I have a hard time grasping why we are not dealing with a fundamentally more dangerous situation in North Korea,
Well, we are trying to deal with it, but the situation is complicated. I think the difference is that Saddam has shown no willingness to cooperate, while North Korea has at least shown a willingness in the past to cooperate. Say what you want about NK, but at least they're *openly* defying us.
or why we are at this very moment "allied" with a military government in Pakistan, a Monarchy which is only nominally friendly in Saudi Arabia
Because sometimes you have to deal with reality, and the reality is that the middle east is not going to turn into stable western-style democracies overnight. Better to hold our nose and try to influence them toward modernity than isolate them and them let them fall toward more fundamentalism.
Anyway, I believe that supporting bad governments for short-term gain is only going to wind up hurting us in the long run (as it did with our support of Hussein in the 1980s).
Yes, unfortunately there are no perfect policies, and there are no crystal balls.
Furthermore, it is impossible to declare war on one man. If we could truly only direct our action against Hussein and his thugs, this would be an entirely different matter. The fact is, though, that the Iraqi people, as well as the American and allied troops, are going to suffer terrible losses in this war.
During WW2, we basically declared war on Hitler. A lot of "innocent Germans" were killed during that war, but I think most agree that sometimes a terrible price is necessary to bring peace to the world. There are a scary number of parallels between Saddam Hussein of today, and Hitler of the 1930s. The same debates about preemptive striking took place back then, and Europe showed the same policies of appeasement back then about dealing with him.
I for one am glad that the US is taking care of Hussein now rather than later when it really would have turned into WW/III with Hussein invading the entire middle east (as he also tried to do back in 1991).
Goods are priced, (and I'm not even talking IP goods) according to what the most customers are willing to pay.
That's correct.
Does it fly in the face of common economical thought? Sure does.
No.
However, I find that economics falls short because it cannot take human emotions such as greed into account.
Economics is fine; it's your understanding of it that's broken.
The missing piece is competition. Sellers have incentive to drive prices up, because that increases profit. However, competition among sellers keeps that in check because a consumer will gravitate toward the store with the lower price. So sellers have to continue lowering their prices to remain competitive, if they demand for their products begins to drop. However, they can only go so low -- that's the level of their cost of goods.
Now, note that theft is part of your cost of goods, and you see why theft influences prices.
Basic economics education *really* needs to be a required high school subject. It would solve so many problems.
War begats peace. [...] Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
I should just ignore something this absurd, but... it's kind of frightening that someone moderated it up.
The word "is" in this context means equivalence. "Freedom is equivalent to slavery" is a contradiction, as is "ignorance is equivalent to strength".
You'll note that nowhere did I claim that "war is equivalent to peace", and in fact, the whole concept has nothing to do with the subject at hand.
The word "beget" means "leads to". Too many people have no concept of what "peace" really means. Stop and think about it for a second... WAY too many people think that "being in favor of peace" is some noble position to take. It never occurs to them that EVERYONE IS IN FAVOR OF PEACE. DUH!
It takes no courage to advocate peace, because there is no one who doesn't advocate peace. Everyone's goal is peace; the only question is how to achieve peace.
You cannot achieve peace by appeasing military dictators with expansionist goals. It's worth pointing out that the same debates took place in the 1930s during Hitler's rise. Imagine if the world had had the guts to stand up to Hitler at the time. Everyone knew he was dangerous, but everyone wanted "peace at any cost". And that lead to millions upon millions of deaths.
The peaceniks seem to think that if we just disbanded the US military then suddenly the world would join hands and weep with joy at world peace suddenly attained.
In the short-run, the US Revolutionary war begat war, such as the war of 1812, which never would have occured if we'd stayed a colonly. The bloody French revolution and probably a few others were inspired by our revolution.
The key words there are "short run". Taking the longer view, the American revolution has been the biggest force for peace in history, because it set an example of Democracy and constitutional rights. It didn't end war, but slowly other countries converted to this model (more or less).
War will be truly obsolete when all countries are stable democracies with stable economies. It won't happen this century, but maybe the next one.
On the contrary, it brought a lot of peace... to Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, who was next.
Millions more people have died as a direct result of that war because of the sanctions imposed on Iraq.
*cough* Are there actually people who believe Hussein's propaganda? "Millions" (not that many, but let's pretend) have died because of SADDAM HUSSEIN. They have plenty of money, and plenty of food. Hussein intentionally starves his people so that he can feed his military machine.
Guess what...war begets war. Weapons beget weapons.
Uh, no. War begats peace. Overwhelming weapons begats non-proliferation.
Why do you think the world has as much peace as it has? It's the called the US Military. The bigger the imbalance of power between the US and the rest of the world, the less the rogue nations will be tempted to invade their neighbors. Unfortunately, expansionism is alive and well in the middle east.
Someday all the countries of the world will be stable democracies, but that day is not today.
Imagine, international internet gaming with low latencies all 'round. Sounds like a pipe dream.
Unfortunately, it is. The two farthest points around earth are 12,000 miles. Round trip means 24,000 miles. Speed of light is 186,000 miles / second. That means that, best theoretical case, round trip is 129 milliseconds. Of course, you'll never get close to the best theoretical case, particularly with wire, never mind routers, etc.
In the immortal words of John Carmack, "The Speed of Light Sucks".
I would love to see some standard Logical Volume Managers make into Linux. I believe there are some that are kicking around, but I haven't seen anything getting standardized.
LVMs for the unaware are disk managers that allow such things as filesystems spanning multiple physical devices, dynamic creation and destruction of filesystems, dynamic resizing of filesystems, and other such goodies. AIX's volume management rocks.
The problem is that now that you've brought up the scrith subject, he'll probably leap on that and answer that question rather than expending the effort to think up something on his own.
If you read Ringworld Engineers and read the prologue, you must have also read that someone DID send him detailed calculations about the required tensile strength of Scrith [this is from memory -- I don't feeling like digging up my copy:) ]
You have a very warped view of what "real programming" is. Compilation v interpretation has nothing to do with it.
Actually, it has a lot to do with it. When you are programming in C or C++, you are very close to the "bare metal" of the computer. To write efficient code, you have to have an understanding of what compilers do and how assembly language works. There are definitely right ways and wrong ways to write code. Real programmers understand assembly language.
On the other hand, when you're using scripting languages, you are shielded from the details of how things are actually implemented. You are at the mercy of how good the interpreter is.
As for Java - it is compiled into machine code, it's just that all the platforms it runs on emulate the target machine.
Er, no. Java is compiled into an intermediate form, just like every other scripting language such as Perl, Python, etc. Calling that "machine code" shows an ignorance of programming in real assembly language. Java bytecodes are just a numeric version of the Java language.
That's the primary reason that Java is so slow. The bytecodes cannot be efficiently interpreted.
And there are also plenty of Java verions that produce native executables.
Big deal. There are Perl compilers as well, but that doesn't count either. Hell, back in the old days they produced APL compilers.
There are things in Java that will NEVER allow Java to be useful as a general purpose language. The lack of an unsigned datatype is probably the most egregious flaw.
By the way, none of this is meant to say that Java is not useful in certain circumstances. Just that it isn't and never will be appropriate for "real" programming such as operating systems.
Just tell him that both PHP and Java are both interpreted languages, and thus are "morally" equivalent. Only languages compiled into assembly are worthy of being considered "real" programming.:)
It just astounds me that anyone can be snobby about Java. I mean, it's not a terrible language, but...
This is like saying that speaking another language will make a difference in mathematics.
No, I think it's more like a mathematician using calculus to solve the area under a curve, versus someone who uses graph paper and counts the boxes to arrive at an approximate answer. Both get to an answer, but one has a much higher understanding of the nature of the answer.
That's funny, except what's funnier is that I consider Java a scripting language.
If it ain't compiled into assembly language, it ain't real programming.
That said, I personally do more programming in Perl nowadays than C or C++ because it's appropriate to the primary project that I work on. I don't pretend that it's real programming though.
Like it or not science and religion are both belief systems.
The Theory of Relativity and Santa Clause are also both belief systems, but that doesn't mean they are both intellectually equivalent.
Religion seems to think it's OK to subvert the scientific method while science (some science teachers anyway) seem to think it's OK to claim that science delivers truth.
Religion delivers truth with zero evidence (and proudly so), while science delivers truth with all the supporting evidence -- and a caveat that new evidence may change the conclusions.
Science has a much better track record for delivering truth.
Most creationists aren't hated for their beliefs, they're hated because they try and legislate religion into the schools to try and corrupt the minds of other people's children.
In other words, they would be hated a lot less if they would just mind their own business and just mess up their own children and leave everyone else alone.
If I placed an ad in the paper selling something (say, a large supply of ammonium nitrate fertilizer), and the police came up to me and asked me about what people came and inquired about it, I would tell them without hesitation. Big deal.
Guess what? There is no right to anonymity. And law enforcement has to have SOME room to work. Too many people seem to think that law enforcement should be required to never ask questions and never access the public.
But even better, Sun Microsystems Labs has backed this up with an open-source version in Java on Sourceforge."
Does it ever occur to Sun that Java is not the answer to all problems? That maybe, just maybe, an implementation in C would be more generally useful as a reference implementation?
Java is not a bad language, but it's a niche language. I love Perl, but I wouldn't write an operating system in it.
This is why Sun is going to ultimately fail as a company. They are more interested in political solutions (e.g., write everything in Java whether it's appropriate or not) rather than producing real technology.
This post implies that it's only been three years. Just for the record, the earliest Usenet Post referencing Duke Nukem Forever was June 7, *1996*. Yes, coming up on SEVEN YEARS. Heh.
This is certainly a step in the right direction, but if you want do something now, do what I did which has actually almost completely stopped telemarking calls.
Just interrupt their spiel and say the magic words: "could you take me off the call-list, please?" They will usually immediately stop and just say "Sure!" and hang up. Don't get your blood pressure up, just say the magic words and you're gone.
Since I stopped getting annoyed and did this absolutely consistently, telemarking calls have almost completely stopped. The only ones I still get are automated recordings where I don't feel like trying to drill-down to a real person. They're pretty rare, though.
Something a little weird happened on friday -- out of the blue, the local FAA guy that had been running us around about low altitude flight testing at my property outside Dallas, just called up and said that we can do flight tests to 3,500' if we call them on Wednesday, then again on Saturday before we fly. Someone must have prodded him.
A couple of the OSIDA folks visited with us on Saturday. I was complaining about our current peroxide supply problems with FMC, and they asked if it would be helpful to have a governor or senator call someone. Yes indeed, I think that would be helpful!
I'm not too worried about things getting worse on the clearance side. Especially in our case, where we really don't overfly anything -- we just go straght up, then straight down. We expect to come down pretty fast on the parachutes, so we shouldn't even drift very far.
John Carmack
So perhaps things are moving forward after all! All you "chem majors" can now stop e-mailing him.:)
The rational point of view is to examine the intent of an act?
No, the rational point of view is to examine the intent of speech that offends (the subject at hand). I never said anything about physical acts. The fact is that no one suffers physical harm from offensive words.
Now, there is such a principle as "fighting words", which can be illegal. But again, it goes back to intent. If I go up to someone and launch into an insulting diatribe and cause a fight, then I could be liable for starting the fight. On the other hand, if I say something innocently and someone starts beating on me because of their misunderstanding, then I will absolutely NOT be liable, and the other guy goes to jail.
the more time you have to predict something, the more likely it is to become a certainty. I can't predict with too much a degree of certainty that it will rain tomorrow, but I can predict with a much greater degree of certainty that it will rain sometime this year.
Well, sort of, but not really. Your weather argument is a statistical argument ("I've observed that it rarely goes more than a few months without raining, therefore, a year is highly unlikely"), not a predictive argument based on a weather model ("I've calculated the effects of weather in this region, and based on those results I can say that it's highly probably that it will rain the next year").
The question is actually more complicated that you give it credit. A much better way to state the weather question is, "if they think they can predict that the earth will warm up by 7 degrees over the next century through global warming, why can't they predict the weather tomorrow?". There are two possible answers to this: 1) it makes sense because you can statistically model weather, and local "tomorrow" effects cancel out making long-range modelling possible, or 2) It doesn't make sense, because the longer you forecast, the higher the accumulated error should be. Of course, there is also a third possibility: 3) The weather system is so complex that our understanding is at the level of stone knives and swinging dead chickens.
Of course, no one knows which possibility is correct. I personally lean heavily toward (3) with a good dose of (2).
Slashdot Mirror
I have a hard time grasping why we are not dealing with a fundamentally more dangerous situation in North Korea,
Well, we are trying to deal with it, but the situation is complicated. I think the difference is that Saddam has shown no willingness to cooperate, while North Korea has at least shown a willingness in the past to cooperate. Say what you want about NK, but at least they're *openly* defying us.
or why we are at this very moment "allied" with a military government in Pakistan, a Monarchy which is only nominally friendly in Saudi Arabia
Because sometimes you have to deal with reality, and the reality is that the middle east is not going to turn into stable western-style democracies overnight. Better to hold our nose and try to influence them toward modernity than isolate them and them let them fall toward more fundamentalism.
Anyway, I believe that supporting bad governments for short-term gain is only going to wind up hurting us in the long run (as it did with our support of Hussein in the 1980s).
Yes, unfortunately there are no perfect policies, and there are no crystal balls.
Furthermore, it is impossible to declare war on one man. If we could truly only direct our action against Hussein and his thugs, this would be an entirely different matter. The fact is, though, that the Iraqi people, as well as the American and allied troops, are going to suffer terrible losses in this war.
During WW2, we basically declared war on Hitler. A lot of "innocent Germans" were killed during that war, but I think most agree that sometimes a terrible price is necessary to bring peace to the world. There are a scary number of parallels between Saddam Hussein of today, and Hitler of the 1930s. The same debates about preemptive striking took place back then, and Europe showed the same policies of appeasement back then about dealing with him.
I for one am glad that the US is taking care of Hussein now rather than later when it really would have turned into WW/III with Hussein invading the entire middle east (as he also tried to do back in 1991).
Goods are priced, (and I'm not even talking IP goods) according to what the most customers are willing to pay.
That's correct.
Does it fly in the face of common economical thought? Sure does.
No.
However, I find that economics falls short because it cannot take human emotions such as greed into account.
Economics is fine; it's your understanding of it that's broken.
The missing piece is competition. Sellers have incentive to drive prices up, because that increases profit. However, competition among sellers keeps that in check because a consumer will gravitate toward the store with the lower price. So sellers have to continue lowering their prices to remain competitive, if they demand for their products begins to drop. However, they can only go so low -- that's the level of their cost of goods.
Now, note that theft is part of your cost of goods, and you see why theft influences prices.
Basic economics education *really* needs to be a required high school subject. It would solve so many problems.
The problem is that the phrase "military dictatorship with expansionist goals" can be applied reasonably precisely to George W. Bush.
*PLEASE* learn what expansionism means. The last I checked, the US was not planning on turning Iraq into the 51st state by force.
War begats peace. [...] Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
I should just ignore something this absurd, but... it's kind of frightening that someone moderated it up.
The word "is" in this context means equivalence. "Freedom is equivalent to slavery" is a contradiction, as is "ignorance is equivalent to strength".
You'll note that nowhere did I claim that "war is equivalent to peace", and in fact, the whole concept has nothing to do with the subject at hand.
The word "beget" means "leads to". Too many people have no concept of what "peace" really means. Stop and think about it for a second... WAY too many people think that "being in favor of peace" is some noble position to take. It never occurs to them that EVERYONE IS IN FAVOR OF PEACE. DUH!
It takes no courage to advocate peace, because there is no one who doesn't advocate peace. Everyone's goal is peace; the only question is how to achieve peace.
You cannot achieve peace by appeasing military dictators with expansionist goals. It's worth pointing out that the same debates took place in the 1930s during Hitler's rise. Imagine if the world had had the guts to stand up to Hitler at the time. Everyone knew he was dangerous, but everyone wanted "peace at any cost". And that lead to millions upon millions of deaths.
The peaceniks seem to think that if we just disbanded the US military then suddenly the world would join hands and weep with joy at world peace suddenly attained.
In the short-run, the US Revolutionary war begat war, such as the war of 1812, which never would have occured if we'd stayed a colonly. The bloody French revolution and probably a few others were inspired by our revolution.
The key words there are "short run". Taking the longer view, the American revolution has been the biggest force for peace in history, because it set an example of Democracy and constitutional rights. It didn't end war, but slowly other countries converted to this model (more or less).
War will be truly obsolete when all countries are stable democracies with stable economies. It won't happen this century, but maybe the next one.
The last war on Iraq did not bring peace.
On the contrary, it brought a lot of peace ... to Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, who was next.
Millions more people have died as a direct result of that war because of the sanctions imposed on Iraq.
*cough* Are there actually people who believe Hussein's propaganda? "Millions" (not that many, but let's pretend) have died because of SADDAM HUSSEIN. They have plenty of money, and plenty of food. Hussein intentionally starves his people so that he can feed his military machine.
Guess what...war begets war. Weapons beget weapons.
Uh, no. War begats peace. Overwhelming weapons begats non-proliferation.
Why do you think the world has as much peace as it has? It's the called the US Military. The bigger the imbalance of power between the US and the rest of the world, the less the rogue nations will be tempted to invade their neighbors. Unfortunately, expansionism is alive and well in the middle east.
Someday all the countries of the world will be stable democracies, but that day is not today.
Imagine, international internet gaming with low latencies all 'round. Sounds like a pipe dream.
Unfortunately, it is. The two farthest points around earth are 12,000 miles. Round trip means 24,000 miles. Speed of light is 186,000 miles / second. That means that, best theoretical case, round trip is 129 milliseconds. Of course, you'll never get close to the best theoretical case, particularly with wire, never mind routers, etc.
In the immortal words of John Carmack, "The Speed of Light Sucks".
Average speed: more than 923 megabits per second, or more than 3,500 times faster than a typical home broadband connection.
That'd be pretty sucky broadband, if you ask me. 262kb? I mean, it's better than dial-up certainly, but...
Not to brag, but I typically get better than 2.4Mb, if I'm downloading from a good site. That makes it only 385 times faster than me. :)
I would love to see some standard Logical Volume Managers make into Linux. I believe there are some that are kicking around, but I haven't seen anything getting standardized.
LVMs for the unaware are disk managers that allow such things as filesystems spanning multiple physical devices, dynamic creation and destruction of filesystems, dynamic resizing of filesystems, and other such goodies. AIX's volume management rocks.
The problem is that now that you've brought up the scrith subject, he'll probably leap on that and answer that question rather than expending the effort to think up something on his own.
If you read Ringworld Engineers and read the prologue, you must have also read that someone DID send him detailed calculations about the required tensile strength of Scrith [this is from memory -- I don't feeling like digging up my copy :) ]
You have a very warped view of what "real programming" is. Compilation v interpretation has nothing to do with it.
Actually, it has a lot to do with it. When you are programming in C or C++, you are very close to the "bare metal" of the computer. To write efficient code, you have to have an understanding of what compilers do and how assembly language works. There are definitely right ways and wrong ways to write code. Real programmers understand assembly language.
On the other hand, when you're using scripting languages, you are shielded from the details of how things are actually implemented. You are at the mercy of how good the interpreter is.
As for Java - it is compiled into machine code, it's just that all the platforms it runs on emulate the target machine.
Er, no. Java is compiled into an intermediate form, just like every other scripting language such as Perl, Python, etc. Calling that "machine code" shows an ignorance of programming in real assembly language. Java bytecodes are just a numeric version of the Java language.
That's the primary reason that Java is so slow. The bytecodes cannot be efficiently interpreted.
And there are also plenty of Java verions that produce native executables.
Big deal. There are Perl compilers as well, but that doesn't count either. Hell, back in the old days they produced APL compilers.
There are things in Java that will NEVER allow Java to be useful as a general purpose language. The lack of an unsigned datatype is probably the most egregious flaw.
By the way, none of this is meant to say that Java is not useful in certain circumstances. Just that it isn't and never will be appropriate for "real" programming such as operating systems.
Just tell him that both PHP and Java are both interpreted languages, and thus are "morally" equivalent. Only languages compiled into assembly are worthy of being considered "real" programming. :)
It just astounds me that anyone can be snobby about Java. I mean, it's not a terrible language, but...
This is like saying that speaking another language will make a difference in mathematics.
No, I think it's more like a mathematician using calculus to solve the area under a curve, versus someone who uses graph paper and counts the boxes to arrive at an approximate answer. Both get to an answer, but one has a much higher understanding of the nature of the answer.
That's funny, except what's funnier is that I consider Java a scripting language.
If it ain't compiled into assembly language, it ain't real programming.
That said, I personally do more programming in Perl nowadays than C or C++ because it's appropriate to the primary project that I work on. I don't pretend that it's real programming though.
Like it or not science and religion are both belief systems.
The Theory of Relativity and Santa Clause are also both belief systems, but that doesn't mean they are both intellectually equivalent.
Religion seems to think it's OK to subvert the scientific method while science (some science teachers anyway) seem to think it's OK to claim that science delivers truth.
Religion delivers truth with zero evidence (and proudly so), while science delivers truth with all the supporting evidence -- and a caveat that new evidence may change the conclusions.
Science has a much better track record for delivering truth.
Most creationists aren't hated for their beliefs, they're hated because they try and legislate religion into the schools to try and corrupt the minds of other people's children.
In other words, they would be hated a lot less if they would just mind their own business and just mess up their own children and leave everyone else alone.
If I placed an ad in the paper selling something (say, a large supply of ammonium nitrate fertilizer), and the police came up to me and asked me about what people came and inquired about it, I would tell them without hesitation. Big deal.
Guess what? There is no right to anonymity. And law enforcement has to have SOME room to work. Too many people seem to think that law enforcement should be required to never ask questions and never access the public.
But even better, Sun Microsystems Labs has backed this up with an open-source version in Java on Sourceforge."
Does it ever occur to Sun that Java is not the answer to all problems? That maybe, just maybe, an implementation in C would be more generally useful as a reference implementation?
Java is not a bad language, but it's a niche language. I love Perl, but I wouldn't write an operating system in it.
This is why Sun is going to ultimately fail as a company. They are more interested in political solutions (e.g., write everything in Java whether it's appropriate or not) rather than producing real technology.
This post implies that it's only been three years. Just for the record, the earliest Usenet Post referencing Duke Nukem Forever was June 7, *1996*. Yes, coming up on SEVEN YEARS. Heh.
This is certainly a step in the right direction, but if you want do something now, do what I did which has actually almost completely stopped telemarking calls.
Just interrupt their spiel and say the magic words: "could you take me off the call-list, please?" They will usually immediately stop and just say "Sure!" and hang up. Don't get your blood pressure up, just say the magic words and you're gone.
Since I stopped getting annoyed and did this absolutely consistently, telemarking calls have almost completely stopped. The only ones I still get are automated recordings where I don't feel like trying to drill-down to a real person. They're pretty rare, though.
Following up on a recent story (Carmack Needs Rocket Fuel), John an interesting post to the CATS board, which I'll reproduce here to save Slashdotting:
So perhaps things are moving forward after all! All you "chem majors" can now stop e-mailing him. :)
The rational point of view is to examine the intent of an act?
No, the rational point of view is to examine the intent of speech that offends (the subject at hand). I never said anything about physical acts. The fact is that no one suffers physical harm from offensive words.
Now, there is such a principle as "fighting words", which can be illegal. But again, it goes back to intent. If I go up to someone and launch into an insulting diatribe and cause a fight, then I could be liable for starting the fight. On the other hand, if I say something innocently and someone starts beating on me because of their misunderstanding, then I will absolutely NOT be liable, and the other guy goes to jail.
the more time you have to predict something, the more likely it is to become a certainty. I can't predict with too much a degree of certainty that it will rain tomorrow, but I can predict with a much greater degree of certainty that it will rain sometime this year.
Well, sort of, but not really. Your weather argument is a statistical argument ("I've observed that it rarely goes more than a few months without raining, therefore, a year is highly unlikely"), not a predictive argument based on a weather model ("I've calculated the effects of weather in this region, and based on those results I can say that it's highly probably that it will rain the next year").
The question is actually more complicated that you give it credit. A much better way to state the weather question is, "if they think they can predict that the earth will warm up by 7 degrees over the next century through global warming, why can't they predict the weather tomorrow?". There are two possible answers to this: 1) it makes sense because you can statistically model weather, and local "tomorrow" effects cancel out making long-range modelling possible, or 2) It doesn't make sense, because the longer you forecast, the higher the accumulated error should be. Of course, there is also a third possibility: 3) The weather system is so complex that our understanding is at the level of stone knives and swinging dead chickens.
Of course, no one knows which possibility is correct. I personally lean heavily toward (3) with a good dose of (2).