We should really stop pretending that grades are a measure of anything important. Just recognize that school is a waste of time suffered through just to get the diploma so some employer can check a box on his form. Give everyone a certificate of attendance and be done with it, ending the ridiculous notion that completing a school makes anybody smarter or more educated. If you want to measure skill levels in a standard way, make a standardized test, and quit wasting everyone's time on years and years of boredom in schools.
E.Jaynes in "Probability, The Logic of Science" devotes several pages to this very issue. It turns out that when testing multiple hypotheses, we always end up comparing the two most probable ones because probability is perceived exponentially (he in fact uses dB for measuring evidence) and the gaps between prior probabilities becomes very large. When listening to a news story that presents evidence contrary to your own current beliefs, you will end up comparing the "I am wrong" hypothesis with "The newsman is lying" hypothesis. Because the prior probability for the latter is always higher than the prior for the former, no amount of evidence will change your mind. The only way it can happen is if enough evidence accumulates against "he is lying" hypothesis that it falls below the prior for "I am wrong". So, as you can see, this behavior is mathematically correct and is the right method of reasoning because it prevents us from incorrectly changing beliefs when given false evidence.
The paper is simply packed with logical fallacies. Yes, many of these are commonly accepted in the physics community, and are indeed the cause of the current pithy state of physics research, that continues to leap from one absurd conclusion to the next, discarding logic in the process. But is it really a good idea to pollute the minds of the next generation with them? The paper starts with a misconception right from the start:
> Nothing, not even information, can travel faster than the speed of light.
Here is a fine example of the mind projection fallacy: failure to distinguish between reality and what you think about reality. Information is not a physical object. A physical signal varying in an informative (to you) way is indeed limited by the speed of light, but the transfer of information is not necessarily limited to a direct transfer of measurements through a physical signal. An obvious example are the current research into "entangled" particles, where you can create two particles with correlated properties and by measuring the parameters of one know the parameters of the other. Because of the mind projection fallacy, physicists still think of this as "spooky action at a distance", even though no "action" has occured except in the experimenter's mind. No physical signal was sent from one particle to the other, only information was "sent" from the experimenter's mental model of one particle to the mental model of the other. Such virtual "transfers" are limited only by the size of the containing brain. Understand this, and you'll see why we must always make the distinction between what we think and what is. Unfortunately, the very formulation of quantum theory forbids such questions. In section 2.4 we see a continuation of this insanity:
> If we have an electron orbiting a nucleus, then the electron "knows" of an opposing electrical charge of the nucleus.
Quantum theory models all interactions as particle exchanges and thus has mostly lost the concept of a field of force. We could, for instance ask the very same question about the earth orbiting the sun and receive an answer that the gravitational field deforms the space around the sun and the earth, and that the interaction of their curvatures produces the gravitational force. Likewise, we could imagine charge curving some "electromagnetic space" and causing protons and electrons to interact in the same manner. (Interestingly, the old ether theories were "disproved" because we could not find effects of motion through it, even though the gravitational space does not appear to manifest any absolute velocity either)
> In other words, information about that charge has been received. In order to manage that, energy must be transmitted away from one or the other. How does the energy get replenished?
How does the "energy" get replenished when the earth moves around the sun? The answer, of course, is that there is no energy transmission, or information transmission. Neither the electron nor the earth is an intelligent entity capable of processing information in the same way we do. Physical objects merely interact with local space, creating gravitational deformation, and space then arranges those deformations into a minimal energy configuration, which, in the case of the earth, just happens to be an orbit around the sun. The same happens in the nucleus, except that the minimum energy levels are limited by quantum effects (why they are limited is a whole different discussion, and one that quantum mechanics simply postulates without any explanation whatsoever).
> In a world of absolutes, where particles are immutable and indivisible, the particles also become invincible.
Where the heck did he get that? Particles and antiparticles can annihilate into electromagnetic radiation, and radiation can create particle-antiparticle pairs. No, we don't know why that is so. Quantum mechanics has a mathematical model that can calculate the parameters of the interaction, but offers no explanation of how it actually happens (nor c
I'd say that when you hire three programmers, it is more appropriate to expect that one of them will be bad, the second one will be bad, and the third one will be the worst of all.
Given the great complexity of dealing with floating point numbers properly, my first instinct, and my advice to anybody not already an expert on the subject, is to avoid them at all cost. Many algorithms can be redone in integers, similarly to Bresenham, and work without rounding errors at all. It's true that with SSE, floating point can sometimes be faster, but anyone who doesn't know what he's doing is vastly better off without it. At the very least, find a more experienced coworker and have him explain it to you before you shoot your foot off.
> UbiSoft wins. The game strategy guide industry wins. The customer loses.
On the contrary, the customer still wins. The manuals that come with the game are worthless, as I am sure you'd know if you read one in the last ten years. Strategy guides by companies like Prima, on the other hand, are awesome. For example, I bought the Fallout 3 guide, since I love the game. It is an incredible book, hardbound, 500 pages thick, and has EVERYTHING. But it wouldn't be right to force it on everybody; some people are fine with playing the game without any reference. Bundling it with every game would have unnecessarily increased the cost, which is already too damn high. This way I buy what I want, and they don't have to, so the consumer definitely wins.
We already have the standard for configuring the firewall ports and NAT; it's called UPnP. It works just fine on a home network. On corporate networks it is usually not enabled due to security concerns. If the protocol designers could fix the perceived security problems with UPnP, the all the problems in the article would be solved.
> piercings and mohawks somehow make someone 'cutting edge' or a better coder?
The article is talking about attracting a younger audience, which they equate with some of their more appalling (to the older generation) fashion markers like piercings and mohawks. If you can't attract younger developers, you'll eventually die out. Older programmers burn out, get married, and have little interest in working 80 hour weeks. They also cost several times more than a fresh graduate, and while that often correlates with higher skill and better quality output, these things have little effect on a manager's short term bottom line. So the old people get laid off in hopes of attracting a younger and cheaper generation. If a company fails to do the latter, they end up with no developers, no code, and no money. That is the path to bankrupcy.
>> Won't this just make people buy new cars less often? > and this is a bad thing... how?
Considering that cars are one of the few products that are still manufactured in the US, I'd say it could be a bad thing. A country that thinks that it can survive on imports without making anything itself is going to get exactly what it deserves: bankrupcy.
So what if I want to buy a truck? A Dodge Ram 2500 averages around 17mpg, and there ain't no way you're getting it to 35. Is Obama so mad at Scott Brown that he's going to make sure that nobody can buy a truck? I'd really like to see him demonstrate how to haul a ton of manure in a Prius. Really, Mr.President, let's see how you do it!
I would be much more interested in having people stop using bits for measuring connection speed. How long will it take you to download a 15MB file over a megabit connection? Do you have the answer yet, punk? Huh? Huh? Do you feel lucky?
It would be so much better for everyone if we switched our human number system to octal. Eight a power of two, which is a MAJOR plus when dealing with computers, a very important issue in any technologically advanced civilization. This property makes it locally convertible to any other power of two base. Eight is a natural cube, making even volumes easier for manufacturers. Eight occurs in many natural relationships and physical laws, making it a much better choice for doing science. Eight has a smaller addition and multiplication tables, which will make our children better at math. And, in octal, you can count to thirty without removing your shoes; how's that for an advantage?
Base 10, on the other hand, has no advantages whatsoever.
> if everyone jointly pays for healthcare and everybody gets treated health costs go down.
Only for those who already pay for insurance, and only assuming that the insurance companies will pass on the savings to you, which they won't. Except, they won't get any savings, because:
> This is because no one puts off going to the doctor because of expense.
When people don't have to pay for doctors, they go more often, raising the overall health care expenditures and cancelling any savings you may have incurred for increasing the insured pool. So, if anything, your rates will go up, and MUCH higher.
> Cancers are caught sooner, infections are treated before the victim starts coughing up blood.
Cancer screening is not good for you. Yes, early detection can be helpful for some cancers, but false positives and unnecessary treatments can cause a great deal of harm. Prostate cancer, which you mention, is an excellent example. Very few men die from prostate cancer, treated or not, because it grows so slowly that you are much more likely to die from other causes before it kills you. In most cases, treating it will just cause you lots of misery that chemo and radiation create.
Even when you have some other cancer, you need to realize that with the exception of breast and testicular cancer, nearly all of them are fatal. You might buy yourself a few years with treatment, but you'll die anyway. It might be worth taking a hard look at your own life and see if you really want to have an extra few years at the cost of pain and suffering that chemo will give you. (In socialized health care, other people may make this decision for you)
Other infections are also frequently overtreated. Your body really is very very good at fighting diseases. Give it food and water, and it will kill the infection all by itself. For centuries, people have got by just fine without ever seeing a doctor, and you would do well to try to do the same. Doctors often cause more harm than not and avoiding them really is good for you.
> What selfish libertarians like yourself don't realise is that a persons health is mostly unrelated > to their choices. No one chooses to get prostate cancer, no one chooses to get bitten by a rabid dog.
On the contrary, health is very much related to your choices. Smoking and obesity are both personal choices and are the most damaging things you can do to yourself. Nearly all diseases, cancers, and heart problems are manyfold more likely if you make these choices. Then there's the impact of stress), which damages your immune system and contributes to many disorders, possibly including cancer.
> You get your kraft dinner and a shack paid for, you don't get a nice meal and a house > with a large screen tv and high speed internet and fancy clothes paid for.
Gee, that's really unfair. Think of all the poor children who don't have a large screen tv or high speed internet! Wait! I have an idea! Let's create an individual large screen tv mandate legislation, requiring by law for everyone to buy a large screen tv. Anyone refusing to do so, will be subjected to a fine. Subsidies will be provided to low-income families. And finally, after so many years, a high standard of living will no longer just be a privilege of the rich, but will become accessible to all. Isn't that something worth fighting for?
And let's not forget the pony! Millions of children in the country are suffering because they don't have a pony! It's time for the individual pony mandate! Bring a smile to your children's faces with the priceless (literally) gift of pony ownership. Isn't your children's happiness worth a measly extra 5% in taxes?
The $6400 is just an average I saw somewhere. I can't find that article; however, here's a breakdown on employer provided plan costs. Your employer pays $4824 for just you, or $13375 for a family plan. Since individuals buying health insurance don't have as good a bargaining position, I would expect the premiums to be much higher, and $6400 sounds about right. Note the $13375 figure for the family plan, which is what most people will be buying.
You see, that's what people think health insurance is: just a way to get others to pay for their problems. Socialism and its "single payer" system will arrive eventually, it will just take a while. First, all the people who have insurance now will stop buying it. Insurance costs $6400/year while the fee for not having it is $700. Furthermore, many states have already passed nullification laws prohibiting the federal government from charging you the above fee, so if you live in, say, Idaho, you will not have to pay a thing. Then, when you get cancer, you can simply go to any insurance company and buy coverage at that point; the company will be forbidden to turn you down for this preexisting condition. Then employers will eventually start doing the same thing. The fee for employers not providing insurance is higher, $3200, but it is still higher than the coverage premiums. So the boss will tell you to just buy insurance when you need it and take an extra $2000/year raise (or not).
The insurance companies will start losing lots of money, since only the sick will be subscribed, and will raise your premiums. If price controls are instituted (and they will be), the insurance companies will start going bankrupt. Then we can have another huge bailout bill for the "too big to fail" ones, which will then end up being mostly owned and financed by the government. They will stay that way because there is no way to turn a profit when you stop being "insurance" and become "entitlement". Then we'll get another health reform bill, where the government will step in, raise everyone's taxes and just pay for health care itself, like most of the other countries do.
> about time that we stopped the system of some people getting "insurance" only when they get sick
On the contrary, we've made doing it easier than ever before. Because insurance companies are no longer allowed to "discriminate" against me for preexisting conditions, it is actually better for me to not buy insurance until I get sick. The uninsured fee will only be $700 and there's a pretty high income threshold (~$80000? I think) before you have to pay it. Insurance costs on average $6400/year, so if you are buying insurance yourself, it's TEN TIMES more expensive to buy insurance now than it would be to wait until you need it. I predict that this is exactly what I and most other the uninsured are going to do. In fact, even those that have insurance now, might consider getting rid of it for the enormous financial gain that provides. How would you like to have and extra SIX THOUSAND dollars of disposable income every year?
> If you could send critiques like that to the developer list instead of posting them to slashdot, > it'd have a better chance of getting attention from the other developers
The problem is that I simply don't see what sort of "attention" I would want in such a situation. Yes, I could write up a mile-long list of complaints about the code, but it would not do any good because they would all add up to: "your code sucks; throw it all out and start over". It's not just one little thing or two little things, it's everything. It's the whole approach to interface design that plagues all open source projects and it's caused by releasing too early. Once the code is "out there", there is a chance that somebody will start using it, so you start worrying about breaking the API and inconveniencing these (often imaginary) users. If you know from the start that you intend to release early, you end up designing safety factors like pimpl into the API, in case you want to change something. I would advocate the opposite route: let the API float until the implementation settles, because you don't know how to best access the implementation until you have the implementation. And once we state our positions, there is nothing that can be done short of starting from scratch, which in not an option for a codebase many years in development.
Furthermore, my gripes have a very different focus; I care passionately about code size. To me, code simplicity is the most important goal. Simple code is easier to understand, easier to maintain, less buggy, and faster to run. I believe that code simplicity is best objectively measured by measuring the size of the resultant execuables, because "simple" should primarily mean "simple for the computer". Thus, most of the complaints I am likely to make about your code will relate to what it looks like to the computer. That's where your pimpls and out-of-line wrappers and externally visible long names all are painfully obvious. And it's also where no modern developer ever thinks of looking. No modern C++ programmer looks at the assembly his source code generates, and so he remains ignorant of where all the horrendous bloat is coming from. He doesn't understand that objects aren't real and that abstractions have costs. And from that lack of understanding comes a horrid implementation, from which then comes a horrid API.
I can complain all day about your design, but you won't know how to fix it until you understand the above problem and learn to see your code from the computer's point of view. Then I won't have to tell you what is rotten about your code, because you'll know it. Thousand-instruction functions will burn your eyes and you'll scream "but I didn't know!" and maybe then, grasshopper, will you achieve true enlightenment.
Well, I took a look at the code, and it's a typical "modern" C++ design. There's a gazillion classes in an "everything-is-an-object" hierarchy, using the latest and greatest "patterns" in superfluously complex ways. Doesn't anybody care about simplicity in design any more? Granted, BIND9 code was a mess, but this IMO is not much of an improvement. Ugly C++ is just as bad as ugly C. For example, why, for the love of God, would you replace a simple enum with a class with a member variable set to a constant value, and with each instance of the class created by a named constructor with a hardcoded constant in it? In src/lib/dns/message.h there are four of these. And what's with all the wrappers? I suppose it's their definition of "extensibility" -- a framework where everything is accessed through wrapped pimpls, so that anybody could change the implementation without changing binary compatibility with... oh, wait, it's an executable, so WTF? When you change something, you have to rebuild it anyway. So all you really get is ugly wrappers over ugly wrappers over actual code. Why do you need these wrappers anyway? What's wrong with boost's base64_encoder, for instance, that you need to wrap it with an encodeBase64 function, which instantiates a 20 line local BinaryNormalizer class in an anonymous namespace, the purpose of which, as far as I can see, is to pad the binary input with zeroes in case some evil application decides to read past the end of the vector. Oh, wait, this is only called from encodeBase64, and the read-past-the-end thing never happens. So WTF?
That's just four files I looked at, and already it's WTF piled on WTF. Maybe I ought to submit it to thedailywtf.com and see if it's accepted...
If you paid $40000 for a broken leg, you're either an idiot, or you had no idea that's how much was spent. Did you even ask the doctor how much the proposed treatment was going to cost? No? Of course not. We're trained by insurance not to do that. A broken leg is fixed by realigning the bones (which may need an xray) by pulling on the leg, and then placing the whole thing in a plaster cast. We're talking ~$300. If there was nothing available for less than $40000, heck, I'd probably mix the plaster and fix the leg myself, with the help of a friend. Sure, it might heal a bit crooked, but it will heal. People have been fixing broken bones since the stone age; it's not rocket science.
> Did you also resent having your money taken at gunpoint to go into Iraq? Afghanistan?
Damn right I do! Neither Iraq nor Afganistan have any ambition to invade the US, nor did they ever. We're in Iraq to control the oilfields and to build huge military bases there. We do that to keep telling the Middle East to do our bidding and to create profits for Haliburton and its ilk. We're in Afganistan because US oil companies want to build a pipeline there. Or, at least, they did, before it became obvious that Afganistan will never become the sort of stable country where such a project can succeed. Neither of these goals does anything to enhance my personal safety and security. They're just about the power elite grabbing more power. Why should I pay for that?
> To fund your local fire and police departments?
To fund them to oppress and terrorize us? If you have ever had to deal with the police, you'd swear not to ever, under any circumstances, call them again. And as for the fire department, why should I pay to put out your fire? In most cases, it will have been your own stupid fault for leaving candles around (it's the single major cause of fires).
> To provide clean drinking water in your community?
Clean drinking water is not free. Maybe you don't know that if you live in an apartment, since the landlord pays the city water bill for you. Out in the country many people have their own wells and don't have to pay for water. If the city government did not provide the water service, someone would start a company doing it if it were cheaper to do so than to have everyone install their own well.
> To provide education for the children in your neighborhood?
Who's providing education? The quality of public schooling is atrocious. And with all the government propaganda children are exposed to in public schools, there is no friggin way I'm sending my child there, and I certainly don't recommend anyone else to do so. Instead get together with your neighbors and homeschool your kids. If you stagger your days off, four adults could educate their children while working full time. Your kids will likely have a better relationship with you and be happier too, if you just spend more time with them.
> It is THE COMMUNITY that you live in, that allows for a rule of law, so that when your neighbor > decides that he doesn't love you as much as he loves his other neighbors and decides that he > should roll up in your house and take all your possessions in the dead of night, that there > is a system in place to protect you from that.
Contrary to what you government advocates belive, most people respect private property. I have no interest in robbing my neighbors, and I know they have no interest in robbing me. If you live in a neighborhood where they do, maybe it's time to move.
Furthermore, you don't need an official police force to prevent such things, even if you do decide you need to. Back in the middle ages, a small village in the middle of nowhere would have been able to handle the above situation just fine. The neighbors get together and confront the thief, and he'll probably apologize and never do it again.
If you really want to have a police force, a private police force works much better than a squad of government goons. For an example see the special police of San Francisco; it's a private police force (although it does have official recognition), funded entirely through subscriptions by individuals and business in the area.
> The COMMUNITY is what allows you to live a non-third-world existence.
The lack of excessive population growth is what allows me to live a non-third-world
Re:Taking care of people is not wrong
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> This would be fine if the emergency room wasn't forced by law to care for you when you need it. > They way it is now, hospitals have to pay for those like you who might choose not to buy insurance > through a mix of raising prices and federal assistance.
I really don't know where Obama and you get these idiotic ideas. If I go to the emergency room, I'll have to pay for it. I seriously doubt that I can just show up and say, "treat me for free". They will probably ask for some proof of insufficient income or something. And if I don't qualify for assistance, they'll just sell the bill to the collection agency and ruin my credit rating. Maybe the illegal immigrants don't care about such things, but I do.
But, of course, this argument is missing the point; if the emergency room is forced by law to care for you when you need it, then
> please rally to change the law to allow ERs to turn away patients who can't pay
If there is a law like that, it is effectively forcing the emergency room to work for you for free. That's slavery, and we have a constitutional amendment prohibiting it. Therefore, the law MUST GO! And if people start yelling about how turning away people who can't pay is like killing them, note that a grocery store will not give you free food just because you are hungry, even if you'll starve to death because of it, and yet most of us think that this practice is perfectly fair and just. After all, nobody is stopping you from paying to heal the sick or to feed the hungry. And many people do just that without any government compulsion.
Re:Taking care of people is not wrong
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> Why is it acceptable to value the lives of people you love more than those you don't?
Because that's the definition of love. To love someone or something is to value them. Are you seriously suggesting that it is not acceptable for me to love and value my daughter more than you? If so, you need to get your head examined and maybe get some treatment at your local mental institution (assuming you can afford it, of course; I have no interest in paying for your problems).
Re:Taking care of people is not wrong
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· Score: 2, Funny
> Here is a simple question: if you make taxes optional, then what would you do if 90% of the people choose not to pay taxes?
I would end up with a smaller government, of course. If you eliminated all the income redistribution programs like social security, medicare, medicaid, earned income credit, etc., the government would likely end up needing 10% of the tax revenue it needs now. Then, if we also stopped fighting stupid wars over pipeline politics in central asia, we might actually be able to *gasp* pay off the national debt.
Slashdot Mirror
We should really stop pretending that grades are a measure of anything important. Just recognize that school is a waste of time suffered through just to get the diploma so some employer can check a box on his form. Give everyone a certificate of attendance and be done with it, ending the ridiculous notion that completing a school makes anybody smarter or more educated. If you want to measure skill levels in a standard way, make a standardized test, and quit wasting everyone's time on years and years of boredom in schools.
Everyone knows that first came the Easter Bunny, who laid the egg, which hatched into the chicken.
E.Jaynes in "Probability, The Logic of Science" devotes several pages to this very issue. It turns out that when testing multiple hypotheses, we always end up comparing the two most probable ones because probability is perceived exponentially (he in fact uses dB for measuring evidence) and the gaps between prior probabilities becomes very large. When listening to a news story that presents evidence contrary to your own current beliefs, you will end up comparing the "I am wrong" hypothesis with "The newsman is lying" hypothesis. Because the prior probability for the latter is always higher than the prior for the former, no amount of evidence will change your mind. The only way it can happen is if enough evidence accumulates against "he is lying" hypothesis that it falls below the prior for "I am wrong". So, as you can see, this behavior is mathematically correct and is the right method of reasoning because it prevents us from incorrectly changing beliefs when given false evidence.
The paper is simply packed with logical fallacies. Yes, many of these are commonly accepted in the physics community, and are indeed the cause of the current pithy state of physics research, that continues to leap from one absurd conclusion to the next, discarding logic in the process. But is it really a good idea to pollute the minds of the next generation with them? The paper starts with a misconception right from the start:
> Nothing, not even information, can travel faster than the speed of light.
Here is a fine example of the mind projection fallacy: failure to distinguish between reality and what you think about reality. Information is not a physical object. A physical signal varying in an informative (to you) way is indeed limited by the speed of light, but the transfer of information is not necessarily limited to a direct transfer of measurements through a physical signal. An obvious example are the current research into "entangled" particles, where you can create two particles with correlated properties and by measuring the parameters of one know the parameters of the other. Because of the mind projection fallacy, physicists still think of this as "spooky action at a distance", even though no "action" has occured except in the experimenter's mind. No physical signal was sent from one particle to the other, only information was "sent" from the experimenter's mental model of one particle to the mental model of the other. Such virtual "transfers" are limited only by the size of the containing brain. Understand this, and you'll see why we must always make the distinction between what we think and what is. Unfortunately, the very formulation of quantum theory forbids such questions. In section 2.4 we see a continuation of this insanity:
> If we have an electron orbiting a nucleus, then the electron "knows" of an opposing electrical charge of the nucleus.
Quantum theory models all interactions as particle exchanges and thus has mostly lost the concept of a field of force. We could, for instance ask the very same question about the earth orbiting the sun and receive an answer that the gravitational field deforms the space around the sun and the earth, and that the interaction of their curvatures produces the gravitational force. Likewise, we could imagine charge curving some "electromagnetic space" and causing protons and electrons to interact in the same manner. (Interestingly, the old ether theories were "disproved" because we could not find effects of motion through it, even though the gravitational space does not appear to manifest any absolute velocity either)
> In other words, information about that charge has been received. In order to manage that, energy must be transmitted away from one or the other. How does the energy get replenished?
How does the "energy" get replenished when the earth moves around the sun? The answer, of course, is that there is no energy transmission, or information transmission. Neither the electron nor the earth is an intelligent entity capable of processing information in the same way we do. Physical objects merely interact with local space, creating gravitational deformation, and space then arranges those deformations into a minimal energy configuration, which, in the case of the earth, just happens to be an orbit around the sun. The same happens in the nucleus, except that the minimum energy levels are limited by quantum effects (why they are limited is a whole different discussion, and one that quantum mechanics simply postulates without any explanation whatsoever).
> In a world of absolutes, where particles are immutable and indivisible, the particles also become invincible.
Where the heck did he get that? Particles and antiparticles can annihilate into electromagnetic radiation, and radiation can create particle-antiparticle pairs. No, we don't know why that is so. Quantum mechanics has a mathematical model that can calculate the parameters of the interaction, but offers no explanation of how it actually happens (nor c
I'd say that when you hire three programmers, it is more appropriate to expect that one of them will be bad, the second one will be bad, and the third one will be the worst of all.
Given the great complexity of dealing with floating point numbers properly, my first instinct, and my advice to anybody not already an expert on the subject, is to avoid them at all cost. Many algorithms can be redone in integers, similarly to Bresenham, and work without rounding errors at all. It's true that with SSE, floating point can sometimes be faster, but anyone who doesn't know what he's doing is vastly better off without it. At the very least, find a more experienced coworker and have him explain it to you before you shoot your foot off.
> UbiSoft wins. The game strategy guide industry wins. The customer loses.
On the contrary, the customer still wins. The manuals that come with the game are worthless, as I am sure you'd know if you read one in the last ten years. Strategy guides by companies like Prima, on the other hand, are awesome. For example, I bought the Fallout 3 guide, since I love the game. It is an incredible book, hardbound, 500 pages thick, and has EVERYTHING. But it wouldn't be right to force it on everybody; some people are fine with playing the game without any reference. Bundling it with every game would have unnecessarily increased the cost, which is already too damn high. This way I buy what I want, and they don't have to, so the consumer definitely wins.
We already have the standard for configuring the firewall ports and NAT; it's called UPnP. It works just fine on a home network. On corporate networks it is usually not enabled due to security concerns. If the protocol designers could fix the perceived security problems with UPnP, the all the problems in the article would be solved.
> piercings and mohawks somehow make someone 'cutting edge' or a better coder?
The article is talking about attracting a younger audience, which they equate with some of their more appalling (to the older generation) fashion markers like piercings and mohawks. If you can't attract younger developers, you'll eventually die out. Older programmers burn out, get married, and have little interest in working 80 hour weeks. They also cost several times more than a fresh graduate, and while that often correlates with higher skill and better quality output, these things have little effect on a manager's short term bottom line. So the old people get laid off in hopes of attracting a younger and cheaper generation. If a company fails to do the latter, they end up with no developers, no code, and no money. That is the path to bankrupcy.
>> Won't this just make people buy new cars less often?
> and this is a bad thing... how?
Considering that cars are one of the few products that are still manufactured in the US, I'd say it could be a bad thing. A country that thinks that it can survive on imports without making anything itself is going to get exactly what it deserves: bankrupcy.
So what if I want to buy a truck? A Dodge Ram 2500 averages around 17mpg, and there ain't no way you're getting it to 35. Is Obama so mad at Scott Brown that he's going to make sure that nobody can buy a truck? I'd really like to see him demonstrate how to haul a ton of manure in a Prius. Really, Mr.President, let's see how you do it!
I would be much more interested in having people stop using bits for measuring connection speed. How long will it take you to download a 15MB file over a megabit connection? Do you have the answer yet, punk? Huh? Huh? Do you feel lucky?
It would be so much better for everyone if we switched our human number system to octal. Eight a power of two, which is a MAJOR plus when dealing with computers, a very important issue in any technologically advanced civilization. This property makes it locally convertible to any other power of two base. Eight is a natural cube, making even volumes easier for manufacturers. Eight occurs in many natural relationships and physical laws, making it a much better choice for doing science. Eight has a smaller addition and multiplication tables, which will make our children better at math. And, in octal, you can count to thirty without removing your shoes; how's that for an advantage?
Base 10, on the other hand, has no advantages whatsoever.
> if everyone jointly pays for healthcare and everybody gets treated health costs go down.
Only for those who already pay for insurance, and only assuming that the insurance companies will pass on the savings to you, which they won't. Except, they won't get any savings, because:
> This is because no one puts off going to the doctor because of expense.
When people don't have to pay for doctors, they go more often, raising the overall health care expenditures and cancelling any savings you may have incurred for increasing the insured pool. So, if anything, your rates will go up, and MUCH higher.
> Cancers are caught sooner, infections are treated before the victim starts coughing up blood.
Cancer screening is not
good for you. Yes, early detection can be helpful for some cancers, but false positives and
unnecessary treatments can cause a great deal of harm. Prostate cancer, which you mention, is an
excellent example. Very few men die from prostate cancer, treated or not, because it grows so slowly
that you are much more likely to die from other causes before it kills you. In most cases, treating
it will just cause you lots of misery that chemo and radiation create.
Even when you have some other cancer, you need to realize that with the exception of breast and
testicular cancer, nearly all of them are fatal. You might buy yourself a few years with treatment,
but you'll die anyway. It might be worth taking a hard look at your own life and see if you really
want to have an extra few years at the cost of pain and suffering that chemo will give you. (In
socialized health care, other
people may make this decision for you)
Other infections are also frequently overtreated. Your body really is very very good at fighting
diseases. Give it food and water, and it will kill the infection all by itself. For centuries,
people have got by just fine without ever seeing a doctor, and you would do well to try to do
the same. Doctors often cause more harm than not and avoiding them really is good for you.
> What selfish libertarians like yourself don't realise is that a persons health is mostly unrelated
> to their choices. No one chooses to get prostate cancer, no one chooses to get bitten by a rabid dog.
On the contrary, health is very much related to your choices. Smoking and obesity are both personal
choices and are the most damaging things you can do to yourself. Nearly all diseases, cancers, and
heart problems are manyfold more likely if you make these choices. Then there's the impact of
stress), which damages your
immune system and contributes to many disorders, possibly including cancer.
> You get your kraft dinner and a shack paid for, you don't get a nice meal and a house
> with a large screen tv and high speed internet and fancy clothes paid for.
Gee, that's really unfair. Think of all the poor children who don't have a large screen tv or high speed internet! Wait! I have an idea! Let's create an individual large screen tv mandate legislation, requiring by law for everyone to buy a large screen tv. Anyone refusing to do so, will be subjected to a fine. Subsidies will be provided to low-income families. And finally, after so many years, a high standard of living will no longer just be a privilege of the rich, but will become accessible to all. Isn't that something worth fighting for?
And let's not forget the pony! Millions of children in the country are suffering because they don't have a pony! It's time for the individual pony mandate! Bring a smile to your children's faces with the priceless (literally) gift of pony ownership. Isn't your children's happiness worth a measly extra 5% in taxes?
The $6400 is just an average I saw somewhere. I can't find that article; however, here's a breakdown on employer provided plan costs. Your employer pays $4824 for just you, or $13375 for a family plan. Since individuals buying health insurance don't have as good a bargaining position, I would expect the premiums to be much higher, and $6400 sounds about right. Note the $13375 figure for the family plan, which is what most people will be buying.
You see, that's what people think health insurance is: just a way to get others to pay for their problems. Socialism and its "single payer" system will arrive eventually, it will just take a while. First, all the people who have insurance now will stop buying it. Insurance costs $6400/year while the fee for not having it is $700. Furthermore, many states have already passed nullification laws prohibiting the federal government from charging you the above fee, so if you live in, say, Idaho, you will not have to pay a thing. Then, when you get cancer, you can simply go to any insurance company and buy coverage at that point; the company will be forbidden to turn you down for this preexisting condition. Then employers will eventually start doing the same thing. The fee for employers not providing insurance is higher, $3200, but it is still higher than the coverage premiums. So the boss will tell you to just buy insurance when you need it and take an extra $2000/year raise (or not).
The insurance companies will start losing lots of money, since only the sick will be subscribed, and will raise your premiums. If price controls are instituted (and they will be), the insurance companies will start going bankrupt. Then we can have another huge bailout bill for the "too big to fail" ones, which will then end up being mostly owned and financed by the government. They will stay that way because there is no way to turn a profit when you stop being "insurance" and become "entitlement". Then we'll get another health reform bill, where the government will step in, raise everyone's taxes and just pay for health care itself, like most of the other countries do.
Of course, you'll have to contend with various problems that will bring, like long waiting times, care rationing, and "for your own good" legislation. But at least, everyone will finally be equal.
> about time that we stopped the system of some people getting "insurance" only when they get sick
On the contrary, we've made doing it easier than ever before. Because insurance companies are no longer allowed to "discriminate" against me for preexisting conditions, it is actually better for me to not buy insurance until I get sick. The uninsured fee will only be $700 and there's a pretty high income threshold (~$80000? I think) before you have to pay it. Insurance costs on average $6400/year, so if you are buying insurance yourself, it's TEN TIMES more expensive to buy insurance now than it would be to wait until you need it. I predict that this is exactly what I and most other the uninsured are going to do. In fact, even those that have insurance now, might consider getting rid of it for the enormous financial gain that provides. How would you like to have and extra SIX THOUSAND dollars of disposable income every year?
> If you could send critiques like that to the developer list instead of posting them to slashdot,
> it'd have a better chance of getting attention from the other developers
The problem is that I simply don't see what sort of "attention" I would want in such a situation. Yes, I could write up a mile-long list of complaints about the code, but it would not do any good because they would all add up to: "your code sucks; throw it all out and start over". It's not just one little thing or two little things, it's everything. It's the whole approach to interface design that plagues all open source projects and it's caused by releasing too early. Once the code is "out there", there is a chance that somebody will start using it, so you start worrying about breaking the API and inconveniencing these (often imaginary) users. If you know from the start that you intend to release early, you end up designing safety factors like pimpl into the API, in case you want to change something. I would advocate the opposite route: let the API float until the implementation settles, because you don't know how to best access the implementation until you have the implementation. And once we state our positions, there is nothing that can be done short of starting from scratch, which in not an option for a codebase many years in development.
Furthermore, my gripes have a very different focus; I care passionately about code size. To me, code simplicity is the most important goal. Simple code is easier to understand, easier to maintain, less buggy, and faster to run. I believe that code simplicity is best objectively measured by measuring the size of the resultant execuables, because "simple" should primarily mean "simple for the computer". Thus, most of the complaints I am likely to make about your code will relate to what it looks like to the computer. That's where your pimpls and out-of-line wrappers and externally visible long names all are painfully obvious. And it's also where no modern developer ever thinks of looking. No modern C++ programmer looks at the assembly his source code generates, and so he remains ignorant of where all the horrendous bloat is coming from. He doesn't understand that objects aren't real and that abstractions have costs. And from that lack of understanding comes a horrid implementation, from which then comes a horrid API.
I can complain all day about your design, but you won't know how to fix it until you understand the above problem and learn to see your code from the computer's point of view. Then I won't have to tell you what is rotten about your code, because you'll know it. Thousand-instruction functions will burn your eyes and you'll scream "but I didn't know!" and maybe then, grasshopper, will you achieve true enlightenment.
Well, I took a look at the code, and it's a typical "modern" C++ design. There's a gazillion classes in an "everything-is-an-object" hierarchy, using the latest and greatest "patterns" in superfluously complex ways. Doesn't anybody care about simplicity in design any more? Granted, BIND9 code was a mess, but this IMO is not much of an improvement. Ugly C++ is just as bad as ugly C. For example, why, for the love of God, would you replace a simple enum with a class with a member variable set to a constant value, and with each instance of the class created by a named constructor with a hardcoded constant in it? In src/lib/dns/message.h there are four of these. And what's with all the wrappers? I suppose it's their definition of "extensibility" -- a framework where everything is accessed through wrapped pimpls, so that anybody could change the implementation without changing binary compatibility with... oh, wait, it's an executable, so WTF? When you change something, you have to rebuild it anyway. So all you really get is ugly wrappers over ugly wrappers over actual code. Why do you need these wrappers anyway? What's wrong with boost's base64_encoder, for instance, that you need to wrap it with an encodeBase64 function, which instantiates a 20 line local BinaryNormalizer class in an anonymous namespace, the purpose of which, as far as I can see, is to pad the binary input with zeroes in case some evil application decides to read past the end of the vector. Oh, wait, this is only called from encodeBase64, and the read-past-the-end thing never happens. So WTF?
That's just four files I looked at, and already it's WTF piled on WTF. Maybe I ought to submit it to thedailywtf.com and see if it's accepted...
If you paid $40000 for a broken leg, you're either an idiot, or you had no idea that's how much was spent. Did you even ask the doctor how much the proposed treatment was going to cost? No? Of course not. We're trained by insurance not to do that. A broken leg is fixed by realigning the bones (which may need an xray) by pulling on the leg, and then placing the whole thing in a plaster cast. We're talking ~$300. If there was nothing available for less than $40000, heck, I'd probably mix the plaster and fix the leg myself, with the help of a friend. Sure, it might heal a bit crooked, but it will heal. People have been fixing broken bones since the stone age; it's not rocket science.
> Did you also resent having your money taken at gunpoint to go into Iraq? Afghanistan?
Damn right I do! Neither Iraq nor Afganistan have any ambition to invade the US, nor did they ever. We're in Iraq to control the oilfields and to build huge military bases there. We do that to keep telling the Middle East to do our bidding and to create profits for Haliburton and its ilk. We're in Afganistan because US oil companies want to build a pipeline there. Or, at least, they did, before it became obvious that Afganistan will never become the sort of stable country where such a project can succeed. Neither of these goals does anything to enhance my personal safety and security. They're just about the power elite grabbing more power. Why should I pay for that?
> To fund your local fire and police departments?
To fund them to oppress and terrorize us? If you have ever had to deal with the police, you'd swear not to ever, under any circumstances, call them again. And as for the fire department, why should I pay to put out your fire? In most cases, it will have been your own stupid fault for leaving candles around (it's the single major cause of fires).
> To provide clean drinking water in your community?
Clean drinking water is not free. Maybe you don't know that if you live in an apartment, since the landlord pays the city water bill for you. Out in the country many people have their own wells and don't have to pay for water. If the city government did not provide the water service, someone would start a company doing it if it were cheaper to do so than to have everyone install their own well.
> To provide education for the children in your neighborhood?
Who's providing education? The quality of public schooling is atrocious. And with all the government propaganda children are exposed to in public schools, there is no friggin way I'm sending my child there, and I certainly don't recommend anyone else to do so. Instead get together with your neighbors and homeschool your kids. If you stagger your days off, four adults could educate their children while working full time. Your kids will likely have a better relationship with you and be happier too, if you just spend more time with them.
> It is THE COMMUNITY that you live in, that allows for a rule of law, so that when your neighbor
> decides that he doesn't love you as much as he loves his other neighbors and decides that he
> should roll up in your house and take all your possessions in the dead of night, that there
> is a system in place to protect you from that.
Contrary to what you government advocates belive, most people respect private property. I have no interest in robbing my neighbors, and I know they have no interest in robbing me. If you live in a neighborhood where they do, maybe it's time to move.
Furthermore, you don't need an official police force to prevent such things, even if you do decide you need to. Back in the middle ages, a small village in the middle of nowhere would have been able to handle the above situation just fine. The neighbors get together and confront the thief, and he'll probably apologize and never do it again.
If you really want to have a police force, a private police force works much better than a squad of government goons. For an example see the special police of San Francisco; it's a private police force (although it does have official recognition), funded entirely through subscriptions by individuals and business in the area.
> The COMMUNITY is what allows you to live a non-third-world existence.
The lack of excessive population growth is what allows me to live a non-third-world
> This would be fine if the emergency room wasn't forced by law to care for you when you need it.
> They way it is now, hospitals have to pay for those like you who might choose not to buy insurance
> through a mix of raising prices and federal assistance.
I really don't know where Obama and you get these idiotic ideas. If I go to the emergency room, I'll have to pay for it. I seriously doubt that I can just show up and say, "treat me for free". They will probably ask for some proof of insufficient income or something. And if I don't qualify for assistance, they'll just sell the bill to the collection agency and ruin my credit rating. Maybe the illegal immigrants don't care about such things, but I do.
But, of course, this argument is missing the point; if the emergency room is forced by law to care for you when you need it, then
> please rally to change the law to allow ERs to turn away patients who can't pay
If there is a law like that, it is effectively forcing the emergency room to work for you for free. That's slavery, and we have a constitutional amendment prohibiting it. Therefore, the law MUST GO! And if people start yelling about how turning away people who can't pay is like killing them, note that a grocery store will not give you free food just because you are hungry, even if you'll starve to death because of it, and yet most of us think that this practice is perfectly fair and just. After all, nobody is stopping you from paying to heal the sick or to feed the hungry. And many people do just that without any government compulsion.
> Why is it acceptable to value the lives of people you love more than those you don't?
Because that's the definition of love. To love someone or something is to value them. Are you seriously suggesting that it is not acceptable for me to love and value my daughter more than you? If so, you need to get your head examined and maybe get some treatment at your local mental institution (assuming you can afford it, of course; I have no interest in paying for your problems).
> Here is a simple question: if you make taxes optional, then what would you do if 90% of the people choose not to pay taxes?
I would end up with a smaller government, of course. If you eliminated all the income redistribution programs like social security, medicare, medicaid, earned income credit, etc., the government would likely end up needing 10% of the tax revenue it needs now. Then, if we also stopped fighting stupid wars over pipeline politics in central asia, we might actually be able to *gasp* pay off the national debt.