Towards a Quantum Theory of Humour (Thu, 16 Mar 2017)
And thanks as well for the quote from Good Omens a while back; funny story. I'm a sucker for two-author-collaboration novels; liked The Difference Engine, liked Deus Irae (Philip K. Dick and Roger Zelazny), liked Rapture of the Nerds, liked Good Omens a lot.
]]>It should go without saying that you shouldn't use floating-point numbers for financial applications — that's what decimal classes in languages like Python and C# are for.
Oreilly has a list of 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know.
]]>Here's the details. A US President is above the law. Well not really but they have a lot of protection. The only way they can be removed from office for breaking the law is via the impeachment process. Which means that the House of Reps would have to basically organize a majority of themselves and accuse him of "reason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors". Pass some articles of impeachment then hand it over to the Senate. And there 2/3s have to vote to convict after a trial.
While many R's in Congress think pretty lowly of him, impeaching him is a big step. It wreaks the agenda for a year or so and creates all kinds of hassles for many of them to get re-elected. And 2/3s of the Senate requires a non trivial number of cross party movement.
Now a lot of R's in Congress somewhat expect DT to go so totally off the rails that this is what happens and Pence becomes the President. But they really want it to not happen until they pass some of their favorite plans this year.
Dianne Feinstein is playing to the choir. (Angry hard left D's) She knows reality.
See this for some details: http://www.crf-usa.org/impeachment/high-crimes-and-misdemeanors.html
]]>Well, that's definitely not going to fly! ;-)
]]>Anyway, impeachment will likely not happen unless DT shoots someone in the Oval Office in front of witnesses. Otherwise the hard core R's would vote out half or more of the R's in the house if they let an impeachment go forward.
A more likely path is the 25th Amendment to the Constitution.
Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.
If his cabinet starts it then Congress is just "doing what's right".
]]>(One of my first encounters with this kind of decay was when I found that Internet Explorer 2 was so broken it could not download Internet Explorer 3! But fortunately, I could download Netscape, which could download IE 3. This on Windows NT 4, circa 1997)
Protel ... I spent some years in the 1980's working in Protel, and it's a rare thing these days, what we used to call a "system implementation language". It's more like a strongly typed C; and with very few built in types. You can define integers to be 13 or 17 bits if you feel like it, but at your own risk. There were at least two dialects, Protel-DMS and Prot370. Prot370, originally for the VM/CMS mainframe, was the dialect for the tools and compilers. A late compiler for Prot370 compiled to C; then used the platform's C compiler, so we could be platform-agile for developer tools. I think we got support for a new workstation platform going in under a week about the time I left that world.
But, there also was "BNR Pascal" aka "XMS Pascal" for the telephone switch "peripherals". The peripherals include line cards, so they have essential stuff like the tone generators, switch-hook flash handling, and a lot of the device interface end of the many, many features of the telephone system. I think there were about as many lines of Pascal as Protel. Much of that work was done on home-grown "XMS" workstations, a 68000-based box (as were that generation of peripherals).
]]>It may be less painful than you think, programming languages that automate more of the correctness and correctness-checking to eliminate entire classes of bugs such as buffer overflows are gaining in popularity (Erlang, Rust, etc.), and developers are already using them to write replacement low-level system components as well as high-level applications and systems.
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