I'm sorry to say it but I'm amazed by the support for this in these comments.
"Punishment should be harder", "sex offenders should be shot", etc. is all that there seems to be said.
So suddenly the law system is not good enough anymore?
Does everybody think that the way sentances are set up (the 'more evil' the crime, the 'heavier' the punishment) was pulled out of a hat and needs to be fixed?
100 years ago the same crimes existed with the same impact as they have today.
Warning: nasty example below
Apparently in the view of people here it's better to *kill* a little girl and *then* have sex with the corpse (dead girls don't say no) then letting her live in the first place.
Something is fundamentally wrong with that thought. Scarred for life, possibly, but STILL HAVING A LIFE!. So the punishment for murder is heavier then for sex offenders, as, I think, it *should* be. Apparently it is considered that 20 years in prison without parole is heavy enough for premeditated mass murder (as it's the upper bound in my country - of course, in the US it's a bit different, but...). So you can't go over that.
So, first point: there is an order in evilness and punishment for the crime and that is logical, and *should* remain.
Second a bit more personal note, is that to some apparently some offenses are so blatant that offenders are to be limited for life. Offenders are all of a no longer entirely free human beings and being discriminated against and no longer have the ability to redeem themselves. This is important people. For a god-loving country apparently only a minority believes that it's possible to redeem oneself as the majority thinks it isn't. Do something wrong and have no means to redeem yourself is therefore for me denying the idea that it's possible to improve oneself. For a counry which proclaims the american dream where one *can* improve oneself, its a weird view.
But to be able to redeem oneself you must serve the punishment. If the punishment is set at 20 years jailtime, the system *should* assume that it's now a 'clean sheet' (with some remarks, of course). At least, this is an idealists point of view of course, which *I* personally adhere to. As a counterargument, there are of course continuous offenders who are inherently 'evil' (or nonconformant, or...) who do pose a threat to members of a society. But the question here for me is when are you willing to label a person as such (and not how you then handle him or her). I personally feel that a lot of people want to join the mass and throw the rocks as soon as possible, thereby denying that the offender is a human being too.
Now, from that, I personally don't feel that a 'permanent punishment' which removes personal liberties permanently and unconditionally is a good idea. At least give people a chance to improve.
For those of you out there who are into this stuff:
I had a nice course on this once, discussing all sorts of programming languages. Both their histories, and their design decisions.
Most importantly, they did it by a quite nice book: Concepts of Programming Languages.
Starting with simple constructs and the way they are used, leading up to all the different decisions between languages and their reasons, and splitting off into the different paradigms in programming, it is a MUST HAVE for any CS student. I kid you not. It's damn expensive, but reading it learned me the global view of all the languages out there. Because of it, taking up a new language is much easier since I now can classify it and know what generic specifics to expect.
As said. Get it. Or check the library. I'm guessing any university library with a CS department worth it's salt has one (although possibly older versions which are fine as well).
Although only used in 4 computers, (IIRC), Plankalkul was the first 'real' language. Developed by Konrad Zuse. Check wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk% FCl http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse
Egads! Wikipedia even has THIS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_pr ogrammi ng_languages
a problem is in NP, iff it has a polynomial time verifier. Thus, by definition, NP includes all problems in P (yet not the other way round).
IF a problem has a non polynomial verifier, it is useless for cryptography as it would take too much time to verify the correctness of the input recieved. It would be nonpolynomial. Not even that, it would be beyond NP to verify (as P=NP would imply that any nonpolynomial verification would also be polynomial).
We thus end up in PSPACE. Yet these problems are
SO, P=NP is certainly important for cryptography, as it would require to fall back on other methods.
One time pads may be nice, but they're simply unworkable. If we were to use one-time pad passwords, it would mean that for every password you had, you would have to use a list of 'one time' codes. Security then would become no better then the place where that piece of machinery is stashed. It cannot be paper, because we cannot expect people to continually write down long, long lines as passwords - especially if they were to be random characters (which you would want for security). So it would have to be an electronic device.
That would require that we have an electronic device for *every* password we have (of course, we *can* make a 'master device' which functions as all, but that is a major security risk I would not want to take).
In short, first think of what it would mean if we were to use harder problems. The current NP class is a perfect class: it is (nigh) impossible to break, yet easy to prove the correctness of a token.
I just read pengwindows. Now there's a nice tux reference for you...
Let's just call the next OS windows manager penguindows. At least they can't call out for a copyrighted 'windows' in there. (or really call it PenGwindows, where G stands for Gnu?)
Seeing this confirms what I read that piece. Reading above line I had to think twice about m____e l_____s - because they are longer words: It also matters *a lot* on the word length, or, the percentual of the word which *is* in the correct place.
watch me go "aamrisnooctrl"... (granted, it's not totally random cos I put noocntrl in there giving nerds a definitely different idea:) )
I'm guessing that took you a while to find out it's actually astronomical. That's because it's a long word.
First and last letters are important. Use any hashtable, or searchmethod, and know why. You need to index on something. A word *always* has a last and a first letter (else it would be a single letter;) ), so you can build indices on them.
I'm guessing a program with a decent dictionary can get quite a big number of the words right without looking even at the surrounding words, grammer, or what have you, with simple chance algorithms (say, "this" is used 80% of the times you see "t__s, and so forth).
So, my point would be: nothing new here. Nice gadget, but don't use it on, say, anything archaic (since you won't have much use of the context and the words aren't that well known), and anything "thanciecl" will probably be way out there because the words are too long to match easily.
I study CS @ Eindhoven University, where he came and teached a lot(his and his compatriots were good in programming methodology: http://www.win.tue.nl/pm/ - horrible looking webpage) Trust me, it shows. Most of the 'hardcore' faculty members were friends/exstudents/what have you, and work the way he did. Dijkstra (and the folks at my faculty) did not bother himself with implementations of programming languages. Nor with what function to call for what. They all strive to understand the nature of the problem, and from that they try to derive the solution. That's a totally different approach to programming, which is a *lot* of work. However, it shows in areas where simplicity is key. There is a reason why Dijkstra used Semaphores (what do you think Java uses?). Or have you ever seen a good proof of Peterson's Algorithm? (I know Feijen and van Gasteren gave a generic derivation in 'On a Method of Multiprogramming', but that's just me having had to read it because it's part of my study there, of course. A book which delves into seemingly simplistic problems, but then gathers a framework which can tackle much bigger problems then you would expect.)
The problems for single-process computing are easy. For those of you who program in them, I'm not trying to critisize or anything (I personally know that it's still damn hard from time to time), but there are no synchronisation problems, for one. To ensure that these are all systematicly handled you'd really want to have a proof that nothing can go wrong. Java and exceptions? Fine, it's just a way to get away with bad programming. There are a lot of places where you simply cannot get away with dirty programming: you don't want your car to deadlock going at 90 MpH, now would you? You want to be absolutely positive that it will *never* happen. THat means having either done extensive testing (which you can only hope it was sufficient), or having formal proof that it cannot go wrong.
That is why Dijkstra held himself to the 'very hard problems'. The easy ones you can mess up with and still have not too much problems. The hard ones are problematic if they fail. He did not believe in cluttered code. Everything should be there for a reason, should be proven to be there and exactly there for a reason.
"If I've learned one thing it's that in IS/IT/CS you either adapt and move on or you end up doing tech support on the midnight shift. Plain and simple. I think Fred Brooks touched on this in his book "The Mythical Man Month" when he said that computer programming will never be a mature field because to excel in it you must always be changing your language focus.
To excel in Computer Programming you must be so smart as to be able to tackle the really hard problems. That means tackling problems on the problem field. You don't need languages for that, you need proof. Languages are but a tool for describing a solution and verifying your proof. Some languages describe easier then others, yes, but the solution is the same.
I can write a C to Haskell to C++ to Prolog to Java compiler. Pretty straightforward too. The languages are the same. You just don't want to see the spaghetti which comes out of a program once I'm through with it. And that's the reason why you use a specific language for a solving a problem: some languages simply are much easier to express the solution in. However, that does NOT solve the problem, it merely makes it easier to program a solution understandibly.
Dijkstra was above all a scientist, and thus had to convince the scientific community of his ideas. This normally is done by using formal methods which describe both the problem as the solution in such a away that they can be easily understood.
That is still the holy grail for may solutions: how can they be written such that they can be understood more easily.
Being a helpdesker I really, *really* hope never to see *this* supported. I know the amount of troubles V90 gave (and K56Flex - oh, and let's not forget USR's X2), because to actually *get* a V90 connection you need to be *lucky* - i.e. - *your* telephone line shouldnt have too much interference, - the telephone company's switchers shouldn't interfere too much, - your modem should support it well (gawd the amount of time I've seen that those "WE ARE V90" stickers and found out that they *werent*...) - and for all windows users, there's this issue with Windows which has an instable Dial-up Networking which seems quite happy to NOT work when you reinstall everything - even if it did before.
and if *all* that works for you, and you actually *do* get a connection at more then 33k6 bps then you can only hope that it's *stable* - which, in about 50 % of all connections, it isn't, due to the aforementioned reasons.
No, V90 is like balancing on the edge of the cliff of what's possible using analog (non-DSL) modems, and as such it's just another way to drive up sales. (and make crappier modems - the modem industry probably learned from MS that you dont need a good product, as long as the people dont know it's not good). Pushing it even further is nice for a theoretical discussion and proof of human capabilities to crank (possibly) even more out of an already overstretched way of communication, but it's already too unstable.
It never will, It will just cease to hurt as you come to terms with it. But you cant hope to change yourself as if it never happened. Yet, you can change, and you can get your confidence back -eventually-. All I can do is wish you good luck and dont give up...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry to say it but I'm amazed by the support for this in these comments.
...) who do pose a threat to members of a society. But the question here for me is when are you willing to label a person as such (and not how you then handle him or her). I personally feel that a lot of people want to join the mass and throw the rocks as soon as possible, thereby denying that the offender is a human being too.
"Punishment should be harder", "sex offenders should be shot", etc. is all that there seems to be said.
So suddenly the law system is not good enough anymore?
Does everybody think that the way sentances are set up (the 'more evil' the crime, the 'heavier' the punishment) was pulled out of a hat and needs to be fixed?
100 years ago the same crimes existed with the same impact as they have today.
Warning: nasty example below
Apparently in the view of people here it's better to *kill* a little girl and *then* have sex with the corpse (dead girls don't say no) then letting her live in the first place.
Something is fundamentally wrong with that thought.
Scarred for life, possibly, but STILL HAVING A LIFE!.
So the punishment for murder is heavier then for sex offenders, as, I think, it *should* be. Apparently it is considered that 20 years in prison without parole is heavy enough for premeditated mass murder (as it's the upper bound in my country - of course, in the US it's a bit different, but...). So you can't go over that.
So, first point:
there is an order in evilness and punishment for the crime and that is logical, and *should* remain.
Second a bit more personal note, is that to some apparently some offenses are so blatant that offenders are to be limited for life. Offenders are all of a no longer entirely free human beings and being discriminated against and no longer have the ability to redeem themselves. This is important people. For a god-loving country apparently only a minority believes that it's possible to redeem oneself as the majority thinks it isn't.
Do something wrong and have no means to redeem yourself is therefore for me denying the idea that it's possible to improve oneself. For a counry which proclaims the american dream where one *can* improve oneself, its a weird view. But to be able to redeem oneself you must serve the punishment. If the punishment is set at 20 years jailtime, the system *should* assume that it's now a 'clean sheet' (with some remarks, of course). At least, this is an idealists point of view of course, which *I* personally adhere to. As a counterargument, there are of course continuous offenders who are inherently 'evil' (or nonconformant, or
Now, from that, I personally don't feel that a 'permanent punishment' which removes personal liberties permanently and unconditionally is a good idea. At least give people a chance to improve.
Regards,
Koos
For those of you out there who are into this stuff:
I had a nice course on this once, discussing all sorts of programming languages. Both their histories, and their design decisions. Most importantly, they did it by a quite nice book:
Concepts of Programming Languages.
Starting with simple constructs and the way they are used, leading up to all the different decisions between languages and their reasons, and splitting off into the different paradigms in programming, it is a MUST HAVE for any CS student. I kid you not. It's damn expensive, but reading it learned me the global view of all the languages out there. Because of it, taking up a new language is much easier since I now can classify it and know what generic specifics to expect.
As said. Get it. Or check the library. I'm guessing any university library with a CS department worth it's salt has one (although possibly older versions which are fine as well).
Fwiffo
Argh!
i ng_languages
Of course i wanted to embed the links.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%FCl
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_programm
I feel SO stupid now.
Although only used in 4 computers, (IIRC), Plankalkul was the first 'real' language. Developed by Konrad Zuse. Check wikipedia:% FCl
r ogrammi ng_languages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse
Egads!
Wikipedia even has THIS:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_p
Fwiffo
And what would it mean to use a harder problem?
a problem is in NP, iff it has a polynomial time verifier.
Thus, by definition, NP includes all problems in P (yet not the other way round).
IF a problem has a non polynomial verifier, it is useless for cryptography as it would take too much time to verify the correctness of the input recieved. It would be nonpolynomial.
Not even that, it would be beyond NP to verify (as P=NP would imply that any nonpolynomial verification would also be polynomial).
We thus end up in PSPACE. Yet these problems are
SO, P=NP is certainly important for cryptography, as it would require to fall back on other methods.
One time pads may be nice, but they're simply unworkable. If we were to use one-time pad passwords, it would mean that for every password you had, you would have to use a list of 'one time' codes. Security then would become no better then the place where that piece of machinery is stashed. It cannot be paper, because we cannot expect people to continually write down long, long lines as passwords - especially if they were to be random characters (which you would want for security).
So it would have to be an electronic device.
That would require that we have an electronic device for *every* password we have (of course, we *can* make a 'master device' which functions as all, but that is a major security risk I would not want to take).
In short, first think of what it would mean if we were to use harder problems. The current NP class is a perfect class: it is (nigh) impossible to break, yet easy to prove the correctness of a token.
Regards,
Koos
I just read pengwindows. Now there's a nice tux reference for you...
Let's just call the next OS windows manager penguindows.
At least they can't call out for a copyrighted 'windows' in there.
(or really call it PenGwindows, where G stands for Gnu?)
anyway. useless brainbabble.
Hmmmm...
:)))
800 megs of data... Would that be the server logs of the FTP's which I get my stuff?
Hmmm. Well, that and probably the 20+megs of spam I get to have every month would make it easy to put it up to 800 megs/year...
Koos
Seeing this confirms what I read that piece.
... :) )
;) ), so you can build indices on them.
Reading above line I had to think twice about m____e l_____s - because they are longer words:
It also matters *a lot* on the word length, or, the percentual of the word which *is* in the correct place.
watch me go "aamrisnooctrl"
(granted, it's not totally random cos I put noocntrl in there giving nerds a definitely different idea
I'm guessing that took you a while to find out it's actually astronomical. That's because it's a long word.
First and last letters are important. Use any hashtable, or searchmethod, and know why. You need to index on something. A word *always* has a last and a first letter (else it would be a single letter
I'm guessing a program with a decent dictionary can get quite a big number of the words right without looking even at the surrounding words, grammer, or what have you, with simple chance algorithms (say, "this" is used 80% of the times you see "t__s, and so forth).
So, my point would be: nothing new here. Nice gadget, but don't use it on, say, anything archaic (since you won't have much use of the context and the words aren't that well known), and anything "thanciecl" will probably be way out there because the words are too long to match easily.
(oh, that would be, technical)
I study CS @ Eindhoven University, where he came and teached a lot(his and his compatriots were good in programming methodology: http://www.win.tue.nl/pm/ - horrible looking webpage) Trust me, it shows. Most of the 'hardcore' faculty members were friends/exstudents/what have you, and work the way he did. Dijkstra (and the folks at my faculty) did not bother himself with implementations of programming languages. Nor with what function to call for what. They all strive to understand the nature of the problem, and from that they try to derive the solution.
That's a totally different approach to programming, which is a *lot* of work. However, it shows in areas where simplicity is key. There is a reason why Dijkstra used Semaphores (what do you think Java uses?). Or have you ever seen a good proof of Peterson's Algorithm? (I know Feijen and van Gasteren gave a generic derivation in 'On a Method of Multiprogramming', but that's just me having had to read it because it's part of my study there, of course. A book which delves into seemingly simplistic problems, but then gathers a framework which can tackle much bigger problems then you would expect.)
The problems for single-process computing are easy. For those of you who program in them, I'm not trying to critisize or anything (I personally know that it's still damn hard from time to time), but there are no synchronisation problems, for one. To ensure that these are all systematicly handled you'd really want to have a proof that nothing can go wrong. Java and exceptions? Fine, it's just a way to get away with bad programming. There are a lot of places where you simply cannot get away with dirty programming: you don't want your car to deadlock going at 90 MpH, now would you? You want to be absolutely positive that it will *never* happen. THat means having either done extensive testing (which you can only hope it was sufficient), or having formal proof that it cannot go wrong.
That is why Dijkstra held himself to the 'very hard problems'. The easy ones you can mess up with and still have not too much problems. The hard ones are problematic if they fail.
He did not believe in cluttered code. Everything should be there for a reason, should be proven to be there and exactly there for a reason.
To excel in Computer Programming you must be so smart as to be able to tackle the really hard problems. That means tackling problems on the problem field. You don't need languages for that, you need proof. Languages are but a tool for describing a solution and verifying your proof. Some languages describe easier then others, yes, but the solution is the same.
I can write a C to Haskell to C++ to Prolog to Java compiler. Pretty straightforward too. The languages are the same. You just don't want to see the spaghetti which comes out of a program once I'm through with it. And that's the reason why you use a specific language for a solving a problem: some languages simply are much easier to express the solution in.
However, that does NOT solve the problem, it merely makes it easier to program a solution understandibly.
Dijkstra was above all a scientist, and thus had to convince the scientific community of his ideas. This normally is done by using formal methods which describe both the problem as the solution in such a away that they can be easily understood.
That is still the holy grail for may solutions: how can they be written such that they can be understood more easily.
But I'm starting to rant here...
If it can kill cells, it could make a damn hefty genetic virus (okay, maybe that's a cartoonish thought. but still.... *shiver)
Oh my,
Being a helpdesker I really, *really* hope never to see *this* supported. I know the amount of troubles V90 gave (and K56Flex - oh, and let's not forget USR's X2), because to actually *get* a V90 connection you need to be *lucky* - i.e.
- *your* telephone line shouldnt have too much interference,
- the telephone company's switchers shouldn't interfere too much,
- your modem should support it well (gawd the amount of time I've seen that those "WE ARE V90" stickers and found out that they *werent*...)
- and for all windows users, there's this issue with Windows which has an instable Dial-up Networking which seems quite happy to NOT work when you reinstall everything - even if it did before.
and if *all* that works for you, and you actually *do* get a connection at more then 33k6 bps then you can only hope that it's *stable* - which, in about 50 % of all connections, it isn't, due to the aforementioned reasons.
No, V90 is like balancing on the edge of the cliff of what's possible using analog (non-DSL) modems, and as such it's just another way to drive up sales.
(and make crappier modems - the modem industry probably learned from MS that you dont need a good product, as long as the people dont know it's not good).
Pushing it even further is nice for a theoretical discussion and proof of human capabilities to crank (possibly) even more out of an already overstretched way of communication, but it's already too unstable.
Cpt. Fwiffo
Not entirely true,
It would only need one operation.
However, to do that operation, the normal O(N) steps are required, since it is still sequential.
It never will,
It will just cease to hurt as you come to terms with it. But you cant hope to change yourself as if it never happened.
Yet, you can change, and you can get your confidence back -eventually-.
All I can do is wish you good luck and dont give up...