Where are the research papers about how to get more men into Nursing? Or men into elementary education? How about Men into being stay at home dads? Men being "Admin Assistants"?
Why does it seem that "gender equality" only a one way street?
Yeah, there's absolutely no interest in getting men into primary education or nursing or anything like that. It's ridiculous. Now, if I can just continue to fail to look for any such things, I can continue to believe they don't exit.
This does not surprise me in the least. But then I'm a mathematician and I have pretty much the same sort of reaction when I see what they teach in many high school mathematics classes -- it's a pale shadow of real mathematics; mostly just a hodge podge of poorly taught arbitrary skills and facts that may or may not have a lot of relevance to actual mathematics. There is a disconnect where many people don't see the difference over the difference between "facts about mathematics" and actual mathematics. It therefore comes as little surprise to me that there is a similar disconnect over the difference between "things you do on computers" and computer science.
The simple answer is that both mathematics and computer science are far too often taught by people who don't really actually have any grasp of the subject. Get someone who actually knows computer science to teach the subject and it will be taught very differently and cover different things. Get someone who actually knows mathematics well and it will be taught very differently and cover different things. Welcome to the real world. It sucks. Get used to it.
There are times a government needs to keep secrets, however the US government has gone way overboard. Obama has done nothing to change that despite promises of a more open government, so I for one welcome the new openness that has come from wikileaks and will support efforts for it to continue.
It's quite possible that recent incidents with Wikileaks have gone a long way toward setting back openness and transparency in government. So far nothing classified Top Secret or above has been leaked. So now, anyone the least bit concerned about keeping information secret in government is just going to go for the higher levels of classification and associated compartmentalization. Far more information is going to be slapped with Top Secret and be much less widely read so people can play it safe. Honestly, after these leaks expect to see less information make it out to the public as government gets over-zealous with over classification.
This leak was a win for both the US and China. It gets the word out that China isn't going to back any stupid actions by Kim Jong-il. without China's leadership having to say so publicly. This helps calm the situation down.
Well, that's what you think is going to be the outcome here, and that there won't be any associated ill effects from North Korea feeling alienated by China. I presume you're an expert on Chinese and Korean affairs who is familiar enough with the intricacies involved to know that this is the highly likely outcome, with no unforseen nasty repurcussions. Oddly other people who are also experts on the situation apparently deemed that making the information public was not helpful -- or else they would have made it public. I'm glad we can rely on your authoritative analysis, and can safely ignore decisions made by others who have also spent their entire careers studying the delicate politics of the region. I mean, I presume this is your career right?
I suppose you have a significantly better (simpler and more flexible) compiled OO language suitable for system-level programming up your sleeve, when you talk like that.
I'm not sure "simpler and more flexible" are the only measures of "better", but if you want compiled OO languages suitable for systems level programming that are arguably better than Objective-C, you could try
Ada2005
Eiffel
Lisp (with CLOS for OO)
OCaml
Certainly arguments for each of them as better options could be made.
Also, MS produces a much better integrated and more functional development environment that anything available in the FOSS world.
They're nowhere near the level of depth in the HPC world that linux has, but if they can do for parallel programming what VB did for programming generally (make is accesible to non-programmer domain experts) then it could be a compelling alternative.
If you want that, then you're probably looking for either X10 or Chapel which offer a huge leap forward in making massive scale parallel programming simpler and easier. Of course X10 is from IBM and has Eclipse and plugins as the dev environment, and the closest they offer to a Windows version of the compiler is one compiled against cygwin. Chapel is from Cray, and has practically no Windows support, save for a claim that you can get it working with cygwin. Both languages are excellently supported on Linux (which is, of course, what Cray and IBM supercomputers run these days). So it woudl seem the future of parallel programming is firmly in the linux camp.
Not sure what is more amazing, that INTERCAL "exists" or that I had never heard of it. Very good stuff, and thanks.
And yet there exists worse. Malbolge generally takes the cake for the most esoteric and unreadable programming language. It only took a couple of years to write "Hello world" in it.
Is there any high-level, easy language today that's not threathened somewhow by f%^&%ng patents from the big guys?
Well, presuming you want something fast, as opposed to say Python or Ruby, there are some options:
Ada: No, seriously, it's a nice language and Ada2005 is worth looking at; perhaps lower level than you might like. I seriously doubt it faces any patent troubles whatsoever.
D: Sort of C++ done right. Unlikely to face patent issues, but does have some standard library issues with more recent versions of D being incompatible with some standard library efforts.
Eiffel: High level, OO, garbage collection, generics, closures, and still fast and memory efficient. It might have patent issues from ISE, but they're very small, and the core language and IDE are all GPL.
If you read through some of the forum posts linked in the article you'll see that after not too long he encountered protoss players who easily countered his rush based on scouting and knowing what sorts of things to do. In this case the right thing to do is see that there are no zerglings out, so whack down a forge and at the last minute warp in some cannons behind a building wall. That pretty much stops the rush dead, at little cost to the protoss economy, while the rushing zerg has little left, with the cannons not arriving till he was committed to the rush and thus lost all his units. It will not be long before this sort of obvious counter becomes well known and the rush will become completely ineffective.
Personally, speaking as a software engineer, I do wish I had studied more higher math in college, because it would help me do more. More and better mental tools rarely hurt. But, to be honest, that really hasn't affected my earning power in the slightest.
Because earning power is the only relevant measure of value from education? I've read a lot of poetry, but it sure hasn't affected my earning power in the slightest; it must have been a complete waste of time. And really, why bother reading Shakespeare in English class? I bet that has very little affect on people's earning power. The time would probably be better spent reading and analysing corporate memos and license agreements.
I know this will apparently come as a shock to many on Slashdot (who repeat the same sort of line as you do here), but career and earning power are not the be all and end all of life. Education is not just vocational training, and how much more money you can get for it is not really the greatest universal measure of whether something is worthwhile.
You sound like someone complaining that people who go to a restaurant for a meal are idiots. Clearly they could save themselves considerable money and precious time by simply taking the relevant proteins, vitamins and nutrients, intravenously while they work. Apparently you see the only way to value a meal is how much time and money it saves you, not how good it tastes, or the enjoyment gained from it.
Sometimes education is worth it simply to be a better person; to have a better and broader understanding of the world; to sate curiousity, and to inspire it; to learn more about other people, and to learn more about yourself. Utility should not always be measured in cold hard lucre.
That's nice in principle, but poor in practice. There are some fields of mathematics that can be taught from scratch with little requirement for much other math outside of that little field. Those are few and far between however. If you've had any experience trying to teach math, even to people who need it, who don't have the necessary background, you'll understand. It is an extremely frustrating process for the student, because the reality is that mathematics is one of those subjects that is very hard to pick up later, and is certainly hard to pick up piecemeal.
I'm glad that you managed to picm up the bits and pieces required, but in my experience teaching math, you are the exceptional student: most have a great deal of difficulty picking it up -- instead they require labourious coverage of the pre-requisites which, unfortunately can take years -- it's not a very practical way to go about it.
Saving memory isn't the only reason to use Fluxbox
Unless you're equally selective about every other application you choose to run other than just your window manager, Fluxbox isn't saving you much memory. As soon as you run any app that makes much use of, say, GTK, you're pulling in a whole bunch of libraries that, were you running GNOME, would be shared with most other applications you're running, and hence you're no longer making any significant saving. That's not to say you can't partner Fluxbox with a careful selection of apps to have a very resource light solution, just that using Fluxbox is not much of a saving on its own.
That's a non-sequitur: it was neevr meant to be an app store, and that wasn't the point under discussion. The question was: is the app store more closed than linux repositories. The answer is yes. You could have the app store and still have the repository style open nature that let's other people set up stores that, when added, will present Apps from those stores right alongside the Apple store apps. The creator, hoster, and distributor of the new store can arrange payment for you.
But Apple can't be blamed for that. You want your programs to use their repository features you submit it to their repository. Just like if you want you programs to be included in a Linux repository you submit it to the repository maintainer.
Well yes, but with linux the whole infrastructure is open. If you want the benefits of repository based easy install and automatic updating for Ubuntu then you submit it to canonical. If they reject you for inclusion you can always try and get included in the Universe repositories. If that fails you can always get it added to one of the third party repositories (such as, say Medibuntu which many users add to their repositories). If that fails you can do like Google did for their Chrome linux beta and simply host their own repository. If that fails you can always set up you own PPA on launchpad.
The only thing Ubuntu's core repositories have going for them is that they are in the repository list by default. Any of those other options, from third party, to a PPA, will, once added to the repository list (which is easy to do), see your app as indistinguishable from the Ubuntu provided ones when the user browses available applications, updates, etc. There is no "one true repository" -- you can add more if you wish and the app selection and updating tools will see it as all the same. Other distros are no different.
This is a significant difference, unless Apple actually allows independent people to set up their own stores that will, if selected by the user, see the apps from that store presented right along side the Apple store apps in the same GUI. If that's the case, then great; if it's not, then there is a big difference bwteen Linux repositories and what Apple is proposing.
The downward spiral began with Lincoln violating the Constitution and starting a war to prevent people from peacefully leaving the US.
The downward spiral began with Jefferson violating the Constitution and purchasing Louisiana from the French when the constitution gave no provision for such actions. President's all throughout history violated strict readings of the constitution whenever it was expedient. Yes, in principle they needed to get a constitutional amendment passed; in practice that was either infeasible,or would have taken to long for the problem at hand (Jefferson's Louisiana purchase being a fine example, FDR's New Deal being pushed through when it became necessary is another). Ultimately this is a weakness of the constitution -- what the correct fix is, I am not sure, but let's be honest enough to admit that Presidents of all stripes have had to work around, ignore, or nibble away at the consitution for all sorts of reasons.
I'm a christian and an American, yet I don't get offended when I see people burning bibles or American flags; I look at them like they're idiots. Sure, the symbolism of their action is bad, but it's still just a book - it's nothing I'm going to lose sleep over.
Well there was the case of much hullaballoo and threats some time ago when PZ Mysers was threatening to desecrate a consecrated wafer. A large number of people really did get very offended even by the suggestion that he might do such a thing. Now, of course, I expect you're not Catholic and so wouldn't care. The fact remains that there are things can cause some Christians to lose a lot of sleep. I expect there are plenty of muslims (I'm betting the vast majority) that will have a similar reaction to yours over the book burning, but there will be some who will indeed be offended. This is how religion works: sacred things are sacred and threats to do bad things to them are deemed offensive by whoever takes the dogma very seriously.
I really think that means that you need to become better acquainted with those tools. specifying what you intend to happen is a lot easier than specifying how to do it. The first is a specification, the second is an implementation. Consider, I can specify a sqrt function by simply saying the result squared should be within some error tolerance of the input; that is a long way from writing an implementation of a square root function. Likewise, I can specify a sort function (the output list should contain exactly the same elements as the input list, and they should now be in order with respect to a comparison operator) without ever doing anything as complicated as actually implementing quicksort, or mergesort, or heapsort or... Try looking at the tools and what they can do and you'll satrt to get the idea.
But most likely those comments will be pretty useless from a commenting perspective, namely to explain stuff which is not easily codified in a formal language.
Well no, it doesn't absolve you from writing comments detailing the "why" of what you are doing in plain english; we're talking about comments describing what the code is intended to do. If you are concerned that you won't be able to say anything interesting then I suggest you take some time to look at JML and ACSL because they are far more flexible and expressive than you might imagine. No, you can't always easily say everything you want to say, but far more often that not it is very easy particularly because of the syntactic sugar for expressing constraints that these languages provide.
But not so many that you (or others) will find it more work than it's worth to change the comments when the code changes.
I prefer code with no comments to code with actively misleading comments, and I hate code with no comments!:)
The trick is that if you are writing comments describing what the code is intended to do, you can write those comments in something like JML or Frama-C's ACSL. That was you can use ESC/Java2 and Junit, or Frama-C, to do your checking that the code does what you intended. You get two benefits: more rigorous checks on your code (including use of theorem provers from ESC/Java and Frama-C); if your documentation ever falls out of date with the code, you'll immediately get errors flagged.
Hmm, where is the -1 "Woefully misinformed" moderation when you need it.
It's not just that the consistency of Peano arithmetic cannot be proved inside Peano arithmetic, it can't be proved, at all (in any meaningfull way : the only way to "prove" it is to accept it's correctness as axiom).
Well this is just wrong. You can indeed prove the consistency of Peano arithmetic if you're willing to go outside it. Specifically you can use Gentzen's consistency proof, which doesn't "accept the correctness of Peano as an axiom" (but has other limitations). To add further weight to this, you may note that the Incompleteness theorems state that the system will either be incomplete (have unprovable truths) or inconsistent; Peano arithmetic is incomplete, for instance Goodstein's theorem is unprovable.
rational numbers and, God help us, real numbers have much, much worse problems than mere doubts. It is known that rational numbers are inconsistent, and real numbers cannot be proven to even exist. There are no known ways to construct real numbers that are not simple extensions of rational numbers.
This is just false as well. Real numbers are on firmer ground than the natural numbers as far as proof theory goes, since there is a complete and consistent axiomitization of the real numbers (in fact several) that aren't "constructed as an extension of the rational numbers". Since the axiomitization is simple enough, it doesn't fall afoul of the incompleteness theorems, and thus can be proved both consistent and complete.
There are also some particularly strange choices for the overlaps of mathematics and physics. Einstein, for instance, wasn't pioneering new mathematical methods for the most part, but links the math and physics lines. Then Ed Witten, the only physicist ever to win a Fields Medal, isn't connected to the math line.
Very true, Einstein leaned heavily on Hilbert top produce any new mathematics required to support his ideas. And yes, Witten is oddly lacking in the extra connection. I also note that Leibniz, who was one of the last true polymaths, is only attached to a single line, despite being a world renowned figure in philosophy, mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology is his day.
It kind of raises my hackles a bit when a document claims to list prominent personalities in the history of critical thought and leaves off such basic people as, I don't know, Plato and Aristotle.
If you actually scan the map you'll see that it is only since the 15th century and anyone prior to that is left off. If you want to talk about omissions then try scanning along the "mathematics and computing" line, which is far more sparse than it should be. Where is Bertrand Russell, who ought to be straddling a couple of lines at least? Where are many of the mid to late 20th century mathematicians (are Grothendieck, Conway, and Wiles really all you can manage? How about Deligne, Mac Lane, Quillen, Tate, Perelman, thew list goes on...).
The way I read all this anger that the iPhone is really the best smartphone out there and some people feel it's a disgrace that Apple has the affront to control it the way it does. Otherwise, they would simply purchase a Samsung, Nokia, RIM or HTC smartphone and be happy with it.
I think it has more to do with the fact that since the iPhone and iPad are currently very popular, they can foresee a future when there aren't any options other than completely locked down and controlled environments. This is a future that they wish to avoid, and that means being noisy about the perceived shortcomings of such controlled systems in the hope that other people will see this as a problem and diminish the popularity of such systems to a level that continues to provide strong competition from more open systems.
As I see it, the average reader should only care if the person writing the blog is writing things they don't believe in exchange for pay.
Well there is more to it than that. Paying bloggers potentially gives them the means to work less and blog more. It's not about creating views that wouldn't otherwise exist, but about creating a volume of noise that wouldn't otherwise exist. That is, the issue with astroturfing, in any case of astroturfing, is not that the views being pushed don't exist, but that it gives the false impression of broader and deeper support for those views than actually exists.
Slashdot Mirror
Where are the research papers about how to get more men into Nursing? Or men into elementary education? How about Men into being stay at home dads? Men being "Admin Assistants"?
Why does it seem that "gender equality" only a one way street?
Yeah, there's absolutely no interest in getting men into primary education or nursing or anything like that. It's ridiculous. Now, if I can just continue to fail to look for any such things, I can continue to believe they don't exit.
This does not surprise me in the least. But then I'm a mathematician and I have pretty much the same sort of reaction when I see what they teach in many high school mathematics classes -- it's a pale shadow of real mathematics; mostly just a hodge podge of poorly taught arbitrary skills and facts that may or may not have a lot of relevance to actual mathematics. There is a disconnect where many people don't see the difference over the difference between "facts about mathematics" and actual mathematics. It therefore comes as little surprise to me that there is a similar disconnect over the difference between "things you do on computers" and computer science.
The simple answer is that both mathematics and computer science are far too often taught by people who don't really actually have any grasp of the subject. Get someone who actually knows computer science to teach the subject and it will be taught very differently and cover different things. Get someone who actually knows mathematics well and it will be taught very differently and cover different things. Welcome to the real world. It sucks. Get used to it.
There are times a government needs to keep secrets, however the US government has gone way overboard. Obama has done nothing to change that despite promises of a more open government, so I for one welcome the new openness that has come from wikileaks and will support efforts for it to continue.
It's quite possible that recent incidents with Wikileaks have gone a long way toward setting back openness and transparency in government. So far nothing classified Top Secret or above has been leaked. So now, anyone the least bit concerned about keeping information secret in government is just going to go for the higher levels of classification and associated compartmentalization. Far more information is going to be slapped with Top Secret and be much less widely read so people can play it safe. Honestly, after these leaks expect to see less information make it out to the public as government gets over-zealous with over classification.
This leak was a win for both the US and China. It gets the word out that China isn't going to back any stupid actions by Kim Jong-il. without China's leadership having to say so publicly. This helps calm the situation down.
Well, that's what you think is going to be the outcome here, and that there won't be any associated ill effects from North Korea feeling alienated by China. I presume you're an expert on Chinese and Korean affairs who is familiar enough with the intricacies involved to know that this is the highly likely outcome, with no unforseen nasty repurcussions. Oddly other people who are also experts on the situation apparently deemed that making the information public was not helpful -- or else they would have made it public. I'm glad we can rely on your authoritative analysis, and can safely ignore decisions made by others who have also spent their entire careers studying the delicate politics of the region. I mean, I presume this is your career right?
I suppose you have a significantly better (simpler and more flexible) compiled OO language suitable for system-level programming up your sleeve, when you talk like that.
I'm not sure "simpler and more flexible" are the only measures of "better", but if you want compiled OO languages suitable for systems level programming that are arguably better than Objective-C, you could try
Certainly arguments for each of them as better options could be made.
Also, MS produces a much better integrated and more functional development environment that anything available in the FOSS world.
They're nowhere near the level of depth in the HPC world that linux has, but if they can do for parallel programming what VB did for programming generally (make is accesible to non-programmer domain experts) then it could be a compelling alternative.
If you want that, then you're probably looking for either X10 or Chapel which offer a huge leap forward in making massive scale parallel programming simpler and easier. Of course X10 is from IBM and has Eclipse and plugins as the dev environment, and the closest they offer to a Windows version of the compiler is one compiled against cygwin. Chapel is from Cray, and has practically no Windows support, save for a claim that you can get it working with cygwin. Both languages are excellently supported on Linux (which is, of course, what Cray and IBM supercomputers run these days). So it woudl seem the future of parallel programming is firmly in the linux camp.
Not sure what is more amazing, that INTERCAL "exists" or that I had never heard of it. Very good stuff, and thanks.
And yet there exists worse. Malbolge generally takes the cake for the most esoteric and unreadable programming language. It only took a couple of years to write "Hello world" in it.
Is there any high-level, easy language today that's not threathened somewhow by f%^&%ng patents from the big guys?
Well, presuming you want something fast, as opposed to say Python or Ruby, there are some options:
If you read through some of the forum posts linked in the article you'll see that after not too long he encountered protoss players who easily countered his rush based on scouting and knowing what sorts of things to do. In this case the right thing to do is see that there are no zerglings out, so whack down a forge and at the last minute warp in some cannons behind a building wall. That pretty much stops the rush dead, at little cost to the protoss economy, while the rushing zerg has little left, with the cannons not arriving till he was committed to the rush and thus lost all his units. It will not be long before this sort of obvious counter becomes well known and the rush will become completely ineffective.
Personally, speaking as a software engineer, I do wish I had studied more higher math in college, because it would help me do more. More and better mental tools rarely hurt. But, to be honest, that really hasn't affected my earning power in the slightest.
Because earning power is the only relevant measure of value from education? I've read a lot of poetry, but it sure hasn't affected my earning power in the slightest; it must have been a complete waste of time. And really, why bother reading Shakespeare in English class? I bet that has very little affect on people's earning power. The time would probably be better spent reading and analysing corporate memos and license agreements.
I know this will apparently come as a shock to many on Slashdot (who repeat the same sort of line as you do here), but career and earning power are not the be all and end all of life. Education is not just vocational training, and how much more money you can get for it is not really the greatest universal measure of whether something is worthwhile.
You sound like someone complaining that people who go to a restaurant for a meal are idiots. Clearly they could save themselves considerable money and precious time by simply taking the relevant proteins, vitamins and nutrients, intravenously while they work. Apparently you see the only way to value a meal is how much time and money it saves you, not how good it tastes, or the enjoyment gained from it.
Sometimes education is worth it simply to be a better person; to have a better and broader understanding of the world; to sate curiousity, and to inspire it; to learn more about other people, and to learn more about yourself. Utility should not always be measured in cold hard lucre.
Teach it to them when they do need it.
That's nice in principle, but poor in practice. There are some fields of mathematics that can be taught from scratch with little requirement for much other math outside of that little field. Those are few and far between however. If you've had any experience trying to teach math, even to people who need it, who don't have the necessary background, you'll understand. It is an extremely frustrating process for the student, because the reality is that mathematics is one of those subjects that is very hard to pick up later, and is certainly hard to pick up piecemeal.
I'm glad that you managed to picm up the bits and pieces required, but in my experience teaching math, you are the exceptional student: most have a great deal of difficulty picking it up -- instead they require labourious coverage of the pre-requisites which, unfortunately can take years -- it's not a very practical way to go about it.
Saving memory isn't the only reason to use Fluxbox
Unless you're equally selective about every other application you choose to run other than just your window manager, Fluxbox isn't saving you much memory. As soon as you run any app that makes much use of, say, GTK, you're pulling in a whole bunch of libraries that, were you running GNOME, would be shared with most other applications you're running, and hence you're no longer making any significant saving. That's not to say you can't partner Fluxbox with a careful selection of apps to have a very resource light solution, just that using Fluxbox is not much of a saving on its own.
You can save yourself a little code there with list comprehensions and the built in set type:
and python3 has set comprehensions which would save you the call to Set.
That's a non-sequitur: it was neevr meant to be an app store, and that wasn't the point under discussion. The question was: is the app store more closed than linux repositories. The answer is yes. You could have the app store and still have the repository style open nature that let's other people set up stores that, when added, will present Apps from those stores right alongside the Apple store apps. The creator, hoster, and distributor of the new store can arrange payment for you.
But Apple can't be blamed for that. You want your programs to use their repository features you submit it to their repository. Just like if you want you programs to be included in a Linux repository you submit it to the repository maintainer.
Well yes, but with linux the whole infrastructure is open. If you want the benefits of repository based easy install and automatic updating for Ubuntu then you submit it to canonical. If they reject you for inclusion you can always try and get included in the Universe repositories. If that fails you can always get it added to one of the third party repositories (such as, say Medibuntu which many users add to their repositories). If that fails you can do like Google did for their Chrome linux beta and simply host their own repository. If that fails you can always set up you own PPA on launchpad.
The only thing Ubuntu's core repositories have going for them is that they are in the repository list by default. Any of those other options, from third party, to a PPA, will, once added to the repository list (which is easy to do), see your app as indistinguishable from the Ubuntu provided ones when the user browses available applications, updates, etc. There is no "one true repository" -- you can add more if you wish and the app selection and updating tools will see it as all the same. Other distros are no different.
This is a significant difference, unless Apple actually allows independent people to set up their own stores that will, if selected by the user, see the apps from that store presented right along side the Apple store apps in the same GUI. If that's the case, then great; if it's not, then there is a big difference bwteen Linux repositories and what Apple is proposing.
The downward spiral began with Lincoln violating the Constitution and starting a war to prevent people from peacefully leaving the US.
The downward spiral began with Jefferson violating the Constitution and purchasing Louisiana from the French when the constitution gave no provision for such actions. President's all throughout history violated strict readings of the constitution whenever it was expedient. Yes, in principle they needed to get a constitutional amendment passed; in practice that was either infeasible,or would have taken to long for the problem at hand (Jefferson's Louisiana purchase being a fine example, FDR's New Deal being pushed through when it became necessary is another). Ultimately this is a weakness of the constitution -- what the correct fix is, I am not sure, but let's be honest enough to admit that Presidents of all stripes have had to work around, ignore, or nibble away at the consitution for all sorts of reasons.
I'm a christian and an American, yet I don't get offended when I see people burning bibles or American flags; I look at them like they're idiots. Sure, the symbolism of their action is bad, but it's still just a book - it's nothing I'm going to lose sleep over.
Well there was the case of much hullaballoo and threats some time ago when PZ Mysers was threatening to desecrate a consecrated wafer. A large number of people really did get very offended even by the suggestion that he might do such a thing. Now, of course, I expect you're not Catholic and so wouldn't care. The fact remains that there are things can cause some Christians to lose a lot of sleep. I expect there are plenty of muslims (I'm betting the vast majority) that will have a similar reaction to yours over the book burning, but there will be some who will indeed be offended. This is how religion works: sacred things are sacred and threats to do bad things to them are deemed offensive by whoever takes the dogma very seriously.
I really think that means that you need to become better acquainted with those tools. specifying what you intend to happen is a lot easier than specifying how to do it. The first is a specification, the second is an implementation. Consider, I can specify a sqrt function by simply saying the result squared should be within some error tolerance of the input; that is a long way from writing an implementation of a square root function. Likewise, I can specify a sort function (the output list should contain exactly the same elements as the input list, and they should now be in order with respect to a comparison operator) without ever doing anything as complicated as actually implementing quicksort, or mergesort, or heapsort or ... Try looking at the tools and what they can do and you'll satrt to get the idea.
But most likely those comments will be pretty useless from a commenting perspective, namely to explain stuff which is not easily codified in a formal language.
Well no, it doesn't absolve you from writing comments detailing the "why" of what you are doing in plain english; we're talking about comments describing what the code is intended to do. If you are concerned that you won't be able to say anything interesting then I suggest you take some time to look at JML and ACSL because they are far more flexible and expressive than you might imagine. No, you can't always easily say everything you want to say, but far more often that not it is very easy particularly because of the syntactic sugar for expressing constraints that these languages provide.
But not so many that you (or others) will find it more work than it's worth to change the comments when the code changes.
I prefer code with no comments to code with actively misleading comments, and I hate code with no comments! :)
The trick is that if you are writing comments describing what the code is intended to do, you can write those comments in something like JML or Frama-C's ACSL. That was you can use ESC/Java2 and Junit, or Frama-C, to do your checking that the code does what you intended. You get two benefits: more rigorous checks on your code (including use of theorem provers from ESC/Java and Frama-C); if your documentation ever falls out of date with the code, you'll immediately get errors flagged.
Hmm, where is the -1 "Woefully misinformed" moderation when you need it.
It's not just that the consistency of Peano arithmetic cannot be proved inside Peano arithmetic, it can't be proved, at all (in any meaningfull way : the only way to "prove" it is to accept it's correctness as axiom).
Well this is just wrong. You can indeed prove the consistency of Peano arithmetic if you're willing to go outside it. Specifically you can use Gentzen's consistency proof, which doesn't "accept the correctness of Peano as an axiom" (but has other limitations). To add further weight to this, you may note that the Incompleteness theorems state that the system will either be incomplete (have unprovable truths) or inconsistent; Peano arithmetic is incomplete, for instance Goodstein's theorem is unprovable.
rational numbers and, God help us, real numbers have much, much worse problems than mere doubts. It is known that rational numbers are inconsistent, and real numbers cannot be proven to even exist. There are no known ways to construct real numbers that are not simple extensions of rational numbers.
This is just false as well. Real numbers are on firmer ground than the natural numbers as far as proof theory goes, since there is a complete and consistent axiomitization of the real numbers (in fact several) that aren't "constructed as an extension of the rational numbers". Since the axiomitization is simple enough, it doesn't fall afoul of the incompleteness theorems, and thus can be proved both consistent and complete.
There are also some particularly strange choices for the overlaps of mathematics and physics. Einstein, for instance, wasn't pioneering new mathematical methods for the most part, but links the math and physics lines. Then Ed Witten, the only physicist ever to win a Fields Medal, isn't connected to the math line.
Very true, Einstein leaned heavily on Hilbert top produce any new mathematics required to support his ideas. And yes, Witten is oddly lacking in the extra connection. I also note that Leibniz, who was one of the last true polymaths, is only attached to a single line, despite being a world renowned figure in philosophy, mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology is his day.
It kind of raises my hackles a bit when a document claims to list prominent personalities in the history of critical thought and leaves off such basic people as, I don't know, Plato and Aristotle.
If you actually scan the map you'll see that it is only since the 15th century and anyone prior to that is left off. If you want to talk about omissions then try scanning along the "mathematics and computing" line, which is far more sparse than it should be. Where is Bertrand Russell, who ought to be straddling a couple of lines at least? Where are many of the mid to late 20th century mathematicians (are Grothendieck, Conway, and Wiles really all you can manage? How about Deligne, Mac Lane, Quillen, Tate, Perelman, thew list goes on...).
The way I read all this anger that the iPhone is really the best smartphone out there and some people feel it's a disgrace that Apple has the affront to control it the way it does. Otherwise, they would simply purchase a Samsung, Nokia, RIM or HTC smartphone and be happy with it.
I think it has more to do with the fact that since the iPhone and iPad are currently very popular, they can foresee a future when there aren't any options other than completely locked down and controlled environments. This is a future that they wish to avoid, and that means being noisy about the perceived shortcomings of such controlled systems in the hope that other people will see this as a problem and diminish the popularity of such systems to a level that continues to provide strong competition from more open systems.
As I see it, the average reader should only care if the person writing the blog is writing things they don't believe in exchange for pay.
Well there is more to it than that. Paying bloggers potentially gives them the means to work less and blog more. It's not about creating views that wouldn't otherwise exist, but about creating a volume of noise that wouldn't otherwise exist. That is, the issue with astroturfing, in any case of astroturfing, is not that the views being pushed don't exist, but that it gives the false impression of broader and deeper support for those views than actually exists.