The "Internet" is not the "World Wide Web". There are many applications for a large-scale network beyond mere pr0n viewing.
For example, the First Alert medical emergency system works by calling a homebase which in turn calls the local emergency authorities when something bad has happened to a First Alert bracelet (is that what they use?) wearer. Phones require someone on the other end to route the call to the proper destination. A system that sent emergency notifications directly to the authorities would be a much better solution, enter the Internet.
In the days of the Greek philosophers, communication between cities was handled by messengers. Would you say that a gov't funded phone system infrastructure project would be a "luxury item to enhance communication"?
Would you say the same for gov't sponsored telephone lines or highway system? It could be argued that people living in the middle of nowhere have no reason to be driving hundreds of miles to reach the city.
The real problem is that people who have optic nerve degeneration or retinal damage are not going to benefit at all from this invention. Why in the world would people with normal vision want to wear something like this? It seems that this is an invention with no market whatsoever.
The first point is that speeding is illegal and you ought not do it. Excessive speeding is dangerous to the speeding driver as well as others who are on the road. It's a bad thing to do in general.
The second point is that this kind of Big Brother-ism on the part of the rental car company can be quickly dealt with be actually posting the name of the company. Let's say it was Avis (I don't know, let's just pretend). If Avis decides to do this, Budget can then advertise that they don't "spy" on their customers. Customers then vote with their feet. Companies who may have previously had rental agreements with Avis would also back out because the extra expenses accrued by business travelers would be intimidating.
In a capitalistic society, voting with your feet effects the greatest change without having to resort to government involvement.
And even if the GPL didn't imply that, the practical implications of retaining and defending your GPL'd code yourself is overwhelming. The only hope that a GPL'd program has is to have its copyright transferred to the FSF. Once this is done, though, any hope of creating derived works that aren't GPL'd are quickly dashed, because the FSF wouldn't allow it.
The GPL extends the right to anyone to use the original work for any purpose whatsoever on a perpetual, royalty-free, non-exlusive basis.
But a lot of universities won't accept work that was derived directly from another work. If I write a pre-compiling front end to an interpreter today, I am not allowed to use that front end in a compiler project.
GPL'ing the project does no one any good, at least at the undergraduate level. Now graduate-level projects may be more usefully GPL'd.
No one wants a hundred thousand GPL'd Hello Worlds.
Dancin Santa
Re:Real risks with this expirement
on
Star In A Jar
·
· Score: 1
Has anyone seen my Mickey Mouse stamps? I think I left them in the lab, but they're missing. Damn Germans, always swiping my funny papers.
If you come across a situation where you have two contradicting solutions to the same problem, you have made an error(unless you can provide me with a counter-example).
Here is a counter example:
A human fetus is a collection of cells that may one day grow up to be a neurotic 40 year old.
Conclusion 1: The fetus is innately human and should be given protections under the law.
Conclusion 2: The fetus is no more human than a clump of cells scraped from the inside of your mouth and should not be given any special protection under the law.
CS is not about writing programs. It is about problem solving and computation. Java is no more appropriate than HTML in this sense.
However, since writing programs is the method of dealing with the above issues, it begs the question of what language would be the best to teach.
Ideally, a good language should have at least the following features:
1) Enforces good design
2) Supports procedural programming
3) Supports OO programming
4) Is compiled
5) Is interpreted
6) Is useful outside academia
7) Is limited, to provide students an easy foundation
8) Allows direct memory manipulation
9) Disallows bad things like pointer manipulation
10) Is assembly language
In short, no one language is good enough to take a student through all four years of schooling.
mailto://mycompany_all (alias)
Subject: XXX.xxx needed
Message:
I'm looking for XXX.xxx document. I seem to have lost my copy. Does anyone have a copy I could borrow?
I was just looking up Mirsky on the web the other day. It was cute, I found the Drunk Browsing Test. It's not the Worst of the Web or anything, but fairly amusing.
The place to look for the kind of input you need would be comp.lang.ruby and the various Ruby mailing lists. A comprehensive FAQ like Perl's would be really good too.
It's a pain in the butt to write documentation, Perl's lucky to have had Tom C. write vast swaths of it in his spare time. Who does Ruby have with that kind of enthusiasm?
Text parsing and DB accessing are B-O-R-I-N-G. Get them doing "graphics programming" with LOGO or some other similarly easy-to-learn-with-quick-results language.
Slashdot Mirror
The "Internet" is not the "World Wide Web". There are many applications for a large-scale network beyond mere pr0n viewing.
For example, the First Alert medical emergency system works by calling a homebase which in turn calls the local emergency authorities when something bad has happened to a First Alert bracelet (is that what they use?) wearer. Phones require someone on the other end to route the call to the proper destination. A system that sent emergency notifications directly to the authorities would be a much better solution, enter the Internet.
In the days of the Greek philosophers, communication between cities was handled by messengers. Would you say that a gov't funded phone system infrastructure project would be a "luxury item to enhance communication"?
I'm not sure I would.
Dancin Santa
Would you say the same for gov't sponsored telephone lines or highway system? It could be argued that people living in the middle of nowhere have no reason to be driving hundreds of miles to reach the city.
Dancin Santa
The real problem is that people who have optic nerve degeneration or retinal damage are not going to benefit at all from this invention. Why in the world would people with normal vision want to wear something like this? It seems that this is an invention with no market whatsoever.
Dancin Santa
Oh wait, ACME is a real car rental company? I thought they were just changing the names to protect the guilty.
Dancin Santa
I've seen too many roadrunner cartoons to have any faith in ACME.
Dancin Santa
The first point is that speeding is illegal and you ought not do it. Excessive speeding is dangerous to the speeding driver as well as others who are on the road. It's a bad thing to do in general.
The second point is that this kind of Big Brother-ism on the part of the rental car company can be quickly dealt with be actually posting the name of the company. Let's say it was Avis (I don't know, let's just pretend). If Avis decides to do this, Budget can then advertise that they don't "spy" on their customers. Customers then vote with their feet. Companies who may have previously had rental agreements with Avis would also back out because the extra expenses accrued by business travelers would be intimidating.
In a capitalistic society, voting with your feet effects the greatest change without having to resort to government involvement.
Dancin Santa
And even if the GPL didn't imply that, the practical implications of retaining and defending your GPL'd code yourself is overwhelming. The only hope that a GPL'd program has is to have its copyright transferred to the FSF. Once this is done, though, any hope of creating derived works that aren't GPL'd are quickly dashed, because the FSF wouldn't allow it.
Dancin Santa
The GPL extends the right to anyone to use the original work for any purpose whatsoever on a perpetual, royalty-free, non-exlusive basis.
But a lot of universities won't accept work that was derived directly from another work. If I write a pre-compiling front end to an interpreter today, I am not allowed to use that front end in a compiler project.
GPL'ing the project does no one any good, at least at the undergraduate level. Now graduate-level projects may be more usefully GPL'd.
No one wants a hundred thousand GPL'd Hello Worlds.
Dancin Santa
Has anyone seen my Mickey Mouse stamps? I think I left them in the lab, but they're missing. Damn Germans, always swiping my funny papers.
Dancin Santa
If you come across a situation where you have two contradicting solutions to the same problem, you have made an error(unless you can provide me with a counter-example).
Here is a counter example:
A human fetus is a collection of cells that may one day grow up to be a neurotic 40 year old.
Conclusion 1: The fetus is innately human and should be given protections under the law.
Conclusion 2: The fetus is no more human than a clump of cells scraped from the inside of your mouth and should not be given any special protection under the law.
Which of these conclusions is correct?
Dancin Santa
CS is not about writing programs. It is about problem solving and computation. Java is no more appropriate than HTML in this sense.
However, since writing programs is the method of dealing with the above issues, it begs the question of what language would be the best to teach.
Ideally, a good language should have at least the following features:
1) Enforces good design
2) Supports procedural programming
3) Supports OO programming
4) Is compiled
5) Is interpreted
6) Is useful outside academia
7) Is limited, to provide students an easy foundation
8) Allows direct memory manipulation
9) Disallows bad things like pointer manipulation
10) Is assembly language
In short, no one language is good enough to take a student through all four years of schooling.
Dancin Santa
mailto://mycompany_all (alias)
Subject: XXX.xxx needed
Message:
I'm looking for XXX.xxx document. I seem to have lost my copy. Does anyone have a copy I could borrow?
Thanks,
Dancin Santa
It works like a charm.
Lotus
Borland
WordPerfect (Borland, I guess)
Netscape
Linux
I'd wager that "them" expands as priorities shift.
Didn't someone over at MSFT once say (paraphrased) "We only want a fair amount of marketshare. We believe that 100% is fair"?
Dancin Santa
So if A and A' are true...
zzzzzzzz...
I was just looking up Mirsky on the web the other day. It was cute, I found the Drunk Browsing Test. It's not the Worst of the Web or anything, but fairly amusing.
Dancin Santa
The place to look for the kind of input you need would be comp.lang.ruby and the various Ruby mailing lists. A comprehensive FAQ like Perl's would be really good too.
It's a pain in the butt to write documentation, Perl's lucky to have had Tom C. write vast swaths of it in his spare time. Who does Ruby have with that kind of enthusiasm?
Dancin Santa
You had 640K on your first machine?
We had to make do with an 'Enhanced' 128K Apple IIe.
Dancin Santa
Text parsing and DB accessing are B-O-R-I-N-G. Get them doing "graphics programming" with LOGO or some other similarly easy-to-learn-with-quick-results language.
Dancin Santa
Equilateral triangular lids won't fall into holes either.
Why aren't manhole covers triangular?
Dancin Santa
1) Do you pronounce "Monday" and "Mundie" the same, or do you emphasize the "day" in "Monday"?
/. ID, or do you troll anonymously?
2) Before you came to Microsoft, what special talents did you possess?
3) If I were to grep the Windows source code, how many "We'd be totally fucked if our customers knew we did this" comments would I find?
4) Are you wearing a hairpiece?
5) What's your
6) When Bill or Steve makes a joke, does everyone laugh? Is it a fearful laughter?
7) How much Linux code is actually in Windows? Haha, just joking. Windows would be a lot stabler if it had any.
8) If you were a Hostess snack cake, which one would you be and why?
9) Why are manhole covers round?
10) Have you thought about suing tobacco companies and making a quick billion or two?
Dancin Santa
My vote's with you. That guy would make a great /. interviewee.
Dancin Santa
Great, you just advanced the patient to the final stage. I don't think he was ready to meet the Boss.
Dancin Santa
Harrassment is against the law
:-)
Generally speaking, of course.
How did that one get through?...
Dancin Santa
It all boils down to this: Harrassment is against the law.
If you can frame spam in that light, you can make it illegal too.
Dancin Santa
Wouldn't that be "Yo ho ho"?
Yo ho ho... It's a pilot's wife for me...
Dancin Santa