Domain naming is going to need to grow to be more versatile and expressive.
Um, no. We need to stop relying so much on domain names as an end-user access method for internet content, and just rely on search engines and other kinds of directory services.
Here's an experiment for you to try: set your homepage to your favorite search engine or portal, turn off the address bar in your browser, and navigate the internet just with just your home page and browser bookmarks. It's easy, isn't it?
DNS solves one kind of problem very well: it provides a distributed database from symbolic host names to IP addresses, so that you can change the IP address of a host without breaking symbolic references to it, and so that you can do it with minimal interaction with some centralized host naming authority. The problems related to connecting end users to the content they would like to see are best solved with search engines and portals.
I always assumed the reason behind.org,.net,.com and country TLDs was to keep things organized and consistent.
Let's grant the assumption for the sake of argument. Now, really, how useful is that, and why does it need to be done with DNS?
Here's the alternative: DNS just provides mappings from host names to IP addresses (and other things like MX records), and only organizes and classifies domains by owner (who controls which records are published for the domain). Other classifications or ways of organization can be done through other services, like search engines or tailor-built directory services.
Basically, DNS should just be part of the plumbing of the Internet, not a mechanism for organizing its content to users in general.
Um, there was a big market for non-Fannie or Freddie mortgage backed securities. In fact. Fannie and Freddie, who had regulatory standards on the minimum quality of what debt they could buy, were playing catch-up to the private sector lenders, who were free to use lower standards to lend, and managed to find other buyers for that debt.
I don't think the GSE's were at all in the CDO market, for example.
The ratings were based on the idea that house prices only ever go up, and that they could always foreclose and get their money back.
Citation needed.
I don't think models were anywhere near that simple. The closest you could get to that is if you fed home appreciation data from a time period where house prices mostly went up, and had no examples of periods when they went significantly down. That's a plausible failure mode for many of these models (and it happens all the time with financial models, ugh, and the financiers don't seem to learn), but the models would have made different predictions with different data sets.
There's another assumption that people made that led to the problems with the ratings: the assumption that housing and mortgages from different parts of the country would have uncorrelated performance, so that packaging them all together would diversify risk away. The short catchy phrase for that was "all real estate is local": the assumption was that house prices can go down in some parts of the country at any given time, but that it was unlikely that they would go down in all of the country all at once. You can see how that one turned out, of course.
That one, again, turns out to be a recurring problem with financial modeling:
The supar-smart quant financiers make models that assume that some assets' returns are uncorrelated, using historical data from a relatively short time period.
The supar-smart quants then build "safe," diversified portfolios out of the assets in question, using those models.
When the shit hits the fan, the "safe," diversified portfolios' assets plunge in lockstep (yay for mixed metaphors!), and the portfolios crash.
The financial model failures we're seeing now are remarkably similar to the crisis that led to the failure of LTCM 10 years ago. The industry doesn't seem to learn, which is a big problem.
More generally, there's a bigger problem here (and I'm paraphrasing Buffett in the following): it's not that the mathematical models of risk aren't valuable, it's that, by putting very precise-looking numbers to aggregates of thousands of highly uncertain estimates of future risks, they make it look like risk has been tamed. If you have a model that tells you that the current risk of your portfolio is, say, 15.72%, and you mechanically decide how to allocate your capital using a formula that doesn't build in a generous margin of safety against mistakes in that number, you're going to get burned by problems like this.
Instead of changing the clocks, businesses should just say "Summer hours: 9am-5pm, winter hours: 8am-4pm.
That's a great idea!
However, if every business decided on its own when summer and winter hours started, then during spring and fall, there would be serious confusion about whether any one given establishment you deal with was on summer or winter hours. Therefore, we need to take your idea one step further, and set national standard dates for when everybody should switch between summer and winter hours (except for states that don't want to do it, like Arizona, of course).
Also, many localities have laws or regulations that refer to specific times. Things like "no parking from 9am-5pm," or "drinking establishments must close by 2am." We just need to change all those laws, regulations and signs so that they use different summer and winter hours for the official summer hours and winter hours periods of the year.
We should really work to make this happen. I propose a recurring meeting on the first Saturday of every month, at noon during summer hours and 11am in winter hours. (Oh, oops, sorry, I forgot to add: I'm provisionally assuming that summer hours start when that awful DST contraption starts, and end when DST ends.)
I love Slashdot, I read it near religiously, but I know better. The truth for any Slashdot posting is usually found in the comments, or in some misreported part of the article. I know how to look at the comments, deal with conflicting statements, and find the real answer.
Or, in other words: (a) the Slashdot editors don't even bother to read the links to see if the submitters' descriptions are even remotely accurate, (b) you think you're smart.
The difference here is that Islam has a much, much bigger emphasis on textual integrity of scripture.
Remember that, according to Islam, God first revealed his book to the Jews, and then later to the Christians, but both distorted the text and the meaning; only the Muslims have a correct version of the book. Because of this, Muslims are supposed to be very careful about how the text of the Koran is used. For example, they are encouraged to learn Arabic so they can read it in the original. Even if they don't know Arabic, when they discuss religious matters in their native languages, they prefer to use the Arabic words for religious concepts instead of vernacular translations. When citing the Koran, it is very important to convey the context of the quote carefully, so as not to distort the meaning. Etc.
Compare this with, say, the widespread acceptance and official sanction of Bible translations among Christian denominations (e.g., the Vulgata and the King James translation). In Islam, translations of the Koran are at best seen as a necessary evil, and are certainly not given any official sanction.
Ah, so this explains some of the enmity directed toward Sufis, then. FWIW, I don't think this view that mixing sacred scripture and music is a bad thing is entirely universal, merely a view held by the conservative elements within Islam. Which seem to be the most vocal. (That said, I am also aware that many Wahabbists view music in general as un-islamic or anti-islamic, so Sufis get a lot of hate just for that...)
...and you've put your finger on something relevant to the present case, too. The song in question is from West Africa, and the singer in that track is Senegalese (the group is from Mali). Sufi brotherhoods dominate Senegalese Islam.
Another look at the meaning is clearly only stating the obvious: Just as every life has a beginning it also too must have an end. It does not say that everyone must perish in a cruel, agonizing, bloody death. Even the bible has some pretty dark lines surpassing this one.
I have the album that song comes from. If I remember correctly (from the liner notes), the song is an hommage to the singer's late brother.
The musicians are mostly from Mali, but the singer is from Senegal, and this one song is primarily in Wolof. Nearly all of the musicians are in the record are Muslims, so they'd indeed be familiar with koranic language. And clearly, they don't seem to think that it's objectionable for Muslims to use Koranic quotations in music.
From what the article says, it seems some Muslims got offended at their holy scriptures being put to music. So, Sony is bowing to a few fundamentalist Muslims to keep from generating any bad press about how they offend Islam or whatever.
And you need to put this together with the fact that the track has been released on an album recorded by a Muslim artist (Toumani Diabaté), backed by musicians who are mostly Muslims too. Clearly, many Muslims don't object to this.
The name of a product is a marketing decision, period. The version numbers that make sense to you as developer of the product, at best, mean nothing to the buyers of the product. At worst, well, your own example about "1.0" is perfect.
You need to have some internal scheme for keeping track of builds and versions of your product for release management and support issues, but there's no sense in having engineers decide whether a given release is 2.5 or 3.0. Let marketing pick the name that's most meaningful to buyers.
Has this changed recently? Because at least as recently as my 1st-gen Macbook Pro, upgrading the RAM on any Mac I've ever used doesn't void the warranty. Hell, the computer's instruction booklet shows you how do to it.
You mean the gold standard creates a situation where financial systems suddenly have to obey the same laws every other system in nature does?
The problem you're failing to see is that the supply of goods and services can easily grow faster than the supply of gold. In this case, over time, more goods and services become available, when you add everything up, there won't be enough gold to buy the whole supply of goods and services at a profit to the aggregate of the producers. This means that producers will seek to match their output to the gold supply, instead of matching it to the economy's real supply and demand capacities. (Exception: producers can barter their output, but barter doesn't scale up to a complex economy. How do you barter programming labor for heart surgery?)
So, in short, the problem with using gold as money is that there won't be enough money for producers to trade all the goods they are capable of producing, and therefore, they will not produce.
As somebody with an A.B.D. in Linguistics, I'm not sure your criticism of GP is correct, because I can't see that GP is saying what you attribute to them. This is mostly because GP isn't being very clear about what they mean, I'll grant you.
It all comes down to what GP means by "formal grammar." In your response, you have assumed that this means "grammar guides," apparently of the prescriptive sort, but GP's example is Panini, and Europeans' discovery thereof. This is one of the key historical events that launched modern European linguistics, since it provided both a clear example of a family relationship between very far-flung languages, but also because Paninian grammar is far more technical and precise than anything that Europe had ever produced. The statement that European languages "didn't have formal grammar" until the discovery of Panini's work sounds very much like a claim that the European discipline of linguistics only really took off after the discovery of Sanskrit.
Though even reading it charitably in this way, GP's statement is still very garbled. The discovery of Sanskrit eventually started an ongoing change of grammatical theory in Western science, but it didn't change the grammar of the languages.
...and the ancient Greeks discussed grammar in their works, and the Romans had grammars of Latin, and in fact, those Latin grammars provided an important model for the European vernacular grammars that you mention. Hell, even modern-day linguists get a much bigger chunk of their grammatical terminology from Latin grammar than they do from Panini's Sanskrit grammar--even though the latter is much deeper than Latin grammar, and a bigger conceptual influence on modern linguistics.
There is no REAL wealth. Not since the gold standard was dropped and fractional banking was introduced and floating currencies was introduced.
Gee. And all this time I was under the delusion that I successfully exchange my labor for money, and then successfully exchange that money for all sorts of valuable goods and services. Thanks for clearing that up!
It is less abstract in at least one very important way - the amount of work it takes to extract another gram from the ground and put it in a vault. Modern currency has effectively zero marginal cost to make more of. There are pluses and minus to that fact - as in money can now represent something like the total value of the economy of the country rather than be limited to a pile of metal in a vault somewhere. On the other hand it also makes it really, really, really tempting for the government to just print more money in response to any fiscal crisis with the obvious long term effect of devaluing all the money had been previously printed.
But the government can always print more money, even under the gold standard, to the extent that trade is carried out with notes backed by a nominal amount of metal. They can just revalue the currency so that the notes corresponds to a smaller amount of gold than before.
The gold standard is just as much of a standard, i.e., an arbitrary social convention, as fiat currency is.
Why should I care if my face appears on some Facebook or Myspace page? It's no different than if I'm in the downtown square, a photographer snaps a photo of the crowd, and slaps the image on the front page of the newspaper.
No, it is different. Context, context.
When you just happen to show up in a photo of a random crowd, that is just an accident, and people do not draw any conclusions from it. However, when you're in a tagged photo in somebody else's social networking profile, there may be many, many more inferences that people may draw from it, based on various things that come along with the photo: the profile of the person who posted the photo, their blog entries, the people who belong in their social network, etc.
Remember that the problem with privacy isn't just people getting access to individual pieces of data that one doesn't want them to see; it's also about their ability to aggregate all sorts of pieces of data that are innocuous on their own, but lead them to infer unwelcome conclusions. The reason why your face on somebody's social networking profile has potentially much bigger privacy implications than your face in a crowd is that the social networking site is semantically rich in many, many ways the photo of the crowd is not.
How many amnesties have been granted since she was born? She had been living in the US for the required years, so she should be golden.
You're missing GP's point. GP's mother doesn't need an amnesty. She is a natural-born US citizen, because she was born in the USA, and has never renounced her citizenship or involuntarily lost it. Having a USA birth certificate is not a requirement for being a natural citizen; being born in the USA is the requirement. The birth certificate is just evidence that somebody was born in the USA, but neither necessary (since some US births may go unregistered) nor sufficient (since birth certificates may be in error, either by accident or on purpose).
Sworn statements from people who know her well can also be used as evidence that she was born in the USA, if the need arises for such evidence. GP's bigger point, however, is that putting extremely strict and bureaucratic documentation requirements as a requisite for voting, for the sake of preventing fraudulent votes by aliens, also has the practical effect of making it much harder for many legitimate citizens to vote.
I will add that the idea of illegal aliens showing up to the polls in large numbers to vote is a big moral panic. Actual illegal aliens would actually rather not vote. Showing up in voter registration rolls (even under false ID) is not good for them; it just increases their risk of getting caught, with very little to show in exchange for it.
Proactively reducing the performance of infrequently used applications in favor of a theoretical gain to an application you might decide to launch later is just stupid logic.
So pretty much all kernels in common use are designed around stupid logic? You should write your own kernel following your theory, then.
Here's the logic, how it should really work: your system uses disk blocks and memory pages. A block or page that's accessed very frequently is "hot," and one that's accessed infrequently is "cold." You'll get the best throughput when the hottest stuff is in RAM, and the coldest is on disk, period. Application private memory vs. cached disk block doesn't factor in the logic, only frequency of use. The granularity of the decisions isn't at the application level, either.
No swap means your system can't make the most efficient use of all of your memory, period.
*looks at my activity monitor in osx* Ya, um... "Swap used:0 Bytes" As it has always been and will always be.
Then your system is almost certainly using RAM inefficiently, because it has more than it actually needs. All the hot blocks and pages fit into available RAM, with room to spare, so there are always cold disk blocks falling off. You could have gotten the same performance with less RAM.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, no. We need to stop relying so much on domain names as an end-user access method for internet content, and just rely on search engines and other kinds of directory services.
Here's an experiment for you to try: set your homepage to your favorite search engine or portal, turn off the address bar in your browser, and navigate the internet just with just your home page and browser bookmarks. It's easy, isn't it?
DNS solves one kind of problem very well: it provides a distributed database from symbolic host names to IP addresses, so that you can change the IP address of a host without breaking symbolic references to it, and so that you can do it with minimal interaction with some centralized host naming authority. The problems related to connecting end users to the content they would like to see are best solved with search engines and portals.
You seem to have hit "Submit" before you entered the list of pro-America areas of the USA...
Let's grant the assumption for the sake of argument. Now, really, how useful is that, and why does it need to be done with DNS?
Here's the alternative: DNS just provides mappings from host names to IP addresses (and other things like MX records), and only organizes and classifies domains by owner (who controls which records are published for the domain). Other classifications or ways of organization can be done through other services, like search engines or tailor-built directory services.
Basically, DNS should just be part of the plumbing of the Internet, not a mechanism for organizing its content to users in general.
Um, there was a big market for non-Fannie or Freddie mortgage backed securities. In fact. Fannie and Freddie, who had regulatory standards on the minimum quality of what debt they could buy, were playing catch-up to the private sector lenders, who were free to use lower standards to lend, and managed to find other buyers for that debt.
I don't think the GSE's were at all in the CDO market, for example.
Citation needed.
I don't think models were anywhere near that simple. The closest you could get to that is if you fed home appreciation data from a time period where house prices mostly went up, and had no examples of periods when they went significantly down. That's a plausible failure mode for many of these models (and it happens all the time with financial models, ugh, and the financiers don't seem to learn), but the models would have made different predictions with different data sets.
There's another assumption that people made that led to the problems with the ratings: the assumption that housing and mortgages from different parts of the country would have uncorrelated performance, so that packaging them all together would diversify risk away. The short catchy phrase for that was "all real estate is local": the assumption was that house prices can go down in some parts of the country at any given time, but that it was unlikely that they would go down in all of the country all at once. You can see how that one turned out, of course.
That one, again, turns out to be a recurring problem with financial modeling:
The financial model failures we're seeing now are remarkably similar to the crisis that led to the failure of LTCM 10 years ago. The industry doesn't seem to learn, which is a big problem.
More generally, there's a bigger problem here (and I'm paraphrasing Buffett in the following): it's not that the mathematical models of risk aren't valuable, it's that, by putting very precise-looking numbers to aggregates of thousands of highly uncertain estimates of future risks, they make it look like risk has been tamed. If you have a model that tells you that the current risk of your portfolio is, say, 15.72%, and you mechanically decide how to allocate your capital using a formula that doesn't build in a generous margin of safety against mistakes in that number, you're going to get burned by problems like this.
Dude, don't underestimate the power of exponential growth. If they keep doing that for a while, this is so gonna be the Swatch century.
That's a great idea!
However, if every business decided on its own when summer and winter hours started, then during spring and fall, there would be serious confusion about whether any one given establishment you deal with was on summer or winter hours. Therefore, we need to take your idea one step further, and set national standard dates for when everybody should switch between summer and winter hours (except for states that don't want to do it, like Arizona, of course).
Also, many localities have laws or regulations that refer to specific times. Things like "no parking from 9am-5pm," or "drinking establishments must close by 2am." We just need to change all those laws, regulations and signs so that they use different summer and winter hours for the official summer hours and winter hours periods of the year.
We should really work to make this happen. I propose a recurring meeting on the first Saturday of every month, at noon during summer hours and 11am in winter hours. (Oh, oops, sorry, I forgot to add: I'm provisionally assuming that summer hours start when that awful DST contraption starts, and end when DST ends.)
That sounds like a great idea. Let's get together and start planning the transition, tomorrow at noon.
Or, in other words: (a) the Slashdot editors don't even bother to read the links to see if the submitters' descriptions are even remotely accurate, (b) you think you're smart.
The difference here is that Islam has a much, much bigger emphasis on textual integrity of scripture.
Remember that, according to Islam, God first revealed his book to the Jews, and then later to the Christians, but both distorted the text and the meaning; only the Muslims have a correct version of the book. Because of this, Muslims are supposed to be very careful about how the text of the Koran is used. For example, they are encouraged to learn Arabic so they can read it in the original. Even if they don't know Arabic, when they discuss religious matters in their native languages, they prefer to use the Arabic words for religious concepts instead of vernacular translations. When citing the Koran, it is very important to convey the context of the quote carefully, so as not to distort the meaning. Etc.
Compare this with, say, the widespread acceptance and official sanction of Bible translations among Christian denominations (e.g., the Vulgata and the King James translation). In Islam, translations of the Koran are at best seen as a necessary evil, and are certainly not given any official sanction.
...and you've put your finger on something relevant to the present case, too. The song in question is from West Africa, and the singer in that track is Senegalese (the group is from Mali). Sufi brotherhoods dominate Senegalese Islam.
What about the people of Mali, a majority Muslim country, who're having the music of one of their major artists pulled from the game?
I have the album that song comes from. If I remember correctly (from the liner notes), the song is an hommage to the singer's late brother.
The musicians are mostly from Mali, but the singer is from Senegal, and this one song is primarily in Wolof. Nearly all of the musicians are in the record are Muslims, so they'd indeed be familiar with koranic language. And clearly, they don't seem to think that it's objectionable for Muslims to use Koranic quotations in music.
And you need to put this together with the fact that the track has been released on an album recorded by a Muslim artist (Toumani Diabaté), backed by musicians who are mostly Muslims too. Clearly, many Muslims don't object to this.
The name of a product is a marketing decision, period. The version numbers that make sense to you as developer of the product, at best, mean nothing to the buyers of the product. At worst, well, your own example about "1.0" is perfect.
You need to have some internal scheme for keeping track of builds and versions of your product for release management and support issues, but there's no sense in having engineers decide whether a given release is 2.5 or 3.0. Let marketing pick the name that's most meaningful to buyers.
Has this changed recently? Because at least as recently as my 1st-gen Macbook Pro, upgrading the RAM on any Mac I've ever used doesn't void the warranty. Hell, the computer's instruction booklet shows you how do to it.
The problem you're failing to see is that the supply of goods and services can easily grow faster than the supply of gold. In this case, over time, more goods and services become available, when you add everything up, there won't be enough gold to buy the whole supply of goods and services at a profit to the aggregate of the producers. This means that producers will seek to match their output to the gold supply, instead of matching it to the economy's real supply and demand capacities. (Exception: producers can barter their output, but barter doesn't scale up to a complex economy. How do you barter programming labor for heart surgery?)
So, in short, the problem with using gold as money is that there won't be enough money for producers to trade all the goods they are capable of producing, and therefore, they will not produce.
I don't know for sure what the guy meant. Again, it's pretty garbled, and the choice of example only makes it more so.
As somebody with an A.B.D. in Linguistics, I'm not sure your criticism of GP is correct, because I can't see that GP is saying what you attribute to them. This is mostly because GP isn't being very clear about what they mean, I'll grant you.
It all comes down to what GP means by "formal grammar." In your response, you have assumed that this means "grammar guides," apparently of the prescriptive sort, but GP's example is Panini, and Europeans' discovery thereof. This is one of the key historical events that launched modern European linguistics, since it provided both a clear example of a family relationship between very far-flung languages, but also because Paninian grammar is far more technical and precise than anything that Europe had ever produced. The statement that European languages "didn't have formal grammar" until the discovery of Panini's work sounds very much like a claim that the European discipline of linguistics only really took off after the discovery of Sanskrit.
Though even reading it charitably in this way, GP's statement is still very garbled. The discovery of Sanskrit eventually started an ongoing change of grammatical theory in Western science, but it didn't change the grammar of the languages.
...and the ancient Greeks discussed grammar in their works, and the Romans had grammars of Latin, and in fact, those Latin grammars provided an important model for the European vernacular grammars that you mention. Hell, even modern-day linguists get a much bigger chunk of their grammatical terminology from Latin grammar than they do from Panini's Sanskrit grammar--even though the latter is much deeper than Latin grammar, and a bigger conceptual influence on modern linguistics.
Gee. And all this time I was under the delusion that I successfully exchange my labor for money, and then successfully exchange that money for all sorts of valuable goods and services. Thanks for clearing that up!
No, it is different. Context, context.
When you just happen to show up in a photo of a random crowd, that is just an accident, and people do not draw any conclusions from it. However, when you're in a tagged photo in somebody else's social networking profile, there may be many, many more inferences that people may draw from it, based on various things that come along with the photo: the profile of the person who posted the photo, their blog entries, the people who belong in their social network, etc.
Remember that the problem with privacy isn't just people getting access to individual pieces of data that one doesn't want them to see; it's also about their ability to aggregate all sorts of pieces of data that are innocuous on their own, but lead them to infer unwelcome conclusions. The reason why your face on somebody's social networking profile has potentially much bigger privacy implications than your face in a crowd is that the social networking site is semantically rich in many, many ways the photo of the crowd is not.
You're missing GP's point. GP's mother doesn't need an amnesty. She is a natural-born US citizen, because she was born in the USA, and has never renounced her citizenship or involuntarily lost it. Having a USA birth certificate is not a requirement for being a natural citizen; being born in the USA is the requirement. The birth certificate is just evidence that somebody was born in the USA, but neither necessary (since some US births may go unregistered) nor sufficient (since birth certificates may be in error, either by accident or on purpose).
Sworn statements from people who know her well can also be used as evidence that she was born in the USA, if the need arises for such evidence. GP's bigger point, however, is that putting extremely strict and bureaucratic documentation requirements as a requisite for voting, for the sake of preventing fraudulent votes by aliens, also has the practical effect of making it much harder for many legitimate citizens to vote.
I will add that the idea of illegal aliens showing up to the polls in large numbers to vote is a big moral panic. Actual illegal aliens would actually rather not vote. Showing up in voter registration rolls (even under false ID) is not good for them; it just increases their risk of getting caught, with very little to show in exchange for it.
So pretty much all kernels in common use are designed around stupid logic? You should write your own kernel following your theory, then.
Here's the logic, how it should really work: your system uses disk blocks and memory pages. A block or page that's accessed very frequently is "hot," and one that's accessed infrequently is "cold." You'll get the best throughput when the hottest stuff is in RAM, and the coldest is on disk, period. Application private memory vs. cached disk block doesn't factor in the logic, only frequency of use. The granularity of the decisions isn't at the application level, either.
No swap means your system can't make the most efficient use of all of your memory, period.
Then your system is almost certainly using RAM inefficiently, because it has more than it actually needs. All the hot blocks and pages fit into available RAM, with room to spare, so there are always cold disk blocks falling off. You could have gotten the same performance with less RAM.