Than why isn't India a superpower? Why does India have to squabble with Pakistan? If the US had the same problems with Canada as India does with pakistan, we would just crush them.
Imagine Canada with the capablity to turn every major city within a hundred miles of the border into radioactive dust. There's no doubt that, in a serious war between India and Pakistan, Pakistan would lose -- but the cost would be horrendous; it might very well be the bloodiest war in history.
To use an analogy with more recent historical precedent: why did we go to war with Iraq and not with North Korea? Because North Korea actually has WMD's...
Watch out what you ask for. If you get those religious/moral types too far out of science you end up with Mengele reruns throwing jews into freezing water just to measure how quickly they die. It's good science but morally impermissible.
GMAFB. Naziism was a religious ideology which directly incorporated the Christianity of the society in which it was formed ("Gott mit uns") and which furthermore inherited the idea that it was okay to kill Jews (defined, of course, by their religion) from centuries of Christian anti-Semitism. I am sick to death of people citing Mengele as a favorite example of "why science needs religion" when a) Mengele was himself a religious man, and b) religion has never shown any special aptitude for morality, in science or anywhere else.
Can you give give me one single solid example of a time when religious restraint on scientific research has done more good than harm? (I assure you, history is full of examples of the reverse.) A single one? Apparently when religion and morality are invoked, we're all supposed to stroke our chins and nod wisely and say, "Hmmm, well, of course, science requires religious morality to control its excesses." It's bullshit. If I have to choose between superstition and ignorance and morality-by-authority on the one hand, and a longer, happier, healthier life for myself and the people I love on the other, I know which one to pick.
Well, on the bright side (such as it is) this may be the kick in the ass AOL needs to really go with a Gecko-based default browser instead of IE. Granted, AOL/TW screwed up with the settlement (they should have insisted on a couple billion in cash and ignored the whole browser-licensing issue) but AOL really isn't any worse off than it was before. And AOL/TW as a company may be in some degree of trouble, but AOL itself is still by far the biggest and most powerful ISP in the world. If they move to Gecko, it may be a problem for them, but it will be unreservedly a Good Thing for the Net as a whole.
Re:A serious question - i'm not trolling, honest!
on
Twin Prime Proof Erroneous
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· Score: 4, Informative
Well, pretty much all current cryptography techniques depend on primes. Whether knowing anything about the occurrence of twin primes has any bearing on crypto, I have no idea.
The longer answer to your question is: who the hell knows? One of the fascinating things about math is how results that seem utterly abstract when they're [invented | discovered] (not going to get into that argument right now) turn out to have profound applications years or decades or even centuries down the road. Linear algebra was an interesting but rather small and not terribly important field of study before computers came along...
The twin prime problem may remain a curiosity of number theory forever, or it may turn out to be fundamental to some new application that's just down the road; there's no way to know. But given the history of math's progress from pure theory to the basis of technology we use every day, I'm betting on the latter.
The only difference between "pacifists" and "peace-loving people", and those who are "warmongering" and "hawkish", is that the latter are ready to protect themselves and their society from those who would attack it. The former come in two categories - those who simply don't get the real world and think everyone else is 100% peaceful and harmless as a daisy, and those who aren't that naive, but are cynical enough to let the "hawkish" to protect them and their family while acting all nice and dovish and "better than the warmongers".
Fuck you. I'm a pacifist. I believe that war is the greatest calamity that can befall a nation. I believe that violence is inherently a bad thing, and that both individuals and groups (including nations) should try to exahust all reasonable alternatives before resorting to it. I believe that the only time violence is ever justified is in self-defense or in response to a clear and imminent threat of attack.
I believe this because I served as a medic in Desert Storm, and saw the effects of violence first-hand. Oh yeah... before that, I was stationed in Europe, as part of the fifty-year vigilant defense against the USSR. You know, we were the guys who won the Cold War. Watching the Berlin Wall come down was quite possibly the greatest moment of my life, because I knew I was part of it.
I'm going to make some guesses about you. Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong:
You have never served in the military.
You voted for the chickenhawk deserter, George W. Bush.
While I was taking care of wounded on the battlefield, you were sitting in the TV room at the frat house drinking lite beer and watching the fireworks show on CNN.
People always think that we *NEED* more scientists. We don't! There are simply not enough jobs to go around for all the scientists now, that's why so many work in a lab for X number of years, see that there is no opportunity for advancement within the organization (to earn more $$$), and go on into business and law. Just because you're a pencil-necked geek doesn't mean you don't want the *American Dream* - a nice house, a playboy babe for a wife, and two above average children living in rural/suburbia America, driving a Saab, BMW, or C-Class Mercedes Benz. The problem with science at most universities is that they are not rigorous enough to produce the *Best* scientists. Often, but not always, the *Best* scientists come from the Ivy Leagues and second tier schools, not your average [Insert City Here] State University or University of [Insert City Here] school. Science in the laboratory is now highly automated; we don't need chemists any more, we need technicians that make $12 to $14/hour. The hard and cool stuff has been solved, now we have stream-lined laboratories that push out products and analyses. Many of these jobs are leaving the US economy and relocating over seas. I wish the situation were different, but this is the ugly truth about science in this day and age.
That's an artificial problem. It's not that there isn't lots of real science to be done by real scientists ("the hard and cool stuff has been solve" -- GMAFB; there's more hard and cool stuff waiting in the wings than at any other point in human history) but that the money isn't there for the projects needed to hire the people to do it. And why is that? Well, maybe because the three main sources of research funding -- the government, corporations, and universities -- are spending their money elsewhere. The government is too concerned kickbacks, pork, and dirty little (but enormously expensive) wars. The corporate world is more interested in multi-million-dollar executive compensation packages than in hiring people to, you know, invent useful stuff. Universities spend obscene amounts of money on athletic programs and business schools while departments involved in the study of anything that matters are starved for funds.
This is a matter of society's priorities. Give us a big enough external stimulus -- which I suspect a Chinese moon base would be -- and you'll see those priorities change damn fast. Right now people just can't be bothered.
BTW, the whole purpose of laboratory automation is to free scientists from having to spend endless hours at the lab bench so they can actually think about what they're doing. Yes, you still need technicians to run the machines -- but you can get many more hours of real science per scientist if you have a couple of technicians running machines on their own, instead of an army of techs doing complex experiments by hand with constant supervision from the scientists. That's the way it's supposed to work; that it does not is a result of the distortion of priorities I mentioned above.
[blink] Well, okay; it may be that there's something about DuBois' writing style that just doesn't work for you. I didn't think of anything in the book as "filler" -- instead I found lots of step-by-step instruction on, as you say, how to use MySQL. Everything from setting up the server to tips on query construction (which is very useful; many of the limitations people complain about in MySQL disappear if you pay close attention to how your queries are built) is in there, and no, it's not stuff you'll find in the online references. The API's section is also very useful, although it would be nice if he covered Python in addition to C, Perl, and PHP.
FWIW, MySQL and Perl for the Web is a somewhat slimmer and more compact book; it assumes you already know a fair amount about both MySQL and Perl, and doesn't take quite the "from the ground up" approach of MySQL.
"Inconsistent data" in the context people isn't a good thing. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that you have two tables, "People" and "Employees". People has two fields named "FirstName" and "LastName". Employees has a field named "Name". Let's suppose there's a record for "Mary Smith" in Employees -- but it turns out Mary got married last year, so her record in People now has FirstName = "Mary" and LastName = "Jones"; apparently HR updated her name in People but forgot to do so in Employees. That's inconsistent data.
MySQL lacks some of the features of other RDBMS's that are supposed to catch this sort of thing. But it can be prevented with careful table design (hint: indexing on text rather than integer fields is a bad idea, as is needless replication of data, especially text data, across tables) which is the sort of thing one learns by experience.
MySQL and Perl for the Web, Paul DuBois, published by New Riders. DuBois also wrote MySQL, also published by New Riders, which IMO is the best MySQL reference book around. Good stuff.
As a 34-year-old computational biology grad student, I've put a lot of thought into this.
Definitely, computational biology (of which genomics is a subset) is a field which requires experience in a number of other fields, and that takes time. I spent eight years in the Air Force as a medic; and medicine is applied biology, so when I started taking bio classes, I had a much better feel for the way living things work than most of my classmates.
And I also did a lot broader work as an undergrad than most -- a math major combined with bio and CS minors. Most of my fellow students in the graduate comp. bio. program came from one side of things (CS/math or bio/chem) with little exposure to the other, and it shows. These are very smart, hard-working people, but it's a real struggle for them to pick up the concepts from whichever field they haven't previously been exposed to.
Math is hard. Biology is hard. Computer science is hard. All of these fields take significant time to learn on their own. Learning enough of each of them to combine them in a meaningful way takes even more time. There's no way around this.
Also, math may be a young man's game, but biology definitely isn't. Watson & Crick were the exception, not the rule; biology is a field that rewards patience and experience more than raw inspiration. Well, that's my hope, anyway.;)
Re:Where's it coming from?
on
Summer on Neptune
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· Score: 2, Informative
From the article:
"These extreme conditions on the surface of the gas giant are believed to be largely driven by heat from Neptune's inner core of molten rock, liquid ammonia and methane."
There ya go.;)
IIRC, Jupiter radiates more total EM energy than it gets from the Sun, but most of that is in radio and IR, not visible light. Dunno about the other gas giants. Neptune, surely. Saturn and Uranus, maybe not; they're enough closer to the Sun than Neptune, and enough smaller than Jupiter, that they might break even. Just guessing, of course. It's been a long time since I read up on this stuff.
does this surprise anyone? Darwin's natural selection at work maybe?
Well, it may come as a surprise to the creationists. One of their standard canards is that "mutations are invariably harmful, so how could complex organisms evolve through a series of mutations?" Well, here ya go -- a simple and obviously useful mutation with far-reaching consequences.
Am I the only one who finds the term "social software" terribly ironic, considering the social skills of the people who write software?:-)
Seriously? Social skills are defined by what society you're part of. The well-dressed, smooth-talking types who are usually what we think of as "socially skilled" are just as out of place among a bunch of geeks as geeks are in other settings. "Social software," it seems to me, can be seen as a -- largely successful -- attempt by geeks to foster societies that play to their own strengths. If the rise of social software means that we have larger chunks of society in which the skills valued by geeks (technical competence, weird humor) actually qualify as social skills, that's a good thing.
All that being said, I do very often get annoyed at my fellow techies who seem to insist on living down to the worst stereotypes of our group. I want to grab them and shake them and say, "It's okay to get some exercise, take a shower, and put on clean clothes! You'll still be smart!" Fortunately, it seems to me that Those People are in the minority.
Re:A good nurse can tell by the smell
on
Sniffing Out Cancer
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Yes, quite a few serious illnesses produce distinctive odors. The problem is, of course, that this is pretty useless as a diagnostic tool (with the human sense of smell) because by the time you can smell it, the patient's doomed. Something with the sensitivity to detect the odors in time to be diagnostically useful would be pretty cool, and it sounds like the researchers are on track.
Why would you want to pay to sit in low-earth orbit for (any) period of time?
Because it's space, man.
Look, of course the eventual goal is to do more practical things with the technology -- high-speed suborbital flights, orbital manufacturing, Lunar hotels, etc. But it's a big mistake to try to develop that kind of thing without taking intermediate steps.
If we're going to have an inter-sol-system trucking company we've gotta have pioneers. ^_^
Agreed. But before the pioneers come the trailblazers. Right now, we're still at the Lewis & Clark stage; it will be a while before we can have a Space Homestead Act.
IIRC, "j'accuse" first gained its cultural resonance during the Reign of Terror -- the idea was that all someone had to do was point a finger at a neighbor he didn't like, say "j'accuse," and the poor sucker was off to the guillotine. That's certainly the context I had in mind, anyway.
My guess is that Zola was using it ironically, but I don't know for sure.
RSFH (Read Some Fucking History). Only in sensitive areas, yes. First that's the perimeter of the power plant. Then the road leading to the power plant is declared sensitive. Then the roads leading to the road to the power plant... etc. And pretty soon everything within a 100-mile radius of any government or major industrial facility -- which means just about everywhere -- is being watched 24/7, and "suspicious" activity becomes a matter of "j'accuse." The only reason the Committee for Public Safety or the Okhrana or the Cheka/NKVD/KGB or the SS never did something like this was because they didn't have the technology.
Is that the fault of the scientists, or the governments that hired them? I'm talking about protecting science from government, not science used by government.
Say you have a scientist that kills people "in the name of science." Perhaps he's murdered thousands or millions, doing various things like cutting the head open and removing a chunk of brain, all while the test subject is living and conscious. Sorry, but no. We've had Hitler already, and the world decided what to do with him. We don't need an organization going around and defending people that ignore humanity "in the name of knowledge."
Um, not really the kind of thing I'm talking about. I'm talking more about the fact that a frighteningly large number of countries (the US seems to be, er, leading the way, but it's not the only one) have banned or are talking about banning research with enormous potential benefits based on motives of hysteria and oppression. The three types I mentioned, stem cells, cloning, and GM food, are probably the best-known, but there are others, especially here in the US as "homeland security" becomes the excuse for the government to put anything it wants under lock and key.
The idea of the amoral scientist driven by a quest for knowledge at the expense of humanity is a straw man. The vast majority of scientists are also humanists, in the strictest sense of the word: that is, they care deeply about other human beings and feel that their work will be of benefit to them. This is particularly true in the applied biosciences, where the overriding goal is to reduce or eliminate disease and starvation. The people doing this work need to be protected from those who would stop them because of religion, ignorance, or the desire for power.
Actually, a "BFF" (Biotech Frontier Foundation) would be a good organization to have around. They could contribute to the freedom of the biological research world in a number of ways:
Campaigning against stupid patents that lock up what should be public knowledge in the hands of one company or institution (and yes I know that isn't what this patent application is, but the point is they shouldn't have to file a "defensive patent" at all.)
Education about hot-button issues like stem cell research, cloning, GM food, etc. so people can make rational decisions based on knowledge instead of hysteria.
Legal defense for scientists who feel that dissemination of knowledge for the good of mankind is more important than laws based on the abovementioned hysteria or the "homeland security" boogeyman.
In actual point of fact, the State Department seems mainly concerned with police funding (which has nothing to do with civil liberties), low penalties for marijuana possession (also not a civil liberty) and privacy laws.
Well, police funding has to do with civil liberties in the sense that, after a certain point, more cops = less liberty. Up until that point, it's more cops = less crime, which of course is a good thing; but I suspect the US passed that point a long time ago. We now have a gigantic law enforcement apparatus in the US which is more about enforcing the government's will on the citizens than it is about catching murderers and thieves.
Which leads to the second point: possessing marijuana may not be a civil liberty, except in the general "ain't nobody's business if I do" sense that there is something profoundly fucked up about the government telling you that it's okay to get drunk but not to get stoned... but as part of the War on Drugs, which up until the War on Terror was the greatest assault on American freedoms in history, it is most definitely a civil liberties issue. The average drug dealer does more jail time than the average murderer. There is something seriously wrong here.
There's nothing wrong with Java, other than the fact that it's not as fast as C++. People just like to whine about it because they're worried they might have to learn something new one day.
No, that's not the only reason people whine about it. I learned C++ and Java at almost the same time (C++ about a year earlier) and I, like a lot of other programmers, can honestly say that IMO C++ is just a better language than Java. It's more compact, easier and more pleasant to write, etc.
That being said, I'm not a Java-hater. I don't think it's an awful language. My main complaint is how verbose it is. Now, compactness is not always a measure of a good programming language (consider APL, or some of the more obscure Perl regular expressions) but it's a good place to start. It irritates me to have to write ten lines of code when one line in some other language would do; hell, it even irritates me when a line of code in one language is equivalent to a line of code in the other, but the first takes five times as much typing.
But what Java did do -- and this is valuable -- was bring the idea of object-oriented, platform-independent, and VM-based languages into the mainstream. They were around before Java, of course, but none of them had anywhere near its impact. This is unreservedly a Good Thing, and Sun should be thanked for having done it, whatever happens in the future.
Actually, I agree with you. But the post I was replying too talked about shooting someone who was breaking into your house as a metaphor for what the RIAA wants to do, so I kind of took the metaphor and ran with it...
Well, what I meant was that even for non-mathematical papers, the 5-10 page stuff you describe, I've come to love TeX's powers of layout and -- especially -- organization. Citations, cross-references, chapters and sections and subsections, all that stuff. As long as you're working in a good text editor (I use BBEdit) then it's just like working in an old-school word processor (WordStar or WordPerfect, say) only with much more control over the document. Now, granted, a good TeX-based werp, something that gives you some of the goodies but also gives you by-hand control of the formatting on the level of WordPerfect's "reveal codes" feature, might not be a bad thing. I gave LyX a try and wasn't too impressed, but that might turn out to be useful one of these days.
I also write pretty huge chunks of HTML by hand, so take this FWIW.;)
Slashdot Mirror
To use an analogy with more recent historical precedent: why did we go to war with Iraq and not with North Korea? Because North Korea actually has WMD's
Can you give give me one single solid example of a time when religious restraint on scientific research has done more good than harm? (I assure you, history is full of examples of the reverse.) A single one? Apparently when religion and morality are invoked, we're all supposed to stroke our chins and nod wisely and say, "Hmmm, well, of course, science requires religious morality to control its excesses." It's bullshit. If I have to choose between superstition and ignorance and morality-by-authority on the one hand, and a longer, happier, healthier life for myself and the people I love on the other, I know which one to pick.
Well, on the bright side (such as it is) this may be the kick in the ass AOL needs to really go with a Gecko-based default browser instead of IE. Granted, AOL/TW screwed up with the settlement (they should have insisted on a couple billion in cash and ignored the whole browser-licensing issue) but AOL really isn't any worse off than it was before. And AOL/TW as a company may be in some degree of trouble, but AOL itself is still by far the biggest and most powerful ISP in the world. If they move to Gecko, it may be a problem for them, but it will be unreservedly a Good Thing for the Net as a whole.
Well, pretty much all current cryptography techniques depend on primes. Whether knowing anything about the occurrence of twin primes has any bearing on crypto, I have no idea.
...
The longer answer to your question is: who the hell knows? One of the fascinating things about math is how results that seem utterly abstract when they're [invented | discovered] (not going to get into that argument right now) turn out to have profound applications years or decades or even centuries down the road. Linear algebra was an interesting but rather small and not terribly important field of study before computers came along
The twin prime problem may remain a curiosity of number theory forever, or it may turn out to be fundamental to some new application that's just down the road; there's no way to know. But given the history of math's progress from pure theory to the basis of technology we use every day, I'm betting on the latter.
"In order to protect the rights of ethnic Linux users, we must attack SCO in self-defense."
;)
There ya go.
I believe this because I served as a medic in Desert Storm, and saw the effects of violence first-hand. Oh yeah
I'm going to make some guesses about you. Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong:
- You have never served in the military.
- You voted for the chickenhawk deserter, George W. Bush.
- While I was taking care of wounded on the battlefield, you were sitting in the TV room at the frat house drinking lite beer and watching the fireworks show on CNN.
What've you got, tough guy?This is a matter of society's priorities. Give us a big enough external stimulus -- which I suspect a Chinese moon base would be -- and you'll see those priorities change damn fast. Right now people just can't be bothered.
BTW, the whole purpose of laboratory automation is to free scientists from having to spend endless hours at the lab bench so they can actually think about what they're doing. Yes, you still need technicians to run the machines -- but you can get many more hours of real science per scientist if you have a couple of technicians running machines on their own, instead of an army of techs doing complex experiments by hand with constant supervision from the scientists. That's the way it's supposed to work; that it does not is a result of the distortion of priorities I mentioned above.
[blink] Well, okay; it may be that there's something about DuBois' writing style that just doesn't work for you. I didn't think of anything in the book as "filler" -- instead I found lots of step-by-step instruction on, as you say, how to use MySQL. Everything from setting up the server to tips on query construction (which is very useful; many of the limitations people complain about in MySQL disappear if you pay close attention to how your queries are built) is in there, and no, it's not stuff you'll find in the online references. The API's section is also very useful, although it would be nice if he covered Python in addition to C, Perl, and PHP.
FWIW, MySQL and Perl for the Web is a somewhat slimmer and more compact book; it assumes you already know a fair amount about both MySQL and Perl, and doesn't take quite the "from the ground up" approach of MySQL.
"Inconsistent data" in the context people isn't a good thing. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that you have two tables, "People" and "Employees". People has two fields named "FirstName" and "LastName". Employees has a field named "Name". Let's suppose there's a record for "Mary Smith" in Employees -- but it turns out Mary got married last year, so her record in People now has FirstName = "Mary" and LastName = "Jones"; apparently HR updated her name in People but forgot to do so in Employees. That's inconsistent data.
MySQL lacks some of the features of other RDBMS's that are supposed to catch this sort of thing. But it can be prevented with careful table design (hint: indexing on text rather than integer fields is a bad idea, as is needless replication of data, especially text data, across tables) which is the sort of thing one learns by experience.
MySQL and Perl for the Web, Paul DuBois, published by New Riders. DuBois also wrote MySQL, also published by New Riders, which IMO is the best MySQL reference book around. Good stuff.
As a 34-year-old computational biology grad student, I've put a lot of thought into this.
;)
Definitely, computational biology (of which genomics is a subset) is a field which requires experience in a number of other fields, and that takes time. I spent eight years in the Air Force as a medic; and medicine is applied biology, so when I started taking bio classes, I had a much better feel for the way living things work than most of my classmates.
And I also did a lot broader work as an undergrad than most -- a math major combined with bio and CS minors. Most of my fellow students in the graduate comp. bio. program came from one side of things (CS/math or bio/chem) with little exposure to the other, and it shows. These are very smart, hard-working people, but it's a real struggle for them to pick up the concepts from whichever field they haven't previously been exposed to.
Math is hard. Biology is hard. Computer science is hard. All of these fields take significant time to learn on their own. Learning enough of each of them to combine them in a meaningful way takes even more time. There's no way around this.
Also, math may be a young man's game, but biology definitely isn't. Watson & Crick were the exception, not the rule; biology is a field that rewards patience and experience more than raw inspiration. Well, that's my hope, anyway.
From the article:
;)
"These extreme conditions on the surface of the gas giant are believed to be largely driven by heat from Neptune's inner core of molten rock, liquid ammonia and methane."
There ya go.
IIRC, Jupiter radiates more total EM energy than it gets from the Sun, but most of that is in radio and IR, not visible light. Dunno about the other gas giants. Neptune, surely. Saturn and Uranus, maybe not; they're enough closer to the Sun than Neptune, and enough smaller than Jupiter, that they might break even. Just guessing, of course. It's been a long time since I read up on this stuff.
All that being said, I do very often get annoyed at my fellow techies who seem to insist on living down to the worst stereotypes of our group. I want to grab them and shake them and say, "It's okay to get some exercise, take a shower, and put on clean clothes! You'll still be smart!" Fortunately, it seems to me that Those People are in the minority.
Yes, quite a few serious illnesses produce distinctive odors. The problem is, of course, that this is pretty useless as a diagnostic tool (with the human sense of smell) because by the time you can smell it, the patient's doomed. Something with the sensitivity to detect the odors in time to be diagnostically useful would be pretty cool, and it sounds like the researchers are on track.
Look, of course the eventual goal is to do more practical things with the technology -- high-speed suborbital flights, orbital manufacturing, Lunar hotels, etc. But it's a big mistake to try to develop that kind of thing without taking intermediate steps.Agreed. But before the pioneers come the trailblazers. Right now, we're still at the Lewis & Clark stage; it will be a while before we can have a Space Homestead Act.
IIRC, "j'accuse" first gained its cultural resonance during the Reign of Terror -- the idea was that all someone had to do was point a finger at a neighbor he didn't like, say "j'accuse," and the poor sucker was off to the guillotine. That's certainly the context I had in mind, anyway.
My guess is that Zola was using it ironically, but I don't know for sure.
RSFH (Read Some Fucking History). Only in sensitive areas, yes. First that's the perimeter of the power plant. Then the road leading to the power plant is declared sensitive. Then the roads leading to the road to the power plant ... etc. And pretty soon everything within a 100-mile radius of any government or major industrial facility -- which means just about everywhere -- is being watched 24/7, and "suspicious" activity becomes a matter of "j'accuse." The only reason the Committee for Public Safety or the Okhrana or the Cheka/NKVD/KGB or the SS never did something like this was because they didn't have the technology.
Is that the fault of the scientists, or the governments that hired them? I'm talking about protecting science from government, not science used by government.
The idea of the amoral scientist driven by a quest for knowledge at the expense of humanity is a straw man. The vast majority of scientists are also humanists, in the strictest sense of the word: that is, they care deeply about other human beings and feel that their work will be of benefit to them. This is particularly true in the applied biosciences, where the overriding goal is to reduce or eliminate disease and starvation. The people doing this work need to be protected from those who would stop them because of religion, ignorance, or the desire for power.
Which leads to the second point: possessing marijuana may not be a civil liberty, except in the general "ain't nobody's business if I do" sense that there is something profoundly fucked up about the government telling you that it's okay to get drunk but not to get stoned
That being said, I'm not a Java-hater. I don't think it's an awful language. My main complaint is how verbose it is. Now, compactness is not always a measure of a good programming language (consider APL, or some of the more obscure Perl regular expressions) but it's a good place to start. It irritates me to have to write ten lines of code when one line in some other language would do; hell, it even irritates me when a line of code in one language is equivalent to a line of code in the other, but the first takes five times as much typing.
But what Java did do -- and this is valuable -- was bring the idea of object-oriented, platform-independent, and VM-based languages into the mainstream. They were around before Java, of course, but none of them had anywhere near its impact. This is unreservedly a Good Thing, and Sun should be thanked for having done it, whatever happens in the future.
Actually, I agree with you. But the post I was replying too talked about shooting someone who was breaking into your house as a metaphor for what the RIAA wants to do, so I kind of took the metaphor and ran with it ...
- Getting your house broken into, then,
- Breaking into the house of someone else who you think might have been the guy who broke into your house, then,
- Looking around the place, then,
- Deciding that some of the stuff in his house looks something like stuff that was taken from yours, and then,
- Setting the house on fire in retaliation.
The legality of that sequence of events is not "questionable" at allWell, what I meant was that even for non-mathematical papers, the 5-10 page stuff you describe, I've come to love TeX's powers of layout and -- especially -- organization. Citations, cross-references, chapters and sections and subsections, all that stuff. As long as you're working in a good text editor (I use BBEdit) then it's just like working in an old-school word processor (WordStar or WordPerfect, say) only with much more control over the document. Now, granted, a good TeX-based werp, something that gives you some of the goodies but also gives you by-hand control of the formatting on the level of WordPerfect's "reveal codes" feature, might not be a bad thing. I gave LyX a try and wasn't too impressed, but that might turn out to be useful one of these days.
;)
I also write pretty huge chunks of HTML by hand, so take this FWIW.