His two reasons why everyone hates Fortran can be made to apply to any language (let's get that out of the way), or indeed any course where some of the students already know the subject materials and others don't know it at all.
I don't know what 'foibles' of Fortran he's talking about, except perhaps having to type numbers in with a.0 on the end if they want them treated as floats. That's all that I can think of.
Fortran 77 was painful - I never learnt it, but as an F90 programmer was exposed to it and saw how ugly it was. F90, on the other hand, is not painful. Stuff works, the language is forgiving (with the exception of the thing about getting integers to behave as floats) and it does what you want with the minimum of fuss. Compared to C (I'm only going to compare to C - you don't do scientific programming in high-level languages); C may be (at a stretch) twice as powerful, but takes 4 times as long to write, and 10 times as long to debug. Most stuff that you want to do is build directly into the language - you don't have to monkey about linking math libraries in to get a square-root. Fortran is case-insensitive (this is GOOD - it shouldn't be possible to have two variables named power and Power)
Donâ(TM)t believe me? OK, write a program in pure Fortran that gives a plot of a Sin(n*x) for integer n and x ranging from -2*pi to 2*pi. Now connect that plot up to a slider control which will control the value of n.
Now, that's just stupid - that pretty picture drawing and should be accomplished in matlab or similar. Fortran is not supposed to be used for writing programs with a GUI, and whining that it's hard to shoehorn it into that role is monumentally stupid. You can bosh that out with minimal training in some higher-level language like matlab - what you cannot do it write some efficient, high performance program after 'learning programming' in matlab, and being given a crash-course in Fortran. Granted, it doesn't give you as much of an idea about what is going on on the underlying metal as, say, C, but it gives you enough. If you don't initially tell your students that they can copy part of an array using colon-notation, they have to do it with a for-loop. Now they get the idea about how ugly such an action is to perform. That sort of thing, and having the number of clock-cycles that common operations take explained to you, is what gets you into a programming mindset where every other line you think 'how can I be doing this more efficiently?' How many python programmers do you know who, when needing to divide a number by 2, multiply it by 0.5 instead?
I still use Fortran,. when I was an undergraduate I used it for my project, and as a masters student I chose to use it for my dissertation, despite it not having been on the syllabus. My Fortran skills also enabled me to help some of my colleagues who had to use codes provided by their supervisors which were written in fortran, as they were hopelessly out of their depth, not having been taught any fortran at all.
His rant about compilers shows a total lack of backbone. A small number of shouty people call for their own preference of compiler and he seriously considers buying them all. The choices are, of course, obvious. gfortran or G95. If you're using the supercomputer you can also have access to the Intel compiler. Choosing a compiler because it's very standards-compliant isn't very clever. Firstly because standards compliance is best achieved through good teaching and secondly because at least one part of the standard (invalidness of tab-characters) needs to be safely ignored, without having to teach the students about shutting the rest of the standards off with compiler switches. The idea of picking a compiler on the basis that it allows you to shoehorn fortran into being a GUI language boggles the mind - if you must have some sort of GUI, write it with a C-library and cross-compile.
What he doesn't seem to realise about first programming languages, is that they're like a ratchet - it's very hard to later go to a lower level language than the one that you started with. If you start people on python or matlab, they'll be very hard to turn into decent fortran programmers later.
When I download X piece of GPL software, I don't expect the documentation to tell me that it depends on Y piece of GPL software which they want me to go download myself.
You may not have had a conscript army since Vietnam, but you still have to register for the selective service commission, and there have been no changes in the legal landscape since that would preclude the re-introduction of the draft.
ok, but they're exposing themselves to liability in the courts if their detaining you is completely baseless.
Your first post seemed to imply a conversation such as this: Police Officer: Show me your ID Citizen: No Police Officer: You're under arrest [citizen then duly charged with, and convicted of, an offence under section 5 of the public order act]
Whereas what you're actually saying is: Police Officer: Show me your ID Citizen: No Police Officer: I'm detaining you so as to find information necessary to summons you for an offence under section 5 of the public order act [citizen hands over details to officer and is let on their way] Probably followed by, [citizen sues police, wins oodles of money].
There's a difference between refusing to identify yourself being an offence under section 5 of the public order act, and using a non-existant offence under section 5 of the public order act to justify compelling a person to identify themselves.
It's also not as simple as 'if they don't believe you'. They have to have a reason to not believe you. For instance, if you give the name "Mickey Mouse", or "George W. Bush", those would be reasons to not believe you. Simple failure to produce identification documents which you aren't required to own, let alone carry won't cut it.
The situation that you describe would expose the police to massive liability both on the detention for a non-existant offence front, and on the full arrest without a reason front. Granted, though, sufficent evidence to prove it in court may be a bigger hurdle to get over.
The other obvious factor here is that Section 5 of the Public Order Act has never been tested in Strasbourg. Which is good, because the taxpayer will be on the hook for billions when it is.
Also in the UK If a police officer asks your name for any reason (even if you are walking down a road and done NOTHING illegal) and you refuse, you get arrested / finger printed / DNA taken
Closely followed by a big chunk of change. UK police officers only have the power to require you to identify yourself if they are taking your details so as to send you a summons, or issuing you with a fixed penalty notice, or ask you under section 44 of the Terrorism act whilst you're in an area pre-designated by the Secretary of State. They don't have any power to require the production of identity documents (even for driving: you have to take them to a police station within 1 week, but you don't have to produce them on the spot). Even when performing a stop & search, they cannot compel you to identify yourself (in which case they will write a description of you on the forms).
Giving them false information is probably illegal, but refusing to provide information normally isn't.
Ok, a store is not public property, but it is a public place.
As private property owners, they have the right to tell him to stop taking photographs. This is backed up solely by being able to ask him to leave. There's no seperate law against not obeying the proprietor of an establishment (except in regard to be asked to leave). Similarly if they try to have a rule requiring people to provide ID when asked for it - all they can actually do is tell people to leave if they don't produce ID.
That's really all that there is to it. Loomis has no authority at all, if REI want him to leave because he's upsetting the Loomis guys they can, and he's trespassing if he doesn't, UNLESS he's being forcibly prevented from leaving (and a man with a gun & threatening to 'tackle' you telling you not to leave counts as 'forcibly')
Yeah, it's a sucky part of our common legal system. There was a case in the UK where a local police force declared a curfew - anyone under 18 out after 9pm would be detained and returned to their home. A boy in this area (who didn't fancy getting detained and returned home) sued the police force because he believed that the curfew was a breach of his human rights. After weeks in the High Court, the judges finally said that, though the curfew was utterly illegal, and would be thrown out, they had to rule against the boy because he hadn't yet actually been detained & returned home. If he wanted to not be threatened with illegal action by the police, he had to let them perform said illegal action against him first and sue them later.
Say the police in state A* attach a GPS tracker to a car sans warrant, then say that the owner of that car drives to a different state, B**; would evidence collected whilst the vehicle was in State B count? Would the officers in State A be exposing themselves to actual liability (as opposed to the evidence simply being thrown out) in State B?
And how, exactly, does the chief clerk respond when called to the subsequent non-payment-of-fine hearing and gets asked "did you recieve the bag with the money in it?"? In what bizarre version of the world is it the person paying the fine's responsibility if the court clerks left it in the cupboard somewhere?
So if you want to irk someone in the UK, give them 20p in coppers, then throw in some New Zealand 5 cent pieces - they're the same shape, size & alloy as a British 1p and even have the same picture of HMQ on one side.
You can either go "I told you so" when they try to complain that you're over the 20p limit, or you can let them accept all the coins, then point out that there were 5 foreign coins (and that's why they're 5p over) which have now ben mixed into their coin box, and ask for them back. Massive entropy increase FTW.
Ok, I haven't watched the rest of American TV - I'd somewhat assumed that it was back-to-back awesomeness consisting solely of the good bits that we get here.
You're right, my assertion that HIGNFY is better than BB&F is entirely personal opinion. That's the point of the discussion; 'Does the BBC make programmes which in a small number of people's personal opinion are good, but which don't get the ratings which would justify their production by a commercial broadcaster?'
HIGNFY is probably a bad example, since it IS popular, but then I brought it up as an example of a show which the BBC alone has the clout to make, not one which is unpopular but made anyway.
Just two examples of quite a few shows that are widely accepted to be genuinely good,
You're making my argument for me - they're widely accepted to be good, and the commercial channels are clamouring to buy up the rights - this is high-rating programming which will more-or-less guarantee the advertising revenue needed to pay for it.
You're right that the BBC has lost its way of late - but that doesn't mean that the entire system is somehow a bad one. How about Blackadder? Series one was very expensive (big risk - not for commercial stations) and not particularly popular. The BBC, however, decided to continue taking the risk (albeit with a reduced budget) and comissioned series two. What happened? It turned out to be one of the most popular sitcoms in the UK. Would a commercial broadcaster have paid up for an historical sitcom in which Rowan Atkinson had a speaking part? And then decided that it was an inherently sound idea and comissioned a second series even after the first one flopped? No.
Infact TV itself. The BBC (then funded by radio licenses) put money in to John Logi Baird's new invention and despite the fact that it was a complete joke which didn't generate as much as it cost, continued to fund it. BBC Research has invented a whole bunch of stuff that makes modern broadcasting easier. Would that have been invented so soon (if at all) by the commercial sector? No. And what about the iPlayer? Not only is it the best system used by the British broadcasters, but its very existence is what spurred everyone else to try and catch up with their rather pitiful knock-offs. (Have you used 4OD?).
The point is not that the BBC can churn out endless supplies of programs with low ratings but which ought to be made anyway, but that it can afford to innovate, and that enriches our entire viewing experience. Would special effects be where they are today without the Radiophonics Workshop?
I never said that he should go to my Flickr. I said that he should go to the actual physical junction and see for himself what the layout of the junction is. I never said that judges should use sources provided by either side, or of unknown provenance. I specifically said that they should know where the source has come from, and how reliable this makes it ("probably true with a quantification of 'probably' and reasons for that"). A random flickr account would be unreliable and wouldn't be considered (and I'd expect the judge to list their sources - so either party could object to them, as in the present system).
In the junction example, the judge would go and look at the junction, and would (to ensure the validity of the information gained), check with the City works department that the junction layout hadn't been changed since the alleged incident (and document that he'd done this).
To use your table example - both sides put their cards on the table, but the judge can now point out when someone has dropped one of their cards, or that the other guy seems to have put down 5 aces on the table.
but whether an appellate judge should be reading case material that isn't in the record. The obvious answer is "no,"
I disagree - judges should have any information which is both relevant and true (or probably true with a quantification of 'probably' and reasons for that) at their disposal. Justice is not served by handing judges the opportunity to make wrong decisions because of wilful ignorance of objective reality.
For instance, say there's a dispute over a car accident (got to get a car in here somewhere), which hinges on the layout of a junction. One party makes a submission to the court asserting some information about the junction. This information is wrong. The other party does not, for whatever reason, contest it. The judge happens to drive through this junction at some point over a weekend (or goes there deliberately - whatever); should the wrong information supplied by the first party stand because it wasn't contested, or be thrown out because the judge now knows that it was wrong?
How about another example - a judge issues a temporary injunction requiring a website to be taken down for the duration of proceedings (the defendant's website). Some reasonable time later, the plantiff complains to the judge that the website hasn't been taken down. The defendant says that it has. Should the judge:
Take the plantiff's word for it and smack the defendant
Take the defendants word for it and censure the plantiff
Let the two of them bicker about it for a few weeks in a side-trial
Type the URL into a web browser and find out whether it's up or not
It seems obvious to me that the latter is far preferable - whether the website is still up is an objective fact, and getting facts from two parties who both have an interest in distorting them, whilst deliberately refraining from finding out yourself seems irresponsible. In the real world, however, the latter is the one course that the judge is NOT meant to take.
To make up some numbers: Let's say that there are 10 wrong decisions. It we don't allow judges to use information from outside, then all those decisions will continue to be wrong. If we do allow them to use information form outside, then one of those decisions will no longer be wrong (but it'll be down to chance as to which that one is). The present system seems to think that it would serve justice better if all 10 wrong decisions stood, than one person, who would otherwise have got a wrong decision, got a right decision due to chance.
Slashdot Mirror
we're not getting to a situation where we have two parties which are both the same. We have 3 parties which are both the same!
His two reasons why everyone hates Fortran can be made to apply to any language (let's get that out of the way), or indeed any course where some of the students already know the subject materials and others don't know it at all.
I don't know what 'foibles' of Fortran he's talking about, except perhaps having to type numbers in with a .0 on the end if they want them treated as floats. That's all that I can think of.
Fortran 77 was painful - I never learnt it, but as an F90 programmer was exposed to it and saw how ugly it was. F90, on the other hand, is not painful. Stuff works, the language is forgiving (with the exception of the thing about getting integers to behave as floats) and it does what you want with the minimum of fuss. Compared to C (I'm only going to compare to C - you don't do scientific programming in high-level languages); C may be (at a stretch) twice as powerful, but takes 4 times as long to write, and 10 times as long to debug. Most stuff that you want to do is build directly into the language - you don't have to monkey about linking math libraries in to get a square-root. Fortran is case-insensitive (this is GOOD - it shouldn't be possible to have two variables named power and Power)
Now, that's just stupid - that pretty picture drawing and should be accomplished in matlab or similar. Fortran is not supposed to be used for writing programs with a GUI, and whining that it's hard to shoehorn it into that role is monumentally stupid. You can bosh that out with minimal training in some higher-level language like matlab - what you cannot do it write some efficient, high performance program after 'learning programming' in matlab, and being given a crash-course in Fortran. Granted, it doesn't give you as much of an idea about what is going on on the underlying metal as, say, C, but it gives you enough. If you don't initially tell your students that they can copy part of an array using colon-notation, they have to do it with a for-loop. Now they get the idea about how ugly such an action is to perform. That sort of thing, and having the number of clock-cycles that common operations take explained to you, is what gets you into a programming mindset where every other line you think 'how can I be doing this more efficiently?' How many python programmers do you know who, when needing to divide a number by 2, multiply it by 0.5 instead?
I still use Fortran,. when I was an undergraduate I used it for my project, and as a masters student I chose to use it for my dissertation, despite it not having been on the syllabus. My Fortran skills also enabled me to help some of my colleagues who had to use codes provided by their supervisors which were written in fortran, as they were hopelessly out of their depth, not having been taught any fortran at all.
His rant about compilers shows a total lack of backbone. A small number of shouty people call for their own preference of compiler and he seriously considers buying them all. The choices are, of course, obvious. gfortran or G95. If you're using the supercomputer you can also have access to the Intel compiler. Choosing a compiler because it's very standards-compliant isn't very clever. Firstly because standards compliance is best achieved through good teaching and secondly because at least one part of the standard (invalidness of tab-characters) needs to be safely ignored, without having to teach the students about shutting the rest of the standards off with compiler switches. The idea of picking a compiler on the basis that it allows you to shoehorn fortran into being a GUI language boggles the mind - if you must have some sort of GUI, write it with a C-library and cross-compile.
What he doesn't seem to realise about first programming languages, is that they're like a ratchet - it's very hard to later go to a lower level language than the one that you started with. If you start people on python or matlab, they'll be very hard to turn into decent fortran programmers later.
and, someone else can't hire a plumber to make your life a misery; and bankrupt you unless you have a better plumber.
pfft, on 24 they always seem to have a proprietary algorithm for this sort of stuff. Why can't the UK police get one of them?
they don't - you have to prove that you've forgotten it O.o.
Yes, this is a bad law.
mod up! mod up!
When I download X piece of GPL software, I don't expect the documentation to tell me that it depends on Y piece of GPL software which they want me to go download myself.
Ok, it's not surprising that this got Godwinned so soon, but I wasn't expecting the discussion to get there by that route!
I think this clarifies your point:
As I understand it, 'good faith' shields them from criminal charges, not civil liability. IANAL, etc.
You may not have had a conscript army since Vietnam, but you still have to register for the selective service commission, and there have been no changes in the legal landscape since that would preclude the re-introduction of the draft.
Yes, 1944. Carry on.
that's a bit redundant: acme - American Company which Makes Everything
ok, but they're exposing themselves to liability in the courts if their detaining you is completely baseless.
Your first post seemed to imply a conversation such as this:
Police Officer: Show me your ID
Citizen: No
Police Officer: You're under arrest
[citizen then duly charged with, and convicted of, an offence under section 5 of the public order act]
Whereas what you're actually saying is:
Police Officer: Show me your ID
Citizen: No
Police Officer: I'm detaining you so as to find information necessary to summons you for an offence under section 5 of the public order act
[citizen hands over details to officer and is let on their way]
Probably followed by, [citizen sues police, wins oodles of money].
There's a difference between refusing to identify yourself being an offence under section 5 of the public order act, and using a non-existant offence under section 5 of the public order act to justify compelling a person to identify themselves.
It's also not as simple as 'if they don't believe you'. They have to have a reason to not believe you. For instance, if you give the name "Mickey Mouse", or "George W. Bush", those would be reasons to not believe you. Simple failure to produce identification documents which you aren't required to own, let alone carry won't cut it.
The situation that you describe would expose the police to massive liability both on the detention for a non-existant offence front, and on the full arrest without a reason front. Granted, though, sufficent evidence to prove it in court may be a bigger hurdle to get over.
The other obvious factor here is that Section 5 of the Public Order Act has never been tested in Strasbourg. Which is good, because the taxpayer will be on the hook for billions when it is.
Closely followed by a big chunk of change.
UK police officers only have the power to require you to identify yourself if they are taking your details so as to send you a summons, or issuing you with a fixed penalty notice, or ask you under section 44 of the Terrorism act whilst you're in an area pre-designated by the Secretary of State.
They don't have any power to require the production of identity documents (even for driving: you have to take them to a police station within 1 week, but you don't have to produce them on the spot).
Even when performing a stop & search, they cannot compel you to identify yourself (in which case they will write a description of you on the forms).
Giving them false information is probably illegal, but refusing to provide information normally isn't.
REIs photo policies aren't law.
Ok, a store is not public property, but it is a public place.
As private property owners, they have the right to tell him to stop taking photographs. This is backed up solely by being able to ask him to leave. There's no seperate law against not obeying the proprietor of an establishment (except in regard to be asked to leave). Similarly if they try to have a rule requiring people to provide ID when asked for it - all they can actually do is tell people to leave if they don't produce ID.
That's really all that there is to it. Loomis has no authority at all, if REI want him to leave because he's upsetting the Loomis guys they can, and he's trespassing if he doesn't, UNLESS he's being forcibly prevented from leaving (and a man with a gun & threatening to 'tackle' you telling you not to leave counts as 'forcibly')
Yeah, it's a sucky part of our common legal system. There was a case in the UK where a local police force declared a curfew - anyone under 18 out after 9pm would be detained and returned to their home.
A boy in this area (who didn't fancy getting detained and returned home) sued the police force because he believed that the curfew was a breach of his human rights. After weeks in the High Court, the judges finally said that, though the curfew was utterly illegal, and would be thrown out, they had to rule against the boy because he hadn't yet actually been detained & returned home. If he wanted to not be threatened with illegal action by the police, he had to let them perform said illegal action against him first and sue them later.
Say the police in state A* attach a GPS tracker to a car sans warrant, then say that the owner of that car drives to a different state, B**; would evidence collected whilst the vehicle was in State B count? Would the officers in State A be exposing themselves to actual liability (as opposed to the evidence simply being thrown out) in State B?
*Wisconsin
**New York
oblig.
And how, exactly, does the chief clerk respond when called to the subsequent non-payment-of-fine hearing and gets asked "did you recieve the bag with the money in it?"? In what bizarre version of the world is it the person paying the fine's responsibility if the court clerks left it in the cupboard somewhere?
did they have a freepost address that you could send them to? (preferably from overseas. By airmail.)
So if you want to irk someone in the UK, give them 20p in coppers, then throw in some New Zealand 5 cent pieces - they're the same shape, size & alloy as a British 1p and even have the same picture of HMQ on one side.
You can either go "I told you so" when they try to complain that you're over the 20p limit, or you can let them accept all the coins, then point out that there were 5 foreign coins (and that's why they're 5p over) which have now ben mixed into their coin box, and ask for them back. Massive entropy increase FTW.
Ok, I haven't watched the rest of American TV - I'd somewhat assumed that it was back-to-back awesomeness consisting solely of the good bits that we get here.
You're right, my assertion that HIGNFY is better than BB&F is entirely personal opinion. That's the point of the discussion; 'Does the BBC make programmes which in a small number of people's personal opinion are good, but which don't get the ratings which would justify their production by a commercial broadcaster?'
HIGNFY is probably a bad example, since it IS popular, but then I brought it up as an example of a show which the BBC alone has the clout to make, not one which is unpopular but made anyway.
You're making my argument for me - they're widely accepted to be good, and the commercial channels are clamouring to buy up the rights - this is high-rating programming which will more-or-less guarantee the advertising revenue needed to pay for it.
You're right that the BBC has lost its way of late - but that doesn't mean that the entire system is somehow a bad one.
How about Blackadder? Series one was very expensive (big risk - not for commercial stations) and not particularly popular. The BBC, however, decided to continue taking the risk (albeit with a reduced budget) and comissioned series two. What happened? It turned out to be one of the most popular sitcoms in the UK. Would a commercial broadcaster have paid up for an historical sitcom in which Rowan Atkinson had a speaking part? And then decided that it was an inherently sound idea and comissioned a second series even after the first one flopped? No.
Infact TV itself. The BBC (then funded by radio licenses) put money in to John Logi Baird's new invention and despite the fact that it was a complete joke which didn't generate as much as it cost, continued to fund it. BBC Research has invented a whole bunch of stuff that makes modern broadcasting easier. Would that have been invented so soon (if at all) by the commercial sector? No. And what about the iPlayer? Not only is it the best system used by the British broadcasters, but its very existence is what spurred everyone else to try and catch up with their rather pitiful knock-offs. (Have you used 4OD?).
The point is not that the BBC can churn out endless supplies of programs with low ratings but which ought to be made anyway, but that it can afford to innovate, and that enriches our entire viewing experience. Would special effects be where they are today without the Radiophonics Workshop?
I never said that he should go to my Flickr. I said that he should go to the actual physical junction and see for himself what the layout of the junction is. I never said that judges should use sources provided by either side, or of unknown provenance. I specifically said that they should know where the source has come from, and how reliable this makes it ("probably true with a quantification of 'probably' and reasons for that"). A random flickr account would be unreliable and wouldn't be considered (and I'd expect the judge to list their sources - so either party could object to them, as in the present system).
In the junction example, the judge would go and look at the junction, and would (to ensure the validity of the information gained), check with the City works department that the junction layout hadn't been changed since the alleged incident (and document that he'd done this).
To use your table example - both sides put their cards on the table, but the judge can now point out when someone has dropped one of their cards, or that the other guy seems to have put down 5 aces on the table.
To the bunker! The apocalypse is nigh!
I disagree - judges should have any information which is both relevant and true (or probably true with a quantification of 'probably' and reasons for that) at their disposal.
Justice is not served by handing judges the opportunity to make wrong decisions because of wilful ignorance of objective reality.
For instance, say there's a dispute over a car accident (got to get a car in here somewhere), which hinges on the layout of a junction. One party makes a submission to the court asserting some information about the junction. This information is wrong. The other party does not, for whatever reason, contest it. The judge happens to drive through this junction at some point over a weekend (or goes there deliberately - whatever); should the wrong information supplied by the first party stand because it wasn't contested, or be thrown out because the judge now knows that it was wrong?
How about another example - a judge issues a temporary injunction requiring a website to be taken down for the duration of proceedings (the defendant's website). Some reasonable time later, the plantiff complains to the judge that the website hasn't been taken down. The defendant says that it has. Should the judge:
It seems obvious to me that the latter is far preferable - whether the website is still up is an objective fact, and getting facts from two parties who both have an interest in distorting them, whilst deliberately refraining from finding out yourself seems irresponsible.
In the real world, however, the latter is the one course that the judge is NOT meant to take.
To make up some numbers:
Let's say that there are 10 wrong decisions. It we don't allow judges to use information from outside, then all those decisions will continue to be wrong. If we do allow them to use information form outside, then one of those decisions will no longer be wrong (but it'll be down to chance as to which that one is). The present system seems to think that it would serve justice better if all 10 wrong decisions stood, than one person, who would otherwise have got a wrong decision, got a right decision due to chance.