Guessing what's going on in a foreign-language film and knowing a few stock phrases in another language do not count as "knowing a second language."
If I recall correctly from my own childhood experience, I could not speak English at age 6, despite my father and his family being completely bilingual (they grew up in NYC), watching Sesame Street on TV, having straight A's in English, having children's books in English and reading them with the help of my mother. I knew a bunch of words, sure, but when I was taken on a trip to Disney World at age 6, I know for sure that I could not speak English beyond uttering individual words. Like, when I was in that ride that had these two-seat airplanes attached by a pole to a thing in the middle that made them go around, and the kid in the front seat gets a lever that controls whether the airplane goes up or down, and the dumb American kid who got to sit in that seat just kept the airplane in the highest position all the time, do you think I managed to convey to the kid, in English, my desire that he adopt a more vertically varied course of motion? No, all I could say was "Down!" (after telling him what I really wanted, in Spanish, gotten the kid to look at me funny, and realized that, duh, yeah, I gotta tell him in English, but oops, how do you do that?).
When did I actually manage to speak English decently? When an American kid moved into my street, who couldn't speak Spanish, like two years later, and I started playing with him regularly. I can't remember for the life of me how I managed at first, but by the end I could definitely talk.
Spanish and Portuguese are Latin-derived languages, but they are close to each other as much they are with Italian and French (ie, no, if you speak just Portuguese you do *not* understand Spanish, nor Italian, nor French).
Actually, Spanish and Portuguese are much closer to each other than either is to French or Italian. Spanish and Portuguese grammar are also nearly identical; there's a big pile of small differences. The biggest difference by far is pronunciation.
Portuguese and Spanish speakers can conduct moderately simple conversations very easily. This is also true to some extent between them and Italian, but not nearly as much.
Also, the most effective method for teaching Spanish or Portuguese to a speaker of the other language is by contrast ("such-and-such in Portuguese corresponds to such-and-such in Spanish"); the students' knowledge of how sentences are formed in one language mostly transfers to the other, as does about 90% of the vocabulary after adjusting for pronunciation. I've seen Brazilian teachers who don't speak Spanish fluently teach Portuguese to Spanish speakers, in Portuguese.
Finnish fits easily into no language group - the claimed similarity with Hungarian is largely down to 3-400 shared word families, rather than any morphological or phonetic similarity.
The number of cognates is absolutely irrelevant. The criterion that establishes the relationship is systematic sound correspondences; read up on the comparative method.
Finnish fits quite uncontroversially into the Uralic family.
The closest language to English is French. Even though it is not a Germanic language, most of the words (and spelling horrors) in English come from French, and English grammar is fairly easy to pick up anyway.
Um, you're setting yourself up for confusing with this comment, because on the one hand you say that French is the "closest" language to English, and on the other, you cite the reason precisely by which it isn't so, in the sense that most people will understand for "closest" in this case.
The other replies did a good job of setting out the linguistic taxonomy issues, so I'll just limit myself to making what I think is a deeper point: a language is not a bag of words, it's a system for forming and using sentences; i.e., a grammar. This is one of the key insights that distinguishes a true linguist from a layperson with a passing interest in languages. For example, some people often ask me (as a linguist) why is it that English is classified as a Germanic language, despite such a large amount of its vocabulary coming from Romance. The answer to that one is that the proportion of words from Romance vs. Germanic is just irrelevant. The language is a grammar.
Now, having pointed that out, let's focus on grammatical issues:
Romance languages like French and Spanish have adjectives after the nouns (normally). Germanic languages like English and Dutch have adjectives before nouns.
The function words and verb tense/mood/aspect inflections in English look more like the ones in Dutch or German than the ones in French or Spanish.
Noun compound formation in English is much more similar to German or Dutch than it is to Spanish or French. Germanic languages' noun compounds tend to be combinations of noun-noun and adjective-noun. Think of those really long German words, whose equivalent in English would be written with spaces between the parts; the grammar is similar. In Romance, on the other hand, noun compounds often involve prepositional phrases.
Degree of systematic sound correspondence between core vocabularies. I'm not going to explain this one, but I'll point you at the wikipedia article.
I should have added to my reply: from your story, it sounds like you made concentrated, deliberate efforts to learn English, at a relatively late age where you've already mastered one language. You didn't learn English by some sort of metaphorical osmosis at age three from watching Sesame Street.
Remember that I'm responding to a very narrow claim: the idea that airing Sesame Street in English in local TV contributes to Finnish children learning English. There is precious little evidence that young children, at the age that Sesame Street targets, learn anything from watching it in a different language. To the extent that Finnish children learn English, I don't think Sesame Street in English has much to do with it.
The first example cited (p. 46) is deaf parents turning the TV on for their hearing children to be exposed to the community's spoken language. The second one concerns Sesame Street directly:
Another natural experiment in acquisition occurs when children speaking one language are exposed to a second via television. Such children appear not to learn much or even any of the second language even after daily exposure. For example, Dutch children who watch Sesame Street in German do not appear to learn any German from it (Snow et al., 1976), even though this is a program designed for children. Because it is something to be watched, it lacks the direct interactive properties of language used for face-to-face communication. (p. 46)
The page with the Snow et al. 1976 reference is missing from the Google book preview.
I thought I had read/heard somewhere (might have even been the documentary Revolution OS) that Finns & Swedes grow up with English Sesame Street available to them and as a result many of them are bilingual from a young age.
If I recall correctly from my graduate-level psychology of language course, children can't learn a language from TV. They need to interact with speakers, in the language in question, to learn it.
You seem to want to encourage a mindset that separates people who work with DBs and programmers who more often than not, work with these "empty" values in their code, and expect the same behaviour from the DB. Sort of counter intuitive to a lot of us, especially those of us that have to perform BOTH programming AND DBA tasks.
The problem with what you're saying here is that, in the name of programmer convenience, you're not addressing any of the problems that an RDBMS is supposed to solve. Most critically in this case, logical data integrity. Do you understand what problem RDBMS features like constraints are supposed to solve? Do you seriously want databases to stop solving those problems in the name of being more similar to a tool you're more familiar with, that does not solve that problem?
I propose you stop telling us all how databases should work, and learn some elementary database theory.
When I write NOT NULL in a column, it doesn't necessarily mean I want to enforce that I MUST supply a value during any INSERT (and indeed then have to check that my INSERT actually worked and check for possible returned errors, coding exceptions etc). Therefore I always supply a DEFAULT value, that the DB can safely insert in that column, IF I haven't specified anything different during the INSERT.
And then your buggy programs that fail to specify a value for that column cause the silent insertion of bogus data into your database; data that we could prove at that moment to be wrong. Then nobody notices for a long time, run queries against the DB and get incorrect answers. For example, they fail to specify the column for the amount of a cash transaction, which means that a row with $0 is inserted, and all reports that rely on computing the average amount per transaction are hopelessly wrong.
Sorry if I missed something critical, but it seems like you are trying to put all the load onto the programmer just so you can have a "cleaner" table definition?
No, we're trying to make sure the data doesn't get into a state where it's hopelessly and irrecoverably incorrect. It's got nothing to do with conspiracies to "put all the load onto the programmer" to get the tables to be "clean" or "elegant" or anything of the sort. It's the damn simple fact that it is very often the case that we can tell beforehand that a column in a table must never have be null if the table's data is to be correct, yet there is no sensible default value. Like, you know, my example of the dollar amount column in a table storing financial transaction details.
How can I be "creating a market" if I didn't pay, wouldn't pay and I'm not expected to pay, may I ask?
You create a market to the extent that your actions reasonably lead the suppliers to conclude that there is a demand.
Hypothetical scenario: imagine a child pornography site funded 100% by advertisers, and free to viewers. If the site has enough viewers that the pornographers and advertisers believe they can turn a profit from it, does this not result in a market for child pornography, even though the viewers don't pay, wouldn't pay, and are not expected to pay?
Isn't the whole reason (excuse) for making some images illegal that a crime was committed in MAKING it -- performing a sex act on a child -- whether anyone sees the image at all is really irrelevant to that, except as it serves as evidence of the act.
No, that is not the whole reason. Which is why the argument you're trying to make here fails. The distribution of the photos is judged to be an abuse independently of the taking thereof. If third parties distribute and possess the photos in question, that in itself is continued abuse of the minor.
There is also the fact that the state has an interest in prohibiting a market in photos of this kind; the state wants the demand for this kind of photo not be met, period, because supply can only be provided abusively.
Why is it not illegal to look at images of crime scenes, death, murder? You see these in newspapers....
Because the circumstances are different. Why are you looking to impose a general rule here? Can you at the very least accept the possibility that child pornography and murder are different problems, that may require different solutions?
On the other hand, some works that depict death and murder may be judged obscene in some jurisdictions. Snuff films would arguably be prosecuted as such, if they did in fact exist.
The logical, reason-based conclusion is on the other hand rather obviously consistent: images of (and other information about a) crime is not a crime itself. A picture of an armed robbery is not the robbery itself. A picture of a car theft is not the car theft. A picture of a murder, no matter how torturous and bloody, is not the murder itself. A picture of a child being molested is not the molestation itself. It is rather simple, no?
You implicitly propose that the criminalization of child pornography is based on the following premise:
If a photo that depicts an actual instance of a criminal act, then that photo is an instance of the exact same criminal act itself.
Then you list a series of counterexamples to that claim: for example, pictures of a car theft are not themselves the theft of the car in question. All that counterexamples show is that a depiction of a criminal act is not in general a criminal act. You're asking us to accept an argument of the following form:
Premise: all swans are white
Observation: there exists a black swan
Conclusion: all swans are black
Your counterexamples thus cannot prove the conclusion you actually want us to reach: that it is impossible for any depiction of a criminal act to be a criminal act of the same sort as the original. All the counterexamples show is that depiction of an actual criminal act is not, in itself, the same actual criminal act. But all that means is that one would need additional premises to reach the conclusion in question.
And in fact, the actual sexual abuse of a child is a different crime in the law than the and the creation, distribution and possession of pornographic pictures of the same child. The law isn't making the strawman argument that you want to attribute to it. The premises for judging some specific acts to be criminal are not the same premises used for judging the depiction of those same acts criminal. We have laws against car theft, but no laws against photos of car theft. But on the other hand, we have laws against child sexual abuse, and laws against child pornography. Child pornography isn't a crime because child sexual abuse is a crime and depiction of crimes is a crime; it's a crime because the depiction of child sexual abuse is judged to promote serious crimes against children. (The depiction of car theft, on the other hand, is not judged to lead to crime serious enough to prohibit it.)
Why on earth should titillating the person who looks at an image make it illegal? Isn't the whole reason (excuse) for making some images illegal that a crime was committed in MAKING it -- performing a sex act on a child -- whether anyone sees the image at all is really irrelevant to that, except as it serves as evidence of the act.
You're failing to see the point, on two counts:
The distribution of the images in question creates a market, whose demand provides an incentive for creating more pictures of the same kind, leading to more abuse of children.
You're assuming that the abuse resides only in the context where the pictures are taken. I would answer that by saying that distribution of child pornography is abusive independently of whether the pictures were taken abusively or not. A minor is assumed to be unable to consent to being depicted in a manner, nor are guardians allowed to consent for it either. Therefore, distributing such images is unlawful, regardless of the context in which they were taken.
This means that, for example, that somebody who distributed an image could be correctly convicted for child pornography while the person who took the photo is acquitted. That would just mean that the photographer was not judged to have abused the subject of the photos, while the distributor's actions were abusive. I think the case of self-shot nude photos is exactly like this, with the proviso that the photographer and the subject are the same.
Skumanick won't show the pictures to anyone, including the girls' lawyers, but according to the reported descriptions, one picture shows two of the girls flashing the peace sign in their bras, and the other picture shows a girl wrapped in a towel with her breasts exposed after stepping out of the shower. Unless there's something very significant being deliberately left out of those descriptions, it sounds pretty obvious that the pictures do not meet the definition of child pornography, which requires sexual explicitness, not just nudity.
From one of your own links: "Under Pennsylvania's child pornography law, it's a felony to possess or disseminate photos of a minor engaged in sexual activity, "lewd exhibition of the genitals," or nudity that is meant to titillate. Open lewdness, a misdemeanor, includes any lewd act that is likely to be observed by others." [my emphasis]
It seems that a large chunk of your overlong article is based on a wrong premise as to what is the relevant law. Which only goes to show that you did not research the relevant law.
Giving him credit, if someone had come to his office and shown him the picture of the towel girl by itself and asked him to prosecute the girl for creating child pornography, he might have said that it didn't meet the legal definition.
How generous of you to give him credit for meeting a legal definition that doesn't apply to this case.
Anyway, your talk about "context syndrome" entails that you'd forbid the DA from considering the contexts in which the picture was created and distributed in deciding whether a child pornography or open lewdness offence was perpretrated. "Child pornography" is a property of photos, and a photo is either CP or not on its own merits, irrelevant of how it was taken, and what was done with it afterwards. That assumption permeates your whole analysis and proposal.
The problem is that, under your approach, if I was a child abuser abusing the towel photo girl, made her pose for that photo, distributed it to other people under the understanding that these are sexually titillating photos of minors, and hell, got paid for it too, you seem to want to drop all of this context from consideration as to whether I and the people that I sold photos to should be convicted under child pornography charges.
More generally, there are plenty of pictures of minors that, taken individually, could be created under either completely innocent circumstances or sexually abusive ones, but taken in the context of their creation and distribution, must count as child porn. The best example of this is photo series of clothed pre-pubescent girls in spread-legged poses that emphasize the girls' groins, taken by commercial photographers and sold over web sites dedicated to this kind of photo series, and that really go out of their way to say they are about "modeling" and "art," and not about porn. This kind of thing has been found in the past to be child pornography; however, if we take any one photo in isolation, and strip all of the context away from it, the photo may be read as just depicting a young girl in an unknowingly immodest pose, taken perhaps by a relative. Or in other words: there are cases of child pornography that you can't catch without bringing context in.
And at any rate, the problem with these prosecutions seems to be a failure to give due weight to context. The whole point of child pornography laws is to protect minors from sexual predation; child pornography is a visual record of child sexual abuse (note how context-bound that is), and its creation and dissemination perpetuates the sexual abuse of the victim. Then the best argument that the girls are innocent of creating and disseminating child pornography is contextual: they didn't abuse anybody! Your standards, however, would deprive us of that argument, and we'd be reduced to having a panel of random folks be shown a picture of a 17 year old girl, rig
In other news, as I've been saying for years now, religion breeds terrorism.
And so does anarchism, communism, fascism, nationalism, and plenty other nonreligious or anti-religious political causes which you conveniently fail to mention.
In fact, if you examine terrorism, what you more commonly find is political fanaticism of one sort or another. Sometimes political fanaticism is connected to organized religion, and other times to "secular religions" like Marxism.
The translation from Python to LLVM is going to lose some specificity and require that extra code be added to implement whatever needs to be done in Python that isn't trivially implemented by LLVM. Then the LLVM code needs to be compiled to native, introducing yet more "glue" code in the process.
What do you mean by "lose specificity" here?
It's not clear to me that either the Python bytecode or the LLVM code is "more specific" than the others. Simply, one of them is higher level than the other; there will be many cases where the Python bytecode spells out "what to do," and the corresponding LLVM translation spells out "how to do it." This means that both of them will end up having information that the other one doesn't; the Python source bytecode will imply that some sequences of LLVM instructions "belong together" in ways that the LLVM doesn't represent.
This just means that some optimizations can be performed on one representation, but not the other. The Python bytecode will be susceptible to optimization that eliminate relatively large chunks of LLVM code; the LLVM code will be susceptible to peephole optimizations that span across Python opcode barriers. So to the extent that that extra "glue" code you mention does work that really needs to be done, inlining it into the translations allows the compiler to use the surrounding context to optimize the glue in ways that the interpreter cannot.
Wouldn't a more direct compile yield a better result?
What's a "direct" compile? Optimizing compilers use multiple levels of representation, because each level is suited to different kinds of optimizations. For example, common expression elimination is easier to do in the abstract syntax tree (which represents the structure of the source code at a very high level.); while peephole optimization is best done at a lower-level representation (because you're looking to eliminate things like redundant instruction sequences).
I just think that a more direct approach would reduce some of the superfluous glue code and a variety of other inefficiencies in translation that result from a loss of knowledge about what the original program was actually trying to implement.
If anything, excessively "direct" compilation produces suboptimal code. The optimizations that rely on knowledge of the details of a high-level representation should be done at a high-level representation.
Prosecutors always have some leeway in what charges they'll bring. If they charged everyone for every conceivable violation we'd all have criminal records. Just as no sane prosecutor would go after parents for sending pictures of their naked infants to relatives, no prosecutor who's not a publicity seeking, grade A ass hole would charge a teenager with distributing child porn in these circumstances.
Quibble: there's plenty of precedent that the nekkid infant pix aren't child porn. Not that that stops every prosecutor out there...
I always hate the "X army did more than Y army" debate of WWII. There was one overriding thing that dictated the outcome of WWII. America's manufacturing centers were basically untouchable. In the end, we simply made material faster than it could be destroyed.
But the Soviets also managed to outproduce the Germans. And the Soviets were at the receiving end of the world's largest, most destructive invasion ever.
There is no one thing that dictated the outcome of WWII. Germany lost to a USSR that mobilized more forces, and built more tanks and planes, and used American trucks to deliver Caucasian oil, American food and Soviet-built armament efficiently to the front, while the Germans were slow to put their economy into war footing, and suffered greatly from uncontested strategic bombing by the USA and Britain.
Americans, Brits and the French massively overemphasize the west front in WWII, and tend to ignore the East Front. A more fair assessment is that the Soviet Union defeated Germany, with significant logistical and material support from the USA (the most important of which was trucks and food, IIRC). Germany was already losing against the Soviets by the time of the Normandy invasions.
According to Karl Popper, a late philosopher of science who's very popular among people who are not philosophers of science, but not so among his actual colleagues.
Falsificationism is a decent rule of thumb in arguing about science; it's very useful to ask oneself what kind of evidence would lead one to abandon a certain hypothesis. But attempts to flesh out the concept in a precise manner as a criterion to distinguish science from non-science fail utterly, because of the Quine-Duhem thesis. No observation can ever truly falsify any hypothesis, because some background assumption can always be abandoned instead.
GP is basically right, BTW. The principle of natural selection is more of a mathematical model of population change than an empirical hypothesis. If you go by the silly criterion that every "scientific theory" needs to be falsifiable, well, the principle of natural selection fails that test, just as "2 + 2 = 4" or the fundamental theorem of calculus do. That's not exactly a problem, you know.
This is not quite breaking the "freedom to modify" principle, since technically the source code is available, but he's calling it a trap because in practice it's extremely difficult to get in there and modify a web application since current browsers don't provide an easy way to do it, and the "source code" is almost impossible to read.
Actually, by his criteria, the source code is not available. From TFA:
"For instance, Google Docs downloads into your machine a Javascript program which measures half a megabyte, in a compacted form that we could call Obfuscript because it has no comments and hardly any whitespace, and the method names are one letter long. The source code of a program is the preferred form for modifying it; the real source code of this program is not available to the user."
Obfuscated "source code" doesn't count for the GPL, which defines source code as the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.
The problem with that logic is that Stallman missed a huge point. If, from his example you're using Google Docs, even if the JavaScript is "freed" using his new standard with stylized comments and the @source directive - you are still accessing non-free server software (the Google web servers) that responds to the AJAX requests. Not only that, but your browser is also making a call to the Google Ad server, which also has non-free software. You might also argue that its being served by a modified version of MySQL thats non-free, and perhaps even the firewall and the proxy that its passing through is a custom version written by Google Engineers (likely.)
There are two problems I can perceive with your argument, though:
It is still potentially very useful to you to be able to modify the software that runs on your computer, and to share these modifications with other people. This is one of the major points of the GPL.
You're describing here a system with three kinds of compoments: (a) client software, (b) server software, (c) server data. It's much harder to argue that (b) should be free software, especially if it's in-house Google software that we're talking about, not distributed outside the company. And (c) is not software at all, so the argument doesn't apply. Should the GPL have clauses that forbid, say, a GPL-licensed web browser from being able to connect to a web server running a non-free http server? What if it's a free http server connected to a non-free database? What if the http server and database are free software, but the people who operate the server don't allow you to download all of their data in bulk and serve it yourself?
You have to draw a line somewhere here, and drawing the line between (a) and (b) seems reasonable.
C or Fortran, perhaps, but once you start to get into higher level languages, knowing assembly language isn't very applicable. Knowing how to program well in assembly doesn't mean you know how to program well in, say, Ruby or Lisp.
I don't think either GP's suggestion nor your retort are quite satisfactory. You are right that learning assembly doesn't mean you can program well in higher order languages like Ruby or Lisp; in fact, I'd say that the point applies just as well to C or C++, since programing a large system in those languages requires understanding of how to break down a large problem domain to organize your software into pieces that are relatively easy to understand, write and maintain. GP is right that some understanding of assembly is very important; however, too much of knowledge about assembly is just irrelevant to programmers, and spending a lot of time learning it is counterproductive.
The best topic to understand here, the correct compromise, is to learn a bit about compilers. The real value of understanding assembly for a programmer in a high-level language is to get an understanding of what the code is going to compile down to, and this is just as true for Lisp as it is for C. Going into assembly at any more depth than required to understand compilers at a general level is counterproductive.
GP is wrong that knowledge of assembly gives one an "intuitive grasp of what is a good C or Fortran program"; it gives one a grasp of what C or Fortran code can be compiled tightly. This is a very good skill to have, but programs that compile tightly can be just as badly organized otherwise as any other program.
You can say that half of the uranium in a given sample will decay in a certain amount of time, but you cannot predict when any single particle will decay, and it's not just because you don't have enough information. It's because the event is truly random.
I feel that what you've said here is circular, because this concept of "truly random" will have to be explained in terms of unpredictability. A better formulation is perhaps that quantum physics says that observers can never obtain enough information to predict when any single particle will decay.
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The point is that the interaction was crucial. The TV, if it helped at all, could not have done so without the interaction.
Guessing what's going on in a foreign-language film and knowing a few stock phrases in another language do not count as "knowing a second language."
If I recall correctly from my own childhood experience, I could not speak English at age 6, despite my father and his family being completely bilingual (they grew up in NYC), watching Sesame Street on TV, having straight A's in English, having children's books in English and reading them with the help of my mother. I knew a bunch of words, sure, but when I was taken on a trip to Disney World at age 6, I know for sure that I could not speak English beyond uttering individual words. Like, when I was in that ride that had these two-seat airplanes attached by a pole to a thing in the middle that made them go around, and the kid in the front seat gets a lever that controls whether the airplane goes up or down, and the dumb American kid who got to sit in that seat just kept the airplane in the highest position all the time, do you think I managed to convey to the kid, in English, my desire that he adopt a more vertically varied course of motion? No, all I could say was "Down!" (after telling him what I really wanted, in Spanish, gotten the kid to look at me funny, and realized that, duh, yeah, I gotta tell him in English, but oops, how do you do that?).
When did I actually manage to speak English decently? When an American kid moved into my street, who couldn't speak Spanish, like two years later, and I started playing with him regularly. I can't remember for the life of me how I managed at first, but by the end I could definitely talk.
So yeah, anecdote is a game that two can play.
Actually, Spanish and Portuguese are much closer to each other than either is to French or Italian. Spanish and Portuguese grammar are also nearly identical; there's a big pile of small differences. The biggest difference by far is pronunciation.
Portuguese and Spanish speakers can conduct moderately simple conversations very easily. This is also true to some extent between them and Italian, but not nearly as much.
Also, the most effective method for teaching Spanish or Portuguese to a speaker of the other language is by contrast ("such-and-such in Portuguese corresponds to such-and-such in Spanish"); the students' knowledge of how sentences are formed in one language mostly transfers to the other, as does about 90% of the vocabulary after adjusting for pronunciation. I've seen Brazilian teachers who don't speak Spanish fluently teach Portuguese to Spanish speakers, in Portuguese.
The number of cognates is absolutely irrelevant. The criterion that establishes the relationship is systematic sound correspondences; read up on the comparative method.
Finnish fits quite uncontroversially into the Uralic family.
Um, you're setting yourself up for confusing with this comment, because on the one hand you say that French is the "closest" language to English, and on the other, you cite the reason precisely by which it isn't so, in the sense that most people will understand for "closest" in this case.
The other replies did a good job of setting out the linguistic taxonomy issues, so I'll just limit myself to making what I think is a deeper point: a language is not a bag of words, it's a system for forming and using sentences; i.e., a grammar. This is one of the key insights that distinguishes a true linguist from a layperson with a passing interest in languages. For example, some people often ask me (as a linguist) why is it that English is classified as a Germanic language, despite such a large amount of its vocabulary coming from Romance. The answer to that one is that the proportion of words from Romance vs. Germanic is just irrelevant. The language is a grammar.
Now, having pointed that out, let's focus on grammatical issues:
Um, he said he will argue it, silly, not that he did.
I should have added to my reply: from your story, it sounds like you made concentrated, deliberate efforts to learn English, at a relatively late age where you've already mastered one language. You didn't learn English by some sort of metaphorical osmosis at age three from watching Sesame Street.
Remember that I'm responding to a very narrow claim: the idea that airing Sesame Street in English in local TV contributes to Finnish children learning English. There is precious little evidence that young children, at the age that Sesame Street targets, learn anything from watching it in a different language. To the extent that Finnish children learn English, I don't think Sesame Street in English has much to do with it.
I had a chance to look this up. From First Language Acquisition, by Eve Clark.
The first example cited (p. 46) is deaf parents turning the TV on for their hearing children to be exposed to the community's spoken language. The second one concerns Sesame Street directly:
The page with the Snow et al. 1976 reference is missing from the Google book preview.
If I recall correctly from my graduate-level psychology of language course, children can't learn a language from TV. They need to interact with speakers, in the language in question, to learn it.
The problem with what you're saying here is that, in the name of programmer convenience, you're not addressing any of the problems that an RDBMS is supposed to solve. Most critically in this case, logical data integrity. Do you understand what problem RDBMS features like constraints are supposed to solve? Do you seriously want databases to stop solving those problems in the name of being more similar to a tool you're more familiar with, that does not solve that problem?
I propose you stop telling us all how databases should work, and learn some elementary database theory.
And then your buggy programs that fail to specify a value for that column cause the silent insertion of bogus data into your database; data that we could prove at that moment to be wrong. Then nobody notices for a long time, run queries against the DB and get incorrect answers. For example, they fail to specify the column for the amount of a cash transaction, which means that a row with $0 is inserted, and all reports that rely on computing the average amount per transaction are hopelessly wrong.
You create a market to the extent that your actions reasonably lead the suppliers to conclude that there is a demand.
Hypothetical scenario: imagine a child pornography site funded 100% by advertisers, and free to viewers. If the site has enough viewers that the pornographers and advertisers believe they can turn a profit from it, does this not result in a market for child pornography, even though the viewers don't pay, wouldn't pay, and are not expected to pay?
No, that is not the whole reason. Which is why the argument you're trying to make here fails. The distribution of the photos is judged to be an abuse independently of the taking thereof. If third parties distribute and possess the photos in question, that in itself is continued abuse of the minor.
There is also the fact that the state has an interest in prohibiting a market in photos of this kind; the state wants the demand for this kind of photo not be met, period, because supply can only be provided abusively.
Because the circumstances are different. Why are you looking to impose a general rule here? Can you at the very least accept the possibility that child pornography and murder are different problems, that may require different solutions?
On the other hand, some works that depict death and murder may be judged obscene in some jurisdictions. Snuff films would arguably be prosecuted as such, if they did in fact exist.
You implicitly propose that the criminalization of child pornography is based on the following premise:
Then you list a series of counterexamples to that claim: for example, pictures of a car theft are not themselves the theft of the car in question. All that counterexamples show is that a depiction of a criminal act is not in general a criminal act. You're asking us to accept an argument of the following form:
Your counterexamples thus cannot prove the conclusion you actually want us to reach: that it is impossible for any depiction of a criminal act to be a criminal act of the same sort as the original. All the counterexamples show is that depiction of an actual criminal act is not, in itself, the same actual criminal act. But all that means is that one would need additional premises to reach the conclusion in question.
And in fact, the actual sexual abuse of a child is a different crime in the law than the and the creation, distribution and possession of pornographic pictures of the same child. The law isn't making the strawman argument that you want to attribute to it. The premises for judging some specific acts to be criminal are not the same premises used for judging the depiction of those same acts criminal. We have laws against car theft, but no laws against photos of car theft. But on the other hand, we have laws against child sexual abuse, and laws against child pornography. Child pornography isn't a crime because child sexual abuse is a crime and depiction of crimes is a crime; it's a crime because the depiction of child sexual abuse is judged to promote serious crimes against children. (The depiction of car theft, on the other hand, is not judged to lead to crime serious enough to prohibit it.)
You're failing to see the point, on two counts:
This means that, for example, that somebody who distributed an image could be correctly convicted for child pornography while the person who took the photo is acquitted. That would just mean that the photographer was not judged to have abused the subject of the photos, while the distributor's actions were abusive. I think the case of self-shot nude photos is exactly like this, with the proviso that the photographer and the subject are the same.
From one of your own links: "Under Pennsylvania's child pornography law, it's a felony to possess or disseminate photos of a minor engaged in sexual activity, "lewd exhibition of the genitals," or nudity that is meant to titillate. Open lewdness, a misdemeanor, includes any lewd act that is likely to be observed by others." [my emphasis]
It seems that a large chunk of your overlong article is based on a wrong premise as to what is the relevant law. Which only goes to show that you did not research the relevant law.
How generous of you to give him credit for meeting a legal definition that doesn't apply to this case.
Anyway, your talk about "context syndrome" entails that you'd forbid the DA from considering the contexts in which the picture was created and distributed in deciding whether a child pornography or open lewdness offence was perpretrated. "Child pornography" is a property of photos, and a photo is either CP or not on its own merits, irrelevant of how it was taken, and what was done with it afterwards. That assumption permeates your whole analysis and proposal.
The problem is that, under your approach, if I was a child abuser abusing the towel photo girl, made her pose for that photo, distributed it to other people under the understanding that these are sexually titillating photos of minors, and hell, got paid for it too, you seem to want to drop all of this context from consideration as to whether I and the people that I sold photos to should be convicted under child pornography charges.
More generally, there are plenty of pictures of minors that, taken individually, could be created under either completely innocent circumstances or sexually abusive ones, but taken in the context of their creation and distribution, must count as child porn. The best example of this is photo series of clothed pre-pubescent girls in spread-legged poses that emphasize the girls' groins, taken by commercial photographers and sold over web sites dedicated to this kind of photo series, and that really go out of their way to say they are about "modeling" and "art," and not about porn. This kind of thing has been found in the past to be child pornography; however, if we take any one photo in isolation, and strip all of the context away from it, the photo may be read as just depicting a young girl in an unknowingly immodest pose, taken perhaps by a relative. Or in other words: there are cases of child pornography that you can't catch without bringing context in.
And at any rate, the problem with these prosecutions seems to be a failure to give due weight to context. The whole point of child pornography laws is to protect minors from sexual predation; child pornography is a visual record of child sexual abuse (note how context-bound that is), and its creation and dissemination perpetuates the sexual abuse of the victim. Then the best argument that the girls are innocent of creating and disseminating child pornography is contextual: they didn't abuse anybody! Your standards, however, would deprive us of that argument, and we'd be reduced to having a panel of random folks be shown a picture of a 17 year old girl, rig
And so does anarchism, communism, fascism, nationalism, and plenty other nonreligious or anti-religious political causes which you conveniently fail to mention.
In fact, if you examine terrorism, what you more commonly find is political fanaticism of one sort or another. Sometimes political fanaticism is connected to organized religion, and other times to "secular religions" like Marxism.
What do you mean by "lose specificity" here?
It's not clear to me that either the Python bytecode or the LLVM code is "more specific" than the others. Simply, one of them is higher level than the other; there will be many cases where the Python bytecode spells out "what to do," and the corresponding LLVM translation spells out "how to do it." This means that both of them will end up having information that the other one doesn't; the Python source bytecode will imply that some sequences of LLVM instructions "belong together" in ways that the LLVM doesn't represent.
This just means that some optimizations can be performed on one representation, but not the other. The Python bytecode will be susceptible to optimization that eliminate relatively large chunks of LLVM code; the LLVM code will be susceptible to peephole optimizations that span across Python opcode barriers. So to the extent that that extra "glue" code you mention does work that really needs to be done, inlining it into the translations allows the compiler to use the surrounding context to optimize the glue in ways that the interpreter cannot.
What's a "direct" compile? Optimizing compilers use multiple levels of representation, because each level is suited to different kinds of optimizations. For example, common expression elimination is easier to do in the abstract syntax tree (which represents the structure of the source code at a very high level.); while peephole optimization is best done at a lower-level representation (because you're looking to eliminate things like redundant instruction sequences).
If anything, excessively "direct" compilation produces suboptimal code. The optimizations that rely on knowledge of the details of a high-level representation should be done at a high-level representation.
Quibble: there's plenty of precedent that the nekkid infant pix aren't child porn. Not that that stops every prosecutor out there...
But the Soviets also managed to outproduce the Germans. And the Soviets were at the receiving end of the world's largest, most destructive invasion ever.
There is no one thing that dictated the outcome of WWII. Germany lost to a USSR that mobilized more forces, and built more tanks and planes, and used American trucks to deliver Caucasian oil, American food and Soviet-built armament efficiently to the front, while the Germans were slow to put their economy into war footing, and suffered greatly from uncontested strategic bombing by the USA and Britain.
Americans, Brits and the French massively overemphasize the west front in WWII, and tend to ignore the East Front. A more fair assessment is that the Soviet Union defeated Germany, with significant logistical and material support from the USA (the most important of which was trucks and food, IIRC). Germany was already losing against the Soviets by the time of the Normandy invasions.
According to Karl Popper, a late philosopher of science who's very popular among people who are not philosophers of science, but not so among his actual colleagues.
Falsificationism is a decent rule of thumb in arguing about science; it's very useful to ask oneself what kind of evidence would lead one to abandon a certain hypothesis. But attempts to flesh out the concept in a precise manner as a criterion to distinguish science from non-science fail utterly, because of the Quine-Duhem thesis. No observation can ever truly falsify any hypothesis, because some background assumption can always be abandoned instead.
GP is basically right, BTW. The principle of natural selection is more of a mathematical model of population change than an empirical hypothesis. If you go by the silly criterion that every "scientific theory" needs to be falsifiable, well, the principle of natural selection fails that test, just as "2 + 2 = 4" or the fundamental theorem of calculus do. That's not exactly a problem, you know.
Actually, by his criteria, the source code is not available. From TFA:
Obfuscated "source code" doesn't count for the GPL, which defines source code as the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.
There are two problems I can perceive with your argument, though:
You have to draw a line somewhere here, and drawing the line between (a) and (b) seems reasonable.
I don't think either GP's suggestion nor your retort are quite satisfactory. You are right that learning assembly doesn't mean you can program well in higher order languages like Ruby or Lisp; in fact, I'd say that the point applies just as well to C or C++, since programing a large system in those languages requires understanding of how to break down a large problem domain to organize your software into pieces that are relatively easy to understand, write and maintain. GP is right that some understanding of assembly is very important; however, too much of knowledge about assembly is just irrelevant to programmers, and spending a lot of time learning it is counterproductive.
The best topic to understand here, the correct compromise, is to learn a bit about compilers. The real value of understanding assembly for a programmer in a high-level language is to get an understanding of what the code is going to compile down to, and this is just as true for Lisp as it is for C. Going into assembly at any more depth than required to understand compilers at a general level is counterproductive.
GP is wrong that knowledge of assembly gives one an "intuitive grasp of what is a good C or Fortran program"; it gives one a grasp of what C or Fortran code can be compiled tightly. This is a very good skill to have, but programs that compile tightly can be just as badly organized otherwise as any other program.
I feel that what you've said here is circular, because this concept of "truly random" will have to be explained in terms of unpredictability. A better formulation is perhaps that quantum physics says that observers can never obtain enough information to predict when any single particle will decay.