Good question. Possibly, if Senator Foo called a press conference to announce his change of mind, he would win respect. Usually the politician bellows his opinion in a way that suggests he's always held it.
There's another side to it. In foreign policy, we elect politicians to combat our adversaries. Unlike atoms and molecules, these adversaries have a mental model of said politician which affects their actions.
If Senator Foo advertises the open mind of a scientist, he may be telling adversaries, "attack us hard enough and I'll change my mind."
I think a nation led by scientists would be doomed, for numerous reasons. But on domestic issues, it seems like a more scientific approach would work better. Maybe the problem is that voters have strong ideologies. So many are voting to punish the perceived villains of national life that they wouldn't welcome a "scientific" re-evaluation of the worldview they endorsed.
How about the fact that you have just discarded all field type information? That's a far more serious problem.
Why is it a problem? (If we've ruled out performance issues.) If you want to attach meaning to a field in the hash, you obviously know what type it is. For instance, int empNum = atoi(h.get("empNum"));. But most fields are just generic data, to be shoveled from point A to point B. Might as well automate the shovelling.
I did not understand your comments about arrays and indexes. Could you clarify how arrays are entering the picture? As for validation, if I understood your comment correctly, it is easily made generic: typedef struct {
char *name;
bool mandatory;
char *regex;
pcre_t *compiled_regex; } field_t;
static const field_t fields[] =
{ "empNum", 1, "\\d{1,12}" },
{ "name", 1, "[\\w ]{10,50" },...
{ 0 } }; At startup you compile the regexes. Obviously, you can add "types" if you like, possibly instead of regexes.
It's an interesting question. My preference is not to create classes for this type of object, but instead represent it as a "hash". Then you can do something like: map employee; dbh->selectRow("select * from employee where id=?", employee, id);
I wrote the db wrapper used here; I haven't seen any open source C++ db wrapper with comparable high-level functionality, and my company makes it very hard to open source anything.
I realize you will shrink from this suggestion, for performance reasons and because turning an int into a string and sticking it in a map feels yucky. However it allows a more generic style of programming: const char *cols_to_render = { "name", "phone", "address", NULL };
Iterate over that instead of writing a bunch of "comb code". And of course, it's easy to write an insert_row() that removes a lot of tedium. If you insist on keeping the custom classes, you have two choices; hand-written marshalling or object-relational mappers. Almost all the code I've seen uses the hand-written marshalling, and it's hideously verbose and repetitive. Note: contrary to what another poster suggested, db's do not generally store or transmit everything as text; therefore it's useful to explore the C api and get your ints as ints, if that's what you want.
I don't think there are any muslim states. The only one was Afghanistan under the Taliban. A muslim state will be ruled by Sharia law.
In Pakistan, for instance, someone who commits an "honor killing" will be prosecuted. Whether honor killings are part of Islam or part of "local tradition" is another question.
As for your larger question, I think the only consistent position for a free country is to get government out of religion completely. In the US we're mostly there, but we have tax exemptions. That puts the government in the position of deciding who is and isn't a religion. That's ridiculous.
If churches were taxed on income (revenue minus expenses) just like corporations, most would pay very little tax.
To expand on IP_Troll's point, the odd-sounding rule is actually reasonable. It's not so much needing a special kind of lawyer. Rather, admittance to the patent bar is completely separate from admission to any state bar. Which is as it should be. The prosecution of patent applications is so specialized and technical that we cannot assume all lawyers are qualified to do it; nor should we exclude non-lawyers (typically engineers) who wish to practice it.
Actually, both Patent Attorneys and Patent Agents may practice before the USPTO. The difference is that Patent Attorneys are lawyers and Patent Agents are not.
These objectives seem very non-objective. Meaning, when the project is done, you can argue that all objectives were reached. I don't mean to pick on this one project - modern management tends this way. Failure-proof.
For example, maximize... something (#7). Say you manage to increase X by 20%. Did you maximize? "Yes we did, within the constraints we were given."
A witch, based on most Christian teachings, is anyone who doesn't believe in Christ and practices a religion (and more specifically anyone who practices a "nature" or animist religion).
I disagree. The strongest statement of Christian views on witchcraft is probably The Malleus Malificarum, or "Witch Hammer". Its authors were certainly aware of Muslims and Jews. Yet they do not confuse them with witches.
Without attempting a precise definition, Christians generally viewed witches as:
Perverting elements of Christian ritual; for example, smuggling the holy wafer out of Catholic Mass to mix into potions;
Child abuse, including infanticide;
Causing and curing illnesses in people and animals by magical means.
I think you will agree that even at the height of the witch hysteria, Christians did not regard non-Christians as witches.
As for animists, I'm less sure. Certainly, Christians converted many Animists to Christianity without accusing them of witchcraft; rather, the Christians regarded them as heathens. However, were those conversions contemporaneous with the witchcraft scare?
Do you know of instances where Christians accused heathens of witchcraft?
It's up to the US government to decide what countries it regards as enemies. Currently the US treats China as a friend. Therefore it is unfair and unrealistic to expect any US company to abstain from business with China on moral grounds. In fact, the US could very well forbid such boycotts, as it has done with Israel in the past.
It seems your real complaint should be with the US government. If China is a national enemy, we should ban trade with them on a national level. Such a radical step obviously raises many questions.
Well put. And reading history is a great antidote. America is in a very pleasant and precarious bubble, relative to both space and time. Tyranny, injustice and cruelty are the norm, across ages and across nations.
Denizens of the bubble complain vociferously if the people maintaining the bubble accidentally jostle them.
What is up with journalists and their weird desire to to compare everything to "everyday" units? Why not say it's about 3/4" wide? Of course some people don't know what an inch is, but they might not know what a "penny" (meaning, one assumes, US cent) is either.
Other journalism units:
Great length is measured in footballs fields.
Microscopic length is measured in fractions of "a human hair".
Corporations pay taxes, sure, but everything they pay is built into the price of the items they sell, and you should keep in mind who pays that: The consumer.
This logic is flawed. You can extend this argument to prove that waiters, for example, support the entire economy. You haven't explained how a corporation is able to just "pass on" an expense while "consumers" (meaning, I think, individuals) are not able to.
All individuals and corporations incur expenses. Taxes are just one expense. All of us would love to "pass on" our expenses to our customers/employers. Unfortunately, our customers/employers don't care about our expenses. We charge what the market will bear, and hope that it's well above our expenses.
Briefly, Republicans favor Christianity, religion in general, traditional families, a strong military, business interests, a hawkish foreign policy, minimal welfare benefits, and harsh punishment for criminals. Democrats favor secular government, alternative families (such as single-parent or gay), decreasing the military, labor and environmental interests, a dovish foreign policy, generous welfare benefits, and lenient treatment of criminals.
Needless to say, such a brief summary oversimplifies.
Traditionally, Democrats wanted high taxes and spending, while Republicans wanted the opposite. Recently Republicans have greatly increased their appetite for spending; unfortunately there is no counterbalancing decrease on the Democratic side.
On the contrary; it's generally a bad idea to be specific in these kinds of letters. Off hand:
The letter should be designed for its impact on a jury. If it contains legal technicalities, it looks scheming and calculated. Rather, it should emphasize the unfairness of the defendant's action.
It's hard to be accurately comprehensive. If someone infringes two of your rights, and you only complain about one, it looks like you're waiving the other.
The problem is, installing cable TV in a town is a big and risky investment. The cable company normally demands a "franchise", meaning a monopoly on cable access in the town. Without the franchise, the investment is less likely to pay off; therefore it's probably impossible to attract a cable company without offering exclusivity.
That's not just a bank vault door, it's a blast door. If it's designed to resist nuclear attack, no redneck with a backhoe and some dynamite is going to be able to do much to it.
A blast door is not necessarily resistant to burglary. It's installed from the outside and can generally be removed from the outside. I saw the blast door at the Titan missile base in Arizona, and while it's an impressive chunk of steel, it has some glaring differences from a bank vault door. Such as only a single locking point (IIRC), and no jamb. Vault doors evolved to their current design for excellent reasons.
No one gets in without passing though the 4.5-ton steel door and then a three-step process. A scanner uses radio frequency to read the would-be entrant's skin as a biometric identifier. He then needs to use a keycard and enter a code on the keypad. This three-tier security is standard for high-level military installations, McGinnis explains.
There are problems with playing "military installation" when you're not a government. What do you do when someone shows up at your front door with apparent legal authority to enter? Could be an OSHA inspector, an FBI agent with a national security letter, someone from your insurance company, etc. They will not go through your "three step process". Failure to admit them could have consequences ranging from adminstrative through civil to criminal.
In reality, you let them in, no matter how many tons your front door weighs.
Also, physical barriers only buy time for an armed reaction force to respond. An ordinary metal fire door with an alarm and an armed security guard able to respond in two minutes is a considerable deterrent. But if you're out in the boondocks and have no armed security on site, any amount of metal isn't much deterrent. There are plenty of rednecks with the skills and equipment access to tear your fancy door right off the structure.
And lastly, if you rent racks to lots of customers, the value of access control at the front door approaches zero. Anyone who wants to get past your 4.5-ton steel door just rents a rack. So the important access control has to be on a more granular level.
To make the best use of the power available, ADC is building what Cohen calls state-of-the-art HVAC systems that can cool in excess of 225 watts of power.
Sounds like a denominator is missing. Likely candidates are:
Square foot and
Rack unit.
Reporters puzzle me. I realize they're not EE's, but don't they have some tenuous linkage to reality? Does 225 watts for an entire data center sound right to a reporter?
And watts of power are my favorite watts. As opposed to watts of mass, newsprint, or innumeracy.
Even though you don't personally hire a lawyer, you still benefit from living in a society of laws. Every time you deal with a large corporation, they take advantage as much as their lawyers will allow. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. To be reasonably safe from violent criminals, and also from over-zealous polic officers, requires a body of case law created by intelligent and hard-working lawyers over centuries.
Where there is law, there are lawyers. The alternative is the rule of brute force. Despite its refreshing simplicity, that approach has been proven not to produce wealth, freedom or happiness for the majority.
OK, great. You've burned up all the lawyers. Now you get into a dispute with your employer/employee/partner over money. You're both convinced that you're right. Do you settle it with:
So which societies are advanced in your view, if not western ones? Is Saudi Arabia advanced?
Not that it matters. If you're going to paradoxically insist that the West isn't "advanced" and advocate some "noble primitives", you're just childishly switching labels. The proposition is still that to enjoy a western-style society (what everyone else means by "advanced"), we need laws and lawyers. Do you agree with that?
And you think you can wish away the complexities of law by stating that murder is wrong? Law is complex because people's behavior is complex. Most of that behavior has to do with business and money. People have been trading for millenia, and we've accumulated some wisdom about what can go wrong in business relationships and how to preserve fairness. That is codified in our law.
Question for your ideal society of enlightened thinkers:
Adam borrows four dollars from Bob, and fails to repay it on time. Seeking to recover his money, Bob covertly takes Adam's cow, which Adam thinks is worth seven dollars, and sells it to Charlie for three dollars. Bob says that Adam still owes him one dollar. Adam says that Bob owes him three dollars; alternatively, that Charlie should return the cow, since Bob had no right to sell it. Who is right?
I've noticed it too. And to those who say that all nationalities are like that: far from it. People from America, Britain, India, and African countries are quite skeptical of their governments, while still taking pride in the good parts.
Here's what I've learned from Chinese people. While we in the west see the government "oppressing the citizens" in China they see it punishing the jerks. Falun Gong, for example, is like a Chinese Scientology, and I think most Chinese want it shut down forcefully.
Also, China is sharply divided between City people, who get most of the benefits of modernization, and country people, who remain third world. One role of the government is to keep the country people down. For example, country people can't move to Beijing without a special permit; otherwise they all would. Chinese people in the US tech industry are overwhelmingly City people. So it's like asking a Sunni in Saddam-era Iraq about his government; since his 40% of the population gets 90% of the benefit, it would be understandable if he resists change.
China has a bloody history, and I think most Chinese want a government with a very firm grip to prevent internal conflicts from exploding into civil war.
There was a study a while ago which I can't find right now. In a monkey tribe where food was scarce, the researchers taught certain low-status monkeys how to get food. Soon the whole tribe knew that these monkeys could bring them precious food.
The interesting thing is that their status didn't change. They remained at the bottom of the totem pole.
Sound familiar? No amount of cleverness will raise your status.
I'll take your word for it that the firings you saw were suboptimal. But I have to insist that part of professional management is the ability to separate employees, whether the separation is driven by the employee leaving, by a disciplinary firing, or by cost-cutting.
I skimmed a book by a business professor about the problems of small business and how to fix them. Most of the problems come down to lack of professional management. Over the decades, a successful small business may become filled with timid, insular employees whose main qualification is loyalty. They rightly suspect that they're unemployable elsewhere, so they're terrified to challenge the boss, even if they had the background to do so.
I am sensing a faint echo of this idea in your description of employees who stick around at low salaries for "stability".
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Good question. Possibly, if Senator Foo called a press conference to announce his change of mind, he would win respect. Usually the politician bellows his opinion in a way that suggests he's always held it.
There's another side to it. In foreign policy, we elect politicians to combat our adversaries. Unlike atoms and molecules, these adversaries have a mental model of said politician which affects their actions.
If Senator Foo advertises the open mind of a scientist, he may be telling adversaries, "attack us hard enough and I'll change my mind."
I think a nation led by scientists would be doomed, for numerous reasons.
But on domestic issues, it seems like a more scientific approach would work better. Maybe the problem is that voters have strong ideologies. So many are voting to punish the perceived villains of national life that they wouldn't welcome a "scientific" re-evaluation of the worldview they endorsed.
Why is it a problem? (If we've ruled out performance issues.) If you want to attach meaning to a field in the hash, you obviously know what type it is. For instance, int empNum = atoi(h.get("empNum"));. But most fields are just generic data, to be shoveled from point A to point B. Might as well automate the shovelling.
I did not understand your comments about arrays and indexes. Could you clarify how arrays are entering the picture?
As for validation, if I understood your comment correctly, it is easily made generic:
typedef struct {
char *name;
bool mandatory;
char *regex;
pcre_t *compiled_regex;
} field_t;
static const field_t fields[] =
{ "empNum", 1, "\\d{1,12}" },
{ "name", 1, "[\\w ]{10,50" },
{ 0 }
};
At startup you compile the regexes. Obviously, you can add "types" if you like, possibly instead of regexes.
It's an interesting question. My preference is not to create classes for this type of object, but instead represent it as a "hash". Then you can do something like:
map employee;
dbh->selectRow("select * from employee where id=?", employee, id);
I wrote the db wrapper used here; I haven't seen any open source C++ db wrapper with comparable high-level functionality, and my company makes it very hard to open source anything.
I realize you will shrink from this suggestion, for performance reasons and because turning an int into a string and sticking it in a map feels yucky. However it allows a more generic style of programming:
const char *cols_to_render = { "name", "phone", "address", NULL };
Iterate over that instead of writing a bunch of "comb code". And of course, it's easy to write an insert_row() that removes a lot of tedium.
If you insist on keeping the custom classes, you have two choices; hand-written marshalling or object-relational mappers. Almost all the code I've seen uses the hand-written marshalling, and it's hideously verbose and repetitive. Note: contrary to what another poster suggested, db's do not generally store or transmit everything as text; therefore it's useful to explore the C api and get your ints as ints, if that's what you want.
I don't think there are any muslim states. The only one was Afghanistan under the Taliban. A muslim state will be ruled by Sharia law.
In Pakistan, for instance, someone who commits an "honor killing" will be prosecuted. Whether honor killings are part of Islam or part of "local tradition" is another question.
As for your larger question, I think the only consistent position for a free country is to get government out of religion completely. In the US we're mostly there, but we have tax exemptions. That puts the government in the position of deciding who is and isn't a religion. That's ridiculous.
If churches were taxed on income (revenue minus expenses) just like corporations, most would pay very little tax.
To expand on IP_Troll's point, the odd-sounding rule is actually reasonable. It's not so much needing a special kind of lawyer. Rather, admittance to the patent bar is completely separate from admission to any state bar. Which is as it should be. The prosecution of patent applications is so specialized and technical that we cannot assume all lawyers are qualified to do it; nor should we exclude non-lawyers (typically engineers) who wish to practice it.
Actually, both Patent Attorneys and Patent Agents may practice before the USPTO. The difference is that Patent Attorneys are lawyers and Patent Agents are not.
These objectives seem very non-objective. Meaning, when the project is done, you can argue that all objectives were reached. I don't mean to pick on this one project - modern management tends this way. Failure-proof.
... something (#7). Say you manage to increase X by 20%. Did you maximize? "Yes we did, within the constraints we were given."
For example, maximize
I disagree. The strongest statement of Christian views on witchcraft is probably The Malleus Malificarum, or "Witch Hammer". Its authors were certainly aware of Muslims and Jews. Yet they do not confuse them with witches.
Without attempting a precise definition, Christians generally viewed witches as:
I think you will agree that even at the height of the witch hysteria, Christians did not regard non-Christians as witches.
As for animists, I'm less sure. Certainly, Christians converted many Animists to Christianity without accusing them of witchcraft; rather, the Christians regarded them as heathens. However, were those conversions contemporaneous with the witchcraft scare?
Do you know of instances where Christians accused heathens of witchcraft?
It's up to the US government to decide what countries it regards as enemies. Currently the US treats China as a friend. Therefore it is unfair and unrealistic to expect any US company to abstain from business with China on moral grounds. In fact, the US could very well forbid such boycotts, as it has done with Israel in the past.
It seems your real complaint should be with the US government. If China is a national enemy, we should ban trade with them on a national level. Such a radical step obviously raises many questions.
Well put. And reading history is a great antidote. America is in a very pleasant and precarious bubble, relative to both space and time. Tyranny, injustice and cruelty are the norm, across ages and across nations.
Denizens of the bubble complain vociferously if the people maintaining the bubble accidentally jostle them.
Other journalism units:
This logic is flawed. You can extend this argument to prove that waiters, for example, support the entire economy. You haven't explained how a corporation is able to just "pass on" an expense while "consumers" (meaning, I think, individuals) are not able to.
All individuals and corporations incur expenses. Taxes are just one expense. All of us would love to "pass on" our expenses to our customers/employers. Unfortunately, our customers/employers don't care about our expenses. We charge what the market will bear, and hope that it's well above our expenses.
Briefly, Republicans favor Christianity, religion in general, traditional families, a strong military, business interests, a hawkish foreign policy, minimal welfare benefits, and harsh punishment for criminals.
Democrats favor secular government, alternative families (such as single-parent or gay), decreasing the military, labor and environmental interests, a dovish foreign policy, generous welfare benefits, and lenient treatment of criminals.
Needless to say, such a brief summary oversimplifies.
Traditionally, Democrats wanted high taxes and spending, while Republicans wanted the opposite. Recently Republicans have greatly increased their appetite for spending; unfortunately there is no counterbalancing decrease on the Democratic side.
The problem is, installing cable TV in a town is a big and risky investment. The cable company normally demands a "franchise", meaning a monopoly on cable access in the town. Without the franchise, the investment is less likely to pay off; therefore it's probably impossible to attract a cable company without offering exclusivity.
A blast door is not necessarily resistant to burglary. It's installed from the outside and can generally be removed from the outside. I saw the blast door at the Titan missile base in Arizona, and while it's an impressive chunk of steel, it has some glaring differences from a bank vault door. Such as only a single locking point (IIRC), and no jamb. Vault doors evolved to their current design for excellent reasons.
There are problems with playing "military installation" when you're not a government. What do you do when someone shows up at your front door with apparent legal authority to enter? Could be an OSHA inspector, an FBI agent with a national security letter, someone from your insurance company, etc. They will not go through your "three step process". Failure to admit them could have consequences ranging from adminstrative through civil to criminal.
In reality, you let them in, no matter how many tons your front door weighs.
Also, physical barriers only buy time for an armed reaction force to respond. An ordinary metal fire door with an alarm and an armed security guard able to respond in two minutes is a considerable deterrent. But if you're out in the boondocks and have no armed security on site, any amount of metal isn't much deterrent. There are plenty of rednecks with the skills and equipment access to tear your fancy door right off the structure.
And lastly, if you rent racks to lots of customers, the value of access control at the front door approaches zero. Anyone who wants to get past your 4.5-ton steel door just rents a rack. So the important access control has to be on a more granular level.
Sounds like a denominator is missing. Likely candidates are:
Reporters puzzle me. I realize they're not EE's, but don't they have some tenuous linkage to reality? Does 225 watts for an entire data center sound right to a reporter?
And watts of power are my favorite watts. As opposed to watts of mass, newsprint, or innumeracy.
Even though you don't personally hire a lawyer, you still benefit from living in a society of laws. Every time you deal with a large corporation, they take advantage as much as their lawyers will allow. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. To be reasonably safe from violent criminals, and also from over-zealous polic officers, requires a body of case law created by intelligent and hard-working lawyers over centuries.
Where there is law, there are lawyers. The alternative is the rule of brute force. Despite its refreshing simplicity, that approach has been proven not to produce wealth, freedom or happiness for the majority.
So which societies are advanced in your view, if not western ones? Is Saudi Arabia advanced?
Not that it matters. If you're going to paradoxically insist that the West isn't "advanced" and advocate some "noble primitives", you're just childishly switching labels. The proposition is still that to enjoy a western-style society (what everyone else means by "advanced"), we need laws and lawyers. Do you agree with that?
And you think you can wish away the complexities of law by stating that murder is wrong? Law is complex because people's behavior is complex. Most of that behavior has to do with business and money. People have been trading for millenia, and we've accumulated some wisdom about what can go wrong in business relationships and how to preserve fairness. That is codified in our law.
Question for your ideal society of enlightened thinkers:
Adam borrows four dollars from Bob, and fails to repay it on time. Seeking to recover his money, Bob covertly takes Adam's cow, which Adam thinks is worth seven dollars, and sells it to Charlie for three dollars. Bob says that Adam still owes him one dollar. Adam says that Bob owes him three dollars; alternatively, that Charlie should return the cow, since Bob had no right to sell it. Who is right?
I've noticed it too. And to those who say that all nationalities are like that: far from it. People from America, Britain, India, and African countries are quite skeptical of their governments, while still taking pride in the good parts.
Here's what I've learned from Chinese people. While we in the west see the government "oppressing the citizens" in China they see it punishing the jerks. Falun Gong, for example, is like a Chinese Scientology, and I think most Chinese want it shut down forcefully.
Also, China is sharply divided between City people, who get most of the benefits of modernization, and country people, who remain third world. One role of the government is to keep the country people down. For example, country people can't move to Beijing without a special permit; otherwise they all would. Chinese people in the US tech industry are overwhelmingly City people. So it's like asking a Sunni in Saddam-era Iraq about his government; since his 40% of the population gets 90% of the benefit, it would be understandable if he resists change.
China has a bloody history, and I think most Chinese want a government with a very firm grip to prevent internal conflicts from exploding into civil war.
Why are you safe? Married? Gay? Taking drugs to suppress the libido? (Probably an excellent investment).
There was a study a while ago which I can't find right now. In a monkey tribe where food was scarce, the researchers taught certain low-status monkeys how to get food. Soon the whole tribe knew that these monkeys could bring them precious food.
The interesting thing is that their status didn't change. They remained at the bottom of the totem pole.
Sound familiar? No amount of cleverness will raise your status.
While searching for this study, I saw quite a few monkey studies. Almost all made similar, depressing points. Like this story about monkey celebrity fever.
I'll take your word for it that the firings you saw were suboptimal. But I have to insist that part of professional management is the ability to separate employees, whether the separation is driven by the employee leaving, by a disciplinary firing, or by cost-cutting.
I skimmed a book by a business professor about the problems of small business and how to fix them. Most of the problems come down to lack of professional management. Over the decades, a successful small business may become filled with timid, insular employees whose main qualification is loyalty. They rightly suspect that they're unemployable elsewhere, so they're terrified to challenge the boss, even if they had the background to do so.
I am sensing a faint echo of this idea in your description of employees who stick around at low salaries for "stability".