However, as previously pointed out, houses can appreciate.
Yeah, the magic house value fairy flies by, waves her wand and sprinkles some pixie dust, and now your house is worth 5% more.
You're missing the point. I know that houses have appreciated over the past few years, and a lot (what do you think, that I live under a freaking rock?). The question, again: what causes houses to appreciate? To what extent can you rely on that? Do you seriously think it makes sense to put the biggest portion of your wealth into a house without being able to answer this question?
In the years before this ARM debacle, houses in some markets were appreciating in double digit percentages every year. It may not pay dividends, but when you sell, if the house has appreciated, you pocket significant change.
And you think that the fact that houses were appreciating in double-digit percentages is unrelated to the fact that we're having a debacle now? (Not to mention that houses can depreciate. And not to mention that mortgages are leverage, and the 4:1 leverage of a mortgage with 20% down means that a 5% nominal loss in house value wipes out all of your equity.)
Again, you're failing to provide a good answer the real question: why do you expect a house that you buy now to produce a capital gain later? ("Because they did so in the past 5 years" is not a good answer.)
And your example of a payment being all interest totally misses the point that the ratio changes throughout the loan. Only if you get an interest-only loan is it all interest. On regular loans, with each payment, you are paying more and more principal and less and less interest. Your example works only for people who buy and sell within a time period such that the house does not appreciate and all they are paying is interest.
You're not understanding my example properly. The example doesn't assume that the whole of the mortgage payment is interest. GGGP says that he pays $500 rent, and would have to pay about $1200 to buy. All that I was assuming is that out of that $1200, more than $700 goes into interest for a long while.
Let's assume a $180,000 loan for 30 years at a fixed 7%. That's $1,197.54 a month for 30 years. On the first payment, $1,050 go towards interest. If you take out that loan today, the ratio of your monthly payment that goes toward interest only reaches $700 on June 2025; $500 in May 2030.
So, for the same outlay of money ($1200/month), GGGP can choose to put about $150/month into principal in a house, and toss out $1,050 in the interest on the mortgage, or to put $700 into a well-diversified investment portfolio (which would include stocks in many countries, bonds, and, incidentally, indirect commercial real estate holdings through REITs).
And you still haven't given us any good reason to believe that the slowly increasing $147/month in home equity will produce a good return, other than the lame old "but houses always go up!"
The truly unfortunate part here is that our Government has now seen fit to reward (by strong arming the lenders into relaxing the rates) those who should not be rewarded [...]
Dude, there's no strong-arming here. The servicers are working out distressed loans because it's in the best interest of the lenders; better to have the borrowers continue to make payments at the present rate than to raise the rates and have massive foreclosures. Do you seriously think that lenders will be interested in raising rates if it makes them lose money? It's better get 7% of $300,000 than 9% of $200,000, and that's what the lenders are shooting for.
Really, all the Bush plan does is help the servicers set some common standards for working out the loans, set up a 1-800 hotline for borrowers to call, and publicize it very prominently (with no less than the President involved) so that people will call it. Yes, the government is helping mortgage lenders, which raises a number of issues, but by calling this "strong-arming" you're fundamentally misunderstanding what's going on.
When owning is "better" it's better because you own an asset (the house) which can appreciate in value.
Stop mindlessly repeating what you've heard, and think: why would a house appreciate? What would be a cause for appreciation in houses? Can you rely on that? Is a house really a capital gains investment?
A house is an investment, not much different from owning stock in a company or holding a government bond [...]
Houses don't pay dividends or have earnings growth like stocks do, and they don't pay interest. The most you can say about a house as an investment is that (a) it pays you what it would cost you to rent it (if you own a house, you can rent it out for that amount, or you can live in it, which means you don't have to rent somewhere else); (b) it can serve as an inflation hedge. How exactly do you expect a house to make you money?
Compare it to, say, stocks: stocks represent ownership interest in companies that have a potential to bring to the market valuable goods and services that didn't exist before. Stocks can appreciate because companies invent, sell and popularize new, good stuff, and can command a profit for doing so. That's how you can expect stocks to make you money.
Bonds are either issued by companies, which make money in the way described above, or are issued by governments, who make money through future taxation. Whether future taxation actually brings in any non-funny money depends on whether the economy overall does well, which means that it comes down to the same thing as with stocks: bonds can make you money because companies make the economy grow, and if you own bonds, you share to a limited degree in any growth that does happen.
So again: how do you expect houses to make you money?
At least in the US (not so sure about other countries) owning a house has benefits from a taxation standpoint. You can get a significant "return" on your investment through reduced taxes.
Um, you don't achieve a "return" by spending more money to "earn" a tax break. Spend an extra $700 so he can make $196 in tax savings? Doesn't sound like such a great idea.
And you're failing to address the really important thing: all of that extra $700 would go towards interest on a mortgage. Paying interest is not an investment. Paying interest is "throwing money away," which is exactly what people say about renting when they don't think it through.
When the interest on a loan to buy a home, even after it's been adjusted for taxes, is way more than what it costs to rent an equivalent unit, you should expect to do better by renting an investing the difference. You're paying less in expenses overall, and getting more equity in investments that are expected to return more. You're also making diversified investments, instead of putting most of your money into and unproductive asset that happens to be exactly where you live (so that if something bad happens to it, you end up penniless and homeless at the same time!).
In your case if there really is a $700 difference, renting is only better if you can get a better return on your investment through other investment vehicles (stocks, etc) than you would through the appreciation of the value of the house and any tax offsets.
I.e., given the returns on stocks and bonds, renting is a no-brainer, in his case.
The key advantage of digital is that you can make exact copies, regardless of content.
Unless the media goes bad, in which case, well, an exact copy of media that went bad isn't any consolation.
The properties of analog that make it impossible to make exact copies are intimately related to why analog media can last longer: analog degrades more gracefully than digital. Film fades in a way that preserves many important properties of the original image, so that a faded film frame can still be very much useful. When digital fails, OTOH, it tends to do so in a more all-or-nothing manner.
Fine, you are entitled to your opinion after all, but be aware that those advocating a complete scrapping of the object oriented paradigm, which you seem to be advocating, are in the minority.
Who's advocating a complete scrapping of anything? I said that the paradigm is overrated, not worthless.
That is sort of an apples and oranges comparison. You understand that the original purpose of the C programming language was the construction of operating systems, namely the research project which became UNIX at the original Bell Labs, right? I haven't used C for some time now, but I would probably not consider using it again unless there was a very good project based reason to do so. Another reason that C tends to hang around is that C compilers have been written for just about every modern processor assembler language out there which is one reason, among others, that you do not see many operating system kernels written in languages other than C. I would argue that C was tremendously successful at accomplishing what its designers set out for it to do. What people have used it for subsequently does not in any way diminish the work of the original designers.
And again, you're not actually contradicting anything I actually said. It is not an apples to oranges comparison because people still use C to write, say, desktop apps, in this day and age.
Certainly C achieved its goals back in the 70s, and even well into the 80s, when people had to program for very resource-constrained hardware, using the same hardware as the development platform. But that was 20-30 years ago. Even for portable systems programming, C's prime problem area, we should be able to do a lot better today.
Personally I don't see anything wrong with building adapters, which is really what an ORM is.
There's no problem with building adapters if the adapters are truly needed. Implicitly, I'm arguing that many, many programs that deal with the database today would be better served by ditching OO for data representation, and use the relational model directly.
My point is that we should have general-purpose programming languages with support for the relational model, where relation types, relations, relational operators, relational constraints and the like, are all first-class concepts. The closest we have right now in the mainstream is LINQ.
As for LINQ I personally do not plan to use it in my projects mostly because it makes use of classes dynamically generated at runtime upon which it is not possible to make use of declarative programming with attributes. I also do not like the idea of mixing my business logic with my data access in partial classes.
That seems to indicate that you see the database as a "data store," providing persistence for data, while your program provides "business logic." This assumption just begs the question; my argument is that we should have better support for the relational model right in the language, so that we can use the database as a kind of restricted theorem prover optimized for high performance and high data volumes. The database isn't just an inert collection of data that you "access"; you give the database certain assertions about your model, the business logic and the facts; then you ask it complex question questions, and it gives you the answers that the inputs entail. You're not dealing with a data store; you're dealing with a semantic repository of facts.
Why can't we do stuff like that today? Because our RDBMSs aren't good enough, and neither are our general-purpose programming languages (functional and OOP both). And nobody's seriously investing in making it happen.
So what? The same can be said for object oriented programming environments and technologies. Now obviously you don't believe that the benefits are worth the cost of admission, but that is sort of like arguing that we should neve
The fact that they can not get the Wii at this time only means that they will wait until sometime next year or later to get it.
Maybe. The fact that they can't get the Wii right now means that Nintendo has to face the risk that they will never again be willing to buy one. That's a risk that can only be justified if it is likely to produce an excess profit over the profit of selling stuff to them now.
You can't just say that those people will buy it anyway. To justify "sell to them later" you have to make a case as to why selling later has a chance of producing a larger return than selling now. And in this case, the argument likely is "the cost of manufacturing capabilities to deliver all the product that we could sell now would cut into our profit margin."
Nothing could be further from the truth, if anything the practice of programming has improved dramatically over the years and especially so in the last fourteen (14) years starting with the publication of the Design Patterns book in 1994 and continuing on through the development of better languages to support these methodologies such as Java, Python, and Delphi and really culminating thus far IMHO in the development of the C# programming language and the.NET Framework (which owes a debt to Java which owes a debt to C++ and so on back down the chain).
Um, no. You're failing to see how the things you mention have held software engineering back. Design patterns are part of a broader trend to slavish adherence to "Object-Oriented" technologies whose value and philosophy is overrated.
Since 1994, garbage collection has become commonplace, which is good. We've gotten languages better than C for general programming, which is at best faint praise, given that C is a language with many shortcomings, that was applied way beyond where it's actually good, back when computers weren't as powerful as they now are. But there are a number of things that simply haven't happened, because of the reign of "Object-Oriented" programming:
Paradigm improvements in relational database technology. We've had plenty of incremental improvements, but we're still largely stuck with SQL and ORM (the latter of which is a "solution" for problems caused by slavish application of OOP). (LINQ in.NET is certainly addressing this, but I can't really say much intelligent about it.)
Advanced and commercially feasible functional programming environments and technologies.
Advanced and commercially feasible tools for concurrent and parallel programming; which is precisely the problem that this story is about. The languages and techniques you mention and lionize in your comment do nothing to make it easier to build concurrent software. Threads, locks, atomic memory operations and memory barriers are way too low-level and complicated to make the task of building concurrent software easier.
The words; "optimized code" have little or no significance in todays programming shops because of budgets. Because of the push to get stuff out the door as quickly as possible, corners are cut all over the place on many things.
I suspect you overestimate the value of "optimized code."
I have personally not coded in a multi-threading project but have the concepts down.
Famous last words. Care to tell us about the relative advantages and disadvantages of locks + shared memory concurrency, message-passing concurrency (both in asynchronous and synchronous flavors), and software transactional memory? This stuff ain't easy at all.
The basic flawed assumption that you (and hundreds of other people in this discussion) are making is that this is all about "speed," in the sense of raw computation throughput.
Speeding up intensive computations by splitting them up across threads that run in parallel in separate execution units isn't the only application of concurrent programming. Here's another one: making interactive or real-time programs more responsive, by flexibilizing the order in which the program can perform its computations, and allowing "important" events to preempt less important computations. Using concurrency to make software more responsive, in fact, often makes programs slower in raw throughput (since they have to pay the cost of complex scheduling and synchronization of all their threads), but it's very often OK to make a program objectively slower if it makes it feel subjectively faster to the end users.
Concurrency has had the potential to improve software since long before multi-core processors became commonplace. The recent mainstreaming of multi-core processors, contrary to what the story here would have us believe, really isn't all that relevant when you evaluate the industry's failure to develop and market advanced solutions for developing concurrent software. The absence of advanced tools for concurrent programming has been a problem since long before, and the cost is in usability of software.
Without food, the kids will starve to death. Name one way that giving them laptops will be of any help.
That's easy. You give the laptop to the kids in the country next door, where people aren't starving to death. Then 15-20 years later, they can help you help the starving kids better.
Legal documents can hinge on a single piece of punctuation or a misplaced word just like a computer program.
Two things:
Did I claim otherwise?
Let's grant that. How would that contradict my point? Just because both can hinge on details that superficially are the same, doesn't mean that the reasons why those details make a difference are anyway similar in the two cases.
Computer science and engineering establish exceptionless mathematical and mechanical relations between the text of a program and the behavior of an abstract or physical machine; the regularities that links the two things are mathematical and physical. A legal system establishes a set of social practices for deciding how texts (statutes, case law) are applied to disputes; the regularities that link the two things are social practices. Computers programs rely on mathematical rules whose application can be determined in every case beforehand; legal systems exist because the application of law to every possible case can never be determined beforehand. (This is all basic Wittgenstein, BTW.)
Now while it is true that legal documents are open to interpretation in a manner that is not true with computer programs, you are dramatically overblowing that potential.
I'm sorry, but you've failed to make your case that I've overblown anything. And what's the point of your little lecture that judges in common law jurisdictions are called to decide cases according to precedent? My original post explicitly mentions the doctrine of stare decisis.
While the average slashdotter may not be a lawyer, we seem to have a better grasp of legal fundamentals than many of the "experts". Why? Because we write code, and we know the consequences of overlooking a missed semicolon, a typo, or starting from wrong assumptions.
ROFL. The average slashbot, when faced with a legal issue, shows a fundamental ignorance of law, and reasons according to pet theories born out of a carefully and unconsciously crafted combination of hearsay and wishful thinking.
Law is not at all like programming. The way to read a legal document is completely different from the way you read a computer program. Legal documents are subject to having their meaning determined by future court decisions that are ultimately impossible to predict (despite judges best (or worst) efforts to act predictably, by adhering to principles like stare decisis and such). Programming boils down to discrete maths and formal systems. Law boils down to mediation and exercise of socially vested power.
And while I'm at it, the average slashbot is a mediocre programmer that thinks that his skill at programming makes him smarter than non-programmers.
I'm talking absolute numbers, not relative. It doesn't matter if only.5% of illegal aliens don't learn English if that make the number 20,000,000 people (I know those figures are wrong, just hyperbole to make my point).
But guess what: in absolute numbers, today more people in the USA speak English than ever before. What the hell are you complaining about, then?
I realize the Spanish signs are for people who haven't learned English, almost always first generation.
No, you don't. Did you read what I said?
The Spanish menus are for people who speak Spanish, regardless of whether they speak English or not. In fact, many companies that market their products in Spanish are primarily trying to reach Spanish-dominant bilinguals and full bilinguals. Why? Because the bilinguals as a group have better jobs, and thus, more money to spend than the ones who only speak Spanish.
I'm saying I think it's wrong because it makes it easier to slide along and not integrate.
Do you seriously think it's easy to live in the USA without knowing a fair amount of English? And care tell me, why are the Spanish-language TV networks so full commercials for home courses in English? (The latest one I saw, the course is in MP3s, and they throw in a cheap MP3 player for you to play the course in.)
You know, American xenophobes think we live in a fantasy world where recent immigrants that move into the USA and militantly refuse to learn English or assimilate to American society. At the same time, they believe that in the glory days of past, when their own immigrant ancestors came to the USA, they integrated trivially and effortlessly into the USA. Neither of these is true.
[...] the thing I dislike the most is that I see a great many of the illegal aliens and coming in and not integrating. That's why we have Spanish on all sorts of menus and signs here in the middle of the country where there is no good reason: for people who aren't integrating.
The rates of English adoption by immigrants and their children in the USA are at all-time highs. What the hell are you talking about?
The reason there's all that much Spanish language stuff isn't because immigrants aren't learning English. It's because the first generation immigrants will always be better at Spanish than English, and you get a competitive advantage selling them stuff if you use Spanish.
Forget when they decide to post about your activities online - their terms and conditions clearly state that if they want to, they can take that photo that you posted of you under a beer funnel at a frat party and sell it to anybody they want. You might end up in a TV commercial and receive no notice, compensation, or even acknowledgment. If you write something interesting in a note, they can publish it and collect profits from it. Scary.
The text of the terms is almost exclusively framed in terms of copyright. Just because you have a copyright license to a work doesn't mean that you can do anything whatsoever with it. In this context, "for any purpose" means that the copyright license itself does not restrict the purpose to which you may use the content, but there may still be other laws that restrict the use of the content.
To use a recognizable portrait of somebody to promote a product, service or idea, typically, you need additional permission to do so. If I take a recognizable photo of you and Blockbuster wants to use it in their advertisements, they need my permission to use that photo (since I'm the copyright holder) and your permission (as a model release) to use your likeness in that photo to promote their business (since you're the person who is the photo's subject).
And also, permission to use your likeness for promotional purposes might not be possible to establish through a clickable ToS; it boils down to the question whether you are receiving valuable consideration in exchange for permitting use of your likeness.
"We eventually figured out that what we were doing is quite likely illegal, so now we'll roll back the most blatant aspects of it before we get sued, without ever admitting to its questionable legality."
My guess is that Mozart is not one of the people to be used in relation to this article. I would guess that he is an exception rather than the rule. The occurrence of that sort of gift would be 1 in a billion. The rest of us have to do the best that we can.
But here you're begging the question. If you assume beforehand that Mozart's skills came from an inborn "gift" that only one in a billion have, that's pretty much the same as assuming that kids that achieve something do so because they're "smart." If you assume that the conclusion of the research is false, you can prove that the research reaches as false conclusion, but that is absolutely trivial.
In any case, it's not nearly as rare as you think for children to learn to play an instrument skillfully at an early age and exhibiting musical creativity. Mozart's precociousness is seen as evidence of his genius only with the benefit of hindsight, and by dint of not confronting the many, many cases of children who learned music at comparable ages, yet didn't become Mozarts.
I question the assumption that "intelligence" can be defined in any principled way so that it will make sense to talk about an "upper limit" for intelligence, as if it was a number that your intelligence can't rise above.
When you get down to it, calling somebody "smart" or "intelligent" in the relevant sense, what you're doing is issuing a positive value judgement on some ill-defined set of their skills or attributes, but pretending that you're referring to an intrinsic property of that person, independent of your preferences and attitudes. You're making a value judgement, but disguising it as a fact judgement. That may be ordinary in commonday language, but it's not going to fly in a scientific inquiry; the "intelligence" tests that you devise are really going to be "how much I like this guy" tests.
Why are we so unwilling to admit that some kids are born smarter than others?
Because calling a kid "smart," taken by itself, does not really tell us much about the child. What it does is to reify as an intrinsic and objective property of the child what, in truth, is the value that we put on an ill-defined set of qualities of that child. What we're really saying is that we approve of the child's qualities, but we say it in such a way erase ourselves from the picture. This allows us to pretend that the child is "good" by some objective standard, and to avoid confronting our preferences and submitting them to criticism.
I bet most children could be nurtured to be gifted musicians with the right support. Mozart was challenged with music at a young age, most kids are assumed to be idiots and forced to listen to Barney.
Yup. One great example is that there are cultures with musician castes. It's certainly not the case that everybody who's born into such a caste is a great musician, but training children in music from very early ages is quite normal. Youtube has an nice video of a 5 year old in Burkina Faso getting some training on the balafon, that's illustrative.
(My apologies if you actually are a public health professor or grad student that received pre-prints to this article months ago and just happens to frequently comment on Slashdot stories about tech topics.)
Do you have anything that actually contradicts those criticisms other than, "hey, everyone always says that"?
You're missing my point: you should be testing your preconceptions by looking for those. It's not my job to think for you.
How about if you go and read the damn research before trotting out the standard criticisms that everybody trots out who dislikes the conclusions of a study that they did not read? These standard criticisms include, but are not necessarily limited, to the following:
"The newspaper article I'm reading doesn't mention a really obvious statistical variable that could influence this result, so I'm very conveniently going to assume that the study did not take the utterly trivial statistical care to control for this variable."
"Correlation doesn't imply causation. And since the statistical methods that scientists use to judge the significance of data to alternative hypothesis can only establish correlations, by the magic of double standards and selective application of the aforementioned maxim, I can always disbelieve exactly those results that I wished to disbelieve beforehand anyway."
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, the magic house value fairy flies by, waves her wand and sprinkles some pixie dust, and now your house is worth 5% more.
You're missing the point. I know that houses have appreciated over the past few years, and a lot (what do you think, that I live under a freaking rock?). The question, again: what causes houses to appreciate? To what extent can you rely on that? Do you seriously think it makes sense to put the biggest portion of your wealth into a house without being able to answer this question?
And you think that the fact that houses were appreciating in double-digit percentages is unrelated to the fact that we're having a debacle now? (Not to mention that houses can depreciate. And not to mention that mortgages are leverage, and the 4:1 leverage of a mortgage with 20% down means that a 5% nominal loss in house value wipes out all of your equity.)
Again, you're failing to provide a good answer the real question: why do you expect a house that you buy now to produce a capital gain later? ("Because they did so in the past 5 years" is not a good answer.)
You're not understanding my example properly. The example doesn't assume that the whole of the mortgage payment is interest. GGGP says that he pays $500 rent, and would have to pay about $1200 to buy. All that I was assuming is that out of that $1200, more than $700 goes into interest for a long while.
Let's assume a $180,000 loan for 30 years at a fixed 7%. That's $1,197.54 a month for 30 years. On the first payment, $1,050 go towards interest. If you take out that loan today, the ratio of your monthly payment that goes toward interest only reaches $700 on June 2025; $500 in May 2030.
So, for the same outlay of money ($1200/month), GGGP can choose to put about $150/month into principal in a house, and toss out $1,050 in the interest on the mortgage, or to put $700 into a well-diversified investment portfolio (which would include stocks in many countries, bonds, and, incidentally, indirect commercial real estate holdings through REITs).
And you still haven't given us any good reason to believe that the slowly increasing $147/month in home equity will produce a good return, other than the lame old "but houses always go up!"
Dude, there's no strong-arming here. The servicers are working out distressed loans because it's in the best interest of the lenders; better to have the borrowers continue to make payments at the present rate than to raise the rates and have massive foreclosures. Do you seriously think that lenders will be interested in raising rates if it makes them lose money? It's better get 7% of $300,000 than 9% of $200,000, and that's what the lenders are shooting for.
Really, all the Bush plan does is help the servicers set some common standards for working out the loans, set up a 1-800 hotline for borrowers to call, and publicize it very prominently (with no less than the President involved) so that people will call it. Yes, the government is helping mortgage lenders, which raises a number of issues, but by calling this "strong-arming" you're fundamentally misunderstanding what's going on.
Keep in mind that the private can reject these government arrangements if they want, and have done so in another case.
Stop mindlessly repeating what you've heard, and think: why would a house appreciate? What would be a cause for appreciation in houses? Can you rely on that? Is a house really a capital gains investment?
Houses don't pay dividends or have earnings growth like stocks do, and they don't pay interest. The most you can say about a house as an investment is that (a) it pays you what it would cost you to rent it (if you own a house, you can rent it out for that amount, or you can live in it, which means you don't have to rent somewhere else); (b) it can serve as an inflation hedge. How exactly do you expect a house to make you money?
Compare it to, say, stocks: stocks represent ownership interest in companies that have a potential to bring to the market valuable goods and services that didn't exist before. Stocks can appreciate because companies invent, sell and popularize new, good stuff, and can command a profit for doing so. That's how you can expect stocks to make you money.
Bonds are either issued by companies, which make money in the way described above, or are issued by governments, who make money through future taxation. Whether future taxation actually brings in any non-funny money depends on whether the economy overall does well, which means that it comes down to the same thing as with stocks: bonds can make you money because companies make the economy grow, and if you own bonds, you share to a limited degree in any growth that does happen.
So again: how do you expect houses to make you money?
Um, you don't achieve a "return" by spending more money to "earn" a tax break. Spend an extra $700 so he can make $196 in tax savings? Doesn't sound like such a great idea.
And you're failing to address the really important thing: all of that extra $700 would go towards interest on a mortgage. Paying interest is not an investment. Paying interest is "throwing money away," which is exactly what people say about renting when they don't think it through.
When the interest on a loan to buy a home, even after it's been adjusted for taxes, is way more than what it costs to rent an equivalent unit, you should expect to do better by renting an investing the difference. You're paying less in expenses overall, and getting more equity in investments that are expected to return more. You're also making diversified investments, instead of putting most of your money into and unproductive asset that happens to be exactly where you live (so that if something bad happens to it, you end up penniless and homeless at the same time!).
I.e., given the returns on stocks and bonds, renting is a no-brainer, in his case.
Unless the media goes bad, in which case, well, an exact copy of media that went bad isn't any consolation.
The properties of analog that make it impossible to make exact copies are intimately related to why analog media can last longer: analog degrades more gracefully than digital. Film fades in a way that preserves many important properties of the original image, so that a faded film frame can still be very much useful. When digital fails, OTOH, it tends to do so in a more all-or-nothing manner.
Who's advocating a complete scrapping of anything? I said that the paradigm is overrated, not worthless.
And again, you're not actually contradicting anything I actually said. It is not an apples to oranges comparison because people still use C to write, say, desktop apps, in this day and age.
Certainly C achieved its goals back in the 70s, and even well into the 80s, when people had to program for very resource-constrained hardware, using the same hardware as the development platform. But that was 20-30 years ago. Even for portable systems programming, C's prime problem area, we should be able to do a lot better today.
There's no problem with building adapters if the adapters are truly needed. Implicitly, I'm arguing that many, many programs that deal with the database today would be better served by ditching OO for data representation, and use the relational model directly.
My point is that we should have general-purpose programming languages with support for the relational model, where relation types, relations, relational operators, relational constraints and the like, are all first-class concepts. The closest we have right now in the mainstream is LINQ.
That seems to indicate that you see the database as a "data store," providing persistence for data, while your program provides "business logic." This assumption just begs the question; my argument is that we should have better support for the relational model right in the language, so that we can use the database as a kind of restricted theorem prover optimized for high performance and high data volumes. The database isn't just an inert collection of data that you "access"; you give the database certain assertions about your model, the business logic and the facts; then you ask it complex question questions, and it gives you the answers that the inputs entail. You're not dealing with a data store; you're dealing with a semantic repository of facts.
Why can't we do stuff like that today? Because our RDBMSs aren't good enough, and neither are our general-purpose programming languages (functional and OOP both). And nobody's seriously investing in making it happen.
Maybe. The fact that they can't get the Wii right now means that Nintendo has to face the risk that they will never again be willing to buy one. That's a risk that can only be justified if it is likely to produce an excess profit over the profit of selling stuff to them now.
You can't just say that those people will buy it anyway. To justify "sell to them later" you have to make a case as to why selling later has a chance of producing a larger return than selling now. And in this case, the argument likely is "the cost of manufacturing capabilities to deliver all the product that we could sell now would cut into our profit margin."
Um, no. You're failing to see how the things you mention have held software engineering back. Design patterns are part of a broader trend to slavish adherence to "Object-Oriented" technologies whose value and philosophy is overrated.
Since 1994, garbage collection has become commonplace, which is good. We've gotten languages better than C for general programming, which is at best faint praise, given that C is a language with many shortcomings, that was applied way beyond where it's actually good, back when computers weren't as powerful as they now are. But there are a number of things that simply haven't happened, because of the reign of "Object-Oriented" programming:
I suspect you overestimate the value of "optimized code."
Famous last words. Care to tell us about the relative advantages and disadvantages of locks + shared memory concurrency, message-passing concurrency (both in asynchronous and synchronous flavors), and software transactional memory? This stuff ain't easy at all.
The basic flawed assumption that you (and hundreds of other people in this discussion) are making is that this is all about "speed," in the sense of raw computation throughput.
Speeding up intensive computations by splitting them up across threads that run in parallel in separate execution units isn't the only application of concurrent programming. Here's another one: making interactive or real-time programs more responsive, by flexibilizing the order in which the program can perform its computations, and allowing "important" events to preempt less important computations. Using concurrency to make software more responsive, in fact, often makes programs slower in raw throughput (since they have to pay the cost of complex scheduling and synchronization of all their threads), but it's very often OK to make a program objectively slower if it makes it feel subjectively faster to the end users.
Concurrency has had the potential to improve software since long before multi-core processors became commonplace. The recent mainstreaming of multi-core processors, contrary to what the story here would have us believe, really isn't all that relevant when you evaluate the industry's failure to develop and market advanced solutions for developing concurrent software. The absence of advanced tools for concurrent programming has been a problem since long before, and the cost is in usability of software.
Probably an incident of jamais vu.
(Note that by linking to that article I am not endorsing it. There's some stuff there that sounds very much like it's nonsense somebody made up.)
That's easy. You give the laptop to the kids in the country next door, where people aren't starving to death. Then 15-20 years later, they can help you help the starving kids better.
Two things:
Computer science and engineering establish exceptionless mathematical and mechanical relations between the text of a program and the behavior of an abstract or physical machine; the regularities that links the two things are mathematical and physical. A legal system establishes a set of social practices for deciding how texts (statutes, case law) are applied to disputes; the regularities that link the two things are social practices. Computers programs rely on mathematical rules whose application can be determined in every case beforehand; legal systems exist because the application of law to every possible case can never be determined beforehand. (This is all basic Wittgenstein, BTW.)
I'm sorry, but you've failed to make your case that I've overblown anything. And what's the point of your little lecture that judges in common law jurisdictions are called to decide cases according to precedent? My original post explicitly mentions the doctrine of stare decisis.
ROFL. The average slashbot, when faced with a legal issue, shows a fundamental ignorance of law, and reasons according to pet theories born out of a carefully and unconsciously crafted combination of hearsay and wishful thinking.
Law is not at all like programming. The way to read a legal document is completely different from the way you read a computer program. Legal documents are subject to having their meaning determined by future court decisions that are ultimately impossible to predict (despite judges best (or worst) efforts to act predictably, by adhering to principles like stare decisis and such). Programming boils down to discrete maths and formal systems. Law boils down to mediation and exercise of socially vested power.
And while I'm at it, the average slashbot is a mediocre programmer that thinks that his skill at programming makes him smarter than non-programmers.
But guess what: in absolute numbers, today more people in the USA speak English than ever before. What the hell are you complaining about, then?
No, you don't. Did you read what I said?
The Spanish menus are for people who speak Spanish, regardless of whether they speak English or not. In fact, many companies that market their products in Spanish are primarily trying to reach Spanish-dominant bilinguals and full bilinguals. Why? Because the bilinguals as a group have better jobs, and thus, more money to spend than the ones who only speak Spanish.
Do you seriously think it's easy to live in the USA without knowing a fair amount of English? And care tell me, why are the Spanish-language TV networks so full commercials for home courses in English? (The latest one I saw, the course is in MP3s, and they throw in a cheap MP3 player for you to play the course in.)
You know, American xenophobes think we live in a fantasy world where recent immigrants that move into the USA and militantly refuse to learn English or assimilate to American society. At the same time, they believe that in the glory days of past, when their own immigrant ancestors came to the USA, they integrated trivially and effortlessly into the USA. Neither of these is true.
The rates of English adoption by immigrants and their children in the USA are at all-time highs. What the hell are you talking about?
The reason there's all that much Spanish language stuff isn't because immigrants aren't learning English. It's because the first generation immigrants will always be better at Spanish than English, and you get a competitive advantage selling them stuff if you use Spanish.
Where can I buy one of those? I googled for it and I couldn't find it! I guess I must have an IQ in the same range as pubic hair does...
The text of the terms is almost exclusively framed in terms of copyright. Just because you have a copyright license to a work doesn't mean that you can do anything whatsoever with it. In this context, "for any purpose" means that the copyright license itself does not restrict the purpose to which you may use the content, but there may still be other laws that restrict the use of the content.
To use a recognizable portrait of somebody to promote a product, service or idea, typically, you need additional permission to do so. If I take a recognizable photo of you and Blockbuster wants to use it in their advertisements, they need my permission to use that photo (since I'm the copyright holder) and your permission (as a model release) to use your likeness in that photo to promote their business (since you're the person who is the photo's subject).
And also, permission to use your likeness for promotional purposes might not be possible to establish through a clickable ToS; it boils down to the question whether you are receiving valuable consideration in exchange for permitting use of your likeness.
"We eventually figured out that what we were doing is quite likely illegal, so now we'll roll back the most blatant aspects of it before we get sued, without ever admitting to its questionable legality."
I bet you the real story is that they eventually figured out that what they were doing is quite likely illegal, but don't wish to admit so.
But here you're begging the question. If you assume beforehand that Mozart's skills came from an inborn "gift" that only one in a billion have, that's pretty much the same as assuming that kids that achieve something do so because they're "smart." If you assume that the conclusion of the research is false, you can prove that the research reaches as false conclusion, but that is absolutely trivial.
In any case, it's not nearly as rare as you think for children to learn to play an instrument skillfully at an early age and exhibiting musical creativity. Mozart's precociousness is seen as evidence of his genius only with the benefit of hindsight, and by dint of not confronting the many, many cases of children who learned music at comparable ages, yet didn't become Mozarts.
I question the assumption that "intelligence" can be defined in any principled way so that it will make sense to talk about an "upper limit" for intelligence, as if it was a number that your intelligence can't rise above.
When you get down to it, calling somebody "smart" or "intelligent" in the relevant sense, what you're doing is issuing a positive value judgement on some ill-defined set of their skills or attributes, but pretending that you're referring to an intrinsic property of that person, independent of your preferences and attitudes. You're making a value judgement, but disguising it as a fact judgement. That may be ordinary in commonday language, but it's not going to fly in a scientific inquiry; the "intelligence" tests that you devise are really going to be "how much I like this guy" tests.
Because calling a kid "smart," taken by itself, does not really tell us much about the child. What it does is to reify as an intrinsic and objective property of the child what, in truth, is the value that we put on an ill-defined set of qualities of that child. What we're really saying is that we approve of the child's qualities, but we say it in such a way erase ourselves from the picture. This allows us to pretend that the child is "good" by some objective standard, and to avoid confronting our preferences and submitting them to criticism.
Yup. One great example is that there are cultures with musician castes. It's certainly not the case that everybody who's born into such a caste is a great musician, but training children in music from very early ages is quite normal. Youtube has an nice video of a 5 year old in Burkina Faso getting some training on the balafon, that's illustrative.
While it is not impossible, I feel justified to be skeptical that you've read a study that only became available online today and hasn't been in print so far, found time to perform a serious evaluation of it, and, most critically of all, get an early post to a Slashdot story about it.
(My apologies if you actually are a public health professor or grad student that received pre-prints to this article months ago and just happens to frequently comment on Slashdot stories about tech topics.)
You're missing my point: you should be testing your preconceptions by looking for those. It's not my job to think for you.