Would anyone convert existing perl 5 scripts to perl 6? Would anyone write new scripts in perl 6 as opposed to Python or Ruby or Perl 5? Really, would anyone except the most diehard Perl addicts even notice or care about Perl 6?
Yeah, I can't wait. I like programming in perl and ruby but not python. It doesn't mesh with me. But perl5's object system is a pain in the ass. perl6 takes what I love about java and ruby and expresses it like perl.:my hero:
perl is fast as hell and light on memory. Python tends to eat memory an ruby tends to be slow.
But most important to me is the perl community. Not just the perlmonks nerds, the guys who do release planning, application design, Q/A, test metrics, run CPAN, module maintainers. They do lots of things right.
Ruby is nearly there with GEM's, but darned if getting Rails working isn't an exacting science of matching old GEM versions. Security patch in the latest one? TFB.
Python has some great libraries and frameworks, but CPAN is much more comprehensive.
Which leads to the best part of perl6 - its parrot vm. The perl6 VM has implementations for python and ruby. I'm sure they're not complete or fully optimized yet, but the potential exists. Ruby stuff can run fast, python stuff can run light. And most importantly, we can all share a library - write the module in your language of choice and everybody who's using a parrot language can use it.
perl6 is still the future of high-level open source languages. Whether you like perl or not you should like perl6 because it's what open source is all about.
I haven't really figure out what it's good for. When I log in it balloons me with a message that Nepomuk couldn't find redland and that my data isn't available. To fix this, a mailing list post said that I'd need some kind of soprano tool but that doesn't really work most of the time. I still have no idea really what these are, I'd just like a dot-release upgrade to succeed. I hack on stuff, but I don't want to hack on everything.
I hope KDE4 gains resiliency after it's feature complete. I still think they're doing more right than GNOME, though, and their architecture looks great on paper.
I recall reading a blog post from one of the KDE architects a year or so ago bemoaning the situation that on linux/xorg KDE nearly always winds up with an non-ideal/inefficient render path. Do you happen to know if that's improved? I think xorg improvements were needed to make it great.
Totally agree, we are altruistic creatures, but our current societal models are based on Original Sin Theory. That's a vestige that needs shaking free, and again I rely optimistically on science to defeat The Church.
, but they are never absolute. Even the right to life: in certain cases, nearly all societies agree that that right needs to be removed. For murder, for instance, or in the case of war.
I think this can be approached from a better perspective - taking life is always wrong, especially by a State (which does not grant, and so cannot take away life). But in the case of murder, for instance, I think it would be OK for society to remove its protection from people who have been proven to be murders - they no longer deserve that protection. At that point, the dead little girl's father will restore the balance. Even though he'll be doing wrong, society does not need to weigh his wrong as heavily as the murderer's.
It's not an ideal proposal, but one I think would be better than what we have now, supposedly do deal with this problem.
I'm all for defensive use of force. I think generally a well-educated society that can keep from over-concentrating power will have no need for offensive use of force.
2. bp or balckwater will create legislation suitable to their agenda and trampling on individual's rights
Right, so how do we solve the problem - Get rid of BP and Blackwater? That seems to be essentially impossible. Get rid of the current government? It's been done before.
Even if you got rid of BP and Blackwater, given our current government, other corporations would just take their place. I submit, and I think our only point of disagreement, that the conditions that allow them to exist as they do now have to change or nothing will be any different, and that those are government-granted conditions.
But natural rights are simply human ideas...you need to fight for them, not appeal to a belief in some sky daddy or philosophical rationalization. You need to convince those other people, who do not think you should have certain rights, that it is in their best interest for everyone to have those rights.
I agree. I've got a small stack of books on the subject (game theory, social science, distributed decision making, etc.) but the science is new and/or just emerging. I've been encouraging some of my friends in neuroscience to work on this.
I'm making the leap of faith that science is the best tool to conquer this, but it's had a good track record over the past few centuries, so I think it's a worthwhile presumption.
#1: yes, it would be lovely if corporations were merely appendages of the government. unfortunately the truth is that our government is somewhat of an appendage of corporations
I'm not sure the semantics matter, but you've got a causality problem there. Corporations don't exist without government. It's all the government, and you won't get any arguments from me about regulatory capture or oligarchy, but let's remember from whence the use of violence arises.
#2: corporations would trample on your rights with blackwater style private military forces
Interesting link - I read about the Homestead Strike and the Anti-Pinkerton Act. What are the Pinkertons accused of doing? The worst I see is the government hiring strike breakers to benefit corporations. Again, the government was causing the problem.
if you fear police or military abuse by your government: if those who wish to weaken our government get their way, you haven't seen anything yet.
Really? So if our government were weakened to the 1840's level we'd be much worse off in terms of military and police abuse? They were breaking down doors of people engaged in 'victimless crimes' to fund their cronies and black ops programs when the government was dramatically weaker?
not fanciful conjecture, its historical fact from when corporations were able to run roughshod over american lives, the gilded age
The gilded age was created when the government stopped limiting corporate charters "for limited times, and for the public good". Really, State governments used to revoke corporate charters all the time, when corporations misbehaved. John D. Rockefeller saw to it by bribing Congress around 1870 that this was stopped, and in Santa Clara, just couple decades later, they gave them human rights.
Don't you think we'd be better off if BP and Blackwater had their corporate charters revoked?
"You control the rewards of your work because everyone agrees that they would like to control the rewards of theirs."
I love your ideal, but the problem is "because everybody agrees" is an argument that's subject to change and has proven unworkable for minorities. Certainly not everybody agrees about anything, so as soon as you diverge from that you have a majority-rule situation.
Sometimes majorities like to agree on how minorities ought to serve them. I wish it weren't so.
why should we bother going down and turning off the tap?
The cost of turning off the tap is essentially non-zero, so it's a bad analogy.
Try: "We have a wet basement, it gets a bit of water in it whenever it rains. We could remove the porch and deck, trench around the house, apply damp-proofing, french drains to air, and backfill with nice material, or we could put the few things we have in the basement up on concrete blocks."
The first option becomes much more attractive when you add, "and we can make our neighbors pay for the job".
Generation of electrity from fossil fuels is currently at the point where they get away with dumping some of the toxic products created as a side effect of their process directly to the air without paying for it. Like my example above, their process is profitable because they don't have to pay for dumping toxic substances into the environment.
We have a fairly weak set of property rights in our current governments and too much public property. With strong property rights, somebody would own a river that's being dumped into and sue the polluter for damages. Last month here in the northeast, we had terrible smog conditions (especially over the White Mountains, where hardly anybody lives). They were having a heatwave in the MidWest, though, so I was breathing in their coal plant emissions all day so the people there could refrigerate themselves.
My eyes are overly sensitive to this kind of pollution and they fouled up a set of $30 contact lenses when the smog rolled in. Who do I sue to recover those damages? I'd likely be laughed out of court if I tried.
Because if the US did it, then everyone else would too. And they make gathering fuel for a bomb really easy, in several different ways.
Designs like the IFR contain that capability to a single location, which is much easier to audit/monitor. Besides, our dedication to fossil fuel is not keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of Pakistan, North Korea, or Iran.
I would never argue that it's risk-free, but compared with petro-states, AGW, and world poverty it's a much better deal. Unless we address the root-causes of those 'whackos' who want to kill us, then nutter nations using nuclear weapons is just a matter of 'when' not 'if'. Getting the US out of the middle east because we have enough oil to fly airplanes and make plastics here is going to greatly increase our safety far more than worrying about if we can't fortify energy facilities against materials-raids.
Non-proliferation policies may actually have had the opposite effect.
But you still have the problem of what to do with the spent fuel. Looking at the so-called test facilities for long term storage, there is a very large energy cost as the result of finding geologically safe places and digging and maintaining the storage facilities.
There are two important characteristics to spent fuel - first is the quantity, second is the longevity (how long it takes before the natural decay of the waste returns it to the level of the ore from which it was mined).
The old designs for reactors burn about 1% of the fuel. They leave behind 'waste' that's very radioactive for about 300,000 years. It would be the height of hubris to imagine our society could last that long.
The new reactors (like IFR) burn about 99% of the fuel. So, right there you have massively reduced the scope of the problem. Secondly, the waste they leave behind has a life of about 300 years. Even if our society doesn't last that long, we know how to build and mark facilities that can last that long to protect our posterity.
So, then the remaining question is, "what do we do with the old waste, from the old reactors?" Do we try to bury it for 300,000 years? It's my contention that so-called 'geologic storage' is a pipe-dream and morally irresponsible. So, we have to reduce its level of radioactivity, to be decent human beings during our stewardship of the planet.
So, how would we do that? The answer is to use it as feedstock into a modern nuclear reactor, like the IFR. If we do that, we wind up with the 300-year waste and enough power for most of the world's needs through the rest of this century.
The choice was made when the light-water reactors were brough online in the 1950's. They decided to leave clean-up to future generations. That's us. Assuming we accept our responsibility, why not derive some benefit from it as well?
you heard me correctly: the government protects your rights and corporations trample them.
Hearing, but disagreeing:
First, corporations are appendages of government. Think about it - they don't exist without the force of government to create and back them. So you arguments against corporations are arguments against government protection of corporate actors, who could not get away with their actions but for corporate protection.
Second, a corporation never put anybody in a rape cage for ingesting the wrong type of plant. Perhaps more importantly, they never locked up a hundred thousand American citizens in concentration camps for having the wrong type of genetic heritage.
It takes a violence-based government to really trample rights.
When the hackers approached the DECT people they were basically welcomed and both, DECT group and hackers, worked together on fixing the protocol, spec and especially implementations.
This is great - is there a DECT2 now? My current phones are 900MHz spread-spectrum, but they don't seem to be widely available any longer.
Ironically the DECT industry group and the GSM association is made of largely of the same companies...
So perhaps the first hackers' group had a superior approach? I don't recally ever reading about it - perhaps that was part of the success?
This takes away any sort of "green" cred the vehicle had.
The thing costs $41,000 which is an average family's yearly earnings in the US.
It takes a tremendous amount of energy to make $41,000 if you're not the Fed, whether that money is genearated directly by the buyer or through his contractors/suppliers/employees.
For this money you could buy and gas three families with new Honda Fits to replace their old vehicles.
Economics is hard - harder still when there's a political agenda behind perceived brand values, and triply so when the government owns the brand.
The California teacher salaries are too high because the cost of living in California is too high because their regulatory scheme is too big. If they want to tax their people to pay for it, fine, people can vote with their feet. But an Montana teacher is going to have a lower base salary.
But, Californians want to have a situation where they can crank up their government, make their cost of living high, but not raise taxes, and expect people in the rest of the country to pay for their teachers' salaries. That's at least taxation without representation.
There are much harder jobs than being a teacher that pay less money. It's not a cakewalk, for sure (my wife is a teacher), but it's not working in a coal mine either.
The most interesting bit of that to me is that this ended up on the front page of Slashdot before Boing Boing heard about it. That's not exactly cricket.
Well, Corey is on vacation and unavailable. Perhaps the Slashdot poster jumped the gun.
I suspect Lessig wanted the video of the debate available for all to see for free, and Williams wouldn't participate unless each viewer had to pay 3 cents to see it.
Slashdot Mirror
Single-window mode hasn't been released yet, but it's coming. This will make it usable for folks who aren't using fvwm with focus-follows-cursor.
Would anyone convert existing perl 5 scripts to perl 6? Would anyone write new scripts in perl 6 as opposed to Python or Ruby or Perl 5? Really, would anyone except the most diehard Perl addicts even notice or care about Perl 6?
Yeah, I can't wait. I like programming in perl and ruby but not python. It doesn't mesh with me. But perl5's object system is a pain in the ass. perl6 takes what I love about java and ruby and expresses it like perl. :my hero:
perl is fast as hell and light on memory. Python tends to eat memory an ruby tends to be slow.
But most important to me is the perl community. Not just the perlmonks nerds, the guys who do release planning, application design, Q/A, test metrics, run CPAN, module maintainers. They do lots of things right.
Ruby is nearly there with GEM's, but darned if getting Rails working isn't an exacting science of matching old GEM versions. Security patch in the latest one? TFB.
Python has some great libraries and frameworks, but CPAN is much more comprehensive.
Which leads to the best part of perl6 - its parrot vm. The perl6 VM has implementations for python and ruby. I'm sure they're not complete or fully optimized yet, but the potential exists. Ruby stuff can run fast, python stuff can run light. And most importantly, we can all share a library - write the module in your language of choice and everybody who's using a parrot language can use it.
perl6 is still the future of high-level open source languages. Whether you like perl or not you should like perl6 because it's what open source is all about.
Nepomuk can be disabled easily
I haven't really figure out what it's good for. When I log in it balloons me with a message that Nepomuk couldn't find redland and that my data isn't available. To fix this, a mailing list post said that I'd need some kind of soprano tool but that doesn't really work most of the time. I still have no idea really what these are, I'd just like a dot-release upgrade to succeed. I hack on stuff, but I don't want to hack on everything.
I hope KDE4 gains resiliency after it's feature complete. I still think they're doing more right than GNOME, though, and their architecture looks great on paper.
I recall reading a blog post from one of the KDE architects a year or so ago bemoaning the situation that on linux/xorg KDE nearly always winds up with an non-ideal/inefficient render path. Do you happen to know if that's improved? I think xorg improvements were needed to make it great.
Totally agree, we are altruistic creatures, but our current societal models are based on Original Sin Theory. That's a vestige that needs shaking free, and again I rely optimistically on science to defeat The Church.
, but they are never absolute. Even the right to life: in certain cases, nearly all societies agree that that right needs to be removed. For murder, for instance, or in the case of war.
I think this can be approached from a better perspective - taking life is always wrong, especially by a State (which does not grant, and so cannot take away life). But in the case of murder, for instance, I think it would be OK for society to remove its protection from people who have been proven to be murders - they no longer deserve that protection. At that point, the dead little girl's father will restore the balance. Even though he'll be doing wrong, society does not need to weigh his wrong as heavily as the murderer's.
It's not an ideal proposal, but one I think would be better than what we have now, supposedly do deal with this problem.
I'm all for defensive use of force. I think generally a well-educated society that can keep from over-concentrating power will have no need for offensive use of force.
2. bp or balckwater will create legislation suitable to their agenda and trampling on individual's rights
Right, so how do we solve the problem - Get rid of BP and Blackwater? That seems to be essentially impossible. Get rid of the current government? It's been done before.
Even if you got rid of BP and Blackwater, given our current government, other corporations would just take their place. I submit, and I think our only point of disagreement, that the conditions that allow them to exist as they do now have to change or nothing will be any different, and that those are government-granted conditions.
But natural rights are simply human ideas...you need to fight for them, not appeal to a belief in some sky daddy or philosophical rationalization. You need to convince those other people, who do not think you should have certain rights, that it is in their best interest for everyone to have those rights.
I agree. I've got a small stack of books on the subject (game theory, social science, distributed decision making, etc.) but the science is new and/or just emerging. I've been encouraging some of my friends in neuroscience to work on this.
I'm making the leap of faith that science is the best tool to conquer this, but it's had a good track record over the past few centuries, so I think it's a worthwhile presumption.
#1: yes, it would be lovely if corporations were merely appendages of the government. unfortunately the truth is that our government is somewhat of an appendage of corporations
I'm not sure the semantics matter, but you've got a causality problem there. Corporations don't exist without government. It's all the government, and you won't get any arguments from me about regulatory capture or oligarchy, but let's remember from whence the use of violence arises.
#2: corporations would trample on your rights with blackwater style private military forces
Why would only corporations have these?
and private prison systems
really? Why would people accept these?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_National_Detective_Agency
Interesting link - I read about the Homestead Strike and the Anti-Pinkerton Act. What are the Pinkertons accused of doing? The worst I see is the government hiring strike breakers to benefit corporations. Again, the government was causing the problem.
if you fear police or military abuse by your government: if those who wish to weaken our government get their way, you haven't seen anything yet.
Really? So if our government were weakened to the 1840's level we'd be much worse off in terms of military and police abuse? They were breaking down doors of people engaged in 'victimless crimes' to fund their cronies and black ops programs when the government was dramatically weaker?
not fanciful conjecture, its historical fact from when corporations were able to run roughshod over american lives, the gilded age
The gilded age was created when the government stopped limiting corporate charters "for limited times, and for the public good". Really, State governments used to revoke corporate charters all the time, when corporations misbehaved. John D. Rockefeller saw to it by bribing Congress around 1870 that this was stopped, and in Santa Clara, just couple decades later, they gave them human rights.
Don't you think we'd be better off if BP and Blackwater had their corporate charters revoked?
"You control the rewards of your work because everyone agrees that they would like to control the rewards of theirs."
I love your ideal, but the problem is "because everybody agrees" is an argument that's subject to change and has proven unworkable for minorities. Certainly not everybody agrees about anything, so as soon as you diverge from that you have a majority-rule situation.
Sometimes majorities like to agree on how minorities ought to serve them. I wish it weren't so.
why should we bother going down and turning off the tap?
The cost of turning off the tap is essentially non-zero, so it's a bad analogy.
Try: "We have a wet basement, it gets a bit of water in it whenever it rains. We could remove the porch and deck, trench around the house, apply damp-proofing, french drains to air, and backfill with nice material, or we could put the few things we have in the basement up on concrete blocks."
The first option becomes much more attractive when you add, "and we can make our neighbors pay for the job".
Generation of electrity from fossil fuels is currently at the point where they get away with dumping some of the toxic products created as a side effect of their process directly to the air without paying for it. Like my example above, their process is profitable because they don't have to pay for dumping toxic substances into the environment.
We have a fairly weak set of property rights in our current governments and too much public property. With strong property rights, somebody would own a river that's being dumped into and sue the polluter for damages. Last month here in the northeast, we had terrible smog conditions (especially over the White Mountains, where hardly anybody lives). They were having a heatwave in the MidWest, though, so I was breathing in their coal plant emissions all day so the people there could refrigerate themselves.
My eyes are overly sensitive to this kind of pollution and they fouled up a set of $30 contact lenses when the smog rolled in. Who do I sue to recover those damages? I'd likely be laughed out of court if I tried.
Because if the US did it, then everyone else would too. And they make gathering fuel for a bomb really easy, in several different ways.
Designs like the IFR contain that capability to a single location, which is much easier to audit/monitor. Besides, our dedication to fossil fuel is not keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of Pakistan, North Korea, or Iran.
I would never argue that it's risk-free, but compared with petro-states, AGW, and world poverty it's a much better deal. Unless we address the root-causes of those 'whackos' who want to kill us, then nutter nations using nuclear weapons is just a matter of 'when' not 'if'. Getting the US out of the middle east because we have enough oil to fly airplanes and make plastics here is going to greatly increase our safety far more than worrying about if we can't fortify energy facilities against materials-raids.
Non-proliferation policies may actually have had the opposite effect.
Why do people insist on using 1950s reactors as the basis of safety/cost measurements?
So that they can confirm their biases?
But you still have the problem of what to do with the spent fuel. Looking at the so-called test facilities for long term storage, there is a very large energy cost as the result of finding geologically safe places and digging and maintaining the storage facilities.
There are two important characteristics to spent fuel - first is the quantity, second is the longevity (how long it takes before the natural decay of the waste returns it to the level of the ore from which it was mined).
The old designs for reactors burn about 1% of the fuel. They leave behind 'waste' that's very radioactive for about 300,000 years. It would be the height of hubris to imagine our society could last that long.
The new reactors (like IFR) burn about 99% of the fuel. So, right there you have massively reduced the scope of the problem. Secondly, the waste they leave behind has a life of about 300 years. Even if our society doesn't last that long, we know how to build and mark facilities that can last that long to protect our posterity.
So, then the remaining question is, "what do we do with the old waste, from the old reactors?" Do we try to bury it for 300,000 years? It's my contention that so-called 'geologic storage' is a pipe-dream and morally irresponsible. So, we have to reduce its level of radioactivity, to be decent human beings during our stewardship of the planet.
So, how would we do that? The answer is to use it as feedstock into a modern nuclear reactor, like the IFR. If we do that, we wind up with the 300-year waste and enough power for most of the world's needs through the rest of this century.
The choice was made when the light-water reactors were brough online in the 1950's. They decided to leave clean-up to future generations. That's us. Assuming we accept our responsibility, why not derive some benefit from it as well?
Hello? P3P where are you?
six feet under
you heard me correctly: the government protects your rights and corporations trample them.
Hearing, but disagreeing:
First, corporations are appendages of government. Think about it - they don't exist without the force of government to create and back them. So you arguments against corporations are arguments against government protection of corporate actors, who could not get away with their actions but for corporate protection.
Second, a corporation never put anybody in a rape cage for ingesting the wrong type of plant. Perhaps more importantly, they never locked up a hundred thousand American citizens in concentration camps for having the wrong type of genetic heritage.
It takes a violence-based government to really trample rights.
When the hackers approached the DECT people they were basically welcomed and both, DECT group and hackers, worked together on fixing the protocol, spec and especially implementations.
This is great - is there a DECT2 now? My current phones are 900MHz spread-spectrum, but they don't seem to be widely available any longer.
Ironically the DECT industry group and the GSM association is made of largely of the same companies...
So perhaps the first hackers' group had a superior approach? I don't recally ever reading about it - perhaps that was part of the success?
And yet most people are more concerned about the law then about the technical side of it all.
This is surprising? A kernel panic doesn't get you sent to a rape cage.
This takes away any sort of "green" cred the vehicle had.
The thing costs $41,000 which is an average family's yearly earnings in the US.
It takes a tremendous amount of energy to make $41,000 if you're not the Fed, whether that money is genearated directly by the buyer or through his contractors/suppliers/employees.
For this money you could buy and gas three families with new Honda Fits to replace their old vehicles.
Economics is hard - harder still when there's a political agenda behind perceived brand values, and triply so when the government owns the brand.
Come to think of it, that's what Fox News would be doing if management had more intellectual integrity.
You haven't heard the term 'infobabe' or noticed that all but one of the Fox News anchorettes is a pretty bleach-blonde?
Actually, one of them is pretty smart, she can hold her own in a policy debate.
"Well, at least this President isn't having people tortured."
You think the CIA isn't doing that in black camps across Eurasia? Was there an executive order to that effect?
To top it off, Obama has ordered the execution of Americans overseas suspected of participating in terrorism, without even a trial.
You're right in my book, but entirely missing the point of USA socialism.
The California teacher salaries are too high because the cost of living in California is too high because their regulatory scheme is too big. If they want to tax their people to pay for it, fine, people can vote with their feet. But an Montana teacher is going to have a lower base salary.
But, Californians want to have a situation where they can crank up their government, make their cost of living high, but not raise taxes, and expect people in the rest of the country to pay for their teachers' salaries. That's at least taxation without representation.
There are much harder jobs than being a teacher that pay less money. It's not a cakewalk, for sure (my wife is a teacher), but it's not working in a coal mine either.
The most interesting bit of that to me is that this ended up on the front page of Slashdot before Boing Boing heard about it. That's not exactly cricket.
Well, Corey is on vacation and unavailable. Perhaps the Slashdot poster jumped the gun.
I suspect Lessig wanted the video of the debate available for all to see for free, and Williams wouldn't participate unless each viewer had to pay 3 cents to see it.