I think it's a crying shame that no one (i.e. Red Hat, Novell, IBM, etc) stepped up to sponsor such an intelligent and capable guy.
You're not seeing the big picture: these companies sponsor several Linux development activities. They've done a lot for Linux and they pour a lot of money into making it better. For the most part, they do a really good job of working with the community. Of course, this relationship would not be possible unless the FOSS commnuity had a business-friendly attitude to begin with (e.g., the GPL would not have been successful if it had restricted commercial usage like so many freeware/shareware programs out there).
Similarly, the decision of whether to sponsor an project or developer should be a business one. We, the community, should really avoid putting social pressures on these companies for this type of thing. Social pressure is good for encouraging fair play (e.g., esp. in regards to patent use and legal issues), but playing the violin every time we see a cause will just hamper the businesses which stand in the best postition to promote Linux.
Besides, the companies you mentioned (Novell and IBM especially) are more intersted in targeting the server market at this time. If anyone should volutnteer to support Jon, it should be a company who stands to benefit more immediately from his actions (e.g., perhaps Nvidia, Linspire, or some coalition of Hollywood renderfarms...).
The arrogany egocentric attitude of introvert geeks still rules: it should work the way I say and not the way those n00b lusers say.
It's always ashame to come across an Open Source developer who is contributing with his skills but not with his attitude.
That said, it seems like you are sort of dishing out the bad attitude you are complaining about. Why not find or spearhead a project to help make open source more usable? There are plenty of efforts: both KDE and GNOME are intersted in usability and freedesktop.org is doing some of the ground work for broader interoperability.
At the same time, Linux will always have rough edges because that's where most of the growth occurs. If a new feature is added to the kernel, for instance, you're not going to immediately have this feature integrated into other system-level and application-level software. At first, you might only have some command line utilities. Then you might get a few TKinter apps. Then KDE or Gnome will arrive on the scene. Then the distros will integrate it with other utilities really nicely so you don't have to set anything up. This is not a "difficult is beautiful" situation, but rather a proper seperation of responsibilities.
There will always be a subset of open source that is neat, proper, and tightly packaged. You can help make that subset bigger, or you can work on expanding the frontiers... it's up to you.
It's always been a pet peeve of mine that software companies aren't held to any real sort of accountability for shipping product that is clearly flawed.
What makes you say that Creative's product was clearly flawed? Perhaps the virus was introduced by the CD manufacturer right before it went golden master. Perhaps they ran antivirus scans but--due to a subtle interaction b/t a bug in the antivirus product and a temporary network glitch--the latest virus definitions were not used. Perhaps Creative did due diligence at every step of the way, only to have their product intentionally compromised by a disgruntled employee with a bump key.
That said, let me approach this from another angle. The average commercial software ships with ~3000 bugs in it. Most of them don't matter, but you will occassionaly encounter some that do. Pain, frustration, and potiential monetary loss will result. We could avert this with extensive over-engineering (like we do for the space shuttle), but as a result we would not have all the great functionality that's readily available on today's computers. Imagine: the web might not exist within your lifetime. Militarily, industrially, and socially, we'd still be stuck in the 70's or 80's. With no economies of scale, computers would still be rare and expensive.
Fortunately, the market is smarter than you (not you specifically, but people who advocate software liability for non-critical systems)... the market has rewarded vendors who produce more functionality at lower quality. That's not to say that the market has got it perfect, but there are reasos for why things are balanced they way they are. (As an aside, I would argue that open source software--not being so strictly subject to traditonal market pressures--can occupy a wider range of the quality curve. That's probably a part of why it's so successful in the server market.)
I think the ideal solution to this would be to have a set of methodology standards which software vendors could claim their software adheres to. E.g., the consumer could determine for themselves if they want to buy a grade-B word processor or a cheaper grade-C word processor. The vendor would only be liable for not following the methodology they claimed. It would be difficult to set up such a system without locking developers into specific metholodogies though, and there's no guarantee that methodologies produce software of uniform quality across different software markets. (E.g., the methodology you would use to design a high-quality automotive subsystem probably doesn't have the amount of user-interface testing you would want if trying to design a high-quality video game.)
Mitnick didn't steal anything? Mitnick allegedly copied and removed....software valued at $2,100,000.00.
I hate to take Kevin's side on this because his actions were illegal and immoral. However, it's very important to accurately appraise the costs (financial, emotional, cultural, etc.) of a crime. If the costs are exaggerated then justice is miscarried, tax money is misspent, the public is misserved, and third parties--such as policy makers, security analysts, and insurance companies--are misinformed.
The $2.1 billion number represents the cost to make the software. If Mitnick merely made an unauthorized copy, burned it to CD, and shoved it in a drawer somewhere, what part of that $2.1 billion did the companies lose? None. Nada. Business would continue uninterrupted.
Alternatively, suppose that Mitnick managed to destroy every copy of the software that the company owned. That would make the $2.1 billion a much more accurate assessment. The business could go bankrupt.
And then there's the middle ground... what about leaking secrets to competitors or providing binaries to black-market distributors? These are things that chip away at that $2.1 billion, but it's unlikely they erode it completely.
Of course, we haven't discussed administrative costs associated with mopping up and responding to the Mitnick incidents. We haven't factored in the intangible losses to privacy or even the hidden gains that might have come from the crime (e.g., if benign criminals attack you early and force you to beef up your security before the truly malignant ones arrive, haven't you inadvertly made money?)
A true valuation is perhaps impossible, but we can be more accurate than to assume that the unauthorized copying of private/proprietary information is directly equivalent to the theft of physical goods.
As an adjective, I believe "this" is an article (sometimes called a determiner). It functions much like a, an, the, some, most, etc.
As a (demonstrative) pronoun, "this" has to act like a noun. Notice how it does act this way in the second sentence but not in the first.
I'm not sure that my adverbial example is accurate, but "terrible" is an adjective and "this" appears to be acting as a degree modifier. Anybody got a better example?
One thing that might muddy the waters for English is that nouns can modify nouns more so than the romantic languages [I think]. While I believe "this" should be fully recognized as an adjective, I'm not sure how linguist classify a word like "sun" in the sentence "The sun god blessed his worshippers with a 1% higher return on their small cap investments.". I would expect the dictionary to list "sun" as a noun only, even though it plays an adjective role in the noun phrase of the sentence.
One thing's for sure... studying entry-level linguistics badly injured my grade-school conception of "seven neat and tidy word categories" [noun, pronoun, verb, adverb, adjective, conjunction, exclamation].
I do have to admit there are some ugly things in Perl.
The first thing that comes to mind are regexes.
I think that's a bad example. Regexes are not not unique to Perl. Every major language/platform has a regex API available to it (including Java, C#, SmallTalk, Python, Ruby, and C). Many include it in the core set of API's for the language.
It is true that regexes look ugly, but you have to remember that, even in simple cases, a 1-line regex can replace a dozen of lines of normal code. While I'm not generally a fan of sacrificing clarity to get brevity, I can appreciate a 1-2 orders of magnitude reduction in line count, especially when (1) it's accompanied by a similar reduction in debugging time and defects rates, (2) it allows for easy end-user extensibility, and (3) it's a common technique that you can leverage across several tasks, problem domains, and programming languages. These gains make regexes well worth the time you must invest to learn how to use them effectively.
I would go so far as to consider regexes a fundamental programming skill: if you're a programmer you should know them. If you don't and you are unwilling to spend a month or two learning them, how did you ever spend years learning to read, write, and do mathematics?
BTW, if you run KDE, take a look at kregexpeditor, which permits you to edit regexes in a friendlier fashion. KDE program are starting to embed this tool for use with their find functionality... a very slick way to make this mini-language accessible to a wider audience.
You obviously have never studied any film theory, for if you had, you would have realized that documentaries are not objective.
You have a point in that every attempt at human communicatons can be viewed as an argument... an assertion of truthhood. Critical theories aside, most people use the label "objective" to characterize the manner in which the particular argument under consideration was built and presented.
I could go on, but it would be more meaningful for this "film theory" to develop standards for assessing and promoting objectivity instead of finding coy ways to argue that it does not exist.
By saying you wish to preserve the "legitimacy" of the documentary is saying you want to put critical thinking aside. There is no legitimacy.
Honesty (on behalf of the filmmaker) yields legitimacy, but I guess you are correct in saying that we (as an audience) are too quick to grant "legitimate" status to anything labeled "documentary" in lieu of critically examining it. It is troubling, though, that films like Bowling for Columbine show such disregard for even attempting honesty. There's a dearth of honesty in the U.S.A. on both sides of the polticial spectrum, and it's only dividing us further...
Nothing is to be hidden in only right-click-only accessable menus.
Someone always defends the one-button mouse with this logic, but I don't really see how burying stuff in the menus, in a secret keyboard combo (e.g., holding down the shift key while clicking), or beneath a mouse gesture (double-click, anyone?) is any better. Sometimes you can do funky stuff with the display for the interaction (e.g., setting up selection pseudo-modes, providing drop-targets, etc.), but that takes additional cost, complexity, and raw imagination for each new function.
What you definitely don't want is the every-button-does-something-different-in-every-dif ferent-mode phenomena, a la xfig, but the context menu is different because it is consistent: left-click for primary interaction, right-click to get a list of all your options. Of course, without bothering to conduct or dig up research and put it in perspective, we're both talking out of our arse, but at least the context menu has Direct Manipulation and ease-of-implementation going for it.
Griffin stated that human expansion into the solar system is his long term vision for space policy.
Question: is space worth it? I mean, sure, I would love for humans to colonize the solar system, but the vastness of intrasolar distances, the lack of available raw materials, and the cost of moving thing out of Earth's gravity well makes it so... pointless? It's like splurging your life's savings on collecting Pez dispensers...
Speculation: what we're really going to need is a dozen or so decades of advancement in biotech and nanoengineering first. There's no way you're going to turn Moon or Mars into something livable without custom-engineered self-replicating microorganisms churning lifeless dust into organic soil and solving the whole "atmosphere" problem at the same time.
Ever heard the phrase "Law of Evolution"? Nope, it's still "Theory of Evolution".
A "Theory" generally tends to cover a large body of knowledge (consisting of several inter-related sub-theories, disciplines, or hypotheses). A "Law" tends to be a simple equation (or set of equations) that nicely characterizes a phenomenon. Ultimately, the scientific community tends to be informal with these terms because a phrase like "Theory of Evolution" is just a label for a huge set of ideas, each of which can be true or false on its own.
Theory = not reproduced enough to be called a Law or Fact.
Your definition of "Theory" is useful and correct in some contexts, but you have drawn the wrong inferences about how other people use the term.
Most conclusions from these sciences are technically still theories.
In a sense, all conclusions from science are still "just theory".
(GP:) How I hate the sentence "I did what I was told to do". Everybody should check the orders against his conscience, no matter where they come from.
(P:) It's easy to get self-righteous when you have the benefit of 60 years hindsight.
We humans have a few thousand years of hindsight on this. If this species is to survive past its adolecense, we need get past this inherent flaw and take responsibility for our own actions. As the GP post pointed out, "I did what I was told" (IDWIWT) seems like something of an excuse to defray this responsibility.
We can condemn or exonerate the individuals who built and dropped the bomb... it doesn't really matter. What matters is: how would you make the decision in a similar situation with incomplete and unreliable data? How would you check this out with your own conscience? IMO, people with well-developed moral reasoning skills validly reached both conclusions ("drop the bomb"/"don't drop the bomb"). Let's learn from their experiences so that we can become stronger moral fibers in the fabric of our own generation.
The Baroque Cycle (of which Quicksilver is the first volume) covers the birth of science and the birth of finance, much like Cryptonomicon covered the birth of modern cryptography. While many parts are absorbing and fascinating, there are too many tedious sections. This is partially because Neal crams in references to every scientist, royalty, war, and political/religious faction over the course of several decades and he must necessarily spur his characters to take miscellaneous detours, escapades, flashbacks, and chance encounters. Still, I think he could cut the page count from 2600 to 2000 or less and end up with a better novel. (Half of those pages could be taken from book 3.)
The law is for the ignorant masses, to make them "feel" safe. The only time the law can actually do something is AFTER the fact, and even then it requires a lot of resources to actually try and enforce it.
Tell me: do you evaluate the structural integrity of every building you walk into? Do you audit the food handling practices of every restaurant you frequent? When you fly on an airplane, do you interview the pilot before takeoff and try to judge if he is fit for duty or not?
Some laws enable "strategic ignorance", which means that we, the masses, can live safer lives without sacrificing the modern conveniences that let us further develop in our own areas of expertise. E.g., sometimes centralized decision-making makes sense and raises the quality of life for everybody.
I agree that "common sense and good manners" is the best way affect behavior (and people are all too quick to reach for laws when other mechanism would solve the problem more elegantly), but the fact is that a lot of people don't have that type of respect. Even the people who do have it don't agree with each other very well. At some point, it's best to codify and enforce an expectation (e.g., such as "don't play your car stereo so loud that people can hear it 2 blocks away") and fine those who violate it.
Interface comments are also a good place to make behavioral guarantees. In your example, for instance, it would be nice to know whether stability was guaranteed or not. (You get off the hook, of course, since the job of sorting plain ints will always yield the same results whether you are using a stable or unstable algorithm...)
I could see the following comments for a sort(arr) method:
// sort arr, ascending, stability guaranteed
// sort arr, ascending, stability not guaranteed
// sort arr, ascending, stability not guaranteed // WARNING: this version uses a stable sort, but this may change // in the future.
It can be very frustrating when an interface does not specify key behavioral guarantees and you have to guess whether or not it's safe to rely on the apparent behavior.
Freeciv lets me hack with options that can change the gameplay of old game a LOT, and make it even more interesting
I hope that, with this new release, they fixed the bug where AI players don't account for global warming. I had some frustrated experiencs with global warming kicking in every ~10 rounds or so.
The neat thing was that I was able to spend a ~2 hours reading the source code and creating a perl script that removes all polution from a map. The open-ness of the system (in this case, the plain text data format for the game file) helped me work-around a critical bug.
Faith can be used to justify appaling acts and discrimination or can limit development of society, and is not something to be respected.
Doubt is a virtue, and faith is a means for extending denial contrary to evidence. Still, there are a lot of people with a lot of weird beliefs on this planet, and we should respect them as people. Always.
Remember too that most people want to think of themselves as a good person. Religion (at least in the forms that I have encountered in the U.S.'s Bible Belt) often uses this desire to discourage critical examination of sacred beliefs. A gratuitous example: a local church billboard reads "blessed are those who believe but have not seen".
We humans are a young species yet, and we have a ways to go before coming to terms with our lack of Adult Supervision. As we get there, let's not lose the opportunity to work with religious people to obtain mutually desirable goals ("feeding the hungry", "wise economic policies", etc.). Ultimately, it's up to all of us to make this world a better place.
What you are saying is that people just use 'lots' because they are inexperienced, ignorant, or poorly educated with regards to scale.
I think the parent poster was arguing that 'lots' is not a consequence of ignorance or poor education, but a reflection of how the human mind tends to structure numerical concepts. We don't appreciate, at an intuitive level, the difference b/t 10^5 and 10^20.
I wouldn't rush to blame our culture: our primary opportunity for improvement in this area is to realize that this is a place where our intuitions break down. We can use certain logical mechanisms to work around that limitation for the purposes of rational decision-making, but we probably can't do much to fix the intuitions themselves.
Note that by "inutition", I am referring to the subconscious subsystems that manage most of our cognitive existance, including impulses, insights, gut feelings, background processing, etc. These subsystems DO NOT include our most directly conscious, highly-symbolic thoughts (such as your inner monologue or your ability to explictly visualize things). Intution does some amazing things, and it frequently the quickest or only source of knowledge for certain tasks (e.g., especially figuring out emotional and social situations, as when trying to determine if the girl you're bringing back from a date wants to be kissed or not). Intuition can quickly lead us astray though, especially when it operates outside its evolutionarily-determined parameters.
In the end, I would agree with you: we need a good education system focused on building critical thinkers.
Humans cannot seriously undertake the population of space unless there is a way to make wealth out of it that exceeds the wealth we would have by remaining squat on the planet. It's great to talk about the sensous possibilities of zero-gravity or the ultimate survival of humankind, but if there's no payoff, then we are doing the wrong thin for humanity.
Don't interpret this as a cynical comment about capitalism or human greed: this is a basic economic reality. What if we spend trillions just to bring back a few moon rocks or stick some NASA jockeys in a white tent on Mars? Unless there are phenomenal payoffs (in the form knowledge) to such ventures, such scenarios are "failure".
On the other hand, if we are able to mine asteroids for extradorinary materials or terraform Mars, than we might be looking at a scenario called "success".
Personally, I would really like to see humans make it into space, but I'm pessimisitic about the opportunities. I suspect that the next frontiers for humankind lie more along the lines of biology, medicine, and AI: let's engineer immortality and hyper-extend consciousness before we colonize space (unless there's a definite payoff to the latter).
Philosophically speaking, what right does one individual (the State) have to *force* another individual (me) never to choose the gender of my child?
Philosophically speaking, what right does one individual have to force another individual to do anything?
The answer? None, except perhaps in cases of self-defense, an you indicate. However, the end result of this type thinking is anarchy, misery, and the inevitable rise of those who don't care about your philosophy.
Don't be fooled: might makes right, in a warped sense. The point of civilization is that we try to pool our strengths together to simulate justice, equality, opportunity, freedom, etc. Once you adjust your philosophy to take some grim realities into account, you start asking questions like "is there anyway to grant this freedom without seriously screwing up future generations?". Homosexuality? Probably so. Polygamy? Probably not. Designer children? Not yet.
I understand and sympathize with your philosophical impulse to favor the individual over the state. I favor it whenever possible. But in this case, it's very difficult to imagine that a male-skewed gender distribution could turn out well. Feel free to dig up sociological and zoological research to the contrary.
If I had a child, I would, once it were born, be fully responsible for its life; I would choose whether it learned French while young, or the piano, or karate, the flute...
I'm beginning to cringe at the words "*my* child". The child is his or her own person. You should really revisit your philosophical and moral assumptions if you want to exert such a high level of control over the development of your child's identity. (Although granted that culture and religion do this to a great extent as it is...)
The answer is federal regulations requiring the explicit permission of the affected parties before any data on any individual is sold to anyone.
Hmm... might be a problem for banks, landlords, and other lenders who need to check your credit history. There's also a good deal of info that is required by law to be public... e.g., the state of Georgia requires that the salary of all state employees be made public (in fact, it gets posted to the web). Property deeds, court cases... many other things.
Part of the issue here is that you engage in transactions with other parties (business, individuals, the state, etc.). Traditionally, the other party has always had the ability (and usually the legal permission) to (1) remember that it interacted with you, (2) analyze information it obtained about you, and (3) share both the information and analysis. Many, many things would have to be seriously re-thought and revamped to make personal data seriously private as you propose.
And even if you do this get to work, it will probably end being of little consequence. To get credit, too rent an apartment, to get accepted into college, you'll have to sign something to give people the permission to obtain/retain/analyze/share information about you. If you don't like it, you can try to find a bank/renter/college that doesn't have you sign quite such a scary form. (It's a great idea! Take your 153rd choice for college because all the others wouldn't give you the legal terms that would perfectly protect your privacy. "The free market will take care of it" my ass... markets aren't very good at protecting freedom.)
So in the end, all you've done is added a thick layer of paperwork to things and created more job opportunities for lawyers. Don't try to get business done in a hurry!
A better idea is to make identity theft pointless: no matter how much you know about a person, you should never be able to co-opt their identity. Easier said than done, of course...
If you are against software patents, then you must be against any type of patents because it would not be fair to have a special exemption for one type of invention and not another.
I'm primarily against poor patent quality, which greatly benefits people like you but does not benefit "small and individual inventors" or society as a whole. Really, poor patents favor (1) large companies and (2) parasites [any size]. Having an IP lawyer in the family, I would assume that you agree with me here.
Secondarily, I have a moral issue with software patents: for me, software is the marriage of mathematics with cognition. Patenting software is like patenting thought itself. Or at least, that's the ethical ground you're treading on.
From a pragmatic perspective, I will acknowledge that I want a "special expemption" for software patents primarily because I believe that these patents will destroy individual freedom and hender technological progress. Is this so unreasonable? The "special exemption" was built into the patent process from the start by the prohibition on mathematical and conceptual patents.
If anything, the similarities between software patents and traditional patents should prompt us to reconsider the merit of traditional patents instead of opening ourselves up to software patents.
I sleep very well at night knowing I am providing a valuable service to my clients.
If your clients have worked for 14 years through thousands of design variations to solve one of the hard problems facing humanity, then great! I won't begrudge you. If, however, they spent a few months writing a code generator or UI widget or something they think is "really clever" then pffttt... I guarantee you it is (1) obvious to any hardcore programmer and (2) first done with LISP or Smalltalk sometime before 1985.
Chip fabrication is hard.
Let's make general purpose CPU's that can be programmed. It's easier!
No wait... let's use PICs so that our {small electronics project} doesn't need an ATX case.
Ah yeah that's the ticket - the best of both worlds!
</sarcasm>
Binary XML *does* give you the best of both worlds, for the most part. Remember that binary formats, in general, are bad because a human cannot infer much about the information they represent or how to change that information w/o violating the format. Remember that XML gives a programmer many advantages over other text-based formats, including the ability to create new languages without having to write a parser; the ability to mix vocabularies from multiple languages; and the ability to use a wide array of pre-existing tools (XSLT, xpath, text editors, schema validators, etc.) on newly minted data models.
Binary XML is a logical compromise: there's a greater risk of conflicting implementations and it will be more difficult to repair a corrupted file, but--in general--programmers will still be able to see the underlying data model by reading the binary glob through DOM or by dumping it to text. And it will be much more efficent.
Note also that this spec is rather rote: no real "chasing" done here.
Slashdot Mirror
You're not seeing the big picture: these companies sponsor several Linux development activities. They've done a lot for Linux and they pour a lot of money into making it better. For the most part, they do a really good job of working with the community. Of course, this relationship would not be possible unless the FOSS commnuity had a business-friendly attitude to begin with (e.g., the GPL would not have been successful if it had restricted commercial usage like so many freeware/shareware programs out there).
Similarly, the decision of whether to sponsor an project or developer should be a business one. We, the community, should really avoid putting social pressures on these companies for this type of thing. Social pressure is good for encouraging fair play (e.g., esp. in regards to patent use and legal issues), but playing the violin every time we see a cause will just hamper the businesses which stand in the best postition to promote Linux.
Besides, the companies you mentioned (Novell and IBM especially) are more intersted in targeting the server market at this time. If anyone should volutnteer to support Jon, it should be a company who stands to benefit more immediately from his actions (e.g., perhaps Nvidia, Linspire, or some coalition of Hollywood renderfarms...).
It's always ashame to come across an Open Source developer who is contributing with his skills but not with his attitude.
That said, it seems like you are sort of dishing out the bad attitude you are complaining about. Why not find or spearhead a project to help make open source more usable? There are plenty of efforts: both KDE and GNOME are intersted in usability and freedesktop.org is doing some of the ground work for broader interoperability.
At the same time, Linux will always have rough edges because that's where most of the growth occurs. If a new feature is added to the kernel, for instance, you're not going to immediately have this feature integrated into other system-level and application-level software. At first, you might only have some command line utilities. Then you might get a few TKinter apps. Then KDE or Gnome will arrive on the scene. Then the distros will integrate it with other utilities really nicely so you don't have to set anything up. This is not a "difficult is beautiful" situation, but rather a proper seperation of responsibilities.
There will always be a subset of open source that is neat, proper, and tightly packaged. You can help make that subset bigger, or you can work on expanding the frontiers... it's up to you.
What makes you say that Creative's product was clearly flawed? Perhaps the virus was introduced by the CD manufacturer right before it went golden master. Perhaps they ran antivirus scans but--due to a subtle interaction b/t a bug in the antivirus product and a temporary network glitch--the latest virus definitions were not used. Perhaps Creative did due diligence at every step of the way, only to have their product intentionally compromised by a disgruntled employee with a bump key.
That said, let me approach this from another angle. The average commercial software ships with ~3000 bugs in it. Most of them don't matter, but you will occassionaly encounter some that do. Pain, frustration, and potiential monetary loss will result. We could avert this with extensive over-engineering (like we do for the space shuttle), but as a result we would not have all the great functionality that's readily available on today's computers. Imagine: the web might not exist within your lifetime. Militarily, industrially, and socially, we'd still be stuck in the 70's or 80's. With no economies of scale, computers would still be rare and expensive.
Fortunately, the market is smarter than you (not you specifically, but people who advocate software liability for non-critical systems)... the market has rewarded vendors who produce more functionality at lower quality. That's not to say that the market has got it perfect, but there are reasos for why things are balanced they way they are. (As an aside, I would argue that open source software--not being so strictly subject to traditonal market pressures--can occupy a wider range of the quality curve. That's probably a part of why it's so successful in the server market.)
I think the ideal solution to this would be to have a set of methodology standards which software vendors could claim their software adheres to. E.g., the consumer could determine for themselves if they want to buy a grade-B word processor or a cheaper grade-C word processor. The vendor would only be liable for not following the methodology they claimed. It would be difficult to set up such a system without locking developers into specific metholodogies though, and there's no guarantee that methodologies produce software of uniform quality across different software markets. (E.g., the methodology you would use to design a high-quality automotive subsystem probably doesn't have the amount of user-interface testing you would want if trying to design a high-quality video game.)
I hate to take Kevin's side on this because his actions were illegal and immoral. However, it's very important to accurately appraise the costs (financial, emotional, cultural, etc.) of a crime. If the costs are exaggerated then justice is miscarried, tax money is misspent, the public is misserved, and third parties--such as policy makers, security analysts, and insurance companies--are misinformed.
The $2.1 billion number represents the cost to make the software. If Mitnick merely made an unauthorized copy, burned it to CD, and shoved it in a drawer somewhere, what part of that $2.1 billion did the companies lose? None. Nada. Business would continue uninterrupted.
Alternatively, suppose that Mitnick managed to destroy every copy of the software that the company owned. That would make the $2.1 billion a much more accurate assessment. The business could go bankrupt.
And then there's the middle ground... what about leaking secrets to competitors or providing binaries to black-market distributors? These are things that chip away at that $2.1 billion, but it's unlikely they erode it completely.
Of course, we haven't discussed administrative costs associated with mopping up and responding to the Mitnick incidents. We haven't factored in the intangible losses to privacy or even the hidden gains that might have come from the crime (e.g., if benign criminals attack you early and force you to beef up your security before the truly malignant ones arrive, haven't you inadvertly made money?)
A true valuation is perhaps impossible, but we can be more accurate than to assume that the unauthorized copying of private/proprietary information is directly equivalent to the theft of physical goods.
Consider these three sentences:
- Adjective: I agree with this post.
- Pronoun: I agree with this.
- Adverb???: How can it be this terrible?
As an adjective, I believe "this" is an article (sometimes called a determiner). It functions much like a, an, the, some, most, etc.As a (demonstrative) pronoun, "this" has to act like a noun. Notice how it does act this way in the second sentence but not in the first.
I'm not sure that my adverbial example is accurate, but "terrible" is an adjective and "this" appears to be acting as a degree modifier. Anybody got a better example?
One thing that might muddy the waters for English is that nouns can modify nouns more so than the romantic languages [I think]. While I believe "this" should be fully recognized as an adjective, I'm not sure how linguist classify a word like "sun" in the sentence "The sun god blessed his worshippers with a 1% higher return on their small cap investments.". I would expect the dictionary to list "sun" as a noun only, even though it plays an adjective role in the noun phrase of the sentence.
One thing's for sure... studying entry-level linguistics badly injured my grade-school conception of "seven neat and tidy word categories" [noun, pronoun, verb, adverb, adjective, conjunction, exclamation].
I think that's a bad example. Regexes are not not unique to Perl. Every major language/platform has a regex API available to it (including Java, C#, SmallTalk, Python, Ruby, and C). Many include it in the core set of API's for the language.
It is true that regexes look ugly, but you have to remember that, even in simple cases, a 1-line regex can replace a dozen of lines of normal code. While I'm not generally a fan of sacrificing clarity to get brevity, I can appreciate a 1-2 orders of magnitude reduction in line count, especially when (1) it's accompanied by a similar reduction in debugging time and defects rates, (2) it allows for easy end-user extensibility, and (3) it's a common technique that you can leverage across several tasks, problem domains, and programming languages. These gains make regexes well worth the time you must invest to learn how to use them effectively.
I would go so far as to consider regexes a fundamental programming skill: if you're a programmer you should know them. If you don't and you are unwilling to spend a month or two learning them, how did you ever spend years learning to read, write, and do mathematics?
BTW, if you run KDE, take a look at kregexpeditor, which permits you to edit regexes in a friendlier fashion. KDE program are starting to embed this tool for use with their find functionality... a very slick way to make this mini-language accessible to a wider audience.
You have a point in that every attempt at human communicatons can be viewed as an argument... an assertion of truthhood. Critical theories aside, most people use the label "objective" to characterize the manner in which the particular argument under consideration was built and presented.
I could go on, but it would be more meaningful for this "film theory" to develop standards for assessing and promoting objectivity instead of finding coy ways to argue that it does not exist.
By saying you wish to preserve the "legitimacy" of the documentary is saying you want to put critical thinking aside. There is no legitimacy.
Honesty (on behalf of the filmmaker) yields legitimacy, but I guess you are correct in saying that we (as an audience) are too quick to grant "legitimate" status to anything labeled "documentary" in lieu of critically examining it. It is troubling, though, that films like Bowling for Columbine show such disregard for even attempting honesty. There's a dearth of honesty in the U.S.A. on both sides of the polticial spectrum, and it's only dividing us further...
Someone always defends the one-button mouse with this logic, but I don't really see how burying stuff in the menus, in a secret keyboard combo (e.g., holding down the shift key while clicking), or beneath a mouse gesture (double-click, anyone?) is any better. Sometimes you can do funky stuff with the display for the interaction (e.g., setting up selection pseudo-modes, providing drop-targets, etc.), but that takes additional cost, complexity, and raw imagination for each new function.
What you definitely don't want is the every-button-does-something-different-in-every-dif ferent-mode phenomena, a la xfig, but the context menu is different because it is consistent: left-click for primary interaction, right-click to get a list of all your options. Of course, without bothering to conduct or dig up research and put it in perspective, we're both talking out of our arse, but at least the context menu has Direct Manipulation and ease-of-implementation going for it.
Question: is space worth it? I mean, sure, I would love for humans to colonize the solar system, but the vastness of intrasolar distances, the lack of available raw materials, and the cost of moving thing out of Earth's gravity well makes it so... pointless? It's like splurging your life's savings on collecting Pez dispensers...
Speculation: what we're really going to need is a dozen or so decades of advancement in biotech and nanoengineering first. There's no way you're going to turn Moon or Mars into something livable without custom-engineered self-replicating microorganisms churning lifeless dust into organic soil and solving the whole "atmosphere" problem at the same time.
A "Theory" generally tends to cover a large body of knowledge (consisting of several inter-related sub-theories, disciplines, or hypotheses). A "Law" tends to be a simple equation (or set of equations) that nicely characterizes a phenomenon. Ultimately, the scientific community tends to be informal with these terms because a phrase like "Theory of Evolution" is just a label for a huge set of ideas, each of which can be true or false on its own.
Theory = not reproduced enough to be called a Law or Fact.
Your definition of "Theory" is useful and correct in some contexts, but you have drawn the wrong inferences about how other people use the term.
Most conclusions from these sciences are technically still theories.
In a sense, all conclusions from science are still "just theory".
(GP:) How I hate the sentence "I did what I was told to do". Everybody should check the orders against his conscience, no matter where they come from.
(P:) It's easy to get self-righteous when you have the benefit of 60 years hindsight.
We humans have a few thousand years of hindsight on this. If this species is to survive past its adolecense, we need get past this inherent flaw and take responsibility for our own actions. As the GP post pointed out, "I did what I was told" (IDWIWT) seems like something of an excuse to defray this responsibility.
We can condemn or exonerate the individuals who built and dropped the bomb... it doesn't really matter. What matters is: how would you make the decision in a similar situation with incomplete and unreliable data? How would you check this out with your own conscience? IMO, people with well-developed moral reasoning skills validly reached both conclusions ("drop the bomb"/"don't drop the bomb"). Let's learn from their experiences so that we can become stronger moral fibers in the fabric of our own generation.
The Baroque Cycle (of which Quicksilver is the first volume) covers the birth of science and the birth of finance, much like Cryptonomicon covered the birth of modern cryptography. While many parts are absorbing and fascinating, there are too many tedious sections. This is partially because Neal crams in references to every scientist, royalty, war, and political/religious faction over the course of several decades and he must necessarily spur his characters to take miscellaneous detours, escapades, flashbacks, and chance encounters. Still, I think he could cut the page count from 2600 to 2000 or less and end up with a better novel. (Half of those pages could be taken from book 3.)
Tell me: do you evaluate the structural integrity of every building you walk into? Do you audit the food handling practices of every restaurant you frequent? When you fly on an airplane, do you interview the pilot before takeoff and try to judge if he is fit for duty or not?
Some laws enable "strategic ignorance", which means that we, the masses, can live safer lives without sacrificing the modern conveniences that let us further develop in our own areas of expertise. E.g., sometimes centralized decision-making makes sense and raises the quality of life for everybody.
I agree that "common sense and good manners" is the best way affect behavior (and people are all too quick to reach for laws when other mechanism would solve the problem more elegantly), but the fact is that a lot of people don't have that type of respect. Even the people who do have it don't agree with each other very well. At some point, it's best to codify and enforce an expectation (e.g., such as "don't play your car stereo so loud that people can hear it 2 blocks away") and fine those who violate it.
Interface comments are also a good place to make behavioral guarantees. In your example, for instance, it would be nice to know whether stability was guaranteed or not. (You get off the hook, of course, since the job of sorting plain ints will always yield the same results whether you are using a stable or unstable algorithm...)
I could see the following comments for a sort(arr) method:
It can be very frustrating when an interface does not specify key behavioral guarantees and you have to guess whether or not it's safe to rely on the apparent behavior.I hope that, with this new release, they fixed the bug where AI players don't account for global warming. I had some frustrated experiencs with global warming kicking in every ~10 rounds or so.
The neat thing was that I was able to spend a ~2 hours reading the source code and creating a perl script that removes all polution from a map. The open-ness of the system (in this case, the plain text data format for the game file) helped me work-around a critical bug.
Doubt is a virtue, and faith is a means for extending denial contrary to evidence. Still, there are a lot of people with a lot of weird beliefs on this planet, and we should respect them as people. Always.
Remember too that most people want to think of themselves as a good person. Religion (at least in the forms that I have encountered in the U.S.'s Bible Belt) often uses this desire to discourage critical examination of sacred beliefs. A gratuitous example: a local church billboard reads "blessed are those who believe but have not seen".
We humans are a young species yet, and we have a ways to go before coming to terms with our lack of Adult Supervision. As we get there, let's not lose the opportunity to work with religious people to obtain mutually desirable goals ("feeding the hungry", "wise economic policies", etc.). Ultimately, it's up to all of us to make this world a better place.
Amen. Contempt == always bad for the relationship and the players involved.
I think the parent poster was arguing that 'lots' is not a consequence of ignorance or poor education, but a reflection of how the human mind tends to structure numerical concepts. We don't appreciate, at an intuitive level, the difference b/t 10^5 and 10^20.
I wouldn't rush to blame our culture: our primary opportunity for improvement in this area is to realize that this is a place where our intuitions break down. We can use certain logical mechanisms to work around that limitation for the purposes of rational decision-making, but we probably can't do much to fix the intuitions themselves.
Note that by "inutition", I am referring to the subconscious subsystems that manage most of our cognitive existance, including impulses, insights, gut feelings, background processing, etc. These subsystems DO NOT include our most directly conscious, highly-symbolic thoughts (such as your inner monologue or your ability to explictly visualize things). Intution does some amazing things, and it frequently the quickest or only source of knowledge for certain tasks (e.g., especially figuring out emotional and social situations, as when trying to determine if the girl you're bringing back from a date wants to be kissed or not). Intuition can quickly lead us astray though, especially when it operates outside its evolutionarily-determined parameters.
In the end, I would agree with you: we need a good education system focused on building critical thinkers.
Don't interpret this as a cynical comment about capitalism or human greed: this is a basic economic reality. What if we spend trillions just to bring back a few moon rocks or stick some NASA jockeys in a white tent on Mars? Unless there are phenomenal payoffs (in the form knowledge) to such ventures, such scenarios are "failure".
On the other hand, if we are able to mine asteroids for extradorinary materials or terraform Mars, than we might be looking at a scenario called "success".
Personally, I would really like to see humans make it into space, but I'm pessimisitic about the opportunities. I suspect that the next frontiers for humankind lie more along the lines of biology, medicine, and AI: let's engineer immortality and hyper-extend consciousness before we colonize space (unless there's a definite payoff to the latter).
I second that... how does one expatriate successfully?
Philosophically speaking, what right does one individual have to force another individual to do anything?
The answer? None, except perhaps in cases of self-defense, an you indicate. However, the end result of this type thinking is anarchy, misery, and the inevitable rise of those who don't care about your philosophy.
Don't be fooled: might makes right, in a warped sense. The point of civilization is that we try to pool our strengths together to simulate justice, equality, opportunity, freedom, etc. Once you adjust your philosophy to take some grim realities into account, you start asking questions like "is there anyway to grant this freedom without seriously screwing up future generations?". Homosexuality? Probably so. Polygamy? Probably not. Designer children? Not yet.
I understand and sympathize with your philosophical impulse to favor the individual over the state. I favor it whenever possible. But in this case, it's very difficult to imagine that a male-skewed gender distribution could turn out well. Feel free to dig up sociological and zoological research to the contrary.
If I had a child, I would, once it were born, be fully responsible for its life; I would choose whether it learned French while young, or the piano, or karate, the flute...
I'm beginning to cringe at the words "*my* child". The child is his or her own person. You should really revisit your philosophical and moral assumptions if you want to exert such a high level of control over the development of your child's identity. (Although granted that culture and religion do this to a great extent as it is...)
Hmm... might be a problem for banks, landlords, and other lenders who need to check your credit history. There's also a good deal of info that is required by law to be public... e.g., the state of Georgia requires that the salary of all state employees be made public (in fact, it gets posted to the web). Property deeds, court cases... many other things.
Part of the issue here is that you engage in transactions with other parties (business, individuals, the state, etc.). Traditionally, the other party has always had the ability (and usually the legal permission) to (1) remember that it interacted with you, (2) analyze information it obtained about you, and (3) share both the information and analysis. Many, many things would have to be seriously re-thought and revamped to make personal data seriously private as you propose.
And even if you do this get to work, it will probably end being of little consequence. To get credit, too rent an apartment, to get accepted into college, you'll have to sign something to give people the permission to obtain/retain/analyze/share information about you. If you don't like it, you can try to find a bank/renter/college that doesn't have you sign quite such a scary form. (It's a great idea! Take your 153rd choice for college because all the others wouldn't give you the legal terms that would perfectly protect your privacy. "The free market will take care of it" my ass... markets aren't very good at protecting freedom.)
So in the end, all you've done is added a thick layer of paperwork to things and created more job opportunities for lawyers. Don't try to get business done in a hurry!
A better idea is to make identity theft pointless: no matter how much you know about a person, you should never be able to co-opt their identity. Easier said than done, of course...
I'm primarily against poor patent quality, which greatly benefits people like you but does not benefit "small and individual inventors" or society as a whole. Really, poor patents favor (1) large companies and (2) parasites [any size]. Having an IP lawyer in the family, I would assume that you agree with me here.
Secondarily, I have a moral issue with software patents: for me, software is the marriage of mathematics with cognition. Patenting software is like patenting thought itself. Or at least, that's the ethical ground you're treading on.
From a pragmatic perspective, I will acknowledge that I want a "special expemption" for software patents primarily because I believe that these patents will destroy individual freedom and hender technological progress. Is this so unreasonable? The "special exemption" was built into the patent process from the start by the prohibition on mathematical and conceptual patents.
If anything, the similarities between software patents and traditional patents should prompt us to reconsider the merit of traditional patents instead of opening ourselves up to software patents.
I sleep very well at night knowing I am providing a valuable service to my clients.
If your clients have worked for 14 years through thousands of design variations to solve one of the hard problems facing humanity, then great! I won't begrudge you. If, however, they spent a few months writing a code generator or UI widget or something they think is "really clever" then pffttt... I guarantee you it is (1) obvious to any hardcore programmer and (2) first done with LISP or Smalltalk sometime before 1985.
At some point it becomes cheating. Cheating by large, powerful entities is inherently nefarious.
Chip fabrication is hard.
Let's make general purpose CPU's that can be programmed. It's easier!
No wait... let's use PICs so that our {small electronics project} doesn't need an ATX case.
Ah yeah that's the ticket - the best of both worlds!
</sarcasm>
Binary XML *does* give you the best of both worlds, for the most part. Remember that binary formats, in general, are bad because a human cannot infer much about the information they represent or how to change that information w/o violating the format. Remember that XML gives a programmer many advantages over other text-based formats, including the ability to create new languages without having to write a parser; the ability to mix vocabularies from multiple languages; and the ability to use a wide array of pre-existing tools (XSLT, xpath, text editors, schema validators, etc.) on newly minted data models.
Binary XML is a logical compromise: there's a greater risk of conflicting implementations and it will be more difficult to repair a corrupted file, but--in general--programmers will still be able to see the underlying data model by reading the binary glob through DOM or by dumping it to text. And it will be much more efficent.
Note also that this spec is rather rote: no real "chasing" done here.