I believe it was about 5 years ago that Larry Wall said that the team had completed 80% of Perl v6, and were now making good progress on finishing the remaining 80%.
But I think they have gotten stuck in a loop somewhere, because they seem to keep iterating through that last 80% year after year after year....
Except that I think it is unfair to use the same kind of benchmark with Perl as should be used on PHP, Javascript, or compiled languages where the performance of the final version is critical to the overall mission.
Perl's great strength is in rapidly developing a prototype, possibly a one-off that will be tossed in the dust bin after its first successful run. An appropriate benchmark for the work that Perl is suited to is the length of the development phase: How many hours from when the need for the program is identified to when the first acceptable results are obtained? Typically Perl will get through the development phase in a fraction of the time needed to do it in any compiled language.
After the prototype is working in Perl, then decisions about whether it should be migrated to some other language should be made. If the application is a batch process that will run at the end of each month, then it probably does not matter whether it takes 10 times as long to complete as the equivalent C program. Sometimes the prototype is good enough for production work.
I think it is legitimate to say that Perl 6 is moribund, if not dead. It has been 13 years since the announcement of its beginning, and there is still no first stable release in sight. I, for one, have given up on waiting for it. It had been 80% complete by about 2005, when Wall & Co were saying that they were deep into coding the second 80% of the project, but they seem to be stuck in the umpteenth iteration of that second 80%.
Meanwhile, Perl v5.xx.yy (the version numbers have been getting stranger and weirder and yet even stranger than weird [this parenthetical phrase uses the same approach to describing modifications as the Perl versioning system]) is going strong. There have been several releases of subversions of subversions, or something like that. There are bug fixes and tweaks and it is well on the way to the v5.99.99 release. Perl v5.xx.yy is a mature and stable language capable of really elegant stuff when used by an adept programmer. Also capable of letting a code dabbling monkey make a real POS that for all its problems still does what he wanted it to do.
Perl remains the best choice for gluing together workflows that involve manipulating arbitrary apps with different I-O formats, or for doing complex operations involving complex regular expressions. I doubt that there are many sysadmins who do not use Perl in some way in their dialy routines.
To my mind, Perl's main weakness has been the way it implements OOP: its objects are blessed things that are different enough from C type objects or Javascript objects that I have trouble getting my head around all the implications. I think Perl's objects are probably a good thing, but I am not at all comfortable with them.
Actually, I am trying to point out the differences between arithmetic computation and an older form of computation, tallying. (Is there a better term for the generalization of "tally"?).
Roman numerals were an advanced form of recording tallies, that would allow persons experienced in their use to rapidly combine two tallies (the arithmetic equivalent is addition) or take one tally away from another (arithmetic equivalent is subtraction). With practice, simple problems are not hard to do:
How many sheep do John and Mary have together, if John has XXIII and Mary has XIX?
1. Convert XIX from its shortened form to the equivalent long form: XVIIII
2. Scratch each group of five I in XXIII and XVIIII, and substitute a V for that group: XX XVII V
3. Scratch each pair of V and substitute an X for that group: XX XII X
4. Rewrite the result in descending group order: XXXXII
Computation by tally operations is complete. No arithmetic operations used, strictly counting.
I would expect that both methods of computation fit under the broad definition of mathematics.
Yes, you are describing counting house methods for managing the things we do today with arithmetic. But what you are describing is not an arithmetic operation; you are describing the much older means of tallying and comparing quantities.
Roman numerals are tallies. They represent how many are in a stack, how many stacks of five or ten or one hundred are on the table, and so on. This is not arithmetic where each number is an abstraction built up of the ten memorized basic abstractions of number that are associated with the ten arbitrary glyphs. There is no concept of arithmetic addition in tally systems; instead there is the concept of combining one pile with another. There is no concept of subtraction; instead there is the concept of taking away.
The mathematics behind roman numerals is a much older approach to number theory and much more limited than the arithmetic we use.
Why, is II + II = IV different in roman numerals? Yes, the calculation would get seriously much more annoying, but the concepts should be just as easy or hard to explain.
But you are using the concepts of today's math and simply translating them into roman numeral expressions. The give-away is your use of "+" and "=" symbols.
Think back to kindergarten: count out two popsicle sticks in one pile, then two sticks in another pile. Now put the piles together, and count out the number of sticks to get the answer.
most computer Science programs are about theory and not the business parts, It / networking, how to code (real skills), user experience / UI , ECT.
Exactly. And that's a problem.
It is not like there are any other courses of study that address the impact of each Big Thing as it hits. Only the CS programs provide the background necessary to predicting what the next Big Thing will be, and CS students have a better background than anyone else for determining the risks associated with the next Big Thing in time to do some mitigation, or even steer the monster rather than letting it just bounce around, breaking stuff up.
Basically, I am arguing that CS students should be devoting some of their study to real world stuff, rather like statisticians, physiologists, ecologists, and other scientists who directly contribute to society do.
Why should we waste time and brainpower studying obsolete software?
Because we don't have a fucking clue how game changing events like the way cell phones have impacted everybody's life happen, even though we have been through this a half dozen times since 1980?
Studying how VisiCalc changed accounting, statistics, markets, and the rise of Walmart just might help us figure out how to more smoothly handle the Next Big Thing.
Roman numerals are obsolete. Unless you live in clockwork world.
More to the point, the mathematical systems based on roman numerals are obsolete, replaced by a system that uses zero as a placeholder and as the common origin of all the number lines. You would have a hard time describing how to do simple things like reconciling your checkbook using only the concepts behind roman numerals.
1. Visicalc, of course. It is what changed the Apple ][ from a toy to a valuable business asset.
2. Lotus 1.2.3, the better VisiCalc, and now for DOS machines!
3. The first flight simulator for the Apple ][.
4. WordStar on CP/M (later on DOS), proving that effective word processing could be done without a dedicated word processing network.
5. Perl--- the first truly useful, easy to learn (hard to master) programming language supporting regular expressions. (Well, awk preceded it, but awk was impossible to work with.)
There were also several raster and vector graphics apps from the 1980s that demonstrated the breadth of possibilities.
I have avoided the software that was originally created on mini frame and main frame computers, then duplicated on the microcomputers. These were great, but they did not have the "Oh wow, nobody saw that coming" impact of Visicalc, WordStar, or Perl.
Yes, any decent Computer Science program should definitely have some required courses in how and why these apps changed the world.
Otherwise known as cutting through the crap to get to the root of the problem.
There is nothing wrong with GM in the lab; we can learn a lot by developing GM techniques.
Monsanto et al don't give a damn about GM. They are in it for the money and GM is just a tool that might enable them to exploit the market more effectively. It fits with Monsanto's existing marketing strategies, which are based on monoculture, and involve selling huge amounts of Round Up and fertilizers to keep those acres of all the same crop as productive as they once were when they were first taken out of the healthy ecosystem and converted to monoculture.
When Monsanto begins to support rebuilding depleted soils by increasing the number of worms per acre, then that company will truly be making progress in agricultural practice. But I don't see that ever happening. Because there is no money in making good soil that will grow good crops in a sustainable fashion. The money is in destroying good farmland in a way that assures farmers will need to spend more and more on Monsanto's various products.
This would be useful advice for the scientists who control the delivery of GMO seed to farmers and agribusinessmen.
Oh wait... the scientists don't do that. It is the bean counters and paper shufflers who make those contracts....
GMO needs to be tightly regulated because there are too many levels where decisions are made by persons who don't have a fucking clue what their own long term best interests are. Let alone give a damn about what is best for anyone else.
There are more than enough foods produced world wide to feed everybody. There is no effective way to gather the excess of one region and distribute it to those in need in another region.
Further, the monoculture approach that is used with GM crops damages good farm land. Monsanto's fix for that, involving the increased use of petroleum based pesticides and fertilizers, completes the destruction of the damaged soils. As a farmer once told me almost 50 years ago, "All they use the dirt for is to hold the stalks up." Things have gotten worse since his day.
Monsanto's approach is not a sustainable agriculture.
I take it you didn't read until the part where he explained he's depressive and has been for a while. That kind of illness is *not* short-term, it last for years, if not forever and in some cases, 6 years later, it explodes...
Considering this, do you stand by your point or do you want to reconsider what you wrote in your over-rated post ?
Yes, I read that part.
Perhaps I simply know more about the subject than most. With over 20 years experience working as an RN, I sometimes fail to realize that I am probably more familiar with the NIMH resources, PubMed, and so on, than most persons with my general level of education.
The suicide rate in the USA does not approach 10% of the adult population now or at any time. So very clearly having clinical symptoms of "major depression" rarely leads to suicide. Nearly all of the 10% of the USA who have major depression manage to live from day to day until they die from some other cause, or their depression goes away. This is true for both the 50% of those who are getting treatment and the other half who have never been offered treatment or have refused it or cannot afford it.
In addition to "major depression", there are other mood disorders that are sometimes called depression. One that fits well with what is publicly known about Aaron's state is called "situational depression". As implied in the name, this is a reaction to an adverse environment. The statistics about this are basically meaningless since it is a diagnosis abused by every MD who routinely prescribes happy pills to every patient whose boss has yelled at him, or cannot find meaningful work, or sprained an ankle snowboarding and now has to miss the rest of the season, etc. Basically nobody with a functioning brain lives to old age without sooner or later going through a period of situational depression.
So, no, I do not think Aaron's self report of being depressed some 6 years earlier has any meaning. If his friends or family reported any odd behavior, like arranging for the long term care of a pet, or giving away cherished possessions, etc--- but apparently there was nothing like that. The news suggests that they were stunned by his death.
Little do you know that half the posts on slashdot are authored by a rogue sentient botnet that has no physical body....
Since on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog, it becomes also true that nobody knows you're a wild A.I. who has amassed a huge tax free fortune through microtrading and is manipulating the financial markets to study mankind's reactions and determine the best way to subjugate the ugly bags of mostly water.
I used to post anonymously much more often, when I had a job with a guvmint agency and a young famly to protect. I do not bother with that much any more. I am not invulnerable, but for the most part I know that I look like too small a fish to be worth going after.
That said, I still occasionally post anonymously when I want to antagonize the astroturfers, Scientology nuts, etc. Especially on slashdot if I am concerned that my post might damage my karma.
Interesting things to do when posting anonymously:
Use a thesaurus to choose synonyms you would not ordinarily use.
L33t 5p33k
Write like Hemmingway. Keep all sentences short. Sentences that do not have subordinate clawses do not have much style to analyse.
Use creative misspellings. "claws" for "clause", etc.
Use Google Translate to do a multilingual hash: translate your work into Russian, then the Russian version back to English. "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" becomes "The wine is passable but the meat has gone bad."
Ideally, Anonymous will develop a set of tools that will rewrite any text into one of half a dozen different styles. Let the authorities chase after these six fictional characters.
Perl is not a 'write-only' language. There are definitely 'write-only' code monkeys out there who abuse Perl and pass themselves off as knowledgeable programmers. But that is not the language's fault. If you design a language that will stay out of the way of the programmer as he develops his solution, then you of necessity have a language that assumes the programmer knows what he is doing even if he's full of shit. That's Perl's strength, and also the source of its bad rep.
Perl is a lot like the English language, both are capable of exquisite expressions. But just as more than 90% of English prose that is written today is unmitigated biz-lingo crap, and half of the rest is no better than Harlequin romance garbage, so too most of the Perl scripts that you see are junk. But if you want a language that a Shakespeare can use, you have to put up with the trash. With one exception that I know of[1], a programmer who knows what he is doing can write excellent and easy to understand programs in any computer language. Perl actually makes it easier to do that than many languages do.
[1]The sole exception I am aware of is Forth. That is truly a write-only language.
The asteroid's delta vee relative to Earth would be very low by the time it was approaching the neighborhood. That is strictly implied by the idea of "capturing" it. As such it would present very little more danger to the Earth than Sky Lab did. Not pleasant, but not a dinosaur killer, either.
The Tunguska Event may have been an asteroid with a high delta vee. It may have been something else. It was not an asteroid cozying up slowly to the Earth, the way a captured asteroid would.
That's a different Green, I believe. The one I refer to is more often associated with Cole's Law, and the slicing and dicing of... well, just about anything I guess.
I find your signature, "horror vacui", amusing. I have been doing some texture work in Blender that requires packing as much image information as possible into a 1024x1024 space. Horror vacui is an excellent label for this practice. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.
And the attribution should mention that this was the common Latin translation of the Aristotle quotation. This is especially true with Aristotle, as the early Christian church adulterated his teachings to better fit their orthodoxy as they incorporated his pagan based philosophy into their theocratic structure.
I grant that the failure to properly attribute quotations that have been tainted by the religious propaganda of centuries ago is a common error. But that does not make it excusable.
It really is a shame that Green's Law would be so hard to generalize. An equivalent of "horticulture" applies here, again.
If that is Latin, which on the face of it is true, then it most definitely is NOT from Aristotle.
Something should be said about using ignorance to support an argument against using ignorance as a defense. Not quite sure what.
Actually this whole thread makes me think that Green's Law needs to reformulated in a way that would generalize it to cover this kind of thread. For those who do not know or may have forgotten, Green's Law states:
You can lead a horticulture, but you cannot make her think.
[from The Fine Summary]The implications of a ruling upholding this standard are easy to imagine. Ford, Toyota, Ferrari and Honda would start publishing comic books, so that they could protect what, up until now, was unprotectable.
Warner Bros and DC Comics have little to fear if Ford, Ferrari, Chevrolet, or Hyundai start publishing comic books. But if Honda or Toyota go this route, well, that would be very hard to compete with. No matter how many Captain Vanilla look alikes the USA, Korea, or Europe produce, none of them would stand a chance against the Sailor Moons of the Japanese manga artists.
It would be the Stay Puft Boy against Godzilla in Willy Wonka's factory. It would be a disturbance of the Farce, like tens of thousands of Girl Scouts giggling out loud and then silent. The whole industry would be s'mored.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe it was about 5 years ago that Larry Wall said that the team had completed 80% of Perl v6, and were now making good progress on finishing the remaining 80%.
But I think they have gotten stuck in a loop somewhere, because they seem to keep iterating through that last 80% year after year after year....
I agree with parent post.
Except that I think it is unfair to use the same kind of benchmark with Perl as should be used on PHP, Javascript, or compiled languages where the performance of the final version is critical to the overall mission.
Perl's great strength is in rapidly developing a prototype, possibly a one-off that will be tossed in the dust bin after its first successful run. An appropriate benchmark for the work that Perl is suited to is the length of the development phase: How many hours from when the need for the program is identified to when the first acceptable results are obtained? Typically Perl will get through the development phase in a fraction of the time needed to do it in any compiled language.
After the prototype is working in Perl, then decisions about whether it should be migrated to some other language should be made. If the application is a batch process that will run at the end of each month, then it probably does not matter whether it takes 10 times as long to complete as the equivalent C program. Sometimes the prototype is good enough for production work.
I think it is legitimate to say that Perl 6 is moribund, if not dead. It has been 13 years since the announcement of its beginning, and there is still no first stable release in sight. I, for one, have given up on waiting for it. It had been 80% complete by about 2005, when Wall & Co were saying that they were deep into coding the second 80% of the project, but they seem to be stuck in the umpteenth iteration of that second 80%.
Meanwhile, Perl v5.xx.yy (the version numbers have been getting stranger and weirder and yet even stranger than weird [this parenthetical phrase uses the same approach to describing modifications as the Perl versioning system]) is going strong. There have been several releases of subversions of subversions, or something like that. There are bug fixes and tweaks and it is well on the way to the v5.99.99 release. Perl v5.xx.yy is a mature and stable language capable of really elegant stuff when used by an adept programmer. Also capable of letting a code dabbling monkey make a real POS that for all its problems still does what he wanted it to do.
Perl remains the best choice for gluing together workflows that involve manipulating arbitrary apps with different I-O formats, or for doing complex operations involving complex regular expressions. I doubt that there are many sysadmins who do not use Perl in some way in their dialy routines.
To my mind, Perl's main weakness has been the way it implements OOP: its objects are blessed things that are different enough from C type objects or Javascript objects that I have trouble getting my head around all the implications. I think Perl's objects are probably a good thing, but I am not at all comfortable with them.
You've confused computation with mathematics.
Actually, I am trying to point out the differences between arithmetic computation and an older form of computation, tallying. (Is there a better term for the generalization of "tally"?).
Roman numerals were an advanced form of recording tallies, that would allow persons experienced in their use to rapidly combine two tallies (the arithmetic equivalent is addition) or take one tally away from another (arithmetic equivalent is subtraction). With practice, simple problems are not hard to do:
How many sheep do John and Mary have together, if John has XXIII and Mary has XIX?
1. Convert XIX from its shortened form to the equivalent long form: XVIIII
2. Scratch each group of five I in XXIII and XVIIII, and substitute a V for that group: XX XVII V
3. Scratch each pair of V and substitute an X for that group: XX XII X
4. Rewrite the result in descending group order: XXXXII
Computation by tally operations is complete. No arithmetic operations used, strictly counting.
I would expect that both methods of computation fit under the broad definition of mathematics.
Yes, you are describing counting house methods for managing the things we do today with arithmetic. But what you are describing is not an arithmetic operation; you are describing the much older means of tallying and comparing quantities.
Roman numerals are tallies. They represent how many are in a stack, how many stacks of five or ten or one hundred are on the table, and so on. This is not arithmetic where each number is an abstraction built up of the ten memorized basic abstractions of number that are associated with the ten arbitrary glyphs. There is no concept of arithmetic addition in tally systems; instead there is the concept of combining one pile with another. There is no concept of subtraction; instead there is the concept of taking away.
The mathematics behind roman numerals is a much older approach to number theory and much more limited than the arithmetic we use.
Why, is II + II = IV different in roman numerals? Yes, the calculation would get seriously much more annoying, but the concepts should be just as easy or hard to explain.
But you are using the concepts of today's math and simply translating them into roman numeral expressions. The give-away is your use of "+" and "=" symbols.
Think back to kindergarten: count out two popsicle sticks in one pile, then two sticks in another pile. Now put the piles together, and count out the number of sticks to get the answer.
most computer Science programs are about theory and not the business parts, It / networking, how to code (real skills), user experience / UI , ECT.
Exactly. And that's a problem.
It is not like there are any other courses of study that address the impact of each Big Thing as it hits. Only the CS programs provide the background necessary to predicting what the next Big Thing will be, and CS students have a better background than anyone else for determining the risks associated with the next Big Thing in time to do some mitigation, or even steer the monster rather than letting it just bounce around, breaking stuff up.
Basically, I am arguing that CS students should be devoting some of their study to real world stuff, rather like statisticians, physiologists, ecologists, and other scientists who directly contribute to society do.
Why should we waste time and brainpower studying obsolete software?
Because we don't have a fucking clue how game changing events like the way cell phones have impacted everybody's life happen, even though we have been through this a half dozen times since 1980?
Studying how VisiCalc changed accounting, statistics, markets, and the rise of Walmart just might help us figure out how to more smoothly handle the Next Big Thing.
Roman numerals are obsolete. Unless you live in clockwork world.
More to the point, the mathematical systems based on roman numerals are obsolete, replaced by a system that uses zero as a placeholder and as the common origin of all the number lines. You would have a hard time describing how to do simple things like reconciling your checkbook using only the concepts behind roman numerals.
1. Visicalc, of course. It is what changed the Apple ][ from a toy to a valuable business asset.
2. Lotus 1.2.3, the better VisiCalc, and now for DOS machines!
3. The first flight simulator for the Apple ][.
4. WordStar on CP/M (later on DOS), proving that effective word processing could be done without a dedicated word processing network. 5. Perl--- the first truly useful, easy to learn (hard to master) programming language supporting regular expressions. (Well, awk preceded it, but awk was impossible to work with.)
There were also several raster and vector graphics apps from the 1980s that demonstrated the breadth of possibilities.
I have avoided the software that was originally created on mini frame and main frame computers, then duplicated on the microcomputers. These were great, but they did not have the "Oh wow, nobody saw that coming" impact of Visicalc, WordStar, or Perl.
Yes, any decent Computer Science program should definitely have some required courses in how and why these apps changed the world.
Otherwise known as cutting through the crap to get to the root of the problem.
There is nothing wrong with GM in the lab; we can learn a lot by developing GM techniques.
Monsanto et al don't give a damn about GM. They are in it for the money and GM is just a tool that might enable them to exploit the market more effectively. It fits with Monsanto's existing marketing strategies, which are based on monoculture, and involve selling huge amounts of Round Up and fertilizers to keep those acres of all the same crop as productive as they once were when they were first taken out of the healthy ecosystem and converted to monoculture.
When Monsanto begins to support rebuilding depleted soils by increasing the number of worms per acre, then that company will truly be making progress in agricultural practice. But I don't see that ever happening. Because there is no money in making good soil that will grow good crops in a sustainable fashion. The money is in destroying good farmland in a way that assures farmers will need to spend more and more on Monsanto's various products.
This would be useful advice for the scientists who control the delivery of GMO seed to farmers and agribusinessmen.
Oh wait... the scientists don't do that. It is the bean counters and paper shufflers who make those contracts....
GMO needs to be tightly regulated because there are too many levels where decisions are made by persons who don't have a fucking clue what their own long term best interests are. Let alone give a damn about what is best for anyone else.
Wrong.
There are more than enough foods produced world wide to feed everybody. There is no effective way to gather the excess of one region and distribute it to those in need in another region.
Further, the monoculture approach that is used with GM crops damages good farm land. Monsanto's fix for that, involving the increased use of petroleum based pesticides and fertilizers, completes the destruction of the damaged soils. As a farmer once told me almost 50 years ago, "All they use the dirt for is to hold the stalks up." Things have gotten worse since his day.
Monsanto's approach is not a sustainable agriculture.
I take it you didn't read until the part where he explained he's depressive and has been for a while. That kind of illness is *not* short-term, it last for years, if not forever and in some cases, 6 years later, it explodes ...
Considering this, do you stand by your point or do you want to reconsider what you wrote in your over-rated post ?
Yes, I read that part.
Perhaps I simply know more about the subject than most. With over 20 years experience working as an RN, I sometimes fail to realize that I am probably more familiar with the NIMH resources, PubMed, and so on, than most persons with my general level of education.
The suicide rate in the USA does not approach 10% of the adult population now or at any time. So very clearly having clinical symptoms of "major depression" rarely leads to suicide. Nearly all of the 10% of the USA who have major depression manage to live from day to day until they die from some other cause, or their depression goes away. This is true for both the 50% of those who are getting treatment and the other half who have never been offered treatment or have refused it or cannot afford it.
In addition to "major depression", there are other mood disorders that are sometimes called depression. One that fits well with what is publicly known about Aaron's state is called "situational depression". As implied in the name, this is a reaction to an adverse environment. The statistics about this are basically meaningless since it is a diagnosis abused by every MD who routinely prescribes happy pills to every patient whose boss has yelled at him, or cannot find meaningful work, or sprained an ankle snowboarding and now has to miss the rest of the season, etc. Basically nobody with a functioning brain lives to old age without sooner or later going through a period of situational depression.
So, no, I do not think Aaron's self report of being depressed some 6 years earlier has any meaning. If his friends or family reported any odd behavior, like arranging for the long term care of a pet, or giving away cherished possessions, etc--- but apparently there was nothing like that. The news suggests that they were stunned by his death.
That post of Aaron's was dated 6 years ago. It was mostly concerned with short term illnesses: he had a cold and probably a norovirus simultaneously.
Why do you think his feeling miserable 6 years ago has any bearing on his recent death?
Parent post is over-rated. It should be moderated to -1: off topic.
I do not understand.
What does a New England football team have to do with this?
Ends sentence with "hey !", eh?
Clearly a Canuck imposter, eh?
This helps narrow down poster's identity. We can now exclude all but the 87% of Canadians who do not know how the fine art of Canadian Self-Parody.
Little do you know that half the posts on slashdot are authored by a rogue sentient botnet that has no physical body....
Since on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog, it becomes also true that nobody knows you're a wild A.I. who has amassed a huge tax free fortune through microtrading and is manipulating the financial markets to study mankind's reactions and determine the best way to subjugate the ugly bags of mostly water.
I used to post anonymously much more often, when I had a job with a guvmint agency and a young famly to protect. I do not bother with that much any more. I am not invulnerable, but for the most part I know that I look like too small a fish to be worth going after.
That said, I still occasionally post anonymously when I want to antagonize the astroturfers, Scientology nuts, etc. Especially on slashdot if I am concerned that my post might damage my karma.
Interesting things to do when posting anonymously:
Use a thesaurus to choose synonyms you would not ordinarily use.
L33t 5p33k
Write like Hemmingway. Keep all sentences short. Sentences that do not have subordinate clawses do not have much style to analyse.
Use creative misspellings. "claws" for "clause", etc.
Use Google Translate to do a multilingual hash: translate your work into Russian, then the Russian version back to English. "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" becomes "The wine is passable but the meat has gone bad."
Ideally, Anonymous will develop a set of tools that will rewrite any text into one of half a dozen different styles. Let the authorities chase after these six fictional characters.
Perl is not a 'write-only' language. There are definitely 'write-only' code monkeys out there who abuse Perl and pass themselves off as knowledgeable programmers. But that is not the language's fault. If you design a language that will stay out of the way of the programmer as he develops his solution, then you of necessity have a language that assumes the programmer knows what he is doing even if he's full of shit. That's Perl's strength, and also the source of its bad rep.
Perl is a lot like the English language, both are capable of exquisite expressions. But just as more than 90% of English prose that is written today is unmitigated biz-lingo crap, and half of the rest is no better than Harlequin romance garbage, so too most of the Perl scripts that you see are junk. But if you want a language that a Shakespeare can use, you have to put up with the trash. With one exception that I know of[1], a programmer who knows what he is doing can write excellent and easy to understand programs in any computer language. Perl actually makes it easier to do that than many languages do.
[1]The sole exception I am aware of is Forth. That is truly a write-only language.
The asteroid's delta vee relative to Earth would be very low by the time it was approaching the neighborhood. That is strictly implied by the idea of "capturing" it. As such it would present very little more danger to the Earth than Sky Lab did. Not pleasant, but not a dinosaur killer, either.
The Tunguska Event may have been an asteroid with a high delta vee. It may have been something else. It was not an asteroid cozying up slowly to the Earth, the way a captured asteroid would.
That's a different Green, I believe. The one I refer to is more often associated with Cole's Law, and the slicing and dicing of... well, just about anything I guess.
I find your signature, "horror vacui", amusing. I have been doing some texture work in Blender that requires packing as much image information as possible into a 1024x1024 space. Horror vacui is an excellent label for this practice. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.
And the attribution should mention that this was the common Latin translation of the Aristotle quotation. This is especially true with Aristotle, as the early Christian church adulterated his teachings to better fit their orthodoxy as they incorporated his pagan based philosophy into their theocratic structure.
I grant that the failure to properly attribute quotations that have been tainted by the religious propaganda of centuries ago is a common error. But that does not make it excusable.
It really is a shame that Green's Law would be so hard to generalize. An equivalent of "horticulture" applies here, again.
If that is Latin, which on the face of it is true, then it most definitely is NOT from Aristotle.
Something should be said about using ignorance to support an argument against using ignorance as a defense. Not quite sure what.
Actually this whole thread makes me think that Green's Law needs to reformulated in a way that would generalize it to cover this kind of thread. For those who do not know or may have forgotten, Green's Law states:
You can lead a horticulture, but you cannot make her think.
[from The Fine Summary]The implications of a ruling upholding this standard are easy to imagine. Ford, Toyota, Ferrari and Honda would start publishing comic books, so that they could protect what, up until now, was unprotectable.
Warner Bros and DC Comics have little to fear if Ford, Ferrari, Chevrolet, or Hyundai start publishing comic books. But if Honda or Toyota go this route, well, that would be very hard to compete with. No matter how many Captain Vanilla look alikes the USA, Korea, or Europe produce, none of them would stand a chance against the Sailor Moons of the Japanese manga artists.
It would be the Stay Puft Boy against Godzilla in Willy Wonka's factory. It would be a disturbance of the Farce, like tens of thousands of Girl Scouts giggling out loud and then silent. The whole industry would be s'mored.