Charles Simonyi, one of the creators of Microsoft Word, went on a crusade to enable "intentional programming", which is to programming what the WYSIWYG word processor was to LaTeX. You can see what he does here. This is a VERY hard problem to solve. Simonyi is a good programmer, has tons of money, yet this is not a battle that he has clearly won yet.
I once received a phone call at work from a Forbes journalist, saying that Simonyi had described my own pet project, XL (http://xlr.sf.net), and the associated "Concept Programming" ideas as one of the only competitors to Intentional Programming. That was interesting, because it shows that Simonyi had "groked" what I wanted to do, despite the total lack of polish of this little project. (As an aside, if you are curious, you can see XL in action in Taodyne's software to create interactive 3D documents)
But what Simonyi saw (I believe) is that the general questioning was similar. How do we transform ideas into code. For Simonyi, this can be done with graphical tools. For XL, this can be done with simple transformations on text (more precisely, on a Lisp-like parse tree generated from the text). For example, with XL, you can implement the "if-then-else" concept using the "->" (transforms into) operator as follows:
if true then X else Y -> X if false then X else Y -> Y
With this approach, it is possible to use nice notations for arbitrary concepts. In Taodyne's products, for example, a slide is described by something like:
slide "Hello world",
* "This is a bullet point"
* "This is another one"
This pseudo-markup language is then rewritten recursively until we reach "primitive" operations, e.g. 3D graphics rendering or basic computations.
XL is based on text because a) it's easier to do than Simonyi's approach, and b) I think it is generally easier to read and write "globally". If you have a "picture" in a document, of course showing the picture tells you more than just its name. But knowing that there is a picture in a document is easy with something like image "Woman.jpg" or (in HTML) a img tag.
As the experience with HTML or Postscript demonstrated, text or graphical does not matter much anyway. It's possible to have a text-based representation of the code that most people manipulate graphically and never need to be aware of. You can generate your HTML with Word, never need to know anything about it. It's likely the same thing is slowly happening with code as well: IDEs tend to give you more and more meta-data which is "behind" the text and helps you navigate it or code faster.
One important practical freedom is that LLVM works as a library. With GCC, leveraging the GCC backend, even for an open source project such as XL (http://xlr.sf.net), was a pain. With LLVM, it was dead easy. And then, building a commercial product on top of said open-source project (http://www.taodyne.com) was legally possible, whereas with GCC it would have been challenging to say the least.
if (wtype == w_eol)
{
if (*p2 != '\0')/* There's no need to be ivory-tower about this: check for
one of the most common bugs found in makefiles... */
fatal (fstart, _("missing separator%s"),
(cmd_prefix == '\t' && !strneq (line, " ", 8))
? "" : _(" (did you mean TAB instead of 8 spaces?)"));
continue;
}
So they detect it, and they'd rather insult the user. But "no ivory tower", no no, we will just not parse a space when the ATT code only parsed tabs. It's a "makefile bug", not a "make bug". Sure.
And for the fun, I just tried to build make. On MacOSX, supposedly some kind of Unix that I head a few folks actually use to build stuff. Could be a prime citizen. OK, no configure out of the box with the git repository. OK. No makefile, obviously. No install script. Bogus information in the INSTALL that tells me to run nonexistent configure. Well, running the magic incantation, aclocal ; autoheader; automake ; autoconf. Still does not work, missing files like config/compile. Running automake --add-missing. Whatever. Still an error where it's looking for po/Makefile.in.in. Huh?
So to build make, I need not just make, but four other utilities and makefile input inputs? WTF?
Make alone was bad enough. But it was not good enough for portability, so autoconf was added. But it did not work so automake was added. But it did not work, so... And now at version 4.0, we have a system here you need half a dozen commands just to build the damn thing, and it still does not build out of the box. Seriously?
This whole archaic build system is doomed. Go cmake.
If you don't like it don't buy it. Enough with the stupid fucking boycotts that are nothing but attempts at silencing free speech.
You're not making any sense. A boycott is nothing but a large group of people saying "we don't like it, so we're not buying it."
But the boycott is not about a large group of people not liking the pasta, it's about a minority not liking what the CEO said, and a large group of people being manipulated into attacking him. If it was a boycott of pasta that were made with whale oil by young kids in poor countries, it would actually be a boycott of the product. But as long as the boycott is in reaction to what the CEO said, then it's a totally different matter. It's actually a blatant attempt at silencing an opinion, not an attempt at criticizing a product. And it makes the boycott totally illegitimate. If you pretend not understanding that, you are simply playing dumb.
Unfortunately, gay activists are often violent like this. They all too often launch vicious hate campaigns against anybody who simply voices vaguely anti-gay opinions. Come on, is it a victory that a guy was bashed for saying he does not want to put gay peoples in ads for... pasta?!? What is the connexion between homosexuality and pasta, seriously? Why should I have homosexuals in ads for pasta and not, say, people with blue hair or ugly people, other minorities that are all too often victimized. Why can't Barilla simply promote pasta, instead of being forced to promote homosexuality at the same time?
Let me be very clear. My own company does not intend to run ads with pasta in them. I hope that this won't cause me to be called a pastaphobic by all pasta lovers. I pray this won't cause a massive stir on twitter, a rally to arms of all the pasta lovers I insulted for not intending to prominently promote their lifestyle in my ads instead of promoting my products. And yes, I'm being sarcastic, because this is exactly what happened to the Barilla CEO.
As of me, I'm so tired of this gay activism that I will say "Go Barilla" on this one, and buy more.
About "surrender monkeys", US citizen should remember their history.
September 1st, 1939: Germany invades Poland September 3rd, 1939: France and UK declare war on Germany to honor their alliance with Poland, counting on their US ally to follow suit. September 5th, 1939: The US proclaims their neutrality in the conflict, leaving the road wide open to Germany.
If the US had done for France and UK what France and UK did for Poland, chances are WWII would have stopped in 1939.
The page you are referring to is only trying to validate the testimony of various people from that time regarding one specific photo. The photo was lost, but we have lithographs that reportedly were based on it, like this one. So the investigation is only about checking whether witnesses who claim they saw the photo at the 1906 exhibition were credible. It's not inventing the reports, it's checking them. As for the reports, Jane's writes:
Syndicated reports of Whitehead's exploits contemporaneously appeared around the globe, from Australia to Austria. One, mentioned here not entirely at random, appeared on page 3 of the Portsmouth Evening News of 21 August 1901. At the time, this was the local newspaper of Southsea resident, Fred Jane. As a man keenly interested in technology (and author of four published science fiction novels) it is difficult to imagine Jane not reading the report with utmost interest. However, it would be stretching credibility beyond its limits to suggest that this was the Genesis of the annual now achieving its hundredth volume.
In short, there are numerous articles indicating that Whitehead achieved sustained controlled flight in 1901, and demonstrated a 360 degrees turn in 1902 with a different plane. Whitehead's planes were taking off the ground under their own power, something that the Wright brothers didn't have in 1903. So why didn't we hear more from Whitehead? It's not a conspiracy theory. To quote Jane's again:
when selecting a partner to commercialise his invention, Whitehead exhibited catastrophic misjudgement....three times over. After two false starts, his third investor proved to be the serial convicted criminal (and, subsequently, lunatic asylum patient) Herman Linde who, early in 1902, attempted to appropriate the venture and had Whitehead locked out of the factory containing his production line of between four and six aeroplanes. To recover solvency, Whitehead turned all attentions to his other great skill: the manufacture of light and powerful engines, which became much in demand by a growing number of aspiring aviators. It is as such that he has been remembered.
Minitel was all about a network of services, from phone directory to Minitel Rose (ASCII pr0n). Without recreating the network, the exhibit will show dead hardware, not its original soul
Why all the swearing? Isn't Torvalds smart enough to express the exact same idea in a civil manner? To think that there was a big ruckus when Dujardin said "Putain".
Taodyne delivers Tao, a 3D dynamic document description language which is quite a departure from HTML + WebGL for building 3D contents.
Based on our experience, here are some of the key attributes you need for good 3D to take off on the web:
* Device independence, like PDF or HTML. 3D does not just mean 3D models, but also depth, stereoscopy. You don't want to have to care about the many 3D technologies out there, active, passive, auto-stereoscopic, holographic, whatever. Tao contents adapts transparently, and will look exactly the same on a 2D or 3D display, including 3D without glasses from Alioscopy, Tridelity or Dimenco/Philips. Of course, it degrades gracefully on a 2D screen just like PDF degrades gracefully on a black-and-white printer.
* Integration of text, 2D graphics, images, movies and 3D objects in the same 3D scene. We are very far from that in HTML + WebGL, where there is practically zero integration between 2D and 3D contents. In Tao, 2D graphics and text obey the same rotations, translation or scaling as 3D objects.
* Being able to mix pre-rendered / filmed 3D movies with real-time 3D contents. In Tao, you can have 3D movie appear on the screen of 3D model of a TV, with text on top of it, all rendered in real-time. And that scene will show correctly even on an Alioscopy screen in glasses-free 3D...
* The ability to directly read 3D assets and not just 2D assets. This is almost there for WebGL with Three.js, but still very far from the ease of use of the video tag. By contrast, in Tao, displaying a model that moves with my mouse is nothing more than: import ObjectLoader light 0 light_position 1000, 1000, 1000 rotatey 0.1 * mouse_x object "MyModel.3ds"
Right now, Chrome Experiments are proud to announce "Not your morther's Javascript". We should not collectively take pride in having a web that's for experts only. We want to make things easier to create.
While the Taodyne 3D dynamic document description language is not available in browsers yet, we clearly see what we did as something that could be part of HTML6. We built it with that in mind. It's text based, and you can reference an URL in images, movies, etc. Actually, we would like nothing better than open-source the whole thing and integrate it with the WebKit, we just don't have the resources to do that at the moment. But if a good soul at Google or Apple is reading this, we can talk.
I choose to believe that a good God would not have allowed WWII to go on...and would have given Hitler the flu or something similar
Wow, is that really your ideal god? Some entity punishing people who don't do what he wants? "Do no evil or you'll get the flu"? How do you envision free-will and true love in your North Korean universe? Would you rather have a god who is "Word" and shares his will as knowledge, or a god who is "Sword" and shares his will with brute force?
This issue of free will is addressed as early as Genesis in the Bible. The story of Adam and Eve explains that we are truly free to reject God (something that according to the scripture is not true for all of God's creatures), but also that this freedom has consequences. This was true for Hitler and those who followed us. This was also true for the positive consequences of all WWII soldiers who offered their lives (and too often lost them) for others that they didn't even know.
I've always been quite puzzled about the use of "Visual" or "Graphical" for this kind of "mostly text with some rectangles thrown-in for good measure" IDEs. Besides being bit-mapped, there's nothing really graphical about them.
There aren't that many attempts at completely getting rid of the textual representation in programming. One of them is Intentional Programming (http://www.intentsoft.com). See this demo from 2006 for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSnnfUj1XCQ. I think it's fair to say it didn't really take the world by storm. Unfortunately?
How do you consider these portable? Because they were compatible with both Windows 3.0 as well as Windows 3.1?
Regarding portability, I was thinking about the original 8-bit BASIC, which Microsoft went out of their way to port of a very large number of platforms. It was not 100% compatible from platform to platform, e.g. there were additional graphics or I/O keywords. But Microsoft is the reason the vast majority of microcomputers at the time came with a form of BASIC. Don't get me wrong, there were also many original implementations of BASIC (Sinclair, Oric, Texas Instruments, HP to name a few).
Microsoft BASIC and later Visual Basic: Unjustly despised, but introduced many to programming (and the very first ones were marvels of micro-programming too). Also interestingly portable at a time where portability was on nobody's radar.
Spectre GCR, a Mac emulator on Atari ST. A precursor of virtualization in my opinion, and a very smartly done one at that.
VMware for making virtualization available to the masses and enabling the cloud.
AmigaDOS for being the first OS with built-in hardware-accelerated graphics and sound.
The RPL system in the HP28 and HP48 series of calculator. Reverse Polish Lisp and symbolic processing on a 4-bit calculator with 4K of RAM? Seriously?
The Minitel system in France, including nationwide phone directory and dubious innovations such as Minitel Rose (porn in text mode at 1200bps, basically).
Postscript and the whole desktop publishing revolution.
NeXTStep (or whatever the CorRect CapItalizATION is), so far ahead of its time that it took years for it to reach its full potential in the form of iOS.
GeOS (already mentioned by someone else)
Mathematica. Just wow. But also forgotten precursors such as TK! Solver.
Lisp, Fortran, Algol, Pascal, Ada, Eiffel, Smalltalk and a whole bunch of under-utilized languages.
Much lower on the name recognition scale, Alpha Waves, arguably one of the earliest real 3D games, which also influenced the creation of Alone in the Dark.
Amen to that. Though it's fair to say that Mark Hurd did a pretty good job killing whatever remained of the HP spirit, with his pure "drive by numbers" approach to management.
The spread of the theory of relativity is not an example of biological evolution.[...] if you decide to redefine the evolutionary history of the human species as [...]
That's the core of our disagreement. You are redefining the history of the human species as being purely biological. That's patently wrong. Knowledge, civilization, communication between individuals shape the evolution of humanity more than biology, to the point where some refer to this well known effect as "the end of evolution". It's like computers: the nature of my laptop is defined more by the fact that it runs MacOSX than by the fact that it has a Core i7 inside. To wit: not so long ago, my Mac laptop had a PowerPC in it, it still was a Mac. And surely you would not debate that man and woman are biologically different.
To be clear : in my mind, "Adam" was probably born non-human. Then he groked something, updated his software, became human and spread this virus around him, starting with "Eve". And that process repeated itself multiple times, for multiple things that we associate to being human: bipedalism, use of fire, speech, self-awareness, burying the dead, religion, art, etc. In that sense, there may have been multiple Adams. But I'm pretty sure very few of these key evolutionary steps were biological or genetic in nature. And I'm pretty sure that in all cases, Adam was alone for a while, then they were two.
The Bible, assuming it's actually the point of view of God, tells us that one specific event was more essential than the rest in defining us as human. It was the end of innocence, the precise moment when someone first realized that he was responsible for his own actions. That makes sense, even if you are a scientist. So, even with all our scientific knowledge, I don't see Genesis as a strong argument against religion. On the contrary, I find the choice of what defines us as human really subtle and interesting. I find the storytelling really great for a text that old (compare it to other creation myths, you might see my point, I posted another comment here on this topic). And I find the philosophy disturbingly advanced for its time.
By the way, there is another similarly advanced insight in the Bible: "I am that I am". The insight is this. If you trace where something comes from, you can trace it to some other event, and then again and again. From there, there are a few logical options, e.g. :
1. a cyclic causal chain of events (i.e. A caused B that caused C that caused A), something that creates so many logical problems and occurs so infrequently in nature that we typically eliminate it as a possibility.
2. a chain of events with an unexplained end-point (e.g. the Big Bang in cosmology: we don't have an answer at this point to "what caused the Big Bang", though some theorists are pushing this limit, e.g. bubble multiverses, but we'll be back in the same situation).
3. a chain of events with an self-explaining end-point, e.g. "I am that I am", "I exist without a cause".
So when I read that "I am that I am" is the name of God, and when I think that this was written eons ago, I'm just puzzled. Either the guy who wrote that was über-smart, or he was über-lucky, or He was in the know.
And, again, the whole point zooms past you. There were never two human beings on the planet. Never. Not once. Ever.
You keep repeating this like a creed. For you, it is an act of faith, and you seem convinced that just repeating that like a broken record will make it more true. But since that "fact" is the core of the discussion, that's precisely what you need to prove.
I claim that this "fact"of yours is patently false, because it is so easily falsified with myriads of counter examples. There was a time where a single person on Earth knew relativity, and then he taught others and relativity became part of humanity.There was a time where a single person on Earth knew how to do fire, and then he taught others and fire became part of humanity. There was a time when a single person on Earth knew how to send an e-mail, and then he taught others and e-mail became part of humanity. There was a first blue rose. And so on.
On the other hand, I cannot think of a single part of our human heritage that appeared all over the place at once. Whether it's physical like skin color or cultural like cave painting, we always observe a starting point followed by contamination.
So what is there really behind your statement that there were never two human beings on the planet? The fact that proto-humans lived in tribes? The fact that the hypothetical first human had to mate with non-humans, and was therefore not so different from them? Or the fact that you don't know how to define "human" precisely enough to be able to pinpoint that first human?
The Catholic church claims that there were only two people at one point,
It's not the Catholic church, it's the Bible, so it's all Muslims, all Jews, all Christians including non-Catholic.
though they claim that these could have been drawn from a group of proto-humans.
I, not the church, claimed in this thread that based on modern science, we know the first human was drawn from a group of proto-humans, and then taught the second human to be human (because what makes us human is largely social and not genetic). And I find it reasonable to believe that the second "human" in this transmission chain was the mate of the first one. I am not sure that this hypothesis is true, but it's definitely the most plausible scientific hypothesis that I can derive from the theory of evolution and observation of knowledge transmission. It's not derived from the Bible, however, it does match the account in the Bible relatively well.
If you want to claim that there were always multiple humans, you need to blur the definition of human. With a blurred definition, you blur the boundary in space and time. With a crisp definition, the first human becomes unique. The Bible chose a crisp definition, the knowledge of good and evil.
the Catholic church requires that this bit of Genesis be interpreted LITERALLY. And this point is LITERALLY false.
Again, you seem to think that by repeating and SHOUTING your creed, you will make it more credible.
And no, the existence of a first human is not false, if we define humanity based on any kind of knowledge or sapience, as I tried to demonstrate time and time again. It is highly likely to be true because all our experience with science, knowledge, genetics or epidemics is that there is always a "patient zero". At that point, I am tempted myself to say that is't my own point that zooms past you, and I'm very sorry that I can't get it across. If there are "patient zero" or "inventor zero" for everything we know, then logically there has to be a "human zero". Claiming that we "know" otherwise in all caps is not going to address this argument.
But it is completely silly to belive that there existed at one point ONLY one couple of humans, who invented fire and passed it on to their children.
You are completely misinterpreting what I wrote. Just because I said that one single individual passed fire to the entire human race does not imply that there was a single individual at that time, only that a single individual was historically "the first one" to pass fire along up to today. Just like a single individual was historically the inventor of e-mail, despite the fact that tens of people were probably capable of inventing e-mail at the time. There just was one who happened to be first. Not ten or one thousand.
[The problem] is the fact that the Catholic church claims that there were two people who were the first humans. The whole "sin" angle is largely irrelevant to the claim, though it is central to the reason behind making such a claim.
Genesis explains what makes us human, and that is being conscious of our actions. Being conscious also makes us responsible. With consciousness (humanity) comes responsability (sin). If you let a chimp drive a car, and the car hits and kills someone, is the car responsible? Is the chimp responsible? No, you are. In my opinion, this is the reason why Genesis links the first man and the first sin.
In short, it's logically backwards compared to your reasoning. It is not "there was a single hominid and we all descend from that single hominid, and by a mere and truly bizarre coincidence, that single hominid also was a sinner, and bam, we inherited that." That, indeed, doesn't make sense. Instead, the idea is: "the first person in history to be given the capability to reach the knowledge of good and evil was by definition the first true human. And that individual was in all likelihood just like us, just as unable to resist temptation and to stick to pure good as we all are, so as he passed knowledge of good and evil along (the famous fruit), he passed both humanity and sin along."
Was this a single person? I think so. The population in 1905 was much higher than in prehistoric times, yet there was a single Einstein, and he's at the root of all subsequent relativity knowledge (even if folks like Poincarre could have shared practically the same knowledge, they just didn't.) I don't see any logical reason to believe it was any different for the knowledge of good and evil.
There was never a time when you could point at a parent and say "that's not a dolphin" while pointing at a child and say "that is a dolphin."
No, that is not my argument. What I'm saying is that if you plot the times when each of the ancestors of dolphins living today entered the sea, you get a huge number of events, but one of these events was the very first one. And in all likelihood, it is unique.
Similarly, if you had a time machine and could plot all cases where a human ever lit a fire on earth and where that information was not lost in the following generations, there would be one of these events that would be the first one.
Let me give a more recent example. You can pinpoint the first time someone sent an e-mail. In that specific case, the knowledge was never lost after that, and when/where it happened has not yet be forgotten. So even if the number of emails today is amazing, even if email technology was reinvented multiple times since then, even if just like for dolphins vs. non-dolphins, it's hard to draw a line between e-mail-capable computers and computers that couldn't do e-mail, there still was a first e-mail, and there still was a single computer sending that first e-mail.
Yet another example : for each child, learning how to speak takes a long time, but each dad remembers a "first word". And that first word turns a non-speaking child into a speaking child.
So I do not believe that the passage you quote condemns the scenario, on the contrary. It says we have all reasons to believe that there was a first sin. It says something more important, which is humanity and sin coincided.
Slashdot Mirror
Charles Simonyi, one of the creators of Microsoft Word, went on a crusade to enable "intentional programming", which is to programming what the WYSIWYG word processor was to LaTeX. You can see what he does here. This is a VERY hard problem to solve. Simonyi is a good programmer, has tons of money, yet this is not a battle that he has clearly won yet.
I once received a phone call at work from a Forbes journalist, saying that Simonyi had described my own pet project, XL (http://xlr.sf.net), and the associated "Concept Programming" ideas as one of the only competitors to Intentional Programming. That was interesting, because it shows that Simonyi had "groked" what I wanted to do, despite the total lack of polish of this little project. (As an aside, if you are curious, you can see XL in action in Taodyne's software to create interactive 3D documents)
But what Simonyi saw (I believe) is that the general questioning was similar. How do we transform ideas into code. For Simonyi, this can be done with graphical tools. For XL, this can be done with simple transformations on text (more precisely, on a Lisp-like parse tree generated from the text). For example, with XL, you can implement the "if-then-else" concept using the "->" (transforms into) operator as follows:
With this approach, it is possible to use nice notations for arbitrary concepts. In Taodyne's products, for example, a slide is described by something like:
This pseudo-markup language is then rewritten recursively until we reach "primitive" operations, e.g. 3D graphics rendering or basic computations.
XL is based on text because a) it's easier to do than Simonyi's approach, and b) I think it is generally easier to read and write "globally". If you have a "picture" in a document, of course showing the picture tells you more than just its name. But knowing that there is a picture in a document is easy with something like image "Woman.jpg" or (in HTML) a img tag.
As the experience with HTML or Postscript demonstrated, text or graphical does not matter much anyway. It's possible to have a text-based representation of the code that most people manipulate graphically and never need to be aware of. You can generate your HTML with Word, never need to know anything about it. It's likely the same thing is slowly happening with code as well: IDEs tend to give you more and more meta-data which is "behind" the text and helps you navigate it or code faster.
One important practical freedom is that LLVM works as a library. With GCC, leveraging the GCC backend, even for an open source project such as XL (http://xlr.sf.net), was a pain. With LLVM, it was dead easy. And then, building a commercial product on top of said open-source project (http://www.taodyne.com) was legally possible, whereas with GCC it would have been challenging to say the least.
Yes, it's possible to do better. But inventing new models is not easy, and it's an uphill battle.
See page 184 of the Unix Haters Handbook, http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf. That has to be the most obstinate bug in the world.
Helpful comments in the source code:
if (wtype == w_eol) /* There's no need to be ivory-tower about this: check for
{
if (*p2 != '\0')
one of the most common bugs found in makefiles... */
fatal (fstart, _("missing separator%s"),
(cmd_prefix == '\t' && !strneq (line, " ", 8))
? "" : _(" (did you mean TAB instead of 8 spaces?)"));
continue;
}
So they detect it, and they'd rather insult the user. But "no ivory tower", no no, we will just not parse a space when the ATT code only parsed tabs. It's a "makefile bug", not a "make bug". Sure.
And for the fun, I just tried to build make. On MacOSX, supposedly some kind of Unix that I head a few folks actually use to build stuff. Could be a prime citizen. OK, no configure out of the box with the git repository. OK. No makefile, obviously. No install script. Bogus information in the INSTALL that tells me to run nonexistent configure. Well, running the magic incantation, aclocal ; autoheader; automake ; autoconf. Still does not work, missing files like config/compile. Running automake --add-missing. Whatever. Still an error where it's looking for po/Makefile.in.in. Huh?
So to build make, I need not just make, but four other utilities and makefile input inputs? WTF?
Make alone was bad enough. But it was not good enough for portability, so autoconf was added. But it did not work so automake was added. But it did not work, so... And now at version 4.0, we have a system here you need half a dozen commands just to build the damn thing, and it still does not build out of the box. Seriously?
This whole archaic build system is doomed. Go cmake.
Concept programming is the simple idea that the concept is not the code, and that being aware of the differences matters.
See http://xlr.sourceforge.net/Concept%20Programming%20Presentation.pdf for more details.
You're not making any sense. A boycott is nothing but a large group of people saying "we don't like it, so we're not buying it."
But the boycott is not about a large group of people not liking the pasta, it's about a minority not liking what the CEO said, and a large group of people being manipulated into attacking him. If it was a boycott of pasta that were made with whale oil by young kids in poor countries, it would actually be a boycott of the product. But as long as the boycott is in reaction to what the CEO said, then it's a totally different matter. It's actually a blatant attempt at silencing an opinion, not an attempt at criticizing a product. And it makes the boycott totally illegitimate. If you pretend not understanding that, you are simply playing dumb.
Unfortunately, gay activists are often violent like this. They all too often launch vicious hate campaigns against anybody who simply voices vaguely anti-gay opinions. Come on, is it a victory that a guy was bashed for saying he does not want to put gay peoples in ads for... pasta?!? What is the connexion between homosexuality and pasta, seriously? Why should I have homosexuals in ads for pasta and not, say, people with blue hair or ugly people, other minorities that are all too often victimized. Why can't Barilla simply promote pasta, instead of being forced to promote homosexuality at the same time?
Let me be very clear. My own company does not intend to run ads with pasta in them. I hope that this won't cause me to be called a pastaphobic by all pasta lovers. I pray this won't cause a massive stir on twitter, a rally to arms of all the pasta lovers I insulted for not intending to prominently promote their lifestyle in my ads instead of promoting my products. And yes, I'm being sarcastic, because this is exactly what happened to the Barilla CEO.
As of me, I'm so tired of this gay activism that I will say "Go Barilla" on this one, and buy more.
About "surrender monkeys", US citizen should remember their history.
September 1st, 1939: Germany invades Poland
September 3rd, 1939: France and UK declare war on Germany to honor their alliance with Poland, counting on their US ally to follow suit.
September 5th, 1939: The US proclaims their neutrality in the conflict, leaving the road wide open to Germany.
If the US had done for France and UK what France and UK did for Poland, chances are WWII would have stopped in 1939.
The fact that a video game company was voted worst company in America is ridiculous and would be laughable if it was not so frightening. Come on! Is there nothing more serious on the planet than botching a game release? Aren't companies that fight like crazy to deprive cancer patients from inexpensive treatments a little worse? Or companies who lie to be free to play with your health in the name of profit? Or companies using child labor to lower the price of smartphones? Or simply profitable companies planning massive layoffs? Or media associations with an agenda built on layers of lies?
Apparently, for the majority of Slashdot readers, getting a perspective chip would be a good idea.
One has to wonder.
The page you are referring to is only trying to validate the testimony of various people from that time regarding one specific photo. The photo was lost, but we have lithographs that reportedly were based on it, like this one. So the investigation is only about checking whether witnesses who claim they saw the photo at the 1906 exhibition were credible. It's not inventing the reports, it's checking them. As for the reports, Jane's writes:
In short, there are numerous articles indicating that Whitehead achieved sustained controlled flight in 1901, and demonstrated a 360 degrees turn in 1902 with a different plane. Whitehead's planes were taking off the ground under their own power, something that the Wright brothers didn't have in 1903.
So why didn't we hear more from Whitehead? It's not a conspiracy theory. To quote Jane's again:
Minitel was all about a network of services, from phone directory to Minitel Rose (ASCII pr0n). Without recreating the network, the exhibit will show dead hardware, not its original soul
Why all the swearing? Isn't Torvalds smart enough to express the exact same idea in a civil manner? To think that there was a big ruckus when Dujardin said "Putain".
Taodyne delivers Tao, a 3D dynamic document description language which is quite a departure from HTML + WebGL for building 3D contents.
Based on our experience, here are some of the key attributes you need for good 3D to take off on the web:
* Device independence, like PDF or HTML. 3D does not just mean 3D models, but also depth, stereoscopy. You don't want to have to care about the many 3D technologies out there, active, passive, auto-stereoscopic, holographic, whatever. Tao contents adapts transparently, and will look exactly the same on a 2D or 3D display, including 3D without glasses from Alioscopy, Tridelity or Dimenco/Philips. Of course, it degrades gracefully on a 2D screen just like PDF degrades gracefully on a black-and-white printer.
* Integration of text, 2D graphics, images, movies and 3D objects in the same 3D scene. We are very far from that in HTML + WebGL, where there is practically zero integration between 2D and 3D contents. In Tao, 2D graphics and text obey the same rotations, translation or scaling as 3D objects.
* Being able to mix pre-rendered / filmed 3D movies with real-time 3D contents. In Tao, you can have 3D movie appear on the screen of 3D model of a TV, with text on top of it, all rendered in real-time. And that scene will show correctly even on an Alioscopy screen in glasses-free 3D...
* The ability to directly read 3D assets and not just 2D assets. This is almost there for WebGL with Three.js, but still very far from the ease of use of the video tag. By contrast, in Tao, displaying a model that moves with my mouse is nothing more than:
import ObjectLoader
light 0
light_position 1000, 1000, 1000
rotatey 0.1 * mouse_x
object "MyModel.3ds"
Right now, Chrome Experiments are proud to announce "Not your morther's Javascript". We should not collectively take pride in having a web that's for experts only. We want to make things easier to create.
While the Taodyne 3D dynamic document description language is not available in browsers yet, we clearly see what we did as something that could be part of HTML6. We built it with that in mind. It's text based, and you can reference an URL in images, movies, etc. Actually, we would like nothing better than open-source the whole thing and integrate it with the WebKit, we just don't have the resources to do that at the moment. But if a good soul at Google or Apple is reading this, we can talk.
Wow, is that really your ideal god? Some entity punishing people who don't do what he wants? "Do no evil or you'll get the flu"? How do you envision free-will and true love in your North Korean universe? Would you rather have a god who is "Word" and shares his will as knowledge, or a god who is "Sword" and shares his will with brute force?
This issue of free will is addressed as early as Genesis in the Bible. The story of Adam and Eve explains that we are truly free to reject God (something that according to the scripture is not true for all of God's creatures), but also that this freedom has consequences. This was true for Hitler and those who followed us. This was also true for the positive consequences of all WWII soldiers who offered their lives (and too often lost them) for others that they didn't even know.
I've always been quite puzzled about the use of "Visual" or "Graphical" for this kind of "mostly text with some rectangles thrown-in for good measure" IDEs. Besides being bit-mapped, there's nothing really graphical about them.
Want something visual? Try this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apy5csu0DkE. Or this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paJG7Fy5Few. Or this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4a0jcrDgK0. Or the amazing stuff on this page: http://www.iquilezles.org/live/index.htm. Now, that's visual ;-)
The problem is that we say "Lisp has macro" when we should really say "Lisp has meta-programming". And that, C or C++ don't have.
There aren't that many attempts at completely getting rid of the textual representation in programming. One of them is Intentional Programming (http://www.intentsoft.com). See this demo from 2006 for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSnnfUj1XCQ. I think it's fair to say it didn't really take the world by storm. Unfortunately?
You are right about Simula. There are just too many languages to not forget a few when you try to make a list.
How do you consider these portable? Because they were compatible with both Windows 3.0 as well as Windows 3.1?
Regarding portability, I was thinking about the original 8-bit BASIC, which Microsoft went out of their way to port of a very large number of platforms. It was not 100% compatible from platform to platform, e.g. there were additional graphics or I/O keywords. But Microsoft is the reason the vast majority of microcomputers at the time came with a form of BASIC. Don't get me wrong, there were also many original implementations of BASIC (Sinclair, Oric, Texas Instruments, HP to name a few).
Microsoft BASIC and later Visual Basic: Unjustly despised, but introduced many to programming (and the very first ones were marvels of micro-programming too). Also interestingly portable at a time where portability was on nobody's radar.
Spectre GCR, a Mac emulator on Atari ST. A precursor of virtualization in my opinion, and a very smartly done one at that.
VMware for making virtualization available to the masses and enabling the cloud.
AmigaDOS for being the first OS with built-in hardware-accelerated graphics and sound.
The RPL system in the HP28 and HP48 series of calculator. Reverse Polish Lisp and symbolic processing on a 4-bit calculator with 4K of RAM? Seriously?
The Minitel system in France, including nationwide phone directory and dubious innovations such as Minitel Rose (porn in text mode at 1200bps, basically).
Postscript and the whole desktop publishing revolution.
NeXTStep (or whatever the CorRect CapItalizATION is), so far ahead of its time that it took years for it to reach its full potential in the form of iOS.
GeOS (already mentioned by someone else)
Mathematica. Just wow. But also forgotten precursors such as TK! Solver.
Lisp, Fortran, Algol, Pascal, Ada, Eiffel, Smalltalk and a whole bunch of under-utilized languages.
Much lower on the name recognition scale, Alpha Waves, arguably one of the earliest real 3D games, which also influenced the creation of Alone in the Dark.
Amen to that. Though it's fair to say that Mark Hurd did a pretty good job killing whatever remained of the HP spirit, with his pure "drive by numbers" approach to management.
The spread of the theory of relativity is not an example of biological evolution.[...] if you decide to redefine the evolutionary history of the human species as [...]
That's the core of our disagreement. You are redefining the history of the human species as being purely biological. That's patently wrong. Knowledge, civilization, communication between individuals shape the evolution of humanity more than biology, to the point where some refer to this well known effect as "the end of evolution". It's like computers: the nature of my laptop is defined more by the fact that it runs MacOSX than by the fact that it has a Core i7 inside. To wit: not so long ago, my Mac laptop had a PowerPC in it, it still was a Mac. And surely you would not debate that man and woman are biologically different.
To be clear : in my mind, "Adam" was probably born non-human. Then he groked something, updated his software, became human and spread this virus around him, starting with "Eve". And that process repeated itself multiple times, for multiple things that we associate to being human: bipedalism, use of fire, speech, self-awareness, burying the dead, religion, art, etc. In that sense, there may have been multiple Adams. But I'm pretty sure very few of these key evolutionary steps were biological or genetic in nature. And I'm pretty sure that in all cases, Adam was alone for a while, then they were two.
The Bible, assuming it's actually the point of view of God, tells us that one specific event was more essential than the rest in defining us as human. It was the end of innocence, the precise moment when someone first realized that he was responsible for his own actions. That makes sense, even if you are a scientist. So, even with all our scientific knowledge, I don't see Genesis as a strong argument against religion. On the contrary, I find the choice of what defines us as human really subtle and interesting. I find the storytelling really great for a text that old (compare it to other creation myths, you might see my point, I posted another comment here on this topic). And I find the philosophy disturbingly advanced for its time.
By the way, there is another similarly advanced insight in the Bible: "I am that I am". The insight is this. If you trace where something comes from, you can trace it to some other event, and then again and again. From there, there are a few logical options, e.g. :
1. a cyclic causal chain of events (i.e. A caused B that caused C that caused A), something that creates so many logical problems and occurs so infrequently in nature that we typically eliminate it as a possibility.
2. a chain of events with an unexplained end-point (e.g. the Big Bang in cosmology: we don't have an answer at this point to "what caused the Big Bang", though some theorists are pushing this limit, e.g. bubble multiverses, but we'll be back in the same situation).
3. a chain of events with an self-explaining end-point, e.g. "I am that I am", "I exist without a cause".
So when I read that "I am that I am" is the name of God, and when I think that this was written eons ago, I'm just puzzled. Either the guy who wrote that was über-smart, or he was über-lucky, or He was in the know.
And, again, the whole point zooms past you. There were never two human beings on the planet. Never. Not once. Ever.
You keep repeating this like a creed. For you, it is an act of faith, and you seem convinced that just repeating that like a broken record will make it more true. But since that "fact" is the core of the discussion, that's precisely what you need to prove.
I claim that this "fact"of yours is patently false, because it is so easily falsified with myriads of counter examples. There was a time where a single person on Earth knew relativity, and then he taught others and relativity became part of humanity.There was a time where a single person on Earth knew how to do fire, and then he taught others and fire became part of humanity. There was a time when a single person on Earth knew how to send an e-mail, and then he taught others and e-mail became part of humanity. There was a first blue rose. And so on.
On the other hand, I cannot think of a single part of our human heritage that appeared all over the place at once. Whether it's physical like skin color or cultural like cave painting, we always observe a starting point followed by contamination.
So what is there really behind your statement that there were never two human beings on the planet? The fact that proto-humans lived in tribes? The fact that the hypothetical first human had to mate with non-humans, and was therefore not so different from them? Or the fact that you don't know how to define "human" precisely enough to be able to pinpoint that first human?
The Catholic church claims that there were only two people at one point,
It's not the Catholic church, it's the Bible, so it's all Muslims, all Jews, all Christians including non-Catholic.
though they claim that these could have been drawn from a group of proto-humans.
I, not the church, claimed in this thread that based on modern science, we know the first human was drawn from a group of proto-humans, and then taught the second human to be human (because what makes us human is largely social and not genetic). And I find it reasonable to believe that the second "human" in this transmission chain was the mate of the first one. I am not sure that this hypothesis is true, but it's definitely the most plausible scientific hypothesis that I can derive from the theory of evolution and observation of knowledge transmission. It's not derived from the Bible, however, it does match the account in the Bible relatively well.
If you want to claim that there were always multiple humans, you need to blur the definition of human. With a blurred definition, you blur the boundary in space and time. With a crisp definition, the first human becomes unique. The Bible chose a crisp definition, the knowledge of good and evil.
the Catholic church requires that this bit of Genesis be interpreted LITERALLY. And this point is LITERALLY false.
Again, you seem to think that by repeating and SHOUTING your creed, you will make it more credible.
But no, the Catholic church does not require literal interpretation of Genesis, on the contrary.
And no, the existence of a first human is not false, if we define humanity based on any kind of knowledge or sapience, as I tried to demonstrate time and time again. It is highly likely to be true because all our experience with science, knowledge, genetics or epidemics is that there is always a "patient zero". At that point, I am tempted myself to say that is't my own point that zooms past you, and I'm very sorry that I can't get it across. If there are "patient zero" or "inventor zero" for everything we know, then logically there has to be a "human zero". Claiming that we "know" otherwise in all caps is not going to address this argument.
But it is completely silly to belive that there existed at one point ONLY one couple of humans, who invented fire and passed it on to their children.
You are completely misinterpreting what I wrote. Just because I said that one single individual passed fire to the entire human race does not imply that there was a single individual at that time, only that a single individual was historically "the first one" to pass fire along up to today. Just like a single individual was historically the inventor of e-mail, despite the fact that tens of people were probably capable of inventing e-mail at the time. There just was one who happened to be first. Not ten or one thousand.
[The problem] is the fact that the Catholic church claims that there were two people who were the first humans. The whole "sin" angle is largely irrelevant to the claim, though it is central to the reason behind making such a claim.
Genesis explains what makes us human, and that is being conscious of our actions. Being conscious also makes us responsible. With consciousness (humanity) comes responsability (sin). If you let a chimp drive a car, and the car hits and kills someone, is the car responsible? Is the chimp responsible? No, you are. In my opinion, this is the reason why Genesis links the first man and the first sin.
In short, it's logically backwards compared to your reasoning. It is not "there was a single hominid and we all descend from that single hominid, and by a mere and truly bizarre coincidence, that single hominid also was a sinner, and bam, we inherited that." That, indeed, doesn't make sense. Instead, the idea is: "the first person in history to be given the capability to reach the knowledge of good and evil was by definition the first true human. And that individual was in all likelihood just like us, just as unable to resist temptation and to stick to pure good as we all are, so as he passed knowledge of good and evil along (the famous fruit), he passed both humanity and sin along."
Was this a single person? I think so. The population in 1905 was much higher than in prehistoric times, yet there was a single Einstein, and he's at the root of all subsequent relativity knowledge (even if folks like Poincarre could have shared practically the same knowledge, they just didn't.) I don't see any logical reason to believe it was any different for the knowledge of good and evil.
There was never a time when you could point at a parent and say "that's not a dolphin" while pointing at a child and say "that is a dolphin."
No, that is not my argument. What I'm saying is that if you plot the times when each of the ancestors of dolphins living today entered the sea, you get a huge number of events, but one of these events was the very first one. And in all likelihood, it is unique.
Similarly, if you had a time machine and could plot all cases where a human ever lit a fire on earth and where that information was not lost in the following generations, there would be one of these events that would be the first one.
Let me give a more recent example. You can pinpoint the first time someone sent an e-mail. In that specific case, the knowledge was never lost after that, and when/where it happened has not yet be forgotten. So even if the number of emails today is amazing, even if email technology was reinvented multiple times since then, even if just like for dolphins vs. non-dolphins, it's hard to draw a line between e-mail-capable computers and computers that couldn't do e-mail, there still was a first e-mail, and there still was a single computer sending that first e-mail.
Yet another example : for each child, learning how to speak takes a long time, but each dad remembers a "first word". And that first word turns a non-speaking child into a speaking child.
So I do not believe that the passage you quote condemns the scenario, on the contrary. It says we have all reasons to believe that there was a first sin. It says something more important, which is humanity and sin coincided.