I found this pretty frustrating when my kids took a computer course and found it basically consisted of learning to use Microsoft Office. No bytes, bits, binary calculations, parts of a computer (input, output, processing, RAM, etc.). In my mind the only useful part of the class was that they got a chance to practice keyboarding.
Let's force everyone to learn how to code! We need more bad programmers!
After all, people who think they know something without really knowing anything are the best!
We need people who understand what computers are and what they are capable of. This is similar to how we teach biology to everyone even though most will never become doctors (or even bad doctors). We teach chemistry to everyone although most will never become physics. We teach literature to everyone even though many will never work at McDonald's or Starbucks.
Most people will never be doctors, but they will visit doctors, take medicines, deal with minor injuries at home, vote on issues related to impacts of chemicals on humans and animals, etc.
Most people will never be programmers, but they will use computers for a growing number of things throughout their lives and be affected by policies like net-nuetrality, big data mining, data retention, computerized vote fraud, etc.
Scratch is fine, but if you're going to teach any of the modern languages that use "=" for assignment, I would recommend waiting until algrebra is completed to avoid creating confusing between the mathematical "=" and the assignment "=".
But better would be to start with Pascal-like syntax where ":=" can be read as "becomes equal to" with the colon standing in for "becomes".
For the really high IQ kids it may not matter, but the average student who has trouble grasping the full implication of mathematical "equal", introducing a new meaning for the sign will cause trouble.
And soon we'll have self-driving vehicles in certain industrial applications where the environment can be controlled (if we don't have them already). Warehouses, golf courses, quarries, These are some examples of where self-driving vehicles can be useful without having to handle every conceivable obstacle that might be encountered in city or even highway driving. With an industrial base to fund further research the vehicles will get better. Griffin is right - it's just a question of when.
Even if there were such a thing as "basic scientific fact" this wouldn't come anywhere close to it. This is complex theory based on many diverse data points with no possibility of controlled testing.
I'm not saying it's wrong. But it isn't basic and unfortunately it may not be fact until it is too late.
I wish I were. But the fact is once you start working for other people they get to tell you what you're allowed to say on the job if you want to keep working for them, and sometimes restrictions are made that aren't good for society at large.
It will probably hold up easily so long as the restriction only applies while they're on the job.
As for beyond work, you might be surprised. I believe there are laws restricting federal employees from doing things like doing campaign work for candidates for federal office.
I won't defend it by saying it is a good idea. But I will point out that it isn't unique and that companies and government quite often ban discussion of certain topics and use of certain words while on the job. Sometimes it even extends to what you can say or even which political causes you can donate to while off the job. It's not like Brenden Eich never received any pressure to step down.
This will probably come across as a kneejerk response, but the submission makes it sound like Liu's themes are almost entirely derived from PRC propaganda.
I read that bit about the plot for "The Wages of Humanity" and almost laughed out loud. Straight out of Mao's little red pulp mag. What would aliens care about the form of government used on another planet?
Although it doesn't sound that different from some of the line's Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek. "The economics of the future is somewhat different. You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th century... The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of Humanity"
I guess it's possible, of course you would first have to commit genocide against everyone with normal human instincts. That pretty much sums up communism.
Your other narrative of fear and scare-mongering of the great Chinese space migration is as nutty as the fear of Japan taking over the world was in the 1980s.
Sadly it is an open question whether China's present will become seen to more closely resembles Japan of the 1980s or Japan/Germany of the 1930s. Even if China does manage to maintain a somewhat peaceful course (which will be surprising given how they're threatening to annex territory from nearly all their neighbors and even threatening to completely annex Taiwan), a China that achieves the same level of prosperity as Japan won't be as weak as Japan. Japan peaked with a per capita GDP slightly larger than America's giving it an economy about half the size of America's (because Japan has roughly half as many people). China on the other hand has 4 times as many people as America. If China reaches per capita GDP parity, it will have an economy 4 times as large as America's, and larger than America Europe and Japan combined. They'll get their way. While America too often live up to its ideals, China doesn't even have similar ideals.
I've never understood how "patriarchal society" and "tolerance of rape" go together. I a culture where women are just used for one night stands and abadoned, I could see male police not paying much attention to rape.
But in a society where a daughter's virginity is highly important to her ability to get married, in a society where marrying a virgin is considered very important, in a society where traditional marriage is valued and infidelity a rightly punishable offense, how can rape be ignored? Surely the father brother and husband (including potential future husbands) of the raped woman have a huge interest in protecting her and should be allowed to do unspeakable things to the perpetrator.
It sounds to me like this was a test to confirm that the technique gives similar results to what has been shown before. Being able to use computer games to test this stuff makes all kinds of variations cheap and easy to test. Want to see what other colors matter? Want to see if a different position, different lighting, different clothes, etc. matter? A few strokes on the keyboard and you have a new test with all the other factors unchanged. Want volunteers? The game can be distributed world-wide by the internet.
But suppose you go to the department head and ask for a lot of time and money to recruit people all over the world and run a lot of different variations and it turns out that the racism seen in other tests doesn't show up in the computer game at all. You've wasted time and money. So you start small with the people around you, who just happen to be white Italians. You get the response you expect and you've shown your technique is valid.
I'm pretty sick of PC stuff but I don't see this research as necessarily racist or anti-white. I see it as the beginning stage of a work in progress and as something valuable because it demonstrated the usefulness of a new technique.
What I see as potentially racist and anti-white is Slashdot's trumpeting of this incomplete work.
SETI found nothing.. Maybe an alien civilization is in it's dark ages.. couple of hundred years away from inventing the radio.
That is a very real possibility. Or maybe the aliens aren't civilized or even intelligent. Or maybe they're in one of the trillions upon trillions of places SETI hasn't had a chance to look yet. Or maybe they're using transmission frequencies SETI isn't checking, or the transmissions have been wave shifted out of SETI's range. Or perhaps SETI just didn't recognize the signals received.
The fact that SETI has found nothing tells us practically nothing about whether there is life out there. God may have created life (directly or indirectly) all over the universe. We don't have enough knowledge to say for certain yet.
With Democrats in control of both houses of congress (I know the numbers don't show it, you have to look at the results) it's surprising Obama feels the need to threaten a veto.
But I've certainly had cases where I needed to copy and paste a few lines of code maybe even 100 times and then tweak each instance to put in the data values or validations I want.
This leads to bugs where a tweak gets missed in one of the copies (copy, paste, do tweak 1, interruption!, forget tweak 2). It also causes maintenance problems when the person coding a bug fix doesn't know there are a bunch of other places that need to be fixed.
You're right that forgetting to do the tweak can be a problem. But as for not knowing there are a bunch of other places that need fixing, I guess I wasn't clear enough. The repetition gets centralized in a single file so that you can look over all the locations at once.
oooh, a car analogy:)
Refactoring isn't repairing the car. Refactoring is moving the battery a little to the left so that next time you have to do a jump start the cables have room to grip the nodes.
No that's not quite it either.
Refactoring is the engineer changing the design of the car so that that instead of connecting the power steering to the front axle by using a wire that runs from the steering column to the roof to the trunk to underneath the seats and finally to the axle, the wire goes forward and down to the axle. This will make diagnosing problems with the steering easier (won't have to wonder if roof damage is problem) and will make future design work easier. However the customer is unlikely to notice any immediate difference.
I don't think refactoring implies simplification. I think ideally it would simplify something about the code (e.g. semantics, interoperability, etc), but it will likely make some parts of the code more complex (e.g. more levels of abstraction, or a more complex design patterns, etc)
Code refactoring is the process of restructuring existing computer code – changing the factoring – without changing its external behavior. Refactoring improves nonfunctional attributes of the software. Advantages include improved code readability and reduced complexity to improve source code maintainability, and create a more expressive internal architecture or object model to improve extensibility.
Occasionally you may be refactoring the code to give it more capabilities so you'll move to a higher level of abstraction. But I think in most cases the goal is to make the code simpler even if doing so makes some portions of the code more complex. A design pattern that reduces coupling between two classes can make the overall code simpler even if the code that implements the design pattern is complex. If you have a program that, for example, prints a custom driver's license for each of the fifty states, you may put complexity into certain parts of the code so that the parts of the code that focus on the differences between each state can be simple.(instead of 50 mildly complex pieces of code have one more complex piece of code and a list of 50 calls to that code with each call having unique parameters).
If the logic itself is convoluted, roundabout, or inefficient (ie n^2 sort onstead of n log n, exhaustive search instead of bisectioon search or kd-tree), prettying up the code won't help.
Quite often when I'm refactoring, thus making it simple enough to be understood, I discover code that is inefficient that wasn't noticed before because it was too difficult for anyone to really see what was going on.
Slashdot Mirror
I found this pretty frustrating when my kids took a computer course and found it basically consisted of learning to use Microsoft Office. No bytes, bits, binary calculations, parts of a computer (input, output, processing, RAM, etc.). In my mind the only useful part of the class was that they got a chance to practice keyboarding.
Let's force everyone to learn how to code! We need more bad programmers!
After all, people who think they know something without really knowing anything are the best!
We need people who understand what computers are and what they are capable of. This is similar to how we teach biology to everyone even though most will never become doctors (or even bad doctors). We teach chemistry to everyone although most will never become physics. We teach literature to everyone even though many will never work at McDonald's or Starbucks.
Most people will never be doctors, but they will visit doctors, take medicines, deal with minor injuries at home, vote on issues related to impacts of chemicals on humans and animals, etc.
Most people will never be programmers, but they will use computers for a growing number of things throughout their lives and be affected by policies like net-nuetrality, big data mining, data retention, computerized vote fraud, etc.
Scratch is fine, but if you're going to teach any of the modern languages that use "=" for assignment, I would recommend waiting until algrebra is completed to avoid creating confusing between the mathematical "=" and the assignment "=".
But better would be to start with Pascal-like syntax where ":=" can be read as "becomes equal to" with the colon standing in for "becomes".
For the really high IQ kids it may not matter, but the average student who has trouble grasping the full implication of mathematical "equal", introducing a new meaning for the sign will cause trouble.
And soon we'll have self-driving vehicles in certain industrial applications where the environment can be controlled (if we don't have them already). Warehouses, golf courses, quarries, These are some examples of where self-driving vehicles can be useful without having to handle every conceivable obstacle that might be encountered in city or even highway driving. With an industrial base to fund further research the vehicles will get better. Griffin is right - it's just a question of when.
You can only learn from the mistakes if you have the courage to make mistakes.
but banning basic scientific fact?
Even if there were such a thing as "basic scientific fact" this wouldn't come anywhere close to it. This is complex theory based on many diverse data points with no possibility of controlled testing. I'm not saying it's wrong. But it isn't basic and unfortunately it may not be fact until it is too late.
I wish I were. But the fact is once you start working for other people they get to tell you what you're allowed to say on the job if you want to keep working for them, and sometimes restrictions are made that aren't good for society at large.
It will probably hold up easily so long as the restriction only applies while they're on the job.
As for beyond work, you might be surprised. I believe there are laws restricting federal employees from doing things like doing campaign work for candidates for federal office.
I won't defend it by saying it is a good idea. But I will point out that it isn't unique and that companies and government quite often ban discussion of certain topics and use of certain words while on the job. Sometimes it even extends to what you can say or even which political causes you can donate to while off the job. It's not like Brenden Eich never received any pressure to step down.
We ban so many things these days. Try discussing the idea that racial differences go beyond the cosmetic and see how long you last at your job.
Most states and corporations have rules about discussing promoting political views on the job.
This will probably come across as a kneejerk response, but the submission makes it sound like Liu's themes are almost entirely derived from PRC propaganda.
I read that bit about the plot for "The Wages of Humanity" and almost laughed out loud. Straight out of Mao's little red pulp mag. What would aliens care about the form of government used on another planet?
Although it doesn't sound that different from some of the line's Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek. "The economics of the future is somewhat different. You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th century... The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of Humanity"
I guess it's possible, of course you would first have to commit genocide against everyone with normal human instincts. That pretty much sums up communism.
Under our current leadership America is becoming more and more like China everyday.
Your other narrative of fear and scare-mongering of the great Chinese space migration is as nutty as the fear of Japan taking over the world was in the 1980s.
Sadly it is an open question whether China's present will become seen to more closely resembles Japan of the 1980s or Japan/Germany of the 1930s. Even if China does manage to maintain a somewhat peaceful course (which will be surprising given how they're threatening to annex territory from nearly all their neighbors and even threatening to completely annex Taiwan), a China that achieves the same level of prosperity as Japan won't be as weak as Japan. Japan peaked with a per capita GDP slightly larger than America's giving it an economy about half the size of America's (because Japan has roughly half as many people). China on the other hand has 4 times as many people as America. If China reaches per capita GDP parity, it will have an economy 4 times as large as America's, and larger than America Europe and Japan combined. They'll get their way. While America too often live up to its ideals, China doesn't even have similar ideals.
Ok, so China's past looks like America's past.
I've never understood how "patriarchal society" and "tolerance of rape" go together. I a culture where women are just used for one night stands and abadoned, I could see male police not paying much attention to rape.
But in a society where a daughter's virginity is highly important to her ability to get married, in a society where marrying a virgin is considered very important, in a society where traditional marriage is valued and infidelity a rightly punishable offense, how can rape be ignored? Surely the father brother and husband (including potential future husbands) of the raped woman have a huge interest in protecting her and should be allowed to do unspeakable things to the perpetrator.
I just don't get how that's not the case.
It sounds to me like this was a test to confirm that the technique gives similar results to what has been shown before. Being able to use computer games to test this stuff makes all kinds of variations cheap and easy to test. Want to see what other colors matter? Want to see if a different position, different lighting, different clothes, etc. matter? A few strokes on the keyboard and you have a new test with all the other factors unchanged. Want volunteers? The game can be distributed world-wide by the internet.
But suppose you go to the department head and ask for a lot of time and money to recruit people all over the world and run a lot of different variations and it turns out that the racism seen in other tests doesn't show up in the computer game at all. You've wasted time and money. So you start small with the people around you, who just happen to be white Italians. You get the response you expect and you've shown your technique is valid.
I'm pretty sick of PC stuff but I don't see this research as necessarily racist or anti-white. I see it as the beginning stage of a work in progress and as something valuable because it demonstrated the usefulness of a new technique.
What I see as potentially racist and anti-white is Slashdot's trumpeting of this incomplete work.
SETI found nothing .. Maybe an alien civilization is in it's dark ages .. couple of hundred years away from inventing the radio.
That is a very real possibility. Or maybe the aliens aren't civilized or even intelligent. Or maybe they're in one of the trillions upon trillions of places SETI hasn't had a chance to look yet. Or maybe they're using transmission frequencies SETI isn't checking, or the transmissions have been wave shifted out of SETI's range. Or perhaps SETI just didn't recognize the signals received.
The fact that SETI has found nothing tells us practically nothing about whether there is life out there. God may have created life (directly or indirectly) all over the universe. We don't have enough knowledge to say for certain yet.
With Democrats in control of both houses of congress (I know the numbers don't show it, you have to look at the results) it's surprising Obama feels the need to threaten a veto.
But I've certainly had cases where I needed to copy and paste a few lines of code maybe even 100 times and then tweak each instance to put in the data values or validations I want.
This leads to bugs where a tweak gets missed in one of the copies (copy, paste, do tweak 1, interruption!, forget tweak 2). It also causes maintenance problems when the person coding a bug fix doesn't know there are a bunch of other places that need to be fixed.
You're right that forgetting to do the tweak can be a problem. But as for not knowing there are a bunch of other places that need fixing, I guess I wasn't clear enough. The repetition gets centralized in a single file so that you can look over all the locations at once.
I'm always amazed that they were able to build a civilization in such a thick jungle.
I'm sick and tired of these overly dramatic headlines Slashdot keeps throwing at us. The city was never "lost". It was misplaced.
oooh, a car analogy :)
Refactoring isn't repairing the car. Refactoring is moving the battery a little to the left so that next time you have to do a jump start the cables have room to grip the nodes.
No that's not quite it either.
Refactoring is the engineer changing the design of the car so that that instead of connecting the power steering to the front axle by using a wire that runs from the steering column to the roof to the trunk to underneath the seats and finally to the axle, the wire goes forward and down to the axle. This will make diagnosing problems with the steering easier (won't have to wonder if roof damage is problem) and will make future design work easier. However the customer is unlikely to notice any immediate difference.
I don't think refactoring implies simplification. I think ideally it would simplify something about the code (e.g. semantics, interoperability, etc), but it will likely make some parts of the code more complex (e.g. more levels of abstraction, or a more complex design patterns, etc)
Refactoring definitely doesn't imply optimization.
from wikipedia
Code refactoring is the process of restructuring existing computer code – changing the factoring – without changing its external behavior. Refactoring improves nonfunctional attributes of the software. Advantages include improved code readability and reduced complexity to improve source code maintainability, and create a more expressive internal architecture or object model to improve extensibility.
Occasionally you may be refactoring the code to give it more capabilities so you'll move to a higher level of abstraction. But I think in most cases the goal is to make the code simpler even if doing so makes some portions of the code more complex. A design pattern that reduces coupling between two classes can make the overall code simpler even if the code that implements the design pattern is complex. If you have a program that, for example, prints a custom driver's license for each of the fifty states, you may put complexity into certain parts of the code so that the parts of the code that focus on the differences between each state can be simple.(instead of 50 mildly complex pieces of code have one more complex piece of code and a list of 50 calls to that code with each call having unique parameters).
If the logic itself is convoluted, roundabout, or inefficient (ie n^2 sort onstead of n log n, exhaustive search instead of bisectioon search or kd-tree), prettying up the code won't help.
Quite often when I'm refactoring, thus making it simple enough to be understood, I discover code that is inefficient that wasn't noticed before because it was too difficult for anyone to really see what was going on.