Well, duh. When "public transportation" or "public healthcare" get mentioned in the media, the view is almost entirely that such things exist only in Commie Pinko Subversive countries and that Americans who prefer such things are "traitors" to Megacorp Inc. The people who elect officials and the officials themselves are the same people who (a) read the press, and (b) control what the press says. Therefore, the press is a good reflection of the mood and thus this incredible persecution complex which feeds itself.
So what? The Supreme Court has ruled that even International Law can't be applied unless it has been duplicated in Federal Law. International Law is given the same weight as the Constitution. Ergo, nothing in the Constitution can be regarded as provably enforceable unless also Federal Law - the Supreme Court ruling can be used to selectively exempt anything that isn't duplicated. That's what makes the ruling so horribly dangerous. (The Law of Unintended Consequences, however, doesn't need to be on statute books and doesn't need a federal agency to apply it - although most agencies do a superb job if it anyways.)
In other words, the fact that it's nominally an illegal search doesn't mean that the Supreme Court will say it is. It's why exceptions are such horribly dangerous things. If the law is flawed, replace it. Putting in exemptions - particularly for political purposes - can be extended forever and are unlikely to ever get repealed. And political exemptions are never going to be politics the way YOU like it, no matter what it is that you happen to like.
The TSA and the Supreme Court rulings - however frightening and un-Constitutional - are merely symptoms. A fever will kill but a fever isn't a disease. The diseases, in this case, are fear, ignorance, insularism and superstition. Fighting for rights is no more than aspirin (and complaining about rights is no more than baby aspirin at best) - important but no antibiotic. If you want to cure the diseases, not merely mask them in the hopes they'll go away, you need superior education (a wonderful vaccine that is being withdrawn from many areas for being "expensive") and superior culture (the best antibiotic is to not have society imagine we're somehow neolithic pig farmers - the popular remedies that worked in 1776 BC barely worked in 1776 AD and certainly don't work today.)
Education is going to be the tough one. 2011 saw a budget of $23.75 billion for mandatory spending. (If you want universal quality, mandatory matters and discretionary does not.) That covers 19.7 million college/university students, around 55.5 million students K-12 and somewhere around 97 million from there on up to college. That's around 172 million students, so about $13.8K per student. The actual cost, as claimed by that highly reputable source of dubious numbers Wikipedia puts the actual cost per student per year at about twice that. (The University cost is the one that matters, because the student:staff ratio is usually saner, facilities are usually closer to being on-par, textbooks are almost decent and bake sales aren't used to cover over the cracks. If all K-18 schools were of high calibre, they would cost about the same per year per student as a University.)
The idea that Congress might actually cover the cost of inflation is laughable enough. That they'd do that and THEN double the total is absolutely hysterical. That the States (busy ordering textbooks that include Intelligent Design, flat Earths and fake moonlanding claims, no doubt) would then use the money "intelligently" and design a credible education system from the ground up is a joke of almost lethal proportions. They're way too busy warding off the evil eye with chicken blood and sacrificial heavy metal albums.
(University standards aren't perfect - far from it, way too much parroting and way too little skill building - but you've got to start somewhere. You can get 40%+ just from a mix of rote memorization and test-taking skills in most University exams, never having to understand a damn thing. I'd like to see that reduced to an absolute ceiling of 10%, but let's be honest - if there's absolutely not a chance in hell of even getting UP to sub-par but to
The problem is that Americans are taught from day 1 to fear collective action. "The individual is everything, all-powerful. You are the captain of your destiny. The collective is for pinko subversive socialist countries like Britain, who we pretend to be allies with but secretly regard as no better than Stalinist Russia."
The IT industry is a classic example. Know of any major IT unions? No? Why? Because "collective rights" are somehow mysteriously "bad". Individual rights are ok, but the notion that two individuals might have the same rights and therefore speak collectively isn't exactly kosher. (That individuals can't protect said rights against corporations, patent trolls, government departments or anything much more substantial than a hamster, well, that's apparently immaterial.)
We know that gold arrived on Earth via asteroids and that dead white dwarf stars form diamond planets, so sparkly faery planets seems reasonable to me.
I hereby name the diamond planet that was announced recently on Slashdot "Tinkerbell" in honour of ackthpt's suggestion.
A lot of the parallel languages I've encountered (UPC, Occam, Parallel Fortran, etc) are procedural. The 4th and 5th generation languages that I know of that I know are also parallelized (Parlog, for example) are dead and you don't even need Netcraft to confirm it. However, I'm more than happy to get updates in these sorts of areas (damn functional programmer's mailing list won't let you subscribe unless you're hyperactive in the field) so thanks for the correction.
Which Fortran? I - IV, 77, 90, 95, 2000 or 2005?:)
Actually, Fortran is still THE language of choice for anyone working in mathematics. There are more codes for it and the compilers are just so much better for that type of problem.
Seriously, I "speak" 20 programming languages either fluently or close to it, so have some experience of the HORRIBLE choices some designers have made.
I'm ok with functional languages, but freely admit that I've concentrated on procedural languages. The main problem I've had with functional languages is that lambda expressions can be damn hard to read - or write - though that's just a learning-curve thing. A secondary issue is that it's actually quite difficult to figure out how to parallelize code outside of either the object (parallelizing OO is trivial, though parallelizing it well is hard) and procedural domains. Attempts by the University of Manchester to develop in the 1970s compilers that could intelligently regroup expressions such that each group could be a distinct parallel task never really got anywhere and I've not seen much in the way of any serious attempts since. Haskell has no serious parallel processing capability, for example.
Occam-Pi is one of the few hybrid procedural/functional languages (the Pi is both a play on words, since it's an extended version of Occam 3, and a reference to Pi calculus) that I like. It has a few problems, though - the development server was hacked and damaged, there IS only one group developing it, I am one of about a half dozen outside the group who even uses the language, the compiler is more designed for research than producing highly-optimized code, manuals don't exist for that version and it would be extremely hard to develop hooks for Gnome or KDE with it. Having said that, if someone wrote a decent GCC frontend for it, I could easily see all these being fixed.
There are ways to circumvent that, of course - abolish the concept of a corporation as a person, treat all copyrights owned by them as assets that can be seized, and if the sum value so seized is less than the money owed, seize assets of management (within bounds, an individual should never be sued beyond the ability to function as an individual) including the business license for the corporation. If it's still less, ban all members of management from holding management positions or being able to obtain a license to run a business for X number of years.
It's a purer paradigm (which generally makes for cleaner code), you can't free an unmalloced structure or do other illegal pointer arithmetic in Java, C++ has way way too many different approaches munged into one language (it's not OO, it has support for objects - making it object-based - but it also has support for a host of other paradigms), it doesn't take a decade for the standards body to produce updates, and Sun did a reasonable job of killing dialects - the main threat to any language.
Having said that, Digital Mars' D is better than either, I very much prefer Occam for parallel work and I'm sure other excellent languages are out there.
With this problem, you'd do basically the same thing but you'd want slightly more data to handle the smaller size. (For handwriting, pressure and gradient would be the most obvious extensions to use. For original printed documents, you MAY be able to use any random fluctuations in toner or ink, since any fluctuations will be highly localized. For photocopies, the contrast of the copy might not be enough to show up extremely small variations - I'm really not sure what you could use there.)
However, you needn't get a unique solution.
Option 1: (Assumes some text is on the document.) You can use the methods used in cryptology to determine if the result of using a given key has produced a possible plaintext. A random arrangement of remains will never produce a sane text when OCRed, you'll always get a line where characters should be but can't be identified.
Option 2: An alternative second stage would be to treat every possible combination that meets the initial criteria as possible plaintexts for a cypher. The analysis at the end of the 2dem paper shows that basic encryption always expose some information even when the encrypted document is not considered readable. So it aught to be possible to look for information leakage to reduce the number of "keys" (ie: orderings that meet the criteria of stage 1) you need to brute-force look at.
If option 1 is sensitive enough and the document is of a type that permits simple analysis of the form rather than the content, then step 2 would never be needed. Step 2 is only needed if the form is not enough.
The problem here is that the above solution isn't guaranteed to reduce the number of possibilities to anything sensible. Stage 2 is a herustic that tries to make one segment correct in the hopes that this will make everything correct. Anyone who has solved one face of a Rubics cube knows this isn't a guaranteed approach. The best that can be said is that it will always reduce the problem space, but won't necessarily reduce it to the level that the problem can be considered essentially solved.
You say "this is all true of Vista and 7", but then have to come up with convoluted reasons as to why IE's marketshare is going up despite failing ACID and why other browsers' shares are going down. Isn't it easier (and therefore the more correct) to say that bundling had this identical effect before and so bundling will have this effect again?
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. I don't know what it is when Microsoft does the same thing and you expect different results, but lunacy springs to mind.
In the Windows 95 days, if I wanted to use Windows' winsock, I could do so. I could also replace it with Trumpet's. If I wanted to use Windows memory manager, I could do so, or I could replace it with EMM386. I don't think you could seriously get away with saying a memory manager wasn't shared code, but they still had it so that you could swap it out and insert something that did the same job from someone else.
In the modern Unix (including OS/X and OLPC) world, I can still do this. What I can't do is replace IE's rendering engine.
Explain how this is so amazingly superior, given they didn't originally have this kind of issue with ANY core component, no matter how shared, and that no competing system has this problem today.
You and the other MS schills say I'm whining, but you haven't explained a damn thing. You lot keep avoiding the fact that these components HAVE been interchangeable in Windows in the past AND are interchangeable in other systems today. Your pointing to mscorlib and comctl32 are laughable because these ARE replaceable with rival DLLs, but still IE's rendering engine IS NOT.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, the US military bought a whole bunch of those rocks for detecting IEDs in Afghanistan and the rock budget is currently empty.
Well, duh. When "public transportation" or "public healthcare" get mentioned in the media, the view is almost entirely that such things exist only in Commie Pinko Subversive countries and that Americans who prefer such things are "traitors" to Megacorp Inc. The people who elect officials and the officials themselves are the same people who (a) read the press, and (b) control what the press says. Therefore, the press is a good reflection of the mood and thus this incredible persecution complex which feeds itself.
So what? The Supreme Court has ruled that even International Law can't be applied unless it has been duplicated in Federal Law. International Law is given the same weight as the Constitution. Ergo, nothing in the Constitution can be regarded as provably enforceable unless also Federal Law - the Supreme Court ruling can be used to selectively exempt anything that isn't duplicated. That's what makes the ruling so horribly dangerous. (The Law of Unintended Consequences, however, doesn't need to be on statute books and doesn't need a federal agency to apply it - although most agencies do a superb job if it anyways.)
In other words, the fact that it's nominally an illegal search doesn't mean that the Supreme Court will say it is. It's why exceptions are such horribly dangerous things. If the law is flawed, replace it. Putting in exemptions - particularly for political purposes - can be extended forever and are unlikely to ever get repealed. And political exemptions are never going to be politics the way YOU like it, no matter what it is that you happen to like.
The TSA and the Supreme Court rulings - however frightening and un-Constitutional - are merely symptoms. A fever will kill but a fever isn't a disease. The diseases, in this case, are fear, ignorance, insularism and superstition. Fighting for rights is no more than aspirin (and complaining about rights is no more than baby aspirin at best) - important but no antibiotic. If you want to cure the diseases, not merely mask them in the hopes they'll go away, you need superior education (a wonderful vaccine that is being withdrawn from many areas for being "expensive") and superior culture (the best antibiotic is to not have society imagine we're somehow neolithic pig farmers - the popular remedies that worked in 1776 BC barely worked in 1776 AD and certainly don't work today.)
Education is going to be the tough one. 2011 saw a budget of $23.75 billion for mandatory spending. (If you want universal quality, mandatory matters and discretionary does not.) That covers 19.7 million college/university students, around 55.5 million students K-12 and somewhere around 97 million from there on up to college. That's around 172 million students, so about $13.8K per student. The actual cost, as claimed by that highly reputable source of dubious numbers Wikipedia puts the actual cost per student per year at about twice that. (The University cost is the one that matters, because the student:staff ratio is usually saner, facilities are usually closer to being on-par, textbooks are almost decent and bake sales aren't used to cover over the cracks. If all K-18 schools were of high calibre, they would cost about the same per year per student as a University.)
The idea that Congress might actually cover the cost of inflation is laughable enough. That they'd do that and THEN double the total is absolutely hysterical. That the States (busy ordering textbooks that include Intelligent Design, flat Earths and fake moonlanding claims, no doubt) would then use the money "intelligently" and design a credible education system from the ground up is a joke of almost lethal proportions. They're way too busy warding off the evil eye with chicken blood and sacrificial heavy metal albums.
(University standards aren't perfect - far from it, way too much parroting and way too little skill building - but you've got to start somewhere. You can get 40%+ just from a mix of rote memorization and test-taking skills in most University exams, never having to understand a damn thing. I'd like to see that reduced to an absolute ceiling of 10%, but let's be honest - if there's absolutely not a chance in hell of even getting UP to sub-par but to
The problem is that Americans are taught from day 1 to fear collective action. "The individual is everything, all-powerful. You are the captain of your destiny. The collective is for pinko subversive socialist countries like Britain, who we pretend to be allies with but secretly regard as no better than Stalinist Russia."
The IT industry is a classic example. Know of any major IT unions? No? Why? Because "collective rights" are somehow mysteriously "bad". Individual rights are ok, but the notion that two individuals might have the same rights and therefore speak collectively isn't exactly kosher. (That individuals can't protect said rights against corporations, patent trolls, government departments or anything much more substantial than a hamster, well, that's apparently immaterial.)
Well, the alternative is to make them patent lawyers.
We know that gold arrived on Earth via asteroids and that dead white dwarf stars form diamond planets, so sparkly faery planets seems reasonable to me.
I hereby name the diamond planet that was announced recently on Slashdot "Tinkerbell" in honour of ackthpt's suggestion.
Depends on how strong the acid is, I think.
A lot of the parallel languages I've encountered (UPC, Occam, Parallel Fortran, etc) are procedural. The 4th and 5th generation languages that I know of that I know are also parallelized (Parlog, for example) are dead and you don't even need Netcraft to confirm it. However, I'm more than happy to get updates in these sorts of areas (damn functional programmer's mailing list won't let you subscribe unless you're hyperactive in the field) so thanks for the correction.
Which Fortran? I - IV, 77, 90, 95, 2000 or 2005? :)
Actually, Fortran is still THE language of choice for anyone working in mathematics. There are more codes for it and the compilers are just so much better for that type of problem.
Seriously, I "speak" 20 programming languages either fluently or close to it, so have some experience of the HORRIBLE choices some designers have made.
Since dwarf is already used, wouldn't the IAU use "pixie" to denigrate it further?
I'm ok with functional languages, but freely admit that I've concentrated on procedural languages. The main problem I've had with functional languages is that lambda expressions can be damn hard to read - or write - though that's just a learning-curve thing. A secondary issue is that it's actually quite difficult to figure out how to parallelize code outside of either the object (parallelizing OO is trivial, though parallelizing it well is hard) and procedural domains. Attempts by the University of Manchester to develop in the 1970s compilers that could intelligently regroup expressions such that each group could be a distinct parallel task never really got anywhere and I've not seen much in the way of any serious attempts since. Haskell has no serious parallel processing capability, for example.
Occam-Pi is one of the few hybrid procedural/functional languages (the Pi is both a play on words, since it's an extended version of Occam 3, and a reference to Pi calculus) that I like. It has a few problems, though - the development server was hacked and damaged, there IS only one group developing it, I am one of about a half dozen outside the group who even uses the language, the compiler is more designed for research than producing highly-optimized code, manuals don't exist for that version and it would be extremely hard to develop hooks for Gnome or KDE with it. Having said that, if someone wrote a decent GCC frontend for it, I could easily see all these being fixed.
Only if they have money.
There are ways to circumvent that, of course - abolish the concept of a corporation as a person, treat all copyrights owned by them as assets that can be seized, and if the sum value so seized is less than the money owed, seize assets of management (within bounds, an individual should never be sued beyond the ability to function as an individual) including the business license for the corporation. If it's still less, ban all members of management from holding management positions or being able to obtain a license to run a business for X number of years.
My AD&D manual says otherwise.
Yes, but the predilections of the users shouldn't enter into it.
It's a purer paradigm (which generally makes for cleaner code), you can't free an unmalloced structure or do other illegal pointer arithmetic in Java, C++ has way way too many different approaches munged into one language (it's not OO, it has support for objects - making it object-based - but it also has support for a host of other paradigms), it doesn't take a decade for the standards body to produce updates, and Sun did a reasonable job of killing dialects - the main threat to any language.
Having said that, Digital Mars' D is better than either, I very much prefer Occam for parallel work and I'm sure other excellent languages are out there.
I dunno. Since it's a comment on Perl, starting with a # would seem to be entirely accurate according to the syntax.
I dunno. Only a few more boilerplates to go before all programs can be reduced to 10 lines of code or less.
I regard Occam-Pi to be superior to any other Pascal variant, especially for readability and provability, but it is incredibly fussy over whitespace.
Fortran is interesting, theologically - it considers God to be real unless declared integer.
That rules out any whose syntax is so complex that you NEED some form of RAD tool to be able to write in it. ie: 98% of all modern languages.
Nonono, it's pseudorandom. They just used a very good function.
With this problem, you'd do basically the same thing but you'd want slightly more data to handle the smaller size. (For handwriting, pressure and gradient would be the most obvious extensions to use. For original printed documents, you MAY be able to use any random fluctuations in toner or ink, since any fluctuations will be highly localized. For photocopies, the contrast of the copy might not be enough to show up extremely small variations - I'm really not sure what you could use there.)
However, you needn't get a unique solution.
Option 1: (Assumes some text is on the document.) You can use the methods used in cryptology to determine if the result of using a given key has produced a possible plaintext. A random arrangement of remains will never produce a sane text when OCRed, you'll always get a line where characters should be but can't be identified.
Option 2: An alternative second stage would be to treat every possible combination that meets the initial criteria as possible plaintexts for a cypher. The analysis at the end of the 2dem paper shows that basic encryption always expose some information even when the encrypted document is not considered readable. So it aught to be possible to look for information leakage to reduce the number of "keys" (ie: orderings that meet the criteria of stage 1) you need to brute-force look at.
If option 1 is sensitive enough and the document is of a type that permits simple analysis of the form rather than the content, then step 2 would never be needed. Step 2 is only needed if the form is not enough.
The problem here is that the above solution isn't guaranteed to reduce the number of possibilities to anything sensible. Stage 2 is a herustic that tries to make one segment correct in the hopes that this will make everything correct. Anyone who has solved one face of a Rubics cube knows this isn't a guaranteed approach. The best that can be said is that it will always reduce the problem space, but won't necessarily reduce it to the level that the problem can be considered essentially solved.
You say "this is all true of Vista and 7", but then have to come up with convoluted reasons as to why IE's marketshare is going up despite failing ACID and why other browsers' shares are going down. Isn't it easier (and therefore the more correct) to say that bundling had this identical effect before and so bundling will have this effect again?
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. I don't know what it is when Microsoft does the same thing and you expect different results, but lunacy springs to mind.
In the Windows 95 days, if I wanted to use Windows' winsock, I could do so. I could also replace it with Trumpet's. If I wanted to use Windows memory manager, I could do so, or I could replace it with EMM386. I don't think you could seriously get away with saying a memory manager wasn't shared code, but they still had it so that you could swap it out and insert something that did the same job from someone else.
In the modern Unix (including OS/X and OLPC) world, I can still do this. What I can't do is replace IE's rendering engine.
Explain how this is so amazingly superior, given they didn't originally have this kind of issue with ANY core component, no matter how shared, and that no competing system has this problem today.
You and the other MS schills say I'm whining, but you haven't explained a damn thing. You lot keep avoiding the fact that these components HAVE been interchangeable in Windows in the past AND are interchangeable in other systems today. Your pointing to mscorlib and comctl32 are laughable because these ARE replaceable with rival DLLs, but still IE's rendering engine IS NOT.
Don't complain, EXPLAIN.
KDE isn't packaged with Konqueror. Konqueror is an independent package and there's no requirement to install it.