I'm not sure your estimate of the use time is accurate for a turbine in the open ocean. I suspect that away from obstacles the wind would blow considerably more frequently. I'm sure the information is available somewhere, and I agree with you that it should be a part of the article. But different locations have different use factors. There are locations where the wind effectively NEVER stops blowing. Naturally, these aren't on the open ocean, and they rarely have very MUCH wind. But I suspect that a location in the open ocean might have a use factor of over 50%...depending on the location. (OTOH, in some locations it could shut down for months at a time. See "becalmed". See also "horse latitudes".)
No. For me the canon was basically the books by L. Frank Baum and by his granddaughter Ruth Plumly Thompson. I accepted a couple of John R. Neil books...but they never really felt like they fit. The later renditions... well... "Historical revisionism"? They just interfered with the consistency of the system.
Remember. these books aren't told in the first person, so it's not a matter of differing points of view. Motives aren't directly perceptible, actions are, including speech action. (It's been a few decades, so I could be wrong about this, but it's how I remember them.)
After a quick brief check, emotions are occasionally attributed to characters by the omniscient observer, but they are validated by observable actions. (Note that it was a quick check, not an extensive one. It's quite possible that there are slips into an alternate mode of narration, but the basic one is the omniscient observer.)
Well, at one time negro was an adjective meaning black. Not meaning a racial group. I think Latin may have been the dominant tongue then...and they spelled it either niger or nigra depending on the gender of what they modified. (It also varied with the case...I gave the nominative.) But pronunciation was a lot sloppier than spelling. And when the adjective became nominalized (negrus: The Black one) it was pronounced negro. (This, naturally, varies with the century and the country.) (Also note the changed spelling...well, spelling wasn't very standardized then. People prided themselves on the number of way they knew to spell a word. And literacy had declined a long way from Roman times.)
If a group of people are persecuted under a name, they are likely to take one of two paths: either they will embrace the name or they will reject it. If they chose the name themselves, they are more likely to embrace it. You rarely find a Zulu rejecting the term Zulu. And Slavs don't reject the term slav, just because it turned into the english word Slave. (But then few of the Slavs that we know of are the descendants of those slaves.)
The term "The black one" is rather obviously a term applied by an outsider. As such, it's not surprising that it is rejected. It's interesting, though, that the term adopted by the American descendants of the Africans also means the same thing. I have my doubts as to it's durability, but for now to accept it seems the only polite thing to do.
The thing is, almost any of the current word processors is perfectly adequate for documents that you create in it. And most of them are good enough to handle over, say, 97% of the documents created.
Toss in network effects, and the difficulties in converting a document created in one word processor into another word processor. (Margins handled slightly differently, different handling of tables of contents and indexes, alignment of images, etc.)
Given all that we don't WANT to have many word processors. We want to have only a very few. In particular we want a small, light, word processor for trivial documents, and we want a full-featured word processor for complex documents. (And don't say Lyx. Shudder. Or TEX.) Well, ok, one super deluxe type layout program. That one hasn't been written yet. It's a cross between a page layout program and a word processor. It has it's own embedded graphic engines. (And, no, I don't count OpenOffice as having an embedded graphic engine. It's one step in that direction, or maybe two. But there's most of a block to go.) And there might also be a place for a medium level word processor. Something between AbiWord and OpenOffice. But I don't think KWord fits. It's trying to BE OpenOffice, i.e. the heavyweight word processor.)
Now I'll grant that normally what I'd want is the "heavy weight word processor". I generally want indexes and a table of contents. I'd like to have chapter specific tables of contents, and multiple indicies. I don't generally want much in the way of graphics, but my wife is almost the opposite. She wants lots of graphics and text is thought of as an adjunct to the graphics. And she wants to divide pages into quarters, with each quarter having a separate rotation. (Which should be vertical for editing, but proper for page viewing.) And she'd like to have double-sided printing, specifying which quarter-sheet is on the back of which quarter sheet. Only simply. But we want to share documents easily.
That "share documents easily" rules out the "multitude of word processors" option as satisfactory.
It's much easier to write portable interpreted languages, (But I don't call them "High Performance".)
One interesting language I haven't mentioned is Eiffel. It's a language that COULD have been a contender. But again, it's hamstrung by it's lack of libraries and the clumsy C interface. (Actually, I understand that it's C interface is improving...but it's probably too late.)
I expect that what will arise, finally, is a modified version of C or C++ that restricts pointers and doesn't allow conversion between pointers and integers. I may or may not like it, but it will be comfortable enough to enough people. It won't have a robust type system like Ada has (pity...mostly), because not enough people see the value. It might expand on the syntactical uses of enum types, though. It might have range types. It had *better* have garbage collection, or, as I mentioned previously, it won't solve the problem. (I think C++ has pushed that off until 2012 or later, but I'm not real sure.)
Note that steps have already been taken towards all of these features within either C or C++. (See various boost library features, and some recent syntax adoptions.) The syntax that is used is GARBAGE!!!, but the features are there, which makes a syntax translator a reasonable thing to create. Then you could have a front-end to C or C++ that would itself be a decent language, and which only needed to make an isomorphic transform of the code to become compileable. (That's a one way transform, of course. The transform may be one-to-one, but it wouldn't be onto. There's no safe translation for freely convertible pointers.) This neo-C would be something that it was much more reasonable to write a garbage collector for, and it would be designed from the beginning to allow easy integration of C or C++ libraries.
My feeling is that it would be very simple to create such a language NOW. What would be difficult would be convincing people to use it. The basic idea is to allow references, but to forbid pointers. That and a few other changes, like eliminating the preprocessor, but replacing it with safer methods for accomplishing the same things...or such of the same things as are reasonably safe. I think that all macro equivalent expressions should themselves be required to be syntactically correct. (Maybe that's been done. It's been a long time since I did extensive programming in C...especially of other people's code. And I avoid the use of macros in my own code.)
FWIW, I've done most of my programming recently in Python or D...pretty much depending on whether I needed access to extensive libraries. Now I've hit a place where Python's to slow and D doesn't have the libraries...so I'm switching to Java. I find C's use of pointer's too appalling to tolerate.
Ada's main problem is that it's quite difficult to use strings. Fixed strings of different lengths are different types, and Fixed string is the default string type. If unlimited strings were the default (and what literal strings were) and Fixed strings were an optimization, this problem would go away.
Of course, there's still the library problem. Ada can easily call C routines, *IF* the routines expect arguments of a compatible nature. If not... well, it's do-able, but it requires upkeep. Look at the state of Gtk support in Ada. It was done quite awhile ago, and the last time I looked, they were still fighting with an old version of Gtk. Database support would be as bad, but until quite recently NOBODY has done Database support well. (SQL is powerful, but manipulating SQL strings to get at your data is worse than awkward.) I rather like some of the recent approaches I've encountered (e.g., Python's SqlObject), but I don't think that it's a high performance approach. Nothing that involves storing numbers as strings is going to be high performance. Oracle's BerkeleyDB-je approach has promise (class annotations), but again I have a hard time thinking of anything for Java as being high-performance. I suspect that it's just easier to use...not that that's to be sneezed at.
Ada is, indeed, a high performance language that has had separate tasking built-into it for quite awhile. But it has run into the problem of Libraries and generally ignored it. As a result it has niche superiority and use. It's a rather nice language except for it's problem with strings.
OTOH, I admit to doubts about any language that doesn't handle garbage collection being usable in a distributed multi-processor environment...except for largely single-threaded applications. Memory management is difficult enough in single-threaded applications. Once you expand to multi-tasking where each task can be multi-threaded... well, I expect memory leaks to become MUCH more common, unless that language itself handles garbage collection.
The main problem faced by each new language is "How do I access all the stuff that's already been done?"
The "Do it over again" answer hasn't been successful since Sun pushed Java, and Java's initial target was an area that hadn't had a lot of development work. Sun spent a lot of money pushing Java, and was only partially successful. Now it probably couldn't be done again even by a major corporation.
The other main answer is make calling stuff written in C or C++ (or Java) trivial.Python has used this to great effect, and Ruby to a slightly lesser one. Also note Jython, Groovy, Scala, etc. But if you're after high performance, Java has the dead weight of an interpreter (i.e., virtual machine). So that basically leaves easy linkage with C or C++. And both are purely DREADFUL languages to link to, due to pointer/integer conversions and macros. And callbacks. Individual libraries can be wrapped, but it's not easy to craft global solutions that work nicely. gcc has some compiler options that could be used to eliminate macros. Presumably so do other compilers. But they definitely aren't standardized. And you're still left not knowing what's a pointer so you don't know what memory can be freed.
The result of this is that to get a new language into a workable state means a tremendous effort to wrap libraries. And this needs to be done AFTER the language is stabilized. And the people willing to work on this aren't the same people as the language implementers (who have their own jobs).
I looked over those language sites, and I couldn't see any sign that thoughts had been given to either Foreign Function Interfaces or wrapping external libraries. Possibly they just used different terms, but I suspect not. My suspicion is that the implementers aren't really interested in language use so much as proving a concept. So THESE aren't the languages that we want, but they are test-beds for working out ideas that will later be imported into other languages.
6) Well get prepared for governments totally without justice and fairness then. Because they ARE becoming more automated. (To me it appears a practical question.)
A philosophical question is, by definition, one that is considered because of love of knowledge. If you consider it because of practical implications, then it's not philosophical. I'm not a philosopher because my interests are founded elsewhere than in love of knowledge...usually practicality. This shouldn't be taken to imply that I'm not interested in remote consequences, but rather that I'm interested in what the observable consequences are or will be. And the observation can be statistical in nature.
Observation is actually the wrong term, but it seems standard. What I actually mean is results that are predictable based on my model of the interactions that happen. Some of these results need to be observable to validate the model, but many of them may not be in any practical sense. They are still predicted actual consequences.
The feds have frequently closed down alternative currencies that were not politically correct. The excuse was that they were illegally printing money, though I forget the exact wording of the charge. Most of the alternative currencies only circulated in local areas. (I.e., not across state boundaries.)
1) The Socrates that we know is a literary creation. Quite fictional. (There are a couple of alternative portrayals that are less flattering than Plato's.)
3) Plato came LONG before Aesop. And Plato was a political meddler, whereas Aesop was a slave.
4) All rulers are held in power by force. I suspect that very few of them actually control the force without regard for other agencies. (Yeah, the philosopher-king, either in my form or in Plato's form, is something that could never happen.)
5) I'm judging on the historical record of how much they desired power. The more they desired it, the less qualified I consider them. (There's also how much they would feel impelled to do a good job, but that's another axis.)
6) I'm interested in justice, but to me it has a rather practical measure. It's a metaphor for good construction, as, say, a just tempered scale (music). It means something like well put together, as in the joints don't flex when they aren't supposed to, and do when they should. It's not the same as fair, which to me means that you can exchange sides without loss. (I.e., the metaphor is to a set of honest scales. [The kind that use weights.]) As such, people are required to judge as external observers, but aren't required as decision makers. This works for both fair and just, though they measure different qualities.
Now I'll grant that this definition is rather problematic. I can't think of an objective measure for EITHER justice or fairness. But as systems become more automated we better come up with one! This is going to have practical impacts on our society. (In fact, it's already having such impacts, and neither justice nor fairness is readily observable in the results.)
It's not that I like him. It's that he's better than Biden.
Actually, he may be better than the average Senator. As presidents go, he's not that bad. Of course, just like most presidents, he *IS* an enemy of freedom, but so are ALL of the alternates.
The constitution doesn't give the Govt the right to a MONOPOLY on the printing of money. At that time, and for nearly a century afterwards, various states had their own currencies. So did various municipalities. (This was frequently abused in "company towns". If you worked for the company you were paid in company money which was only good in company stores, etc.)
The "interstate commerce" clause has been expanded in interpretation beyond all recognition of it's original intent: To act as a mediator between the states at boundary disputes, and in the crossing of good. It wasn't intended to regulate non-governmental commerce. I can't remember when or why the current interpretation was created.
N.B.: I'm not claiming that the constitution as originally interpreted would or could work in the current world. I'm claiming that the means used to alter it, altering the interpretation of the meaning rather than amending it, were illegitimate.
1) I'm not a philosopher. I (as opposed to Plato) was arguing that philosophers should be in power because they were less interested in power than most people. There is, of course, a statistical distribution of "love of power" among philosophers. The one's most interested are, by this criterion, unqualified.
2) I didn't propose any way in which this would occur. I haven't imagined any that puts a qualified human philosopher in charge.
3) My argument is loosely based on Aesop's "Better king log than king stork." In Aesop's fable, the king was a gift of the gods, and thus required neither agreement or support.
4) All rulers are held in power by force. That this one would require the same is not an argument against it.
5) Yeah, Plato is one of the philosophers that I would consider supremely unqualified. His creation, Socrates, however, would be a good choice. I'd prefer Feynman over Mother Theresa. But not Teller.
6) Nobody can be a good president. The psychological characteristics necessary to deal with Congress prevent one from making choices good for the country, so you're either ineffectual or you make bad choices. Or, of course, both. This is why I proposed selecting both the president and the legislature by lot. (I'm not sure about the president. Congress requires general agreement to do anything, so individual aberrations tend to get weeded out. The president, however, acts as an individual. Single bad choices are much worse. I'd worry about this if my proposal had any chance of being put into action.)
More on Plato: Plato wrote his "The Republic" after "leaving town for his health" after having dabbled a bit freely in politics. He's almost the antithesis of the psychological type I meant when I said "Philosopher". But people today tend to segregate themselves differently. Today people don't tend to go into philosophy unless they are rather uninterested in the mundane world. And love of power isn't one of their dominant characteristics. So there's no guarantee this same distribution of psychological types would continue if philosophers started getting picked for positions of authority. And it's the psychological type that's important.
Additionally, it's almost certain that people would be very unhappy with a ruler that was so disinterested in power. This doesn't mean he'd be a bad choice, merely that people like a strong ruler. But strong rulers tend to be more aggressive than is good for the country. They tend to manipulate in various ways, and creating an external enemy is one of the traditional ways. But once you've created an external enemy, the next step is obvious...eliminate it. This has happened over and over throughout human history. (Not always successfully, but it's destructive whether successful or not.)
OTOH, people are people. They only, en mass, react in a certain limited number of ways. It may well be impossible to have a just government. At least one judged and administered by humans. (If the legislators were actually held to the laws that they passed, then things MIGHT be a bit different. But possibly not. People can be incredibly short-sighted...and predict only what they want as the results of their actions.)
FWIW, this argument is more important than is immediately apparent. The government decisions are increasingly being made by automated decision procedures. Bureaucracy is slowly giving way to something that hasn't yet been named. This means that both the vices and the virtues of Bureaucracy can't be expected to survive the transformation. (They may, but don't count on it.) So far it's still people making the decisions, albeit people at greater and greater remove from the event. This means that it's often still possible to appeal a decision of the system to a human decision maker. But yearly this is becoming less true. You want a fair system? This may give you a fair system, but one with no sympathy at all. At that point it becomes crucially important that the laws be just. A fair system enforcing unjust laws may be a nightmare from which we cannot awaken.
As a statistician, I claim that it *IS* possible to be unbiased. Of course, you've got to accept my definition of bias. (I.e., having an unbiased viewpoint would be equivalent to having a viewpoint the same as that of the mean viewpoint of your population sample.)
Do you have a different definition of bias?
N.B.: What I object to is that belief that an unbiased viewpoint is necessarily better.
But philosophers ARE the ones most suited to be kings (well, most of them) because they are the ones least interested in power. This isn't a claim that they are suited, merely that they are somewhat less unsuited. (Programmers are up there too. And abstract mathematicians. And some applied mathematicians. And several sorts of artist. But not engineers. Nobody involved in the experimental sciences. They're too connected to achieving their ends in the physical universe. So they would want power as a tool.)
The real problem with an average philosopher as king is that he wouldn't be even interested enough to do a decent job. But being interested for the power is a true disqualifier. (Not for being a king, but for being a good one.)
My real feeling is that given the nature of people, the best way to choose executives and legislators would be by random choice among high school graduates. This makes it impossible to bribe them before they take the office. And it means that there aren't any re-election campaigns to take bribes to pay for. (If there were significant chance of this being implemented there are various "fine-tuning" tweaks I'd apply, but as there's no chance, why bother.)
I don't know about you, but as a four year old I needed SOME privacy. I was able to get it, and it is not the same as neglect at all. (Granted, I don't have specific memories of needing privacy as a five year old. But I still doubt your assertion.)
It's possible that a one or two year old has no need for privacy, but that's not the way I'd place a bet. Their need is considerably smaller, but I believe that it still exists.
As a four year old, I achieved privacy by climbing up in an apple tree and staying there for ??? some period of time, probably less than an hour, but whatever felt right. This is an escape that isn't usually available these days.
Privacy and neglect are almost orthogonal. One can easily have both neglect and lack of privacy. One can also easily have both privacy and lack of neglect. Privacy and neglect is trivial. The final quadrant is a bit more difficult, but also happens, when the parents are sufficiently neurotic.
Kids, as well as teens and adults, NEED privacy. They also need to be protected, but that doesn't obviate the need for privacy.
The problem is how to respect their need for privacy while sufficiently protecting them in an environment that's unconscionably dangerous. The best solution would be to make the environment safer, but that's a bit difficult for one individual to do. Work toward, yes, but be reasonable about what you expect.
So you need to take reasonable measures to protect your children while still respecting their privacy. For someone under 12 a locator seems a quite reasonable method. It's not perfect, and won't defend against malice, but it's reasonable. Something like a remotely readable GPS system that's accessible by phone. I suspect that such things are available, but I'm not certain. WiFi trackers are used for tracking animals, and some are pretty small, but many locations are without live WiFi networks accessible to random passers-by. So a cell phone connection seems the right answer. This probably means that there isn't an open source solution, since the number of open source cell phones is miniscule. But it also means that there is probably a extant solution...if you look in the right place.
I don't know about now, but at one point they had a line in their EULA that read (approx.) "We have the right to add, delete, modify, copy, or remove any file on your computer." That can be taken pretty much as a paraphrase of your "we'll do what we want with your system and installed programs".
I stopped using MS software before agreeing to that line.
Interestingly enough a year or so ago that same line also popped up in a Mac software upgrade's EULA. I stopped buying or upgrading Macs then. Fortunately, I'd already mainly shifted over to Linux, but my wife's been a harder case. She's more interested in what she can do than in legal liabilities, and there are several proprietary applications that don't work particularly well (if at all) on Linux. And their files are in proprietary formats, so I can't do much to save the data. Be Warned.
This is a community, not a borg. You get lots of different ideas in a community. Some aren't so hot.
If you read the threads under this article, you'll notice that most people are dismissing this argument. You might also notice that the published article was in InfoWorld. Hardly a spokesman for ANY segment of the FOSS community.
I doubt they're "flushing down the drain" ANY. Linux is one of the more popular OSs installed on IBM mainframes. (I don't even KNOW if they support MVS/MT anymore. Or CMS.)
It's been decades since *I've* used an IBM mainframe, but I still read the new occasionally.
That's their loss. The next time the software's revised, their version will be incompatible. Different fixes will have been used. And the revisions will work with the standard fixes, not their custom mods.
So, yes, they're playing dog in the manger. But it's likely to hurt them more than it hurts the community. (The community probably won't even notice.)
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I'm not sure your estimate of the use time is accurate for a turbine in the open ocean. I suspect that away from obstacles the wind would blow considerably more frequently. I'm sure the information is available somewhere, and I agree with you that it should be a part of the article. But different locations have different use factors. There are locations where the wind effectively NEVER stops blowing. Naturally, these aren't on the open ocean, and they rarely have very MUCH wind. But I suspect that a location in the open ocean might have a use factor of over 50%...depending on the location. (OTOH, in some locations it could shut down for months at a time. See "becalmed". See also "horse latitudes".)
No. For me the canon was basically the books by L. Frank Baum and by his granddaughter Ruth Plumly Thompson. I accepted a couple of John R. Neil books...but they never really felt like they fit. The later renditions... well... "Historical revisionism"? They just interfered with the consistency of the system.
Remember. these books aren't told in the first person, so it's not a matter of differing points of view. Motives aren't directly perceptible, actions are, including speech action. (It's been a few decades, so I could be wrong about this, but it's how I remember them.)
After a quick brief check, emotions are occasionally attributed to characters by the omniscient observer, but they are validated by observable actions. (Note that it was a quick check, not an extensive one. It's quite possible that there are slips into an alternate mode of narration, but the basic one is the omniscient observer.)
I read the book first, and always despised the movie. I'm told I even despised it at 6 years old.
And that hideously atrocious ending! YUCK!
Well, at one time negro was an adjective meaning black. Not meaning a racial group. I think Latin may have been the dominant tongue then...and they spelled it either niger or nigra depending on the gender of what they modified. (It also varied with the case...I gave the nominative.) But pronunciation was a lot sloppier than spelling. And when the adjective became nominalized (negrus: The Black one) it was pronounced negro. (This, naturally, varies with the century and the country.) (Also note the changed spelling...well, spelling wasn't very standardized then. People prided themselves on the number of way they knew to spell a word. And literacy had declined a long way from Roman times.)
If a group of people are persecuted under a name, they are likely to take one of two paths: either they will embrace the name or they will reject it. If they chose the name themselves, they are more likely to embrace it. You rarely find a Zulu rejecting the term Zulu. And Slavs don't reject the term slav, just because it turned into the english word Slave. (But then few of the Slavs that we know of are the descendants of those slaves.)
The term "The black one" is rather obviously a term applied by an outsider. As such, it's not surprising that it is rejected. It's interesting, though, that the term adopted by the American descendants of the Africans also means the same thing. I have my doubts as to it's durability, but for now to accept it seems the only polite thing to do.
The thing is, almost any of the current word processors is perfectly adequate for documents that you create in it. And most of them are good enough to handle over, say, 97% of the documents created.
Toss in network effects, and the difficulties in converting a document created in one word processor into another word processor. (Margins handled slightly differently, different handling of tables of contents and indexes, alignment of images, etc.)
Given all that we don't WANT to have many word processors. We want to have only a very few. In particular we want a small, light, word processor for trivial documents, and we want a full-featured word processor for complex documents. (And don't say Lyx. Shudder. Or TEX.) Well, ok, one super deluxe type layout program. That one hasn't been written yet. It's a cross between a page layout program and a word processor. It has it's own embedded graphic engines. (And, no, I don't count OpenOffice as having an embedded graphic engine. It's one step in that direction, or maybe two. But there's most of a block to go.) And there might also be a place for a medium level word processor. Something between AbiWord and OpenOffice. But I don't think KWord fits. It's trying to BE OpenOffice, i.e. the heavyweight word processor.)
Now I'll grant that normally what I'd want is the "heavy weight word processor". I generally want indexes and a table of contents. I'd like to have chapter specific tables of contents, and multiple indicies. I don't generally want much in the way of graphics, but my wife is almost the opposite. She wants lots of graphics and text is thought of as an adjunct to the graphics. And she wants to divide pages into quarters, with each quarter having a separate rotation. (Which should be vertical for editing, but proper for page viewing.) And she'd like to have double-sided printing, specifying which quarter-sheet is on the back of which quarter sheet. Only simply. But we want to share documents easily.
That "share documents easily" rules out the "multitude of word processors" option as satisfactory.
It's much easier to write portable interpreted languages, (But I don't call them "High Performance".)
One interesting language I haven't mentioned is Eiffel. It's a language that COULD have been a contender. But again, it's hamstrung by it's lack of libraries and the clumsy C interface. (Actually, I understand that it's C interface is improving...but it's probably too late.)
I expect that what will arise, finally, is a modified version of C or C++ that restricts pointers and doesn't allow conversion between pointers and integers. I may or may not like it, but it will be comfortable enough to enough people. It won't have a robust type system like Ada has (pity...mostly), because not enough people see the value. It might expand on the syntactical uses of enum types, though. It might have range types. It had *better* have garbage collection, or, as I mentioned previously, it won't solve the problem. (I think C++ has pushed that off until 2012 or later, but I'm not real sure.)
Note that steps have already been taken towards all of these features within either C or C++. (See various boost library features, and some recent syntax adoptions.) The syntax that is used is GARBAGE!!!, but the features are there, which makes a syntax translator a reasonable thing to create. Then you could have a front-end to C or C++ that would itself be a decent language, and which only needed to make an isomorphic transform of the code to become compileable. (That's a one way transform, of course. The transform may be one-to-one, but it wouldn't be onto. There's no safe translation for freely convertible pointers.) This neo-C would be something that it was much more reasonable to write a garbage collector for, and it would be designed from the beginning to allow easy integration of C or C++ libraries.
My feeling is that it would be very simple to create such a language NOW. What would be difficult would be convincing people to use it. The basic idea is to allow references, but to forbid pointers. That and a few other changes, like eliminating the preprocessor, but replacing it with safer methods for accomplishing the same things...or such of the same things as are reasonably safe. I think that all macro equivalent expressions should themselves be required to be syntactically correct. (Maybe that's been done. It's been a long time since I did extensive programming in C...especially of other people's code. And I avoid the use of macros in my own code.)
FWIW, I've done most of my programming recently in Python or D...pretty much depending on whether I needed access to extensive libraries. Now I've hit a place where Python's to slow and D doesn't have the libraries...so I'm switching to Java. I find C's use of pointer's too appalling to tolerate.
Ada's main problem is that it's quite difficult to use strings. Fixed strings of different lengths are different types, and Fixed string is the default string type. If unlimited strings were the default (and what literal strings were) and Fixed strings were an optimization, this problem would go away.
Of course, there's still the library problem. Ada can easily call C routines, *IF* the routines expect arguments of a compatible nature. If not... well, it's do-able, but it requires upkeep. Look at the state of Gtk support in Ada. It was done quite awhile ago, and the last time I looked, they were still fighting with an old version of Gtk. Database support would be as bad, but until quite recently NOBODY has done Database support well. (SQL is powerful, but manipulating SQL strings to get at your data is worse than awkward.) I rather like some of the recent approaches I've encountered (e.g., Python's SqlObject), but I don't think that it's a high performance approach. Nothing that involves storing numbers as strings is going to be high performance. Oracle's BerkeleyDB-je approach has promise (class annotations), but again I have a hard time thinking of anything for Java as being high-performance. I suspect that it's just easier to use...not that that's to be sneezed at.
Ada is, indeed, a high performance language that has had separate tasking built-into it for quite awhile. But it has run into the problem of Libraries and generally ignored it. As a result it has niche superiority and use. It's a rather nice language except for it's problem with strings.
OTOH, I admit to doubts about any language that doesn't handle garbage collection being usable in a distributed multi-processor environment...except for largely single-threaded applications. Memory management is difficult enough in single-threaded applications. Once you expand to multi-tasking where each task can be multi-threaded... well, I expect memory leaks to become MUCH more common, unless that language itself handles garbage collection.
The main problem faced by each new language is "How do I access all the stuff that's already been done?"
The "Do it over again" answer hasn't been successful since Sun pushed Java, and Java's initial target was an area that hadn't had a lot of development work. Sun spent a lot of money pushing Java, and was only partially successful. Now it probably couldn't be done again even by a major corporation.
The other main answer is make calling stuff written in C or C++ (or Java) trivial.Python has used this to great effect, and Ruby to a slightly lesser one. Also note Jython, Groovy, Scala, etc. But if you're after high performance, Java has the dead weight of an interpreter (i.e., virtual machine). So that basically leaves easy linkage with C or C++. And both are purely DREADFUL languages to link to, due to pointer/integer conversions and macros. And callbacks. Individual libraries can be wrapped, but it's not easy to craft global solutions that work nicely. gcc has some compiler options that could be used to eliminate macros. Presumably so do other compilers. But they definitely aren't standardized. And you're still left not knowing what's a pointer so you don't know what memory can be freed.
The result of this is that to get a new language into a workable state means a tremendous effort to wrap libraries. And this needs to be done AFTER the language is stabilized. And the people willing to work on this aren't the same people as the language implementers (who have their own jobs).
I looked over those language sites, and I couldn't see any sign that thoughts had been given to either Foreign Function Interfaces or wrapping external libraries. Possibly they just used different terms, but I suspect not. My suspicion is that the implementers aren't really interested in language use so much as proving a concept. So THESE aren't the languages that we want, but they are test-beds for working out ideas that will later be imported into other languages.
6) Well get prepared for governments totally without justice and fairness then. Because they ARE becoming more automated. (To me it appears a practical question.)
A philosophical question is, by definition, one that is considered because of love of knowledge. If you consider it because of practical implications, then it's not philosophical. I'm not a philosopher because my interests are founded elsewhere than in love of knowledge...usually practicality. This shouldn't be taken to imply that I'm not interested in remote consequences, but rather that I'm interested in what the observable consequences are or will be. And the observation can be statistical in nature.
Observation is actually the wrong term, but it seems standard. What I actually mean is results that are predictable based on my model of the interactions that happen. Some of these results need to be observable to validate the model, but many of them may not be in any practical sense. They are still predicted actual consequences.
The feds have frequently closed down alternative currencies that were not politically correct. The excuse was that they were illegally printing money, though I forget the exact wording of the charge. Most of the alternative currencies only circulated in local areas. (I.e., not across state boundaries.)
1) The Socrates that we know is a literary creation. Quite fictional. (There are a couple of alternative portrayals that are less flattering than Plato's.)
3) Plato came LONG before Aesop. And Plato was a political meddler, whereas Aesop was a slave.
4) All rulers are held in power by force. I suspect that very few of them actually control the force without regard for other agencies. (Yeah, the philosopher-king, either in my form or in Plato's form, is something that could never happen.)
5) I'm judging on the historical record of how much they desired power. The more they desired it, the less qualified I consider them. (There's also how much they would feel impelled to do a good job, but that's another axis.)
6) I'm interested in justice, but to me it has a rather practical measure. It's a metaphor for good construction, as, say, a just tempered scale (music). It means something like well put together, as in the joints don't flex when they aren't supposed to, and do when they should. It's not the same as fair, which to me means that you can exchange sides without loss. (I.e., the metaphor is to a set of honest scales. [The kind that use weights.]) As such, people are required to judge as external observers, but aren't required as decision makers. This works for both fair and just, though they measure different qualities.
Now I'll grant that this definition is rather problematic. I can't think of an objective measure for EITHER justice or fairness. But as systems become more automated we better come up with one! This is going to have practical impacts on our society. (In fact, it's already having such impacts, and neither justice nor fairness is readily observable in the results.)
It's not that I like him. It's that he's better than Biden.
Actually, he may be better than the average Senator. As presidents go, he's not that bad. Of course, just like most presidents, he *IS* an enemy of freedom, but so are ALL of the alternates.
The constitution doesn't give the Govt the right to a MONOPOLY on the printing of money. At that time, and for nearly a century afterwards, various states had their own currencies. So did various municipalities. (This was frequently abused in "company towns". If you worked for the company you were paid in company money which was only good in company stores, etc.)
The "interstate commerce" clause has been expanded in interpretation beyond all recognition of it's original intent: To act as a mediator between the states at boundary disputes, and in the crossing of good. It wasn't intended to regulate non-governmental commerce. I can't remember when or why the current interpretation was created.
N.B.: I'm not claiming that the constitution as originally interpreted would or could work in the current world. I'm claiming that the means used to alter it, altering the interpretation of the meaning rather than amending it, were illegitimate.
You dare to suggest that DARE is just the modern version of "Reefer Madness"?
1) I'm not a philosopher. I (as opposed to Plato) was arguing that philosophers should be in power because they were less interested in power than most people. There is, of course, a statistical distribution of "love of power" among philosophers. The one's most interested are, by this criterion, unqualified.
2) I didn't propose any way in which this would occur. I haven't imagined any that puts a qualified human philosopher in charge.
3) My argument is loosely based on Aesop's "Better king log than king stork." In Aesop's fable, the king was a gift of the gods, and thus required neither agreement or support.
4) All rulers are held in power by force. That this one would require the same is not an argument against it.
5) Yeah, Plato is one of the philosophers that I would consider supremely unqualified. His creation, Socrates, however, would be a good choice. I'd prefer Feynman over Mother Theresa. But not Teller.
6) Nobody can be a good president. The psychological characteristics necessary to deal with Congress prevent one from making choices good for the country, so you're either ineffectual or you make bad choices. Or, of course, both. This is why I proposed selecting both the president and the legislature by lot. (I'm not sure about the president. Congress requires general agreement to do anything, so individual aberrations tend to get weeded out. The president, however, acts as an individual. Single bad choices are much worse. I'd worry about this if my proposal had any chance of being put into action.)
More on Plato: Plato wrote his "The Republic" after "leaving town for his health" after having dabbled a bit freely in politics. He's almost the antithesis of the psychological type I meant when I said "Philosopher". But people today tend to segregate themselves differently. Today people don't tend to go into philosophy unless they are rather uninterested in the mundane world. And love of power isn't one of their dominant characteristics. So there's no guarantee this same distribution of psychological types would continue if philosophers started getting picked for positions of authority. And it's the psychological type that's important.
Additionally, it's almost certain that people would be very unhappy with a ruler that was so disinterested in power. This doesn't mean he'd be a bad choice, merely that people like a strong ruler. But strong rulers tend to be more aggressive than is good for the country. They tend to manipulate in various ways, and creating an external enemy is one of the traditional ways. But once you've created an external enemy, the next step is obvious...eliminate it. This has happened over and over throughout human history. (Not always successfully, but it's destructive whether successful or not.)
OTOH, people are people. They only, en mass, react in a certain limited number of ways. It may well be impossible to have a just government. At least one judged and administered by humans. (If the legislators were actually held to the laws that they passed, then things MIGHT be a bit different. But possibly not. People can be incredibly short-sighted...and predict only what they want as the results of their actions.)
FWIW, this argument is more important than is immediately apparent. The government decisions are increasingly being made by automated decision procedures. Bureaucracy is slowly giving way to something that hasn't yet been named. This means that both the vices and the virtues of Bureaucracy can't be expected to survive the transformation. (They may, but don't count on it.) So far it's still people making the decisions, albeit people at greater and greater remove from the event. This means that it's often still possible to appeal a decision of the system to a human decision maker. But yearly this is becoming less true. You want a fair system? This may give you a fair system, but one with no sympathy at all. At that point it becomes crucially important that the laws be just. A fair system enforcing unjust laws may be a nightmare from which we cannot awaken.
As a statistician, I claim that it *IS* possible to be unbiased. Of course, you've got to accept my definition of bias. (I.e., having an unbiased viewpoint would be equivalent to having a viewpoint the same as that of the mean viewpoint of your population sample.)
Do you have a different definition of bias?
N.B.: What I object to is that belief that an unbiased viewpoint is necessarily better.
But philosophers ARE the ones most suited to be kings (well, most of them) because they are the ones least interested in power. This isn't a claim that they are suited, merely that they are somewhat less unsuited. (Programmers are up there too. And abstract mathematicians. And some applied mathematicians. And several sorts of artist. But not engineers. Nobody involved in the experimental sciences. They're too connected to achieving their ends in the physical universe. So they would want power as a tool.)
The real problem with an average philosopher as king is that he wouldn't be even interested enough to do a decent job. But being interested for the power is a true disqualifier. (Not for being a king, but for being a good one.)
My real feeling is that given the nature of people, the best way to choose executives and legislators would be by random choice among high school graduates. This makes it impossible to bribe them before they take the office. And it means that there aren't any re-election campaigns to take bribes to pay for. (If there were significant chance of this being implemented there are various "fine-tuning" tweaks I'd apply, but as there's no chance, why bother.)
I don't know about you, but as a four year old I needed SOME privacy. I was able to get it, and it is not the same as neglect at all. (Granted, I don't have specific memories of needing privacy as a five year old. But I still doubt your assertion.)
It's possible that a one or two year old has no need for privacy, but that's not the way I'd place a bet. Their need is considerably smaller, but I believe that it still exists.
As a four year old, I achieved privacy by climbing up in an apple tree and staying there for ??? some period of time, probably less than an hour, but whatever felt right. This is an escape that isn't usually available these days.
Privacy and neglect are almost orthogonal. One can easily have both neglect and lack of privacy. One can also easily have both privacy and lack of neglect. Privacy and neglect is trivial. The final quadrant is a bit more difficult, but also happens, when the parents are sufficiently neurotic.
You are absurd!
Kids, as well as teens and adults, NEED privacy. They also need to be protected, but that doesn't obviate the need for privacy.
The problem is how to respect their need for privacy while sufficiently protecting them in an environment that's unconscionably dangerous. The best solution would be to make the environment safer, but that's a bit difficult for one individual to do. Work toward, yes, but be reasonable about what you expect.
So you need to take reasonable measures to protect your children while still respecting their privacy. For someone under 12 a locator seems a quite reasonable method. It's not perfect, and won't defend against malice, but it's reasonable. Something like a remotely readable GPS system that's accessible by phone. I suspect that such things are available, but I'm not certain. WiFi trackers are used for tracking animals, and some are pretty small, but many locations are without live WiFi networks accessible to random passers-by. So a cell phone connection seems the right answer. This probably means that there isn't an open source solution, since the number of open source cell phones is miniscule. But it also means that there is probably a extant solution...if you look in the right place.
So it means lying without wearing a beard?
You mean like a disabled "uninstall" button?
I don't know about now, but at one point they had a line in their EULA that read (approx.) "We have the right to add, delete, modify, copy, or remove any file on your computer." That can be taken pretty much as a paraphrase of your "we'll do what we want with your system and installed programs".
I stopped using MS software before agreeing to that line.
Interestingly enough a year or so ago that same line also popped up in a Mac software upgrade's EULA. I stopped buying or upgrading Macs then. Fortunately, I'd already mainly shifted over to Linux, but my wife's been a harder case. She's more interested in what she can do than in legal liabilities, and there are several proprietary applications that don't work particularly well (if at all) on Linux. And their files are in proprietary formats, so I can't do much to save the data. Be Warned.
This is a community, not a borg. You get lots of different ideas in a community. Some aren't so hot.
If you read the threads under this article, you'll notice that most people are dismissing this argument. You might also notice that the published article was in InfoWorld. Hardly a spokesman for ANY segment of the FOSS community.
I doubt they're "flushing down the drain" ANY. Linux is one of the more popular OSs installed on IBM mainframes. (I don't even KNOW if they support MVS/MT anymore. Or CMS.)
It's been decades since *I've* used an IBM mainframe, but I still read the new occasionally.
That's their loss. The next time the software's revised, their version will be incompatible. Different fixes will have been used. And the revisions will work with the standard fixes, not their custom mods.
So, yes, they're playing dog in the manger. But it's likely to hurt them more than it hurts the community. (The community probably won't even notice.)