Just because the incompleteness theorem says that there are statements that cannot be proven in a logical system, this does not mean any given statement is unprovable.
For example, if you assume a certain computational model such as a Turing machine, you can prove things like the minimum amount of computation required to add or multiply two numbers. There is no (known) theoretical roadblock to proving that some mathematical problem on which cryptography is based takes a certain minimum amount of computation to solve.
If I was doing a security audit for a secure workstation that ran a version of Windows, I would darn well like to see the source code to Solitaire. How can I be sure there aren't Trojan horses in the code? Or that it isn't recording keystrokes for later transmital to MS?
The Mormon pioneers emmigrated west to get away from the federal government and to found their own territory. Utah is now a state, and is doing quite well. I don't know if I would call Utah a "rebel state", but it was certainly settled as a new utopia to get away from the federal government (and persecution in general).
I don't think your argument works. If all drivers have perfect knowledge of road conditions, and make completely rational choices about which routes to take, then the job of the people analyzing traffic becomes easier. They just choose the most congested area and widen it. If the drivers didn't have perfect knowledge, then this might actually create more problems than it solves (since drivers might irrationally choose the big freeway even though it gets them to their destination more slowly).
If you are doing Google searches on potential empoyees, YOU ARE BREAKING THE LAW!! The law is very clear about questions that you may or may not ask. Doing a Google search is implicitly asking ALL the illegal questions. For example, asking if someone is married in the interview is ILLEGAL. It doesn't matter that your marriage is public knowledge; you can't ask the question. If you look at a Google search and see a posting by the potential employee ranting about their wife, you just learned that they are married. Another example is religion. You are forbidden to ask the religious views of potential employees. If you see in a Google search a Baptist newsletter saying how glad they are that Mr. X helped out with the fundraiser, you just learned they are Baptist.
And this doesn't even touch the issue of whether the search results for the name of the applicant actually are valid for the person applying for the job. Even if they are 100 percent accurate, they are illegal.
My knowledge of law about this is from WA, but even if other states have different laws the same moral principle applies. If you think Google searches in this context are OK, I really would like to know your reasoning.
Consider this. There is no Hippocratic Oath sort of thing for physicists, and yet physics has brought us the bomb. It really takes individual people reasoning about the consequences of their actions to affect change.
Read the rest of the linked article. The states side didn't understand when they could admit witnesses and associated evidence, so now they are begging the judge to get stuff into the trial. It's pretty scary to think how important this trial is and how badly both sides are screwing up.
There are special laws about libraries. I don't have a reference, but I think there are fees that libraries must pay to publishers that represent lost revenues due to loaning free books out.
My guess is that dad is a patent attorney, and son is a 6-yr old. The son figured out a way to start swinging horizontally from a dead stop without having to "pump" the swing, and his dad got all excited about helping his son get a genuine patent.
This seems like a really neat idea. I don't understand why people are all in a fuss over it. Dead people don't care what is on their tombstone. And if the family wants to do it, why not? I think it is much more outrageous how much people are expected to pay for funerals and things of that nature.
But then the No-click crowd gets in on the action...
Actually, why can't there be a no-click patent? If you point your mouse at a book, it gets ordered. Just use MouseOver. This post counts as prior art if anyone ever tries to patent it...
It is not the company's responsibility to pay for this. I think it is entirely appropriate that you pay for your own business line to telecommute. That's a decision you have to make. Businesses do not buy you a car to be able to get to work every day; why should they buy you a business line to telecommute? It would be nice if businesses helped provide you with internet connectivity, but I wouldn't be upset if they did not.
The problem with that is that you are analyzing code. So you have to look at JavaScript code and determine what it does, and if it does something annoying. In general, analyzing code to see what it does is no easier than just running the code and seeing what happens. In this case it might be possible to look for specific phrases like OnClose (or whatever), or whatever command starts a popup.
I don't think people are worried that there will never be a way to write functional programs in.NET. This is clearly possible. As someone else said, the IL virtual machine is like assembly with some extra features. The things people worry about are efficiency and convenience.
To take one example, in Lisp you can pass nameless functions quite easily. So you might have a library that has a function to create a new button. One of the arguments to the function is a function that the library will execute when the button is pressed. In Lisp this is a trivial thing, you just create a function and pass it as the argument. But if nameless functions are not supported by the virtual machine, then this operation becomes very problematic.
What if the nameless function is created dynamically by the program? How can the virtual machine compile this nameless function to native code before running the program? Unless the virtual machine knows how to compile Lisp code, it cannot. It may be that the Lisp library must be changed to accept some other form of argument for the callback for efficiency reasons. If most of the work you do is just calling libraries and putting things together, you just lost one of the biggest features of Lisp. You have to trade off efficiency and convenience. If you use a native Lisp virtual machine, you have both efficiency and convenience.
I like this idea. But I would limit the definition of "annoyance" to something easily quantifiable. Broken links might be the easiest, but even for that you have the problem of internet addresses being sporadically available, or just slow some days.
Another idea is to just count the number of HTML errors as the annoyance factor. I'm sure there are many tools out there that can do this rather quickly. If this were actually implemented by Google, so sites with bad HTML were ranked below all other sites, imagine how much cleaner the web would get!
I would personally like to see more books devoted to the theoretical side of CS. Most of the theory books that are out there now are academic textbook type things that the bookstore chains almost refuse to carry. I would love to see more books that talk about interesting theoretical topics that are not just academic textbooks. For example, the theory of operating systems, 3d graphics, AI, logic design, programming language design, etc.
My other vote is for reference books. It seems that there are way too many half-assed books that try to be all things to all people. These books attempt to teach the subject and somehow be the ultimate reference on the subject at the same time. These types of books just aren't any good. If you are going to publish a reference book, make it an honest-to-god reference book. Have lots of index entries with ample cross listings. Document every feature that is discussed. Spend an extra month to check the facts.
This is actually one of the deep philosophical points about free software. Namely, that software should be unrestricted in use, be it good or evil, commercial or educational, legal or illegal. Software is a tool just like a car is a tool. You don't have to sign an agreement when you buy a car to only use it on Microsoft(c) paved roads.
Factoring is not known to be NP-complete. Of course factoring is NP, since we can verify that a number is a factor of another by just dividing (which takes polynomial time). So factoring integers is not more difficult than any NP-complete problem. That said, even if someone discovered a polynomial time algorithm to solve NP-complete problems, the degree of the polynomial would probably be so big that it was useless in practice for any real problems with today's technology.
But the future of cryptography would be seriously shaken, since technology gets better and better, eventually the asymptotically faster methods will become the best way to do things. If the asymptotically fastest method is polynomial, then key lengths will have to get bigger faster and faster. Currently, increasing your key size by a X bits per year makes you immune to attack. But if there is a polynomial time attack, then suddenly the key size has to grow exponentially. Imagine doubling your key size every month.
I believe all cryptographic schemes are based on algorithms that are NP. Being NP means that the solution can be verified in polynomial time, but the solution cannot necessarily be found in polynomial time. The verification part is important to cryptography, since you have to be able to prove to other people that you can solve the problem (since you have the key).
I challenge anyone to name a cryptosystem that is not based on a problem that is NP.
This is not a solution to the current question, but is something to think about when choosing which tools to use for any project. Different languages handle portability in different ways. The C approach is a mixed blessing; the core language is portable to about any platform in existence. But almost every non-trivial program uses many many library calls, and libraries can have many inconsistencies across platforms. Even if the functionality is the same, the functions may be called different names. In the case of more advanced features such as threads or IPC, different platforms can have entirely different systems. The way I see it (I may be wrong), automake and autoconf solve the stupid inconsistencies between library functions, and tell the user if a needed library is not installed.
Other languages take different approaches. Java has a very large set of libraries that are specified to be part of the language and so must be included. The Java language is also constant between platforms. Not every platform has a conforming Java environment, but the most popular ones do. Common Lisp also has huge functionality in its standard library that is part of the language specification. OCaml has a nice standard library, and is open source. If you want your program to work in OCaml on some unsupported archictecture, you can compile it yourself. This still leaves porting the library. If the target archicture has POSIX, this is easy.
I think that research work done while taking money from the NSF and other public agencies should be freely available to the public. In general this means that the research is published in public refereed journals that anyone can buy and read. In some sense the "intellectual property" of the research is being given away to the public, since anyone can read it. In another sense, the researcher and the university "own" the idea since no-one else can claim credit for it. But products and patentable ideas get a bit murkier.
I think everyone agrees that it is immoral for someone to do research while accepting public money and then keep the research secret and proprietary (except in extraordinary circumstances). There is also something fishy about a company being granted exclusive rights for an idea that was developed using public funds. The universities would like to patent everything themselves, but in practice it is often the decision of the researcher whether an idea should or should not be patented.
If I am on a project and write code, I ask whoever is in charge if I may release the code to the public. If they say no, I would want a pretty convincing explanation of why not. I don't think public research should have any secrets.
You say my argument is bullshit, and that creators should be allowed to distribute their creations under any license agreements. But for decades the modern world has disagreed with you. Copyright law was originally created to satisfy book publishers and artists so that other publishers could not reprint books without compensation to the author and original publisher. But fair use has always been an accepted exception. Book copyright notices say things like "no part of this book may be reproduced except with written permission". Do you honestly think that this means it is illegal and immoral to photocopy a diagram on a single page for your own use? Of course not, it is fair use. Yet according to your views on absolute creator licensing rights, even quoting a single line of text from any book under copyright would be illegal. "Fair use" is society agreeing to restrictions on what book licences can be.
If you have ever bought a book, you have "agreed" to the license that "no part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the author". But that license has restrictions and exceptions called fair use. When you "agree" to the Windows license agreement, what are the exceptions? We need to debate what is fair use for software. The laws that we have don't address the issue.
Maybe you misunderstood my views. I think that creators should be allowed to make up any license they want when releasing their work. But not everything in every license should be binding. For example, I think it should be legal to sell copies of Windows that you no longer use, no matter what the license says.
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For example, if you assume a certain computational model such as a Turing machine, you can prove things like the minimum amount of computation required to add or multiply two numbers. There is no (known) theoretical roadblock to proving that some mathematical problem on which cryptography is based takes a certain minimum amount of computation to solve.
If I was doing a security audit for a secure workstation that ran a version of Windows, I would darn well like to see the source code to Solitaire. How can I be sure there aren't Trojan horses in the code? Or that it isn't recording keystrokes for later transmital to MS?
Publishing exploits is like shouting fire in a crowded theater -- when there is a fire!
You should have been embarassed, Harry Potter was the best movie playing last night and two geeks playing Magic got to see it and you didn't.
The Mormon pioneers emmigrated west to get away from the federal government and to found their own territory. Utah is now a state, and is doing quite well. I don't know if I would call Utah a "rebel state", but it was certainly settled as a new utopia to get away from the federal government (and persecution in general).
Where do you get this information from? My personal experience is that Americans are considerably better off on average than Europeans.
I don't think your argument works. If all drivers have perfect knowledge of road conditions, and make completely rational choices about which routes to take, then the job of the people analyzing traffic becomes easier. They just choose the most congested area and widen it. If the drivers didn't have perfect knowledge, then this might actually create more problems than it solves (since drivers might irrationally choose the big freeway even though it gets them to their destination more slowly).
And this doesn't even touch the issue of whether the search results for the name of the applicant actually are valid for the person applying for the job. Even if they are 100 percent accurate, they are illegal.
My knowledge of law about this is from WA, but even if other states have different laws the same moral principle applies. If you think Google searches in this context are OK, I really would like to know your reasoning.
Consider this. There is no Hippocratic Oath sort of thing for physicists, and yet physics has brought us the bomb. It really takes individual people reasoning about the consequences of their actions to affect change.
Read the rest of the linked article. The states side didn't understand when they could admit witnesses and associated evidence, so now they are begging the judge to get stuff into the trial. It's pretty scary to think how important this trial is and how badly both sides are screwing up.
There are special laws about libraries. I don't have a reference, but I think there are fees that libraries must pay to publishers that represent lost revenues due to loaning free books out.
My guess is that dad is a patent attorney, and son is a 6-yr old. The son figured out a way to start swinging horizontally from a dead stop without having to "pump" the swing, and his dad got all excited about helping his son get a genuine patent.
This seems like a really neat idea. I don't understand why people are all in a fuss over it. Dead people don't care what is on their tombstone. And if the family wants to do it, why not? I think it is much more outrageous how much people are expected to pay for funerals and things of that nature.
But then the No-click crowd gets in on the action...
Actually, why can't there be a no-click patent? If you point your mouse at a book, it gets ordered. Just use MouseOver. This post counts as prior art if anyone ever tries to patent it...
Dude, it's 25% of 53%, not 25% of the total. It says the percentage fell by 25%.
It is not the company's responsibility to pay for this. I think it is entirely appropriate that you pay for your own business line to telecommute. That's a decision you have to make. Businesses do not buy you a car to be able to get to work every day; why should they buy you a business line to telecommute? It would be nice if businesses helped provide you with internet connectivity, but I wouldn't be upset if they did not.
The problem with that is that you are analyzing code. So you have to look at JavaScript code and determine what it does, and if it does something annoying. In general, analyzing code to see what it does is no easier than just running the code and seeing what happens. In this case it might be possible to look for specific phrases like OnClose (or whatever), or whatever command starts a popup.
To take one example, in Lisp you can pass nameless functions quite easily. So you might have a library that has a function to create a new button. One of the arguments to the function is a function that the library will execute when the button is pressed. In Lisp this is a trivial thing, you just create a function and pass it as the argument. But if nameless functions are not supported by the virtual machine, then this operation becomes very problematic.
What if the nameless function is created dynamically by the program? How can the virtual machine compile this nameless function to native code before running the program? Unless the virtual machine knows how to compile Lisp code, it cannot. It may be that the Lisp library must be changed to accept some other form of argument for the callback for efficiency reasons. If most of the work you do is just calling libraries and putting things together, you just lost one of the biggest features of Lisp. You have to trade off efficiency and convenience. If you use a native Lisp virtual machine, you have both efficiency and convenience.
Another idea is to just count the number of HTML errors as the annoyance factor. I'm sure there are many tools out there that can do this rather quickly. If this were actually implemented by Google, so sites with bad HTML were ranked below all other sites, imagine how much cleaner the web would get!
My other vote is for reference books. It seems that there are way too many half-assed books that try to be all things to all people. These books attempt to teach the subject and somehow be the ultimate reference on the subject at the same time. These types of books just aren't any good. If you are going to publish a reference book, make it an honest-to-god reference book. Have lots of index entries with ample cross listings. Document every feature that is discussed. Spend an extra month to check the facts.
This is actually one of the deep philosophical points about free software. Namely, that software should be unrestricted in use, be it good or evil, commercial or educational, legal or illegal. Software is a tool just like a car is a tool. You don't have to sign an agreement when you buy a car to only use it on Microsoft(c) paved roads.
Factoring is not known to be NP-complete. Of course factoring is NP, since we can verify that a number is a factor of another by just dividing (which takes polynomial time). So factoring integers is not more difficult than any NP-complete problem. That said, even if someone discovered a polynomial time algorithm to solve NP-complete problems, the degree of the polynomial would probably be so big that it was useless in practice for any real problems with today's technology.
But the future of cryptography would be seriously shaken, since technology gets better and better, eventually the asymptotically faster methods will become the best way to do things. If the asymptotically fastest method is polynomial, then key lengths will have to get bigger faster and faster. Currently, increasing your key size by a X bits per year makes you immune to attack. But if there is a polynomial time attack, then suddenly the key size has to grow exponentially. Imagine doubling your key size every month.
I believe all cryptographic schemes are based on algorithms that are NP. Being NP means that the solution can be verified in polynomial time, but the solution cannot necessarily be found in polynomial time. The verification part is important to cryptography, since you have to be able to prove to other people that you can solve the problem (since you have the key).
I challenge anyone to name a cryptosystem that is not based on a problem that is NP.
This is not a solution to the current question, but is something to think about when choosing which tools to use for any project. Different languages handle portability in different ways. The C approach is a mixed blessing; the core language is portable to about any platform in existence. But almost every non-trivial program uses many many library calls, and libraries can have many inconsistencies across platforms. Even if the functionality is the same, the functions may be called different names. In the case of more advanced features such as threads or IPC, different platforms can have entirely different systems. The way I see it (I may be wrong), automake and autoconf solve the stupid inconsistencies between library functions, and tell the user if a needed library is not installed.
Other languages take different approaches. Java has a very large set of libraries that are specified to be part of the language and so must be included. The Java language is also constant between platforms. Not every platform has a conforming Java environment, but the most popular ones do. Common Lisp also has huge functionality in its standard library that is part of the language specification. OCaml has a nice standard library, and is open source. If you want your program to work in OCaml on some unsupported archictecture, you can compile it yourself. This still leaves porting the library. If the target archicture has POSIX, this is easy.
I think that research work done while taking money from the NSF and other public agencies should be freely available to the public. In general this means that the research is published in public refereed journals that anyone can buy and read. In some sense the "intellectual property" of the research is being given away to the public, since anyone can read it. In another sense, the researcher and the university "own" the idea since no-one else can claim credit for it. But products and patentable ideas get a bit murkier.
I think everyone agrees that it is immoral for someone to do research while accepting public money and then keep the research secret and proprietary (except in extraordinary circumstances). There is also something fishy about a company being granted exclusive rights for an idea that was developed using public funds. The universities would like to patent everything themselves, but in practice it is often the decision of the researcher whether an idea should or should not be patented.
If I am on a project and write code, I ask whoever is in charge if I may release the code to the public. If they say no, I would want a pretty convincing explanation of why not. I don't think public research should have any secrets.
You say my argument is bullshit, and that creators should be allowed to distribute their creations under any license agreements. But for decades the modern world has disagreed with you. Copyright law was originally created to satisfy book publishers and artists so that other publishers could not reprint books without compensation to the author and original publisher. But fair use has always been an accepted exception. Book copyright notices say things like "no part of this book may be reproduced except with written permission". Do you honestly think that this means it is illegal and immoral to photocopy a diagram on a single page for your own use? Of course not, it is fair use. Yet according to your views on absolute creator licensing rights, even quoting a single line of text from any book under copyright would be illegal. "Fair use" is society agreeing to restrictions on what book licences can be.
If you have ever bought a book, you have "agreed" to the license that "no part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the author". But that license has restrictions and exceptions called fair use. When you "agree" to the Windows license agreement, what are the exceptions? We need to debate what is fair use for software. The laws that we have don't address the issue.
Maybe you misunderstood my views. I think that creators should be allowed to make up any license they want when releasing their work. But not everything in every license should be binding. For example, I think it should be legal to sell copies of Windows that you no longer use, no matter what the license says.