Yup. You absolutely cannot get funding for anything called "artificial intelligence". I think that's right, too - it's too broad a term to be meaningful. It's OK as an umbrella term for related(ish) areas of study, but when it comes down to getting a bank loan (or VC cash) you need something a little more specific.
You could argue that economics without models implies no trading, and therefore no losses. In that sense, a model with unknowable downside genuinely *is* worse than no model at all.
You make some very persuasive economic arguments. I was with you right up to here:
Saying that a particular work of art belongs to "humanity" as opposed to the artist who made it makes about as much sense as saying that your car belongs to humanity
Here you make precisely the mistake that the copyright industry wants you to make: that of assuming that intellectual works have the same limitations as physical property. It is perfectly possible for every human to have a (digital) copy of your work. It is not possible for everyone to have a piece of my car.
By your logic, "society" has the right to anyone and everyone's labor, unless you believe that art, music and literature are somehow inferior to other kinds of work.
They are not inferior, but they are fundamentally different in that there is no scarcity in their output. They have zero intrinsic value, what with copying being free. Any value assigned to them is entirely artificial, and, economics being what it is, that value is effectively a loan from society to the artist/musician/novelist, to be repaid in the form of creative output which, in time, becomes public domain.
This was a bit of a tirade, but I'm a writer (as yet unpublished), as are several of my friends, and if you were to suggest to any of us that you had some sort of right to the stories we've spent hours, days, weeks or months writing, rewriting and generally trying to cobble in to the best shape possible after racking our brains for inspiration that might or might not come, it's even money as to whether you'd get laughed out of the room or carried out on a stretcher.
Nobody is underestimating the effort it takes to write a novel. However, a novel is a collection of words, an idea. Once you've exposed anyone else to it, to say that they don't have a right to that idea is to say that you have a right to control their thoughts. If, economically, the only way to sustain a novel-writing industry is to legislate precisely that, then so be it. I'd much rather have copyright than not in that case, provided the terms are sane. Currently they are not.
How big and expensive does an echo sounder have to be? Would it be feasible to fit them to medium/small slocum gliders and just let them random-walk their way around the ocean, beaming back (or storing) GPS and depth data?
To be honest, expecting anything else from anyone who leases bandwidth from BT is optimistic. They *have* to cap, otherwise they can't afford it. The cap's higher than I thought it would be, too - 50GB for £35 a month isn't too shabby.
My guess is that it's part of a geological survey. The depth is boring, but it's on the edge of the area of effect of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. There's probably some interesting stuff going on under the top-most layer of "bottom".
IANAL. I'm pretty sure that if you've personally put your own details outside the zone covered by the Data Protection Act, there's not a lot that could be done. On the other hand, if all you've done is upload your details to a UK subsidiary or operational arm of a foreign company, then there may be recourse if that company subsequently breaks the DPA.
Note that even if they're covered by it, I don't *think* you can force them to delete anything under the DPA, as long as they've got a legitimate need for it, or it's inaccurate.
The individual freedom fighters that we supplied during the Soviet invasion didn't have much to do with the later movement (the Taliban) that came to govern Afghanistan.
Thank you. I'm sick and tired of people blaming the Muj for what the Taliban got up to, when it was the warlords' inability to run a country that let the students take over.
I think this is more to do with Google not wanting GMail to be used as a software (and potentially trojan) distribution system. They block (at least).exe's,.zip's and.rar's, but not.7z's, so that's what I use.
So you allow for a scripting language to become a non-scripting language over time, when the dominant implementation gains a compiler?
The dominant method of software distribution would also have to change, from people installing the software as source code to people compiling the software before distribution (in the case of proprietary software) or before installation (in the case of free software).
This really doesn't make a lot of sense to me. What you're saying, in effect, is that C is a scripting language to people who use Gentoo, because the dominant distribution method for them is uncompiled source code.
Besides, what does software distribution have to do with language definition? You're using the word "language" in almost precisely the same way I'd use the word "implementation," and they are not the same thing at all.
I think my problem here is that calling something a "scripting language" is meaningless; there's no useful definition that I'm aware of which doesn't fall apart under inspection.
Using the word "language" implies something static and fundamental - for example, you have "dynamic-typed language" or "object-oriented language," which are features that you explicitly cannot change without changing the language you're speaking about.
Adding a variant type to any language results in a language that can be used as a dynamic-typed language.
Yes, and you get a different language as a result, probably a superset of the one you started with.
Well, yes - but it's still illegal in those jurisdictions not to have useful information on hand for the police, regardless of the reason, which was my point.
You're not wrong in pointing these out, but they're all remediable without transferrable copyright, just using existing legal structures.
Exclusive licences answer, I think, all these problems. They also allow for much more subtlety in the nature of the contract between creator and exploiter than the all-or-nothing of copyright ownership.
Being "interpreted" is not a property of the language
If a language has its translation mechanism easily available to the program, then the language itself is designed to be interpreted (or at least bytecode-compiled). ECMAScript and the three P's all have this, and it's called eval() in all four.
There's a C eval() implementation out there for GCC that cropped up on reddit a few months back. It's quite neat, I'll have to see if I can dig it up.
merely of some implementation of the language.
Under that definition, a "scripting" language is one whose dominant implementations are all interpreters.
So you allow for a scripting language to become a non-scripting language over time, when the dominant implementation gains a compiler? Using the word "language" implies something static and fundamental - for example, you have "dynamic-typed language" or "object-oriented language," which are features that you explicitly cannot change without changing the language you're speaking about. To shanghai implementation-specific details into the language definition looks like a mistake.
Why is explicit memory management required for a language to be a "programming" language? What practical difference does it make to have explicit memory management as opposed to implicit, but well-defined, automatic behaviour?
I realize you guys feel that code should LOOK pretty. But not everyone agrees that you need the language to mandate style and FUNCTIONALLY python is no more capable than Perl (example intentionally chosen to make pythonites cring). For most web projects, php is as capable as either.
I don't believe the objections to PHP in favour of Python are entirely stylistic. I think the standard libraries of each are enough of an argument; if you need anything more, I'll throw "namespaces" in for free. Yes, I know PHP's getting/got namespaces (depending on where you are in the upgrade cycle). They aren't applied to the stdlib, though, so it comes across as a bit half-arsed.
The question is, is the time you would have saved by seeing the type errors earlier more or less than accounted for by the development speedup that was gained by using Python rather than C++ in the first place? The second question is, was that time more or less than the time taken in creating a test suite?
These are fairly well-covered arguments, so there's little to be gained here other than to realise that static typing only saves you from some sorts of errors, it's always possible to have dynamic-type errors in a static system, a proper test suite should be able to cover both, and a decent test suite takes significant effort and discipline to get right. It's just one of those trade-offs. TANSTAAFL.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup. You absolutely cannot get funding for anything called "artificial intelligence". I think that's right, too - it's too broad a term to be meaningful. It's OK as an umbrella term for related(ish) areas of study, but when it comes down to getting a bank loan (or VC cash) you need something a little more specific.
You could argue that economics without models implies no trading, and therefore no losses. In that sense, a model with unknowable downside genuinely *is* worse than no model at all.
You make some very persuasive economic arguments. I was with you right up to here:
Saying that a particular work of art belongs to "humanity" as opposed to the artist who made it makes about as much sense as saying that your car belongs to humanity
Here you make precisely the mistake that the copyright industry wants you to make: that of assuming that intellectual works have the same limitations as physical property. It is perfectly possible for every human to have a (digital) copy of your work. It is not possible for everyone to have a piece of my car.
By your logic, "society" has the right to anyone and everyone's labor, unless you believe that art, music and literature are somehow inferior to other kinds of work.
They are not inferior, but they are fundamentally different in that there is no scarcity in their output. They have zero intrinsic value, what with copying being free. Any value assigned to them is entirely artificial, and, economics being what it is, that value is effectively a loan from society to the artist/musician/novelist, to be repaid in the form of creative output which, in time, becomes public domain.
This was a bit of a tirade, but I'm a writer (as yet unpublished), as are several of my friends, and if you were to suggest to any of us that you had some sort of right to the stories we've spent hours, days, weeks or months writing, rewriting and generally trying to cobble in to the best shape possible after racking our brains for inspiration that might or might not come, it's even money as to whether you'd get laughed out of the room or carried out on a stretcher.
Nobody is underestimating the effort it takes to write a novel. However, a novel is a collection of words, an idea. Once you've exposed anyone else to it, to say that they don't have a right to that idea is to say that you have a right to control their thoughts. If, economically, the only way to sustain a novel-writing industry is to legislate precisely that, then so be it. I'd much rather have copyright than not in that case, provided the terms are sane. Currently they are not.
How big and expensive does an echo sounder have to be? Would it be feasible to fit them to medium/small slocum gliders and just let them random-walk their way around the ocean, beaming back (or storing) GPS and depth data?
To be honest, expecting anything else from anyone who leases bandwidth from BT is optimistic. They *have* to cap, otherwise they can't afford it. The cap's higher than I thought it would be, too - 50GB for £35 a month isn't too shabby.
Let me guess that iBench is an apple app
No. Next?
Not to say you don't have a problem, but I've never seen that on mine.
I'd not heard of Zen before. Given that I'm shopping for a new ISP, guess who's now at the top of the list? I very much doubt I'm alone, either.
My guess is that it's part of a geological survey. The depth is boring, but it's on the edge of the area of effect of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. There's probably some interesting stuff going on under the top-most layer of "bottom".
IANAL. I'm pretty sure that if you've personally put your own details outside the zone covered by the Data Protection Act, there's not a lot that could be done. On the other hand, if all you've done is upload your details to a UK subsidiary or operational arm of a foreign company, then there may be recourse if that company subsequently breaks the DPA.
Note that even if they're covered by it, I don't *think* you can force them to delete anything under the DPA, as long as they've got a legitimate need for it, or it's inaccurate.
It's pretty borderline on my eee701. I have to install noscript and adblock to keep it usable.
I'm more convinced by "it was always the government's plan and they just wanted to dole out juicy contracts to the private sector."
The individual freedom fighters that we supplied during the Soviet invasion didn't have much to do with the later movement (the Taliban) that came to govern Afghanistan.
Thank you. I'm sick and tired of people blaming the Muj for what the Taliban got up to, when it was the warlords' inability to run a country that let the students take over.
I think this is more to do with Google not wanting GMail to be used as a software (and potentially trojan) distribution system. They block (at least) .exe's, .zip's and .rar's, but not .7z's, so that's what I use.
...and currently modded "Informative." Yay Slashdot.
So you allow for a scripting language to become a non-scripting language over time, when the dominant implementation gains a compiler?
The dominant method of software distribution would also have to change, from people installing the software as source code to people compiling the software before distribution (in the case of proprietary software) or before installation (in the case of free software).
This really doesn't make a lot of sense to me. What you're saying, in effect, is that C is a scripting language to people who use Gentoo, because the dominant distribution method for them is uncompiled source code.
Besides, what does software distribution have to do with language definition? You're using the word "language" in almost precisely the same way I'd use the word "implementation," and they are not the same thing at all.
I think my problem here is that calling something a "scripting language" is meaningless; there's no useful definition that I'm aware of which doesn't fall apart under inspection.
Using the word "language" implies something static and fundamental - for example, you have "dynamic-typed language" or "object-oriented language," which are features that you explicitly cannot change without changing the language you're speaking about.
Adding a variant type to any language results in a language that can be used as a dynamic-typed language.
Yes, and you get a different language as a result, probably a superset of the one you started with.
Well, yes - but it's still illegal in those jurisdictions not to have useful information on hand for the police, regardless of the reason, which was my point.
Unless it's fractal. Actually, that's the definition.
About a million miles off topic, admittedly, but there you go...
You're not wrong in pointing these out, but they're all remediable without transferrable copyright, just using existing legal structures.
Exclusive licences answer, I think, all these problems. They also allow for much more subtlety in the nature of the contract between creator and exploiter than the all-or-nothing of copyright ownership.
As far as I know, no free country makes it illegal to honestly not have useful information for the police.
Isn't it illegal in various places to drive without your driving licence, for that precise reason?
Being "interpreted" is not a property of the language
If a language has its translation mechanism easily available to the program, then the language itself is designed to be interpreted (or at least bytecode-compiled). ECMAScript and the three P's all have this, and it's called eval() in all four.
There's a C eval() implementation out there for GCC that cropped up on reddit a few months back. It's quite neat, I'll have to see if I can dig it up.
merely of some implementation of the language.
Under that definition, a "scripting" language is one whose dominant implementations are all interpreters.
So you allow for a scripting language to become a non-scripting language over time, when the dominant implementation gains a compiler? Using the word "language" implies something static and fundamental - for example, you have "dynamic-typed language" or "object-oriented language," which are features that you explicitly cannot change without changing the language you're speaking about. To shanghai implementation-specific details into the language definition looks like a mistake.
Why is explicit memory management required for a language to be a "programming" language? What practical difference does it make to have explicit memory management as opposed to implicit, but well-defined, automatic behaviour?
I don't believe the objections to PHP in favour of Python are entirely stylistic. I think the standard libraries of each are enough of an argument; if you need anything more, I'll throw "namespaces" in for free. Yes, I know PHP's getting/got namespaces (depending on where you are in the upgrade cycle). They aren't applied to the stdlib, though, so it comes across as a bit half-arsed.
The question is, is the time you would have saved by seeing the type errors earlier more or less than accounted for by the development speedup that was gained by using Python rather than C++ in the first place? The second question is, was that time more or less than the time taken in creating a test suite?
These are fairly well-covered arguments, so there's little to be gained here other than to realise that static typing only saves you from some sorts of errors, it's always possible to have dynamic-type errors in a static system, a proper test suite should be able to cover both, and a decent test suite takes significant effort and discipline to get right. It's just one of those trade-offs. TANSTAAFL.
Nobody else seems to have mentioned this, so I will: Cisco have a vested interest in increasing the bandwidth available to and in the US. Just sayin'.