I'm the maintainer of (one of) the Linux port of the ftpd from OpenBSD. Since version 0.3.0 (of my port, taken from OpenBSD 2.7) it has had IPv6 support (this has been a pain to port, as a matter of fact).
(I'm still a bit short of confirmations that the IPv6 part works correctly. It would be nice if more people with IPv6 connectivity could try it out and tell me.)
Also check out my "sock" program (instructions for use: see comments at the start of the source) for an IPv6-aware equivalent of netcat/socket that uses the spiffy getaddrinfo() function from libc.
Besides this, I think Linux is still wanting in IPv6-aware tools. Now that the kernel supports it and the libc supports it, I think all distributions could afford to ship with a fully IPv6-aware environment. Not having ping6 and all by default is rather ridiculous.
First of all, I am certainly incredibly naïve in my not-a-lawyerness, but why is it that the copyright must be granted exclusively to the FSF? Why can't I write something like "Copyright (C) 2000 by [me], the Free Software Foundation [and perhaps also a few other people I might trust in the matter]"? Doesn't this give them the right to (1)sue anyone found guilty of a license infringement, and (2)relicense the code if needed?
In other words, if I understand correctly, the FSF is interested in rights (1) and (2) above. Why must the original author relinquish these rights so the FSF can have them? Why cannot they both have them? I see no reason why two groups of people's rights to the same code should come in conflict; in fact, there are many such cases.
As a matter of fact, this question of copyright transfer is dubious: it works in those countries that have the "copyright" approach to copy protection, but it won't work in those countries which have "intellectual property" instead. Although both are unified under the Berne convention, the important difference is that intellectual property is not transferable.
The whole question is pretty murky: can't someone make the effort of translating it all (copyright laws and various licenses) in formal logic so we can be sure, once and for all, what it all means?
Outrageous! Not only that, but you are also guilty of a fourth theft; that of intellectual property! Did you ask for your author's written permission before printing the email you mention?
For this crime, the Court decides to ban you, and 300000 other Slashdot users, from this site.
Vinton Cerf (the "father" of the Internet, perhaps even without the quotes) is constantly talking about Internet in space, interplanetary Internet and so on. For example, in his celebrated essay (an Internet draft) "The Internet is for Everyone" (now the official motto of the ISOC), he writes:
"The Internet is moving off the planet. Already, an interplanetary Internet is part of the NASA Mars mission program now under way at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. By 2008 we should have a well-functioning Earth-Mars network that serves as the nascent backbone of an interplanetary system of Internets: InterPlaNet is a network of Internets. Ultimately, we will have interplanetary Internet relays in polar solar orbit so that such relays can see most of the planets and their interplanetary gateways for most if not all of the time."
To be quite honest, if I didn't have so much admiration for him, I would say that Vint is going just a bit off his rocker, there. But, who cares? The idea is fun, and if a man can't dream, what's left for him to do?
Did you know it, the ISOC has even formed an "Interplanetary International Special Interest Group" (IPNSIG).
TeX is not a format, it's a language. Or, if you want, it is a format that has only one implementation and that is defined by it, and that's bad. Furthermore, TeX is a very old standard and it's quite painfully appearent. Try to write a context-free grammar for TeX, for example: you can't (and Knuth deserves serious blame for this, since he is the one who suggested the name "Backus-Naur form"). TeX is not semantical, it's presentational: another bad point (LaTeX does not have that disadvantage, at least). TeX is Turing-complete, which for a description language is a bad thing (for an input language it's good, obviously). Last but not least, TeX does not support Unicode (the specially modified version of TeX which does, Omega, is a progress, but I don't think it's still good enough).
Sorry, no cigar. There are plenty of reasons to prefer anythingML over TeX.
I must say I really don't understand the hype about XML. It's certainly a progress wrt SGML, because it's free (in the sense that the standard is free, as in speech, by the W3 Consortium, whereas SGML is an ISO standard). But technically I find its usefulness questionable. It is a completely content-free language, for one thing. Not that this is a major defect, but it's certainly not something to be enthusiastic about. And despite its claim to simplicity, it seems like we still don't have one free (as in speech), validating XML parser library that also doesn't fsck everything up in its handing of Unicode (last time I checked, the libxml from the W3 Consortium was completely broken in this respect and expat was hardly better; even the SGMLtools don't really validate XML, since they only validate it as SGML).
All right, let's admit it's a general-purpose, content-free, easy to parse markup language. And so what? Didn't LISP sexps exist long before this? They are exactly that, and they're far simpler than XML. I still don't see it.
Sorry, you seem to forget again that not everyone reading slashdot is American and able to decipher these abbreviations. So, what is this ACLU that Stallman mentions?
Re:Some Perfect... (correction)
on
Solving Chess?
·
· Score: 2
Sorry, URL missing. Should have used "Preview".
Ken Thompson's web page is here and his page on chess endgames is there.
Some Perfect endgames are known
on
Solving Chess?
·
· Score: 4
A few posters have pointed out at the incredibly large number of possible games of chess. However, determining the optimal strategy does not require analyzing every game but "only" every single move from every configuration (still a rather large number in the ten-to-the-fourty's).
A few perfect endgames are known, however. That is, when only a small number of pieces are left on the board (five, I think, or pehaps only four in some situations), we have some gigabyte-sized tables which will give the optimal solution. Such tables are available for the Chess program "crafty" (semi-free I think; I don't remember the URL but it should be easy to find): so not only will the program play perfectly (if the tables are installed) at endgame, but it will also be able to make use of the tables a few moves before that to prune its search tree (so it can sometimes claim a mate in 30 or some crazy thing like that).
(Talking about crafty, I'd like to hear some comparison between it and the new version of GNU chess. Does anyone have data here?)
Playing chess against a perfect algorithm must be weird. Suppose the optimal solution is a win for white, say: then the perfect player would make its first move and announce "mate in 58 moves" (say). You make your move, and he announces "mate in 54": ah, well, you didn't do as good as you could have, some move would have let you remain alive for 57 more moves. And so on, you could see your "time to live" go down and down as you make those moves. Really weird.
Inventor of Unix Ken Thompson has always been very interested in chess (he was involved in some way in the Deep Blue event, I don't recall how, exactly). His web page has this table of chess endgames on it. Can someone figure out how it works? (I couldn't.)
From chess we can move to other games. The book you want to read is Winning Ways by E. Berlekam, J. H. Conway and R. Guy. It is the ultimate reference bible in combinatorial game theory (unfortunately, volume 1 is out of print; but you can still understand much of volume 2 without it; in it you will learn optimal solutions for a certain number of games, including some "classical" games (that is, not specially constructed so as to make this easy)). Really worth reading.
First, I don't believe in the Sapir-Whorf (sp?) hypothesis. In any case, we are talking about the lingua franca here, the language used to communicate worldwide, and that is not the same as the language we use to think in, which is most likely to be our native tongue (not strictly true: I think in English about half the time, and it is not my native tongue).
Second, I don't see any hints that human intelligence is evolving at all (I mean, on a small scale of a few thousand years); in fact, it would be very surprising to see a rapid evolution like that when natural selection is probably gone for humanity, and, even if it isn't, is much slower in action.
Third, I do not think any constructed language has any chance of being adopted in these days. And I do not see any natural evolution of the language going in the direction you suggest, even if it is desirable. You make this point yourself.
Fourth, since about a hundred years, we have a theory of formal logic. Note that to benefit from it you do not need to actually speak it (if that means anything, which I doubt), merely to learn it (and to think about it). I do not see the point of trying to.
Fifth, redundancy is good for language. Logic is bad. The way we think is redundant and illogical. Language should follow this system also.
Sixth, there isn't such a big difference in efficiency between all existing languages. Even if there is, English is pretty good in this respect.
I don't mean this as a troll: I rather like the language, it has this rather quaint quality to it (if you've never seen examples, try fortune -m ESPERANTO, and also fortune -o -m RFCRENAGB | rot13 if you have the off fortunes installed). And it has enjoyed a remarkable popularity for a constructed language: when you consider that many natural languages (and not just languages you've never heard of) have fewer speakers than Esperanto, you should be impressed.
In a way, Esperanto is a historically first example of an "open content" view of things: before Esperanto there was Volapük, and Volapük was on its way to be a big success, only the inventor of the language (whose name I can't remember and won't be bothered to look up) wanted to keep a tight control over it. On the other hand, Dr. Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto, had the smart idea of immediately giving up control over the language, and letting the speakers themselves make the usage decisions they wanted. Also, he made the right choice in deciding not to associate too tightly his constructed language and his mumbo-jumbo philosophy (of the kind that was en vogue in those days). Because he made those smart moves, Esperanto still exists, relatively, whereas Volapük is sleeping in Tumbolia (the land of used light-bulbs and forgotten languages).
Despite this positive aspect, Esperanto came too late to be a success. English was already on its way to becoming the universal language (as a famous French author wrote (in French) "you don't want Esperanto? too bad for you: you will get English instead"). Note that the battle was perhaps tighter than you might think: evidently English has always had far more speakers than Esperanto, but China was all in favor of Esperanto at some point, and with its considerable population, it could have made a difference. (I don't think, however, that Chinese will become a world language at any point.)
Logic is perhaps a criterion for geeks, but it isn't one for success. Regularity is, certainly. But logic isn't. Esperanto isn't so very logical (at least not in the eyes of a mathematician with a special interest in logic, plus who's a computer geek, like me). Lojban (and the rival version of the same, what's it called again?) is a failure at that (i.e. it has the disadvantages of a logical language without being truly logical, only logical in its syntax). It is, I think, possible to build a completely logical language, but it will never be spoken, simply because we do not think logically, and the ideas we want to express are not logical: even if everything can be expressed in the language, it will be far too tedious. On the other hand, logical languages might be of interest to artificial intelligence researchers, but then it is an abstract language that is to be invented, not a concrete realization (who cares whether "man" is called "fubabusti", why not call it "man"? language is much more than a set of meme-to-sound translations).
A more interesting class of constructed languages is represented by Interlingua, a mixture of the Latin languages which has the property that someone speaking a Latin language does not have to learn Interlingua in order to be able to understand it (though he must learn it to speak it, of course). I can assure you: it's true.
English is the fourth lingua franca of the Earth (that is, of the "interesting" parts of the Earth:-). The first was Greek, which was the real language spoken in the Roman Empire (everyone spoke Greek, only Romans spoke Latin). Then came Latin, in the middle-ages, being the official language of the Roman Catholic Church. Then French in the Enlightenment (Voltaire, then at the court of Frederik the Great in Prussia, pointed out that german was only used to speak to horses in Prussia in those days). So English is the fourth. There are similarities between all these linguæ francæ. The Greek spoken in the mediterranean basin during the Roman Empire, the mediaeval Latin and the "internetican" English are spoken and written by people whose it is not the native tongue, and who consequently modify it (to use a neutral term) in various ways. English has, therefore, much more changed since the XIXth century than French or Italian, for example, in much the same way that the "Koine" Greek of the New Testament or the Latin of the Vulgate would have horrified Euripides and Cicero; under, notably the influence of people like myself who have to speak English to make themselves understood, but whom list fain speak vilely than beware lest some vile words mar the purity of their discourse (ahem).
I do not think there will be a lingua franca beyond English. Simply because we have reached the global stage, there is no exterior influence that would cause is to switch to another language. But, of course, English has yet to evolve considerably under, this time, a whole planet of influences and locutors.
(As a friend of mine likes to say, if the French had not had the stupid idea of winning the hundred-years war instead of losing it as they seemed prepared to do, everyone would be speaking French nowadays.)
.fx has a strange story. In short, it doesn't exist, but it almost did. The FX country code is one of these weird things in the ISO standard: it's supposed to stand for metropolitan France. Someone tried to persuade Postel (the late IANA) to let him have it because of the fascist way that the.fr domain is administrated; ultimately, he failed, though.
Similarly, some friends of mine are currently setting up the fx.* Usenet hierarchy because of problems with fr.* (they're looking for more feeds, btw, so if someone is interested...).
Of course, the AlterNIC has some more strange TLDs, for example.porn or.xxx (I have special entries in my/etc/named.conf file to redirect such domains to the AlterNIC root servers not that I use them, but as a protest against the ICANN foolishness).
Another question is whether the universe is finite or infinite. I think if the curvature is positive (enough), the Universe must be finite (essentially, you look at the surface of a sphere and you make the radius of the sphere become larger and larger: at some point it must decrease because of the positive curvature, and when it goes back to zero your sphere is the entire, finite, universe — sorry for the hand-waving). If the curvature is zero or negative, on the other hand, the Universe can be infinite but it can also be finite (notice that there is no difference between a finite universe and a periodic one). This applies for time as well as space.
Would you rather live in a finite universe or an infinite one?
Excuuuse me? Slashdot a breeding group for SOCIALISM? Now that should be moderated (+3, Hilarious)! Nowhere have I seen such an intense concentration of libertarian and anti-socialist feelings as on Slashdot.
Mind you, I'm not making a political statement either for or against anything, here. But this part of your comment is ridiculous! (The rest of it is very sound, though.)
It's interesting to see the difference in attitude between Germany and France as concerns the question of open standards and open source. Germany has been giving substantial amounts of money to various open source projects (notably GPG). France will vote laws. Now which is best?
I think it does have a chance. First, the MPs who are proposing the bill are members of the majority parliamentary group (and party discipline is, in French politics, much more effective than it is in US politics). Second, the French Government has been making some important efforts among similar lines, and I think they will support the bill.
This is quite similar to an older proposal made in the French Senate: there was already an article in/. about this previous proposal (where, strangely enough, it was considered much more favorably). However, it was turned down (I do not remember whether it was turned down by the Senate or whether it made its way to the National Assembly and was turned down there). At any rate, I am happy to learn that this proposal (or a similar one) is back on the table (and this time proposed by members of the majority in power, so there are more changes of it getting voted in).
Incidentally, someone was mentioning the bizarre French laws on encryption. These laws have been repealed a year or so ago: by that same (socialist) government which is now proposing this bill.
Remember what happened to fishermen who tried to get rid of seafishes by cutting them in pieces? They ended up with many more seafishes.
But Judge Jackson said unto them, They need not depart; give ye them software. And they say unto him, We have here but one Microsoft. He said, Bring it hither to me. And he commanded the DOJ to sit down, and took the Microsoft, and looking up to heaven, he blessed, and brake, and gave the companies to his disciples, and the disciples to the DOJ. And they did all have software, and were filled: and they took up of the stocks that remained twelve billion dollars full. (Gospel according to/dev/null, chapter 14.)
This is semi-OT, but, is it just my impression or has the amounted of paper printed indeed increased exponentially with, in the last decade or so, computers having made printed material supposedly “obsolete”?
(Yeah, that sentence was rather a mouthful. Let me try to say that more clearly.) I get the feeling that, in the computer age, the use of paper has increased tremendously. I'm not just talking about twirps who feel the need to print thousand-pages long listings with just one column of digits on each page. I mean that not only have screens not replaced paper but computers seem to have made the need for the latter even higher. Probably because, before computers, the producer of some data used to print the data on paper; now it's the users who print the data (“data” in the broad sense—this includes manuals), even when they might not use it. (All right, this analysis is really simplistic; please fill in the missing details.)
The Xerox, ahem, photocopy machine, was the first step in the massive-paper-consumption trend. The computer was the second. Clay tablets, anyone?
While we're talking about HTTPD's written in various languages, the W3 Consortium has written a free (as in speech) HTTPD entirely in Java for maximal portability: Jigsaw (see also the Jigsaw test site — that is, let's see how Jigsaw reacts to being slashdotted:-).
As you can guess, Jigsaw is fully HTTP/1.1 compliant (last time I checked, Apache still had some problems with that). While it's certainly much less efficient than Apache, it's probably also more flexible, modular and reusable. Personaly I haven't given it more than a cursory glance: I wonder if some people have tried it more thoroughly and would care to review its pros and cons?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm the maintainer of (one of) the Linux port of the ftpd from OpenBSD. Since version 0.3.0 (of my port, taken from OpenBSD 2.7) it has had IPv6 support (this has been a pain to port, as a matter of fact).
(I'm still a bit short of confirmations that the IPv6 part works correctly. It would be nice if more people with IPv6 connectivity could try it out and tell me.)
Also check out my "sock" program (instructions for use: see comments at the start of the source) for an IPv6-aware equivalent of netcat/socket that uses the spiffy getaddrinfo() function from libc.
Besides this, I think Linux is still wanting in IPv6-aware tools. Now that the kernel supports it and the libc supports it, I think all distributions could afford to ship with a fully IPv6-aware environment. Not having ping6 and all by default is rather ridiculous.
First of all, I am certainly incredibly naïve in my not-a-lawyerness, but why is it that the copyright must be granted exclusively to the FSF? Why can't I write something like "Copyright (C) 2000 by [me], the Free Software Foundation [and perhaps also a few other people I might trust in the matter]"? Doesn't this give them the right to (1)sue anyone found guilty of a license infringement, and (2)relicense the code if needed?
In other words, if I understand correctly, the FSF is interested in rights (1) and (2) above. Why must the original author relinquish these rights so the FSF can have them? Why cannot they both have them? I see no reason why two groups of people's rights to the same code should come in conflict; in fact, there are many such cases.
As a matter of fact, this question of copyright transfer is dubious: it works in those countries that have the "copyright" approach to copy protection, but it won't work in those countries which have "intellectual property" instead. Although both are unified under the Berne convention, the important difference is that intellectual property is not transferable.
The whole question is pretty murky: can't someone make the effort of translating it all (copyright laws and various licenses) in formal logic so we can be sure, once and for all, what it all means?
Outrageous! Not only that, but you are also guilty of a fourth theft; that of intellectual property! Did you ask for your author's written permission before printing the email you mention?
For this crime, the Court decides to ban you, and 300000 other Slashdot users, from this site.
Vinton Cerf (the "father" of the Internet, perhaps even without the quotes) is constantly talking about Internet in space, interplanetary Internet and so on. For example, in his celebrated essay (an Internet draft) "The Internet is for Everyone" (now the official motto of the ISOC), he writes:
To be quite honest, if I didn't have so much admiration for him, I would say that Vint is going just a bit off his rocker, there. But, who cares? The idea is fun, and if a man can't dream, what's left for him to do?
Did you know it, the ISOC has even formed an "Interplanetary International Special Interest Group" (IPNSIG).
--
David A. Madore (ISOC member)
TeX is not a format, it's a language. Or, if you want, it is a format that has only one implementation and that is defined by it, and that's bad. Furthermore, TeX is a very old standard and it's quite painfully appearent. Try to write a context-free grammar for TeX, for example: you can't (and Knuth deserves serious blame for this, since he is the one who suggested the name "Backus-Naur form"). TeX is not semantical, it's presentational: another bad point (LaTeX does not have that disadvantage, at least). TeX is Turing-complete, which for a description language is a bad thing (for an input language it's good, obviously). Last but not least, TeX does not support Unicode (the specially modified version of TeX which does, Omega, is a progress, but I don't think it's still good enough).
Sorry, no cigar. There are plenty of reasons to prefer anythingML over TeX.
I must say I really don't understand the hype about XML. It's certainly a progress wrt SGML, because it's free (in the sense that the standard is free, as in speech, by the W3 Consortium, whereas SGML is an ISO standard). But technically I find its usefulness questionable. It is a completely content-free language, for one thing. Not that this is a major defect, but it's certainly not something to be enthusiastic about. And despite its claim to simplicity, it seems like we still don't have one free (as in speech), validating XML parser library that also doesn't fsck everything up in its handing of Unicode (last time I checked, the libxml from the W3 Consortium was completely broken in this respect and expat was hardly better; even the SGMLtools don't really validate XML, since they only validate it as SGML).
All right, let's admit it's a general-purpose, content-free, easy to parse markup language. And so what? Didn't LISP sexps exist long before this? They are exactly that, and they're far simpler than XML. I still don't see it.
Sorry, you seem to forget again that not everyone reading slashdot is American and able to decipher these abbreviations. So, what is this ACLU that Stallman mentions?
Sorry, URL missing. Should have used "Preview".
Ken Thompson's web page is here and his page on chess endgames is there.
A few posters have pointed out at the incredibly large number of possible games of chess. However, determining the optimal strategy does not require analyzing every game but "only" every single move from every configuration (still a rather large number in the ten-to-the-fourty's).
A few perfect endgames are known, however. That is, when only a small number of pieces are left on the board (five, I think, or pehaps only four in some situations), we have some gigabyte-sized tables which will give the optimal solution. Such tables are available for the Chess program "crafty" (semi-free I think; I don't remember the URL but it should be easy to find): so not only will the program play perfectly (if the tables are installed) at endgame, but it will also be able to make use of the tables a few moves before that to prune its search tree (so it can sometimes claim a mate in 30 or some crazy thing like that).
(Talking about crafty, I'd like to hear some comparison between it and the new version of GNU chess. Does anyone have data here?)
Playing chess against a perfect algorithm must be weird. Suppose the optimal solution is a win for white, say: then the perfect player would make its first move and announce "mate in 58 moves" (say). You make your move, and he announces "mate in 54": ah, well, you didn't do as good as you could have, some move would have let you remain alive for 57 more moves. And so on, you could see your "time to live" go down and down as you make those moves. Really weird.
Inventor of Unix Ken Thompson has always been very interested in chess (he was involved in some way in the Deep Blue event, I don't recall how, exactly). His web page has this table of chess endgames on it. Can someone figure out how it works? (I couldn't.)
From chess we can move to other games. The book you want to read is Winning Ways by E. Berlekam, J. H. Conway and R. Guy. It is the ultimate reference bible in combinatorial game theory (unfortunately, volume 1 is out of print; but you can still understand much of volume 2 without it; in it you will learn optimal solutions for a certain number of games, including some "classical" games (that is, not specially constructed so as to make this easy)). Really worth reading.
That would have been in Italy. But the Roman Empire was far larger than Italy.
I don't buy that.
First, I don't believe in the Sapir-Whorf (sp?) hypothesis. In any case, we are talking about the lingua franca here, the language used to communicate worldwide, and that is not the same as the language we use to think in, which is most likely to be our native tongue (not strictly true: I think in English about half the time, and it is not my native tongue).
Second, I don't see any hints that human intelligence is evolving at all (I mean, on a small scale of a few thousand years); in fact, it would be very surprising to see a rapid evolution like that when natural selection is probably gone for humanity, and, even if it isn't, is much slower in action.
Third, I do not think any constructed language has any chance of being adopted in these days. And I do not see any natural evolution of the language going in the direction you suggest, even if it is desirable. You make this point yourself.
Fourth, since about a hundred years, we have a theory of formal logic. Note that to benefit from it you do not need to actually speak it (if that means anything, which I doubt), merely to learn it (and to think about it). I do not see the point of trying to.
Fifth, redundancy is good for language. Logic is bad. The way we think is redundant and illogical. Language should follow this system also.
Sixth, there isn't such a big difference in efficiency between all existing languages. Even if there is, English is pretty good in this respect.
I don't mean this as a troll: I rather like the language, it has this rather quaint quality to it (if you've never seen examples, try fortune -m ESPERANTO, and also fortune -o -m RFCRENAGB | rot13 if you have the off fortunes installed). And it has enjoyed a remarkable popularity for a constructed language: when you consider that many natural languages (and not just languages you've never heard of) have fewer speakers than Esperanto, you should be impressed.
In a way, Esperanto is a historically first example of an "open content" view of things: before Esperanto there was Volapük, and Volapük was on its way to be a big success, only the inventor of the language (whose name I can't remember and won't be bothered to look up) wanted to keep a tight control over it. On the other hand, Dr. Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto, had the smart idea of immediately giving up control over the language, and letting the speakers themselves make the usage decisions they wanted. Also, he made the right choice in deciding not to associate too tightly his constructed language and his mumbo-jumbo philosophy (of the kind that was en vogue in those days). Because he made those smart moves, Esperanto still exists, relatively, whereas Volapük is sleeping in Tumbolia (the land of used light-bulbs and forgotten languages).
Despite this positive aspect, Esperanto came too late to be a success. English was already on its way to becoming the universal language (as a famous French author wrote (in French) "you don't want Esperanto? too bad for you: you will get English instead"). Note that the battle was perhaps tighter than you might think: evidently English has always had far more speakers than Esperanto, but China was all in favor of Esperanto at some point, and with its considerable population, it could have made a difference. (I don't think, however, that Chinese will become a world language at any point.)
Logic is perhaps a criterion for geeks, but it isn't one for success. Regularity is, certainly. But logic isn't. Esperanto isn't so very logical (at least not in the eyes of a mathematician with a special interest in logic, plus who's a computer geek, like me). Lojban (and the rival version of the same, what's it called again?) is a failure at that (i.e. it has the disadvantages of a logical language without being truly logical, only logical in its syntax). It is, I think, possible to build a completely logical language, but it will never be spoken, simply because we do not think logically, and the ideas we want to express are not logical: even if everything can be expressed in the language, it will be far too tedious. On the other hand, logical languages might be of interest to artificial intelligence researchers, but then it is an abstract language that is to be invented, not a concrete realization (who cares whether "man" is called "fubabusti", why not call it "man"? language is much more than a set of meme-to-sound translations).
A more interesting class of constructed languages is represented by Interlingua, a mixture of the Latin languages which has the property that someone speaking a Latin language does not have to learn Interlingua in order to be able to understand it (though he must learn it to speak it, of course). I can assure you: it's true.
English is the fourth lingua franca of the Earth (that is, of the "interesting" parts of the Earth :-). The first was Greek, which was the real language spoken in the Roman Empire (everyone spoke Greek, only Romans spoke Latin). Then came Latin, in the middle-ages, being the official language of the Roman Catholic Church. Then French in the Enlightenment (Voltaire, then at the court of Frederik the Great in Prussia, pointed out that german was only used to speak to horses in Prussia in those days). So English is the fourth. There are similarities between all these linguæ francæ. The Greek spoken in the mediterranean basin during the Roman Empire, the mediaeval Latin and the "internetican" English are spoken and written by people whose it is not the native tongue, and who consequently modify it (to use a neutral term) in various ways. English has, therefore, much more changed since the XIXth century than French or Italian, for example, in much the same way that the "Koine" Greek of the New Testament or the Latin of the Vulgate would have horrified Euripides and Cicero; under, notably the influence of people like myself who have to speak English to make themselves understood, but whom list fain speak vilely than beware lest some vile words mar the purity of their discourse (ahem).
I do not think there will be a lingua franca beyond English. Simply because we have reached the global stage, there is no exterior influence that would cause is to switch to another language. But, of course, English has yet to evolve considerably under, this time, a whole planet of influences and locutors.
(As a friend of mine likes to say, if the French had not had the stupid idea of winning the hundred-years war instead of losing it as they seemed prepared to do, everyone would be speaking French nowadays.)
Just my EUR 0.02.
Similarly, some friends of mine are currently setting up the fx.* Usenet hierarchy because of problems with fr.* (they're looking for more feeds, btw, so if someone is interested...).
Of course, the AlterNIC has some more strange TLDs, for example .porn or .xxx (I have special entries in my /etc/named.conf file to redirect such domains to the AlterNIC root servers not that I use them, but as a protest against the ICANN foolishness).
Yow! WHAT I WANT is a .IN-ADDR.ARPA domain! I want the 1.0.0.127.IN-ADDR.ARPA NAME!
(Any other bizarre TLD's we can think of? What was this special domain created for URNs called, again?)
Another question is whether the universe is finite or infinite. I think if the curvature is positive (enough), the Universe must be finite (essentially, you look at the surface of a sphere and you make the radius of the sphere become larger and larger: at some point it must decrease because of the positive curvature, and when it goes back to zero your sphere is the entire, finite, universe — sorry for the hand-waving). If the curvature is zero or negative, on the other hand, the Universe can be infinite but it can also be finite (notice that there is no difference between a finite universe and a periodic one). This applies for time as well as space.
Would you rather live in a finite universe or an infinite one?
Excuuuse me? Slashdot a breeding group for SOCIALISM? Now that should be moderated (+3, Hilarious)! Nowhere have I seen such an intense concentration of libertarian and anti-socialist feelings as on Slashdot.
Mind you, I'm not making a political statement either for or against anything, here. But this part of your comment is ridiculous! (The rest of it is very sound, though.)
Yes: Thompson's Turing Award speech.
It's interesting to see the difference in attitude between Germany and France as concerns the question of open standards and open source. Germany has been giving substantial amounts of money to various open source projects (notably GPG). France will vote laws. Now which is best?
I think it does have a chance. First, the MPs who are proposing the bill are members of the majority parliamentary group (and party discipline is, in French politics, much more effective than it is in US politics). Second, the French Government has been making some important efforts among similar lines, and I think they will support the bill.
This is quite similar to an older proposal made in the French Senate: there was already an article in /. about this previous proposal (where, strangely enough, it was considered much more favorably). However, it was turned down (I do not remember whether it was turned down by the Senate or whether it made its way to the National Assembly and was turned down there). At any rate, I am happy to learn that this proposal (or a similar one) is back on the table (and this time proposed by members of the majority in power, so there are more changes of it getting voted in).
Incidentally, someone was mentioning the bizarre French laws on encryption. These laws have been repealed a year or so ago: by that same (socialist) government which is now proposing this bill.
Remember what happened to fishermen who tried to get rid of seafishes by cutting them in pieces? They ended up with many more seafishes.
But Judge Jackson said unto them, They need not depart; give ye them software. /dev/null, chapter 14.)
And they say unto him, We have here but one Microsoft.
He said, Bring it hither to me.
And he commanded the DOJ to sit down, and took the Microsoft, and looking up to heaven, he blessed, and brake, and gave the companies to his disciples, and the disciples to the DOJ.
And they did all have software, and were filled: and they took up of the stocks that remained twelve billion dollars full.
(Gospel according to
This is semi-OT, but, is it just my impression or has the amounted of paper printed indeed increased exponentially with, in the last decade or so, computers having made printed material supposedly “obsolete”?
(Yeah, that sentence was rather a mouthful. Let me try to say that more clearly.) I get the feeling that, in the computer age, the use of paper has increased tremendously. I'm not just talking about twirps who feel the need to print thousand-pages long listings with just one column of digits on each page. I mean that not only have screens not replaced paper but computers seem to have made the need for the latter even higher. Probably because, before computers, the producer of some data used to print the data on paper; now it's the users who print the data (“data” in the broad sense—this includes manuals), even when they might not use it. (All right, this analysis is really simplistic; please fill in the missing details.)
The Xerox, ahem, photocopy machine, was the first step in the massive-paper-consumption trend. The computer was the second. Clay tablets, anyone?
Easy:
`r`.n`.e`.d`.d`.i`.b`.r`.o`.F`. `.3`.0`.4i
It's too easy. Try this for example:
#! /bin/sh
# Set the following to the location of Apache:
APACHE_LOC=/opt/apache/bin/httpd
exec $APACHE_LOC "$@"
exit 1
While we're talking about HTTPD's written in various languages, the W3 Consortium has written a free (as in speech) HTTPD entirely in Java for maximal portability: Jigsaw (see also the Jigsaw test site — that is, let's see how Jigsaw reacts to being slashdotted:-).
As you can guess, Jigsaw is fully HTTP/1.1 compliant (last time I checked, Apache still had some problems with that). While it's certainly much less efficient than Apache, it's probably also more flexible, modular and reusable. Personaly I haven't given it more than a cursory glance: I wonder if some people have tried it more thoroughly and would care to review its pros and cons?