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Comment Re:do not track or do not serve target ads? (Score 4, Informative) 110

Assuming this is a serious question, as I understand it, the browser, when requesting a page, will set a flag denoting your "do not track" status. It's up to the site to honor the request or not (which more often they don't). Of course, if you were being facetious, then feel free to ignore this.

Comment Re:Comments by an old programmer (Score 1) 388

Not to sound confrontational, but the only people who dismiss C++ templates as being in "la-la land" are those who don't understand templates. You're entitled to your opinion, but consider giving it another look. Also I'm curious, how precisely would you want to improve machine learning notation? Have people drawing hypercubes everywhere?

Comment Re:Revoting... (Score 1) 503

I voted green (although technically now I'm registered as democrat, as I had to switch in '08 to vote in the democratic primary). I would be willing to bet that there are many other people who are aligned closer ideologically to the green party, but vote democrat

Comment DSP (Score 1) 1086

It largely depends on what sub-field of computer science you go into. If you do any DSP work (or more specifically, image processing/computer vision) there's going to be a ton of math. Some of those papers will make your eyes bleed. More to the point, if you're implementing some algorithm, even if you're using a library to perform say, an FFT in the actual code, you still have to be able to grok the paper to know what to do, and that will require some strong math skills.

Comment Re:Am I the only one.. (Score 1) 594

I didn't like the art/feel at first either, but as you progress past the stages available in the beta the art grows on you. At least, it did on me (got to play for a few hours before the servers went down again). And to be fair, I don't think anyone liked the beginning stages in D2 either, i.e. for the past decade or so on battle net you'd just have a friend rush you into hell mode. People might play through for the story the first time, but beyond that the levels from 1 to 70 or so were just a stepping stone to getting to the end-game stage. The fact that you feel unenthusiastic about the early stages of D3 aren't particularly surprising. But based on what I've seen, it looks like it'll be a worthy successor to D1 and D2.

Comment Re:Doomed (Score 1) 435

Yes. C/C++ are inherently predisposed towards being buggy and unsafe, relative to more modern languages. They trade runtime checks for minimal runtime overhead (and I'm not saying that's a bad thing), but they don't make any effort to assist the programmer in the area of code correctness. Even the few compile-time systems in place to prevent programmer error (i.e. the type system) is pretty easy to circumvent. Take for example assigning one struct to a (completely different) one (which is an illegal operation); type1 t1; type2 t2; t1 = *(type1 *) It's as easy as that to completely subvert the type system. This is because C assumes the programmer knows what they're doing/is always right, which more often than not is not the case. However, if as you say, people who write unsafe code "shouldn't be allowed near any programming language anyway", then we'd have precious few (i.e. zero) programmers. You can never tell that there's a security vulnerability in your code until it's been found, and you can never conclusively prove your code to be security-hole free. In addition, very often in industry software security is an afterthought, as it's not as tangible as implementing new features. As a result, no one spends any meaningful time on detecting vulnerabilities (which can be very subtle). This is why having a language that makes it easy to write good code and hard to write bad code is so important. C will always have a place in embedded systems and OSes because of its flexibility and speed, but it's high time that we moved away from such low level languages in other software contexts.

Comment Re:Not smart Enough? (Score 1) 1276

I'm not sure that IQ is a very effective metric for gauging someone's intelligence, seeing as the average score for IQ tests have been steadily rising since their introduction (see the Flynn Effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect). With that said, all things being equal, I would much rather have someone smarter than me calling the shots than someone dumber, the smarter the better.

Comment Worst... Dictator.... Ever! (Score 1) 231

Jesus, as if killing your own people isn't bad enough, you also use one of the worst passwords of all time for (multiple) government passwords. Maybe he wasn't so far off in his Barbara Walters interview; "No government in the world kills its people, unless it’s led by a crazy person” - Assad

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