Erlang and haskel have not caught on precisely because they are not suited well for the kind of programs people generally write or use.
This is circular reasoning at its finest. The main reason the program that people write and use aren't written in a style to which a language such as Haskel or Erlang are suited is that the people who programed them wrote them in a style more suited to the languages in which they were written.
There's nothing about the tasks themselves that make them unsuited for massively parallel solutions; the actual dependency and sequences in the problems (as opposed to in the programs that are currently used to solve them) are few and far between.
For a few examples:
Anything dealing with screen displays or graphics generally has massive opportunities for parallel execution
Searching and sorting are suitable to parallel solution (this is the secret to Google's success, for example)
Many scoring / filtering applications (such as spam filters) could benefit from at least a hundred cores if written properly
Servers and middle tier software that handle asynchronous requests
Databases (being mostly a combination of the preceding three cases)
Spread sheets
...and so on and so forth
It may be easier to turn the question around: what exactly are the "kinds of programs that people generally write and use" that couldn't benefit from massively parallel solutions because the problems are full of "dependencies and sequences"?
Making a program parallel will always be too hard for most programmers.
Nonsense. The problem isn't with the programmers, it's with the languages. Writing object oriented code in Fortran is too difficuiltr for most programmers, but that doesn't mean that the programmers aren't up to the task, but that the language they are using isn't well suited to the job.
Learn a little erlang, or Haskel to see how easy writing massively parallel programs can be.
p.--MarkusQ
The problem with your example is that this is going to end up being a Youngstown Steel problem. The President will claim that the state secret privilege is a power granted to him by Article II of the Constitution, and thus Congress can't limit that power--just as Congress can't interfere with his power as Commander in Chief (itself a hotly debated point).
The difference being that his/her role as Commander in Chief is actually in the constitution. But where in section two do you see anything at all that sounds like it gives the President the ability to declare State Secrets? And you can't even say it's an implicit part of the Presidential responsibility to defend us, since his actual Article II responsibility is to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States" (not the people, not our stuff, and not our secrets).
As for Congress's ability to limit Presidential power, note that the President "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed" (such Laws being enacted by Congress) but nowhere is Congress required to "assure that the President's Ass is Covered when he gets Caught doing Something He Shouldn't Have" (which is what the State Secrets doctrine boils down to).
Note also that Youngstown Steel was only a "problem" for fans of broad Presidential power. For those inclined to a more conservative reading of the constitution (e.g. for people not interested in establishing an American elected Monarchy) it isn't really a problem to have the SCOTUS slap down overly aggressive executives.
The problem with the position of president is that he is both EMPLOYEE (supposedly of the people) *AND* THE BOSS (of the country) at the same time. So when he says he's working on a super secret project that he cant tell anyone about then everyone has to sigh, twiddle their thumbs and hope he don't run the country into the ground then try to reverse the damage when he gets the hell out of office.
Not quite. He's "the Executive," which makes him a rather important boss (roughly equivalent to a CEO), but not "THE BOSS" in the sense of being beyond question. Just as a real CEO still has to answer to HR, Legal, Finance, the board of directors, etc. the President of the US is still answerable to Congress and the Courts. Or at least is supposed to be.
We have a system of "checks and balances" wher no one is "THE BOSS" in the sense of being unaccountable. The doctrine of "State Secrets" flies in the face of that, and is just as silly as if we gave Congress the right to pass "Symon Says" laws or let the Courts operate like Bush's "Military Tribunals."
I wouldn't mind seeing the whole concept of "state secret" repudiated. It really has no place in a free society.
If we really have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people what gives some part of that government the right to keep secrets from every other part, including the parts that are supposed to be watching over them and keeping them in check? The very notion should set warning bells off from here to next Tuesday.
Think about it? In what other context would that sort of inversion of ultimate authority be considered even remotely reasonable? If you told your boss that you were working on a project that was so secret you couldn't tell them about it, or any of your co-workers, including accounting, HR, the legal department, and it involved you needing to have building security look the other way while you took things in and out of the building...how long do you think you'd be employed?
It also becomes a great issue to underfund so when a politician loses they can blame voting machines for it because no one wants to admit they lost a popularity contest.
You've got it backwards. No one really cares what the loser says.
The point is, the winner won't have any incentive to fix the system that got them elected. Maybe it was an honest win, maybe it was rigged without their knowledge, or maybe they know damn well that they were elected because the machines are manipulable; in every case there's no incentive to try to fix the system and in some cases there is a strong disincentive to even admitting there might be a problem.
One can be an open-source advocate without being an open-source fundamentalist.
How true, how true. I couldn't agree more. Open source is like so many things (human rights and the lead free nonsense come to mind) where some people go overboard and just take it way too far. I mean, sure, having your kid chew on a hunk of lead isn't going to be good for them. For one thing, it's not very nutritions. But some people take this way too far, and say that something that is 98% corn syrup with only a trace of lead is just as bad.
Humbug.
I think it is perfectly possible to be an open source advocate without getting all fundamentalist about it, just like you can support human rights but not get too worked up about the occasional state sponsored rape, torture, genocide, or whatever. The important thing is that you advocate the right side on the broader issue, not that you pay any attention to any specific exceptions.
And besides, what's the big deal about open source anyway? Big deal.. It's not like it was free software, or anything.
And just how much power did Clinton lose when we all found out he was spewing on the interns?
Yes. We get to hear about fornication...maybe even get to watch a mock impeachment. But what was going on that they didn't want us to hear about? Maybe the illegal invasion of Kosovo?
I'm not sure what your point is. While Clinton was on questionable legal grounds to bomb Kosovo (we didn't really invade, though we came close) he was on a lot stronger footing than Bush's invasion of Iraq. I will agree that in both cases the media gave insufficient attention to the legality of the attacks. But I'm otherwise at a loss for how or why you are comparing the two, when one lasted about seventy five days with few net causalities and at minimal expense and the other is likely to go longer than seventy five months, with considerable casualties and at enormous expense.
What point are you trying to make? You aren't trying to make a case that Clinton benefited from the Lewinsky scandal, are you?
It's a small irony that only John McCain has actually said that he would not issue "signing statements" and that he would not allow for torture to take place in his administration.
That's the big advantage of knowingly lying; you can say anything you feel like.
Campaigned against lobbyists while taking there money and advocating their causes (same link, and many others).
...and so on.
In short, his promises are worth nothing. He will break them without blinking an eye when he decides it's in his best interests to do so. If you can find anyone that seriously believes John McCain would honor a campaign promise no matter what happens tell them their shoe's untied and grab their wallet.
If a popular president has an extramarital affair, the press shows no fear and shouts it from the rooftops night and day.
But if the least popular president on record (backed by his administration) maintains that he has the inherent authority to kidnap US citizens at will and make them watch while his goons crush their children's testicles, the "free press" covers his butt so well that if you blink you'll miss the story.
I think you're trying to attribute to politics something that has a rather simple alternative explanation. In the eyes of the public (and therefore the press):
Salacious scandal >>> any other type of scandal
Ok, let's pick a salacious scandal then. Surely you remember these stories:
The White House is still refusing to let anyone see their visitor logs, even though previous presidents considered them open public records.
So where's the media circus? Why haven't we heard about this to the blue dress and blood on the glove level that other similar stories get? Why do they just report it tiny bits and pieces and then let each one fade quietly into the night?
If that's true, wouldn't be a great idea just to collect all the fallen leaves and put them underground?... The fact that driving around picking up leaves and sticking them in the ground releases carbon into the atmosphere should be countered by the fact that it's not being released from the leaves.
Yes, although that's an awful lot of leaves to collect. Problem is, what do you use to collect them with? And haul them? And bury them? Unless the machines you use run on magic, you're going to pump out a lot of CO2 doing it. And you'll have to bury them pretty deep to keep them from decaying and outgassing the CO2. The calculations I've seen look like it wouldn't work.
Some of the alternatives I've heard:
Make some GMO that produces an indigestible cellulose analogue.
Fertilize the mid ocean to create continent sized algae blooms. When the plants die they'll sink to the bottom, taking the carbon with them.
Get some little beasty to do the sequestering for you. I've yet to see an explanation of how this would work that doesn't involve a lot of hand waving.
Every autumn here in Victoria (state in south eastern Australia) the Department of Sustainability and the Environment, who are responsible for fires on Crown land, perform "backburning" or "controlled burns". Basically the idea is that the Australian bush will burn--our trees are full of oil precisely to make sure they burn every few years--so the DSE chooses when and how much it'll happen, and makes sure there's people around to put them out if they go places they're not meant to. Of course, the process is hugely controversial---they release a shitload of smoke and practically every year one fires get out of control and spread like, ahem, wildfire. This process is not new; it was performed just the same by the Aborigines before white people came, except with less technology.
Ah yes, the Austrailian bush fires. I remember them well. Quite impressive, especially if you're a dumb tourist out hiking in the middle of nowhere when you first encounter one. Fortunately, they aren't all as scary hot and fast moving as they are in the dreams you'll have in the following months. And I got some great vacation pictures out of it. So it's all good.
The problem is that Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, let him get away with this. Congress holds the purse strings, and if they wanted to force his hand they need do nothing more than say "Either you stop this now, or tomorrow you're going to have a $1.95 left to fight your war with."
Agreed, they are cutting him as much unjustified slack as the press is, and are arguably even more responsible for the state we're in.
Sometimes, when I've got my paranoid cranked up past 7 or so, I wonder if the conjunction of the above mentioned claims of power to torture anyone they want combined with the proven ability to eavesdrop on anyone they want without a warrant (a power which we now know they've used on reporters and politicians) work to reduce the collective spine of those that should be standing up and saying "Hey, wait just a cotten picking minute!"
Perhaps it isn't dereliction of duty so much as rational fear of a powerful and amoral opponent.
It also doesn't address the ongoing problem of releasing CO2 into the atmosphere at a rate that can't be reabsorbed naturally (so the concentration of CO2 keeps increasing without limit).
Plants are quite capable of sucking up CO2 much faster than we are releasing it (that's why the global CO2 levels drop when it's springtime in the Northern hemisphere, where most of the plants are; Google for the Hawaii CO2 graph and note the annual sawtooth). The problem is that even though the plants are better at sucking up CO2 than we are at spitting it out, the various bugs and beasties that live off plant matter are even better at pumping it right back out again. In the fall and winter, they put it all right back into the air again.
If we could stop leaves from rotting and grass from being eaten and so forth for just a few years, we'd have the problem solved. But no one knows how to do that without causing some even bigger problem.
News media are very careful to keep onside with the Whitehouse, Pentagon etc.
I used to think that was the case. But watching over the last twenty years or so I've come to realize that it isn't quite that simple.
For example, during the Monica Lewinsky hoopla, it seemed you couldn't look at a newspaper or turn on a TV without hearing more than you wanted to know about the story. They certainly weren't trying to stay on Clinton's good side, even though he was very popular at the time.
Fast forward a decade, and if you keep your eyes peeled you can catch stories like this:
The Bush administration claims the authority to brand anyone (even US citizens) an "enemy combatant" based only on their say-so, with no recourse and no appeal.
The Bush administration claims the ability to "render" these "enemy combatants", taking them to undisclosed secret prisons without trial or any public record of what happened to them.
If a popular president has an extramarital affair, the press shows no fear and shouts it from the rooftops night and day.
But if the least popular president on record (backed by his administration) maintains that he has the inherent authority to kidnap US citizens at will and make them watch while his goons crush their children's testicles, the "free press" covers his butt so well that if you blink you'll miss the story.
Also, I think that most of those space industry/near sci-fi books (even though I love them, esp. islands in the sky) REALLY underestimate the engineering needed to mine, process and fashion materials into products and overestimate the usefulness of raw materials. In other words, a hunk of iron is probably less useful than a hydraulic pump or a chip for a transceiver.
I think you're missing the point.
True, for some things it would be ridiculous to try to make them in space--take music, for an extreme example. The cost of setting up a decent music industry in space would vastly exceed the cost of transmitting a bunch of MP3s to them.
But this is just one end of a long continuum. At the other end, consider light. It would be just as moronic to ship all of your illumination up from Earth when you are surrounded by free sunlight.
In between we find all sorts of things from hard drives (easier to ship up) to bulk matter for radiation shielding (for any project > 10*ISS or so, easier to get up there). By the time you start talking about things on the scale of space based solar power to meet the world's energy needs, a lot more things make sense to harvest up there rather than sending them up. Glass, aluminum, and oxygen are much easier to get from the moon than from the earth after economies of scale start to kick in.
that isn't to say it can't be done, but it is akin to asking a Columbus to build a mechanical clock at sea using only the materials found around him. What might be an acceptable task in Spain becomes monstrously difficult in the Atlantic.
A better analogy would be expecting Columbus to take all his air and drinking water with him rather than just breathing normally and catching / storing rain water.
It wasn't unreasonable to look at that possibility, but it has been shown not to be the cause many times."
[Citation Needed]
No...seriously. Cite it, and make sure it's publicly available without me paying a few grand for a subscription to a medical journal that sponsors ghost-writing and studies done without publishing the raw (blinded) data from clinical trials.
Google for
autism and vaccines large scale studies for all the information you might want. Face it, from a scientific perspective this issue is dead. You might as well argue that evolution is just a theory or global warming is an artifact of the sun getting brighter.
There is no reason to suspect that vaccines cause autism. To put this in perspective, the case for the claim that eating solid foods causes autism is susceptible children (which I just made up) is actually stronger than the case for the vaccine-autism link. Likewise the plastic toy link and the living indoors link.
I read one of Marilyn Vos Savant's books, and in it she listed 9 as a prime...
Where? Googling for this claim, I only came up with people asserting that she had made the blunder without saying where and other people responding to ask them where (book, page number, and context) she'd claimed 9 was prime. But the question never gets answered.
The only exception to this pattern I found was your post which had the claim but was missing the requisite challenge. Thus my post and query.
Then I noticed that you can't produce an executable file, although it's compiled: it has to run within its environment application. Big no-no.
There's a reason for that. Erlang is designed for writing robust meshes of tightly interacting processes, and supports things such as on-the-fly code upgrades (0 down time!). That doesn't mesh well with the idea of producing an "executable" file. But, when you come to think about it, what does these days? C might be your best answer, but even there you're more likely to end up with a slew of files that need to be installed for any but the most trivial applications.
Then it's excruciatingly slow.
I have that problem for the first day or so any time I switch paradigms. Functional programing is different in a lot of subtle ways, and things that would have been the obvious best way to approach a problem in Ruby (to choose another language I like a lot) simply aren't a good idea in erlang. And visa versa. Using runtime reflection to modify classes on the fly can do amazing things in Ruby, but it's a borderline nonsensical trick to try in erlang. Conversely, launching a bazillion threads diving down tail-recursive rabbit holes would quickly bring Ruby to it's knees, and often works great in erlang.
Then it has virtually no useful libraries.
It has more than you might realize in part because they tend to be called "applications" instead of libraries (probably as a consequence of the "everything is a service" philosophy). You don't think so much in terms of calling a library as requesting a service which is provided by an application.
In other words I couldn't figure out what to do with it
So here's an interesting idea to try, in case you're interested in giving it another shot: how about a highly parallel spam filter? Something that runs on a mail server, vets messages as they come it, and has the following properties:
Messages that take a long time to scan don't hold up messages that arrive later but can be decided quickly.
All the test suites proceed in parallel, and as soon as a determination can be made one way or another (spam/ham) the unfinished tests are abandoned.
New tests / test suites can be added without taking the scanner down for even a fraction of a second, and existing tests can be updated or removed the same way.
Try it in erlang, and then try it in java or something, and I think you'll start to see the value of languages like erlang.
Too bad "Think of a number, any number" isn't a question, otherwise this solution would've been fairly elegant.
It depends on how you define "question"; on rather narrow syntactic grounds (it doesn't end with a question mark) it isn't, but it sure fits the semantic definition of a question (a grammatical utterance calling for a response providing a specific piece of information) it certainly is.
Note that not all semantic questions end with a question mark and not everything that ends in a question mark fits the semantic definition of a question. For example, "What's you name?" and "Please state you name." are very close semantically (and both are questions) while "What did I do to deserve this?" is not generally intended as a semantic question, but rather as another way of saying "Oh, whoa is me."
The ultimate question is "Think of a number, any number" to which the correct answer is "42".
Which immediately suggests such as penultimate questions: "Why is that the ultimate question?" "Why does it have a correct answer?" and "Why is 42 the correct answer?"
Which D.A. explained quite succinctly by saying "The road to wisdom is infinitely long. It doesn't matter which end you start at."
--MarkusQ
Trying to claim that ndiswrapper somehow itself is GPL'd even though it then loads modules that aren't is stupid and pointless.
There may be a valid argument for saying that ndiswrapper can't be GPL'd, but this isn't it. In what context would this sort of reasoning be considered sound?
Trying to claim that a cows somehow itself is a mammal even though it then eats things that aren't is stupid and pointless.
Trying to claim that 5 somehow itself is an integer even though it then can be multiplied by fractions that aren't is stupid and pointless.
Trying to claim that Apache somehow itself is open source even though it then serves content files that aren't is stupid and pointless.
...and so on. The claim may be valid but this argument certainly can't be used to establish it.
Did someone here actually use callcc for something "real" in production code that could not be done someway else or was best implemented with callcc?
I don't have the code for either handy, but I've used it to implement an asynchronous discrete event simulations environment (loosely based on DEMOS) and a stateful-backtracking set up for intertwining syntax and semantics in a natural language system.
In the first case, a multi-threaded version has proved easier to maintain, and in the second case Moore's law caught up with me and it's now reasonable to just compute everything and not worry about the backtracking at all.
How many documented civilian deaths since 2003 is Pakistan responsible for
Try 3 million in 1971,...
Last time I checked, 1971 camr before 2003. So data from 1971 can't be used to answer a "since 2003" question.
...and 500-3000 women a year, and numerous religious minorities. There is a difference between people killed in the exigencies of war (as in US involvement in Iraq), a transient phenomenon, and the pervasive intolerance and violence all across Pakistan, which lasts for decades.
That might look like a snappy rebuttal if you squint at it just right, but add in a few more facts and it doesn't look so pat. Consider:
3000 people a year may sound like a lot, until you compare it to the various estimates of civilian casualties inflicted by the US invasion of Iraq:
15000/year (Bush)
60000/year (US Military)
120000/year (Lancet study)
Also consider that, during this time Pakistan has been a US ally--we didn't invade them even though similar claims were floated as a justification of our invasion of Iraq
Saying that the US occupation of Iraq is a "transient phenomenon" in contrast to things that "last for decades" is kind of silly when you consider that the US officials in charge of the occupation are pretty much unanimous in expecting it to last decades.
Slashdot Mirror
This is circular reasoning at its finest. The main reason the program that people write and use aren't written in a style to which a language such as Haskel or Erlang are suited is that the people who programed them wrote them in a style more suited to the languages in which they were written.
There's nothing about the tasks themselves that make them unsuited for massively parallel solutions; the actual dependency and sequences in the problems (as opposed to in the programs that are currently used to solve them) are few and far between.
For a few examples:
It may be easier to turn the question around: what exactly are the "kinds of programs that people generally write and use" that couldn't benefit from massively parallel solutions because the problems are full of "dependencies and sequences"?
--MarkusQ
Nonsense. The problem isn't with the programmers, it's with the languages. Writing object oriented code in Fortran is too difficuiltr for most programmers, but that doesn't mean that the programmers aren't up to the task, but that the language they are using isn't well suited to the job.
Learn a little erlang, or Haskel to see how easy writing massively parallel programs can be. p.--MarkusQ
The difference being that his/her role as Commander in Chief is actually in the constitution. But where in section two do you see anything at all that sounds like it gives the President the ability to declare State Secrets? And you can't even say it's an implicit part of the Presidential responsibility to defend us, since his actual Article II responsibility is to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States" (not the people, not our stuff, and not our secrets).
As for Congress's ability to limit Presidential power, note that the President "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed" (such Laws being enacted by Congress) but nowhere is Congress required to "assure that the President's Ass is Covered when he gets Caught doing Something He Shouldn't Have" (which is what the State Secrets doctrine boils down to).
Note also that Youngstown Steel was only a "problem" for fans of broad Presidential power. For those inclined to a more conservative reading of the constitution (e.g. for people not interested in establishing an American elected Monarchy) it isn't really a problem to have the SCOTUS slap down overly aggressive executives.
-- MarkusQ
Not quite. He's "the Executive," which makes him a rather important boss (roughly equivalent to a CEO), but not "THE BOSS" in the sense of being beyond question. Just as a real CEO still has to answer to HR, Legal, Finance, the board of directors, etc. the President of the US is still answerable to Congress and the Courts. Or at least is supposed to be.
We have a system of "checks and balances" wher no one is "THE BOSS" in the sense of being unaccountable. The doctrine of "State Secrets" flies in the face of that, and is just as silly as if we gave Congress the right to pass "Symon Says" laws or let the Courts operate like Bush's "Military Tribunals."
--MarkusQ
It's about time.
I wouldn't mind seeing the whole concept of "state secret" repudiated. It really has no place in a free society.
If we really have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people what gives some part of that government the right to keep secrets from every other part, including the parts that are supposed to be watching over them and keeping them in check? The very notion should set warning bells off from here to next Tuesday.
Think about it? In what other context would that sort of inversion of ultimate authority be considered even remotely reasonable? If you told your boss that you were working on a project that was so secret you couldn't tell them about it, or any of your co-workers, including accounting, HR, the legal department, and it involved you needing to have building security look the other way while you took things in and out of the building...how long do you think you'd be employed?
-- MarkusQ
You've got it backwards. No one really cares what the loser says.
The point is, the winner won't have any incentive to fix the system that got them elected. Maybe it was an honest win, maybe it was rigged without their knowledge, or maybe they know damn well that they were elected because the machines are manipulable; in every case there's no incentive to try to fix the system and in some cases there is a strong disincentive to even admitting there might be a problem.
-- MarkusQ
How true, how true. I couldn't agree more. Open source is like so many things (human rights and the lead free nonsense come to mind) where some people go overboard and just take it way too far. I mean, sure, having your kid chew on a hunk of lead isn't going to be good for them. For one thing, it's not very nutritions. But some people take this way too far, and say that something that is 98% corn syrup with only a trace of lead is just as bad.
Humbug.
I think it is perfectly possible to be an open source advocate without getting all fundamentalist about it, just like you can support human rights but not get too worked up about the occasional state sponsored rape, torture, genocide, or whatever. The important thing is that you advocate the right side on the broader issue, not that you pay any attention to any specific exceptions.
And besides, what's the big deal about open source anyway? Big deal.. It's not like it was free software, or anything.
--MarkusQ
I'm not sure what your point is. While Clinton was on questionable legal grounds to bomb Kosovo (we didn't really invade, though we came close) he was on a lot stronger footing than Bush's invasion of Iraq. I will agree that in both cases the media gave insufficient attention to the legality of the attacks. But I'm otherwise at a loss for how or why you are comparing the two, when one lasted about seventy five days with few net causalities and at minimal expense and the other is likely to go longer than seventy five months, with considerable casualties and at enormous expense.
What point are you trying to make? You aren't trying to make a case that Clinton benefited from the Lewinsky scandal, are you?
--MarkusQ
That's the big advantage of knowingly lying; you can say anything you feel like.
To put these claims in context:
In short, his promises are worth nothing. He will break them without blinking an eye when he decides it's in his best interests to do so. If you can find anyone that seriously believes John McCain would honor a campaign promise no matter what happens tell them their shoe's untied and grab their wallet.
--MarkusQ
Ok, let's pick a salacious scandal then. Surely you remember these stories:
So where's the media circus? Why haven't we heard about this to the blue dress and blood on the glove level that other similar stories get? Why do they just report it tiny bits and pieces and then let each one fade quietly into the night?
--MarkusQ
Yes, although that's an awful lot of leaves to collect. Problem is, what do you use to collect them with? And haul them? And bury them? Unless the machines you use run on magic, you're going to pump out a lot of CO2 doing it. And you'll have to bury them pretty deep to keep them from decaying and outgassing the CO2. The calculations I've seen look like it wouldn't work.
Some of the alternatives I've heard:
Ah yes, the Austrailian bush fires. I remember them well. Quite impressive, especially if you're a dumb tourist out hiking in the middle of nowhere when you first encounter one. Fortunately, they aren't all as scary hot and fast moving as they are in the dreams you'll have in the following months. And I got some great vacation pictures out of it. So it's all good.
-- MarkusQ
Agreed, they are cutting him as much unjustified slack as the press is, and are arguably even more responsible for the state we're in.
Sometimes, when I've got my paranoid cranked up past 7 or so, I wonder if the conjunction of the above mentioned claims of power to torture anyone they want combined with the proven ability to eavesdrop on anyone they want without a warrant (a power which we now know they've used on reporters and politicians) work to reduce the collective spine of those that should be standing up and saying "Hey, wait just a cotten picking minute!"
Perhaps it isn't dereliction of duty so much as rational fear of a powerful and amoral opponent.
-- MarkusQ
Plants are quite capable of sucking up CO2 much faster than we are releasing it (that's why the global CO2 levels drop when it's springtime in the Northern hemisphere, where most of the plants are; Google for the Hawaii CO2 graph and note the annual sawtooth). The problem is that even though the plants are better at sucking up CO2 than we are at spitting it out, the various bugs and beasties that live off plant matter are even better at pumping it right back out again. In the fall and winter, they put it all right back into the air again.
If we could stop leaves from rotting and grass from being eaten and so forth for just a few years, we'd have the problem solved. But no one knows how to do that without causing some even bigger problem.
--MarkusQ
I used to think that was the case. But watching over the last twenty years or so I've come to realize that it isn't quite that simple.
For example, during the Monica Lewinsky hoopla, it seemed you couldn't look at a newspaper or turn on a TV without hearing more than you wanted to know about the story. They certainly weren't trying to stay on Clinton's good side, even though he was very popular at the time.
Fast forward a decade, and if you keep your eyes peeled you can catch stories like this:
So it's not quite as simple as you make it sound.
If a popular president has an extramarital affair, the press shows no fear and shouts it from the rooftops night and day.
But if the least popular president on record (backed by his administration) maintains that he has the inherent authority to kidnap US citizens at will and make them watch while his goons crush their children's testicles, the "free press" covers his butt so well that if you blink you'll miss the story.
--MarkusQ
I think you're missing the point.
True, for some things it would be ridiculous to try to make them in space--take music, for an extreme example. The cost of setting up a decent music industry in space would vastly exceed the cost of transmitting a bunch of MP3s to them.
But this is just one end of a long continuum. At the other end, consider light. It would be just as moronic to ship all of your illumination up from Earth when you are surrounded by free sunlight.
In between we find all sorts of things from hard drives (easier to ship up) to bulk matter for radiation shielding (for any project > 10*ISS or so, easier to get up there). By the time you start talking about things on the scale of space based solar power to meet the world's energy needs, a lot more things make sense to harvest up there rather than sending them up. Glass, aluminum, and oxygen are much easier to get from the moon than from the earth after economies of scale start to kick in.
A better analogy would be expecting Columbus to take all his air and drinking water with him rather than just breathing normally and catching / storing rain water.
--MarkusQ
Google for autism and vaccines large scale studies for all the information you might want. Face it, from a scientific perspective this issue is dead. You might as well argue that evolution is just a theory or global warming is an artifact of the sun getting brighter.
There is no reason to suspect that vaccines cause autism. To put this in perspective, the case for the claim that eating solid foods causes autism is susceptible children (which I just made up) is actually stronger than the case for the vaccine-autism link. Likewise the plastic toy link and the living indoors link.
--MarkusQ
Where? Googling for this claim, I only came up with people asserting that she had made the blunder without saying where and other people responding to ask them where (book, page number, and context) she'd claimed 9 was prime. But the question never gets answered.
The only exception to this pattern I found was your post which had the claim but was missing the requisite challenge. Thus my post and query.
--MarkusQ
Thank you!
I love it when someone comes up with a good solid answer to what I'd thought was a rhetorical question.
--MarkusQ
There's a reason for that. Erlang is designed for writing robust meshes of tightly interacting processes, and supports things such as on-the-fly code upgrades (0 down time!). That doesn't mesh well with the idea of producing an "executable" file. But, when you come to think about it, what does these days? C might be your best answer, but even there you're more likely to end up with a slew of files that need to be installed for any but the most trivial applications.
I have that problem for the first day or so any time I switch paradigms. Functional programing is different in a lot of subtle ways, and things that would have been the obvious best way to approach a problem in Ruby (to choose another language I like a lot) simply aren't a good idea in erlang. And visa versa. Using runtime reflection to modify classes on the fly can do amazing things in Ruby, but it's a borderline nonsensical trick to try in erlang. Conversely, launching a bazillion threads diving down tail-recursive rabbit holes would quickly bring Ruby to it's knees, and often works great in erlang.
It has more than you might realize in part because they tend to be called "applications" instead of libraries (probably as a consequence of the "everything is a service" philosophy). You don't think so much in terms of calling a library as requesting a service which is provided by an application.
So here's an interesting idea to try, in case you're interested in giving it another shot: how about a highly parallel spam filter? Something that runs on a mail server, vets messages as they come it, and has the following properties:
Try it in erlang, and then try it in java or something, and I think you'll start to see the value of languages like erlang.
--MarkusQ
It depends on how you define "question"; on rather narrow syntactic grounds (it doesn't end with a question mark) it isn't, but it sure fits the semantic definition of a question (a grammatical utterance calling for a response providing a specific piece of information) it certainly is.
Note that not all semantic questions end with a question mark and not everything that ends in a question mark fits the semantic definition of a question. For example, "What's you name?" and "Please state you name." are very close semantically (and both are questions) while "What did I do to deserve this?" is not generally intended as a semantic question, but rather as another way of saying "Oh, whoa is me."
--MarkusQ
Correct.
The ultimate question is "Think of a number, any number" to which the correct answer is "42".
Which immediately suggests such as penultimate questions: "Why is that the ultimate question?" "Why does it have a correct answer?" and "Why is 42 the correct answer?"
Which D.A. explained quite succinctly by saying "The road to wisdom is infinitely long. It doesn't matter which end you start at." --MarkusQ
There may be a valid argument for saying that ndiswrapper can't be GPL'd, but this isn't it. In what context would this sort of reasoning be considered sound?
...and so on. The claim may be valid but this argument certainly can't be used to establish it.
--MarkusQ
They're more alike than you might realize. They were both Goldwater supporters, and she was even president of the Young Republicans at her school.
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.
--MarkusQ
I don't have the code for either handy, but I've used it to implement an asynchronous discrete event simulations environment (loosely based on DEMOS) and a stateful-backtracking set up for intertwining syntax and semantics in a natural language system.
In the first case, a multi-threaded version has proved easier to maintain, and in the second case Moore's law caught up with me and it's now reasonable to just compute everything and not worry about the backtracking at all.
--MarkusQ
Last time I checked, 1971 camr before 2003. So data from 1971 can't be used to answer a "since 2003" question.
That might look like a snappy rebuttal if you squint at it just right, but add in a few more facts and it doesn't look so pat. Consider:
--MarkusQ