Because sometimes, recursion is more natural and easier than an iterative solution. For a very good example of this, write an implementation of a binary tree that uses no iteration.
The chances of your letter actually being read by your representative are very slim. I went to high school in Fairfax county, Virignia, which is very close to Washington, DC. My senior year, I was in a political science class, and second semester, we interned. I interned at the ACLU. Quite a few people in my class interned for Senators or Representatives.
My classmates were reading the mail, sending out form letters. I don't know what the criteria was for a letter actually getting passed on, but the chances of your letter actually being read by the person you sent it to are rather slim.
I'm a junior computer science major at Virgina Tech, and I have noticed this problem myself. I can not work in groups in school, but I will have to when I graduate.
A corrolary of this is that I only see my own code. I can't see classmate's code because that would be an honor code violationg. And I can't see my professor's solution to the problem because they don't want their code floating around, in case they ever do a similar assignment, or if another professor does a similar assignment.
In my math and physics classes, the most effective way to learn how to work out a problem is to see someone who knows what they're doing do a similar problem. There is nothing analagous in my CS classes.
In my physics class, it's encouraged for us to work in groups on the problem sets--it helps us understand it. When I went for help in my first physics class, the first thing my professor asked was if I was studying in a group.
In my programming intensive CS courses (most of them), we work in a void.
This is in direct opposition to the job experience I have had. I continually was asking questions in order to get a better feel for what I needed to be doing. For one of the bigger projects I worked on, it was an aside comment my boss made one time during lunch that prompted me to realize the best way of implementing the system. Real people do not work in a void.
You're seriously underestimating The Dispossessed. The level of symbolism in that book is amazing, and it gives a very interesting example of an anarchistic society, which is a rarity in any popular piece of literature.
I used Redhat simply because that's what was easily on hand. My main concerns, however, are not about the distrubution, but about simple things such as installing downloaded programs. On Windows, they just double-click setup.exe, and follow the prompts. If necessary, they double-click the zip file, unextract it, then double-click setup.exe.
All this changes when they have to unextract things from the command line (which is very intimidating to people who have not used it before), and then compile the source code.
Damn near forgot: I had to jump through some hoops so that I could change the desktop resolution and color depth. Not very intensive--editing some config files, running Xauthority (I think that was what I ran)--but more than they'd be able to, or want to do.
That, believe it or not, it too much for some people. More, though, I'm talking about installing and configuring programs that aren't installed with the system.
I'm thinking more along the lines of home users when I talk about people configuring their own system. That's what my friends would have to do, which is why I used them as an example. If you own the machine, you need to be able to do ruidementary maintenence and installations; they can't be calling their CS major friend every time they want to install a new program.
One of my friends has actually become quite profecient in Windows, to the point that he has everything set up exactly how he likes it, he has an organized system of where applications go, where music goes, where pictures go, where all the shortcuts go, he installs and uninstalls programs as he wants to, stuff like that. Figuring out / learning from me how to do these things was pretty straightforward in Windows (2000, after we got the vile beast known as 98 off his machine due to lots and lots of problems), but I'm not so sure how well he would have been able to do this in Linux.
I say this mainly because in order to know how to do something in a Unix based system, having a basic understanding of certain Unix concepts is a must. (That is, if you not only want to know how to do something, but also be able to apply that knowledge elsewhere.)
One thing I noticed when I installed Redhat on a machine (I'm a Linux newbie) was that it was very usable by anyone, provided someone else configured it.
Easily, my non-tech-savvy friends could get used to KDE and become comfortable in it, but I don't think they could set it up to be usable (nor do they care, and rightly so, they shouldn't have to). They could actually install easily--the Redhat install was exquisitley easy--but as far as installing programs, setting things up the way they like, etc., I don't think they could.
Then again, many people can't do the same with Windows (installing programs and configuring it to their liking).
It's a game alright. The battles require strategy. If you can't see that, I think you're being either elitist or difficult. And like I said, there is exploration involved.
Pick up Final Fantasy Tactics, now that it's a Greatest Hits title for the PS (ugly green bar on the side, but it's only $20). It's essentialy souped-up chess. (Actually don't pick it up yet; they fucked up and the current press doesn't work.)
Blah blah blah, "kids these days don't know what real games are."
In twenty years, someone will be saying the same thing about the games they grew up with. And that's the key, that's what you grew up with.
You're also looking for a much different experience than I am. You want simple puzzle-like games. Personally, I want to search over something the size of Siberia; I love console RPGs, and get a big kick out of exploring these digital worlds the game designers have created.
Before you preach about how games should be, stop to think that maybe what you want and what other people want from their games is entirely different.
Alright, I don't think Pong is "great" because to me, games that are "great" have something in them that emotionaly move me. I very much enjoy console RPGs, and although I enjoy many games from other genres, I have the most attachment to RPGs I've played. To me, for a game to be great, it has to be more than just fun.
You think Pong is great. I think it's just mindless fun.
Also, if you're ever in the position to compare Pong to Final Fantasy VI, you know you're doing something wrong. They're both videogames, but they're entirely different in design and intent. Nobody does this with movies (compare movies from different genres), I guess people just do it with games because it's a younger industry, and much more of a niche.
Well no shit you're not going to recognize the games if you don't play them anymore. If there was a "Top 50 Greatest Basketball Players of All Time" list, and you don't follow basketball, would you expect to recognize everyone on the list?
I'd also like to point out there is a big difference between the greatest games of all time, and the most influential games of all time. A list of the influential games will likely have the games you're listing.
For those of you who don't visit videogame sites with any regularity, you should probably know that these sites do an "Top $num Games" feature damn near every other week. So don't take this one to be the ultimate judgement of anything, if you think something is missing, it's probably because the few people who came up with it (surprise, surprise) have different tastes than you do.
I think you're really missing a crucial point: Java is proposed as their first language.
You're right, if they only knew Java, and never went on to learn other languages, they would be tripped up by those things you mentioned, but who only learns one language? You have to start on something, and by no means is it going to teach you everything.
In fact, one could argue that because they don't have to worry about things such as memory leaks and pointers in general (of course, once they do, they'll realize it's not that Java has no pointers, it's nothing but pointers--const pointers), it's a better teaching language. And that's key, it's being used to teach basic CS concepts, not the entire universe.
Kids from the "inner city" are less likely to have access to computers, and as far as technology is concerned, are more likely to be at a disadvantage than kids from the suburbs. A prime example of this would be that even the crappy schools in the county I live, Fairfax County, are much better off than most schools in nearby Washington, DC. (Which often start the school year late because the schools don't meet basic fire codes.)
It's relevant because kids from the inner city are more likely to be a monetary disadvantage than those in the middle class suburbs. Because of this, there will be more needed instruction. It's a pretty simple concept: the less one knows about something, they more one needs to be exposed to it to learn about it.
Heisenberg was saying absolutely nothing about the nature of matter, he was bitching about his lab equipment.
Heisenberg may have been stating it that way, but the ramifications have been such that it is something inherent in nature, not just the crudness of our instruments.
What they say in quantum mechanics is that we have a given particle that has a probability of being in any given point. This is the basic statement which scream statistical treatment.
And? That doesn't go against anything I said. The other person said systems of particles, and large systems of particles lends itself better to thermodynamics, although you can deal with systems in quantum mechanics. It is very normal to consider a single particle in quantum mechanics as well, which is what I said. What you said about probability is true, but it doesn't contradict anything I said.
Hawkings understands part of it, which is why if you read any of his papers, he is rabidly against the idea that there is anything random in the universe. He believes, but can't prove that the universe is "predestined".
From what I remember of A Brief History of Time, he repeats the idea that the uncertainty principle is something that is inherent in the universe.
Not quite, quantum theory in its simplest form is built on the idea that no matter how good our instruments, the more accurately we read the exact circumstances of an event, or small system, the more we alter it.
It's not just our measurements. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Priciple (which is what you're talking about) is a statement about the universe, not our ability to measure it. More and more, it is apparent that this uncertainty is not because our instruments are too crude, but that this uncertainty is inherent in nature. You can not measure well defined velocities and positions of particles on the quantum scale because they do not have well defined positions and velocities.
Einstein had a hard time with that notion--that we live in a non-deterministic world, that chance is built into the universe--but that is the case.
The real power of quantum physics is that it gives us the means of treating these systems statistically without having to look at them on an individual basis.
Systems of particles is really thermodynamics. In quantum mechanics, you can (and do) pay attention to a single particle.
Since you're obviously not going to read the article on your own, here are the parts that you're contradicting:
The programs have paid off. In 1994, the World Bank estimated that by 2000 Brazil would have 1.2 million H.I.V.-positive people. In fact it had half that many. The epidemic has stabilized, with some 20,000 new cases each year for the last three years. The treatment program has cut the AIDS death rate nationally by about 50 percent so far, and each AIDS patient is only a quarter as likely to be hospitalized as before.
So treating the disease helps stop the spread, not help the spread, like you want to believe. But wait, there's more...
Treating AIDS also fights other diseases. The incidence of tuberculosis in H.I.V.-positive patients has dropped by half. AIDS has also helped to mobilize people to fight for better health care. "In 1999, the Health Ministry had problems getting its budget passed for AIDS, TB and other diseases," says Pedro Chequer, Teixeira's predecessor as head of the AIDS program and now the Unaids director for the southern part of South America.
Let's see, this person has been to Brazil and talked to people in all levels of the treatment programs, and is a reporter for an internationally respected newspaper. Who to believe, who to believe.
But wait, you say, you don't care about all of this, you still don't want to be "held respsonsible" for other people's problems. Well hmmm...
Ah, but treating AIDS is too expensive! In fact, Brazil's program almost certainly pays for itself. It has halved the death rate from AIDS, prevented hundreds of thousands of new hospitalizations, cut the transmission rate, helped to stabilize the epidemic and improved the overall state of public health in Brazil.
when did the big bad drug companies make a drug that stops the spread of hiv/aids? last i herd they only made drugs that keep the infected helthy looking and alive longer so that they can spred hiv/aids to more people!
Read the freaking article before ranting, because you just said some very ignorant things.
The triad of drugs reduce the prevealence of the virus in the body. If you reduce how much of the virus there is in the patients body, not only does the person live longer and have a better quality of life, the virus is less likely to be passed on. It makes sense: The less of the virus there is, the less likely it is to be transmitted.
To reiterate, these drugs help slow the rate of infection, quite the opposite of what you're claiming.
so let the infected live(DIE) with their choices.
This disease could devastate the entire continent of Africa. It has gotten to the point that it's not about individual people but entire nations. This is an epidemic, like the bubonic plague, and it needs to be controlled.
Read the freaking article. Those in Brazil who take the drug follow the guidlines with the same success rate as those who do it in America.
And see, this article used sources and such to back up its claims. Might want to try that when you directly contradict an article that has been published by a major newspaper.
It seems funny to me that people sit arong and whine cause someone isnt sacrificing there life to
provide them with free drugs. I say shut up and make you own damn drug.
Make their own drugs? Some have tried, some have succeeded:
The drug industry's dominance over American trade policy on pharmaceuticals finally crashed over South Africa. In 1997, South Africa, which does respect pharmaceutical patents, amended its laws to allow compulsory licensing of essential medicines, including AIDS drugs. Pharmaceutical companies sued. The suit is still going on.
In case you didn't read the article, compulsory licensing is when a government takes over a patent, and makes the drug themselves, then sells it at a heavily discounted (i.e. affordable and reosonable) price.
Doing this will save lives, and save the governments money in the future, because it costs more money to let it go unchecked than it does to treat it.
But American drug companies don't like this because they lose profits. Well boohoo.
Few people are doing research for free.
Read the freaking article. The people who actually do the research aren't the ones that make the profit from the drug; some drug company gets a hold of the patent and profit off of something they never did research for. And often, the money that funded the research in the first place was federal money, i.e. our money. And keep in mind that...
The manufacturers generally spend twice as much on marketing and administration as they do on research and development.
We're talking about people's lives here. Wake up. Third world countries need to be able to stop AIDS from spreading, and this means treating those who are already infected. If this means that they have to violate patents that American drug companies hold, so freaking be it. Saving people's lives--and quite literaly, these nations--is much more important than some corporations keeping high profits.
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Because sometimes, recursion is more natural and easier than an iterative solution. For a very good example of this, write an implementation of a binary tree that uses no iteration.
The chances of your letter actually being read by your representative are very slim. I went to high school in Fairfax county, Virignia, which is very close to Washington, DC. My senior year, I was in a political science class, and second semester, we interned. I interned at the ACLU. Quite a few people in my class interned for Senators or Representatives.
My classmates were reading the mail, sending out form letters. I don't know what the criteria was for a letter actually getting passed on, but the chances of your letter actually being read by the person you sent it to are rather slim.
I'm a junior computer science major at Virgina Tech, and I have noticed this problem myself. I can not work in groups in school, but I will have to when I graduate.
A corrolary of this is that I only see my own code . I can't see classmate's code because that would be an honor code violationg. And I can't see my professor's solution to the problem because they don't want their code floating around, in case they ever do a similar assignment, or if another professor does a similar assignment.
In my math and physics classes, the most effective way to learn how to work out a problem is to see someone who knows what they're doing do a similar problem. There is nothing analagous in my CS classes.
In my physics class, it's encouraged for us to work in groups on the problem sets--it helps us understand it. When I went for help in my first physics class, the first thing my professor asked was if I was studying in a group.
In my programming intensive CS courses (most of them), we work in a void.
This is in direct opposition to the job experience I have had. I continually was asking questions in order to get a better feel for what I needed to be doing. For one of the bigger projects I worked on, it was an aside comment my boss made one time during lunch that prompted me to realize the best way of implementing the system. Real people do not work in a void.
But CS majors do.
You're seriously underestimating The Dispossessed. The level of symbolism in that book is amazing, and it gives a very interesting example of an anarchistic society, which is a rarity in any popular piece of literature.
All this changes when they have to unextract things from the command line (which is very intimidating to people who have not used it before), and then compile the source code.
Damn near forgot: I had to jump through some hoops so that I could change the desktop resolution and color depth. Not very intensive--editing some config files, running Xauthority (I think that was what I ran)--but more than they'd be able to, or want to do.
"Make? What the hell's that?"
One of my friends has actually become quite profecient in Windows, to the point that he has everything set up exactly how he likes it, he has an organized system of where applications go, where music goes, where pictures go, where all the shortcuts go, he installs and uninstalls programs as he wants to, stuff like that. Figuring out / learning from me how to do these things was pretty straightforward in Windows (2000, after we got the vile beast known as 98 off his machine due to lots and lots of problems), but I'm not so sure how well he would have been able to do this in Linux.
I say this mainly because in order to know how to do something in a Unix based system, having a basic understanding of certain Unix concepts is a must. (That is, if you not only want to know how to do something, but also be able to apply that knowledge elsewhere.)
Easily, my non-tech-savvy friends could get used to KDE and become comfortable in it, but I don't think they could set it up to be usable (nor do they care, and rightly so, they shouldn't have to). They could actually install easily--the Redhat install was exquisitley easy--but as far as installing programs, setting things up the way they like, etc., I don't think they could.
Then again, many people can't do the same with Windows (installing programs and configuring it to their liking).
Pick up Final Fantasy Tactics, now that it's a Greatest Hits title for the PS (ugly green bar on the side, but it's only $20). It's essentialy souped-up chess. (Actually don't pick it up yet; they fucked up and the current press doesn't work.)
In twenty years, someone will be saying the same thing about the games they grew up with. And that's the key, that's what you grew up with.
You're also looking for a much different experience than I am. You want simple puzzle-like games. Personally, I want to search over something the size of Siberia; I love console RPGs, and get a big kick out of exploring these digital worlds the game designers have created.
Before you preach about how games should be, stop to think that maybe what you want and what other people want from their games is entirely different.
Alright, I don't think Pong is "great" because to me, games that are "great" have something in them that emotionaly move me. I very much enjoy console RPGs, and although I enjoy many games from other genres, I have the most attachment to RPGs I've played. To me, for a game to be great, it has to be more than just fun.
Also, if you're ever in the position to compare Pong to Final Fantasy VI, you know you're doing something wrong. They're both videogames, but they're entirely different in design and intent. Nobody does this with movies (compare movies from different genres), I guess people just do it with games because it's a younger industry, and much more of a niche.
That's been done before too.
I'd also like to point out there is a big difference between the greatest games of all time, and the most influential games of all time. A list of the influential games will likely have the games you're listing.
For those of you who don't visit videogame sites with any regularity, you should probably know that these sites do an "Top $num Games" feature damn near every other week. So don't take this one to be the ultimate judgement of anything, if you think something is missing, it's probably because the few people who came up with it (surprise, surprise) have different tastes than you do.
You're right, if they only knew Java, and never went on to learn other languages, they would be tripped up by those things you mentioned, but who only learns one language? You have to start on something, and by no means is it going to teach you everything.
In fact, one could argue that because they don't have to worry about things such as memory leaks and pointers in general (of course, once they do, they'll realize it's not that Java has no pointers, it's nothing but pointers--const pointers), it's a better teaching language. And that's key, it's being used to teach basic CS concepts, not the entire universe.
How the hell is this a troll?
It's relevant because kids from the inner city are more likely to be a monetary disadvantage than those in the middle class suburbs. Because of this, there will be more needed instruction. It's a pretty simple concept: the less one knows about something, they more one needs to be exposed to it to learn about it.
Get a grip.
Heisenberg may have been stating it that way, but the ramifications have been such that it is something inherent in nature, not just the crudness of our instruments.
What they say in quantum mechanics is that we have a given particle that has a probability of being in any given point. This is the basic statement which scream statistical treatment.
And? That doesn't go against anything I said. The other person said systems of particles, and large systems of particles lends itself better to thermodynamics, although you can deal with systems in quantum mechanics. It is very normal to consider a single particle in quantum mechanics as well, which is what I said. What you said about probability is true, but it doesn't contradict anything I said.
Hawkings understands part of it, which is why if you read any of his papers, he is rabidly against the idea that there is anything random in the universe. He believes, but can't prove that the universe is "predestined".
From what I remember of A Brief History of Time, he repeats the idea that the uncertainty principle is something that is inherent in the universe.
It's not just our measurements. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Priciple (which is what you're talking about) is a statement about the universe, not our ability to measure it. More and more, it is apparent that this uncertainty is not because our instruments are too crude, but that this uncertainty is inherent in nature. You can not measure well defined velocities and positions of particles on the quantum scale because they do not have well defined positions and velocities.
Einstein had a hard time with that notion--that we live in a non-deterministic world, that chance is built into the universe--but that is the case.
The real power of quantum physics is that it gives us the means of treating these systems statistically without having to look at them on an individual basis.
Systems of particles is really thermodynamics. In quantum mechanics, you can (and do) pay attention to a single particle.
But wait, you say, you don't care about all of this, you still don't want to be "held respsonsible" for other people's problems. Well hmmm...
Get your head out of the sand.Read the freaking article before ranting, because you just said some very ignorant things.
The triad of drugs reduce the prevealence of the virus in the body. If you reduce how much of the virus there is in the patients body, not only does the person live longer and have a better quality of life, the virus is less likely to be passed on. It makes sense: The less of the virus there is, the less likely it is to be transmitted.
To reiterate, these drugs help slow the rate of infection, quite the opposite of what you're claiming.
so let the infected live(DIE) with their choices.
This disease could devastate the entire continent of Africa. It has gotten to the point that it's not about individual people but entire nations. This is an epidemic, like the bubonic plague, and it needs to be controlled.
And see, this article used sources and such to back up its claims. Might want to try that when you directly contradict an article that has been published by a major newspaper.
Make their own drugs? Some have tried, some have succeeded:
In case you didn't read the article, compulsory licensing is when a government takes over a patent, and makes the drug themselves, then sells it at a heavily discounted (i.e. affordable and reosonable) price.Doing this will save lives, and save the governments money in the future, because it costs more money to let it go unchecked than it does to treat it.
But American drug companies don't like this because they lose profits. Well boohoo.
Few people are doing research for free.
Read the freaking article. The people who actually do the research aren't the ones that make the profit from the drug; some drug company gets a hold of the patent and profit off of something they never did research for. And often, the money that funded the research in the first place was federal money, i.e. our money. And keep in mind that...
We're talking about people's lives here. Wake up. Third world countries need to be able to stop AIDS from spreading, and this means treating those who are already infected. If this means that they have to violate patents that American drug companies hold, so freaking be it. Saving people's lives--and quite literaly, these nations--is much more important than some corporations keeping high profits.