Month: April 2008
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Tibet
Tibet has been in the news recently, as people are using the fact that the Olympics are taking place in China to protest against Chinese control. I’ve never been to Tibet, and I don’t know very much about it. Tibetans are an ethnic group, they have a long history, they have their own religion, they…
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Digital Copyright
Control over copying of analog data is, in practice, made possible by cost: it’s a pain to transcribe a book, it’s hard to make a perfect copy of a record. The cost of copying digital data, however, is near zero. This means that control over copying of digital data is, in practice, impossible. It’s not…
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Financial Complexity 2
Almost six months later, I’ll look back at my earlier post about financial complexity. Considering the continuing troubles of the financial markets, it seems clear that I underestimated the degree of the problem. But I think I was generally correct in pointing out that the complexity of modern markets helped hide the nature of the…
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Happiness
One of the drawbacks of our secular age is that it is less clear what we should strive for in our lives. In medieval Europe it seems as though life goals were pretty clear for most people: keep your nose clean, and you get to go to heaven after you die. Heaven is a good…
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GCC vs. CERT
CERT recently issued an unfortunate advisory about gcc. The advisory is about an optimization which gcc introduced in gcc 4.2: given a pointer p, then a comparison of the form p + C1 < p + C2 can be reduced to C1 < C2. This is always valid in standard C and C++, because those…