But yes, he probably does think that too. Having written some of the greatest Lisp books of all time, and having built a major Shopping engine in Lisp (was that right).
How much were you paid for this Informercial?
on
Matrix Decision Making
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I'm posting Paid For Placement on this article.
and while I'm at it, where the heck are all the Funny +5 that many of the posts above so deserve!
Ok, the more I read this, the more it seems like a scam. Of course Slashdot can't be held responsible for novel scams, I do think a large rwarning should be put up now enough folks have ridiculed the site.
Lets see: Weird named OS that has never seen the light of day, a "deposit" required, etc. Even if this isnt a scam, seems like these guys dont have a shippable product, and are looking for some free funding... and that's being charitable
follow up - I googled RECURSION and SQL, and came back with very little - apparently its only Oracle that's implemented this. I found a little example from MS showing how to use Stored Procedures (heh, cheating SOB's !).
I guess in theory there is nothing really stopping SQL becoming like Prolog in expressability, after all, they run on regular computersm no magic here. Although personally, I'd *really* like to just use proper relational syntax, instead of having to do unions etc. In logic, if you say:
p(x,y):= q(x),r(y)
You can introduce supplementary relations like
p(x,y):= s(x),t(y)
arbritarily. To do this in SQL you have to start UNIONing sub views together...
anyway, this isnt a thread about how Prolog > SQL, but rather that X Query language is going to be a mess...
ok, aside from efficiencies in implementation and writing, the main concern should be with the expressability.
Question - can you express the recursive ancestor relation in SQL? You can express a single relation such as grand parent, but not the full relation.
Reason? Because SQL is not full relational calculus. It is basically propositional calculus (actually I maybe slightly wrong, and it falls in a higher calculus than propositional).
Prolog for example is closer, but still not true relational calculus (I forget whats missing).
There's a reason for SQL's limitations, and that's decidability - guaranteeing that the query will terminate... (admittedly in theory, and you can write some pretty horrendous statements).
Anyway, just wanted to get that off my chest. Doesn't say much about where XML falls in the scheme of thing - I guess strictlt speaking it doesn't - its just a layout. In fact, to compare XML and SQL is a complete misunderstanding. Its XSLT which should be compared.
Why did the companies stop making station wagons? I'm curious - I must admit when i was growing up in Britain in the 70s Station Wagons (or Estate Cars we called em over there) were very popular for families.
Lets see. Basic cable costs 15 bucks a month. Cheapest way to get HBO - about 70 a month. Lets see thats 55 bucks difference. Thats either 12 Season Sized DVD purchases (how Soprano seasons are made a year?) or nearly 3 complete Netflix subscriptions. Mix and match.
I remember in a control engineering course, 20 years ago, that one of our professors told us how traffic lights were often timed in such a way to slow down speeding traffic. I can't for the life of me remember anything more - but it was to do with wave theory. Basically if you maintained a steady speed of say 25 then you would synchronize with all the greens on a stretch of a road. Wish I could remember more for you. This had nothing to do with detecting on coming fast traffic.
but aren't they arguing that its impossible to build a theorem prover that is provably bug-free?
Seems like its a variant on one of Godel/Church/Turing theses (I forget which one, halting problem I guess)... One can probably prove that simple programs are "correct", but Theorem provers are effectively Turing Machines, thus, you can't step out of that space to prove they are 100% correct.
I'm not sure I buy this - although given that the space explored by a Theorem prover is infinite, it seems hard to verify:) However, given a limited set of rules, one could prove that the machine does the individual operations correctly, and combines them correctly, so even though the space is infinite, the set of operations is very finite, and provable?
For example addition - just requires successor(x) to be operational, so if you can prove the machine always give the right result for successor(X) and successor(successor(X)), then you infinitably nest em, without proving every step is correct.
Err, ok, its late, I'm tired, and my theoretical reading in this field is about 4 years old now... someone else take up the slack:) ?
Once upon a time (1984), in a land far, far away (England), I was a comp-sci student. In mid June, I hitched down to the last legal Stonehenge festival. Myself and temporary girlfriend got a lift from Reading to Salisbury by a guy driving a Porsche. Bear in mind we are both were dressed appropriately (Mohawk, bleached black jeans, way too much metal everywhere).
Anyway, conversation with driver lands me with an offer to give him a call when I was back (and down I guess). He runs a small software development company in Reading. I do, and end up doing a variety of things, the worse of which is counting packages of VAX box/racking. The best is writing Z80- assembler to interface between some cheap daisywheel printers they are trying to sell to hook up to VAXen.
Anyway, two months into this, I arrive at 9am, to find the place surrounded by the police. Office manager mutters something incoherent about the place being shutdown and being in trouble with DEC (Digital Equipment Corp) for something.
Several years go by, and I'm actually working for the self same American multi-national, and I mention the story to an old hand who'd just joined my group. Turns out he knew the whole story. The three principle partners had not just run off with customer lists and been selling third party gear, but they had been helping themselves out the back door of DEC's own facilities. The security guard who'd they'd paid off had killed himself, and the main partner had been chased across fields by the cops....
No, but trying to avoid Custom's duty is. Ask Al Capone about avoiding taxes...
I think if they feel you are evading, they will give you a very hard time. My advice was simply - if you're stopped, don't risk getting a huge fine and a record. It aint worth it.
Well clearly they probably wouldnt have real time access, but it wouldnt take a customs agent too long to call up the manufacturer and find out when and where.
No, just VAT.The guy said that if I had denied it, they would have prosecuted me - but I don't remember if he told me what the penalty would have been.
No, it is not considered PERSONAL EFFECTS, UNLESS YOU HAVE OWNED FOR 6 MONTHS or so.
For all the rest of you suggesting claiming innocence if you are stopped, HM Custom & Excise have access to VERY comprehensive databases. If they suspect you just bought it, they will check up. I highly recommend if you are stopped that you tell the truth and dont attempt to conceal the fact you bought it. They will question you if they find a laptop in yoru baggage, and it will be childs play to find out that it was just purchased. You will then be subject to a much larger penalty.
See my posting below. The office who stopped me, actually ended up entertaining me with lots of stories about guys who deliberately "tattered" their laptops with sticky tape and the like to attempt to make it look used. Trouble is those things come with serial numbers. They are also on the look out for high end guitars as well apparently there's a brisk trade in Gibsen's etc.
Sure, try to go through the green channel with an innocent face, but if you are stopped, and asked, tell them you bought it in the US.
Hey, be very careful, or Her Majesty's revenue collectors will nab you off the plane and charge you VAT on it.
I had that experience coming back to the UK during a break in working in the US, and the SOB's saw my newish Apple 5300, and whisked me off to a cash machine (ATM) to pay 300 quid (450 dollars). Which for a research assistant was a lot of money. Mofo's. They know their stuff, and the guy who got me (I wasnt hiding it btw, just wasnt declaring it either), said it is something very common to happen.
Anyway, I got the last laugh as their delaying me in the middle of a British Airways transfer from the international flight to a domestic one ending up costing BA a 2 hour security related work stoppage and a 737 sitting at its gate for 2 hours while they argued about who would take my dangerous transferred luggage off... apparently around a million quid.
Slashdot Mirror
I was thinking what the heck is WIRED poster geek girl Cynthia Breazeal doing commenting on Wi Fi security ....
Must be the AI researcher in me...
The one true language.
But yes, he probably does think that too. Having written some of the greatest Lisp books of all time, and having built a major Shopping engine in Lisp (was that right).
I'm posting Paid For Placement on this article.
and while I'm at it, where the heck are all the Funny +5 that many of the posts above so deserve!
Ok, the more I read this, the more it seems like a scam. Of course Slashdot can't be held responsible for novel scams, I do think a large rwarning should be put up now enough folks have ridiculed the site.
Lets see: Weird named OS that has never seen the light of day, a "deposit" required, etc. Even if this isnt a scam, seems like these guys dont have a shippable product, and are looking for some free funding... and that's being charitable
Question: Can you leave desc out? ie, can you do an enumeration of all Ancestors?
In the back of my mind there is some memory that grounding variables makes recursion safe, but I could have been smoking crack that day in class...
follow up - I googled RECURSION and SQL, and came back with very little - apparently its only Oracle that's implemented this. I found a little example from MS showing how to use Stored Procedures (heh, cheating SOB's !).
:= q(x),r(y)
:= s(x),t(y)
I guess in theory there is nothing really stopping SQL becoming like Prolog in expressability, after all, they run on regular computersm no magic here. Although personally, I'd *really* like to just use proper relational syntax, instead of having to do unions etc. In logic, if you say:
p(x,y)
You can introduce supplementary relations like
p(x,y)
arbritarily. To do this in SQL you have to start UNIONing sub views together...
anyway, this isnt a thread about how Prolog > SQL, but rather that X Query language is going to be a mess...
My bad :) I'd never come across the 1999 SQL spec.
:= parent(x,y) := ancestor(x,y), parent(y,z)
Interesting, I must say.
Not quite as concise as say (now its been a while, so no critiquing my Prolog).
ancestor(x,y)
ancestor(x,z)
I dont know if the WITH RECURSIVE spec has any limits that arent in say Prolog (Prolog isn't full First Order Predicate Calculus either).
Winton
ok, aside from efficiencies in implementation and writing, the main concern should be with the expressability.
Question - can you express the recursive ancestor relation in SQL? You can express a single relation such as grand parent, but not the full relation.
Reason? Because SQL is not full relational calculus. It is basically propositional calculus (actually I maybe slightly wrong, and it falls in a higher calculus than propositional).
Prolog for example is closer, but still not true relational calculus (I forget whats missing).
There's a reason for SQL's limitations, and that's decidability - guaranteeing that the query will terminate... (admittedly in theory, and you can write some pretty horrendous statements).
Anyway, just wanted to get that off my chest. Doesn't say much about where XML falls in the scheme of thing - I guess strictlt speaking it doesn't - its just a layout. In fact, to compare XML and SQL is a complete misunderstanding. Its XSLT which should be compared.
Why did the companies stop making station wagons? I'm curious - I must admit when i was growing up in Britain in the 70s Station Wagons (or Estate Cars we called em over there) were very popular for families.
Winton
Three little words for them.
Netflix and Amazon
Lets see. Basic cable costs 15 bucks a month. Cheapest way to get HBO - about 70 a month. Lets see thats 55 bucks difference. Thats either 12 Season Sized DVD purchases (how Soprano seasons are made a year?) or nearly 3 complete Netflix subscriptions. Mix and match.
and no crappy commercials either.
Winton
I remember in a control engineering course, 20 years ago, that one of our professors told us how traffic lights were often timed in such a way to slow down speeding traffic. I can't for the life of me remember anything more - but it was to do with wave theory. Basically if you maintained a steady speed of say 25 then you would synchronize with all the greens on a stretch of a road. Wish I could remember more for you. This had nothing to do with detecting on coming fast traffic.
Winton
All Your Dead Badgers Belong To Us.
(see below for Four and Five: Beowulf and Business Model).
In Soviet Russia, Dead Badgers Install You!
I, for one, welcome our new Zombie Badger Overlords...
but aren't they arguing that its impossible to build a theorem prover that is provably bug-free?
:) However, given a limited set of rules, one could prove that the machine does the individual operations correctly, and combines them correctly, so even though the space is infinite, the set of operations is very finite, and provable?
:) ?
Seems like its a variant on one of Godel/Church/Turing theses (I forget which one, halting problem I guess)... One can probably prove that simple programs are "correct", but Theorem provers are effectively Turing Machines, thus, you can't step out of that space to prove they are 100% correct.
I'm not sure I buy this - although given that the space explored by a Theorem prover is infinite, it seems hard to verify
For example addition - just requires successor(x) to be operational, so if you can prove the machine always give the right result for successor(X) and successor(successor(X)), then you infinitably nest em, without proving every step is correct.
Err, ok, its late, I'm tired, and my theoretical reading in this field is about 4 years old now... someone else take up the slack
Winton
Not really, as Yahoo just puts out the REUTERS, AP etc news feeds w/o comment.
Courtesy of GSearch, here are other sources
of course it would have been creepy, if there had been a Content-based Ad, advertising Gmail!...
Once upon a time (1984), in a land far, far away (England), I was a comp-sci student. In mid June, I hitched down to the last legal Stonehenge festival. Myself and temporary girlfriend got a lift from Reading to Salisbury by a guy driving a Porsche. Bear in mind we are both were dressed appropriately (Mohawk, bleached black jeans, way too much metal everywhere).
Anyway, conversation with driver lands me with an offer to give him a call when I was back (and down I guess). He runs a small software development company in Reading. I do, and end up doing a variety of things, the worse of which is counting packages of VAX box/racking. The best is writing Z80- assembler to interface between some cheap daisywheel printers they are trying to sell to hook up to VAXen.
Anyway, two months into this, I arrive at 9am, to find the place surrounded by the police. Office manager mutters something incoherent about the place being shutdown and being in trouble with DEC (Digital Equipment Corp) for something.
Several years go by, and I'm actually working for the self same American multi-national, and I mention the story to an old hand who'd just joined my group. Turns out he knew the whole story. The three principle partners had not just run off with customer lists and been selling third party gear, but they had been helping themselves out the back door of DEC's own facilities. The security guard who'd they'd paid off had killed himself, and the main partner had been chased across fields by the cops....
Ditto, I keep looking to switch my context by tabbing and missing. Damn it Google!
Nuff said :)
No, but trying to avoid Custom's duty is. Ask Al Capone about avoiding taxes...
I think if they feel you are evading, they will give you a very hard time. My advice was simply - if you're stopped, don't risk getting a huge fine and a record. It aint worth it.
Well clearly they probably wouldnt have real time access, but it wouldnt take a customs agent too long to call up the manufacturer and find out when and where.
No, just VAT.The guy said that if I had denied it, they would have prosecuted me - but I don't remember if he told me what the penalty would have been.
No, it is not considered PERSONAL EFFECTS, UNLESS YOU HAVE OWNED FOR 6 MONTHS or so.
For all the rest of you suggesting claiming innocence if you are stopped, HM Custom & Excise have access to VERY comprehensive databases. If they suspect you just bought it, they will check up. I highly recommend if you are stopped that you tell the truth and dont attempt to conceal the fact you bought it. They will question you if they find a laptop in yoru baggage, and it will be childs play to find out that it was just purchased. You will then be subject to a much larger penalty.
See my posting below. The office who stopped me, actually ended up entertaining me with lots of stories about guys who deliberately "tattered" their laptops with sticky tape and the like to attempt to make it look used. Trouble is those things come with serial numbers. They are also on the look out for high end guitars as well apparently there's a brisk trade in Gibsen's etc.
Sure, try to go through the green channel with an innocent face, but if you are stopped, and asked, tell them you bought it in the US.
Winton
Oh my god, there are two of us, and I thought I was unique? Nope I'm in the US now, fairly permamently.
Winton
Hey, be very careful, or Her Majesty's revenue collectors will nab you off the plane and charge you VAT on it.
I had that experience coming back to the UK during a break in working in the US, and the SOB's saw my newish Apple 5300, and whisked me off to a cash machine (ATM) to pay 300 quid (450 dollars). Which for a research assistant was a lot of money. Mofo's. They know their stuff, and the guy who got me (I wasnt hiding it btw, just wasnt declaring it either), said it is something very common to happen.
Anyway, I got the last laugh as their delaying me in the middle of a British Airways transfer from the international flight to a domestic one ending up costing BA a 2 hour security related work stoppage and a 737 sitting at its gate for 2 hours while they argued about who would take my dangerous transferred luggage off... apparently around a million quid.
Winton