The whole idea that dumb people are undeserving of life (so much so that we can point and laugh at the ones who perish) is so... fascist... that it scares me.
Except that someone who can use a laptop is not dump. Neither is someone who can drive a car. The guy who got himself killed by using a laptop while driving was not dump; he had intelligence, he simply didn't use it. It's not stupidity which got him killed, it was irresponsibility; in all likelihood he knew perfectly well that what he was doing was risky, but chose to do it anwyway. He didn't care about the risk he caused, for himself and others, and got killed. It's a miracle he didn't kill anyone else.
Looking at the solution, the question appears to be dividing a big integer by two. The big integer is represented as an arbitrary length string of base 10 digits in least significant digit first order (little endian).
But doesn't that kind of representation still have inherent limits on the size of the integer ? You can't, after all, have strings which exceed the size of the computer's memory space, at least not in C.
No, I was wrong: it prints eleven alert boxes, since the box is printed even on the iteration where the check p < 10 fails. I guess I'll never be a developer:(.
Altought I have to admit that the use of line-number BASIC brings back memories...
That's why you always leave the interface ugly as possible until the very end.
Which means that you use 30% more time per project than Joe Bullshit. Consequently, Joe gets promoted for his efficiency, while you'll get downsized for your lack of productivity. Oh, and Joe gets to maintain your clear, elegant code, reaping the benefits of your work ethics while you starve penniless on the streets.
I guess that's the real reason we get so many crap products...
As an example, in konsole when you have multiple tabs open switching between tabs is as easy as shift-(right or left arrow); in Gnome's terminal it is some esoteric 3-button key combo.
CTRL-(PageUpor PageDown), actually. Opening a new tab is the three-button combo (SHIFT-CTRL-T).
But, to stay on topic: I've personally found Linux From Scratch extremely helpful in updating and maintaining my RH9-based chimeiresque computer, but Gnome have pretty much given up in getting Gnome work properly; there is just too many interdependencies between it and various other packages. I wonder if I should try KDE at some point, or go with Enlightenment... then again, Ratpoison would give my poor mousearm a break:).
Stability is a pretty important thing. Look at Debian, for example.
Mind you, Debian isn't without some weird issues either. For example, VNCServer doesn't depend on any font packages, despite not being able to start without them, with the official explanation being that the user could be running a font server somewhere in their network.
So crank up the air conditioner and make the room cooler. Or just use Peltier elements to drain heat from the cold end of the generator. Coming to think of it, you could simply have a closed compartment, use Peltier elements to move heat from one side to the other, and run the generator - and power the Peltiers - from the resulting temperature gradient forever and ever.
I'm proud for the kid in the sense that he put his mind to work, but at the same time, no points for lacking discretion, and a good sense of responsibility. And I don't think he should get a free pass just because he is a kid. If he is smart enough to do what he did, I think its entirely reasonable to assume that he had the capacity to know what the effects may be.
Back when I was in school, around 20 as I recall, someone offered to send porn over email to askers. So, naturally, being a young man, I asked all 4GB of it. Unfortunately, the email box was only 20 MB, and there was no posssibility of running my own email server in my dorm room. So, I changed the settings in my email client to check the mailbox every ten seconds. Luckily, the other guy had more common sense, and didn't try it.
So, it is entirely possible that this kid never once thought of consequences of playing with his new toy. He is, after all, just 14; and 14 years old is a minor and under his parent's control precisely for the reason that he can't be trusted to use his common sense yet. Not that most majors can either, judging by the number of people who fail to understand that ice is indeed slippery this winter too so you can't drive on it like you can on dry asphalth at summer, but that's besides the point.
I think the Powerpuff Girls (yes, I'm man enough to admit I watched and liked the series) put it best: Just because you're a genius doesn't mean you're smart.
Hahahahahaha. Come on. Tell me another one! You're good. Hahahahaha. Unions are the most worthless devices on this earth. They serve to inflate the value of the unskilled and devalue those with extra skills. I will never take a job where I have to join a union. They're demeaning and only beneficial if you can't get work you want on your own merits, in which case, it's your problem.
I can't tell if you're being serious or if you simply read my second paragraph and are purposefully demonstrating every point of it true. In any case, assuming the first:
The purpose of the unions and collective bargaining is to even the ground. Any single employee is replacable, not matter how good he might be; but the employees as a whole aren't. All the employees as a whole have exactly as much power as all the employers as a whole, since both need each other to stay in business. This is a neccessary prerequisite for reaching a fair deal, rather than one side telling the other: "take it or starve".
As for your claim of collective bargaining devaluing the better-than-average (should that be median ?) developers, that is simply not true. After all, the bargain merely sets the minimum possible wage and other benefits; there is nothing stopping you from asking more. You won't likely get it, because you are unlikely to be so much better than average that getting you would warrant the extra expense, but you can always ask.
As for the incompetent, did you ever consider that perhaps there are so many of them in IT because competent people look at the cutthroat environment you seem to be promoting and say to themselves: "I don't need to put up with that shit." ? That perhaps IT is not so much drawing people in, but is rather the final destination of those who can't get a decent job ? Because frankly, with all the tales of abuse floating around in the Net, you'd have to be crazy to want to get into an IT career.
I have no idea why you think unions are demaning, since you didn't specify. Nor do I understand why you think you'd have to join one if you didn't want to. Are you perhaps confusing a private, voluntary organization of workers with state-mandated and force-backed communism ?
Maybe the government thinks you should exercise more so they regulate your TV time.
Hmmm... making all TV sets powered by threadmills would solve the obesity epidemic while lowering power consumptions significantly. They could even be marketed with a positive spin: "Never again miss an episode of American Idol due to a blackout!"
Seriously, threadmills with a wall-socket compatible power output might actually have a market niche. There are, after all, situations where getting electricity is literally the matter of life and death.
Here's an idea. Instead of the current typical 200amp service, everybody gets a 20amp service that is "always on", and a 200 amp service that's subject to rolling blackouts.
200 amps ? At 110 volts, that is 22000 Watts. My parent's house, which is rather large and located near the arctic circle and uses electricity for heating, makes do with 10000 Watt connection. So, I'd like to ask: just what the heck are you doing with that much power ? Nuclear research ?
I have never aged so rapidly as when I've been working for some of the more truly abusive bosses. Sadly, employment in America is "by will" and there's no meaningful support for IT employees.
The cure for all this is to unionize and negotiate contracts as a community rather than as individual replacable cogs in the machine.
Unfortunately, nearly everyone thinks that they're better than average, and can thus get better pay than average (which is a false conclusion, even if the premise were true), and will consequently not support any such effort, especially since their "lazy coworkers" would also benefit from it.
That's called the First sale doctrine. I have every right to sale someone else a book I bought and paid for, even after I read it, but I have no right to copy that book and sale the copy but keep the one I bought.
The copyright law forbids it. Can you show a moral principle which forbids it ? Because if there's none, then the copyright law is wrong.
That's called Work for Hire. If I work for an auto manufacture I get paid for the work I do making cars, but I don't have the right to be paid every tyme a car is sold to someone else.
Actually, the exact same is true even if you build the car - or house, or whatever - independently by yourself. You still have no say what happens to it after it is sold.
Now if working for myself I create the next killer app, while I don't have the right to expect to be paid every tyme someone transfers ownership of the app to someone else, I do have the right to expect them to delete the app from their own computer and to hand over or destroy any backups of it they made of it.
I disagree. You don't have any such right. You have no right whatsoever to force me to destroy data from my computer. Any law which attempts to give you such power should be abolished, since it grievously violates my right to do as I wish with my own property.
Again, if you disagree, show why I should have any obligation to obey you. And no, "I can make more money that way" is not a sufficient reason.
Kind of like a cell phone hey? You can get one that makes calls really well, or one that makes calls and takes pictures, both poorly.
I see your camera phone and raise you an "intelligent" phone with a Java-based GUI which you need to operate with number buttons, has a half-second lag between action and response, tends to crash randomly and silently (usually when you're waiting for an important call), but to compensate for this has sufficient functionality to be potentially infected by a virus. Oh, and of course it is vendor-locked.
Prostitution is a funny case. Often, the "seller" is in a position of peculiar weakness compared to the "buyer" and "broker" (pimp). If buying and broking is illegal but selling isn't, then the prostitute has immunity from prosecution, giving him/her a great deal of negotiating power they wouldn't normally have.
In third world shitholes with little or no social security, either due to overall poverty of society or rampant free market fundamentalism, that might be true. Thankfully, none of the Nordic countries are counted amongst these shitholes, so a prostitute who refuses the terms of the seller is not going to face starvation.
Besides, this page lists 54 prostitutes in Stocholm alone in a completely public list, so I find it a bit hard to believe that it is actually illegal in Sweden.
Finally, the normal and time-tested way of getting better rates and working conditions is trough a trade union, the forming of which of course requires that the trade is completely legal with no shades of gray whatever. Consequently, such laws might actually end up weakening the position of prostitutes - which, of course, might be their actual purpose. I certainly wouldn't put harming people "for their own good" beneath a politician on a moral crusade.
Whilst the industry's practises unsettle me, if I want to charge money for my work that's my perogative as a producer.
Only because the copyright law states so. Which is insufficient (circular, actually) argument to support copyright law saying so.
Or, to put it another way: you have a right to ask for money for your work. Why would anyone else be obliged to honor your wishes and not distribute it further after they have paid for and received your work ? What moral principle gives you any power over a work you produced after you have sold it, when no other producer - of, say, cars - have such power ?
The default position, after all, is that I can do as I please. On what grounds do you deny me this freedom in this context ?
Firefox development has been glacially slow. For example, in 6 years the CPU hogging and memory hogging bugs are still not fixed (although there has been considerable improvement).
Yes, there has been improvement. Nowadays Firefox usually crashes long before these bugs manifest. It especially seems to hate writing replies on Slashdot.
I've jumped boat twice before: from Netscape to IE when NS4 was simply horrible, and from IE to Mozilla when I switched to Linux for good (since Win98 was horrible, and the choices were Linux or Windows XP, which I had no reason to expect to be above usual Microsoft quality). I've since upgraded to Firefox; unfortunately it seems that I'll have to start seeking alternatives once again, since Firefox typically crashes multiple times per day, and I see no improvement forthcoming.
I think that the idea is to not have a standard library of ready made tree blocks to use over and over. What I do believe that they're getting at is "growing" trees based on the attributes that are put in.
Which is also not new. What is very impressive, however, is that they seem to have somehow managed to project a 100-dimensional tree-space (one for each attribute) into two-dimensional plane seen in the article in a navigable way.
Oh? Is your/usr/local/bin world writable? Or do you just always work as root?
You could, of course, use the 1337 h4x0r t3chn1qu3 of placing the executable file in your home directory or a subdirectory of it and running it from there.
People drive too fast all the time. I mean, who hasn't had a ticket for speeding?
I haven't, in 10 years of driving, gotten anything more than two parking tickets.
Besides, I haven't ever heard anyone arguing about speed limits besides a few obvious trolls who argued that they want to drive 160 km/h through downtown, which is simply impossible due to the curves of the road. The only arguments I've heard have been against some particular limit on a particular road or the default limits on cities or outside of them being too high or low.
So no, the majority of people are not against speed limits, AFAIK.
I was talking about a chip made from some hypothetical material which can withstand high temperatures and thus wouldn't need to be cooled. You would let it heat up as high as it goes and then let the heat run an electric generator to feed energy back into the batteries, thus reducing total drain. In fact, if the material can withstand high temperatures, it would make sense to put thermal insulation around it to get it as hot as possible, because this would increase the efficiency of the electricity generation.
Can I use the excess heat from my P4 to produce the energy for my p4?
In theory, yes; the chip is hotter than its environment, so you can put a heat engine between them and generate energy. The maximum theoretical efficiency of this process is given by Carnot cycle and depends on the heat difference between the processor and the environment and the temperature of the environment. With current processors you can't really exceed 60 degree Celsius, or 333 Kelvin, and the environment is typically at 20 degree Celsius, or 293 Kelvin, so the maximum theoretical efficiency is around 12%.
Of course, if you could find more durable materials, you could just insulate the processor, let it heat up to a thousand degree Celsius or so, and get nearly 77 percent efficiency. The hotter you run the processor, the more efficient the system becomes; a hypothetical plasma-state processor at 10,000K would give a theoretical efficiency of 97%.
It would also give a whole new meaning to "flamebait";).
I believe the GP was pointing out that he was just as careless with his information as were "the idiots who lost the discs".
The key word being "his", as opposed to "25 million peoples".
There is a certain difference between being careless in a way which will cause you trouble, and being careless in a way which will cause other people trouble.
You've left out a mechanism to make sure that the numbers which are called into the "central tallying" place are actually the numbers which were counted.
No. The seventh point ("Each and every tallying center publishes both the sum and the sub-sums it was calculated from") addresses just this. Simply check that the tallying center's published vote count for each candidate from the voting place you personally oversaw matches what was counted there, ask your friends who oversaw other voting places to confirm those place's vote counts, and them sum them up and check that the total matches. Then, if there's multiple levels of tallying centers (as there propably would be, in a national election), repeat the process until you reach the top.
Instead of central tallying place, why not let the various interested parties do the sums themselves (i.e., have their own tallying places)?
Since all the numbers are public - indeed, those interested parties can send their own observers to oversee the counting in the voting places and phoning home as soon as it's finished - there's nothing stopping any interested party from doing just that.
If there's a significant discrepancy between their counts, then they'll have to figure out where the discrepancy occurred & resolve the issue with the other parties.
Again, since the vote counting happens in plain sight of anyone who cares to watch, and all the subtotals - and of course the final totals - are public, as is the information which voting place or lower-level tallying center reported what numbers, and because the hardest math here is integer addition, it should be extremely simple to figure out where any such discrepancies originate.
The whole point here is that you don't have to trust anyone, but can observe and verify each step with your very own eyes. All inputs and outputs are public and their processing deterministic, so any corruption is immediately obvious. The only weakness I can think of is that you can't be in two voting places simultaneously due to them being in separate physical locations, so you can only keep one voting place under constant personal surveillance. But of course you can organize a group of friends to overcome this problem.
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Except that someone who can use a laptop is not dump. Neither is someone who can drive a car. The guy who got himself killed by using a laptop while driving was not dump; he had intelligence, he simply didn't use it. It's not stupidity which got him killed, it was irresponsibility; in all likelihood he knew perfectly well that what he was doing was risky, but chose to do it anwyway. He didn't care about the risk he caused, for himself and others, and got killed. It's a miracle he didn't kill anyone else.
But doesn't that kind of representation still have inherent limits on the size of the integer ? You can't, after all, have strings which exceed the size of the computer's memory space, at least not in C.
No, I was wrong: it prints eleven alert boxes, since the box is printed even on the iteration where the check p < 10 fails. I guess I'll never be a developer :(.
Altought I have to admit that the use of line-number BASIC brings back memories...
I haven't done Javascript, but if I understand this correctly, it prints 10 alert boxes with text "'cheater512 ruleZ'" on them. Am I correct ?
Which means that you use 30% more time per project than Joe Bullshit. Consequently, Joe gets promoted for his efficiency, while you'll get downsized for your lack of productivity. Oh, and Joe gets to maintain your clear, elegant code, reaping the benefits of your work ethics while you starve penniless on the streets.
I guess that's the real reason we get so many crap products...
CTRL-(PageUpor PageDown), actually. Opening a new tab is the three-button combo (SHIFT-CTRL-T).
But, to stay on topic: I've personally found Linux From Scratch extremely helpful in updating and maintaining my RH9-based chimeiresque computer, but Gnome have pretty much given up in getting Gnome work properly; there is just too many interdependencies between it and various other packages. I wonder if I should try KDE at some point, or go with Enlightenment... then again, Ratpoison would give my poor mousearm a break :).
Mind you, Debian isn't without some weird issues either. For example, VNCServer doesn't depend on any font packages, despite not being able to start without them, with the official explanation being that the user could be running a font server somewhere in their network.
So crank up the air conditioner and make the room cooler. Or just use Peltier elements to drain heat from the cold end of the generator. Coming to think of it, you could simply have a closed compartment, use Peltier elements to move heat from one side to the other, and run the generator - and power the Peltiers - from the resulting temperature gradient forever and ever.
Back when I was in school, around 20 as I recall, someone offered to send porn over email to askers. So, naturally, being a young man, I asked all 4GB of it. Unfortunately, the email box was only 20 MB, and there was no posssibility of running my own email server in my dorm room. So, I changed the settings in my email client to check the mailbox every ten seconds. Luckily, the other guy had more common sense, and didn't try it.
So, it is entirely possible that this kid never once thought of consequences of playing with his new toy. He is, after all, just 14; and 14 years old is a minor and under his parent's control precisely for the reason that he can't be trusted to use his common sense yet. Not that most majors can either, judging by the number of people who fail to understand that ice is indeed slippery this winter too so you can't drive on it like you can on dry asphalth at summer, but that's besides the point.
I think the Powerpuff Girls (yes, I'm man enough to admit I watched and liked the series) put it best: Just because you're a genius doesn't mean you're smart.
I can't tell if you're being serious or if you simply read my second paragraph and are purposefully demonstrating every point of it true. In any case, assuming the first:
The purpose of the unions and collective bargaining is to even the ground. Any single employee is replacable, not matter how good he might be; but the employees as a whole aren't. All the employees as a whole have exactly as much power as all the employers as a whole, since both need each other to stay in business. This is a neccessary prerequisite for reaching a fair deal, rather than one side telling the other: "take it or starve".
As for your claim of collective bargaining devaluing the better-than-average (should that be median ?) developers, that is simply not true. After all, the bargain merely sets the minimum possible wage and other benefits; there is nothing stopping you from asking more. You won't likely get it, because you are unlikely to be so much better than average that getting you would warrant the extra expense, but you can always ask.
As for the incompetent, did you ever consider that perhaps there are so many of them in IT because competent people look at the cutthroat environment you seem to be promoting and say to themselves: "I don't need to put up with that shit." ? That perhaps IT is not so much drawing people in, but is rather the final destination of those who can't get a decent job ? Because frankly, with all the tales of abuse floating around in the Net, you'd have to be crazy to want to get into an IT career.
I have no idea why you think unions are demaning, since you didn't specify. Nor do I understand why you think you'd have to join one if you didn't want to. Are you perhaps confusing a private, voluntary organization of workers with state-mandated and force-backed communism ?
Hmmm... making all TV sets powered by threadmills would solve the obesity epidemic while lowering power consumptions significantly. They could even be marketed with a positive spin: "Never again miss an episode of American Idol due to a blackout!"
Seriously, threadmills with a wall-socket compatible power output might actually have a market niche. There are, after all, situations where getting electricity is literally the matter of life and death.
200 amps ? At 110 volts, that is 22000 Watts. My parent's house, which is rather large and located near the arctic circle and uses electricity for heating, makes do with 10000 Watt connection. So, I'd like to ask: just what the heck are you doing with that much power ? Nuclear research ?
The cure for all this is to unionize and negotiate contracts as a community rather than as individual replacable cogs in the machine.
Unfortunately, nearly everyone thinks that they're better than average, and can thus get better pay than average (which is a false conclusion, even if the premise were true), and will consequently not support any such effort, especially since their "lazy coworkers" would also benefit from it.
The copyright law forbids it. Can you show a moral principle which forbids it ? Because if there's none, then the copyright law is wrong.
Actually, the exact same is true even if you build the car - or house, or whatever - independently by yourself. You still have no say what happens to it after it is sold.
I disagree. You don't have any such right. You have no right whatsoever to force me to destroy data from my computer. Any law which attempts to give you such power should be abolished, since it grievously violates my right to do as I wish with my own property.
Again, if you disagree, show why I should have any obligation to obey you. And no, "I can make more money that way" is not a sufficient reason.
I see your camera phone and raise you an "intelligent" phone with a Java-based GUI which you need to operate with number buttons, has a half-second lag between action and response, tends to crash randomly and silently (usually when you're waiting for an important call), but to compensate for this has sufficient functionality to be potentially infected by a virus. Oh, and of course it is vendor-locked.
In third world shitholes with little or no social security, either due to overall poverty of society or rampant free market fundamentalism, that might be true. Thankfully, none of the Nordic countries are counted amongst these shitholes, so a prostitute who refuses the terms of the seller is not going to face starvation.
Besides, this page lists 54 prostitutes in Stocholm alone in a completely public list, so I find it a bit hard to believe that it is actually illegal in Sweden.
Finally, the normal and time-tested way of getting better rates and working conditions is trough a trade union, the forming of which of course requires that the trade is completely legal with no shades of gray whatever. Consequently, such laws might actually end up weakening the position of prostitutes - which, of course, might be their actual purpose. I certainly wouldn't put harming people "for their own good" beneath a politician on a moral crusade.
Only because the copyright law states so. Which is insufficient (circular, actually) argument to support copyright law saying so.
Or, to put it another way: you have a right to ask for money for your work. Why would anyone else be obliged to honor your wishes and not distribute it further after they have paid for and received your work ? What moral principle gives you any power over a work you produced after you have sold it, when no other producer - of, say, cars - have such power ?
The default position, after all, is that I can do as I please. On what grounds do you deny me this freedom in this context ?
Yes, there has been improvement. Nowadays Firefox usually crashes long before these bugs manifest. It especially seems to hate writing replies on Slashdot.
I've jumped boat twice before: from Netscape to IE when NS4 was simply horrible, and from IE to Mozilla when I switched to Linux for good (since Win98 was horrible, and the choices were Linux or Windows XP, which I had no reason to expect to be above usual Microsoft quality). I've since upgraded to Firefox; unfortunately it seems that I'll have to start seeking alternatives once again, since Firefox typically crashes multiple times per day, and I see no improvement forthcoming.
Which is also not new. What is very impressive, however, is that they seem to have somehow managed to project a 100-dimensional tree-space (one for each attribute) into two-dimensional plane seen in the article in a navigable way.
You could, of course, use the 1337 h4x0r t3chn1qu3 of placing the executable file in your home directory or a subdirectory of it and running it from there.
I haven't, in 10 years of driving, gotten anything more than two parking tickets.
Besides, I haven't ever heard anyone arguing about speed limits besides a few obvious trolls who argued that they want to drive 160 km/h through downtown, which is simply impossible due to the curves of the road. The only arguments I've heard have been against some particular limit on a particular road or the default limits on cities or outside of them being too high or low.
So no, the majority of people are not against speed limits, AFAIK.
I was talking about a chip made from some hypothetical material which can withstand high temperatures and thus wouldn't need to be cooled. You would let it heat up as high as it goes and then let the heat run an electric generator to feed energy back into the batteries, thus reducing total drain. In fact, if the material can withstand high temperatures, it would make sense to put thermal insulation around it to get it as hot as possible, because this would increase the efficiency of the electricity generation.
In theory, yes; the chip is hotter than its environment, so you can put a heat engine between them and generate energy. The maximum theoretical efficiency of this process is given by Carnot cycle and depends on the heat difference between the processor and the environment and the temperature of the environment. With current processors you can't really exceed 60 degree Celsius, or 333 Kelvin, and the environment is typically at 20 degree Celsius, or 293 Kelvin, so the maximum theoretical efficiency is around 12%.
Of course, if you could find more durable materials, you could just insulate the processor, let it heat up to a thousand degree Celsius or so, and get nearly 77 percent efficiency. The hotter you run the processor, the more efficient the system becomes; a hypothetical plasma-state processor at 10,000K would give a theoretical efficiency of 97%.
It would also give a whole new meaning to "flamebait" ;).
The key word being "his", as opposed to "25 million peoples".
There is a certain difference between being careless in a way which will cause you trouble, and being careless in a way which will cause other people trouble.
No. The seventh point ("Each and every tallying center publishes both the sum and the sub-sums it was calculated from") addresses just this. Simply check that the tallying center's published vote count for each candidate from the voting place you personally oversaw matches what was counted there, ask your friends who oversaw other voting places to confirm those place's vote counts, and them sum them up and check that the total matches. Then, if there's multiple levels of tallying centers (as there propably would be, in a national election), repeat the process until you reach the top.
Since all the numbers are public - indeed, those interested parties can send their own observers to oversee the counting in the voting places and phoning home as soon as it's finished - there's nothing stopping any interested party from doing just that.
Again, since the vote counting happens in plain sight of anyone who cares to watch, and all the subtotals - and of course the final totals - are public, as is the information which voting place or lower-level tallying center reported what numbers, and because the hardest math here is integer addition, it should be extremely simple to figure out where any such discrepancies originate.
The whole point here is that you don't have to trust anyone, but can observe and verify each step with your very own eyes. All inputs and outputs are public and their processing deterministic, so any corruption is immediately obvious. The only weakness I can think of is that you can't be in two voting places simultaneously due to them being in separate physical locations, so you can only keep one voting place under constant personal surveillance. But of course you can organize a group of friends to overcome this problem.