I've been involved in more threads than I wish to recall slinging mud at C++ and there is always a strong representation from the crowd who aren't willing to invest the time to understand the object they are criticizing. The criticism fundamentally boils down to: why should a language force me to think?
That's a good question. The purpose of a programming language is much the same of that of mathematical notation, which is to allow you to think at the level of abstraction of your problem while not wasting time with irrelevant details. Modern calculus notation gives university freshmen the ability to solve problems in a few hours that baffled the greatest minds of history for thousands of years.
Note that this doesn't mean that you don't have to think when learning a mathematical language. The concepts of limit, derivative, and integral are difficult to grasp at first, but once you understand them, they offer powerful mathematical methods that allow you to think about the problem at hand and not the notation you're using.
Can computer science make similar claims? The jump from assembly to FORTRAN was a tremendous improvement in productivity, but FORTRAN to C or C to C++ produced small to no productivity improvements, perhaps in part because you have to think more and more about the language. We should be looking for a language that may require thinking to learn, but that once when learned offers powerful methods at a high level of abstraction that allow you to think about the problem without being distracted by the language.
I would suggest that we look at languages like Haskell, Scheme, or Smalltalk, which do require that we learn concepts like currying, higher-order functions, monads, and type classes, but which offer a higher level of abstraction and greater consistency than languages like C++ or Java.
Re:MEPIS: (K)Ubuntu with codecs
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Ubuntu 6.06 Reviewed
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Ubuntu doesn't incorporate MP3 and other codecs as part of the distribution because of legal issues, but you can install support for MP3s and most of the other software you want that's excluded with a few clicks of the mouse by using EasyUbuntu.
There are a lot of cheap ways to contaminate crime scenes. Criminals have already begun dumping the contents of public ashtrays onto crime scenes, contaminating the scene with the DNA of dozens of people. We need to consider whether the immense expense and privacy invasion of a national DNA database, along with the inevitable errors and counterfeiting (the 9/11 terrorists were able to pay DMV personnel for fake driver's licenses; surely people will pay to falsify their records to replace their digital DNA records with those of someone else), makes sense when there are such simple, cheap ways to evade the system. Are there other systems that would give us more security for those billions of dollars, perhaps without such loss of privacy?
Usability is a growing area of research within computer security. The SOUPS conference focuses on that subject. The SOUPS Blog discusses user interface changes that would help computer users realize that bad guys are attempting to trick them, like using per-user labels or backgrounds so that phishers can't emulate a site since it differs for each users in ways the phisher can't predict.
If you design user interfaces to secure applications, I highly recommend the O'Reilly book Security and Usability. It's a collection of classic and new papers on the topic. Simson Garfinkel's thesis is also a good reference on usability and security.
A 2005 paper by David Evans, "Where's the FEEB? The Effectiveness of Instruction Set Randomization", demonstrates how to remotely determine the key for this protection scheme in under 6 minutes. The paper goes on to examines diversity defenses more broadly to examine schemes that might be resistant to such attacks.
The author also gave an interesting talk at USENIX Security Symposium on What Biology Can (and Can't) Teach Us About Security, which is probably a better paper for this article to point to.
Whether a language is functional or imperative says nothing about its type system. There are imperative languages that are typed much like Lisp, and there are functional languages that are typed much like Ada. However, the vast majority of research into type safety and types in general occurs in functional languages. See Benjamin Pierce's Types and Programming Languages, which uses ML, or almost any paper in the field. It's also worth looking at Microsoft Research's work in types (usually tested in their Cw language, though C# 3.0 looks to be inheriting some of ML's type features.)
While C++ is more strongly typed than C, C++ is not type safe. Type safety means that the language ensures that no operation will ever be applied to a variable of the wrong type. However, C++ supports the ability to access arbitrary memory locations, allows type casting, and automatically converts types in many instances. Java is more strongly typed than C++, as it doesn't allow access to arbitrary memory locations, but it also supports casting and automatic conversions, and so is not type safe. If you want type safety, try a language like Ocaml or SPARK Ada.
You prefer to read from a book because it's a superior technology. The book's resolution is far higher than the screen, as books are typically printed at a resolution of 1500dpi or better, compared to around 100dpi for most modern monitors. The book's display is an absorptive technology, which is easier on your eyes than the projective nature of the monitor. You also can't beat the book's infinite "battery life," compared to a few hours for notebook computers.
While technologies like digital ink, which is an absorptive display that doesn't consume power unless you're changing the text, may offer a superior technology to books in the future, the book is a much better technology than current computers for reading large amounts of text.
Intelligent Design was created for the specific purpose of denying naturalism (or materialism as they typically call it.) The problem isn't that a few proponents deny it, but that the entire concept is a Trojan horse designed not just to get creationism into our schools but to eliminate naturalism from science.
The Intelligent Design movement started in 1992 according to its founder Phillip Johnson. Let's look at the beginning of the strategy section of the Wedge document, which describes the purpose of Intelligent Design and how its creators intend to use it:
The social consequences of materialism have been devastating. As symptoms, those consequences are certainly worth treating. However, we are convinced that in order to defeat materialism, we must cut it off at its source. That source is scientific materialism. This is precisely our strategy. If we view the predominant materialistic science as a giant tree, our strategy is intended to function as a "wedge" that, while relatively small, can split the trunk when applied at its weakest points. The very beginning of this strategy, the "thin edge of the wedge," was Phillip ]ohnson's critique of Darwinism begun in 1991 in Darwinism on Trial, and continued in Reason in the Balance and Defeatng Darwinism by Opening Minds. Michael Behe's highly successful Darwin's Black Box followed Johnson's work. We are building on this momentum, broadening the wedge with a positive scientific alternative to materialistic scientific theories, which has come to be called the theory of intelligent design (ID). Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.
They organized their Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture at their conference titled "The Death of Materialism and the Renewal of Culture." Their web site a few years later makes it clear that their goals hadn't changed:
"Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies . . .." --Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture
Don't be deceived by the image of Intelligent Design that they've carefully constructed through their multimillion dollar PR campaign. Intelligent Design is nothing more than a religious attack on science and naturalism.
A quick look at Dembski's work makes it clear that he believes that the Christian God is the intelligent designer. It's clear that he's not serious about aliens, and a closer look at his writings reveals that the purpose of offering alternative designers like aliens is simply part of what the intelligent design creationists call the "wedge" strategy.
Intelligent design is a legal and public relations strategy designed to get Christianity into the public sphere, and especially to get creationism into American classrooms. Dembski acknowledges the purpose of ID in his own words below:
"In its relation to Christianity, intelligent design should be viewed as a ground-clearing operation that gets rid of the intellectual rubbish that for generations has kept Christianity from receiving serious consideration," Dembski wrote in a reply to [scientific creationist leader] Morris.
1. Good technical solutions to the nuclear waste problem have existed since the 1970's. Nuclear waste consists of highly radioactive isotopes with half-lives less than 90 years, which produce 99% of the radioactivity, and less radioactive isotopes with half-lives more than 70,000 years.
We can separate the two types of isotopes. We store the highly radioactive ones for the 300 years or so that's necessary for their radioativity to fall to background levels, and we reprocess the long half life components. Reprocessing can be done in a breeder reactor or in a subcritical reactor activated by a particle beam.
2. None of the waste can be used to build nuclear weapons without extensive processing. The highly radioactive light elements that we need to storeare useless for this purpose even with reprocessing.
3. Modern nuclear plants, like the pebble bed design, cannot melt down. If you're worried about meltdowns, you should be a strong advocate of replacing the US's aging plants with modern nuclear power plants.
4. Yes, but per megawatt of power, coal plants emit more radioactivity than nuclear plants due to the presence of trace amounts of radioactive materials present in coal and the immense amount you have to burn to produce a megawatt of power.
5. False, as explained in another post above.
Advantages of dynamic languages
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Ajax On Rails
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· Score: 2, Insightful
No, the fundamental advantage of dynamic languages is programmer productivity. You can accomplish a goal in a dynamic language like Scheme, Smalltalk, Python, or Ruby in 100 lines that would require 500 or more lines of Java. That's also an advantage when you have to modify the code--there's less of it and it's faster and easier to read as a result. It's also much simpler and faster to create unit tests in dynamic languages, leading to more and faster testing of projects. These advantages grow with the size of the project.
The other advantage of dynamic languages is flexibility. While Java has limited support for features like reflection and generics, dynamic languages have offered much more powerful and easy to use versions of these features for years. Java is also missing other dynamic features like closures and metaprogramming. Groovy's feature list is an inverted list of many of the limitations in Java's dynamic capabilities.
Java's main contribution to programming languages isn't any new feature. It doesn't have any significant new features, and most of its main features like object orientation, byte-compilation/VM and primitive concurrency were in other languages like Simula and Pascal in the 1960s or 1970s. Java's primary contribution is that it was well marketed and that its limited dynamic features have inspired a large number of programmers to want more of the flexibility that languages like Scheme and Smalltalk offered decades ago.
The copyright industry has tried to tie the unrelated issues of plagiarism and copyright together, in order to attribute the distaste we have for the ancient injustice of plagiarism to the modern practice of perpetual copyright.
We should not succumb to this deception. Plagiarism is a completely different offense that dates back to Roman times if not earlier. The offence of plagiarism is claiming credit for someone else's work. If you purchase the rights to a term paper from its original author or if you copy from a pre-copyright source like Shakespeare or Aristotle, you've still committed plagiarism if you submitted that paper as your own work, even though you haven't committed copyright infringement.
Copyright is the comparatively recent idea of governments granting temporary monopolies to publishers. If you've copied the latest top 20 hit, you've committed copyright infringement though you haven't committed plagiarism unless you redistributed the song under your name instead of the original artist's name. Copyright is a less serious offense than plagiarism, as we can see in part because it's a temporary offence: after all, if the item you copied was old enough for the monopoly to lapse, you haven't committed copyright infringement.
And for your general information, the other gospels and new testament works have not been "tainted" through translation or interpretation- anyone who wants to can still access the original greek of those texts.
We have no original texts; the earliest texts that we have are fragments of copies of copies. Unsurprisingly, these multi-generation copies disagree with each other in places. One well known disagreement is the ending of Mark. The modern ending is found in none of the earliest manuscripts, and when we do begin finding manuscripts with an ending, we find two different endings. The Catholic Church declared the currently popular ending canonical at the Council of Trent in the 16th century.
There is also no "the Bible." Each major branch of the Christian church has their own Bibles, with numbers of books ranging from about two dozen for the Syrian church to 66 for the Protestants to 81 for the Ethiopian church. The most common dates I've seen for the Gospel of Thomas are 100-150, which puts it in about the same range as the 90-120 dates for the Gospel of John.
Since you brought up Paul, it's worth examining the authenticity of his writings too. For example, the Ethiopian Bible has 3 letters to the Corinthians, while the Catholic/Protestant Bible has only 2 such letters. Several of his epistles, including 3rd Corithians, were debated strongly when the Catholic church began putting together its Biblical canon in the 4th century. The Catholics rejected 3rd Corinthians, but kept several of the other more dubious epistles, which modern scholars now have come to same conclusion that some 4th century bishops did--they were
forgeries.
The controversy over what was really canonical or not erupted again in Europe with the Protestant Reformation. Luther rejected the apostolicity of Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation, and moved them to the back of his translation of the Catholic Bible. Modern rediscoveries of the gnostic gospels, and communication between the European branch of Christianity with branches in Asia and Africa with their different Bibles have brought these controversies to life again.
In the US, physics classes are predominantly male even in high school. While only 28% of men have taken high school physics, the percentage of women is even lower: 21%. However, the big differences appear in the undergraduate years, where over 80% of physics majors in US universities are men. According to a 1996 survey by the American Institute of Physics, 17% of physics bachelor's and master's degree recipients in 1995 were women, while 12% of physics PhD recipients were women.
I'm curious to know what the difference in Australian educational systems or culture is that makes such a difference in number of women physics undergraduates. Does anyone have any ideas, or knowledge of any studies done on such differences?
Facts and theories are completely different concepts in science. Facts are observations; theories are explanations of facts.
Gravity is a fact, or more precisely, a set of facts describing how objects are attracted to each other. General relativity is our best theory for explaining how gravity works. We know that it's flawed, but we haven't been able to come up with a consistent theory of quantum gravity.
Evolution is also a fact. It is the observed change in allele frequencies over time. We've observed species adapting to new situations, and we've observed new species evolving from older ones. Natural selection is our best current theory for how explaining how evolution works.
Neither Creationism and Intelligent Design are theories. They are both myths, which cannot be tested or falsified.
Singling out the fact of evolution or the theory of natural selection is an attempt by American fundamentalists to prevent children from seriously considering and understanding evolution. They do it for the same reasons that people objected to the heliocentric model of the solar system: they think it reduces the significance of humanity so that it's not the most important thing in the cosmos.
Is scientific truth important in this case? Yes, modern biology is based on the foundation of evolution. Look to history to see what happens when dogma trumps scientific fact: google for Lysenkoism, which the dogmatic Soviet interpretation of Lamarck's failed theory of acquired characteristics, that lead to the starvation and death of millions of Russians in the 20th century.
Of course, if it were genetics, according to Darwin, it would be a trait that should have been wiped out long ago since homosexuals cant reproduce.
While homosexuals can reproduce, the largest problem with your argument is your complete misunderstanding of Darwin. Even if homosexuality had no reproductive value, it could still be propagated if possessing two such genes made your homosexual but having one such gene increased your chances of reproduction. Many recessive genetic traits follow this pattern, where having one gene is beneficial to survival, while having two such genes is harmful. However, reproducing isn't the only way to propagate your genes. Your siblings share 1/2 your genes on average, so if being homosexual increases the chances of your nieces, nephews, and cousins surviving to a reproductive age, the continued existence of homosexuality can also be selected for through kin selection
As you say, you're an MD, which gives you a different perspective on health care. For example, you know many MDs personally and indirectly through them have a network to many other MDs. Don't you doctor shop too, to find the best person you know? The rest of us don't know any MDs personally, so to find the best doctor, all we have are recommendations from friends who aren't MDs, which are sometimes useful, but generally we actually have to go in for a visit to see how good someone is.
Also, how long will your doctor see you for? The typical visit time for my HMO is 2 minutes, and I've never personally been able to keep a doctor in the room for 5 minutes, even when it took longer than that span to explain my problem.
I've been in Patrick's position, having a chronic condition where I went through over a dozen doctors who were completely useless. All the doctors seemed to have the same set of flowcharts for diagnosing me and never listened to what I said. Each GP did the same tests, sent me to the same types of specialists, and gave up at about the same time. They were like bad help desk personnel reading from the same script.
Fortunately, I met someone with the same problem and went to her doctor (that she'd found through a multi-year search like the one I had been doing). Her doctor was outside my HMO and quite expensive as a result, but well worth the cost as he spent the time to talk with me and learn my medical history, diagnosed the problem correctly, and prescribed a successful set of treatments.
Perhaps you would know the right person to go to immediately, but most of the rest of us are trapped in the HMO system without your connections to find the right person or to convince most MDs to spend more than a couple minutes with us.
The 2004 election revealed many problems with electronic voting: lost votes, undervotes, overvotes, and votes rolling over into negative numbers. These links are taken from the group blog E-voting experts:
Columbus, OH - An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials said. Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,25
I'm not sure your risk evaluation is correct. You may be right about your own field because in some fields, it's relatively easy to get an academic job. However, English is not such a field. As there aren't nearly as many jobs outside universities that require an English PhD as there are for a CS PhD, there are far more English PhDs produced than jobs for them.
After all, if a professor produces 10 grad students during a 30-40 year career, only one of them can get his job. Worse yet, English professors are more likely to be replaced after retirement by several part-time adjuncts rather than by another full time professor. All the effort of getting a PhD, then years of non-tenure track jobs, is a taking a considerable risk with a decade or more of your life on the chance of getting an academic job.
You may have a better chance of becoming an academic making the $20,000 a year a starting English prof makes in many universities than you do of being a writer who makes that much, but I'm not sure the chances are that much better and taking a chance at being a writer doesn't take the decade of time that taking a chance at being an English professor does.
If you haven't used one of the BSDs, why not give FreeBSD a try with the FreeSBIE Live CD? FreeSBIE lets you try out FreeBSD and a wide array of its applications without needing to install anything on your hard disk.
I downloaded it once and installed it on replicated NFS servers for a Fortune 100 company with over 20,000 UNIX/Linux users. The Fedora, SUSE, and Debian maintainers download it once each for a total of millions of users. It takes a lot of multiple-downloaders like you to equal a few people like me and them, so I wouldn't assume that there's fewer than one million users. There might be quite a few more than a million from those million downloads.
You can bring yourself up to speed on the disastrous consequences of the Induce Act on the future of technological innovation by reading some of Ernie Miller's excellent articles. LawMeme provides a regularly updated index to Ernie Miller's Induce Act writings, which is a good place to start reading.
Interesting point. We seem to be living in a culture where it is becoming increasingly popular to explain away all personal responsibility for our actions. No one does anything anymore because they were drunk, stupid, angry, jealous, foolish, greedy or just not able to cope properly. Now its genetic predisposition and psychological forces at work. If these scientists/doctors/quacks are to believed its amazing we dont all just crumble completely into a blubbering mass under the pressure of all these external forces and influences we are subject to.
How are your own brain and genes external forces?
The brain is an organ that functions according to physical laws, but it's also an organ that's evolved to respond to a social environment where people are held accountable. You don't need a soul or some mysterious and magical process of free will to hold people accountable. In fact, you can argue the opposite of that, because if your will was totally unconstrained then the bad consequencies of your actions under the law would have no power to dissuade you from doing them.
Steven Pinker explains this in greater depth than I can here in his book The Blank Slate, which demolishes cherished and commonly held myths about human nature, including the blank slate of the title and the ghost in the machine myth. The book is a good summary of current knowledge of the brain and human nature, but most importantly, it analyzes those commonly held myths about human nature and explains both why they're false and why we don't need to believe them to sustain our society.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a good question. The purpose of a programming language is much the same of that of mathematical notation, which is to allow you to think at the level of abstraction of your problem while not wasting time with irrelevant details. Modern calculus notation gives university freshmen the ability to solve problems in a few hours that baffled the greatest minds of history for thousands of years.
Note that this doesn't mean that you don't have to think when learning a mathematical language. The concepts of limit, derivative, and integral are difficult to grasp at first, but once you understand them, they offer powerful mathematical methods that allow you to think about the problem at hand and not the notation you're using.
Can computer science make similar claims? The jump from assembly to FORTRAN was a tremendous improvement in productivity, but FORTRAN to C or C to C++ produced small to no productivity improvements, perhaps in part because you have to think more and more about the language. We should be looking for a language that may require thinking to learn, but that once when learned offers powerful methods at a high level of abstraction that allow you to think about the problem without being distracted by the language.
I would suggest that we look at languages like Haskell, Scheme, or Smalltalk, which do require that we learn concepts like currying, higher-order functions, monads, and type classes, but which offer a higher level of abstraction and greater consistency than languages like C++ or Java.
Ubuntu doesn't incorporate MP3 and other codecs as part of the distribution because of legal issues, but you can install support for MP3s and most of the other software you want that's excluded with a few clicks of the mouse by using EasyUbuntu.
There are a lot of cheap ways to contaminate crime scenes. Criminals have already begun dumping the contents of public ashtrays onto crime scenes, contaminating the scene with the DNA of dozens of people. We need to consider whether the immense expense and privacy invasion of a national DNA database, along with the inevitable errors and counterfeiting (the 9/11 terrorists were able to pay DMV personnel for fake driver's licenses; surely people will pay to falsify their records to replace their digital DNA records with those of someone else), makes sense when there are such simple, cheap ways to evade the system. Are there other systems that would give us more security for those billions of dollars, perhaps without such loss of privacy?
If you design user interfaces to secure applications, I highly recommend the O'Reilly book Security and Usability. It's a collection of classic and new papers on the topic. Simson Garfinkel's thesis is also a good reference on usability and security.
A 2005 paper by David Evans, "Where's the FEEB? The Effectiveness of Instruction Set Randomization", demonstrates how to remotely determine the key for this protection scheme in under 6 minutes. The paper goes on to examines diversity defenses more broadly to examine schemes that might be resistant to such attacks. The author also gave an interesting talk at USENIX Security Symposium on What Biology Can (and Can't) Teach Us About Security, which is probably a better paper for this article to point to.
Whether a language is functional or imperative says nothing about its type system. There are imperative languages that are typed much like Lisp, and there are functional languages that are typed much like Ada. However, the vast majority of research into type safety and types in general occurs in functional languages. See Benjamin Pierce's Types and Programming Languages, which uses ML, or almost any paper in the field. It's also worth looking at Microsoft Research's work in types (usually tested in their Cw language, though C# 3.0 looks to be inheriting some of ML's type features.)
While C++ is more strongly typed than C, C++ is not type safe. Type safety means that the language ensures that no operation will ever be applied to a variable of the wrong type. However, C++ supports the ability to access arbitrary memory locations, allows type casting, and automatically converts types in many instances. Java is more strongly typed than C++, as it doesn't allow access to arbitrary memory locations, but it also supports casting and automatic conversions, and so is not type safe. If you want type safety, try a language like Ocaml or SPARK Ada.
You prefer to read from a book because it's a superior technology. The book's resolution is far higher than the screen, as books are typically printed at a resolution of 1500dpi or better, compared to around 100dpi for most modern monitors. The book's display is an absorptive technology, which is easier on your eyes than the projective nature of the monitor. You also can't beat the book's infinite "battery life," compared to a few hours for notebook computers.
While technologies like digital ink, which is an absorptive display that doesn't consume power unless you're changing the text, may offer a superior technology to books in the future, the book is a much better technology than current computers for reading large amounts of text.
Intelligent Design was created for the specific purpose of denying naturalism (or materialism as they typically call it.) The problem isn't that a few proponents deny it, but that the entire concept is a Trojan horse designed not just to get creationism into our schools but to eliminate naturalism from science.
The Intelligent Design movement started in 1992 according to its founder Phillip Johnson. Let's look at the beginning of the strategy section of the Wedge document, which describes the purpose of Intelligent Design and how its creators intend to use it:
They organized their Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture at their conference titled "The Death of Materialism and the Renewal of Culture." Their web site a few years later makes it clear that their goals hadn't changed:
Don't be deceived by the image of Intelligent Design that they've carefully constructed through their multimillion dollar PR campaign. Intelligent Design is nothing more than a religious attack on science and naturalism.
A quick look at Dembski's work makes it clear that he believes that the Christian God is the intelligent designer. It's clear that he's not serious about aliens, and a closer look at his writings reveals that the purpose of offering alternative designers like aliens is simply part of what the intelligent design creationists call the "wedge" strategy.
Intelligent design is a legal and public relations strategy designed to get Christianity into the public sphere, and especially to get creationism into American classrooms. Dembski acknowledges the purpose of ID in his own words below:
"In its relation to Christianity, intelligent design should be viewed as a ground-clearing operation that gets rid of the intellectual rubbish that for generations has kept Christianity from receiving serious consideration," Dembski wrote in a reply to [scientific creationist leader] Morris.1. Good technical solutions to the nuclear waste problem have existed since the 1970's. Nuclear waste consists of highly radioactive isotopes with half-lives less than 90 years, which produce 99% of the radioactivity, and less radioactive isotopes with half-lives more than 70,000 years.
We can separate the two types of isotopes. We store the highly radioactive ones for the 300 years or so that's necessary for their radioativity to fall to background levels, and we reprocess the long half life components. Reprocessing can be done in a breeder reactor or in a subcritical reactor activated by a particle beam.
2. None of the waste can be used to build nuclear weapons without extensive processing. The highly radioactive light elements that we need to storeare useless for this purpose even with reprocessing.
3. Modern nuclear plants, like the pebble bed design, cannot melt down. If you're worried about meltdowns, you should be a strong advocate of replacing the US's aging plants with modern nuclear power plants.
4. Yes, but per megawatt of power, coal plants emit more radioactivity than nuclear plants due to the presence of trace amounts of radioactive materials present in coal and the immense amount you have to burn to produce a megawatt of power.
5. False, as explained in another post above.
No, the fundamental advantage of dynamic languages is programmer productivity. You can accomplish a goal in a dynamic language like Scheme, Smalltalk, Python, or Ruby in 100 lines that would require 500 or more lines of Java. That's also an advantage when you have to modify the code--there's less of it and it's faster and easier to read as a result. It's also much simpler and faster to create unit tests in dynamic languages, leading to more and faster testing of projects. These advantages grow with the size of the project.
The other advantage of dynamic languages is flexibility. While Java has limited support for features like reflection and generics, dynamic languages have offered much more powerful and easy to use versions of these features for years. Java is also missing other dynamic features like closures and metaprogramming. Groovy's feature list is an inverted list of many of the limitations in Java's dynamic capabilities.
Java's main contribution to programming languages isn't any new feature. It doesn't have any significant new features, and most of its main features like object orientation, byte-compilation/VM and primitive concurrency were in other languages like Simula and Pascal in the 1960s or 1970s. Java's primary contribution is that it was well marketed and that its limited dynamic features have inspired a large number of programmers to want more of the flexibility that languages like Scheme and Smalltalk offered decades ago.
The copyright industry has tried to tie the unrelated issues of plagiarism and copyright together, in order to attribute the distaste we have for the ancient injustice of plagiarism to the modern practice of perpetual copyright.
We should not succumb to this deception. Plagiarism is a completely different offense that dates back to Roman times if not earlier. The offence of plagiarism is claiming credit for someone else's work. If you purchase the rights to a term paper from its original author or if you copy from a pre-copyright source like Shakespeare or Aristotle, you've still committed plagiarism if you submitted that paper as your own work, even though you haven't committed copyright infringement.
Copyright is the comparatively recent idea of governments granting temporary monopolies to publishers. If you've copied the latest top 20 hit, you've committed copyright infringement though you haven't committed plagiarism unless you redistributed the song under your name instead of the original artist's name. Copyright is a less serious offense than plagiarism, as we can see in part because it's a temporary offence: after all, if the item you copied was old enough for the monopoly to lapse, you haven't committed copyright infringement.
And for your general information, the other gospels and new testament works have not been "tainted" through translation or interpretation- anyone who wants to can still access the original greek of those texts.
We have no original texts; the earliest texts that we have are fragments of copies of copies. Unsurprisingly, these multi-generation copies disagree with each other in places. One well known disagreement is the ending of Mark. The modern ending is found in none of the earliest manuscripts, and when we do begin finding manuscripts with an ending, we find two different endings. The Catholic Church declared the currently popular ending canonical at the Council of Trent in the 16th century.
There is also no "the Bible." Each major branch of the Christian church has their own Bibles, with numbers of books ranging from about two dozen for the Syrian church to 66 for the Protestants to 81 for the Ethiopian church. The most common dates I've seen for the Gospel of Thomas are 100-150, which puts it in about the same range as the 90-120 dates for the Gospel of John.
Since you brought up Paul, it's worth examining the authenticity of his writings too. For example, the Ethiopian Bible has 3 letters to the Corinthians, while the Catholic/Protestant Bible has only 2 such letters. Several of his epistles, including 3rd Corithians, were debated strongly when the Catholic church began putting together its Biblical canon in the 4th century. The Catholics rejected 3rd Corinthians, but kept several of the other more dubious epistles, which modern scholars now have come to same conclusion that some 4th century bishops did--they were forgeries.
The controversy over what was really canonical or not erupted again in Europe with the Protestant Reformation. Luther rejected the apostolicity of Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation, and moved them to the back of his translation of the Catholic Bible. Modern rediscoveries of the gnostic gospels, and communication between the European branch of Christianity with branches in Asia and Africa with their different Bibles have brought these controversies to life again.
In the US, physics classes are predominantly male even in high school. While only 28% of men have taken high school physics, the percentage of women is even lower: 21%. However, the big differences appear in the undergraduate years, where over 80% of physics majors in US universities are men. According to a 1996 survey by the American Institute of Physics, 17% of physics bachelor's and master's degree recipients in 1995 were women, while 12% of physics PhD recipients were women.
I'm curious to know what the difference in Australian educational systems or culture is that makes such a difference in number of women physics undergraduates. Does anyone have any ideas, or knowledge of any studies done on such differences?
Facts and theories are completely different concepts in science. Facts are observations; theories are explanations of facts.
Gravity is a fact, or more precisely, a set of facts describing how objects are attracted to each other. General relativity is our best theory for explaining how gravity works. We know that it's flawed, but we haven't been able to come up with a consistent theory of quantum gravity.
Evolution is also a fact. It is the observed change in allele frequencies over time. We've observed species adapting to new situations, and we've observed new species evolving from older ones. Natural selection is our best current theory for how explaining how evolution works.
Neither Creationism and Intelligent Design are theories. They are both myths, which cannot be tested or falsified.
Singling out the fact of evolution or the theory of natural selection is an attempt by American fundamentalists to prevent children from seriously considering and understanding evolution. They do it for the same reasons that people objected to the heliocentric model of the solar system: they think it reduces the significance of humanity so that it's not the most important thing in the cosmos.
Is scientific truth important in this case? Yes, modern biology is based on the foundation of evolution. Look to history to see what happens when dogma trumps scientific fact: google for Lysenkoism, which the dogmatic Soviet interpretation of Lamarck's failed theory of acquired characteristics, that lead to the starvation and death of millions of Russians in the 20th century.
Of course, if it were genetics, according to Darwin, it would be a trait that should have been wiped out long ago since homosexuals cant reproduce.
While homosexuals can reproduce, the largest problem with your argument is your complete misunderstanding of Darwin. Even if homosexuality had no reproductive value, it could still be propagated if possessing two such genes made your homosexual but having one such gene increased your chances of reproduction. Many recessive genetic traits follow this pattern, where having one gene is beneficial to survival, while having two such genes is harmful. However, reproducing isn't the only way to propagate your genes. Your siblings share 1/2 your genes on average, so if being homosexual increases the chances of your nieces, nephews, and cousins surviving to a reproductive age, the continued existence of homosexuality can also be selected for through kin selection
As you say, you're an MD, which gives you a different perspective on health care. For example, you know many MDs personally and indirectly through them have a network to many other MDs. Don't you doctor shop too, to find the best person you know? The rest of us don't know any MDs personally, so to find the best doctor, all we have are recommendations from friends who aren't MDs, which are sometimes useful, but generally we actually have to go in for a visit to see how good someone is.
Also, how long will your doctor see you for? The typical visit time for my HMO is 2 minutes, and I've never personally been able to keep a doctor in the room for 5 minutes, even when it took longer than that span to explain my problem.
I've been in Patrick's position, having a chronic condition where I went through over a dozen doctors who were completely useless. All the doctors seemed to have the same set of flowcharts for diagnosing me and never listened to what I said. Each GP did the same tests, sent me to the same types of specialists, and gave up at about the same time. They were like bad help desk personnel reading from the same script.
Fortunately, I met someone with the same problem and went to her doctor (that she'd found through a multi-year search like the one I had been doing). Her doctor was outside my HMO and quite expensive as a result, but well worth the cost as he spent the time to talk with me and learn my medical history, diagnosed the problem correctly, and prescribed a successful set of treatments.
Perhaps you would know the right person to go to immediately, but most of the rest of us are trapped in the HMO system without your connections to find the right person or to convince most MDs to spend more than a couple minutes with us.
The 2004 election revealed many problems with electronic voting: lost votes, undervotes, overvotes, and votes rolling over into negative numbers. These links are taken from the group blog E-voting experts:
If you aren't ready to install FreeBSD on your hard disk, you can try out FreeBSD 5 with the live FreeSBIE CD. It's currently based on FreeBSD 5.2.1.
After all, if a professor produces 10 grad students during a 30-40 year career, only one of them can get his job. Worse yet, English professors are more likely to be replaced after retirement by several part-time adjuncts rather than by another full time professor. All the effort of getting a PhD, then years of non-tenure track jobs, is a taking a considerable risk with a decade or more of your life on the chance of getting an academic job.
You may have a better chance of becoming an academic making the $20,000 a year a starting English prof makes in many universities than you do of being a writer who makes that much, but I'm not sure the chances are that much better and taking a chance at being a writer doesn't take the decade of time that taking a chance at being an English professor does.
If you haven't used one of the BSDs, why not give FreeBSD a try with the FreeSBIE Live CD? FreeSBIE lets you try out FreeBSD and a wide array of its applications without needing to install anything on your hard disk.
I downloaded it once and installed it on replicated NFS servers for a Fortune 100 company with over 20,000 UNIX/Linux users. The Fedora, SUSE, and Debian maintainers download it once each for a total of millions of users. It takes a lot of multiple-downloaders like you to equal a few people like me and them, so I wouldn't assume that there's fewer than one million users. There might be quite a few more than a million from those million downloads.
You can bring yourself up to speed on the disastrous consequences of the Induce Act on the future of technological innovation by reading some of Ernie Miller's excellent articles. LawMeme provides a regularly updated index to Ernie Miller's Induce Act writings, which is a good place to start reading.
How are your own brain and genes external forces?
The brain is an organ that functions according to physical laws, but it's also an organ that's evolved to respond to a social environment where people are held accountable. You don't need a soul or some mysterious and magical process of free will to hold people accountable. In fact, you can argue the opposite of that, because if your will was totally unconstrained then the bad consequencies of your actions under the law would have no power to dissuade you from doing them.
Steven Pinker explains this in greater depth than I can here in his book The Blank Slate , which demolishes cherished and commonly held myths about human nature, including the blank slate of the title and the ghost in the machine myth. The book is a good summary of current knowledge of the brain and human nature, but most importantly, it analyzes those commonly held myths about human nature and explains both why they're false and why we don't need to believe them to sustain our society.