Yes, this is one of many troubling aspects of applying something like the War Powers Resolution or the Geneva Convention to an organization like Al Qaeda. Unfortunately, in all the excitement after September 11th, 2001, there wasn't much discussion of these issues. The good news is that perhaps once word gets out that this is in fact legal, and that it is one of the consequences of declaring war, perhaps folks will reflect on whether it makes sense to continue to be "at war" with Al Qaeda.
Why oh why is this simple, yet critical fact so rarely spoken? Congress authorized funds, but NEVER declared war!
It's not spoken of because it's not true. Take a look at Senate Joint Resolution #23 from Sept. 18th, 2001 (see link in my other comment in this thread). It very much authorizes the use of force, and most importantly invokes the War Powers Resolution. It doesn't mention one thing about funds.
Given that the wiretaps are in theory being used to track down suspected members of Al Qaeda, they would appear to be authorized by and well within the scope of the Sept. 18th resolution.
It's sad when actions with such significance are glossed over to the extent that people aren't actually aware of them.
I'm more than a little disappointed that this got a "5: Informative". Please. There is little to no difference between the SATA protocol and SCSI protocol in terms of latency. To the extent there is, one could easily argue it favors SATA.
SATA *drives* tend to have lower rotational speeds, which tends to lead to slower responses to requests, but you can get SATA drives with zippy response rates that match or exceed the numbers for most SCSI drives.
The SCSI protocol is traditionally preferred for heavy loads and random access patterns not because the low latency it provides, but rather the command queuing (which technically can actually increase the latency of a given request) which allows the disk to minimize how much it jumps around under such circumstances. Of course, unlike traditional IDE devices, the SATA protocol supports this kind of functionality, and it is supported by a lot of SATA devices.
I think you misunderstood. The article is suggesting that models that are currently G4-based will be updated to something other than a G4 processor (most likely Intel).
All opinions on the topic aside, isn't it scary that some judge, who is realistically accountable to no one and not required to have any knowledge at all of this subject (or any other), can make such a pronouncement and give it the force of law?
He didn't give it the force of law. As other's have pointed out, it is a finding of fact. Such facts are of course admissible in future court proceedings, but they can be challenged (although you had better bring new information to the table if you want to avoid a judge getting annoyed with you).
Either way, we don't have laws about what is science and what is not. This judge's statement merely makes the case that based on what was presented at trial, ID is clearly not science. Honestly, if we're going to let a school board in Kansas decide what is and isn't science, which has much more significant implications (since judges don't draw up curriculumns), I'm not going to get too upset about a judge making that call. Sometimes it won't go the way I want it to, but frankly I have far more confidence in the checks and balances in the judicial system than those in the school board system.
These are things that Google's map system DOES do correctly, among many others, which MSN, Yahoo! and MapQuest all fail at.
You ought to check out the betas of maps that both Yahoo and MSN have. The Yahoo API's in particular are really nice. They don't have satellite, but of course WorldWind is better than Google Maps or Google Earth for that anyway.
At a certain piont, the obsessive-compulsive Yahoo branding effort becomes counterproductive.
Yeah, it's terrible how they changed Flickr too.... Flickr.;-)
Of course, that just shows how evil they are, hiding the fact that they are the ones behind Flickr now...;-)
Fortunately, Google doesn't rebrand stuff like Google Groups, Google Earth, Google AdWords, Google AdSense, or Google Analytics....;-)
Re:Emacs is nice, but conceptually dated...
on
The Future of Emacs
·
· Score: 1
1) I use Emacs extensively, with lots of packages. The whole major-mode/minor-mode system seems to do a good job of avoiding collisions. I'm not sure what you are doing that is causing you problems, but I can assure you that for the most part it is not a problem. Indeed, I have far more problems with my Eclipse plug-ins than I do with my elisp code.
2) Several other posters have explained how easy it is to do Unicode with emacs. If you have to do extensive font configuration, it must be because of problems with Unicode support on your underlying platform. I did zero font configuration on my system beyond installing fonts on it for the different languages I was working with. Everything just worked. Either it's a platform problem or it's a case of PEBKAC.
3) The features you listed off as being important were
a) graphical cues (you can do this in emacs)
b) floating annotations (you can do this in emacs)
c) I couldn't find anything support Alice or Oz on Eclipse, but certainly Emacs seems capable of almost anything you do in the Alice environment (although I agree the polygon tree display would be a pain to implement)
4) I can assure you I'm using emacs in a very serious way to handle both version control and build management. Emacs' VC mode provides a set of semantics that version control backends can be hooked in to, and it works pretty darn well. Sure, Emacs's model for interacting with everything is through pipes, but that hardly seems like a bad thing.
5) "Semantic works marginally well if you are using one of a rather restricted set of languages...". Sure, it only has grammars defined for a small number of languages, but one need only define a grammar for a new language and it works quite well. Heck, the newest version of Semantic can do everything Bison can do (right down to reading.y files). It handles caching (both in memory and on disk). You can use Semantic for code completion/intellisense/whatever you want to call it, refactoring, outlining (like speedbar does) whatever you want to do. Frankly, I can't think of anything that one can do in the outline view in Eclipse that couldn't be done with speedbar. Can you give me an example?
"Saying you miss a feature you never had a chance to use..."
Buzz! Sorry, try again next time. I've used Eclipse and Emacs a great deal (not to mention horrid tools like Visual Age for Java that did incremental compilation). I even used a funky mode for Java development on Emacs (Tekade, back when it was actively maintained) that *did* do incremental compilation of Java code. So I've very much used this feature and I can tell you that more often than not, it is a distraction and gets in my way.
Re:Emacs is nice, but conceptually dated...
on
The Future of Emacs
·
· Score: 1
1) I agree code reuse is rare, but that has a lot to do with the standard Emacs distribution having most of what you need, and a general dislike for having dependencies between elisp snippets. That said, EIEIO and a few other libraries for doing objects in Elisp are clearly designed to be modular, demonstrating that it's possible. Really, given the size of most elisp projects, the different code bases are not really a problem.
2) Nah, Unicode is very easy.
3) Hmm.. the GNU Emacs I'm using seems to have the display capabilities you are lacking. No idea why you can't get them.
4) I use ant for most of my work, and have used Subversion instead of CVS. No significant problems at all.
5) The semantic bovinator does this job pretty well. Eclipse gets it's more extensive error messages by constantly doing incremental compilation (very different from keeping the syntax tree in memory). One could conceivably do this with Emacs, but honestly I don't miss this feature much at all when I'm in Emacs.
One of the funniest bits of this article was on the subject of correlation:
But so far, connections between IQ and specific genes have been just correlations, with little supporting evidence. The new research, Jirtle and other experts said, will need to be replicated before it is considered definitive.
Unless there is something in the research that the article failed to capture, I don't see how this would amount to anything other than a correlation, as there isn't any evidence of the mechanism by which the gene is causing this effect, or an observation of the gene causing the effect (tricky with genetics, but nonetheless).
If you read the description of the author at the end of the article, it reads:
Bonhomie Snoutintroff is a plain-spoken strong leader in cyberspace. He did poorly in school but his family is rich and well connected, so he's served as CEO of numerous, well-known Internet ventures that for various reasons unrelated to his forward-looking guidance no longer exist. He developed a cocaine and alcohol problem, although he refuses to dwell on the past: his mission is to bring honor and dignity to the IT profession. His keen insight as a global techno-visionary is matched only by his Christian humility.
Through the course of the show, its creator J. Michael Straczynski (JMS) wrote 92 of the 110 episodes filmed, including every episode of seasons four and five and all but one of season five -- a record-breaking achievement.
That leaves me still equally confused. It would seem to suggest he both wrote all of the episodes and all but one of the episodes of season five.
Through the course of the show, its creator J. Michael Straczynski (JMS) wrote 92 of the 110 episodes filmed, including all of seasons four and five and all but one of season five -- a record-breaking achievement.
I'm normally not one to gripe about things that should be fixed by an editor, as I'm one of the worst offenders, but I'm at a loss here to figure out what this sentence was intended to mean. Can anyone clarify?
If designed with security, instead of "ease of coding" was the design from the start, RPC wouldn't be used for communication between processes on the exact same piece of hardware. This is how it is done with MySQL and Apache on Linux and why RPC exploits won't work if those services are running on the exact same hardware....and once again a profound misunderstanding of computer architectures appears magically before us.
So, when you have Apache talking to MySQL, it's talking through a "socket" right? Guess what, whether that "socket" is a local socket (say, Unix Domain Sockets) or a network "socket" (say, a TCP socket) is really up to the application. Either way it's still using sockets. Much the same as with Xwindows.
Such is also the case with Windows RPC's (and most decent RPC mechanisms as well). The most common transport for RPC's is LPC which stands for... you got it! Local Procedure Call. It never goes out over the network!
Interestingly, Windows RPC's are, from a design standpoint, *more* secure than using straight socket communication, because they leave the highly error prone process of marshalling and unmarshalling to a well tested component, rather than being a roll-your-own kind of thing. They also have those nice security descriptors which get enforced in the kernel.
The MS-SQL bugs you refer to are typically caused by one of two things:
MS-SQL stupidly defaulting to network based access (actually pretty common for databases until quite recently, but nonetheless, not a good idea).
A non-RPC service used for finding a specific MSDE instance.
There is a specific, annoying issue with Windows RPC's, whereby if you have multiple instances providing the same RPC service, then the transports bound to each instance is the union of all the transports requested. This does create a problem because admins deploy an instance configured for local use only, and therefore don't lock it down quite so tightly, and then because they deploy another instance configured for remote use, it gets exposed as well. I believe there are some programmatic ways to get around this issue now, but it is a pain. It is, in general, a tougher nut to crack than at first glance, because of the abstraction for services implicit with RPC's. Nonetheless, it is only a bug for cases where you have multiple instances which might be deployed with multiple different transports. Interestingly, this "feature" was inherited from DCE, which was the OSF's idea of how to do distributed systems.
Actually, you might want to talk to a certain mafioso who used PGP to protect his communications, only to find out that the FBI didn't even need a court order to tap his keyboard.:-(
So, I see the poster has recently picked up RAII.;-) Yup, it's lot's of fun.
However, what RAII provides is a way to do lexically scoped resource lifecycles. It's really handy for common cases, but it turns out that for complex situations it gets quite ugly, becuase it's hard to be certain that you are really "done" with a resource simply based on lexical analysis (hence why people end up doing things like reference counting).
Arguably, a better solution would be for the runtime to have knowledge of how to manage all types of resources, not just memory but file descriptors, disk space, database connections, etc. Indeed, a lot of the code in complex systems is all about implementating algorithms for generically managing such resources and then providing an abstracted interface to said algorithms.
However, in the imperfect, real world of programming, it's tough enough to find a runtime that can intelligently manage memory, let alone other resources. In systems that do have automatic memory management, it is still possible to have lexically scoped resource management (C#'s "using" clause as an example) for other resources. So, the resources get freed up when you drop out of your lexical context, but the memory associated with those resources gets managed seperately by the runtime's automatic memory manager.
So, going with automatic memory management is really orthogonal to using something like the RAII paradigm for managing resources.
You're assuming that the introverts are only solving one problem at a time. My experience is that most introverts juggle many thoughts at the same time. I'll watch tv, listen to music, read a couple books, surf the web, check my email, and work on 5 or 6 things all at once without problem.
Nope. I'm assuming no such thing. Whether one focuses single mindedly on a problem or thinks about several ideas at once is independent of whether one is an introvert or an extrovert (and fairly independent of one's intelligence).
It's also worth noting that the "all at once without a problem" is a matter of your own perceptions rather than reality. While people tend not to perceive a problem with such scenarios (and indeed often feel like they get more done this way), they actually do perform better when focused on a single task.
Less brain activity altogether means your dead, a rock, really stupid, or simply lacking in curiosity and ambition.
You might think that, but all evidence is to the contrary. Indeed, people who are mentally retarded tend to have a flurry of mental activity. Similarly, type A's personalities, who tend to have all kinds of curiosity and ambition, don't have any observable increased mental activity than folks we'd tend to classify as dullards (the dullards are probably just thinking about things that we'd describe as boring or unimportant).
As it I find it difficult to ever be bored or idle because I'm always thinking of new interesting things.
Anyone who things that finding their own thoughts interesting is an indication of intelligence clearly hasn't spent much time getting to know someone who is demonstrably less intelligent than they are.;-)
Mr. Gates, as an introvert, would disagree. As would the DOJ (in conversation of the cleverness of Mr. Gates), and many, many/.ers.
Huh? Did someone do brain scans of Mr. Gates and a bunch of/.ers?
I'm not making a statement about introverts at all. All I'm saying is that more brain activity is not an indication of more intelligence, and can actually be an indication of less intelligence. The article bears all the hallmarks of a piece of journalism based on a complete misunderstanding of a perfectly good study.
What theory? Introverts are not Intel processors (P4), and Extraverts are not AMD processors (A64)! Your conjecture seems to claim that while introverts may "clock higher" than extraverts, they in fact do less work with each cycle, and therefore must do more work to be the equivalent of an extravert.
It's not my conjecture, and it's not about extroverts vs. introverts. Studies have been done comparing brain activity of people with differing levels of intelligence show that the less intelligent ones have significantly more activity when problem solving. This (and a lot of other stuff) has lead to the theory that the brains in smarter folks are more efficient and actually don't have to work as hard to reach their conclusions.
Now maybe differences in the way extroverts and introverts function means that an introvert of equivalent problem solving skill will have more brain activity. Maybe introverts are just inherently smarter than extroverts. I'm not making any claims in this regard (and really, nor should anyone else unless there is some kind of work to back this up). All I'm suggesting is that the reasoning that this article and a lot of the posts about it have made is completely broken. Specifically, indications that introverts have more brain activity than extroverts are not in any way an indiciation that introverts are more intelligent, and absent anything other data they actually suggest less intelligence.
I must be replying to an extravert. Any introvert already knows that there is no comparison between extravert brain power, and that of an introvert.
Sigh... and I must be replying to someone who tends to generate a lot of brain activity when problem solving....;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Um, you mean the resolution that says: ....
;-)
Yup, that one.
Wait, you didn't think those generals were testifying to congress all the time because they thought it was fun, did you?
Yes, this is one of many troubling aspects of applying something like the War Powers Resolution or the Geneva Convention to an organization like Al Qaeda. Unfortunately, in all the excitement after September 11th, 2001, there wasn't much discussion of these issues. The good news is that perhaps once word gets out that this is in fact legal, and that it is one of the consequences of declaring war, perhaps folks will reflect on whether it makes sense to continue to be "at war" with Al Qaeda.
Why oh why is this simple, yet critical fact so rarely spoken? Congress authorized funds, but NEVER declared war!
It's not spoken of because it's not true. Take a look at Senate Joint Resolution #23 from Sept. 18th, 2001 (see link in my other comment in this thread). It very much authorizes the use of force, and most importantly invokes the War Powers Resolution. It doesn't mention one thing about funds.
Even if the Gonzales' statement was true (which it isn't)
s c_sec_50_00001811----000-.html
No, it really is:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode50/u
the United States is not in a state of war
No, it really is.
For the United States to enter a war, Congress must exercise their constitutional authority to declare war. They have chosen not to do so.
Actually they have. First, the US is at war "with those responsible for the Sept. 11'th attacks" and it is at war with Iraq. Both bills specifically invoke the War Powers Resolution.
Given that the wiretaps are in theory being used to track down suspected members of Al Qaeda, they would appear to be authorized by and well within the scope of the Sept. 18th resolution.
It's sad when actions with such significance are glossed over to the extent that people aren't actually aware of them.
The problem with SATA is latency
Huh?
I'm more than a little disappointed that this got a "5: Informative". Please. There is little to no difference between the SATA protocol and SCSI protocol in terms of latency. To the extent there is, one could easily argue it favors SATA.
SATA *drives* tend to have lower rotational speeds, which tends to lead to slower responses to requests, but you can get SATA drives with zippy response rates that match or exceed the numbers for most SCSI drives.
The SCSI protocol is traditionally preferred for heavy loads and random access patterns not because the low latency it provides, but rather the command queuing (which technically can actually increase the latency of a given request) which allows the disk to minimize how much it jumps around under such circumstances. Of course, unlike traditional IDE devices, the SATA protocol supports this kind of functionality, and it is supported by a lot of SATA devices.
I think you misunderstood. The article is suggesting that models that are currently G4-based will be updated to something other than a G4 processor (most likely Intel).
Funny, I was thinking ObjC is nice and C++ "is an antiquated and bastardized attempt at object orientated programming".
;-) +1 Insightful? Please!
That's about as accurate and insightful as his comments on Objective-C.
All opinions on the topic aside, isn't it scary that some judge, who is realistically accountable to no one and not required to have any knowledge at all of this subject (or any other), can make such a pronouncement and give it the force of law?
He didn't give it the force of law. As other's have pointed out, it is a finding of fact. Such facts are of course admissible in future court proceedings, but they can be challenged (although you had better bring new information to the table if you want to avoid a judge getting annoyed with you).
Either way, we don't have laws about what is science and what is not. This judge's statement merely makes the case that based on what was presented at trial, ID is clearly not science. Honestly, if we're going to let a school board in Kansas decide what is and isn't science, which has much more significant implications (since judges don't draw up curriculumns), I'm not going to get too upset about a judge making that call. Sometimes it won't go the way I want it to, but frankly I have far more confidence in the checks and balances in the judicial system than those in the school board system.
These are things that Google's map system DOES do correctly, among many others, which MSN, Yahoo! and MapQuest all fail at.
You ought to check out the betas of maps that both Yahoo and MSN have. The Yahoo API's in particular are really nice. They don't have satellite, but of course WorldWind is better than Google Maps or Google Earth for that anyway.
Launch.com was great, until Yahoo took it over and made it completely fucking useless and annoying.
I dunnoh. It seems pretty great these days, particularly with the YMU service. What is making it useless and annoying for you?
At a certain piont, the obsessive-compulsive Yahoo branding effort becomes counterproductive.
;-)
;-)
;-)
Yeah, it's terrible how they changed Flickr too.... Flickr.
Of course, that just shows how evil they are, hiding the fact that they are the ones behind Flickr now...
Fortunately, Google doesn't rebrand stuff like Google Groups, Google Earth, Google AdWords, Google AdSense, or Google Analytics....
1) I use Emacs extensively, with lots of packages. The whole major-mode/minor-mode system seems to do a good job of avoiding collisions. I'm not sure what you are doing that is causing you problems, but I can assure you that for the most part it is not a problem. Indeed, I have far more problems with my Eclipse plug-ins than I do with my elisp code.
.y files). It handles caching (both in memory and on disk). You can use Semantic for code completion/intellisense/whatever you want to call it, refactoring, outlining (like speedbar does) whatever you want to do. Frankly, I can't think of anything that one can do in the outline view in Eclipse that couldn't be done with speedbar. Can you give me an example?
2) Several other posters have explained how easy it is to do Unicode with emacs. If you have to do extensive font configuration, it must be because of problems with Unicode support on your underlying platform. I did zero font configuration on my system beyond installing fonts on it for the different languages I was working with. Everything just worked. Either it's a platform problem or it's a case of PEBKAC.
3) The features you listed off as being important were
a) graphical cues (you can do this in emacs)
b) floating annotations (you can do this in emacs)
c) I couldn't find anything support Alice or Oz on Eclipse, but certainly Emacs seems capable of almost anything you do in the Alice environment (although I agree the polygon tree display would be a pain to implement)
4) I can assure you I'm using emacs in a very serious way to handle both version control and build management. Emacs' VC mode provides a set of semantics that version control backends can be hooked in to, and it works pretty darn well. Sure, Emacs's model for interacting with everything is through pipes, but that hardly seems like a bad thing.
5) "Semantic works marginally well if you are using one of a rather restricted set of languages...". Sure, it only has grammars defined for a small number of languages, but one need only define a grammar for a new language and it works quite well. Heck, the newest version of Semantic can do everything Bison can do (right down to reading
"Saying you miss a feature you never had a chance to use..."
Buzz! Sorry, try again next time. I've used Eclipse and Emacs a great deal (not to mention horrid tools like Visual Age for Java that did incremental compilation). I even used a funky mode for Java development on Emacs (Tekade, back when it was actively maintained) that *did* do incremental compilation of Java code. So I've very much used this feature and I can tell you that more often than not, it is a distraction and gets in my way.
1) I agree code reuse is rare, but that has a lot to do with the standard Emacs distribution having most of what you need, and a general dislike for having dependencies between elisp snippets. That said, EIEIO and a few other libraries for doing objects in Elisp are clearly designed to be modular, demonstrating that it's possible. Really, given the size of most elisp projects, the different code bases are not really a problem.
2) Nah, Unicode is very easy.
3) Hmm.. the GNU Emacs I'm using seems to have the display capabilities you are lacking. No idea why you can't get them.
4) I use ant for most of my work, and have used Subversion instead of CVS. No significant problems at all.
5) The semantic bovinator does this job pretty well. Eclipse gets it's more extensive error messages by constantly doing incremental compilation (very different from keeping the syntax tree in memory). One could conceivably do this with Emacs, but honestly I don't miss this feature much at all when I'm in Emacs.
One of the funniest bits of this article was on the subject of correlation:
But so far, connections between IQ and specific genes have been just correlations, with little supporting evidence. The new research, Jirtle and other experts said, will need to be replicated before it is considered definitive.
Unless there is something in the research that the article failed to capture, I don't see how this would amount to anything other than a correlation, as there isn't any evidence of the mechanism by which the gene is causing this effect, or an observation of the gene causing the effect (tricky with genetics, but nonetheless).
If you read the description of the author at the end of the article, it reads:
Bonhomie Snoutintroff is a plain-spoken strong leader in cyberspace. He did poorly in school but his family is rich and well connected, so he's served as CEO of numerous, well-known Internet ventures that for various reasons unrelated to his forward-looking guidance no longer exist. He developed a cocaine and alcohol problem, although he refuses to dwell on the past: his mission is to bring honor and dignity to the IT profession. His keen insight as a global techno-visionary is matched only by his Christian humility.
It seems like this is much ado about nothing.
And while MJS may have written the vast majority of the episodes, the very best one was written by David Gerrold!
Okay, so I looked it up. Believers? Puh-lease!
Through the course of the show, its creator J. Michael Straczynski (JMS) wrote 92 of the 110 episodes filmed, including every episode of seasons four and five and all but one of season five -- a record-breaking achievement.
That leaves me still equally confused. It would seem to suggest he both wrote all of the episodes and all but one of the episodes of season five.
(Season 5's "Day of the Dead," written by Sandman writer Neil Gaiman)
;-)
I loved that one.
Through the course of the show, its creator J. Michael Straczynski (JMS) wrote 92 of the 110 episodes filmed, including all of seasons four and five and all but one of season five -- a record-breaking achievement.
I'm normally not one to gripe about things that should be fixed by an editor, as I'm one of the worst offenders, but I'm at a loss here to figure out what this sentence was intended to mean. Can anyone clarify?
...and this would have helped how?
They didn't grab his passphrase, they grabbed *everything he typed* before it was encrypted.
So, when you have Apache talking to MySQL, it's talking through a "socket" right? Guess what, whether that "socket" is a local socket (say, Unix Domain Sockets) or a network "socket" (say, a TCP socket) is really up to the application. Either way it's still using sockets. Much the same as with Xwindows.
Such is also the case with Windows RPC's (and most decent RPC mechanisms as well). The most common transport for RPC's is LPC which stands for... you got it! Local Procedure Call. It never goes out over the network!
Interestingly, Windows RPC's are, from a design standpoint, *more* secure than using straight socket communication, because they leave the highly error prone process of marshalling and unmarshalling to a well tested component, rather than being a roll-your-own kind of thing. They also have those nice security descriptors which get enforced in the kernel.
The MS-SQL bugs you refer to are typically caused by one of two things:
There is a specific, annoying issue with Windows RPC's, whereby if you have multiple instances providing the same RPC service, then the transports bound to each instance is the union of all the transports requested. This does create a problem because admins deploy an instance configured for local use only, and therefore don't lock it down quite so tightly, and then because they deploy another instance configured for remote use, it gets exposed as well. I believe there are some programmatic ways to get around this issue now, but it is a pain. It is, in general, a tougher nut to crack than at first glance, because of the abstraction for services implicit with RPC's. Nonetheless, it is only a bug for cases where you have multiple instances which might be deployed with multiple different transports. Interestingly, this "feature" was inherited from DCE, which was the OSF's idea of how to do distributed systems.
Actually, you might want to talk to a certain mafioso who used PGP to protect his communications, only to find out that the FBI didn't even need a court order to tap his keyboard. :-(
So, I see the poster has recently picked up RAII. ;-) Yup, it's lot's of fun.
However, what RAII provides is a way to do lexically scoped resource lifecycles. It's really handy for common cases, but it turns out that for complex situations it gets quite ugly, becuase it's hard to be certain that you are really "done" with a resource simply based on lexical analysis (hence why people end up doing things like reference counting).
Arguably, a better solution would be for the runtime to have knowledge of how to manage all types of resources, not just memory but file descriptors, disk space, database connections, etc. Indeed, a lot of the code in complex systems is all about implementating algorithms for generically managing such resources and then providing an abstracted interface to said algorithms.
However, in the imperfect, real world of programming, it's tough enough to find a runtime that can intelligently manage memory, let alone other resources. In systems that do have automatic memory management, it is still possible to have lexically scoped resource management (C#'s "using" clause as an example) for other resources. So, the resources get freed up when you drop out of your lexical context, but the memory associated with those resources gets managed seperately by the runtime's automatic memory manager.
So, going with automatic memory management is really orthogonal to using something like the RAII paradigm for managing resources.
You're assuming that the introverts are only solving one problem at a time. My experience is that most introverts juggle many thoughts at the same time. I'll watch tv, listen to music, read a couple books, surf the web, check my email, and work on 5 or 6 things all at once without problem.
;-)
Nope. I'm assuming no such thing. Whether one focuses single mindedly on a problem or thinks about several ideas at once is independent of whether one is an introvert or an extrovert (and fairly independent of one's intelligence).
It's also worth noting that the "all at once without a problem" is a matter of your own perceptions rather than reality. While people tend not to perceive a problem with such scenarios (and indeed often feel like they get more done this way), they actually do perform better when focused on a single task.
Less brain activity altogether means your dead, a rock, really stupid, or simply lacking in curiosity and ambition.
You might think that, but all evidence is to the contrary. Indeed, people who are mentally retarded tend to have a flurry of mental activity. Similarly, type A's personalities, who tend to have all kinds of curiosity and ambition, don't have any observable increased mental activity than folks we'd tend to classify as dullards (the dullards are probably just thinking about things that we'd describe as boring or unimportant).
As it I find it difficult to ever be bored or idle because I'm always thinking of new interesting things.
Anyone who things that finding their own thoughts interesting is an indication of intelligence clearly hasn't spent much time getting to know someone who is demonstrably less intelligent than they are.
Mr. Gates, as an introvert, would disagree. As would the DOJ (in conversation of the cleverness of Mr. Gates), and many, many /.ers.
/.ers?
;-)
Huh? Did someone do brain scans of Mr. Gates and a bunch of
I'm not making a statement about introverts at all. All I'm saying is that more brain activity is not an indication of more intelligence, and can actually be an indication of less intelligence. The article bears all the hallmarks of a piece of journalism based on a complete misunderstanding of a perfectly good study.
What theory? Introverts are not Intel processors (P4), and Extraverts are not AMD processors (A64)! Your conjecture seems to claim that while introverts may "clock higher" than extraverts, they in fact do less work with each cycle, and therefore must do more work to be the equivalent of an extravert.
It's not my conjecture, and it's not about extroverts vs. introverts. Studies have been done comparing brain activity of people with differing levels of intelligence show that the less intelligent ones have significantly more activity when problem solving. This (and a lot of other stuff) has lead to the theory that the brains in smarter folks are more efficient and actually don't have to work as hard to reach their conclusions.
Now maybe differences in the way extroverts and introverts function means that an introvert of equivalent problem solving skill will have more brain activity. Maybe introverts are just inherently smarter than extroverts. I'm not making any claims in this regard (and really, nor should anyone else unless there is some kind of work to back this up). All I'm suggesting is that the reasoning that this article and a lot of the posts about it have made is completely broken. Specifically, indications that introverts have more brain activity than extroverts are not in any way an indiciation that introverts are more intelligent, and absent anything other data they actually suggest less intelligence.
I must be replying to an extravert. Any introvert already knows that there is no comparison between extravert brain power, and that of an introvert.
Sigh... and I must be replying to someone who tends to generate a lot of brain activity when problem solving....