Rope and tree? Hard to say. Maybe if the government is overthrown by Cuban expats living in the US, but not surprisingly these are the most extreme critics of Castro. Cuban residing in Cuba might be sick of the regime, but it is unlikely they hate it as much as US expats do. The proportion of people who have a positive view of Castro is bound to be higher in Cuba than in US, which is a haven for the regime's most bitter enemies.
In any case, you have to look at the specific nature of the overthrow. If it were a military coup, Castro's fate would depend on what is most useful to the junta: co-opting Castro or castigating him. If the government were to fall apart under popular unrest, chances are Castro would spend the balance of his retirement in Venezuela.
Which is ironic, because phrases like *that* set *my* bullshit detector off. But I try to ignore it. One ought not be credulous about any such detector that operates on automatic.
Your point has a certain philosophical validity, but who we think we are and who we "pretend" to be are *both* part of who we are. The difference between who we think we are and how we believe others will perceive us are an important driver of our behavior and a major source of subjective pain.
I think we all know instinctively that people are these ways. The creepy think about the Shatner persona performance is that it at least purports to violate this common unspoken assumption. It's probably not quite right to call the effect "scary". "Horrific" would be a better term. Something whose outward appearance violates our expectations in some subtle way is the cornerstone of horror fiction. That's precisely my emotional reaction to Shatner's self-referential performance of his persona.
I make no representation about what Shatner intends by the performance; I'm out of my depth there. But it is immensely entertaining and fascinating, unquestionably a work of genius, the acting equivalent of Stephen King in his top writing form.
This reminds me of the most fascinating lecture by a bad speaker I've ever heard. It was a by a cognitive therapist on the topic of "Willpower". He had what I thought was an interesting point: there are other ways to conceptualize self-discipline than in terms of willpower. He argued that it is more useful to look at what we call willpower as a matter of scope: the universe of outcomes we consider when we make a decision. There is the dimension of time: if I buy the cheap alternative now, in the short term I have the widget I need and more money in my pocket. In the long term I may have to keep buying that widget over and over again. There is a social dimension. If I make a selfish decision, I undermine people around me upon whom I depend. I think one aspect of contemporary culture is a pressure to narrow the scope of our decisions. We are trained by big box stores to go to the store with the lowest advertised entry price and walk out on our first visit having made a purchase. If that purchase is cheesy enough, we'll be back again soon for a replacement. Our attention is saturated with distractions and exhortations to act now because the clock is ticking on a low price for a purchase we probably shouldn't make in the first place.
We've been trained, I think, not to buy quality for *pragmatic* reasons. Instead, quality is a *fashion statement*. People will will drop several thousand dollars on a Rolex watch that doesn't keep any better time than a $30 watch with a Japanese quartz movement, because of the vast amount of labor and craftsmanship lavished on the inferior technology to bring it up to scratch. As it happens, I don't condemn the quality as fashion statement phenomenon. Arguably it is entirely rational to make top quality lace using 19th century tech. What better place to make a fashion statement than in fashion? There is a certain charm to displaying an elaborate textile created on a authentic period technology. Likewise there's a charm to having a watch (which is after all jewelry) with an exhibition back that lets you show off the complex automatic movement. I do worry about the lack of pragmatic concern for quality.
As an environmentalist I believe one of the best ways to reduce human impact on the Earth while improving human lives is to focus on pragmatic quality. Buying quality is even better than recycling. It's actually better for the planet to drop a couple thousand dollars on an office chair that will look like new in twenty years, than to buy five or six cheap chairs over the years that fall apart. That's true even if you recycle the junk chairs. In the meantime you're a lot more comfortable. Environmentalism doesn't necessarily mean wearing a hair shirt, although buying the very best may not always be possible with one's immediate means.
In any case, getting back to this speaker, he was extremely insightful, but spoke in a very slow monotone with lots of "umms" and "errs" that made it very difficult to follow him. The effect is hypnotic. I have the lecture on my iPod, and play it when I have difficulty sleeping. The insights in it are enough to capture my attention, but the delivery has me nodding off within a few minutes.
Well, I'm not so sure that William Shatner always seems to speak his mind. It seems to me that William Shatner the person always seems to speak the mind of 'William Shatner' the public persona, while being very clear that the two aren't necessarily the same. I find that slightly terrifying, like the clown from the Stephen King novel.
Actors are sometimes persons prone to insecurity and self-loathing. Perhaps the nature of the job attracts such people. Anyhow, one likes to see an interview with a favorite actor in which the actor seems like a *real person*. Of course that "real person" may be (probably is) a work of art. That's what actors do. When you get an entertainer who is so clueless you see the person behind the persona, it's disturbing.
Shatner is in a class of his own. He's completely up front about playing a persona... but who is it who's being up front about that? It's just another persona. Underneath the blatant egotism and insecurity you get a peek of the guy who's laughing at the whole circus, but what would you see if you look behind *that* guy? You peel back the outer layers of the onion, and you get... more onion.
What's fascinating, fun, and frightening aren't the *iterations* of William Shatner, but the *recursions*.
Third option: disclose the algorithm to a trusted third party under a non-disclosure agreement. Basically you'd have the Justice Department appoint a review board of academics with expertise in algorithm design, and allow the board to investigate the algorithm. They would then disclose the general business objectives pursued by the algorithm, or at least the lack of certain legally proscribed objectives like stifling competition.
The solution of further decomposing nullable tables and then joining the results is almost laughably impractical. The first thing programmers (especially these days) will do is join them back together so they can deserialize objects from the database.
In any case, that solution doesn't solve the real problem. It ensures that (A or not(A)) is true for any domain, but it doesn't address the very practical problem of identifying where information for some reason does not apply. For a null value A that means "unknown", (A or not(A)) should be a tautology. For a null value A that means "does not apply" (A or not(A)) has no defined value.
Of course you *can* evade all this by introducing more base relations into you schema and doing more joins (hahaha). But it's simply not a practical solution. It's the kind of thing you suggest to make an academic point, not to make the model more usable. Codd is the one who's right here. You have to deal with these issues by representation, not introduce more relational decomposition into database design.
What we're wrestling with here is that the relational model is a wonderful metamodel of computerized record keeping systems. It's not a very good metamodel for creating models of the real world. You can see that by the lack of provision in the model for open world reasoning. There's a certain useful creative tension involved in this dichotomy; two arrows for our designer's quiver (object and relational modeling) instead of one.
There's nothing necessarily mathematically obnoxious about the "surprising" cases Date cites here, any more than sqrt(-1) is a bad thing in algebra. You just have to know what you were doing.
Second, I never said that understanding NULLs wasn't important to using SQL.
Yes, you were using my post as a springboard to make a related point.
I've been following the relational literature for almost thirty years, and practicing as a designer. I have an appreciation for the value of computer science to the practitioner, but there is a point where you are ultimately talking about academic math with no practical application to engineering. Basically the idea of eliminating nulls is the kind of idea that does more to keep the researcher publishing than it does for bringing better behaved, more expressive tools to market. The behavior of SQL's null is quite tolerable in practical systems, so long as you understand it.
The truth is that practical implementations of the relational model -- ones that competent engineers would find helpful in solving real world problems -- nearly always have some kind of NULL and if they don't it's a fault. Codd's idea of multiple kinds of nulls will almost certainly be needed to extend the relational model to allow queries to be explicitly made under open and closed world reasoning, if that ever happens.
By the way on slide 4 "Nulls ARE permitted in alternate keys..." Where did that come from? If by "alternate key" he means "candidate key that is not chosen as primary", Date is contradicting his own earlier writings. In any case, key candidacy is almost certainly the biggest practical weakness of the relational model per se, particularly if you allow composite candidate keys. The problem is one of fundamental epistemology. All the analysis you do to choose a candidate key is based on closed world reasoning. In practical terms system requirements evolve, undermining key choices, *especially* the subtle assertions you must make about normal forms beyond the 3rd.
Disney's depiction of the characters from Winnie the Pooh is distinct from (and in my opinion inferior to) the E.H. Shephard versions. In part this may have been because of the needs of animation. Shephard's characterizations were somewhat ragged stuffed toys we animate with our imaginations.
Depicting Pooh as Chewbacca is a stoke of genius. Lucas's huge accomplishment is that he envisioned a somewhat grimy, lived-in science fiction world that was different from the obviously plywood sound stages of low budget pictures like Flash Gordon or the antiseptic cleanliness of a movie like 2001. Remember this was five years before Blade Runner. Star Wars showed us beat up looking space ships and props that appeared to have got hard usage. That's precisely the charm of the Shephard illustrations. One gets the impression that Pooh has been cuddled until he's a bit ragged and the stuffing is in the wrong place. Sometimes he looks like he's been dragged through the dust until he has loose threads and bits of fur sticking up. The Disney Pooh has become slicker and slicker over the years, until in his recent digital incarnations he looks like he has been blown by venetian glassblowers rather than sewn from woven mohair .
In any case, I think it very likely that Disney would be in its rights to sue somebody for misappropriating the slick Disney Pooh even after the Milne copyright expires in 2026. It's a distinct and novel artistic presentation, even if it is inferior.
I've been in this business long enough to remember trying to explain email to people; or the web, or blogging, or wikis. A few people just jumped on the bandwagon because these were the new things, but a lot of people could not see the point. Why use a computer and a network and all that newfangled stuff just to send a note? Of course it helps if you can say something like "the marginal cost of sending a note will be zero," but then people looked at you like you were nuts. We pay good money to send letters or make phone calls, how could the network provider afford to let us send as much data as will fit without charging us per minute or page or something?
What it boils down to is that most people are muddling through without the new wonder technology. They won't see the tech as valuable until they see that other people are using it to muddle through more successfully than they are. Most people don't want change for change's sake, which is reasonable enough, but they also tend to be blind to change until it is well under way.
It's the same thing that happens when you develop any computer application, only here we're talking about a *class of applications*. Most users and stakeholders don't have much capacity for imagination when it comes to abstract thought. They don't really have a clear idea of what they want or don't want until they start using them. A new technology has got to get a critical mass which makes people sit up and think, "I'm missing something important here." Sometimes that doesn't happen, and an idea has to go back on the shelf until somebody comes up with it again in a new implementation.
Well, to play devil's advocate why not ban those professions? Because there is no substitute for air traffic controller or infantry grunt, and society needs them. Society doesn't need prostitutes to ensure sex happens, although possibly not *enough* sex will happen.
It's too simplistic either way; to assume that sex work is automatically dirty, dangerous and degrading on one hand, or to assume that it cannot be so otherwise. My personal, a priori inclination would be to legalize prostitution and regulate it to minimize the dangers to the workers and public health. But there will always be prostitution which falls below any standard one would choose to set as "decent". At the very least I hope we could agree that prostitution should be consensual if it exists at all, but there will always be customers who are all the more attracted to non-consensual sexual encounters because they are forbidden. And as with every contraband market, there will be businesses that serve it and profit by an economic niche with (pun recognized but not intended) barriers to entry.
Prostitution is historically been a last ditch profession for many women who ply that trade. Obviously it doesn't logically have to be so for all prostitutes, but it will probably always be so for many. Combine this vulnerability with customers who actually want a dirty, dangerous and brutal experience with a vulnerable woman or child, and it is clear that prostitution will always have its dark side.
The very fact that prostitution has this ineradicable dark side probably argues for some kind legalization and policing, because those aspects of prostitution that we'd most like to prevent cannot be eliminated by any sort of a ban. Legalization and well designed regulation could force sex businesses to take one of two paths: entirely legitimate with all the normal protections of law, or totally outside the law.
Would this reduce the dark side of prostitution? I think that's too much to hope, so we shouldn't legalize it with that purpose in mind. If we legalize it, it should be because the forms of prostitution that are legalized can be made tolerable within our concept of justice and are bound to happen anyway. Outlawing such forms of prostitution serves little or no purpose for considerable cost.
If accounting doesn't know what's going on, then they're incompetent. Accounting is essentially financial epistemology: it is about creating true, *justifiable* beliefs. The ultimate test is the audit. An *outsider* comes in and takes everything you say about yourself financially and puts it to the test. Then they sample things that happened (e.g. an invoice payment) and make every event is reflected on the financial statements.
When you have a situation where ignorance is tolerated in the accounting department, there's a good chance something corrupt going on.
I once worked at a biggish non-profit as IT director. The place habitually skated on the edge of financial disaster, and there was a lot of pressure on me to "improve the financial systems" by which management meant "software". It was true that the financial software was crap, but what was worse was that accounting was run by a bunch of amateurs who created complex, bizarre procedures. Sometimes checks would come in, and they would get lost for weeks. That's crazy: everyone knows you cash checks immediately and you hold onto the money as long as you can. So when the finance department head leaves, I suggest we bring in this friend of mine as interim manager. The selling point is that he knows a huge amount about financial software, but more importantly he's a really sharp CPA. Right from day one, he starts tearing out all the procedural cruft in the the accounting department.
This causes all kinds of grief and woe. One person freaks out because my friend the CPA tells her she can't use her color highlighters anymore. The color coding system she had devised was non-standard and unsound. People start to quit. No problem. We hire replacements. Not one of the people we hired had less than fifteen years of corporate bookkeeping experience. These weren't kids right out of college willing to work cheap, these were pros and worth every penny. For once we knew whether we were making money or losing it; whether we had enough cash to keep going or whether we were going to run out. You don't save money by hiring an accounting staff that doesn't have the expertise to manage money.
This all happened very fast, so one day the CEO takes my friend aside and asks, "Can these new people you hired figure out how much money I'm paid?" This seems like a strange question to ask, but the CEO's official salary was very high for an organization that size. What wasn't obvious by casual inspection of the books was that he was actually took two salaries, his official salary and a second salary through a paper organization that charged back internally for normal operation services. That was why our overhead rate was so high; I'd estimate that ten cents on every grant dollar we landed went straight into his pocket... Well, not *straight*; that's the entire point.
So anyways, the boss asks my friend that loaded question, and he laughs and says, "I wouldn't hire anyone who wasn't competent enough to figure that out." Hell, even *I* had worked that one out, and I wasn't an accountant. Anyway, not long after that my friend is no longer working for the organization, and management is reorganized so that as IT director I'm no longer on the management committee.
E.F. Codd would have disagreed with you. True, it wasn't part of his landmark 1970 paper, but by the early 80s he was asserting that having a concept for "null" was a requirement of a system that was "really relational". The reason was that while you can have a nice, self-consistent mathematical model of relations without NULL, a practical system absolutely needs some kind of NULL. I know what I'm talking about here. Back before decent embeddable database systems existed, it was common to put "relational" facades on top of indexed file storage. Let me tell you, if you don't have NULL in a record keeping system, pretty soon you find yourself inventing your own version of NULL and littering your code with checks. The relational model without nulls is from a practical standpoint garbage.
Granted, SQL's concept of NULL is problematic, but you are... let's say *seriously misguided*... if you think a programmer can work with a SQL based relational database (which is the only kind of RDBMS there is) without understanding SQL's concept of NULL and how it affects things like existential predicates or aggregate functions.
In any case, I'd like to see a serious argument that NULL violates the fundamental underpinnings of the relational model. The fundamental underpinnings of the model are in the relational calculus and algebra. Adding NULL to all domains does not alter any calculation that does not specifically involve a null value, so it seems to be consistent with the "fundamental underpinnings" to me.
NoSQL is not really about scalability, it is about modelling your data the same way your application does.
I've actually been in the business long enough to remember when relational databases were the new thing. What people seem to forget is that modeling your data in a different way than your application does *was the whole point*. The idea was to make data a reusable resource *across applications*. Of course, that turned out to be a lot harder than we thought it would be. Philosophically, one might well ask whether it is possible to understand data at all apart from its intended applications. Of course, by the time we'd figured that out, a whole new generation was coming up trying to create a Semantic Web.
I basically agree that SQL isn't always the right tool for the job. I happen to think certain aspects of the relational model are somewhat broken (e.g. composite keys), and SQL is a pretty crappy query language in any case. But I think because RDBMSs are a mature technology, recently trained programmers don't bother to understand them, and cover that lack of understanding by pooh-pooh-ing the stuff that's over their head. I went through a patch a few years ago where I was interviewing programming candidates who had XML coming out of their ears but hadn't the foggiest idea of what "NULL" means in the relational model. Naturally they had all kinds of problems on the relational end of things, and tended to view the RDBMS as a kind of pitfall in which bad things inexplicably happen. Consequently, they tended to think of the database as simply a backing store for the application *they* were working on. In some cases this is acceptable, but one often sees abominable schema that are the product of ignorance, pure and simple.
Naturally, non-relational systems are most attractive where performance is at a higher premium than flexibility. This characterizes many web applications that do a small number of relatively simple things, but to do it on a scale that takes special expertise to achieve using a relational model. That was very much the case at the beginning of the relational era, when applications tended to be narrower in scope and query optimization primitive. You thought of order line items as "part-of" an order, whereas in relational thinking they could just as easily be considered attributes of products. This made the programmer's job a lot easier, so long as the RDBMS could process invoices fast enough to make the users happy.
I'm not speaking specifically about Wikipedia, which has its uses but citation is not one of them. Nor am I speaking about truly basic knowledge that anyone working in the field would have in his head. I'm speaking of documenting where you actually get your facts, and if its from the Britannica, I think you *should* cite Britannica. That's only fair and honest.
Naturally, you should not cite Britannica for meat of your argument. For example, you should not use Britannica as a source for what Leibniz said about the idiscernibility of identicals. You should go to Leibniz's own writings for that, because the encyclopedia will explain too much to you. You ought to struggle with Leibinz himself so that you don't propagate some common misperception of what he says. But what about the fact that Leibniz was born on July 1, 1646? Should we travel to Leipzig and examine the baptismal records there? That's what a consistent rule of *only* citing original sources would demand. But no... the "no encyclopedias" rule would have you either (a) not disclosing where you got the information or (b) citing some other work that, for all you know, simply repeats what is in the encyclopedia.
If you are writing a paper on chronology, you *should* travel to Lepzig and examine the records there. But if you just want to refer to the birth dates of several logicians in order to establish that (for instance) Leibiniz lived in an earlier era than De Morgan, you are going to do no such thing. You're going to use a secondary source. And if you use it, you should *cite* it.
As far as Joe Blow's web page, you can and should certain cite that when quoting Joe Blow's insightful opinion on a topic. In other words, there should be no hard and fast rules about citation other than (a) cite your sources and (b) use sources that are reasonable for the purpose. Much of Wikipedia's usefulness comes from the same things that make it unreasonable as a source of information: it changes too rapidly to rely on what it saying today being the same tomorrow.
The way I think it should work in the case discussed in TFA is that the prosecutor should get a copy of the Diagnostics and Statistics Manual and cite that. However in academic papers I think there really ought to be an additional kind of non-authoritative citation to say that your source of information was the Wikipedia, but that you checked the DSM and confirmed that the information was correct. Why? Because everybody does it, and *credit* is something which is dishonest for a scholar to withhold. That citation would give Wikipedia credit, without recommending it to readers as an authoritative source of information.
Anyone in the field who hasn't figured this out yet needs to be let go. Programming requires long nights staring blankly at mind-muddling objective languages.
That's simply not true. It's just *one* way of getting the job done. True, you need to achieve a flow state to be maximally productive. The reason for the late nights is to have time when you aren't interrupted. In other words, the belief that you *have* to stay late at night to be productive is the product of incompetent management.
I understand that the idea is to point students to original sources, but I happen to think that the mindless application of the rule that you can't cite encyclopedias is wrong headed. There are often bits of information that need to be sourced but aren't really worth looking up in primary sources or for which primary sources simply aren't worth obtaining to make a point. If it's OK to cite secondary sources, it should be OK to cite a reliable encyclopedia.
For example, if I wanted to assert that Caspar Weinberger succeeded Eliot Richardson as Secretary of Health and Education and Welfare, is it really less scholarly to cite Britannica than to leave the assertion unsourced or to city Joe Blow's webpage (which is allowed)?
Another example would be John Wilkins' book, published in 1668, entitled "An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language". I had reason recently to describe the contents of that book in regard to the applicability of web ontologies to scientific data sharing. Now I live in Boston, and there is so far as I know only one copy of that work available for public inspection within reasonable driving distance. Nonetheless the work is widely cited in secondary sources. I *should* take the car trip to Gordon College if I am relying heavily upon the contents of that work. If, however, my purposes are satisfied by citing secondary sources, there is no rational reason to prefer some individual author's account of the contents of Wilkins' book over Britannica's.
It a bit silly that there are instances you can cite Joe Blow's webpage but not Britannica.
In short:
* where a less reliable secondary source than Britannica would be acceptable, citing Britannica should be allowed.
* where a fact might reasonably go unsourced as "common knowledge" (e.g. Elliot Richardson's tenure at Dept. of HEW), then citing an reliable encyclopedia should be encouraged.
* where it is reasonable to forbid the citation of Britannica, *other* secondary sources should likewise be forbidden, unless they are sources that have been peer reviewed in the field *as* reliable compendia of a discipline's knowledge.
I feel entitled to withhold a tip if I get bad service, but it's actually in my self interest to tip reasonable or good service. This is the way waitresses and waiters are compensated in our culture, and it's actually a reasonably good system for me as a diner. Basically, dealing with the public sucks. The tip system gives servers an incentive to put the schmuck who came in earlier behind them and give me good service.
Now there are people who feel entitled to repay good service with no tip, but the system would not work if everyone did what they did. Waiters and waitresses aren't paid a living wage, and if everyone stiffed the people who waited on them, we'd have to raise the wages of the servers and roll that into the food prices. Then there'd be no incentive except professional pride for a server to make an effort to take care of me after they'd had a crappy experience with the last customer. And we certainly don't want to pay the kind of wages that buy professional pride.
So in a nutshell, people who don't tip are contemptible freeloaders, but there's no way to eliminate the possibility of freeloading without eliminating incentive pay (i.e., "tips"). Stiffing a waiter who has given you acceptable service certainly *is* immoral.
Now as this applies to open source projects, its not exactly the same situation, but the same issue of enlightened self-interest apply. If one benefits from an open source project and are in a position to help that project, it is quite reasonable to do so. It wouldn't kill Microsoft to throw some help the developer's way in this case, as Mapquest has done. It's just common sense.
Where it might get interesting is if Microsoft actually thinks that helping the project is against its own interest. In that case, they're quite entitled to even work against the project while at the same time benefiting from it. But in that case the rest of us who benefit from that project might well question whether we want to encourage Microsoft to act this way.
Let me say for the record I don't think Microsoft is pursuing rational self-interest here. I don't think that giving back, even in rational self-interest, is part of the corporate culture there. It's a company renowned for people undermining each other within the organization itself.
Right. So the key here is downward scalability. In the proposed system concept, the oil/water separation process doesn't take energy input. You only have to put energy into the process when you've collected enough oil to make it worthwhile to bootstrap a process whereby you burn the oil you recover to power further separation.
The alternative would be to build somewhat larger robots that had some kind of centrifuge separator. That'd work too, but only if you could drop the robot right on a nice thick oil slick. Otherwise you'd have to tanker the water/oil emulsion until you had enough oil to get net energy yield from running the centrifuges. That still might be a worthwhile system to build, but it would be operated differently. You might air drop the system onto a known oil slick, rather than waiting for large specialized recovery vessels to be moved to the site. It wouldn't work in an oil spill that was so vast you didn't know where most of it was.
Of course, the first thing we should do is fix the incompetence and unconscionable negligence that led to the DWH spill and *killed eleven men*. We're talking belt and suspenders *but we have no pants*.
There's a lot to be said for that position (ie fantasy stories have fantasy furniture and sci-fi stories have sci-fi furniture ), but I take the position that logic ought to differentiate between the two. For example, if a magic carpet is the product of an economic system that encourages clever young people to go to magic school and learn the (repeatable ) principles of aerial textile system design, and perhaps others to opt for a rewarding career in magic carpet maintenance, that seems to me to be a sci-fi world. If the hero is the first man to pilot a rocket ship to Planet X because it us his destiny, then I'd call that a fantasy world.
If metaphysical issues have empirical effects in a story, or linguistics acts like a branch of physical science, one has either fantasy or sloppily written sci-fi. If course that's always somewhat true through the agency of the author's godlike power, but in sci-fi it oughtn't show.
I generally agree with you, but I would say its an overstatement to compare this to "Wii exercise machine" and "Cadbury chocolate flavoured condoms", because there is a real chance of creating confusion in consumers' minds in those cases.
There is little chance that anyone buying a "Jedi Mind Mouse" is likely to think he's getting bona fide Lucasfilm merchandise.
Overall this works out well for "Jedi Mind", because now a lot more people will have heard of their product.
I don't think this is something that's worth doing for *vocational* reasons. You don't do this because you'll produce a supply of programmers who are better at the flavor du jour of programming language. You don't do it as an *alternative* to access to modern machines either.
You do it for *educational* purposes, to produce people who understand on a deeper level what is going on than somebody who has studied for some kind of vocational certification. Perhaps they'll go onto be hardware designers, or systems programmers. Maybe they'll design the next generation of computer architectures. Or maybe they'll go on to be a code monkey in the language du jour -- but it won't have hurt them to have been exposed to this stuff.
Naturally, you have to couple this with the right curriculum and the right teachers. For example, students could learn the bad habit of premature optimization which many of us who learned on these machines did. But you can also teach fundamentally sound coding practice such as sound algorithm selection using basic tasks like sorting and selection. Of course you can do that today as well, but you're immediately into somewhat more advanced mathematics like graph or number theory. That's good stuff too, but it won't hurt to have got a more hands on feel for what makes a program efficient using more basic concepts first before moving on to the stuff that's really interesting from an algorithmic perspective today.
In short, it's not necessary or sufficient to teach students to program on old hardware, but in the right curriculum with the right teachers, it could certainly be beneficial. With the wrong teachers, it could be pointless or even harmful.
Re:7 inches is perfect for the girl slashdotters
on
7-Inch iPad Rumored
·
· Score: 1
Too bad she will still be unimpressed by the hamster-sized organ between your legs.
Slashdot Mirror
Rope and tree? Hard to say. Maybe if the government is overthrown by Cuban expats living in the US, but not surprisingly these are the most extreme critics of Castro. Cuban residing in Cuba might be sick of the regime, but it is unlikely they hate it as much as US expats do. The proportion of people who have a positive view of Castro is bound to be higher in Cuba than in US, which is a haven for the regime's most bitter enemies.
In any case, you have to look at the specific nature of the overthrow. If it were a military coup, Castro's fate would depend on what is most useful to the junta: co-opting Castro or castigating him. If the government were to fall apart under popular unrest, chances are Castro would spend the balance of his retirement in Venezuela.
Phrases like this set my bullshit detector off.
Which is ironic, because phrases like *that* set *my* bullshit detector off. But I try to ignore it. One ought not be credulous about any such detector that operates on automatic.
Your point has a certain philosophical validity, but who we think we are and who we "pretend" to be are *both* part of who we are. The difference between who we think we are and how we believe others will perceive us are an important driver of our behavior and a major source of subjective pain.
I think we all know instinctively that people are these ways. The creepy think about the Shatner persona performance is that it at least purports to violate this common unspoken assumption. It's probably not quite right to call the effect "scary". "Horrific" would be a better term. Something whose outward appearance violates our expectations in some subtle way is the cornerstone of horror fiction. That's precisely my emotional reaction to Shatner's self-referential performance of his persona.
I make no representation about what Shatner intends by the performance; I'm out of my depth there. But it is immensely entertaining and fascinating, unquestionably a work of genius, the acting equivalent of Stephen King in his top writing form.
And I happen to have Marshall McLuhan right here...
[Obligatory link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpIYz8tfGjY%5D
This reminds me of the most fascinating lecture by a bad speaker I've ever heard. It was a by a cognitive therapist on the topic of "Willpower". He had what I thought was an interesting point: there are other ways to conceptualize self-discipline than in terms of willpower. He argued that it is more useful to look at what we call willpower as a matter of scope: the universe of outcomes we consider when we make a decision. There is the dimension of time: if I buy the cheap alternative now, in the short term I have the widget I need and more money in my pocket. In the long term I may have to keep buying that widget over and over again. There is a social dimension. If I make a selfish decision, I undermine people around me upon whom I depend. I think one aspect of contemporary culture is a pressure to narrow the scope of our decisions. We are trained by big box stores to go to the store with the lowest advertised entry price and walk out on our first visit having made a purchase. If that purchase is cheesy enough, we'll be back again soon for a replacement. Our attention is saturated with distractions and exhortations to act now because the clock is ticking on a low price for a purchase we probably shouldn't make in the first place.
We've been trained, I think, not to buy quality for *pragmatic* reasons. Instead, quality is a *fashion statement*. People will will drop several thousand dollars on a Rolex watch that doesn't keep any better time than a $30 watch with a Japanese quartz movement, because of the vast amount of labor and craftsmanship lavished on the inferior technology to bring it up to scratch. As it happens, I don't condemn the quality as fashion statement phenomenon. Arguably it is entirely rational to make top quality lace using 19th century tech. What better place to make a fashion statement than in fashion? There is a certain charm to displaying an elaborate textile created on a authentic period technology. Likewise there's a charm to having a watch (which is after all jewelry) with an exhibition back that lets you show off the complex automatic movement. I do worry about the lack of pragmatic concern for quality.
As an environmentalist I believe one of the best ways to reduce human impact on the Earth while improving human lives is to focus on pragmatic quality. Buying quality is even better than recycling. It's actually better for the planet to drop a couple thousand dollars on an office chair that will look like new in twenty years, than to buy five or six cheap chairs over the years that fall apart. That's true even if you recycle the junk chairs. In the meantime you're a lot more comfortable. Environmentalism doesn't necessarily mean wearing a hair shirt, although buying the very best may not always be possible with one's immediate means.
In any case, getting back to this speaker, he was extremely insightful, but spoke in a very slow monotone with lots of "umms" and "errs" that made it very difficult to follow him. The effect is hypnotic. I have the lecture on my iPod, and play it when I have difficulty sleeping. The insights in it are enough to capture my attention, but the delivery has me nodding off within a few minutes.
Well, I'm not so sure that William Shatner always seems to speak his mind. It seems to me that William Shatner the person always seems to speak the mind of 'William Shatner' the public persona, while being very clear that the two aren't necessarily the same. I find that slightly terrifying, like the clown from the Stephen King novel.
Actors are sometimes persons prone to insecurity and self-loathing. Perhaps the nature of the job attracts such people. Anyhow, one likes to see an interview with a favorite actor in which the actor seems like a *real person*. Of course that "real person" may be (probably is) a work of art. That's what actors do. When you get an entertainer who is so clueless you see the person behind the persona, it's disturbing.
Shatner is in a class of his own. He's completely up front about playing a persona ... but who is it who's being up front about that? It's just another persona. Underneath the blatant egotism and insecurity you get a peek of the guy who's laughing at the whole circus, but what would you see if you look behind *that* guy? You peel back the outer layers of the onion, and you get ... more onion.
What's fascinating, fun, and frightening aren't the *iterations* of William Shatner, but the *recursions*.
Third option: disclose the algorithm to a trusted third party under a non-disclosure agreement. Basically you'd have the Justice Department appoint a review board of academics with expertise in algorithm design, and allow the board to investigate the algorithm. They would then disclose the general business objectives pursued by the algorithm, or at least the lack of certain legally proscribed objectives like stifling competition.
The solution of further decomposing nullable tables and then joining the results is almost laughably impractical. The first thing programmers (especially these days) will do is join them back together so they can deserialize objects from the database.
In any case, that solution doesn't solve the real problem. It ensures that (A or not(A)) is true for any domain, but it doesn't address the very practical problem of identifying where information for some reason does not apply. For a null value A that means "unknown", (A or not(A)) should be a tautology. For a null value A that means "does not apply" (A or not(A)) has no defined value.
Of course you *can* evade all this by introducing more base relations into you schema and doing more joins (hahaha). But it's simply not a practical solution. It's the kind of thing you suggest to make an academic point, not to make the model more usable. Codd is the one who's right here. You have to deal with these issues by representation, not introduce more relational decomposition into database design.
What we're wrestling with here is that the relational model is a wonderful metamodel of computerized record keeping systems. It's not a very good metamodel for creating models of the real world. You can see that by the lack of provision in the model for open world reasoning. There's a certain useful creative tension involved in this dichotomy; two arrows for our designer's quiver (object and relational modeling) instead of one.
There's nothing necessarily mathematically obnoxious about the "surprising" cases Date cites here, any more than sqrt(-1) is a bad thing in algebra. You just have to know what you were doing.
Second, I never said that understanding NULLs wasn't important to using SQL.
Yes, you were using my post as a springboard to make a related point.
I've been following the relational literature for almost thirty years, and practicing as a designer. I have an appreciation for the value of computer science to the practitioner, but there is a point where you are ultimately talking about academic math with no practical application to engineering. Basically the idea of eliminating nulls is the kind of idea that does more to keep the researcher publishing than it does for bringing better behaved, more expressive tools to market. The behavior of SQL's null is quite tolerable in practical systems, so long as you understand it.
The truth is that practical implementations of the relational model -- ones that competent engineers would find helpful in solving real world problems -- nearly always have some kind of NULL and if they don't it's a fault. Codd's idea of multiple kinds of nulls will almost certainly be needed to extend the relational model to allow queries to be explicitly made under open and closed world reasoning, if that ever happens.
By the way on slide 4 "Nulls ARE permitted in alternate keys..." Where did that come from? If by "alternate key" he means "candidate key that is not chosen as primary", Date is contradicting his own earlier writings. In any case, key candidacy is almost certainly the biggest practical weakness of the relational model per se, particularly if you allow composite candidate keys. The problem is one of fundamental epistemology. All the analysis you do to choose a candidate key is based on closed world reasoning. In practical terms system requirements evolve, undermining key choices, *especially* the subtle assertions you must make about normal forms beyond the 3rd.
Disney's depiction of the characters from Winnie the Pooh is distinct from (and in my opinion inferior to) the E.H. Shephard versions. In part this may have been because of the needs of animation. Shephard's characterizations were somewhat ragged stuffed toys we animate with our imaginations.
Depicting Pooh as Chewbacca is a stoke of genius. Lucas's huge accomplishment is that he envisioned a somewhat grimy, lived-in science fiction world that was different from the obviously plywood sound stages of low budget pictures like Flash Gordon or the antiseptic cleanliness of a movie like 2001. Remember this was five years before Blade Runner. Star Wars showed us beat up looking space ships and props that appeared to have got hard usage. That's precisely the charm of the Shephard illustrations. One gets the impression that Pooh has been cuddled until he's a bit ragged and the stuffing is in the wrong place. Sometimes he looks like he's been dragged through the dust until he has loose threads and bits of fur sticking up. The Disney Pooh has become slicker and slicker over the years, until in his recent digital incarnations he looks like he has been blown by venetian glassblowers rather than sewn from woven mohair .
In any case, I think it very likely that Disney would be in its rights to sue somebody for misappropriating the slick Disney Pooh even after the Milne copyright expires in 2026. It's a distinct and novel artistic presentation, even if it is inferior.
I've been in this business long enough to remember trying to explain email to people; or the web, or blogging, or wikis. A few people just jumped on the bandwagon because these were the new things, but a lot of people could not see the point. Why use a computer and a network and all that newfangled stuff just to send a note? Of course it helps if you can say something like "the marginal cost of sending a note will be zero," but then people looked at you like you were nuts. We pay good money to send letters or make phone calls, how could the network provider afford to let us send as much data as will fit without charging us per minute or page or something?
What it boils down to is that most people are muddling through without the new wonder technology. They won't see the tech as valuable until they see that other people are using it to muddle through more successfully than they are. Most people don't want change for change's sake, which is reasonable enough, but they also tend to be blind to change until it is well under way.
It's the same thing that happens when you develop any computer application, only here we're talking about a *class of applications*. Most users and stakeholders don't have much capacity for imagination when it comes to abstract thought. They don't really have a clear idea of what they want or don't want until they start using them. A new technology has got to get a critical mass which makes people sit up and think, "I'm missing something important here." Sometimes that doesn't happen, and an idea has to go back on the shelf until somebody comes up with it again in a new implementation.
Well, to play devil's advocate why not ban those professions? Because there is no substitute for air traffic controller or infantry grunt, and society needs them. Society doesn't need prostitutes to ensure sex happens, although possibly not *enough* sex will happen.
It's too simplistic either way; to assume that sex work is automatically dirty, dangerous and degrading on one hand, or to assume that it cannot be so otherwise. My personal, a priori inclination would be to legalize prostitution and regulate it to minimize the dangers to the workers and public health. But there will always be prostitution which falls below any standard one would choose to set as "decent". At the very least I hope we could agree that prostitution should be consensual if it exists at all, but there will always be customers who are all the more attracted to non-consensual sexual encounters because they are forbidden. And as with every contraband market, there will be businesses that serve it and profit by an economic niche with (pun recognized but not intended) barriers to entry.
Prostitution is historically been a last ditch profession for many women who ply that trade. Obviously it doesn't logically have to be so for all prostitutes, but it will probably always be so for many. Combine this vulnerability with customers who actually want a dirty, dangerous and brutal experience with a vulnerable woman or child, and it is clear that prostitution will always have its dark side.
The very fact that prostitution has this ineradicable dark side probably argues for some kind legalization and policing, because those aspects of prostitution that we'd most like to prevent cannot be eliminated by any sort of a ban. Legalization and well designed regulation could force sex businesses to take one of two paths: entirely legitimate with all the normal protections of law, or totally outside the law.
Would this reduce the dark side of prostitution? I think that's too much to hope, so we shouldn't legalize it with that purpose in mind. If we legalize it, it should be because the forms of prostitution that are legalized can be made tolerable within our concept of justice and are bound to happen anyway. Outlawing such forms of prostitution serves little or no purpose for considerable cost.
If accounting doesn't know what's going on, then they're incompetent. Accounting is essentially financial epistemology: it is about creating true, *justifiable* beliefs. The ultimate test is the audit. An *outsider* comes in and takes everything you say about yourself financially and puts it to the test. Then they sample things that happened (e.g. an invoice payment) and make every event is reflected on the financial statements.
When you have a situation where ignorance is tolerated in the accounting department, there's a good chance something corrupt going on.
I once worked at a biggish non-profit as IT director. The place habitually skated on the edge of financial disaster, and there was a lot of pressure on me to "improve the financial systems" by which management meant "software". It was true that the financial software was crap, but what was worse was that accounting was run by a bunch of amateurs who created complex, bizarre procedures. Sometimes checks would come in, and they would get lost for weeks. That's crazy: everyone knows you cash checks immediately and you hold onto the money as long as you can. So when the finance department head leaves, I suggest we bring in this friend of mine as interim manager. The selling point is that he knows a huge amount about financial software, but more importantly he's a really sharp CPA. Right from day one, he starts tearing out all the procedural cruft in the the accounting department.
This causes all kinds of grief and woe. One person freaks out because my friend the CPA tells her she can't use her color highlighters anymore. The color coding system she had devised was non-standard and unsound. People start to quit. No problem. We hire replacements. Not one of the people we hired had less than fifteen years of corporate bookkeeping experience. These weren't kids right out of college willing to work cheap, these were pros and worth every penny. For once we knew whether we were making money or losing it; whether we had enough cash to keep going or whether we were going to run out. You don't save money by hiring an accounting staff that doesn't have the expertise to manage money.
This all happened very fast, so one day the CEO takes my friend aside and asks, "Can these new people you hired figure out how much money I'm paid?" This seems like a strange question to ask, but the CEO's official salary was very high for an organization that size. What wasn't obvious by casual inspection of the books was that he was actually took two salaries, his official salary and a second salary through a paper organization that charged back internally for normal operation services. That was why our overhead rate was so high; I'd estimate that ten cents on every grant dollar we landed went straight into his pocket... Well, not *straight*; that's the entire point.
So anyways, the boss asks my friend that loaded question, and he laughs and says, "I wouldn't hire anyone who wasn't competent enough to figure that out." Hell, even *I* had worked that one out, and I wasn't an accountant. Anyway, not long after that my friend is no longer working for the organization, and management is reorganized so that as IT director I'm no longer on the management committee.
E.F. Codd would have disagreed with you. True, it wasn't part of his landmark 1970 paper, but by the early 80s he was asserting that having a concept for "null" was a requirement of a system that was "really relational". The reason was that while you can have a nice, self-consistent mathematical model of relations without NULL, a practical system absolutely needs some kind of NULL. I know what I'm talking about here. Back before decent embeddable database systems existed, it was common to put "relational" facades on top of indexed file storage. Let me tell you, if you don't have NULL in a record keeping system, pretty soon you find yourself inventing your own version of NULL and littering your code with checks. The relational model without nulls is from a practical standpoint garbage.
Granted, SQL's concept of NULL is problematic, but you are ... let's say *seriously misguided* ... if you think a programmer can work with a SQL based relational database (which is the only kind of RDBMS there is) without understanding SQL's concept of NULL and how it affects things like existential predicates or aggregate functions.
In any case, I'd like to see a serious argument that NULL violates the fundamental underpinnings of the relational model. The fundamental underpinnings of the model are in the relational calculus and algebra. Adding NULL to all domains does not alter any calculation that does not specifically involve a null value, so it seems to be consistent with the "fundamental underpinnings" to me.
NoSQL is not really about scalability, it is about modelling your data the same way your application does.
I've actually been in the business long enough to remember when relational databases were the new thing. What people seem to forget is that modeling your data in a different way than your application does *was the whole point*. The idea was to make data a reusable resource *across applications*. Of course, that turned out to be a lot harder than we thought it would be. Philosophically, one might well ask whether it is possible to understand data at all apart from its intended applications. Of course, by the time we'd figured that out, a whole new generation was coming up trying to create a Semantic Web.
I basically agree that SQL isn't always the right tool for the job. I happen to think certain aspects of the relational model are somewhat broken (e.g. composite keys), and SQL is a pretty crappy query language in any case. But I think because RDBMSs are a mature technology, recently trained programmers don't bother to understand them, and cover that lack of understanding by pooh-pooh-ing the stuff that's over their head. I went through a patch a few years ago where I was interviewing programming candidates who had XML coming out of their ears but hadn't the foggiest idea of what "NULL" means in the relational model. Naturally they had all kinds of problems on the relational end of things, and tended to view the RDBMS as a kind of pitfall in which bad things inexplicably happen. Consequently, they tended to think of the database as simply a backing store for the application *they* were working on. In some cases this is acceptable, but one often sees abominable schema that are the product of ignorance, pure and simple.
Naturally, non-relational systems are most attractive where performance is at a higher premium than flexibility. This characterizes many web applications that do a small number of relatively simple things, but to do it on a scale that takes special expertise to achieve using a relational model. That was very much the case at the beginning of the relational era, when applications tended to be narrower in scope and query optimization primitive. You thought of order line items as "part-of" an order, whereas in relational thinking they could just as easily be considered attributes of products. This made the programmer's job a lot easier, so long as the RDBMS could process invoices fast enough to make the users happy.
I'm not speaking specifically about Wikipedia, which has its uses but citation is not one of them. Nor am I speaking about truly basic knowledge that anyone working in the field would have in his head. I'm speaking of documenting where you actually get your facts, and if its from the Britannica, I think you *should* cite Britannica. That's only fair and honest.
Naturally, you should not cite Britannica for meat of your argument. For example, you should not use Britannica as a source for what Leibniz said about the idiscernibility of identicals. You should go to Leibniz's own writings for that, because the encyclopedia will explain too much to you. You ought to struggle with Leibinz himself so that you don't propagate some common misperception of what he says. But what about the fact that Leibniz was born on July 1, 1646? Should we travel to Leipzig and examine the baptismal records there? That's what a consistent rule of *only* citing original sources would demand. But no ... the "no encyclopedias" rule would have you either (a) not disclosing where you got the information or (b) citing some other work that, for all you know, simply repeats what is in the encyclopedia.
If you are writing a paper on chronology, you *should* travel to Lepzig and examine the records there. But if you just want to refer to the birth dates of several logicians in order to establish that (for instance) Leibiniz lived in an earlier era than De Morgan, you are going to do no such thing. You're going to use a secondary source. And if you use it, you should *cite* it.
As far as Joe Blow's web page, you can and should certain cite that when quoting Joe Blow's insightful opinion on a topic. In other words, there should be no hard and fast rules about citation other than (a) cite your sources and (b) use sources that are reasonable for the purpose. Much of Wikipedia's usefulness comes from the same things that make it unreasonable as a source of information: it changes too rapidly to rely on what it saying today being the same tomorrow.
The way I think it should work in the case discussed in TFA is that the prosecutor should get a copy of the Diagnostics and Statistics Manual and cite that. However in academic papers I think there really ought to be an additional kind of non-authoritative citation to say that your source of information was the Wikipedia, but that you checked the DSM and confirmed that the information was correct. Why? Because everybody does it, and *credit* is something which is dishonest for a scholar to withhold. That citation would give Wikipedia credit, without recommending it to readers as an authoritative source of information.
It's because hiring managers are afraid to hire people with more experience than they have.
Anyone in the field who hasn't figured this out yet needs to be let go. Programming requires long nights staring blankly at mind-muddling objective languages.
That's simply not true. It's just *one* way of getting the job done. True, you need to achieve a flow state to be maximally productive. The reason for the late nights is to have time when you aren't interrupted. In other words, the belief that you *have* to stay late at night to be productive is the product of incompetent management.
I understand that the idea is to point students to original sources, but I happen to think that the mindless application of the rule that you can't cite encyclopedias is wrong headed. There are often bits of information that need to be sourced but aren't really worth looking up in primary sources or for which primary sources simply aren't worth obtaining to make a point. If it's OK to cite secondary sources, it should be OK to cite a reliable encyclopedia.
For example, if I wanted to assert that Caspar Weinberger succeeded Eliot Richardson as Secretary of Health and Education and Welfare, is it really less scholarly to cite Britannica than to leave the assertion unsourced or to city Joe Blow's webpage (which is allowed)?
Another example would be John Wilkins' book, published in 1668, entitled "An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language". I had reason recently to describe the contents of that book in regard to the applicability of web ontologies to scientific data sharing. Now I live in Boston, and there is so far as I know only one copy of that work available for public inspection within reasonable driving distance. Nonetheless the work is widely cited in secondary sources. I *should* take the car trip to Gordon College if I am relying heavily upon the contents of that work. If, however, my purposes are satisfied by citing secondary sources, there is no rational reason to prefer some individual author's account of the contents of Wilkins' book over Britannica's.
It a bit silly that there are instances you can cite Joe Blow's webpage but not Britannica.
In short:
* where a less reliable secondary source than Britannica would be acceptable, citing Britannica should be allowed.
* where a fact might reasonably go unsourced as "common knowledge" (e.g. Elliot Richardson's tenure at Dept. of HEW), then citing an reliable encyclopedia should be encouraged.
* where it is reasonable to forbid the citation of Britannica, *other* secondary sources should likewise be forbidden, unless they are sources that have been peer reviewed in the field *as* reliable compendia of a discipline's knowledge.
I feel entitled to withhold a tip if I get bad service, but it's actually in my self interest to tip reasonable or good service. This is the way waitresses and waiters are compensated in our culture, and it's actually a reasonably good system for me as a diner. Basically, dealing with the public sucks. The tip system gives servers an incentive to put the schmuck who came in earlier behind them and give me good service.
Now there are people who feel entitled to repay good service with no tip, but the system would not work if everyone did what they did. Waiters and waitresses aren't paid a living wage, and if everyone stiffed the people who waited on them, we'd have to raise the wages of the servers and roll that into the food prices. Then there'd be no incentive except professional pride for a server to make an effort to take care of me after they'd had a crappy experience with the last customer. And we certainly don't want to pay the kind of wages that buy professional pride.
So in a nutshell, people who don't tip are contemptible freeloaders, but there's no way to eliminate the possibility of freeloading without eliminating incentive pay (i.e., "tips"). Stiffing a waiter who has given you acceptable service certainly *is* immoral.
Now as this applies to open source projects, its not exactly the same situation, but the same issue of enlightened self-interest apply. If one benefits from an open source project and are in a position to help that project, it is quite reasonable to do so. It wouldn't kill Microsoft to throw some help the developer's way in this case, as Mapquest has done. It's just common sense.
Where it might get interesting is if Microsoft actually thinks that helping the project is against its own interest. In that case, they're quite entitled to even work against the project while at the same time benefiting from it. But in that case the rest of us who benefit from that project might well question whether we want to encourage Microsoft to act this way.
Let me say for the record I don't think Microsoft is pursuing rational self-interest here. I don't think that giving back, even in rational self-interest, is part of the corporate culture there. It's a company renowned for people undermining each other within the organization itself.
Right. So the key here is downward scalability. In the proposed system concept, the oil/water separation process doesn't take energy input. You only have to put energy into the process when you've collected enough oil to make it worthwhile to bootstrap a process whereby you burn the oil you recover to power further separation.
The alternative would be to build somewhat larger robots that had some kind of centrifuge separator. That'd work too, but only if you could drop the robot right on a nice thick oil slick. Otherwise you'd have to tanker the water/oil emulsion until you had enough oil to get net energy yield from running the centrifuges. That still might be a worthwhile system to build, but it would be operated differently. You might air drop the system onto a known oil slick, rather than waiting for large specialized recovery vessels to be moved to the site. It wouldn't work in an oil spill that was so vast you didn't know where most of it was.
Of course, the first thing we should do is fix the incompetence and unconscionable negligence that led to the DWH spill and *killed eleven men*. We're talking belt and suspenders *but we have no pants*.
The "nanowires" just sound like the usual hype from MIT's PR operation (which has gotten out of hand enough to be an embarrassment for MIT.)
*sigh*. I wish that I was back up in the 'Tech on Boylston Street...
There's a lot to be said for that position (ie fantasy stories have fantasy furniture and sci-fi stories have sci-fi furniture ), but I take the position that logic ought to differentiate between the two. For example, if a magic carpet is the product of an economic system that encourages clever young people to go to magic school and learn the (repeatable ) principles of aerial textile system design, and perhaps others to opt for a rewarding career in magic carpet maintenance, that seems to me to be a sci-fi world. If the hero is the first man to pilot a rocket ship to Planet X because it us his destiny, then I'd call that a fantasy world.
If metaphysical issues have empirical effects in a story, or linguistics acts like a branch of physical science, one has either fantasy or sloppily written sci-fi. If course that's always somewhat true through the agency of the author's godlike power, but in sci-fi it oughtn't show.
I generally agree with you, but I would say its an overstatement to compare this to "Wii exercise machine" and "Cadbury chocolate flavoured condoms", because there is a real chance of creating confusion in consumers' minds in those cases.
There is little chance that anyone buying a "Jedi Mind Mouse" is likely to think he's getting bona fide Lucasfilm merchandise.
Overall this works out well for "Jedi Mind", because now a lot more people will have heard of their product.
I don't think this is something that's worth doing for *vocational* reasons. You don't do this because you'll produce a supply of programmers who are better at the flavor du jour of programming language. You don't do it as an *alternative* to access to modern machines either.
You do it for *educational* purposes, to produce people who understand on a deeper level what is going on than somebody who has studied for some kind of vocational certification. Perhaps they'll go onto be hardware designers, or systems programmers. Maybe they'll design the next generation of computer architectures. Or maybe they'll go on to be a code monkey in the language du jour -- but it won't have hurt them to have been exposed to this stuff.
Naturally, you have to couple this with the right curriculum and the right teachers. For example, students could learn the bad habit of premature optimization which many of us who learned on these machines did. But you can also teach fundamentally sound coding practice such as sound algorithm selection using basic tasks like sorting and selection. Of course you can do that today as well, but you're immediately into somewhat more advanced mathematics like graph or number theory. That's good stuff too, but it won't hurt to have got a more hands on feel for what makes a program efficient using more basic concepts first before moving on to the stuff that's really interesting from an algorithmic perspective today.
In short, it's not necessary or sufficient to teach students to program on old hardware, but in the right curriculum with the right teachers, it could certainly be beneficial. With the wrong teachers, it could be pointless or even harmful.
Too bad she will still be unimpressed by the hamster-sized organ between your legs.
[Guy unzips his jeans]
Girl [screams]: Oh my God!
Guy: impressive, ain't it?
Girl: It's got hair!
Guy: That's because it's my hamster.
Girl: Help! Somebody get me out of here!
Guy [drooling]: I really looove my hamster...