This would be relevant if CMS on a VM had been the dominant mode of interaction with mainframes. It wasn't. The standard big iron operating system had all applications under ACL with the default state being *not* enabled (including basic CLI commands such as ls/dir or chdir/cd).
This made eminent sense at the time. Do you really want a regular user of the bank mainframe being able to do anything more than start the standard bank teller application?
Once you have your own personal computer you can do a lot more, because if you screw it up, your computer goes down, not the entire mainframe.
Today's computer systems are essentially what we had with time-sharing mainframes in the 1960s and 70s: personal workstations connected to a large central computer system (server farm), able to communicate with each other and run spreadsheets, word processors, and apps.
Oh please he has no idea what he was talking about. Mainframes had as much freedom as a Stalinist gulag. Usually you could run a single application as decided by the IT department.
Sure, PCs are connected to the cloud which acts as a server of sorts, but I can run any application I want, connect to any server I wish. These are key differences with the centralized world of the 70s. How soon do they forget...
Yet more BS. Only signed comments can be edited, hence it would be easy to punish people who abuse the editing feature (for example, disallow any change whose edit distance to the original post is too high).
To further prove my point the main web forum software in use currently, namely, Disquss, allows you to edit your posts and it works just fine.
In military speak, which is where it comes from, it means a soldier hurt to the point they can't go back and fight
Actually in military speak it used to mean someone killed. Then at some point the US military switched to current usage.
I ran into this while researching war casualties going back nearly two hundred years. One has to be very careful when comparing casualty figures across wars, because very old and/or European records use casualty to mean deaths, while more modern records (particularly American ones) use it to mean death and wounded.
Right because we couldn't possibly have a system in which if you edit your post your post loses all it's earned mod points. I'm glad you found such an insurmountable difficulty. I don't know what we would do without your deft insights./sarcasm
If you think about it giving away your earned mod points for editing would be almost always a moot point, since typically one notices errors within minutes of postings, well before any mod points are earned. Secondly, if the error/addendum is legit and substantial enough to warrant the change being made, one would recover the mod points in no time whatsoever.
At this time there is no valid excuse for lack of edit function.
It is clear you haven't thought about this in any depth if you think it has anything to do with parentheses.
For extensions to be first class what you need is the parser to be ready to treat user constructs the same way as native constructs. This is, for example, what happens with operator overloading in C++. There is nothing stopping you from having keyword overloading too and now extensions are first class.
It is really funny that you think parentheses are fundamental to this. Honestly just by pure syntactic sugar alone (i.e. a combination of new lines and statement separators) you can get rid of about 50% of the parenthesis in lisp/scheme and still have the same language as before.
I already gave an example before, in which one can remove parentheses from a define operator with exactly the same semantics as before thus still having a 100% scheme equivalent but parentheses are now gone.
First of all if you have a reason you have to spell it out. This I'm keeping it secret shows that you are not even sure about what you've got.
Second of all what you said makes no sense at all. You can make C extensible "in a first class way" by making every keyword a function or by operator overloading and hence function declarations/overloading extend the language in a "first class way" without any parentheses whatsoever.
You mean F counters as in "First Class"? Even then my experience (not with BA) is that there are lineups. Much shorter, usually only one or two passengers ahead of me.
Only if you persist in using parentheses everywhere. If you really think about it the supposed symmetry between data and code is not really there, hence the quote. In other words no matter how hard you try to make it look like they are the same either you end up quoting data or you represent functions explicitly via the f( ) convention.
The advantages of the latter are that (1) mimics math notation and (2) keeps the number of parentheses down.
Another question is whether you are able call a function with itself as an argument in your preferred language...
Algol had that already in the 60s without need for endless parentheses.
I fly BA a bit, 56 flights with them this year. I check a bag on almost all of them. There's rarely a queue.
I call BS. Either you're flying out of a very small airport or checking in hours in advance. You see queues are almost inevitable when the system requires you to interact with an agent. Just do the math: 320 passengers in a transoceanic flight, let's optimistically assume we have 8 counters open, so that is a load of 40 people per counter. Passengers arrive overwhelmingly within a very short and narrow window of the required two hour check in time (+/- 10 minutes), and say it takes a minute to check in. This means you are likely to wait at least ten minutes in the queue.
What existed were hundreds of feuding statelets that all spoke German.
Not even that, they all spoke dialects of Germanic such as:
Ripuarian, Moselle Franconian, Central Hessian, East Hessian, North Hessian, Thuringian, North Upper Saxon, Rhine Franconian, Lorraine Franconian, Silesian German, High Prussian, Lausitzisch-NeumÃrkisch, Upper Saxon, Alsatian, Swabian, Low Alemannic, Central Alemannic, High Alemannic, Highest Alemannic, Southern Austro-Bavarian, Central Austro-Bavarian and Northern Austro-Bavarian. [wikipedia]
when the feuding statelets came together they had to settle on High German as the "common language" but make no mistake the country came first, the common language came after.
Right, because management had nothing to do with that boondoggle.... It was both management and unions which hand on hand created that disaster. One made for the other.
2) Public-key cryptography was invented separately at GCHQ (UK NSA) and NSA itself, several years *before* Diffie-Hellmann.
At best, this is accepted as probably true. It is unverifiable because neither GCHQ nor NSA published their work. If true, it does show that NSA and their UK cousins GCHQ are very good at their work.
Erh, from Wikipedia:
In 1997, it was publicly disclosed that asymmetric key algorithms were secretly developed by James H. Ellis, Clifford Cocks, and Malcolm Williamson at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in the UK in 1973.[4] In the public disclosure it was claimed that these researchers had independently developed Diffieâ"Hellman key exchange, and a special case of RSA. The GCHQ cryptographers referred to the technique as "non-secret encryption". This work was named an IEEE Milestone in 2010.[5]
We acknowledge receipt of your application for "Biggest Idiot on Planet Earth". As you know we take the selection process quite seriously and every year we examine millions of applications. If I might proffer a word of encouragement at this point I would like to say that yours looks really promising. You will hear more from us in the future.
Only if you think the purpose of government is to take as much real money as possible from its citizens.
Not at all. The above reasoning also holds if you don't believe on leaving your chidren and your children's children laden with a federal debt load that will be impossible to pay.
So long as we are spending more than we are collecting taxes are not high enough. For the last 16 years we spent more than we collected which means that taxes were too low. This is a fact that is beyond ideology: we did not collect enough taxes for the level of expenditures we had. Period, no two ways about it.
Sure enough for next year we do have a choice, which is ideological: can cut services and thus reduce the deficit or we can increase our tax levels up from third world levels to those of developed countries just like we did in the Clinton years and get rid of the deficit. We do have that choice, for next year. This year taxes were too low.
A suspicious Martin Gardner then plotted the actual relationship between tax rates and government revenue per capita, and got something that looks like this: Neo-Laffer Curve
First off, that graph is a joke, not actual data. Second even if it were actual data it would prove the point of the Laffer curve as it still traces its general shape. Keep in mind that when you have so many variables you do not expect, say, the clean parabola of a body falling in the vacuum, but a squiggly line that shows the general pattern of the correlation between the two variables and that joke curve does exactly that.
There is wide agreement that something like the Laffer curve exists. There is also wide agreement among serious economists (i.e. people who look at data rather than their ideology manual to reach conclusions) that currently America seems to be sitting well to the left of the peak on the curve. Yes Virginia, the Laffer curve (as well as our gianormous deficit) both indicate that taxes in America are too low at least as far as Mr. Laffer and his curve are concerned.
, it is still significantly larger than when he first entered office.
False. The 2009 budget is proposed by the outgoing president, so the number of federal employees in that year was chosen by Bush Jr. In 2009 under the Bush budget the number of federal employees was 4,430,000. The year after, thanks to the surge an extra 11,000 soldiers were kept on payroll leading to a payroll of 4,443,000. In 2011 the number dropped down to 4,403,000 with further drops in 2012 and 2013.
So again, this increase in the size of the federal government under Obama exists only in your imagination.
I'm sure you meant to point out this is only true when you include state and local governments
Not at all. The size of the federal government in number of workers and as percentage of GDP has gone down since 2009, even without including the census worker spike. This is at a time when simply by increase of population alone we should expect the number of workers to go up 1% a year to maintain current levels of service.
Easy, just to give an example federal government spending went down in size during the Clinton administration, and indeed it was smaller on the average than during the Bush administration. In the Obama years, after the first Keynesian expansion, the size of the government has been going down every year since FY 2009.
The days of tax-and-spend democrats are gone. Now the biggest problem facing America is slash-and-burn republicans, which approve of all and any tax cuts, including those what would place the country at a serious economic disadvantage with the rest of the world such as education, research, basic health and public infrastructure.
Nope, I got it loud and clear. Furthermore I gave you evidence to the contrary, i.e. that this "less government implies richer country" is just not supported by the facts. More specifically, there are no examples in the world for the following claim you made.
That is how a country becomes wealthy- when the population provides for themselves and the government only keeps the social economic environment that makes it possible to do so.
The last country that tried that is Ireland, which is currently one of the basket cases of Europe. In the meantime the direct opposite of what you claimed, namely Germany, is thriving.
Seriously dude, you bought this right wing lie of "less government is always better" not unlike the dems of old bought into "more government is always better". Neither one is the case.
Modern democrats now realize that there is such a thing as too much government. Republicans, on the contrary, have yet to learn that there is such a thing as too little government. See Haiti, for an example across the board, or America under-performing Europe in most health indicators while spending more money for an example of an area where America needs more government, not less.
Slashdot Mirror
This would be relevant if CMS on a VM had been the dominant mode of interaction with mainframes. It wasn't. The standard big iron operating system had all applications under ACL with the default state being *not* enabled (including basic CLI commands such as ls/dir or chdir/cd).
This made eminent sense at the time. Do you really want a regular user of the bank mainframe being able to do anything more than start the standard bank teller application?
Once you have your own personal computer you can do a lot more, because if you screw it up, your computer goes down, not the entire mainframe.
From TFA:
Today's computer systems are essentially what we had with time-sharing mainframes in the 1960s and 70s: personal workstations connected to a large central computer system (server farm), able to communicate with each other and run spreadsheets, word processors, and apps.
Oh please he has no idea what he was talking about. Mainframes had as much freedom as a Stalinist gulag. Usually you could run a single application as decided by the IT department.
Sure, PCs are connected to the cloud which acts as a server of sorts, but I can run any application I want, connect to any server I wish. These are key differences with the centralized world of the 70s. How soon do they forget...
Yet more BS. Only signed comments can be edited, hence it would be easy to punish people who abuse the editing feature (for example, disallow any change whose edit distance to the original post is too high).
To further prove my point the main web forum software in use currently, namely, Disquss, allows you to edit your posts and it works just fine.
In military speak, which is where it comes from, it means a soldier hurt to the point they can't go back and fight
Actually in military speak it used to mean someone killed. Then at some point the US military switched to current usage.
I ran into this while researching war casualties going back nearly two hundred years. One has to be very careful when comparing casualty figures across wars, because very old and/or European records use casualty to mean deaths, while more modern records (particularly American ones) use it to mean death and wounded.
Right because we couldn't possibly have a system in which if you edit your post your post loses all it's earned mod points. I'm glad you found such an insurmountable difficulty. I don't know what we would do without your deft insights. /sarcasm
If you think about it giving away your earned mod points for editing would be almost always a moot point, since typically one notices errors within minutes of postings, well before any mod points are earned. Secondly, if the error/addendum is legit and substantial enough to warrant the change being made, one would recover the mod points in no time whatsoever.
At this time there is no valid excuse for lack of edit function.
It is clear you haven't thought about this in any depth if you think it has anything to do with parentheses.
For extensions to be first class what you need is the parser to be ready to treat user constructs the same way as native constructs. This is, for example, what happens with operator overloading in C++. There is nothing stopping you from having keyword overloading too and now extensions are first class.
It is really funny that you think parentheses are fundamental to this. Honestly just by pure syntactic sugar alone (i.e. a combination of new lines and statement separators) you can get rid of about 50% of the parenthesis in lisp/scheme and still have the same language as before.
I already gave an example before, in which one can remove parentheses from a define operator with exactly the same semantics as before thus still having a 100% scheme equivalent but parentheses are now gone.
First of all if you have a reason you have to spell it out. This I'm keeping it secret shows that you are not even sure about what you've got.
Second of all what you said makes no sense at all. You can make C extensible "in a first class way" by making every keyword a function or by operator overloading and hence function declarations/overloading extend the language in a "first class way" without any parentheses whatsoever.
If only slashdot's character support wasn't utterly broken, I could type them here...
You should have used the preview button.
[Isn't that the ISO standard Slashdot response to any suggested improvement to the message system?]
You mean F counters as in "First Class"? Even then my experience (not with BA) is that there are lineups. Much shorter, usually only one or two passengers ahead of me.
You mean your "deep reason" was to aid a brain addled parser so that it doesn't have to cogitate about what is looking at?
I thought you were aiming higher than that.
Only if you persist in using parentheses everywhere. If you really think about it the supposed symmetry between data and code is not really there, hence the quote. In other words no matter how hard you try to make it look like they are the same either you end up quoting data or you represent functions explicitly via the f( ) convention.
The advantages of the latter are that (1) mimics math notation and (2) keeps the number of parentheses down.
Another question is whether you are able call a function with itself as an argument in your preferred language...
Algol had that already in the 60s without need for endless parentheses.
I fly BA a bit, 56 flights with them this year. I check a bag on almost all of them. There's rarely a queue.
I call BS. Either you're flying out of a very small airport or checking in hours in advance. You see queues are almost inevitable when the system requires you to interact with an agent. Just do the math: 320 passengers in a transoceanic flight, let's optimistically assume we have 8 counters open, so that is a load of 40 people per counter. Passengers arrive overwhelmingly within a very short and narrow window of the required two hour check in time (+/- 10 minutes), and say it takes a minute to check in. This means you are likely to wait at least ten minutes in the queue.
Right, because the only possible way to equate data and code is to wrap it around in an untold number of parentheses. For example if we were to change
(define X (blah blah))
to
define X = blah blah
there is no possible way we could all agree that define returns a list and save the parentheses. /sarcasm
Reality is there is no deep reason to layer scheme with so many parentheses outside the lack of imagination of scheme fanatics.
What existed were hundreds of feuding statelets that all spoke German.
Not even that, they all spoke dialects of Germanic such as:
Ripuarian, Moselle Franconian, Central Hessian, East Hessian, North Hessian, Thuringian, North Upper Saxon, Rhine Franconian, Lorraine Franconian, Silesian German, High Prussian, Lausitzisch-NeumÃrkisch, Upper Saxon, Alsatian, Swabian, Low Alemannic, Central Alemannic, High Alemannic, Highest Alemannic, Southern Austro-Bavarian, Central Austro-Bavarian and Northern Austro-Bavarian. [wikipedia]
when the feuding statelets came together they had to settle on High German as the "common language" but make no mistake the country came first, the common language came after.
Right, because management had nothing to do with that boondoggle.... It was both management and unions which hand on hand created that disaster. One made for the other.
2) Public-key cryptography was invented separately at GCHQ (UK NSA) and NSA itself, several years *before* Diffie-Hellmann.
At best, this is accepted as probably true. It is unverifiable because neither GCHQ nor NSA published their work. If true, it does show that NSA and their UK cousins GCHQ are very good at their work.
Erh, from Wikipedia:
In 1997, it was publicly disclosed that asymmetric key algorithms were secretly developed by James H. Ellis, Clifford Cocks, and Malcolm Williamson at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in the UK in 1973.[4] In the public disclosure it was claimed that these researchers had independently developed Diffieâ"Hellman key exchange, and a special case of RSA. The GCHQ cryptographers referred to the technique as "non-secret encryption". This work was named an IEEE Milestone in 2010.[5]
You'd never know the official langauge of the country was English.
Except that it isn't. The USA has no official language. Look it up.
Dear Mr. Samuelson,
We acknowledge receipt of your application for "Biggest Idiot on Planet Earth". As you know we take the selection process quite seriously and every year we examine millions of applications. If I might proffer a word of encouragement at this point I would like to say that yours looks really promising. You will hear more from us in the future.
Sincerely,
The Internet
Only if you think the purpose of government is to take as much real money as possible from its citizens.
Not at all. The above reasoning also holds if you don't believe on leaving your chidren and your children's children laden with a federal debt load that will be impossible to pay.
So long as we are spending more than we are collecting taxes are not high enough. For the last 16 years we spent more than we collected which means that taxes were too low. This is a fact that is beyond ideology: we did not collect enough taxes for the level of expenditures we had. Period, no two ways about it.
Sure enough for next year we do have a choice, which is ideological: can cut services and thus reduce the deficit or we can increase our tax levels up from third world levels to those of developed countries just like we did in the Clinton years and get rid of the deficit. We do have that choice, for next year. This year taxes were too low.
A suspicious Martin Gardner then plotted the actual relationship between tax rates and government revenue per capita, and got something that looks like this:
Neo-Laffer Curve
First off, that graph is a joke, not actual data. Second even if it were actual data it would prove the point of the Laffer curve as it still traces its general shape. Keep in mind that when you have so many variables you do not expect, say, the clean parabola of a body falling in the vacuum, but a squiggly line that shows the general pattern of the correlation between the two variables and that joke curve does exactly that.
There is wide agreement that something like the Laffer curve exists. There is also wide agreement among serious economists (i.e. people who look at data rather than their ideology manual to reach conclusions) that currently America seems to be sitting well to the left of the peak on the curve. Yes Virginia, the Laffer curve (as well as our gianormous deficit) both indicate that taxes in America are too low at least as far as Mr. Laffer and his curve are concerned.
Is it any better than the new lighter high-res Asus Zenbook Infinity?
, it is still significantly larger than when he first entered office.
False. The 2009 budget is proposed by the outgoing president, so the number of federal employees in that year was chosen by Bush Jr. In 2009 under the Bush budget the number of federal employees was 4,430,000. The year after, thanks to the surge an extra 11,000 soldiers were kept on payroll leading to a payroll of 4,443,000. In 2011 the number dropped down to 4,403,000 with further drops in 2012 and 2013.
So again, this increase in the size of the federal government under Obama exists only in your imagination.
I'm sure you meant to point out this is only true when you include state and local governments
Not at all. The size of the federal government in number of workers and as percentage of GDP has gone down since 2009, even without including the census worker spike. This is at a time when simply by increase of population alone we should expect the number of workers to go up 1% a year to maintain current levels of service.
Easy, just to give an example federal government spending went down in size during the Clinton administration, and indeed it was smaller on the average than during the Bush administration. In the Obama years, after the first Keynesian expansion, the size of the government has been going down every year since FY 2009.
The days of tax-and-spend democrats are gone. Now the biggest problem facing America is slash-and-burn republicans, which approve of all and any tax cuts, including those what would place the country at a serious economic disadvantage with the rest of the world such as education, research, basic health and public infrastructure.
but you have missed the entire point.
Nope, I got it loud and clear. Furthermore I gave you evidence to the contrary, i.e. that this "less government implies richer country" is just not supported by the facts. More specifically, there are no examples in the world for the following claim you made.
That is how a country becomes wealthy- when the population provides for themselves and the government only keeps the social economic environment that makes it possible to do so.
The last country that tried that is Ireland, which is currently one of the basket cases of Europe. In the meantime the direct opposite of what you claimed, namely Germany, is thriving.
Seriously dude, you bought this right wing lie of "less government is always better" not unlike the dems of old bought into "more government is always better". Neither one is the case.
Modern democrats now realize that there is such a thing as too much government. Republicans, on the contrary, have yet to learn that there is such a thing as too little government. See Haiti, for an example across the board, or America under-performing Europe in most health indicators while spending more money for an example of an area where America needs more government, not less.