Care to point to point two of such "wild claims" that Noam Chomsky might have made?
About fifteen years ago or so he used to claim quite often that there was a conspiracy by which the NYT determines what will be the next day headlines and all other papers in the nation obey. Tin foil hat stuff, really.
His proof was the apparent coordination between newspapers, which only showed that he doesn't understand how order can arise from a bunch of independent minded agents. (E.g. the NYT headlines are often newsbreaking and well thought out, so three times out of four the best headline you can come up with is that of the NYT. Indeed, whenever any other big east coast newspaper broke a big story --say the WSJ-- all other newspapers copied the WSJ headline, not the NYT headline).
To his credit I haven't heard him say it lately, which suggest to me that somebody sat him down and explained why his "proof" was no proof at all (maybe they explained the game of life to him, since he is also a distinguished linguist and computer scientist).
He also had an error ridden article on the Latin American neoliberal recovery, getting all his facts mixed up. Looked like a rush job really, and out of character with his usually much more reasoned arguments.
They all started processing the header into an abnormal instruction sequence (for example one of them started interpreting the next line as commands typed within the mail client). Only one called the shell.
As anybody who has been to Alberta in February knows, all you need is walk into the local Walmart, ask for standard gear for the Albertan winter, remove a couple of layers and voila: martian-ready space suit.
On the day the rover sojourner landed in Mars it was colder in Edmonton than in the sojourner landing area (seriously).
Pfft. The very fact that you have a hard time believing it shows how little you know about Unix/Linux security.
To give a very recent example, about a month ago I received a weird piece of mail which made pine barf and try to execute the next line of the message in a shell. I couldn't even delete the message, so I tried mutt, elm and mail. All of them choked equally. This is the n-th time that this has happened. I've seen it on a sun, dec unix and a linux box at one time or another, btw.
In the end since the message was at the end of my mailbox it was easier to "head" the file to the right location and thus dispose of the message.
PArt of the problem is that the argument came down to a value judgement.
You are mixing two things here: whether AST was right or wrong and what were his motivations. Sure it came down to a value judgement which is one reason I never fully bought into his arguments, but that in no way implies he was "out to get Linux" or "just sour grapes".
Lastly over the years we seem to have more and more spare CPU cycles while user driven demand is lagging. Because of this, I have changed my mind, for example, about automatic arrays bound checking. Back in the early 80's programs IBM PC programs were short enough that a good programmer could keep track of not violating array bounds, while the penalty of checking said bounds everytime was too high.
Today I see positively no reason to use a language without array bounds checking for a user app. The only applications that I can think you wouldn't want to do this are the OS kernel and real time control software.
Ditto for kernels. In today's world of worms and viruses we should gladly pay a 20% penalty in exchange for extra security.
Keep in mind that Linux/Unix is not half as secure as more people think it is. For example almost all mail clients are prone to buffer overflow errors on the subject line, for one. Most of them don't handle control or extended ascii characters correctly either.
Indeed, how could your favorite programming language be other than perfect? What was I saying about Linux kiddies not knowing how to handle reasoned criticism?
By the way, the bug I pointed out has been fixed in Python, and similar bugs have been fixed in C, so there is not reason why it couldn't be fixed.
You know, I think I had AST wrong. I'd seen the thread where he bashes Linus for not doing a microkernel design and thought that maybe it was sour grapes.
Well shame on you. While I've never fully bought into Tanenbaum's arguments on microkernel they have never been antyhing but cogent, coherent and well made.
It is the kind of debate that academics are used to making all the time and AST as the distinguished and brilliant OS professor he is, gave us a good example of.
It seems Linux kiddies weren't mature enough to handle them and asumed malice on AST's part.
ESR is at his stupidiest when he goes into his anarchist/libertarian rants. The election he quotes above took place a year after the burning of the Reichstag, after which Hitler eliminated all his political opponents.
Reminds me of the movie where the leader asks "any objections" and somebody raises his hand and the leader shoots him, then asks "any others"?
Then along comes ESR and idiotically points out that there was only one objection. Duh!
Some of the simpler -yet useful- parts of the semantic web can be done today. Other parts of the more grandiose vision of TBL are as much pie in the sky as the promises of AI were in the 70s.
The semantic web is the return of the snake oil salesman of the 70s and early 80s who highjacked AI research with undeliverable promises of intelligent machines "just around the corner".
To this date, serious AI researchers are still paying the price of this scientific fraud, which makes cold fussion look like a prank.
Tim Berners-Lee is a good person and not a computer scientist so he has neither the knowledge nor enough malice to understand the pack of thieves he has surrounded himself with.
I'm not the only one saying this:
Semantic web is doomed to failure precisely because it is being pushed by a group with a reputation for talking rather than doing.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=108295&thres ho ld=-1&commentsort=1&tid=95&mode=nested&cid=9207128
r John Lieske of the Mayo Clinic claims they have found irrefutable evidence of the existence of nanobacteria.
They do not claim such a thing. They claim to have found potential evidence of the existence of nanobacteria. Alternate explanations of the evidence have already been given (false positive DNA test, for one).
SUV's have there place. Yes they are stupid as a communter car for one person, but that doesn't make them bad. You take that same SUV, put 6 people in it that communt, then it's pretty good.
You are confused. Most SUVs do not sit six people. Those are called minivans. For example, Chevrolet lists seven SUVs of which only two sit more than five people.
Yes, lets get my family of 4, plus groceries in a hond civic. That will work.
Tell you what, go to your Honda dealer with your family of four and ask for to test drive a Honda Element. Drive over to the supermarket and buy your groceries. You'll see that there is plenty of space for your family of 4 and your groceries, while getting 50% better mileage than a Tahoe.
Doomsayers
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Look, we can curtail consumption dramatically overnight if need be. In fact we could increase the car efficiency by a factor of 3 overnight. Not only the technology is already here, but you can drive it off the parking lot today!
Do you know that the average mile per gallon today in the US is lower than in the mid-80s?
What would be the reduction in gas consumption if we all dumped our SUVs and bought Honda Civics?
Now, what if we then switched to Hybrids?
What if we gave up the back seat for our one-person commute and we all switched to smart cars?
What if we equipped said smartcars with super-efficient bicycle-like wheels as California is suggesting we do?
Mark my words: in two years people won't be able to give away for free their gas guzzling SUV (people who are old enough will remember that in the late 70s you could not give away your LTD Crown Victoria).
An OSS search engine that actually indexes the entire web and is used by many people is at least a couple of orders of magnitude harder than the Mozilla project.
Writing the search code itself is not too hard (you still need a PhD in data structures and algorithms, but those can be found), the real hard part is the amount of bandwidth and CPU power that is required.
except for that pesky little shortest path first algorithm (developed by Dijkstra)
Except that he didn't. People in the field already knew the algorithm. Dijkstra was the one who decided that for the sake of completeness it was worth joting it down. He use to protest against the usage of the term "Dijkstra's algorithm".
Most of the rest are cold blooded killings where there is actually a low chance of being caught.
Only because the streets are underpoliced. If you look at statistics overseas, you can find jurisdictions where the number of unsolved deaths is minimal (for one, since they have lower murder rates they can devote a dozen detectives for an entire a year to each murder case... which further increases the chances of the murderer being caught and thus reduces the number of murders, freeing even more detectives to investigating the next case and so on. In other words a virtuous circle).
The number of people who would be discouraged by say 30 years prison, but not discouraged by 20 years prison is miniscule.
True, but as I said even in this case a measurable drop in crime has been detected due to having the hardened criminals off commission for longer.
Actually, you are wrong on that one. Your rebuttal argument is flawed:
Texas is the death penalty capital of the world. By your logic that would also make it the safest place in the world, yet people are murdered here every day.
You are using a flawed control group: other random places in the world. For the control group to be valid you have to find a place with similar socio-economic characteristics *and* similar prison conditions but laxer sentencing practices.
Moreover, save for hardened criminals which tend not to act rationally, studies *have* shown that the common folk tend to adjust their rates of criminal behaviour in proportion to (a) likelihood of being caught (b) harshness of the penalty if caught and (c) potential reward as compared to living a straight life.
For example in a jurisdiction when a specific crime is suddenly punished in a much harsher way, criminals gravitate to less harshly punished activities.
Same studies have shown that a certain percentage of the drop in crime rates of that type are due to the simple reason that criminals are out of comission longer, due to the longer jail sentences (duh!). So even among the hardened criminals we see a reduction in crime rates, simply because they are in prison and off the streets.
I don't know how this thing actually works in practice, but if the quality of their graphics is an indication, I'm optimistic. I had a quick look at the screenshots and my immediate reaction was "at last a linux GUI that doesn't hurt my eyes".
Why the heck are we still focused on emulating windows right down to the exact contextual menus?
For one because however quirky they are still better than what Linux offers.
As well, we would be better off first fully catching up to Windows/MacOS and then striking off on a better path. That way OSSers get to benefit from somebody else's efforts, just like Microsoft learned from others.
C'mon, don't waste your talents for another second!
Actually what you have is a severe case of NIH syndrome.
I agree. I'm really worried about what he did to that intern. Such a lack of judgement... I mean invading the wrong country for the wrong reasons and getting us into a quagmire, that I can understand. but talking advantage of a 23 year old intern! For godsake, she was almost a child!
When I came here at the age of 16, one of the biggest cultural shocks for me was that among people my own age, intellect and doing good at school was not encouraged.. even mocked.
And you know what? You go to you highshool reunion fifteen years later and in all likelihood you are doing substantially better than them (even before bubble times Techie salaries were above average).
Plus, by that time the acne has gone down and you have developed a healthy CRT tan, as well as bought the obligatory bimmer... The girls are all over you while the jocks are definitely impressed.
You figure it wouldn't be that hard to put two and two together and expect the friendly school geek to do well, but somehow chicks&jocks miss the obvious and are very surprised during the high school reunion....
One of the reasons our schools are ineffective is this: If we had standards, a lot more kids would flunk out of school, putting more criminals on the street.
How about the idea of having half-grades like in Minnesota. Good students go from Grade 1 to Grade 2, students who struggled too much go from Grade 1 to Grade 1.5. This helps them shore up knowledge while removing stigma, since it is assumed that a large percentage of kids will do this (something like 25%).
Plus bright kids might also find themselves in a half grade (say an outstanding kid could go form Grade 2 to Grade 3.5). Slow kids would do well, as they are reviewing material for the second time.
Slashdot Mirror
Care to point to point two of such "wild claims" that Noam Chomsky might have made?
About fifteen years ago or so he used to claim quite often that there was a conspiracy by which the NYT determines what will be the next day headlines and all other papers in the nation obey. Tin foil hat stuff, really.
His proof was the apparent coordination between newspapers, which only showed that he doesn't understand how order can arise from a bunch of independent minded agents. (E.g. the NYT headlines are often newsbreaking and well thought out, so three times out of four the best headline you can come up with is that of the NYT. Indeed, whenever any other big east coast newspaper broke a big story --say the WSJ-- all other newspapers copied the WSJ headline, not the NYT headline).
To his credit I haven't heard him say it lately, which suggest to me that somebody sat him down and explained why his "proof" was no proof at all (maybe they explained the game of life to him, since he is also a distinguished linguist and computer scientist).
He also had an error ridden article on the Latin American neoliberal recovery, getting all his facts mixed up. Looked like a rush job really, and out of character with his usually much more reasoned arguments.
They all started processing the header into an abnormal instruction sequence (for example one of them started interpreting the next line as commands typed within the mail client). Only one called the shell.
As anybody who has been to Alberta in February knows, all you need is walk into the local Walmart, ask for standard gear for the Albertan winter, remove a couple of layers and voila: martian-ready space suit.
On the day the rover sojourner landed in Mars it was colder in Edmonton than in the sojourner landing area (seriously).
Name one.
Pfft. The very fact that you have a hard time believing it shows how little you know about Unix/Linux security.
To give a very recent example, about a month ago I received a weird piece of mail which made pine barf and try to execute the next line of the message in a shell. I couldn't even delete the message, so I tried mutt, elm and mail. All of them choked equally. This is the n-th time that this has happened. I've seen it on a sun, dec unix and a linux box at one time or another, btw.
In the end since the message was at the end of my mailbox it was easier to "head" the file to the right location and thus dispose of the message.
PArt of the problem is that the argument came down to a value judgement.
You are mixing two things here: whether AST was right or wrong and what were his motivations. Sure it came down to a value judgement which is one reason I never fully bought into his arguments, but that in no way implies he was "out to get Linux" or "just sour grapes".
Lastly over the years we seem to have more and more spare CPU cycles while user driven demand is lagging. Because of this, I have changed my mind, for example, about automatic arrays bound checking. Back in the early 80's programs IBM PC programs were short enough that a good programmer could keep track of not violating array bounds, while the penalty of checking said bounds everytime was too high.
Today I see positively no reason to use a language without array bounds checking for a user app. The only applications that I can think you wouldn't want to do this are the OS kernel and real time control software.
Ditto for kernels. In today's world of worms and viruses we should gladly pay a 20% penalty in exchange for extra security.
Keep in mind that Linux/Unix is not half as secure as more people think it is. For example almost all mail clients are prone to buffer overflow errors on the subject line, for one. Most of them don't handle control or extended ascii characters correctly either.
Indeed, how could your favorite programming language be other than perfect? What was I saying about Linux kiddies not knowing how to handle reasoned criticism?
By the way, the bug I pointed out has been fixed in Python, and similar bugs have been fixed in C, so there is not reason why it couldn't be fixed.
You know, I think I had AST wrong. I'd seen the thread where he bashes Linus for not doing a microkernel design and thought that maybe it was sour grapes.
Well shame on you. While I've never fully bought into Tanenbaum's arguments on microkernel they have never been antyhing but cogent, coherent and well made.
It is the kind of debate that academics are used to making all the time and AST as the distinguished and brilliant OS professor he is, gave us a good example of.
It seems Linux kiddies weren't mature enough to handle them and asumed malice on AST's part.
ESR is at his stupidiest when he goes into his anarchist/libertarian rants. The election he quotes above took place a year after the burning of the Reichstag, after which Hitler eliminated all his political opponents.
Reminds me of the movie where the leader asks "any objections" and somebody raises his hand and the leader shoots him, then asks "any others"?
Then along comes ESR and idiotically points out that there was only one objection. Duh!
The technology for a semantic web exists already.
Some of the simpler -yet useful- parts of the semantic web can be done today. Other parts of the more grandiose vision of TBL are as much pie in the sky as the promises of AI were in the 70s.
The semantic web is the return of the snake oil salesman of the 70s and early 80s who highjacked AI research with undeliverable promises of intelligent machines "just around the corner".
s ho ld=-1&commentsort=1&tid=95&mode=nested&cid=9207128
To this date, serious AI researchers are still paying the price of this scientific fraud, which makes cold fussion look like a prank.
Tim Berners-Lee is a good person and not a computer scientist so he has neither the knowledge nor enough malice to understand the pack of thieves he has surrounded himself with.
I'm not the only one saying this:
Semantic web is doomed to failure precisely because it is being pushed by a group with a reputation for talking rather than doing.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=108295&thre
r John Lieske of the Mayo Clinic claims they have found irrefutable evidence of the existence of nanobacteria.
They do not claim such a thing. They claim to have found potential evidence of the existence of nanobacteria. Alternate explanations of the evidence have already been given (false positive DNA test, for one).
potential != irrefutable
SUV's have there place. Yes they are stupid as a communter car for one person, but that doesn't make them bad. You take that same SUV, put 6 people in it that communt, then it's pretty good.
You are confused. Most SUVs do not sit six people. Those are called minivans. For example, Chevrolet lists seven SUVs of which only two sit more than five people.
Yes, lets get my family of 4, plus groceries in a hond civic. That will work.
Tell you what, go to your Honda dealer with your family of four and ask for to test drive a Honda Element. Drive over to the supermarket and buy your groceries. You'll see that there is plenty of space for your family of 4 and your groceries, while getting 50% better mileage than a Tahoe.
Look, we can curtail consumption dramatically overnight if need be. In fact we could increase the car efficiency by a factor of 3 overnight. Not only the technology is already here, but you can drive it off the parking lot today!
Do you know that the average mile per gallon today in the US is lower than in the mid-80s?
What would be the reduction in gas consumption if we all dumped our SUVs and bought Honda Civics?
Now, what if we then switched to Hybrids?
What if we gave up the back seat for our one-person commute and we all switched to smart cars?
What if we equipped said smartcars with super-efficient bicycle-like wheels as California is suggesting we do?
Mark my words: in two years people won't be able to give away for free their gas guzzling SUV (people who are old enough will remember that in the late 70s you could not give away your LTD Crown Victoria).
Look, any way you cut it the 100K computers Google is reputed to have is the most powerful Linux cluster anywhere in the world.
An OSS search engine that actually indexes the entire web and is used by many people is at least a couple of orders of magnitude harder than the Mozilla project.
Writing the search code itself is not too hard (you still need a PhD in data structures and algorithms, but those can be found), the real hard part is the amount of bandwidth and CPU power that is required.
except for that pesky little shortest path first algorithm (developed by Dijkstra)
Except that he didn't. People in the field already knew the algorithm. Dijkstra was the one who decided that for the sake of completeness it was worth joting it down. He use to protest against the usage of the term "Dijkstra's algorithm".
Most of the rest are cold blooded killings where there is actually a low chance of being caught.
Only because the streets are underpoliced. If you look at statistics overseas, you can find jurisdictions where the number of unsolved deaths is minimal (for one, since they have lower murder rates they can devote a dozen detectives for an entire a year to each murder case... which further increases the chances of the murderer being caught and thus reduces the number of murders, freeing even more detectives to investigating the next case and so on. In other words a virtuous circle).
The number of people who would be discouraged by say 30 years prison, but not discouraged by 20 years prison is miniscule.
True, but as I said even in this case a measurable drop in crime has been detected due to having the hardened criminals off commission for longer.
Harsh penalties do *nothing* to deter crime.
Actually, you are wrong on that one. Your rebuttal argument is flawed:
Texas is the death penalty capital of the world. By your logic that would also make it the safest place in the world, yet people are murdered here every day.
You are using a flawed control group: other random places in the world. For the control group to be valid you have to find a place with similar socio-economic characteristics *and* similar prison conditions but laxer sentencing practices.
Moreover, save for hardened criminals which tend not to act rationally, studies *have* shown that the common folk tend to adjust their rates of criminal behaviour in proportion to (a) likelihood of being caught (b) harshness of the penalty if caught and (c) potential reward as compared to living a straight life.
For example in a jurisdiction when a specific crime is suddenly punished in a much harsher way, criminals gravitate to less harshly punished activities.
Same studies have shown that a certain percentage of the drop in crime rates of that type are due to the simple reason that criminals are out of comission longer, due to the longer jail sentences (duh!). So even among the hardened criminals we see a reduction in crime rates, simply because they are in prison and off the streets.
First the kid ..
He's old enough to drive, work, vote, own a gun, go to war and die on the service of his country, and be elected to office.
That makes him a young man, not a kid.
I don't know how this thing actually works in practice, but if the quality of their graphics is an indication, I'm optimistic. I had a quick look at the screenshots and my immediate reaction was "at last a linux GUI that doesn't hurt my eyes".
Such statements only hurt OSS. There's plenty intuitive in Windows, and the sooner we duplicate those the better we are.
/. never mind.
By the same token, there is plenty that is non-intuitive too, so we should steer away from those.
As they say, know thy enemy. That is the rational think to do.... hey wait, this is
Why the heck are we still focused on emulating windows right down to the exact contextual menus?
For one because however quirky they are still better than what Linux offers.
As well, we would be better off first fully catching up to Windows/MacOS and then striking off on a better path. That way OSSers get to benefit from somebody else's efforts, just like Microsoft learned from others.
C'mon, don't waste your talents for another second!
Actually what you have is a severe case of NIH syndrome.
I agree. I'm really worried about what he did to that intern. Such a lack of judgement... I mean invading the wrong country for the wrong reasons and getting us into a quagmire, that I can understand. but talking advantage of a 23 year old intern! For godsake, she was almost a child!
When I came here at the age of 16, one of the biggest cultural shocks for me was that among people my own age, intellect and doing good at school was not encouraged.. even mocked.
And you know what? You go to you highshool reunion fifteen years later and in all likelihood you are doing substantially better than them (even before bubble times Techie salaries were above average).
Plus, by that time the acne has gone down and you have developed a healthy CRT tan, as well as bought the obligatory bimmer... The girls are all over you while the jocks are definitely impressed.
You figure it wouldn't be that hard to put two and two together and expect the friendly school geek to do well, but somehow chicks&jocks miss the obvious and are very surprised during the high school reunion....
One of the reasons our schools are ineffective is this: If we had standards, a lot more kids would flunk out of school, putting more criminals on the street.
How about the idea of having half-grades like in Minnesota. Good students go from Grade 1 to Grade 2, students who struggled too much go from Grade 1 to Grade 1.5. This helps them shore up knowledge while removing stigma, since it is assumed that a large percentage of kids will do this (something like 25%).
Plus bright kids might also find themselves in a half grade (say an outstanding kid could go form Grade 2 to Grade 3.5). Slow kids would do well, as they are reviewing material for the second time.