Actually, I disagree also with the first assertion.
When "Piracy" is restated as "Copyright infringement", then the whole thing becomes a bit muddy. When you consider that the particular laws being infringed were written by the media companies and passage was purchased, then I believe a good case could be made for copyright infringement being moral civil disobedience.
It's true that this isn't the classic form of civil disobedience, but with the penalties written so high, why would anyone expect to find the classic form. You'd be more likely to find targeted assassination and hired hit-men. It would be cheaper and safer. (And even that I would consider to be political action, though quite un-civil.)
The laws are unjust. Obeying them is not the duty of the citizenry. Just how one should avoid obeying them is a matter of tactics and strategy. And morals. But these folk have already demonstrated a willingness to escalate the stakes to a major felony level, so an actual felony isn't disproportionate reaction. And they've demonstrated that they are willing to coerce us to pay their agents (via taxes) for the suppression of services as their greed demands. So the payment of agent to act in our stead is not immoral.
OTOH. One must consider what kind of society would evolve. Boycott, total boycott, is a better answer. Those, however, who will not boycott are not being immoral when they try other tactics. Short-signted, yes. But that's a different matter.
If you want to claim that there isn't a strong financial relationship between Sony electronics and Sony Music, then I need to see evidence.
I see the claim raised everytime Sony does something else to screw-over their customers and, incidentally, also any bystanders around. I've never heard of any evidence. I've seen at least *SOME* evidence that there is, or was, a strong financial connection.
If Sony electronics doesn't want to tarred with the same brush as Sony Music, then they should sue them for defamation of character of something. It is my belief that they are both subsidiaries (probably only partially) of the same corporation. As such there is a strong financial relationship between them, even if they don't share the same accounting.
There are many observable properties. We single out the ones that are easy to model for special attention. Once we do that, we frequently find uses for those properties.
Note, however, that surface texture would also be useful if we could model it in a simple way...but we can't. So we've got the term, but no good characterization of it's properties.
Or look at friction. We've got several reasonable ways to characterize it, but they don't yield identical "equations", so we use different models in different environments. And none of them are particularly easy to calculate, so we tend to handle friction in clumsy ways.
Most potentially useful properties don't have simple characterizations. We select out the ones that we can find simple characterizations for, and make extensive use of them. The concept of momentum wasn't needed to create the spear thrower and it's throwing spear. But once we had a simple model, we could build pendulum clocks, which we couldn't before. (I think pendulum clocks came before the current model of momentum, and the crucial invention was the escapement wheel, but the general idea holds... that also depends on momentum being understood clearly. But also on good machining and cleverness.)
Did Aristotle understand momentum? I haven't read his works, but from brief excerpts I don't believe that he did. Which clearly means that it's not an obvious concept. (Even if he did I would assert that it's not an obvious concept, but that's a considerably less potent argument.)
Once you define momentum as p, in p=mv, then of course it scales linearly with both mass and velocity. That's straight from the definition.
If, however, we'd decided we were more interested in something else, that, perhaps, fit the equation w=md, we'd have something else, call it work, that scaled linearly with mass and distance. And if we'd instead decided that we were interested in something that fit mv^2, then we'd define another term to fit that.
In each of these cases being surprised that the defined term fit the equation would be circular reasoning. If fits it because that's how we defined it.
OTOH, the regularity had to be there, or we wouldn't have found the term useful...and sometimes centuries have gone by between the time a relationship is described and the time it's found to be useful. In the intermediate period it's "A jewel of pure mathematics". And perhaps many current "jewels of pure mathematics" will eventually find utilitarian interpretations.
Mathematics is the discovery of these "pure mathematical patterns". Science happens when they are put to work. (Well, that's one mode of science.)
There are many times when it's quite useful to say which loop is being closed. *Very* many. This doesn't mean that it's always reasonable, or even usually so. But there are times when I'll even so comment a 4 line loop.
Code isn't static. You can't depend on it not changing. If something just says "}", then an inserted code change above it, which happens to have forgotten the terminating brace, can send you on an extended chase through the code.
Breaking small loops out as functions is, perhaps, worse than not commenting at all. It's on the near order of impossible to come up with distinctive and meaningful names for an, essentially, unboundedly large number of functions. I've not only seen code like that, I've written it. Then I went back to try to maintain it. Never again! It *is* as bad as spaghetti code. Often worse. (If you can keep all of your branches within 50 lines of their labels, and you have 3 colors of pen and some scotch tape, you can trace the flow of spaghetti code. I used to program in Fortran IV, so I can guarantee that this is true. [There were techniques that couldn't be handled so simply, but spaghetti code wasn't one of them, though it could be quite a logical puzzle to figure out what it was doing.])
Well, when I first encountered Java 1.0 I was quite enthused, but soon after I switched to Linux, and Java became an annoyance. So I haven't kept up and have used other languages instead.
Now I don't have an investment in Java, and I'm not that interested in it. If I need speed + a garbage collector, I pick D. (This may change. D doesn't have the libraries, and I pick it because of enthusiasm.) If I need garbage collection but not speed, I pick Python. If I need a simple basic program with lots of libraries, I pick C. (I prefer Ruby over Python, but Ruby's slower, and it doesn't have as many libraries for what I need. So I rarely use it.)
Did you notice that Java wasn't on that list? It could have dominated it. Now...it's going to have to come up with a new reason to choose it.
For the future...the next language that I find important should be something that makes it simple to program on multiple processors. Erlang doesn't cut the mustard. There's no reasonable graphics. The language needs to make it reasonably simple to transfer data and other messages between processes running on different processors, but it also can't have any really sizable holes. And it needs to be *fast*. If something needs to run on multiple processors, you can expect speed to be important.
It's hard to see Java playing in this field, but it's possible.
Haven't you ever heard of Soylent Green? Supposed to be delicious.
Also, rumor has it that simply roasted in a pit people taste remarkably like pork. Ever heard of "long pig"?
If you accept that animals are designed, then you need to also accept that animals made out of meat were designed to be eaten...except possibly male cats and mustelids (skunks, weasels, etc.).
What you probably mean is that animals attempt to prevent attempts to eat them. That's unequivocally correct. Even oysters attempt to stop others from eating them, though passively. And some animals aren't practical for people to eat, like small barnacles.
Brick is probably the wrong word, but I've rendered systems unbootable with both grub and LILO. In both cases it was fixable, but the first time I didn't know how to do it without reinstalling MSWind. It's not that it couldn't have been done...but I needed to conduct an on-line search to find out how to recover from my mistake. (I Forget what it was.)
I'm sure most people who installed systems 5-10 years ago had similar experiences. I seem to even remember one from an early Mac.
P.S.: If you're installing to a fresh disk, don't write grub to a disk partition. It'll never be seen. Write it to the MBR. There *ARE* times when writing it to a partition is appropriate, but it should be a less prominent option.
Then shut up. (Notice how I just assume the answer is no?)
You aren't describing me or anyone that I know well enough to know whether you could be describing them. I'll accept that there ARE people such as you are asserting "the majority" to be, but I don't know anyone like that, so unless you have proof that it is common, moderate your tone or just shut up.
I suspect you of describing yourself, but I have no proof that this is so. And perhaps you are describing at least some of your friends. But I've already acknowledged that such people exist. That is no evidence that there is any sizable number of them. The popularity of iTunes argues against it.
Umnh... the cable infrastructure means that some one entity must build and maintain cables over a significant geographic area. Call it a city. So the city either builds and maintains it's own local network, which it doesn't have the skills to do, or it contracts with an outside agent. That outside agent either gives special prices for the right to sole access, or won't build it at all without such a right.
That was how it was early on. After the monopolies got established in local areas they merged into larger monopolies. Very few cities built their own local infrastructure. So the cable supplier became a monopoly over a large area.
Government regulation was required. Otherwise the original cable couldn't be laid. Just like the power company needs government sponsorship to ensure that someone can't prevent his neighbors from getting power by refusing to allow the power cables through his property. Ditto for the water company. And the water company is allowed to enter your property without your permission to fix a broken pipe. That's only because of a special deal with the government. The same kind of deal that the cable people got.
Personally I feel this is a mistake, and that cities should own their own infrastructure. But then they don't get the "special deals", and they need to raise taxes to support it. But they also get to control prices.
If I must chose between a local government owning something and a large corporation doing the same (especially as a monopoly), I'll choose the local government. They're likely to be less efficient, but they're much more likely to consider the desires of the local citizenry.
Think of it this way: Large organizations don't consider the needs or desires of individuals. Smaller ones are more likely to. Monopolies don't consider the needs or desires of individuals. Cities can't prevent people from choosing to live elsewhere, so they aren't monopolies. Companies that control exclusive access to some resource over an extensive geographic area ARE monopolies.
Government is that entity which claims a monopoly over the use of force in a geographic area.
This object is in an orbit which resonates with our own orbit. It is certain to continue close approaches with Earth until either (1) it hits us or (2) is thrown into a totally different orbit, most likely as a result of a very close approach. A very close approach to something else. If it's a close approach to Earth that deflects it, it will continue to return to that point as a part of it's new orbit.
I'd like to believe that your statements are correct. OTOH, if you intend to run penetration testing, get approval in advance and in writing. One hears stories.
I chose that site because it was the best source I knew. I also seem to remember that they glossed over features of the story that would have made Ada a bit less innocent. I don't remember what they were, it being decades ago, and the story as reported is substantially as I remember it being reported at the time. But I seem to remember something (not anything I can put my finger on) which is glossed over in this version. Possibly something like a company touting Ada's unquestionable security causing sufficient care not to be taken, or something like that. (Think of Oracle's "Unbreakable Linux".)
I maintain that Ada programs tend to be huge. On small translations to a different language I've occasionally had size reductions of over 50%.
I'll grant that there are reasons, and they're reasonable arguments (about each particular feature). I'm just not certain that they're convincing, especially when taken together.
OTOH, it clearly depends on just what you're doing. "Hello, World!" is smaller in Ada than in Java (though C and Fortran are yet more compact).
This was really brought home to me recently when I tried to translate some old Ada-83 neural networking code into a more modern language. It became not only smaller, but much more comprehensible. Partially this was due to automatic allocation and freeing of memory in the modern language, and partially it was due to Ada just being verbose.
Additionally, private variables should NOT need to be declared in files that are supposed to be shared publicly. I know some of the reasons, and it's still a bad decision. (C++ deserves criticism here also, but it has so many worse problems that why bother.) The language I'm currently most interesting in, D (Digital Mars D), has ALL of the program file possibly hidden, and the compiler generates an interface file which defines the publicly visible data.
Well, all languages are trade-offs. There's no way to avoid it. I think Ada would have been a much sounder basis than C, but C was what AT&T promoted to the world. By the time that the DOD got around to promoting Ada, most programmers had made their choice. That the early compilers cost an arm and a leg didn't make converting anyone who didn't *NEED* to use Ada any easier. Most people never even had a chance to look at it.
No, Niven wrote before we knew that the Milky Way *HAD* a central black hole. He was assuming that there were a whole bunch of really large stars hidden behind the gas clouds (that we couldn't see through from ground level).
At the time he wrote it, it was plausible. Now he'd probably write about a huge gamma burst instead. Not quite as destructive. Or he could write about a cluster of stars that had been merged into the accretion disk, and were now feeding into the central black hole.
Don't try to make what he wrote then match with current possibilities. It doesn't mesh. If you want to find really blatant mismatches, look at his really early stories that take place within the solar system, and before the interstellar drive. (More particularly, before the "Gil the Arm" stories.) Try "Becalmed in Hell".
Niven made reasonable guesses given what was known at the time. Don't try to stuff his guesses into what was later discovered. They don't fit.
Well, neither is a Dyson sphere. A Dyson sphere just isn't passively unstable, but once it starts moving WRT the sun, there's nothing to stop it or slow it down. (Or speed it up, which is how it differs from a RingWorld.)
My favorite is a Topopolis, also called "Cosmic Spaghetti". The idea is that you orbit a cylinder, and just start extending the ends. Rotate it for gravity, so you want one that's pretty wide. Occasionally you include a non-rotating section where you make joints to other strands.
You start this in solar orbit, so it's a bit beyond our current capabilities, but not very far. Some sections are pressurized, some aren't. Eventually you just start building out in the direction of the Oort clouds, and you consume any asteroid that come close for building materials. You'd probably want a mag-lev on the outside for fast transport to distant segments.
In case of social disagreement, any segment could remove itself from the rest, move to a new orbit, and start building from there.
But now I'm talking about a LONG time in the future. We couldn't start this until we've got space factories working, and there's lots of details to work out before that happens. (Pity, I though we'd be at least THAT far along by now. Too much military and short-term thinking at NASA. We could have been working on factories before the 1990's started.)
Well, if we don't, someone else will. China probably. Because we abdicated our responsibilities.
Re:My problems with Ada
on
The Return of Ada
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I didn't say there weren't solutions to those problems. Merely that the problems exist.
1) Unbounded strings is a partial solution, but it doesn't blend nicely with string constants, so it's not a good solution.
2) I don't like C or C++ and garbage collection either. I'm considering boost C++ for a project, but I'll probably opt for some language with decent garbage collection.
3) Exporting a C interface isn't equivalent to good support of C++. Try interfacing Qt to Ada. (It's probably been done, but I mean try doing it yourself...this is about the general problem of C++ libraries.) And Ada doesn't even handle interfacing with C well (which isn't unusual, it's a hard problem...macros and other #define's).
5) I can tell what kind of data I'm dealing with at run time, but dealing with this in Ada is unpleasant. Think of a container of objects that resides on a disk. If you read something in, it will tell you what kind of thing you've retrieved, but if you need to have that type hard-coded into your program, you've got to run through considerable contortions to deal with this. It's hard to handle this well and still be efficient at run time, but to me it's a continual irritation if I'm trying to use Ada.
6) I think I understand what you're saying, but I guess I was too vague. Ada's model of objects *IS* a data structure. What you inherit is that data structure, which you can extend. Operations on the structure aren't a part of the "object". Operations, however, are typed to deal with particular groupings of objects. (I'm not clear on precisely when you need to say type'class, but I haven't used Ada much because of the other irritations.)
Yes, I'm picky. I acknowledge that. Currently I'm using Python while I wait for D to develop into a suitable language. (Insufficient libraries is the main problem. Again there's problems connecting to libraries written in C or C++ . Nobody seems to handle that well. Macros and other preprocessor abominations appear to be an intractable problem. If D doesn't shape up in time I'll probably either switch to Boost C++ + Boost Python, or Python + Pyrex + C. Neither option thrills me, but both look possible. So does D + C + Python...though that one looks fragile. And maybe D + Pyrex + Python. But anything involving Python is going to presume that a compatible interpreter is installed on every system that hosts it.
1) Ada is cumbersome, especially when you are dealing with character strings of variable length.
2) Garbage collection is managed by hand.
3) Poor interfacing with C++. (Well, so has most everything but C++.)
4) Programs in Ada tend to be HUGE!!!. That's the big one. I'm talking about source code size here, not binary size, which is reasonable.
5) If you don't know the type of data you're reading in, it's difficult to handle it. This is both a problem and an advantage.
6) Ada's handling of inheritance is very different from that of most other languages. Lisp is probably the language that comes closest to it. You could think of it as noun dominated rather than verb dominated. (I.e., instead of functional it's ??? I don't know the proper term. It works, but it's a very different model. Calling the inheritable types objects isn't really appropriate (and the term isn't used).)
I notice some Linux supporting companies there, but a lot of companies whose support is, at best, half-hearted.
(I'd have copied out the list, but it's all pictures of the names. Look if you care. IBM and Red Hat are there, but so is Adobe. And a bunch of companies I've never heard of, as well as many whose position on Linux I don't know.)
In this case what's wrong with personal attacks. They have personally acted to damage me. I'm all in favor of someone acting to personally damage them. Preferably severely.
I can understand that they would not want to be held personally responsible for the actions which they have personally undertaken, probably for their personal gain, but why should I agree with them?
As it is, it's not personal attacks they've been experiencing. Well, the ISO also deserved to be attacked for allowing this indecent farce to proceed, and for not immediately revoking that hideous parody of a standard. So that's also appropriate, and even underdone.
What they deserve is to have their charter revoked, and for countries to refuse to support them. Unfortunately there's decent grounds for belief that the supporting countries have, themselves, also been corrupted.
Demonstrations are the VERY least they deserve. And things shouldn't stop there. I hope somebody can come up with additional ways to discomfort them...preferably severely.
OOXML is *not* a standard, I don't care what the ISO says. I deny that *ANYBODY* can implement it, and I include Microsoft. There's no compliance test, so they can claim to implement it, when it's convenient, but they don't. They don't even come reasonably close.
Additionally, due to patent issues, and the extremely limited nature of the MS patent pledge, nobody but MS who cares for their corporate existence would even *try* to implement it. Remember that the MS patent pledge was good for only one version of the OOXML specifications, and only for complete implementations of the specifications. Which nobody, including MS, has yet done.
I'll accept the description of OOXML as specifications, not as standard. At that I feel I'm being generous. If the OOXML is specifications, then so is "Build me a barn like the one I lived near when I was 9 years old."
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent up.
He probably should have said, however, "If you're a Canadian...".
Actually, I disagree also with the first assertion.
When "Piracy" is restated as "Copyright infringement", then the whole thing becomes a bit muddy. When you consider that the particular laws being infringed were written by the media companies and passage was purchased, then I believe a good case could be made for copyright infringement being moral civil disobedience.
It's true that this isn't the classic form of civil disobedience, but with the penalties written so high, why would anyone expect to find the classic form. You'd be more likely to find targeted assassination and hired hit-men. It would be cheaper and safer. (And even that I would consider to be political action, though quite un-civil.)
The laws are unjust. Obeying them is not the duty of the citizenry. Just how one should avoid obeying them is a matter of tactics and strategy. And morals. But these folk have already demonstrated a willingness to escalate the stakes to a major felony level, so an actual felony isn't disproportionate reaction. And they've demonstrated that they are willing to coerce us to pay their agents (via taxes) for the suppression of services as their greed demands. So the payment of agent to act in our stead is not immoral.
OTOH. One must consider what kind of society would evolve. Boycott, total boycott, is a better answer. Those, however, who will not boycott are not being immoral when they try other tactics. Short-signted, yes. But that's a different matter.
If you want to claim that there isn't a strong financial relationship between Sony electronics and Sony Music, then I need to see evidence.
I see the claim raised everytime Sony does something else to screw-over their customers and, incidentally, also any bystanders around. I've never heard of any evidence. I've seen at least *SOME* evidence that there is, or was, a strong financial connection.
If Sony electronics doesn't want to tarred with the same brush as Sony Music, then they should sue them for defamation of character of something. It is my belief that they are both subsidiaries (probably only partially) of the same corporation. As such there is a strong financial relationship between them, even if they don't share the same accounting.
There are many observable properties. We single out the ones that are easy to model for special attention. Once we do that, we frequently find uses for those properties.
Note, however, that surface texture would also be useful if we could model it in a simple way...but we can't. So we've got the term, but no good characterization of it's properties.
Or look at friction. We've got several reasonable ways to characterize it, but they don't yield identical "equations", so we use different models in different environments. And none of them are particularly easy to calculate, so we tend to handle friction in clumsy ways.
Most potentially useful properties don't have simple characterizations. We select out the ones that we can find simple characterizations for, and make extensive use of them. The concept of momentum wasn't needed to create the spear thrower and it's throwing spear. But once we had a simple model, we could build pendulum clocks, which we couldn't before. (I think pendulum clocks came before the current model of momentum, and the crucial invention was the escapement wheel, but the general idea holds... that also depends on momentum being understood clearly. But also on good machining and cleverness.)
Did Aristotle understand momentum? I haven't read his works, but from brief excerpts I don't believe that he did. Which clearly means that it's not an obvious concept. (Even if he did I would assert that it's not an obvious concept, but that's a considerably less potent argument.)
But you're arguing in circles.
Once you define momentum as p, in p=mv, then of course it scales linearly with both mass and velocity. That's straight from the definition.
If, however, we'd decided we were more interested in something else, that, perhaps, fit the equation w=md, we'd have something else, call it work, that scaled linearly with mass and distance. And if we'd instead decided that we were interested in something that fit mv^2, then we'd define another term to fit that.
In each of these cases being surprised that the defined term fit the equation would be circular reasoning. If fits it because that's how we defined it.
OTOH, the regularity had to be there, or we wouldn't have found the term useful...and sometimes centuries have gone by between the time a relationship is described and the time it's found to be useful. In the intermediate period it's "A jewel of pure mathematics". And perhaps many current "jewels of pure mathematics" will eventually find utilitarian interpretations.
Mathematics is the discovery of these "pure mathematical patterns". Science happens when they are put to work. (Well, that's one mode of science.)
There are many times when it's quite useful to say which loop is being closed. *Very* many. This doesn't mean that it's always reasonable, or even usually so. But there are times when I'll even so comment a 4 line loop.
Code isn't static. You can't depend on it not changing. If something just says "}", then an inserted code change above it, which happens to have forgotten the terminating brace, can send you on an extended chase through the code.
Breaking small loops out as functions is, perhaps, worse than not commenting at all. It's on the near order of impossible to come up with distinctive and meaningful names for an, essentially, unboundedly large number of functions. I've not only seen code like that, I've written it. Then I went back to try to maintain it. Never again! It *is* as bad as spaghetti code. Often worse. (If you can keep all of your branches within 50 lines of their labels, and you have 3 colors of pen and some scotch tape, you can trace the flow of spaghetti code. I used to program in Fortran IV, so I can guarantee that this is true. [There were techniques that couldn't be handled so simply, but spaghetti code wasn't one of them, though it could be quite a logical puzzle to figure out what it was doing.])
Well, when I first encountered Java 1.0 I was quite enthused, but soon after I switched to Linux, and Java became an annoyance. So I haven't kept up and have used other languages instead.
Now I don't have an investment in Java, and I'm not that interested in it. If I need speed + a garbage collector, I pick D. (This may change. D doesn't have the libraries, and I pick it because of enthusiasm.) If I need garbage collection but not speed, I pick Python. If I need a simple basic program with lots of libraries, I pick C. (I prefer Ruby over Python, but Ruby's slower, and it doesn't have as many libraries for what I need. So I rarely use it.)
Did you notice that Java wasn't on that list? It could have dominated it. Now...it's going to have to come up with a new reason to choose it.
For the future...the next language that I find important should be something that makes it simple to program on multiple processors. Erlang doesn't cut the mustard. There's no reasonable graphics. The language needs to make it reasonably simple to transfer data and other messages between processes running on different processors, but it also can't have any really sizable holes. And it needs to be *fast*. If something needs to run on multiple processors, you can expect speed to be important.
It's hard to see Java playing in this field, but it's possible.
It all depends on what you're doing. For some purposes Ruby is the correct choice, and it's significantly slower than Python.
Haven't you ever heard of Soylent Green? Supposed to be delicious.
Also, rumor has it that simply roasted in a pit people taste remarkably like pork. Ever heard of "long pig"?
If you accept that animals are designed, then you need to also accept that animals made out of meat were designed to be eaten...except possibly male cats and mustelids (skunks, weasels, etc.).
What you probably mean is that animals attempt to prevent attempts to eat them. That's unequivocally correct. Even oysters attempt to stop others from eating them, though passively. And some animals aren't practical for people to eat, like small barnacles.
Brick is probably the wrong word, but I've rendered systems unbootable with both grub and LILO. In both cases it was fixable, but the first time I didn't know how to do it without reinstalling MSWind. It's not that it couldn't have been done...but I needed to conduct an on-line search to find out how to recover from my mistake. (I Forget what it was.)
I'm sure most people who installed systems 5-10 years ago had similar experiences. I seem to even remember one from an early Mac.
P.S.: If you're installing to a fresh disk, don't write grub to a disk partition. It'll never be seen. Write it to the MBR. There *ARE* times when writing it to a partition is appropriate, but it should be a less prominent option.
Got any proof of your assertions?
Then shut up. (Notice how I just assume the answer is no?)
You aren't describing me or anyone that I know well enough to know whether you could be describing them. I'll accept that there ARE people such as you are asserting "the majority" to be, but I don't know anyone like that, so unless you have proof that it is common, moderate your tone or just shut up.
I suspect you of describing yourself, but I have no proof that this is so. And perhaps you are describing at least some of your friends. But I've already acknowledged that such people exist. That is no evidence that there is any sizable number of them. The popularity of iTunes argues against it.
Umnh... the cable infrastructure means that some one entity must build and maintain cables over a significant geographic area. Call it a city. So the city either builds and maintains it's own local network, which it doesn't have the skills to do, or it contracts with an outside agent. That outside agent either gives special prices for the right to sole access, or won't build it at all without such a right.
That was how it was early on. After the monopolies got established in local areas they merged into larger monopolies. Very few cities built their own local infrastructure. So the cable supplier became a monopoly over a large area.
Government regulation was required. Otherwise the original cable couldn't be laid. Just like the power company needs government sponsorship to ensure that someone can't prevent his neighbors from getting power by refusing to allow the power cables through his property. Ditto for the water company. And the water company is allowed to enter your property without your permission to fix a broken pipe. That's only because of a special deal with the government. The same kind of deal that the cable people got.
Personally I feel this is a mistake, and that cities should own their own infrastructure. But then they don't get the "special deals", and they need to raise taxes to support it. But they also get to control prices.
If I must chose between a local government owning something and a large corporation doing the same (especially as a monopoly), I'll choose the local government. They're likely to be less efficient, but they're much more likely to consider the desires of the local citizenry.
Think of it this way:
Large organizations don't consider the needs or desires of individuals. Smaller ones are more likely to.
Monopolies don't consider the needs or desires of individuals. Cities can't prevent people from choosing to live elsewhere, so they aren't monopolies. Companies that control exclusive access to some resource over an extensive geographic area ARE monopolies.
Government is that entity which claims a monopoly over the use of force in a geographic area.
I'd like to believe that your statements are correct. OTOH, if you intend to run penetration testing, get approval in advance and in writing. One hears stories.
I chose that site because it was the best source I knew. I also seem to remember that they glossed over features of the story that would have made Ada a bit less innocent. I don't remember what they were, it being decades ago, and the story as reported is substantially as I remember it being reported at the time. But I seem to remember something (not anything I can put my finger on) which is glossed over in this version. Possibly something like a company touting Ada's unquestionable security causing sufficient care not to be taken, or something like that. (Think of Oracle's "Unbreakable Linux".)
I maintain that Ada programs tend to be huge. On small translations to a different language I've occasionally had size reductions of over 50%.
I'll grant that there are reasons, and they're reasonable arguments (about each particular feature). I'm just not certain that they're convincing, especially when taken together.
OTOH, it clearly depends on just what you're doing. "Hello, World!" is smaller in Ada than in Java (though C and Fortran are yet more compact).
This was really brought home to me recently when I tried to translate some old Ada-83 neural networking code into a more modern language. It became not only smaller, but much more comprehensible. Partially this was due to automatic allocation and freeing of memory in the modern language, and partially it was due to Ada just being verbose.
Additionally, private variables should NOT need to be declared in files that are supposed to be shared publicly. I know some of the reasons, and it's still a bad decision. (C++ deserves criticism here also, but it has so many worse problems that why bother.) The language I'm currently most interesting in, D (Digital Mars D), has ALL of the program file possibly hidden, and the compiler generates an interface file which defines the publicly visible data.
Well, all languages are trade-offs. There's no way to avoid it. I think Ada would have been a much sounder basis than C, but C was what AT&T promoted to the world. By the time that the DOD got around to promoting Ada, most programmers had made their choice. That the early compilers cost an arm and a leg didn't make converting anyone who didn't *NEED* to use Ada any easier. Most people never even had a chance to look at it.
No, Niven wrote before we knew that the Milky Way *HAD* a central black hole. He was assuming that there were a whole bunch of really large stars hidden behind the gas clouds (that we couldn't see through from ground level).
At the time he wrote it, it was plausible. Now he'd probably write about a huge gamma burst instead. Not quite as destructive. Or he could write about a cluster of stars that had been merged into the accretion disk, and were now feeding into the central black hole.
Don't try to make what he wrote then match with current possibilities. It doesn't mesh. If you want to find really blatant mismatches, look at his really early stories that take place within the solar system, and before the interstellar drive. (More particularly, before the "Gil the Arm" stories.) Try "Becalmed in Hell".
Niven made reasonable guesses given what was known at the time. Don't try to stuff his guesses into what was later discovered. They don't fit.
Well, neither is a Dyson sphere. A Dyson sphere just isn't passively unstable, but once it starts moving WRT the sun, there's nothing to stop it or slow it down. (Or speed it up, which is how it differs from a RingWorld.)
My favorite is a Topopolis, also called "Cosmic Spaghetti". The idea is that you orbit a cylinder, and just start extending the ends. Rotate it for gravity, so you want one that's pretty wide. Occasionally you include a non-rotating section where you make joints to other strands.
You start this in solar orbit, so it's a bit beyond our current capabilities, but not very far. Some sections are pressurized, some aren't. Eventually you just start building out in the direction of the Oort clouds, and you consume any asteroid that come close for building materials. You'd probably want a mag-lev on the outside for fast transport to distant segments.
In case of social disagreement, any segment could remove itself from the rest, move to a new orbit, and start building from there.
But now I'm talking about a LONG time in the future. We couldn't start this until we've got space factories working, and there's lots of details to work out before that happens. (Pity, I though we'd be at least THAT far along by now. Too much military and short-term thinking at NASA. We could have been working on factories before the 1990's started.)
Well, if we don't, someone else will. China probably. Because we abdicated our responsibilities.
I didn't say there weren't solutions to those problems. Merely that the problems exist.
1) Unbounded strings is a partial solution, but it doesn't blend nicely with string constants, so it's not a good solution.
2) I don't like C or C++ and garbage collection either. I'm considering boost C++ for a project, but I'll probably opt for some language with decent garbage collection.
3) Exporting a C interface isn't equivalent to good support of C++. Try interfacing Qt to Ada. (It's probably been done, but I mean try doing it yourself...this is about the general problem of C++ libraries.) And Ada doesn't even handle interfacing with C well (which isn't unusual, it's a hard problem...macros and other #define's).
5) I can tell what kind of data I'm dealing with at run time, but dealing with this in Ada is unpleasant. Think of a container of objects that resides on a disk. If you read something in, it will tell you what kind of thing you've retrieved, but if you need to have that type hard-coded into your program, you've got to run through considerable contortions to deal with this. It's hard to handle this well and still be efficient at run time, but to me it's a continual irritation if I'm trying to use Ada.
6) I think I understand what you're saying, but I guess I was too vague. Ada's model of objects *IS* a data structure. What you inherit is that data structure, which you can extend. Operations on the structure aren't a part of the "object". Operations, however, are typed to deal with particular groupings of objects. (I'm not clear on precisely when you need to say type'class, but I haven't used Ada much because of the other irritations.)
Yes, I'm picky. I acknowledge that. Currently I'm using Python while I wait for D to develop into a suitable language. (Insufficient libraries is the main problem. Again there's problems connecting to libraries written in C or C++ . Nobody seems to handle that well. Macros and other preprocessor abominations appear to be an intractable problem. If D doesn't shape up in time I'll probably either switch to Boost C++ + Boost Python, or Python + Pyrex + C. Neither option thrills me, but both look possible. So does D + C + Python...though that one looks fragile. And maybe D + Pyrex + Python. But anything involving Python is going to presume that a compatible interpreter is installed on every system that hosts it.
Ariane V http://www.adapower.com/index.php?Command=Class&ClassID=FAQ&CID=328
OTOH, remember the link is to a site promoting Ada. They're telling the truth as they know it, but they're biased.
1) Ada is cumbersome, especially when you are dealing with character strings of variable length.
2) Garbage collection is managed by hand.
3) Poor interfacing with C++. (Well, so has most everything but C++.)
4) Programs in Ada tend to be HUGE!!!. That's the big one. I'm talking about source code size here, not binary size, which is reasonable.
5) If you don't know the type of data you're reading in, it's difficult to handle it. This is both a problem and an advantage.
6) Ada's handling of inheritance is very different from that of most other languages. Lisp is probably the language that comes closest to it. You could think of it as noun dominated rather than verb dominated. (I.e., instead of functional it's ??? I don't know the proper term. It works, but it's a very different model. Calling the inheritable types objects isn't really appropriate (and the term isn't used).)
http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/Members
I notice some Linux supporting companies there, but a lot of companies whose support is, at best, half-hearted.
(I'd have copied out the list, but it's all pictures of the names. Look if you care. IBM and Red Hat are there, but so is Adobe. And a bunch of companies I've never heard of, as well as many whose position on Linux I don't know.)
In this case what's wrong with personal attacks. They have personally acted to damage me. I'm all in favor of someone acting to personally damage them. Preferably severely.
I can understand that they would not want to be held personally responsible for the actions which they have personally undertaken, probably for their personal gain, but why should I agree with them?
As it is, it's not personal attacks they've been experiencing. Well, the ISO also deserved to be attacked for allowing this indecent farce to proceed, and for not immediately revoking that hideous parody of a standard. So that's also appropriate, and even underdone.
What they deserve is to have their charter revoked, and for countries to refuse to support them. Unfortunately there's decent grounds for belief that the supporting countries have, themselves, also been corrupted.
Demonstrations are the VERY least they deserve. And things shouldn't stop there. I hope somebody can come up with additional ways to discomfort them...preferably severely.
That's a reference to SCOX and it's attempt to get $699 from everyone who uses Linux.
Insightful is another possibility, but funny is MUCH more apt.
OOXML is *not* a standard, I don't care what the ISO says. I deny that *ANYBODY* can implement it, and I include Microsoft. There's no compliance test, so they can claim to implement it, when it's convenient, but they don't. They don't even come reasonably close.
Additionally, due to patent issues, and the extremely limited nature of the MS patent pledge, nobody but MS who cares for their corporate existence would even *try* to implement it. Remember that the MS patent pledge was good for only one version of the OOXML specifications, and only for complete implementations of the specifications. Which nobody, including MS, has yet done.
I'll accept the description of OOXML as specifications, not as standard. At that I feel I'm being generous. If the OOXML is specifications, then so is "Build me a barn like the one I lived near when I was 9 years old."