The matter is greatly simplified if we consider, as the law does now, what the author intended. If give you a painting I have done, and you use that painting to crush someone's windpipe and kill him, I cannot be charged as an accessory before the fact for providing you with a murder weapon. I created the work intending it to be viewed, and uses for other unintended ends have no bearing on my rights and responsibilities.
If I take a photograph and email it to you, and you listen to it using some software that does the sort of trivial "conversion" into audio format, that doesn't make my photograph a musical work, or the resultant noise that spews out of your speakers "music." I made the work intending it to be viewed. Your use of it as sound is your doing, and says nothing about my work.
Indeed, to claim otherwise is to claim that everything that exists is a musical work because anything can be used to make sound in one way or another.
Once your definitions of individual terms start to include the entire known universe, you know you've made a mistake. The only reason we have definitions is to make distinctions among what is, originally, an undifferentiated continuum of experience. This purpose is completely defeated by overly broad definitions.
No, text is equally analog information. It has only been encoded in a fixed format encoding (i.e., printed in a standardized script, with standardized glyphs, and standardized spelling/orthography) relatively recently. For example, different spanish colonial authors spelled the same word with an initial 'v' or an initial 'b.' We can only guess how each author meant it to be pronounced - the pronunciation is between the two, and varies to a certain extent from one linguistic community to another.
Before the invention of the printing press, and before standardized spelling, different scribes wrote things quite differently.
I think the concept of fractal dimension might be useful here. At one extreme we have binary digital encoding, which could be said to be of digital dimension 2 (1 & 0). At the other, we have analog, which could be said to be 3 dimensional (e.g., for sound, the pattern of compression and rarefaction of air throughout 3-space). We keep time separate and distinct in both cases.
Some intermediate forms of encoding, such as alphabetic writing, alphabetic print, ideographic writing, etc., would be encodings of fractal digitality. For example, 15th century handwriting in non standardized spelling, would be, let's say of digital dimension 2.5, but text that is laser printed in a monotype font would be of digital dimension 2.1., etc.
In any event, even if this metaphor is not precise, it is clear that there is no bright line distinction to be made between digital encodings, and analog. There now exist, and have historically existed, formats that are between analog and digital, because people are not machines.
The position of "other side" certainly cannot be characterized as "reasonable," precisely because it is based on religious teaching. When a belief is based on faith, not examination and thought, then it is, by definition, unreasonable.
An opinion can only be characterized as reasonable if its formation required some use of reason, not mere blind faith, and unquestioning acceptance of doctrine.
If one holds the position of religious tradition regarding gays, then one has to accept that ones opinion has been arrived at with no thought on ones own part, but by blind and unquestioning acceptance of the traditional opinion of ones forbearers.
No one is suggesting that chickens have specifically "human" standards of beauty hardwired into their brains.
The suggestion is that there exist hardwired standards of beauty that are the same for many species, because these brain functions were first developed in a very distant common ancestor, such as reptiles, amphibians, or fish.
There is also the possibility that many species share standards of beauty, because the standard of beauty that we share is somehow adaptive, and we have all converged on it somewhat independently.
But, again, no one is suggesting that chickens have specifically "human" standards of beauty hardwired into their little chicken heads.
A little thought goes a long way. Try to read posts to which you are responding more carefully.
I believe the resolution to this issue is to be found in the usage note:
"Although ensure and insure are generally interchangeable, only insure is now widely used in American English in the commercial sense of "to guarantee persons or property against risk."
In the States, insure has started to acquire the exclusive meaning of "to guarantee persons or property," while ensure has retained the more general meaning. So, in contemporary American usage, ensure is general, and insure has the specific meaning associated with Lloyds and Allstate.
Re:at the limit it actually would be a good thing.
on
Building Better Spam
·
· Score: 1
If you live in a reasonably affluent neighborhood, you can count on getting about 10-20 pieces of mail each day, almost all of which are unsolicited commercail mail.
Winnowing through this large pile of trash to find the one piece (or no pieces) of real, important mail, takes up a significant amount of my time (about an hour each week).
Snail mail spam is just as annoying as email spam, and even more costly of my time and effort.
Re:Genetic algorithm (was Re:What does ... spam?
on
Building Better Spam
·
· Score: 1
Except that Taguchi invented his process long before there were genetic algorithms - i.e., Taguchi's methods were applied in the Japanese automotive industry from the early 1950s onward. In contrast, Holland's pioneering work on genetic algorithms dates to the 1980s.
The Constitution prohibits Congress from establishing a religion. General references to God are seen, by the law, as not establishing a particular religion or sect, and so therefore, permissible. You'll notice that the Dollar bill does not say "Catholics Suck," or "Hindus got it wrong - go Christians!"
That said, I happen to disagree with the current interpretation. I think that even mention of God constitutes the establishment of a religion, even if it is a non-sectarian one.
If you actually read the article, you'll see that he's running Mac OS X, and that the OS sees his box as a single, 1.1 TB, Mac OS Extended volume called "BigHonkingDrive." So, no, the "PC" doesn't see it as 6 200 gig firewire drives.
This never ceases to come up, and it's always from people who think that companies are in business to provide them with neat stuff at low prices. News flash! - companies like Apple (and MS, and Dell, etc.) are in business to *make money*.
If Apple went to stock x86 hardware, yes, their prices probably would fall. This helps Apple how?
Apple has assiduously avoided having to compete in the low margin, backwards compatibility nightmare, stock x86 hardware realm for a reason. Apple make systems with a level of hardware/software integration across the product line that is only dreamt of in the wintel world. Because their systems provide such a superior user experience, Apple can, and does, charge a premium for a premium product. This premium price makes Apple profitable.
Moving to x86 destroys all of Apple's advantages. Their systems would no longer work seamlessly because the near infinite combination of possible hardware would guarantee the same sorts of nightmares seen by windows users daily. And Apple would have to drop prices to compete with MS and Linux on the same hardware platform.
No wonder Apple have wisely opted to keep their platform different from the low cost, hardware incompatibility swamp that is the world of stock x86.
Re:We already HAVE the different language.
on
Secure Programming
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This is just silly - existing commercial lisps compile to machine code, same as c, or fortran, or ada, etc. Current lisp implementations run on stock hardware, on all the major platforms - Windows (XP,ME, NT, 9x, Dos), Linux (ix86, sparc, ppc), Mac OS X (and Classic), and various Unices.
OS kernels are not written in lisp because Unix was written in C, so everyone mistakenly believed that C was *the* language for OS kernel implementation. However, this is simply not so. Any language compiler that can generate machine code can be used to write an OS kernel.
Since common lisp is already a *strongly typed* language, type checking is easy. You can have whatever level of type checking you want - you just have to code accordingly.
Since common lisp is a *dynamic* language, you can't have static type checking. Indeed, static type checking is only a meaningful concept when it is possible for the compiler to know the type of every program entity at compile time.
The desire for static type checking betrays a false understaning of the nature of programming - i.e., the implicit belief that all programs are fixed algorithms operating on data, the type of which is known at compile time, in order to produce output, the range of which is well understood at compile time.
Many more straightforward progamming tasks do still take this form. It is, however, extremely short sighted to believe that this limited (and fairly trivial) set of tasks should form the basis for the specification of all general purpose programming languages.
Most of the more interesting things that can be done in software require that the program deal gracefully with input data types that were not fully known at compile time (because of inheritance hierarchies and object interactions), yielding outputs that may not have been anticpated at all (because interesting programming means exploration of new areas, not reinventing the wheel).
To impose static type checking on programmers is to virtually guarantee that they will merely reinvent known solutions to known problems ad infinitum, just because their language tools don't allow them to deal with the new and unexpected gracefully.
You are missing the context to which the OP refers, which is Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution. This Section gives Congress the power:
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries; " The "requirement" that the grantee of either a copyright or a patent publish the work in question follows from the first clause of the sentence, i.e. "To promote the progress of science and useful arts."
If grantees were allowed to keep their works secret, the grant would not be promoting the "progress of science and useful arts," since no other scientist or author would have access to their work.
The whole idea of patents and copyrights in the U.S. constitution is that the grantee goes public with the invention/work, thus letting others advance "science and the useful arts" by using the grantee's work. In exchange for disclosing this information (remember, the word "patent" means "public."), the grantee is given a legal monopoly on the right to profit from the invention/work for a limited period of time.
As the constitution sees it there are only two alternatives. Either the potential grantee keeps the work/invention a trade secret, never publishing it, but thereby giving up legal rights to time limited exclusive profitability, or, the potential grantee "promotes the sciences and useful arts" by publishing the work/invention, and thereby gains a time limited exclusive right to profit from it.
Lisp hackers routinely write code generators for other languages when necessary. They just (wisely) prefer to use lisp as the source language, even if the target is some half baked monstrosity, such as C++, for example.
The point your parent poster was making, is that a lisp program has the full power of the language available at macro expansion time, just prior to compilation. This means you can redefine the syntax of the language at will to create any language you like on top of lisp. Lisp macros should not be confused with c-style macros, which are merely token substitutions, not redefinitions of language grammar.
You only have this in perl in a very crude and hackish sense. You have to write your own parser; you have to write your own code generator; you have to run every piece of code through your home-brew parser/code-generator before you send it to the perl interpreter. Debugging? Heaven help you if any of: 1. Your code written in your new-language-built-on-perl has errors 2. Your parser has errors. 3. Your code generator has errors.
In Lisp, the macro facilities come for free, are part of the standard (so macros are portable). Vendors are responsible for correctness, so debugging is a simple matter of using the built in functions macroexpand and macroexpand-1.
Saying that Perl has the same sort of code generation capabilities as Lisp is rather like saying that, since all languages are Turing equivalent, assembly language has the same macro capabilities as lisp.
The power of a language comes from its expressiveness, the things it lets you do easily without having to resort the 21st century equivalents of a turing machine. With Perl, you only get this level of expressiveness by using convoluted, error prone, home-brew substitutes for real macros.
"He just keeps describing space time with intervals that contain no points."
But that is precisely his point (no pun intended). Specifically, that there *are no points*, either in space, or time. That all supposedly instantaneous points in time, are actually deltas. That all supposedly instantaneous positions are in fact, deltas.
He must "keep describing space time with intervals that contain no points," because his whole argument is that there *are* no points.
Damn straight about Ph.Ds - more should understand that the only real credential they hold is to be lovers of wisdom (philo = love, sophia = goddess of wisdom, wisdom).
One shouldn't assume that the slang used in ones locale is universal for english.
To Wit:
In the UK, "get pissed," means "become inebriated." In the USA "get pissed," does not mean "become inebriated." In fact, only people familiar with UK culture and slang know that it does mean that on the other side of the Pond. In the USA, "get pissed," is a commonly used shorthand for "get pissed off," as in, "I really got pissed when when they told me I had to work late."
So, yes, the original model sentence is ambiguous, but only to people who use "pissed" as a shorthand for "pissed off" who also know some UK slang.
Since Pixar is running Linux x86 now, they could switch to Linux PPC running on G5s, and all their "proprietary Pixar tools," for which they have the source, could be ported with a simple recompile.
Slashdot Mirror
The matter is greatly simplified if we consider, as the law does now, what the author intended. If give you a painting I have done, and you use that painting to crush someone's windpipe and kill him, I cannot be charged as an accessory before the fact for providing you with a murder weapon. I created the work intending it to be viewed, and uses for other unintended ends have no bearing on my rights and responsibilities.
If I take a photograph and email it to you, and you listen to it using some software that does the sort of trivial "conversion" into audio format, that doesn't make my photograph a musical work, or the resultant noise that spews out of your speakers "music." I made the work intending it to be viewed. Your use of it as sound is your doing, and says nothing about my work.
Indeed, to claim otherwise is to claim that everything that exists is a musical work because anything can be used to make sound in one way or another.
Once your definitions of individual terms start to include the entire known universe, you know you've made a mistake. The only reason we have definitions is to make distinctions among what is, originally, an undifferentiated continuum of experience. This purpose is completely defeated by overly broad definitions.
No, text is equally analog information. It has only been encoded in a fixed format encoding (i.e., printed in a standardized script, with standardized glyphs, and standardized spelling/orthography) relatively recently. For example, different spanish colonial authors spelled the same word with an initial 'v' or an initial 'b.' We can only guess how each author meant it to be pronounced - the pronunciation is between the two, and varies to a certain extent from one linguistic community to another.
Before the invention of the printing press, and before standardized spelling, different scribes wrote things quite differently.
I think the concept of fractal dimension might be useful here. At one extreme we have binary digital encoding, which could be said to be of digital dimension 2 (1 & 0). At the other, we have analog, which could be said to be 3 dimensional (e.g., for sound, the pattern of compression and rarefaction of air throughout 3-space). We keep time separate and distinct in both cases.
Some intermediate forms of encoding, such as alphabetic writing, alphabetic print, ideographic writing, etc., would be encodings of fractal digitality. For example, 15th century handwriting in non standardized spelling, would be, let's say of digital dimension 2.5, but text that is laser printed in a monotype font would be of digital dimension 2.1., etc.
In any event, even if this metaphor is not precise, it is clear that there is no bright line distinction to be made between digital encodings, and analog. There now exist, and have historically existed, formats that are between analog and digital, because people are not machines.
The position of "other side" certainly cannot be characterized as "reasonable," precisely because it is based on religious teaching. When a belief is based on faith, not examination and thought, then it is, by definition, unreasonable.
An opinion can only be characterized as reasonable if its formation required some use of reason, not mere blind faith, and unquestioning acceptance of doctrine.
If one holds the position of religious tradition regarding gays, then one has to accept that ones opinion has been arrived at with no thought on ones own part, but by blind and unquestioning acceptance of the traditional opinion of ones forbearers.
One more try, and this time, pay attention.
No one is suggesting that chickens have specifically "human" standards of beauty hardwired into their brains.
The suggestion is that there exist hardwired standards of beauty that are the same for many species, because these brain functions were first developed in a very distant common ancestor, such as reptiles, amphibians, or fish.
There is also the possibility that many species share standards of beauty, because the standard of beauty that we share is somehow adaptive, and we have all converged on it somewhat independently.
But, again, no one is suggesting that chickens have specifically "human" standards of beauty hardwired into their little chicken heads.
A little thought goes a long way. Try to read posts to which you are responding more carefully.
I believe the resolution to this issue is to be found in the usage note:
"Although ensure and insure are generally interchangeable, only insure is now widely used in American English in the commercial sense of "to guarantee persons or property against risk."
In the States, insure has started to acquire the exclusive meaning of "to guarantee persons or property," while ensure has retained the more general meaning. So, in contemporary American usage, ensure is general, and insure has the specific meaning associated with Lloyds and Allstate.
If you live in a reasonably affluent neighborhood, you can count on getting about 10-20 pieces of mail each day, almost all of which are unsolicited commercail mail.
Winnowing through this large pile of trash to find the one piece (or no pieces) of real, important mail, takes up a significant amount of my time (about an hour each week).
Snail mail spam is just as annoying as email spam, and even more costly of my time and effort.
Except that Taguchi invented his process long before there were genetic algorithms - i.e., Taguchi's methods were applied in the Japanese automotive industry from the early 1950s onward. In contrast, Holland's pioneering work on genetic algorithms dates to the 1980s.
The Constitution prohibits Congress from establishing a religion. General references to God are seen, by the law, as not establishing a particular religion or sect, and so therefore, permissible. You'll notice that the Dollar bill does not say "Catholics Suck," or "Hindus got it wrong - go Christians!"
That said, I happen to disagree with the current interpretation. I think that even mention of God constitutes the establishment of a religion, even if it is a non-sectarian one.
If you actually read the article, you'll see that he's running Mac OS X, and that the OS sees his box as a single, 1.1 TB, Mac OS Extended volume called "BigHonkingDrive." So, no, the "PC" doesn't see it as 6 200 gig firewire drives.
This never ceases to come up, and it's always from people who think that companies are in business to provide them with neat stuff at low prices. News flash! - companies like Apple (and MS, and Dell, etc.) are in business to *make money*.
If Apple went to stock x86 hardware, yes, their prices probably would fall. This helps Apple how?
Apple has assiduously avoided having to compete in the low margin, backwards compatibility nightmare, stock x86 hardware realm for a reason. Apple make systems with a level of hardware/software integration across the product line that is only dreamt of in the wintel world. Because their systems provide such a superior user experience, Apple can, and does, charge a premium for a premium product. This premium price makes Apple profitable.
Moving to x86 destroys all of Apple's advantages. Their systems would no longer work seamlessly because the near infinite combination of possible hardware would guarantee the same sorts of nightmares seen by windows users daily. And Apple would have to drop prices to compete with MS and Linux on the same hardware platform.
No wonder Apple have wisely opted to keep their platform different from the low cost, hardware incompatibility swamp that is the world of stock x86.
No, that would be lisp.
This is just silly - existing commercial lisps compile to machine code, same as c, or fortran, or ada, etc. Current lisp implementations run on stock hardware, on all the major platforms - Windows (XP,ME, NT, 9x, Dos), Linux (ix86, sparc, ppc), Mac OS X (and Classic), and various Unices.
OS kernels are not written in lisp because Unix was written in C, so everyone mistakenly believed that C was *the* language for OS kernel implementation. However, this is simply not so. Any language compiler that can generate machine code can be used to write an OS kernel.
Since common lisp is already a *strongly typed* language, type checking is easy. You can have whatever level of type checking you want - you just have to code accordingly.
Since common lisp is a *dynamic* language, you can't have static type checking. Indeed, static type checking is only a meaningful concept when it is possible for the compiler to know the type of every program entity at compile time.
The desire for static type checking betrays a false understaning of the nature of programming - i.e., the implicit belief that all programs are fixed algorithms operating on data, the type of which is known at compile time, in order to produce output, the range of which is well understood at compile time.
Many more straightforward progamming tasks do still take this form. It is, however, extremely short sighted to believe that this limited (and fairly trivial) set of tasks should form the basis for the specification of all general purpose programming languages.
Most of the more interesting things that can be done in software require that the program deal gracefully with input data types that were not fully known at compile time (because of inheritance hierarchies and object interactions), yielding outputs that may not have been anticpated at all (because interesting programming means exploration of new areas, not reinventing the wheel).
To impose static type checking on programmers is to virtually guarantee that they will merely reinvent known solutions to known problems ad infinitum, just because their language tools don't allow them to deal with the new and unexpected gracefully.
You're thinking of Richard Stallman, (RMS), who did write gcc and emacs.
Eric Raymond, (ESR), did not write gcc, nor did he write emacs.
You are missing the context to which the OP refers, which is Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution. This Section gives Congress the power:
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries; "
The "requirement" that the grantee of either a copyright or a patent publish the work in question follows from the first clause of the sentence, i.e. "To promote the progress of science and useful arts."
If grantees were allowed to keep their works secret, the grant would not be promoting the "progress of science and useful arts," since no other scientist or author would have access to their work.
The whole idea of patents and copyrights in the U.S. constitution is that the grantee goes public with the invention/work, thus letting others advance "science and the useful arts" by using the grantee's work. In exchange for disclosing this information (remember, the word "patent" means "public."), the grantee is given a legal monopoly on the right to profit from the invention/work for a limited period of time.
As the constitution sees it there are only two alternatives. Either the potential grantee keeps the work/invention a trade secret, never publishing it, but thereby giving up legal rights to time limited exclusive profitability, or, the potential grantee "promotes the sciences and useful arts" by publishing the work/invention, and thereby gains a time limited exclusive right to profit from it.
Lisp hackers routinely write code generators for other languages when necessary. They just (wisely) prefer to use lisp as the source language, even if the target is some half baked monstrosity, such as C++, for example.
Yes, of course you can do this in lisp.
The point your parent poster was making, is that a lisp program has the full power of the language available at macro expansion time, just prior to compilation. This means you can redefine the syntax of the language at will to create any language you like on top of lisp. Lisp macros should not be confused with c-style macros, which are merely token substitutions, not redefinitions of language grammar.
You only have this in perl in a very crude and hackish sense. You have to write your own parser; you have to write your own code generator; you have to run every piece of code through your home-brew parser/code-generator before you send it to the perl interpreter. Debugging? Heaven help you if any of:
1. Your code written in your new-language-built-on-perl has errors
2. Your parser has errors.
3. Your code generator has errors.
In Lisp, the macro facilities come for free, are part of the standard (so macros are portable). Vendors are responsible for correctness, so debugging is a simple matter of using the built in functions macroexpand and macroexpand-1.
Saying that Perl has the same sort of code generation capabilities as Lisp is rather like saying that, since all languages are Turing equivalent, assembly language has the same macro capabilities as lisp.
The power of a language comes from its expressiveness, the things it lets you do easily without having to resort the 21st century equivalents of a turing machine. With Perl, you only get this level of expressiveness by using convoluted, error prone, home-brew substitutes for real macros.
"He just keeps describing space time with intervals that contain no points."
But that is precisely his point (no pun intended).
Specifically, that there *are no points*, either in space, or time. That all supposedly instantaneous points in time, are actually deltas. That all supposedly instantaneous positions are in fact, deltas.
He must "keep describing space time with intervals that contain no points," because his whole argument is that there *are* no points.
Mod parent up.
Damn straight about Ph.Ds - more should understand that the only real credential they hold is to be lovers of wisdom (philo = love, sophia = goddess of wisdom, wisdom).
Buy a cassette adapter. Here's one for example:
XtremeMac's iPod Cassette Adapter
Though any cassette adapter will work (there are many manufacturers).
One shouldn't assume that the slang used in ones locale is universal for english.
To Wit:
In the UK, "get pissed," means "become inebriated."
In the USA "get pissed," does not mean "become inebriated." In fact, only people familiar with UK culture and slang know that it does mean that on the other side of the Pond.
In the USA, "get pissed," is a commonly used shorthand for "get pissed off," as in, "I really got pissed when when they told me I had to work late."
So, yes, the original model sentence is ambiguous, but only to people who use "pissed" as a shorthand for "pissed off" who also know some UK slang.
Small Claims Court = No Lawyer required
"Why dont people accept nuclear power as the solution?"
Chernobyl & Three Mile Island.
"Even the audiance [sic] placement can be a part of the performance."
Please arrange for me to be seated so far away that I can't hear it at all.
Thank you.
Since Pixar is running Linux x86 now, they could switch to Linux PPC running on G5s, and all their "proprietary Pixar tools," for which they have the source, could be ported with a simple recompile.