The problem is that kids today don't view school as a place to learn (if they ever did), but as a system to be gamed. I know that my first several years in college I didn't care so much about learning as about how much I could get away with; I viewed it like high school, and grade school before it. The concern of most kids is not learning, but of passing, and of passing with good enough grades to keep the four-year party known as college going.
I don't know about addiction--it's just a damned good show which never got the chance it should have. It's well worth watching, and serves as an excellent example that sometimes the market doesn't do the right thing (Wonderfalls is another).
And frankly, there is simply no motivation for most users to switch to a Jabber-based system right now.
I think that federation support is exactly the motivation needed; now Google Talk is no longer its own walled garden, but it can speak to other protocols; users will soon discover that they have backwards compatibility with AIM and MSN Messenger. More and more ISPs are offering XMPP, and eventually we will have a standard IM protocol. Yeah, XMPP has its issues, but it's what we have now.
Of course, it's trivial to demonstrate that unanimous consent doesn't work: many folks would like to be free to commit murder or theft, and they won't consent to laws punishing those acts...
That's easy enough--clear the suid bit when ownership is changed. This should probably be implemented in the kernel, so that not even root can get around it (he can chown, then chmod like everyone else...). Not a big deal. In fact, I thought that this was the way it works already?
The chown security issue is that if a system uses quotas, then user foo can mask his disk usag by chowning his files to user bar. Of course, on a system without quotas this isn't an issue, and it's just annoying not to be able to chown.
Why? It's masculine to smoke, but not very feminine; thus it's more acceptable for a man to smoke, and less likely that he'll want to quit, whereas it's less socially acceptable for a woman to smoke and more likely that she'll want to quit.
Or it may be that guys tend to figure they'll tough it out themselves whereas women look for assistance. Or there could be another explanation.
Well, if we can mount tank-level weaponry on men, surely we'd be able to mount even better weaponry on tanks; I'm not convinced that an exoskeleton will enable a footsoldier to take on a tank of the same tech level.
But he'll be able to take on tasks that he couldn't previously. For example, crew served weapons are wonderful, but aren't very portable. Imagine every soldier carrying one...
Imagine a single soldier carrying enough firepower to destroy a building...
Imagine a soldier carrying a ton of armour, yet able to move almost as quickly as a man, yet impervious to most weapons...
And as you note, the commercial applications will be very cool too. Me, I'm seeing the US Marines vs. the People's Army squaring off in the radioactive rubble that used to be Taiwan. Add a thumping metal soundtrack and Jerry Bruckheimer, and we've got cinematic gold!
There are a lot of excellent American beers; the craft brewing revolution really did pay off. I've been to England, Belgium & Germany and I gotta say that I missed Colorado. English beers are the best, but they don't seem to have a very vital scene. Belgium has a lot of different types of beer, but many of them are an acquired taste. German beer is almost all lagers, and thus just not that interesting.
But Rockies Brewing's Hazed & Infused! Tommyknocker's Maple Nut Brown! Odell's 90 Shilling (which is sadly no longer as good as it was); New Belgium's La Follie, and so on & so forth. And Washington & Oregon are even better than we are!
Try drinking Budweiser, Coors, Miller or Michelob at a decent beer-serving temperature: they have taste alright. A nasty, foul, disgusting taste which no-one would willingly subject himself to, which is why American megabrews are served ice cold.
Of course, one should never consider American microbrews to be in the same category as the megabrews. I rather think that, all told, we have the healthiest brewing culture in the world--and I've travelled to England, Belgium & Germany.
Well, it wasn't 'standard' until recently; for the entire history of the net top-posting has been discouraged. It's poor style, and only exists because of certain popular proprietary mailers.
Re. 'a ball of tissue,' so far as I can tell it is a human being: there's no certain point one side of which it is and one side of which it's not, save conception. It's like puberty: there's no instant at which a boy becomes a man. So far as I can see, conception is the instant at which life is created. Certainly, the embryo is a primitive kind of human being, but I don't see that it's anything else--what else could it be?
I did some Googling, but was unable to find number for when abortions occur; I imagine that they probably are in the first three months, although first six weeks seems a bit early--a mother probably wouldn't know she's pregnant until at least four weeks in. And by week six there's already a heart, brain, arms & legs (acc. to Wikipedia, so take that for what it's worth)...
Well, considering that radical Islamists have murdered a man openly in the streets, threaten members of your own government such that they must live in hiding and are attempting to overthrow your laid-back, tolerant society, wouldn't a little fear be in order? Just curious...
Indeed, that was essentially the rationale used by the court in Roe vs. Wade; however there's one key difference between the examples you cite and abortion: a tumour is part of one's body; a foreskin is part of one's body; and egg or sperm is part of one's body; a blastocyst, embryo or foetus is not, but is instead a seperate human being (albeit one which relies on his mother for food & protection--not all that different from an infant in that regard). The debate is not over whether one should be allowed to do with one's body as one pleases, but over whether one should be allowed to do with another what one pleases. If the embryo weren't a human being, I couldn't care less what is done with it.
Your position in favour of abortion but in opposition to infant circumcision is peculiar: you are alright with killing the kid one minute before birth, but against a procedure which reduces the risk of various diseases one minute after? Peculiar.
Graduated? It seems to me that moving from a free platform to a proprietary one is a step backward. And Mac OS X is IMHO nowhere near as pleasant to use as the old Mac OS; in fact I prefer GNOME!
While I definitely like having lots of prefab around, with respect to that point, I was talking about not having to reimplement things as basic as split and join. It would be bad to have to look for the relevant modules from CPAN just to do split, join, map, associative arrays.
Common Lisp supports the equivalents of join, map & associative arrays as part of the standard; there is an equivalent to split easily available (it's called split-sequence and is pretty nice).
No argument that things like that are nice. It is kinda funny, though: people used to complain that the Common Lisp standard was too large--after all, it included things like OS-independent pathnames, and object orientation, and hash tables, and condition handling (like exceptions, but more powerful)! Now the criticism is from the other direction: Common Lisp is too small, because it doesn't include an HTTP server as part of the standard:-)
In those ArpaNet days, most of the people who discovered the ArpaNet and used MIT's systems were pretty benign, but today, sadly, his stand wouldn't last 24 hours before his data was ruined by vandals. It is truly a sad world we live in.
Well, that's reality. Leftists tend to be over-optimistic about the altruism of their fellow men.
A married man posting that he's never found another woman like his first girlfriend (who's not the woman he married) may be lacking things other than emotional mturity:-)
Well, it's not surprising: many geeks don't have much time for others unless they're interested in them somehow (for learning, entertainment, employment, friendship, what-have-you), so naturally they'd see 'friendly interaction' as an expression of interest, and since it's impossible for men & women to be friends (see When Harry Mey Sally), the obvious conclusion follows...
The really sad thing is that I suspect that if the geek didn't come on so strongly then he might actually stand a chance. And when I write 'he' I really mean s/h/m/...
As mentioned I'm lazy and not so smart, I wouldn't want to have to reimplement split, join or map. Nor would I want to always have to figure out how someone's variant of those work.
Oh, that's not really any more of a problem than figuring out someone's CPAN module works. And you don't really need to worry about a different dialect of Lisp for each programmer--it actually works out pretty nice (there are Lisp dialects, but they are essentially different languages which share similar ideas).
I think what you're saying is that you enjoy having a language with lots of pre-built modules, such that you can tie them together to achieve your goals. That's really not so much a characteristic of the language as it is of community around it. But me saying that doesn't help you if there's a library you'd like which doesn't exist--OTOH writing such libraries is often pretty fun! There is a short list of Common Lisp packages at cliki.net; there are lots more out there, though. Some recent interesting work has been done in auto-wrapping C libraries for easy use from Lisp.
One unfortunate thing in a language like Perl or Python is that often to get good performance one must write the innards of a module in some other language like C--in Common Lisp this isn't a factor: just write it in Lisp, compile it and it runs as fast as possible (in some domains, faster than C, in most somewhat more slowly).
Something you might like about CL is its object system, which is very easy to use, and yet can be extended to do some pretty crazy things.
I should clear something up: Lisp macros aren't self-modifying code, although it is possible for a Lisp program to define or redefine data & functions at runtime (it can redefine macros, too, but of course anything already compiled won't be affected).
<p>Concerning modification of a program--typically, with well-designed macros, they make it much easier to understand what's going on, and much easier to modify. An example is with-open-file, which is a macro which takes care of opening a file, assigning its stream to a variable, doing whatever the programmer wants done, and closing the file regardless of errors which may arrive. Thus the simple
in SBCL (a particular implementation of Common Lisp). If I wanted to read from an open socket instead, I could write a with-open-socket macro; if I wanted to read from a speech-to-text converter, I could write a with-speech-to-text macro and so on.
<p>A well-designed macro becomes part of the language; a programmer understands what it does just like he understand what split and join do in Perl, or what a CPAN module does.
<p>To answer the specific question, if I wished to write a DHCP server in Lisp and store the leases in a database, I'd probably use CL-SQL for the db interface (it abstracts away different databases and provides an object-oriented way of dealing with tables); I'm not familiar enough with DHCP to know how to write that side of it, but I imagine I'd use sb-bsd-sockets, which provides BSD-style sockets for SBCL (it's my preferred Lisp implementation). Pretty much the same as with Perl: find a DB library and use the sockets interface provided.
<p>CLiki serves in many ways the same function as CPAN.
A quick Googling reveals several apparent ways to deal with SourceSafe from within emacs; I don't use it myself, so I cannot evaluate them. It's possible that they work well out of the box, or that they are incomplete, or that they would require server-side changes--or worst of all, site-wide policy changes.
Emacs version control has a directory browsing feature for CVS too: C-x v d. By default it displays only the modified files, but v t will toggle this, and there's a variable to control it as well.
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Pipes smell good, and don't disturb sane people. Also, since pipes are not smoked as often as cigarettes, they discolour the teeth far less.
The problem is that kids today don't view school as a place to learn (if they ever did), but as a system to be gamed. I know that my first several years in college I didn't care so much about learning as about how much I could get away with; I viewed it like high school, and grade school before it. The concern of most kids is not learning, but of passing, and of passing with good enough grades to keep the four-year party known as college going.
I don't know about addiction--it's just a damned good show which never got the chance it should have. It's well worth watching, and serves as an excellent example that sometimes the market doesn't do the right thing (Wonderfalls is another).
I think that federation support is exactly the motivation needed; now Google Talk is no longer its own walled garden, but it can speak to other protocols; users will soon discover that they have backwards compatibility with AIM and MSN Messenger. More and more ISPs are offering XMPP, and eventually we will have a standard IM protocol. Yeah, XMPP has its issues, but it's what we have now.
Of course, it's trivial to demonstrate that unanimous consent doesn't work: many folks would like to be free to commit murder or theft, and they won't consent to laws punishing those acts...
That's easy enough--clear the suid bit when ownership is changed. This should probably be implemented in the kernel, so that not even root can get around it (he can chown, then chmod like everyone else...). Not a big deal. In fact, I thought that this was the way it works already?
The chown security issue is that if a system uses quotas, then user foo can mask his disk usag by chowning his files to user bar. Of course, on a system without quotas this isn't an issue, and it's just annoying not to be able to chown.
Or it may be that guys tend to figure they'll tough it out themselves whereas women look for assistance. Or there could be another explanation.
But he'll be able to take on tasks that he couldn't previously. For example, crew served weapons are wonderful, but aren't very portable. Imagine every soldier carrying one...
Imagine a single soldier carrying enough firepower to destroy a building...
Imagine a soldier carrying a ton of armour, yet able to move almost as quickly as a man, yet impervious to most weapons...
And as you note, the commercial applications will be very cool too. Me, I'm seeing the US Marines vs. the People's Army squaring off in the radioactive rubble that used to be Taiwan. Add a thumping metal soundtrack and Jerry Bruckheimer, and we've got cinematic gold!
But Rockies Brewing's Hazed & Infused! Tommyknocker's Maple Nut Brown! Odell's 90 Shilling (which is sadly no longer as good as it was); New Belgium's La Follie, and so on & so forth. And Washington & Oregon are even better than we are!
Of course, one should never consider American microbrews to be in the same category as the megabrews. I rather think that, all told, we have the healthiest brewing culture in the world--and I've travelled to England, Belgium & Germany.
Well, it wasn't 'standard' until recently; for the entire history of the net top-posting has been discouraged. It's poor style, and only exists because of certain popular proprietary mailers.
I did some Googling, but was unable to find number for when abortions occur; I imagine that they probably are in the first three months, although first six weeks seems a bit early--a mother probably wouldn't know she's pregnant until at least four weeks in. And by week six there's already a heart, brain, arms & legs (acc. to Wikipedia, so take that for what it's worth)...
Re. circumcision, it does reduce the risk of penile cancer; out of 60,000 cases of penile cancer since 1930, less than ten involved circumcised men. Moreover, sexual partners of uncircumcised men are more likely to contract cervical cancer.
Well, considering that radical Islamists have murdered a man openly in the streets, threaten members of your own government such that they must live in hiding and are attempting to overthrow your laid-back, tolerant society, wouldn't a little fear be in order? Just curious...
Your position in favour of abortion but in opposition to infant circumcision is peculiar: you are alright with killing the kid one minute before birth, but against a procedure which reduces the risk of various diseases one minute after? Peculiar.
If you're interested, take a gander at Practical Common Lisp, by Peter Seibel. It's an excellent introduction to the language.
Graduated? It seems to me that moving from a free platform to a proprietary one is a step backward. And Mac OS X is IMHO nowhere near as pleasant to use as the old Mac OS; in fact I prefer GNOME!
Troll?!? The moderators really need to put down the crack pipe...
Common Lisp supports the equivalents of join, map & associative arrays as part of the standard; there is an equivalent to split easily available (it's called split-sequence and is pretty nice).
No argument that things like that are nice. It is kinda funny, though: people used to complain that the Common Lisp standard was too large--after all, it included things like OS-independent pathnames, and object orientation, and hash tables, and condition handling (like exceptions, but more powerful)! Now the criticism is from the other direction: Common Lisp is too small, because it doesn't include an HTTP server as part of the standard:-)
Well, that's reality. Leftists tend to be over-optimistic about the altruism of their fellow men.
A married man posting that he's never found another woman like his first girlfriend (who's not the woman he married) may be lacking things other than emotional mturity:-)
The really sad thing is that I suspect that if the geek didn't come on so strongly then he might actually stand a chance. And when I write 'he' I really mean s/h/m/...
Oh, that's not really any more of a problem than figuring out someone's CPAN module works. And you don't really need to worry about a different dialect of Lisp for each programmer--it actually works out pretty nice (there are Lisp dialects, but they are essentially different languages which share similar ideas).
I think what you're saying is that you enjoy having a language with lots of pre-built modules, such that you can tie them together to achieve your goals. That's really not so much a characteristic of the language as it is of community around it. But me saying that doesn't help you if there's a library you'd like which doesn't exist--OTOH writing such libraries is often pretty fun! There is a short list of Common Lisp packages at cliki.net; there are lots more out there, though. Some recent interesting work has been done in auto-wrapping C libraries for easy use from Lisp.
One unfortunate thing in a language like Perl or Python is that often to get good performance one must write the innards of a module in some other language like C--in Common Lisp this isn't a factor: just write it in Lisp, compile it and it runs as fast as possible (in some domains, faster than C, in most somewhat more slowly).
Something you might like about CL is its object system, which is very easy to use, and yet can be extended to do some pretty crazy things.
I should clear something up: Lisp macros aren't self-modifying code, although it is possible for a Lisp program to define or redefine data & functions at runtime (it can redefine macros, too, but of course anything already compiled won't be affected).
/etc/passwd and prints the first line, expands into:
:abort #:g4517))))
<p>Concerning modification of a program--typically, with well-designed macros, they make it much easier to understand what's going on, and much easier to modify. An example is with-open-file, which is a macro which takes care of opening a file, assigning its stream to a variable, doing whatever the programmer wants done, and closing the file regardless of errors which may arrive. Thus the simple
(with-open-file (file #p"/etc/passwd")
(print (read-line file)))
which opens
(let ((file (open #P"/etc/passwd")) (#:g4517 t))
(unwind-protect
(multiple-value-prog1 (progn (print (read-line file)))
(setq #:g4517 nil))
(when file (close file
in SBCL (a particular implementation of Common Lisp). If I wanted to read from an open socket instead, I could write a with-open-socket macro; if I wanted to read from a speech-to-text converter, I could write a with-speech-to-text macro and so on.
<p>A well-designed macro becomes part of the language; a programmer understands what it does just like he understand what split and join do in Perl, or what a CPAN module does.
<p>To answer the specific question, if I wished to write a DHCP server in Lisp and store the leases in a database, I'd probably use CL-SQL for the db interface (it abstracts away different databases and provides an object-oriented way of dealing with tables); I'm not familiar enough with DHCP to know how to write that side of it, but I imagine I'd use sb-bsd-sockets, which provides BSD-style sockets for SBCL (it's my preferred Lisp implementation). Pretty much the same as with Perl: find a DB library and use the sockets interface provided.
<p>CLiki serves in many ways the same function as CPAN.
Emacs version control has a directory browsing feature for CVS too: C-x v d. By default it displays only the modified files, but v t will toggle this, and there's a variable to control it as well.