It's the same old cycle. Douche bag politician with an inferiority complex wants to flex his muscles -- to seem decisive, and proposes a law that increases penalties, and/or increases the effectiveness of the cops (typically by infringing on the rights of people). All good and well, except, in a couple of years the next douche bag politician will do the same. And then the next, and it goes on over and over again, grinding rights and liberties into the ground all for the sake of short term gains for politicians nobody even remembers any more.
People need to put their foot down. As long as it is possible to buy cheap political points by doing this routine, politicians will do it.
Who ever wrote TFS (possibly also TFA) should be made to write "Correlation does not imply causation" 100 times on the blackboard.
Patient was treated with "magnetic therapy."
Patient woke up from coma.
This does not mean that the magnetic therapy woke the patient from the coma. It merits examining the possibility correlation, but it does not by any means a proof this therapy had any hand in waking the patient from the coma.
Re:Not that significant?
on
The Quietest Sun
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Indeed, I can't refrain from commenting on the part of TFS that notes that "Scientists are unsure of the significance of this unusual calm..."
I mean, of course they're not sure. They shouldn't care about the significance of what the heavenly bodies are doing at all. That is the area of astrologers and other pseudo scientists.
Any self respecting scientist should answer the question "What does it mean when the sun is unusually quiet?" with "It means that the sun is unusually quiet."
Not to nitpick, but air resistance goes with velocity cubed, not squared. Coasting to stop lights is one of the best and easiest ways to save gas (along with not driving overly fast on the highway and moderate, smooth acceleration).
Not to nitpick on your nitpick, but air resistance goes up with speed cubed, not velocity cubed. Velocity is a vector quantity and not a scalar.
About 20 years ago, I could see that I was going to go bald like my dad did, and I decided to just live with it. No drugs, plugs, or rugs.
-jcr
That really is the only dignified way to go. Nothing spells out the word pathetic as clearly as trying to conceal your baldness with a toupee or a comb over.
I wouldn't do it at all, personally, because I'd consider it a violation of my integrity to do so. Kinda like a deal with the devil, if you will.
Assuming they really want your skills, you could always make demands on them. Like refusing to sign any non competition clauses. If they still want you, then good for them. Otherwise, flick them off, grow a UNIX beard and live on the dole like the rest of us.
it still has VALUE and is thus potentially worth more than the money being printed to pay for it....
Then let private firms buy it up and make that money... why the panic?
Because private firms are under pressure to make money NOW, and always turn a profit. No private enterprise would ever go for this type of long term investment with zero profits in the foreseeable future. Government, however, can wait. It really doesn't matter if it takes ten years for the money to return.
It is in the general interest of the public to resolve these type of situations as fast as possible, because in the end, it's (as usual) Joe Sixpack that's going to suffer if a larger chunk of Wall Street goes belly up.
After several Swedish magazines attempted to calculate advertising revenues for Pirate Bay, Svenska Dagbladet said that the advertising revenues for the past four months reached 600000 SEK (84000 USD or 65400 EUR). This information was provided to the magazine from the advertising company Eastpoint Media. Svenska Dagbladet reminds that in reality even larger sums are involved. Pirate Bay operates internationally and advertising sales are therefore also international and being sold by more companies than only Eastpoint Media.
Not too shabby.
On the other hand, that calculation does not take into account what they spend running servers for a major international website with millions of users every day (both HTTP and BitTorrent). It doesn't that big of a leap of the imagination to imagine that costing a fair bit.
Of course, but for any given problem, there is only so far you can vectorize it.
Of all the places to have a HUGE bottleneck, iteration has to be one of the more painful ones. The culprit is probably their arbitrary precision numbers, but there has to be some way of optimizing at least at the places where there's limited range integer iteration.
MATLAB is great at advanced stuff, but ask it to do something simple, and it will be slower than a tortoise knee deep in syrup.
The paradox that always gets me with larger simulations is whether to spend 1 day writing it in MATLAB, and 6 days running it -- or spending 6 days coding it in C, and 1 day running it?
The obvious way to go about it is to let them use mutt or some other console mail client. The only pornography they'll be exposed to will be ASCII-pr0n, and that is pretty rare nowadays (ah the nostalgia). Furthermore, it will either emotionally scar them for life leaving them with a pathological fear of endless masses of white text scrolling across a black screen, or make them UNIX gurus by the age of 13.
Actually, vi I am proficient in, and emacs I can get out of, but nano is a complete mystery. I'm often forced to use it in stupid systems, and I still can't figure out how the hell to save a file and exit without feeling like an idiot.
Re:I really want a copy of this...
on
Clean Code
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
There are naturally various considerations: Value caching as you mention, whether the programming language optimizes tail recursion, and so forth.
But the real shenanigans in the function is that you can use mathematics and find that the sum of the series 1...n is n*(n+1)/2 straight away, so making such a function is a moot exercise altogether.
On the other hand, keeping that sort of mathematics arcane and shrouded in mystery creates thousands of extra programming jobs all across the world.
Oops, pay no mind to the sentence fragment that slipped through at the beginning of the second paragraph.
Re:I really want a copy of this...
on
Clean Code
·
· Score: 4, Funny
to set right next to my "How to Write Unmaintainable Code".
It's an artform, some people make it look so easy, but to write truly horrible code takes lot of practice. The key is gotos and ifs (preferably nested deeply). Consider the first "clean" sum generator:
It's important to note just how unmaintainable this function is. It's hard coded (the limit is stored in two different places), so that it only calculates the sum of 1...10, (so, in fact, the entire function could be replaced by a a constant integer). It also has a redundant check, to make sure that the two are the same (so that it doesn't get too large), but it might get too small. Naturally, goto is cruise control for cool.
I just like the wording. The fact that you bothered to include this error implies to me that you knew there was a chance that the system call could fail.
Usually these sorts of errors mean that this is not an error that should happen if the OS behaves as can be expected; situations where stuff like memory corruption, broken drivers, or other unpredictable stuff is to blame.
That's at least where my code tends to spew out such seemingly self-contradictory statements.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the same old cycle. Douche bag politician with an inferiority complex wants to flex his muscles -- to seem decisive, and proposes a law that increases penalties, and/or increases the effectiveness of the cops (typically by infringing on the rights of people). All good and well, except, in a couple of years the next douche bag politician will do the same. And then the next, and it goes on over and over again, grinding rights and liberties into the ground all for the sake of short term gains for politicians nobody even remembers any more.
People need to put their foot down. As long as it is possible to buy cheap political points by doing this routine, politicians will do it.
Just call it "_________ 5000" and it'll be a while before it starts to sound outdated.
Yeah, we all know how well HAL 9000 worked.
Who ever wrote TFS (possibly also TFA) should be made to write "Correlation does not imply causation" 100 times on the blackboard.
This does not mean that the magnetic therapy woke the patient from the coma. It merits examining the possibility correlation, but it does not by any means a proof this therapy had any hand in waking the patient from the coma.
Indeed, I can't refrain from commenting on the part of TFS that notes that "Scientists are unsure of the significance of this unusual calm..."
I mean, of course they're not sure. They shouldn't care about the significance of what the heavenly bodies are doing at all. That is the area of astrologers and other pseudo scientists.
Any self respecting scientist should answer the question "What does it mean when the sun is unusually quiet?" with "It means that the sun is unusually quiet."
For 2007, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists listed the U.S. with about 5,400 total nuclear warheads.
So that means each warhead is worth about $1,879,741,432 each.
Well, that's one way of discouraging nuclear war.
Not to nitpick, but air resistance goes with velocity cubed, not squared. Coasting to stop lights is one of the best and easiest ways to save gas (along with not driving overly fast on the highway and moderate, smooth acceleration).
Not to nitpick on your nitpick, but air resistance goes up with speed cubed, not velocity cubed. Velocity is a vector quantity and not a scalar.
About 20 years ago, I could see that I was going to go bald like my dad did, and I decided to just live with it. No drugs, plugs, or rugs.
-jcr
That really is the only dignified way to go. Nothing spells out the word pathetic as clearly as trying to conceal your baldness with a toupee or a comb over.
I wouldn't do it at all, personally, because I'd consider it a violation of my integrity to do so. Kinda like a deal with the devil, if you will.
Assuming they really want your skills, you could always make demands on them. Like refusing to sign any non competition clauses. If they still want you, then good for them. Otherwise, flick them off, grow a UNIX beard and live on the dole like the rest of us.
Then let private firms buy it up and make that money... why the panic?
Because private firms are under pressure to make money NOW, and always turn a profit. No private enterprise would ever go for this type of long term investment with zero profits in the foreseeable future. Government, however, can wait. It really doesn't matter if it takes ten years for the money to return.
It is in the general interest of the public to resolve these type of situations as fast as possible, because in the end, it's (as usual) Joe Sixpack that's going to suffer if a larger chunk of Wall Street goes belly up.
This was in 2006:
After several Swedish magazines attempted to calculate advertising revenues for Pirate Bay, Svenska Dagbladet said that the advertising revenues for the past four months reached 600000 SEK (84000 USD or 65400 EUR). This information was provided to the magazine from the advertising company Eastpoint Media. Svenska Dagbladet reminds that in reality even larger sums are involved. Pirate Bay operates internationally and advertising sales are therefore also international and being sold by more companies than only Eastpoint Media.
Not too shabby.
On the other hand, that calculation does not take into account what they spend running servers for a major international website with millions of users every day (both HTTP and BitTorrent). It doesn't that big of a leap of the imagination to imagine that costing a fair bit.
Of course, but for any given problem, there is only so far you can vectorize it.
Of all the places to have a HUGE bottleneck, iteration has to be one of the more painful ones. The culprit is probably their arbitrary precision numbers, but there has to be some way of optimizing at least at the places where there's limited range integer iteration.
MATLAB is great at advanced stuff, but ask it to do something simple, and it will be slower than a tortoise knee deep in syrup.
The paradox that always gets me with larger simulations is whether to spend 1 day writing it in MATLAB, and 6 days running it -- or spending 6 days coding it in C, and 1 day running it?
"The IOC are a bunch of fascists - with glowing hearts"
How was that? Sue me.
I'm sure they'll get around to that in the winter of 2010.
It's okay so long as they are imaginary.
Actually Fallout (not Fallout 3) is from Black Isle.
The obvious way to go about it is to let them use mutt or some other console mail client. The only pornography they'll be exposed to will be ASCII-pr0n, and that is pretty rare nowadays (ah the nostalgia). Furthermore, it will either emotionally scar them for life leaving them with a pathological fear of endless masses of white text scrolling across a black screen, or make them UNIX gurus by the age of 13.
also, don't boink the boss's daughter for at least 3 weeks!
That won't be a problem, he frequents slashdot.
Ouch... Your function fails miserably if n is negative. Check if n greater than 0, not !0
If the programmer feeds it stupid input, the function returns in kind.
That's the sort of tough love that's necessary to put hair on the budding programmer's chest.
Actually, vi I am proficient in, and emacs I can get out of, but nano is a complete mystery. I'm often forced to use it in stupid systems, and I still can't figure out how the hell to save a file and exit without feeling like an idiot.
There are naturally various considerations: Value caching as you mention, whether the programming language optimizes tail recursion, and so forth.
But the real shenanigans in the function is that you can use mathematics and find that the sum of the series 1...n is n*(n+1)/2 straight away, so making such a function is a moot exercise altogether.
On the other hand, keeping that sort of mathematics arcane and shrouded in mystery creates thousands of extra programming jobs all across the world.
Were you typing that with vi or something?
Well, the vimperator. Close enough in my book.
Oops, pay no mind to the sentence fragment that slipped through at the beginning of the second paragraph.
to set right next to my "How to Write Unmaintainable Code".
It's an artform, some people make it look so easy, but to write truly horrible code takes lot of practice. The key is gotos and ifs (preferably nested deeply). Consider the first "clean" sum generator:
int sum(int n) {
if(!n) return 0;
return sum(n-1) + n;
}
We'll see about that:
int sum() { int n,ro,r; ro=-1; n=r=0;
f: if(n<10) {
ro=r;
r=r+n++;
}
if(!(ro^r)==0) goto f2;
if(n>=10) goto f2;
goto f;
f2:
return r;
}
It's important to note just how unmaintainable this function is. It's hard coded (the limit is stored in two different places), so that it only calculates the sum of 1...10, (so, in fact, the entire function could be replaced by a a constant integer). It also has a redundant check, to make sure that the two are the same (so that it doesn't get too large), but it might get too small. Naturally, goto is cruise control for cool.
I just like the wording. The fact that you bothered to include this error implies to me that you knew there was a chance that the system call could fail.
Usually these sorts of errors mean that this is not an error that should happen if the OS behaves as can be expected; situations where stuff like memory corruption, broken drivers, or other unpredictable stuff is to blame.
That's at least where my code tends to spew out such seemingly self-contradictory statements.