Progressives tend to take a dim view of turning our country into a caste system. Just saying.
While simultaneously supporting policies that turn our country into a caste system. Something like 80% of the "Obama recovery" has went to the top 10%.
It's mind-boggling to me that anybody would use the word "Progressive" in any manner other than derogatory, anyway, given what the Progressives stood for 100 years ago.
Given that Microsoft seems to be investing heavily in Azure, I'd wonder exactly how they plan to beat AWS. AWS had some new machine learning algorithm added a month ago; Azure doesn't have that. Either way, however, is a win. If Microsoft's making some fatal mistake with their new business model, then maybe they'd go bankrupt and help the industry by going open-source before death. If Azure stays where it is or ranks up in usage with its SaaS model, then there'll probably be some interesting competition between them two and Google with large user bases. Either way, there's competition, which will (almost) forever spiral downward prices and upward capabilities.
The scary thing about Microsoft is that they have at least 10s of billions of dollars in the bank. They will likely never go bankrupt, but I'm not sure they'll ever make money in computers again if the Windows/Office gravy train ever comes to a halt.
Back when IBM executive predicted "the world will probably need six computers", the main computing model was a mainframe at a distant location and time share on it via (overpriced) telephone lines and VT-100 terminals. Eventually workstations appeared and the move was to get off the mainframe and do local computing. Then came along Sun, "The network is *the* computer" and diskless workstations that would boot into an X-11 display terminal off a distant server. Well, PCs came along and desktop became powerful enough to run even fluid mechanics simulations. Then came high performance computing, and now the cloud.
A bigger machine in a far away place always had the cost advantages of the economy of scale. Everytime there is a jump in connection speeds and bandwidth some customers found it cheaper to "out source" computing to a remote machine. But eventually the advantages of local storage and local computation adds up. So let us see how long this iteration lasts.
The difference is that we still have really strong clients now and use the back end mainly for storage and some computation. It's not very comparable.
The other difference is that the technologies in use today make the "cloud" pretty much infinitely expandable, unlike a mainframe. Amazon has petabytes of storage and adds more continuously.
It won't matter. Initial negative experience will color all future opinions. Apple really screwed the pooch on this one.
Yeah, badly. I mean, they only presold 1,000,000 of them with an average price of around $400. That's $400,000,000 in one single day.
This is version 1.0, which in the open source world would really be version 0.8 or so. It's a beta. Totally new product for Apple, and the people who are lining up to buy them know this.
Give it a few versions and it'll likely be faster and have longer battery life, as well as some very reasonable native apps.
Most of what you say is true, but irrelevant. There are other ways that compensation happens, particularly in a church setting. If you look at the truly rich preachers they tend to have everything owned by the company - house, cars, etc. There are really few rules for limitations on that sort of stuff. Even the executive compensation isn't capped as you think. The IRS rules (which they rely on a court to enforce) looks at comparable compensation in the same general area of business and may try to get a court to declare some "salary" as "dividends" which are then taxed at the corporate level as well as the individual level.
Little of that would matter to huge "churches" any more than it matters to huge corporations. They'll find ways to get rid of any "profits" before the tax man comes.
This. I tend to cringe at these megachurches that collect (metric) tons of money from poor people with the (false) promise of "health, wealth, and prosperity" - only to turn-around and spend hundreds of thousands, or even millions, to buy a fancy plane, property for a bigger parking-lot (I've personally seen that same church humiliate a poor, homeless person - by putting a suit jacket on them for service, then refuse to provide any kind of real material help.
The bible's position on it is pretty simple, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's..." - "USA" is printed on the dollar, churches ought to pay taxes. Even money that falls out of the sky counts as income.
This seems to be a recurring theme with people who have no understanding of taxes and corporations. Removing the tax exempt status from most churches wouldn't change anything - at least not at the federal level.
Churches aren't people. If you buy a car, you buy it with money that's already taxed. Same with your house, clothing, food, etc. You get to deduct charitable donations.
But corporations only pay taxes on profits, which are [generally speaking] what's left over after the expenses are paid. That means the plane, big building, parking lot, etc. gets paid for before taxes. Same with salaries. They would likely have no problem getting by with little or no taxes. Actually, it would probably end up like the corporate world where the biggest players pay little or nothing and the small guy gets screwed because he can't afford as good of an accountant.
I see this from the left quite often. I get stuff in my email every couple of weeks about how we need to revoke the NFL's tax exempt status. The NFL lost a couple hundred million last year - think they care about taxes? If they weren't tax exempt they'd be getting a substantial refund (and I'd likely be getting emails about *that*).
This seems to be an article more about condemning Tesla's batteries that about energy. In fact the word "watt" appears nowhere. Before you can have a discussion about energy you need to be armed with some facts about actual energy needs and potentials. This is just more anti-Tesla propaganda.
As well as anti-reality.
"Stover worries that shifting responsibility for solutions to climate change from governments to individuals creates an 'every-man-for-himself' culture that actually works against energy solutions and does little to reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions."
Right - because central planning is a much better idea <eye roll>.
The bottom line is that when I reduce my carbon footprint I save money, at least in the long run. I've invested hundreds of dollars in the last year in getting LED lights throughout the house. I'll make that money back within 5 years - I can already see the difference on my light bills. Next year I'm hoping to start my solar farm on my very large southern-facing roof. I'll likely have negative light bills when I'm done and it'll pay for itself within 3 or 4 years (yes, that's less than average and there's a reason for that having to do with my air conditioning and the solar panels taking heat off the house).
So, yeah, we need the grid upgraded. But at this stage we need a lot of people trying a lot of different things so that we can find out what works and what's economical. Ultimately, if it doesn't save me money it ain't gonna happen.
This is an ongoing subject. According to some other poster it cost x amount of dollars to run a cab. A taxi can't run at a loss so the more taxis there are the less riders per taxi means higher fares to keep all those cabs running. That million dollar medallion might have something to do with cost though.
It's so funny to see stuff like this written so seriously by someone who doesn't understand basic economics.
Here's something to chew on: why does this "problem" only apply to taxis? Why don't we have a medallion system for grocery stores?
Be careful, your brain might catch fire thinking this hard....
His blood wasn't really an alcoholic drink, but at.20% a person is stone drunk. There's video of him standing around talking closely with other officers who would later claim that a) they didn't smell alcohol and b) he didn't act drunk. Neither claim is remotely credible.
In Ferguson we see that blacks have "contraband" in their vehicles at a lower rate than whites, yet black cars still get searched more. I agree that blacks commit crimes at a higher rate than whites, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that they tend to be lower income than whites. They're also scrutinized more as you can see in Ferguson. Note also in Ferguson we find that blacks are more likely to be ticketed when pulled over, etc.
The bottom line is that blacks who commit the same crimes are more likely to be convicted and get harsher punishment.
Note that doesn't invalidate what you say. The answer is far more complex than a simple fix.
These stories of police corruption come from north and south, from many different cities and neighborhoods.
This isn't police corruption, it's police brutality, which is a separate issue. I have friends and family members who are police officers, the lion's share of them are decent people, but knowing them and the small handful of their colleagues who aren't decent people I can proffer a few opinions on what drives behaviors such as these:
1. There's a siege mentality in modern law enforcement, manifested as "I'm going home to my family, no matter what it takes." Do you have to worry about getting shot at your job? Probably not. LEOs have to worry about that every single time they pull someone over. Is it a soccer mom, a businessman, or a three strikes felon who doesn't want to go back inside? They don't know.
Police are safer than they've ever been. The job isn't even in the top 10 most dangerous jobs. Yes, there are people who shoot at an officer who pulls them over. There are also people who shoot at the guy working the 2AM shift in Mapco. But I don't walk into Mapco at 2AM and have the guy pull a gun on me "just in case".
2. Modern media reinforces #1, by making line of duty deaths/injuries more accessible than ever before. Follow the "Officer Down Memorial Page" on Facebook; there's a line of duty death in the United States nearly every day of the week. Statistically speaking law enforcement is safer today than it has been in a long time, but in a large country statistically rare occurrences happen with distressing frequency and modern media ensures that we know all about them.
Right. In other words, a big part of the problem is cultural, both within law enforcement and from without. I know cops, too, and they're always talking in hushed tones about how it's just becoming so much more dangerous. A big part of why is that they don't feel they have as much support from the community as they used to. And a big part of that is a) municipalities using cops for revenue enhancement (see Ferguson) and b) cameras are now exposing just how much corruption there is in law enforcement and the justice system as a whole. See recent videos of a judge asking a prosecutor if she's going to charge a police officer with perjury after he obviously committed perjury as a good example.
3. The War on Drugs provides such a profit motive that criminals are encouraged to arm themselves and resist violently, which in turn drives the militarization of law enforcement while reinforcing the siege mentality. The War on Drugs also alienates the police from our poorest and most vulnerable communities. The same thing happened during prohibition, this is not a new societal phenomenon. Nor can you blame the police, they enforce the law, legislators write it.
Research shows that most raids on "drug houses" either turn up "no weapons" or a handgun. There's very little violent resistance.
4. There are a handful of people in law enforcement who have no business being in law enforcement, or any other field that requires them to interact with human beings as a matter of course. They have chips on their shoulders, the stereotype is the kid that got bullied a lot in high school, now he has a badge and a gun, so don't you dare fuck with him. These people are a minority, out of the dozens of LEOs I know I can only name one that falls into this category. Short tempered and thin skinned are bad personality attributes for LEOs.
Let me give you an example of why you're wrong. And I could come up with a hundred (literally) but I just need one. Take the David Bisard case in Indianapolis. You can look it up in Google, but short version: Bisard got stone drunk before work one day, jumped in his squad car, someone mentioned that they were doing a simple drug arrest on the radio, Bisard said he'd be right there, they said they didn't need him,
"But on August 11, 2011, however, BART took an unprecedented step. Under orders from BART police, the system shut down underground wireless service for three hours. The interruption covered stations in downtown San Francisco. In a statement, administrators clearly identified “organizers planning to disrupt BART service . . . us[ing] mobile devices to coordinate their disruptive activities and communicate about the location and number of BART Police” as the rationale behind the move."
For democrats, it mainly comes down to the belief that their guy will give them free stuff (money for nothing, chicks for free.)
This is correct. See the youtube videos of people claiming Obama would pay their mortgage as a good example.
No, for Democrats it comes down to hoping that they'll make the hard/unpopular choices of keeping the environment clean, protecting citizens' rights in the face of "for the children" and "or the terrorists win" crap, etc..
Uh, yeah, if you're a big enough sucker to buy their marketing. They are all for the drug war (I could end there and your comment would already be a smoking crater), they're anti-gun-rights ("duh, for the children! drool"), etc. Only a sucker buys their marketing bs.
Unfortunately, they (like the Republicans) are typically more interested in getting corporate sponsorships to get re-elected, and will generally sell out everything they pretend to believe in to get it.
Right, got it. Democrats are good, but if they're bad it's in the same ways that Republicans are bad. But Republicans are also bad in even more ways, so they're worse.
Got it.
You'll vote for Feinstein because she's not an evil Republican, right?
My wife is from the Philippines and I've traveled there a few times. One of the first things that one notices is that there are very few overweight people. I mean like one in a thousand. It's funny in a way because most young women have great legs even if they're not otherwise pretty.
But when they come to America they tend to gain weight rapidly. In the Philippines they eat a lot of starch. Actually, most calories probably come from starches. But they also tend to move around a lot more.
Here, the issue is not just the diet - it's also the sitting around watching TV or whatever, along with driving everywhere and walking only minimally.
Anyway, the point being that it's not just the food - it's the lifestyle.
"Poverty" and "income inequality" are very different. While the US has a fairly large income inequality, poverty isn't common. (Note that "poverty" to most people means "unable to meet basic needs"). The irony is in our culture that poor people tend to be overweight.
Even if you wrote this in C in the style in which they did it the program would be slow. Since there's no way to "extend" a C string, it would require determining the length of the current string (which involves scanning the string for a null byte), malloc'ing a new buffer with one more byte,
There is. It is called realloc. If you are unlucky, it will just divide the number of times the system actually performs by 16 or whatever the malloc implementation uses as an alignment, but once the allocation gets big enough you get a pages directly from the system, and it just maps in more pages on the end.
malloc isn't the problem, though. My point was that if you write it in the style of the code in the paper (don't keep track of the string length between character appends) then it'll still have to scan the string a million times. If you know ahead of time that you're going to append exactly one million characters to the string then you need but one malloc, right? I can make this program extremely fast in that manner but that's not what they're doing.
Well, yeah, but that's not going to work consistently. Worst case is if the string is on the stack you'll smash the stack and likely have a memory access error. If it's on the heap you'll likely get the error quicker.
I wouldn't even think of writing a program in the manner in which their sample was written, but if I was trying to solve their basic "problem" there are better ways to go about it.
The real story here, is that if you don't know how to write code properly, then string concatenation can be really slow.
Was their paper peer reviewed?
I just reviewed it, but frankly, they're not my peers.
They actually understand the problem and state it near the end of the paper. The issue is pretty simple and when I read the/. summary I knew what the problem was. They're appending single bytes to a string. In both chosen languages - Java and Python - strings are immutable so the "concatenation" is way the hell more complex than simply sticking a byte in a memory location. What it involves is creating a new string object to hold both strings together. So, there's the overhead of object creation, memory copying, etc. Yes, by the time you're done it's a lot of extra work for the CPU.
I'm going to state this as nicely as I can: what they proved is that a complete moron can write code so stupidly that a modern CPU and RAM access can be slowed down to the extent that even disk access is faster. That's it.
Even if you wrote this in C in the style in which they did it the program would be slow. Since there's no way to "extend" a C string, it would require determining the length of the current string (which involves scanning the string for a null byte), malloc'ing a new buffer with one more byte, copying the old string and then adding the new character and new null byte. Scanning and copying are both going to require an operation for each byte (yeah, it could be optimized to take advantage of the computer's word length) on each iteration, with that byte count growing by "1" each time.
The sum of all integers up to N is N(N+1)/2. If N is 1,000,000 the sum is 500,000,500,000. So, counting bytes (looking for null) requires half a trillion operations and copying bytes requires another half trillion operations. Note that "operations" is multiple machine instructions for purposes of this discussion.
Yeah, modern computers are fast, but when you start throwing around a trillion operations it's going to take some time.
Writing to disk will be faster for a number of reasons, mainly because the OS is going to buffer the writes (and know the length of the buffer) and handle it much much better. It's not doing a disk operation every time they do a write. If they were to flush to disk every time they would still be waiting for it to finish.
There are a few notes, here. First, in Java and Python the string object likely holds a "length" value along with the actual character buffer. That would make it faster and not require all the operations the badly written C code that I describe above would require. But the overhead of objects, JVM, interpreter, etc. gets thrown into the mix. Second, if I were doing something like this in C I could keep the string length as part of a struct and at least make it that much faster. The point is that a good programmer wouldn't write code in this manner.
Anyway, this "paper" proves nothing except that really bad code will always suck. One would have to be an idiot to write anything close to what they've done here in a real-life scenario. I know because I've cleaned up other people's code that's on the level of this junk...
Slashdot Mirror
If I also said he needed to be fluent in Mandarin and Farsi, I've just written an H1-B for my candidate.
In my entire life I've never met anyone who filled that requirement.
Yeah, and that's the point. You know there are people who fill that requirement, just not a lot of them in the US.
Progressives tend to take a dim view of turning our country into a caste system. Just saying.
While simultaneously supporting policies that turn our country into a caste system. Something like 80% of the "Obama recovery" has went to the top 10%.
It's mind-boggling to me that anybody would use the word "Progressive" in any manner other than derogatory, anyway, given what the Progressives stood for 100 years ago.
Right... because running a different operating system would have stopped a 3rd party application from crashing. >.
Well, it's pretty likely that trying to run an iOS app under Android would result in the application not even starting....
Given that Microsoft seems to be investing heavily in Azure, I'd wonder exactly how they plan to beat AWS. AWS had some new machine learning algorithm added a month ago; Azure doesn't have that. Either way, however, is a win. If Microsoft's making some fatal mistake with their new business model, then maybe they'd go bankrupt and help the industry by going open-source before death. If Azure stays where it is or ranks up in usage with its SaaS model, then there'll probably be some interesting competition between them two and Google with large user bases. Either way, there's competition, which will (almost) forever spiral downward prices and upward capabilities.
The scary thing about Microsoft is that they have at least 10s of billions of dollars in the bank. They will likely never go bankrupt, but I'm not sure they'll ever make money in computers again if the Windows/Office gravy train ever comes to a halt.
Back when IBM executive predicted "the world will probably need six computers", the main computing model was a mainframe at a distant location and time share on it via (overpriced) telephone lines and VT-100 terminals. Eventually workstations appeared and the move was to get off the mainframe and do local computing. Then came along Sun, "The network is *the* computer" and diskless workstations that would boot into an X-11 display terminal off a distant server. Well, PCs came along and desktop became powerful enough to run even fluid mechanics simulations. Then came high performance computing, and now the cloud.
A bigger machine in a far away place always had the cost advantages of the economy of scale. Everytime there is a jump in connection speeds and bandwidth some customers found it cheaper to "out source" computing to a remote machine. But eventually the advantages of local storage and local computation adds up. So let us see how long this iteration lasts.
The difference is that we still have really strong clients now and use the back end mainly for storage and some computation. It's not very comparable.
The other difference is that the technologies in use today make the "cloud" pretty much infinitely expandable, unlike a mainframe. Amazon has petabytes of storage and adds more continuously.
I wish I could mod this up.
But did anyone ask Jenny McCarthy about it?
It won't matter. Initial negative experience will color all future opinions. Apple really screwed the pooch on this one.
Yeah, badly. I mean, they only presold 1,000,000 of them with an average price of around $400. That's $400,000,000 in one single day.
This is version 1.0, which in the open source world would really be version 0.8 or so. It's a beta. Totally new product for Apple, and the people who are lining up to buy them know this.
Give it a few versions and it'll likely be faster and have longer battery life, as well as some very reasonable native apps.
If you're obese or out of shape, I guess. For the rest of us, a walking tour is good exercise.
Not to mention faster...
Most of what you say is true, but irrelevant. There are other ways that compensation happens, particularly in a church setting. If you look at the truly rich preachers they tend to have everything owned by the company - house, cars, etc. There are really few rules for limitations on that sort of stuff. Even the executive compensation isn't capped as you think. The IRS rules (which they rely on a court to enforce) looks at comparable compensation in the same general area of business and may try to get a court to declare some "salary" as "dividends" which are then taxed at the corporate level as well as the individual level.
Little of that would matter to huge "churches" any more than it matters to huge corporations. They'll find ways to get rid of any "profits" before the tax man comes.
This. I tend to cringe at these megachurches that collect (metric) tons of money from poor people with the (false) promise of "health, wealth, and prosperity" - only to turn-around and spend hundreds of thousands, or even millions, to buy a fancy plane, property for a bigger parking-lot (I've personally seen that same church humiliate a poor, homeless person - by putting a suit jacket on them for service, then refuse to provide any kind of real material help.
The bible's position on it is pretty simple, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's..." - "USA" is printed on the dollar, churches ought to pay taxes. Even money that falls out of the sky counts as income.
This seems to be a recurring theme with people who have no understanding of taxes and corporations. Removing the tax exempt status from most churches wouldn't change anything - at least not at the federal level.
Churches aren't people. If you buy a car, you buy it with money that's already taxed. Same with your house, clothing, food, etc. You get to deduct charitable donations.
But corporations only pay taxes on profits, which are [generally speaking] what's left over after the expenses are paid. That means the plane, big building, parking lot, etc. gets paid for before taxes. Same with salaries. They would likely have no problem getting by with little or no taxes. Actually, it would probably end up like the corporate world where the biggest players pay little or nothing and the small guy gets screwed because he can't afford as good of an accountant.
I see this from the left quite often. I get stuff in my email every couple of weeks about how we need to revoke the NFL's tax exempt status. The NFL lost a couple hundred million last year - think they care about taxes? If they weren't tax exempt they'd be getting a substantial refund (and I'd likely be getting emails about *that*).
This seems to be an article more about condemning Tesla's batteries that about energy. In fact the word "watt" appears nowhere. Before you can have a discussion about energy you need to be armed with some facts about actual energy needs and potentials. This is just more anti-Tesla propaganda.
As well as anti-reality.
"Stover worries that shifting responsibility for solutions to climate change from governments to individuals creates an 'every-man-for-himself' culture that actually works against energy solutions and does little to reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions."
Right - because central planning is a much better idea <eye roll>.
The bottom line is that when I reduce my carbon footprint I save money, at least in the long run. I've invested hundreds of dollars in the last year in getting LED lights throughout the house. I'll make that money back within 5 years - I can already see the difference on my light bills. Next year I'm hoping to start my solar farm on my very large southern-facing roof. I'll likely have negative light bills when I'm done and it'll pay for itself within 3 or 4 years (yes, that's less than average and there's a reason for that having to do with my air conditioning and the solar panels taking heat off the house).
So, yeah, we need the grid upgraded. But at this stage we need a lot of people trying a lot of different things so that we can find out what works and what's economical. Ultimately, if it doesn't save me money it ain't gonna happen.
This is an ongoing subject. According to some other poster it cost x amount of dollars to run a cab. A taxi can't run at a loss so the more taxis there are the less riders per taxi means higher fares to keep all those cabs running. That million dollar medallion might have something to do with cost though.
It's so funny to see stuff like this written so seriously by someone who doesn't understand basic economics.
Here's something to chew on: why does this "problem" only apply to taxis? Why don't we have a medallion system for grocery stores?
Be careful, your brain might catch fire thinking this hard....
Still trying to say you're not a taxi service at this point is getting pretty ridiculous.
So is claiming that limiting the number of taxis through a medallion system is for the benefit of consumers.
I don't think you know what "hyperbole" is.
His blood wasn't really an alcoholic drink, but at .20% a person is stone drunk. There's video of him standing around talking closely with other officers who would later claim that a) they didn't smell alcohol and b) he didn't act drunk. Neither claim is remotely credible.
In Ferguson we see that blacks have "contraband" in their vehicles at a lower rate than whites, yet black cars still get searched more. I agree that blacks commit crimes at a higher rate than whites, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that they tend to be lower income than whites. They're also scrutinized more as you can see in Ferguson. Note also in Ferguson we find that blacks are more likely to be ticketed when pulled over, etc.
The bottom line is that blacks who commit the same crimes are more likely to be convicted and get harsher punishment.
Note that doesn't invalidate what you say. The answer is far more complex than a simple fix.
These stories of police corruption come from north and south, from many different cities and neighborhoods.
This isn't police corruption, it's police brutality, which is a separate issue. I have friends and family members who are police officers, the lion's share of them are decent people, but knowing them and the small handful of their colleagues who aren't decent people I can proffer a few opinions on what drives behaviors such as these:
1. There's a siege mentality in modern law enforcement, manifested as "I'm going home to my family, no matter what it takes." Do you have to worry about getting shot at your job? Probably not. LEOs have to worry about that every single time they pull someone over. Is it a soccer mom, a businessman, or a three strikes felon who doesn't want to go back inside? They don't know.
Police are safer than they've ever been. The job isn't even in the top 10 most dangerous jobs. Yes, there are people who shoot at an officer who pulls them over. There are also people who shoot at the guy working the 2AM shift in Mapco. But I don't walk into Mapco at 2AM and have the guy pull a gun on me "just in case".
2. Modern media reinforces #1, by making line of duty deaths/injuries more accessible than ever before. Follow the "Officer Down Memorial Page" on Facebook; there's a line of duty death in the United States nearly every day of the week. Statistically speaking law enforcement is safer today than it has been in a long time, but in a large country statistically rare occurrences happen with distressing frequency and modern media ensures that we know all about them.
Right. In other words, a big part of the problem is cultural, both within law enforcement and from without. I know cops, too, and they're always talking in hushed tones about how it's just becoming so much more dangerous. A big part of why is that they don't feel they have as much support from the community as they used to. And a big part of that is a) municipalities using cops for revenue enhancement (see Ferguson) and b) cameras are now exposing just how much corruption there is in law enforcement and the justice system as a whole. See recent videos of a judge asking a prosecutor if she's going to charge a police officer with perjury after he obviously committed perjury as a good example.
3. The War on Drugs provides such a profit motive that criminals are encouraged to arm themselves and resist violently, which in turn drives the militarization of law enforcement while reinforcing the siege mentality. The War on Drugs also alienates the police from our poorest and most vulnerable communities. The same thing happened during prohibition, this is not a new societal phenomenon. Nor can you blame the police, they enforce the law, legislators write it.
Research shows that most raids on "drug houses" either turn up "no weapons" or a handgun. There's very little violent resistance.
4. There are a handful of people in law enforcement who have no business being in law enforcement, or any other field that requires them to interact with human beings as a matter of course. They have chips on their shoulders, the stereotype is the kid that got bullied a lot in high school, now he has a badge and a gun, so don't you dare fuck with him. These people are a minority, out of the dozens of LEOs I know I can only name one that falls into this category. Short tempered and thin skinned are bad personality attributes for LEOs.
Let me give you an example of why you're wrong. And I could come up with a hundred (literally) but I just need one. Take the David Bisard case in Indianapolis. You can look it up in Google, but short version: Bisard got stone drunk before work one day, jumped in his squad car, someone mentioned that they were doing a simple drug arrest on the radio, Bisard said he'd be right there, they said they didn't need him,
"But on August 11, 2011, however, BART took an unprecedented step. Under orders from BART police, the system shut down underground wireless service for three hours. The interruption covered stations in downtown San Francisco. In a statement, administrators clearly identified “organizers planning to disrupt BART service . . . us[ing] mobile devices to coordinate their disruptive activities and communicate about the location and number of BART Police” as the rationale behind the move."
https://www.aclu.org/blog/tech...
It has nothing to do with "bombs". We had to get the patriot act in order to fight terrorists.
"Of the 22,741 warrants issued since 2003, 21,838 (96%) were issued under the heading of "Narcotics."
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...
How many times are we going to fall for this trick?
For democrats, it mainly comes down to the belief that their guy will give them free stuff (money for nothing, chicks for free.)
This is correct. See the youtube videos of people claiming Obama would pay their mortgage as a good example.
No, for Democrats it comes down to hoping that they'll make the hard/unpopular choices of keeping the environment clean, protecting citizens' rights in the face of "for the children" and "or the terrorists win" crap, etc..
Uh, yeah, if you're a big enough sucker to buy their marketing. They are all for the drug war (I could end there and your comment would already be a smoking crater), they're anti-gun-rights ("duh, for the children! drool"), etc. Only a sucker buys their marketing bs.
Unfortunately, they (like the Republicans) are typically more interested in getting corporate sponsorships to get re-elected, and will generally sell out everything they pretend to believe in to get it.
Right, got it. Democrats are good, but if they're bad it's in the same ways that Republicans are bad. But Republicans are also bad in even more ways, so they're worse.
Got it.
You'll vote for Feinstein because she's not an evil Republican, right?
My wife is from the Philippines and I've traveled there a few times. One of the first things that one notices is that there are very few overweight people. I mean like one in a thousand. It's funny in a way because most young women have great legs even if they're not otherwise pretty.
But when they come to America they tend to gain weight rapidly. In the Philippines they eat a lot of starch. Actually, most calories probably come from starches. But they also tend to move around a lot more.
Here, the issue is not just the diet - it's also the sitting around watching TV or whatever, along with driving everywhere and walking only minimally.
Anyway, the point being that it's not just the food - it's the lifestyle.
"Poverty" and "income inequality" are very different. While the US has a fairly large income inequality, poverty isn't common. (Note that "poverty" to most people means "unable to meet basic needs"). The irony is in our culture that poor people tend to be overweight.
There is. It is called realloc. If you are unlucky, it will just divide the number of times the system actually performs by 16 or whatever the malloc implementation uses as an alignment, but once the allocation gets big enough you get a pages directly from the system, and it just maps in more pages on the end.
malloc isn't the problem, though. My point was that if you write it in the style of the code in the paper (don't keep track of the string length between character appends) then it'll still have to scan the string a million times. If you know ahead of time that you're going to append exactly one million characters to the string then you need but one malloc, right? I can make this program extremely fast in that manner but that's not what they're doing.
Well, yeah, but that's not going to work consistently. Worst case is if the string is on the stack you'll smash the stack and likely have a memory access error. If it's on the heap you'll likely get the error quicker.
I wouldn't even think of writing a program in the manner in which their sample was written, but if I was trying to solve their basic "problem" there are better ways to go about it.
The real story here, is that if you don't know how to write code properly, then string concatenation can be really slow.
Was their paper peer reviewed?
I just reviewed it, but frankly, they're not my peers.
They actually understand the problem and state it near the end of the paper. The issue is pretty simple and when I read the /. summary I knew what the problem was. They're appending single bytes to a string. In both chosen languages - Java and Python - strings are immutable so the "concatenation" is way the hell more complex than simply sticking a byte in a memory location. What it involves is creating a new string object to hold both strings together. So, there's the overhead of object creation, memory copying, etc. Yes, by the time you're done it's a lot of extra work for the CPU.
I'm going to state this as nicely as I can: what they proved is that a complete moron can write code so stupidly that a modern CPU and RAM access can be slowed down to the extent that even disk access is faster. That's it.
Even if you wrote this in C in the style in which they did it the program would be slow. Since there's no way to "extend" a C string, it would require determining the length of the current string (which involves scanning the string for a null byte), malloc'ing a new buffer with one more byte, copying the old string and then adding the new character and new null byte. Scanning and copying are both going to require an operation for each byte (yeah, it could be optimized to take advantage of the computer's word length) on each iteration, with that byte count growing by "1" each time.
The sum of all integers up to N is N(N+1)/2. If N is 1,000,000 the sum is 500,000,500,000. So, counting bytes (looking for null) requires half a trillion operations and copying bytes requires another half trillion operations. Note that "operations" is multiple machine instructions for purposes of this discussion.
Yeah, modern computers are fast, but when you start throwing around a trillion operations it's going to take some time.
Writing to disk will be faster for a number of reasons, mainly because the OS is going to buffer the writes (and know the length of the buffer) and handle it much much better. It's not doing a disk operation every time they do a write. If they were to flush to disk every time they would still be waiting for it to finish.
There are a few notes, here. First, in Java and Python the string object likely holds a "length" value along with the actual character buffer. That would make it faster and not require all the operations the badly written C code that I describe above would require. But the overhead of objects, JVM, interpreter, etc. gets thrown into the mix. Second, if I were doing something like this in C I could keep the string length as part of a struct and at least make it that much faster. The point is that a good programmer wouldn't write code in this manner.
Anyway, this "paper" proves nothing except that really bad code will always suck. One would have to be an idiot to write anything close to what they've done here in a real-life scenario. I know because I've cleaned up other people's code that's on the level of this junk...
Like, maybe the coder chicks could wear bikinis while writing those functions and post selfies to prove it?