I am boggled, O knight. Because I use a different word than you when talking about animated cartoons, you decide that I'm an idiot and you need not bother to read the rest of my post? Under the title 'No', you are reiterating my point, you silly person. For many reasons, including the one you give, a good dubbed cartoon is indeed a rare thing, but it is still more likely than good dubbed live action, for all the very same reasons. Everyone will have different personal levels of emotional sensitivity and concern about textual and artistic integrity, but for any given set of parameters, dubbed live action will always be less satisfactory than dubbed animation, because faces are very high bandwidth channels, and we spend much of our lives focussed on them—there is just more skew between face and voice available to experience.
Oh, and on the subject of using the wrong word, it's 'proper to,' not 'proper of.'
Ah, and one other thing. You are, I think, confusing the cultural and linguistic levels. Now, I forgive you, because they are interrelated, and it's very clear that the entertainment industry is actively exacerbating the problem. Why someone should 'translate,' let's say, 'noodles' as 'pizza,' I just can't imagine. And if vocatives were left alone, people would just come off as sounding like they come from a culture with a lot of vocatives. But somehow, cultural erasure becomes one of the goals of translators. This I don't understand, and, yes, this is one of the forces opposing competent translation of anything. Why would you want to be unfaithful to the original, when the experience of the original is what the customers are paying for?
With a cartoon, of course, the original is 'dubbed'. So the question becomes largely one of which version has the better voice acting. That's still usually the original because of matters of budget, access to the original creators, and because of timing (human languages can take surprisingly different amounts of speech to encode the same information, especially when differences in cultural context are taken into account). But at least in principle one could prefer a second language version. With live action, however, the chance of the voice actor catching the emotion and timing of the original actor, who you can see, is close to nil, even aside from any cognitive difficulties with broken lip synch. Finally, of course, subtitles and dubbing will typically have different translations, and all bets are off as to which is better.
So I usually try cartoons both ways and see which one I like, but for live action, I'd almost rather watch an unsubtitled film in a language I don't know than something dubbed.
8859-1 may be American-centric, but it's not English-centric by any means. It lacks the English letter OE! Something very strange must have happened in committee, that 8859-1 was eventually delivered in a form that supports neither English nor French spelling (someone once told me it was all to spite DEC...).
I think how consumers are supposed to select their QoS strategy is with QoS labels. The question is not 'should we have QoS' (I don't know about you, but I would rather have my videoconference packets queued ahead of my ftp packets), it's should the ISP be overriding our choices to satisfy their own policies. This is the same issue as randomly dropped connections: a mechanism to drop connections should exist because the endpoints need it. The carrier should not be invoking it 'on your behalf' and in the face of your desires, or it simply isn't doing what it was paid to do.
There's a secondary issue of whether your operating system provides a good mechanism for QoS policy management at the endpoints (hint: no, it doesn't). But that's something to take up with the O/S vendor, or perhaps—an easier nut to crack—the router in your home. But in any case, it seems reasonably clear that QoS should be honoured or ignored end-to-end, and not randomly messed with in transit to the benefit of third parties.
...Unless I've misunderstood the technical situation completely....
This point is perhaps particularly relevant to the extremely gifted. Lack of challenge and lack of feedback can easily produce the 'helpless' personality type even in people with an IQ of 200. Going to a school where there is no possible way of failing prepares you for real life in no way at all. Speaking from my own experience, here in Quebec, school grades of 98% are eminently attainable without real effort, and there is no higher grade (god help those in places with letter grades!). If you are one of the students who can do this (and the exams are structured so that you can usually do well simply on the basis of internal evidence; I think it possible that a sufficiently cynical teacher could teach average students to ace them cold), no one will believe you when you say you are having trouble understanding the material, and no one will provide you with any motivation to do any better—or frankly, any guidance about anything. When you get into the real world and people start asking you to do the impossible, guaranteed failure scenarios being a genuine part of reality, it all falls apart. It's a big shock, and many of the most valuable people are lost, I think.
I've never understood this argument. If the land is too expensive for rail, how is it affordable for roads? Kick the cars out of the city centres, sell off half the road area, put in rail systems, profit!
Well, I certainly can't make head or tail of this conversation.
Well, that'd be a wrong suspicion, then. It's probably much more appropriate and reasonable to believe that C++ is possibly overcomplicated, but brings some very useful facilities to the table.
If by 'possibly' you mean an order of magnitude, perhaps. And certainly C++ attempts to deploy some useful ideas, but it hardly does it in a useful or manageable way. Seriously, can you name anything that C++ does right? To take a random example, the templates look interesting, until you realise that they don't give you code sharing, that they are not required to generate code transparently into libraries, and that the rules for the binding of names inside them are beyond human intuition. Or an older one: privacy control looks interesting, until you realise that it's been implemented in such a way as to require most code to be lifted from the implementation fie to the interface file, providing negative information hiding.
When I 'new' a MyClass, I get a pointer to a MyClass. There's no except.
Yes yes yes. What I mean to say is, than when you are packaging up data for the users of a module, you need to use pointers for class data in order to get the OO-ish semantics. But the facilities for numeric data rely on them being unboxed. This means, among other things, that it's unnecessarily hard to provide opacity for simple values. It's a bizarre state of affairs in C++; how it got carried across into Java I will never understand (and recently they've tried to patch around it, and that's a mess too...).
Writing a multithreaded garbage-collecting runtime environment entirely in C and/or assembly? You must be joking.
You boggle me. Why on earth not? We write operating systems in C. In olden times, we wrote them in assembly. I certainly wrote my garbage collectors, multithread executives, core library routines and whatall in assembler when I was doing such things. It wasn't especially hard, and it certainly wasn't technically inappropriate. Did something happen along the way to make it impossible?
In any event, C++ is certainly not the language for such tasks, because they share the common property that tight control of data representation is an absolute requirement. Since C++ does not provide this once you step outside the almost-C-compatible subset, why not save yourself pain and use C? (I mean, not that C is fantastic about it. What one wants is a language whose representation control is good enough that sending a data structure straight out on the wire is a plausble programming strategy.)
Pointers to anything is dangerous - so are scissors and cars. And saying pointers to stack objects is "suicidal" sounds like more hyperbole.
Matter of fact you'll definitely hear me advocating the banning of private cars, at least in urban areas. I simply do not understand how people can argue about whether money is being spent on antiterrorism measures that could be spent on education (for example) while random people are allowed to drive those things. Does nobody pay any attention to the statistics?
But (in the absence of an appropriate static checking mechanism, of course) I'll stand by my characterisation of pointers to stack objects as suicidalhopefully it's the process that dies and not the user, of course, but (in the case of closures) it was famously one of the great design flaws of Algol 68—or does my memory fail me?
Based on your comments - and I really hate to make this kind of accusation and I hope you don't take it personally - I think you have very limited experience with C++ given many things you've written that don't ring true.
Well, only five or six years of solid nine-to-five experience with C++, which I guess does not compare well to my C experience, if you want to
I think you're being unnecessarily derogative of C++. Different tools for different jobs.
I freely admit I never know what to do in this situation. The rhetoric texts will say that the response I am about to make is a fallacy; the experience is much like that of trying to argue against naive creationism—I just don't know what to say. But look, I'm quite serious and not at all trying to be inflammatory; if you believe that C++ is not a complete disaster, then it makes me suspect that programming language design was not part of your curriculum at school. It's just a stupendously horrible job. I would not give it a passing grade. I guess I could pull out my copy of Stroustrup and go through it line by line, but there just isn't the space here. I'm genuinely sorry if that sounds ranty, but words truly fail me. Each application may have a tool, but it does not follow that each tool has an application.
There are many scenarios where deterministic, manual GC has benefits over automatic GC. I wouldn't characterize having deterministic destructors in place of GC as having no arms and no legs.
And I'm sorry if it read like that. I meant to suggest that having no garbage collector is like having no legs; the missing arms are, if you like, some of the language's many other design features.;)
I do agree that there are some circumstances for which we do not yet have good enough implementations of garbage collection; generally, however, I would suggest a C++ programmer use C or even assembly code for programming at this level, though these are merely the most familiar options.
C++ is pretty consistent here. You can new up an int and char and require them to be deleted, just like I can instantiate classes/structs on the stack. Nothing in C++ says I ever have to call new/delete.
Well—except that if you 'new' an int, you don't get an int, you get a pointer to int. It's a different thing. And if you don't new your structs then you can't make dynamic or even variable sized structures; you can't safely pass pointers; you can't build linked structures; you have no way of simulating function objects; and you can only really make use of methods in the context of callback structures—you're basically hosed as regards basic programming techniques. See, the thing is that C++ programming relies heavily on abstraction, but the abstraction mechanisms it provides operate specifically through pointers (this all harkens back to the long and strange tradition whereby C programs pass structures by reference, even though struct declarations describe layout at the referent. In the context of the language family, the ability to pass structs around as values is the innovation, not the pointers. This may be ancient history now, but it wasn't when C++ was originally devised...). Without a garbage collector, pointers to heap objects are dangerous; but pointers to stack objects are suicidal and semantically anaemic.
And, even in java or.net, you often have to essentially manually manage freeing certain kinds of resources anyways (eg. database connections).
Ouch! Where did you get the idea that I was advocating Java or.Net? Garbage collection may be necessary to a modern high level language, but it is far from sufficient. Though you have a point: when managing resources external to the language system some accomodation generally must be made. Though it's subtle: one of the ways in which Un*x scores over other operating systems designs is that unlinking a file does not cause it to be deleted; there is a garbage collector, and so long as there is an fd (an O/S level pointer, if you like) open on something, it is retained. That's a good and useful idiom; but not all system designers believe in garbage collection, you see. So, yes, systems do have edges; it's an issue.
Yes, it is well known by those who know it well that LANL are just a front enabling the government to pump billions of dollars into the development of pyramid schemes and penis enlargers. From there the money flows through Steve Jackson to Area 51 and off-planet. This also explains why it took so long for US money to be updated to modern standards: the aliens, having supertechnology, can easily defeat human anti-forgery techniques, but they are blind to green light. Thus, by keeping the bills perfectly green, they were protected. Unfortunately, once alien breeding programs produced a strain of hyperintelligent green-seeing cheese-weasels, the green-only ploy was defeated. Now multicoloured forged US bills with full DRM are flooding in from the Z'z'z'qqrkk Sector and the US economy is tanking. Building fake nuclear reactors full of double-A cells and selling them to terrorists on the sly is America's last best hope of defeating the Communist Chinese before they become completely Capitalist and therefore good and undefeatable.
I feel I am being most aggressively misrepresented. I am not presently fighting any wars of any description; I do not believe that I am in any sense cheapening human life. I am merely commenting on the game theory, the logic, and the doctrine of evil people who themselves place no value on life.
As to the claim that I assume approval of the atom bomb, read again. I claim only that its use was approved by those who dropped it, and that such people still exist and are still electable—for which the simple evidence is that I have heard current US presidential hopefuls say publicly that they are willing to nuke Iran, and this proved not to be suicidal. It is not something I am making up; it is not a straw man.
Finally, I do not believe that terrorism is the only possible response to the might of the US. Indeed, I don't believe it's an effective response at all. Unfortunately, I do not believe that the people of Iraq currently have a playable hand. The effective response to the US is probably a long, slow process of economic ostracisation by the rest of the world.
But it is flamebait. First, there are people who disbelieve in copyright but feel that plagiarism is a major sin; this is the traditional ethos of academia, where people desperately need the ideas to be free, in order to do what they perhaps rightly perceive to be the most important work in society—but still want to be rewarded in terms of reputation, which to them is more valuable than money. Second, some of the people here who are quite willing to characterise the ID crowd as evil drooling morons are also very respectful of copyright, and I sincerely doubt that you have your finger on detailed statistics of who is who. Finally, it is nearly certain you know all this, but you wanted to start a fight.
You have to remember that these are not just any creationists, they are (a) the particular creationists who are too stupid to imagine a God who can do his job well enough to build a universe that can run for more than a few thousand years without pulling it up under the debugger, and (b) the particular brand of such idiots who would rather lie about science than argue theology honestly.
The thing I don't understand about the entire situation is not why there are evil morons out there, but where they get their influence (since the fact that they are evil morons is no secret). But perhaps that's the general mystery of politics....
But using remotely operated vehicles, smart weapons, &c. isn't a level playing field either. If you want 'level playing field' then everyone needs to go out there naked. Or play chess. Or something where both sides agree to the rules a priori.
Of course, this is the very opposite of military strategy, which is to change the rules; in essence, to win by any means necessary (so long as it doesn't get you shot by your own side). This will involve adopting the methods of the enemy (using high technology, manipulating the media) where they are effective, but also, and more importantly, trying to outflank them mentally and economically.
The US is very fond of the attitude that the 'right' way to fight wars is to spend a lot of money on them. This seems good, because the US is very rich, and thus it is a method that will let the US win. If you had a country with a lot of cheap lives, then - and I know that to those of us who live in countries where life is dear this sounds terrible - spending lives would seem like the right way to go. I'm afraid that's logic. (It seems to me that - in the very broadest strokes - the Soviet Union won when it was spending lives and lost when it was spending money.) Remember, the goal in a war is to win, not to have American values.
This also makes it very clear that hiding behind women and children most precisely is tactics. It's the tactics of a different handbook, but it is exploitation of terrain; it is an attack on the enemy's morale; and it is a method of shifting the balance away from the people with the expensive weapons to those who know the territory. It could come right out of Sun Tzu, were it not for the fact that most manuals of war contain an exception rule, "don't mess with women and children."
Here's the odd thing, though; what's that rule for? It's to safeguard population recovery, and perhaps, secondarily, to address some moral scruples that wars are, in some sense, men's fault. Now, if your opponent on the one hand develops doctrines of surgical warfare that attempt to achieve political goals with minimum losses to civilian population, and on the other, starts inducting women into its army, then that rule starts to look like a tradition, the sort of thing the violation of which makes you one of the generals who are mentioned by name in history books.
Times change. America has this notion that it is the driver of change and thus it gets to write all the rulebooks. No matter what your politics, this could only ever work at the negotiating table; it is not a winning idea in a war.
As to talk of warfare with conscience, of scruples about the annihilation of innocents; I'm sorry, this is nothing but propaganda. In this case, you are speaking of the US; and we all remember who dropped the atom bomb. And times have not changed enough; we all know that there are circumstances under which the US would do it again; for example, it would fight a nuclear war before it would accept externally imposed 'regime change'. In Iraq, today, case the US is not under any particular threat, but its enemies are. That's a situation that the US chose; it need not have started this 'asymmetrical war.' Even without a cultural and economic gap, who would be expected to act more desperately?
In sum: the US has elected what may be the most asymmetrical war in history. It has unilaterally promulgated a doctrine that war is to be fought by spending money, not lives, because that is where its advantage lies. However, (and ironically, because he adduced the opposite conclusion) as the parent said: "The reason the playing field is leveled is because of tactics, not technology."
Certainly, mortality-wise, it is far more important to ban private cars than it is to cure flu. But will anyone go for that? There's so little connection between reality and public policy (at least that I can see) that I can hardly imagine how this can be discussed rationally.
Yeah. Especially when I remember all the effort I had to go to to shoehorn Nethack into the 640k PC footprint....;)
I do get your point, even though it's also clear that memory efficiency is not the matter of pride among programmers that it used to be in the Dark Ages.
But it always depends what you mean by 'open.' I don't know how it is now, but in days of yore VMS generally came with a swatload of API documentation and the entire source—on microfiche. That's opener than is being proposed for OOXML, if I understand aright, even if it isn't as open as Linux—because it is enough information to interoperate (which, frankly, I think ought to be the minimum legal requirement for any product whatsoever, let alone standards).
More like "we didn't have an unlimited amount of time and money with which to write the engine, so what can we do?"
I find this interesting, because it has been my impression of the modern games industry that the resources available are uncanny. Unless artists are an order of magnitude more productive than I imagine, then it seems to me that the execution engines could be quite sophisticated with that order of effort. But, well, perhaps they are.
But I'm going to stop writing now since this heading into off-topic territory.
If you say so. But in fact, perhaps you've just given the true answer to the original question.
...Yeeeessss, but a lot of planning is supposed to be done in the initial design phase. Now, I understand that my perspective on this is a bit different from the average game programmer, because my background is in programming language design and implementation, but.... Before you write the game don't you sit down and say, "so ok, we will be putting the player in a world. So we need to be walk around in unbounded models, synthesise detail on demand, smoothly pre-load local context, save and load state, and never ever crash"? Aren't those engine issues?
Nah, mitochondria are like tapeworms (but more useful); they pass all the tests for being 'regular' life—they even have DNA. It's the fact that they do have their own DNA that's interesting, in fact; that's the strongest evidence for their having once been independent organisms. But we share a fairly recent common ancestor—they're just bacteria.
It's interesting that you should bring up Intelligent Design in this context. One of the things that's always bothered me about discussions of 'alien life' (as it relates to other planets), is that it seems more and more to fall within the Intelligent Design philosophical camp, if not within its social camp. We seem to have become obsessed with looking for earth-like planets of earth-like sizes and ages, and above all with the presence of water.
This is rather predicated on the assumption that Nature, instead of exploring all paths and propagating anything and everything that, well, propagates (the obvious fact that is the core of evolutionary mathematics), is a hide-bound little old guy in the clouds who can't think how to make anything other than people (and maybe the odd platypus).
I won't accuse the specialists in the field of straying this far, but it is distressingly common to hear apparently educated people with solid science backgrounds talk about, e.g., 'alien DNA'. Look, find an envelope and a pencil, and make an estimate of the prior probability of developing DNA. It's a nonsense idea! What is the prior probability of our particular set of amino acids?
So, to answer your question, no. The problem faced by Intelligent Design is that it's utter batshit irrationality. If you want to believe in a creator, you are rationally welcome to do so; but believe in one who is omnipotent and competent, who created a finished, complete universe, with laws of physics that work without constant maintenance and naturally give rise to the mathematics and physical science that we so readily and consistently observe around us. If you don't want to believe in a creator, then there is no need to, because the data that the ID crowd say make them fret are already well explained.
The problems really faced by the search for alien life on earth include
imagining what to look for
searching for it
identifying it
disentangling the effects of co-evolution with 'our' life (you'll note that one of the most sensible places to look for such alien organisms is inside 'normal' ones, or even in more exotic relationships with them - please excuse me if I don't wander off into a discussion of memes)
working out what is attributable to loss of function rather than 'forward progress' (you understand the need for quotes)
...and the fact that this question is being asked strongly suggests that the askers have specifically overcome their irrational reliance on the counterfactual assumption that the universe is homogeneous to the point of offending basic statistics. But those statistics are such that we're likely to know it when we find it - providing the right questions are asked.
I don't know what the current status is on this theory, but it's well worth remembering that it has been suggested more than once that cellular organisation and RNA catalysis may be symbiotic at root, and lack an early common origin. And this suggests that we may already have the data, somewhere, but be missing no more than the question. If it turns out that in retrospect we are kicking ourselves and saying, how could we have missed that, of course <common phenomenon x> is better explained if its origin is truly independent, I shall be very far from surprised.
So those are truly hard problems, but they are quite different from the challenges facing Intelligent Design, viz.: dismantling science education, persuading people to disregard the results of common logic, subverting the theology of major religions to political ends, and generally trying to deconstruct Western Civilisation (which - and I'm sorry to be suddenly embedding part of a totally different rant - here includes centuries of brilliant Islamic research, for what that's worth).
Having lived in several places across the width of the province of Quebec, and on a number of different personal schedules, I have experienced nothing to support this theory. Subjective mornings suck no matter where the sun is in the sky, and the 'appropriateness' of the timezone doesn't seem to help you get lost in the least.
If you want China to stop having influence on the US through trade, then step one is for the US to stop doing trade with China, don't you think? Trade is influence.
The point I was making, the point you missed, and the thing that the US seems chronically unable to get its head around, is that everything is a two-way street. If the US wants to recede into hardcore isolationism, most of the rest of the world will, I am sure, breathe a sigh of relief. But by definition, it cannot both do that and arse around with everyone else's economies and/or politics.
To be blunt, for an American today to whine about other people not respecting US sovereignty beggars belief.
Welcome to globalisation, America. It's a good thing, remember? Petty national interests, including your petty national interests, need to become a thing of the past. And the view that shipping is a strategic resource and communication is not is bizarre beyond belief, moreso in a democracy such as you supposedly inhabit.
Ports, Airlines, etc ARE strategic resource. Imagine if China presses for some trade advantage from the US and is rebuffed. If they had the ability to go close some of your major ports, you'd be feeling the pain really quickly.
Then, and if it ever came to that, I think that's ultimately why you have an army. Defending your own ports is certainly a better use for it than, say, overthrowing foreign governments because you think you can embarrass the French by showing the world that they are as moronically unethical in their arms sales as you are, when actually they aren't....
Yeah, yeah, it's a troll... but I am so tired of this doctrine that freedom of movement, freedom of trade, the rule of law, democracy, freedom of speech and the right to a good cup of coffee are to be the goals of the entire world, but only in so far as they inure solely to the benefit of the USA.
As far as I can tell from non-US, non-Chinese news sources, the Chinese are presently trying at least as hard as the US to put their house in order. Their priorities may be different from yours, but yours are different from theirs, right? When CNN is a better news source than the Daily Show, maybe we can talk about Chinese information policy. When American corporations stop bullying foreign governments, we can talk about how foreign governments should be nicer to American corporations.
...And to those many readers who are American and not insane, look, I apologise for frothing at the mouth. I know it's worse for you than it is for me.
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I am boggled, O knight. Because I use a different word than you when talking about animated cartoons, you decide that I'm an idiot and you need not bother to read the rest of my post? Under the title 'No', you are reiterating my point, you silly person. For many reasons, including the one you give, a good dubbed cartoon is indeed a rare thing, but it is still more likely than good dubbed live action, for all the very same reasons. Everyone will have different personal levels of emotional sensitivity and concern about textual and artistic integrity, but for any given set of parameters, dubbed live action will always be less satisfactory than dubbed animation, because faces are very high bandwidth channels, and we spend much of our lives focussed on them—there is just more skew between face and voice available to experience.
Oh, and on the subject of using the wrong word, it's 'proper to,' not 'proper of.'
Ah, and one other thing. You are, I think, confusing the cultural and linguistic levels. Now, I forgive you, because they are interrelated, and it's very clear that the entertainment industry is actively exacerbating the problem. Why someone should 'translate,' let's say, 'noodles' as 'pizza,' I just can't imagine. And if vocatives were left alone, people would just come off as sounding like they come from a culture with a lot of vocatives. But somehow, cultural erasure becomes one of the goals of translators. This I don't understand, and, yes, this is one of the forces opposing competent translation of anything. Why would you want to be unfaithful to the original, when the experience of the original is what the customers are paying for?
With a cartoon, of course, the original is 'dubbed'. So the question becomes largely one of which version has the better voice acting. That's still usually the original because of matters of budget, access to the original creators, and because of timing (human languages can take surprisingly different amounts of speech to encode the same information, especially when differences in cultural context are taken into account). But at least in principle one could prefer a second language version. With live action, however, the chance of the voice actor catching the emotion and timing of the original actor, who you can see, is close to nil, even aside from any cognitive difficulties with broken lip synch. Finally, of course, subtitles and dubbing will typically have different translations, and all bets are off as to which is better.
So I usually try cartoons both ways and see which one I like, but for live action, I'd almost rather watch an unsubtitled film in a language I don't know than something dubbed.
8859-1 may be American-centric, but it's not English-centric by any means. It lacks the English letter OE! Something very strange must have happened in committee, that 8859-1 was eventually delivered in a form that supports neither English nor French spelling (someone once told me it was all to spite DEC...).
Wow! So that proves that God is made of cake!
Sorry, sorry.
I think how consumers are supposed to select their QoS strategy is with QoS labels. The question is not 'should we have QoS' (I don't know about you, but I would rather have my videoconference packets queued ahead of my ftp packets), it's should the ISP be overriding our choices to satisfy their own policies. This is the same issue as randomly dropped connections: a mechanism to drop connections should exist because the endpoints need it. The carrier should not be invoking it 'on your behalf' and in the face of your desires, or it simply isn't doing what it was paid to do.
There's a secondary issue of whether your operating system provides a good mechanism for QoS policy management at the endpoints (hint: no, it doesn't). But that's something to take up with the O/S vendor, or perhaps—an easier nut to crack—the router in your home. But in any case, it seems reasonably clear that QoS should be honoured or ignored end-to-end, and not randomly messed with in transit to the benefit of third parties.
...Unless I've misunderstood the technical situation completely....
This point is perhaps particularly relevant to the extremely gifted. Lack of challenge and lack of feedback can easily produce the 'helpless' personality type even in people with an IQ of 200. Going to a school where there is no possible way of failing prepares you for real life in no way at all. Speaking from my own experience, here in Quebec, school grades of 98% are eminently attainable without real effort, and there is no higher grade (god help those in places with letter grades!). If you are one of the students who can do this (and the exams are structured so that you can usually do well simply on the basis of internal evidence; I think it possible that a sufficiently cynical teacher could teach average students to ace them cold), no one will believe you when you say you are having trouble understanding the material, and no one will provide you with any motivation to do any better—or frankly, any guidance about anything. When you get into the real world and people start asking you to do the impossible, guaranteed failure scenarios being a genuine part of reality, it all falls apart. It's a big shock, and many of the most valuable people are lost, I think.
I've never understood this argument. If the land is too expensive for rail, how is it affordable for roads? Kick the cars out of the city centres, sell off half the road area, put in rail systems, profit!
Well, I certainly can't make head or tail of this conversation.
If by 'possibly' you mean an order of magnitude, perhaps. And certainly C++ attempts to deploy some useful ideas, but it hardly does it in a useful or manageable way. Seriously, can you name anything that C++ does right? To take a random example, the templates look interesting, until you realise that they don't give you code sharing, that they are not required to generate code transparently into libraries, and that the rules for the binding of names inside them are beyond human intuition. Or an older one: privacy control looks interesting, until you realise that it's been implemented in such a way as to require most code to be lifted from the implementation fie to the interface file, providing negative information hiding.
Yes yes yes. What I mean to say is, than when you are packaging up data for the users of a module, you need to use pointers for class data in order to get the OO-ish semantics. But the facilities for numeric data rely on them being unboxed. This means, among other things, that it's unnecessarily hard to provide opacity for simple values. It's a bizarre state of affairs in C++; how it got carried across into Java I will never understand (and recently they've tried to patch around it, and that's a mess too...).
You boggle me. Why on earth not? We write operating systems in C. In olden times, we wrote them in assembly. I certainly wrote my garbage collectors, multithread executives, core library routines and whatall in assembler when I was doing such things. It wasn't especially hard, and it certainly wasn't technically inappropriate. Did something happen along the way to make it impossible?
In any event, C++ is certainly not the language for such tasks, because they share the common property that tight control of data representation is an absolute requirement. Since C++ does not provide this once you step outside the almost-C-compatible subset, why not save yourself pain and use C? (I mean, not that C is fantastic about it. What one wants is a language whose representation control is good enough that sending a data structure straight out on the wire is a plausble programming strategy.)
Matter of fact you'll definitely hear me advocating the banning of private cars, at least in urban areas. I simply do not understand how people can argue about whether money is being spent on antiterrorism measures that could be spent on education (for example) while random people are allowed to drive those things. Does nobody pay any attention to the statistics?
But (in the absence of an appropriate static checking mechanism, of course) I'll stand by my characterisation of pointers to stack objects as suicidalhopefully it's the process that dies and not the user, of course, but (in the case of closures) it was famously one of the great design flaws of Algol 68—or does my memory fail me?
Well, only five or six years of solid nine-to-five experience with C++, which I guess does not compare well to my C experience, if you want to
I freely admit I never know what to do in this situation. The rhetoric texts will say that the response I am about to make is a fallacy; the experience is much like that of trying to argue against naive creationism—I just don't know what to say. But look, I'm quite serious and not at all trying to be inflammatory; if you believe that C++ is not a complete disaster, then it makes me suspect that programming language design was not part of your curriculum at school. It's just a stupendously horrible job. I would not give it a passing grade. I guess I could pull out my copy of Stroustrup and go through it line by line, but there just isn't the space here. I'm genuinely sorry if that sounds ranty, but words truly fail me. Each application may have a tool, but it does not follow that each tool has an application.
And I'm sorry if it read like that. I meant to suggest that having no garbage collector is like having no legs; the missing arms are, if you like, some of the language's many other design features. ;)
I do agree that there are some circumstances for which we do not yet have good enough implementations of garbage collection; generally, however, I would suggest a C++ programmer use C or even assembly code for programming at this level, though these are merely the most familiar options.
Well—except that if you 'new' an int, you don't get an int, you get a pointer to int. It's a different thing. And if you don't new your structs then you can't make dynamic or even variable sized structures; you can't safely pass pointers; you can't build linked structures; you have no way of simulating function objects; and you can only really make use of methods in the context of callback structures—you're basically hosed as regards basic programming techniques. See, the thing is that C++ programming relies heavily on abstraction, but the abstraction mechanisms it provides operate specifically through pointers (this all harkens back to the long and strange tradition whereby C programs pass structures by reference, even though struct declarations describe layout at the referent. In the context of the language family, the ability to pass structs around as values is the innovation, not the pointers. This may be ancient history now, but it wasn't when C++ was originally devised...). Without a garbage collector, pointers to heap objects are dangerous; but pointers to stack objects are suicidal and semantically anaemic.
Ouch! Where did you get the idea that I was advocating Java or .Net? Garbage collection may be necessary to a modern high level language, but it is far from sufficient. Though you have a point: when managing resources external to the language system some accomodation generally must be made. Though it's subtle: one of the ways in which Un*x scores over other operating systems designs is that unlinking a file does not cause it to be deleted; there is a garbage collector, and so long as there is an fd (an O/S level pointer, if you like) open on something, it is retained. That's a good and useful idiom; but not all system designers believe in garbage collection, you see. So, yes, systems do have edges; it's an issue.
Yes, it is well known by those who know it well that LANL are just a front enabling the government to pump billions of dollars into the development of pyramid schemes and penis enlargers. From there the money flows through Steve Jackson to Area 51 and off-planet. This also explains why it took so long for US money to be updated to modern standards: the aliens, having supertechnology, can easily defeat human anti-forgery techniques, but they are blind to green light. Thus, by keeping the bills perfectly green, they were protected. Unfortunately, once alien breeding programs produced a strain of hyperintelligent green-seeing cheese-weasels, the green-only ploy was defeated. Now multicoloured forged US bills with full DRM are flooding in from the Z'z'z'qqrkk Sector and the US economy is tanking. Building fake nuclear reactors full of double-A cells and selling them to terrorists on the sly is America's last best hope of defeating the Communist Chinese before they become completely Capitalist and therefore good and undefeatable.
I feel I am being most aggressively misrepresented. I am not presently fighting any wars of any description; I do not believe that I am in any sense cheapening human life. I am merely commenting on the game theory, the logic, and the doctrine of evil people who themselves place no value on life.
As to the claim that I assume approval of the atom bomb, read again. I claim only that its use was approved by those who dropped it, and that such people still exist and are still electable—for which the simple evidence is that I have heard current US presidential hopefuls say publicly that they are willing to nuke Iran, and this proved not to be suicidal. It is not something I am making up; it is not a straw man.
Finally, I do not believe that terrorism is the only possible response to the might of the US. Indeed, I don't believe it's an effective response at all. Unfortunately, I do not believe that the people of Iraq currently have a playable hand. The effective response to the US is probably a long, slow process of economic ostracisation by the rest of the world.
Thus: flamebait.
You have to remember that these are not just any creationists, they are (a) the particular creationists who are too stupid to imagine a God who can do his job well enough to build a universe that can run for more than a few thousand years without pulling it up under the debugger, and (b) the particular brand of such idiots who would rather lie about science than argue theology honestly.
The thing I don't understand about the entire situation is not why there are evil morons out there, but where they get their influence (since the fact that they are evil morons is no secret). But perhaps that's the general mystery of politics....
But using remotely operated vehicles, smart weapons, &c. isn't a level playing field either. If you want 'level playing field' then everyone needs to go out there naked. Or play chess. Or something where both sides agree to the rules a priori.
Of course, this is the very opposite of military strategy, which is to change the rules; in essence, to win by any means necessary (so long as it doesn't get you shot by your own side). This will involve adopting the methods of the enemy (using high technology, manipulating the media) where they are effective, but also, and more importantly, trying to outflank them mentally and economically.
The US is very fond of the attitude that the 'right' way to fight wars is to spend a lot of money on them. This seems good, because the US is very rich, and thus it is a method that will let the US win. If you had a country with a lot of cheap lives, then - and I know that to those of us who live in countries where life is dear this sounds terrible - spending lives would seem like the right way to go. I'm afraid that's logic. (It seems to me that - in the very broadest strokes - the Soviet Union won when it was spending lives and lost when it was spending money.) Remember, the goal in a war is to win, not to have American values.
This also makes it very clear that hiding behind women and children most precisely is tactics. It's the tactics of a different handbook, but it is exploitation of terrain; it is an attack on the enemy's morale; and it is a method of shifting the balance away from the people with the expensive weapons to those who know the territory. It could come right out of Sun Tzu, were it not for the fact that most manuals of war contain an exception rule, "don't mess with women and children."
Here's the odd thing, though; what's that rule for? It's to safeguard population recovery, and perhaps, secondarily, to address some moral scruples that wars are, in some sense, men's fault. Now, if your opponent on the one hand develops doctrines of surgical warfare that attempt to achieve political goals with minimum losses to civilian population, and on the other, starts inducting women into its army, then that rule starts to look like a tradition, the sort of thing the violation of which makes you one of the generals who are mentioned by name in history books.
Times change. America has this notion that it is the driver of change and thus it gets to write all the rulebooks. No matter what your politics, this could only ever work at the negotiating table; it is not a winning idea in a war.
As to talk of warfare with conscience, of scruples about the annihilation of innocents; I'm sorry, this is nothing but propaganda. In this case, you are speaking of the US; and we all remember who dropped the atom bomb. And times have not changed enough; we all know that there are circumstances under which the US would do it again; for example, it would fight a nuclear war before it would accept externally imposed 'regime change'. In Iraq, today, case the US is not under any particular threat, but its enemies are. That's a situation that the US chose; it need not have started this 'asymmetrical war.' Even without a cultural and economic gap, who would be expected to act more desperately?
In sum: the US has elected what may be the most asymmetrical war in history. It has unilaterally promulgated a doctrine that war is to be fought by spending money, not lives, because that is where its advantage lies. However, (and ironically, because he adduced the opposite conclusion) as the parent said: "The reason the playing field is leveled is because of tactics, not technology."
Certainly, mortality-wise, it is far more important to ban private cars than it is to cure flu. But will anyone go for that? There's so little connection between reality and public policy (at least that I can see) that I can hardly imagine how this can be discussed rationally.
Yeah. Especially when I remember all the effort I had to go to to shoehorn Nethack into the 640k PC footprint.... ;)
I do get your point, even though it's also clear that memory efficiency is not the matter of pride among programmers that it used to be in the Dark Ages.
But it always depends what you mean by 'open.' I don't know how it is now, but in days of yore VMS generally came with a swatload of API documentation and the entire source—on microfiche. That's opener than is being proposed for OOXML, if I understand aright, even if it isn't as open as Linux—because it is enough information to interoperate (which, frankly, I think ought to be the minimum legal requirement for any product whatsoever, let alone standards).
I find this interesting, because it has been my impression of the modern games industry that the resources available are uncanny. Unless artists are an order of magnitude more productive than I imagine, then it seems to me that the execution engines could be quite sophisticated with that order of effort. But, well, perhaps they are.
If you say so. But in fact, perhaps you've just given the true answer to the original question.
...So this all summarises as "we didn't write the engine, so what can we do"?
...Yeeeessss, but a lot of planning is supposed to be done in the initial design phase. Now, I understand that my perspective on this is a bit different from the average game programmer, because my background is in programming language design and implementation, but.... Before you write the game don't you sit down and say, "so ok, we will be putting the player in a world. So we need to be walk around in unbounded models, synthesise detail on demand, smoothly pre-load local context, save and load state, and never ever crash"? Aren't those engine issues?
Nah, mitochondria are like tapeworms (but more useful); they pass all the tests for being 'regular' life—they even have DNA. It's the fact that they do have their own DNA that's interesting, in fact; that's the strongest evidence for their having once been independent organisms. But we share a fairly recent common ancestor—they're just bacteria.
It's interesting that you should bring up Intelligent Design in this context. One of the things that's always bothered me about discussions of 'alien life' (as it relates to other planets), is that it seems more and more to fall within the Intelligent Design philosophical camp, if not within its social camp. We seem to have become obsessed with looking for earth-like planets of earth-like sizes and ages, and above all with the presence of water.
This is rather predicated on the assumption that Nature, instead of exploring all paths and propagating anything and everything that, well, propagates (the obvious fact that is the core of evolutionary mathematics), is a hide-bound little old guy in the clouds who can't think how to make anything other than people (and maybe the odd platypus).
I won't accuse the specialists in the field of straying this far, but it is distressingly common to hear apparently educated people with solid science backgrounds talk about, e.g., 'alien DNA'. Look, find an envelope and a pencil, and make an estimate of the prior probability of developing DNA. It's a nonsense idea! What is the prior probability of our particular set of amino acids?
So, to answer your question, no. The problem faced by Intelligent Design is that it's utter batshit irrationality. If you want to believe in a creator, you are rationally welcome to do so; but believe in one who is omnipotent and competent, who created a finished, complete universe, with laws of physics that work without constant maintenance and naturally give rise to the mathematics and physical science that we so readily and consistently observe around us. If you don't want to believe in a creator, then there is no need to, because the data that the ID crowd say make them fret are already well explained.
The problems really faced by the search for alien life on earth include
...and the fact that this question is being asked strongly suggests that the askers have specifically overcome their irrational reliance on the counterfactual assumption that the universe is homogeneous to the point of offending basic statistics. But those statistics are such that we're likely to know it when we find it - providing the right questions are asked.
I don't know what the current status is on this theory, but it's well worth remembering that it has been suggested more than once that cellular organisation and RNA catalysis may be symbiotic at root, and lack an early common origin. And this suggests that we may already have the data, somewhere, but be missing no more than the question. If it turns out that in retrospect we are kicking ourselves and saying, how could we have missed that, of course <common phenomenon x> is better explained if its origin is truly independent, I shall be very far from surprised.
So those are truly hard problems, but they are quite different from the challenges facing Intelligent Design, viz.: dismantling science education, persuading people to disregard the results of common logic, subverting the theology of major religions to political ends, and generally trying to deconstruct Western Civilisation (which - and I'm sorry to be suddenly embedding part of a totally different rant - here includes centuries of brilliant Islamic research, for what that's worth).
Having lived in several places across the width of the province of Quebec, and on a number of different personal schedules, I have experienced nothing to support this theory. Subjective mornings suck no matter where the sun is in the sky, and the 'appropriateness' of the timezone doesn't seem to help you get lost in the least.
If you want China to stop having influence on the US through trade, then step one is for the US to stop doing trade with China, don't you think? Trade is influence.
The point I was making, the point you missed, and the thing that the US seems chronically unable to get its head around, is that everything is a two-way street. If the US wants to recede into hardcore isolationism, most of the rest of the world will, I am sure, breathe a sigh of relief. But by definition, it cannot both do that and arse around with everyone else's economies and/or politics.
To be blunt, for an American today to whine about other people not respecting US sovereignty beggars belief.
Welcome to globalisation, America. It's a good thing, remember? Petty national interests, including your petty national interests, need to become a thing of the past. And the view that shipping is a strategic resource and communication is not is bizarre beyond belief, moreso in a democracy such as you supposedly inhabit.
Then, and if it ever came to that, I think that's ultimately why you have an army. Defending your own ports is certainly a better use for it than, say, overthrowing foreign governments because you think you can embarrass the French by showing the world that they are as moronically unethical in their arms sales as you are, when actually they aren't....
Yeah, yeah, it's a troll... but I am so tired of this doctrine that freedom of movement, freedom of trade, the rule of law, democracy, freedom of speech and the right to a good cup of coffee are to be the goals of the entire world, but only in so far as they inure solely to the benefit of the USA.
As far as I can tell from non-US, non-Chinese news sources, the Chinese are presently trying at least as hard as the US to put their house in order. Their priorities may be different from yours, but yours are different from theirs, right? When CNN is a better news source than the Daily Show, maybe we can talk about Chinese information policy. When American corporations stop bullying foreign governments, we can talk about how foreign governments should be nicer to American corporations.
...And to those many readers who are American and not insane, look, I apologise for frothing at the mouth. I know it's worse for you than it is for me.