Try to use some other language that compiles to the JVM, that produces good numeric code and has overloading. I don't really know if such a beast exists, but here's a list of languages that you can start on.
There's a serious question here as to how much performance you're willing to sacrifice just to be able to live solely under the JVM, though.
But I will note that if I wanted to develop a thorough and accurate model of the evolution and development of a speech community I would need to address how it is that we are able to learn (and create) languages at all.
I seriously think you underestimate how far you can get without that, but I'm not about to just say "no".
This is not trivial because the machinery in the brain that make language learning possible can very well have an enormous impact on the shapes that languages take.
There is a classic Chomskian argument along these lines: (a) we tabulate the features in a lot of languages (in linguist-speak, we do a "typology"); (b) we observe that among the logical space of possibilities for that feature, languages only occupy a limited subset of it; (c) we use this observation to support a statement that there is a corresponding language universal; (d) we conclude that this universal is due to a principle of Universal Grammar, which is "hard-wired" into the human brain.
This argument goes wrong at step (d). Many language universals can be plausibly explained in these terms: from what we know about patterns of language change, there is no plausible path of change that leads to any language like those not observed. It may be the case that, psychologically speaking, many such languages are learnable, in the sense that a if a community had such a language, the children would learn it fine; but you don't get it, because of properties of the language change process.
This does not rule out the possibility of psychological constraints on which languages are possible-- in fact, I don't think anybody seriously believes anymore that such things don't exist. But, it does demand that one not jump to the immediate conclusion that if one's found a language universal, one's found out something about the "wiring" of the brain in any useful sense.
The individual is also the common denominator in any speech community.
This is an ideologically charged statement, and one you wouldn't get away with in many academic circles I take very seriously (in the social sciences). The development of an individual is profoundly shaped by the details of their membership in a community.
Classically you I think would be a macro-linguist and Chomsky a micro-linguist, you saying language is embedded in a larger system, and Chomsky saying, look this is how the machinery of language works. Like macro-economics and micro-economics, it may be difficult to reconcile the two views, but I think that a population-thinking approach may help. On the one hand you start off with a model of individuals, and then you specify, or examine, the structure of the dynamics between those individuals, and move on from there.
I think you've hit a huge part of the problem right on the head, in such a way that I can criticise this right back in your own terms: I don't believe that one can "start" off with a "model of individuals", unless one does so arbitrarily (which can be a fine procedure relative to some purpose, but we must not lose track of the arbitrariness). I don't really think we'll find an asocial core of human psychology or biology in any principled sense.
As for poverty of stimulus and parental cues, I've a number of replies. 1) First, a question: is the evidence contrary to Chomky's position cross-cultural? Is it universally true that all children who have learned a language have also had such cues?
Yup, that's a great question. One to which the answer is not presently known, AFAIK. There is some literature on different attitudes toward talking to children in different cultures; it's mostly qualitative, IIIRC, while the cues stuff that I'm talking about has been measured.
However, I generally hold it to be true that a person with a tabla rasa brain could not possibly make any sense of the world in its lifetime. I believe, though again I'm not sure, that this has been called the grounding problem in cognitive science. How is a
These people are providing potentially objectionable captions to images of recognizable people that have not authorized such use of their image (through a model release). They may well be liable for defamatory use of these people's images.
Model releases are usually needed for commercial use of photos. For journalistic or artistic uses of photography, releases are usually not needed (though you should always consult a lawyer; IIRC the photo in the cover of an artistic photography book may need a release).
People here have already mentioned the copyright issues, but they've missed the biggest problem: the captioning of the images. Quite simply, you can be held legally liable for captioning a recognizable image of a person in a way that reflects badly on them. In fact, how the images are to be used and presented are a huge component of model releases-- if you photograph a model dressed up in like a tough guy, and wish to use the image with a caption saying something like "gang member", your model release better cover this use of the image.
Now I'm ready to hear out your explanation for how it is that a person is capable of acquiring language without having a language instinct.
This statement may sound obvious to you, but it's far from explicit. What is a language "instinct" supposed to be?
Chomsky's argument is fairly straightforward: Given a blank slate brain, a language-learner will never have sufficient language learning opportunities to learn a language, roughly because there are too many possible hypotheses to consider.
It's simple, but he did not come to believe it from experiment or testing it, but rather, because he was committed to believing it from the start. Then he and his followers set out not to test whether it was true, but to pile up evidence selectively to support it.
The classic evidence for the "poverty of the stimulus" argument has long known to be suspect, and is now known to be wrong. For example, a cornerstone of Chomsky's argument is the related claims that (a) parents hardly ever correct their children's speech and (b) when they do, children don't attend to the correction anyway. In short, this is the claim that children don't have negative evidence in learning language; nothing in their experience can indicate which utterances, among those they hear from other people and those they utter themselves, are grammatically ill-formed. Therefore, this knowledge must come from the child.
The problem is that the "evidence" cited is plain wrong. Children do get numerous cues from their parents when they utter something that's not grammatically well-formed, and they do attend to these cues. These cues don't take the crude form of the parents flat out telling the kid that they said something wrong (the basis for the old claims); the most well-know of this sort of cue is that when the child says something ungrammatical, the adult will rephrase it correctly. (See the work of Eve Clark and her students.)
Until you give an alternate explanation of how we learn language that can address the poverty of stimulus question, language as instinct is the better of the two foundations
That's a non-sequitur. "It doesn't matter if you can demonstrate that view X is nonsense, and, to boot, founded on bad evidence."
The Chomskian isn't saying that social dynamics in a speech community is unimportant, but that it does not, and cannot, explain, in of itself, how we are capable of acquiring language.
But Chomsky is on the record dismissing the social aspects of language learning. In fact, there's a more fundamental problem in that Chomsky takes for granted that "language" is a purely individual phenomenon, and that the fact that languages are spoken in communities where people communicate is merely incidental. (Chomsky has said, literally, that he doesn't believe that language is "for communication", nor that its use for this is an "interesting" fact about it.)
So, for Chomsky, "language" is, essentially and before anything else, a kind of knowledge possessed individual speaker. Contrast this with, say, Saussure, who considered language to be, essentially, a code shared by a community. Now I'm not going to claim that one of them is right and the other wrong, but let's look at the issue at hand: the emergence of languages like Nicaraguan Sign Language, where "language" is being used in a sense more like Saussure's than Chomsky's; i.e., we're talking about the emergence of a new speech community. Do you think that using an individualistic, purely psychological notion of "language" you're going to satisfy people's questions about this phenomenon?
The problem is that the Noam Chomskys and Steven Pinkers of the world are trying to draw extremely biased conclusions on the basis of the evidence you propose here: that "language is hard-wired into individuals" (WTF "hardwired" is supposed to mean is something they hardly ever sit down to think through clearly).
This is using the example selectively to support their biases. One example of the sort of thing they downplay: the role that bringing these kids together into a community plays. Chomsky's model of language acquisition is strictly individualistic: the infant witnesses "primary linguistic data" (the speech in an adult community), and the appropriate pieces of PLD trigger various innate cognitive mechanisms for language acquisition. This is modeled as a strictly individualistic process.
The thing with the Nicaraguan Sign Language examples (and with the pidgin and creole examples in general) is that, while that is (for reasons I won't discuss) not all that good of a model of how a child learns language in a community with an established adult language they have access to, it is far worse as a model for a community where the children don't have access to such a language. What's needed is a more dynamic, community based model, where the interactions between a bunch of kids who don't have any language nor access to another one create a feedback loop and converge into a single language.
Anecdote: I once asked of a Chomskian who was ranting about creoles to tell me how Chomsky's acquisition model accounts for the fact that the children in one of these creole genesis scenarios end up speaking the same language, and not widely different ones. He said "because they all receive the same input". At this point, a sociolinguist in the room immediately got it, and retorted: "Yeah, every single one of them, locked up individually in their own room". (This sort of thing is usually called "missing the forest for the trees".)
The only real life examples anybody (and that includes Pinker with his horribly bad, self-serving books full of strawmen) ever presents of children inventing a language are one of the following: (a) Nicaraguan Sign Language; (b) creole languages in slave colonies.
The second example is always based on citing Derek Bickerton's work on Hawaiian Pidgin English-- which not only has been regarded by creolists as being fundamentally flawed since it came out; recently it has been all but refuted by a former student of his who made an extensive documentary archive of written sources of the language from 1850 to 1950, and established clearly that it didn't emerge like he says at all.
In short, we just don't know how sign languages and creoles come into existence, and anybody who says otherwise is trying to fool you; especially if said person says it in a book for non-linguists which systemtatically excludes or distorts results that contradict what they want you to believe (i.e., Pinker).
I bought some last week labeled "wheat beer" that was unfilterd and cloudy...is that the same sort of thing?
"Wheat beer" is a pretty generic term for beer whose brewing process involves, um, wheat. There's two major traditional styles of wheat beer: Bavarian Hefeweisse, and Belgian wheat beers (called something like Witbier, can't recall).
In addition, in the US you'll find a number of wheat beers that aren't either of these styles. Some of these are (mis)labeled as "Hefeweizen", but don't taste anything like the real thing. I've had bad experiences with most of these, at least in the left coast.
For a nice Belgian-style wheat beer brewed in this side of the world, you may try to find some Blanche de Chambly...
A good number of American "Hefeweizens" are really abominable, IMO. To get a good taste of the style, go for the real German item: here in the Bay Area the ones you find most easily are Franziskaner and Paulaner, and both are good.
There are decent American hefes, though. Again, this is a Bay Area-centric list: Bison Brewing in Berkeley used to make a pretty awesome Hefeweizen, though their site doesn't mention it anymore, and I haven't seen it for a few years. Pyramid Hefeweizen isn't quite a superb exemplar of the style, but it is very drinkable.
One non-obvious thing about drinking bottled Hefeweizen: yeast accumulates in the bottom of them bottle. When you serve it, you leave some beer at the bottom of the bottle when you first pour, you swish this remainder around the bottom of the bottle to dislodge the yeast residue, and then you pour the remaining beer along with the yeast. (Well, unless you like to have fewer yeast. Try it both ways, and see what you prefer.)
I haven't tried either JRuby or Groovy, to tell you the truth (but I have a good amount of experience with plain Ruby), but my impression is that Groovy is a language that's modeled primarily on Ruby, but designed from the ground up to live in a Java environment. I think this is a pretty good idea, but I'm in no position to judge if it's been implemented properly.
Groovy seems to have more momentum than JRuby, and to have had more work getting it properly debugged and so on. Again, I have not tried either, but I would be surprised if JRuby, in its current state of development, could beat Groovy.
Last I looked (which can't have been over a month ago), JRuby was far from being ready for prime time. I'm a Ruby guy myself, yet I really wouldn't touch JRuby just yet, unless my purpose was to develop it myself.
Groovy is, IMO, a near-clone of Ruby designed from the ground up to integrate with Java, and would probably be a better choice than JRuby. I think the Groovy documentation isn't quite there yet, tugh.
Extremely commonplace sort of phenomenon. You work on some problem really hard, then at some point where you're not working on it, the solution comes in a flash. Happened to me last week with a mysterious bug.
I have not noticed any growth in the number of SACD discs available to purchase, it is to all intents and purposes a dead format.
DVD-A and SACD have a particularl advantage that could well make them more resilient than you give them credit for: the discs are the same size as CDs, and the players are backwards-compatible with CDs (and DVDs). Which means that once the costs come down, SACD and DVD-A playing capability could become standard in players, laying the basis for a market for the discs. Unless you believe in the imminent death of the CD, I'd call SACD "dormant", not "dead"-- it could wake up easily on a dime.
There's two things to be balanced here: timely updates and conservative updating. Debian, frankly, is horrible at both-- either you run stable and give up on timely updating entirely, or you run on testing, which forces you to upgrade all your software constantly to something that's barely tested.
This was the whole reason I left Debian for BSD, in fact-- if I need to upgrade one port in BSD, I can usually update just that one port, instead of having 150MB+ of fresh, questionable quality.deb's forced down my throat every week. (Linux users tend to boast of how easily they can upgrade every package in their system at once. That is a really stupid feat, though.)
PS my job uses Debian stable. I often have to build and installl packages manually from source, however, because Debian stable's versions of the prerequisites are too old (e.g. MySQL 3.23.x). So much for the benefits of package management.
And that can be a big, big difference, with the information we have at this point. There are two general sorts of trajectories Atlantic hurricanes take: either they swerve north relatively early and head out to the northern Atlantic, or they stay in a more southernly track and hit Central America, and if they survive the landfall, then reform in the Pacific.
With Frances, it was clear early on that is was of the first kind-- it swerved north really earlly on. With Ivan there is no way of telling (nor was there with Charley at the time it was where Charley is right now). The information we have right now is compatible either with swerving to the North Atlantic or going over to the Pacific.
The projected path of Ivan is very, very different from Frances. It's projected to imminently hit the Lesser Antilles and enter the Caribbean Ocean, which Frances did not.
Misinformation is worse than no information. Even if the rate of mistakes in Wikipedia were comparable to Britannica (and where's the studies on this? where are the attempts to measure it?), if Wikipedia has more articles, it will have more misinformation in absolute terms, on more topics, and the more topics it has, the wider the number of people that will be misinformed by it.
And C++'s template ugliness is better in what way?
Not many. Which means that your comparison to C is a strawman.
Two better things to compare it to:
Dynamic languages. No extra syntactic clutter at all.
A static language with non-broken generics. Good examples: ML, Haskell.
If you don't like to see lots of repetive casting, then write a class that either derives from or aggregates ArrayList and do the casting there. Programming 101.
Then you need to write a distict class of each sort for each type for which you want to avoid the casting, each with nearly identical code. You've increased the complexity and duplicated lots of effort. Programming 201.
My diagnosis: the fact that C++ is the sole the point of comparison you draw from to evaluate Java's collections support means that you can't understand the grandparent poster's point.
RMS's essays, which form the philosophical underpinnings of the GPL and the copyleft, are based on the conviction that the concept of "ownership" ceases to apply when the digital reproduction technology allows us to make countless, non-degrading copies of the same object.
The point is that by copying a program from somebody else, you are not depriving your source form having that program. It is ridiculous to call this situation "theft" or "piracy", since nobody is being denied of the good involved.
Now, juxtapose this with the typical argument of the GPS zealtot: "If you don't put your code under GPL, a big bad wolf is going to come and EAT YOU!!!." Ooops, I mean,: "If you don't put your code under the GPL, Big Evil Corporations will *steal it*!!!
But... excuse me Mr. Zealot... it's impossible to steal software, according to RMS, from who you draw your inspiration.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have to say the same thing twice in a program, you're probably doing something wrong.
There's a serious question here as to how much performance you're willing to sacrifice just to be able to live solely under the JVM, though.
I seriously think you underestimate how far you can get without that, but I'm not about to just say "no".
This is not trivial because the machinery in the brain that make language learning possible can very well have an enormous impact on the shapes that languages take.
There is a classic Chomskian argument along these lines: (a) we tabulate the features in a lot of languages (in linguist-speak, we do a "typology"); (b) we observe that among the logical space of possibilities for that feature, languages only occupy a limited subset of it; (c) we use this observation to support a statement that there is a corresponding language universal; (d) we conclude that this universal is due to a principle of Universal Grammar, which is "hard-wired" into the human brain.
This argument goes wrong at step (d). Many language universals can be plausibly explained in these terms: from what we know about patterns of language change, there is no plausible path of change that leads to any language like those not observed. It may be the case that, psychologically speaking, many such languages are learnable, in the sense that a if a community had such a language, the children would learn it fine; but you don't get it, because of properties of the language change process.
This does not rule out the possibility of psychological constraints on which languages are possible-- in fact, I don't think anybody seriously believes anymore that such things don't exist. But, it does demand that one not jump to the immediate conclusion that if one's found a language universal, one's found out something about the "wiring" of the brain in any useful sense.
The individual is also the common denominator in any speech community.
This is an ideologically charged statement, and one you wouldn't get away with in many academic circles I take very seriously (in the social sciences). The development of an individual is profoundly shaped by the details of their membership in a community.
Classically you I think would be a macro-linguist and Chomsky a micro-linguist, you saying language is embedded in a larger system, and Chomsky saying, look this is how the machinery of language works. Like macro-economics and micro-economics, it may be difficult to reconcile the two views, but I think that a population-thinking approach may help. On the one hand you start off with a model of individuals, and then you specify, or examine, the structure of the dynamics between those individuals, and move on from there.
I think you've hit a huge part of the problem right on the head, in such a way that I can criticise this right back in your own terms: I don't believe that one can "start" off with a "model of individuals", unless one does so arbitrarily (which can be a fine procedure relative to some purpose, but we must not lose track of the arbitrariness). I don't really think we'll find an asocial core of human psychology or biology in any principled sense.
As for poverty of stimulus and parental cues, I've a number of replies. 1) First, a question: is the evidence contrary to Chomky's position cross-cultural? Is it universally true that all children who have learned a language have also had such cues?
Yup, that's a great question. One to which the answer is not presently known, AFAIK. There is some literature on different attitudes toward talking to children in different cultures; it's mostly qualitative, IIIRC, while the cues stuff that I'm talking about has been measured.
However, I generally hold it to be true that a person with a tabla rasa brain could not possibly make any sense of the world in its lifetime. I believe, though again I'm not sure, that this has been called the grounding problem in cognitive science. How is a
These people are providing potentially objectionable captions to images of recognizable people that have not authorized such use of their image (through a model release). They may well be liable for defamatory use of these people's images.
People here have already mentioned the copyright issues, but they've missed the biggest problem: the captioning of the images. Quite simply, you can be held legally liable for captioning a recognizable image of a person in a way that reflects badly on them. In fact, how the images are to be used and presented are a huge component of model releases-- if you photograph a model dressed up in like a tough guy, and wish to use the image with a caption saying something like "gang member", your model release better cover this use of the image.
This statement may sound obvious to you, but it's far from explicit. What is a language "instinct" supposed to be?
Chomsky's argument is fairly straightforward: Given a blank slate brain, a language-learner will never have sufficient language learning opportunities to learn a language, roughly because there are too many possible hypotheses to consider.
It's simple, but he did not come to believe it from experiment or testing it, but rather, because he was committed to believing it from the start. Then he and his followers set out not to test whether it was true, but to pile up evidence selectively to support it.
The classic evidence for the "poverty of the stimulus" argument has long known to be suspect, and is now known to be wrong. For example, a cornerstone of Chomsky's argument is the related claims that (a) parents hardly ever correct their children's speech and (b) when they do, children don't attend to the correction anyway. In short, this is the claim that children don't have negative evidence in learning language; nothing in their experience can indicate which utterances, among those they hear from other people and those they utter themselves, are grammatically ill-formed. Therefore, this knowledge must come from the child.
The problem is that the "evidence" cited is plain wrong. Children do get numerous cues from their parents when they utter something that's not grammatically well-formed, and they do attend to these cues. These cues don't take the crude form of the parents flat out telling the kid that they said something wrong (the basis for the old claims); the most well-know of this sort of cue is that when the child says something ungrammatical, the adult will rephrase it correctly. (See the work of Eve Clark and her students.)
Until you give an alternate explanation of how we learn language that can address the poverty of stimulus question, language as instinct is the better of the two foundations
That's a non-sequitur. "It doesn't matter if you can demonstrate that view X is nonsense, and, to boot, founded on bad evidence."
The Chomskian isn't saying that social dynamics in a speech community is unimportant, but that it does not, and cannot, explain, in of itself, how we are capable of acquiring language.
But Chomsky is on the record dismissing the social aspects of language learning. In fact, there's a more fundamental problem in that Chomsky takes for granted that "language" is a purely individual phenomenon, and that the fact that languages are spoken in communities where people communicate is merely incidental. (Chomsky has said, literally, that he doesn't believe that language is "for communication", nor that its use for this is an "interesting" fact about it.)
So, for Chomsky, "language" is, essentially and before anything else, a kind of knowledge possessed individual speaker. Contrast this with, say, Saussure, who considered language to be, essentially, a code shared by a community. Now I'm not going to claim that one of them is right and the other wrong, but let's look at the issue at hand: the emergence of languages like Nicaraguan Sign Language, where "language" is being used in a sense more like Saussure's than Chomsky's; i.e., we're talking about the emergence of a new speech community. Do you think that using an individualistic, purely psychological notion of "language" you're going to satisfy people's questions about this phenomenon?
Indeed, perhaps next year will truly be The Year of Linux on the Desktop(TM).
This is using the example selectively to support their biases. One example of the sort of thing they downplay: the role that bringing these kids together into a community plays. Chomsky's model of language acquisition is strictly individualistic: the infant witnesses "primary linguistic data" (the speech in an adult community), and the appropriate pieces of PLD trigger various innate cognitive mechanisms for language acquisition. This is modeled as a strictly individualistic process.
The thing with the Nicaraguan Sign Language examples (and with the pidgin and creole examples in general) is that, while that is (for reasons I won't discuss) not all that good of a model of how a child learns language in a community with an established adult language they have access to, it is far worse as a model for a community where the children don't have access to such a language. What's needed is a more dynamic, community based model, where the interactions between a bunch of kids who don't have any language nor access to another one create a feedback loop and converge into a single language.
Anecdote: I once asked of a Chomskian who was ranting about creoles to tell me how Chomsky's acquisition model accounts for the fact that the children in one of these creole genesis scenarios end up speaking the same language, and not widely different ones. He said "because they all receive the same input". At this point, a sociolinguist in the room immediately got it, and retorted: "Yeah, every single one of them, locked up individually in their own room". (This sort of thing is usually called "missing the forest for the trees".)
The second example is always based on citing Derek Bickerton's work on Hawaiian Pidgin English-- which not only has been regarded by creolists as being fundamentally flawed since it came out; recently it has been all but refuted by a former student of his who made an extensive documentary archive of written sources of the language from 1850 to 1950, and established clearly that it didn't emerge like he says at all.
In short, we just don't know how sign languages and creoles come into existence, and anybody who says otherwise is trying to fool you; especially if said person says it in a book for non-linguists which systemtatically excludes or distorts results that contradict what they want you to believe (i.e., Pinker).
"Wheat beer" is a pretty generic term for beer whose brewing process involves, um, wheat. There's two major traditional styles of wheat beer: Bavarian Hefeweisse, and Belgian wheat beers (called something like Witbier, can't recall).
In addition, in the US you'll find a number of wheat beers that aren't either of these styles. Some of these are (mis)labeled as "Hefeweizen", but don't taste anything like the real thing. I've had bad experiences with most of these, at least in the left coast.
For a nice Belgian-style wheat beer brewed in this side of the world, you may try to find some Blanche de Chambly...
There are decent American hefes, though. Again, this is a Bay Area-centric list: Bison Brewing in Berkeley used to make a pretty awesome Hefeweizen, though their site doesn't mention it anymore, and I haven't seen it for a few years. Pyramid Hefeweizen isn't quite a superb exemplar of the style, but it is very drinkable.
One non-obvious thing about drinking bottled Hefeweizen: yeast accumulates in the bottom of them bottle. When you serve it, you leave some beer at the bottom of the bottle when you first pour, you swish this remainder around the bottom of the bottle to dislodge the yeast residue, and then you pour the remaining beer along with the yeast. (Well, unless you like to have fewer yeast. Try it both ways, and see what you prefer.)
OpenBSD has had encrypted swap for a few years now.
Groovy seems to have more momentum than JRuby, and to have had more work getting it properly debugged and so on. Again, I have not tried either, but I would be surprised if JRuby, in its current state of development, could beat Groovy.
Groovy is, IMO, a near-clone of Ruby designed from the ground up to integrate with Java, and would probably be a better choice than JRuby. I think the Groovy documentation isn't quite there yet, tugh.
Extremely commonplace sort of phenomenon. You work on some problem really hard, then at some point where you're not working on it, the solution comes in a flash. Happened to me last week with a mysterious bug.
DVD-A and SACD have a particularl advantage that could well make them more resilient than you give them credit for: the discs are the same size as CDs, and the players are backwards-compatible with CDs (and DVDs). Which means that once the costs come down, SACD and DVD-A playing capability could become standard in players, laying the basis for a market for the discs. Unless you believe in the imminent death of the CD, I'd call SACD "dormant", not "dead"-- it could wake up easily on a dime.
In theory. In practice, if your package from testing indirectly requires a glibc version from testing, you are screwed.
Debian, frankly, is horrible at both I mean, Debian is horrible at balancing both.
This was the whole reason I left Debian for BSD, in fact-- if I need to upgrade one port in BSD, I can usually update just that one port, instead of having 150MB+ of fresh, questionable quality .deb's forced down my throat every week. (Linux users tend to boast of how easily they can upgrade every package in their system at once. That is a really stupid feat, though.)
PS my job uses Debian stable. I often have to build and installl packages manually from source, however, because Debian stable's versions of the prerequisites are too old (e.g. MySQL 3.23.x). So much for the benefits of package management.
With Frances, it was clear early on that is was of the first kind-- it swerved north really earlly on. With Ivan there is no way of telling (nor was there with Charley at the time it was where Charley is right now). The information we have right now is compatible either with swerving to the North Atlantic or going over to the Pacific.
The projected path of Ivan is very, very different from Frances. It's projected to imminently hit the Lesser Antilles and enter the Caribbean Ocean, which Frances did not.
Misinformation is worse than no information. Even if the rate of mistakes in Wikipedia were comparable to Britannica (and where's the studies on this? where are the attempts to measure it?), if Wikipedia has more articles, it will have more misinformation in absolute terms, on more topics, and the more topics it has, the wider the number of people that will be misinformed by it.
Not many. Which means that your comparison to C is a strawman.
Two better things to compare it to:
If you don't like to see lots of repetive casting, then write a class that either derives from or aggregates ArrayList and do the casting there. Programming 101.
Then you need to write a distict class of each sort for each type for which you want to avoid the casting, each with nearly identical code. You've increased the complexity and duplicated lots of effort. Programming 201.
My diagnosis: the fact that C++ is the sole the point of comparison you draw from to evaluate Java's collections support means that you can't understand the grandparent poster's point.
In dynamic logic, formulas are interpreted as state transition functions.
RMS's essays, which form the philosophical underpinnings of the GPL and the copyleft, are based on the conviction that the concept of "ownership" ceases to apply when the digital reproduction technology allows us to make countless, non-degrading copies of the same object.
The point is that by copying a program from somebody else, you are not depriving your source form having that program. It is ridiculous to call this situation "theft" or "piracy", since nobody is being denied of the good involved.
Now, juxtapose this with the typical argument of the GPS zealtot: "If you don't put your code under GPL, a big bad wolf is going to come and EAT YOU!!!." Ooops, I mean,: "If you don't put your code under the GPL, Big Evil Corporations will *steal it*!!!
But... excuse me Mr. Zealot... it's impossible to steal software, according to RMS, from who you draw your inspiration.