For one example, consider tail-end recursion. CALL stores a return address on the stack, which is not needed in tail-end recursion. So if you use CALL and RET, you will either have to waste lots of stack space, which will make the program more likely to run out of memory and crash, and which will be slower, or do some extra work like POPing the unneeded address to stop the stack from growing, then when it is time to RET, putting it back on just to give RET something to pop. It's just better to use jumps.
For another example, many subroutines are very short, do not use all the registers, and are not recursive. Better to copy the instruction pointer into another register of the programmer's choice, then jump. When the subroutine is done, just do an indirect jump to the address contained in that register. Further, to save the contents of the registers it does use, either you have to do a PUSHA and save them all, even the ones it wasn't using, which wastes space and time, or you have to do individual PUSHes of the several registers it does use, which is very bad. Each PUSH instruction updates the stack pointer. It stalls the execution pipeline to update the same register repeatedly. Why not just update the stack pointer once? PUSHing 6 registers is the equivalent of writing MOV and ADD SP,4 6 times. Better to do 6 MOVs and one ADD SP,24, unless size of the code is more important than speed, as PUSH is a shorter instruction than MOV.
As for using the stack to pass parameters, yuck. Same problem, you're updating SP multiple times instead of once, or not at all, as all that will happen is the routine will just POP the parameters right back off the stack. Whenever possible, use registers to pass parameters.
Additionally, if you don't use the stack instructions at all, then you free up the SP register (and the SS register) for whatever you want. A longstanding criticism of the x86 architecture was the small number of general purpose registers. Intel has done a lot to address that, and these inherent inefficiencies, so those problems are not as bad on a modern x86 CPU as on a 386 or 486.
You know you can load a binary into a debugger and view the assembly code?
There's really not much to basic assembler. You have main memory, registers, and flags. You can move bytes (1, 2, 4, or 8 at a time, usually) between memory and registers. You can do basic arithmetic and bit operations in the registers, and those set the flags. You can make jumps (gotos) based on whether the the flags are set or not. That's pretty much it. The hard part is putting such basic instructions together to accomplish things. It takes a lot of assembler to do even the simplest things.
Be warned that the x86 instruction set is loaded with all kinds of obsolete crap and dumb ideas. Like, it has instructions for doing basic arithmetic on packed decimal representations of numbers, as well as straight binary representations. Nothing uses packed decimal these days, it's all done in binary. Then there's the stack stuff, PUSH, POP, CALL, RET, and a few others. They're excellent examples of instructions that are less useful and general than they could be, because they do a little too much.
Since you're playing Devil's advocate here, I've a few questions. Would you like to work for BAE's HR department?
And, don't you believe in the 40 hour work week? That the position required 24/7 availability in addition to 40 hours is already too much. He should not have had to beg to be allowed to work from home for any hours beyond the 40. He had done his duty to arrange to be able to work 40 hours a week at the office. Yet you're talking like it's perfectly acceptable and normal for a company to ask more of their employees.
In the 19th century, 80 hour work weeks in the factories were not uncommon. You worked 12 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week. Employers were not convinced to reduce to a 40 hour week by arguments of humanity, work/life balance, or union pressure. What convinced them were facts and studies showing that people are more productive if worked less hard. It was a tough sell, because it is so easy and simple to equate hours worked with production, and of course some were never convinced. In particular, such thinking was a threat to the institution of slavery, so of course slave owners rejected it out of hand. It became more possible to accept it once slavery was abolished.
This is what I've been saying for years. There is no way to stop or regulate people swapping data among themselves. DRM does not work and no one, no matter how talented, is going to find a way to make it work.
What is sad is how producers have failed to understand the issue. They want to believe they can produce and sell data same as any other material good that is subject to scarcity. They've gone to great lengths to try to turn this dark fantasy into reality, and have of course completely failed. Their efforts were doomed, like any effort to create an actual flying horse, a pegasus, would be. With advances in genetic engineering technology, we could possibly create a horse with wings. But no way would it be able to fly.
Further, they haven't understood that even if success was possible, and achieved, it would be a setback for society. Because then, it would be possible to lock down and control information, and the power to do that could only be abused to impose tolls on the public in exchange for the same basic information, over and over. Imagine how "profitable" it would be to own the secret of "2+2=4", and no elementary school child could learn that until they paid the owner for the privilege. As it is, the secret of the birds and the bees is guarded entirely too zealously, and the more successful adults are at keeping teenagers in the dark about that, the worse the outcomes tend to be for all concerned. Nudity in Playboy was ever so slightly educational. I bought one for that purpose when I was around 14. The clerk at the bookstore frowned at me-- I was obviously underage, and he wasn't supposed to sell X rated things to minors-- but he didn't ask for my age, just took my cash in exchange for the zine.
Are you talking about the one that translated "the body is weak but the spirit is strong" into Russian and back to English and got "the meat is rotten but the vodka is strong"?
Why dud you make Swift a curly brace language, especially as it seems you admire Python? One thing Python shows is that C style syntax is not the ultimate. I suppose you were in a hurry to get to the interesting stuff and just grabbed onto curly brace syntax?
I'd like to see a real programming language that can be taught to elementary school students, not toy stuff like Logo or Scratch. These days, seems Python comes the closest to that ideal. Some still seriously recommend C/C++ for the kids.
I've experienced gaslighting. Many of us in IT have experienced hostile work environments. There are many options for dealing with it. By far the easiest, fastest way is to simply leave. You're not leaving just for your own mental well being. Another reason to leave is to take their power away, gives them less room to maneuver when abusing your former colleagues.
Unfortunately, many employees don't position themselves to be able to do that without prohibitive loss. And employers encourage that! Ever have your boss suggest you should buy a new car and house? I have, more than once. I didn't understand why that was any of their business the 1st time. Now I know that's why. They think of you as a "flight risk", and like the idea of you feeling chained to your job by debt up to your eyeballs. Lose that job and your life blows up. You lose your house, spouse, car, the respect of your friends, your credit rating, etc. They have code phrases for this, stuff like "showing team spirit" and "commitment". There are sick managers out there who enjoy bullying and abusing hapless underlings.
If you are determined to hang on for financial reasons, pride in your successes, don't want to leave under a cloud of failure, don't want to be labeled a quitter and a wimp, feel like there are still worthy people you can help, or the environment isn't completely horrible and has its redeeming qualities, and whatever other reasons, there's still much else you can do. There will always be some crap to handle at any job, and it is impractical to walk out on every employer unless you're independently wealthy and can retire at the age of 30 or some such. Still improve your financial situation. Next, keeping records is huge. Get all the gaslighters' crap down in writing. Ask them to email or text you, not just give you verbal instructions which can be denied later. Do it smoothly too, don't be verbally demanding, just be firm and put your time to use on other duties until they give you written instruction. What may very well happen is that they get cold feet. They don't want a paper trail showing what scumbags they really are. They'll foam at the mouth with rage and frustration, but they will back down if they have any brains. They may not, they may indeed give it to you in writing. They may try to weasel around with their written instructions. If they threaten to fire you, call them on that. Tell them you're waiting, hurry up and fire you already. It usually is a bluff, but it may not be, and if so, that's okay too. Being fired is not the end of the world.
A big problem is assessing management demands. It can sometimes be very hard to tell if they really are asking for too much. Asking for perpetual motion is too much. Asking for the moon might not be. Likely they have no idea either. It's their job to work that out, not come up with a schedule out of thin air but get input from their experts and work it out. But sometimes managers are lazy on that and try to compensate by bullying their underlings. Ask you for a schedule, then behind your back alter it to cut the time way down, and throw in a few simple little extras that aren't so simple or little. In any case, it's not good to declare some demand is impossible and unreasonable and walk out, if it wasn't.
So there it is. Free yourself from your own desperation. Whichever way things work out, years later you'd like to be proud of the decisions you made and the manner you handled yourself. No job is worth breaking laws you respect and treacherously throwing colleagues under the bus. There are bigger things in life than that. No job is worth your self respect. Being unemployed is hard, but it is not The End.
McDonald's is also losing sales to Burger King, Wendy's, Whataburger, and so on, and the venerable grocery store. Maybe we should outlaw grocery stores and close all other burger restaurants for copying McDonald's ideas?
Private book, record, and movie sellers have always had to compete with the public library and the used book and record store. And now there's another competitor, the (relatively) new kid on the block, the Internet. Big Media would of course prefer that these alternatives be shuttered, and if they can persuade the public to go for that idea, accept their propaganda that competition is so unfair to poor starving artists, that would be a major setback to us all.
By far the biggest slant is the movie industry's. Cheap, easy, fast copying is in the hands of the masses now. There's no putting that genie back in the bottle.
You too may be falling for that trick. Lot of the discussion here runs with the implication that while downloading is not as heinous a crime as stealing, it is still sort of unfair to the artists.
Should downloading be a crime at all? Nothing was hurt except a tired, broken, obsolete and extremely inefficient business model that needs to be killed off. If you buy from the grocery store, did you just hurt the fast food industry business model? If you drive a car, did you hurt buggy whip manufacturers? Yes, yes you did! Why aren't those actions crimes, why does the music industry get such special status, get to cling to their business model of choice, when there are other perfectly viable models they could use?
If only! Choices of Internet providers are few. Do you want provider A or provider B, both of whom are in the Copyright Alert System?
My ISP texted me a CAS notice once. I was plenty angry about the accusation, the system, and the premises the whole thing is built on, as well as their choice of communication medium, but what could I do? Who could I switch to? I looked for alternatives and found nothing but another member of the CAS, though I am in a major metropolitan area.
CLRS is no picnic for people who aren't very good at math
That's true. The first chapters wade into big O notation, in ways that don't match the standards of clarity of the rest of the book. You shouldn't need calculus to understand big O. It's good to show how to apply calculus to these problems, and calculus is a natural fit for the necessary math, but the student shouldn't be pushed into a refresher course in calculus to comprehend the basic concepts. The authors try to fill in some of the mathematical knowledge they apply in the next sections, rather than restrict themselves to basic algebra.
How about a car analogy? Algorithms is like engine and transmission design. That the driver can easily drive the car over a cliff or into a wall, that driving takes considerable skill and constant attention to keep the car on the road, is not the concern of the motor designers, nor should it be.
About as far as engine design can go to enhance safety, apart from ensuring that the engine doesn't blow up or make an oil slick on the highway and cause an accident, is stuff like limiting the maximum output, and therefore speed, and add means for mechanical and computerized control that can be used by safety features, but need not be.
CLR is Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson and Rivest. The S in CLRS is for Stein, who joined the team for the 2nd edition. When CLR came out in 1990, it was hailed as the best algorithms textbook ever, and what an algorithms textbook should be, a huge jump in readability and clarity over the not wholly satisfying existing algorithms textbooks. It uses pseudocode, instead of a real programming language. Allowed the algorithms to be presented cleanly, without any boilerplate code, overhead, or worries about limitations, no need for tedious checks for array out of bounds, numeric overflow, or out of memory, or invalid input. Don't have to declare any variables, or figure out how many elements an array needs.
The Abelson and Sussman textbook, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, uses LISP (actually Scheme). There are quite a few LISP fanatics who passionately feel it is still the best programming language made, citing such reasons as the simplicity of writing an interpreter for it. However, that textbook is pretty difficult. The authors didn't appreciate how hard recursion can be for many students to understand, and LISP and functional programming in general uses recursion so heavily it's the proverbial hammer for every nail of a programming problem.
Since then, programming languages have improved. Still not good enough for the textbook, but closer.
Number of deaths is a poor measure of risk. By that reckoning, a bus accident earlier this year in Ghana is a worse disaster than the 1992 Hurricane Andrew, because 71 died in the bus accident and only 65 died from the hurricane. Andrew caused $26 billion in damage. A bus and a truck are worth what? Less than $1 million.
You have to look at total damages. Many sq km of Japanese land that can't be safely used for centuries is a loss of hundreds of billions. Land is very, very expensive in Japan. Expected increase in medical work to deal with all the cancers is more millions. Cleaning up the mess is another huge cost. And, Fukushima is still not over! It's still leaking radioactive material into the Pacific Ocean.
Seems that mistake in Scientific American will never be lived down:
In response to some concerns raised by readers, a change has been made to this story. The sentence marked with an asterisk was changed from "In fact, fly ash—a by-product from burning coal for power—and other coal waste contains up to 100 times more radiation than nuclear waste" to "In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy." Our source for this statistic is Dana Christensen, an associate lab director for energy and engineering at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as well as 1978 paper in Science authored by J. P. McBride and colleagues, also of ORNL.
Coal waste is NOT more radioactive than nuclear waste. The difference is that nuclear waste is not dumped into the environment, while waste from coal burning is. Nuclear waste is stored, and storage space is limited. Permanent dumps for nuclear waste are difficult to engineer. They must be designed to hold nuclear waste for millennia.
The big problem with nuclear power is that accidents are extremely dangerous and costly. That wouldn't be a problem if accidents were extremely unlikely. We know how to design and operate nuclear power plants safely, the problem is that we won't. Fukushima showed that. That accident was entirely avoidable. They needed only to build the walls higher. They had good information on how high the walls needed to be, and the recommended height was not a strain on our engineering capabilities. But management chose to ignore the recommendations and build a lower wall, to save a little money. The fools in those management positions did not understand that the risk they were taking was very high, they chose instead to ignore the warnings. Disaster could still have been averted had they not also cut another corner to save a little money, and the backup generators had been in working order and not located in the basement.
Months ago, Michael Moore predicted a Trump win based on the blue wall in the rust belt turning red. He gave simple, excellent reasons why. People are sick of being thrown under the bus by the wealthy and powerful, which establishment Republicans and Democrats both have been doing for decades now. Trump campaigned on preserving rust belt jobs, threatening to put serious hurt on Ford if they followed through on their plan to move a factory from Michigan to Mexico. That was what really won it for him in the rust belt, not all that white male supremacy garbage.
All the media noise focusing on Trump's ignorance and sexist and racist antics missed badly. They thought they could cynically use Trump to boost their numbers, thought they could skimp on covering the meat and focus mainly on personality and scandal, without affecting the outcome of the election, because Trump couldn't possibly make it all the way to election day without imploding spectacularly, he was too dumb, arrogant, undisciplined, and impulsive to run a serious campaign, or so they believed. Some even entertained the idea that his campaign was all just an elaborate publicity stunt, he didn't really want to be President, and would simply drop out at an opportune moment.
Liberals have been pretty smug about the conservative turn towards deliberate ignorance, their preference for living in an echo chamber full of like minded people. And now we see liberals did the same thing, didn't see a Trump victory coming. How could our polls have been so wrong? Hillary was supposed to not just win, but win big, win in a landslide. And now they're calling this election the biggest upset in history, as if no one could have seen it coming. Michael Moore saw it, and was right on all counts.
Thing is, that $2/day stuff is a myth. That does not put any value to all the labor of doing everything yourself.
Standard of living is the big factor. We in the US could live on $2/day if we cut everything, and I mean everything. Not just no Internet and cable TV, but no electricity, water, sewage, and road. You could then spend your time working in your vegetable garden and milking your goats so you'd have something to eat, and trudging to the nearby creek for fresh water, trying to avoid all the shit on the trail, hoping you don't catch cholera or some of those lovely intestinal parasites, and chopping wood so you don't freeze next winter and can have a cook fire. If you do get sick, you tough it out, or die. Transport? Walk, or saddle up, or hitch up the wagon. Clothes? Grow some flax or cotton, spin the fibers yourself with a spinning wheel, weave it into cloth, then cut and sew into shape. So what if that takes weeks, what better things do you have to do? Sanitation? Forget the daily shower, you're going to bathe once a week, maybe. You only washed when you were so heavily coated with grime and filth that it was interfering with your ability to labor. Mow the lawn? Ha ha, are you nuts? Send in the goats, dummy! Refrigerator? Without electricity? No, you're going to use a root cellar, and maybe an ice house. There's also canning. Cold? Put on a coat. Hot? Sweat it, A/C is for sissies. Wash your clothes by hand in a wash tub and hang them from a clothesline to dry. That's not too far off from how my great grandparents lived: farm with a veggie garden, no electricity or indoor plumbing, just chamberpots stowed under the bed, except they didn't do their own clothes, they bought factory stuff for that, and they had a well, none of this hauling of water 1km or more.
We've really run wild. Many modern conveniences are great to have, but enable a great deal of waste and foolishness. Many companies made a businesses out of catering to our dumber instincts. The biggest things the daily shower does are waste a whole lot of fresh water, make water infrastructure businesses and shampoo and soap manufacturers richer, and actually make us less healthy by washing away beneficial bacteria! And we do it because we've brainwashed ourselves into believing that body odor is offensive. We've all dealt with suburban sprawl. Car manufacturers have brilliantly exploited our foibles to promote the car at the expense of all other forms of transportation. Then there are expensive hobbies such as boating, owning your own swimming pool, off roading, hot rodding, skiing, or flying your own private plane. Even something less intense on required equipment such as golf isn't too cheap either. So many sports have commercial interests dangling options in front of us to turn it from not too terribly costly to insanely expensive.
A relevant incident is the 2010 suicide of Joseph Stack. He was angry that the government had bailed out big banks but he personally was being audited by the IRS. He flew his private plane into an IRS building in Austin. While I sympathize with his complaints, the fact that he had a private plane shows he wasn't hurting for money.
Ah, so the problem that bothers you is piggybacking, so to speak. Using other's work to bring attention to ads and products that generate income.
On piggybacking, I feel our "mother may I" system is a serious drag. I don't like the idea that artists should have control over how their works are used. The artists should receive money somehow, but they shouldn't be able to dictate usage on some far fetched notion that lack of control might somehow negatively impact potential profits. I believe that's the rationale commonly used to justify such control. For an example of the trouble such control causes, consider the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's album cover. They had to ask permission of each and every one of the hundred or so people they wanted on the cover, an expensive and time consuming project. For that reason, works like that album cover are quite rare.
It would be better if no permission was required, and artists whose work was used could simply apply for money from a publicly funded trust. Maybe don't even need to apply, perhaps the trust could actively work to discover such usages. Would have to be careful exactly how such a system was set up, as the potential for cheating is huge. I think it could be done and could work better than copyright.
Copying is in the hands of the masses now. The Internet is even more revolutionary than the Gutenberg printing press, which was perhaps the most revolutionary and life changing invention in the past 1000 years.
Understandable, as there is a lot of confusion on this subject. Took me a long time to work out answers I find satisfying.
Firstly, it's a mistake to equate copying with stealing. Copying is not stealing, copying is copying. Vandalism is not stealing. Littering is not stealing, Nor are speeding, trespassing, slander, forgery, creating a parody, taking photos in public spaces, insulting politicians, and a whole bunch of other activities in any way stealing. Nor is buying from Burger King stealing from McDonalds. When you say "stealing others' works" to mean copying, you fall for publisher propaganda that does want the public to accept that copying is in fact stealing, to stir public anger, slandering sharers as "thieves". They're trying to push our buttons.
To really steal someone else's work, you'd have to take credit for it. We have a name for that: plagiarism. You added "selling them as their own" to "stealing others' works", so what did you mean exactly? Were you talking about distributing others' works, or plagiarism? It's a big, important difference.
"they are undeniably causing harm by siphoning money away" Certainly it is harmful to McDonalds for a Burger King restaurant to open up nearby. Now publishers are being challenged by competition that they have never faced before, the Internet. We're 25 years into the rise of the Internet and the Age of Information, and they're still struggling to get it, meanwhile whining how unfair the whole thing is that their old business model that relied on media being a scarce resource doesn't work any more. They want the Internet and computers to be hamstrung so badly they work no better at moving information around than distribution via CD/DVD. That is asking far too much of us all. Just turn the clock back to the 1980s, rip up the Internet, uninvent the CD/DVD burner and hard drives bigger than 40M? They claim that artists will starve, seem to take it as a given that copyright is the glue that makes art possible. They're wrong. There are other ways to earn a living, such as crowdfunding. And it's not a new idea. Classical music was and still is mostly supported by patronage, not copyright.
The harm to us all is huge. Our public libraries should be a lot more digital than they are. Think of it: no more late returns, lost books, waiting for a copy to be returned because they're all checked out at the moment, and most of all, a much, much larger collection and searchability. If you've ever used a card catalog, one with actual little rectangles of cardboard with typing on them, you can see how much computer search surpasses that. Further, our education system relies far too much on private, for-profit printers. We should have a huge choice of excellent, open, online works available and used for basic education, We have some things. Wikipedia completely outstrips print encyclopedias, just no comparison between the two. We should have more, and we would if not for the evil known as extreme copyright,
That's what I did. Got a new spider from them. Then I took it to a business that does protective powder coatings. Replaced the broken corroded spider with the new coated spider myself. Even with the money I spent on the coating, it was way cheaper, if you don't count my time as particularly valuable. They wanted so much money for repairs that it made more sense to buy a new washer and throw the old one away than go through them.
LG's warranty is a joke. They're only trying to make it sound like they stand behind their products. They sure don't want to spend any of their own money actually repairing their shoddy engineering decisions.
Oh, I think reform will happen, one way or another. Either we get busy bringing sanity back to our laws, or watch helplessly as the ever increasing corruption pushes us into doing a reboot. Revolutions clear away all kinds of bought laws.
So far, there isn't any political entity that hasn't eventually fallen. Their elites always push too far and beggar everyone else or push their state into overreach, or they get stuck in a rut, or they hold too dearly profoundly wrong or inferior ideas. Time and time again belligerents have lost despite numerical superiority, when the other side employed superior weapons they refused to accept, or sometimes only superior tactics, or merely didn't make the incredibly stupid military move of calling for a massive assault on a well fortified and defended position while the losing side did. Sometimes the internal corruption wasn't too bad, but it was enough to bring about a collapse in the face of a big problem such as a long drought or severe plague. The Byzantine Empire was so notorious their name is now a byword for corruption and graft covered up with excessive complexity. The Ottoman Empire that conquered the Byzantines itself succumbed to corruption.
There's more than mere technical problems to overcome before we'll ever be capable of colonizing other star systems. A generational colony ship needs a society that can remain more than stable for millenia, that society has to really clamp down on violence, can't have so much as one gunfight between two individuals lest the ship and everyone on it become collateral damage.
I've had that experience with so-called warranties. Have an LG front loading washing machine with a lifetime warranty on the stainless steel drum that holds the clothes, and a 10 year warranty on the motor. But the "spider", the piece that connects the motor to the drum, was not covered, and it broke because it was made of some sort of cheap aluminum alloy that corroded rapidly. All they had to do was add a protective coating during manufacture, but no, that costs more money. I tried to argue that the spider was part of the motor, but it was no good. Even had the spider been covered, it wouldn't have been worth the cost. I could only get warranty work at approved repair centers, and the cost of labor wasn't included in the coverage. Had that been something like a part of the axle of a car, they would have been in lots of trouble and would have had to do a recall. Btu washing machines are much less visible than cars.
I pretty much told them to fuck off
Wish more people would do that! The much vaunted Power of the Market can't stop lock down and all the other crap vendors pull if buyers passively accept it, then grumble but keep buying while sellers control, monopolize, and gouge them. BestBuy went too far even for the sheep, what with that aggressive pushing of extended warranties by holding people up at the checkout.
I've been wondering if Capitalism is fatally flawed. We've seen reckless, foolish greed destroy lives time and time again. It seems capitalism elevates psychopathic individuals to positions of great power and responsibility. Of course people of that sort abuse their power. Strip resources from everything within reach, leaving behind waste and destruction.
We moved from monarchy to democracy because the former just doesn't work for long. Monarchy works okay until an idiot gets elevated to the kingship, solely because he's the oldest son of the previous leader, and not because he has any qualifications whatsoever. It's a horrible way to choose leaders. Even when a talented, vigorous, enlightened king comes to the throne, he's still just one man. If a monarchy has instilled passivity in the people, only the monarch himself can inspire action. These days, nations are far too large for that to work well no matter how talented the monarch is. Our nation is a democracy, yet many of our private corporations operate as feudal domains. And it shows in these incredibly short-sighted, anti-social moves they make.
What Big Sugar has done is bad, but it's just another greedy corporate action that we, with our low expectations of corporate behavior, hardly notice. The one that will change that blase attitude is Big Oil, when all our coasts drown.
Traffic lights are stupidly brainless. Nearly every trip I take, I end up getting stuck at a red light for nothing. There were no cars on the cross street, but the light turned red anyway.
Often, there are also underhanded politics at work. Such as, the lights on the free "service road" (a parallel road to the main, limited access highway), are purposefully neglected because the main road is toll, and badly timed traffic lights on the service road are a way to harass people for trying to avoid the tolls. Of course, private operators of red light cameras have been caught numerous times screwing up the traffic lights. And then there's things like Bridgegate. I've noticed that traffic lights for access roads to major shopping malls push it, holding up as much through traffic as they can get away with without a public outcry. Merchants think that the longer people are stuck in front of their stores, the more business they get.
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Mod this up! +5 informative.
For one example, consider tail-end recursion. CALL stores a return address on the stack, which is not needed in tail-end recursion. So if you use CALL and RET, you will either have to waste lots of stack space, which will make the program more likely to run out of memory and crash, and which will be slower, or do some extra work like POPing the unneeded address to stop the stack from growing, then when it is time to RET, putting it back on just to give RET something to pop. It's just better to use jumps.
For another example, many subroutines are very short, do not use all the registers, and are not recursive. Better to copy the instruction pointer into another register of the programmer's choice, then jump. When the subroutine is done, just do an indirect jump to the address contained in that register. Further, to save the contents of the registers it does use, either you have to do a PUSHA and save them all, even the ones it wasn't using, which wastes space and time, or you have to do individual PUSHes of the several registers it does use, which is very bad. Each PUSH instruction updates the stack pointer. It stalls the execution pipeline to update the same register repeatedly. Why not just update the stack pointer once? PUSHing 6 registers is the equivalent of writing MOV and ADD SP,4 6 times. Better to do 6 MOVs and one ADD SP,24, unless size of the code is more important than speed, as PUSH is a shorter instruction than MOV.
As for using the stack to pass parameters, yuck. Same problem, you're updating SP multiple times instead of once, or not at all, as all that will happen is the routine will just POP the parameters right back off the stack. Whenever possible, use registers to pass parameters.
Additionally, if you don't use the stack instructions at all, then you free up the SP register (and the SS register) for whatever you want. A longstanding criticism of the x86 architecture was the small number of general purpose registers. Intel has done a lot to address that, and these inherent inefficiencies, so those problems are not as bad on a modern x86 CPU as on a 386 or 486.
You know you can load a binary into a debugger and view the assembly code?
There's really not much to basic assembler. You have main memory, registers, and flags. You can move bytes (1, 2, 4, or 8 at a time, usually) between memory and registers. You can do basic arithmetic and bit operations in the registers, and those set the flags. You can make jumps (gotos) based on whether the the flags are set or not. That's pretty much it. The hard part is putting such basic instructions together to accomplish things. It takes a lot of assembler to do even the simplest things.
Be warned that the x86 instruction set is loaded with all kinds of obsolete crap and dumb ideas. Like, it has instructions for doing basic arithmetic on packed decimal representations of numbers, as well as straight binary representations. Nothing uses packed decimal these days, it's all done in binary. Then there's the stack stuff, PUSH, POP, CALL, RET, and a few others. They're excellent examples of instructions that are less useful and general than they could be, because they do a little too much.
Since you're playing Devil's advocate here, I've a few questions. Would you like to work for BAE's HR department?
And, don't you believe in the 40 hour work week? That the position required 24/7 availability in addition to 40 hours is already too much. He should not have had to beg to be allowed to work from home for any hours beyond the 40. He had done his duty to arrange to be able to work 40 hours a week at the office. Yet you're talking like it's perfectly acceptable and normal for a company to ask more of their employees.
In the 19th century, 80 hour work weeks in the factories were not uncommon. You worked 12 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week. Employers were not convinced to reduce to a 40 hour week by arguments of humanity, work/life balance, or union pressure. What convinced them were facts and studies showing that people are more productive if worked less hard. It was a tough sell, because it is so easy and simple to equate hours worked with production, and of course some were never convinced. In particular, such thinking was a threat to the institution of slavery, so of course slave owners rejected it out of hand. It became more possible to accept it once slavery was abolished.
This is what I've been saying for years. There is no way to stop or regulate people swapping data among themselves. DRM does not work and no one, no matter how talented, is going to find a way to make it work.
What is sad is how producers have failed to understand the issue. They want to believe they can produce and sell data same as any other material good that is subject to scarcity. They've gone to great lengths to try to turn this dark fantasy into reality, and have of course completely failed. Their efforts were doomed, like any effort to create an actual flying horse, a pegasus, would be. With advances in genetic engineering technology, we could possibly create a horse with wings. But no way would it be able to fly.
Further, they haven't understood that even if success was possible, and achieved, it would be a setback for society. Because then, it would be possible to lock down and control information, and the power to do that could only be abused to impose tolls on the public in exchange for the same basic information, over and over. Imagine how "profitable" it would be to own the secret of "2+2=4", and no elementary school child could learn that until they paid the owner for the privilege. As it is, the secret of the birds and the bees is guarded entirely too zealously, and the more successful adults are at keeping teenagers in the dark about that, the worse the outcomes tend to be for all concerned. Nudity in Playboy was ever so slightly educational. I bought one for that purpose when I was around 14. The clerk at the bookstore frowned at me-- I was obviously underage, and he wasn't supposed to sell X rated things to minors-- but he didn't ask for my age, just took my cash in exchange for the zine.
Are you talking about the one that translated "the body is weak but the spirit is strong" into Russian and back to English and got "the meat is rotten but the vodka is strong"?
Why dud you make Swift a curly brace language, especially as it seems you admire Python? One thing Python shows is that C style syntax is not the ultimate. I suppose you were in a hurry to get to the interesting stuff and just grabbed onto curly brace syntax?
I'd like to see a real programming language that can be taught to elementary school students, not toy stuff like Logo or Scratch. These days, seems Python comes the closest to that ideal. Some still seriously recommend C/C++ for the kids.
I've experienced gaslighting. Many of us in IT have experienced hostile work environments. There are many options for dealing with it. By far the easiest, fastest way is to simply leave. You're not leaving just for your own mental well being. Another reason to leave is to take their power away, gives them less room to maneuver when abusing your former colleagues.
Unfortunately, many employees don't position themselves to be able to do that without prohibitive loss. And employers encourage that! Ever have your boss suggest you should buy a new car and house? I have, more than once. I didn't understand why that was any of their business the 1st time. Now I know that's why. They think of you as a "flight risk", and like the idea of you feeling chained to your job by debt up to your eyeballs. Lose that job and your life blows up. You lose your house, spouse, car, the respect of your friends, your credit rating, etc. They have code phrases for this, stuff like "showing team spirit" and "commitment". There are sick managers out there who enjoy bullying and abusing hapless underlings.
If you are determined to hang on for financial reasons, pride in your successes, don't want to leave under a cloud of failure, don't want to be labeled a quitter and a wimp, feel like there are still worthy people you can help, or the environment isn't completely horrible and has its redeeming qualities, and whatever other reasons, there's still much else you can do. There will always be some crap to handle at any job, and it is impractical to walk out on every employer unless you're independently wealthy and can retire at the age of 30 or some such. Still improve your financial situation. Next, keeping records is huge. Get all the gaslighters' crap down in writing. Ask them to email or text you, not just give you verbal instructions which can be denied later. Do it smoothly too, don't be verbally demanding, just be firm and put your time to use on other duties until they give you written instruction. What may very well happen is that they get cold feet. They don't want a paper trail showing what scumbags they really are. They'll foam at the mouth with rage and frustration, but they will back down if they have any brains. They may not, they may indeed give it to you in writing. They may try to weasel around with their written instructions. If they threaten to fire you, call them on that. Tell them you're waiting, hurry up and fire you already. It usually is a bluff, but it may not be, and if so, that's okay too. Being fired is not the end of the world.
A big problem is assessing management demands. It can sometimes be very hard to tell if they really are asking for too much. Asking for perpetual motion is too much. Asking for the moon might not be. Likely they have no idea either. It's their job to work that out, not come up with a schedule out of thin air but get input from their experts and work it out. But sometimes managers are lazy on that and try to compensate by bullying their underlings. Ask you for a schedule, then behind your back alter it to cut the time way down, and throw in a few simple little extras that aren't so simple or little. In any case, it's not good to declare some demand is impossible and unreasonable and walk out, if it wasn't.
So there it is. Free yourself from your own desperation. Whichever way things work out, years later you'd like to be proud of the decisions you made and the manner you handled yourself. No job is worth breaking laws you respect and treacherously throwing colleagues under the bus. There are bigger things in life than that. No job is worth your self respect. Being unemployed is hard, but it is not The End.
McDonald's is also losing sales to Burger King, Wendy's, Whataburger, and so on, and the venerable grocery store. Maybe we should outlaw grocery stores and close all other burger restaurants for copying McDonald's ideas?
Private book, record, and movie sellers have always had to compete with the public library and the used book and record store. And now there's another competitor, the (relatively) new kid on the block, the Internet. Big Media would of course prefer that these alternatives be shuttered, and if they can persuade the public to go for that idea, accept their propaganda that competition is so unfair to poor starving artists, that would be a major setback to us all.
By far the biggest slant is the movie industry's. Cheap, easy, fast copying is in the hands of the masses now. There's no putting that genie back in the bottle.
You too may be falling for that trick. Lot of the discussion here runs with the implication that while downloading is not as heinous a crime as stealing, it is still sort of unfair to the artists.
Should downloading be a crime at all? Nothing was hurt except a tired, broken, obsolete and extremely inefficient business model that needs to be killed off. If you buy from the grocery store, did you just hurt the fast food industry business model? If you drive a car, did you hurt buggy whip manufacturers? Yes, yes you did! Why aren't those actions crimes, why does the music industry get such special status, get to cling to their business model of choice, when there are other perfectly viable models they could use?
If only! Choices of Internet providers are few. Do you want provider A or provider B, both of whom are in the Copyright Alert System?
My ISP texted me a CAS notice once. I was plenty angry about the accusation, the system, and the premises the whole thing is built on, as well as their choice of communication medium, but what could I do? Who could I switch to? I looked for alternatives and found nothing but another member of the CAS, though I am in a major metropolitan area.
CLRS is no picnic for people who aren't very good at math
That's true. The first chapters wade into big O notation, in ways that don't match the standards of clarity of the rest of the book. You shouldn't need calculus to understand big O. It's good to show how to apply calculus to these problems, and calculus is a natural fit for the necessary math, but the student shouldn't be pushed into a refresher course in calculus to comprehend the basic concepts. The authors try to fill in some of the mathematical knowledge they apply in the next sections, rather than restrict themselves to basic algebra.
How about a car analogy? Algorithms is like engine and transmission design. That the driver can easily drive the car over a cliff or into a wall, that driving takes considerable skill and constant attention to keep the car on the road, is not the concern of the motor designers, nor should it be.
About as far as engine design can go to enhance safety, apart from ensuring that the engine doesn't blow up or make an oil slick on the highway and cause an accident, is stuff like limiting the maximum output, and therefore speed, and add means for mechanical and computerized control that can be used by safety features, but need not be.
CLR is Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson and Rivest. The S in CLRS is for Stein, who joined the team for the 2nd edition. When CLR came out in 1990, it was hailed as the best algorithms textbook ever, and what an algorithms textbook should be, a huge jump in readability and clarity over the not wholly satisfying existing algorithms textbooks. It uses pseudocode, instead of a real programming language. Allowed the algorithms to be presented cleanly, without any boilerplate code, overhead, or worries about limitations, no need for tedious checks for array out of bounds, numeric overflow, or out of memory, or invalid input. Don't have to declare any variables, or figure out how many elements an array needs.
The Abelson and Sussman textbook, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, uses LISP (actually Scheme). There are quite a few LISP fanatics who passionately feel it is still the best programming language made, citing such reasons as the simplicity of writing an interpreter for it. However, that textbook is pretty difficult. The authors didn't appreciate how hard recursion can be for many students to understand, and LISP and functional programming in general uses recursion so heavily it's the proverbial hammer for every nail of a programming problem.
Since then, programming languages have improved. Still not good enough for the textbook, but closer.
Number of deaths is a poor measure of risk. By that reckoning, a bus accident earlier this year in Ghana is a worse disaster than the 1992 Hurricane Andrew, because 71 died in the bus accident and only 65 died from the hurricane. Andrew caused $26 billion in damage. A bus and a truck are worth what? Less than $1 million.
You have to look at total damages. Many sq km of Japanese land that can't be safely used for centuries is a loss of hundreds of billions. Land is very, very expensive in Japan. Expected increase in medical work to deal with all the cancers is more millions. Cleaning up the mess is another huge cost. And, Fukushima is still not over! It's still leaking radioactive material into the Pacific Ocean.
Seems that mistake in Scientific American will never be lived down:
In response to some concerns raised by readers, a change has been made to this story. The sentence marked with an asterisk was changed from "In fact, fly ash—a by-product from burning coal for power—and other coal waste contains up to 100 times more radiation than nuclear waste" to "In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy." Our source for this statistic is Dana Christensen, an associate lab director for energy and engineering at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as well as 1978 paper in Science authored by J. P. McBride and colleagues, also of ORNL.
Coal waste is NOT more radioactive than nuclear waste. The difference is that nuclear waste is not dumped into the environment, while waste from coal burning is. Nuclear waste is stored, and storage space is limited. Permanent dumps for nuclear waste are difficult to engineer. They must be designed to hold nuclear waste for millennia.
The big problem with nuclear power is that accidents are extremely dangerous and costly. That wouldn't be a problem if accidents were extremely unlikely. We know how to design and operate nuclear power plants safely, the problem is that we won't. Fukushima showed that. That accident was entirely avoidable. They needed only to build the walls higher. They had good information on how high the walls needed to be, and the recommended height was not a strain on our engineering capabilities. But management chose to ignore the recommendations and build a lower wall, to save a little money. The fools in those management positions did not understand that the risk they were taking was very high, they chose instead to ignore the warnings. Disaster could still have been averted had they not also cut another corner to save a little money, and the backup generators had been in working order and not located in the basement.
Months ago, Michael Moore predicted a Trump win based on the blue wall in the rust belt turning red. He gave simple, excellent reasons why. People are sick of being thrown under the bus by the wealthy and powerful, which establishment Republicans and Democrats both have been doing for decades now. Trump campaigned on preserving rust belt jobs, threatening to put serious hurt on Ford if they followed through on their plan to move a factory from Michigan to Mexico. That was what really won it for him in the rust belt, not all that white male supremacy garbage.
All the media noise focusing on Trump's ignorance and sexist and racist antics missed badly. They thought they could cynically use Trump to boost their numbers, thought they could skimp on covering the meat and focus mainly on personality and scandal, without affecting the outcome of the election, because Trump couldn't possibly make it all the way to election day without imploding spectacularly, he was too dumb, arrogant, undisciplined, and impulsive to run a serious campaign, or so they believed. Some even entertained the idea that his campaign was all just an elaborate publicity stunt, he didn't really want to be President, and would simply drop out at an opportune moment.
Liberals have been pretty smug about the conservative turn towards deliberate ignorance, their preference for living in an echo chamber full of like minded people. And now we see liberals did the same thing, didn't see a Trump victory coming. How could our polls have been so wrong? Hillary was supposed to not just win, but win big, win in a landslide. And now they're calling this election the biggest upset in history, as if no one could have seen it coming. Michael Moore saw it, and was right on all counts.
Thing is, that $2/day stuff is a myth. That does not put any value to all the labor of doing everything yourself.
Standard of living is the big factor. We in the US could live on $2/day if we cut everything, and I mean everything. Not just no Internet and cable TV, but no electricity, water, sewage, and road. You could then spend your time working in your vegetable garden and milking your goats so you'd have something to eat, and trudging to the nearby creek for fresh water, trying to avoid all the shit on the trail, hoping you don't catch cholera or some of those lovely intestinal parasites, and chopping wood so you don't freeze next winter and can have a cook fire. If you do get sick, you tough it out, or die. Transport? Walk, or saddle up, or hitch up the wagon. Clothes? Grow some flax or cotton, spin the fibers yourself with a spinning wheel, weave it into cloth, then cut and sew into shape. So what if that takes weeks, what better things do you have to do? Sanitation? Forget the daily shower, you're going to bathe once a week, maybe. You only washed when you were so heavily coated with grime and filth that it was interfering with your ability to labor. Mow the lawn? Ha ha, are you nuts? Send in the goats, dummy! Refrigerator? Without electricity? No, you're going to use a root cellar, and maybe an ice house. There's also canning. Cold? Put on a coat. Hot? Sweat it, A/C is for sissies. Wash your clothes by hand in a wash tub and hang them from a clothesline to dry. That's not too far off from how my great grandparents lived: farm with a veggie garden, no electricity or indoor plumbing, just chamberpots stowed under the bed, except they didn't do their own clothes, they bought factory stuff for that, and they had a well, none of this hauling of water 1km or more.
We've really run wild. Many modern conveniences are great to have, but enable a great deal of waste and foolishness. Many companies made a businesses out of catering to our dumber instincts. The biggest things the daily shower does are waste a whole lot of fresh water, make water infrastructure businesses and shampoo and soap manufacturers richer, and actually make us less healthy by washing away beneficial bacteria! And we do it because we've brainwashed ourselves into believing that body odor is offensive. We've all dealt with suburban sprawl. Car manufacturers have brilliantly exploited our foibles to promote the car at the expense of all other forms of transportation. Then there are expensive hobbies such as boating, owning your own swimming pool, off roading, hot rodding, skiing, or flying your own private plane. Even something less intense on required equipment such as golf isn't too cheap either. So many sports have commercial interests dangling options in front of us to turn it from not too terribly costly to insanely expensive.
A relevant incident is the 2010 suicide of Joseph Stack. He was angry that the government had bailed out big banks but he personally was being audited by the IRS. He flew his private plane into an IRS building in Austin. While I sympathize with his complaints, the fact that he had a private plane shows he wasn't hurting for money.
Ah, so the problem that bothers you is piggybacking, so to speak. Using other's work to bring attention to ads and products that generate income.
On piggybacking, I feel our "mother may I" system is a serious drag. I don't like the idea that artists should have control over how their works are used. The artists should receive money somehow, but they shouldn't be able to dictate usage on some far fetched notion that lack of control might somehow negatively impact potential profits. I believe that's the rationale commonly used to justify such control. For an example of the trouble such control causes, consider the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's album cover. They had to ask permission of each and every one of the hundred or so people they wanted on the cover, an expensive and time consuming project. For that reason, works like that album cover are quite rare.
It would be better if no permission was required, and artists whose work was used could simply apply for money from a publicly funded trust. Maybe don't even need to apply, perhaps the trust could actively work to discover such usages. Would have to be careful exactly how such a system was set up, as the potential for cheating is huge. I think it could be done and could work better than copyright.
Copying is in the hands of the masses now. The Internet is even more revolutionary than the Gutenberg printing press, which was perhaps the most revolutionary and life changing invention in the past 1000 years.
Understandable, as there is a lot of confusion on this subject. Took me a long time to work out answers I find satisfying.
Firstly, it's a mistake to equate copying with stealing. Copying is not stealing, copying is copying. Vandalism is not stealing. Littering is not stealing, Nor are speeding, trespassing, slander, forgery, creating a parody, taking photos in public spaces, insulting politicians, and a whole bunch of other activities in any way stealing. Nor is buying from Burger King stealing from McDonalds. When you say "stealing others' works" to mean copying, you fall for publisher propaganda that does want the public to accept that copying is in fact stealing, to stir public anger, slandering sharers as "thieves". They're trying to push our buttons.
To really steal someone else's work, you'd have to take credit for it. We have a name for that: plagiarism. You added "selling them as their own" to "stealing others' works", so what did you mean exactly? Were you talking about distributing others' works, or plagiarism? It's a big, important difference.
"they are undeniably causing harm by siphoning money away" Certainly it is harmful to McDonalds for a Burger King restaurant to open up nearby. Now publishers are being challenged by competition that they have never faced before, the Internet. We're 25 years into the rise of the Internet and the Age of Information, and they're still struggling to get it, meanwhile whining how unfair the whole thing is that their old business model that relied on media being a scarce resource doesn't work any more. They want the Internet and computers to be hamstrung so badly they work no better at moving information around than distribution via CD/DVD. That is asking far too much of us all. Just turn the clock back to the 1980s, rip up the Internet, uninvent the CD/DVD burner and hard drives bigger than 40M? They claim that artists will starve, seem to take it as a given that copyright is the glue that makes art possible. They're wrong. There are other ways to earn a living, such as crowdfunding. And it's not a new idea. Classical music was and still is mostly supported by patronage, not copyright.
The harm to us all is huge. Our public libraries should be a lot more digital than they are. Think of it: no more late returns, lost books, waiting for a copy to be returned because they're all checked out at the moment, and most of all, a much, much larger collection and searchability. If you've ever used a card catalog, one with actual little rectangles of cardboard with typing on them, you can see how much computer search surpasses that. Further, our education system relies far too much on private, for-profit printers. We should have a huge choice of excellent, open, online works available and used for basic education, We have some things. Wikipedia completely outstrips print encyclopedias, just no comparison between the two. We should have more, and we would if not for the evil known as extreme copyright,
That's what I did. Got a new spider from them. Then I took it to a business that does protective powder coatings. Replaced the broken corroded spider with the new coated spider myself. Even with the money I spent on the coating, it was way cheaper, if you don't count my time as particularly valuable. They wanted so much money for repairs that it made more sense to buy a new washer and throw the old one away than go through them.
LG's warranty is a joke. They're only trying to make it sound like they stand behind their products. They sure don't want to spend any of their own money actually repairing their shoddy engineering decisions.
Oh, I think reform will happen, one way or another. Either we get busy bringing sanity back to our laws, or watch helplessly as the ever increasing corruption pushes us into doing a reboot. Revolutions clear away all kinds of bought laws.
So far, there isn't any political entity that hasn't eventually fallen. Their elites always push too far and beggar everyone else or push their state into overreach, or they get stuck in a rut, or they hold too dearly profoundly wrong or inferior ideas. Time and time again belligerents have lost despite numerical superiority, when the other side employed superior weapons they refused to accept, or sometimes only superior tactics, or merely didn't make the incredibly stupid military move of calling for a massive assault on a well fortified and defended position while the losing side did. Sometimes the internal corruption wasn't too bad, but it was enough to bring about a collapse in the face of a big problem such as a long drought or severe plague. The Byzantine Empire was so notorious their name is now a byword for corruption and graft covered up with excessive complexity. The Ottoman Empire that conquered the Byzantines itself succumbed to corruption.
There's more than mere technical problems to overcome before we'll ever be capable of colonizing other star systems. A generational colony ship needs a society that can remain more than stable for millenia, that society has to really clamp down on violence, can't have so much as one gunfight between two individuals lest the ship and everyone on it become collateral damage.
I've had that experience with so-called warranties. Have an LG front loading washing machine with a lifetime warranty on the stainless steel drum that holds the clothes, and a 10 year warranty on the motor. But the "spider", the piece that connects the motor to the drum, was not covered, and it broke because it was made of some sort of cheap aluminum alloy that corroded rapidly. All they had to do was add a protective coating during manufacture, but no, that costs more money. I tried to argue that the spider was part of the motor, but it was no good. Even had the spider been covered, it wouldn't have been worth the cost. I could only get warranty work at approved repair centers, and the cost of labor wasn't included in the coverage. Had that been something like a part of the axle of a car, they would have been in lots of trouble and would have had to do a recall. Btu washing machines are much less visible than cars.
I pretty much told them to fuck off
Wish more people would do that! The much vaunted Power of the Market can't stop lock down and all the other crap vendors pull if buyers passively accept it, then grumble but keep buying while sellers control, monopolize, and gouge them. BestBuy went too far even for the sheep, what with that aggressive pushing of extended warranties by holding people up at the checkout.
I've been wondering if Capitalism is fatally flawed. We've seen reckless, foolish greed destroy lives time and time again. It seems capitalism elevates psychopathic individuals to positions of great power and responsibility. Of course people of that sort abuse their power. Strip resources from everything within reach, leaving behind waste and destruction.
We moved from monarchy to democracy because the former just doesn't work for long. Monarchy works okay until an idiot gets elevated to the kingship, solely because he's the oldest son of the previous leader, and not because he has any qualifications whatsoever. It's a horrible way to choose leaders. Even when a talented, vigorous, enlightened king comes to the throne, he's still just one man. If a monarchy has instilled passivity in the people, only the monarch himself can inspire action. These days, nations are far too large for that to work well no matter how talented the monarch is. Our nation is a democracy, yet many of our private corporations operate as feudal domains. And it shows in these incredibly short-sighted, anti-social moves they make.
What Big Sugar has done is bad, but it's just another greedy corporate action that we, with our low expectations of corporate behavior, hardly notice. The one that will change that blase attitude is Big Oil, when all our coasts drown.
Yes! Improve the traffic lights.
Traffic lights are stupidly brainless. Nearly every trip I take, I end up getting stuck at a red light for nothing. There were no cars on the cross street, but the light turned red anyway.
Often, there are also underhanded politics at work. Such as, the lights on the free "service road" (a parallel road to the main, limited access highway), are purposefully neglected because the main road is toll, and badly timed traffic lights on the service road are a way to harass people for trying to avoid the tolls. Of course, private operators of red light cameras have been caught numerous times screwing up the traffic lights. And then there's things like Bridgegate. I've noticed that traffic lights for access roads to major shopping malls push it, holding up as much through traffic as they can get away with without a public outcry. Merchants think that the longer people are stuck in front of their stores, the more business they get.