If programmers have to write the assertions themselves, then the compiler isn't doing the verifying. THEY are. And if you can't trust a programmer to write correct software, can you trust him to write correct assertions to test the correctness of his software?
Your response is inconsistent. You say it's feasable, then give examples where you have to craft the language specifically for it, and then you have to force certain language constructs to be disallowed. (i.e. have to add a counter to a loop that doesn't need one, just to prove to the compiler that the loop will end when it otherwise couldn't tell.) To me, straightjacketing the programmer like that makes it not feasable.
Language often contains holdovers from past predjudices. For example, the fact that "he" is the generally used generic form in Latin-derivitives like French for when you don't know the gender, is a holdover from the assumption that women are somehow the deviation from the "norm", and that you're going to talk about men more often than women. Similarly, in job titles: Waiter/waitress, actor/actress, governor/governess - the male version is also the accepted generic version for either gender. If you said "She is an actor" nobody would even bat an eye about using the male form for a woman. But if you said "He is an actress" that would immediately imply something about this guy being a sissy, or crossdressing, or something like that.
THe problem with trying to invent a new pronoun for this is that it is generally something pushed for mostly by the trans-gendered community. So if you say "hir" or "zhe", you end up immediately carrying the connotation that you are speaking of someone of androgynous appearance, when all you may have wanted was to say that you don't know the gender because you haven't narrowed down whom you are talkinag about yet.
You *are* picking nits. The redefinition was designed to get around the problem that "boiling point of water" is not as constant as previously thought. But, that doesn't change the fact that that's why 0 is where it is and 100 is where it is. It wasn't a case of "oh, let's see, I think I'll design a new temperature measurement, and I'll set one degree as being 1/273.6th of the difference between the triple point of water and absolute zero - yes, yes, that makes a fine, nice, clear system...." No. It was a way to use a different physical property (absolute zero) to achieve a system on the same scale as the intended one (water's freezing and boiling points).
To achieve the goal of building dependable computer systems, the scientists suggest building a verifying compiler, a tool that proves automatically that a program is correct before allowing it to run -- something first written about in the 1950s.
This, admittedly was in the summary text in the magazine, not the article by the scientists themselves, so it could be a case of "idiot summarizing it wrong", but there just is NO WAY to do what they are talking about. No how, no way.
To prove a program correct requires that you run it in a test environment. If you run it, and it is not correct, you get the same problem in your test run that occurs in the real run. Therefore you cannot test for a program's correctness automatically in a compiler. For example, any program trying to detect if a loop is infinite will itself end up looping infinitely when it encounters one and tries to check it.
The article you link to makes that claim, but then gives examples that don't back it up. The examples are arguably plural, used with concepts like "everyone" or "everybody" or "nobody" (is zero things a singular or plural concept - usually it's grammatically plural, as in "I have zero apples".)
Do you also object to "It looks like he or Samantha went shopping"? It has the exact same problem, so yes.
"He or she" also doesn't convey the concept of "I'm only talking about one person here, not two people" very well. "Bob or John" implies I'm talking about two different people. "He or She", used as a replacement for "one person who's gender I'm not specifying", ends up carrying the same connotation of talking about two different people, as in "this man or that woman", and that's not really accurate.
"he or she" is awkward because the word "or" tends to typically have a late order in the order of operations of typical English speaking. It's not a "tight" enough coupling to sound like an atomic phrase in the grammar. It's like defining a macro in C for "X+Y" and forgetting to wrap it in parenthesis. so that then MACRO * z ends up meaning "x+(Y*Z)" instead of "(x+y)*z".
"It looks like he or she went shopping." seems like "it looks like he. Or. She went shopping". Rather than "it looks like. he or she. went shopping."
It's by definition because that is the INTENT of the IQ scale. Much like 100 degrees is one of the defining achor points in Celcius, defined to be the boiling point of water *by definition* (in other words, if it turns out not to be the boiling point of water, then the Celcius scale is wrong and needs adjusting, not the other way around. 100 is the average IQ *by definition*, and if that turns out to be wrong, then the IQ scale needs to be adjusted to match (and it frequently is, which is why someone's IQ can shift without them becoming any smarter or dumber. Their rating can shift because the anchor point of 100 shifts when the average of the population is revised.
You miss the point. Some of them are mapped for adjacency rather than linguistic meaning. The cut/copy/paste of CTRL-x,c,v is like that. If you switch layouts, these no longer are adjacent. The biggest example of this is HJKL in 'vi'. Go to DVORAK and 'vi' suddenly becomes as confusing and hard to use as the manual would have you believe it is.
English, like many languages, contains the inherent (and very broken) feature that it is impossible to speak of a person as a person without specifying gender. If you use the genderless pronoun ("it"), you end up also saying that the subject in question is an animal or a thing and not a person. So, basically the language itself is broken becuase there are ideas that are impossible to express in it, and these ideas come up very often. It happens all the time when writing instructions or user manuals. You can't keep saying "he or she" all over the place without sounding cumbersome and hindering communication.
So, basically, no matter what you choose to say, it's going to offend someone because the 100% honest truth is not expressable in English.
In vim you could use digraphs and keep the US layout. For example: ctrl-K e ' gets you é
Now, whether that is worse or better than what you're doing depends on how often you need C language punctuation versus how often you need french characters, and that I can't tell.
Vi needs adjacent HJKL, which is only on QWERTY.
on
New Standard Keyboard
·
· Score: 1
In years of using text editors I still haven't been able to come up with something that works faster and better for me than vi (well, vim these days). This is not for lack of trying. A major downside of vi is that it requires a QWERTY layout to really work well (because HJKL need to be adjacent or else moving the cursor becomes a world of suck). The advanatage of vi is that once you learn the "old" "archaic" key commands that use no function keys, no arrow keys, no nuthin', your speed of editing things doubles. - your hands don't have to leave "home" to move the cursor around and edit stuff.
This new keyboard looks like it would have the potential to fix that finally, by putting the arrow keys right in the middle where you can access them quickly and instantly, and the other keys where you just whack them with your thumbs and leave your fingers where they are.
Pretty cool.
Now, if only they had a version that looked professional and not colored like something from Fischer-Price. I look at the picture and it seems like it should be called "Baby's first Keyboard" or something like that.
The wording of the executive order is in 100% direct contradiction to the policy of the NIH in that document. The executive order says that what the NIH is doing is wrong. The executive order says that the organization doing a certain type of research is not federally fundable, and the NIH says those parts of that organization that aren'd doing that kind of research are still federally fundable provided they keep meticulous accounting records that prove none of the federal money is being "slushed" over to the nonfundable research.
Since I can't imagine that the NIH could get away with that if it was against the intent of the executive order, I guess I'll chalk up the difference to the following: The executive order was phrased incorrectly.
The executive order DOES say precisely what I said it says though. It's just that, as usual, Bush does not have good command of English. So what he meant to say doesn't match what he actually said.
They don't do long-term research with no idea yet where it will lead (the 10-year stuff). They let public institutions do that. When it gets to the stage that there is enough information in the science journals to indicate that there are 2 to 3 years left to go before an answer is found, THEN they start getting involved.
And actually, I don't have a problem with this setup. It totally makes sense why it ended up that way. What I do have a problem with is people who don't acknowlege the "shoulders of giants" that the drug companies are standing on top of, and instead discredit them for not producing an end-product.
It's like saying an arc-welding robot is a peice of trash becuase all it produces is an unfinished car frame - something totally useles for public consumption. The real work is done by the spray-paint robot that makes the car sellable.
But the point is this:
This is what people THINK the ban is a ban on, and they have been getting all haughty "correcting" people who say otherwise: This is only banning the federal funding of this type of research. It can still exist if you fund it privately or if your state funds it.
What the ban is ACTUALLY a ban on: This is banning any use of this type of research by any federally funded organization, EVEN IF they used private or state funding for the stem cell portion of what that organization does. Let's say that that california state funding for this research is used by a california university. The way this rule is phrased, that university loses ALL of its federal funding for all its projects, and no university would dare do that.
So what's going to happen is that this doesn't just ban federal funding of this research - it's going to effectively ban public dissmetion of the information obtained as well, by ensuring that insular, disconnected private firms are the only people who can engage in it - i.e. drug companies that will consider the information proprietary.
I know someone at work who has a spinal cord injury with no feeling in his legs (motorcycle accident). There is an experimental stem-cell based treatment that has been shown to actually regrow nerves in the spinal cord and reconnect some (not all) feeling in cases like this. It's not a great cure, and it doesn't work all the time, but it's better than not having a chance at all. He's working on a visa to go to Siberia. Becuase the US is so far behind the technology curve on this that he can't have the operation done here.
We're already behind. This law will just ensure we stay that way.
The executive order does not withold funding from the just harvesters of stem cells. It witholds funding from the entire organization that an experiment using those cells is a part of. In other words, if your university's biochemistry department is doing such an experiment, the entire university can lose funding - including, say, the physics projects, the engineering projects, the biology projects, the chemistry projects, etc. By making that "viral" association, it makes it so that organizations doing this kind of research cannot be part of any larger group. It messes up more groups than just those that people think it does.
Private business is very effective at funding things that take a couple of years to become a product. Private business is utterly ineffective at funding things that will take ten years to become a product. Private research aims for the local maxima, and veers away from the global maxima.
No, it's a "viral" ban on fedearal funding in much the same way that some software licenses are "viral" licenses. It affects the entire organization it touches. It cuts funding to any ORGANIZATION that uses embyronic stem cells in research from new lines. That would mean that if anyone at a university is doing an experiment with embryonic stem cells, even if that experiment itself is privately funded, then the entire university loses all federal funding, not just the small group doing that one experiment. That's effectively banning it, in practice, because you can't wall off your orgainization enough from other unrelated projects, and so people will make you stop so they don't lose THEIR funding.
Go to class. If you have to choose between doing homework and going to class - go to class. Each person is different, but from my experience, you learn more in class (at the very least you will know what the teacher wants you to know which may vary from the book) Depending what school a person went to, a person may have done reasonably well because HS is a joke compared to college. I know, I was awesome in HS (8th ranked) and when I got to college I was slammed.
I was the opposite (Bad grades in high school. Great grades in college). I think for me it was a case of hating pointless repetitive drudgery. There's a lot more of that in high school (you'll be graded badly for skipping this homework even if you can prove you know the material when taking the tests). In college it's much more a case where you'll be graded on major projects and tests, but not on the day-to-day little stuff. What matters is that you end up knowing the material. How you got to that point is up to you. Pick the study habits that suit you best. In highschool you have to use the study habits dictated to you by the teacher, and in my case they don't mesh well with how I learn. (I'm very good at noticing patterns, but very bad at rote memorization. Therefore I have the hardest time with subjects where you have to memorize a large pile of disconnected nonsensical material first before you start to see enough patterns in it for it to become sensical. I was horrible at memorizing my multiplication tables (to this day I still have "gaps" that I have to fill in using neighbors on the table, like "7x8...damn I don't remember that one. Well, what's near 7x8 that I can remember...oh, 7x7 is 49, I remember that one, and then that would mean 7x8 is 7 more than that, so 49+7 = 56. there. The answer is 56." For me, that's what arithmetic in my head is like, because, again, I just can't remember by rote very well. But, I did really well later in Calculus. Because once I see something fits a pattern, then I never forget that pattern.
Or, in other words, I can only remember things that I grok.
I think you are correct, but it's not because college is all that good. It's because high school is bad and doesn't finish the job it's supposed to do.
I started college already knowing 95% of what was being taught in the first year and a half of programming classes. The only stuff I didn't know was how to map my internal terminology to the terminology everyone else used. I was self-taught and had learned many of those basic concepts not from books, but from experimentation and playing. For example, I already had made a tree structure once. But it used indeces into arrays instead of pointers since I had never encountered a language yet with pointers in it. (Although I knew what a pointer was from having used them in machine language, although I called them "address variables".) And I didn't know that it was called a "tree". I thought of it as a "that category grouping splitting thingy I did that kinda worked like one of those single-elimination tournament diagrams".
But then after that first year and a half, my grades took a nosedive. I had gotten really lazy and in the habit of barely paying attention to lessons. Then we finally started hitting the material I didn't already know and I didn't notice the change right away, and didn't adjust my habits.
Luckily I noticed quickly what was wrong (It only took one semester of a drop in grades for me to wake up and see it happening), so I started actually paying attention and the grades came back up.
And I noticed something else: That point where the material started getting harder was, not coincidentally, the same point at which the cross-major students stopped advancing further. I'm referring to students who are not going for computer science, but are taking a few 100 and 200 level programming classes as requirements for some other degree in business or education. Once the classes started being the type where ONLY compsci students were present, and the class sizes dropped dramaticly, and you were meeting in small classrooms instead of big pit classes, the material got a lot harder (and finally interesting).
1. Your original claim was B52's. These examples you just gave, while still not perfect precision weapons, were still much more precise weapons than B52s. Nice attempt to mask your backpedalling.
2. The dissidents in Palestine are fighting with rocks and homemade explosives - not with free access to guns so the analogy does not hold.
3. The armed dissidents in Iraq are a small minority so the analogy does not hold. (And you will note that even with that small minority, a few small arms in a few people's hands is STILL causing major headaches for the occupation and keeping us from being able to finish our plans.)
If one of your principles is "the party system is inherently flawed" then "fix it from the inside" and "stick to principles" are mutually exclusive tasks.
Slashdot Mirror
If programmers have to write the assertions themselves, then the compiler isn't doing the verifying. THEY are. And if you can't trust a programmer to write correct software, can you trust him to write correct assertions to test the correctness of his software?
Your response is inconsistent. You say it's feasable, then give examples where you have to craft the language specifically for it, and then you have to force certain language constructs to be disallowed. (i.e. have to add a counter to a loop that doesn't need one, just to prove to the compiler that the loop will end when it otherwise couldn't tell.)
To me, straightjacketing the programmer like that makes it not feasable.
deliberately untrue
Pretending to have the ablity to read my mind is itself a form a lying.
Language often contains holdovers from past predjudices. For example, the fact that "he" is the generally used generic form in Latin-derivitives like French for when you don't know the gender, is a holdover from the assumption that women are somehow the deviation from the "norm", and that you're going to talk about men more often than women. Similarly, in job titles: Waiter/waitress, actor/actress, governor/governess - the male version is also the accepted generic version for either gender. If you said "She is an actor" nobody would even bat an eye about using the male form for a woman. But if you said "He is an actress" that would immediately imply something about this guy being a sissy, or crossdressing, or something like that.
THe problem with trying to invent a new pronoun for this is that it is generally something pushed for mostly by the trans-gendered community. So if you say "hir" or "zhe", you end up immediately carrying the connotation that you are speaking of someone of androgynous appearance, when all you may have wanted was to say that you don't know the gender because you haven't narrowed down whom you are talkinag about yet.
You *are* picking nits. The redefinition was designed to get around the problem that "boiling point of water" is not as constant as previously thought. But, that doesn't change the fact that that's why 0 is where it is and 100 is where it is. It wasn't a case of "oh, let's see, I think I'll design a new temperature measurement, and I'll set one degree as being 1/273.6th of the difference between the triple point of water and absolute zero - yes, yes, that makes a fine, nice, clear system...." No. It was a way to use a different physical property (absolute zero) to achieve a system on the same scale as the intended one (water's freezing and boiling points).
To achieve the goal of building dependable computer systems, the scientists suggest building a verifying compiler, a tool that proves automatically that a program is correct before allowing it to run -- something first written about in the 1950s.
This, admittedly was in the summary text in the magazine, not the article by the scientists themselves, so it could be a case of "idiot summarizing it wrong", but there just is NO WAY to do what they are talking about. No how, no way.
To prove a program correct requires that you run it in a test environment. If you run it, and it is not correct, you get the same problem in your test run that occurs in the real run. Therefore you cannot test for a program's correctness automatically in a compiler. For example, any program trying to detect if a loop is infinite will itself end up looping infinitely when it encounters one and tries to check it.
The article you link to makes that claim, but then gives examples that don't back it up. The examples are arguably plural, used with concepts like "everyone" or "everybody" or "nobody" (is zero things a singular or plural concept - usually it's grammatically plural, as in "I have zero apples".)
Do you also object to "It looks like he or Samantha went shopping"?
It has the exact same problem, so yes.
"He or she" also doesn't convey the concept of "I'm only talking about one person here, not two people" very well. "Bob or John" implies I'm talking about two different people. "He or She", used as a replacement for "one person who's gender I'm not specifying", ends up carrying the same connotation of talking about two different people, as in "this man or that woman", and that's not really accurate.
"They" is plural. It does not work fine.
"he or she" is awkward because the word "or" tends to typically have a late order in the order of operations of typical English speaking. It's not a "tight" enough coupling to sound like an atomic phrase in the grammar. It's like defining a macro in C for "X+Y" and forgetting to wrap it in parenthesis. so that then MACRO * z ends up meaning "x+(Y*Z)" instead of "(x+y)*z".
"It looks like he or she went shopping." seems like "it looks like he. Or. She went shopping". Rather than "it looks like. he or she. went shopping."
It's by definition because that is the INTENT of the IQ scale. Much like 100 degrees is one of the defining achor points in Celcius, defined to be the boiling point of water *by definition* (in other words, if it turns out not to be the boiling point of water, then the Celcius scale is wrong and needs adjusting, not the other way around. 100 is the average IQ *by definition*, and if that turns out to be wrong, then the IQ scale needs to be adjusted to match (and it frequently is, which is why someone's IQ can shift without them becoming any smarter or dumber. Their rating can shift because the anchor point of 100 shifts when the average of the population is revised.
You miss the point. Some of them are mapped for adjacency rather than linguistic meaning. The cut/copy/paste of CTRL-x,c,v is like that. If you switch layouts, these no longer are adjacent. The biggest example of this is HJKL in 'vi'. Go to DVORAK and 'vi' suddenly becomes as confusing and hard to use as the manual would have you believe it is.
If that 'vi' comes from a linux system, then it is probably actually 'vim'. "Real" vi is much smaller than 1.2 Meg (and of course, less featurefull.)
English, like many languages, contains the inherent (and very broken) feature that it is impossible to speak of a person as a person without specifying gender. If you use the genderless pronoun ("it"), you end up also saying that the subject in question is an animal or a thing and not a person. So, basically the language itself is broken becuase there are ideas that are impossible to express in it, and these ideas come up very often. It happens all the time when writing instructions or user manuals. You can't keep saying "he or she" all over the place without sounding cumbersome and hindering communication.
So, basically, no matter what you choose to say, it's going to offend someone because the 100% honest truth is not expressable in English.
In vim you could use digraphs and keep the US layout. For example:
ctrl-K e ' gets you é
Now, whether that is worse or better than what you're doing depends on how often you need C language punctuation versus how often you need french characters, and that I can't tell.
In years of using text editors I still haven't been able to come up with something that works faster and better for me than vi (well, vim these days). This is not for lack of trying. A major downside of vi is that it requires a QWERTY layout to really work well (because HJKL need to be adjacent or else moving the cursor becomes a world of suck). The advanatage of vi is that once you learn the "old" "archaic" key commands that use no function keys, no arrow keys, no nuthin', your speed of editing things doubles. - your hands don't have to leave "home" to move the cursor around and edit stuff.
This new keyboard looks like it would have the potential to fix that finally, by putting the arrow keys right in the middle where you can access them quickly and instantly, and the other keys where you just whack them with your thumbs and leave your fingers where they are.
Pretty cool.
Now, if only they had a version that looked professional and not colored like something from Fischer-Price. I look at the picture and it seems like it should be called "Baby's first Keyboard" or something like that.
The wording of the executive order is in 100% direct contradiction to the policy of the NIH in that document. The executive order says that what the NIH is doing is wrong. The executive order says that the organization doing a certain type of research is not federally fundable, and the NIH says those parts of that organization that aren'd doing that kind of research are still federally fundable provided they keep meticulous accounting records that prove none of the federal money is being "slushed" over to the nonfundable research.
Since I can't imagine that the NIH could get away with that if it was against the intent of the executive order, I guess I'll chalk up the difference to the following: The executive order was phrased incorrectly.
The executive order DOES say precisely what I said it says though. It's just that, as usual, Bush does not have good command of English. So what he meant to say doesn't match what he actually said.
They don't do long-term research with no idea yet where it will lead (the 10-year stuff). They let public institutions do that. When it gets to the stage that there is enough information in the science journals to indicate that there are 2 to 3 years left to go before an answer is found, THEN they start getting involved.
And actually, I don't have a problem with this setup. It totally makes sense why it ended up that way. What I do have a problem with is people who don't acknowlege the "shoulders of giants" that the drug companies are standing on top of, and instead discredit them for not producing an end-product.
It's like saying an arc-welding robot is a peice of trash becuase all it produces is an unfinished car frame - something totally useles for public consumption. The real work is done by the spray-paint robot that makes the car sellable.
But the point is this:
This is what people THINK the ban is a ban on, and they have been getting all haughty "correcting" people who say otherwise:
This is only banning the federal funding of this type of research. It can still exist if you fund it privately or if your state funds it.
What the ban is ACTUALLY a ban on:
This is banning any use of this type of research by any federally funded organization, EVEN IF they used private or state funding for the stem cell portion of what that organization does. Let's say that that california state funding for this research is used by a california university. The way this rule is phrased, that university loses ALL of its federal funding for all its projects, and no university would dare do that.
So what's going to happen is that this doesn't just ban federal funding of this research - it's going to effectively ban public dissmetion of the information obtained as well, by ensuring that insular, disconnected private firms are the only people who can engage in it - i.e. drug companies that will consider the information proprietary.
I know someone at work who has a spinal cord injury with no feeling in his legs (motorcycle accident). There is an experimental stem-cell based treatment that has been shown to actually regrow nerves in the spinal cord and reconnect some (not all) feeling in cases like this. It's not a great cure, and it doesn't work all the time, but it's better than not having a chance at all. He's working on a visa to go to Siberia. Becuase the US is so far behind the technology curve on this that he can't have the operation done here.
We're already behind. This law will just ensure we stay that way.
The executive order does not withold funding from the just harvesters of stem cells. It witholds funding from the entire organization that an experiment using those cells is a part of. In other words, if your university's biochemistry department is doing such an experiment, the entire university can lose funding - including, say, the physics projects, the engineering projects, the biology projects, the chemistry projects, etc. By making that "viral" association, it makes it so that organizations doing this kind of research cannot be part of any larger group. It messes up more groups than just those that people think it does.
Private business is very effective at funding things that take a couple of years to become a product. Private business is utterly ineffective at funding things that will take ten years to become a product. Private research aims for the local maxima, and veers away from the global maxima.
No, it's a "viral" ban on fedearal funding in much the same way that some software licenses are "viral" licenses. It affects the entire organization it touches. It cuts funding to any ORGANIZATION that uses embyronic stem cells in research from new lines. That would mean that if anyone at a university is doing an experiment with embryonic stem cells, even if that experiment itself is privately funded, then the entire university loses all federal funding, not just the small group doing that one experiment. That's effectively banning it, in practice, because you can't wall off your orgainization enough from other unrelated projects, and so people will make you stop so they don't lose THEIR funding.
Go to class. If you have to choose between doing homework and going to class - go to class. Each person is different, but from my experience, you learn more in class (at the very least you will know what the teacher wants you to know which may vary from the book)
Depending what school a person went to, a person may have done reasonably well because HS is a joke compared to college. I know, I was awesome in HS (8th ranked) and when I got to college I was slammed.
I was the opposite (Bad grades in high school. Great grades in college). I think for me it was a case of hating pointless repetitive drudgery. There's a lot more of that in high school (you'll be graded badly for skipping this homework even if you can prove you know the material when taking the tests). In college it's much more a case where you'll be graded on major projects and tests, but not on the day-to-day little stuff. What matters is that you end up knowing the material. How you got to that point is up to you. Pick the study habits that suit you best. In highschool you have to use the study habits dictated to you by the teacher, and in my case they don't mesh well with how I learn. (I'm very good at noticing patterns, but very bad at rote memorization. Therefore I have the hardest time with subjects where you have to memorize a large pile of disconnected nonsensical material first before you start to see enough patterns in it for it to become sensical. I was horrible at memorizing my multiplication tables (to this day I still have "gaps" that I have to fill in using neighbors on the table, like "7x8...damn I don't remember that one. Well, what's near 7x8 that I can remember...oh, 7x7 is 49, I remember that one, and then that would mean 7x8 is 7 more than that, so 49+7 = 56. there. The answer is 56." For me, that's what arithmetic in my head is like, because, again, I just can't remember by rote very well. But, I did really well later in Calculus. Because once I see something fits a pattern, then I never forget that pattern.
Or, in other words, I can only remember things that I grok.
I think you are correct, but it's not because college is all that good. It's because high school is bad and doesn't finish the job it's supposed to do.
I started college already knowing 95% of what was being taught in the first year and a half of programming classes. The only stuff I didn't know was how to map my internal terminology to the terminology everyone else used. I was self-taught and had learned many of those basic concepts not from books, but from experimentation and playing. For example, I already had made a tree structure once. But it used indeces into arrays instead of pointers since I had never encountered a language yet with pointers in it. (Although I knew what a pointer was from having used them in machine language, although I called them "address variables".) And I didn't know that it was called a "tree". I thought of it as a "that category grouping splitting thingy I did that kinda worked like one of those single-elimination tournament diagrams".
But then after that first year and a half, my grades took a nosedive. I had gotten really lazy and in the habit of barely paying attention to lessons. Then we finally started hitting the material I didn't already know and I didn't notice the change right away, and didn't adjust my habits.
Luckily I noticed quickly what was wrong (It only took one semester of a drop in grades for me to wake up and see it happening), so I started actually paying attention and the grades came back up.
And I noticed something else: That point where the material started getting harder was, not coincidentally, the same point at which the cross-major students stopped advancing further. I'm referring to students who are not going for computer science, but are taking a few 100 and 200 level programming classes as requirements for some other degree in business or education. Once the classes started being the type where ONLY compsci students were present, and the class sizes dropped dramaticly, and you were meeting in small classrooms instead of big pit classes, the material got a lot harder (and finally interesting).
1. Your original claim was B52's. These examples you just gave, while still not perfect precision weapons, were still much more precise weapons than B52s. Nice attempt to mask your backpedalling.
2. The dissidents in Palestine are fighting with rocks and homemade explosives - not with free access to guns so the analogy does not hold.
3. The armed dissidents in Iraq are a small minority so the analogy does not hold. (And you will note that even with that small minority, a few small arms in a few people's hands is STILL causing major headaches for the occupation and keeping us from being able to finish our plans.)
If one of your principles is "the party system is inherently flawed" then "fix it from the inside" and "stick to principles" are mutually exclusive tasks.