This is off-topic, I know, but tell me what the following all have in common:
Panama, 1989
Waco, Texas, 1993
Afghanistan, 2002
Iraq, 2003
Here's a hint: In all of the above, the US government met a lot of well-armed locals and beat them completely.
As a thought experiment, ask yourself: Under what circumstances could the US population be persuaded to rise up against its government? Arresting large groups of people and holding them without trial? Nope, it happened to people of Japanese descent held during WW2, and is still happening today in Gitmo Bay, Cuba. How about widespread illegal search and seizure? Nope, the "war on drugs" is still alive and well. How about restricting freedom of speech? Nope, we're fine with putting you in a "free speech zone". How about removing the right to vote? Prepare for a repeat of Florida circa November 2000 later this year. After all, it was the pro-gun guy who won, right? Not even the Patriot act, the most over-reaching insult to the Bill of Rights to date, has caused even a hint of a threat from gun owners that I've seen.
The only thing which would motivate gun owners to act is the one thing that they have in common: they would act if the US government tried to take their guns away.
Ye have heard it said in the past: Guns don't kill people; people kill people. Verily I say unto you: Guns don't protect civil rights; people protect civil rights. This is something that gun owners as a whole appear to have no particular desire to do.
This reinforces something that I've believed for a long time: Gun owners don't, as a whole, care about civil rights. At best, they care about one civil right. So long as the US government doesn't tread too far on that particular "right", they can get away with pretty much anything else. Take my free speech, take my free assembly, take my vote (it's not like I was using it anyway)... but you'll have to pry my gun out of my cold, dead hands.
And somehow, Americans, who are comprised of people who are descended from immigrants from all parts of the world (as well as indigenous people and freed slaves), are somehow responsible for the crimes of Cortez (a Spaniard who invaded Central America long before the pilgrims settled in Massachusetts in North America) and the British East India Company?
One of the problems with the current era in history is that you can't state facts without someone else thinking you're putting a spin on them.
Read the article that I responded to. RobinH said that the west became economically prosperous because "economic climate was designed to be (and lucky enough to be) the most conducive to economic growth. It encouraged people to create wealth because they get to keep some of it". My point was that this isn't true. What, if anything, we do about it today is a different question which I choose not to address.
As it happens, that some parts of the developing world (India, in the case of this article) are only just bouncing back now, and are doing it "without a handout", as you put it. So perhaps I'm actually saying the opposite of what you think I am.
They are efficient coders because of the relative cost advantage they have over US based coders. Probably related to there being 4 times as many.
Also related to the cost of living. If a typical programmer from Europe were to live in some parts of India on their US salary, they'd be able to afford servants. Now imagine what a programmer on a Silicon Valley salary could afford.
For some definition of "stolen", anyway. From Cortez to the East India Company to the slave trade, natural and human resources were systematically removed from the rest of the world by European colonial powers.
Yes, since then, most of the wealth of the west has been generated. You have to understand, however, that it takes wealth to make wealth. The rest of the world is only just now starting to bounce back thanks to globalisation, despite the best efforts of wealthy countries to keep protectionism alive in all industries except the ones they do well.
No you can't. As previously mentioned, many languages don't have 1:1 mappings for case conversion. German, for example maps the lower case es-set to capital "SS". That's two glyphs. There are some which require three.
It also doesn't solve problems of languages sharing glyphs, which were also previously mentioned. One might expect, for example, lower-case English "a" and lower-case Greek "alpha" to be different variables, but they map to the same upper-case glyph. Then there's the special Turkic rule for uppercase I and dotted uppercase I.
Interestingly, there are also case folding rules for Deseret which is outside the basic multilingual plane. I think most Mormon programmers speak English, though, so we can probably ignore this for now.
In C++, the standard library does almost everything that GLib does, and arguably better.
While there are a few things which are not so platform-agnostic which GLib does that the C++ standard library doesn't (like handling dynamic libraries), there are a lot more things that the C++ standard library does that GLib doesn't. Just typing "sort" and letting the library optimise it depending on whether it's called on a dynamically-sized array, doubly- or singly-linked list or a funky container which you just wrote at compile time is kinda funky.
I am not sure of this, but I do not expect bytecode to include variable/method/property names.
In Java, they do. Moreover, there are punctuation marks (e.g. '/' for package name separators, other characters for type mangling etc) so case folding is not as simple as oring every character in the string. Takealook.
Having been a professional programmer for the same length of time, I spend less than 0.0001% of my time fixing capitalisation errors. Even less since I started using a text editor with keyword completion.
This proves nothing, except the maxim that for every anecdote there is an equal and opposite anecdote.
Fair enough. I hack a certain high-performance database server for a living. I/O often dominates our applications, so we really care about memory-mapped I/O. As a result, we often find ourselves scrounging address space on "large" databases. Maybe our domain is more sensitive about it than yours is.
OTOH, other than disk controller caches (?), what kind of embedded systems need more than 4GB online simultaneously?
There's a lot of modern medical equipment which can definitely use the 4GB. MRI machines, CT scanners, ultrasound machines ("sonographs" if you prefer the term) and so on do tend to chew up memory. Particularly the first two, because you often need to hold whole voxel sets in memory while you compute a bunch of cross-sections at odd angles.
...and I'm saying that I/O can easily dominate cache. This is especially true when you consider that copying a few disk pages from one physical memory location to another could easily trash the contents of your L1 cache.
As I mentioned previously, this can be more than offset by the cost savings you get in using memory-mapped I/O. Using standard POSIX I/O, your data hits memory twice.
Oh, and 64-bit CPUs tend to have larger cache lines to cope.
When you think "embedded", you're probably thinking of a smartcard, a pacemaker, a digital television or a fax machine. It may interest you to know that an MRI scanner is also an embedded system.
Using mmap() for certain kinds of I/O is very, very useful in performance-sensitive applications. Using POSIX I/O (i.e. read(), write() and its relatives) means that your data must go through memory twice: once from disk into the buffer/page cache and then once again into userland. Memory-mapped I/O effectively unifies the two, saving on precious memory and memory bandwidth.
Closer to home, have a look at the new (well, not that new) Australian $5 note. You'll see the circles on the wattle to the right of Catherine Helen Spence's head. Bottom branch, half-way along.
It's interesting how things change. The view that the scientific method can be applied to everything was the party line in the late 19th and early 20th century. The trouble is, when you believe that and you have the mentality of a Victorian academic, you end up with things like phrenology, mesmerism and eugenics. The mid 20th century gave us such gems as lamarckian evolution. It's a little early to see what misapplications of the scientific method are in vogue today. Some scientists believe that the field of social darwinism is one of them, for example. If you read slashdot, you'll know that there is a vocal minority who disagree with modern scientific environmentalism, too. Who's right? Only time will tell.
Now I do agree the that scientific method can be applied in almost any field? As a yes/no answer, my answer is "yes", however, there are demonstratably severe limits on how far it will take you in some fields, because it is singularly unsuitable for chasing a moving target. Even Feynman couldn't apply it to art (he may or may not have tried; I don't know), even though he developed an appreciation for it as a result of living with an artist for a while.
The thing about art (including literature) is that it is, by nature, highly subjective. Understanding art requires understanding psychology, that's true, but it also requires understanding cultural history. Take Elvis Presley, for example. Today, it's difficult for anyone younger than about 40 why his music was considered risque and sexual. In 1957, it sounded new and different. In 2004, it sounds old.
However, a minor British bureaucrat has uncovered evidence that a Martian official tried to buy illudium from Venus, which could mean that Marvin has an Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator programme underway.
Slashdot Mirror
This is off-topic, I know, but tell me what the following all have in common:
Here's a hint: In all of the above, the US government met a lot of well-armed locals and beat them completely.
As a thought experiment, ask yourself: Under what circumstances could the US population be persuaded to rise up against its government? Arresting large groups of people and holding them without trial? Nope, it happened to people of Japanese descent held during WW2, and is still happening today in Gitmo Bay, Cuba. How about widespread illegal search and seizure? Nope, the "war on drugs" is still alive and well. How about restricting freedom of speech? Nope, we're fine with putting you in a "free speech zone". How about removing the right to vote? Prepare for a repeat of Florida circa November 2000 later this year. After all, it was the pro-gun guy who won, right? Not even the Patriot act, the most over-reaching insult to the Bill of Rights to date, has caused even a hint of a threat from gun owners that I've seen.
The only thing which would motivate gun owners to act is the one thing that they have in common: they would act if the US government tried to take their guns away.
Ye have heard it said in the past: Guns don't kill people; people kill people. Verily I say unto you: Guns don't protect civil rights; people protect civil rights. This is something that gun owners as a whole appear to have no particular desire to do.
This reinforces something that I've believed for a long time: Gun owners don't, as a whole, care about civil rights. At best, they care about one civil right. So long as the US government doesn't tread too far on that particular "right", they can get away with pretty much anything else. Take my free speech, take my free assembly, take my vote (it's not like I was using it anyway)... but you'll have to pry my gun out of my cold, dead hands.
I worded that badly. I meant to say "this isn't the whole truth", or perhaps "this isn't the whole story". My mistake.
I did not say that, nor did I imply it. Read my other comment for details.
One of the problems with the current era in history is that you can't state facts without someone else thinking you're putting a spin on them.
Read the article that I responded to. RobinH said that the west became economically prosperous because "economic climate was designed to be (and lucky enough to be) the most conducive to economic growth. It encouraged people to create wealth because they get to keep some of it". My point was that this isn't true. What, if anything, we do about it today is a different question which I choose not to address.
As it happens, that some parts of the developing world (India, in the case of this article) are only just bouncing back now, and are doing it "without a handout", as you put it. So perhaps I'm actually saying the opposite of what you think I am.
Possibly, but this isn't evidence of it.
Also related to the cost of living. If a typical programmer from Europe were to live in some parts of India on their US salary, they'd be able to afford servants. Now imagine what a programmer on a Silicon Valley salary could afford.
No, most of it was stolen.
For some definition of "stolen", anyway. From Cortez to the East India Company to the slave trade, natural and human resources were systematically removed from the rest of the world by European colonial powers.
Yes, since then, most of the wealth of the west has been generated. You have to understand, however, that it takes wealth to make wealth. The rest of the world is only just now starting to bounce back thanks to globalisation, despite the best efforts of wealthy countries to keep protectionism alive in all industries except the ones they do well.
No you can't. As previously mentioned, many languages don't have 1:1 mappings for case conversion. German, for example maps the lower case es-set to capital "SS". That's two glyphs. There are some which require three.
It also doesn't solve problems of languages sharing glyphs, which were also previously mentioned. One might expect, for example, lower-case English "a" and lower-case Greek "alpha" to be different variables, but they map to the same upper-case glyph. Then there's the special Turkic rule for uppercase I and dotted uppercase I.
This is all covered in section 5.18 of the Unicode 4.0 standard.
Interestingly, there are also case folding rules for Deseret which is outside the basic multilingual plane. I think most Mormon programmers speak English, though, so we can probably ignore this for now.
In C++, the standard library does almost everything that GLib does, and arguably better.
While there are a few things which are not so platform-agnostic which GLib does that the C++ standard library doesn't (like handling dynamic libraries), there are a lot more things that the C++ standard library does that GLib doesn't. Just typing "sort" and letting the library optimise it depending on whether it's called on a dynamically-sized array, doubly- or singly-linked list or a funky container which you just wrote at compile time is kinda funky.
In Java, they do. Moreover, there are punctuation marks (e.g. '/' for package name separators, other characters for type mangling etc) so case folding is not as simple as oring every character in the string. Take a look.
Having been a professional programmer for the same length of time, I spend less than 0.0001% of my time fixing capitalisation errors. Even less since I started using a text editor with keyword completion.
This proves nothing, except the maxim that for every anecdote there is an equal and opposite anecdote.
Fair enough. I hack a certain high-performance database server for a living. I/O often dominates our applications, so we really care about memory-mapped I/O. As a result, we often find ourselves scrounging address space on "large" databases. Maybe our domain is more sensitive about it than yours is.
There's a lot of modern medical equipment which can definitely use the 4GB. MRI machines, CT scanners, ultrasound machines ("sonographs" if you prefer the term) and so on do tend to chew up memory. Particularly the first two, because you often need to hold whole voxel sets in memory while you compute a bunch of cross-sections at odd angles.
...and I'm saying that I/O can easily dominate cache. This is especially true when you consider that copying a few disk pages from one physical memory location to another could easily trash the contents of your L1 cache.
As I mentioned previously, this can be more than offset by the cost savings you get in using memory-mapped I/O. Using standard POSIX I/O, your data hits memory twice.
Oh, and 64-bit CPUs tend to have larger cache lines to cope.
When you think "embedded", you're probably thinking of a smartcard, a pacemaker, a digital television or a fax machine. It may interest you to know that an MRI scanner is also an embedded system.
The poster named one point: mapping large files.
Using mmap() for certain kinds of I/O is very, very useful in performance-sensitive applications. Using POSIX I/O (i.e. read(), write() and its relatives) means that your data must go through memory twice: once from disk into the buffer/page cache and then once again into userland. Memory-mapped I/O effectively unifies the two, saving on precious memory and memory bandwidth.
Closer to home, have a look at the new (well, not that new) Australian $5 note. You'll see the circles on the wattle to the right of Catherine Helen Spence's head. Bottom branch, half-way along.
"Licence" is the correct spelling outside of the US (and probably Canada). "Licence" is a noun, and "license" is a verb.
I don't think "ceace" is right anywhere, though.
Evidently not. How do you pronounce it?
Not just beer, either. The liquers Frangelico and Benedictine were originally made by monks.
It's interesting how things change. The view that the scientific method can be applied to everything was the party line in the late 19th and early 20th century. The trouble is, when you believe that and you have the mentality of a Victorian academic, you end up with things like phrenology, mesmerism and eugenics. The mid 20th century gave us such gems as lamarckian evolution. It's a little early to see what misapplications of the scientific method are in vogue today. Some scientists believe that the field of social darwinism is one of them, for example. If you read slashdot, you'll know that there is a vocal minority who disagree with modern scientific environmentalism, too. Who's right? Only time will tell.
Now I do agree the that scientific method can be applied in almost any field? As a yes/no answer, my answer is "yes", however, there are demonstratably severe limits on how far it will take you in some fields, because it is singularly unsuitable for chasing a moving target. Even Feynman couldn't apply it to art (he may or may not have tried; I don't know), even though he developed an appreciation for it as a result of living with an artist for a while.
The thing about art (including literature) is that it is, by nature, highly subjective. Understanding art requires understanding psychology, that's true, but it also requires understanding cultural history. Take Elvis Presley, for example. Today, it's difficult for anyone younger than about 40 why his music was considered risque and sexual. In 1957, it sounded new and different. In 2004, it sounds old.
It's Perl. Try running it.
However, a minor British bureaucrat has uncovered evidence that a Martian official tried to buy illudium from Venus, which could mean that Marvin has an Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator programme underway.
Didn't you get the memo? "All these worlds are yours except Europa."
You misspelled "maaaaammaries". This is the web we're talking about, you know.
Hope this helps.