Sure, but outlawing suspicion and accusation are cures that would be worse than the disease.
Requiring proof by trial according to high standards of evidence seems a reasonable compromise to me. However, this requires a well thought out series of rules. It seems to me that the person who brought up the scenario where any bit of gibberish can become truth under this rule has a valid point. The prosecution should be able to prove that (a) it isn't just random gibberish and (b) that the defendant could, if he wanted to, decrypt the gibberish.
Part of the reason that the US forbids self-incrimination is that it is a practice that has been susceptible to abuse. Forced confessions are the favorite tools of tyrants everywhere in every age. Producing physical evidence under duress is a different matter. The evidence either exists or it does not, whereas confessions of any sort can be spun from pure fantasy, with enough "persuasion".
This seems to me to be a borderline case. The only way to prove the defendant can decrypt the gibberish is to have him do it. The defendant's claims one way or the other are suspect.
Well, don't keep files other people might need to use on your desk, unless you want your desk to become part of the shared filing system.
Filing isn't rocket science. Everybody who needs access to something in the filing system should be able to find it, at any time, unless that thing is being worked on at this every instant.
There are few simple principles that make this posible: Everything gets filed alphabetically, except things which (a) are chronological in nature and (b) things too big to fit in a file. Any creative organizational impulses are accommodated by pointers -- notes that are filed by whatever keyword you want, and point to the proper location for the actual information. Every folder has one and only one place it belongs, and that place belongs to that folder alone. This usually translates to one folder per hanging folder. You treat a folder as a unit. You take the entire folder out when you need something in it, and when you're not using that thing at the moment, you put it back in the folder and return the entire folder to its proper place in the file. If you need a copy of something in the folder, you make a copy. If you need to physical custody of the original, then you put a note in the folder to that effect, and possibly a copy then return the folder to the files.
Good defense lawyers do two things with evidence: they either discredit it, or they interpret it in a benign context.
When the Big Box O' Porn is produced in court, a competent defense lawyer demands the police produce a chain of custody showing how the box allegedly got from the defendant's home to the court. If the police can't show that, it's not evidence any longer. If the police can't prove the DNA sample analyzed actually came from the crime scene, it's not credible any longer. It might not even be admissible.
After the chain of custody is thoroughly tested, the lawyer then works to put the evidence in a favorable context. Sure, they have proof it arrived in the mail for the defendant, but where is the proof it was ordered by him? What about the defendant's neighbor, who is a member of a militant white supremacist church, and hates him because he's black and gay? What about the police detective, who was given to brag about how many n-words he put in prison?
It is the ability to contest evidence that makes admitting the evidence fair. If the police could just produce the Box O' Porn in court, and that's it, you're going to fry, well that would be very bad. If the police can produce any old binary gibberish in court and claim it contains porn, with no supporting evidence at all, that would be worse.
There's perhaps a difference between "organized" and "tidy".
I once worked for a guy whose neurotic comfort activity was reorganizing files. When things got tough, he'd stay late into the night or over the weekend shuffling his paper, and when he got tired of that he started in on other people's files. There really is only so much scope for creativity in a filing system before it begins to stop functioning as a filing system. Things used to look tidy enough, but the bookkeepers would go ballistic when documents were removed from their chronological files then stapled to other documents that were in the alphabetical files, except those files had been reorganized geographically (or worse, by keywords). Oh, it was very tidy. On a physical level. On a functional level it was a mess.
I guess the issue is where you put your energy.
We all know people who have messy desks, but know exactly where everything is on the desks. That's fine for people who work in isolation,. These are people who put all their energy into their work. Now, what happens when you need a document on that person's desk? They aren't putting energy energy into making your work easier. People used to go to the guy I was talking about and complain that they couldn't find things after he reorganized the files, and he'd reply, as if this trumped everything, "but it has to work for me." Ironically, it didn't work for him. This was just rationalization of something he had done impulsively, without considering the viewpoint of other people.
Now, this guy was extremely liberal. You can spin all kinds of psychological interpretations into that, but I'm also extremely liberal, and I'd never in a million years touch the accountants' files, not without doing some kind of analysis first and getting their sign off. Even if I were "the boss". Especially if I were the boss. I'd never hire somebody for the job of filing who couldn't do it better than I would, or at least better than some wild-ass late night hunch.
It's not just that liberal/conservative is a simplistic dichotomy; even to the degree that dichotomy is precise in describing political views, political views don't describe an entire person. The same views in different personalities yield very different actions. Different kinds of people put their energies into different kinds of things. So probably, every bad thing that is said about liberals is true.... of some liberals. Likewise, every bad thing said about conservatives is true of some conservatives.
Well, that's assuming we're talking about a reflector. You can do what GP suggests by holding a pair of cheap binoculars just so, or indeed with any other refractor.
I'd choose an eyepiece that wasn't an expensive, wide field design if I was doing extended observations. A Huygenian or Ramsden would probably serve, and they have only air spaced elements. You could either use a really, really cheap eyepiece in a 1.25 to 0.965" adapter, adapt a microscope eyepiece, or even rig up your own air spaced eyepieces. Finished Huygenians can be found for about $6 in the 1.25" format.
Historically, small aperture refractors have been used to project images on to paper for solar studies, so it is quite practical to do this or even build your own simple telescope. Since the diameter of the objective needed is small, you can use very long f ratios which simplify the optical demands for the system. The small lenses would also simplify the mechanical aspects of building the telescope. You could build the whole thing out of a 1.25" ID tube, and find a cheap f10 achromat that will just fit in the tube with a little ingenuity, and the whole thing'd be about a foot long.
Well -- make sure it is one that is from a reputable source, and of course don't trust anything that doesn't go over the objective.
Personally, I'd experiment with some kind of projection system first, before I started pointing cameras at the sun. You could do something considerably nicer than the classic box-pinhole arrangement with a surplus lens and a first surface mirror.
Ummm. To promote user choice within Microsoft's product line of course.
Take standards. You participate in standards in order to increase the size of the market for your goods. Then you try to capture as much as that market as possible buy creating a "superior" implementation of that standard. The fact that this locks in the customer doesn't mean the customer didn't have a choice. Anybody who has thought about vendor lock in realizes that the element of buyer choice is critical in making it possible. Microsoft doesn't put a gun to people's heads; customers put it there then invite Microsoft to hold the trigger.
Corporate ethics standards -- sensible ones anyway -- are always about enlightened self-interest. It'd be ridiculous to expect Microsoft not to drive users to IE. Or it might be visionary. But whatever that may be, it's certainly ridiculous to expect a monopolist to be a visionary. Visionary strategies are a nuisance to monopolies. Making money from a monopoly is about tactics; the only strategy there is is to preserve the monopoly.
That's probably why Bill Gates isn't that interested in Microsoft any longer. I imagine it isn't much fun any longer. Achieving a monopoly requires boldness, vision and ruthlessness. Maintaining it just requires ruthlessness.
Not everybody can sell snake oil. It's a real skill, that requires talent in that direction.
Engineers are seldom good at this. First, while engineers don't have worse people skills than the general population (contrary to the popular notion), engineering success does not select as strongly for people skills as other fields.
Secondly, selling is seldom where an engineer's heart lies. An engineer would rather you admire their engineering brilliance than work a different form of cleverness on you. Therefore engineers love to explain; they want people to really appreciate how hard a problem is. A good ghost story has to have ghosts that are scary. A good engineering story has to have problems that are hairy.
An engineer's approach to doubt is to quantify it, then weight it against expected benefits. This means engineers are best at selling solid, rational investments.
Engineering is about ingenuity after all: creating amazing things out of unamazing stuff. You have to be interested in that process to follow the details. Most "entrepreneurial problem solving" is really just identifying and characterizing a problem, imagining the problem solved, then finding people you can trust to take care of the details. The key to selling snake oil is selling trust. For an engineer, trust is a byproduct of rational inquiry. For the snake oil salesman, trust is generated by hope, and hope is generated by recognizing the value of a problem (hypothetically) solved.
The sad thing is that people make what should be serious economic arguments based on urban myths.
What killed nuclear power in the US was decades of low energy prices. Where energy has been more expensive, businesses have continued to build nuclear plants, even in countries with much more influential environmental movements than the US has. Because of recently higher energy prices, there are now plans to build as many as thirty new nuclear power plants in the US. That trend also has been accelerated by special laws allowing utilities that have electric monopolies to charge some of the costs over the ten year construction time of new plants to current ratepayers.
With respect to radiation, it's a natural aspect of the environment. The problem is when you have it in quantities significantly higher than they are naturally in an area. It is true that nuclear plants aren't supposed to leak radiation, but that is part of what makes them expensive. A nuclear plant that costed as little per kw as a coal fired plant probably would leak radiation -- just not be design. Modern coal fired power plant cost about $1300/kw of capacity, as opposed to over $2000/kw for nuclear plants. Dropping the construction cost by 30% without changing the fundamental design would probably not be a good idea. Nobody wants to invest in unconventional designs of the scale of a typical nuclear plant, although smaller projects might foster more technological innovation. Rather than advocating putting all our national "chips" to ride on massive, conventional reactors, nuclear proponents would better look to removing barriers to introducing superior nuclear technology. This is an area where regulations might reasonably be rethought.
They'd also be better served to advocate investment in long distance electricity transmission. The lack of efficient long term energy transmission also drives up the cost of nuclear plants. If you build a huge plant in the middle of a major population center (as increasingly the US has become a series of geographical megacities), you have to amortize the statistical cost of any accidents into the design.
Finally, it is disingenuous to talk about nuclear plants "releasing" radiation, since such accidents are not the primary environmental concern. Bigger concerns includethe waste generated from processing fuel, dealing with spent fuel, and decommissioning the plants. Personally, I think this is "just" a matter of costs. If we required plant operators to set aside a fraction of the profits generated by the plant towards these costs, rather than pretending the costs don't exist and dumping them on our future selves, then I think the problem could be manageable. However that further reduces the attractiveness of investing in new plants.
When plants become attractive even with all the formerly externalized costs internalized, then that is the right time to build more. Within that framework, efforts to make nuclear power a more affordable investment are reasonable.
From the provider's standpoint, it's not so hard. Future expenses are always factored into every sale in one way or another, but as a net present value.
The NPV of maintaining the servers forever is, in fact, finite, although the total expenditure over time has no upper bound.
What should give anybody pause when buying a piece of DRM'd music is whether the true cost of maintaining the infrastructure behind the DRM indefinitely is factored into the cost.
No, I'm suggesting that natural selection exerts a non-random effect on random mutations.
Let's say that two mutations are equally likely, one of which improves the blood's capacity to carry oxygen by 50%, one of which reduces it by 50%. Both mutations are equally likely to occur; if you look at just the molecular biology of it they are indistinguishable. They are not equally like to be passed on to later generations.
Suppose I'm born into the feudal system. The people who are above me in status essentially own rights to things like my labor. If they don't, I'm in big trouble because you are either a lord who lives off the labor of serfs, or you're a serf who lives of the land of a lord. Is the feudal system a system of government, or a system of property rights?
It's both.
The very idea of libertarianism only makes sense if there is a government, distinct from private individuals, which keeps powerful individuals in check. I think even libertarians would agree with this. The police and courts should not belong to the highest bidder.
Where libertarians and political liberals fundamentally disagree is for the potential of economic power to translate into de facto government by wealth, either by control of the economic destiny of the less wealthy, or by control of the machinery of government itself. Libertarians believe the private power either cannot get out of hand by definition. So long as the private entities don't have de jure power, it doesn't matter how much de facto power they wield. Extreme libertarians would think that if a company bought all the streets in a city, they could charge people to move around because that would somehow still be "private enterprise".
Net neutrality is a test of faith. Do you believe that if somebody gains the property rights to a critical piece of network infrastructure, he has the right to control any commerce that passes through it? That seems reasonable to me. I'm not sure that letting that process continue unchecked is reasonable. In fact, I'm pretty sure it is unreasonable. As soon as control over a set of assets becomes control over a wide class of transactions between third parties, it's not private enterprise any longer, at least in my view. It's government.
Look at all the stupid services mobile companies want us to buy. Are any of them even remotely good as iTunes? Who has reasonable alternatives to iTunes? Well, there's Amazon. Neither of these companies are in the "tubes" business. Neither of these business models are possible under the stifling hand of private sector regulation by the companies strategically positioned in the "tubes" business.
Once a business or group of businesses control parts of the economy by virtue of it running through their collective property, they are government. They are, in fact, one of the worst forms of government known to history, but unfortunately unfamiliar to modern citizens: they are government by barons. The barons may squabble amongst themselves about their share of the system, but they'll quash any attempt to supplant the system with something better.
Well, if I put Al Gore in charge of defining traffic management algorithms, I expect he'd do a pretty good job of it. He's not a communications engineer, but he's interested in that kind of thing and he understands the public stake in these things, so I think he'd be much better than some PHB at, say, Sun.
This is not an ideological battle between engineers -- not unless people like Lawrence Lessig are "engineers". In fact, law professors are probably much better qualified to lead this discussion than engineers, because they understand that what is at issue is not controlling congestion, it is controlling markets.
Just think what life will be like when the entire Internet is like Verizon or Sprint's mobile services.
That's like saying it's easier to hunt polar bears with a.22 than squirrels, because polar bears are easier to hit. They're bigger and they don't run away. In order for evolution to take place, genetic feature has to become predominant in a population. It doesn't matter how quickly the gene rattles around in the general population, because it will take many, many generations for any single gene (much less a group of genes) to leave a statistical mark.
What you want are small, isolated populations that maybe occasionally swap genes with neighboring populations - enough to blunt the effects of inbreeding. In fact the kinds of things we see in inbreeding are evolution in action; the only thing missing is selective pressure.
Your example of white Australians illustrates this perfectly. If you split white Australians into isolated groups of twenty or so interbreeding adults, then took away their buildings and their sunscreen and their clothing, then perhaps in a thousand years or so you'll see natural selection at work, with darker skinned populations being more successful. Take either factor out, either small gene pool or selective pressure, and you will see zero measurable change in a thousand years.
A mutation can, in a constant population of 32 people, take over that population in five generations -- let's call that about a hundred years. In a constant population of a billion it would take thirty generations -- let's call that 600 years. But either way, it'd have to be an incredibly advantageous mutation that immediately stomps all over the alternative genotypes, maybe telepathy or something like that.
In more of a marginal advantage, you'd have a random walk that would take much longer; on the order of hundreds of years for the small population, if it doesn't get snuffed out by chance, and on the order of many thousands of years for the billion population, with a high probability of extinction along the way. Absorbing boundaries are unforgiving.
Furthermore, evolution isn't a matter of single genes -- it's a matter of groups of genes. If you need four or five mutations to create a trait like telepathy, they all have to do their random walk through the population independently.
Well, I think the difference is this. Bloom County was written by a younger, more idealistic, more hopeful man. Outland was written by man who was prone to saying things like "I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners." Yeah, it's funny, but not the kind of thing you look forward to reading over your morning coffee every day.
Here's the full quote: "Liberal, shmiberal. That should be a new word. Shmiberal: one who is assumed liberal, just because he's a professional whiner in the newspaper. If you'll read the subtext for many of those old strips, you'll find the heart of an old-fashioned Libertarian. And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners." Again, it's funny, but it's not true. The Breathed of Bloom County -- at least the one we see in the strips -- is a fairly standard issue political liberal. The Breathed looking back is somebody who not only thinks government can't work, but thinks thinking government can't work, can't work.
Charles Schultz's genius gradually petered out over the years, repeating the same jokes over and over. Breathed, having stared his career during the master's twilight, knew that even the great have only so much greatness in them. Certainly not enough to fill out a daily comic every day of the year for an entire lifetime.
In the final Bloom County strip, the iconic meadow where the characters muse about life is paved over with asphalt. It was a brutally honest way of saying the creative well was running dry. And when Breathed finally did go back to the well, with Outland, and Opus, it wasn't so much that the well was dry, as it had turned bitter.
I really wish Breathed had Bloom County in him, even if he dribbled it out as a book every couple of years. I wish that Bill Watterson had more Calvin and Hobbes in him. But evidently, they don't. These were personal works, and people change; they move on.
GPL is normally a pretty good license, IMO, if you want to safeguard user freedoms. But it has bugs like any other human artifact, and MySQL illustrates this.
The client libraries for MySQL are licensed under either (a) a proprietary license or (b) GPL. The reason for this is to drive users who must use incompatibly licensed software to buy a non-free license for MySQL. This is contrary to the intent of GPL.
In theory, a user can download the MySQL client libraries since users are not required to accept the GPL. But vendors can't help them with it unless the other software they are providing is compatibly licensed. Furthermore, vendors adapting their software to work with MySQL are on questionable ground. Finally, if the user himself writes a program using the MySQL client, he can't convey that program to anybody else under a different license, even a free one, even though the work is only "derivative" in a trivial, legalistic sense.
This is why there is a LGPL. Downstream licensees can "upgrade" their license from LGPL to GPL if they wish, but not vice versa.
This means Sun alone has the legal right to dictate user freedoms. They can use the GPL to claim legal rights over the works of others, because they simply call the MySQL libraries. Sure, you can fork MySQL if you want, but you can't give the users their freedom. They have to buy that from Sun, even if they are using your fork.
Yeah, well. But disk size has nothing to do with how important a database is. Nor is it the only measure of database "size".
I have clients that have databases in the 100-500MB range, the result of small but regular transaction volumes over the course of years, in some cases decades. They extract a lot of valuable information out of those databases, and the queries that do that can be extremely complex. Some of them insist on MS SQL Server. MSSQL easily scales well beyond any of their transaction volumes, but it scales poorly in complexity. I've had to rewrite a number of queries to handle peculiarities of MSSQL with column aliases for calculated values (well, that's ANSI's fault, but every other vendor on Earth seems to have figured it out), and bugs in "advanced" SQL features like subqueries. Once I rewrite queries around MSSQL's SQL limitations, they run fine, except that they're much, much messier.
Which illustrates my point: there are different dimensions of scalability. For many developers who are primarily interested in integrating with the MS toolchain, MSSQL is sufficiently scalable. If you are doing some kind of IIS hosted web site and you don't need to scale to Amazon levels of transaction volumes, MSSQL is fine.People looking for a simple persistence layer that integrates well with Visual Studio don't run into the problems I do.
It seems to me that MySQL has a similar kind of niche in the open source world that MS SQL Server has in the Microsoft universe. It is sensible default choice for a persistence layer in most projects using an open source tool stack. Just because these projects may not be complex from a database standpoint or large from a storage standpoint doesn't mean they aren't valuable.
This "sensible default" position could be extremely valuable to the right company. That company might be Sun. Unfortunately, Sun's track record is mixed when it comes to delivering successful open source projects.
Spinning off Open Office as a community supported sister project to Star Office seems to have worked reasonably well. Certainly a lot of people are using Open Office. On the other hand, the opening of J2ME has been a disaster. There has yet to be anything close to a production quality open J2ME release after two years, nor is there any specific future date on which we can expect to see such a release. The only result of Sun's opening J2ME has been abandonment by hardware (Palm) and software (IBM) vendors. With Android, Google has managed to bring an entire java centric mobile operating system to market, while Sun has failed to get anything done. So, despite there being plenty of developers out there who are familiar with J2ME, who would like to be able to write J2ME applications for devices like windows smart phones or Palm PDAs, despite one of the most popular line of mobile devices (Blackberries) having a proprietary J2ME port, Android is the platform mobile developers are pinning their hopes on.
All Sun has to do to keep Google from owning the mobile space is to deliver a free, production quality J2ME port for Windows Mobile based phones. Even if it were just MIDP, it would mean developers like me would do our next project in J2ME (or I guess "PhoneME") rather than steering our customers to Android. Once you can get an Android phone from any carrier, the J2ME game is up.
My point here is that while in theory MySQL under Sun's wing might be a good opportunity for Sun, it appears Sun has too many opportunities on its plate already. If there were somebody outside who was willing and able to pick up the ball and run with it, Sun might help them, but Sun isn't going to do it.
Well, I think your point is that such lists aren't new, but having databases means they might as well be.
In the pre tech days, suspicion was something which, with a few simple safeguards (like those in the Bill of Rights) you could trust. The reason is it had a self-limiting feature: it costs money. You have to pay your secret policemen to suspect. Since suspicion was, effectively an expensive commodity, you could simply rule out the obvious first steps towards abuse.
But now, with databases and data mining, we can automate suspicion. The marginal cost of suspecting the next person is effectively zero.
That changes the balance between suspicion and liberty in a fundamental way.
I think there are two really glaringly obvious reasons why human evolution is, for the time being, over: (1) the size of the gene pool (2) low survival pressure.
Suppose I have a really, really good gene mutation. Injecting that mutation into the gene pool is like taking a teaspoon of extremely fine wine and tipping it into a swimming pool. Even if it conferred some kind of survival advantage on my offspring, it would take forever for that gene to become dominant in a population of billions.
Secondly, humanity is already so adaptable that better genes don't confer any reproductive advantage. Even apparently lousy phenotypes have no difficulty surviving and reproducing.
That's not to say that some mutant gene can't become dominant in the human race. Any mutation will, mathematically, either become extremely widespread or it will die out. But the process is more like a random walk with absorbing boundaries than it is like natural selection.
Actually it usually is the "best" technology that wins -- for a certain value of "best". What technology advocates often miss is the role of things like economics and consumer behavior in "best".
MSDOS won in the 1980s, because the most people started out the decade working with typewriters and ended up working with computers. Computers were typically ordered by the truckload and in that environment the fact that MS-DOS systems were cheap was the difference between equipping 100% of the people in the department this year and 80%.
In the VHS-Betamax war, Betamax lost its early lead because Sony would not compromise picture to get longer recording time. For technology advocates, picture quality was paramount. Unfortunately, consumers just didn't care about the better picture as much as having tapes that could record enough program material.
The Android/iPod comparison is interesting... Very interesting.
The truth is, the hardware does not define the device so much any longer. The difference between an iPod touch and a PDA is completely a matter of software. But because of software (and ultimately because of marketing) a PDA is a platform, an iPod is an appliance.
Technical people look at a platform as hands down winner over any comparable appliance. That's why they do things like jail break their iPhones, or install Rockbox on their iPods. A platform can do anything an appliance can, plus anything else you might dream up. But consumers don't dream up new things to do with their tech; they buy into dreams others have had for them. If there is no killer app, they have no inclination to go hunting for one. iPod/iTunes is the killer app for Apple, packaging it as an appliance is a surer path to competitive success, provided that killer apps don't emerge on competing devices.. Apple is selling an appliance that is (a) expensive considering the technology that goes into it and (b) cheap considering the utility people get out of it.
By creating an app store, they're muddying the waters somewhat, but the app store is a marginal activity for them. It may be bet hedging; by creating a developer community, a killer app on a competing device can be ported or reproduced on the iPod. Or it may be the thin edge of a very long wedge that will shoehorn Apple back into the platform market. Or a bit of both.
As it stands, Apple is in the drivers seat. If Android takes off, they can loosen the reins a bit and stay in the game. If Android struggles, they can keep it that way, while still enjoying the fruits of their closed iTunes/iPod appliance utopia.
Well, it appears that the system in question is a kind of circuit simulation, and every problem in NP is reducible to Circuit Satisfiability, it's not surprising that... surprising things can be done with it.
This kind of thing is really the heart and soul of Computer Science: transforming the representation of a problem solution into a form in which at first glance seems unsuited for solving that problem. That's why students have to master the puzzle of representing algorithms on Turing machines. Turing machines have no practical usefulness, but the skills needed to use Turing machine are very practically useful.
This kind of transformation happens every day, we just take it for granted. We take it for granted that sending an email, playing a video, or painting a picture can be transformed into a sequence of operations like additions and subtractions, bit masking and register shifts.
Serious software engineers are called upon all the time to do these kinds of contortions of imagination. Security researchers, for example, have to ask whether a black hat can inject data into a system that will trick it into running an arbitrary program. Cryptographers studying steganography ask whether one kind of data can be represented as another in a way that defies casual inspection.
Once I was asked by a humanitarian relief agency whether a satellite container tracking device could be adapted to track vehicles in a war zone without giving away the position of personnel. The devices, which were designed to function for years on a single battery, transmitted a brief burst of data every ten minutes or so -- to brief and infrequent (as long a it was moving) for radio location techniques, but including the GPS fix in plaintext. There was considerable system engineering to be done to answer this question definitively, but the very first question was whether a sixteen bit pic with 20K of RAM and maybe 32K of ROM available for the program could even run some kind of reasonable encryption algorithm on the message payload. The answer was yes, but a secure system would require more auditing by bona fide cryptographers than the project could afford.
This kind of thing does not strike me as that far removed from making a simple calculator inside of a game. If that doesn't strike you as interesting, then you are probably doomed to be a code monkey: you don't have what it takes to be a senior engineer.
Perl was not conceived as a systems programming language. It was conceived as a language in which a number of very common problems were very convenient to solve. As such, it probably overshot its natural niche, but that's a good thing within limits, because problems are often NOT neatly contained in some kind of application niche.
For example there are a number of nice GIS libraries in Perl. You wouldn't write a full fledged GIS application in Perl, but say you have a simple but successful web site, then decide to repackage it to provide location based services through some mobile carrier. Well, you'll find the GIS and web services libraries there. That's why IronPerl would be really valuable. It would make the vast base of useful Perl code more widely available.
Perl is a contrarian language. I personally don't like it very much, and a lot of people agree with me, but I don't think dislike counts for much. What is interesting is that it shows how much conventional wisdom is a convention. People have been doing surprising things with Perl as long as it has been around. I'm pretty happy with J2EE these days, but a few years ago project after project foundered as they struggled to fit themselves into the J2EE model, even resurrecting discredited practices like fat interfaces to get around problems with J2EE. In the meantime, as J2EE became more popular at Perl's expense, Perl based projects had none of these problems.
It doesn't mean that J2EE isn't the right choice for projects, particularly today. It just means that, to coin a phrase, "there's m ore than one way to do it."
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Sure, but outlawing suspicion and accusation are cures that would be worse than the disease.
Requiring proof by trial according to high standards of evidence seems a reasonable compromise to me. However, this requires a well thought out series of rules. It seems to me that the person who brought up the scenario where any bit of gibberish can become truth under this rule has a valid point. The prosecution should be able to prove that (a) it isn't just random gibberish and (b) that the defendant could, if he wanted to, decrypt the gibberish.
Part of the reason that the US forbids self-incrimination is that it is a practice that has been susceptible to abuse. Forced confessions are the favorite tools of tyrants everywhere in every age. Producing physical evidence under duress is a different matter. The evidence either exists or it does not, whereas confessions of any sort can be spun from pure fantasy, with enough "persuasion".
This seems to me to be a borderline case. The only way to prove the defendant can decrypt the gibberish is to have him do it. The defendant's claims one way or the other are suspect.
Well, don't keep files other people might need to use on your desk, unless you want your desk to become part of the shared filing system.
Filing isn't rocket science. Everybody who needs access to something in the filing system should be able to find it, at any time, unless that thing is being worked on at this every instant.
There are few simple principles that make this posible: Everything gets filed alphabetically, except things which (a) are chronological in nature and (b) things too big to fit in a file. Any creative organizational impulses are accommodated by pointers -- notes that are filed by whatever keyword you want, and point to the proper location for the actual information. Every folder has one and only one place it belongs, and that place belongs to that folder alone. This usually translates to one folder per hanging folder. You treat a folder as a unit. You take the entire folder out when you need something in it, and when you're not using that thing at the moment, you put it back in the folder and return the entire folder to its proper place in the file. If you need a copy of something in the folder, you make a copy. If you need to physical custody of the original, then you put a note in the folder to that effect, and possibly a copy then return the folder to the files.
Well, remember the OJ trial?
Good defense lawyers do two things with evidence: they either discredit it, or they interpret it in a benign context.
When the Big Box O' Porn is produced in court, a competent defense lawyer demands the police produce a chain of custody showing how the box allegedly got from the defendant's home to the court. If the police can't show that, it's not evidence any longer. If the police can't prove the DNA sample analyzed actually came from the crime scene, it's not credible any longer. It might not even be admissible.
After the chain of custody is thoroughly tested, the lawyer then works to put the evidence in a favorable context. Sure, they have proof it arrived in the mail for the defendant, but where is the proof it was ordered by him? What about the defendant's neighbor, who is a member of a militant white supremacist church, and hates him because he's black and gay? What about the police detective, who was given to brag about how many n-words he put in prison?
It is the ability to contest evidence that makes admitting the evidence fair. If the police could just produce the Box O' Porn in court, and that's it, you're going to fry, well that would be very bad. If the police can produce any old binary gibberish in court and claim it contains porn, with no supporting evidence at all, that would be worse.
I once worked for a guy whose neurotic comfort activity was reorganizing files. When things got tough, he'd stay late into the night or over the weekend shuffling his paper, and when he got tired of that he started in on other people's files. There really is only so much scope for creativity in a filing system before it begins to stop functioning as a filing system. Things used to look tidy enough, but the bookkeepers would go ballistic when documents were removed from their chronological files then stapled to other documents that were in the alphabetical files, except those files had been reorganized geographically (or worse, by keywords). Oh, it was very tidy. On a physical level. On a functional level it was a mess.
I guess the issue is where you put your energy.
We all know people who have messy desks, but know exactly where everything is on the desks. That's fine for people who work in isolation,. These are people who put all their energy into their work. Now, what happens when you need a document on that person's desk? They aren't putting energy energy into making your work easier. People used to go to the guy I was talking about and complain that they couldn't find things after he reorganized the files, and he'd reply, as if this trumped everything, "but it has to work for me." Ironically, it didn't work for him. This was just rationalization of something he had done impulsively, without considering the viewpoint of other people.
Now, this guy was extremely liberal. You can spin all kinds of psychological interpretations into that, but I'm also extremely liberal, and I'd never in a million years touch the accountants' files, not without doing some kind of analysis first and getting their sign off. Even if I were "the boss". Especially if I were the boss. I'd never hire somebody for the job of filing who couldn't do it better than I would, or at least better than some wild-ass late night hunch.
It's not just that liberal/conservative is a simplistic dichotomy; even to the degree that dichotomy is precise in describing political views, political views don't describe an entire person. The same views in different personalities yield very different actions. Different kinds of people put their energies into different kinds of things. So probably, every bad thing that is said about liberals is true.... of some liberals. Likewise, every bad thing said about conservatives is true of some conservatives.
Well, that's assuming we're talking about a reflector. You can do what GP suggests by holding a pair of cheap binoculars just so, or indeed with any other refractor.
I'd choose an eyepiece that wasn't an expensive, wide field design if I was doing extended observations. A Huygenian or Ramsden would probably serve, and they have only air spaced elements. You could either use a really, really cheap eyepiece in a 1.25 to 0.965" adapter, adapt a microscope eyepiece, or even rig up your own air spaced eyepieces. Finished Huygenians can be found for about $6 in the 1.25" format.
Historically, small aperture refractors have been used to project images on to paper for solar studies, so it is quite practical to do this or even build your own simple telescope. Since the diameter of the objective needed is small, you can use very long f ratios which simplify the optical demands for the system. The small lenses would also simplify the mechanical aspects of building the telescope. You could build the whole thing out of a 1.25" ID tube, and find a cheap f10 achromat that will just fit in the tube with a little ingenuity, and the whole thing'd be about a foot long.
Well -- make sure it is one that is from a reputable source, and of course don't trust anything that doesn't go over the objective.
Personally, I'd experiment with some kind of projection system first, before I started pointing cameras at the sun. You could do something considerably nicer than the classic box-pinhole arrangement with a surplus lens and a first surface mirror.
Ummm. To promote user choice within Microsoft's product line of course.
Take standards. You participate in standards in order to increase the size of the market for your goods. Then you try to capture as much as that market as possible buy creating a "superior" implementation of that standard. The fact that this locks in the customer doesn't mean the customer didn't have a choice. Anybody who has thought about vendor lock in realizes that the element of buyer choice is critical in making it possible. Microsoft doesn't put a gun to people's heads; customers put it there then invite Microsoft to hold the trigger.
Corporate ethics standards -- sensible ones anyway -- are always about enlightened self-interest. It'd be ridiculous to expect Microsoft not to drive users to IE. Or it might be visionary. But whatever that may be, it's certainly ridiculous to expect a monopolist to be a visionary. Visionary strategies are a nuisance to monopolies. Making money from a monopoly is about tactics; the only strategy there is is to preserve the monopoly.
That's probably why Bill Gates isn't that interested in Microsoft any longer. I imagine it isn't much fun any longer. Achieving a monopoly requires boldness, vision and ruthlessness. Maintaining it just requires ruthlessness.
Not everybody can sell snake oil. It's a real skill, that requires talent in that direction.
Engineers are seldom good at this. First, while engineers don't have worse people skills than the general population (contrary to the popular notion), engineering success does not select as strongly for people skills as other fields.
Secondly, selling is seldom where an engineer's heart lies. An engineer would rather you admire their engineering brilliance than work a different form of cleverness on you. Therefore engineers love to explain; they want people to really appreciate how hard a problem is. A good ghost story has to have ghosts that are scary. A good engineering story has to have problems that are hairy.
An engineer's approach to doubt is to quantify it, then weight it against expected benefits. This means engineers are best at selling solid, rational investments.
Engineering is about ingenuity after all: creating amazing things out of unamazing stuff. You have to be interested in that process to follow the details. Most "entrepreneurial problem solving" is really just identifying and characterizing a problem, imagining the problem solved, then finding people you can trust to take care of the details. The key to selling snake oil is selling trust. For an engineer, trust is a byproduct of rational inquiry. For the snake oil salesman, trust is generated by hope, and hope is generated by recognizing the value of a problem (hypothetically) solved.
The sad thing is that people make what should be serious economic arguments based on urban myths.
What killed nuclear power in the US was decades of low energy prices. Where energy has been more expensive, businesses have continued to build nuclear plants, even in countries with much more influential environmental movements than the US has. Because of recently higher energy prices, there are now plans to build as many as thirty new nuclear power plants in the US. That trend also has been accelerated by special laws allowing utilities that have electric monopolies to charge some of the costs over the ten year construction time of new plants to current ratepayers.
With respect to radiation, it's a natural aspect of the environment. The problem is when you have it in quantities significantly higher than they are naturally in an area. It is true that nuclear plants aren't supposed to leak radiation, but that is part of what makes them expensive. A nuclear plant that costed as little per kw as a coal fired plant probably would leak radiation -- just not be design. Modern coal fired power plant cost about $1300/kw of capacity, as opposed to over $2000/kw for nuclear plants. Dropping the construction cost by 30% without changing the fundamental design would probably not be a good idea. Nobody wants to invest in unconventional designs of the scale of a typical nuclear plant, although smaller projects might foster more technological innovation. Rather than advocating putting all our national "chips" to ride on massive, conventional reactors, nuclear proponents would better look to removing barriers to introducing superior nuclear technology. This is an area where regulations might reasonably be rethought.
They'd also be better served to advocate investment in long distance electricity transmission. The lack of efficient long term energy transmission also drives up the cost of nuclear plants. If you build a huge plant in the middle of a major population center (as increasingly the US has become a series of geographical megacities), you have to amortize the statistical cost of any accidents into the design.
Finally, it is disingenuous to talk about nuclear plants "releasing" radiation, since such accidents are not the primary environmental concern. Bigger concerns includethe waste generated from processing fuel, dealing with spent fuel, and decommissioning the plants. Personally, I think this is "just" a matter of costs. If we required plant operators to set aside a fraction of the profits generated by the plant towards these costs, rather than pretending the costs don't exist and dumping them on our future selves, then I think the problem could be manageable. However that further reduces the attractiveness of investing in new plants.
When plants become attractive even with all the formerly externalized costs internalized, then that is the right time to build more. Within that framework, efforts to make nuclear power a more affordable investment are reasonable.
Yes, but what I think is interesting is that the country that brought you the fantasy ... is bringing you the reality as an encore.
Japan is, famously, a conformist society, yet somehow creativity seems to burst out in wild flights of technological fantasy.
From the provider's standpoint, it's not so hard. Future expenses are always factored into every sale in one way or another, but as a net present value.
The NPV of maintaining the servers forever is, in fact, finite, although the total expenditure over time has no upper bound.
What should give anybody pause when buying a piece of DRM'd music is whether the true cost of maintaining the infrastructure behind the DRM indefinitely is factored into the cost.
Which would actually support the plaintiff's assertion that the government is abusing its regulatory powers to secure an unfair competitive advantage.
No, I'm suggesting that natural selection exerts a non-random effect on random mutations.
Let's say that two mutations are equally likely, one of which improves the blood's capacity to carry oxygen by 50%, one of which reduces it by 50%. Both mutations are equally likely to occur; if you look at just the molecular biology of it they are indistinguishable. They are not equally like to be passed on to later generations.
Here's a question that this brings up.
What is a government?
Suppose I'm born into the feudal system. The people who are above me in status essentially own rights to things like my labor. If they don't, I'm in big trouble because you are either a lord who lives off the labor of serfs, or you're a serf who lives of the land of a lord. Is the feudal system a system of government, or a system of property rights?
It's both.
The very idea of libertarianism only makes sense if there is a government, distinct from private individuals, which keeps powerful individuals in check. I think even libertarians would agree with this. The police and courts should not belong to the highest bidder.
Where libertarians and political liberals fundamentally disagree is for the potential of economic power to translate into de facto government by wealth, either by control of the economic destiny of the less wealthy, or by control of the machinery of government itself. Libertarians believe the private power either cannot get out of hand by definition. So long as the private entities don't have de jure power, it doesn't matter how much de facto power they wield. Extreme libertarians would think that if a company bought all the streets in a city, they could charge people to move around because that would somehow still be "private enterprise".
Net neutrality is a test of faith. Do you believe that if somebody gains the property rights to a critical piece of network infrastructure, he has the right to control any commerce that passes through it? That seems reasonable to me. I'm not sure that letting that process continue unchecked is reasonable. In fact, I'm pretty sure it is unreasonable. As soon as control over a set of assets becomes control over a wide class of transactions between third parties, it's not private enterprise any longer, at least in my view. It's government.
Look at all the stupid services mobile companies want us to buy. Are any of them even remotely good as iTunes? Who has reasonable alternatives to iTunes? Well, there's Amazon. Neither of these companies are in the "tubes" business. Neither of these business models are possible under the stifling hand of private sector regulation by the companies strategically positioned in the "tubes" business.
Once a business or group of businesses control parts of the economy by virtue of it running through their collective property, they are government. They are, in fact, one of the worst forms of government known to history, but unfortunately unfamiliar to modern citizens: they are government by barons. The barons may squabble amongst themselves about their share of the system, but they'll quash any attempt to supplant the system with something better.
Well, if I put Al Gore in charge of defining traffic management algorithms, I expect he'd do a pretty good job of it. He's not a communications engineer, but he's interested in that kind of thing and he understands the public stake in these things, so I think he'd be much better than some PHB at, say, Sun.
This is not an ideological battle between engineers -- not unless people like Lawrence Lessig are "engineers". In fact, law professors are probably much better qualified to lead this discussion than engineers, because they understand that what is at issue is not controlling congestion, it is controlling markets.
Just think what life will be like when the entire Internet is like Verizon or Sprint's mobile services.
That's like saying it's easier to hunt polar bears with a .22 than squirrels, because polar bears are easier to hit. They're bigger and they don't run away. In order for evolution to take place, genetic feature has to become predominant in a population. It doesn't matter how quickly the gene rattles around in the general population, because it will take many, many generations for any single gene (much less a group of genes) to leave a statistical mark.
What you want are small, isolated populations that maybe occasionally swap genes with neighboring populations - enough to blunt the effects of inbreeding. In fact the kinds of things we see in inbreeding are evolution in action; the only thing missing is selective pressure.
Your example of white Australians illustrates this perfectly. If you split white Australians into isolated groups of twenty or so interbreeding adults, then took away their buildings and their sunscreen and their clothing, then perhaps in a thousand years or so you'll see natural selection at work, with darker skinned populations being more successful. Take either factor out, either small gene pool or selective pressure, and you will see zero measurable change in a thousand years.
A mutation can, in a constant population of 32 people, take over that population in five generations -- let's call that about a hundred years. In a constant population of a billion it would take thirty generations -- let's call that 600 years. But either way, it'd have to be an incredibly advantageous mutation that immediately stomps all over the alternative genotypes, maybe telepathy or something like that.
In more of a marginal advantage, you'd have a random walk that would take much longer; on the order of hundreds of years for the small population, if it doesn't get snuffed out by chance, and on the order of many thousands of years for the billion population, with a high probability of extinction along the way. Absorbing boundaries are unforgiving.
Furthermore, evolution isn't a matter of single genes -- it's a matter of groups of genes. If you need four or five mutations to create a trait like telepathy, they all have to do their random walk through the population independently.
Well, I think the difference is this. Bloom County was written by a younger, more idealistic, more hopeful man. Outland was written by man who was prone to saying things like "I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners." Yeah, it's funny, but not the kind of thing you look forward to reading over your morning coffee every day.
Here's the full quote: "Liberal, shmiberal. That should be a new word. Shmiberal: one who is assumed liberal, just because he's a professional whiner in the newspaper. If you'll read the subtext for many of those old strips, you'll find the heart of an old-fashioned Libertarian. And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners." Again, it's funny, but it's not true. The Breathed of Bloom County -- at least the one we see in the strips -- is a fairly standard issue political liberal. The Breathed looking back is somebody who not only thinks government can't work, but thinks thinking government can't work, can't work.
Charles Schultz's genius gradually petered out over the years, repeating the same jokes over and over. Breathed, having stared his career during the master's twilight, knew that even the great have only so much greatness in them. Certainly not enough to fill out a daily comic every day of the year for an entire lifetime.
In the final Bloom County strip, the iconic meadow where the characters muse about life is paved over with asphalt. It was a brutally honest way of saying the creative well was running dry. And when Breathed finally did go back to the well, with Outland, and Opus, it wasn't so much that the well was dry, as it had turned bitter.
I really wish Breathed had Bloom County in him, even if he dribbled it out as a book every couple of years. I wish that Bill Watterson had more Calvin and Hobbes in him. But evidently, they don't. These were personal works, and people change; they move on.
For a given degree of "random".
If you look at the Sistine Chapel closely enough, it is indistinguishable from randomly splattered paint.
GPL is normally a pretty good license, IMO, if you want to safeguard user freedoms. But it has bugs like any other human artifact, and MySQL illustrates this.
The client libraries for MySQL are licensed under either (a) a proprietary license or (b) GPL. The reason for this is to drive users who must use incompatibly licensed software to buy a non-free license for MySQL. This is contrary to the intent of GPL.
In theory, a user can download the MySQL client libraries since users are not required to accept the GPL. But vendors can't help them with it unless the other software they are providing is compatibly licensed. Furthermore, vendors adapting their software to work with MySQL are on questionable ground. Finally, if the user himself writes a program using the MySQL client, he can't convey that program to anybody else under a different license, even a free one, even though the work is only "derivative" in a trivial, legalistic sense.
This is why there is a LGPL. Downstream licensees can "upgrade" their license from LGPL to GPL if they wish, but not vice versa.
This means Sun alone has the legal right to dictate user freedoms. They can use the GPL to claim legal rights over the works of others, because they simply call the MySQL libraries. Sure, you can fork MySQL if you want, but you can't give the users their freedom. They have to buy that from Sun, even if they are using your fork.
Yeah, well. But disk size has nothing to do with how important a database is. Nor is it the only measure of database "size".
I have clients that have databases in the 100-500MB range, the result of small but regular transaction volumes over the course of years, in some cases decades. They extract a lot of valuable information out of those databases, and the queries that do that can be extremely complex. Some of them insist on MS SQL Server. MSSQL easily scales well beyond any of their transaction volumes, but it scales poorly in complexity. I've had to rewrite a number of queries to handle peculiarities of MSSQL with column aliases for calculated values (well, that's ANSI's fault, but every other vendor on Earth seems to have figured it out), and bugs in "advanced" SQL features like subqueries. Once I rewrite queries around MSSQL's SQL limitations, they run fine, except that they're much, much messier.
Which illustrates my point: there are different dimensions of scalability. For many developers who are primarily interested in integrating with the MS toolchain, MSSQL is sufficiently scalable. If you are doing some kind of IIS hosted web site and you don't need to scale to Amazon levels of transaction volumes, MSSQL is fine.People looking for a simple persistence layer that integrates well with Visual Studio don't run into the problems I do.
It seems to me that MySQL has a similar kind of niche in the open source world that MS SQL Server has in the Microsoft universe. It is sensible default choice for a persistence layer in most projects using an open source tool stack. Just because these projects may not be complex from a database standpoint or large from a storage standpoint doesn't mean they aren't valuable.
This "sensible default" position could be extremely valuable to the right company. That company might be Sun. Unfortunately, Sun's track record is mixed when it comes to delivering successful open source projects.
Spinning off Open Office as a community supported sister project to Star Office seems to have worked reasonably well. Certainly a lot of people are using Open Office. On the other hand, the opening of J2ME has been a disaster. There has yet to be anything close to a production quality open J2ME release after two years, nor is there any specific future date on which we can expect to see such a release. The only result of Sun's opening J2ME has been abandonment by hardware (Palm) and software (IBM) vendors. With Android, Google has managed to bring an entire java centric mobile operating system to market, while Sun has failed to get anything done. So, despite there being plenty of developers out there who are familiar with J2ME, who would like to be able to write J2ME applications for devices like windows smart phones or Palm PDAs, despite one of the most popular line of mobile devices (Blackberries) having a proprietary J2ME port, Android is the platform mobile developers are pinning their hopes on.
All Sun has to do to keep Google from owning the mobile space is to deliver a free, production quality J2ME port for Windows Mobile based phones. Even if it were just MIDP, it would mean developers like me would do our next project in J2ME (or I guess "PhoneME") rather than steering our customers to Android. Once you can get an Android phone from any carrier, the J2ME game is up.
My point here is that while in theory MySQL under Sun's wing might be a good opportunity for Sun, it appears Sun has too many opportunities on its plate already. If there were somebody outside who was willing and able to pick up the ball and run with it, Sun might help them, but Sun isn't going to do it.
Well, I think your point is that such lists aren't new, but having databases means they might as well be.
In the pre tech days, suspicion was something which, with a few simple safeguards (like those in the Bill of Rights) you could trust. The reason is it had a self-limiting feature: it costs money. You have to pay your secret policemen to suspect. Since suspicion was, effectively an expensive commodity, you could simply rule out the obvious first steps towards abuse.
But now, with databases and data mining, we can automate suspicion. The marginal cost of suspecting the next person is effectively zero.
That changes the balance between suspicion and liberty in a fundamental way.
I think there are two really glaringly obvious reasons why human evolution is, for the time being, over: (1) the size of the gene pool (2) low survival pressure.
Suppose I have a really, really good gene mutation. Injecting that mutation into the gene pool is like taking a teaspoon of extremely fine wine and tipping it into a swimming pool. Even if it conferred some kind of survival advantage on my offspring, it would take forever for that gene to become dominant in a population of billions.
Secondly, humanity is already so adaptable that better genes don't confer any reproductive advantage. Even apparently lousy phenotypes have no difficulty surviving and reproducing.
That's not to say that some mutant gene can't become dominant in the human race. Any mutation will, mathematically, either become extremely widespread or it will die out. But the process is more like a random walk with absorbing boundaries than it is like natural selection.
Actually it usually is the "best" technology that wins -- for a certain value of "best". What technology advocates often miss is the role of things like economics and consumer behavior in "best".
MSDOS won in the 1980s, because the most people started out the decade working with typewriters and ended up working with computers. Computers were typically ordered by the truckload and in that environment the fact that MS-DOS systems were cheap was the difference between equipping 100% of the people in the department this year and 80%.
In the VHS-Betamax war, Betamax lost its early lead because Sony would not compromise picture to get longer recording time. For technology advocates, picture quality was paramount. Unfortunately, consumers just didn't care about the better picture as much as having tapes that could record enough program material.
The Android/iPod comparison is interesting... Very interesting.
The truth is, the hardware does not define the device so much any longer. The difference between an iPod touch and a PDA is completely a matter of software. But because of software (and ultimately because of marketing) a PDA is a platform, an iPod is an appliance.
Technical people look at a platform as hands down winner over any comparable appliance. That's why they do things like jail break their iPhones, or install Rockbox on their iPods. A platform can do anything an appliance can, plus anything else you might dream up. But consumers don't dream up new things to do with their tech; they buy into dreams others have had for them. If there is no killer app, they have no inclination to go hunting for one. iPod/iTunes is the killer app for Apple, packaging it as an appliance is a surer path to competitive success, provided that killer apps don't emerge on competing devices.. Apple is selling an appliance that is (a) expensive considering the technology that goes into it and (b) cheap considering the utility people get out of it.
By creating an app store, they're muddying the waters somewhat, but the app store is a marginal activity for them. It may be bet hedging; by creating a developer community, a killer app on a competing device can be ported or reproduced on the iPod. Or it may be the thin edge of a very long wedge that will shoehorn Apple back into the platform market. Or a bit of both.
As it stands, Apple is in the drivers seat. If Android takes off, they can loosen the reins a bit and stay in the game. If Android struggles, they can keep it that way, while still enjoying the fruits of their closed iTunes/iPod appliance utopia.
Well, it appears that the system in question is a kind of circuit simulation, and every problem in NP is reducible to Circuit Satisfiability, it's not surprising that ... surprising things can be done with it.
This kind of thing is really the heart and soul of Computer Science: transforming the representation of a problem solution into a form in which at first glance seems unsuited for solving that problem. That's why students have to master the puzzle of representing algorithms on Turing machines. Turing machines have no practical usefulness, but the skills needed to use Turing machine are very practically useful.
This kind of transformation happens every day, we just take it for granted. We take it for granted that sending an email, playing a video, or painting a picture can be transformed into a sequence of operations like additions and subtractions, bit masking and register shifts.
Serious software engineers are called upon all the time to do these kinds of contortions of imagination. Security researchers, for example, have to ask whether a black hat can inject data into a system that will trick it into running an arbitrary program. Cryptographers studying steganography ask whether one kind of data can be represented as another in a way that defies casual inspection.
Once I was asked by a humanitarian relief agency whether a satellite container tracking device could be adapted to track vehicles in a war zone without giving away the position of personnel. The devices, which were designed to function for years on a single battery, transmitted a brief burst of data every ten minutes or so -- to brief and infrequent (as long a it was moving) for radio location techniques, but including the GPS fix in plaintext. There was considerable system engineering to be done to answer this question definitively, but the very first question was whether a sixteen bit pic with 20K of RAM and maybe 32K of ROM available for the program could even run some kind of reasonable encryption algorithm on the message payload. The answer was yes, but a secure system would require more auditing by bona fide cryptographers than the project could afford.
This kind of thing does not strike me as that far removed from making a simple calculator inside of a game. If that doesn't strike you as interesting, then you are probably doomed to be a code monkey: you don't have what it takes to be a senior engineer.
Perl was not conceived as a systems programming language. It was conceived as a language in which a number of very common problems were very convenient to solve. As such, it probably overshot its natural niche, but that's a good thing within limits, because problems are often NOT neatly contained in some kind of application niche.
For example there are a number of nice GIS libraries in Perl. You wouldn't write a full fledged GIS application in Perl, but say you have a simple but successful web site, then decide to repackage it to provide location based services through some mobile carrier. Well, you'll find the GIS and web services libraries there. That's why IronPerl would be really valuable. It would make the vast base of useful Perl code more widely available.
Perl is a contrarian language. I personally don't like it very much, and a lot of people agree with me, but I don't think dislike counts for much. What is interesting is that it shows how much conventional wisdom is a convention. People have been doing surprising things with Perl as long as it has been around. I'm pretty happy with J2EE these days, but a few years ago project after project foundered as they struggled to fit themselves into the J2EE model, even resurrecting discredited practices like fat interfaces to get around problems with J2EE. In the meantime, as J2EE became more popular at Perl's expense, Perl based projects had none of these problems.
It doesn't mean that J2EE isn't the right choice for projects, particularly today. It just means that, to coin a phrase, "there's m ore than one way to do it."