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> Again then: Considering that most languages predate C anyway ...

Is that so?

Religion prevents violence? Ha!

Mankind is violent, have been from the beginning. Religion (or lack thereof) doesn't change it. Atheists have kill MILLIONS in the name of Atheism (USSR, China etc).

http://www.loyola.edu/amnesty/chinapers.htm

Wow, you said that and got modded up. Times are changing. Nearly a decade ago, someone posted this link and tried to defend why OOP was bad. He was mocked soundly, including for the battered Spock image. Unfortunately I couldn't find that story.

OO is practical for lots of problems, because it makes modelling real-world data easy.

One of OOPs biggest myths. Check out http://www.cs.loyola.edu/~binkley/772/articles/oopbad.htm. The site is a bit of a mix, and the author is married to his pet paradigm, but there's more wheat than chaff.

See e.g. here: http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1130/p01s01-usfp.html

So ... yes ... China would be interested in any intelligence it can get its hands on. From innocuous material from open sources to more valuable material, likewise from open sources. But also the more clandestine stuff. From pure industrial espionage to scientific and military espionage. But then so would numerous other countries (see e.g. http://www.loyola.edu/dept/politics/intel/t-nsiad-96-114.pdf). Like Russia, France, Japan, Korea, Israel, South-Africa. Just Google for "economic espionage in the US" and marvel. Have I forgotten anyone? Join the queue on the right please and don't shove! Just about every country in the world gathers economic, industrial, and military intelligence. Starting with the good old US of A of course.

What I mean to say is that there's no reason to be especially paranoid about the Chinese spying on individual travelers to the Olympics, but every reason to be cautious.

China as a country has an active espionage operation in the US, and there is no reason why they would *not* analyze a small surge of electronic communications from Americans abroad through the web. After all ... they have state-of-the-art routers (courtesy of Cisco, 3Com, Sun, HP etc.) that can filter out the more interesting communications as they happen.

Although I can't imagine why a bunch of Olympic-goers would be in a position to yield more interesting data than the scores of people working in the Valley, at Sandia, Livermore, and everyone and his grandmother here who uses MS Windows and a browser that's happy to execute any Javascript it comes across etc. etc..

But even so, ... it's probably not a good idea to use an unencrypted network connection from your Beijing hotel room to the company you work for. Especially if someone might be interested in that company. Or in examining the structure of the computer system at the other end, and the communication between them. And surely no-one would be daft enough to log into company machines from abroad without at least the protection of a VPN, right?

Let's at least make Chinese intelligence collectors *work* for their money . No need to make them a present of passwords or hosts, or to alert them to insecure communication protocols into US servers. Whilst there is no need to get paranoid, there's no reason to give them a presents either.

And let's not forget that the risk from non-state sources, shall we? Americans who have the means to visit the Beijing Olympics are, from the point of view of the average Chinese, obscenely rich. And suddenly there will be a few thousand of them in the city. Being foreigners they will be *much* less likely to have the Chinese policy actively investigate any complaints they may have about their credit-cards being plundered by unspecified third parties. Especially if they only find out after their return, right?

I think that perhaps we should simply interpret the warning as a low-key reminder that it's more than likely that China will be interested in anything they can get at without risk and with minimal effort, and that there will be scores of people with good technical knowledge who regard them as extraordinarily rich. So why not warn people that they should take sensible precautions against exposing the more gaping security holes when they surf the web from their Beijing hotel room?

Don't tell that to anybody who's played Dragon Warrior
Dost thou wish to continue thy quest?

July 28, 1962 -- Mariner I space probe. A bug in the flight software for the Mariner 1 causes the rocket to divert from its intended path on launch. Mission control destroys the rocket over the Atlantic Ocean. The investigation into the accident discovers that a formula written on paper in pencil was improperly transcribed into computer code, causing the computer to miscalculate the rocket's trajectory.

1982 -- Soviet gas pipeline. Operatives working for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency allegedly (.pdf) plant a bug in a Canadian computer system purchased to control the trans-Siberian gas pipeline. The Soviets had obtained the system as part of a wide-ranging effort to covertly purchase or steal sensitive U.S. technology. The CIA reportedly found out about the program and decided to make it backfire with equipment that would pass Soviet inspection and then fail once in operation. The resulting event is reportedly the largest non-nuclear explosion in the planet's history.

1985-1987 -- Therac-25 medical accelerator. A radiation therapy device malfunctions and delivers lethal radiation doses at several medical facilities. Based upon a previous design, the Therac-25 was an "improved" therapy system that could deliver two different kinds of radiation: either a low-power electron beam (beta particles) or X-rays. The Therac-25's X-rays were generated by smashing high-power electrons into a metal target positioned between the electron gun and the patient. A second "improvement" was the replacement of the older Therac-20's electromechanical safety interlocks with software control, a decision made because software was perceived to be more reliable.

What engineers didn't know was that both the 20 and the 25 were built upon an operating system that had been kludged together by a programmer with no formal training. Because of a subtle bug called a "race condition," a quick-fingered typist could accidentally configure the Therac-25 so the electron beam would fire in high-power mode but with the metal X-ray target out of position. At least five patients die; others are seriously injured.

1988 -- Buffer overflow in Berkeley Unix finger daemon. The first internet worm (the so-called Morris Worm) infects between 2,000 and 6,000 computers in less than a day by taking advantage of a buffer overflow. The specific code is a function in the standard input/output library routine called gets() designed to get a line of text over the network. Unfortunately, gets() has no provision to limit its input, and an overly large input allows the worm to take over any machine to which it can connect.

Programmers respond by attempting to stamp out the gets() function in working code, but they refuse to remove it from the C programming language's standard input/output library, where it remains to this day.

1988-1996 -- Kerberos Random Number Generator. The authors of the Kerberos security system neglect to properly "seed" the program's random number generator with a truly random seed. As a result, for eight years it is possible to trivially break into any computer that relies on Kerberos for authentication. It is unknown if this bug was ever actually exploited.

January 15, 1990 -- ATT Network Outage. A bug in a new release of the software that controls ATT's #4ESS long distance switches causes these mammoth computers to crash when they receive a specif

To match the japanese tastes

* Get a lot indignant consumers
* Buy Latest Blizzard game in droves
* Open the box. Start installing the game. Read the EULA end-to-end, noting the parts you don't like. Stop the install by declining the EULA.
* Attempt to return the package to the store; politely express disatisfaction about their refusal to accept EULA returns. Note the parts of the EULA you find unacceptable. Agree that you will take the issue up with the manufacturer.
* Contact Blizzard to obtain an RMA, politely informing them you want a rebate since you don't agree with the EULA, and your local vendor declines to provide one. Be sure to again note the parts that you find offensive, and why. Return all the game materials to Blizzard.
* Repeat every eight weeks. After all, you do want to see whether they've changed the agreement to something more reasonable. =)

Note, you may be out about six bucks per cycle doing this. If it weren't for that, I'd be pleased to join in such a movement. While I like Diablo, I'm afraid Warcraft bores me once I finish clicking through the "You're making me seasick!" gags.

I agree that this does sound like a contradiction, but I went to eat at an Amish restaraunt last summer and was surprised to read a pamphlet about their lifestyle that said they don't shun technology outright. Instead they are trying to avoid intrusions into the home, maintain Gelassenheit (simplicity and modesty) and stay seperate from the rest of the world. The Amish leaders consider each technology carefully before deciding whether to allow it into the community. They don't drive cars because they are status symbols. They don't have electrical outlets because they connect to the world, but they do have generator and batteries. Community telephones are allowed and some Amish men carry mobile phones. There are some definitely some weird contradictions like tractors are ok, but pneumatic tires aren't, so they only use tractors with steel wheels.

More info: Amish Telephones The Amish: Technology The Amish Get Wired. The Amish? Amish FAQ

then maybe I could find my stolen wheels and tires !

No, I think he means HID as in Human Interface Device

It seems to me that what you said is not proof, but it is interesting to think about.

The situation with Japan was unusual, it seemed to me, because of General McArthur. He used his power to help Japan rebuild. (My father was one of the U.S. military people who helped in the re-construction.) Basically, General MacArthur was Japan's first democratic leader.

Japan has been peaceful, not because of war, but because of an amazing amount of creative and intensive charity after the war. Also, the Japanese are culturally pre-disposed to accept one strong, fatherlike, leader.

Notes from Google: General MacArthur, the founder of today's 'prosperous' Japan says "... he had achieved countless reforms such as educational reform, farmland reform, zaibatsu dissolution, dissolution militarism, promotion of democracy and tax reform tax reform as well as signing on battleship Missouri. It is no exaggeration to say that he was the founder of today's prosperous Japan."

This article tells a little more: Japan Under American Occupation.

The cultural disposition of the Japanese to accept an older leader helped them accept W. Edwards Deming, an American quality control expert. See History of Japan's Quality movement which says,

"The quality movement in Japan began in 1946 with the U.S. Occupation Force's mission to revive and restructure Japan's communications equipment industry. General Douglas MacArthur was committed to public education through radio. Homer Sarasohn was recruited to spearhead the effort by repairing and installing equipment, making materials and parts available, restarting factories, establishing the equipment test laboratory (ETL), and setting rigid quality standards for products (Tsurumi 1990). Sarasohn recommended individuals for company presidencies, like Koji Kobayashi of NEC, and he established education for Japan's top executives in the management of quality. Furthermore, upon Sarasohn's return to the United States, he recommended W. Edwards Deming to provide a seminar in Japan on statistical quality control (SQC)."

See also, Japan's Secret: W. Edwards Deming.

As I said, the charity toward Japan after the war was extensive , amazingly so.

Christianity should be given some credit here because the idea of being charitable to Japan apparently came from Christian principles. (This is not meant to be a religious statement. It is only a cultural statement.)

The charity was even more remarkable because Japan had had a really, really rotten outbreak of mental illness that causes Japanese to be disliked in countries surrounding Japan even today. There were certainly many reasons why people would allow themselves to feel negative toward the Japanese.

There must be a free and rational debate about the ethical and social aspects of potential uses of technology, and government must provide an arena for these debates that is most conducive to results that benefit humans.

In other words, here are the options, now let's debate them. That's definitely the right approach.

The only reason I mention the Japanese is the car manufacturing example I used. (Did you look at the link I provided?) The principles of quality control are universal and were actually imported by the United States: The quality movement in Japan began in 1946 with the U.S. Occupation

Now, why would Japanese companies like Toyota (which started basically in someones garage) be able to take market share from companies like Ford (who began mass production)? Because they actually applied the quality control principles. Ford, &c., were selling an inferior product, which the "lemon laws" were meant to protect consumers against.

The same is true for software. Maybe we'll get some "lemon software" protection, but the only thing that's really going to get compaies like Microsoft to start making reliable software is real competition.

The legislation would skyrocket production costs for Microsoft if the company were forced to release foolproof products.

Why would this happen? Car manufacturers used the same "skyrocket production costs" argument with the lemon law with cars. But it just doesn't mean that everything needs to be perfect. Instead it just ensures some basic quality control such as practiced in Japan.

As for free software, it would just mean that some of the legal entities that support a packaged product (i.e., Red Hat) would be held to the same standards. IANAL, but if the FSF says 'this isn't a complete product' they can't be held liable any more than a tire company could be for some idiot putting the wrong tire on their car.

In the land of Azeroth
War was beginning.
Orc Shaman: What happen?
Grunt: Somebody set us up the bomb.
Peon: We get signal.
Shaman: What?
Peon: Ready to work.
Shaman: It's you!!
Blizzard: How are you gentlemen
Blizzard: All your base are belong to us.
Blizzard: You are on the way to destruction.
Blizzard: You have no chance to survive make your time.
HA HA HA HA . . . .

In the land of Azeroth
War was beginning.
Orc Shaman: What happen?
Grunt: Somebody set us up the bomb.
Peon: We get signal.
Shaman: What?
Peon: Ready to work.
Shaman: It's you!!
Blizzard: How are you gentlemen
Blizzard: All your base are belong to us.
Blizzard: You are on the way to destruction.
Blizzard: You have no chance to survive make your time.
HA HA HA HA . . . .

In the land of Azeroth
War was beginning.
Orc Shaman: What happen?
Grunt: Somebody set us up the bomb.
Peon: We get signal.
Shaman: What?
Peon: Ready to work.
Shaman: It's you!!
Blizzard: How are you gentlemen
Blizzard: All your base are belong to us.
Blizzard: You are on the way to destruction.
Blizzard: You have no chance to survive make your time.
HA HA HA HA . . . .

In the land of Azeroth
War was beginning.
Orc Shaman: What happen?
Grunt: Somebody set us up the bomb.
Peon: We get signal.
Shaman: What?
Peon: Ready to work.
Shaman: It's you!!
Blizzard: How are you gentlemen
Blizzard: All your base are belong to us.
Blizzard: You are on the way to destruction.
Blizzard: You have no chance to survive make your time.
HA HA HA HA . . . .

In the land of Azeroth
War was beginning.
Orc Shaman: What happen?
Grunt: Somebody set us up the bomb.
Peon: We get signal.
Shaman: What?
Peon: Ready to work.
Shaman: It's you!!
Blizzard: How are you gentlemen
Blizzard: All your base are belong to us.
Blizzard: You are on the way to destruction.
Blizzard: You have no chance to survive make your time.
HA HA HA HA . . . .

In the land of Azeroth
War was beginning.
Orc Shaman: What happen?
Grunt: Somebody set us up the bomb.
Peon: We get signal.
Shaman: What?
Peon: Ready to work.
Shaman: It's you!!
Blizzard: How are you gentlemen
Blizzard: All your base are belong to us.
Blizzard: You are on the way to destruction.
Blizzard: You have no chance to survive make your time.
HA HA HA HA . . . .

In the land of Azeroth
War was beginning.
Orc Shaman: What happen?
Grunt: Somebody set us up the bomb.
Peon: We get signal.
Shaman: What?
Peon: Ready to work.
Shaman: It's you!!
Blizzard: How are you gentlemen
Blizzard: All your base are belong to us.
Blizzard: You are on the way to destruction.
Blizzard: You have no chance to survive make your time.
HA HA HA HA . . . .

In the land of Azeroth
War was beginning.
Orc Shaman: What happen?
Grunt: Somebody set us up the bomb.
Peon: We get signal.
Shaman: What?
Peon: Ready to work.
Shaman: It's you!!
Blizzard: How are you gentlemen
Blizzard: All your base are belong to us.
Blizzard: You are on the way to destruction.
Blizzard: You have no chance to survive make your time.
HA HA HA HA . . . .

In the land of Azeroth
War was beginning.
Orc Shaman: What happen?
Grunt: Somebody set us up the bomb.
Peon: We get signal.
Shaman: What?
Peon: Ready to work.
Shaman: It's you!!
Blizzard: How are you gentlemen
Blizzard: All your base are belong to us.
Blizzard: You are on the way to destruction.
Blizzard: You have no chance to survive make your time.
HA HA HA HA . . . .

Japan has compulsory licensing for nonprofit activities involving out of print material. This needs to be looked into for Japanese games. You may have to pay a statutory royalty to the Agency of Cultural Affairs of the Ministry of Education.

• New York
• Chicago
• Dallas
• Bombay, India
• Scotland

The future of the Internet is in what I call "rational programming" derived from a revival of Bertrand Russell's Relation Arithmetic. Rational programming is a classically applicable branch of relation arithmetic's sub theory of quantum software (as opposed to the hardware-oriented technology of quantum computing). By classically applicable I mean it is applies to conventional computing systems -- not just quantum information systems. Rational programming will subsume what Tim Berners Lee calls the semantic web. The basic problem Tim (and just about everyone back through Bertrand Russell) fails to perceive is that logic is irrational. John McCarthy's signature line says it all about this kind of approach: "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense." More on this a bit later, but first some history, because he who fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat its nonsense:

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.

So some sinister nameless hax0r who maybe, maybe not, managed to download a few source code files despite Microsoft's "world-class" internal network security is a threat to our national welfare - but each and every one of the tens of thousands of Microsoft employees with unfettered day-to-day access to that same source code, well, all of them can be trusted implicitly?

Gee, thinking like that goes a long way toward explaining how Aldritch Ames got away with all he did to subvert the CIA (Completely Incompetent A**holes) so successfully for as long as he did.

Yours WD "untrustworthy" K - WKiernan@concentric.net

A quick web search for "random haiku generator" turned up several worthy m a t c h e s.

However, most of them either recycle the same lines, or string words together based on few criteria other than syllables. One way or another, they make little sense. I wouldn't consider a haiku generator "intelligent" until it escaped both of these traps. Okay, sure, so the beauty of minimalist work is that the human mind gets to fill in the gaps. But they'd better be "gaps" and not massive, yawning chasms.

And if the haiku/senryu is going to be generated from an RDF file, ideally it would say something of some relevance about the contents of said file. That is, it would either synthesize verbally communicated information or form an opinion, which are both extraordinarily tall orders even with the current advancements in AI technology.

I love haiku/senryu, and if I had the hacking skillz, I'd have a go at this myself. But I don't, so I'll merely wish luck to those who try. And if any of you happen to read this, you'll be my hero if you include a --moooose option. Where a normal haiku is a poem in 5-7-5 format that makes reference to the seaason, a mooooooose haiku is a poem not quite in 5-7-5 format that makes reference to the moooooooose. :P

There have been a lot of questions about the On-Board Processing available on Iridium. This article offers some information about Iridium's on-board Motorola hardware, compared to other systems, and discusses the networking structure (ground and orbital)

There's more info and actual data in an article called Supporting ATM on a Low-Earth Orbit Sattelite System covering the ATM switching network in iridium, including goodies like signal strengths in various ground settings and conditions, traffic capacities, and RF restrictions internationally.

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.

As a matter of fact, I don't think brainfuck is all that cryptic. But perhaps you could discern my bias from my sig. :)

I'd go so far as to say that brainfuck, having been forced to be both logical and simple by virtue of its drive for compactness, is an excellent teaching language. It's a good introduction to the concept of arrays, to ASCII, and to while-loops and sentinel values. I would not go so far as to say that brainfuck is a good first language, but it might be an excellent companion language to C (which was also my first language, and which I do still recommend as a first language: it gives you a good foundation, and is absolutely imperative if you want to be a UNIX developer). Especially since its interpreter and certain tools are written in C.

Anyone interested in learning more about brainfuck can visit the presentation page I set up a couple of semesters ago, when I had to deliver (you guessed it) a class presentation on the language. It was meant as a companion to my talk and demo programs, so if you don't find it as informative as you'd like, follow the links at the bottom. Or, better yet . . . .

Anyway, if you think brainfuck is bad, you've obviously never tried Befunge. ;P

I won't pay a cent for anything that can't compete favorably with this.

http://www.lucifer.com/~sean/Nano.html

http://www.itri.loyola.edu/nanobase/

http://www.dvtech.com/pages/pages/Tec NANO.htm

Nanotechnology is very intersting. Hope you enjoy writing the paper. :-)

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