because other scientists didn't believe that bacteria could live in the stomach with all that acid.
That's just nonsense. Scientists, just like the rest of us, knew full well that there are vast numbers of diseases caused by ingesting bacteria. They wouldn't work if the stomach killed all bacteria.
The discovery of the bacterial cause of most ulcers is actually a really interesting story. But it's one of science progressing exactly as it should, not one of an unreasonable scientific cabal refusing to believe a new idea.
It did involve the unusual step of the scientist experimenting on himself. But that was because there were no suitable animal model. Not that it was a stunt required to overturn some intransigent scientific cabal.
Nice try at attempting to seem like you were an unbiased observer of this political misuse of science. However your examples give away your politics and the incorrect view of the science that those politics have given you:
With respect to global warming, people see partisans making statements attempting to link currently held scientific views to political ideas that run the gamut from signing bad treaties like Kyoto, adopting economically ruinous policies, or enriching crony operators of new "carbon" exchanges.
The politics of the right, through pressure groups like The Tea Party and Fox News continually misrepresent the science, that is true. But there equal and opposite side to this. The Science is now indisputable that AGW is happening. The left tend to accept that, whilst the right tend to deny it. Only one side is wrong.
The right is as wrong on this as they were when they denied that tobacco smoke is a carcinogen. And as wrong as when a goodly proportion of them claim creation rather than evolution.
Right. Because the sun provides a convenient reference point in the sky. But that actual hours and days pass overwhelmingly because of the spin of the earth. And that would even have been true in the imaginary pre-sun days of creation.
I was quite please to get so far through the comments before a post by an idiot denier.
Then you find the "proof" of warming down at the bottom. A carefully excised anomalous temperature chart that. 0.5C total range with a tail pointing down.
BEST, a study financed by deniers, hiring the team and setting the goals in the hope of producing an anti-AGW result. And the conclusion was: AGW is real.
I have been pawing through the data from each station.
As you're not a scientist, that's a sure sign that your denial comes from mental illness.
Note also that the "days of creation", even assuming they happened, cannot be based on 24 hour Terrestrial days, since the Sun didn't exist till the fourth day.
A 24 hour day is based on the earth's spin, it has little to do with the sun. (In practice the orbit around the sun must make one day's difference per year.)
For every dollar (or whatever) of loss for one person there is a dollar (or whatever) of gain for someone else. The lottery everyone loses but the state. Not the same.
The State is also part of the zero-sum game. And you're assuming that Bitcoin is tax free. There's still some uncertainty about which taxes Bitcoin qualifies for. But if Bitcoin ever became a significant currency, you can be sure it would be taxed just as much as the native currency.
Tax evasion might be easer with Bitcoin, but then that's just saving money by being a criminal.
I trade about 10 bitcoins and I'm making good money by buying on bad news and selling on good. It doesn't take anything other than that.
Which is exactly the thing people were saying in every rising stock market. It takes experiencing a crash or two before they realise it's a mirage.
Also, I'll call you on your "proper control structures". In C-like languages, control structures like "break" and "continue" are glorified goto's. 'switch' statements are glorified if-else chains that compiler can usually optimize very well.
I agree. This all started with me pointing out that an early return is effectively a goto. And so are break and continue.
And the C switch construct with it's run-on between cases unless you explicitly break - that's possibly the most horribly broken control structure in any language. Yes, it too is effectively gotos. But that's a fuck up in C, not a general problem with selection control structures. In other languages selection control structures are a proper structured programming construct.
The point of examples is to prove your point, to convince. You have not done so with me.
On Slashdot, few people are ever convinced of anything. Experience tells me that you are convinced enough of your rightness, examples aren't going to change your mind. I'm happy enough to state my opinion, and not really care whether you agree.
And to summarise my opinion - gotos are used only with languages that have poor control structures, especially C. My opening statement was about a language that eschewed the goto. Such a language would also not have early returns (not breaks nor continues). But it would have a full set of control structures that make gotos entirely unnecessary.
Personally I haven't made use of an explicit goto since the 1980s (other than in asm). And only used goto equivalents such as break where the deficiencies of the language have necessitated it.
Sometimes, I just don't understand the Lawyer outlook of the world. If everything is working smoothly between family members, there ought to be no reason whatsoever to involve lawyers, courts, and extra expenses.
This might work if she kept all her money in cash under the mattress. But they'll have just as much of a problem withdrawing her savings from the bank without probate.
If she didn't explicitly mention it in her will, and the Apple's security terms of service don't otherwise allow it, it seems quite reasonable for Apple to defer the decision to a court of law.
The possibility that she held the information under a password because she wanted it to go to the grave with her needs exploring.
The papers show who are the rightful inheritors of the estate, including the iPad hardware. That much is certain.
The question of where that leaves information that is held on iCloud and/or encrypted on a device with a password is unclear. It appears she left neither the password nor specific instructions. She might have wanted the family to have access to this data after her death, but then again she might not.
After all, if you wanted your secrets to die with you, you'd probably keep them on a device in an encrypted/password protected form.
Seems like Apple wants a court to make that decision. Which doesn't seem like a bad thing.
Are we really supposed to believe that a Police Officer would know such geek trivia?
I have a friend who takes no interest in geek stuff, but he raised the topic with me last time I saw him. The Mt Gox incident made the national news. So yes, it's perfectly feasible a police officer had heard of them.
For sure kernel code is the one place where I still see lots of gotos. And I accept that the limitations of C and the need to maximally optimise may justify that. Though I wonder how much the optimisation argument still applies with modern compilers.
In the days of optimising compilers, local variables typically have no cost, and they tend to self-document the code. To defend gotos whilst attacking extra local variables is irrational.
And introducing a sea of "&&"s.
At first blush, that does seem to make the code look more complicated. But in reality it doesn't. As the text explains it's easier to see when a block will be executed if the conditionals are explicitly in the single containing if statement, than if it is implicit through nesting or worse through possible earlier gotos.
And in practice you don't just use this pattern to refactor to the extreme. It's more a mixture of this with refactoring into smaller functions, and accepting that one level of nesting is OK.
In a language like C++, unless there's a "try" block within the function, they are exactly the same as a "return" as far as that function is concerned, and can be invoked from the same places. I don't see why you think that that's acceptable if return isn't.
That's a valid point, however functions that may throw exceptions are usually designed and documented as such. Whereas early returns are just slipped in on a whim of the programmer, and are often missed by maintainers, causing bugs.
If you look at the FAQs for the Go language, the designers explain why they think exceptions suck in general, and why they largely replaced them with multiple return values. So not everyone shares your enthusiasm for exceptions, which are really just a kind of "return" statement on steroids.
I'm not particularly enthusiastic about exceptions. I've actually used cleanup stacks and error codes more often myself, I simply brought up exceptions as one of the more structured mechanisms for avoiding gotos and their equivalents.
Strawman my ass, you only quote half the sentence and take it out of context. If you actually read the link, it talks about such strongly worded "considered harmful" essays are usually taken basically as scripture, and such feature, whatever it is, should never be used. Sure, Dijkstra was writing about Fortran, but he was influential enough that the philosophy carried over to other languages. "Don't ever use this".
And if I'd quoted Dijkstra, or said "thou shalt not use gotos" in a scriptural way, then you'd have a point. But I didn't do those any more than I said "gotos considered harmful". All of these things were raised by you, then dismissed buy you. And that's exactly what a strawman is.
In regards to defining spaghetti code, try google for a change:
Your definition comes from Wikipedia, and it comes without a specific citation. Now, take a look at the references at the bottom. The oldest one is 1977. From the book: "Structured programming for the COBOL programmer: design, documentation, coding, testing." Elsewhere the artcle points out: "author Paul Noll uses the terms spaghetti code and rat's nest as synonyms to describe poorly structured source code."
As I say, spaghetti code is the antonym to structured code. Always was. Deeply nested structured code is not spaghetti. A russian doll might be a suitable metaphor, but a plate of spaghetti is not. There is no structure in spaghetti.
I don't care how long you've been programming or what order you learned different idioms as they developed/were available, it doesn't make you right.
It doesn't make me right in and of itself. However that memory back to the days when structured code was still a topical issue is why I know for sure what spaghetti code is. And that's why I'm telling you. If you can find an earlier reference than 1977 that confirms your understanding, then you can say I'm wrong. Otherwise I'm right.
But never use it (with no evidence, examples)?
What's the point of examples? It's an absolute fact that you cannot dispute that every piece of code that uses a goto can be rewritten using proper control structures. I personally have not used a goto since the 1980s. And my career has included work on a commercial operating system, in which gotos were forbidden at all levels above the kernel. And that was conceived with C++ in the days before it even had exceptions.
(You might ask why gotos were permitted at the kernel level. And the answer is that the kernel engineers mixed assembly and C, and tended to think in assembler first, even if they then wrote in C. If questioned they would say that the goto was more efficient. And in those days of poor compiler optimisations they may have been right. But that argument generally doesn't apply with modern optimising compilers.)
BTW, I think "finally" sections realy are just the same as the "goto: cleanup" target: a branch to explicit cleanup code, fraught with peril.
No they are not. Goto requires that the programmer writes that line each time there is a different path that maybe taken through the possibly failing code. Finally ensures that once the exception block has been entered, the finally block must follow.
However, there are better ways to write exception-safe code where you never explicitly clean up/free/close stuff and instead let the stack unwind handle it all for you
Sure. That's another way of avoiding goto. Symbian was written before C++ got exceptions, and uses a cleanup stack for that purpose.
Until you make it to where there's no "matching close for every open" anywhere, you're just moving the problem around, not solving it.
Which is why you don't manually code it with gotos. Of all the ways of dealing with these problems, goto is the worst.
Of course if any malware is discovered, that developer account is closed, with no refund, and no chance of reopening with the same credit card/mail address etc. And the possibility of a police investigation.
So yes, the is more of a discouragement than for the ordinary developer.
Right, people won't change. That's the argument for curated app stores. Have qualified people look at the software first to weed out the malware. And in the worst case where malware slips past, and makes it into the store, once one person finds it and reports it, it's removed from download to everyone.
It's no coincidence that 97% of mobile malware in the last year was on Android, and there was zero on iOS.
Apple have solved this problem. Google can't now - the cat's already out of the bag for Android.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course Firefox OS Will Become the Mobile OS To Beat. Also, 2014 will be the year of Linux on the desktop.
I
because other scientists didn't believe that bacteria could live in the stomach with all that acid.
That's just nonsense. Scientists, just like the rest of us, knew full well that there are vast numbers of diseases caused by ingesting bacteria. They wouldn't work if the stomach killed all bacteria.
The discovery of the bacterial cause of most ulcers is actually a really interesting story. But it's one of science progressing exactly as it should, not one of an unreasonable scientific cabal refusing to believe a new idea.
It did involve the unusual step of the scientist experimenting on himself. But that was because there were no suitable animal model. Not that it was a stunt required to overturn some intransigent scientific cabal.
Ittp://www.csicop.org/si/show/bacteria_ulcers_and_ostracism_h._pylori_and_the_making_of_a_myth
Nice try at attempting to seem like you were an unbiased observer of this political misuse of science. However your examples give away your politics and the incorrect view of the science that those politics have given you:
With respect to global warming, people see partisans making statements attempting to link currently held scientific views to political ideas that run the gamut from signing bad treaties like Kyoto, adopting economically ruinous policies, or enriching crony operators of new "carbon" exchanges.
The politics of the right, through pressure groups like The Tea Party and Fox News continually misrepresent the science, that is true. But there equal and opposite side to this. The Science is now indisputable that AGW is happening. The left tend to accept that, whilst the right tend to deny it. Only one side is wrong.
The right is as wrong on this as they were when they denied that tobacco smoke is a carcinogen. And as wrong as when a goodly proportion of them claim creation rather than evolution.
Right. Because the sun provides a convenient reference point in the sky. But that actual hours and days pass overwhelmingly because of the spin of the earth. And that would even have been true in the imaginary pre-sun days of creation.
I was quite please to get so far through the comments before a post by an idiot denier.
Then you find the "proof" of warming down at the bottom. A carefully excised anomalous temperature chart that. 0.5C total range with a tail pointing down.
The "tail" seems to be wagging your dog.
This graphic illustrates the stupidity of your view. http://www.skepticalscience.co...
Plot the temperature folks. It ain't hard. BEST has it available for free. http://berkeleyearth.org/data
BEST, a study financed by deniers, hiring the team and setting the goals in the hope of producing an anti-AGW result. And the conclusion was: AGW is real.
I have been pawing through the data from each station.
As you're not a scientist, that's a sure sign that your denial comes from mental illness.
Note also that the "days of creation", even assuming they happened, cannot be based on 24 hour Terrestrial days, since the Sun didn't exist till the fourth day.
A 24 hour day is based on the earth's spin, it has little to do with the sun. (In practice the orbit around the sun must make one day's difference per year.)
For every dollar (or whatever) of loss for one person there is a dollar (or whatever) of gain for someone else. The lottery everyone loses but the state. Not the same.
The State is also part of the zero-sum game. And you're assuming that Bitcoin is tax free. There's still some uncertainty about which taxes Bitcoin qualifies for. But if Bitcoin ever became a significant currency, you can be sure it would be taxed just as much as the native currency.
Tax evasion might be easer with Bitcoin, but then that's just saving money by being a criminal.
I trade about 10 bitcoins and I'm making good money by buying on bad news and selling on good. It doesn't take anything other than that.
Which is exactly the thing people were saying in every rising stock market. It takes experiencing a crash or two before they realise it's a mirage.
Also, I'll call you on your "proper control structures". In C-like languages, control structures like "break" and "continue" are glorified goto's. 'switch' statements are glorified if-else chains that compiler can usually optimize very well.
I agree. This all started with me pointing out that an early return is effectively a goto. And so are break and continue.
And the C switch construct with it's run-on between cases unless you explicitly break - that's possibly the most horribly broken control structure in any language. Yes, it too is effectively gotos. But that's a fuck up in C, not a general problem with selection control structures. In other languages selection control structures are a proper structured programming construct.
The point of examples is to prove your point, to convince. You have not done so with me.
On Slashdot, few people are ever convinced of anything. Experience tells me that you are convinced enough of your rightness, examples aren't going to change your mind. I'm happy enough to state my opinion, and not really care whether you agree.
And to summarise my opinion - gotos are used only with languages that have poor control structures, especially C. My opening statement was about a language that eschewed the goto. Such a language would also not have early returns (not breaks nor continues). But it would have a full set of control structures that make gotos entirely unnecessary.
Personally I haven't made use of an explicit goto since the 1980s (other than in asm). And only used goto equivalents such as break where the deficiencies of the language have necessitated it.
Yeah, if only aboriginal Americans had written it down before the European invasion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
Oh.
History is written by the victors, not the literate.
Steve Ballmer destroyed Microsoft. Everything released in the past 3 years is complete crap, complete and utter crap and it is ALL his fault.
3 years? Microsoft has been fucked this last 14 years.
Sometimes, I just don't understand the Lawyer outlook of the world. If everything is working smoothly between family members, there ought to be no reason whatsoever to involve lawyers, courts, and extra expenses.
This might work if she kept all her money in cash under the mattress. But they'll have just as much of a problem withdrawing her savings from the bank without probate.
Are you saying that information is property? Intellectual property? Does that mean that there is such a thing as software theft?
Unfortunately it's an open question as to whether information held in accounts under password are part of an estate or not.
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2012/...
If she didn't explicitly mention it in her will, and the Apple's security terms of service don't otherwise allow it, it seems quite reasonable for Apple to defer the decision to a court of law.
The possibility that she held the information under a password because she wanted it to go to the grave with her needs exploring.
The papers show who are the rightful inheritors of the estate, including the iPad hardware. That much is certain.
The question of where that leaves information that is held on iCloud and/or encrypted on a device with a password is unclear. It appears she left neither the password nor specific instructions. She might have wanted the family to have access to this data after her death, but then again she might not.
After all, if you wanted your secrets to die with you, you'd probably keep them on a device in an encrypted/password protected form.
Seems like Apple wants a court to make that decision. Which doesn't seem like a bad thing.
I said Bitcoin was regulated too. (In the U.S.)
Then who is the regulator?
It might be nothing on it's own. But together with other stories, it sure feels like Bitcoin is unravelling.
Are we really supposed to believe that a Police Officer would know such geek trivia?
I have a friend who takes no interest in geek stuff, but he raised the topic with me last time I saw him. The Mt Gox incident made the national news. So yes, it's perfectly feasible a police officer had heard of them.
For sure kernel code is the one place where I still see lots of gotos. And I accept that the limitations of C and the need to maximally optimise may justify that. Though I wonder how much the optimisation argument still applies with modern compilers.
By adding extra useless variables
In the days of optimising compilers, local variables typically have no cost, and they tend to self-document the code. To defend gotos whilst attacking extra local variables is irrational.
And introducing a sea of "&&"s.
At first blush, that does seem to make the code look more complicated. But in reality it doesn't. As the text explains it's easier to see when a block will be executed if the conditionals are explicitly in the single containing if statement, than if it is implicit through nesting or worse through possible earlier gotos.
And in practice you don't just use this pattern to refactor to the extreme. It's more a mixture of this with refactoring into smaller functions, and accepting that one level of nesting is OK.
In a language like C++, unless there's a "try" block within the function, they are exactly the same as a "return" as far as that function is concerned, and can be invoked from the same places. I don't see why you think that that's acceptable if return isn't.
That's a valid point, however functions that may throw exceptions are usually designed and documented as such. Whereas early returns are just slipped in on a whim of the programmer, and are often missed by maintainers, causing bugs.
If you look at the FAQs for the Go language, the designers explain why they think exceptions suck in general, and why they largely replaced them with multiple return values. So not everyone shares your enthusiasm for exceptions, which are really just a kind of "return" statement on steroids.
I'm not particularly enthusiastic about exceptions. I've actually used cleanup stacks and error codes more often myself, I simply brought up exceptions as one of the more structured mechanisms for avoiding gotos and their equivalents.
Strawman my ass, you only quote half the sentence and take it out of context. If you actually read the link, it talks about such strongly worded "considered harmful" essays are usually taken basically as scripture, and such feature, whatever it is, should never be used. Sure, Dijkstra was writing about Fortran, but he was influential enough that the philosophy carried over to other languages. "Don't ever use this".
And if I'd quoted Dijkstra, or said "thou shalt not use gotos" in a scriptural way, then you'd have a point. But I didn't do those any more than I said "gotos considered harmful". All of these things were raised by you, then dismissed buy you. And that's exactly what a strawman is.
In regards to defining spaghetti code, try google for a change:
Your definition comes from Wikipedia, and it comes without a specific citation. Now, take a look at the references at the bottom. The oldest one is 1977. From the book: "Structured programming for the COBOL programmer: design, documentation, coding, testing." Elsewhere the artcle points out: "author Paul Noll uses the terms spaghetti code and rat's nest as synonyms to describe poorly structured source code."
As I say, spaghetti code is the antonym to structured code. Always was. Deeply nested structured code is not spaghetti. A russian doll might be a suitable metaphor, but a plate of spaghetti is not. There is no structure in spaghetti.
I don't care how long you've been programming or what order you learned different idioms as they developed/were available, it doesn't make you right.
It doesn't make me right in and of itself. However that memory back to the days when structured code was still a topical issue is why I know for sure what spaghetti code is. And that's why I'm telling you. If you can find an earlier reference than 1977 that confirms your understanding, then you can say I'm wrong. Otherwise I'm right.
But never use it (with no evidence, examples)?
What's the point of examples? It's an absolute fact that you cannot dispute that every piece of code that uses a goto can be rewritten using proper control structures. I personally have not used a goto since the 1980s. And my career has included work on a commercial operating system, in which gotos were forbidden at all levels above the kernel. And that was conceived with C++ in the days before it even had exceptions.
(You might ask why gotos were permitted at the kernel level. And the answer is that the kernel engineers mixed assembly and C, and tended to think in assembler first, even if they then wrote in C. If questioned they would say that the goto was more efficient. And in those days of poor compiler optimisations they may have been right. But that argument generally doesn't apply with modern optimising compilers.)
BTW, I think "finally" sections realy are just the same as the "goto: cleanup" target: a branch to explicit cleanup code, fraught with peril.
No they are not. Goto requires that the programmer writes that line each time there is a different path that maybe taken through the possibly failing code. Finally ensures that once the exception block has been entered, the finally block must follow.
However, there are better ways to write exception-safe code where you never explicitly clean up/free/close stuff and instead let the stack unwind handle it all for you
Sure. That's another way of avoiding goto. Symbian was written before C++ got exceptions, and uses a cleanup stack for that purpose.
Until you make it to where there's no "matching close for every open" anywhere, you're just moving the problem around, not solving it.
Which is why you don't manually code it with gotos. Of all the ways of dealing with these problems, goto is the worst.
Of course if any malware is discovered, that developer account is closed, with no refund, and no chance of reopening with the same credit card/mail address etc. And the possibility of a police investigation.
So yes, the is more of a discouragement than for the ordinary developer.
It's for the same reason that the murder rate inside Disney World is very low.
Security. Yes, that's it exactly.
It is not possible to check every application to see if it is harmless or not. Nobody has those kinds of resources.
And yet the report says that there was zero malware discovered on iOS last year. It seems Apple know something you don't.
Right, people won't change. That's the argument for curated app stores. Have qualified people look at the software first to weed out the malware. And in the worst case where malware slips past, and makes it into the store, once one person finds it and reports it, it's removed from download to everyone.
It's no coincidence that 97% of mobile malware in the last year was on Android, and there was zero on iOS.
Apple have solved this problem. Google can't now - the cat's already out of the bag for Android.