A crowd gathered in Louisiana to watch a 33,000-pound tractor smash a collection of Dixie Chicks CD's, tapes and other paraphernalia. To those familiar with 20th-century European history it seemed eerily reminiscent of . . . . But as Sinclair Lewis said, it can't happen here.
So begins a new op-ed piece by Paul Krugman for the Times, who uses the incident to segue into a discussion of the string of pro-war rallies that have been organized across the US by Clear Channel Communications, a key player in the radio industry with strong ties to the Bush presidency.
Krugman argues that "we're now seeing the next stage in the evolution of a new American oligarchy", where big business interests have an increasing say in government policy as "scores of midlevel appointees [...] now oversee industries for which they once worked." More depressing yet, he ends by noting that the role of the press as a watchdog for such matters has also been severely eroded, because "these days, the scandalmongers are more likely to go after journalists who raise questions."
Posted by Darren Wershler-Henry at March 25, 2003 01:04 PMWhen Batman went home at the end of a night spent fighting crime, he put on a suit and tie and became Bruce Wayne. When Clark Kent saw a news story getting too hot, a phone booth hid his change into Superman. When you're programming, all the variables you juggle around are doing similar tricks as they present one face to you and a totally different one to the machine.
Posted by: Lucas on January 18, 2004 06:27 PMThis variable is then used in various lines of code, holding values given it by variable assignments along the way. In the course of its life, a variable can hold any number of variables and be used in any number of different ways. This flexibility is built on the precept we just learned: a variable is really just a block of bits, and those bits can hold whatever data the program needs to remember. They can hold enough data to remember an integer from as low as -2,147,483,647 up to 2,147,483,647 (one less than plus or minus 2^31). They can remember one character of writing. They can keep a decimal number with a huge amount of precision and a giant range. They can hold a time accurate to the second in a range of centuries. A few bits is not to be scoffed at.
Posted by: Rook on January 18, 2004 06:27 PMThe Stack is just what it sounds like: a tower of things that starts at the bottom and builds upward as it goes. In our case, the things in the stack are called "Stack Frames" or just "frames". We start with one stack frame at the very bottom, and we build up from there.
Posted by: Martin on January 18, 2004 06:28 PMWhen Batman went home at the end of a night spent fighting crime, he put on a suit and tie and became Bruce Wayne. When Clark Kent saw a news story getting too hot, a phone booth hid his change into Superman. When you're programming, all the variables you juggle around are doing similar tricks as they present one face to you and a totally different one to the machine.
Posted by: Dorothy on January 18, 2004 06:28 PMThis back and forth is an important concept to understand in C programming, especially on the Mac's RISC architecture. Almost every variable you work with can be represented in 32 bits of memory: thirty-two 1s and 0s define the data that a simple variable can hold. There are exceptions, like on the new 64-bit G5s and in the 128-bit world of AltiVec
Posted by: Hamond on January 18, 2004 06:29 PM