However, my very first commercial project ended up an ugly glob of assembly with a little bit of C mixed in, which I hopefully will never have to look at again in my life.
The product sold almost a million times and didn't cause any deaths, to my knowledge.
My ability to produce readable, maintainable and debuggable code have improved signficantly since then.
In that case, one minute is a pretty long time, because you can assume everyone in the target zone gets down once the first shell lands.
The main thing this type of artillery if good for is the thing where they fire the shells on different trajectories so they land close to the same time.
So the effect ist similiar to cluster munitions, just without the "evil" cluster part and twenty times as expensive?
it's almost as effective a deterrent as a live-fire exercise where a ship 100 miles away levels all the target buildings in a small town in 60 seconds.
The shells will still be in flight one minute after they were fired.
You do not have a duty to bear arms. You can decide not to have any firearms on your person and in your home, for whatever reason. (Certain towns excepted, where you will need to give a reason for not having a firearm in your house.).
The duty, in both cases, rests with the state. It has a duty to protect these rights, and a duty not to tamper with them. But the individual citizen is free not to exercise them.
If you want the right to be able to buy electoral rsults, you should be able to.
Democracy is a "you get what you vote for" system. If you want to vote for the sleazeball offering you money voting for him, if you're okay with him running politics in your name, that should be considered just another expression of the will of the people.
Ie, no non-constant function pointers, that's a very common and very useful programming method.
It's something that is bound to blow up in your face on certain architectures, e.g. 8051.
Also, non-constant function pointers are convenient, but do not offer any functionality that cannot be achieved with more transparent constructs like switch/case statements, jump tables or arrays (constant) function pointers.
Restrictions on gotos have nothing whatsoever to do with safety.
MISRA is not just about making the code safer, but also about making it easier to review and test. goto, continue, functions with multiple return statements and the like create additional possible code paths and tend to increase complexity. (That doesn't mean I completely agree with every MISRA rule. Some can be translated to "Code shall not contain (certain type of) bugs", for example.)
It sounds like basically, he's of the philosophy that "the code must go on".
It's not a philosophy, but a practical thing. He explained it in various postings. If BUG_ON() is used where it basically crashes the machine, it does not help, but hinder, debugging. Basically, once the machine crashes, there's no way of finding out wtf actually happened. And if this happens to users, they'll just hit the reset button and think that the OS is an unreliably, crashy piece of garbage.
If the state of the machine is not fatally corrupt, there are better ways of dealing with a possible bug than intentionally crashing the machine. Logs, error messages, basically anything that's more useful than the machine suddenly freezing.
I'm amazed that computers still can not simply take commands spoken by the average speaker of the nearly universal language "English" and perform those instructions to the letter.
If THEY are more technologically advanced than we are, THEY already know about us. Or at least they know that there's something peculiar about the third planet around our sun, with its nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere and such.
What could possibly motivate a hospital staff to open themselves up to negligence lawsuits just so that they could... what? Torture a patient for jollies? Or something?
Power, for example. Or someone makes a decision and everyone else just supports it without chechking themselves, since, you know, the person that originally made the decision is a highly qualified professional.
A single person can do batshit crazy stuff, yes. But a group of professionals working in a hospital? Nope. Not going to happen.
It's called esprit de corps. You don't doubt your other fellow professionals, you doubt the stupid patient, since the latter didn't go to university with you and/or isn't in your fraternity.
I bought a Lumia 550 a while ago. Nice device, especially for its price. The only reason I'm still using my old dinosaur E6 is the lack of local synchronization options - in fact the only place that W10M will transfer contacts to is the cloud.
I know there are tricks - setting up a CardDAV server and using the iCloud account option to sync with it - but a W10M phone should be able to locally sync with a W10 PC out of the box.
Any alien civilization with significantly more advanced knowledge of physics will probably not bother talking to us, unless they're really bored or see it as the duty to enlighten less advanced civilizations.
And if their knowledge of civilization is only slightly more advanced than ours, we can probably catch up to their level in the time (>100 years) it takes for our message to get there and their response to get back here.
Or biology
True - that might be another interesting topic. We may know all the moleculues that make up alien biology, but not how they interact. I would add it to the list of "how" questions. "How does your society work?", "How does your biology work?", "How does your communication work?" (of course, we'll need to figure out the basics ourselves, at least up to the point where we can ask the question and understand the answer).
Some answers might also be more intriguing than others. Is the alien biology similar to ours (DNA-based), or is it wildly different?
A few hundred years? You give humanity incredible credit, or perhaps assume that "all possible things that can be done" is and incredibly small set.
I'm just working under the assumption that any aliens we actually get to talk to will have roughly our level of science and technology. Any civilization significantly more advanced will probably not bother talking to a bunch of unwashed barbarians.
Think of everything we don't know about the universe,
Well... ok. Maybe they could tell us more about the star systems in their vicinity than we can find out ourselves.
art, philosophy
Mmh, ok. Point taken.
economics
Or politics. Yes, the questions "How does your society work?" might be an extremely interesting one, even if the answer doesn't have any application (if "they" are photosynthesizing plants, then food production won't be high on their priority list. If they have genetically evolved to live in hive structures, that might work for them, but we can't copy it due to being somewhat civilized apes).
There are intelligent aliens. Okay, that would be a pretty groundbreaking discovery all by itself.
We'll probably not learn much in the ways of science or technology from them, or at least no much that we couldn't discover ourselves within a reasonable (few hundred years) timespan.
That basically leaves philosophy and possibly religion as topics. And poetry.
Because if you let it go in this case then you have to let it go in all cases, and if you let it go in all cases then the police are free to break into your home,
If the police officers involved in obtaining evidence illegally get charged with the approriate crime and sentenced, then the "let it go" part does not happen. Few police officers want criminals behind bars so much that they will sacrifice their own freedom.
Also, in case such a screw-up happens, does the government compensate the victim? He or she may have had claims (in addition to seeing the offender punished) that the government just ruined through incompetence.
Slashdot Mirror
The product sold almost a million times and didn't cause any deaths, to my knowledge.
My ability to produce readable, maintainable and debuggable code have improved signficantly since then.
They didn't even manage to blow themselves up, so they met the minimum standard for cleverness.
In that case, one minute is a pretty long time, because you can assume everyone in the target zone gets down once the first shell lands.
The main thing this type of artillery if good for is the thing where they fire the shells on different trajectories so they land close to the same time.
So the effect ist similiar to cluster munitions, just without the "evil" cluster part and twenty times as expensive?
Sounds more like a mortar for rocket-assisted, guided projetiles.
The shells will still be in flight one minute after they were fired.
Looks like the defense industry figured out how to earn lots of money selling arms while making an actual large-scale war way too expensive.
You do not have a duty to bear arms. You can decide not to have any firearms on your person and in your home, for whatever reason. (Certain towns excepted, where you will need to give a reason for not having a firearm in your house.).
The duty, in both cases, rests with the state. It has a duty to protect these rights, and a duty not to tamper with them. But the individual citizen is free not to exercise them.
Democracy is a "you get what you vote for" system. If you want to vote for the sleazeball offering you money voting for him, if you're okay with him running politics in your name, that should be considered just another expression of the will of the people.
If you want to give up your right to casting a secret ballot, you should be free to do so.
Breaking out of nested loops.
It's something that is bound to blow up in your face on certain architectures, e.g. 8051.
Also, non-constant function pointers are convenient, but do not offer any functionality that cannot be achieved with more transparent constructs like switch/case statements, jump tables or arrays (constant) function pointers.
Restrictions on gotos have nothing whatsoever to do with safety.
MISRA is not just about making the code safer, but also about making it easier to review and test. goto, continue, functions with multiple return statements and the like create additional possible code paths and tend to increase complexity. (That doesn't mean I completely agree with every MISRA rule. Some can be translated to "Code shall not contain (certain type of) bugs", for example.)
It's not a philosophy, but a practical thing. He explained it in various postings. If BUG_ON() is used where it basically crashes the machine, it does not help, but hinder, debugging. Basically, once the machine crashes, there's no way of finding out wtf actually happened. And if this happens to users, they'll just hit the reset button and think that the OS is an unreliably, crashy piece of garbage.
If the state of the machine is not fatally corrupt, there are better ways of dealing with a possible bug than intentionally crashing the machine. Logs, error messages, basically anything that's more useful than the machine suddenly freezing.
Does that include everyone who has to follow MISRA-C rules?
Be careful what you ask for.
If THEY are more technologically advanced than we are, THEY already know about us. Or at least they know that there's something peculiar about the third planet around our sun, with its nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere and such.
Power, for example. Or someone makes a decision and everyone else just supports it without chechking themselves, since, you know, the person that originally made the decision is a highly qualified professional.
A single person can do batshit crazy stuff, yes. But a group of professionals working in a hospital? Nope. Not going to happen.
It's called esprit de corps. You don't doubt your other fellow professionals, you doubt the stupid patient, since the latter didn't go to university with you and/or isn't in your fraternity.
That works if you need to transfer a handful of contacts, but gets tedious with three dozen.
I know there are tricks - setting up a CardDAV server and using the iCloud account option to sync with it - but a W10M phone should be able to locally sync with a W10 PC out of the box.
Any alien civilization with significantly more advanced knowledge of physics will probably not bother talking to us, unless they're really bored or see it as the duty to enlighten less advanced civilizations.
And if their knowledge of civilization is only slightly more advanced than ours, we can probably catch up to their level in the time (>100 years) it takes for our message to get there and their response to get back here.
Or biology
True - that might be another interesting topic. We may know all the moleculues that make up alien biology, but not how they interact. I would add it to the list of "how" questions. "How does your society work?", "How does your biology work?", "How does your communication work?" (of course, we'll need to figure out the basics ourselves, at least up to the point where we can ask the question and understand the answer).
Some answers might also be more intriguing than others. Is the alien biology similar to ours (DNA-based), or is it wildly different?
I'm just working under the assumption that any aliens we actually get to talk to will have roughly our level of science and technology. Any civilization significantly more advanced will probably not bother talking to a bunch of unwashed barbarians.
Think of everything we don't know about the universe,
Well ... ok. Maybe they could tell us more about the star systems in their vicinity than we can find out ourselves.
art, philosophy
Mmh, ok. Point taken.
economics
Or politics. Yes, the questions "How does your society work?" might be an extremely interesting one, even if the answer doesn't have any application (if "they" are photosynthesizing plants, then food production won't be high on their priority list. If they have genetically evolved to live in hive structures, that might work for them, but we can't copy it due to being somewhat civilized apes).
Einstein himself showed that GR explained at least one phenomenon (perihelion precession) that Newtonian mechanics didn't.
All the other observations just served to confirm GR over and over.
And what could that possibly be?
There are intelligent aliens. Okay, that would be a pretty groundbreaking discovery all by itself.
We'll probably not learn much in the ways of science or technology from them, or at least no much that we couldn't discover ourselves within a reasonable (few hundred years) timespan.
That basically leaves philosophy and possibly religion as topics. And poetry.
If the police officers involved in obtaining evidence illegally get charged with the approriate crime and sentenced, then the "let it go" part does not happen. Few police officers want criminals behind bars so much that they will sacrifice their own freedom.
Also, in case such a screw-up happens, does the government compensate the victim? He or she may have had claims (in addition to seeing the offender punished) that the government just ruined through incompetence.
Well yes. At the current state of technology, anything beyond low Earth orbit is "deep space".
And prosecutors, having (hopefully) studied Law, should know this.