It's not just textbooks. Our capitalist society is so thoroughly steeped in profiteering that there is very little you can trust. Doctors over-prescribe procedures and medicine, and when there is a choice, pick the one that profits them the most, never mind what it costs the patient. And health insurance, woof! What a byzantine mess of forms and copays and secret agreements! Try never to use the emergency, always visit a regular doctor if possible. Auto mechanics are notorious for pushing unnecessary repairs, just in case, you know? Employers cheat employees of pay, the whole H1B program is just one example of the things they do. Advertising is designed to convince people that they have a problem and the best solution is their product or service, never mind the best interests of everyone. Marketing is totally amoral that way and marketeers won't hesitate to run propaganda campaigns they think will work. The stock market is full of scams of course, but it is kept honest enough that most individuals can do okay, a big problem for some time now has been the institutional funds composed of our tax dollars or pension payments that the big players rob shamelessly, and corporate officers transferring scandalous amounts of money from the company and stockholders to themselves through exercising options and other trickery, and calling it fair compensation. And the media! Mainstream media doesn't do enough honest reporting. They spin stories to make them more dramatic. Other stories, full of drama and wrongdoing, they inexplicably ignore.
I don't know what the solution is. I would say that the markets must be policed, same as sports games must have refereeing, but the problem with that is that the market police are too easily corrupted. Ultimately, it's up to us all to keep them honest.
For years, I thought iostream was a terrible mistake because of poor performance relative to the older stdio library. Didn't matter whether it was a better model, the lack of performance made that moot. Then recently I heard that iostream is only slower when support for stdio is enabled, which it is by default. I had no idea there was such a toggle, never thought to look for anything of the sort. The worst part is the legacy support is enabled even if all the source code is C++ and stdio is never used.
Maybe C++ is badly taught. But language designers and implementers ought to take the blame for not informing the community how best to use iostream. We know not to mix new and delete with malloc and free. Why weren't we able to discover that iostream does not have a performance problem after all? Legacy support for stdio should have been off by default, so that the iostream library would run at maximum performance, and the compiler should have been programmed to issue an error if stdio was used along with a helpful message about the correct flags, compiler options, directives or whatever was needed to use stdio if the coder really wanted to.
I agree that C/C++ is a terrible choice for a beginning programmer. Pointers are especially tough for newbies to learn. But BASIC? No. When I first learned how to program, I thought the program would exit a loop the moment that the exit condition was satisfied. It was not obvious to me that the exit condition was checked only at the end of the loop. Now I understand it's done that way not because that's inherently better or more intuitive, no, it's done that way because it's easier and faster for the computer. And that's a big problem with most languages. The capabilities of computers still play too big a role in programming language design decisions. That's one reason why I think we don't have any programming languages that have achieved the goal of making programming as simple and accessible as possible while at the same time being fully capable.
Why even use OpenGL directly? It's been called the assembly language of graphics. It has no brains when it comes to sorting polygons by visibility, it just dumbly draws everything in the list your program builds for it, whether visible or not. It's up to your source code to employ a little algorithmic cleverness to prune the list. But even if you do, you soon find that unless the pruning is very good, performance is still unsatisfying. To make the pruning excellent requires implementation of some fairly complicated algorithms.
I'd much rather use a library such as OpenSceneGraph or OGRE.
Many dogs, if given unlimited food, will eat themselves to death. Yes, really. These dogs have no restraint and will consume food until their stomachs cannot physically hold any more. The stomach may rupture, and if not treated quickly, that is fatal.
I think of most of the super rich as suffering from the same sort of problem, only with money instead of food. They will earn, steal, and horde wealth beyond all sense. Even if it causes great harm to many others, damages society, they can't stop themselves. An example is wage theft. We have many people working in the restaurant business, for extremely low pay. But it seems the low pay isn't low enough to suit some owners, who bully their workers into working a few extra hours off the clock, delay paychecks, miscalculate the pay in their favor, and other tricks. It might be somewhat understandable if the franchises were struggling, but often they are doing very well indeed, don't really need more money. Nor is the owner hurting for money. Why then do they do it? They don't have good reason. Reasons of the "trickle down" variety are wrong. It simply is not possible for one person to use vast wealth efficiently. They can blow thousands on luxury conveniences that save a few minutes here and there, but it is not good value.
Meanwhile, the cheated workers must spend even more time struggling to get by on extremely limited means. The old expression "time is money" is so true for the poor. A lot of expense can be eliminated by burning more time. Dishwasher broken? Wash dishes by hand! Water cut off? Lug your laundry to a laundromat, use paper plates and plastic spoons, and as for showers, well, can rent a cheap motel room or visit the Y, but not every day. Instead, keep the deodorants and perfumes handy, and wear a cap to hide your hair. Toilets can be flushed with buckets of rainwater. Car repossessed? Take public transport, or bike or walk. The poor are forced to work around all kinds of things that the middle class take for granted, and ingenious and actually better and healthier though some of the workarounds are, it all takes time. What might they be able to accomplish if they didn't have to spend so much time scrapping and scrounging for every penny?
We should keep constant watch on the rich, and rein them in. Instead, we practically worship them. That's not good for anyone. People think the rich are really special, leaders and doers who've been rewarded with great wealth for their hard work, think it's all merited. Think they're John Galt. Some are, no doubt. However, when such status is given to someone who doesn't merit it, the result is almost always bad. That's where we as a society have fallen down. We let these undeserving rich get away with murder. In all the fraud and cheating that resulted in the Great Recession, only Madoff ended up in prison. This Angelo Mozilo should have gone to jail, instead he was only banned from ever running a company again, and allowed to keep much of the wealth he had stolen, and live on in freedom. Sure, he was fined a record amount, a fact they like to play up to try to show how tough they are on rich criminals, but it didn't reduce him to poverty, far from it. Since then, a few more perps have been put away, but it took years to do it. Meanwhile, little people are routinely dragged through the mud over petty debts. Some consequences would be okay if the big people faced the same consequences, but they don't.
This treaty is an outright declaration of class warfare, with lots of surveillance goodies thrown in to get the enforcement part of government on board.
The thing to do now in the US is simply vote it down. If it is fast tracked so that Congress can only vote yes or no, then "no" it is. Just in case there's a chance of passage, we should make a lot of noise, make sure our representatives know our will and that it won't be safe to ignore us.
Testing has been frequently gamed. Incredibly, the tested parties are often allowed to design the tests. And as one might expect, such industry designed tests are usually too easy, sometimes laughably so. For example, the plumbing industry got away with claiming "lead free" on faucets that were manufactured with brass that was 5% lead, on the untested notion that as long as the lead does not leach out, that's as good as lead free. That idea is wrong, and their tests were ridiculously inadequate. Another dishonest rigging of testing is in the oil pipeline business. They use these devices that they call "pigs" to inspect the inside of a pipeline. As long as the pig hasn't been tampered with, it's pretty good at spotting weaknesses. But some in the business modified the pig, greatly reduced its sensitivity and increased its threshold for sounding the alert. Saved lots of money on pipeline repairs-- until the pipe broke.
This. Also make sure the e-paper trail can't be easily erased. It may not be enough to send one email to one person, send a few CCs to fellow team members, maybe a BCC to your own private outside email account, though that last can also get you in trouble for divulging company secrets. So, maybe sneakernet the emails out. If they'd demand that you break the law, they'd also lean on the system administrators to "clean" the company's servers, and never mind Sarbanes-Oxley. You'd hope system administrators can resist that kind of pressure, and most of the time they can, but be ready just in case they can't or are sidelined.
And don't worry about being fired, don't let that possibility scare you out of covering your butt. It's better to be fired than sued. If it comes to that, call them on their threats to fire you. If they weren't bluffing, fine, let them fire you and try to find someone else they can intimidate.
I wonder if you're talking about the same problem. You're talking about management techniques. The article is about the inherent human problems of giving great power and authority to a few, and solving this issue by not doing so, not having any powerful bosses. I totally agree with your thoughts on "shut up and do as I say" management.
Perhaps power always corrupts, and it doesn't matter who is tapped to be boss, sooner or later, they're going to turn abusive, greedy, treacherous. But we could surely do a better job of picking people for such positions. A mistake I've seen organizations make, over and over, is mistaking a loudmouth for a proactive, energetic, go-getter. And even if they were right and the candidate for a management position actually is not a loudmouth, another mistake is thinking those characteristics-- energy and all that-- are the most important and best sign that a person would make a good manager. So they promote this person into positions of authority over others. They undervalue competence, evidently thinking that noise is more important.
And, sure, being seen and heard is important. But being wrong can be deadly. I'm not taking about technical mistakes, everyone makes those. I'm talking about the mistake of putting an incompetent loudmouth in charge. I've seen the loudmouth caught, and it's not pretty however well deserved. The loudmouth has drowned out everyone else, trampling upon the customs of polite discourse and professional behavior with peers, and with smooth talking persuaded upper management to put them in charge, and then has no idea what to do next. Won't ask for or accept any advice or help, because they see that as weak, and in any case they didn't get there by listening, they got there by talking over others. They are totally into the "shut up and follow orders" style of management. And their orders are "make it happen", and don't bother them with the boring details. But don't embarrass them and accomplish too much, as that might show them up, and they can't have that. They tend to take a pushy, bullying approach to the situation, trying to hang all the responsibility for mistakes or the lack of progress on others, as if the only purpose for the existence of underlings is to take the blame and the fall. Meantime, if anything good is accomplished, they of course try to hog all the credit for it, despite having actively tried to personally sabotage the accomplishment when it looked like someone else, some underling, would reap the credit. Hilarious to see a loudmouth trying to take credit for something that was thought good, until learning that it is actually regarded as a waste of time, then instantly doing a 180 and blaming it all on underlings. When they have to get up in front of an audience and present something real is when it all crashes and burns. Cold comfort when the bullying idiot who should never have been given such responsibility gets ripped apart, as the entire project gets canceled and everyone loses their jobs.
A terminating null byte is a horrible way to denote the end of a string, as C/C++ designers eventually realized. The cost and space to maintain a separate value for the length of a string is O(1) no matter what operation is done. Not only does it take O(n) to find the terminating null, there's the additional complication of how to embed a null in the middle of a string, without terminating it. Use an escape sequence? Just don't allow the terminating character in the string? No modern string manipulation library uses termination characters. So, yeah, checking for equal lengths takes O(1), unless you're using the old string.h C library.
Price was what first drove me away. Price does affect purchasing decisions. does damp down the desire for mildly addictive substances. Works for cigarettes and alcohol.
Improved health is a nice bonus, and now, having learned how unhealthy refined sugar and high fructose corn syrup is, I wouldn't take soda even if it was free. Ironically, many of these drinks were originally promoted for their health effects. Coke was created for pain relief. Carbonation itself was thought to have good effects on health.
Yes, a nice reminder of string processing problems. The problem they worked on isn't exactly string matching. They are trying to find the minimum "edit distance" between 2 strings. There are a lot of very similar seeming problems in this area.
If all one is trying to do is test whether 2 strings match exactly, first check whether the lengths are equal. If they are, then it might be better to compare characters at the end first, under the idea that similar strings are more likely to match at the beginning. It's not an algorithmic savings, still have to compare each character until a mismatch is found or all characters have been checked. All that idea does is try what might be a more likely location for a mismatch sooner, but that depends entirely upon the data.
Trying to find where a shorter string might occur in a longer is a different problem. As you noted, Boyer-Moore is good. Then, the problem of finding matches for n short strings for n>1 within a long string is solvable in yet other ways, faster than simply applying Boyer-Moore n times.
Something else to consider is this kid's history. Is he a prankster? Or, has he shown anti-social behavior, written long rambling notes about how he'd like to kill the teachers and other students? Is he on anti-psychotic drugs? The schools keep records on that kind of stuff, they should know.
If he had no troubled history, there was no reason to think he'd suddenly turned into an angry, dangerous teen, and was about to enact a murder-suicide revenge fantasy. The school's reaction was way over the top, and cowardly.
Money does grow on trees. Food grows on trees, and that's worth money. Food is more directly useful to us than that abstraction we call money.
The energy we need to live comes from the sun. We are also utterly dependent upon other life to harness that energy and package it in forms we can use. We're all moochers. Think on that next time you bash socialism.
Do you not realize that things don't just materialize out of thin air?
IOW, there's no free lunch? Something everyone should better appreciate is just how dependent we all are upon the free lunch Earth receives from the sun, and how utterly dependent animals, including us, are upon the base of the food chain. Life also needs raw material, which it obtains from the Earth. Keep that in mind before accusing others of being moochers. We're all moochers.
If you're worried that a basic income removes the moral hazard from life, rest easy. Free sunlight didn't make living organisms lazy. What a basic income does is reduce desperation. Never back animals into a corner, unless you like being hurt. Pushing people to the edge is asking for trouble. Why do that if it is so easy to avoid? Is it out of some mystical feeling, some religious hangup over dogma about the supposed value of hard work? Maybe you really think we can't afford it? Yet we find buckets of money for our military, and why? Because we're afraid. Get off that pedestal of moral superiority, and look at the matter from a purely practical and social utility viewpoint. The US is overly harsh, too willing to smear people for being lazy without bothering to learn if they really are, and if deciding they are lazy, even if in error, too eager to permanently harm people for it.
There's nothing inherently wrong with double pane windows. They're a big improvement over single pane. And I like saving energy. The problem is retrofitting them. I've had these door-to-door salespeople pitch this idea. The lowest price they could manage was $10,000, for 2 sliding glass doors and 10 windows. I've run the numbers. We use about $1500 per year in electricity and gas. Approximately half of that is for heating and cooling, so $750. Their claim of 50% reduction in heating and cooling costs, if true, means it would save us about $375 per year, for a total payback period of 27 years. That's much too long. Too many things can happen in the meantime. The house might burn down, have to be condemned from foundation or termite or other damage, a tornado might destroy it, some drunk might drive a car into the living room, etc. Rocks or baseballs or hail might smash the windows. And I suspect 50% is too optimistic, the true savings are more likely to be half that. Surely there are other, more effective uses of $10K to get our energy bills down. Heavy drapes are way, way cheaper, and can save as much as the double pane windows. In fact, that's what we have. Why is that idea ignored? It is deliberately overlooked, of course, because it is more profitable to sell a sucker of a homeowner on a massively expensive window replacement job.
Letter was dated 2014, did anyone notice? But it reads like "2014" is just a typo, and it should have been 2015. Had me wondering if we were being fed old news.
He wants some futurism? Hmm. The first question is whether any small group will take over control of our networking, or is that impossible? I think it is impossible, but that won't stop control freaks from trying. Since it is impossible, copyright as we know it will wither. Next, one of the things that divides people into nations is language barriers. Advances in automatic translation will erase that barrier. Also, the dominance of English will grow. The nation state will weaken further. Nations used to be much more jealous about citizenship, insisting that anyone who emigrated was practically a traitor, and never allowing dual citizenship. Now, the attitude is more relaxed and dual citizenship is fairly common. Right now, we're in a minor backlash against science and merit, with the Republicans in particular encouraging this backlash as it makes propaganda easier to pull off. I don't think it will last as information becomes ever easier to store and retrieve, and with increasingly sophisticated educational aides, everyone will get smarter.
Seems likely. America has sunk into a morass of greed. Medical doctors' every decision is colored by considerations of profit, Madison Avenue is ever seeking more ways to manipulate people into parting with their money, and our government has been captured by profiteering special interests. There is no aspect of our American Dream lives that hasn't been warped by this. Your house isn't complete until the lawn is a perfect monoculture, you have a security system with a monthly fee, double pane windows, water filters, Ronco Turnip Twaddlers and a chic set of stainless steel cookware with copper bottoms now that teflon is bad, a king sized water bed, a 72 inch flat screen TV and a surround sound system, etc. If you let your lawn get too free, the city is just waiting to slap you with a big fine not because you deserve that or tall grass is actually a problem and nuisance as they claim, but because they're hungry for revenue. Clotheslines project such a negative, impoverished image that they are severely discouraged, and everyone must use a power hungry clothes dryer instead. Red light cameras can increase safety, but it's too tempting for cities and their private for-profit contractors to abuse the system to extract more money from motorists.
The real fights are over which profiteering businesses will get more taxpayer money. Will it be the Military Industrial Complex, Wall Street, telecoms, Big Pharma, or Big Oil? By comparison, the MAFIAA are pathetic little fish trying to be whales, what with their cries for more policing at others' expense, justified by ludicrous complaints about piracy having cost them more profit than there is money in the entire world economy.
society has collectively decided to reward content creators a right to profit from their creations
I have no problem with a slight rewording of that. Rather than "a right to profit", why not simply "a profit"? Where I disagree is the means. Copyright is only a means, and it's not a good one.
If they decide to share, it's on their terms, not yours
And that's where the argument goes wrong. Why do they get to decide the terms? They really need that kind of control to wring the maximum profit possible from a work? Anything else is somehow not fair to the artists? The goal, you should remember, is to promote the useful arts and sciences, not necessarily be "fair" to artists. We've seen that such control is far from complete and perfect, can be difficult to monetize, and may actually reduce the total value. We, the people, also have interests in this matter. We do not wish to see our tax dollars wasted trying to enforce rules that are anti-social, as well as unenforceable.
This whole thread is discussing punishment as if it's a forgone conclusion that copying is bad. "Piracy" is a loaded term and part of the propaganda publishers use to justify their stance. They've spent decades trying to convince the public to accept the simplification that "property is property" and there's no difference between "intellectual properties" and material properties. However seductive it sounds, it's flat wrong.
You should defend our rights. Sharing of information is a natural right. Sooner or later, creators and peddlers of such products must accept that the business model of selling copies is broken, is against the public interest, and that there are other business models and they do work.
Sending orbiters to Uranus and Neptune has only been the most blindingly obvious next step in space exploration for at least 20 years. Why does Jupiter rate a second orbital mission (Juno) before either of Uranus or Neptune have had one?
A big problem with these guys, especially if they have to evaluate a project, is that they are embarrassingly ignorant about what technology cannot do. They're liable to ask for the impossible, and think they asked for something trivial. Well, if you can solve this problem with 50 coordinates, then 100 coordinates should only take twice as long! Depends on the problem. If it is Traveling Salesperson, the compute time roughly doubles for every 1 additional coordinate, not for a doubling of the number of coordinates. A list of limits would be helpful.
However, airlines have colluded to gouge passengers for convenience. Passengers are charged more, often much more, for the direct flight. The direct flight has the inherent advantage of the economy of carrying a passenger fewer miles and making fewer stops. Savings from other considerations, such as filling a plane to capacity, must therefore be greater to overcome that. Yet airlines game passengers, seeking to charge more for less. Air fares are notoriously fickle.
One time I was trying to get a trip from D.C. to DFW. The cheapest flight was about $250, and included a stop in Atlanta. The direct flights started around $800. But I found a flight that started in Philly and made its one stop in D.C. on the way to DFW, for about $250. I thought about buying it, and just boarding in D.C. But I didn't as I was sure there was some catch, Yes, indeed. The airline will cancel the rest of your flight if you are not on the first leg. Why would they do that? To stop passengers from dodging their monopolistic convenience levies, of course. I would have been screwed out of my flight, and I think the price of the ticket had I tried it. No refunds for missed flights, you know.
It's a good thing their monopoly is limited. Though D.C. to DFW is about 22 hours by car, vs. 4 hours for a direct flight, if the airlines are obnoxious enough, I'd rather take the car. Instead, I've always been able to find a cheap one stop flight. 12 to 14 hours is about the longest car trip I find practical, and that only barely. Any longer than that and you should really stop somewhere for a night of rest. I very rarely take a plane when the destination is only 4 to 6 hours away by car. With it taking an hour to get to and from the airports at either end, plus another hour to get through security, and the flight itself still takes an hour, the time saved by flying isn't much on such a short trip.
I have no right to insist on being able to buy things in a manner that suits my needs best
We do have that right. If a seller accepts cash only, and you wish to pay by credit card, you absolutely can take your business elsewhere or refuse to buy.
I would pay a few hundred bucks a month for full, unfettered, access like that.
The trouble is that their business model of selling copies never did work that well, and now that copies are incredibly easy to make, doesn't work at all. It's only inertia, pity for those poor starving artists, and respect for the law that keeps their impossible business model on life support. You propose a different business model that I think isn't enough of a change. Identifications embedded in files can always be changed or stripped. What we really need is some kind of crowdfunding method. Create the art, receive the funds that have already been promised or collected, and from then on the art is freely available. The public library will be able to have a digital copy immediately, which any number of patrons can copy, no more long bureaucratic delays.
That's for sure! And the fear is strangely selective. I have a difficult time understanding a person who is both a hygiene fanatic and a slob. Out of fear, she insists on ridiculous hygiene measures such as washing a bar of soap with liquid soap after it's been dropped on the floor of the shower stall, but she routinely leaves dirty dishes all over the house.
It's similar with driving. Insists on doing the driving herself because she doesn't trust anyone else to do it, then gets stressed out and starts cutting other drivers off, speeding, tailgating, and lane hopping. She hates the middle lane, feels trapped when cars are on both sides, so she hops from right lane to left and back to the right, making double lane changes if on a 6 lane street. If she sees road construction or a traffic jam ahead, she instantly takes the next turn, and never mind whether that takes her further from her destination.
She's also afraid of crime. Has 2 deadbolts on each door. I pointed out that this could be dangerous if there is a fire and she needs to get out quick, doesn't have time to fumble about hunting for keys and keyholes. But she has not made any changes there, remains much more afraid of criminals than fires.
Little ability to invest or plan for in the long term Is one of the biggest failures of capitalism. An example is the transcontinental railroad. That railroad was worth building, and unlike a lot of ventures, it could hardly be more obvious that it would be a huge boost to the economy and the nation, yet even with that the market could not raise the money necessary to finance the building of it. By the 1860s, the transcontinental was shifting from a dream to concrete plans, the technologies needed for steam powered railroading were proven, with 30 plus years of experience and refinements and a vibrant and expanding railroad network in the eastern US demonstrating daily its usefulness and value. Yet the market couldn't raise the money needed to build the transcontinental. The government had already scouted potential routes at public expense, but the market still couldn't do it. The government then helped out with a massive sweetening of the pot by loaning the railroads land along their routes, if only they would build them. (Prior to the Civil War, the government also hindered the effort thanks to factional fighting over where the route would be.) That was finally enough to get the railroads started. But they still resorted to all kinds of blind optimism, and outright cheating and financial trickery to disguise the true costs of the endeavor, lying even to themselves. The government also hugely underestimated the cost. Still, the railroad was worth it.
Another massive infrastructure project totally worth doing was the Panama Canal, and once again, capitalism was not up to the job. Government had to pony up and guide the entire effort, with capitalistic businesses serving as mere contractors. Somehow no land transport link has ever connected North and South America, a failure of political systems as well as capitalism. Today, would it be worthwhile to put a railroad tunnel under the Bering Strait? Yes, with a few caveats. But it's not happening, neither capitalism nor democratic government is up to the task.
Space exploration is another area that capitalism has, so far, been unable to do. The idea of a corporation, perhaps Apple or Microsoft or Exxon, ever landing on the moon or sending a probe to another planet, is improbable despite their wealth and size. A few corporations such as Scaled Composites are trying, but so far none have had more than limited success.
And finally, doing something about a problem has been another weak point. What are we doing about Climate Change? Business has largely washed its hands of the matter. That's someone else's problem. Some businesses have even been crazy enough to run a propaganda campaign to deny that there is a problem.
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It's not just textbooks. Our capitalist society is so thoroughly steeped in profiteering that there is very little you can trust. Doctors over-prescribe procedures and medicine, and when there is a choice, pick the one that profits them the most, never mind what it costs the patient. And health insurance, woof! What a byzantine mess of forms and copays and secret agreements! Try never to use the emergency, always visit a regular doctor if possible. Auto mechanics are notorious for pushing unnecessary repairs, just in case, you know? Employers cheat employees of pay, the whole H1B program is just one example of the things they do. Advertising is designed to convince people that they have a problem and the best solution is their product or service, never mind the best interests of everyone. Marketing is totally amoral that way and marketeers won't hesitate to run propaganda campaigns they think will work. The stock market is full of scams of course, but it is kept honest enough that most individuals can do okay, a big problem for some time now has been the institutional funds composed of our tax dollars or pension payments that the big players rob shamelessly, and corporate officers transferring scandalous amounts of money from the company and stockholders to themselves through exercising options and other trickery, and calling it fair compensation. And the media! Mainstream media doesn't do enough honest reporting. They spin stories to make them more dramatic. Other stories, full of drama and wrongdoing, they inexplicably ignore.
I don't know what the solution is. I would say that the markets must be policed, same as sports games must have refereeing, but the problem with that is that the market police are too easily corrupted. Ultimately, it's up to us all to keep them honest.
For years, I thought iostream was a terrible mistake because of poor performance relative to the older stdio library. Didn't matter whether it was a better model, the lack of performance made that moot. Then recently I heard that iostream is only slower when support for stdio is enabled, which it is by default. I had no idea there was such a toggle, never thought to look for anything of the sort. The worst part is the legacy support is enabled even if all the source code is C++ and stdio is never used.
Maybe C++ is badly taught. But language designers and implementers ought to take the blame for not informing the community how best to use iostream. We know not to mix new and delete with malloc and free. Why weren't we able to discover that iostream does not have a performance problem after all? Legacy support for stdio should have been off by default, so that the iostream library would run at maximum performance, and the compiler should have been programmed to issue an error if stdio was used along with a helpful message about the correct flags, compiler options, directives or whatever was needed to use stdio if the coder really wanted to.
I agree that C/C++ is a terrible choice for a beginning programmer. Pointers are especially tough for newbies to learn. But BASIC? No. When I first learned how to program, I thought the program would exit a loop the moment that the exit condition was satisfied. It was not obvious to me that the exit condition was checked only at the end of the loop. Now I understand it's done that way not because that's inherently better or more intuitive, no, it's done that way because it's easier and faster for the computer. And that's a big problem with most languages. The capabilities of computers still play too big a role in programming language design decisions. That's one reason why I think we don't have any programming languages that have achieved the goal of making programming as simple and accessible as possible while at the same time being fully capable.
Why even use OpenGL directly? It's been called the assembly language of graphics. It has no brains when it comes to sorting polygons by visibility, it just dumbly draws everything in the list your program builds for it, whether visible or not. It's up to your source code to employ a little algorithmic cleverness to prune the list. But even if you do, you soon find that unless the pruning is very good, performance is still unsatisfying. To make the pruning excellent requires implementation of some fairly complicated algorithms.
I'd much rather use a library such as OpenSceneGraph or OGRE.
Many dogs, if given unlimited food, will eat themselves to death. Yes, really. These dogs have no restraint and will consume food until their stomachs cannot physically hold any more. The stomach may rupture, and if not treated quickly, that is fatal.
I think of most of the super rich as suffering from the same sort of problem, only with money instead of food. They will earn, steal, and horde wealth beyond all sense. Even if it causes great harm to many others, damages society, they can't stop themselves. An example is wage theft. We have many people working in the restaurant business, for extremely low pay. But it seems the low pay isn't low enough to suit some owners, who bully their workers into working a few extra hours off the clock, delay paychecks, miscalculate the pay in their favor, and other tricks. It might be somewhat understandable if the franchises were struggling, but often they are doing very well indeed, don't really need more money. Nor is the owner hurting for money. Why then do they do it? They don't have good reason. Reasons of the "trickle down" variety are wrong. It simply is not possible for one person to use vast wealth efficiently. They can blow thousands on luxury conveniences that save a few minutes here and there, but it is not good value.
Meanwhile, the cheated workers must spend even more time struggling to get by on extremely limited means. The old expression "time is money" is so true for the poor. A lot of expense can be eliminated by burning more time. Dishwasher broken? Wash dishes by hand! Water cut off? Lug your laundry to a laundromat, use paper plates and plastic spoons, and as for showers, well, can rent a cheap motel room or visit the Y, but not every day. Instead, keep the deodorants and perfumes handy, and wear a cap to hide your hair. Toilets can be flushed with buckets of rainwater. Car repossessed? Take public transport, or bike or walk. The poor are forced to work around all kinds of things that the middle class take for granted, and ingenious and actually better and healthier though some of the workarounds are, it all takes time. What might they be able to accomplish if they didn't have to spend so much time scrapping and scrounging for every penny?
We should keep constant watch on the rich, and rein them in. Instead, we practically worship them. That's not good for anyone. People think the rich are really special, leaders and doers who've been rewarded with great wealth for their hard work, think it's all merited. Think they're John Galt. Some are, no doubt. However, when such status is given to someone who doesn't merit it, the result is almost always bad. That's where we as a society have fallen down. We let these undeserving rich get away with murder. In all the fraud and cheating that resulted in the Great Recession, only Madoff ended up in prison. This Angelo Mozilo should have gone to jail, instead he was only banned from ever running a company again, and allowed to keep much of the wealth he had stolen, and live on in freedom. Sure, he was fined a record amount, a fact they like to play up to try to show how tough they are on rich criminals, but it didn't reduce him to poverty, far from it. Since then, a few more perps have been put away, but it took years to do it. Meanwhile, little people are routinely dragged through the mud over petty debts. Some consequences would be okay if the big people faced the same consequences, but they don't.
This treaty is an outright declaration of class warfare, with lots of surveillance goodies thrown in to get the enforcement part of government on board.
The thing to do now in the US is simply vote it down. If it is fast tracked so that Congress can only vote yes or no, then "no" it is. Just in case there's a chance of passage, we should make a lot of noise, make sure our representatives know our will and that it won't be safe to ignore us.
It's even more important for a test to be honest.
Testing has been frequently gamed. Incredibly, the tested parties are often allowed to design the tests. And as one might expect, such industry designed tests are usually too easy, sometimes laughably so. For example, the plumbing industry got away with claiming "lead free" on faucets that were manufactured with brass that was 5% lead, on the untested notion that as long as the lead does not leach out, that's as good as lead free. That idea is wrong, and their tests were ridiculously inadequate. Another dishonest rigging of testing is in the oil pipeline business. They use these devices that they call "pigs" to inspect the inside of a pipeline. As long as the pig hasn't been tampered with, it's pretty good at spotting weaknesses. But some in the business modified the pig, greatly reduced its sensitivity and increased its threshold for sounding the alert. Saved lots of money on pipeline repairs-- until the pipe broke.
This. Also make sure the e-paper trail can't be easily erased. It may not be enough to send one email to one person, send a few CCs to fellow team members, maybe a BCC to your own private outside email account, though that last can also get you in trouble for divulging company secrets. So, maybe sneakernet the emails out. If they'd demand that you break the law, they'd also lean on the system administrators to "clean" the company's servers, and never mind Sarbanes-Oxley. You'd hope system administrators can resist that kind of pressure, and most of the time they can, but be ready just in case they can't or are sidelined.
And don't worry about being fired, don't let that possibility scare you out of covering your butt. It's better to be fired than sued. If it comes to that, call them on their threats to fire you. If they weren't bluffing, fine, let them fire you and try to find someone else they can intimidate.
I wonder if you're talking about the same problem. You're talking about management techniques. The article is about the inherent human problems of giving great power and authority to a few, and solving this issue by not doing so, not having any powerful bosses. I totally agree with your thoughts on "shut up and do as I say" management.
Perhaps power always corrupts, and it doesn't matter who is tapped to be boss, sooner or later, they're going to turn abusive, greedy, treacherous. But we could surely do a better job of picking people for such positions. A mistake I've seen organizations make, over and over, is mistaking a loudmouth for a proactive, energetic, go-getter. And even if they were right and the candidate for a management position actually is not a loudmouth, another mistake is thinking those characteristics-- energy and all that-- are the most important and best sign that a person would make a good manager. So they promote this person into positions of authority over others. They undervalue competence, evidently thinking that noise is more important.
And, sure, being seen and heard is important. But being wrong can be deadly. I'm not taking about technical mistakes, everyone makes those. I'm talking about the mistake of putting an incompetent loudmouth in charge. I've seen the loudmouth caught, and it's not pretty however well deserved. The loudmouth has drowned out everyone else, trampling upon the customs of polite discourse and professional behavior with peers, and with smooth talking persuaded upper management to put them in charge, and then has no idea what to do next. Won't ask for or accept any advice or help, because they see that as weak, and in any case they didn't get there by listening, they got there by talking over others. They are totally into the "shut up and follow orders" style of management. And their orders are "make it happen", and don't bother them with the boring details. But don't embarrass them and accomplish too much, as that might show them up, and they can't have that. They tend to take a pushy, bullying approach to the situation, trying to hang all the responsibility for mistakes or the lack of progress on others, as if the only purpose for the existence of underlings is to take the blame and the fall. Meantime, if anything good is accomplished, they of course try to hog all the credit for it, despite having actively tried to personally sabotage the accomplishment when it looked like someone else, some underling, would reap the credit. Hilarious to see a loudmouth trying to take credit for something that was thought good, until learning that it is actually regarded as a waste of time, then instantly doing a 180 and blaming it all on underlings. When they have to get up in front of an audience and present something real is when it all crashes and burns. Cold comfort when the bullying idiot who should never have been given such responsibility gets ripped apart, as the entire project gets canceled and everyone loses their jobs.
A terminating null byte is a horrible way to denote the end of a string, as C/C++ designers eventually realized. The cost and space to maintain a separate value for the length of a string is O(1) no matter what operation is done. Not only does it take O(n) to find the terminating null, there's the additional complication of how to embed a null in the middle of a string, without terminating it. Use an escape sequence? Just don't allow the terminating character in the string? No modern string manipulation library uses termination characters. So, yeah, checking for equal lengths takes O(1), unless you're using the old string.h C library.
Price was what first drove me away. Price does affect purchasing decisions. does damp down the desire for mildly addictive substances. Works for cigarettes and alcohol.
Improved health is a nice bonus, and now, having learned how unhealthy refined sugar and high fructose corn syrup is, I wouldn't take soda even if it was free. Ironically, many of these drinks were originally promoted for their health effects. Coke was created for pain relief. Carbonation itself was thought to have good effects on health.
Yes, a nice reminder of string processing problems. The problem they worked on isn't exactly string matching. They are trying to find the minimum "edit distance" between 2 strings. There are a lot of very similar seeming problems in this area.
If all one is trying to do is test whether 2 strings match exactly, first check whether the lengths are equal. If they are, then it might be better to compare characters at the end first, under the idea that similar strings are more likely to match at the beginning. It's not an algorithmic savings, still have to compare each character until a mismatch is found or all characters have been checked. All that idea does is try what might be a more likely location for a mismatch sooner, but that depends entirely upon the data.
Trying to find where a shorter string might occur in a longer is a different problem. As you noted, Boyer-Moore is good. Then, the problem of finding matches for n short strings for n>1 within a long string is solvable in yet other ways, faster than simply applying Boyer-Moore n times.
Something else to consider is this kid's history. Is he a prankster? Or, has he shown anti-social behavior, written long rambling notes about how he'd like to kill the teachers and other students? Is he on anti-psychotic drugs? The schools keep records on that kind of stuff, they should know.
If he had no troubled history, there was no reason to think he'd suddenly turned into an angry, dangerous teen, and was about to enact a murder-suicide revenge fantasy. The school's reaction was way over the top, and cowardly.
Money does grow on trees. Food grows on trees, and that's worth money. Food is more directly useful to us than that abstraction we call money.
The energy we need to live comes from the sun. We are also utterly dependent upon other life to harness that energy and package it in forms we can use. We're all moochers. Think on that next time you bash socialism.
Do you not realize that things don't just materialize out of thin air?
IOW, there's no free lunch? Something everyone should better appreciate is just how dependent we all are upon the free lunch Earth receives from the sun, and how utterly dependent animals, including us, are upon the base of the food chain. Life also needs raw material, which it obtains from the Earth. Keep that in mind before accusing others of being moochers. We're all moochers.
If you're worried that a basic income removes the moral hazard from life, rest easy. Free sunlight didn't make living organisms lazy. What a basic income does is reduce desperation. Never back animals into a corner, unless you like being hurt. Pushing people to the edge is asking for trouble. Why do that if it is so easy to avoid? Is it out of some mystical feeling, some religious hangup over dogma about the supposed value of hard work? Maybe you really think we can't afford it? Yet we find buckets of money for our military, and why? Because we're afraid. Get off that pedestal of moral superiority, and look at the matter from a purely practical and social utility viewpoint. The US is overly harsh, too willing to smear people for being lazy without bothering to learn if they really are, and if deciding they are lazy, even if in error, too eager to permanently harm people for it.
There's nothing inherently wrong with double pane windows. They're a big improvement over single pane. And I like saving energy. The problem is retrofitting them. I've had these door-to-door salespeople pitch this idea. The lowest price they could manage was $10,000, for 2 sliding glass doors and 10 windows. I've run the numbers. We use about $1500 per year in electricity and gas. Approximately half of that is for heating and cooling, so $750. Their claim of 50% reduction in heating and cooling costs, if true, means it would save us about $375 per year, for a total payback period of 27 years. That's much too long. Too many things can happen in the meantime. The house might burn down, have to be condemned from foundation or termite or other damage, a tornado might destroy it, some drunk might drive a car into the living room, etc. Rocks or baseballs or hail might smash the windows. And I suspect 50% is too optimistic, the true savings are more likely to be half that. Surely there are other, more effective uses of $10K to get our energy bills down. Heavy drapes are way, way cheaper, and can save as much as the double pane windows. In fact, that's what we have. Why is that idea ignored? It is deliberately overlooked, of course, because it is more profitable to sell a sucker of a homeowner on a massively expensive window replacement job.
Letter was dated 2014, did anyone notice? But it reads like "2014" is just a typo, and it should have been 2015. Had me wondering if we were being fed old news.
He wants some futurism? Hmm. The first question is whether any small group will take over control of our networking, or is that impossible? I think it is impossible, but that won't stop control freaks from trying. Since it is impossible, copyright as we know it will wither. Next, one of the things that divides people into nations is language barriers. Advances in automatic translation will erase that barrier. Also, the dominance of English will grow. The nation state will weaken further. Nations used to be much more jealous about citizenship, insisting that anyone who emigrated was practically a traitor, and never allowing dual citizenship. Now, the attitude is more relaxed and dual citizenship is fairly common. Right now, we're in a minor backlash against science and merit, with the Republicans in particular encouraging this backlash as it makes propaganda easier to pull off. I don't think it will last as information becomes ever easier to store and retrieve, and with increasingly sophisticated educational aides, everyone will get smarter.
Seems likely. America has sunk into a morass of greed. Medical doctors' every decision is colored by considerations of profit, Madison Avenue is ever seeking more ways to manipulate people into parting with their money, and our government has been captured by profiteering special interests. There is no aspect of our American Dream lives that hasn't been warped by this. Your house isn't complete until the lawn is a perfect monoculture, you have a security system with a monthly fee, double pane windows, water filters, Ronco Turnip Twaddlers and a chic set of stainless steel cookware with copper bottoms now that teflon is bad, a king sized water bed, a 72 inch flat screen TV and a surround sound system, etc. If you let your lawn get too free, the city is just waiting to slap you with a big fine not because you deserve that or tall grass is actually a problem and nuisance as they claim, but because they're hungry for revenue. Clotheslines project such a negative, impoverished image that they are severely discouraged, and everyone must use a power hungry clothes dryer instead. Red light cameras can increase safety, but it's too tempting for cities and their private for-profit contractors to abuse the system to extract more money from motorists.
The real fights are over which profiteering businesses will get more taxpayer money. Will it be the Military Industrial Complex, Wall Street, telecoms, Big Pharma, or Big Oil? By comparison, the MAFIAA are pathetic little fish trying to be whales, what with their cries for more policing at others' expense, justified by ludicrous complaints about piracy having cost them more profit than there is money in the entire world economy.
Your scenario is flawed.
society has collectively decided to reward content creators a right to profit from their creations
I have no problem with a slight rewording of that. Rather than "a right to profit", why not simply "a profit"? Where I disagree is the means. Copyright is only a means, and it's not a good one.
If they decide to share, it's on their terms, not yours
And that's where the argument goes wrong. Why do they get to decide the terms? They really need that kind of control to wring the maximum profit possible from a work? Anything else is somehow not fair to the artists? The goal, you should remember, is to promote the useful arts and sciences, not necessarily be "fair" to artists. We've seen that such control is far from complete and perfect, can be difficult to monetize, and may actually reduce the total value. We, the people, also have interests in this matter. We do not wish to see our tax dollars wasted trying to enforce rules that are anti-social, as well as unenforceable.
I never defend piracy
This whole thread is discussing punishment as if it's a forgone conclusion that copying is bad. "Piracy" is a loaded term and part of the propaganda publishers use to justify their stance. They've spent decades trying to convince the public to accept the simplification that "property is property" and there's no difference between "intellectual properties" and material properties. However seductive it sounds, it's flat wrong.
You should defend our rights. Sharing of information is a natural right. Sooner or later, creators and peddlers of such products must accept that the business model of selling copies is broken, is against the public interest, and that there are other business models and they do work.
Sending orbiters to Uranus and Neptune has only been the most blindingly obvious next step in space exploration for at least 20 years. Why does Jupiter rate a second orbital mission (Juno) before either of Uranus or Neptune have had one?
A big problem with these guys, especially if they have to evaluate a project, is that they are embarrassingly ignorant about what technology cannot do. They're liable to ask for the impossible, and think they asked for something trivial. Well, if you can solve this problem with 50 coordinates, then 100 coordinates should only take twice as long! Depends on the problem. If it is Traveling Salesperson, the compute time roughly doubles for every 1 additional coordinate, not for a doubling of the number of coordinates. A list of limits would be helpful.
However, airlines have colluded to gouge passengers for convenience. Passengers are charged more, often much more, for the direct flight. The direct flight has the inherent advantage of the economy of carrying a passenger fewer miles and making fewer stops. Savings from other considerations, such as filling a plane to capacity, must therefore be greater to overcome that. Yet airlines game passengers, seeking to charge more for less. Air fares are notoriously fickle.
One time I was trying to get a trip from D.C. to DFW. The cheapest flight was about $250, and included a stop in Atlanta. The direct flights started around $800. But I found a flight that started in Philly and made its one stop in D.C. on the way to DFW, for about $250. I thought about buying it, and just boarding in D.C. But I didn't as I was sure there was some catch, Yes, indeed. The airline will cancel the rest of your flight if you are not on the first leg. Why would they do that? To stop passengers from dodging their monopolistic convenience levies, of course. I would have been screwed out of my flight, and I think the price of the ticket had I tried it. No refunds for missed flights, you know.
It's a good thing their monopoly is limited. Though D.C. to DFW is about 22 hours by car, vs. 4 hours for a direct flight, if the airlines are obnoxious enough, I'd rather take the car. Instead, I've always been able to find a cheap one stop flight. 12 to 14 hours is about the longest car trip I find practical, and that only barely. Any longer than that and you should really stop somewhere for a night of rest. I very rarely take a plane when the destination is only 4 to 6 hours away by car. With it taking an hour to get to and from the airports at either end, plus another hour to get through security, and the flight itself still takes an hour, the time saved by flying isn't much on such a short trip.
I have no right to insist on being able to buy things in a manner that suits my needs best
We do have that right. If a seller accepts cash only, and you wish to pay by credit card, you absolutely can take your business elsewhere or refuse to buy.
I would pay a few hundred bucks a month for full, unfettered, access like that.
The trouble is that their business model of selling copies never did work that well, and now that copies are incredibly easy to make, doesn't work at all. It's only inertia, pity for those poor starving artists, and respect for the law that keeps their impossible business model on life support. You propose a different business model that I think isn't enough of a change. Identifications embedded in files can always be changed or stripped. What we really need is some kind of crowdfunding method. Create the art, receive the funds that have already been promised or collected, and from then on the art is freely available. The public library will be able to have a digital copy immediately, which any number of patrons can copy, no more long bureaucratic delays.
That's for sure! And the fear is strangely selective. I have a difficult time understanding a person who is both a hygiene fanatic and a slob. Out of fear, she insists on ridiculous hygiene measures such as washing a bar of soap with liquid soap after it's been dropped on the floor of the shower stall, but she routinely leaves dirty dishes all over the house.
It's similar with driving. Insists on doing the driving herself because she doesn't trust anyone else to do it, then gets stressed out and starts cutting other drivers off, speeding, tailgating, and lane hopping. She hates the middle lane, feels trapped when cars are on both sides, so she hops from right lane to left and back to the right, making double lane changes if on a 6 lane street. If she sees road construction or a traffic jam ahead, she instantly takes the next turn, and never mind whether that takes her further from her destination.
She's also afraid of crime. Has 2 deadbolts on each door. I pointed out that this could be dangerous if there is a fire and she needs to get out quick, doesn't have time to fumble about hunting for keys and keyholes. But she has not made any changes there, remains much more afraid of criminals than fires.
Little ability to invest or plan for in the long term Is one of the biggest failures of capitalism. An example is the transcontinental railroad. That railroad was worth building, and unlike a lot of ventures, it could hardly be more obvious that it would be a huge boost to the economy and the nation, yet even with that the market could not raise the money necessary to finance the building of it. By the 1860s, the transcontinental was shifting from a dream to concrete plans, the technologies needed for steam powered railroading were proven, with 30 plus years of experience and refinements and a vibrant and expanding railroad network in the eastern US demonstrating daily its usefulness and value. Yet the market couldn't raise the money needed to build the transcontinental. The government had already scouted potential routes at public expense, but the market still couldn't do it. The government then helped out with a massive sweetening of the pot by loaning the railroads land along their routes, if only they would build them. (Prior to the Civil War, the government also hindered the effort thanks to factional fighting over where the route would be.) That was finally enough to get the railroads started. But they still resorted to all kinds of blind optimism, and outright cheating and financial trickery to disguise the true costs of the endeavor, lying even to themselves. The government also hugely underestimated the cost. Still, the railroad was worth it.
Another massive infrastructure project totally worth doing was the Panama Canal, and once again, capitalism was not up to the job. Government had to pony up and guide the entire effort, with capitalistic businesses serving as mere contractors. Somehow no land transport link has ever connected North and South America, a failure of political systems as well as capitalism. Today, would it be worthwhile to put a railroad tunnel under the Bering Strait? Yes, with a few caveats. But it's not happening, neither capitalism nor democratic government is up to the task.
Space exploration is another area that capitalism has, so far, been unable to do. The idea of a corporation, perhaps Apple or Microsoft or Exxon, ever landing on the moon or sending a probe to another planet, is improbable despite their wealth and size. A few corporations such as Scaled Composites are trying, but so far none have had more than limited success.
And finally, doing something about a problem has been another weak point. What are we doing about Climate Change? Business has largely washed its hands of the matter. That's someone else's problem. Some businesses have even been crazy enough to run a propaganda campaign to deny that there is a problem.