No, I'm saying that learning to program microcontrollers teaches you how to program microcontrollers. If that's your goal, it's fine, but it's disingenuous to claim that it's a good way of teaching a transferable skill. But if you've got any more straw men, feel free to throw them out there.
Until you've programmed ASM for a micro controller, you really don't know what's going on under the hood, and you're almost certainly doomed to create bloated, slow-as-mud compared to what it *could* be, code.
I hear this a lot from people who write unmaintainable code that's full of 'clever' tricks that usually have no measurable impact on performance and, when they do, actually end up making things slower.
A microcontroller has almost no relationship to the kind of system that you find in a modern desktop or even mobile phone. Some differences:
No multiprogramming, meaning your code is free to use all of the resources and you don't need to think about different load conditions.
Single core, so the most efficient code is always single-threaded.
Fixed latency, so you don't have to worry about things costing different amounts depending on conditions.
Flat memory hierarchy, so locality of reference (absolutely the biggest single performance win on a modern system) makes very little difference.
No FPU, so floating point operations are insanely expensive, when on a modern CPU they're much cheaper than some of the tricks people use to avoid them.
Add to that, writing assembly for a short-pipeline, in-order processor is very different from an out-of-order superscalar architecture. If you want to write fast code, design good data structures and good algorithms. No amount of microoptimisation will make up for poor algorithmic design.
It depends on how you do it. If you have your hand on the table and you look down while you reach for your glass of water or similar, you can check subtly because everyone thinks you're looking down to look at the water glass. If you turn the wrist and look at it, then you can send a signal that someone's going on too long. It's much harder to send these subtle signals if you're looking at a mobile phone (it just looks rude to everyone in the room, not just the speaker) or a wall clock (harder to distinguish from just staring into space).
Yup, when Blair was elected over here, his party got 43.2% of the vote, with a voter turnout of around 65%, meaning that less than 30% of those eligible to vote for him actually did. He then made a speech about how he had a mandate from the people. I wish just once we could elect a politician who'd say 'I was elected by 30% of the vote, so thanks to all the people who did vote for me, but my responsibility is to represent everyone in my district and so I'm going to have to make some compromises'. Unfortunately, when that does happen (as it did with the Liberal Democrats in the current coalition government in the UK), their supporters complain about them abandoning their principles because they only manage to achieve some of their goals...
My watch is on my wrist pretty much all of the time, and I can check the time with it when I have my hands full or when I'm walking in a couple of seconds. My mobile phone is in a pocket. Getting it out when I'm walking takes much longer, getting it out of my pocket is pretty much impossible if I'm carrying things in both hands, and can be difficult if I'm carrying something in one hand, depending on which hand and how easy it is to change hands. I can glance at my watch in a meeting without it being obvious that I'm checking the time, I can't pull out a phone and look at it without it being obvious that I'm not paying attention.
It's a question of incentives. In the USA, you refuse to compromise and you get to go back to your district and blame the other guys for holding the country hostage. You're considered essential, so your salary still gets paid, and you get to be the centre of attention for a bit. In other countries, you refuse to compromise and then you get sent home. You then have to say to your constituents 'I just completely failed to do the thing you elected me to do, but you should elect me again because...' This makes people a lot more willing to negotiate, since their jobs are on the line as well.
In most states you only get to redraw the district boundaries if your party is in the majority at the state level. So you care in effect complaining that Republicans are winning at the national level because Republicans are winning at the state level.
No, they're winning this time because they won last time. Being allowed to stay in power because you were in power last time is an artefact of monarchies, not democracies.
In the 2010 election, they had 51.4% of the popular vote and 242 seats. That's 55.6% of the seats, but magnifying majorities is expected in FPTP elections and is considered an advantage by its proponents. In 2012, however, they only got 46.9% of the vote, down 4.8%, but they got 234 seats (53.4%).
Besides that, there is no "popular vote" for House elections. Each vote is district by district
And whoever controls where those district boundaries lie gets to control how the popular vote maps to seats. If you allow the party with the majority of seats to control where the boundaries lie in the next election, you can bet that they'll end up with a majority of seats next time too.
He's presumably talking about minority in terms of the people who are represented. The 46.9% who voted Republican are a minority. The 48.28% who voted Democrat are also a minority, albeit a slightly larger one.
It really annoys me how the media seems to be letting the Tea Party soundbite that the Republican majority in the House represents the will of the people, when more of the people voted against the Republicans in the House election than for them, and fewer people voted for them than in 2010 (they lost 4.8% of the vote and 8 seats in the 2012 elections - before then, they actually represented the majority of voters, as well as holding the majority of seats).
In other modern democracies (e.g. Australia), the current situation would mean the big red reset button on the elected houses gets hit. They all get sent home and a new set get elected. You can't hold the country hostage and keep your job, you can only hold your own and your colleagues' jobs hostage, which provides a much bigger incentive to compromise. I wonder how much more willing both sides in the US would have been to compromise if the result of failing to approve a budget by the deadline would have been that they'd have had to go back to their constituencies and plead for reelection, immediately after fucking up...
For a mechanic, I'd imagine that it's pretty easy to find a garage somewhere who is willing to hire him for very short-term work. You'd be hard pressed to find a garage owner who wouldn't milk being able to tell his customers that the guy servicing his their truck usually works on Apaches...
Sure, but then at the end you need to subtract out those people from the final bill (some restaurants are happy to create individual bills, others aren't), and then divide by n for the rest.
Assuming everyone is on roughly the same income level. If not, then some people may order cheaper things (or, for example, skip a starter) because they can't really afford it. If you then make them pay the same amount as everyone else, then they are likely to not join in the next time. If your peer group includes some vegetarian teetotallers then you'll be in a similar situation: without meat or alcohol, their meal cost is likely to consistently be lower than everyone else's and unless they are a lot better off than everyone else they're likely to resent having to subsidise everyone else every time you go out.
Any form of entertainment that is enjoyed by a nontrivial proportion of the population is part of our cultural legacy. It's only later that you can tell how important a part it is.
No, Australia has to treat it as if copyright were filed in Australia, and so it is in the public domain there, the US has to treat it as if copyright were filed there and so it's in copyright there.
It depends on the level of the manager. Those directing individual teams are there to ensure that the team is at its most productive. This typically means acting as a buffer between senior management, resources / procurement, and the team, ensuring that the senior management knows what is possible, the team knows what is required, and that the team has everything they need. For more senior positions, it's about determining the direction.
Apple is a company with a relatively small number of products, which rides a lot on the perception of their current flagship line. As such, a big part of the job for senior management is defining what the requirements are for the next iteration, balancing them with what's feasible, ensuring that they've done the market research to show that it will work, and then making damn sure that the product meets expectations.
Some of the older material for shows of this era is preserved on cellulose. Unfortunately, as it ages, it becomes a lot more reactive until it will spontaneously ignite on contact with air. I spoke to someone from the BBC archives a few years ago and they have some warehouses with rolls of cellulose in barrels of oil (so that they won't come into contact with any oxygen). Each of these barrels is under a hopper of sand so that, if it does ignite, it can be extinguished before it spreads (a warehouse full of oil is not exactly a safe environment for fires). They're waiting for restoration techniques to improve before they can extract much of it.
The first serial (An Unearthly Child) survives and has been restored into pretty good condition. The second serial (The Daleks), also survives. The fourth serial (Marco Polo) is missing some episodes, and so are several of the later ones. Most of season 3 is lost (including all of four of the seven serials and most of several of them, such as The Daleks' Master Plan) and so are some important bits of Season 4 (including most of the last episode, when the first Doctor dies).
It's a very good argument for shorter copyright, as copyright holders apparently can't be trusted to ensure that our cultural legacy survives.
The Berne Convention says (warning: massive simplifications ahead) that each signatory must treat works copyrighted in other territories as if they were copyrighted in their own territory. That means that if something is copyrighted in the UK, then it is subject to UK copyright law in the UK, but if you are in the USA then it is subject to US copyright law. This means that it can be in the public domain in one place, but not in another.
Perhaps it's different in other disciplines, but I've never seen an idea that could negatively affect my funding, and if there were one it would not be a dissident idea, quite the reverse. Grants aren't to prove that X is true, they are to explore the factors relating to X. If someone has an idea that is disruptive to an entire field (everything you were doing is wrong) then that produces more funding, not less, because now there are a whole new range of avenues of investigation. The things that negatively affect funding are (repeatable) results that show something so conclusively that there is no point in ever investigating it again, and those are very rare.
The AGW example is particularly silly, because fields where there is deep division in the scientific community are the ones where it is easiest to get funding, as everyone wants to know which competing theory is correct (or that they're both wrong). Most climate scientists I've met would love for there to be some strong, evidence-backed, scientific theories countering their work, because then their next grant application practically writes itself.
I very much doubt that. From the politicians that I've met, some honestly believe that what they're doing is for the good of everyone whereas others are borderline sociopaths and are just in it for personal gain with no concern about the damage that they do on the way. Those in the former category are often willing to go along with those in the latter if they think some long-term goal can be achieved as a result, and those in the latter are typically happy to play along with the long-term goals of the former because they're mostly focussed on the short term. If Congress has managed to avoid having any of the second category, then I'd be shocked. From a couple of thousand miles away, it looks more like they're in the majority...
Well, one simple solution is multi-seat constituencies. This doesn't fix the issue, but it does make gerrymandering harder. You vote for (for example) two candidates, and the two candidates who get the most seats win. If the constituency is mostly Democrat, it will get two Democrats Representatives. If it's mostly Republican, it will get two Republican Representatives. If it's split down the middle, it will get one of each. The more seats per constituency, the harder gerrymandering is.
Another possibility is to have single-seat constituencies, but make them overlap, so that everybody gets to either vote for two or more candidates in different House elections, or (ideally) gets to choose which district they will vote in. This doesn't prevent gerrymandering, but it means that everyone can participate in it, rather than whichever party happened to be in power when they were moving electoral boundaries.
Of course, this doesn't help Republicans who are completely surrounded by Democrats or Democrats who are completely surrounded by Republicans, but hopefully that's a relatively small number, and not too unevenly balanced in either direction.
The real problem, however, is that the USA is a country of 320 million people using a political system that expects complete ideological agreement between most members. You need a system where no single party has close to a majority and so the Federal government has to operate by consensus, not by a small majority forcing its will over a slightly smaller minority. If you want an example of a good system of government to use in this situation, I'd recommend reading the Federalist Papers and the US Constitution...
No, there is no GNU code in Android. No glibc, no GNU userland utilities. There is some GNU code in the NDK (gcc, binutils), although it's gradually being replaced.
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It's the national average. Pretty much all of London is above the national average rate for crime.
No, I'm saying that learning to program microcontrollers teaches you how to program microcontrollers. If that's your goal, it's fine, but it's disingenuous to claim that it's a good way of teaching a transferable skill. But if you've got any more straw men, feel free to throw them out there.
Practice with supervision and review. You don't get better by repeating mistakes without learning from them...
Until you've programmed ASM for a micro controller, you really don't know what's going on under the hood, and you're almost certainly doomed to create bloated, slow-as-mud compared to what it *could* be, code.
I hear this a lot from people who write unmaintainable code that's full of 'clever' tricks that usually have no measurable impact on performance and, when they do, actually end up making things slower.
A microcontroller has almost no relationship to the kind of system that you find in a modern desktop or even mobile phone. Some differences:
Add to that, writing assembly for a short-pipeline, in-order processor is very different from an out-of-order superscalar architecture. If you want to write fast code, design good data structures and good algorithms. No amount of microoptimisation will make up for poor algorithmic design.
It depends on how you do it. If you have your hand on the table and you look down while you reach for your glass of water or similar, you can check subtly because everyone thinks you're looking down to look at the water glass. If you turn the wrist and look at it, then you can send a signal that someone's going on too long. It's much harder to send these subtle signals if you're looking at a mobile phone (it just looks rude to everyone in the room, not just the speaker) or a wall clock (harder to distinguish from just staring into space).
Yup, when Blair was elected over here, his party got 43.2% of the vote, with a voter turnout of around 65%, meaning that less than 30% of those eligible to vote for him actually did. He then made a speech about how he had a mandate from the people. I wish just once we could elect a politician who'd say 'I was elected by 30% of the vote, so thanks to all the people who did vote for me, but my responsibility is to represent everyone in my district and so I'm going to have to make some compromises'. Unfortunately, when that does happen (as it did with the Liberal Democrats in the current coalition government in the UK), their supporters complain about them abandoning their principles because they only manage to achieve some of their goals...
My watch is on my wrist pretty much all of the time, and I can check the time with it when I have my hands full or when I'm walking in a couple of seconds. My mobile phone is in a pocket. Getting it out when I'm walking takes much longer, getting it out of my pocket is pretty much impossible if I'm carrying things in both hands, and can be difficult if I'm carrying something in one hand, depending on which hand and how easy it is to change hands. I can glance at my watch in a meeting without it being obvious that I'm checking the time, I can't pull out a phone and look at it without it being obvious that I'm not paying attention.
It's a question of incentives. In the USA, you refuse to compromise and you get to go back to your district and blame the other guys for holding the country hostage. You're considered essential, so your salary still gets paid, and you get to be the centre of attention for a bit. In other countries, you refuse to compromise and then you get sent home. You then have to say to your constituents 'I just completely failed to do the thing you elected me to do, but you should elect me again because...' This makes people a lot more willing to negotiate, since their jobs are on the line as well.
In most states you only get to redraw the district boundaries if your party is in the majority at the state level. So you care in effect complaining that Republicans are winning at the national level because Republicans are winning at the state level.
No, they're winning this time because they won last time. Being allowed to stay in power because you were in power last time is an artefact of monarchies, not democracies.
In the 2010 election, they had 51.4% of the popular vote and 242 seats. That's 55.6% of the seats, but magnifying majorities is expected in FPTP elections and is considered an advantage by its proponents. In 2012, however, they only got 46.9% of the vote, down 4.8%, but they got 234 seats (53.4%).
Besides that, there is no "popular vote" for House elections. Each vote is district by district
And whoever controls where those district boundaries lie gets to control how the popular vote maps to seats. If you allow the party with the majority of seats to control where the boundaries lie in the next election, you can bet that they'll end up with a majority of seats next time too.
He's presumably talking about minority in terms of the people who are represented. The 46.9% who voted Republican are a minority. The 48.28% who voted Democrat are also a minority, albeit a slightly larger one.
It really annoys me how the media seems to be letting the Tea Party soundbite that the Republican majority in the House represents the will of the people, when more of the people voted against the Republicans in the House election than for them, and fewer people voted for them than in 2010 (they lost 4.8% of the vote and 8 seats in the 2012 elections - before then, they actually represented the majority of voters, as well as holding the majority of seats).
In other modern democracies (e.g. Australia), the current situation would mean the big red reset button on the elected houses gets hit. They all get sent home and a new set get elected. You can't hold the country hostage and keep your job, you can only hold your own and your colleagues' jobs hostage, which provides a much bigger incentive to compromise. I wonder how much more willing both sides in the US would have been to compromise if the result of failing to approve a budget by the deadline would have been that they'd have had to go back to their constituencies and plead for reelection, immediately after fucking up...
For a mechanic, I'd imagine that it's pretty easy to find a garage somewhere who is willing to hire him for very short-term work. You'd be hard pressed to find a garage owner who wouldn't milk being able to tell his customers that the guy servicing his their truck usually works on Apaches...
Sure, but then at the end you need to subtract out those people from the final bill (some restaurants are happy to create individual bills, others aren't), and then divide by n for the rest.
Assuming everyone is on roughly the same income level. If not, then some people may order cheaper things (or, for example, skip a starter) because they can't really afford it. If you then make them pay the same amount as everyone else, then they are likely to not join in the next time. If your peer group includes some vegetarian teetotallers then you'll be in a similar situation: without meat or alcohol, their meal cost is likely to consistently be lower than everyone else's and unless they are a lot better off than everyone else they're likely to resent having to subsidise everyone else every time you go out.
Any form of entertainment that is enjoyed by a nontrivial proportion of the population is part of our cultural legacy. It's only later that you can tell how important a part it is.
No, Australia has to treat it as if copyright were filed in Australia, and so it is in the public domain there, the US has to treat it as if copyright were filed there and so it's in copyright there.
Apple is a company with a relatively small number of products, which rides a lot on the perception of their current flagship line. As such, a big part of the job for senior management is defining what the requirements are for the next iteration, balancing them with what's feasible, ensuring that they've done the market research to show that it will work, and then making damn sure that the product meets expectations.
Some of the older material for shows of this era is preserved on cellulose. Unfortunately, as it ages, it becomes a lot more reactive until it will spontaneously ignite on contact with air. I spoke to someone from the BBC archives a few years ago and they have some warehouses with rolls of cellulose in barrels of oil (so that they won't come into contact with any oxygen). Each of these barrels is under a hopper of sand so that, if it does ignite, it can be extinguished before it spreads (a warehouse full of oil is not exactly a safe environment for fires). They're waiting for restoration techniques to improve before they can extract much of it.
The first serial (An Unearthly Child) survives and has been restored into pretty good condition. The second serial (The Daleks), also survives. The fourth serial (Marco Polo) is missing some episodes, and so are several of the later ones. Most of season 3 is lost (including all of four of the seven serials and most of several of them, such as The Daleks' Master Plan) and so are some important bits of Season 4 (including most of the last episode, when the first Doctor dies).
It's a very good argument for shorter copyright, as copyright holders apparently can't be trusted to ensure that our cultural legacy survives.
The Berne Convention says (warning: massive simplifications ahead) that each signatory must treat works copyrighted in other territories as if they were copyrighted in their own territory. That means that if something is copyrighted in the UK, then it is subject to UK copyright law in the UK, but if you are in the USA then it is subject to US copyright law. This means that it can be in the public domain in one place, but not in another.
Ah, and here we see the most effective way of getting karma. Post, including the phrase 'I'll probably be modded down for this' or some variant...
Perhaps it's different in other disciplines, but I've never seen an idea that could negatively affect my funding, and if there were one it would not be a dissident idea, quite the reverse. Grants aren't to prove that X is true, they are to explore the factors relating to X. If someone has an idea that is disruptive to an entire field (everything you were doing is wrong) then that produces more funding, not less, because now there are a whole new range of avenues of investigation. The things that negatively affect funding are (repeatable) results that show something so conclusively that there is no point in ever investigating it again, and those are very rare.
The AGW example is particularly silly, because fields where there is deep division in the scientific community are the ones where it is easiest to get funding, as everyone wants to know which competing theory is correct (or that they're both wrong). Most climate scientists I've met would love for there to be some strong, evidence-backed, scientific theories countering their work, because then their next grant application practically writes itself.
I very much doubt that. From the politicians that I've met, some honestly believe that what they're doing is for the good of everyone whereas others are borderline sociopaths and are just in it for personal gain with no concern about the damage that they do on the way. Those in the former category are often willing to go along with those in the latter if they think some long-term goal can be achieved as a result, and those in the latter are typically happy to play along with the long-term goals of the former because they're mostly focussed on the short term. If Congress has managed to avoid having any of the second category, then I'd be shocked. From a couple of thousand miles away, it looks more like they're in the majority...
Well, one simple solution is multi-seat constituencies. This doesn't fix the issue, but it does make gerrymandering harder. You vote for (for example) two candidates, and the two candidates who get the most seats win. If the constituency is mostly Democrat, it will get two Democrats Representatives. If it's mostly Republican, it will get two Republican Representatives. If it's split down the middle, it will get one of each. The more seats per constituency, the harder gerrymandering is.
Another possibility is to have single-seat constituencies, but make them overlap, so that everybody gets to either vote for two or more candidates in different House elections, or (ideally) gets to choose which district they will vote in. This doesn't prevent gerrymandering, but it means that everyone can participate in it, rather than whichever party happened to be in power when they were moving electoral boundaries.
Of course, this doesn't help Republicans who are completely surrounded by Democrats or Democrats who are completely surrounded by Republicans, but hopefully that's a relatively small number, and not too unevenly balanced in either direction.
The real problem, however, is that the USA is a country of 320 million people using a political system that expects complete ideological agreement between most members. You need a system where no single party has close to a majority and so the Federal government has to operate by consensus, not by a small majority forcing its will over a slightly smaller minority. If you want an example of a good system of government to use in this situation, I'd recommend reading the Federalist Papers and the US Constitution...
No, there is no GNU code in Android. No glibc, no GNU userland utilities. There is some GNU code in the NDK (gcc, binutils), although it's gradually being replaced.