Completely lacking in insight, in fact. If all travellers with mobile phones thought it was ok to steal electricity in this way it would come to quite a large sum. At the end of the day everyone would have to pay with increased fares. Therefore it's necessary to show that this small delict actually has significant social costs.
AFAIK every programming language can be set down, albeit long and complex, in a set of rules in BNF
Essentially this is true, otherwise the language would be syntactically ambiguous, which is very much the case with natural languages. Unfortunately, this only applies to the syntax and not the semantics, without which you don't know what your syntactically correct statement means. Most of the problems in language design and delays in standardisation of languages arise from semantic unclarities and ambiguities.
A pointer isn't a pronoun it is another reference to an object
Isn't that exactly what "he" is? In natural language you know what's being pointed at from the context. Programming languages have to be more specific.
Here's a little "half natural language" program:
For each person in USA If he is President_of_the_United_States then him.impeach end
Now, wouldn't you implement he/him as some kind of object pointer? (Just imagine you had to change keywords according to gender of the object...)
What? This is an assertion, not an imperative. And certainly very ambiguous. How about "Set a equal to b plus c" then? Simple, it obviously defines a set of the elements "a equal to b" and "c". No, sorry, set "a equal to b" (0 or 1) plus c, somewhere. That's why you can't use natural languages for programming. You only really know the meaning if you understand what's being talked about in the first place. To be unambiguous, you must have agreed on a specific set of syntactic and semantic rules. What's more, natural languages are not really equipped for the abstract stuff of programming. Where in reality can you set something equal to something else? Do I really want to say, "a contiguous area of storage made up of the following individual storage areas in order, firstly four bytes to hold an integer value, then....." Wouldn't I introduce something like "struct" into the language? And rely on people understanding it. Those people probably being programmers, to whom I could just say, "a = b+c" (to get back to the original example).
The point is, you can provide more detail with the language if you want, but it is not the standard practice.
It seems to me that you can be ambiguous or simply unclear in (probably) any language. It's more the speaker's mastery of expressing himself than the language, IMO. Just think of all that technical docu you've read. How much of it was completely clear and unambiguous, regardless of the language?
I think you're missing his point. It's not about interpretation it's about observation. You and someone from China would have the same 'mentalese' way of describing the scene
Speaking as someone who knows nothing about the subject, it seems to me that it depends on whether one is thinking about something concrete, such as a dog eating icecream, or about abstract matters. Looking at my own mental processes, when answering this post, for example, they are almost entirely verbal. When thinking about the latest argument with my girlfriend, the same applies. I'm practising my next verbal onslaught, for the most part. I don't even start visualising dogs or arguing women. Maybe I'm not a visual person.
Re:The above comment missed the point
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Hacker Crackdown?
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I would say that a scientist who works on nuclear weapons is very aware of the multitude of purposes to which the technology he is developing could potentially be put to.
I'm sorry, but this is nonsense. Developing nuclear weapons as opposed for example to reactor research or other areas of nuclear phyics is a highly specific area of research, which has only a single purpose: to make more effective nuclear weapons.
Re:The above comment missed the point
on
Hacker Crackdown?
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· Score: 1
the leaders who gave the orders to drop the atomic bomb are to blame, not the scientists who designed it or the works who built it.
I would say that a scientist who works on nuclear weapons is very aware of the one and only purpose of his work. The fact that he does not press the button hardly justifies a complete denial of responsibility, IMO. Neither baseball bats nor cars are designed with the intention of killing people, as far as I am aware.
The only sure way to solve all these problems once and for all is to hold the final decision makers responsible for _their_ actions.
A fine solution, after the act. How about not building weapons of mass destruction, or not making other weapons generally available? We tend to hold people responsible anyway when they shoot others, or clobber them with baseball bats. A good example of the dubiousness of your proposal is the prosecution in reunited Germany of East German guards who shot at escapers. Their defence generally was that they were acting under orders. No doubt they could have been shot themselves for disobeying. Yet as the "final decision makers" they alone would hold responsibility, according to your plan. And are the leaders really the final decision makers (as you also seem to imply)? They are just another part of the whole chain from manufacturer to the guy who actually presses the button or trigger. And in the case of Western democracy at least, we choose them.
We need to stop wanting to cause harm.
Well, there we are in complete agreement, for what it's worth.
Yes, well, whatever, in fact the Earth is not moving around the Sun. They both rotate around a point determined by their relative masses (and affected by all the other masses in the universe, to a minor extent).
Yes, and if you play with a yoyo, you can consider it fixed, and the entire universe is moving up and down. The sensible way to view things depends on the relative masses of the objects involved.
Is the notion of OSS so alien to the Germans that they can't translate it??
No, it's just that many technical terms are taken over directly from the English. "Software" is a good example. A literal translation often sounds more ridiculous in German than using a foreign term.
given (h)is pro-microsoft book and his other articles like "Microsoft Greed is Good"...
Is Moody really so pro-Microsoft? I couldn't find the article you mention at the abc site at least, OTOH I found these quotes in two other articles:
It is always fun to see the smug and the greedy get their comeuppance -- and there is no question that a massive degree of smugness and greed had set in at Microsoft over the years
Microsoft...has grown into a grotesque, politically connected monster intent on protecting an established position of power rather than overthrowing the Establishment.
And that was just from a quick look. Makes me at least wonder...
IBM has several operating systems which run on the S/390 architecture. MVS (Multiple Virtual Storage), now generally called OS/390 (which is really a packaging of MVS OS with other products), VM/ESA (Virtual Machine), VSE/ESA, TPF (for large online systems) and now Linux.
S/390 hardware (except the smallest models) can be hardware partitioned into effectively seperate machines (the feature is called PR/SM and provides so-called LPARs - logical partitions). This allows multiple operating system images to be run on a single box. This is typically used to provide production, development and test systems, allow installation and testing of new OS versions etc.
VM is an operating system that provides "virtual machines" via software (with some hardware assistance). VM itself provides a "sub-operating system" called CMS for interactive use (i.e., each user logs on to a VM virtual machine running CMS). CMS runs as a guest under the VM "hypervisor". Since VM emulates S/390 machines, it is possible to run any other S/390 OS in a VM virtual machine, e.g., MVS, VSE, or VM itself.
An OS such as Linux would most sensibly be run as multiple copies in VM virtual machines. This could typically be used to provide multiple customers with their own isolated OS but using a single real machine.
Slashdot Mirror
This is Slashdot. Don't expect anything sensible or even half reasonable about Microsoft here.
Completely lacking in insight, in fact.
If all travellers with mobile phones thought it was ok to steal electricity in this way it would come to quite a large sum.
At the end of the day everyone would have to pay with increased fares.
Therefore it's necessary to show that this small delict actually has significant social costs.
Don't you need two?
forbid forbade forbidden. It's forbade.
After all?
the Sun informs GCHQ and so on so they can quickly stem the leak, I assume
Exactly, I guess you have to spell things out in cleartext here to get modded up...
So I can only replace ten Pentium 3000s with this one chip, such a pity...
AFAIK every programming language can be set down, albeit long and complex, in a set of rules in BNF
Essentially this is true, otherwise the language would be syntactically ambiguous, which is very much the case with natural languages. Unfortunately, this only applies to the syntax and not the semantics, without which you don't know what your syntactically correct statement means. Most of the problems in language design and delays in standardisation of languages arise from semantic unclarities and ambiguities.
A pointer isn't a pronoun it is another reference to an object
Isn't that exactly what "he" is? In natural language you know what's being pointed at from the context. Programming languages have to be more specific.
Here's a little "half natural language" program:
For each person in USA
If he is President_of_the_United_States then him.impeach
end
Now, wouldn't you implement he/him as some kind of object pointer? (Just imagine you had to change keywords according to gender of the object...)
"a and b should equal c"...
What? This is an assertion, not an imperative. And certainly very ambiguous. How about "Set a equal to b plus c" then? Simple, it obviously defines a set of the elements "a equal to b" and "c". No, sorry, set "a equal to b" (0 or 1) plus c, somewhere. That's why you can't use natural languages for programming. You only really know the meaning if you understand what's being talked about in the first place. To be unambiguous, you must have agreed on a specific set of syntactic and semantic rules. What's more, natural languages are not really equipped for the abstract stuff of programming. Where in reality can you set something equal to something else? Do I really want to say, "a contiguous area of storage made up of the following individual storage areas in order, firstly four bytes to hold an integer value, then....." Wouldn't I introduce something like "struct" into the language? And rely on people understanding it. Those people probably being programmers, to whom I could just say, "a = b+c" (to get back to the original example).
due to a double-entendre, the meaning did not get through.
I'll bet it did though. No way they were going to lose the chance of trying out their new toy.
The point is, you can provide more detail with the language if you want, but it is not the standard practice.
It seems to me that you can be ambiguous or simply unclear in (probably) any language. It's more the speaker's mastery of expressing himself than the language, IMO. Just think of all that technical docu you've read. How much of it was completely clear and unambiguous, regardless of the language?
I think you're missing his point. It's not about interpretation it's about observation. You and someone from China would have the same 'mentalese' way of describing the scene
Speaking as someone who knows nothing about the subject, it seems to me that it depends on whether one is thinking about something concrete, such as a dog eating icecream, or about abstract matters. Looking at my own mental processes, when answering this post, for example, they are almost entirely verbal. When thinking about the latest argument with my girlfriend, the same applies. I'm practising my next verbal onslaught, for the most part. I don't even start visualising dogs or arguing women. Maybe I'm not a visual person.
I would say that a scientist who works on nuclear weapons is very aware of the multitude of purposes to which the technology he is developing could potentially be put to.
I'm sorry, but this is nonsense. Developing nuclear weapons as opposed for example to reactor research or other areas of nuclear phyics is a highly specific area of research, which has only a single purpose: to make more effective nuclear weapons.
the leaders who gave the orders to drop the atomic bomb are to blame, not the scientists who designed it or the works who built it.
I would say that a scientist who works on nuclear weapons is very aware of the one and only purpose of his work. The fact that he does not press the button hardly justifies a complete denial of responsibility, IMO. Neither baseball bats nor cars are designed with the intention of killing people, as far as I am aware.
The only sure way to solve all these problems once and for all is to hold the final decision makers responsible for _their_ actions.
A fine solution, after the act. How about not building weapons of mass destruction, or not making other weapons generally available? We tend to hold people responsible anyway when they shoot others, or clobber them with baseball bats. A good example of the dubiousness of your proposal is the prosecution in reunited Germany of East German guards who shot at escapers. Their defence generally was that they were acting under orders. No doubt they could have been shot themselves for disobeying. Yet as the "final decision makers" they alone would hold responsibility, according to your plan. And are the leaders really the final decision makers (as you also seem to imply)? They are just another part of the whole chain from manufacturer to the guy who actually presses the button or trigger. And in the case of Western democracy at least, we choose them.
We need to stop wanting to cause harm.
Well, there we are in complete agreement, for what it's worth.
Mobile phones are as ordinary as plastic bags are in USA...
In all the films I've seen, they seem to use paper bags over there, actually:-)
You are all a bounch af lazy trained monkeys :)
Yes, well, whatever, in fact the Earth is not moving around the Sun. They both rotate around a point determined by their relative masses (and affected by all the other masses in the universe, to a minor extent).
It's all a question of frames of reference.
Yes, and if you play with a yoyo, you can consider it fixed, and the entire universe is moving up and down. The sensible way to view things depends on the relative masses of the objects involved.
Is the notion of OSS so alien to the Germans that they can't translate it??
No, it's just that many technical terms are taken over directly from the English. "Software" is a good example. A literal translation often sounds more ridiculous in German than using a foreign term.
given (h)is pro-microsoft book and his other articles like "Microsoft Greed is Good"...
Is Moody really so pro-Microsoft? I couldn't find the article you mention at the abc site at least, OTOH I found these quotes in two other articles:
It is always fun to see the smug and the greedy get their comeuppance -- and there is no question that a massive degree of smugness and greed had set in at Microsoft over the years
Microsoft...has grown into a grotesque, politically connected monster intent on protecting an established position of power rather than overthrowing the Establishment.
And that was just from a quick look. Makes me at least wonder...
the S/390 runs VM (Virtual Machine
IBM has several operating systems which run on the S/390 architecture. MVS (Multiple Virtual Storage), now generally called OS/390 (which is really a packaging of MVS OS with other products), VM/ESA (Virtual Machine), VSE/ESA, TPF (for large online systems) and now Linux.
S/390 hardware (except the smallest models) can be hardware partitioned into effectively seperate machines (the feature is called PR/SM and provides so-called LPARs - logical partitions). This allows multiple operating system images to be run on a single box. This is typically used to provide production, development and test systems, allow installation and testing of new OS versions etc.
VM is an operating system that provides "virtual machines" via software (with some hardware assistance). VM itself provides a "sub-operating system" called CMS for interactive use (i.e., each user logs on to a VM virtual machine running CMS). CMS runs as a guest under the VM "hypervisor". Since VM emulates S/390 machines, it is possible to run any other S/390 OS in a VM virtual machine, e.g., MVS, VSE, or VM itself.
An OS such as Linux would most sensibly be run as multiple copies in VM virtual machines. This could typically be used to provide multiple customers with their own isolated OS but using a single real machine.
Pity, thought they might be sending people. Hopefully they won't lose contact with their vehicles before anything comes back from them
Strange I thought we went to war because Germany invaded Poland (a country well known for being a colony state of the UK!) ..
I guesss there's a distinction between the official reason and the political motivation.both Netscape and MSIE warn the user before entering a secure session
Is this warning or informing? I think many people are happy to know that they are using a secure session before entering their credit card info etc.