Right. So by that logic, you can write OO code in machine language. (Which you can't, by the by; no processor on the market today has a "frob this object" command in its opcodes.)
I wonder when this "OO is just a style" meme will die. Guys, we have different computer languages because machine language is icky. (Have you ever hand-hacked applications using debug.exe? I have. I didn't like it and I'm not going back.)
In order to guard our precious sanity from the frozen wasteland that is raw machine language, we've invented formal languages in which it's possible to describe mathematical constructs in terms of various different metaphors. PROLOG uses pure mathematical logic as a way of approaching the problem domain. Instead of raw 1s and 0s, we escape from it altogether and we get to think in terms of bindings and clauses. (Variables? What are those? Functions? Don't need 'em.)
LISP uses set theory to do the same thing. Learn set theory in and out and you'll discover interesting niches of LISP, and come to appreciate its alien beauty.
What's C? C's a portable Assembler that's been kludged up over the years. That's not an insult--sometimes what you want is a portable Assembler with 30 years of hacks on the side, because those hacks are what give it such power. The C language is designed in such a way as to make kludgy hacks easy to write, which is sometimes a great strength.
The languages we use lend themselves, quite directly, to how we think about problems and how we decide to solve them. As such, it makes absolutely no sense to say "well, you can do OO in any language." Sure you can. All Turing-complete languages are equivalent. But at that point, why don't you go back to machine code? That's Turing-complete, too.
When you've bled from your eyeballs on the raw binary, then come back to languages. Discover what each one brings to the table. Discover where they're superior and where they're inferior. You might discover a lot of new things along the way.
As for why the Universe was created, why should a priest have any better answer that, say, a plumber or policeman? On what basis (other than irrational faith) can a priest claim authority and knowledge?
Ironic you should choose this example, since the theory of the Big Bang came from a Belgian priest and amateur astronomer--but that's not an answer to your question; it's only an observation of irony.
Now, about whether a priest has any better idea than anyone else why the universe was created, the answer to that one is they don't--and every priest I know will emphatically agree. They don't know the mind of God any better than anyone else. They're human beings just like the rest of us.
On the other hand, they are in a position to tell us what meaning people have in the past inferred from their observations of the universe--which ideas are widespread, which are not, criticisms which have been levied against one or another, etc.. They study these things in seminary.
Frankly, I'm glad there are people who've formally studied how humanity relates to a cosmos infinitely beyond humanity's limited imagination.
Unfortunately, there certainly are cases where the senior author is famous and/or well-connected and can get a publication because of his name or connections.
This is the purpose behind blind and/or double-blind refereeing. I trust journals which have a blinded refereeing process far more than those which put author names on the submissions.
It's (unfortuntely) true that there are some journals which don't do this, though.
Such as writing a paper that he knew was bogus, in order to see whether or not Social Text would publish it?
and playing on his legitimate reputation within physics, got the Social Text editors to publish an article that they themselves did not think was of high quality.
The very fact he was able to do that at all is strong evidence that the Social Text editors are incompetent.
I'm a graduate student, the lowest rung of professional academic, in a hard discipline. Before I submit a paper anywhere, I submit preprints to experts within whatever field I'm writing about. I do this because I know the journals will do the exact same thing, and it's far better on my reputation if my reviewers find them than if the journal finds them. I know that it doesn't matter if my name is Alan Matheson Turing or Paul Erdoes--whatever I or anyone else submits goes through a formal vetting process which involves having experts pore over my paper with a magnifying glass.
The Sokal Hoax had glaring errors, errors so large that a college senior in mathematics, economics or physics could have spotted them--not only spotted them, but conclusively proven them to be false.
Social Text didn't catch this. Does it really matter if they thought the paper was of poor quality? They published it, and by publishing it put their imprimatur on it. "Here," they said to the academic world, "read this, we think it's worth your time."
Social Text was right. It was worth my time, in that it demonstrated to me precisely why I'm going for a Ph.D. in a discipline where rigor and peer review actually mean something.
What kind of optimization can a static compiler do that a dynamic, profiling runtime compiler can't do?
I'll grant you C, but C++ I can't. C++'s type mechanism stomps all over Java, to the point where I can exploit the type mechanism to do things like programmatically unroll loops, shift computation from run-time to compile-time, etc.
Admittedly, most of these techniques involve template metaprogramming, which is one of the more black-art parts of C++. However, Java simply can't compete with C++ in this realm; Java doesn't have the tools.
At the present time, Java's "generics" are weak tea compared to the strong generics of C++ (and the even stronger ones of Ada95). As soon as I can use Java's generics mechanism to do compile-time assertions, then I'll think Java can compete with C++ in this realm.
(Note: for all I know, the next release of Java will be able to do this. I don't keep abreast of cutting-edge Java developments, only what's in the most recent releases.)
Japan and Germany are stark examples of stable democracies which were imposed by force. Germany was a fascist dictatorship until the Allies conquered it (damn near burning it to the ground in the process) and forced democracy on the people. It took root quickly, and today Germany is a highly functioning democracy.
Japan was a fascist autocracy until we dropped a pair of nukes on them and forced their chief autocrat, pretty much at gunpoint, to renounce all claims to being a living god. MacArthur went into Japan with orders to rebuild the place, and today Japan is a highly functional democracy.
Modern history shows two of the world's foremost democracies became that way as the result of losing a war and having it imposed on them by the victor.
The difference is this: in the United States, prison labor may only be used to produce goods and services for the state. It is illegal for prison-produced goods to compete on the open market and it is illegal for prisons to profit off anyone but other governmental agencies.
For instance, if you're a government executive and the government gives you an allowance with which to outfit your office, you can buy desks for a song. Prisons who teach woodworking as a trade skill offer some beautifully-made things for under $100. They can do this because their labor costs are pretty much nothing. However, the prison can only sell it to other branches of the government--you won't find them for sale in the prison gift shop.
Prison labor is also used to clean up roadways; to dig firebreaks in areas where forest fires are a concern; to make license plates; etc.
I'm not offended by manual labor in the service of the state being a criminal punishment. I'm offended by the idea of convicts being used to make their wardens and jailers independently wealthy, which is precisely what happens in China.
Before you go about preaching there's no difference between what we do and what they do, you may wish to learn what the difference is.
I think it's quite fair. You're assuming that there's an algorithm to analyze, but that's not where you start from. Where you start from is trying to find out whether there's anything to analyze at all. If you have contextual information, great--but when all you can mount is a known-ciphertext attack, your first job is figuring out whether it's ciphertext at all.
It does no good to jump straight into the "we know there's a pattern, we just have to find it" method of thinking until and unless it's proven there is a pattern. If you know there's a pattern, then it's really, really easy to find that pattern--even if what you're looking at is statistical noise.
When you say "they are making the model... from knowledge and understanding of how the atmosphere and the climate ought to work", you're bang-on right: it's the way we think the world ought to work, but not necessarily how the world does work; and it doesn't appear to me that you're considering that difference.
Given all the times climatological predictions have been staggeringly wrong and how many times models have been radically altered to accomodate new understandings, I find it hard to believe that our current models are in the promised land of predictability.
Among the things which make software verificaton difficult are aliasing (pointer aliasing, referencing, equivalences), arrays, side effects, and lack of functional composition.
As it happens, C has all of those save for referencing. Pointers? Yep. Equivalences? Yep. Arrays? Yep. Side effects? Damn near inescapable even if you try. Lack of functional composition? Yep.
The Undecidability issue is a complete red herring, as several others have already pointed out.
Yes, C really is that unsafe of a language, to the point where I'm hard-pressed to think of how to make a language less safe than C. Use something else if at all humanly possible.
Apparently this particular model was used to predict the weather for the last 50 years based on data from 50 years ago and did a decent job.
Color me skeptical, still. I'm not a mathematician; I'm a cryptographer. (Which is a fancy way of saying I'm a computer scientist with delusions of being really good with math theory, I guess.) I can look at random noise and come up with some equation which will successfully 'predict' it; and if I'm allowed to make my model arbitrarily complex, in the name of 'well, a complex system demands a complex model', then it's very easy to fool myself into thinking I'm actually doing something.
Meanwhile, the reality is the next bit to come down the wire is going to be random noise and I'll have just a 50/50 chance of getting it right.
If I'm right, my instinct is to take that as vindication. "My idea is right!" I say. If I'm wrong, I still win, because I get to tell the NSF "more study of this new phenomenon is needed".
And all the while, random bits keep on coming across the wire, and I keep on fooling myself into thinking I can predict them. And I can't.
This is a really hard problem in cryptography; how do you know when you're fooling yourself?
I don't doubt the sincerity of the climatological community. However, they have yet to show me they have any effective mechanism in place for finding out when they're fooling themselves--and for that reason I have to consider their models suspect.
The problem here is that you're answering the wrong question. It's true that the fact we can't predict the weather accurately ten days in advance has no bearing on whether we can predict the weather accurately ten years in advance--but that's not the question.
The question is, can climatological models predict weather ten years in advance?
My answer is "I don't know. Let's get the best climatologists together and sponsor a year of research. At the end of that, they give us a ten-year projection. We keep on going. Ten years later, if their projection is accurate to within ten percent, we say their model has merit and go on from there."
We live in an era where we can send a probe across millions of kilometers to touch down on an icy moon circling Jupiter, and our biggest surprise isn't that we're able to hit it at all but that we got to transmit longer than we thought. The standards set by physics, by chemistry, by biology, by the other hard sciences are extraordinarily high. Demanding ten percent accuracy from climatology just means we're giving them ten times more leeway than we'd give NASA for a space shot.
You could release the entire Windows XP codebase under the GPL and you wouldn't see an active open-source community spring up around it--not immediately, at least. Community-friendly licensing is a prerequisite for communities, but putting a community-friendly license on Solaris isn't enough to cause solaris-kernel@kernel.org to come into being.
While I certainly welcome Solaris to the open-source table, my question for Sun Microsystems is "all right, and what are you prepared to do to help a community form?" They don't have to do very much; just a developer's mailing list, Bugzilla and responsiveness from Sun engineers would do worlds.
Sun has already taken the biggest step by open-sourcing Solaris. The remaining steps are tiny by comparison, and quite painless. So, come on, Sun. Take those last couple of steps. Please. I, and many other open-source geeks, look forward to it.
I'll even meet you halfway on it. As soon as you release Solaris under an open-source license and put ISOs available for download, I'll install Solaris on one of my spare partitions. Assuming my hardware is compatible, I'll commit to using Solaris as my desktop UNIX for the next three months. Whenever I find a usability problem, I'll file Bugzilla reports. If GNOME won't compile, I'll submit patches. I'll do my part for open-source Solaris, as my own show of good faith.
Welcome to the open-source OS party, Solaris. There's no cover charge, the beer is cheap and the live band is surprisingly good. We're glad you could join us.:)
Take a look at a wonderful list of C weirdness which is mandated by the ANSI C89 standard, but which is supported spottily across different platforms.
ANSI C doesn't even specify how large a char should be, for crying out loud. C is many things, but portable ain't one of them. Try taking a codebase written in ANSI C for an embedded microprocessor and compile it for Big Iron. Dollars to donuts says that somewhere in your codebase there are going to be implicit assumptions (about the size of a word, about how memory is allocated, etc.) which are going to be wildly platform-dependent.
ANSI C is standardized, which for some reason people confuse with being portable.
The kernel developers are, in my opinion, shirking their single most fundamental duty
Just a few questions:
How much have you paid Linus, Alan Cox, Andrew Morton, et. al., directly?
Did they make any promises to you about the reliability or stability of the kernel?
Take a look at the GPL, particularly that explicit disclaimer of all warranties. Did Linus send you a certified mail letter in which he waived that clause for you?
Did you get certified mail waivers of that clause from all the other kernel developers?
I'm sorry, I didn't hear you the first time--how much did you pay Linus, himself, directly?
Does Linus give you binaries only of the kernel, and thus make you dependent on him?
Does Linus give you source code, and thus give you the option of auditing code yourself?
Have you done your own code audit?
Just a few simple questions, really. Because before you go about saying that Linus, or any other kernel developer, or any other Free Software developer, has a duty to you, I'd like for you to know what duty means.
Duty means a debt is owed.
So--as a result of the community giving you, at no cost, generous license to literally hundreds of millions of dollars of intellectual property... they owe you something? Because they gave you a gift?
I don't know where this false sense of entitlement within the community arose, but I really hope it goes away soon. You aren't entitled to anything. You aren't entitled to the sweat of my brow, the labor of my hands, the product of my mind--but when I release something under a free license, I give you those things. I say "here, have something; I made this. I want to give it to you."
The whole problem with the Dark Ages was that truths were forgotten by people and had to be rediscovered.
A lot of modern historical scholarship suggests this is a slander invented during the Enlightenment. While the Dark Ages were certainly a period of political upheaval and unrest, the damage to learning was not as great as is commonly believed. It's not as if they burned down universities--they couldn't; universities wouldn't even be invented until the High Middle Ages.
Admittedly, I wouldn't want to live during the Dark Ages, but I think we ought to be fair to the period, too.
The flaw in your argument is that you think the masses ("people") listen to their greatest thinkers and absorb their findings right away.
I never anywhere said "the masses". I said educated people of the Renaissance knew the Earth was round, and had a good idea of its precise size. So when Christopher Columbus went to bankers and kings trying to get funding for his trip around the world, these people didn't laugh at the notion. They knew it was right. They'd been taught it by their tutors, and odds are a lot of them had repeated the experiment.
The better question is, how long have you thought people thought the Earth was flat?
As far back as the ancient Greeks, it was known the Earth was a sphere seven thousand miles across. The Greek mathematician Eratosthenes was down in one city on the spring solstice and looked down a well. He discovered the sunlight shone down to the very bottom. The next year in a different city, again on the solstice, he found himself again by a well. Lo and behold, he was embarassed to discover the well's shadow landed halfway down it.
Eratosthenes thought this was an interesting problem and set himself to tackling it. The only way it could work, he realized, was if the surface of the Earth was a sphere. So by measuring where the shadows fell on the inside of the well and doing a little math, Eratosthenes correctly measured the size of the Earth, accurate to within five percent.
It was one of the finest hacks in the histories of physics, of geometry, of geography, of mathematics. Eratosthenes published his discovery far and wide, and it was a standard part of education throughout the Roman Empire, throughout the Dark Ages, on into the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance.
Every educated person in Columbus' time knew the Earth was round, could tell you why the Earth was round and how Eratosthenes proved the Earth was round. Columbus knew the Earth was round because Columbus had read Eratosthenes as a young man.
Quite some time ago, a writer named Washington Irving wrote a biography of Christopher Columbus in which he needed to make Columbus a man with vision in a world full of the blind. So, with complete disregard for historical truth, Irving had as his story's centerpiece Columbus' conception of the world being round and the world insisting that no, it must be flat.
So no, inertia doesn't have much to do with truth.
As evidenced by the fact you think that for a long time people thought the Earth was flat.
Current sentencing guidelines are a good start. Now we need comparitive sentencing guidelines.
We already have them. They're passed by Congress, and called laws. If the laws specify that copyright infringement is potentially a more serious criminal offense than manslaughter, then those are the sentences which will be passed down.
We don't need comparative sentencing guidelines. We need better laws.
It's not up to the Judiciary. It's up to the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, which were passed in the mid-80s in an attempt to get more uniform sentencing across the nation.
Dad's a Federal judge (semi-retired from the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals--he took senior judge status last year), and for some time he was an instructor for newly-appointed Federal judges teaching them the sentencing system. He used a real example, the name of which I can't remember or the details thereof--it involved a nonviolent drug deal in which someone bartered an automatic weapon for cocaine. All the facts and all the charges were laid out. All these newly-appointed judges were asked, "okay, so come back tomorrow with your idea of how this guy ought be sentenced, and make sure it's legal."
Dad would routinely get answers from a year and probation to 40 years. And remember, these aren't law students. Most of these guys were already state court judges with lots of experience, and they couldn't even agree on what was a fair sentence for a guy who trades an Uzi for some coke. And here's the kicker--all of those sentences were legal.
There was a lot of concern in the '80s about this chasmic gulf in possible sentences. When two guys meet in prison for basically the same offense, and one guy is getting out in a year and the other is spending the rest of his life in prison, it leads to some very serious questions about the fairness of sentencing.
As a result, Congress established the Federal sentencing guidelines. Judges now have very little leeway in determining sentences. Numbers are plugged into a formula, and a range of sentences comes out. The judge gets to sentence within that range where they like, but their ability to deviate upwards or downwards is substantially reduced.
While I agree the sentencing system is completely screwed, let's remember two things: (a) how bad the sentencing system was before the guidelines, and (b) that it's Congress and not the Judiciary who's responsible for the sentencing guidelines.
I'm a graduate student at the University of Iowa, pursuing a Master's in CompSci, focusing on computer security. Until last year, Jathan was the Graduate Student Secretary at UI.
I have no knowledge of any crimes he may or may not have committed.
So, that said... Jathan never did me anything but right. He was quiet, kept to himself an awful lot, but in a department which seems defined by professors who keep their office doors shut, Jathan's door was always open--both figuratively and literally.
My first day at UI, I walked into his office to get a registration number. I looked over his bookshelf and found a surprising number of really high-quality texts on C++, which he told me he'd found laying around MacLean Hall or which someone was throwing away, or whatever. (Strangely enough, the engineering library at Seamans Center has a far, far larger programming library than the CS department in MacLean Hall. The ECE, Electrical and Computer Engineering, geeks have a much better library. In MacLean Hall, getting the book with the right information is a matter of borrowing it from the grad student who owns it, or else hitting Amazon.com.) I walked in there just expecting to get my registration processed; I walked out of there with three good C++ texts under my arm, gifts from him. No money, no favors, no nothing: just "here's how the library situation works, and here, have a few books, do you already have a copy of Josuttis? You do? Okay, never mind that, then..."
So. No matter what happens, let's please remember that Jathan's a human being, with real history, and real people he's helped out in the past for no reason at all other than he wanted to help out.
No, the article gives the family's explanation for why she got better. And, y'know what? If she was my daughter and she came down with rabies, I'd kneel so fast my knees would break Mach One--and I don't even believe in an interventionist God.
Are you really so completely lacking in compassion, empathy, the ability to understand someone else's problems? Their daughter contracted an essentially 100% fatal illness. If they want to credit their belief in pink unicorns for her daughter's recovery, more power to 'em. Guess what? They're terrified. They're under intense stress. They're not thinking rationally. They found something that gave them hope, and you're mocking it.
Is it desperate? Yes. Superstitious? Yes.
Is it hope? Yes.
If you want to sneer at hope, then to hell with you.
[Please don't view anything in this post as trying to show you the 'error of your ways' or any such nonsense. I'm just trying to show that even theologians are irritated by the same things.]
What you're talking about is a well-known heresy: in theological circles it's called the God of the Gaps Fallacy. Priests, ministers, rabbis, imams and pretty much everyone else with formal theological training despises the God of the Gaps, with solid theological reasoning. If we use God to fill in the gaps in human understanding, then to advance in human knowledge is to diminish God's majesty--and that is simply not allowed to occur. That means we have only two choices: we can either not advance human knowledge and let God live in those gaps, or else we can not put God in those gaps in the first place.
Of those two choices, we can't do the first: not just because it's the natural state of knowledge to progress, but because it's heretical to think that God should fit into the world where we want Him to fit. It turns God into a false idol, something we create for our own convenience, and that's major heresy.
Unfortunately, for all the sincere and educated theologians out there, there's an Al Sharpton or another self-appointed minister without theological training who says "no, no! Science is the work of the Devil!"
[sighs] God, you know I love you. But some of your followers are cause to make me doubt your existence, to say nothing of your wisdom.
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Right. So by that logic, you can write OO code in machine language. (Which you can't, by the by; no processor on the market today has a "frob this object" command in its opcodes.)
I wonder when this "OO is just a style" meme will die. Guys, we have different computer languages because machine language is icky. (Have you ever hand-hacked applications using debug.exe? I have. I didn't like it and I'm not going back.)
In order to guard our precious sanity from the frozen wasteland that is raw machine language, we've invented formal languages in which it's possible to describe mathematical constructs in terms of various different metaphors. PROLOG uses pure mathematical logic as a way of approaching the problem domain. Instead of raw 1s and 0s, we escape from it altogether and we get to think in terms of bindings and clauses. (Variables? What are those? Functions? Don't need 'em.)
LISP uses set theory to do the same thing. Learn set theory in and out and you'll discover interesting niches of LISP, and come to appreciate its alien beauty.
What's C? C's a portable Assembler that's been kludged up over the years. That's not an insult--sometimes what you want is a portable Assembler with 30 years of hacks on the side, because those hacks are what give it such power. The C language is designed in such a way as to make kludgy hacks easy to write, which is sometimes a great strength.
The languages we use lend themselves, quite directly, to how we think about problems and how we decide to solve them. As such, it makes absolutely no sense to say "well, you can do OO in any language." Sure you can. All Turing-complete languages are equivalent. But at that point, why don't you go back to machine code? That's Turing-complete, too.
When you've bled from your eyeballs on the raw binary, then come back to languages. Discover what each one brings to the table. Discover where they're superior and where they're inferior. You might discover a lot of new things along the way.
Now, about whether a priest has any better idea than anyone else why the universe was created, the answer to that one is they don't--and every priest I know will emphatically agree. They don't know the mind of God any better than anyone else. They're human beings just like the rest of us.
On the other hand, they are in a position to tell us what meaning people have in the past inferred from their observations of the universe--which ideas are widespread, which are not, criticisms which have been levied against one or another, etc.. They study these things in seminary.
Frankly, I'm glad there are people who've formally studied how humanity relates to a cosmos infinitely beyond humanity's limited imagination.
It's (unfortuntely) true that there are some journals which don't do this, though.
I'm a graduate student, the lowest rung of professional academic, in a hard discipline. Before I submit a paper anywhere, I submit preprints to experts within whatever field I'm writing about. I do this because I know the journals will do the exact same thing, and it's far better on my reputation if my reviewers find them than if the journal finds them. I know that it doesn't matter if my name is Alan Matheson Turing or Paul Erdoes--whatever I or anyone else submits goes through a formal vetting process which involves having experts pore over my paper with a magnifying glass.
The Sokal Hoax had glaring errors, errors so large that a college senior in mathematics, economics or physics could have spotted them--not only spotted them, but conclusively proven them to be false.
Social Text didn't catch this. Does it really matter if they thought the paper was of poor quality? They published it, and by publishing it put their imprimatur on it. "Here," they said to the academic world, "read this, we think it's worth your time."
Social Text was right. It was worth my time, in that it demonstrated to me precisely why I'm going for a Ph.D. in a discipline where rigor and peer review actually mean something.
Admittedly, most of these techniques involve template metaprogramming, which is one of the more black-art parts of C++. However, Java simply can't compete with C++ in this realm; Java doesn't have the tools.
At the present time, Java's "generics" are weak tea compared to the strong generics of C++ (and the even stronger ones of Ada95). As soon as I can use Java's generics mechanism to do compile-time assertions, then I'll think Java can compete with C++ in this realm.
(Note: for all I know, the next release of Java will be able to do this. I don't keep abreast of cutting-edge Java developments, only what's in the most recent releases.)
I'll meet your David Duke and raise you a Robert Byrd.
Yes, that Robert Byrd of the United States Congress, the Democratic archliberal, was a Klansman.
Japan and Germany are stark examples of stable democracies which were imposed by force. Germany was a fascist dictatorship until the Allies conquered it (damn near burning it to the ground in the process) and forced democracy on the people. It took root quickly, and today Germany is a highly functioning democracy.
Japan was a fascist autocracy until we dropped a pair of nukes on them and forced their chief autocrat, pretty much at gunpoint, to renounce all claims to being a living god. MacArthur went into Japan with orders to rebuild the place, and today Japan is a highly functional democracy.
Modern history shows two of the world's foremost democracies became that way as the result of losing a war and having it imposed on them by the victor.
The difference is this: in the United States, prison labor may only be used to produce goods and services for the state. It is illegal for prison-produced goods to compete on the open market and it is illegal for prisons to profit off anyone but other governmental agencies.
For instance, if you're a government executive and the government gives you an allowance with which to outfit your office, you can buy desks for a song. Prisons who teach woodworking as a trade skill offer some beautifully-made things for under $100. They can do this because their labor costs are pretty much nothing. However, the prison can only sell it to other branches of the government--you won't find them for sale in the prison gift shop.
Prison labor is also used to clean up roadways; to dig firebreaks in areas where forest fires are a concern; to make license plates; etc.
I'm not offended by manual labor in the service of the state being a criminal punishment. I'm offended by the idea of convicts being used to make their wardens and jailers independently wealthy, which is precisely what happens in China.
Before you go about preaching there's no difference between what we do and what they do, you may wish to learn what the difference is.
I think it's quite fair. You're assuming that there's an algorithm to analyze, but that's not where you start from. Where you start from is trying to find out whether there's anything to analyze at all. If you have contextual information, great--but when all you can mount is a known-ciphertext attack, your first job is figuring out whether it's ciphertext at all.
... from knowledge and understanding of how the atmosphere and the climate ought to work", you're bang-on right: it's the way we think the world ought to work, but not necessarily how the world does work; and it doesn't appear to me that you're considering that difference.
It does no good to jump straight into the "we know there's a pattern, we just have to find it" method of thinking until and unless it's proven there is a pattern. If you know there's a pattern, then it's really, really easy to find that pattern--even if what you're looking at is statistical noise.
When you say "they are making the model
Given all the times climatological predictions have been staggeringly wrong and how many times models have been radically altered to accomodate new understandings, I find it hard to believe that our current models are in the promised land of predictability.
Among the things which make software verificaton difficult are aliasing (pointer aliasing, referencing, equivalences), arrays, side effects, and lack of functional composition.
As it happens, C has all of those save for referencing. Pointers? Yep. Equivalences? Yep. Arrays? Yep. Side effects? Damn near inescapable even if you try. Lack of functional composition? Yep.
The Undecidability issue is a complete red herring, as several others have already pointed out.
Yes, C really is that unsafe of a language, to the point where I'm hard-pressed to think of how to make a language less safe than C. Use something else if at all humanly possible.
Apparently this particular model was used to predict the weather for the last 50 years based on data from 50 years ago and did a decent job.
Color me skeptical, still. I'm not a mathematician; I'm a cryptographer. (Which is a fancy way of saying I'm a computer scientist with delusions of being really good with math theory, I guess.) I can look at random noise and come up with some equation which will successfully 'predict' it; and if I'm allowed to make my model arbitrarily complex, in the name of 'well, a complex system demands a complex model', then it's very easy to fool myself into thinking I'm actually doing something.
Meanwhile, the reality is the next bit to come down the wire is going to be random noise and I'll have just a 50/50 chance of getting it right.
If I'm right, my instinct is to take that as vindication. "My idea is right!" I say. If I'm wrong, I still win, because I get to tell the NSF "more study of this new phenomenon is needed".
And all the while, random bits keep on coming across the wire, and I keep on fooling myself into thinking I can predict them. And I can't.
This is a really hard problem in cryptography; how do you know when you're fooling yourself?
I don't doubt the sincerity of the climatological community. However, they have yet to show me they have any effective mechanism in place for finding out when they're fooling themselves--and for that reason I have to consider their models suspect.
The problem here is that you're answering the wrong question. It's true that the fact we can't predict the weather accurately ten days in advance has no bearing on whether we can predict the weather accurately ten years in advance--but that's not the question.
The question is, can climatological models predict weather ten years in advance?
My answer is "I don't know. Let's get the best climatologists together and sponsor a year of research. At the end of that, they give us a ten-year projection. We keep on going. Ten years later, if their projection is accurate to within ten percent, we say their model has merit and go on from there."
We live in an era where we can send a probe across millions of kilometers to touch down on an icy moon circling Jupiter, and our biggest surprise isn't that we're able to hit it at all but that we got to transmit longer than we thought. The standards set by physics, by chemistry, by biology, by the other hard sciences are extraordinarily high. Demanding ten percent accuracy from climatology just means we're giving them ten times more leeway than we'd give NASA for a space shot.
You could release the entire Windows XP codebase under the GPL and you wouldn't see an active open-source community spring up around it--not immediately, at least. Community-friendly licensing is a prerequisite for communities, but putting a community-friendly license on Solaris isn't enough to cause solaris-kernel@kernel.org to come into being.
:)
While I certainly welcome Solaris to the open-source table, my question for Sun Microsystems is "all right, and what are you prepared to do to help a community form?" They don't have to do very much; just a developer's mailing list, Bugzilla and responsiveness from Sun engineers would do worlds.
Sun has already taken the biggest step by open-sourcing Solaris. The remaining steps are tiny by comparison, and quite painless. So, come on, Sun. Take those last couple of steps. Please. I, and many other open-source geeks, look forward to it.
I'll even meet you halfway on it. As soon as you release Solaris under an open-source license and put ISOs available for download, I'll install Solaris on one of my spare partitions. Assuming my hardware is compatible, I'll commit to using Solaris as my desktop UNIX for the next three months. Whenever I find a usability problem, I'll file Bugzilla reports. If GNOME won't compile, I'll submit patches. I'll do my part for open-source Solaris, as my own show of good faith.
Welcome to the open-source OS party, Solaris. There's no cover charge, the beer is cheap and the live band is surprisingly good. We're glad you could join us.
... the first time I saw it, back in 1984 when I first met the macro facility on a Symbolics LISP machine.
I'm not kidding. If this offers anything we haven't had for the last 25+ years in LISP, I don't see it.
ANSI C isn't portable; it's only standardized.
Take a look at a wonderful list of C weirdness which is mandated by the ANSI C89 standard, but which is supported spottily across different platforms.
ANSI C doesn't even specify how large a char should be, for crying out loud. C is many things, but portable ain't one of them. Try taking a codebase written in ANSI C for an embedded microprocessor and compile it for Big Iron. Dollars to donuts says that somewhere in your codebase there are going to be implicit assumptions (about the size of a word, about how memory is allocated, etc.) which are going to be wildly platform-dependent.
ANSI C is standardized, which for some reason people confuse with being portable.
- How much have you paid Linus, Alan Cox, Andrew Morton, et. al., directly?
- Did they make any promises to you about the reliability or stability of the kernel?
- Take a look at the GPL, particularly that explicit disclaimer of all warranties. Did Linus send you a certified mail letter in which he waived that clause for you?
- Did you get certified mail waivers of that clause from all the other kernel developers?
- I'm sorry, I didn't hear you the first time--how much did you pay Linus, himself, directly?
- Does Linus give you binaries only of the kernel, and thus make you dependent on him?
- Does Linus give you source code, and thus give you the option of auditing code yourself?
- Have you done your own code audit?
Just a few simple questions, really. Because before you go about saying that Linus, or any other kernel developer, or any other Free Software developer, has a duty to you, I'd like for you to know what duty means.Duty means a debt is owed.
So--as a result of the community giving you, at no cost, generous license to literally hundreds of millions of dollars of intellectual property... they owe you something? Because they gave you a gift?
I don't know where this false sense of entitlement within the community arose, but I really hope it goes away soon. You aren't entitled to anything. You aren't entitled to the sweat of my brow, the labor of my hands, the product of my mind--but when I release something under a free license, I give you those things. I say "here, have something; I made this. I want to give it to you."
And what are you doing?
Looking the gift horse in the mouth.
Admittedly, I wouldn't want to live during the Dark Ages, but I think we ought to be fair to the period, too.I never anywhere said "the masses". I said educated people of the Renaissance knew the Earth was round, and had a good idea of its precise size. So when Christopher Columbus went to bankers and kings trying to get funding for his trip around the world, these people didn't laugh at the notion. They knew it was right. They'd been taught it by their tutors, and odds are a lot of them had repeated the experiment.
As far back as the ancient Greeks, it was known the Earth was a sphere seven thousand miles across. The Greek mathematician Eratosthenes was down in one city on the spring solstice and looked down a well. He discovered the sunlight shone down to the very bottom. The next year in a different city, again on the solstice, he found himself again by a well. Lo and behold, he was embarassed to discover the well's shadow landed halfway down it.
Eratosthenes thought this was an interesting problem and set himself to tackling it. The only way it could work, he realized, was if the surface of the Earth was a sphere. So by measuring where the shadows fell on the inside of the well and doing a little math, Eratosthenes correctly measured the size of the Earth, accurate to within five percent.
It was one of the finest hacks in the histories of physics, of geometry, of geography, of mathematics. Eratosthenes published his discovery far and wide, and it was a standard part of education throughout the Roman Empire, throughout the Dark Ages, on into the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance.
Every educated person in Columbus' time knew the Earth was round, could tell you why the Earth was round and how Eratosthenes proved the Earth was round. Columbus knew the Earth was round because Columbus had read Eratosthenes as a young man.
Quite some time ago, a writer named Washington Irving wrote a biography of Christopher Columbus in which he needed to make Columbus a man with vision in a world full of the blind. So, with complete disregard for historical truth, Irving had as his story's centerpiece Columbus' conception of the world being round and the world insisting that no, it must be flat.
So no, inertia doesn't have much to do with truth.
As evidenced by the fact you think that for a long time people thought the Earth was flat.
We don't need comparative sentencing guidelines. We need better laws.
It's not up to the Judiciary. It's up to the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, which were passed in the mid-80s in an attempt to get more uniform sentencing across the nation.
Dad's a Federal judge (semi-retired from the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals--he took senior judge status last year), and for some time he was an instructor for newly-appointed Federal judges teaching them the sentencing system. He used a real example, the name of which I can't remember or the details thereof--it involved a nonviolent drug deal in which someone bartered an automatic weapon for cocaine. All the facts and all the charges were laid out. All these newly-appointed judges were asked, "okay, so come back tomorrow with your idea of how this guy ought be sentenced, and make sure it's legal."
Dad would routinely get answers from a year and probation to 40 years. And remember, these aren't law students. Most of these guys were already state court judges with lots of experience, and they couldn't even agree on what was a fair sentence for a guy who trades an Uzi for some coke. And here's the kicker--all of those sentences were legal.
There was a lot of concern in the '80s about this chasmic gulf in possible sentences. When two guys meet in prison for basically the same offense, and one guy is getting out in a year and the other is spending the rest of his life in prison, it leads to some very serious questions about the fairness of sentencing.
As a result, Congress established the Federal sentencing guidelines. Judges now have very little leeway in determining sentences. Numbers are plugged into a formula, and a range of sentences comes out. The judge gets to sentence within that range where they like, but their ability to deviate upwards or downwards is substantially reduced.
While I agree the sentencing system is completely screwed, let's remember two things: (a) how bad the sentencing system was before the guidelines, and (b) that it's Congress and not the Judiciary who's responsible for the sentencing guidelines.
What abiggerhammer just said. Me, I have good memories of Jathan. He didn't do me anything but right.
I'm a graduate student at the University of Iowa, pursuing a Master's in CompSci, focusing on computer security. Until last year, Jathan was the Graduate Student Secretary at UI.
I have no knowledge of any crimes he may or may not have committed.
So, that said... Jathan never did me anything but right. He was quiet, kept to himself an awful lot, but in a department which seems defined by professors who keep their office doors shut, Jathan's door was always open--both figuratively and literally.
My first day at UI, I walked into his office to get a registration number. I looked over his bookshelf and found a surprising number of really high-quality texts on C++, which he told me he'd found laying around MacLean Hall or which someone was throwing away, or whatever. (Strangely enough, the engineering library at Seamans Center has a far, far larger programming library than the CS department in MacLean Hall. The ECE, Electrical and Computer Engineering, geeks have a much better library. In MacLean Hall, getting the book with the right information is a matter of borrowing it from the grad student who owns it, or else hitting Amazon.com.) I walked in there just expecting to get my registration processed; I walked out of there with three good C++ texts under my arm, gifts from him. No money, no favors, no nothing: just "here's how the library situation works, and here, have a few books, do you already have a copy of Josuttis? You do? Okay, never mind that, then..."
So. No matter what happens, let's please remember that Jathan's a human being, with real history, and real people he's helped out in the past for no reason at all other than he wanted to help out.
Look, buddy, I don't wanna know what your left hand has been doing in the darkness while thinking about Julia Roberts, okay?
No, the article gives the family's explanation for why she got better. And, y'know what? If she was my daughter and she came down with rabies, I'd kneel so fast my knees would break Mach One--and I don't even believe in an interventionist God.
Are you really so completely lacking in compassion, empathy, the ability to understand someone else's problems? Their daughter contracted an essentially 100% fatal illness. If they want to credit their belief in pink unicorns for her daughter's recovery, more power to 'em. Guess what? They're terrified. They're under intense stress. They're not thinking rationally. They found something that gave them hope, and you're mocking it.
Is it desperate? Yes. Superstitious? Yes.
Is it hope? Yes.
If you want to sneer at hope, then to hell with you.
[Please don't view anything in this post as trying to show you the 'error of your ways' or any such nonsense. I'm just trying to show that even theologians are irritated by the same things.]
What you're talking about is a well-known heresy: in theological circles it's called the God of the Gaps Fallacy. Priests, ministers, rabbis, imams and pretty much everyone else with formal theological training despises the God of the Gaps, with solid theological reasoning. If we use God to fill in the gaps in human understanding, then to advance in human knowledge is to diminish God's majesty--and that is simply not allowed to occur. That means we have only two choices: we can either not advance human knowledge and let God live in those gaps, or else we can not put God in those gaps in the first place.
Of those two choices, we can't do the first: not just because it's the natural state of knowledge to progress, but because it's heretical to think that God should fit into the world where we want Him to fit. It turns God into a false idol, something we create for our own convenience, and that's major heresy.
Unfortunately, for all the sincere and educated theologians out there, there's an Al Sharpton or another self-appointed minister without theological training who says "no, no! Science is the work of the Devil!"
[sighs] God, you know I love you. But some of your followers are cause to make me doubt your existence, to say nothing of your wisdom.