Fortran 77 was a considerable improvement on earlier FORTRAN versions, and a reasonable language for Fortrany projects. Saying that it was a decent language for the sorts of things Pascal and C were usually used for, well, that's quite a stretch. Its control structures were deficient (can't remember the details, since I haven't used in in 25 years), and I don't remember it as being particularly good at string handling.
I'm not specifically familiar with Algol 68, but have some knowledge of Algol 60. There were some brilliant ideas in Algol, but there were a lot of serious duds in Algol 60, such as the 'for' statement and call-by-name, not to mention the language really needed keywords and I/O. Most languages in general use nowadays can be considered Algol descendants, and they've all dropped the really bad ideas.
PL/I was a mashup of COBOL, FORTRAN, and Algol. The Algol pieces were reasonably good, but the combination of COBOL and FORTRAN numbers and arithmetic was frightening. You really do need to know whether you're dealing with a 16-bit twos-complement binary integer, or with a decimal number with fixed numbers of digits.
Pascal had a good many problems, largely traceable from being designed as a language for a Control Data supercomputer that could be easily parsed in one pass by recursive descent, and its own little quirks like the lack of compile-time initialization, strings that were always too limited, and something like static variables.
BASIC was something of a cut-down FORTRAN with its own quirks. Its only virtue was being relatively easy to learn.
This largely explains why C was such a success. It had Algol-like control structures, like Pascal and PL/I, but was much better suited for real-world programming on computers other than IBM mainframes. There were plenty of other obscure languages that could have hit it big, but C made it, and was in general no worse than its competitors.
The serious C++ quirks were inherited from C. The biggest problem with C++ is one of the things that made it successful: being almost a superset of C. It takes time to learn how to use C++ properly, but when used properly it's very powerful.
The truth is that we really don't know good criteria to find good software people. The academic criteria are about the best we can do right now, and with that we can get a higher percentage of good software people.
Frequently, software people are given unclear specs, inadequate access to people who can clarify them, deadlines imposed for external reasons, and told what tools to use. Accountants, doctors, and lawyers typically have more say in what they do: accountants because they know what to do, doctors and lawyers because of education and prestige.
It's a poor workman who blames his tools. It's a poor manager who blames his workers.
Look, guys, they pay me for my talents in software development. Any people skills beyond being mostly inoffensive are gravy. Managers are paid to work with people. They need the people skills to do their job, and many consistently blame the techies for not having those skills. If you want to compare a manager to a child, you're claiming that the manager really doesn't know what managers are paid for knowing.
Okay, what provisions of the Espionage Act did having a private mail server violate? A quick Wikipedia read shows nothing applicable. If Clinton had deliberately passed US secrets to foreign powers, she'd be in violation, but that didn't happen.
Except for the parts they decide to take literally, because those parts line up with they personal experience of reality. What a farce. Either it's the "perfect word of god" and it's all true, OR IT'S NOT. You can't have it both ways, unless you're claiming that god made a bunch of errors while he was dictating his holy book. Is that what you're claiming, or are you going to fall back on the "they made errors in the transcription/translation" argument?
I don't remember saying good things about Biblical literalists. It's a belief that leads to a lot of contradictory beliefs, and so either it's not at all fleshed out or it's a delusion.
What I am saying is that lots of Christians are aware of the problems with the Bible, and are still Christians. It's not possible to disprove that a guy named Jesus, who was also God, lived a couple of millennia ago, died for our sins, and told us how to live and how to have eternal life. (He's recorded as talking in parables, so anyone taking that literally is entirely missing the point.) I don't believe this is the case, and you don't, but it's completely consistent with what we know. It does require believing things that can't be shown rationally, but I don't think that qualifies as delusion.
Say I have a case where I rationally estimate I have an 80% chance of winning. I assume you agree that this isn't a frivolous case.
Under the current system, assuming I'm correct, I have costs that are reasonably predictable, that go into the case no matter what. If I lose, I'm out those costs. If I win, I basically get damages minus costs. A lawyer may well take the case on contingency, and in that case the lawyer risks the work put into the case, but isn't on the hook for any further expenses.
Under loser pays, if I lose I'm liable for a bill for an unknown amount of money without any way of negotiating or predicting what it will be. If there is a limit, it's likely to be pretty high. It's possible that my lawyer will cover that as part of contingency, but to make up for that my lawyer has to take a much larger chunk of any winnings.
Insurance doesn't help much here. As an individual, I effectively can't get insurance unless I'm pretty darn sure I won't need it. There's the concept of "adverse selection", which means that people who are more likely to get payouts from insurance are more likely to buy it. A lawyer will find it possible to get, but expensive. Insurance doesn't reduce the cost of what risks it insures against, but rather increases the total cost while absorbing some of the risk.
I have no problem with the idea of loser pays in a frivolous suit, but a setup where I'm 80% confident I'll get some damages awarded and figure there's a 20% chance I'll lose my house, I'm likely to just sit there and accept the injustice.
What I got as the first definition of delusion on a Google search was "an idiosyncratic belief or impression that is firmly maintained despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality or rational argument, typically a symptom of mental disorder.". A belief in Christianity is not itself an idiosyncratic belief. It can't be contradicted by rational argument, just as it can't be confirmed that way. It doesn't contradict what is generally accepted as reality, since the majority of people in the US do believe in Christianity. I found a reference to the ICD 10 online, and searched on "delusion", and didn't find a definition. I may not have known where to look.
The question of what a delusion is is an interesting one. Do we diagnose people who believe that Trump will be a good president as having delusional disorder? Global warming deniers? I can provide actual evidence against Trump's competence and for global warming, and neither of us can provide evidence that Christianity is a delusion.
I don't know where you get the idea that contradictions in the Bible prove Christianity a delusion. I know lots of Christians who rely on the Bible in general, while being aware of the contradictions. They tend to think that it's stupid to take it literally in most areas. Some Christian denominations have a lot of beliefs that aren't actually in the Bible, Catholicism being a good example. When actual Christians don't take the Bible literally, I don't see why non-Christians think that odd.
(People who interpret the Bible literally almost always cherry-pick verses they like. They're also likely to do things like advocate for Biblical marriage without realizing that it's a man using livestock to buy one or more wives from their fathers.)
What law did it violate? It would be illegal nowadays, but that particular law was passed the year after Kerry took over. It made certain other legal violations easier, but that isn't illegal in itself. It may have violated some regulations, but they may well not have had the force of law. I'm open for enlightenment here.
If you can, at a distance, divine someone's motivations, that's fascinating. If not, please consider that the FBI director might have had legitimate reasons to say what he did.
We both know Clinton was negligent with her server. It was badly secured, some classified material got on it, and whoever she had delete the personal emails also deleted some work emails. That's not good, but it historically hasn't called for criminal prosecution. If you can find someone who was negligent and did get serious criminal prosecution, I'd love to know about it, including the name so I can track things down independently.
The number of classified documents and the number of unclassified is useful to judge the degree of negligence. A few scattered classified documents suggests negligence. A lot, or if the documents were mostly classified, would suggest something worse.
If the speeches support anything you wrote, then it isn't worth my while to read them enough to rebut them. If what you claim was anywhere near true, the medical world would be vastly different. If vaccination doesn't work, explain to me why smallpox has been wiped out, polio and measles eliminated from very large populations.
You seem to think, without any justification that I can tell, that allowing governments to mandate vaccinations, or restrict the non-vaccinated, is tantamount to allowing governments to haul dissenters off the streets. Do you realize that there's a large gap there? That it's easy to keep as a gap?
Treatment of the mentally ill is the real problem here, since involuntary commitment is awful close to locking up dissenters. Mandatory vaccination is not a blip on the radar compared to this.
Vote your own goddam interests, and get your friends and associates to do the same. What ultimately decides an election is voting, not money. If you're too stupid or gullible to make up your mind while ignoring the content-free advertising, you deserve a government that doesn't care about you.
Vaccinations are not perfectly effective, and some people can't be vaccinated. Losing herd immunity hits those people very hard.
Which outbreaks are you talking about, that were among vaccinated people? The ones I've seen involved a significant number of people who weren't vaccinated.
No. The argument is that vaccines are generally very safe, not completely safe, but the risks of too few people being vaccinated are much greater. You're projecting your own lack of rational thinking.
I'm interested in reasonable arguments from viewpoints that differ from mine. It helps me learn.
However, you're going to have to provide reasonable arguments if you want to change my mind.
We don't need to cull people out for preventable reasons. It really doesn't matter if someone has a medical issue that can be routinely and effectively dealt with. You seem to just assume that childhood diseases will kill off the genetically weak, without any evidence that this will be a significant effect. That's no more than somewhat plausible speculation, something that sounds right when you hear it the first time. I've run into lots and lots of these "sounds reasonable" things that turned out to be wrong.
To get that culling, whether desirable or not, we're going to have to have an awful lot of children get sick from preventable diseases, with various lasting effects that won't necessarily cause death or sterility. While the relation between disease and humans can change over time, and the really lethal ones tend to adapt, diseases can remain medium deadly for a long time, and ill effects that don't significantly reduce fertility are still ill effects. Your speculation about autism is just speculation, because nobody really knows what causes it in general, so you're making that up.
For most diseases, there is no arms race, and if one doesn't develop soon it's likely not to develop except over the long run, and it'll be easy to catch up. Flu is an exception here.
The moral issue with universal vaccination is the same as the health issue. If we allow a large number of people to be unvaccinated, we're setting up a large pool of Morlocks where the disease can live and strike out whenever it finds unvaccinated Elois, or those whose vaccinations didn't quite take.
HPV vaccines have to be given before exposure to do any good. You might want to look up stats on when first sexual activity occurs for whatever percentage of the population. It can be frightening.
Scenario 1: Mandatory vaccination reduces everybody's chance of getting measles. The health risk of being vaccinated, however low, is greater than the risk of the measles, assuming everything works. We no longer vaccinate against smallpox. Everybody takes a slight risk for the greater good. Because this is mandatory, it's incumbent on government to provide the vaccines and take care of anyone with complications from the vaccinations, which works pretty well.
Scenario 2: Voluntary vaccination. As long as the measles stays away, the risk of vaccination is very slightly more than the risk of no vaccination. Tragedy of the commons, folks: until we have outbreaks, each individual person is better off not being vaccinated. This pretty much guarantees that the vaccination rate will fall until we lose herd immunity. Once outbreaks appear, people will start getting vaccinated in panic mode. Not good.
The other problem with Scenario 2 is that people who can't get vaccinated (due to age, medical conditions, etc.) have a lot more opportunities to be exposed to measles, even if there is herd immunity, because we not only have the measles patients coming in from out of country but the people they infect.
I'm not going to tell you to educate yourself before spewing nonsense, but you obviously didn't consider everything and your reasoning is seriously flawed.
I've had problems with passphrases. I can remember something that's unlikely to be guessed, but I keep forgetting if there's a comma between clauses, or exactly what the capitalization is, or something like that. All it takes is one slip like that and I can't log in.
Suppose an on-line attacker can get a list of user names. Then the attacker can try a series of weak passwords on each user. On a large site, the odds are that somebody's using an easily guessable password, and if the attacker just wants one login, and doesn't care which one, that could work nicely. Blocking IP addresses doesn't do much good against a botnet.
With unemployment down, the deficit slashed, and a host of other things, if Obama was trying to destroy the US he's been remarkably unsuccessful at it.
Sanders laid out on his website what he wanted to do and how he wanted to pay for it. Most of the money came from removing loopholes and exemptions, which are tax raises but don't affect rates. There was no mention of an 80% tax rate.
Slashdot Mirror
Fortran 77 was a considerable improvement on earlier FORTRAN versions, and a reasonable language for Fortrany projects. Saying that it was a decent language for the sorts of things Pascal and C were usually used for, well, that's quite a stretch. Its control structures were deficient (can't remember the details, since I haven't used in in 25 years), and I don't remember it as being particularly good at string handling.
I'm not specifically familiar with Algol 68, but have some knowledge of Algol 60. There were some brilliant ideas in Algol, but there were a lot of serious duds in Algol 60, such as the 'for' statement and call-by-name, not to mention the language really needed keywords and I/O. Most languages in general use nowadays can be considered Algol descendants, and they've all dropped the really bad ideas.
PL/I was a mashup of COBOL, FORTRAN, and Algol. The Algol pieces were reasonably good, but the combination of COBOL and FORTRAN numbers and arithmetic was frightening. You really do need to know whether you're dealing with a 16-bit twos-complement binary integer, or with a decimal number with fixed numbers of digits.
Pascal had a good many problems, largely traceable from being designed as a language for a Control Data supercomputer that could be easily parsed in one pass by recursive descent, and its own little quirks like the lack of compile-time initialization, strings that were always too limited, and something like static variables.
BASIC was something of a cut-down FORTRAN with its own quirks. Its only virtue was being relatively easy to learn.
This largely explains why C was such a success. It had Algol-like control structures, like Pascal and PL/I, but was much better suited for real-world programming on computers other than IBM mainframes. There were plenty of other obscure languages that could have hit it big, but C made it, and was in general no worse than its competitors.
The serious C++ quirks were inherited from C. The biggest problem with C++ is one of the things that made it successful: being almost a superset of C. It takes time to learn how to use C++ properly, but when used properly it's very powerful.
The truth is that we really don't know good criteria to find good software people. The academic criteria are about the best we can do right now, and with that we can get a higher percentage of good software people.
Frequently, software people are given unclear specs, inadequate access to people who can clarify them, deadlines imposed for external reasons, and told what tools to use. Accountants, doctors, and lawyers typically have more say in what they do: accountants because they know what to do, doctors and lawyers because of education and prestige.
It's a poor workman who blames his tools. It's a poor manager who blames his workers.
Look, guys, they pay me for my talents in software development. Any people skills beyond being mostly inoffensive are gravy. Managers are paid to work with people. They need the people skills to do their job, and many consistently blame the techies for not having those skills. If you want to compare a manager to a child, you're claiming that the manager really doesn't know what managers are paid for knowing.
Okay, what provisions of the Espionage Act did having a private mail server violate? A quick Wikipedia read shows nothing applicable. If Clinton had deliberately passed US secrets to foreign powers, she'd be in violation, but that didn't happen.
I don't remember saying good things about Biblical literalists. It's a belief that leads to a lot of contradictory beliefs, and so either it's not at all fleshed out or it's a delusion.
What I am saying is that lots of Christians are aware of the problems with the Bible, and are still Christians. It's not possible to disprove that a guy named Jesus, who was also God, lived a couple of millennia ago, died for our sins, and told us how to live and how to have eternal life. (He's recorded as talking in parables, so anyone taking that literally is entirely missing the point.) I don't believe this is the case, and you don't, but it's completely consistent with what we know. It does require believing things that can't be shown rationally, but I don't think that qualifies as delusion.
Say I have a case where I rationally estimate I have an 80% chance of winning. I assume you agree that this isn't a frivolous case.
Under the current system, assuming I'm correct, I have costs that are reasonably predictable, that go into the case no matter what. If I lose, I'm out those costs. If I win, I basically get damages minus costs. A lawyer may well take the case on contingency, and in that case the lawyer risks the work put into the case, but isn't on the hook for any further expenses.
Under loser pays, if I lose I'm liable for a bill for an unknown amount of money without any way of negotiating or predicting what it will be. If there is a limit, it's likely to be pretty high. It's possible that my lawyer will cover that as part of contingency, but to make up for that my lawyer has to take a much larger chunk of any winnings.
Insurance doesn't help much here. As an individual, I effectively can't get insurance unless I'm pretty darn sure I won't need it. There's the concept of "adverse selection", which means that people who are more likely to get payouts from insurance are more likely to buy it. A lawyer will find it possible to get, but expensive. Insurance doesn't reduce the cost of what risks it insures against, but rather increases the total cost while absorbing some of the risk.
I have no problem with the idea of loser pays in a frivolous suit, but a setup where I'm 80% confident I'll get some damages awarded and figure there's a 20% chance I'll lose my house, I'm likely to just sit there and accept the injustice.
What I got as the first definition of delusion on a Google search was "an idiosyncratic belief or impression that is firmly maintained despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality or rational argument, typically a symptom of mental disorder.". A belief in Christianity is not itself an idiosyncratic belief. It can't be contradicted by rational argument, just as it can't be confirmed that way. It doesn't contradict what is generally accepted as reality, since the majority of people in the US do believe in Christianity. I found a reference to the ICD 10 online, and searched on "delusion", and didn't find a definition. I may not have known where to look.
The question of what a delusion is is an interesting one. Do we diagnose people who believe that Trump will be a good president as having delusional disorder? Global warming deniers? I can provide actual evidence against Trump's competence and for global warming, and neither of us can provide evidence that Christianity is a delusion.
I don't know where you get the idea that contradictions in the Bible prove Christianity a delusion. I know lots of Christians who rely on the Bible in general, while being aware of the contradictions. They tend to think that it's stupid to take it literally in most areas. Some Christian denominations have a lot of beliefs that aren't actually in the Bible, Catholicism being a good example. When actual Christians don't take the Bible literally, I don't see why non-Christians think that odd.
(People who interpret the Bible literally almost always cherry-pick verses they like. They're also likely to do things like advocate for Biblical marriage without realizing that it's a man using livestock to buy one or more wives from their fathers.)
What law did it violate? It would be illegal nowadays, but that particular law was passed the year after Kerry took over. It made certain other legal violations easier, but that isn't illegal in itself. It may have violated some regulations, but they may well not have had the force of law. I'm open for enlightenment here.
If you can, at a distance, divine someone's motivations, that's fascinating. If not, please consider that the FBI director might have had legitimate reasons to say what he did.
We both know Clinton was negligent with her server. It was badly secured, some classified material got on it, and whoever she had delete the personal emails also deleted some work emails. That's not good, but it historically hasn't called for criminal prosecution. If you can find someone who was negligent and did get serious criminal prosecution, I'd love to know about it, including the name so I can track things down independently.
The number of classified documents and the number of unclassified is useful to judge the degree of negligence. A few scattered classified documents suggests negligence. A lot, or if the documents were mostly classified, would suggest something worse.
Good catch there. You were about to imply that Slashdotters communicate with each other by non-digital means.
In the US, getting help can be beyond the means of the unemployed.
If the speeches support anything you wrote, then it isn't worth my while to read them enough to rebut them. If what you claim was anywhere near true, the medical world would be vastly different. If vaccination doesn't work, explain to me why smallpox has been wiped out, polio and measles eliminated from very large populations.
You seem to think, without any justification that I can tell, that allowing governments to mandate vaccinations, or restrict the non-vaccinated, is tantamount to allowing governments to haul dissenters off the streets. Do you realize that there's a large gap there? That it's easy to keep as a gap?
Treatment of the mentally ill is the real problem here, since involuntary commitment is awful close to locking up dissenters. Mandatory vaccination is not a blip on the radar compared to this.
Vote your own goddam interests, and get your friends and associates to do the same. What ultimately decides an election is voting, not money. If you're too stupid or gullible to make up your mind while ignoring the content-free advertising, you deserve a government that doesn't care about you.
Vaccinations are not perfectly effective, and some people can't be vaccinated. Losing herd immunity hits those people very hard.
Which outbreaks are you talking about, that were among vaccinated people? The ones I've seen involved a significant number of people who weren't vaccinated.
No. The argument is that vaccines are generally very safe, not completely safe, but the risks of too few people being vaccinated are much greater. You're projecting your own lack of rational thinking.
I'm interested in reasonable arguments from viewpoints that differ from mine. It helps me learn.
However, you're going to have to provide reasonable arguments if you want to change my mind.
We don't need to cull people out for preventable reasons. It really doesn't matter if someone has a medical issue that can be routinely and effectively dealt with. You seem to just assume that childhood diseases will kill off the genetically weak, without any evidence that this will be a significant effect. That's no more than somewhat plausible speculation, something that sounds right when you hear it the first time. I've run into lots and lots of these "sounds reasonable" things that turned out to be wrong.
To get that culling, whether desirable or not, we're going to have to have an awful lot of children get sick from preventable diseases, with various lasting effects that won't necessarily cause death or sterility. While the relation between disease and humans can change over time, and the really lethal ones tend to adapt, diseases can remain medium deadly for a long time, and ill effects that don't significantly reduce fertility are still ill effects. Your speculation about autism is just speculation, because nobody really knows what causes it in general, so you're making that up.
For most diseases, there is no arms race, and if one doesn't develop soon it's likely not to develop except over the long run, and it'll be easy to catch up. Flu is an exception here.
The moral issue with universal vaccination is the same as the health issue. If we allow a large number of people to be unvaccinated, we're setting up a large pool of Morlocks where the disease can live and strike out whenever it finds unvaccinated Elois, or those whose vaccinations didn't quite take.
HPV vaccines have to be given before exposure to do any good. You might want to look up stats on when first sexual activity occurs for whatever percentage of the population. It can be frightening.
Scenario 1: Mandatory vaccination reduces everybody's chance of getting measles. The health risk of being vaccinated, however low, is greater than the risk of the measles, assuming everything works. We no longer vaccinate against smallpox. Everybody takes a slight risk for the greater good. Because this is mandatory, it's incumbent on government to provide the vaccines and take care of anyone with complications from the vaccinations, which works pretty well.
Scenario 2: Voluntary vaccination. As long as the measles stays away, the risk of vaccination is very slightly more than the risk of no vaccination. Tragedy of the commons, folks: until we have outbreaks, each individual person is better off not being vaccinated. This pretty much guarantees that the vaccination rate will fall until we lose herd immunity. Once outbreaks appear, people will start getting vaccinated in panic mode. Not good.
The other problem with Scenario 2 is that people who can't get vaccinated (due to age, medical conditions, etc.) have a lot more opportunities to be exposed to measles, even if there is herd immunity, because we not only have the measles patients coming in from out of country but the people they infect.
I'm not going to tell you to educate yourself before spewing nonsense, but you obviously didn't consider everything and your reasoning is seriously flawed.
I've had problems with passphrases. I can remember something that's unlikely to be guessed, but I keep forgetting if there's a comma between clauses, or exactly what the capitalization is, or something like that. All it takes is one slip like that and I can't log in.
Suppose an on-line attacker can get a list of user names. Then the attacker can try a series of weak passwords on each user. On a large site, the odds are that somebody's using an easily guessable password, and if the attacker just wants one login, and doesn't care which one, that could work nicely. Blocking IP addresses doesn't do much good against a botnet.
With unemployment down, the deficit slashed, and a host of other things, if Obama was trying to destroy the US he's been remarkably unsuccessful at it.
Sanders laid out on his website what he wanted to do and how he wanted to pay for it. Most of the money came from removing loopholes and exemptions, which are tax raises but don't affect rates. There was no mention of an 80% tax rate.