How can you list Card with those three? (Besides the fact that he's not dead,) he wouldn't know a stupid, unbelievable plot device if he shot himself in the foot with it.
Actually I just read an article yesterday about a Muslim who immigrated to America. He did not want to come because he thought America was "immoral and violent". Once he got here he saw that things are different, but guess where he got that impression from.
Yes, from the ultimate American ambassidor: Hollywood. Most Islamic people are *very* conservative. The morals and violence depicted in movies casts us in a very bad light, and it can easily be concluded that "America" is to blame for increases in immorality and crime. (If Americans can blame it on video games, Muslims can blame it on Americans.)
Whether you agree with that viewpoint or not, if you don't at least understand that viewpoint, you may be part of the problem.
Personally, I don't see how copyright, fair use, or artist's rights even apply to this issue. These videos are clearly marked as being altered, and clean flicks has paid the studio for the film.
If I buy a shirt and wear out the elbows, I have the right to sell it to a second hand store or at a garage sale.
If I buy a computer and replace the hard drive, I can resell it on Ebay.
If I buy a book and tear out a few pages, no will stop me from offering it for sale to someone else. Nor will anyone complain if someone is crazy enough to buy it, as long as I make them aware of the condition of the book.
If I buy a CD and scratch it so one of the songs is unplayable, I still have the right to resell it.
Why do so many people think the situation is any different, just because pr0n is at stake?
After first sale, the artist/ director/ author/ inventor/ seemstress/ whatever has very little control over what happens to that one particular copy. As long as the changes are not libelous and it remains identifiable as that one particular copy, they really don't have much control over what happens to it.
Re:Concurrent/Distributed tasks
on
Ask Larry Wall
·
· Score: 1
Because it's a text markup format, not a programming language.
I think I'll go write a 10MB technical report as one big nested S-expression. Yeah, right.
One clue too few...
Re:How to become a Perl Guru
on
Ask Larry Wall
·
· Score: 1
I skipped the Llama and Camel, and learned from the perldocs and having a project to do in perl, but I highly recommend Advanced Perl. It has a good and clear explanation of references and OO, and covers some very useful modules.
Don't memorize the perldocs. Just know what's there and consult them often.
What's it like to be a geek celebrity amoung a community of non-geek christians?
A bit like being a ordinary person, I'll wager.
Re:Concurrent/Distributed tasks
on
Ask Larry Wall
·
· Score: 1
I think the other replies misunderstood what you are looking for in "execute and communicate remotely". I think you are asking for an easy to use network-IPC protocol.
If you don't like SOAP, try CORBA, DCE, XML-RPC or even RPC::Simple. Personally, I use HTTP because every language can talk to me. The last thing perl needs is another cannot-work-with-anyone-else protocol like EJB. (uh-oh, here come the java appologists now...)
Re:Dear Larry: Are you crazy?
on
Ask Larry Wall
·
· Score: 1
Larry's background is in chemistry and linguistics. Messy real-world things, instead of mathematically idealized syntaxes.
Sure different styles arise without necessity. On the other hand, sometimes there is a necessity: the other style is more clear and succinct for the task at hand. Considering how many people believe Dijkstra's point of view, it actually took a lot of courage to give the programmer more than one way to do it.
Perl doesn't have an Artistic License for nothing, you know.
Re:Perl as a "scripting" or a "programming" langua
on
Ask Larry Wall
·
· Score: 1
A scripting language lets you get the job done in minimal time without reinventing the wheel. It makes easy things easy and hard things possible (and usually easy because someone else already wrote a module to do that).
A programming language lets you get the job done "correctly" for some academic definition of "correctly", which isn't any more correct than what you could have done in a scripting language, but it was a lot harder, took a lot more time, and involved a lot of artificially complex things like "design patterns", so it MUST have worth all that extra effort.:)
(or more specifically...)
Scripting languages are usually typeless or dynamically typed, have features such as named function parameters, garbage collection, a very large standard library with high-level interfaces, and use TK for their GUI. Basic types in scripting languages are strings, numbers, lists, and associative arrays. They do not usually require being precompiled, as they are either interpreted or pre-compiled at the beginning of each run.
Programming languages (in the non-scripting sense; scripting languages are a subclass of programming languages) are usually strongly typed, have unsafe memory allocation, and a low-level standard library. Basic types in programming languages are char, int, long, float, double, etc, and occasionally even string. They require compilation to machine code or occasionally bytecode. (Java is half-way between a programming language and a scripting language.)
Perl 5 is the perfect combination of speed, power, simplicity and huffman encoding, and I expect perl 6 to be even more perfect. Perl 1-5 has been growing like a wart, and perl 6 is where they get to clean up and simplify the syntax, improve huffman encoding, and increase the power at the same time.
And all this while using that power to maintain a backward-compatible translator. Your concerns about syntax are unfounded. Changing "->" to "." improves readabiliy and huffman encoding. You can still use sedawkish regexes with the -p5 modifier and do sedawkish things like '/pattern/ && action;'
The speed may take a round or two of optimization, but you can't have everything in the x.0 version anyway. Parrot is a whole new way of doing perl, but a welcome change, since current perl internals are *really* scary.
I think of java/python/C# as competing with perl. It has been here longer, even before OO was in fashion. Perl's OO works great, but looks odd to some people, because TIMTOWTDI. A cleaner syntax will make the j/p/c people feel warmer and fuzzier, so they won't mistakenly assume (as an earlier poster did) that perl OO does not have inheritance or polymorphism.
I am very scientific/technical, and I do not find any contradiction between religion and science. Just a lot of comparing apples and oranges.
Scientific people shouldn't expect the Bible to have any sort of resemblance to their current theories. Besides the fact that the current theories keep changing, the theories are describing fine details. Extrapoling from molecular interactions to something of moderate complexity (like weather for instance) is way beyond science. Scientists are optimistic that it can be done if enough computational power can be harnessed, but that just shows that science has to to rely on faith just as much as religion does.
Natural events in the Bible are like describing ants from 10,000 meters. Imagine God describing the creation to Moses:
GOD: Well, I took several parsecs of dispersed hydrogen gas, and condensed it with gravity until thermonuclear ignition occured.
Moses: parsec? hydrogen? gravity? thermo-what?
GOD: Um, I said "Let there be light!" And there was light.
Moses: Oh, yeah. I get it. Pretty slick.
GOD: OK, later I came up with this really versatile molecule called DNA, and spent a few billion years tweaking it to create great varieties of plants and animals.
Moses: molecule? DNA? billion?
GOD: I created lions, tigers, and bears, OK?
Moses: Lions, tigers, and bears. Oh my!
GOD: Look, we'll cover that stuff in more detail in the next life. Right now, I have some commandments I would like you to work on...
Re:How Object-Oriented is Perl
on
Ask Larry Wall
·
· Score: 1
OO Perl inheritance and polymporhism are wonderful compared to, say, C++ or Java. The lack of compile-time checking gives you incredible flexibility.
Amen, brother!
I feel like I spend more time typecasting in other languages than doing actual computation. If you call a car a vehicle, why does it forget that it is a car?
Many college professors put courses online. The lower level/remedial college courses would be excellent for junior high and high school aged children.
Here's link to an annotated, java-illustrated Eudlid's Geometry, since it's way cool, and geometry is taught as early as 8th grade in schools.
K-6 material is more difficult to find for free, I agree. Schoolhouse Technologies has a math worksheet factory that we like, available in pay, trial, and free(lite) versions. Another tool we use is StartWrite which also has a trial version. (Google can't find any pages which link to both of those sites. bummer.)
There is probably a lot of print material for the basics which has expired copyright, but is hard to find since it is so old. The historical fiction by G.A.Henty is excellent. Gutenburg has a few, and the rest are being republished at Prestonspeed Publications.
Re: opposites
on
The Last Place
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
However, there's almost never a real 'cure' to most ailments.
To 'cure' an ailment, you first have to treat the cause of the disease instead of the symptoms. Most cold remedies only treat the symptoms, which are the body's natural immune response to disease, so they actually slow down the body's healing. (This of course gives any non-western healing system a immediate advantage as people who try them notice the faster healing time.)
To treat the cause of a disease, you have to know what it is. Many diseases are simply labels for a condition which could have any number of causes (exzema, flu, anything-ending-in-'itis'). Most patients and doctors are satisfied with a label and a pill (and if that doesn't work, maybe we'll try a different pill). But knowing what the cause is in a biological system is extremely difficult. Different healing systems have their own theories, which are not mutually exclusive (even though the proponents argue as if they are).
In clinical studies, the result was no better than a placebo.
The placebo effect is real, and may be the most important factor in many cases. In double blind studies, a 5% improvement over the control group is "statistically significant" enough to justify the use of the drug. The placebo effect can be negative too. The patient must believe in his medicine, or it probably won't help him. Even Jesus healed by faith.
So it's not that herbal solutions aren't being looked at seriously, or that there isn't funding.
The problem is that the results are not published. Negative or positive, the companies consider the results a valuable trade secret, and only divulge in the patent the method of synthesis, not the source plants.
I read a very interesting article in Scientific American once (short article; not a feature length article) about a berry which was an effective treatment for a local disease in Africa. The authors had tipped off more than one company/university about this, but when they checked back later, each organization had found the chemical and found it so effective that they had decided to "patent instead of publish". In the end nothing useful was accomplished because the research results were secret, and those suffering from the disease could not afford commercially synthesized drugs.
Diabetes is rampant among American Indians. The cause is a diet of white sugar and white flour.
These people have not yet adapted to (been weeded out by?) highly processed and easily assimilated sugars, and the natural result is high blood sugar levels (diabetes).
I hate the "PC" crowd as much as anyone, and you have a valid point, but you are oversimplifying it quite a bit.
I was not a simple land war. I was in fact a whole series of wars over a period of a couple centuries. Many of these wars ended in treaties, in true European fashion. Many of the following wars began when the settlers wanted more land or wanted something on the treaty land. At which point the terms of previous treaties were ignored or forgotten.
The valid condemnations are primarily for breaking treaties so often. After the Mexican war you mention, a treaty was made, and the border has stayed the same since then.
who were later nearly wiped out by smallpox and other diseases. When Europeans such as the Pilgrims arrived, they found cleared fields and no people, and they concluded (falsely) that the New World was a "virgin" land.
Didn't those diseases not occur until after western settlers?
In the case of the Mayflower pilgrims, the cleared fields were empty because the tribe had been wiped out from disease due to contact with earlier European explorers/traders. Read about how Squanto learned English sometime.
(b) ADDITIONAL VIOLATIONS- (1) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that--
(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof;
(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof; or
(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person's knowledge for use in circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof.
(IANAL) www.visoly.com markets the device as a means for independant game developers to produce their own cartridges. Unless you or someone you know is marketing it as a game copier, NOA would have to prove that independant game developers are a "limited commercially significant purpose", or that visoly is cooperating with someone who is marketing the device as a game copier.
IMAP and LDAP have provided us with the means to share email and address books, even with proprietary exchange servers.
What we need is more support for standards for shared calendaring too. Email clients which have calendars should be able to send and receive appointments in vCalendar/iCalendar format, and allow the user to accept the appointment.
Beyond that that, they should support iTIP (RFC 2446) for general group scheduling.
Do any opensource projects support this yet? All the open source projects I have looked at develope their own proprietary methods of sharing calendar information.
Slashdot Mirror
If you like distant future, and have not read Arthur C. Clarke's "The City and the Stars", I would recommend it highly.
Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Card
How can you list Card with those three? (Besides the fact that he's not dead,) he wouldn't know a stupid, unbelievable plot device if he shot himself in the foot with it.
Actually I just read an article yesterday about a Muslim who immigrated to America. He did not want to come because he thought America was "immoral and violent". Once he got here he saw that things are different, but guess where he got that impression from.
Yes, from the ultimate American ambassidor: Hollywood. Most Islamic people are *very* conservative. The morals and violence depicted in movies casts us in a very bad light, and it can easily be concluded that "America" is to blame for increases in immorality and crime. (If Americans can blame it on video games, Muslims can blame it on Americans.)
Whether you agree with that viewpoint or not, if you don't at least understand that viewpoint, you may be part of the problem.
Personally, I don't see how copyright, fair use, or artist's rights even apply to this issue. These videos are clearly marked as being altered, and clean flicks has paid the studio for the film.
If I buy a shirt and wear out the elbows, I have the right to sell it to a second hand store or at a garage sale.
If I buy a computer and replace the hard drive, I can resell it on Ebay.
If I buy a book and tear out a few pages, no will stop me from offering it for sale to someone else. Nor will anyone complain if someone is crazy enough to buy it, as long as I make them aware of the condition of the book.
If I buy a CD and scratch it so one of the songs is unplayable, I still have the right to resell it.
Why do so many people think the situation is any different, just because pr0n is at stake?
After first sale, the artist/ director/ author/ inventor/ seemstress/ whatever has very little control over what happens to that one particular copy. As long as the changes are not libelous and it remains identifiable as that one particular copy, they really don't have much control over what happens to it.
Yep, there's a Jabber::RPC module on cpan too.
Because it's a text markup format, not a programming language.
I think I'll go write a 10MB technical report as one big nested S-expression. Yeah, right.
One clue too few...
I skipped the Llama and Camel, and learned from the perldocs and having a project to do in perl, but I highly recommend Advanced Perl. It has a good and clear explanation of references and OO, and covers some very useful modules.
Don't memorize the perldocs. Just know what's there and consult them often.
What's it like to be a geek celebrity amoung a community of non-geek christians?
A bit like being a ordinary person, I'll wager.
I think the other replies misunderstood what you are looking for in "execute and communicate remotely". I think you are asking for an easy to use network-IPC protocol.
If you don't like SOAP, try CORBA, DCE, XML-RPC or even RPC::Simple. Personally, I use HTTP because every language can talk to me. The last thing perl needs is another cannot-work-with-anyone-else protocol like EJB. (uh-oh, here come the java appologists now...)
Larry's background is in chemistry and linguistics. Messy real-world things, instead of mathematically idealized syntaxes.
Sure different styles arise without necessity. On the other hand, sometimes there is a necessity: the other style is more clear and succinct for the task at hand. Considering how many people believe Dijkstra's point of view, it actually took a lot of courage to give the programmer more than one way to do it.
Perl doesn't have an Artistic License for nothing, you know.
A scripting language lets you get the job done in minimal time without reinventing the wheel. It makes easy things easy and hard things possible (and usually easy because someone else already wrote a module to do that).
:)
A programming language lets you get the job done "correctly" for some academic definition of "correctly", which isn't any more correct than what you could have done in a scripting language, but it was a lot harder, took a lot more time, and involved a lot of artificially complex things like "design patterns", so it MUST have worth all that extra effort.
(or more specifically...)
Scripting languages are usually typeless or dynamically typed, have features such as named function parameters, garbage collection, a very large standard library with high-level interfaces, and use TK for their GUI. Basic types in scripting languages are strings, numbers, lists, and associative arrays. They do not usually require being precompiled, as they are either interpreted or pre-compiled at the beginning of each run.
Programming languages (in the non-scripting sense; scripting languages are a subclass of programming languages) are usually strongly typed, have unsafe memory allocation, and a low-level standard library. Basic types in programming languages are char, int, long, float, double, etc, and occasionally even string. They require compilation to machine code or occasionally bytecode. (Java is half-way between a programming language and a scripting language.)
Perl 5 is the perfect combination of speed, power, simplicity and huffman encoding, and I expect perl 6 to be even more perfect. Perl 1-5 has been growing like a wart, and perl 6 is where they get to clean up and simplify the syntax, improve huffman encoding, and increase the power at the same time.
And all this while using that power to maintain a backward-compatible translator. Your concerns about syntax are unfounded. Changing "->" to "." improves readabiliy and huffman encoding. You can still use sedawkish regexes with the -p5 modifier and do sedawkish things like '/pattern/ && action;'
The speed may take a round or two of optimization, but you can't have everything in the x.0 version anyway. Parrot is a whole new way of doing perl, but a welcome change, since current perl internals are *really* scary.
I think of java/python/C# as competing with perl. It has been here longer, even before OO was in fashion. Perl's OO works great, but looks odd to some people, because TIMTOWTDI. A cleaner syntax will make the j/p/c people feel warmer and fuzzier, so they won't mistakenly assume (as an earlier poster did) that perl OO does not have inheritance or polymorphism.
I am very scientific/technical, and I do not find any contradiction between religion and science. Just a lot of comparing apples and oranges.
Scientific people shouldn't expect the Bible to have any sort of resemblance to their current theories. Besides the fact that the current theories keep changing, the theories are describing fine details. Extrapoling from molecular interactions to something of moderate complexity (like weather for instance) is way beyond science. Scientists are optimistic that it can be done if enough computational power can be harnessed, but that just shows that science has to to rely on faith just as much as religion does.
Natural events in the Bible are like describing ants from 10,000 meters. Imagine God describing the creation to Moses:
GOD: Well, I took several parsecs of dispersed hydrogen gas, and condensed it with gravity until thermonuclear ignition occured.
Moses: parsec? hydrogen? gravity? thermo-what?
GOD: Um, I said "Let there be light!" And there was light.
Moses: Oh, yeah. I get it. Pretty slick.
GOD: OK, later I came up with this really versatile molecule called DNA, and spent a few billion years tweaking it to create great varieties of plants and animals.
Moses: molecule? DNA? billion?
GOD: I created lions, tigers, and bears, OK?
Moses: Lions, tigers, and bears. Oh my!
GOD: Look, we'll cover that stuff in more detail in the next life. Right now, I have some commandments I would like you to work on...
OO Perl inheritance and polymporhism are wonderful compared to, say, C++ or Java. The lack of compile-time checking gives you incredible flexibility.
Amen, brother!
I feel like I spend more time typecasting in other languages than doing actual computation. If you call a car a vehicle, why does it forget that it is a car?
My wife selected a few links from her homeschooling bookmarks, where you can find lots of free material:
Homeschool Central - Study Resources
TeacherFeatures.com
Homeschool Support on the Internet
HomeworkCentral.com - Lesson Plans by Subject
NGA: Teaching Resources: Loan Programs
Novel Study Guides for the Classroom Teacher
Outline Maps
100 Top Map Sites
Unit Studies (huge site!)
Lesson Plans & Teacher Helps
Newton's Apple
MathWork -- Math worksheets you can create in your browser
S.C.O.R.E.
homeschooling.about.com
A to Z Home's Cool - Homeschooling Web Site
Jon's Homeschool Resource Page
Many college professors put courses online. The lower level/remedial college courses would be excellent for junior high and high school aged children.
Here's link to an annotated, java-illustrated Eudlid's Geometry, since it's way cool, and geometry is taught as early as 8th grade in schools.
K-6 material is more difficult to find for free, I agree. Schoolhouse Technologies has a math worksheet factory that we like, available in pay, trial, and free(lite) versions. Another tool we use is StartWrite which also has a trial version. (Google can't find any pages which link to both of those sites. bummer.)
There is probably a lot of print material for the basics which has expired copyright, but is hard to find since it is so old. The historical fiction by G.A.Henty is excellent. Gutenburg has a few, and the rest are being republished at Prestonspeed Publications.
What is the opposite of "pro-life"?
"anti-life" or "pro-death"?
However, there's almost never a real 'cure' to most ailments.
To 'cure' an ailment, you first have to treat the cause of the disease instead of the symptoms. Most cold remedies only treat the symptoms, which are the body's natural immune response to disease, so they actually slow down the body's healing. (This of course gives any non-western healing system a immediate advantage as people who try them notice the faster healing time.)
To treat the cause of a disease, you have to know what it is. Many diseases are simply labels for a condition which could have any number of causes (exzema, flu, anything-ending-in-'itis'). Most patients and doctors are satisfied with a label and a pill (and if that doesn't work, maybe we'll try a different pill). But knowing what the cause is in a biological system is extremely difficult. Different healing systems have their own theories, which are not mutually exclusive (even though the proponents argue as if they are).
In clinical studies, the result was no better than a placebo.
The placebo effect is real, and may be the most important factor in many cases. In double blind studies, a 5% improvement over the control group is "statistically significant" enough to justify the use of the drug. The placebo effect can be negative too. The patient must believe in his medicine, or it probably won't help him. Even Jesus healed by faith.
So it's not that herbal solutions aren't being looked at seriously, or that there isn't funding.
The problem is that the results are not published. Negative or positive, the companies consider the results a valuable trade secret, and only divulge in the patent the method of synthesis, not the source plants.
I read a very interesting article in Scientific American once (short article; not a feature length article) about a berry which was an effective treatment for a local disease in Africa. The authors had tipped off more than one company/university about this, but when they checked back later, each organization had found the chemical and found it so effective that they had decided to "patent instead of publish". In the end nothing useful was accomplished because the research results were secret, and those suffering from the disease could not afford commercially synthesized drugs.
Diabetes is rampant among American Indians. The cause is a diet of white sugar and white flour.
These people have not yet adapted to (been weeded out by?) highly processed and easily assimilated sugars, and the natural result is high blood sugar levels (diabetes).
They have a web site, a mission statement, and ..... nothing!
Can you say "recipe for failure"?
... six hours ...
Is that the version with two hours of Tom Bombadil's singing?
I hate the "PC" crowd as much as anyone, and you have a valid point, but you are oversimplifying it quite a bit.
I was not a simple land war. I was in fact a whole series of wars over a period of a couple centuries. Many of these wars ended in treaties, in true European fashion. Many of the following wars began when the settlers wanted more land or wanted something on the treaty land. At which point the terms of previous treaties were ignored or forgotten.
The valid condemnations are primarily for breaking treaties so often. After the Mexican war you mention, a treaty was made, and the border has stayed the same since then.
who were later nearly wiped out by smallpox and other diseases. When Europeans such as the Pilgrims arrived, they found cleared fields and no people, and they concluded (falsely) that the New World was a "virgin" land.
Didn't those diseases not occur until after western settlers?
In the case of the Mayflower pilgrims, the cleared fields were empty because the tribe had been wiped out from disease due to contact with earlier European explorers/traders. Read about how Squanto learned English sometime.
(b) ADDITIONAL VIOLATIONS- (1) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that--
(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof;
(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof; or
(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person's knowledge for use in circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof.
(IANAL) www.visoly.com markets the device as a means for independant game developers to produce their own cartridges. Unless you or someone you know is marketing it as a game copier, NOA would have to prove that independant game developers are a "limited commercially significant purpose", or that visoly is cooperating with someone who is marketing the device as a game copier.
IMAP and LDAP have provided us with the means to share email and address books, even with proprietary exchange servers.
What we need is more support for standards for shared calendaring too. Email clients which have calendars should be able to send and receive appointments in vCalendar/iCalendar format, and allow the user to accept the appointment.
Beyond that that, they should support iTIP (RFC 2446) for general group scheduling.
Do any opensource projects support this yet? All the open source projects I have looked at develope their own proprietary methods of sharing calendar information.