"This guy obviously knows nothing about biology. A single base change in DNA can result in mutations that cause death or spontaneous abortion. As little as a change in a single 'character' can be lethal. That's a pretty "small change" that results in a pretty big "crash.""
This means that natures has got an excellent error catching and correction system, rather than letting buggy code run and produce flawed result it catches the worst cases and prevent them from running (spontaneous abortion) while code with less bugs (say, a congenital disease) has less chance to run (early death, lesser sexual attractiveness to mates...).
It is only with the advent of modern society and modern medecine that the evolutionary pressure has dropped enough to make it less relevant to humans. Maybe in the future and with genetic engineering we will be able to correct congenital diseases in the womb.
Even beyond DNA I am convinced that nature has a good recovery system and that if humans were to disappear tomorrow most of the damages it did to Earth would eventually be healed (but how long before we reach the no return point?).
Now if software could have similar damage control mechanism and if it could still function while invalidating the buggy code, that would be something.
So let me get this straight. Sony sells you a device to digitally record audio data but cripples it so that you can not transfer it anywhere else and must always stay in the device where it was recorded? It sounds utterly stupid and useless. It borders to false advertising IMHO.
Sure, I would be very impressed when a non-modified bona fide printer manages to create a living, working Anthrax based on shades of black, cyan, yellow and magenta ink.
"There is a downward trend in marketshare, but this is indicative of the entire PC industry in general."
Sorry to nitpick but it doesn't make sense. Marketshare is relative, it is how much of the market you have, it doesn't have anything to do with the size of the market itself. If the whole market goes down 4% and your sales go down 4% too then you keep the same marketshare. On the other hand, if the market augments 5% but your sales only augment 4% then you lose a little bit of marketshare (not much in that example though), at least that's how I was given to understand economics.
Ok, I am not a lawyer and I am not even an American so I'm talking out of my ass here but:
1. Before the SBCTEA (Sony Bono Copyright Terms Extension Act) copyrighted works were owned for a duration of N years (for simplicity) and then it was public domain (owned by everybody) from N+1 to the end of time.
2. Since the SBCTEA the "contract" (a very solid contract, it was signed in a law) about the copyrighted works that were produced before its enactment has changed and twenty years that were by this contract owned by the public domain (everybody) have been "seized" by the government* and given to somebody else.
3. The US constitution says "...nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." (fifth amendment)
Unfortunately, the government has grabbed public property (public domain) for a private use so it probably doesn't apply but couldn't there be a way to argue something along the line that by taking these twenty years out of the public domain they have to compensate the American public for the value of what they have taken because it wasn't theirs?
In other word, they give N years to some private party and the rest to everybody else and then they go back on their word (only talking about retroactive extensions here) and take back twenty years that they had given to everybody and give it to the private parties, shouldn't they compensate everybody else for doing that???
Wouldn't it be worth a try to nail them on that? Imagine, given that they would have to compensate you justly (that is, for at least the amount what they have taken was worth) they would have to compensate you for each time you purchase a license to that copyright (say, a tape or DVD of Star Wars Episode IV) or, to see it in another fashion, these works (from 1926 to 1996 or whenever the SBCTEA was enacted) would be tax deductible;) This has got to be worth trying for.
Even if this doesn't work (quite likely), if it went far enough (say, it wasn't thrown out of court from the go) it would be a good way to attract the public to the fact that a retroactive copyright extension is the government indirectly giving their money to big companies.
Ok, somebody will probably point out why this is stupid but at least I will have it out of my chest.
*It can't be argued to be government's property so they can do whatever they want with it given that they have to put copyrighted stuff they write in the public domain because they can't own it themselves.
Especially given that strictly functional language shouldn't have assignments or other side effects IIRC.
I just checked "The Root of Lisp" and you are right about cond preceding if, which I find an interesting tidbit of trivia (he probably omitted a if construct because it was subsumed in cond IMHO).
For reference the seven primitive operators of Lisp were "quote atom eq car cdr cons cond" and were sufficient to write "eval", quite amazing.
Yeah, I guess that when all you know are CPP macros you might get scared at the idea of having "if" defined using macros;)
I knew about that way of defining IF but personally I find it more natural to define COND using IF than the other way around (and so does R5RS). Of course it doesn't gives the point as well that way.
One thing (among other) that blew my mind when I read about it was the Y operator. It's a way of creating an _unnamed_ recursive function (so guess how a function that has no name can invoke itself). It's not practical (at least I can't think of any practical use for it) but it is really neat and it may interest you to read about it for the mind expanding and jaw dropping effect it has. It also has a humbling effect because I don't think I would ever have thought of something like this.
"Legend has it that the creator first wrote a lisp parser in lisp (and it was pretty short), then it was first implemented when someone else converted that to machine code."
You probably want to read http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html for more information, it's quite long but very interesting. The part that interest us here is:
BEGIN EXCERPT As McCarthy said later:
"Another way to show that Lisp was neater than Turing machines was to write a universal Lisp function and show that it is briefer and more comprehensible than the description of a universal Turing machine. This was the Lisp function eval..., which computes the value of a Lisp expression.... Writing eval required inventing a notation representing Lisp functions as Lisp data, and such a notation was devised for the purposes of the paper with no thought that it would be used to express Lisp programs in practice."
What happened next was that, some time in late 1958, Steve Russell, one of McCarthy's grad students, looked at this definition of eval and realized that if he translated it into machine language, the result would be a Lisp interpreter.
This was a big surprise at the time. Here is what McCarthy said about it later in an interview:
"Steve Russell said, look, why don't I program this eval..., and I said to him, ho, ho, you're confusing theory with practice, this eval is intended for reading, not for computing. But he went ahead and did it. That is, he compiled the eval in my paper into [IBM] 704 machine code, fixing bugs, and then advertised this as a Lisp interpreter, which it certainly was. So at that point Lisp had essentially the form that it has today...."
Suddenly, in a matter of weeks I think, McCarthy found his theoretical exercise transformed into an actual programming language-- and a more powerful one than he had intended.
So the short explanation of why this 1950s language is not obsolete is that it was not technology but math, and math doesn't get stale. The right thing to compare Lisp to is not 1950s hardware, but, say, the Quicksort algorithm, which was discovered in 1960 and is still the fastest general-purpose sort. END EXCERPT
Paul Graham's website (www.paulgraham.com) is very interesting and gives a lot of insight into the beauty of Lisp.
You said: "Any function you add will look exactly like builtin ones from the outside, they're all called the same way (even math operators, like +). Macros for lisp are written in lisp. You can define a function then, in the same file, use that function *during compilation* with identical syntax to runtime code. Thus you can extend lisp with lisp."
It seems a bit confused. In Scheme (can't say about Common Lisp) you have two type of invocations, functions and syntax (macros are syntax defined by the software). For each type of invocation it is the same wether it was written by the language implementor or by the programmer, which is why a macro written in Lisp/Scheme is in fact extending the language, because it is syntax and the program cannot know if it is language defined syntax or user defined syntax.
As for the "during compilation" sentence it would make more sense if you were talking about a macro, given that a function will of course be using the Lisp syntax but functions are not executed during compilation whereas Macros are expanded at interpretation/compilation time and use the whole Lisp syntax (in Common Lisp and some Schemes) or a macro transformer syntax* (in standard Scheme).
*The macro transformer syntax, while less powerful than a classic Lisp macro offers most of its power without the trouble of dealing with the possibility that you macro and the code using your macro may use the same symbol that would create a conflict and cause you a headache (unless you are a Lisp God of course).
"you are not able to tell whether the form "if" is implemented as part of the "language" (whatever that means) or as a procedure in the same way any user could write it."
IIRC, "if" in Scheme cannot be implemented as a procedure because all the arguments to a function/procedure are evaluated before calling the function/procedure so that both the "then" part and the "else" part would be evaluated each time which would be bad if they cause any side effects.
However, Lisp and Scheme have very powerful Macro systems (Scheme's standard macro system trades some flexibility and power for security and ease of use) that allow one to rewrite much of the language using it.
I think that in most Schemes implementations "if" and many other control structures are not primitives but macros, but then, you cannot really tell the difference between a primitive syntactic form and a macro in Scheme/Lisp or, seen from the other side, you can extend Schem/Lisp with new syntax very easily and with nobody knowing that it isn't part of the base interpreter/compiler.
I see that you still haven't found the final boss. Unfortunately,/. has had a spoiler for a long while given that they use his texture for this story's topic icon;)
Windows would be a game if only it was more enjoyable and less repetitive (when are we gonna see the MMORPG version? Will it be.net?).
That's funny, I always thought that Windows was a video game, what with all the puzzles and the sensation that you are battling against the computer and that you need the latest and greatest hardware to get descent performances. Quite a succesful series of video games really, with all the sequels since the first crappy version to the modern multiplayer versions (as long as they don't play at the same time).
On their Firewire webpage at www.apple.com/firewire they say at the bottom right:
"Cable and Adapters:... Get a Belkin cable from the Apple Store to use your FireWire 400 devices on the FireWire 800 port."
So, no you need to buy an extra cable to connect a 9 pin (firewire 800) device to a 6 pin (firewire 400 with power supplied to the device by the cablle) or a 4 pin (firewire 400 without power supplied by the cable) port and vice versa.
FYI at the Apple Store the cables cost $30 (or £19 in the UK) for a 9-6 cable of 18 inch, $40 (£30) for a 6 feet one and $50 (£40) for a 14 feet one. A 6 feet 9-4 cable costs $40 (£30).
I mean, by opposition of being simply modded down because moderators didn't like your post?
As I understand, bitchslapping is when one of the editors mod you down by more than one point to -1. In your case you seem to have only recently gained the +1 bonus so that comment probably was posted with an original score of +1, if you add up all the moderation to it (Flamebait=1, Troll=1, Insightful=1, Overrated=1) you get -1 without having any moderator bitchslap you.
Of course, hte meaning of bitchslapping may have changed from being modded down heavily by an editor to simply having a -1 score but I doubt it.
NB: This doesn't mean that you should have been modded down because they didn't like your opinion, but saying that you were bitchslapped because of that seemed a bit trollish to me at first, before I saw it as an involontary misuse of the word.
Sorry to reply a week later but I was away at some friend's house for christmas.
"The problem is huge plot holes in the story, logical inconsistincies."
Yeah, but we are talking about breaking the second law of thermodynamics here, producing energy from harvesting humans without energetic input from the sun, which is just as impossible according to today's science as the warp drive and is just a McDuffin (or whatever is the term), that is a thing whose nature doesn't really matter because it is only here to justify the story. Like in Ronin, when they try to recover a briefcase but you never know what's inside and where it doesn't matter if it was the plans to a new weapon or next year's sports result or the answer to life, the universe and everything, so is it the case in Matrix where it doesn't matter wether humans are batteries or generators and how the hell do they break the laws of thermodynamics?
Saying that it is a plot hole because it would be more efficient to use a better process htat isn't using humans falls with the same problem, i.e. the film isn't about the soundness of using humans as energy sources, it is about the struggle against slavery of the human race.
Feel free to continue seeing these as plot hole, I will continue not to care and enjoy good movies while still knowing better than my non geeky friends that have no idea how stupid it would be if it was taken seriously as a "world energy shortage" solution.
"Suspension of disbelief does not work, i am afraid. You can't just explain away huge logical falacies away with that term."
You mean that you expect Peter Jackson to explain in Return Of The King the scientific principles governing how the one ring control the others? I mean, if he doesn't explain it better the movie is crap.
PS: Could you please e-mail me the blue prints of the warp drive or, even better, of the iconian portal?
"and 'trusted' means others can trust my computer to obey certain rules while I can't trust it to obey me and don't fully control it, and I think that *is* inherently bad."
True, but it doesn't apply in the military example or corporate secret example (same example, really) where it is not your computer so I don't buy this argument as invalidating this example. However, I agree with it with regards to personally owned computers (especially mine, of course;)).
"I'll admit that I am influenced by my youthful pacifistic ideals here - i.e. I dream of a world where we don't need to have these secrets."
Amen to that. The irony is that in such a world (where we don't need to keep secrets) it probably would be much easier to keep our privacy because people probably wouldn't be as curious to know what dark secret others have.
"For example, Bush is saying to Saddam 'tell us *everything* about your weapons of mass destruction', while he certainly wouldn't want to release his secrets. Does this make sense?"
Not really, I quite agree that it is very hypocritical, especially when the CIA is known to have helped the overthrow of democracies for dictatorships that favors them but the US won't do anything to get Saddam out.
"Anyway, as for espionage, there's still nothing to keep a spy from scribbling the DRM-protected text on his screen onto a paper notepad and smuggling that out. Or memorising it if he can't use physical media. Except of course if we mount all computers with cameras that check whether the user is doing anything naughty..."
Yeah, I guess that a good way to summarise the DRM issue is whether we want to live in a society built on trust, where widespread DRM is not used and people lean toward trusting each other* or a society where we distrust people and try to control them (with DRM for digital data) and spy on them (total information awareness anyone?) and fulfil the 1984 vision. Guess what society America is choosing and how long before it becomes contagious?
*I say lean toward because I wouldn't trust a stranger with everything, trust has to be built too.
I agree that most applications are bad but, at least for me, if there is at least one application that isn't then it isn't inherently bad, just its use.
That being said, because of the overwhelming number of misuse possible I think it is better to do without it at all than to have to deal with all the problems.
BTW, I'm not American, but I'm sure that whatever nation I'm from and whatever nation you're from there are some info that our respective nation would prefer to keep for themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
"This guy obviously knows nothing about biology. A single base change in DNA can result in mutations that cause death or spontaneous abortion. As little as a change in a single 'character' can be lethal. That's a pretty "small change" that results in a pretty big "crash.""
This means that natures has got an excellent error catching and correction system, rather than letting buggy code run and produce flawed result it catches the worst cases and prevent them from running (spontaneous abortion) while code with less bugs (say, a congenital disease) has less chance to run (early death, lesser sexual attractiveness to mates...).
It is only with the advent of modern society and modern medecine that the evolutionary pressure has dropped enough to make it less relevant to humans. Maybe in the future and with genetic engineering we will be able to correct congenital diseases in the womb.
Even beyond DNA I am convinced that nature has a good recovery system and that if humans were to disappear tomorrow most of the damages it did to Earth would eventually be healed (but how long before we reach the no return point?).
Now if software could have similar damage control mechanism and if it could still function while invalidating the buggy code, that would be something.
"You get a prize for it? And here I just thought you got the {MP,RI}AA knocking on your door..."
Yes, the first prize is time in jail and a huge fine.
"People who live in New Oreleans and get their water from the Mississippi consume water that has on average passed through 7 people."
;).
Like Terry Pratchett would say, water that has been filtered by so many kidneys has got to be pure indeed
So let me get this straight. Sony sells you a device to digitally record audio data but cripples it so that you can not transfer it anywhere else and must always stay in the device where it was recorded? It sounds utterly stupid and useless. It borders to false advertising IMHO.
Sure, I would be very impressed when a non-modified bona fide printer manages to create a living, working Anthrax based on shades of black, cyan, yellow and magenta ink.
"You don't think that maybe some of the slashdot editors are getting paid by a Microsoft competitor or something?"
You mean, like VA Software or something?
"There is a downward trend in marketshare, but this is indicative of the entire PC industry in general."
Sorry to nitpick but it doesn't make sense. Marketshare is relative, it is how much of the market you have, it doesn't have anything to do with the size of the market itself. If the whole market goes down 4% and your sales go down 4% too then you keep the same marketshare. On the other hand, if the market augments 5% but your sales only augment 4% then you lose a little bit of marketshare (not much in that example though), at least that's how I was given to understand economics.
Oh, wait, now they are!
Ok, I am not a lawyer and I am not even an American so I'm talking out of my ass here but:
1. Before the SBCTEA (Sony Bono Copyright Terms Extension Act) copyrighted works were owned for a duration of N years (for simplicity) and then it was public domain (owned by everybody) from N+1 to the end of time.
2. Since the SBCTEA the "contract" (a very solid contract, it was signed in a law) about the copyrighted works that were produced before its enactment has changed and twenty years that were by this contract owned by the public domain (everybody) have been "seized" by the government* and given to somebody else.
3. The US constitution says "...nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." (fifth amendment)
Unfortunately, the government has grabbed public property (public domain) for a private use so it probably doesn't apply but couldn't there be a way to argue something along the line that by taking these twenty years out of the public domain they have to compensate the American public for the value of what they have taken because it wasn't theirs?
In other word, they give N years to some private party and the rest to everybody else and then they go back on their word (only talking about retroactive extensions here) and take back twenty years that they had given to everybody and give it to the private parties, shouldn't they compensate everybody else for doing that???
Wouldn't it be worth a try to nail them on that? Imagine, given that they would have to compensate you justly (that is, for at least the amount what they have taken was worth) they would have to compensate you for each time you purchase a license to that copyright (say, a tape or DVD of Star Wars Episode IV) or, to see it in another fashion, these works (from 1926 to 1996 or whenever the SBCTEA was enacted) would be tax deductible
Even if this doesn't work (quite likely), if it went far enough (say, it wasn't thrown out of court from the go) it would be a good way to attract the public to the fact that a retroactive copyright extension is the government indirectly giving their money to big companies.
Ok, somebody will probably point out why this is stupid but at least I will have it out of my chest.
*It can't be argued to be government's property so they can do whatever they want with it given that they have to put copyrighted stuff they write in the public domain because they can't own it themselves.
And the Mafia don gives money to the Catholic Church, but he ain't a saint for that.
Note, I am not saying that MS=Mafia here, just that donating to charity
means nothing if you are a motherfucking bastard the rest of the time.
Oh, and I am convinced that if the donations were sincere and not PR we wouldn't hear about them so much.
Especially given that strictly functional language shouldn't have assignments or other side effects IIRC.
I just checked "The Root of Lisp" and you are right about cond preceding if, which I find an interesting tidbit of trivia (he probably omitted a if construct because it was subsumed in cond IMHO).
For reference the seven primitive operators of Lisp were "quote atom eq car cdr cons cond" and were sufficient to write "eval", quite amazing.
BTW, thanks for the link.
Yeah, I guess that when all you know are CPP macros you might get scared at the idea of having "if" defined using macros
I knew about that way of defining IF but personally I find it more natural to define COND using IF than the other way around (and so does R5RS). Of course it doesn't gives the point as well that way.
One thing (among other) that blew my mind when I read about it was the Y operator. It's a way of creating an _unnamed_ recursive function (so guess how a function that has no name can invoke itself). It's not practical (at least I can't think of any practical use for it) but it is really neat and it may interest you to read about it for the mind expanding and jaw dropping effect it has. It also has a humbling effect because I don't think I would ever have thought of something like this.
"Legend has it that the creator first wrote a lisp parser in lisp (and it was pretty short), then it was first implemented when someone else converted that to machine code."
You probably want to read http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html for more information, it's quite long but very interesting. The part that interest us here is:
BEGIN EXCERPT
As McCarthy said later:
"Another way to show that Lisp was neater than Turing machines was to write a universal Lisp function and show that it is briefer and more comprehensible than the description of a universal Turing machine. This was the Lisp function eval..., which computes the value of a Lisp expression.... Writing eval required inventing a notation representing Lisp functions as Lisp data, and such a notation was devised for the purposes of the paper with no thought that it would be used to express Lisp programs in practice."
What happened next was that, some time in late 1958, Steve Russell, one of McCarthy's grad students, looked at this definition of eval and realized that if he translated it into machine language, the result would be a Lisp interpreter.
This was a big surprise at the time. Here is what McCarthy said about it later in an interview:
"Steve Russell said, look, why don't I program this eval..., and I said to him, ho, ho, you're confusing theory with practice, this eval is intended for reading, not for computing. But he went ahead and did it. That is, he compiled the eval in my paper into [IBM] 704 machine code, fixing bugs, and then advertised this as a Lisp interpreter, which it certainly was. So at that point Lisp had essentially the form that it has today...."
Suddenly, in a matter of weeks I think, McCarthy found his theoretical exercise transformed into an actual programming language-- and a more powerful one than he had intended.
So the short explanation of why this 1950s language is not obsolete is that it was not technology but math, and math doesn't get stale. The right thing to compare Lisp to is not 1950s hardware, but, say, the Quicksort algorithm, which was discovered in 1960 and is still the fastest general-purpose sort.
END EXCERPT
Paul Graham's website (www.paulgraham.com) is very interesting and gives a lot of insight into the beauty of Lisp.
You said:
"Any function you add will look exactly like builtin ones from the outside, they're all called the same way (even math operators, like +). Macros for lisp are written in lisp. You can define a function then, in the same file, use that function *during compilation* with identical syntax to runtime code. Thus you can extend lisp with lisp."
It seems a bit confused. In Scheme (can't say about Common Lisp) you have two type of invocations, functions and syntax (macros are syntax defined by the software). For each type of invocation it is the same wether it was written by the language implementor or by the programmer, which is why a macro written in Lisp/Scheme is in fact extending the language, because it is syntax and the program cannot know if it is language defined syntax or user defined syntax.
As for the "during compilation" sentence it would make more sense if you were talking about a macro, given that a function will of course be using the Lisp syntax but functions are not executed during compilation whereas Macros are expanded at interpretation/compilation time and use the whole Lisp syntax (in Common Lisp and some Schemes) or a macro transformer syntax* (in standard Scheme).
*The macro transformer syntax, while less powerful than a classic Lisp macro offers most of its power without the trouble of dealing with the possibility that you macro and the code using your macro may use the same symbol that would create a conflict and cause you a headache (unless you are a Lisp God of course).
"you are not able to tell whether the form "if" is implemented as part of the "language" (whatever that means) or as a procedure in the same way any user could write it."
IIRC, "if" in Scheme cannot be implemented as a procedure because all the arguments to a function/procedure are evaluated before calling the function/procedure so that both the "then" part and the "else" part would be evaluated each time which would be bad if they cause any side effects.
However, Lisp and Scheme have very powerful Macro systems (Scheme's standard macro system trades some flexibility and power for security and ease of use) that allow one to rewrite much of the language using it.
I think that in most Schemes implementations "if" and many other control structures are not primitives but macros, but then, you cannot really tell the difference between a primitive syntactic form and a macro in Scheme/Lisp or, seen from the other side, you can extend Schem/Lisp with new syntax very easily and with nobody knowing that it isn't part of the base interpreter/compiler.
I see that you still haven't found the final boss. Unfortunately,/. has had a spoiler for a long while given that they use his texture for this story's topic icon
Windows would be a game if only it was more enjoyable and less repetitive (when are we gonna see the MMORPG version? Will it be
That's funny, I always thought that Windows was a video game, what with all the puzzles and the sensation that you are battling against the computer and that you need the latest and greatest hardware to get descent performances. Quite a succesful series of video games really, with all the sequels since the first crappy version to the modern multiplayer versions (as long as they don't play at the same time).
If only
On their Firewire webpage at www.apple.com/firewire they say at the bottom right:
"Cable and Adapters:
So, no you need to buy an extra cable to connect a 9 pin (firewire 800) device to a 6 pin (firewire 400 with power supplied to the device by the cablle) or a 4 pin (firewire 400 without power supplied by the cable) port and vice versa.
FYI at the Apple Store the cables cost $30 (or £19 in the UK) for a 9-6 cable of 18 inch, $40 (£30) for a 6 feet one and $50 (£40) for a 14 feet one. A 6 feet 9-4 cable costs $40 (£30).
Exact meaning maybe not, but more precise than just getting an "undeserved" (or political if you prefer) -1, which happen quite frequently on
BTW, Happy New Year.
Are you sure you got bitchslapped?
I mean, by opposition of being simply modded down because moderators didn't like your post?
As I understand, bitchslapping is when one of the editors mod you down by more than one point to -1. In your case you seem to have only recently gained the +1 bonus so that comment probably was posted with an original score of +1, if you add up all the moderation to it (Flamebait=1, Troll=1, Insightful=1, Overrated=1) you get -1 without having any moderator bitchslap you.
Of course, hte meaning of bitchslapping may have changed from being modded down heavily by an editor to simply having a -1 score but I doubt it.
NB: This doesn't mean that you should have been modded down because they didn't like your opinion, but saying that you were bitchslapped because of that seemed a bit trollish to me at first, before I saw it as an involontary misuse of the word.
"So you are saying I could just add some to the same bags as the body parts?"
;).
Yes! The paper dust can thus sponge up any leaking blood from the body part
Sorry to reply a week later but I was away at some friend's house for christmas.
"The problem is huge plot holes in the story, logical inconsistincies."
Yeah, but we are talking about breaking the second law of thermodynamics here, producing energy from harvesting humans without energetic input from the sun, which is just as impossible according to today's science as the warp drive and is just a McDuffin (or whatever is the term), that is a thing whose nature doesn't really matter because it is only here to justify the story. Like in Ronin, when they try to recover a briefcase but you never know what's inside and where it doesn't matter if it was the plans to a new weapon or next year's sports result or the answer to life, the universe and everything, so is it the case in Matrix where it doesn't matter wether humans are batteries or generators and how the hell do they break the laws of thermodynamics?
Saying that it is a plot hole because it would be more efficient to use a better process htat isn't using humans falls with the same problem, i.e. the film isn't about the soundness of using humans as energy sources, it is about the struggle against slavery of the human race.
Feel free to continue seeing these as plot hole, I will continue not to care and enjoy good movies while still knowing better than my non geeky friends that have no idea how stupid it would be if it was taken seriously as a "world energy shortage" solution.
"Suspension of disbelief does not work, i am afraid. You can't just explain away huge logical falacies away with that term."
You mean that you expect Peter Jackson to explain in Return Of The King the scientific principles governing how the one ring control the others? I mean, if he doesn't explain it better the movie is crap.
PS: Could you please e-mail me the blue prints of the warp drive or, even better, of the iconian portal?
"and 'trusted' means others can trust my computer to obey certain rules while I can't trust it to obey me and don't fully control it, and I think that *is* inherently bad."
;)).
True, but it doesn't apply in the military example or corporate secret example (same example, really) where it is not your computer so I don't buy this argument as invalidating this example. However, I agree with it with regards to personally owned computers (especially mine, of course
"I'll admit that I am influenced by my youthful pacifistic ideals here - i.e. I dream of a world where we don't need to have these secrets."
Amen to that. The irony is that in such a world (where we don't need to keep secrets) it probably would be much easier to keep our privacy because people probably wouldn't be as curious to know what dark secret others have.
"For example, Bush is saying to Saddam 'tell us *everything* about your weapons of mass destruction', while he certainly wouldn't want to release his secrets. Does this make sense?"
Not really, I quite agree that it is very hypocritical, especially when the CIA is known to have helped the overthrow of democracies for dictatorships that favors them but the US won't do anything to get Saddam out.
"Anyway, as for espionage, there's still nothing to keep a spy from scribbling the DRM-protected text on his screen onto a paper notepad and smuggling that out. Or memorising it if he can't use physical media. Except of course if we mount all computers with cameras that check whether the user is doing anything naughty..."
Yeah, I guess that a good way to summarise the DRM issue is whether we want to live in a society built on trust, where widespread DRM is not used and people lean toward trusting each other* or a society where we distrust people and try to control them (with DRM for digital data) and spy on them (total information awareness anyone?) and fulfil the 1984 vision. Guess what society America is choosing and how long before it becomes contagious?
*I say lean toward because I wouldn't trust a stranger with everything, trust has to be built too.
I agree that most applications are bad but, at least for me, if there is at least one application that isn't then it isn't inherently bad, just its use.
That being said, because of the overwhelming number of misuse possible I think it is better to do without it at all than to have to deal with all the problems.
BTW, I'm not American, but I'm sure that whatever nation I'm from and whatever nation you're from there are some info that our respective nation would prefer to keep for themselves.