To be pedantic, that is the contrapositive of Clark's Law. The contrapositive is a rule of inference that allows you to reverse the consequent and antecedent: if P implies Q, then not Q implies not P.
To be pedantic myself, what was wrong with what the OP said? A corollary is a minor claim which is logically dependent on a previously-established claim.
What particular rule of interference was used to deduce the corollary from the original statement isn't really important. There's nothing wrong with calling the contrapositive is a corollary.
Much more likely is that distributions will be [...] created with the express purpose of marketing them to governments at cut-rate pricing. As anyone can create and market a distribution, it's not far-fetched to imagine a version subsidized and supported by organizations that may not have U.S. or other government interests at heart.
Oh no! Linux is funded by Al Qaeda!
This ridiculous hysteria, more than anything else, shows how much this is just propaganda. Cut-rate contractors who code for low-budget government agencies already exist; why would a closed-source one be any more trustworthy than an open-source one?
If your quality control and background checks on outside contractors are so terrible that cut-rate Linux distributors could put in backdoors, why would you not have this problem with a bunch of contract VB coders? Especially since, in the latter case, they may only ever give you a compiled binary.
More specifically, it says "Please do not enter my house and steal my jewelery and banknotes which are in the safe in the bottom-right of the bedroom closet."
The problem with this is, anybody can now download your robots.txt and have a list of your unprotected sensitive data.
Not really. I mean, you're not really giving much away with
Disallow:/personal/
unless going to http://mysite.com/personal/ returns a directory listing.
The general point is that yes, you do have to trust people to respect the robots.txt. The problem we're talking about is Google, though, and we know they do respect it.
No. Can't you just take my statement literally? What I said was all I meant: that it was plausible a Linux hacker wrote MyDoom.
When you're hunting suspects in a shooting, it wouldn't do badly at all to start with the people the victim has pissed off in the past.
In any case, I think the motive in your example is far less clear. Perhaps the CIA et al. had motive, but they would have had a great risk of being discovered, with tremendous negative consequences. This risk doesn't exist to that degree in the original example.
September 11th does provide an illustrative example of my point, though. After it happened, everyone suspected that Muslim terrorists were behind it, even before any governmental figure had said so. While it was wrong to have jumped to conclusions (and much, much more wrong to assume all Muslims were responsible), the initial suspicion was justified, since everyone knew that the U.S. had pissed off Muslims in the past.
Look, all flaming aside, it's at least plausible that a Linux user wrote MyDoom. They, perhaps more than anyone else, had motive.
If anything offends me in the article, it's not that. It's the premise contained in these lines:
If anyone's anger has no measure, it is the wrath of internet zealots who believe that code should be free to all (open source).
So, Linux users are zealots, merely for believing that code which was the collaborative work of hundreds of thousands of individuals should not be repossessed by a private corporation which has little historical association with it?
Free software is an ideology, yes. But I don't think a free-software or open-source advocate becomes a 'zealot' until they begin making sweeping generalizations like "commerical software is evil" or "all software should be free". In the SCO case, Linux users are simply defending the status quo, and existing copyright law.
It's probably possible to prove that the ternary system (with FAIL IMPLIES FAIL = FAIL) is the unique consistent system which gives the usual binary logic when projected from {TRUE, FALSE, FAIL} onto {TRUE, FALSE}.
Er, I should have said "when restricted to {TRUE, FALSE}".
Your rule is only useful to construct the thruth tables of the most basic operations, otherwise you may introduce inconsistencies.
Hmm, you're completely right. The same problem happens if you define f(x)=x OR NOT(x), or, to simplify it a bit, f(x)=x IMPLIES x. The rule says that FAIL IMPLIES FAIL should be TRUE, but consistency requires that it's FAIL.
This would probably explain why I'd never seen my rule before: it made sense to me, and it's probably a good conceptual start, but it sucks formally.
I guess the best way is to start by defining the ternary truth tables and go from there. It's probably possible to prove that the ternary system (with FAIL IMPLIES FAIL = FAIL) is the unique consistent system which gives the usual binary logic when projected from {TRUE, FALSE, FAIL} onto {TRUE, FALSE}.
To be honest, I don't find FAIL IMPLIES FAIL = FAIL to be counterintuitive. FAIL is like a superposition of states (TRUE and FALSE), and as long as there's some possibility of TRUE (which there is) and some possibility of FALSE (which there is) then FAIL is the correct answer.
When I was a kid and heard about this type of logic, I assumed it would have to be done magnetically instead of electronically, such that you would represent three states by "positive", "negative", and "no charge". I had no idea how that would fly given magnets and computers, but it was something to think about.
I think they might have done it that way for the Russian computer that was mentioned.
I seem to remember hearing there were lots of technical problems with implementing it that way. I don't really know much about electrical engineering or circuit design, though.
A brief explanation of ternary logic for those who don't want to bother reading my link.
In addition to TRUE and FALSE, you have another state, which represents "I don't know". It's conventionally called FAIL (well, at least it is in Maple).
How do the truth tables work? The basic idea is that if you have a function f(x) where x is TRUE or FALSE, then you can define f for FAIL with this rule:
IF f(TRUE) = f(FALSE) THEN
f(FAIL):= f(TRUE) ELSE
f(FAIL):= FAIL END IF
So this means you have TRUE AND FAIL = FAIL, but TRUE OR FAIL = TRUE (because TRUE OR TRUE = TRUE OR FALSE = TRUE).
Converting ternary logic to arithmetic modulo 3 is a little more complicated, but once when I was bored I worked out the rules for myself.
If it's so nice and secure (besides the fact that you have to put armed guards for the ashes for 184000 years, which adds quite a bit to the costs) why does no insurance in the world want to cover them at any costs?
If this is true, I would guess it's because the insurance companies don't have an accurate estimate of the risks involved.
If you want to insure something, you have to know 1) what the risks are, and 2) whether it's possible to insure this thing while getting a reasonable return on it, in the expected case.
Insurance companies can afford to insure cars becaus, simply, there are a lot of cars and thus a lot of data on cars.
There are fairly few nuclear power plants around, and I'd guess they differ greatly in the construction procedures and the safety precautions. Plus, in order to assess risk for actuarial purposes, you'd have to have quite advanced knowledge: you'd essentially have to be a nuclear engineer.
It may be that nuclear plants are too unsafe to ever be insured, but it seems to me more likely that the insurance companies are jusst being careful because they have insufficient data.
unjustified advantage from the [fuck knows: undistinguishablility?] and reputation
The confusing phrase is 'onderscheidend vermogen'.
This online Dutch-English dictionary gives the meaning of onderscheidend as 'distinctive' or 'characteristic', and the meaning of vermogen as 'property' or 'ability'.
I'm guessing that maybe it's something like 'distinctive trademark'?
I'll probably get lynched for suggesting this, but maybe he was just crap at spelling?
There was no consistent spelling rule in English then. The best example of this, fast-forwarding a couple hundred years, is Shakespeare, who spelt his name Shakespear, Shaksper, Shakspere, and a bunch of others.
That's just how it was then: spell however you want, so long as you're understood and you didn't look like an idiot.
Yes, he isn't a rah-rah cheerleader, and I don't blame him for questioning the future of development without a profit motive, but he seems a bit pessimistic even for that.
He suggests that all or most successful open-source programs are, at best, black-box rewrites of successful commercial programs. Any number of counterexamples can be provided against this; the best ones are perhaps Apache and Perl.
Sure, there were webservers before Apache, and IIS now has equivalent functionality, but describing Apache as 'just a copy' of IIS or some other commercial webserver is ridicuolous.
In any case, I don't agree with him, but he's so much more on the mark than 95% of popular media accounts of tbe software industry that I, for one, am not going to complain.
Please tell me that's now how the unit of measurement was actually created.... It's a total burn on that idiot above, but it's just hard to believe.
Well, like its name suggests, a foot was originally supposed to be the length of someone's (specifically some nobleman's) foot. In France before the revolution, the analogous unit was called pied du roi, "king's foot".
Who this king exactly was isn't known, I think, because there were probably many kings who went around breaking conventions and imposing their own measurements on the population, but Charlemagne is usually cited.
IIRC, the same goes for yards, I think.
More about foot as a unit of mesaurement is available here.
Probably. Actually, I think County was the variable, not State.
I think you're probably right about that; it's consistent with the colouring on the map. Of course the same logic about the peculiar results of the first-past-the-post system apply just as well to counties as to states.
Only to show there are vastly differing ways of representing the data. I knew there would be a few here that would step up and condemn that map. For all we know... at the total population county level, that picture is accurate. Or it may be the scrawlings of demented monkeys. I did not go through the rigors of checking it. I did find it interesting, though.
You're right, it is interesting. I hadn't realized just how much Bush got the rural vote in 2000.
That said, I was grinding my axe mostly for the benefit of the author of the page you linked, not you, though in your original post you didn't suggest anything to disassociate yourself from the page's reasoning and conclusions.
My objection was essentially that the page author was acting like a disgruntled sports fan inventing previously-unused statistical measures to illustrate his team's superiority. When he says "population voting for Bush" he really means "combined population of all counties that voted for Bush" which is quite different.
Slashdot Mirror
To be pedantic, that is the contrapositive of Clark's Law. The contrapositive is a rule of inference that allows you to reverse the consequent and antecedent: if P implies Q, then not Q implies not P.
To be pedantic myself, what was wrong with what the OP said? A corollary is a minor claim which is logically dependent on a previously-established claim.
What particular rule of interference was used to deduce the corollary from the original statement isn't really important. There's nothing wrong with calling the contrapositive is a corollary.
Much more likely is that distributions will be [...] created with the express purpose of marketing them to governments at cut-rate pricing. As anyone can create and market a distribution, it's not far-fetched to imagine a version subsidized and supported by organizations that may not have U.S. or other government interests at heart.
Oh no! Linux is funded by Al Qaeda!
This ridiculous hysteria, more than anything else, shows how much this is just propaganda. Cut-rate contractors who code for low-budget government agencies already exist; why would a closed-source one be any more trustworthy than an open-source one?
If your quality control and background checks on outside contractors are so terrible that cut-rate Linux distributors could put in backdoors, why would you not have this problem with a bunch of contract VB coders? Especially since, in the latter case, they may only ever give you a compiled binary.
Glad to see Germany's just as progressive as it was back in the day.
You know, maybe the fact that 'weaker sex' was in quotes means it was meant sarcastically?
And hey, Germany was ahead of the game back in the Nazi era. They actually gave women medals for having babies!
More specifically, it says "Please do not enter my house and steal my jewelery and banknotes which are in the safe in the bottom-right of the bedroom closet."
/house/closet/bottomright/safe/jewelry /house/closet/bottomright/safe/banknotes
/house/ :)
Sure, you could do
Disallow:
Disallow:
Or, if you want to be simpler, you could just do
Disallow:
The problem with this is, anybody can now download your robots.txt and have a list of your unprotected sensitive data.
/personal/
Not really. I mean, you're not really giving much away with
Disallow:
unless going to http://mysite.com/personal/ returns a directory listing.
The general point is that yes, you do have to trust people to respect the robots.txt. The problem we're talking about is Google, though, and we know they do respect it.
Do you think that's enough evidence, by itself?
No. Can't you just take my statement literally? What I said was all I meant: that it was plausible a Linux hacker wrote MyDoom.
When you're hunting suspects in a shooting, it wouldn't do badly at all to start with the people the victim has pissed off in the past.
In any case, I think the motive in your example is far less clear. Perhaps the CIA et al. had motive, but they would have had a great risk of being discovered, with tremendous negative consequences. This risk doesn't exist to that degree in the original example.
September 11th does provide an illustrative example of my point, though. After it happened, everyone suspected that Muslim terrorists were behind it, even before any governmental figure had said so. While it was wrong to have jumped to conclusions (and much, much more wrong to assume all Muslims were responsible), the initial suspicion was justified, since everyone knew that the U.S. had pissed off Muslims in the past.
Look, all flaming aside, it's at least plausible that a Linux user wrote MyDoom. They, perhaps more than anyone else, had motive.
If anything offends me in the article, it's not that. It's the premise contained in these lines:
If anyone's anger has no measure, it is the wrath of internet zealots who believe that code should be free to all (open source).
So, Linux users are zealots, merely for believing that code which was the collaborative work of hundreds of thousands of individuals should not be repossessed by a private corporation which has little historical association with it?
Free software is an ideology, yes. But I don't think a free-software or open-source advocate becomes a 'zealot' until they begin making sweeping generalizations like "commerical software is evil" or "all software should be free". In the SCO case, Linux users are simply defending the status quo, and existing copyright law.
Traditionally in text books you will find the word "Don't Care". Especially when concerning thruth tables.
No, a don't care condition is something different. It refers to a truth table entry whose value is irrelevant for the purposes of your circuit design.
This is a third state for a circuit.
It's probably possible to prove that the ternary system (with FAIL IMPLIES FAIL = FAIL) is the unique consistent system which gives the usual binary logic when projected from {TRUE, FALSE, FAIL} onto {TRUE, FALSE}.
Er, I should have said "when restricted to {TRUE, FALSE}".
Your rule is only useful to construct the thruth tables of the most basic operations, otherwise you may introduce inconsistencies.
Hmm, you're completely right. The same problem happens if you define f(x)=x OR NOT(x), or, to simplify it a bit, f(x)=x IMPLIES x. The rule says that FAIL IMPLIES FAIL should be TRUE, but consistency requires that it's FAIL.
This would probably explain why I'd never seen my rule before: it made sense to me, and it's probably a good conceptual start, but it sucks formally.
I guess the best way is to start by defining the ternary truth tables and go from there. It's probably possible to prove that the ternary system (with FAIL IMPLIES FAIL = FAIL) is the unique consistent system which gives the usual binary logic when projected from {TRUE, FALSE, FAIL} onto {TRUE, FALSE}.
To be honest, I don't find FAIL IMPLIES FAIL = FAIL to be counterintuitive. FAIL is like a superposition of states (TRUE and FALSE), and as long as there's some possibility of TRUE (which there is) and some possibility of FALSE (which there is) then FAIL is the correct answer.
When I was a kid and heard about this type of logic, I assumed it would have to be done magnetically instead of electronically, such that you would represent three states by "positive", "negative", and "no charge". I had no idea how that would fly given magnets and computers, but it was something to think about.
I think they might have done it that way for the Russian computer that was mentioned.
I seem to remember hearing there were lots of technical problems with implementing it that way. I don't really know much about electrical engineering or circuit design, though.
I'm sure there are plenty of entirely academic and impractical fields of study that you've never heard of, Stephen, but we won't go into that.
I'm sure there are. Ternary logic, though, is neither academic nor impractical.
I guess my reply did come off as a bit condescending, though. Sorry about that.
A brief explanation of ternary logic for those who don't want to bother reading my link.
:= f(TRUE) := FAIL
In addition to TRUE and FALSE, you have another state, which represents "I don't know". It's conventionally called FAIL (well, at least it is in Maple).
How do the truth tables work? The basic idea is that if you have a function f(x) where x is TRUE or FALSE, then you can define f for FAIL with this rule:
IF f(TRUE) = f(FALSE) THEN
f(FAIL)
ELSE
f(FAIL)
END IF
So this means you have TRUE AND FAIL = FAIL, but TRUE OR FAIL = TRUE (because TRUE OR TRUE = TRUE OR FALSE = TRUE).
Converting ternary logic to arithmetic modulo 3 is a little more complicated, but once when I was bored I worked out the rules for myself.
I cannot imagine how logical operations would work on sutch a thing though.
Sigh. This is Slashdot, so I guess you've never heard of ternary logic, eh?
If it's so nice and secure (besides the fact that you have to put armed guards for the ashes for 184000 years, which adds quite a bit to the costs) why does no insurance in the world want to cover them at any costs?
If this is true, I would guess it's because the insurance companies don't have an accurate estimate of the risks involved.
If you want to insure something, you have to know 1) what the risks are, and 2) whether it's possible to insure this thing while getting a reasonable return on it, in the expected case.
Insurance companies can afford to insure cars becaus, simply, there are a lot of cars and thus a lot of data on cars.
There are fairly few nuclear power plants around, and I'd guess they differ greatly in the construction procedures and the safety precautions. Plus, in order to assess risk for actuarial purposes, you'd have to have quite advanced knowledge: you'd essentially have to be a nuclear engineer.
It may be that nuclear plants are too unsafe to ever be insured, but it seems to me more likely that the insurance companies are jusst being careful because they have insufficient data.
unjustified advantage from the [fuck knows: undistinguishablility?] and reputation
The confusing phrase is 'onderscheidend vermogen'.
This online Dutch-English dictionary gives the meaning of
onderscheidend as 'distinctive' or 'characteristic', and the meaning of vermogen as 'property' or 'ability'.
I'm guessing that maybe it's something like 'distinctive trademark'?
I'll probably get lynched for suggesting this, but maybe he was just crap at spelling?
There was no consistent spelling rule in English then. The best example of this, fast-forwarding a couple hundred years, is Shakespeare, who spelt his name Shakespear, Shaksper, Shakspere, and a bunch of others.
That's just how it was then: spell however you want, so long as you're understood and you didn't look like an idiot.
And to further this point, Old English is more easily parsed when read aloud. Try it -- it works.
You mean Middle English. Old English had stopped being spoken about 200 years before Chaucer, and it would be a lot harder to read.
Yes, he isn't a rah-rah cheerleader, and I don't blame him for questioning the future of development without a profit motive, but he seems a bit pessimistic even for that.
He suggests that all or most successful open-source programs are, at best, black-box rewrites of successful commercial programs. Any number of counterexamples can be provided against this; the best ones are perhaps Apache and Perl.
Sure, there were webservers before Apache, and IIS now has equivalent functionality, but describing Apache as 'just a copy' of IIS or some other commercial webserver is ridicuolous.
In any case, I don't agree with him, but he's so much more on the mark than 95% of popular media accounts of tbe software industry that I, for one, am not going to complain.
They call it Royale with Cheese.
I got the chance to confirm this for myself when I was in Paris this past summer. Here's a photo of the interior of a McDonald's beside Place de la Bastille in Paris.
Note that the burger's name is actually spelled "Royal" with cheese, though a French speaker would pronounce it Royale.
He might be tech savvy, so maybe we'll see MikeRoweMachines.com, or, being a Canadian, maybe next it'll be MikeRoweFish.com
Hmm? Is there some Canadian/fish thing I don't know about? Is this some obscure ice-fishing reference?
Please tell me that's now how the unit of measurement was actually created.... It's a total burn on that idiot above, but it's just hard to believe.
Well, like its name suggests, a foot was originally supposed to be the length of someone's (specifically some nobleman's) foot. In France before the revolution, the analogous unit was called pied du roi, "king's foot".
Who this king exactly was isn't known, I think, because there were probably many kings who went around breaking conventions and imposing their own measurements on the population, but Charlemagne is usually cited.
IIRC, the same goes for yards, I think.
More about foot as a unit of mesaurement is available here.
Is that the metric system is flawed. It is defined in terms of the size of 18th century railroad tie sizes, which is totally arbitrary.
Mmm-hmm. So, clearly, defining length in terms of the feet of a 1200-year old dead Frankish king is a better choice?
Err, the cached login screen looks no different from the real login screen.
Actually, they only hit you with the "we're down" notice after you successfully log in, so the authentication stuff is still working,
Probably. Actually, I think County was the variable, not State.
I think you're probably right about that; it's consistent with the colouring on the map. Of course the same logic about the peculiar results of the first-past-the-post system apply just as well to counties as to states.
Only to show there are vastly differing ways of representing the data. I knew there would be a few here that would step up and condemn that map. For all we know... at the total population county level, that picture is accurate. Or it may be the scrawlings of demented monkeys. I did not go through the rigors of checking it. I did find it interesting, though.
You're right, it is interesting. I hadn't realized just how much Bush got the rural vote in 2000.
That said, I was grinding my axe mostly for the benefit of the author of the page you linked, not you, though in your original post you didn't suggest anything to disassociate yourself from the page's reasoning and conclusions.
My objection was essentially that the page author was acting like a disgruntled sports fan inventing previously-unused statistical measures to illustrate his team's superiority. When he says "population voting for Bush" he really means "combined population of all counties that voted for Bush" which is quite different.