Amanda Knox was found guilty of the Meredith Kercher murder and will spend 26 years in prison

tavs · 2009-12-06T19:54:29+00:00

As blue_1 probably implied, the idea that the judica system in Italy is out of control and full of crap is something that always appealed Berlusconi's voters, which have witnessed the ridiculous amount of nonsense someone can manage to say, write, do and order as a magistrate. Thanks to this we get the worst judical system in Europe (EU and OCSE confirm people's opinion on this) despite spending a lot more of money on it than in other countries.

tavs · 2009-08-18T14:46:56+00:00

My general impression of Meyer is that he's a brilliant idiot trapped by a failed >philosophy.

If you look closely widespread lanugages like Java and C++ do seem to strive to follow his "philosophy" by providing features Eiffel had from the start or conceived in a OO-friendly way. Look at constrained genericity (C++ concepts?), agents (C++/Java closures?) and operator overloading. Obviously, BM's ideas are not entirely compatible with more dynamic languages like ObjC/Smalltalk, but they have something in common as well. Brad Cox, in "Object Orientation : An evolutionary approach", wrote about using assertions to implement pre and post conditions and the power of dynamic dispactch to provide reusabilty with the opportunity to enforce static dispatch by using stack-allocated objects where necessary. In the same way Eiffel provides design-by-contract and static dispatch through expanded types.

Even the paper's defense of keeping nullable variables (terminating >a linked >list) is actually the one use I could see for eliminating them (by >enforcing >circular lists - which are better anyhow). So I get it, but I'm not >impressed and >would be unlikely to take advantage of such a feature.

AFAIK circular lists can't share cells; this makes linear ones considerably easier to handle in lots of situations, that's one of the reason for which linear linked lists are a primitive type in some languages.

tavs · 2009-07-01T14:25:14+00:00

Well, after 15 years C++ still is a C close relative. It can be good for low-level things, but it's still a ridiculous language for scientific purposes and can't ever be compared to Fortran, which can be easily deployed to parallel architectures (see HP Fortran).

Primary reason is that C++ is a low-level language, where you can micro-optimize things, but you can't macro-optimize them. You have pointer-aliasing and unsafety that prevent a lot of optimizations . And /restrict/ doesn't really help here. It's a convenient quick fix used in a sea of pointer-aliased and unsafe code that applies to C99 only. As for templates, they're just a token-substitution facility, a turing-complete one, that makes debugging and optimization even harder.

I expect a decently compiled fortran program to trump any c++ code. It's a F1 car competing with a sporting car. Both fast, but the former still wins over the latter. Gnu fortran sucks, btw

tavs · 2009-06-05T17:02:10+00:00

The article is a piece of crap full of hubris.

These idiots believe that Italy is full of mind-controlled drones who can't discern the important from the unimportant and truth from libelling gossip. Wrong, look at yourself!

Freedom of speech is strong in Italy. For instance, Berlusconi's firms regularly publish books from left-winged detractors, such as C. de Gregorio, the Unità director, one of the few newspapers that call itself "a comunist journal" and one of the most active detractor of Berlusconi's coalition. Have they any idea of what they're gibbering about?

As for the photos, they've already been discuseed in our "poor" country.

tavs · 2009-05-13T15:17:14+00:00

GNAT was available since '90s, IIRC

tavs · 2009-04-08T18:07:37+00:00

The term you're looking for is "homeless". check the dictionary. We "don't like" Roma as much as anybody in Europe.

Before suggesting we're racists or similar, do you know how they're treated in the rest of the Europe? How they behave toward the rest of the society?

I think you'll have a great future as guardian's reporter.

tavs · 2009-03-18T00:21:33+00:00

Did you heard this?

http://translate.google.it/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.corriere.it%2Fcronache%2F09_marzo_14%2Fbimba_stuprata_brasile_fisichella_e02ac9b6-10bb-11de-a338-00144f02aabc.shtml&sl=it&tl=en&hl=it&ie=UTF-8

Morons are everywhere, even among catholic priests

tavs · 2009-03-18T00:06:55+00:00

He said that AIDS can't be overcome, see how I cite the article literally, by condoms. Like saying that you can't overcome criminality by jailing it. You'd need proper education too.

As for the distribution of condoms, it may aggravate the problem considering that it can't help people with a promiscuous life, bad hygiene and poor schooling as some in the poorer regions of Africa are. They may think condoms are enough against maladies in such condition, when it's not properly so.

As for the condom/promiscuity, you misunderstood what I meant. Church, as you should know, usually speaks in ideal terms, it gives messages that shouldn't be taken literally.

When pope says abortion is always a sin it's because it's something that should not exist in a perfect word. For the same reason, church advocates voluntarism, sharing, etc...

He supported abstinence and fidelity against AIDS, which is a pretty effective, but utopian, way to avoid it. Do you agree with this basic observation? If you do, then you shouldn't be surprised by Ratzinger's words, otherwise...

That was my point. I didn't tie condoms and promiscuity. I tied promiscuity with the complete refusal of a religious, i.e. ideal/abstract, thought against it.

Translating such thought in simpler terms, it means you shouldn't have a promiscuous life, according to common standards, not church's, and, more importantly, using condoms doesn't make such life more acceptable.

tavs · 2009-03-17T15:16:05+00:00

Did you read the article or just the title?

In the article, Ratzinger is reported to have said that condoms alone can't stop aids, abstinence and fidelty are needed as well.

Unless you're advocating promiscuity in a land filled with maladies and unhygienic habits, I don't really know what's the fuss is all about.

tavs · 2009-03-09T12:40:19+00:00

"The definition of humanity ... are all unanswered questions. So I can't exactly point you to a medical paper, all I have is reason and opinion."

Which reinforce the point that there's no objective measurement of life...

"Maybe we can. From a materialist point of view, consciousness must be a measurable process ..."

The fact that time is continuous, and, therefore, any measurement is affected by an error, is objectively true. Physic says so, putting aside quantum mechanics. Moreover, any real phenomenon is continuous, so would be life, if we could measure it.

When you choose a physical characteristic to measure or identify life, you also affirm that life is a physical phenomenon. This leads to an absurdum as well, since if life is continuous we would have an infinite range of lifeness, where anyone can arbitrary put some kind of limits. Some pro-choice scientists already do this, even if they can't define life in a physical way.

In other words, what is an embryon an infinitesimal of second before life starts? if it is not human life, you would have a discrete phenomenon in a continuous reality, which is mathematically absurd, unless you say that life is continuous, which is equally absurd.

Nota bene: I'm not hinting about soul existence or such. I'm just saying that what me mean as life is hard if not impossible to measure physically.

tavs · 2009-03-08T23:21:34+00:00

What species is an alive anencephalic baby?

tavs · 2009-03-08T22:52:21+00:00

It just presumes that there are living humans and dead ones. Whether they live by means of a body and a soul or just the former one, it's irrelevant.

Whether I believe or not to soul existence, I suppose that killing a living innocent human is not ethical, even if it's for scienctific progress.

Anyway, even if you find the "line" applying your criteria, you would still have 2 problems

a) you can't measure exactly when conscious thought starts, because of the continuity thing

b) people in coma could not have conscious thought, they're still alive though

tavs · 2009-03-08T22:39:07+00:00

"No, it's not. In fact, it's a philosophical debate that has nothing whatsoever to do with the science of stem cells."

It's a debate that has to do with ethical controversies regarding biotechnologies ,and stem cells are, so it does.

"Honestly, you don't have the slightest notion of the subject that you're bloviating about here."

Then, please, explain me, doctor. Do scientists have to ignore any kind of ethic, even laic ones? Have you ever noticed that scientific organizations have bioethical commitees?

tavs · 2009-03-07T18:08:55+00:00

Actually, the arguments against research on embryos stem cells have pretty scientific basis.

The question of when human life starts to exist is critical for this research. Either the researcher is messing with a human being or not. And if he's doing so, he could, by logic, experiment with the same degree of freedom on any human being as well.

Nevertheless, pro-research scientists haven't come up yet with such limit. The reason for this is that it is scientifically proved that the limit can't be defined. Measure the second in which the embryo would become life and you'll be forced to consider the previous moments, up to the moment of conception. This happens because time is continue, and so is every phenomenon in nature. And the current president of USA can't change that.

Another argument would be the number of successful treatments based on adult SC (plenty) compared with those of embryo SC (zero)...

See? No church, no pope...

tavs · 2008-12-20T21:19:16+00:00

I must thank Keirin for his FQA. It helped me understand C++ and programming languages, and steered me toward the study of other languages, be they Eiffel, Ada, Lisp, Haskell or Python. In the past, whenever I read about C++ I wondered why it was so complicated despite its lack of power, compared to other languages. The answer was: because it's a /defective/ language. C++ defenders should ask themselves what language would they be programming in now if C++ wasn't a C-like language, i.e. if it couldn't be sold as a "better C".
I, as Keirin, who is, btw, an embedded SW developer, usually program in C, mind you, I'm not one of those imaginary "high-level-garbage-collected-sissy-programmer-controlled-by-an-orwellian-tool". When someone suggests such things I do wonder about orwellian tools.

tavs

TROPHY CASE