"For starters, the accuracy of some historical claims is questionable: it is not clear that Vinland of Viking sagas refers to modern-day Newfoundland, or even that there really were grapes, for instance."
Which is completely bogus, and disregards all archeological evidence.
Well, the Balkans certainly proved how much we are in the need of a common army. Yes, it is a major failure of Europe, but... the EU has only the past few years started to build a command structure and prepare itself for leading military operations. During the Balkan wars, no such structure existed, and thus we had to call Uncle Sam for help.
Today, the EU is getting close to be able to handle the Balkans. When the EU battle groups are fully operational, I am confident that the Union would be able to handle a situation like it. There is still a long way to go though, however, the EU-led operations so far have turned into big successes. Operation Artemis is a prime example of this.
"2 countries: France and the Netherlands. And more countries would if they would have been allowed to vote actually. But this has nothing to do with a rejection of the European ideas, but more with the fact that the EU "constitution" was concievend in a very undemocratic way and most concerns from citizens were ignored."
Not entirely true. The convention did a good job of keeping the citizens in the loop. However, it was not a constitution, but a constitutional treaty that was too detailed (if you read it you quickly realise how stupid it was to have referendums about it).
The thing that I find a bit odd is that national referendums were allowed. If a referendum should have happened, it should have been a common referendum in all of Europe, since the question was about our common future, and not about the Dutch or the French.
The EU led military operations so far have been very successful, e.g. op artemis. Bureaucratic issues stem from how legislation is implemented, the lawmakers do not regulate how the army works (except on a high level). Thus the army is largely free from the bureaucracy that can encumber civilian authorities.
Firstly, there is a thing called a "European". I identify myself as European only.
I agree, that the EU is undemocratic, and that stems solely from the fact that it is still an organisation of states, and not a federation. Anti-federalists are anti-democratic by nature. The ONLY solution is to build a United States of Europe.
This is not entirely correct. For example, intelligent people seem to prefer other intelligent people, it does not really matter whether the partner is beautiful or rich (as long as the partner is not horribly ugly).
So, intelligent people breath more intelligent people and beautiful people breath more people with that feat. In the end, we know who really controls our future, and it is not the rich and beautiful.
Sorry, but nazis are banned, it does not matter whether you are a real nazi or a grammar / spelling nazi, the law is blind you know. I have just called Europol to report your transgressions, have a nice day!!!
"The "why go on?" issue is a classic atheist dilemma."
Ehhh... and how is that a dilemma?
Self-preservation is a central instinct, in-fact, few species would survive without it (this should be hard to deny). Making a purpose for your existence might also improve your survival chances when things start going tough.
Why do you need to even hypothesize about a creator? Why do things need a purpose? Do a rock need a purpose to sink in water? It is a rather unfounded assumption that there must be a purpose for the world, or even for your existence. Just because humans that have seen a higher purpose have kept on fighting and survived in greater extent than those that have not does not mean that there is a higher purpose, just that you want to see a higher purpose.
Even I, an atheist want to have a purpose with my existence, and I have chosen that that purpose should be to improve mankind and make the world a better place. That is why I went into engineering, and especially engineering with stuff that we send into space.
And, yes we can laugh at the universe, and do whatever we damn well please as you said, however there is a very primitive sense of moral and ethics that is hardcoded in our brains, which makes us feel bad if we break these rules, that does not prevent you from doing this if you force yourself to ignore these feelings. So, yes we can, but we do not want to...
"the probability that aliens would look like us at all is quite low--unless you posit a common seed/creator"
Um, like for example bats and birds?.
There is a concept called parallel evolution. Species does not need to be related to develop similar features, they just need to be exposed to similar conditions. It is very unlikely that an alien would have EXACTLY the same appearance as a human. However, I would say that it is in-fact very likely that a number of space faring species would be bipedal, walk upright, have fingers (hard to develop a civilisation without them), and have the ability to speak (though not necessarily in a way that humans can pronounce, also difficult to develop a civilisation without complex languages).
I deny the existence of God, and this does not need to be un-scientific.
If the universe was created by some sentient being (I do not deny the possibility of this), then sure, some may call that God, I would just say that it is an alien life-form with great powers, not worth anything more than any other sentient being.
Now, giving you a Star Trek analogy, the being Q could easily be seen as God. But he is not God, even if he is omnipotent. He is a sentient being just like you and me.
I do agree that that might not have been a very good example. The point here was that even a single change of operators _can_ have drastic consequences.
Yes, a decent compiler will do that transformation if one use some optimisation level. But... are you aware that in some fields, you are not allowed to enable optimisations on the code?
Do not take the examples as production quality code, they are there to illustrate low-level behaviour that is easier to grasp if you have a background with C (or other low level language).
It is not only about squeezing out every cycle, it is more about you understanding how a computer works.
A few simple example (simple usually means that the compiler will correct your misstakes, but I rather not get into to many details):
unsigned int a;... a = a / 2;// NO NO NO..., this is equivalient to a >> 1 in many cases over 20 times faster
The next block dels with row major ordering, the code risks running several __thousands__ of times slower than foo[i][j] = bar() due to cache and MMU misses You don't know about these concepts, to bad... you just screwed up your app by not placing the indices right
for (i = 0 ; i N; i ++ ) {
for (j = 0 ; i N; j ++ ) {
foo[j][i] = bar();
} }
The same things can be said about Java, Ruby and other high-level langs. Without the fundamentals you can really completely fuck up a system (I have seen enough of that, and I am not that old), by not thinking.
Just recently, I spent some time to debug a numerical algoritm that I had written. It was crashing occasionally (but not when the debugger was attached). This turned out to be due to rounding effects of floating point numbers. Basically I had something like: acos(f(a)/g(b)), when single stepping through the code I changed the behaviour of the code. This was due to how doubles are handled on x86es. Without the debugger rounding errors and internally 80-bit doubles dictated that I called acos(1.0000000001) (that is of course completely bogus), when the debugger was attached the system constantly flushed the FP-unit and the call was acos(1.0) instead.
Interesting enough, this app ran on top of the.net CLR (that didn't save me). Would a person who started with Ruby or C# and stayed with high level languages have figured out the error, maybe, but very likely not.
Here is a nice example from Java and C.
let farr be a sorted float array of size N
for (i = 0 ; i N ; i ++) {
sum += farr[i]; }
Now, if N is sufficiently large and farr is sorted in descending order, it is very likely that the sum will be wrong, and that it will be more correct if it is sorted in ascending order.
Now, you don't get why? Maybe a little understanding of the basics would be a good thing in that case, and then suddenly you feel how useful it was to learn how the computer works in the beginning, and C is an excellent tool to help you with this.
I work a lot with embedded hard real time system, I have worked with full system simulation as well. Assembly is indeed very useful, especially when you try to figure out why the system is crashing only to in the end uncover code generation bugs in the customised version of gcc that was used to compile the embedded software.
In any field you tend to learn the basics first and then move in to more abstract levels. Any programmer should grasp the physics of a transistor, how a CMOS circuit works, what gates and RTL level descriptions are used for.
This does not necessarily mean that you should be an expert on these things.
As you said if you know C, you understand how much time you can save with a higher level language. You should also understand when C is the right tool to use (and assembly as well), and when Ruby is.
When I write a quick hack to test an algorithm I use Python, when I write code that MUST be fast and every cycle counts, in that case I would use C. C have some nice properties such as that you can actually look on the code and see what the asm output will be (if compiled with -O0).
first language
on
Beginning Ruby
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
As a first programming language, if you are serious about programming, learn C or some Assembler, this will make you understand how a computer actually works and think before you write sucky code.
I know Assembler, C, Obj-C, C++, Haskell, Bash, Java, Python, Matlab (or whatever that language is called) plus a few proprietary languages and toy/educational languages.
Although, while I didn't start with C or Assembler (I started with C++ and felt it was a big piece of shit, though now days I find it quite useful; it is very abstracted though), this is certainly what I recommend for a person who is serious about programming.
As a side note, it is interesting that at the school at which I took my MSc, they used Haskell as a first starting language, basically to tell everyone that "you don't know shit about programming" and bring the sufferers of the perfect programmer syndrome down to the ground. A very good thing indeed.
Learn C or Assembler, and then learn Ruby, that is the way to go.
I just had a video conference with my mother over Skype. She use Windows and I am using a Mac. That is, your post is wrong in that it is only for windows.
However, the Mac implementation is rather buggy and one have to restart Skype occasionally when the video stops working, but it is working more or less. Despite this, it is actually the only realistic alternative to cross platform video conferencing at the moment.
Assuming that the earsets function like the standard swedish active ear protection system, they will dampen out gunfire (so that it is not loud, you will still hear it), it will also be possible to amplify normal sound, these things make your ears better, a lot better, you can hear a lot of stuff that you otherwise would not.
There will naturally be a few issues with the first version of these systems, but all in all, depending on what you do as a soldier it will be very useful. I can see why a marine would not like it. But I am sure that there are a number of SF-personell that would love the system.
I have served in the Swedish army, and what you say is not related to the position that I was in, e.g. a lot of night operations in small teams. While there are a lot of situations where the land warrior is virtually useless, there is a ton of them that are extremely useful.
I would take the situational awareness factor from the land-warrior system over better body armour and a more reliable rifle. Firstly, our rifles are already reliable, and secondly the plates in the body armour stops armour breaking rounds. The SA bonus from the land warrior system would be an extremely valuable asset.
From your comment I doubt that you have ever served in any armed force unit.
Only, that all documentation and comments are written in English anyway. This is done to simplify moving code and software between different parties involved in some project (this is especially true in Europe, where there is a lot of IP exchange between different states that have different official languages).
Most indo-european languages are sufficiently similar to English to make Dvorak a lot better than qwerty.
Going back, to the original discussion. Using Dvorak on a UNIX based system is a real pain, L is above S and at the right pinky position, this is the reason that I am not using Dvorak.
If one want a good layout, go for the Kinesis or Maltron keyboard and get the Arensito layout that is optimised for English and code.
Not only that, the credit card must also have a billing address in the same state as it is issued, something I found out the hard way when I moved to the Netherlands from Sweden. iTunes is in both states, but I was not allowed to shop from any of them.
I could not purchase music in the Dutch store as my credit card was issued in Sweden and I could not purchase music from the Swedish store as the billing address had been changed to be in the Netherlands.
So, in the end I decided to download the music with bit-torrent. I still buy a lot of CDs, but when the music is difficult to find in a store near-by, I go to bit-torrent.
So, if anyone in the music industry is reading this. I do want to pay for the music, but when you start fiddeling with trying to block trade over the state borders within the EU, I as a European (and I am more and more identifying me as only European and not Swedish), get rather pissed, and blimey, you just lost a lot of profit.
I did complain about my situation to Union authorities, glad to see that they are finally doing something about it! In the new Europe, the music industry have to rethink, a lot of industries have to rethink actually. It is also a good thing that the Union is doing something that is obviously good for it's citizens in a directly observable way (this is not the only thing, I can think of the EUs recent fighting with the mobile phone carriers about the ridiculous high roaming charges).
As my lawyer sister would say: "that depends!" For example, if I would leave a gun out where everyone can find it, yes. If I am out hunting and leaves the gun unmonitored, then yes (and you should be, only idiots leave their guns unmonitored). If it is stolen in my home, and it is properly stored, then NO.
However, I do not think that anyone would bother trying to convict any one for negligence in the case that your computer leaked out information (in a situation like this).
I believe that watermarking is a sound compromise, though it would be useless if they did not tell you about it. And, so far we do not know if there would be any watermarking.
If someone steals a gun, registered in my name and shoots someone, I would expect that the police looked me up. That does not mean that I would be convicted for murder.
In the case that your computer is stolen, you can easily prove that. If you were hacked, then you can probably prove that as well as there would most likely be residuals of this on your computer.
"Multiple beings are a possibility as well. Although that introduces greater complexity yet and is therefore even less likely."
Not really, assuming that the hypothetical creator have evolved from single celled life, it is easy to hypothesise that the creation was instansiated by a team of extra dimensional scientists and engineers. Having a multiple of beings working together thus makes the hypothesis more plausable.
In Sweden we voted about changing to driving on the right in 1955. The results were 82.9% against. The parliament still forced us to switch sides in 1963.
I am working with embedded code and hardware simulators (fancy emulators), and in many occations I've had the need to enter opcodes in binary (actually hex, but close enough). When developing simulators you kind of fall down to hand assemled code when doing the initial testing.
Just recently I was more or less forced to patch individual instructions in an already compiled program for an embedded target (don't we just love compiler bugs). I opened the elf-file in an hexeditor and then manually changing an offending instructions to nop-instructions in this case.
The bad thing is that I recognise several instructions for this target by just looking on the hex-representation.
IIRC TextEdit in Leopard will have ODF support, so the chanse is pretty great that iWork will support it (at least for loading and exporting), maybe not as a native format.
Slashdot Mirror
You are making a point...
"For starters, the accuracy of some historical claims is questionable: it is not clear that Vinland of Viking sagas refers to modern-day Newfoundland, or even that there really were grapes, for instance."
Which is completely bogus, and disregards all archeological evidence.
Well, the Balkans certainly proved how much we are in the need of a common army. Yes, it is a major failure of Europe, but... the EU has only the past few years started to build a command structure and prepare itself for leading military operations. During the Balkan wars, no such structure existed, and thus we had to call Uncle Sam for help.
Today, the EU is getting close to be able to handle the Balkans. When the EU battle groups are fully operational, I am confident that the Union would be able to handle a situation like it. There is still a long way to go though, however, the EU-led operations so far have turned into big successes. Operation Artemis is a prime example of this.
"2 countries: France and the Netherlands. And more countries would if they would have been allowed to vote actually.
But this has nothing to do with a rejection of the European ideas, but more with the fact that the EU "constitution" was concievend in a very undemocratic way and most concerns from citizens were ignored."
Not entirely true. The convention did a good job of keeping the citizens in the loop. However, it was not a constitution, but a constitutional treaty that was too detailed (if you read it you quickly realise how stupid it was to have referendums about it).
The thing that I find a bit odd is that national referendums were allowed. If a referendum should have happened, it should have been a common referendum in all of Europe, since the question was about our common future, and not about the Dutch or the French.
The EU led military operations so far have been very successful, e.g. op artemis. Bureaucratic issues stem from how legislation is implemented, the lawmakers do not regulate how the army works (except on a high level). Thus the army is largely free from the bureaucracy that can encumber civilian authorities.
Firstly, there is a thing called a "European". I identify myself as European only.
I agree, that the EU is undemocratic, and that stems solely from the fact that it is still an organisation of states, and not a federation. Anti-federalists are anti-democratic by nature. The ONLY solution is to build a United States of Europe.
BTW, Happy Europe Day in advance!
This is not entirely correct. For example, intelligent people seem to prefer other intelligent people, it does not really matter whether the partner is beautiful or rich (as long as the partner is not horribly ugly).
So, intelligent people breath more intelligent people and beautiful people breath more people with that feat. In the end, we know who really controls our future, and it is not the rich and beautiful.
Sorry, but nazis are banned, it does not matter whether you are a real nazi or a grammar / spelling nazi, the law is blind you know. I have just called Europol to report your transgressions, have a nice day!!!
"The "why go on?" issue is a classic atheist dilemma."
Ehhh... and how is that a dilemma?
Self-preservation is a central instinct, in-fact, few species would survive without it (this should be hard to deny). Making a purpose for your existence might also improve your survival chances when things start going tough.
Why do you need to even hypothesize about a creator? Why do things need a purpose? Do a rock need a purpose to sink in water? It is a rather unfounded assumption that there must be a purpose for the world, or even for your existence. Just because humans that have seen a higher purpose have kept on fighting and survived in greater extent than those that have not does not mean that there is a higher purpose, just that you want to see a higher purpose.
Even I, an atheist want to have a purpose with my existence, and I have chosen that that purpose should be to improve mankind and make the world a better place. That is why I went into engineering, and especially engineering with stuff that we send into space.
And, yes we can laugh at the universe, and do whatever we damn well please as you said, however there is a very primitive sense of moral and ethics that is hardcoded in our brains, which makes us feel bad if we break these rules, that does not prevent you from doing this if you force yourself to ignore these feelings. So, yes we can, but we do not want to...
"the probability that aliens would look like us at all is quite low--unless you posit a common seed/creator"
Um, like for example bats and birds?.
There is a concept called parallel evolution. Species does not need to be related to develop similar features, they just need to be exposed to similar conditions. It is very unlikely that an alien would have EXACTLY the same appearance as a human. However, I would say that it is in-fact very likely that a number of space faring species would be bipedal, walk upright, have fingers (hard to develop a civilisation without them), and have the ability to speak (though not necessarily in a way that humans can pronounce, also difficult to develop a civilisation without complex languages).
I deny the existence of God, and this does not need to be un-scientific.
If the universe was created by some sentient being (I do not deny the possibility of this), then sure, some may call that God, I would just say that it is an alien life-form with great powers, not worth anything more than any other sentient being.
Now, giving you a Star Trek analogy, the being Q could easily be seen as God. But he is not God, even if he is omnipotent. He is a sentient being just like you and me.
I do agree that that might not have been a very good example. The point here was that even a single change of operators _can_ have drastic consequences.
Yes, a decent compiler will do that transformation if one use some optimisation level. But... are you aware that in some fields, you are not allowed to enable optimisations on the code?
Do not take the examples as production quality code, they are there to illustrate low-level behaviour that is easier to grasp if you have a background with C (or other low level language).
It is not only about squeezing out every cycle, it is more about you understanding how a computer works.
... // NO NO NO..., this is equivalient to a >> 1 in many cases over 20 times faster
.net CLR (that didn't save me). Would a person who started with Ruby or C# and stayed with high level languages have figured out the error, maybe, but very likely not.
A few simple example (simple usually means that the compiler will correct your misstakes, but I rather not get into to many details):
unsigned int a;
a = a / 2;
The next block dels with row major ordering, the code risks running several __thousands__ of times slower than foo[i][j] = bar() due to cache and MMU misses You don't know about these concepts, to bad... you just screwed up your app by not placing the indices right
for (i = 0 ; i N; i ++ ) {
for (j = 0 ; i N; j ++ ) {
foo[j][i] = bar();
}
}
The same things can be said about Java, Ruby and other high-level langs. Without the fundamentals you can really completely fuck up a system (I have seen enough of that, and I am not that old), by not thinking.
Just recently, I spent some time to debug a numerical algoritm that I had written. It was crashing occasionally (but not when the debugger was attached). This turned out to be due to rounding effects of floating point numbers. Basically I had something like: acos(f(a)/g(b)), when single stepping through the code I changed the behaviour of the code. This was due to how doubles are handled on x86es. Without the debugger rounding errors and internally 80-bit doubles dictated that I called acos(1.0000000001) (that is of course completely bogus), when the debugger was attached the system constantly flushed the FP-unit and the call was acos(1.0) instead.
Interesting enough, this app ran on top of the
Here is a nice example from Java and C.
let farr be a sorted float array of size N
for (i = 0 ; i N ; i ++) {
sum += farr[i];
}
Now, if N is sufficiently large and farr is sorted in descending order, it is very likely that the sum will be wrong, and that it will be more correct if it is sorted in ascending order.
Now, you don't get why? Maybe a little understanding of the basics would be a good thing in that case, and then suddenly you feel how useful it was to learn how the computer works in the beginning, and C is an excellent tool to help you with this.
I work a lot with embedded hard real time system, I have worked with full system simulation as well. Assembly is indeed very useful, especially when you try to figure out why the system is crashing only to in the end uncover code generation bugs in the customised version of gcc that was used to compile the embedded software.
In any field you tend to learn the basics first and then move in to more abstract levels. Any programmer should grasp the physics of a transistor, how a CMOS circuit works, what gates and RTL level descriptions are used for.
This does not necessarily mean that you should be an expert on these things.
As you said if you know C, you understand how much time you can save with a higher level language. You should also understand when C is the right tool to use (and assembly as well), and when Ruby is.
When I write a quick hack to test an algorithm I use Python, when I write code that MUST be fast and every cycle counts, in that case I would use C. C have some nice properties such as that you can actually look on the code and see what the asm output will be (if compiled with -O0).
As a first programming language, if you are serious about programming, learn C or some Assembler, this will make you understand how a computer actually works and think before you write sucky code.
I know Assembler, C, Obj-C, C++, Haskell, Bash, Java, Python, Matlab (or whatever that language is called) plus a few proprietary languages and toy/educational languages.
Although, while I didn't start with C or Assembler (I started with C++ and felt it was a big piece of shit, though now days I find it quite useful; it is very abstracted though), this is certainly what I recommend for a person who is serious about programming.
As a side note, it is interesting that at the school at which I took my MSc, they used Haskell as a first starting language, basically to tell everyone that "you don't know shit about programming" and bring the sufferers of the perfect programmer syndrome down to the ground. A very good thing indeed.
Learn C or Assembler, and then learn Ruby, that is the way to go.
I just had a video conference with my mother over Skype. She use Windows and I am using a Mac. That is, your post is wrong in that it is only for windows.
However, the Mac implementation is rather buggy and one have to restart Skype occasionally when the video stops working, but it is working more or less. Despite this, it is actually the only realistic alternative to cross platform video conferencing at the moment.
Assuming that the earsets function like the standard swedish active ear protection system, they will dampen out gunfire (so that it is not loud, you will still hear it), it will also be possible to amplify normal sound, these things make your ears better, a lot better, you can hear a lot of stuff that you otherwise would not.
There will naturally be a few issues with the first version of these systems, but all in all, depending on what you do as a soldier it will be very useful. I can see why a marine would not like it. But I am sure that there are a number of SF-personell that would love the system.
I have served in the Swedish army, and what you say is not related to the position that I was in, e.g. a lot of night operations in small teams. While there are a lot of situations where the land warrior is virtually useless, there is a ton of them that are extremely useful.
I would take the situational awareness factor from the land-warrior system over better body armour and a more reliable rifle. Firstly, our rifles are already reliable, and secondly the plates in the body armour stops armour breaking rounds. The SA bonus from the land warrior system would be an extremely valuable asset.
From your comment I doubt that you have ever served in any armed force unit.
Only, that all documentation and comments are written in English anyway. This is done to simplify moving code and software between different parties involved in some project (this is especially true in Europe, where there is a lot of IP exchange between different states that have different official languages).
Most indo-european languages are sufficiently similar to English to make Dvorak a lot better than qwerty.
Going back, to the original discussion. Using Dvorak on a UNIX based system is a real pain, L is above S and at the right pinky position, this is the reason that I am not using Dvorak.
If one want a good layout, go for the Kinesis or Maltron keyboard and get the Arensito layout that is optimised for English and code.
Not only that, the credit card must also have a billing address in the same state as it is issued, something I found out the hard way when I moved to the Netherlands from Sweden. iTunes is in both states, but I was not allowed to shop from any of them.
I could not purchase music in the Dutch store as my credit card was issued in Sweden and I could not purchase music from the Swedish store as the billing address had been changed to be in the Netherlands.
So, in the end I decided to download the music with bit-torrent. I still buy a lot of CDs, but when the music is difficult to find in a store near-by, I go to bit-torrent.
So, if anyone in the music industry is reading this. I do want to pay for the music, but when you start fiddeling with trying to block trade over the state borders within the EU, I as a European (and I am more and more identifying me as only European and not Swedish), get rather pissed, and blimey, you just lost a lot of profit.
I did complain about my situation to Union authorities, glad to see that they are finally doing something about it! In the new Europe, the music industry have to rethink, a lot of industries have to rethink actually. It is also a good thing that the Union is doing something that is obviously good for it's citizens in a directly observable way (this is not the only thing, I can think of the EUs recent fighting with the mobile phone carriers about the ridiculous high roaming charges).
As my lawyer sister would say: "that depends!" For example, if I would leave a gun out where everyone can find it, yes. If I am out hunting and leaves the gun unmonitored, then yes (and you should be, only idiots leave their guns unmonitored). If it is stolen in my home, and it is properly stored, then NO.
However, I do not think that anyone would bother trying to convict any one for negligence in the case that your computer leaked out information (in a situation like this).
I believe that watermarking is a sound compromise, though it would be useless if they did not tell you about it. And, so far we do not know if there would be any watermarking.
And you would probably go clear if you fought it.
If someone steals a gun, registered in my name and shoots someone, I would expect that the police looked me up. That does not mean that I would be convicted for murder.
In the case that your computer is stolen, you can easily prove that. If you were hacked, then you can probably prove that as well as there would most likely be residuals of this on your computer.
"Multiple beings are a possibility as well. Although that introduces greater complexity yet and is therefore even less likely."
Not really, assuming that the hypothetical creator have evolved from single celled life, it is easy to hypothesise that the creation was instansiated by a team of extra dimensional scientists and engineers. Having a multiple of beings working together thus makes the hypothesis more plausable.
In Sweden we voted about changing to driving on the right in 1955. The results were 82.9% against. The parliament still forced us to switch sides in 1963.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_referendums
So, representative democracy might not be the perfect system for governing, but it is the best we have.
I am working with embedded code and hardware simulators (fancy emulators), and in many occations I've had the need to enter opcodes in binary (actually hex, but close enough). When developing simulators you kind of fall down to hand assemled code when doing the initial testing.
Just recently I was more or less forced to patch individual instructions in an already compiled program for an embedded target (don't we just love compiler bugs). I opened the elf-file in an hexeditor and then manually changing an offending instructions to nop-instructions in this case.
The bad thing is that I recognise several instructions for this target by just looking on the hex-representation.
IIRC TextEdit in Leopard will have ODF support, so the chanse is pretty great that iWork will support it (at least for loading and exporting), maybe not as a native format.