I've answered the distribution issue elsewhere, the stats do tend to suggest that the distribution of intelligence amongst the homeless is about the same as that of the housed. Whether it's usable intelligence, that's another issue. And, yes, some are college graduates (and of those, some have PhDs). That knowledge and intelligence has value and under-utilizing it is costing the US. Where the degrees are already there, the question is less of how to get the people to the qualifications they are capable of but to a position where they utilize them. There is clearly a major failing.
Yes, we have a shortage of graduates. If you think of the job market as a gigantic pyramid with the lowest-grade at the base, then current technology (and unskilled labour from overseas) has effectively shifted the entire pyramid up a level. You also need to consider the industrial and scientific base of the country. We have too few types of job, too few fields of endeavor, for the population. We need more types of job, more lines of research, more fields of industry. We do NOT need more of the same, we need diversity. And you don't get that without a surfeit of highly intelligent, creative minds.
The current employers are of no interest because that's old lines of work and most of those career paths are not going to survive as technology evolves. You need the next generation of creators and you won't get the kind of thinking needed from 15yos. We're not talking the next Nokia, we have too many cell phone companies making too poor a product. We're talking industries that don't exist yet because nobody has thought of them. To do that takes serious education.
You are correct that holding a job (and other social requirements) would be a challenge, but there's plenty of dysfunctional people able to hold very good jobs so I don't see that as being a fatal flaw. The IQ score assumption is based on the NIH and NHS data I reference in another reply - there's solid grounds for thinking the distribution is correct. Whether you can then make the extrapolation that this would broaden the industrial and scientific base of the US - that, I think, would only be answerable by carrying out the experiment.
You are correct. The problem is that it has to be 6 bln spent intelligently, in a highly targeted fashion. I don't see that happen to often, although there is nothing to stop it from happening. Slash the homeless figures and you also slash the amount needed on welfare programs, so logically sensible spending is also cost-effective in the long-term.
The underlying assumption is that if you double the number of people in a generic field, you double the number of lines of research. In other words, instead of lots of people designing near-identical phones, you have the Dysons and Baylis' of the world inventing whole new fields or reinventing fields that have stagnated. That's more than enough to produce more revenue.
I agree completely, but if you recall XP actually had to remove security features because of stubborn vendors wanting to write insecure software. Vendors of all kinds hate doing things right.
You are correct about the mental disorders, but bipolar people are famous for unusually high IQs as are people with HFA and LFA, and all of these have mental disorders that cause considerable problems with social interactions of any kind (including keeping a roof over their heads).
What shocked me was an interview I was on some years back for the position as a BIOS programmer. I was told "programmers don't do BIOSes", flat-out by the interviewer. Sorry, they don't grow on binary trees. I was also told "programmers don't do assembly or Forth", leaving me to wonder what else the interviewer was wanting to hire the tooth fairy for.
The very notion of a programmer not wanting to program is beyond my comprehension. A problem is a problem, a solution is a solution, specs are specs and code is code. Why should someone really, truly, passionately care that byte X is in a register rather than in a heap? Does it make that much of a difference? Is a queue or a ring buffer any less of a queue or a ring buffer because you're directly sending words to a port rather than a virtual object? The PCI Express bus uses 4K packets that are addressed to specific devices, so what if that's an on-the-wire protocol? It's not like there's a Spanish OSI Inquisition. Or, at least, not one that's expected.
If you ignore the peaks and troughs, looking only at the general trend, it has been on a fairly steady decline since 2002 according to that graph. (I'm completely ignoring the specific values, for a graph like this you always want to plot a smooth curve that reflects the general pattern and not the individual data points.)
Because the graph is based on what is taught, you're looking at a latency of 1-2 years - maybe more - to factor in the delay between the changes in demand and changes in the classroom. That would imply that the demand itself changed around 2000 at the latest. The steady decline also means that the 2003 and 2008 revisions to the standard have not significantly altered the trend - up or down - and that the problems originate with the C++ 1998 standard (the last one before the known start of the decline).
My guess is that between 1998 and 2000, there would have been a rise in usage of C++ (standards make programming much easier), that it crested around that time and that the decline (which I'm estimating to have started midway between the first and second formal language specifications) came from better specialist tools. I honestly couldn't tell you when CORBA started dying as a standard, but it seems to me that it was around the same timeframe and for much the same reason as I'm giving for C++ (RPC is perfectly good for remote functions, sockets are perfectly good for streaming data, etc - you just don't need a top-heavy solution that can do anything adequately but nothing brilliantly).
Likewise, I think that's part of why scripting languages are starting to suffer. A lot of them are becoming extremely top-heavy and whilst that might make programmers happy in the short-term (they don't have to mix languages right there and then), it makes programmers unhappy in the long-term (they do have to mix languages anyway, it's just more complicated to do so and they feel like they were promised they didn't have to).
If I extrapolate from this, I'm going to say XML (which now requires a monstrous number of libraries to process in various ways) is going to fall out of favour. Architecture-neutral data storage can be done using NetCDF, a key/value database like QDBM is quicker to read/write than an XML database, precisely because XML is often processed as ASCII text it is not very good at handling UTF32 safely, and unordered data is a bugger to read. Specialist tools already exist to do all of the things XML is used for, so I would expect XML to lose ground to those tools once it passes the critical threshold of complexity. It does not appear to have hit that threshold yet, but it will if it continues to gain complexity with no obvious corresponding gain in usefulness. (XML is very useful for some tasks but it doesn't become more useful for those tasks because of XML-RPC or other rarely-used extensions.)
Ada was once extremely popular, far more so than now, but lost a lot of ground because it also became extremely complex. There have been times when Ada has been the laughing-stock of programming because nobody could build a compiler capable of handling it. It was only partially implemented, which caused severe problems for portability but also for provability. (Ada was the flagship language of Formal Methods for a long time, but incomplete and overweight ships sink. It damaged the entire Formal Methods methodology to such an extent that it may never recover.)
This pattern also explains the love-hate relationship with X11 and with other designs that got.... a little too flamboyant. My old Software Engineering instructor used to represent this with a picture of a tyre swing with three ropes holding the tyre up. Each rope functions perfectly as designed, but the result is unusable.
In all probability, homeless people will follow the same distribution curve as everyone else. That would imply that 2% of all homeless people have an IQ of 148 or above (UK's IQ scale, use your local Mensa entry requirement to figure out what's equal to that) and that 30.9% would be able to complete a degree program if given the opportunity.
The Great Source of Wisdom says that there's up to 2 million people in the US who are homeless at any given time, some on a more permanent basis than others. It's a fair bet that even the transients aren't really able to get into a university though.
That would give you 40,000 people of Mensa-level intelligence and around 618,000 people who would be able to complete further education. Finding one person of either level of ability shouldn't be that hard or even unusual - 40,000 people can't be easy to miss and well over half a million should be blatantly obvious.
Now, the median income of people with a bachelor's degree was 40K in 2009. That's the 25% tax bracket. So, the government is losing 10K per year per person who could have a degree but doesn't, which works out to $6.18 billion just from lost income tax revenue. That's ignoring anything such people might invent or contribute to society (and it's clear from even the one example that these are people who are just as able to contribute as anyone) along with all the money the government could collect from businesses as a result of such contributions. That's a hell of a lot of money to be throwing away. I like pragmatic socialism (note the "pragmatic" part) and social justice, so naturally I want fewer homeless people for those reasons. Particularly because I'm pragmatic - that's over half a million potential innovations that won't happen, over half a million potential entrepreneurs that won't get to start anything... Yes, there will always be homeless and the country can't afford to take care of everyone, we all know that, but this goes well beyond what is sane or rational. The desire to be seen as anti-socialist has become moronic and self-destructive.
Nobody can help everybody, but $6bln aught to be more than enough to cover the costs of helping far, far more than we are.
Indeed. I have frequently been accused of being elitist and a snob by looking down on people for not having even the most basic understanding, but really it's not elitist to think. It's elitist to think you don't have to think. I hold people as entirely capable of rational thought, basic education and intelligent conversation - and that if they elect not to perform these very simple tasks that it is they who are holding themselves as "above all that". There are no ivory towers, only ivory pits.
I comprehend the human immune system perfectly well, how it learns, the impact of exposure below the threshold at which illness actually develops, etc. If you wish to live in a la-la land where resistance is magically there without any exposure, feel free. You're an idiot for it if you do.
Or perhaps you believe that low-level exposure (well below the point at which symptoms would appear) isn't enough. Perhaps you take kids to Chicken Pox parties, too. (Brain dead, the lot of ya!) Do you really need me to explain why you can go on vacation somewhere and find that the locals can drink the water but you can't? Seriously? Or is it more of that magic stuff to you?
Low level exposure levels are incredibly useful. (The main reason auto-immune diseases have become common is that low level exposure isn't happening often enough.) Vaccines often utilize such exposure, however the question was not of artificial exposure but of an ideal place. The best place of all for low level exposure is a place where you have low-to-medium population densities, very short exposure times, a heavily temperature controlled environment, absolutely no serious risk of build-up and very limited human interaction.
C didn't gain any ranks but it did gain in the ratings, so two exceptions. If I'm reading the long-term trends correctly, the more potent languages suffered some at the hands of Visual Basic but as VB has died they have recovered. C++ is doing very badly on the long-term trends - that's not merely a product of templates, it would seem to me that it indicates something more serious. Python's usage in the longer-term trends seems to have stabilized, along with a couple of other languages, with most having falling usage. To me, that suggests more hybridization at least in the fields (mostly teaching) that this survey covers - people aren't using one-size-fits-all languages as much, opting for limited use of languages in specialized areas.
Anyone here want to comment on Lua? It's now provided with LaTeX to help provide a bit more oomph, but I'm torn between learning it and seeing what other scripting languages are added in.
Objective C and C# are not terribly surprising but given that there are plenty of C-based languages that never even made the top 20, I find it curious as to which C-based languages are thriving and which are not. If it were on the merits of the language alone, then you'd expect usage to reflect specific features, and I was assured repeatedly in the discussion on Java that languages were not (as I'd claimed) popular due to promotion. Surely not all those people could be wrong, could they?
Logo's popularity is puzzling as this is far too recent a survey to reflect the UK's demand to switch from learning about office supplies in IT to learning about writing software and starting off on 2D graphics applications. However, precisely because of that switch, I'd expect Logo's popularity to rise at least a little bit more. It is, after all, a language designed to start people off on writing 2D graphics applications.
Pascal, Delphi and Ada get mentions, but Modula-2 and Modula-3 do not. Nor does Eiffel. Not a terrible shock, but again it does say a lot about perceptions in regards to usage. I'm no fan of Modula-2 or Modula-3, but there are bound to be cases where they're more appropriate choices but the others are used instead.
Scalable Java is easy and I've already shown elsewhere how to do it. It's far more resource-intensive, because Java isn't a sound platform, but you simply use the same methodology as you do for explicit parallel programming. Communication between objects is just message passing, nothing more, and we know plenty about message passing between independent logical processes and even independent physical machines in explicit parallel programming.
If you write non-portable C++, you're writing it wrong. The =only= language that has any business being non-portable is the native assembly language for the processor. (There are "pseudo assembly languages" that are essentially at the same level as native assembly but which ARE portable across CPU architectures, so it is necessary to say that it has to be a native assembly language.)
GC is still being worked on and time is unimportant. Should we all be using BCPL? It is still being updated, isn't 30 years time enough to erase past sins? No. It is not. BCPL is not a suitable language for most purposes because of the architecture. The same is true with Java. C is tolerable only because of the performance, but has all kinds of architectural defects. You remember the saying "if builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programmers the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization"? If so, then you know that rebuilding civilization after every woodpecker is simply not an acceptable solution. If you designed things right to start off with, you would never have to rebuild at all.
I'd argue that universal education would reduce antibiotic misuse (and thus slow bacterial evolution a bit) and that universal healthcare would allow doctors to detect new strains at the time of emergence rather than after a large reservoir had built up in the population (which means a much shorter time between a new strain emerging and the treatment being adapted accordingly).
It would not halt the evolution of pathogens. You don't even really want to do that. But it would allow you to have a sustainable dynamic equilibrium that caused the least harm to humans.
Antivirals now exist, although there was a fad in over-using them so those that have been developed are now mostly useless. However, yes, the conversation is about bacteria.
Supermarkets are probably a good place to have diseases. Much of the food is either tinned (so isolated from it) or will be washed, and in either case it will likely be cooked (killing most bacteria and deactivating most viruses). Meanwhile, most shoppers won't be exposed for any significant time, which means they stand a far better chance of building up resistance than to suffering any hardship. Ok, no place is "great" to have disease, but in terms of opportunities to strengthen health vs. impair it, I'd consider a supermarket to be as good as it's going to get.
Prisons? Uh, no. First, this is an airborne disease. That means it won't stay in the prisons for very long. There's an incubation period, so when it does break out, it will be far beyond any human capacity to control long before you realize it has done so. And then there's the fact that diseases mutate. In a compressed population, where infection and reinfection are going to be frequent, you're talking about an ideal biological weapons factory. You won't just get one strain escaping, you might get hundreds - thousands for the largest prisons. Developing a vaccine for ONE disease is bad enough, slow enough and expensive enough. You start getting a few hundred strains, each needing its own unique vaccine, and you've something that is far beyond the capacity of any nation's finances to cope with even if it had the gurus necessary to develop that many vaccines.
In fact, underclasses in general are the single-most dangerous vector for diseases of any kind. "Invisible" populations allow outbreaks to move rapidly, mutate rapidly and build up reservoirs which can survive for decades, sometimes centuries.
As long as there are "undesirables" or "untouchables", you are guaranteed to have uncontrollable epidemics. Elimination of underclasses won't eliminate disease, but it WILL eliminate the places diseases can hide amongst humans, which means treatments have an opportunity to evolve as the disease evolves. You don't have to play a decade's worth of catch-up overnight. Diseases don't give a damn about your prejudices, they'll infect everyone equally. Prejudices only make it harder to stop them.
James Lovelock came up with a perfectly good definition that doesn't stipulate any specific chemistry - he merely stated that life is that which will actively sustain a dynamic equilibrium when the non-living parts of the system passively change*. (He also argued that the distinction between living and non-living was stupid anyway, since there are too many inter-dependencies to make such a distinction in a productive way. Since his work forms the backbone of almost all modern life science, it seems pointless NASA resorting to definitions of "life" that have been considered obsolete for a decade or more.)
Indeed, Lovelock's theories on life are exceptionally useful to astronomers, because you CAN monitor the chemistry of the atmosphere of an exoplanet and you CAN monitor things like the solar radiation it gets. You can therefore utilize Lovelock's work to determine if the planet has life on it or not, remotely, without any regard whatsoever to the chemistry of that life or the mechanisms it utilizes.
*The basis of Lovelock's definition is that all life MUST geo-engineer. It has to, with no exceptions. That goes for viruses, bacteria, algae, etc. Not only must it geo-engineer, but in order for a system to be in dynamic equilibrium, the geo-engineering HAS to contain a negative feedback loop. The mere presence of life will alter the planet, but if it were to alter it without creating a dynamic equilibrium it would necessarily create a positive feedback loop that would destroy itself. In his view, you cannot treat the geology, the meteorology and the biochemistry as distinct fields - they interact and compartmentalizing will never let you understand the processes going on.
Analyzing soil samples will help on Mars but really it shouldn't be necessary. Dormant's another matter. If life exists in an active form, there will be variables that are held to a value and do not passively fluctuate with the seasons. If life *ever* existed on the planet, then the chemistry of the rocks will show that variables were held to a specific value and did not fluctuate with the seasons. The geology will record the feedback processes that all life (in this model) must have. The soil samples would let you identify what that life was/is, and to understand HOW it operated, but to merely detect if it was there to begin with you need look no further than the chemistry of the sedimentary rock we already know exists on Mars.
That is, if his theory is correct.
Evidently, despite the views of the life sciences, NASA is not following this path. Ergo, NASA thinks that despite the fact that it doesn't know what to look for, it shouldn't look where Lovelock said. I would hope they have a really good reason -- it's exceptionally bad science to ignore the prevailing theory, particularly if you have none of your own. They have to be rejecting his theory because if they accepted it then they wouldn't need to care about carbon, water, etc. They'd merely need to care about whether the chemistry could or could not be explained by passive processes alone. What the process was would simply not matter.
I didn't say it changed the world, I said that if that was the standard you actually cared about then that would be what you would use. Since you aren't using Occam (and very few people do), it's extremely obvious that this can NOT be the standard you are working by. Duh.
Mobile Java is NOT the same thing as full-blown Java. And, no, it doesn't have "vastly better" threading and concurrency support - which is why it has been completely revamped in 1.6. Everybody, apart from you apparently, loathed and despised Java's threading model. I have never needed to change libraries for threading in C++, whether using DEC OSF/1, HP/UX, Linux, Solaris, OpenBSD, Irix or even something as retarded as Windows. Can you tell me what platform you're using that magically DOES need a new library? No? Thought not. You're merely making bad choices, rather than necessary ones.
What dynamic memory support? Java doesn't use classical dynamic memory (malloc/free and pointers), it uses objects and a garbage collector (pick one of many, and even the garbage collectors keep getting replaced cos they're all naff). Object instantiation is NOT the same thing as dynamic memory. G1 is buggy as hell.
I've used Java for 16 years and C++ for 23. I've master certifications in both. What's your experience - a weekend looking at other people's stuff?
JNI will work on any platform, but it's a bitch to get working with non-OO languages. (F77, in an example I give elsewhere, is a particular pain.)
JINI, the Java virtual bus technology, seems to have died a death years ago.
Java was designed to not just kill MS Windows but the PC as well. The Network Computer - machines that ran relatively small applets that were centrally dispensed - was to be the future. And, at least as far as handheld devices go, that is indeed what has happened.
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I've answered the distribution issue elsewhere, the stats do tend to suggest that the distribution of intelligence amongst the homeless is about the same as that of the housed. Whether it's usable intelligence, that's another issue. And, yes, some are college graduates (and of those, some have PhDs). That knowledge and intelligence has value and under-utilizing it is costing the US. Where the degrees are already there, the question is less of how to get the people to the qualifications they are capable of but to a position where they utilize them. There is clearly a major failing.
Yes, we have a shortage of graduates. If you think of the job market as a gigantic pyramid with the lowest-grade at the base, then current technology (and unskilled labour from overseas) has effectively shifted the entire pyramid up a level. You also need to consider the industrial and scientific base of the country. We have too few types of job, too few fields of endeavor, for the population. We need more types of job, more lines of research, more fields of industry. We do NOT need more of the same, we need diversity. And you don't get that without a surfeit of highly intelligent, creative minds.
The current employers are of no interest because that's old lines of work and most of those career paths are not going to survive as technology evolves. You need the next generation of creators and you won't get the kind of thinking needed from 15yos. We're not talking the next Nokia, we have too many cell phone companies making too poor a product. We're talking industries that don't exist yet because nobody has thought of them. To do that takes serious education.
You are correct that holding a job (and other social requirements) would be a challenge, but there's plenty of dysfunctional people able to hold very good jobs so I don't see that as being a fatal flaw. The IQ score assumption is based on the NIH and NHS data I reference in another reply - there's solid grounds for thinking the distribution is correct. Whether you can then make the extrapolation that this would broaden the industrial and scientific base of the US - that, I think, would only be answerable by carrying out the experiment.
You are correct. The problem is that it has to be 6 bln spent intelligently, in a highly targeted fashion. I don't see that happen to often, although there is nothing to stop it from happening. Slash the homeless figures and you also slash the amount needed on welfare programs, so logically sensible spending is also cost-effective in the long-term.
The underlying assumption is that if you double the number of people in a generic field, you double the number of lines of research. In other words, instead of lots of people designing near-identical phones, you have the Dysons and Baylis' of the world inventing whole new fields or reinventing fields that have stagnated. That's more than enough to produce more revenue.
I agree completely, but if you recall XP actually had to remove security features because of stubborn vendors wanting to write insecure software. Vendors of all kinds hate doing things right.
You are correct about the mental disorders, but bipolar people are famous for unusually high IQs as are people with HFA and LFA, and all of these have mental disorders that cause considerable problems with social interactions of any kind (including keeping a roof over their heads).
Mental disorder rates by State
90% of homeless in UK excluded from education
IQ study in US shows "WAIS-R scores were comparable to population means".
What shocked me was an interview I was on some years back for the position as a BIOS programmer. I was told "programmers don't do BIOSes", flat-out by the interviewer. Sorry, they don't grow on binary trees. I was also told "programmers don't do assembly or Forth", leaving me to wonder what else the interviewer was wanting to hire the tooth fairy for.
The very notion of a programmer not wanting to program is beyond my comprehension. A problem is a problem, a solution is a solution, specs are specs and code is code. Why should someone really, truly, passionately care that byte X is in a register rather than in a heap? Does it make that much of a difference? Is a queue or a ring buffer any less of a queue or a ring buffer because you're directly sending words to a port rather than a virtual object? The PCI Express bus uses 4K packets that are addressed to specific devices, so what if that's an on-the-wire protocol? It's not like there's a Spanish OSI Inquisition. Or, at least, not one that's expected.
If you ignore the peaks and troughs, looking only at the general trend, it has been on a fairly steady decline since 2002 according to that graph. (I'm completely ignoring the specific values, for a graph like this you always want to plot a smooth curve that reflects the general pattern and not the individual data points.)
Because the graph is based on what is taught, you're looking at a latency of 1-2 years - maybe more - to factor in the delay between the changes in demand and changes in the classroom. That would imply that the demand itself changed around 2000 at the latest. The steady decline also means that the 2003 and 2008 revisions to the standard have not significantly altered the trend - up or down - and that the problems originate with the C++ 1998 standard (the last one before the known start of the decline).
My guess is that between 1998 and 2000, there would have been a rise in usage of C++ (standards make programming much easier), that it crested around that time and that the decline (which I'm estimating to have started midway between the first and second formal language specifications) came from better specialist tools. I honestly couldn't tell you when CORBA started dying as a standard, but it seems to me that it was around the same timeframe and for much the same reason as I'm giving for C++ (RPC is perfectly good for remote functions, sockets are perfectly good for streaming data, etc - you just don't need a top-heavy solution that can do anything adequately but nothing brilliantly).
Likewise, I think that's part of why scripting languages are starting to suffer. A lot of them are becoming extremely top-heavy and whilst that might make programmers happy in the short-term (they don't have to mix languages right there and then), it makes programmers unhappy in the long-term (they do have to mix languages anyway, it's just more complicated to do so and they feel like they were promised they didn't have to).
If I extrapolate from this, I'm going to say XML (which now requires a monstrous number of libraries to process in various ways) is going to fall out of favour. Architecture-neutral data storage can be done using NetCDF, a key/value database like QDBM is quicker to read/write than an XML database, precisely because XML is often processed as ASCII text it is not very good at handling UTF32 safely, and unordered data is a bugger to read. Specialist tools already exist to do all of the things XML is used for, so I would expect XML to lose ground to those tools once it passes the critical threshold of complexity. It does not appear to have hit that threshold yet, but it will if it continues to gain complexity with no obvious corresponding gain in usefulness. (XML is very useful for some tasks but it doesn't become more useful for those tasks because of XML-RPC or other rarely-used extensions.)
Ada was once extremely popular, far more so than now, but lost a lot of ground because it also became extremely complex. There have been times when Ada has been the laughing-stock of programming because nobody could build a compiler capable of handling it. It was only partially implemented, which caused severe problems for portability but also for provability. (Ada was the flagship language of Formal Methods for a long time, but incomplete and overweight ships sink. It damaged the entire Formal Methods methodology to such an extent that it may never recover.)
This pattern also explains the love-hate relationship with X11 and with other designs that got.... a little too flamboyant. My old Software Engineering instructor used to represent this with a picture of a tyre swing with three ropes holding the tyre up. Each rope functions perfectly as designed, but the result is unusable.
In all probability, homeless people will follow the same distribution curve as everyone else. That would imply that 2% of all homeless people have an IQ of 148 or above (UK's IQ scale, use your local Mensa entry requirement to figure out what's equal to that) and that 30.9% would be able to complete a degree program if given the opportunity.
The Great Source of Wisdom says that there's up to 2 million people in the US who are homeless at any given time, some on a more permanent basis than others. It's a fair bet that even the transients aren't really able to get into a university though.
That would give you 40,000 people of Mensa-level intelligence and around 618,000 people who would be able to complete further education. Finding one person of either level of ability shouldn't be that hard or even unusual - 40,000 people can't be easy to miss and well over half a million should be blatantly obvious.
Now, the median income of people with a bachelor's degree was 40K in 2009. That's the 25% tax bracket. So, the government is losing 10K per year per person who could have a degree but doesn't, which works out to $6.18 billion just from lost income tax revenue. That's ignoring anything such people might invent or contribute to society (and it's clear from even the one example that these are people who are just as able to contribute as anyone) along with all the money the government could collect from businesses as a result of such contributions. That's a hell of a lot of money to be throwing away. I like pragmatic socialism (note the "pragmatic" part) and social justice, so naturally I want fewer homeless people for those reasons. Particularly because I'm pragmatic - that's over half a million potential innovations that won't happen, over half a million potential entrepreneurs that won't get to start anything... Yes, there will always be homeless and the country can't afford to take care of everyone, we all know that, but this goes well beyond what is sane or rational. The desire to be seen as anti-socialist has become moronic and self-destructive.
Nobody can help everybody, but $6bln aught to be more than enough to cover the costs of helping far, far more than we are.
Maybe one of her siblings is a geek that uses C shell.
Indeed. I have frequently been accused of being elitist and a snob by looking down on people for not having even the most basic understanding, but really it's not elitist to think. It's elitist to think you don't have to think. I hold people as entirely capable of rational thought, basic education and intelligent conversation - and that if they elect not to perform these very simple tasks that it is they who are holding themselves as "above all that". There are no ivory towers, only ivory pits.
I comprehend the human immune system perfectly well, how it learns, the impact of exposure below the threshold at which illness actually develops, etc. If you wish to live in a la-la land where resistance is magically there without any exposure, feel free. You're an idiot for it if you do.
Or perhaps you believe that low-level exposure (well below the point at which symptoms would appear) isn't enough. Perhaps you take kids to Chicken Pox parties, too. (Brain dead, the lot of ya!) Do you really need me to explain why you can go on vacation somewhere and find that the locals can drink the water but you can't? Seriously? Or is it more of that magic stuff to you?
Low level exposure levels are incredibly useful. (The main reason auto-immune diseases have become common is that low level exposure isn't happening often enough.) Vaccines often utilize such exposure, however the question was not of artificial exposure but of an ideal place. The best place of all for low level exposure is a place where you have low-to-medium population densities, very short exposure times, a heavily temperature controlled environment, absolutely no serious risk of build-up and very limited human interaction.
Because there's still a lot of software that doesn't work correctly if UAC is enabled.
Those cards are heavily used. It's not like this would only impact e-mail, the cards are pretty much used for everything.
C didn't gain any ranks but it did gain in the ratings, so two exceptions. If I'm reading the long-term trends correctly, the more potent languages suffered some at the hands of Visual Basic but as VB has died they have recovered. C++ is doing very badly on the long-term trends - that's not merely a product of templates, it would seem to me that it indicates something more serious. Python's usage in the longer-term trends seems to have stabilized, along with a couple of other languages, with most having falling usage. To me, that suggests more hybridization at least in the fields (mostly teaching) that this survey covers - people aren't using one-size-fits-all languages as much, opting for limited use of languages in specialized areas.
Anyone here want to comment on Lua? It's now provided with LaTeX to help provide a bit more oomph, but I'm torn between learning it and seeing what other scripting languages are added in.
Objective C and C# are not terribly surprising but given that there are plenty of C-based languages that never even made the top 20, I find it curious as to which C-based languages are thriving and which are not. If it were on the merits of the language alone, then you'd expect usage to reflect specific features, and I was assured repeatedly in the discussion on Java that languages were not (as I'd claimed) popular due to promotion. Surely not all those people could be wrong, could they?
Logo's popularity is puzzling as this is far too recent a survey to reflect the UK's demand to switch from learning about office supplies in IT to learning about writing software and starting off on 2D graphics applications. However, precisely because of that switch, I'd expect Logo's popularity to rise at least a little bit more. It is, after all, a language designed to start people off on writing 2D graphics applications.
Pascal, Delphi and Ada get mentions, but Modula-2 and Modula-3 do not. Nor does Eiffel. Not a terrible shock, but again it does say a lot about perceptions in regards to usage. I'm no fan of Modula-2 or Modula-3, but there are bound to be cases where they're more appropriate choices but the others are used instead.
Scalable Java is easy and I've already shown elsewhere how to do it. It's far more resource-intensive, because Java isn't a sound platform, but you simply use the same methodology as you do for explicit parallel programming. Communication between objects is just message passing, nothing more, and we know plenty about message passing between independent logical processes and even independent physical machines in explicit parallel programming.
If you write non-portable C++, you're writing it wrong. The =only= language that has any business being non-portable is the native assembly language for the processor. (There are "pseudo assembly languages" that are essentially at the same level as native assembly but which ARE portable across CPU architectures, so it is necessary to say that it has to be a native assembly language.)
GC is still being worked on and time is unimportant. Should we all be using BCPL? It is still being updated, isn't 30 years time enough to erase past sins? No. It is not. BCPL is not a suitable language for most purposes because of the architecture. The same is true with Java. C is tolerable only because of the performance, but has all kinds of architectural defects. You remember the saying "if builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programmers the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization"? If so, then you know that rebuilding civilization after every woodpecker is simply not an acceptable solution. If you designed things right to start off with, you would never have to rebuild at all.
If it does the job...
I'd argue that universal education would reduce antibiotic misuse (and thus slow bacterial evolution a bit) and that universal healthcare would allow doctors to detect new strains at the time of emergence rather than after a large reservoir had built up in the population (which means a much shorter time between a new strain emerging and the treatment being adapted accordingly).
It would not halt the evolution of pathogens. You don't even really want to do that. But it would allow you to have a sustainable dynamic equilibrium that caused the least harm to humans.
Antivirals now exist, although there was a fad in over-using them so those that have been developed are now mostly useless. However, yes, the conversation is about bacteria.
There's two hidden "I"s, so it's here and invisibly spreading.
Supermarkets are probably a good place to have diseases. Much of the food is either tinned (so isolated from it) or will be washed, and in either case it will likely be cooked (killing most bacteria and deactivating most viruses). Meanwhile, most shoppers won't be exposed for any significant time, which means they stand a far better chance of building up resistance than to suffering any hardship. Ok, no place is "great" to have disease, but in terms of opportunities to strengthen health vs. impair it, I'd consider a supermarket to be as good as it's going to get.
Prisons? Uh, no. First, this is an airborne disease. That means it won't stay in the prisons for very long. There's an incubation period, so when it does break out, it will be far beyond any human capacity to control long before you realize it has done so. And then there's the fact that diseases mutate. In a compressed population, where infection and reinfection are going to be frequent, you're talking about an ideal biological weapons factory. You won't just get one strain escaping, you might get hundreds - thousands for the largest prisons. Developing a vaccine for ONE disease is bad enough, slow enough and expensive enough. You start getting a few hundred strains, each needing its own unique vaccine, and you've something that is far beyond the capacity of any nation's finances to cope with even if it had the gurus necessary to develop that many vaccines.
In fact, underclasses in general are the single-most dangerous vector for diseases of any kind. "Invisible" populations allow outbreaks to move rapidly, mutate rapidly and build up reservoirs which can survive for decades, sometimes centuries.
As long as there are "undesirables" or "untouchables", you are guaranteed to have uncontrollable epidemics. Elimination of underclasses won't eliminate disease, but it WILL eliminate the places diseases can hide amongst humans, which means treatments have an opportunity to evolve as the disease evolves. You don't have to play a decade's worth of catch-up overnight. Diseases don't give a damn about your prejudices, they'll infect everyone equally. Prejudices only make it harder to stop them.
James Lovelock came up with a perfectly good definition that doesn't stipulate any specific chemistry - he merely stated that life is that which will actively sustain a dynamic equilibrium when the non-living parts of the system passively change*. (He also argued that the distinction between living and non-living was stupid anyway, since there are too many inter-dependencies to make such a distinction in a productive way. Since his work forms the backbone of almost all modern life science, it seems pointless NASA resorting to definitions of "life" that have been considered obsolete for a decade or more.)
Indeed, Lovelock's theories on life are exceptionally useful to astronomers, because you CAN monitor the chemistry of the atmosphere of an exoplanet and you CAN monitor things like the solar radiation it gets. You can therefore utilize Lovelock's work to determine if the planet has life on it or not, remotely, without any regard whatsoever to the chemistry of that life or the mechanisms it utilizes.
*The basis of Lovelock's definition is that all life MUST geo-engineer. It has to, with no exceptions. That goes for viruses, bacteria, algae, etc. Not only must it geo-engineer, but in order for a system to be in dynamic equilibrium, the geo-engineering HAS to contain a negative feedback loop. The mere presence of life will alter the planet, but if it were to alter it without creating a dynamic equilibrium it would necessarily create a positive feedback loop that would destroy itself. In his view, you cannot treat the geology, the meteorology and the biochemistry as distinct fields - they interact and compartmentalizing will never let you understand the processes going on.
Analyzing soil samples will help on Mars but really it shouldn't be necessary. Dormant's another matter. If life exists in an active form, there will be variables that are held to a value and do not passively fluctuate with the seasons. If life *ever* existed on the planet, then the chemistry of the rocks will show that variables were held to a specific value and did not fluctuate with the seasons. The geology will record the feedback processes that all life (in this model) must have. The soil samples would let you identify what that life was/is, and to understand HOW it operated, but to merely detect if it was there to begin with you need look no further than the chemistry of the sedimentary rock we already know exists on Mars.
That is, if his theory is correct.
Evidently, despite the views of the life sciences, NASA is not following this path. Ergo, NASA thinks that despite the fact that it doesn't know what to look for, it shouldn't look where Lovelock said. I would hope they have a really good reason -- it's exceptionally bad science to ignore the prevailing theory, particularly if you have none of your own. They have to be rejecting his theory because if they accepted it then they wouldn't need to care about carbon, water, etc. They'd merely need to care about whether the chemistry could or could not be explained by passive processes alone. What the process was would simply not matter.
I didn't say it changed the world, I said that if that was the standard you actually cared about then that would be what you would use. Since you aren't using Occam (and very few people do), it's extremely obvious that this can NOT be the standard you are working by. Duh.
Mobile Java is NOT the same thing as full-blown Java. And, no, it doesn't have "vastly better" threading and concurrency support - which is why it has been completely revamped in 1.6. Everybody, apart from you apparently, loathed and despised Java's threading model. I have never needed to change libraries for threading in C++, whether using DEC OSF/1, HP/UX, Linux, Solaris, OpenBSD, Irix or even something as retarded as Windows. Can you tell me what platform you're using that magically DOES need a new library? No? Thought not. You're merely making bad choices, rather than necessary ones.
What dynamic memory support? Java doesn't use classical dynamic memory (malloc/free and pointers), it uses objects and a garbage collector (pick one of many, and even the garbage collectors keep getting replaced cos they're all naff). Object instantiation is NOT the same thing as dynamic memory. G1 is buggy as hell.
I've used Java for 16 years and C++ for 23. I've master certifications in both. What's your experience - a weekend looking at other people's stuff?
JNI will work on any platform, but it's a bitch to get working with non-OO languages. (F77, in an example I give elsewhere, is a particular pain.)
JINI, the Java virtual bus technology, seems to have died a death years ago.
Java was designed to not just kill MS Windows but the PC as well. The Network Computer - machines that ran relatively small applets that were centrally dispensed - was to be the future. And, at least as far as handheld devices go, that is indeed what has happened.