong things nonetheless have (sometimes incorrect) facts and (sometimes faulty) reasoning behind their beliefs. Or are you used to having debates about these kinds of issues where you brilliantly state the simple facts and all your opponents are stunned into silence?
But you / your son can still work up in your minds these fantasies where this occurs, because you really fundamentally just don't believe that people disagree with you because of an honest difference of interpretation -- you believe that this teacher secretly knew the Summers case was simple and in no way demonstrated sexism, but 1. was trying to argue the opposite anyway, and 2. would have absolutely no answer if this falsehood was pointed out.
Anyway. You won't like or believe what I'm saying right now, I expect, but you should realize that I'm saying it because I actually think it's true, based on the evidence of what you've said (and extrapolating some from similar fantasy narratives I heard growing up Evangelical, and the mindset behind those). I don't secretly know you're right and live in fear that you will point out my obvious duplicity. Assuming the teacher in the story exists in some form, I imagine the same is true of them...
Then what school are you at where you have 200-student classes throughout your 4-year degree? And where you are at no point able to get real time with your professors outside of class?
If those are really problems you're facing, then they aren't evidence that formal (non-self-taught) education is worthless, but that your school is terrible and you should get out if you still can.
Err... while you are probably right that the bailouts will continue beyond all rationality, if "they" is the "shiny new government" then you should realize that they haven't actually taken office yet...
Well, but that's part of the issue: not everyone has, or can have, the kind of high school experience we did. College needs to get you started with at least low-level theory early on to prepare you, but if we artificially push it to the extreme of being only math and low-level engineering, it will push people out of the major when they could have been very happy there given a more motivating introduction. I'm not advocating dumbing things down, the courses should be hard, but the students should understand why they are doing the hard work, and that requires at least some hands-on applications early on.
I also speak from the frustration of having had to teach CS stuff in certain contexts where I could be asked "can you give examples of where we would use this stuff?" and having no good answer, because I wasn't crazy about the curriculum myself (and I say this as a theoretician)... and from observations of how much better some students "get it" when they are able to apply even simple abstract concepts to code they write that actually does something. Not everyone learns the same way, but it should be possible for someone entering the discipline to find something they can get excited about right away, even if there are other parts they don't like as much...
Ah -- you mean, he was concealing details that will be explained later? Like he was criticizing the Java version for doing?
I wasn't being a smart-ass, I was pointing out a legitimate contradiction in his complaints. The C++ version concealed namespaces, functions, the whole mess of chaining applications via overloaded operators, and for God's sake, references (which are much worse in C++ than in Java). To me, that looks a lot worse than what he's objecting to...
Err, did you see the part where he talks about how bad it is that calculus is taught by giving example problems from people's chosen field so they see how it's relevant? And how this just conceals how drastically new a tool calculus is, and it should be studied by itself in isolation, not as it is applied? I'm pretty sure there are people outside of CS who might disagree with that. I'm a fan of Dijkstra's research, but not so much his teaching philosophy...
I'm now working on a PhD in theoretical computer science, and am interested in how computers work (although that's not exactly my primary interest). But long before I knew any CS theory or systems programming or anything, what got me interested in computers was the neat things I could make them do. In high school I spent years making games and neat little graphics demos and things. As I understood more of what I was doing, I was able to work at a deeper level, modify kernels, mess with assembly, and generally learn "how computers really work".
But if someone had started me out that way, teaching me from the transistors up how computers worked while never talking about what I can do with them right now, I would have given it up and done something more interesting. I'm glad you weren't my teacher in high school, because these days I'm quite happy with my chosen field, and you're essentially saying (in your other response below) that because I learned about it in a way I found interesting, somehow this is illegitimate and I shouldn't really be in computer science at all.
I agree with you that it is vital that computer scientists learn how computers really work. But it isn't vital that this knowledge is forced on them before they have ever produced a running program, or before their interest has been piqued by other aspects of the field.
If they can almost finish a degree and still be surprised when Java dies with a null reference, then the problem isn't that they were taught to program using Java, it's that they were taught Java very badly...