There is only one english language, which originated in a country called England. The other one is just a strange dialect for people that don't know how to spell correcly.
Why do you have to replace s with z in so many words and why are all those u's missing?
OK, I don't have an Oxford English dictionary handy, and I'm recounting this anecdote from memory, so I hope I get it right, but I think it's good enough to take the risk: I worked at a company in the US where some of the developers had come over from England. One of them told us how he had written some documentation using the word 'recognise', and got his back up when some editor changed it to 'recognize'. He was writing an angry complaint and was going to cite his Oxford English dictionary and found in the dictionary that, 'z' was good. It reflected the Greek origin of the word or something like that. So, with a laugh he admitted he had to trim his sails a bit on that one and accept the change.
When Caxton, the first printer in England, was starting up his operation, he wrote prefaces to his books about the problems of coming up with standard spellings and even standard words for English. He told how you could go to the other side of the river in the town he came from and ask for eggs and they'd tell you they didn't speak French there.
Feel free to disagree, but I say American English is a peer cousin of British English, not some illegitimate, ignorant, deprived child.
OK, I think that I think rationally about copyright, though that may not be a completely objective opinion. Here's my way of thinking about it, and ya'll can decide if it's rational or not:
I'll start with a prosaic non-copyright example to establish my conceptual framework. Suppose you go to a builder to build a house. The builder would be willing to build it for $50000. However, the law requires that he charge you $100000. Would that be rational?
Now, suppose George Gershwin was willing to write "An American In Paris" as long as he had a copyright for 17 years, but the law required that he have the copyright for the rest of his life plus 100 years. Would that be rational?
People might say "It's his property!" But if somebody copies it, have they stolen it from him? Doesn't he still 'have' it. What he doesn't have (after the copyright expires) is the right to deny somebody else copying it.
I thought the original idea of copyright was to give a creator enough incentive to do creative work. Just like $50K might be enough incentive for that builder to build the house.
Copyrights do inhibit other people's rights. Nobody else was likely to independently compose "An American In Paris", but perhaps George Harrison indepedently composed the melody of "He's So Fine" for his song "My Sweet Lord".
If George Gershwin thought to himself, "I ain't gonna bother to write no "American In Paris' if all I get is a measly 17 years copyright'. Then maybe 17 years wouldn't be enough. How often do you suppose that comes up in the minds of creators?
Copyright is now associated with the concept of "intellectual property", and my self-described rational way of thinking of "intellectual property" is that it's a expression coined to trip up people into thinking of copyrights/patents as being the same thing as real property, which is stolen not when somebody copies it, but when somebody actually like, you know, goes out and steals it.
If you're going to recharge a battery fast, you need lots of amps don't you? Where's the current source for that?
Personally, I think the best solution is aluminum air batteries which, when they are drained, you would replace at a station. Not much different than stopping at a (gasoline/diesel) station now. Then you could optimize the design for other things instead of fast recharge.
Has anybody mentioned the Milgram Expriment yet?
on
Torture in Games
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I read an autobiography of Benjamin Franklin which said that when Franklin was in France either negotiating the Treaty of Paris (that's the one where England actually recognized the USA as a separate country, ending the Revolutionary War), or maybe he was still just getting the French to back us, he was observing one of the first balloon flights of the Montgolfier bros, and someone wondered aloud what good was it, and his reply was "What good is a newborn baby?"
BTW, I don't have "heroes", but if I did, Franklin would be my nr 1.
We grow up in a 3 dimensional world, or 4 dimensional if you want to count time, but I would say our experience of time is different enough from our experience of the other 3 dimensions not to count. We grok 3 dimensions.
There is a famous logical argument about how vision is not simply a projection of what our eyes see into the brain. The brain has to construct (perhaps computationally?) a virtual world based upon input from the senses. The visual part is done in the visual cortex it seems, one of the largest segments of the brain, just as in whales, the big part of the brain is supposed to be devoted to processing sonar.
Suppose though, that in the future, via some neural interface, a 4 dimensional quality could be projected into the brain. Would it train itself to deal with that? Would it eventually 'grok' it? Or has our capacity been so honed by evolution that that could not happen. We have evolved to detect things in the horizontal plane especially well for example, which is supposed to be why the moon looks bigger when it is close to the horizon. I would say that's a pretty compelling example of the hard-wiring that evolution has done on our perceptions. On the other hand, there's also a lot of compelling evidence for our brain's ability to re-wire itself to adapt to new circumstances. So it would be a kind of tug of war between adaptability and innate hard wiring.
The article (yes I read it), cites Gerard t'Hooft at the end. According to the wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physics] he's a proponent of digital physics. In that case the spookiness of quantum physics could be explained away by an ultimate determinism in the way a computer program is deterministic. Randomness would be 'pseudo-random'. The universe might have started from a very simple initial state and grown complex by emergent behavior, as seen in cellular automata, (mentioned with links in the digital physics article from the wikipedia cited above.)
Personally, I'm an agnostic. For all I know, I'm living in a virtual reality with false memories of the past, and when someone starts pursuing abstract concepts like "free will", "God", and so on to their ultimate meaning, they always seem to break down.
There has been an ongoing religious debate about free will, the Calvinists maintaining that God must know everything in advance. You get a hint of this in "Moby Dick" where Captain Ahab talks about how they rehearsed their lines a thousand years before the seas began to roll or something like that. But that could be like kicking off a cellular automaton of the rule 30 type [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_30].
I have to admit though, that even I find it hard to believe that Bob and Alice's decision are pre-determined by some rule 30 kind of cascaded development so that they'll always be tied to the 'decisions' of the particles spins.
I have nostalgia for the good old days too
on
R.I.P Usenet: 1980-2008
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· Score: 3, Interesting
My first usenet post was in 1984. The company I worked for had usenet access, and yes I have nostalgic memories of those days. Some of it was just the novelty, the sense of discovery. I understand and sympathize with a lot of what the article is talking about.
But things changed, as they always do. To me the change became noticeable as more dreck, noise and flaming one had to filter out to get to the interesting posts, and I started to disengage. Then my provider became more difficult to work with. I can remember not too long ago, after a long absence, going on sci.physics with a question. A physicist answered it, but the thread was full of crazy talk from various people with wacko theories. That kind of thing always happened to some extent, but I was a bit shocked by the sheer volume this time and wondered how that serious physicist could bring himself to devote time to perusing sci.physics for legitimate questions.
In the past, there was no other place to go for the kind of things usenet provided. Now, there are other places to go and I get the feeling that usenet is being left more and more to the loonies. Granted, sci.physics is probably more of a target than most groups. Something like comp.sci.c++ would probably have a better signal to noise ratio (if it exists, I haven't checked). The last group that I used to regularly engage was sci.econ, and by engage I mean I'd lock horns in arguments with others that were not just flamefests. I remember sci.bio.evolution was heavily moderated for obvious reasons, creationists were always trying to infiltrate with their own ideas.
Actually, slashdot has a bit of the old flavor. Sure there's lots of noise on the channel, but good stuff as well. However, slashdot doesn't have the breadth of usenet and it's up to the higher authorities to decide what topics get selected.
I tried writing a novel a few years ago, and after playing around with TeX and LaTex found TeX easier to use. In the end, to get page numbers in the right places on the opposite sides of the page, I found myself having to kludge something with LaTex, but generally, it was easier to use TeX. But that's because online I found a good guide, "A Gentle Introduction to T E X" by Michael Doob, much more useful than Knuth's "The TeXbook" for 99% of what one would want to do.
I mostly bring up old-timers because they're the ones I read when I was young. Asimov's Robot novels like "Caves Of Steel" might be more appealing than the Foundation stuff. Heinlein wrote a lot of juveniles. I've read that "Starship Troopers" was supposed to be a juvenile but it was deemed to rough by the editors and re-marketed as adult. However, "Double Star" is a good juvenile by Heinlein.
In the old days, Sci-Fi was mostly short stories, go find good anthologies! The Science Fiction Hall Of Fame anthology of the best science fiction stories is a good place to start.
Other recommendations would be "Voyage Of The Space Beagle" by Van Vogt, "Wasp" by Eric Frank Russell.
Well now hold on a minute. Becoming A Master Of A Language is more than just an intellectual exercise. Your work is better: written more quickly, usually running more efficiently (sometimes that still matters), usually written in a more terse way (which might be harder for newbies to figure out, but not for other Masters, and fewer lines of code usually means fewer bugs). In short, easier to maintain.
However, becoming a master means serving an apprenticeship and yes, languages do go out of fashion. If you're paid well enough during the apprenticeship fine, but making a decision about which languages/jobs to pursue can be tricky.
I thought there was so much automation nowadays that the cost of labor wasn't much of a factor anymore. Why ship to China for cheap labor if labor is only a small factor of production? Of course, if China had the modern infrastructure and we didn't, then we would have to make the capital investments to modernize our infrastructure.
Yeah, I bought "Civilization, Call To Power" from Loki, the version specifically for linux. I still like to crank it up once in awhile to relax with, but it doesn't run on most current linux distros. I suppose I could google around and find a fix of some kind, but it still runs on slackware, so I haven't bothered.
This is an example of a commercial application on linux, so one doesn't have open source that can be upgraded. I suppose if I'd purchased a windows version of the game, I'd be running all fine and dandy now under wine.
Don't be so negative about a post-Duke Nukem Forever released world. As other posters have pointed out, we have other eternal vaporware items to continue to joke about. But if this becomes an eternal vaporware item that actually solidified, then, depending on how successful it is, it could provide new memes. It might even be inspirational.
I saw a "Frontline" documentary awhile back about the guy who defied a tank in Tianamen Square. It is a famous image, and apparently helped inspire people in other parts of the world to rise up against totalitarianism. I think, if I were Chinese, that image would make my chest puff out in pride at what one of my countrymen had done. But, as I recall from the documentary, most Chinese have never seen it. They showed the picture to some Chinese who didn't recognize it, who asked if it were a doctored photo. According to the documentary, the guy who took the picture, a foreign journalist type, had a good deal of trouble sneaking it out of China.
Human nature is human nature, whether you're Chinese, American, !Kung, or whatever, and there are many people here in the USA who are shaky on the concepts behind what I'll call the ideas of the Enlightenment, and I'd say our current president is one of them.
Democracy is tough to get used to. Besides the many times it's been shortchanged in American history, it has a hard time taking root elsewhere. It was adopted in France with the French Revolution, and they went through the reign of terror and then the Empire of Napoleon. It was adopted in Germany after World War One, and Hitler was elected Chancellor in 1932. (There were complications faced by both nascent democracies to be sure). Recently, Russia has tried democracy also, with some disappointing results.
It may be 3 steps forward, one step back, but the ideas do seem to be progressing. I keep my fingers crossed.
(I tried to reply before, looked at a preview, tried to continue editing, and it seems the whole thing got lost! That'll learn me. Don't go back, just post.)
Reminds me of structured programming
on
The Return of Ada
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Back in the 70s there was a big fuss being made about something called "Structured Programming". A lot of people took notice when a big project, an indexing system for the New York Times was finished with remarkably few errors. Yet, that success did not seem to become the norm. (It's mentioned briefly in the wikipedia article on 'structured programming').
COBOL used to be touted as a great language because it was 'self documenting'. Yet a lot of retired COBOL programmers got a last hurrah when they were hired to update obscure code in this 'self-documenting' language to handle dates with the year 2000 in them back at the end of the 90s.
Basically, I think what it boils down to is discipline and talent in the development process. That is far more important than the choice of language. To some extent, I would buy the idea that the fewer lines of code required to write out a program, the better, because there are fewer chances of errors. But even that can be taken to extremes in a language like APL, or if the lines refer back through obscure nests of classes. By few lines of code I mean a few readable lines of code that a programmer can look at and actually know what is supposed to be happening and how.
I first heard about John Wheeler surfing the wikipedia about what I'll loosely call 'digital physics', and he was mentioned in contexts that made him sound like a kindred spirit.
Without being a physicist myself, just cherry-picking the theories I like, the way one might choose a religion, I like to think the universe doesn't have infinities, irrational numbers, and everything is discrete (maybe I'd allow aleph-null infinites, but no axiom of choice; I favor the constructivists). So, based on that unchallengeable authority, the wikipedia, Wheeler was a real, top level physicist, who seemed to be in pretty much the same corner.
So this is slashdot and I'm an extreme layman putting out my two-bits, fishing for more enlightened comments from people more in the field.
I'm responding to the "Microsoft has completely lost sight of how to create innovative products...". When did they ever have sight of how to create innovative products? Buying a company that produced an innovative product doesn't count. Copying somebody else's innovative product doesn't count either.
I can remember watching an episode of the TV program "Science Fiction Theater" (look it up in the IMDB) back in the 1950s in which some scientists recovered a rock, and were able to extract the sounds of people in a panic running from the Mt Vesuvius eruption that destroyed Pompeii. (I don't remember many details though, I was pretty young at the time.)
The French 'defined' the enlightenment? Sure they had Voltaire, but what about Sam Adams, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Ben Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson?
Slashdot Mirror
There is only one english language, which originated in a country called England. The other one is just a strange dialect for people that don't know how to spell correcly.
Why do you have to replace s with z in so many words and why are all those u's missing?
OK, I don't have an Oxford English dictionary handy, and I'm recounting this anecdote from memory, so I hope I get it right, but I think it's good enough to take the risk:
I worked at a company in the US where some of the developers had come over from England. One of them told us how he had written some documentation using the word 'recognise', and got his back up when some editor changed it to 'recognize'. He was writing an angry complaint and was going to cite his Oxford English dictionary and found in the dictionary that, 'z' was good. It reflected the Greek origin of the word or something like that. So, with a laugh he admitted he had to trim his sails a bit on that one and accept the change.
When Caxton, the first printer in England, was starting up his operation, he wrote prefaces to his books about the problems of coming up with standard spellings and even standard words for English. He told how you could go to the other side of the river in the town he came from and ask for eggs and they'd tell you they didn't speak French there.
Feel free to disagree, but I say American English is a peer cousin of British English, not some illegitimate, ignorant, deprived child.
OK, I think that I think rationally about copyright, though that may not be a completely objective opinion. Here's my way of thinking about it, and ya'll can decide if it's rational or not:
I'll start with a prosaic non-copyright example to establish my conceptual framework. Suppose you go to a builder to build a house. The builder would be willing to build it for $50000. However, the law requires that he charge you $100000. Would that be rational?
Now, suppose George Gershwin was willing to write "An American In Paris" as long as he had a copyright for 17 years, but the law required that he have the copyright for the rest of his life plus 100 years. Would that be rational?
People might say "It's his property!" But if somebody copies it, have they stolen it from him? Doesn't he still 'have' it. What he doesn't have (after the copyright expires) is the right to deny somebody else copying it.
I thought the original idea of copyright was to give a creator enough incentive to do creative work. Just like $50K might be enough incentive for that builder to build the house.
Copyrights do inhibit other people's rights. Nobody else was likely to independently compose "An American In Paris", but perhaps George Harrison indepedently composed the melody of "He's So Fine" for his song "My Sweet Lord".
If George Gershwin thought to himself, "I ain't gonna bother to write no "American In Paris' if all I get is a measly 17 years copyright'. Then maybe 17 years wouldn't be enough. How often do you suppose that comes up in the minds of creators?
Copyright is now associated with the concept of "intellectual property", and my self-described rational way of thinking of "intellectual property" is that it's a expression coined to trip up people into thinking of copyrights/patents as being the same thing as real property, which is stolen not when somebody copies it, but when somebody actually like, you know, goes out and steals it.
If you're going to recharge a battery fast, you need lots of amps don't you? Where's the current source for that?
Personally, I think the best solution is aluminum air batteries which, when they are drained, you would replace at a station. Not much different than stopping at a (gasoline/diesel) station now. Then you could optimize the design for other things instead of fast recharge.
A lot depends on how it's done of course. The point would be to learn something and not just reinforcement attitudes and habits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Milgram_Experiment
I read an autobiography of Benjamin Franklin which said that when Franklin was in France either negotiating the Treaty of Paris (that's the one where England actually recognized the USA as a separate country, ending the Revolutionary War), or maybe he was still just getting the French to back us, he was observing one of the first balloon flights of the Montgolfier bros, and someone wondered aloud what good was it, and his reply was "What good is a newborn baby?"
BTW, I don't have "heroes", but if I did, Franklin would be my nr 1.
We grow up in a 3 dimensional world, or 4 dimensional if you want to count time, but I would say our experience of time is different enough from our experience of the other 3 dimensions not to count. We grok 3 dimensions.
There is a famous logical argument about how vision is not simply a projection of what our eyes see into the brain. The brain has to construct (perhaps computationally?) a virtual world based upon input from the senses. The visual part is done in the visual cortex it seems, one of the largest segments of the brain, just as in whales, the big part of the brain is supposed to be devoted to processing sonar.
Suppose though, that in the future, via some neural interface, a 4 dimensional quality could be projected into the brain. Would it train itself to deal with that? Would it eventually 'grok' it? Or has our capacity been so honed by evolution that that could not happen. We have evolved to detect things in the horizontal plane especially well for example, which is supposed to be why the moon looks bigger when it is close to the horizon. I would say that's a pretty compelling example of the hard-wiring that evolution has done on our perceptions. On the other hand, there's also a lot of compelling evidence for our brain's ability to re-wire itself to adapt to new circumstances. So it would be a kind of tug of war between adaptability and innate hard wiring.
The article (yes I read it), cites Gerard t'Hooft at the end. According to the wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physics] he's a proponent of digital physics. In that case the spookiness of quantum physics could be explained away by an ultimate determinism in the way a computer program is deterministic. Randomness would be 'pseudo-random'. The universe might have started from a very simple initial state and grown complex by emergent behavior, as seen in cellular automata, (mentioned with links in the digital physics article from the wikipedia cited above.)
Personally, I'm an agnostic. For all I know, I'm living in a virtual reality with false memories of the past, and when someone starts pursuing abstract concepts like "free will", "God", and so on to their ultimate meaning, they always seem to break down.
There has been an ongoing religious debate about free will, the Calvinists maintaining that God must know everything in advance. You get a hint of this in "Moby Dick" where Captain Ahab talks about how they rehearsed their lines a thousand years before the seas began to roll or something like that. But that could be like kicking off a cellular automaton of the rule 30 type [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_30].
I have to admit though, that even I find it hard to believe that Bob and Alice's decision are pre-determined by some rule 30 kind of cascaded development so that they'll always be tied to the 'decisions' of the particles spins.
My first usenet post was in 1984. The company I worked for had usenet access, and yes I have nostalgic memories of those days. Some of it was just the novelty, the sense of discovery. I understand and sympathize with a lot of what the article is talking about.
But things changed, as they always do. To me the change became noticeable as more dreck, noise and flaming one had to filter out to get to the interesting posts, and I started to disengage. Then my provider became more difficult to work with. I can remember not too long ago, after a long absence, going on sci.physics with a question. A physicist answered it, but the thread was full of crazy talk from various people with wacko theories. That kind of thing always happened to some extent, but I was a bit shocked by the sheer volume this time and wondered how that serious physicist could bring himself to devote time to perusing sci.physics for legitimate questions.
In the past, there was no other place to go for the kind of things usenet provided. Now, there are other places to go and I get the feeling that usenet is being left more and more to the loonies. Granted, sci.physics is probably more of a target than most groups. Something like comp.sci.c++ would probably have a better signal to noise ratio (if it exists, I haven't checked). The last group that I used to regularly engage was sci.econ, and by engage I mean I'd lock horns in arguments with others that were not just flamefests. I remember sci.bio.evolution was heavily moderated for obvious reasons, creationists were always trying to infiltrate with their own ideas.
Actually, slashdot has a bit of the old flavor. Sure there's lots of noise on the channel, but good stuff as well. However, slashdot doesn't have the breadth of usenet and it's up to the higher authorities to decide what topics get selected.
I tried writing a novel a few years ago, and after playing around with TeX and LaTex found TeX easier to use. In the end, to get page numbers in the right places on the opposite sides of the page, I found myself having to kludge something with LaTex, but generally, it was easier to use TeX. But that's because online I found a good guide, "A Gentle Introduction to T E X" by Michael Doob, much more useful than Knuth's "The TeXbook" for 99% of what one would want to do.
Why isn't invention compatible with open source 'schtuf'?
I mostly bring up old-timers because they're the ones I read when I was young. Asimov's Robot novels like "Caves Of Steel" might be more appealing than the Foundation stuff. Heinlein wrote a lot of juveniles. I've read that "Starship Troopers" was supposed to be a juvenile but it was deemed to rough by the editors and re-marketed as adult. However, "Double Star" is a good juvenile by Heinlein.
In the old days, Sci-Fi was mostly short stories, go find good anthologies! The Science Fiction Hall Of Fame anthology of the best science fiction stories is a good place to start.
Other recommendations would be "Voyage Of The Space Beagle" by Van Vogt, "Wasp" by Eric Frank Russell.
Well now hold on a minute. Becoming A Master Of A Language is more than just an intellectual exercise. Your work is better: written more quickly, usually running more efficiently (sometimes that still matters), usually written in a more terse way (which might be harder for newbies to figure out, but not for other Masters, and fewer lines of code usually means fewer bugs). In short, easier to maintain.
However, becoming a master means serving an apprenticeship and yes, languages do go out of fashion. If you're paid well enough during the apprenticeship fine, but making a decision about which languages/jobs to pursue can be tricky.
I thought there was so much automation nowadays that the cost of labor wasn't much of a factor anymore. Why ship to China for cheap labor if labor is only a small factor of production? Of course, if China had the modern infrastructure and we didn't, then we would have to make the capital investments to modernize our infrastructure.
Yeah, I bought "Civilization, Call To Power" from Loki, the version specifically for linux. I still like to crank it up once in awhile to relax with, but it doesn't run on most current linux distros. I suppose I could google around and find a fix of some kind, but it still runs on slackware, so I haven't bothered.
This is an example of a commercial application on linux, so one doesn't have open source that can be upgraded. I suppose if I'd purchased a windows version of the game, I'd be running all fine and dandy now under wine.
Don't be so negative about a post-Duke Nukem Forever released world. As other posters have pointed out, we have other eternal vaporware items to continue to joke about. But if this becomes an eternal vaporware item that actually solidified, then, depending on how successful it is, it could provide new memes. It might even be inspirational.
I saw a "Frontline" documentary awhile back about the guy who defied a tank in Tianamen Square. It is a famous image, and apparently helped inspire people in other parts of the world to rise up against totalitarianism. I think, if I were Chinese, that image would make my chest puff out in pride at what one of my countrymen had done. But, as I recall from the documentary, most Chinese have never seen it. They showed the picture to some Chinese who didn't recognize it, who asked if it were a doctored photo. According to the documentary, the guy who took the picture, a foreign journalist type, had a good deal of trouble sneaking it out of China.
Human nature is human nature, whether you're Chinese, American, !Kung, or whatever, and there are many people here in the USA who are shaky on the concepts behind what I'll call the ideas of the Enlightenment, and I'd say our current president is one of them.
Democracy is tough to get used to. Besides the many times it's been shortchanged in American history, it has a hard time taking root elsewhere. It was adopted in France with the French Revolution, and they went through the reign of terror and then the Empire of Napoleon. It was adopted in Germany after World War One, and Hitler was elected Chancellor in 1932. (There were complications faced by both nascent democracies to be sure). Recently, Russia has tried democracy also, with some disappointing results.
It may be 3 steps forward, one step back, but the ideas do seem to be progressing. I keep my fingers crossed.
(I tried to reply before, looked at a preview, tried to continue editing, and it seems the whole thing got lost! That'll learn me. Don't go back, just post.)
Back in the 70s there was a big fuss being made about something called "Structured Programming". A lot of people took notice when a big project, an indexing system for the New York Times was finished with remarkably few errors. Yet, that success did not seem to become the norm. (It's mentioned briefly in the wikipedia article on 'structured programming').
COBOL used to be touted as a great language because it was 'self documenting'. Yet a lot of retired COBOL programmers got a last hurrah when they were hired to update obscure code in this 'self-documenting' language to handle dates with the year 2000 in them back at the end of the 90s.
Basically, I think what it boils down to is discipline and talent in the development process. That is far more important than the choice of language. To some extent, I would buy the idea that the fewer lines of code required to write out a program, the better, because there are fewer chances of errors. But even that can be taken to extremes in a language like APL, or if the lines refer back through obscure nests of classes. By few lines of code I mean a few readable lines of code that a programmer can look at and actually know what is supposed to be happening and how.
Do you know of perfect circles in nature?
I first heard about John Wheeler surfing the wikipedia about what I'll loosely call 'digital physics', and he was mentioned in contexts that made him sound like a kindred spirit.
Without being a physicist myself, just cherry-picking the theories I like, the way one might choose a religion, I like to think the universe doesn't have infinities, irrational numbers, and everything is discrete (maybe I'd allow aleph-null infinites, but no axiom of choice; I favor the constructivists). So, based on that unchallengeable authority, the wikipedia, Wheeler was a real, top level physicist, who seemed to be in pretty much the same corner.
So this is slashdot and I'm an extreme layman putting out my two-bits, fishing for more enlightened comments from people more in the field.
I'm responding to the "Microsoft has completely lost sight of how to create innovative products...". When did they ever have sight of how to create innovative products? Buying a company that produced an innovative product doesn't count. Copying somebody else's innovative product doesn't count either.
I can remember watching an episode of the TV program "Science Fiction Theater" (look it up in the IMDB) back in the 1950s in which some scientists recovered a rock, and were able to extract the sounds of people in a panic running from the Mt Vesuvius eruption that destroyed Pompeii. (I don't remember many details though, I was pretty young at the time.)
The French 'defined' the enlightenment? Sure they had Voltaire, but what about Sam Adams, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Ben Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson?
FORTH you say? How about its child, Postscript?
Pointers are OK. In fact they're cool! At least I thought so. But then, I spent 5 years programming in assembly languages before I learned C.
Speaking for myself, hatred of Microsoft has to do with them being a monopolistic bully, not the quality of their products.