We are a very long way from being able, in hardware, to consistently apply marks in precisely semi-mixed oil paint with the level of control and subtlety of a trained human artist.
The reproduction processes you dicuss are essentially 2D. Oil paintings have a significantly higher fractal dimension, and current 2.x dimensional reproduction techniques are laughably crude compared to a hand made master oil painting.
Yes, and in fact the principal investigator acknowledges that the technique only works well with an artist whose micro technique remains uniform across his/her lifetime, and within each work. So, for example, Picassos could only be analyzed by having a huge database of thousands of his works, since his "style" varied hugely over his working life, and often varied within a single work.
I know this won't put this to rest, because people love to believe in flaky sillyness rather than the relatively boring facts but here goes.
Have you ever excavated a Native American "pyramid?" I have. They bear no resemblance to Egyptian pyramids:
Egyptian Pyramids: 1. pointed on top. 2. built entirely of solid stone. 3. No structures on top. 4. Chambers always inside pyramid.
American "Pyramids" 1. Flat on top (that's why I put "pyramid" in quotes). 2. Built mostly of rubble (i.e., dirt and garbage). Sometimes, though by no means usually, faced with stone. Most often faced with plaster of Lime or clay. 3. Structures always on top. 4. Chambers inside rare.
They show no real signs of having a common cultural origin. Any superficial similiarities are explained, as a previous poster noted, by the fact that building tall structures without the benefit of modern physics and civil engineering techniques is most easily accomplished by making your structure wider at the base than at the top.
Spencer Wells' work on male genetic markers suggests that there were two routes out of Africa - one along the coast of south asia, the other through SW asia (a.k.a., the Midde East) and into Central Asia. The South asian coastal route led to Australia. It is perfectly possible that people first reached both places (Central Asia and Australia) at around the same time. They just moved first along the coastal route probably because they were not slowed by the need to create a whole new set of material adaptations as they went. Lving in Central Asia requires a completely different set of tools, clothing and skills than living in coastal Northeastern Africa (the point of departure). Living in coastal South Asia and Coastal NW Australia does not.
Wells believes that the wave of migration leading to Australia began some 60,000 years ago. The wave leading to Central Asia dates to significantly later, probably 45,000 - 40,000 years ago.
To bring this fully on topic, genetic evidence indicates that people could not have reached North America much earlier than 15,000 - 20,000 years ago, so I'm inclined to believe that the article's suggested 50,000 year date for a hearth is simply wrong. It is probably just a natural feature (remains of a naturally ocurring fire) and the purported "tools" are probably just naturally fractured rocks. You'd be amazed at the broken rocks that some archaeologists (I'm an archaeologist by training) will call "tools." Only microscopic wear pattern analysis of sample edges can begin to establish that some randomly fractured hunk of rock is really a tool. I didn't see any mention that this has been done in the article. Another possibility is stratigraphic mixing (different levels of the site have been disturbed or moved by the activities of burrowing animals).
You've apparently forgotten that all recent genetic evidence shows that we are all descended from Africans. So not only could "negroids" leave their home continent of Africa, but they did so and reached every continent on earch, evolving as they went. BTW, you're one of "them", and so is everyone else.
Sadly, they are successfully agitating to have their unfounded trash taught as the equal of evolution in public schools to young children who do not know enough to see that creationism, a.k.a. "intelligent design" fails to be science in a number of crucial respects, and is, rather, a thinly disguised version of the Book of Genesis.
This is a lot more scary if you have children, or if you care what the intellectual make up of the US will look like in just a decade or so.
You miss an entire category of languages that achieve the aims of 4th gen langauges by allowing the programmer to easily create a domain specific language in what you might term a 3rd gen language. Then domain problems find natural expression in a newly created language just for that domain.
In order to do this, we need a powerful macro system - not just the simple textual substitution of C's preprocessor. The whole lisp family of languages have this sort of powerful macro system, and this is why the lisp family of languages is significanly more expressive and powerful than typical 3rd gen languages like C.
Just a reality check from the 90+ % of humanity that doesn't read and write code daily - '{' and '}' are not "nice obvious visual cues" to most readers - they are line noise. This is why one almost never sees them in prose. In NL, we use paragraphs for block structure, and, more rarely, quotes, parentheses, and indentation (the preferred notation for long quotes, for example).
Your addition example is a red herring - there's no reason why both versions wouldn't be accepted by a decent NL compiler (i.e., both "3 + 2 + 1" and "three plus two plus one.")
As for "englishoid" languages, neither VB nor Java are vaguely NL. You want to look at HyperTalk and AppleScript, both from our friends in Cupertino.
Natual language programming will not happen in my lifetime (and I'm only 24) which is good. It's hard enough to find a programming job as it is.
And this, of course, is the root of all the nay saying. If you are a professional in a field other than programming (doctor, lawyer, chemist, geologist, etc., etc.), and you you need software solutions, then it is obvious that natural language programming would be a big win. Nevertheless, it will be fought tooth and nail by programmers because they don't want to be replaced by the machines they are used to controlling.
Ironic, since programmers have been in the business of helping machines put people out of jobs since programming first began. What goes around, comes around. Did we really think that we, as programmers, would be exempt?
Just as in programming, or any other field, amateurs create amateurish output. There is a tendency among technical people to devalue the skills of non-technical people (and the other way 'round as well). This is a mistake. People with training in anything are going to produce better product than people without training.
Invest in a professional. You'll be surprised how cheaply (sadly) good graphic artists will work.
For the third or fourth time in this thread, we don't need the DOJ to bring antitrust actions against MS. Private firms (like Novell, who just won a half billion dollar settlement) are doing this, thanks to the fact that the Clinton DOJ got it established as a matter of legal fact that MS is a monopoly.
Actually, it did. Not because the DOJ got big damages against MS (we didn't - remember, the DOJ represents us).
No, because the DOJ antritrust action legally established MS as a monopoly in the PC OS market. This opened the door for walkover victories in lawsuits by other firms damaged by MS's monopoly. Now, competitors do not have to do the hard work of establishing that MS is a monopoly - this is, by law, already accepted as established fact by any court in the land. All a competitor must do is show some real monetary damage caused them by MS's use of its monopoly market power. This is much easier, and it's why Novell just got a half billion dollar settlement, as BasilBrush just pointed out.
It's not possible to dumb down all software to the point where nobody wants this [i.e., hand-holding support] anymore.
Actually, it almost always is possible to "dumb down" software to this level. This is why the big money is made by closed source companies who have done exactly this. Take a look at another article today on EA software, the computer game firm. In the referenced paper is a list of the top 10 software companies by market cap. They have all mastered the art of "dumbing down" software to the point that little or no support is needed by users (when was the last time you or anybody you know called user support for a console game?).
If your firm hasn't yet done so, you are just waiting to be displaced by another firm that will do so. Users far prefer simplified software that doesn't require constant support from the vendor to get work done.
The OSS world is used to hopelessly complex software with nightmarish user interfaces because the original user base of OSS was programmers. A programmer's notion of support is the ability to look at the source code and modify it. If OSS is to expand into larger markets, OSS must develop user interfaces that are as "dumbed down" as those of successful closed source software firms. Once this happens, OSS will be as widely popular as closed source software.
At the same time, since arriving at this point will mean that OSS will be just as easy to use as closed source software, OSS will not be able to rely on support as a revenue stream. Good software, just like good anything, doesn't require much support - it just works.
For OSS to succeed widely, it will have to become as easy to use as widely successful closed source software is now. However, this means that OSS will not be able to use support as a means of making money. Some other revenue stream will have to be found, whether it be a closed source proprietary add on to an OSS project (e.g., MacOS X's Quartz, Aqua, Quicktime, etc. on top of the open source Darwin), or sales of hardware that run OSS. But support will not pay the bills for widely successful OSS software, because nothing will become widely successful unless it is so easy to use that it doesn't require much support.
"The law an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." Mohandas Gandhi
The implication is that everyone has committed some offense against some other person in his or her lifetime. If the only form of justice available were retribution, then the entire population of the world would be savaged. Imagine the torments you would have to undergo if every single wrong you have ever done in your life had to be repaid in kind.
I believe another famous religious leader had something similar to say about the idea of justice as retribution:
He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. John, 8:7.
Justice as retribution is only ever advocated by hypocrites, because all of us have committed offenses against others.
Don't people have any sense at all. If India favors one candidate, it means that that candidate's policies are more favorable to Indian workers than they are to US workers.
So called "precision" munitions, when used in large numbers in densely populated urban areas (Baghdad, Fallujah) cease to be precise, and become instead insicriminate killers of tens of thousands of innocent civilians.
The respected medical journal The Lancet has an article on this which concludes that as many as100000 civilians have been killed since the US led invasion began.
Your argument amounts to saying "we know we're killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, but it's for their own good."
See, a fetus is not a human being for the simple reason that a fetus cannot survive on its own. It is, until then, completely dependent on the mother.
When a fetus is able to survive on its own, then it is a human being, and that is why abortion is legal only up to the time when the fetus can survive on its own.
A fetus, before that time, is a potential human being, just as an egg is a potential human being. We don't hear pro-life advocates calling menstruation murder though.
Well, without a doubt, Dems and Repubs would differ on what the proper interpretation of the Constitution is on this matter. This would mean the issue would be decided by the Supreme Court - oh yeah, we already played that game in 2000.
Bottom line, Republican Presidents have been appointing Supreme Court Justices for more than two decades with an eye toward party loyalty as much as (or even more than) judicial qualifications. That means that anything that isn't 100% clearly established by the Constitution and previous electoral processes will be decided to the advantage of Republicans by the Supreme Court.
A comparison of the absolute number of votes is very disingenuous (intentionally misleading for the vocabulary challenged). There were many more total votes this year. The relevant figure is the percentage of the popular vote that Bush got in 2000 compared to the percentage of the popular vote that Bush got in 2004. There isn't a whole lot of difference. About half in 2000 (slightly less, since Gore won the popular vote), and slightly more than half in 2004 (51%). This is not a huge swing, though Bush and his supporters are still trying to spin it as one. The reality is, almost half the people in the US still wanted someone other than Bush as their president. For an incumbent President this should be a sign that something is very wrong. But for Bush, it will be seen as a mandate. That's what makes Bush such a consistent screw up. He interprets everything in the most favorable possible light. He actually thought there would be essentially no casualties in Iraq, and we would be greeted as liberators. Oops!
Cheney's daughter has been openly gay for years. She was not "outed" by Kerry, nor by Edwards. She was also actively campaigning for Bush and her father, so yes, she was part of the campaign.
Kerry was a Prosecutor first. After two years as a prosecutor, he went into private practice, where he won, among other cases, a judgement against a company that used carpet fibers instead of human hair in their "hair" transplants.
Guess what? The reason there are a lot of law suits is that there are a lot of scumbag businesses out there who will continue to cheat people unless they are sued.
The answer is not some sort of prohibitive "legal reform." The answer is to turn the Republicans, the party of sleazy scumbag businesses (Enron anybody?) - out of office.
Mac OS X has had transparent network open and save since beta versions (about 4 years ago). FTP is built into the GUI shell (the equivalent of Konqueror which is called Finder on Mac OS X).
I don't think Mac OS has much catching up to do in this area. Network transparency has been designed into the OS from the very beginning.
Slashdot Mirror
We are a very long way from being able, in hardware, to consistently apply marks in precisely semi-mixed oil paint with the level of control and subtlety of a trained human artist.
The reproduction processes you dicuss are essentially 2D. Oil paintings have a significantly higher fractal dimension, and current 2.x dimensional reproduction techniques are laughably crude compared to a hand made master oil painting.
Yes, and in fact the principal investigator acknowledges that the technique only works well with an artist whose micro technique remains uniform across his/her lifetime, and within each work. So, for example, Picassos could only be analyzed by having a huge database of thousands of his works, since his "style" varied hugely over his working life, and often varied within a single work.
No, inhabitation of Central Asia does by Homo Sapiens Sapiens does not go back to 100,000 years ago as you suggest.
We need to distinguish between fully modern humans, and other hominid species. Fully modern humans did not reach Central Asia till at most 40,000 years ago. Modern humans did not begin their migrations out of Africa until 60,000 years ago.
I know this won't put this to rest, because people love to believe in flaky sillyness rather than the relatively boring facts but here goes.
Have you ever excavated a Native American "pyramid?" I have. They bear no resemblance to Egyptian pyramids:
Egyptian Pyramids:
1. pointed on top.
2. built entirely of solid stone.
3. No structures on top.
4. Chambers always inside pyramid.
American "Pyramids"
1. Flat on top (that's why I put "pyramid" in quotes).
2. Built mostly of rubble (i.e., dirt and garbage). Sometimes, though by no means usually, faced with stone. Most often faced with plaster of Lime or clay.
3. Structures always on top.
4. Chambers inside rare.
They show no real signs of having a common cultural origin. Any superficial similiarities are explained, as a previous poster noted, by the fact that building tall structures without the benefit of modern physics and civil engineering techniques is most easily accomplished by making your structure wider at the base than at the top.
Spencer Wells' work on male genetic markers suggests that there were two routes out of Africa - one along the coast of south asia, the other through SW asia (a.k.a., the Midde East) and into Central Asia. The South asian coastal route led to Australia. It is perfectly possible that people first reached both places (Central Asia and Australia) at around the same time. They just moved first along the coastal route probably because they were not slowed by the need to create a whole new set of material adaptations as they went. Lving in Central Asia requires a completely different set of tools, clothing and skills than living in coastal Northeastern Africa (the point of departure). Living in coastal South Asia and Coastal NW Australia does not.
Wells believes that the wave of migration leading to Australia began some 60,000 years ago. The wave leading to Central Asia dates to significantly later, probably 45,000 - 40,000 years ago.
To bring this fully on topic, genetic evidence indicates that people could not have reached North America much earlier than 15,000 - 20,000 years ago, so I'm inclined to believe that the article's suggested 50,000 year date for a hearth is simply wrong. It is probably just a natural feature (remains of a naturally ocurring fire) and the purported "tools" are probably just naturally fractured rocks. You'd be amazed at the broken rocks that some archaeologists (I'm an archaeologist by training) will call "tools." Only microscopic wear pattern analysis of sample edges can begin to establish that some randomly fractured hunk of rock is really a tool. I didn't see any mention that this has been done in the article. Another possibility is stratigraphic mixing (different levels of the site have been disturbed or moved by the activities of burrowing animals).
Troll, but I'll bite.
You've apparently forgotten that all recent genetic evidence shows that we are all descended from Africans. So not only could "negroids" leave their home continent of Africa, but they did so and reached every continent on earch, evolving as they went. BTW, you're one of "them", and so is everyone else.
Sadly, they are successfully agitating to have their unfounded trash taught as the equal of evolution in public schools to young children who do not know enough to see that creationism, a.k.a. "intelligent design" fails to be science in a number of crucial respects, and is, rather, a thinly disguised version of the Book of Genesis.
This is a lot more scary if you have children, or if you care what the intellectual make up of the US will look like in just a decade or so.
1. Read complaint about Dupes in Slashdot Comments.
2. Post Dupe complaint about Dupes in Slashdot Comments.
3. ? ? ? ? ?
4. Profit!
Are we done with the Slashdot cliche comments yet?
Oh, almost forgot:
Dupe comments, Natalie Portman & hot grits!
BTW, I for one welcome our new dupe comment overlords.
You miss an entire category of languages that achieve the aims of 4th gen langauges by allowing the programmer to easily create a domain specific language in what you might term a 3rd gen language. Then domain problems find natural expression in a newly created language just for that domain.
In order to do this, we need a powerful macro system - not just the simple textual substitution of C's preprocessor. The whole lisp family of languages have this sort of powerful macro system, and this is why the lisp family of languages is significanly more expressive and powerful than typical 3rd gen languages like C.
Just a reality check from the 90+ % of humanity that doesn't read and write code daily - '{' and '}' are not "nice obvious visual cues" to most readers - they are line noise. This is why one almost never sees them in prose. In NL, we use paragraphs for block structure, and, more rarely, quotes, parentheses, and indentation (the preferred notation for long quotes, for example).
Your addition example is a red herring - there's no reason why both versions wouldn't be accepted by a decent NL compiler (i.e., both "3 + 2 + 1" and "three plus two plus one.")
As for "englishoid" languages, neither VB nor Java are vaguely NL. You want to look at HyperTalk and AppleScript, both from our friends in Cupertino.
Natual language programming will not happen in my lifetime (and I'm only 24) which is good. It's hard enough to find a programming job as it is.
And this, of course, is the root of all the nay saying. If you are a professional in a field other than programming (doctor, lawyer, chemist, geologist, etc., etc.), and you you need software solutions, then it is obvious that natural language programming would be a big win. Nevertheless, it will be fought tooth and nail by programmers because they don't want to be replaced by the machines they are used to controlling.
Ironic, since programmers have been in the business of helping machines put people out of jobs since programming first began. What goes around, comes around. Did we really think that we, as programmers, would be exempt?
Just as in programming, or any other field, amateurs create amateurish output. There is a tendency among technical people to devalue the skills of non-technical people (and the other way 'round as well). This is a mistake. People with training in anything are going to produce better product than people without training.
Invest in a professional. You'll be surprised how cheaply (sadly) good graphic artists will work.
For the third or fourth time in this thread, we don't need the DOJ to bring antitrust actions against MS. Private firms (like Novell, who just won a half billion dollar settlement) are doing this, thanks to the fact that the Clinton DOJ got it established as a matter of legal fact that MS is a monopoly.
Actually, it did. Not because the DOJ got big damages against MS (we didn't - remember, the DOJ represents us).
No, because the DOJ antritrust action legally established MS as a monopoly in the PC OS market. This opened the door for walkover victories in lawsuits by other firms damaged by MS's monopoly. Now, competitors do not have to do the hard work of establishing that MS is a monopoly - this is, by law, already accepted as established fact by any court in the land. All a competitor must do is show some real monetary damage caused them by MS's use of its monopoly market power. This is much easier, and it's why Novell just got a half billion dollar settlement, as BasilBrush just pointed out.
Gates- has a got wife
Jobs- doesnt
Jobs' official bio at Apple would seem to differ. Jobs has been married for years, and lives with his wife and 3 of his 4 children in Palo Alto.
It's not possible to dumb down all software to the point where nobody wants this [i.e., hand-holding support] anymore.
Actually, it almost always is possible to "dumb down" software to this level. This is why the big money is made by closed source companies who have done exactly this. Take a look at another article today on EA software, the computer game firm. In the referenced paper is a list of the top 10 software companies by market cap. They have all mastered the art of "dumbing down" software to the point that little or no support is needed by users (when was the last time you or anybody you know called user support for a console game?).
If your firm hasn't yet done so, you are just waiting to be displaced by another firm that will do so. Users far prefer simplified software that doesn't require constant support from the vendor to get work done.
The OSS world is used to hopelessly complex software with nightmarish user interfaces because the original user base of OSS was programmers. A programmer's notion of support is the ability to look at the source code and modify it. If OSS is to expand into larger markets, OSS must develop user interfaces that are as "dumbed down" as those of successful closed source software firms. Once this happens, OSS will be as widely popular as closed source software.
At the same time, since arriving at this point will mean that OSS will be just as easy to use as closed source software, OSS will not be able to rely on support as a revenue stream. Good software, just like good anything, doesn't require much support - it just works.
For OSS to succeed widely, it will have to become as easy to use as widely successful closed source software is now. However, this means that OSS will not be able to use support as a means of making money. Some other revenue stream will have to be found, whether it be a closed source proprietary add on to an OSS project (e.g., MacOS X's Quartz, Aqua, Quicktime, etc. on top of the open source Darwin), or sales of hardware that run OSS. But support will not pay the bills for widely successful OSS software, because nothing will become widely successful unless it is so easy to use that it doesn't require much support.
"The law an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."
Mohandas Gandhi
The implication is that everyone has committed some offense against some other person in his or her lifetime. If the only form of justice available were retribution, then the entire population of the world would be savaged. Imagine the torments you would have to undergo if every single wrong you have ever done in your life had to be repaid in kind.
I believe another famous religious leader had something similar to say about the idea of justice as retribution:
He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. John, 8:7.
Justice as retribution is only ever advocated by hypocrites, because all of us have committed offenses against others.
For example, India is very glad that Bush was reelected because now outsourcing of your job to India can continue unimpeded.
Don't people have any sense at all. If India favors one candidate, it means that that candidate's policies are more favorable to Indian workers than they are to US workers.
The red states need to acquire a clue.
So called "precision" munitions, when used in large numbers in densely populated urban areas (Baghdad, Fallujah) cease to be precise, and become instead insicriminate killers of tens of thousands of innocent civilians.
The respected medical journal The Lancet has an article on this which concludes that as many as100000 civilians have been killed since the US led invasion began.
Your argument amounts to saying "we know we're killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, but it's for their own good."
Then masturbating is murder too.
See, a fetus is not a human being for the simple reason that a fetus cannot survive on its own. It is, until then, completely dependent on the mother.
When a fetus is able to survive on its own, then it is a human being, and that is why abortion is legal only up to the time when the fetus can survive on its own.
A fetus, before that time, is a potential human being, just as an egg is a potential human being. We don't hear pro-life advocates calling menstruation murder though.
Well, without a doubt, Dems and Repubs would differ on what the proper interpretation of the Constitution is on this matter. This would mean the issue would be decided by the Supreme Court - oh yeah, we already played that game in 2000.
Bottom line, Republican Presidents have been appointing Supreme Court Justices for more than two decades with an eye toward party loyalty as much as (or even more than) judicial qualifications. That means that anything that isn't 100% clearly established by the Constitution and previous electoral processes will be decided to the advantage of Republicans by the Supreme Court.
A comparison of the absolute number of votes is very disingenuous (intentionally misleading for the vocabulary challenged). There were many more total votes this year. The relevant figure is the percentage of the popular vote that Bush got in 2000 compared to the percentage of the popular vote that Bush got in 2004. There isn't a whole lot of difference. About half in 2000 (slightly less, since Gore won the popular vote), and slightly more than half in 2004 (51%). This is not a huge swing, though Bush and his supporters are still trying to spin it as one. The reality is, almost half the people in the US still wanted someone other than Bush as their president. For an incumbent President this should be a sign that something is very wrong. But for Bush, it will be seen as a mandate. That's what makes Bush such a consistent screw up. He interprets everything in the most favorable possible light. He actually thought there would be essentially no casualties in Iraq, and we would be greeted as liberators. Oops!
Hello, Earth to the Clueless:
Cheney's daughter has been openly gay for years. She was not "outed" by Kerry, nor by Edwards. She was also actively campaigning for Bush and her father, so yes, she was part of the campaign.
Kerry was a Prosecutor first. After two years as a prosecutor, he went into private practice, where he won, among other cases, a judgement against a company that used carpet fibers instead of human hair in their "hair" transplants.
Guess what? The reason there are a lot of law suits is that there are a lot of scumbag businesses out there who will continue to cheat people unless they are sued.
The answer is not some sort of prohibitive "legal reform." The answer is to turn the Republicans, the party of sleazy scumbag businesses (Enron anybody?) - out of office.
Mac OS X has had transparent network open and save since beta versions (about 4 years ago). FTP is built into the GUI shell (the equivalent of Konqueror which is called Finder on Mac OS X).
I don't think Mac OS has much catching up to do in this area. Network transparency has been designed into the OS from the very beginning.