I'm never FORCED to drive in a blizzard. I LIKE to drive in a blizzard. It's my idea of poetry. I enjoy making the broad-side turns on the slippery road, and driving in the middle of a big highway, all white, no lane markings, and vinyette visibility. It's fun.
Now go from Chicago to Detroit in a blizzard like that and try driving down the middle of the fscking highway. If the roads are empty, who gives a rats ass what you do.
I'm not as good a driver as Mario Andretti. That's not a requirement of ordinary drivers. And, by the way, he has a person in his ear too.
There are many ways to make your life safer, and to make the lives of those around you safer. You're not going to force me to take every safe road. And I promise you, if you want to compare over-all lifestyles, you endanger more lives than I ever will.
Haha, of course, yes, because despite your delusional opinion of your driving ability*, the rest of your life is a very shrine to the concept of humble consideration for the welfare of others. Absolutely. Your promise is as the gold standard to me in this regard.
Don't talk to me about not taking the safe road. I risk my own life weekends when the weather is good, but I don't put anyone else's life at risk for the sake of seizing the day. You can't say the same. Unless you're on the interstate in Nebraska or comparable, please shut your damn fool mouth and hang up the phone, put down the six 40 oz, and stop doing whatever else it is you think isn't a bad idea when you do it because you're so awesome. It's not convenient, it's retarded.
* You're not Mario Andretti, just the Mario of the joe-sixpack common-man's road, oh and fully capable of operating with the same distractions when in your own domain. Don't you think having a "person in your ear" is different when they're watching you drive and basically only talking to you about driving and driving strategy? If you don't think you're Mario, then why does him talking to his crew justify you talking on your phone in any way? Yeah.
An FPGA reads a binary stream of data, and "wires" the interconnect based on that. I think it is a bit of a stretch to call that "interpreting a mathematical description."
Since that "wiring" is as real a "wiring" as when a CPU's ALU gets "wired" to the register file when a processor reads an ADD instruction, I'm not sure I see the difference here. Other than the control inputs for the muxes and tri-states in an FPGA are often in static memory and infrequently if ever changed.
Try this: What's the difference between a stream of binary that's used to program an FPGA, and a stream of binary data that's used to program a software simulation of an FPGA? Not the difference between an FPGA and a software simulator of an FPGA! That's obvious, one's hardware one is software. What's the difference between the binary streams. Either way, it's an mathematical description of how a device is supposed to work. A formula.
I dunno, maybe it's because I'm neck deep in simulators all day, running a program that simulates a computer so as to run a program, running a program that simulates hardware based on an HDL description so as to run a program, combinations thereof. To the extent that the same program behaves differently running on hardware or another program, that's because the simulator program is using an inaccurate formula for modeling physical reality.
But I suppose that I will never convince you. So, yes, call it whatever you want.
It is at conceivable that you could convince me that programs for FPGAs on FPGAs represent a meaningful gray area where language and physicality blend. It is inconceivable that you could convince me that software is more or less than a symbolic representation of math, a formula, because that's literal fact, so not lyin your chances are nil.
Mmm, Soylent Green with red ketchup. It's like a Christmas meal with half your family being the meal.
But then the crisis passes and agriculture will feed everyone again, though people still enjoy the taste of Soylent Green. At some point, to save costs, they will surreptitiously replace the people in Soylent Green with soy beans. They'll get away with it for a while, until Charlton Heston VIII figures it out and takes to the streets, crying out "Soylent Green isn't people!"
Why would you ever pick up the phone to say that? If you are not going ot talk to the person, let them get the voice mail.
Because the call might be important enough that I would pull over and talk to them. I answer the phone, I find out, and either use Correct Response #1 and hang up, or use Correct Response #2 and pull over. If I have no reason to expect an important call, I probably don't answer at all.
The Correct Response is never to announce your intention to pay attention to driving for a few seconds, then resume talking when the need for attention to driving diminishes. The whole point is that talking distracts you so you don't notice these situations fast enough to react, much less politely inform the person you are talking to.
All of that drama could be avoided if you just said "hold on a sec, I'm merging" and then ignore anything that come safter that until your done then come back and say, "Sorry, I was merging"
If people were that good at quickly shifting their attention to and from the phone as the need arises, cell phones wouldn't be that big a deal to begin with. An accident can happen while you're saying those six words.
Anyway, the correct response, the one I use in those rare times that I would pick up the phone at all, is "I'm driving, I'll call you back."
If there's a blizzard out, and you do not have to drive, then you shouldn't. If you do have to drive, well, it's not like you can make it stop snowing, which is why that's legal. Hopefully enough other people were able to stay home that it's safe.
There is no reason why you must talk on a cell phone while driving. If the call is that important that you can't miss it, pull over. If your time is so valuable that you can neither skip the call nor stop driving, then you need to hire a driver. Can't afford a driver? Then your time isn't that valuable. Pull over or call them back.
Hands-free vs hands-on has nothing to do with your available limbs, and everything to do with using those limbs for a completely separate task. I drive a manual, shifting is simply part of the task of driving that I'm focusing on, not a distraction. Fiddling with a cell phone is a distraction, a completely orthogonal task of coordination. It's the difference between a drummer using all their limbs to perform, and using 3 of their limbs to perform and one to juggle. Not that hands-free headsets have been shown to substantially reduce the risk posed by driving while on the phone, because you're already more than distracted enough to cause problems just by talking to someone who isn't present.
Also, it's already been established that talking on a cell phone while driving is more dangerous than driving while at a 0.08% BAC, the legal limit. Which is why you shouldn't do it, no matter how sober or how good a driver you incorrectly think you are. Even if both a 0.08% BAC or talking on a cell phone, by themselves, aren't as dangerous as driving in a blizzard.
I've always thought it was because, culturally, there is a much stronger assumption that when you're talking to someone on the phone, that they have essentially your full attention and vice versa. I think this manifests in two ways: First, you're naturally going to give more attention to the phone conversation since it's expected. Second, if you're quiet for a couple seconds because your exit is coming up and traffic is congested so you need to figure out how best to get over, a person in the car with you won't be offended, while someone on the other end of the phone will start saying "Hello?" or "Are you listening?" demanding your attention again, even if it's just to go "I'm fucking driving!" The second part there is also due to the nature of cell phones, too, I suppose.
But your idea sounds plausible as well, could very well be a contributing factor. I can imagine it being more mental work, inherently demanding more attention, to talk on a phone than in person.
After all, it's not like you'd look in your carryon half-way through the flight, find a gun you didn't expect there, and go "OMG! Got to hijack the plane!"
Yeah, well maybe you can tell me what I should have done instead, Mr. Smarty Pants!
Yeah, the submitter made a typo, and should have capitalized "the Government", since they were referring to the true Government of the world, of which there is only one.
I don't see why it would be surprising at all that a language which has been refined, over time, to describe reality would wind up describing reality.
A huge amount of math had nothing to do with describing reality at the time of its invention, and much still doesn't today.
What aspect of reality were mathematicians trying to describe when they came up with imaginary numbers? I'll short circuit the rhetorical question here. They weren't, and imaginary numbers were considered to be, literally, imaginary and non-existent and probably useless.
Then, more than a century later, someone used imaginary numbers to create a link between two previously unrelated irrational constants by showing that e^(i*x) = cos(x) + i*sin(x). I can't see how someone can look at Euler's Formula and not be at least somewhat impressed or awed by the obviously unintended consequence that e and pi are related via the square root of negative one.
And it was centuries later that it was discovered that this same formula is useful for describing the behavior of AC circuits. Imaginary numbers aren't just made up figments to give an answer to an unanswerable question. They aren't just a clever way to relate e and pi via Taylor series. Imaginary numbers actually represent a physical quantity in the real world that we can measure and see that it works correctly. Without imaginary numbers, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
The math preceded the reality the math describes by around four hundred years.
That's surprising to me. If that's not surprising to you, well, I guess I can accept that. Is it also truly unsurprising to you that quantum mechanics could provide a way to test for mathematical undecidability? And if this is anything but "oh that's obvious in hindsight", is there any way to turn this around and figure out these unsurprising results ahead of time? Cus you could be pretty rich.
That is precisely what a theoretical guy says - but I'm an electrical engineer, so I have designed CPUs... a program is a set of states you want the hardware to go through, not a formula. Look at assembly language - it is a much further stretch to call it a formula than to call a hardware state lists. And when designing it, we definitely treat it as a hardware state list.
I design CPUs... and finite state machines were mathematical constructs long before any electrical computer existed. "A set of states you want to go through", without the word "hardware", is a formula, just an iterative one. That's still math.
So is it not programming to write the software for a machine that is not turing complete? How about FPGA - where software and hardware are truely blended? What about DSPs, where branching is impossible?
Why would Turing Completeness matter? There are mathematical systems where you cannot compute everything that is computable, so what does that have to do with programs being math or not?
FPGAs aren't really any different. You've got a physical device that can read and interpret a mathematical description and turn on or off physical gates based on that langauge. What, you think what I'm saying doesn't apply equally well to HDLs? The only difference is that in most cases, the HDL is not just a language for describing the mathematical operations, it's a blueprint for building a physical device. The physical device isn't a mathematical language anymore. But if you're running your HDL in a software simulator, or simply using it to program the gates of an already existent physical device (FPGA), it's the same as a program.
I think engineering covers a lot more of software development than "formulating" does.
Other than there being no difference, sure why not. Call it whatever you want.
-deciding whether you will write code for calculating the temperature, or if you will hand it off to someone else (call a standard function or API) -deciding when or if the temperature reading given is to be believed. -how much precision do you have the processing capability to do, and how much precision is necessary.
Which are essentially the same as deriving the same formula to be done by hand. It's the same.
The standard way of teaching basic programming is procedural, then functional, then object orientated then onwards.
Who teaches functional programming languages as a standard part of their curriculum, in particular as a "bridge" between procedural and object-oriented paradigms? I learned some Lisp in an AI class, but that wasn't part of the standard programming sequence which went Assembly-C-C++ (with the C and C++ parts now replaced with Java, sadly).
2) He goes further to say that foolish mortals (unlike himself) learn by analogy, and so can't handle the truth, etc. Then, hilariously, he goes on to say that the only true way to look at programming is as deriving a formula! Imagine that, a mathematician describing engineering as deriving a formula! No comfortable analogies here...
Except that's exactly what programming is, writing a mathematical formula. Software is math. And that's not a metaphor; I'm being quite literal. Actually, let me be even more precise: Software is a language for describing math. A rock tossed in the air follows a parabolic path. h = h0 + vt - gt^2 describes a parabola. It's language, nothing by itself without something to interpret it. Software is exactly the same.
Software merely describes math. A computer is a device that is capable of understanding that language, and performing the mathematical operations based on it. And is capable of doing the photon emission or control surface manipulation. Software can't do that. I/O, from a software standpoint, is nothing more than assigning values to or from a matrix from or to a variable. Computer hardware is what makes anything other than that happen. Just like the hand-written formula which uses as one of its values the current outdoor temperature; you personally getting up and checking the temperature and writing it down on the paper where you are doing your calculations does not change the formula you are following into something other than a formula; the formula on your paper didn't go read the thermometer. It's still just a mathematical manipulation, expressed in human-readable form. Software is the same, just machine-readable. And the act of programming is discovering the right formula to get the result that you want.
The 18 researchers, most of them based in China, subjected the cannabis to a battery of tests, including carbon dating and genetic analysis. Scientists also tried to germinate 100 of the seeds found in the cache, without success.
The marijuana was found to have a relatively high content of THC, the main active ingredient in cannabis, but the sample was too old to determine a precise percentage.
Oh yes, the tests included genetic testing and radio-carbon dating. Good to point that out. I'll just speculate what other tests you could do with 2700 year old weed. On a perhaps related note, since they couldn't use spectroscopy or whatever to determine the precise percentage of THC, I wonder what technique they used to come up with the qualitative measurement "relatively high".
(And the lab is still working on better solar cells.)
And after many years of creating better photo sensors for cameras, low-leakage transistors for embedded computers, denser hard drive storage, a material for denser optical disks, and a new formula for Coke that people actually like better than the old one, but never a single improvement in solar cell technology, they give up in disgust.
I mean, appealing is just about always an option. But is there really any realistic chance of it succeeding and their dream coming true? Are we talking "SCO's hypothetical chances of winning SCO v IBM when all we knew was Darl's BS statements to the press" chances, or "SCO's chances of winning SCO v IBM after the judge demanded all their evidence and all they showed was errno.h" chances? As I understand it, you can't win an appeal on a factual basis, the appeal is instead all about any procedural errors made during the main trial that could be the basis for overturning the result. And as far as I can tell, the judge did everything possible to follow procedure and give SCO as much rope as they needed to hang themselves. So, on what basis is SCO going to argue their appeal? Are there any possible levers there? Or is this just another delay tactic they know ultimately won't work?
Yes. Because all of those downsides put together are better than handing all the money to a for-profit intermediary whose most powerful financial motivation is to not provide the service you're paying them for so that they can keep more of the money.
Most of those downsides still apply in the current situation, anyway. Mismanagement, power-seekers, nepotism, corruption, lack of accountability, red tape? Yep, big ol' check mark there. Sure the government overspends, but frankly I'd rather have someone receive an expensive treatment they didn't need or that was overpriced than not receive any treatment at all, with the money saved going into an insurance exec's pocket.
Damned if you don't, damned if you do. In Hell or in Abyss, in D&D cosmology...
I'll take Hell, please. Few enough separate planes of existence to count on both hands so it's easier to find the truly valuable treasures, and the denizens (devils or whatever the fsck they were called in 2nd edition) are Lawful evil and thus easier to bargain with.
Hm, wait, I'm getting the feeling I am missing your point somehow...
Actually only a few things, since mostly what I talked about was the idiocy of thinking monopolies only exist due to the government, a position you did in fact take. I'm sorry that I assumed you think other silly and obviously false things based solely on the fact that everyone else I've ever known far enough gone to believe that also believed those other silly and obviously false things. This is of course immensely unfair of me, it isn't necessarily the case that all Randian idiocies come as a full package, even if they often do.
Why are those things called "zero emission cars" btw?
Because they don't emit anything while running? That's what is usually meant when talking about emissions, things emitted by the device itself while in operation. Of course you can and should consider the pollution generated by manufacturing, but the emissions of the refineries that makes the gas that goes into an ICE are never counted in those cars emissions either.
So are you just joking/trolling now? You certainly can't believe that monopolies are the sole creation of government?!? Government certainly can create a monopoly, and it explicitly does in certain circumstances, but it is also government regulation that ensures a fair marketplace, i.e. prevents monopolization.
No, he's not, and yes he can believe that. There are actually libertarians/randians and fans of their economic theories that are so incredibly stupid, so blinded by their faith in the free market, that they actually think that none of the negative effects of capitalism would occur if the market were truly free. Despite the fact that nobody serious, not even the creators of free market theory like Adam Smith that they claim to hold so dear, have espoused these foolish beliefs. You'll notice that whenever you bring up a specific example from history, they'll respond by saying that obviously the market at that time was not in fact free, and that a free market has never actually existed. Ignoring that this is because nobody has ever been stupid enough to make one.
In their universe, Intel is/was only a monopoly due to government intervention (in the form of enforcing patents or copyrights). It has nothing to do with barriers to entry like having to have a multi-billion dollar fab or deep and undocumented knowledge of the most complicated ISA in existence, nor with arranging deals with OEMs whereby the more of a competitor's part they sell, the more the OEM has to pay for Intel parts. No, it's all the government's fault. Whereas in reality, government-enforced anti-trust law is the only reason AMD exists today, while even still the other CPU players continue to fade.
Their ideas go directly against even the theory of free market economics. It's a sad extremism. Useful policy discourse comes from people who understand that a balance of free markets and government regulation or intervention is best, but disagree on where, when and how to implement this. An extremist who wants nothing but a free market where corporations are free to do whetever they please, yet at the same time insist this is crucial to protecting our rights, is useless.
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I'm never FORCED to drive in a blizzard. I LIKE to drive in a blizzard. It's my idea of poetry. I enjoy making the broad-side turns on the slippery road, and driving in the middle of a big highway, all white, no lane markings, and vinyette visibility. It's fun.
Now go from Chicago to Detroit in a blizzard like that and try driving down the middle of the fscking highway. If the roads are empty, who gives a rats ass what you do.
I'm not as good a driver as Mario Andretti. That's not a requirement of ordinary drivers. And, by the way, he has a person in his ear too.
There are many ways to make your life safer, and to make the lives of those around you safer. You're not going to force me to take every safe road. And I promise you, if you want to compare over-all lifestyles, you endanger more lives than I ever will.
Haha, of course, yes, because despite your delusional opinion of your driving ability*, the rest of your life is a very shrine to the concept of humble consideration for the welfare of others. Absolutely. Your promise is as the gold standard to me in this regard.
Don't talk to me about not taking the safe road. I risk my own life weekends when the weather is good, but I don't put anyone else's life at risk for the sake of seizing the day. You can't say the same. Unless you're on the interstate in Nebraska or comparable, please shut your damn fool mouth and hang up the phone, put down the six 40 oz, and stop doing whatever else it is you think isn't a bad idea when you do it because you're so awesome. It's not convenient, it's retarded.
* You're not Mario Andretti, just the Mario of the joe-sixpack common-man's road, oh and fully capable of operating with the same distractions when in your own domain. Don't you think having a "person in your ear" is different when they're watching you drive and basically only talking to you about driving and driving strategy? If you don't think you're Mario, then why does him talking to his crew justify you talking on your phone in any way? Yeah.
An FPGA reads a binary stream of data, and "wires" the interconnect based on that. I think it is a bit of a stretch to call that "interpreting a mathematical description."
Since that "wiring" is as real a "wiring" as when a CPU's ALU gets "wired" to the register file when a processor reads an ADD instruction, I'm not sure I see the difference here. Other than the control inputs for the muxes and tri-states in an FPGA are often in static memory and infrequently if ever changed.
Try this: What's the difference between a stream of binary that's used to program an FPGA, and a stream of binary data that's used to program a software simulation of an FPGA? Not the difference between an FPGA and a software simulator of an FPGA! That's obvious, one's hardware one is software. What's the difference between the binary streams. Either way, it's an mathematical description of how a device is supposed to work. A formula.
I dunno, maybe it's because I'm neck deep in simulators all day, running a program that simulates a computer so as to run a program, running a program that simulates hardware based on an HDL description so as to run a program, combinations thereof. To the extent that the same program behaves differently running on hardware or another program, that's because the simulator program is using an inaccurate formula for modeling physical reality.
But I suppose that I will never convince you. So, yes, call it whatever you want.
It is at conceivable that you could convince me that programs for FPGAs on FPGAs represent a meaningful gray area where language and physicality blend. It is inconceivable that you could convince me that software is more or less than a symbolic representation of math, a formula, because that's literal fact, so not lyin your chances are nil.
Mmm, Soylent Green with red ketchup. It's like a Christmas meal with half your family being the meal.
But then the crisis passes and agriculture will feed everyone again, though people still enjoy the taste of Soylent Green. At some point, to save costs, they will surreptitiously replace the people in Soylent Green with soy beans. They'll get away with it for a while, until Charlton Heston VIII figures it out and takes to the streets, crying out "Soylent Green isn't people!"
Why would you ever pick up the phone to say that? If you are not going ot talk to the person, let them get the voice mail.
Because the call might be important enough that I would pull over and talk to them. I answer the phone, I find out, and either use Correct Response #1 and hang up, or use Correct Response #2 and pull over. If I have no reason to expect an important call, I probably don't answer at all.
The Correct Response is never to announce your intention to pay attention to driving for a few seconds, then resume talking when the need for attention to driving diminishes. The whole point is that talking distracts you so you don't notice these situations fast enough to react, much less politely inform the person you are talking to.
Oh, another possible correct response is "hold on a sec, I'm pulling over".
All of that drama could be avoided if you just said "hold on a sec, I'm merging" and then ignore anything that come safter that until your done then come back and say, "Sorry, I was merging"
If people were that good at quickly shifting their attention to and from the phone as the need arises, cell phones wouldn't be that big a deal to begin with. An accident can happen while you're saying those six words.
Anyway, the correct response, the one I use in those rare times that I would pick up the phone at all, is "I'm driving, I'll call you back."
If there's a blizzard out, and you do not have to drive, then you shouldn't. If you do have to drive, well, it's not like you can make it stop snowing, which is why that's legal. Hopefully enough other people were able to stay home that it's safe.
There is no reason why you must talk on a cell phone while driving. If the call is that important that you can't miss it, pull over. If your time is so valuable that you can neither skip the call nor stop driving, then you need to hire a driver. Can't afford a driver? Then your time isn't that valuable. Pull over or call them back.
Hands-free vs hands-on has nothing to do with your available limbs, and everything to do with using those limbs for a completely separate task. I drive a manual, shifting is simply part of the task of driving that I'm focusing on, not a distraction. Fiddling with a cell phone is a distraction, a completely orthogonal task of coordination. It's the difference between a drummer using all their limbs to perform, and using 3 of their limbs to perform and one to juggle. Not that hands-free headsets have been shown to substantially reduce the risk posed by driving while on the phone, because you're already more than distracted enough to cause problems just by talking to someone who isn't present.
Also, it's already been established that talking on a cell phone while driving is more dangerous than driving while at a 0.08% BAC, the legal limit. Which is why you shouldn't do it, no matter how sober or how good a driver you incorrectly think you are. Even if both a 0.08% BAC or talking on a cell phone, by themselves, aren't as dangerous as driving in a blizzard.
I've always thought it was because, culturally, there is a much stronger assumption that when you're talking to someone on the phone, that they have essentially your full attention and vice versa. I think this manifests in two ways: First, you're naturally going to give more attention to the phone conversation since it's expected. Second, if you're quiet for a couple seconds because your exit is coming up and traffic is congested so you need to figure out how best to get over, a person in the car with you won't be offended, while someone on the other end of the phone will start saying "Hello?" or "Are you listening?" demanding your attention again, even if it's just to go "I'm fucking driving!" The second part there is also due to the nature of cell phones, too, I suppose.
But your idea sounds plausible as well, could very well be a contributing factor. I can imagine it being more mental work, inherently demanding more attention, to talk on a phone than in person.
After all, it's not like you'd look in your carryon half-way through the flight, find a gun you didn't expect there, and go "OMG! Got to hijack the plane!"
Yeah, well maybe you can tell me what I should have done instead, Mr. Smarty Pants!
Yeah, the submitter made a typo, and should have capitalized "the Government", since they were referring to the true Government of the world, of which there is only one.
I don't see why it would be surprising at all that a language which has been refined, over time, to describe reality would wind up describing reality.
A huge amount of math had nothing to do with describing reality at the time of its invention, and much still doesn't today.
What aspect of reality were mathematicians trying to describe when they came up with imaginary numbers? I'll short circuit the rhetorical question here. They weren't, and imaginary numbers were considered to be, literally, imaginary and non-existent and probably useless.
Then, more than a century later, someone used imaginary numbers to create a link between two previously unrelated irrational constants by showing that e^(i*x) = cos(x) + i*sin(x). I can't see how someone can look at Euler's Formula and not be at least somewhat impressed or awed by the obviously unintended consequence that e and pi are related via the square root of negative one.
And it was centuries later that it was discovered that this same formula is useful for describing the behavior of AC circuits. Imaginary numbers aren't just made up figments to give an answer to an unanswerable question. They aren't just a clever way to relate e and pi via Taylor series. Imaginary numbers actually represent a physical quantity in the real world that we can measure and see that it works correctly. Without imaginary numbers, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
The math preceded the reality the math describes by around four hundred years.
That's surprising to me. If that's not surprising to you, well, I guess I can accept that. Is it also truly unsurprising to you that quantum mechanics could provide a way to test for mathematical undecidability? And if this is anything but "oh that's obvious in hindsight", is there any way to turn this around and figure out these unsurprising results ahead of time? Cus you could be pretty rich.
"Damnit, I'm not a terrorist! I just have a bizarre beard-and-turban fetish!"
But what if they are late arriving in paradise and someone else gets the virgins?
I'm sure they've got that covered as part of the normal course of things. After all, the afterlife is the one place where everyone arrives late.
*ba-dum pssssh*
That is precisely what a theoretical guy says - but I'm an electrical engineer, so I have designed CPUs... a program is a set of states you want the hardware to go through, not a formula. Look at assembly language - it is a much further stretch to call it a formula than to call a hardware state lists. And when designing it, we definitely treat it as a hardware state list.
I design CPUs... and finite state machines were mathematical constructs long before any electrical computer existed. "A set of states you want to go through", without the word "hardware", is a formula, just an iterative one. That's still math.
So is it not programming to write the software for a machine that is not turing complete? How about FPGA - where software and hardware are truely blended? What about DSPs, where branching is impossible?
Why would Turing Completeness matter? There are mathematical systems where you cannot compute everything that is computable, so what does that have to do with programs being math or not?
FPGAs aren't really any different. You've got a physical device that can read and interpret a mathematical description and turn on or off physical gates based on that langauge. What, you think what I'm saying doesn't apply equally well to HDLs? The only difference is that in most cases, the HDL is not just a language for describing the mathematical operations, it's a blueprint for building a physical device. The physical device isn't a mathematical language anymore. But if you're running your HDL in a software simulator, or simply using it to program the gates of an already existent physical device (FPGA), it's the same as a program.
I think engineering covers a lot more of software development than "formulating" does.
Other than there being no difference, sure why not. Call it whatever you want.
-deciding whether you will write code for calculating the temperature, or if you will hand it off to someone else (call a standard function or API)
-deciding when or if the temperature reading given is to be believed.
-how much precision do you have the processing capability to do, and how much precision is necessary.
Which are essentially the same as deriving the same formula to be done by hand. It's the same.
The standard way of teaching basic programming is procedural, then functional, then object orientated then onwards.
Who teaches functional programming languages as a standard part of their curriculum, in particular as a "bridge" between procedural and object-oriented paradigms? I learned some Lisp in an AI class, but that wasn't part of the standard programming sequence which went Assembly-C-C++ (with the C and C++ parts now replaced with Java, sadly).
2) He goes further to say that foolish mortals (unlike himself) learn by analogy, and so can't handle the truth, etc. Then, hilariously, he goes on to say that the only true way to look at programming is as deriving a formula! Imagine that, a mathematician describing engineering as deriving a formula! No comfortable analogies here...
Except that's exactly what programming is, writing a mathematical formula. Software is math. And that's not a metaphor; I'm being quite literal. Actually, let me be even more precise: Software is a language for describing math. A rock tossed in the air follows a parabolic path. h = h0 + vt - gt^2 describes a parabola. It's language, nothing by itself without something to interpret it. Software is exactly the same.
Software merely describes math. A computer is a device that is capable of understanding that language, and performing the mathematical operations based on it. And is capable of doing the photon emission or control surface manipulation. Software can't do that. I/O, from a software standpoint, is nothing more than assigning values to or from a matrix from or to a variable. Computer hardware is what makes anything other than that happen. Just like the hand-written formula which uses as one of its values the current outdoor temperature; you personally getting up and checking the temperature and writing it down on the paper where you are doing your calculations does not change the formula you are following into something other than a formula; the formula on your paper didn't go read the thermometer. It's still just a mathematical manipulation, expressed in human-readable form. Software is the same, just machine-readable. And the act of programming is discovering the right formula to get the result that you want.
Oh yes, the tests included genetic testing and radio-carbon dating. Good to point that out. I'll just speculate what other tests you could do with 2700 year old weed. On a perhaps related note, since they couldn't use spectroscopy or whatever to determine the precise percentage of THC, I wonder what technique they used to come up with the qualitative measurement "relatively high".
(And the lab is still working on better solar cells.)
And after many years of creating better photo sensors for cameras, low-leakage transistors for embedded computers, denser hard drive storage, a material for denser optical disks, and a new formula for Coke that people actually like better than the old one, but never a single improvement in solar cell technology, they give up in disgust.
I mean, appealing is just about always an option. But is there really any realistic chance of it succeeding and their dream coming true? Are we talking "SCO's hypothetical chances of winning SCO v IBM when all we knew was Darl's BS statements to the press" chances, or "SCO's chances of winning SCO v IBM after the judge demanded all their evidence and all they showed was errno.h" chances? As I understand it, you can't win an appeal on a factual basis, the appeal is instead all about any procedural errors made during the main trial that could be the basis for overturning the result. And as far as I can tell, the judge did everything possible to follow procedure and give SCO as much rope as they needed to hang themselves. So, on what basis is SCO going to argue their appeal? Are there any possible levers there? Or is this just another delay tactic they know ultimately won't work?
Yes. Because all of those downsides put together are better than handing all the money to a for-profit intermediary whose most powerful financial motivation is to not provide the service you're paying them for so that they can keep more of the money.
Most of those downsides still apply in the current situation, anyway. Mismanagement, power-seekers, nepotism, corruption, lack of accountability, red tape? Yep, big ol' check mark there. Sure the government overspends, but frankly I'd rather have someone receive an expensive treatment they didn't need or that was overpriced than not receive any treatment at all, with the money saved going into an insurance exec's pocket.
Damned if you don't, damned if you do. In Hell or in Abyss, in D&D cosmology...
I'll take Hell, please. Few enough separate planes of existence to count on both hands so it's easier to find the truly valuable treasures, and the denizens (devils or whatever the fsck they were called in 2nd edition) are Lawful evil and thus easier to bargain with.
Hm, wait, I'm getting the feeling I am missing your point somehow...
Actually only a few things, since mostly what I talked about was the idiocy of thinking monopolies only exist due to the government, a position you did in fact take. I'm sorry that I assumed you think other silly and obviously false things based solely on the fact that everyone else I've ever known far enough gone to believe that also believed those other silly and obviously false things. This is of course immensely unfair of me, it isn't necessarily the case that all Randian idiocies come as a full package, even if they often do.
Why are those things called "zero emission cars" btw?
Because they don't emit anything while running? That's what is usually meant when talking about emissions, things emitted by the device itself while in operation. Of course you can and should consider the pollution generated by manufacturing, but the emissions of the refineries that makes the gas that goes into an ICE are never counted in those cars emissions either.
So are you just joking/trolling now? You certainly can't believe that monopolies are the sole creation of government?!? Government certainly can create a monopoly, and it explicitly does in certain circumstances, but it is also government regulation that ensures a fair marketplace, i.e. prevents monopolization.
No, he's not, and yes he can believe that. There are actually libertarians/randians and fans of their economic theories that are so incredibly stupid, so blinded by their faith in the free market, that they actually think that none of the negative effects of capitalism would occur if the market were truly free. Despite the fact that nobody serious, not even the creators of free market theory like Adam Smith that they claim to hold so dear, have espoused these foolish beliefs. You'll notice that whenever you bring up a specific example from history, they'll respond by saying that obviously the market at that time was not in fact free, and that a free market has never actually existed. Ignoring that this is because nobody has ever been stupid enough to make one.
In their universe, Intel is/was only a monopoly due to government intervention (in the form of enforcing patents or copyrights). It has nothing to do with barriers to entry like having to have a multi-billion dollar fab or deep and undocumented knowledge of the most complicated ISA in existence, nor with arranging deals with OEMs whereby the more of a competitor's part they sell, the more the OEM has to pay for Intel parts. No, it's all the government's fault. Whereas in reality, government-enforced anti-trust law is the only reason AMD exists today, while even still the other CPU players continue to fade.
Their ideas go directly against even the theory of free market economics. It's a sad extremism. Useful policy discourse comes from people who understand that a balance of free markets and government regulation or intervention is best, but disagree on where, when and how to implement this. An extremist who wants nothing but a free market where corporations are free to do whetever they please, yet at the same time insist this is crucial to protecting our rights, is useless.