Everyone listen closely... DO NOT rent Logan's Run and Soylent Green because they are NOT what they were when you were 10.
I don't think a movie has to have predicted correctly to been a good movie. And anyway, the clash between the haves and the have-nots is just as important message of Soylent Green, even if it doesn't get the direct focus in the movie. And that problem is still with us in spades. The image of the "gated community" and what lies outside is still powerfully on-track. Likewise the issue of the cost of luxury, and how that cost is insurmountable to some and trivial to others. And it makes remarkable statements about the loss of beauty in the "modern" world, that people would die just to get to see good pics of the way the world used to look... Sure, the Soylent part is a little off track, but ignore that as you rewatch and watch all the other things that are not.
I'd make a similar note about how to watch Wargames. Even at the time it came out, people grumbled about the massive errors in technology. The confusion of a 'login name' and a 'password' is an example. And yes, there is a place where an unplugged modem still makes a connection. But the movie is a metaphor for something bigger and if you get caught up on the details, you sound like, well,... you sound like the Republicans saying that Kerry is wrong in thinking that war is bad just because they can prove Nixon didn't broadcast a speech on a day that Kerry thought he had. Sometimes if you focus too much on the little details, you miss the big picture. (Ok, ok, I'm drifting off topic. But maybe not as much as you think. Scifi is about the art of social critique, and in that way is very closely linked to politics. And in both venues, if you're too much of a nitpicker, you'll miss out. So there, there is a relation.)
The radio broadcast wasn't heard by that many people, as I recall it was up against a much more popular show. The publicity afterwards sure did a lot to enhance Orson Welles' career.
Whether heard by many or not, people killed themselves thinking the radio show was real, and prefering to die at their own hands than at the Martians', it was that vivid and believable. The movie had no such effect.
Yes, Gattaca was meant to be on my list, too, but I accidentally left it off. Good catch.
Though one thing I'll say about it was that I initially (and, in retrospect, foolishly) expected it to wake up the world to the dangers of medical information sharing in a world where insurance agencies and others can make such abusive use of info they get. But it did nothing on this level. Too artsy and not-to-the-point, I suppose, for the masses. I thought it made the point well, but I guess everyone is not me.
Enemy of the State turned out to be the movie that made the point about privacy better, not by being sci-fi, but by appealing directly to things people in this day and age can relate to: video games, credit cards, and so on.
I saw a lecture by Asimov once where he talked about how he got hauled in to some government place for writing about "atomic" things, and how they let him go on doing it so it wouldn't be suspicious that they'd made him stop all of a sudden. He said for a while, only scifi buffs understood how the world worked and were allowed to talk about it. I suppose we're a harmless niche. In the same sense, maybe only scifi buffs see other coming problems like privacy as addressed in Gattaca. The rest of the world waits for a 9/11-like experience to wake them up and say "it's here now, you have to care."
I don't know why it's marked "funny" that someone would suggest Wrath of Khan belongs here. I put it not only in my list of top 10 scifi pics, but in my list of top-ten best movies ever. It seems to me that it is the movie sequel that pioneered the idea of treating the time between movies as "part of the movie" instead of as "something to be ignored". So while James Bond grows older and we're supposed to ignore the fact, Star Trek did something boldly different: it allowed the characters to age with the actors, and allowed "grown up" thoughts about aging and death from people who used to be carefree young bucks and had off-screen learned what life was. Not to mention being a brilliant idea for a sequel and an outstanding plot.
Also, before The Matrix, I would always prefer to see The Thirteenth Floor, which it seems to me is the same sci-fi concept cast into a much more thoughtful rather than Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark format.
And while I think War of the Worlds was a pivotal book and radio production, I don't think the movie was an especially important work.
And though I thought Star Wars was a fun movie, I have emotional trouble listing it as a great work of scifi. It's pulp. And maybe that entitles it to a spot. There's been tons of pulp scifi (Flash Gordon, etc.) that isn't represented. But there are such amazingly thoughtful pieces that I just don't see giving up a slot to something like this.
Some other overlooked options for this list:
Slaughterhouse 5
The Andromeda Strain
Soylent Green
Planet of the Apes (the original only--don't even think of seeing the remake, or else be sure you stop watching about 10-15 mins before the end).
Silent Running
(Well, I was very moved by it because of the age I was at when it came out. It might not appeal in the same way to a modern audience on a small screen, but...)
Back to the Future and its sequels (not to mention the Deep Space 9 episode where they Back-to-the-Futured the Star Trek Classic "tribbles" episode).
The Abyss
(Also high on my list of all-time most romantic movies just for that scene where Virgil and Lindsey are stuck in the sub together needing to get back to the main habitat.)
The Forbin Project
(Perhaps Wargames is also worth a mention in this general category.)
Total Recall
(You may also like Vanilla Sky and Paycheck in the same category.)
12 Monkeys
(And if you liked this kind of thing you might also try the more obscure The Lathe of Heaven. I also enjoyed Timecop here, but a lot of people classified that as a simple action flick.)
Dark City
Contact
And, ok, they're funny, but they are also still sci-fi and outstanding:
Even where such terms are well-defined among all human cultures (and many of them are not), how the #@&%! are we supposed to program an AI to recognize what they mean?
Actually, if I understood the patent correctly (and I'm not sure it's even possible to understand this complicated patent correctly, so go easy on me), it doesn't say it will recognize these terms, it says it will prefer to express its goals in these terms. That is, it will not express its goals in terms of wanting to optimize a "level of vengeance" or "level of malice", but instead will choose goals that attempt to optimize the corresponding virtues (according to his table).
The problem even with the claim that this has been implemented is that the programmer, not the program has made these choices. Correct me if you have read more thoroughly than I and see otherwise, but, as it seems to me, these robots are not introspective in the sense of things like a Reflective Lisp, capable of pondering its own internals and modifying them. There is no introspection phase I saw where the robot has a chance to introspect and audit its own rules to make sure that the human-coded goals are in fact implementing what they say they are.
The reason this matters is that the robotic laws are expressed in terms of "I" and what "I will express". But the Robot, in point of fact, does not appear to have a choice of how it does and doesn't express its goals because there are parts of it hard-wired and apparently unchangeable by non-robots. Even if the goals are, in part, derived through linguistic interaction, I seriously doubt that the rules for interpreting the linguistic interaction can be themselves modified in all possible ways through introspection and interaction. And if they can, I think the halting problem is very quickly going to get involved in allowing you to continue to prove much of anything about the implications of the mess that results.
No matter how secure, how deeply coded, the rules are, the only way to have robots that don't have the capability to hurt people is to not make robots at all.
Ah. Thanks for clarifying this! I was having trouble figuring out the angle for patenting this, since it doesn't look like the thing can be built and the only other reason might be harass infringers. I just couldn't figure out who the infringers might be.
Maybe all of us not building robots are the infringers, since we're the ones with the correct implementations. Perhaps we can each protect ourselves from suit by moving quickly to create unethical robots... then the patent author will finally be happy and society will be safe (from lawsuits, anyway).
Does this mean I'm free to create an open-source psychopath mass-murdering robot?
No. It means the patent author is trying to encourage you to do so (by creating an economic barrier to your use of his ethical guidelines.)
As such, the fact that the patent was filed at all is probably a proof that the patent was done by a person, rather than a machine--at least one imprinted with this sense of ethics.
Surely a properly encoded sense of justice, grace, charity and decency, dignity and integrity, concern as to effects, and general sense of magnanimity would imply that if you actually knew how to explain in clear terms to people how they might reliably understand the incredible subtleties of ethics, which have eluded philosophers for ages, that it would be dishonorable, hypocritical, an clear display of one or more of (a) avarice & arguable antagonism, (b) foolishness and caprice, or (c) indifference, bordering on malice, to claim that only those people prepared to pay you money should be permitted to exercise your amazing and long-awaited insight into ethical evaluation.
I know Lisp is not the ideal language - its ugly, illegible, and slower than compiled languages
Just in case you don't know, Lisp is a compiled language and not slow, especially when compiled with appropriate type declarations. Only the very most early dialects (forty or so years ago) were interpreted-only. Some interpreted implementations exist now, but that's a choice of the implementor, not a requirement of the language.
I disagree with your remarks about ugly and illegible, too, but that's personal taste, I guess. My views on all this are copiously documented in my Slashdot interview, Part I and Part II.
However, what really disappointed me in this chart was its unscientific and subjective decision about what to include and how to present things.
Some of the arrows stop mysteriously so far leftward (as if to hint "this language is no longer used). That's apparently a subjective assessment on their part offered with no foundation, and irresponsibly inappropriate in a document intended to fairly describe history. Common Lisp's arrow stops short for reasons I don't understand since it continues in commmercial use today.
I didn't check the table thoroughtly, but the absence of mention of the fact that Scheme influences Common Lisp seems odd since it's a well-advertised truth.
The omissions of ISLISP, an ISO standard (ISO/IEC 13816:1997) is also surprising and shows poor researching. The absence of Interlisp, Portable Standard Lisp (PSL), Eulisp, Gnu Emacs-Lisp (in spite of huge distribution world-wide as customization substrate for Emacs), and Xlisp (hugely distributed as part of Autocad) as important dialects is similarly sad.
O'Reilly sells books and has for a long time requested outright that no Lisp authors approach them. I and others have long noted that it has an apparent chip on its shoulder about Lisp, and little surprise they couldn't help exposing that bias in their chart. They want you to think the books they sell define the market. But that's just not so, especially when they voluntarily close their eyes to what's going on around them.
People should look skeptically at a company that wants a reputation as a "documentation" company yet so easily falls victim to its own commercial decision to close its eyes to this language family's achievements (such as an international standard).
A quick glance at other parts of the table leave out many other important languages and dialects, with no explanation of their rationale. Just for example: Teco, which strongly influenced Emacs-Lisp. I don't see HyperTalk there, either, even though I thought it influential. And there were many dialects of BASIC and LISP that are too small to mention, yet variations on the Unix shell language like bash are apparently worth mention. I guess that more reflects O'Reilly's sales than an attempt to explain history.
As a consequence, I have to regard this chart of theirs as commercial eye candy and not a properly scholarly work. I think it's a shame that Slashdot has chosen to give it all this free press. I'm sure that's just what they were hoping. And I'm sure they just don't care about their errors, omissions, and biases. I imagine they just want to sell books, and that all this free press will do just that.
Me, I buy my books from other sources. And I recommend you do, too.
I agree with the article's position criticizing this right of reply and wanted to add some additional perspectives that I've not seen posted anywhere.
In the US, the Supreme Court has generally taken the position that the answer to speech is more speech. That is, dialog is self-repairing. (The court has not yet confronted "flaming", and I eagerly await a test of the "more speech" doctrine when an incessant flamer manages to wend his way to the top of the court docket.)
Nevertheless, I think the point is that the reason that libel has traditionally been dealt with more harshly than slander, for example, is that it allows a more limited opportunity for reply. And yet, public figures have, within the US, a higher burden to meet in showing libel--requring a showing of actual malice and not just ill effect. Why? Because public figures are assumed by their nature to be able to command "press time" and to be able to effectively "call a press conference". As such, they are engaged in a visible dialog with the public any time they want and can use speech (rather than lawsuits) to effect redress in most cases, and the court prefers that.
Now, in many Internet venues, anyone can call a press conference. As I have called you readers here to listen to me blather now. We can just "post". And as such, I claim that in this venue, where we all have access to an ability to post, we can all get redress to confusions and offensenses by counterposting. But if this venue were not of that nature, we couldn't.
You might think I'm leading up to saying that therefore everyone should have a right of reply. I don't think that. I think instead that the incentive for adding a right of reply should be that if you deny a right of reply in a venue, the burden of proof for things like libel should be lower because there was not effective means of simple redress offered. If you do offer a right of reply, then the burden of proof for libel should be higher, rewarding you for having made public dialog the chief means of remedying a problem.
In other words, I think that an "incentive-based" forum technology, where those offering right of reply are rewarded legally is a better way to go. That way, the issues of resource and liability and reward will naturally sort themselves out without additional complex mechanism on the matter of reply per se. Rather, an available right of reply should be seen as one kind of evidence that a forum is not seeking to hoodwink anyone; absent that, the burden might be on the forum to show that in some other way.
what do the people who can't afford cable do then?
The logical answer would be that we pass a point in society where it's so valuable to those among us (who, incidentally might not be me) who want to "move ahead" that they will pay to bring the others up to speed. People are so stingy, though, I don't see this ever happening.
For example, when I was a student in Boston years ago, I was told that the Boston subway system operated at a greater loss by paying state employees to collect tokens (at $0.25 back then) than it would if it were free (with no tolltakers to pay), but that taxpayers liked to see money coming out of the riders' pockets and that's why they continued to charge money. I never did find out if this assertion was so, but it had a ring of truth to it.
Perhaps it's just as well, though.
Personally, I have a little black & white TV that is battery powered and that I can turn on during power outages (e.g., due to hurricanes) to find out the weather. Is someone going to offer me a replacement--and better yet, buy it for me? Not only would a change be inconvenient for me, but I worry that it will make our society fragile against catastrophe.
Although we can make one big all-in-one digital information device, I'm not sure that it's wise to. I like the idea of separated systems so that if one breaks down, another might continue to work so I can find out what's going on...
This patent was only filed in 1998, though it claims to be a continuation of something filed in 1995. Even so, a Google Groups search pre-1995 comes up with pages and pages of references to "Video on Demand". Surely that must suggest that the idea was not novel.
Searching even more refined keywords for:
"video on demand" movies personalized yields a discussion of a prior (claimed to be patented) personalized system that looks (to my unskilled eye) the same as what's in the Microsoft patent:
The patented StarSight service provides television viewers with a personalized on-screen program guide, continuously updated with a seven-day schedule of upcoming TV programming, movies, sporting and special events. Because the StarSight service can be customized, subscribers can tailor the way program information is presented to match their viewing preferences.
Satellite Journal International, June 10, 1993
And this is what I found in ten minutes looking around. I'm sure a deeper search would reveal a heap of scifi stories and movies and tv shows (probably Star Trek and friends) that take such capabilities and even UI techniques totally for granted and that pre-date the application date.
The whole original notion of the web's design in the first place was of "lists of resources" where text pages were just one of many "resources". I bet the original design documents for the web, somewhere, mention the idea of customized streaming video movies.
If no one can see you at work, you're not working. You could be sleeping at your desk and your coworkers would have a higher view of you than a telecommuter. I don't know if it's jealously or just plain incomprehension of the fact that someone doesn't need to sit their butt at the office to do work for the company.
I've telecommuted on and off for about a third of my 20+ year career in computers, and I've thought about this a lot.
I think the real problem here is that if you are away, the superficial information bosses are used to using to tell if you're working go to pieces and they have to either (a) come up with equally superficial ways of judging you at home or (b) [and they really dread this] decide to judge you on what you actually do.
Now, I don't think that it should necessarily even be the case that a boss could do his/her underling's job. However, I think the problem that comes with judging people on what they actually do is that many managers are either ill at ease or downright unqualified to say whether the people working for them are in fact doing their job if the actual criterion to be used is "understanding what they are doing" or "knowing whether what is being done is being done right". And the lack of desire to own up to this is a big problem. Managers have to figure out when and who to trust, and that's not always easy.
I've worked at companies where when you were tired, you just took a nap and no one said anything. After all, wasn't that better than sitting at the console sleepily, one eye on the clock waiting for 5pm so you could duck out after a day of getting nothing done? People came and went when they wanted, too. But this meant that managers had to have the skill to judge who was producing and who wasn't, and the confidence to put their own reputation on the line in asserting this belief and trust.
At MIT, many years ago, I asked why I had to take so many hardware courses for a degree in software. I was told that they didn't know how to grade software, and so they wanted me to take at least some courses that they did know how to grade. Working at a technical job is a lot like this--you have to both do the work assigned you, plus also some busy work that they know how to grade you on.
Slashdot reader TaraByte struck a chord with me with some sad but true commentary on another article, including the remark "For extra credit, send in your report at 8pm or later." This is so familiar. I've had situations where I was working my heart out for up to 80 hrs a week at home, barely eating and sleeping, and it went entirely unnoticed by management until once, not realizing the effect it would have, I sent a status report at 3am (a perfectly normal working hour for me). Someone in company management picked up on the timestamp on my report and said "wow, he's working really hard" (without, I'm quite sure, checking to see if I had been asleep at 3pm that day). I had been working really hard, and was glad to have it realized, even if the "evidence" that led to the conclusion was bogus.
If the code is in Linux, as they claim, then the code is available to the public, and they no reason I can think of to share the infomation about what code they are disputing.
This was my thought when I first heard them say this, too, but if what you're suggesting is that they don't have anything to offer, I don't think they'd be making the legal noises they are. They pretty plainly did some kind of research before they came out with this.
I find myself wondering if what they're afraid of is not exposing the code, but exposing the location of the code.
Think about what would happen if they did. I'm betting 400,000 programmers would rush to rewrite any of the offending sections and that by the time of the trial, SCO would dredge in the "offending code" and the happy band of defendants would plead: "But we changed all of that, so your citing all this old code is irrelevant. Moreover," the defense would continue, "as soon as you brought it to our attention, we fixed it. We had no way of knowing we were infringing because, after all, the code we were infringing is a secret."
Consequently, as odd as it sounds, I'm betting they want the offending code to keep getting used so that they can prosecute the use. I'm betting when they say "stop using it", they are being disingenuous, since it's the continued use that will bring a good judgment.
Cop #1: It's working, sir. Cop #2: What's that? Cop #1: Here, listen. [Cop #2 takes off the headphones and allows Cop #2 to overhear the bad guys conversing somewhere else. The scene fades to the bad guys headquarters.]
Bad Guy #1: What do you mean we have to turn ourselves in? Bad Guy #2: Well, we just don't have the budget to keep on with our life of crime. We used to train our people with those games that let us practice shooting cops. But now we can't buy them any more and we could never afford to develop our own. Bad Guy #1: Can't we just buy games that let us shoot at people besides cops and practice with that? Bad Guy #2: People besides cops? You mean like us? You want us to practice shooting bad guys like ourselves? Bad Guy #1: What are you, some kind of politician? Where's your imagination. Just pretend it's a cop. [Bad Guy #2 just gives him a blank stare.] Bad Guy #1: You're right. It's hopeless. If you losers are all I have to help me commit crimes, I might as well just turn myself in. Now where's the phone book? I have to look up the number for 911 so I can turn myself in.
[Fade back to Cops Headquarters, where the police who now have nothing more to do are on the phone to their congressional representatives, thanking them for the new tough laws that make crime-fighting so much easier.]
The more we centralize things, the more vulnerable we are to a single point of failure with absolutely catastrophic consequences.
Historically, the core value behind the second amendment was not the right to go deer hunting, but the idea that we needed to reserve to the states and to the people enough power to protect itself if the federal government seemed overpowerful or out of control.
As information becomes more and more literally a form of armament in modern society, perhaps we need to ask the Supreme Court to start to construe control of information as covered under the second amendment, and to say that the unfettered protection of private information by the states and by individuals is Constitutionally protected. I've seen the courts look to the 4th and then 9th amendments for privacy protection, and having trouble finding it. Maybe they're just looking in the wrong place.
If I ask a good question, do I get to claim the copyright on it? And how will I enforce payment?
I decided to be a little less flippant and submitted a question quite like this one to the site.
One thing that occurred to me and that I asked in the extended question was this:
In the new world of license enforcement, every time I make a tiny use of a song I end up having to seek a license and pay for it. But here I am the little guy submitting a question to the big guys in Television Land and I have no mechanism for forcing them to pay at all for a BIG use of my words if they decide they are important enough to use on their show. Something seems unbalanced about that.
As a straw man, shouldn't they be forced to offer me royalties and trickle out money to me every time they rerun their show? In a world that's becoming increasingly peer to peer, why should an individual do all the paying and none of the receiving?
I suspect the answer is "Because we can" from the big guys. That doesn't seem very fair though.
Ignoring the numerous ad hominem attacks (I've linked to its definition in case you're not as familiar with its definition as its use) in your largely off-topic ("about me" rather than "about the issues") post, I'll respond just to the meager substance that remains and will save any defense of myself and any credentials I might have for some forum where that's of interest to more people than just yourself...
You have companies that comercilize Linux and whose costs in doing so are not zero.
If you think of capitalism as an engine that grinds out better versions of whatever is competing, then what you are saying is that you are not competing on product. You have costs for the product, but you are choosing to make back that money (and hence, to compete) in another arena.
Sun does this, for example, by making back their Java money on unrelated projects that make enough excess to support it--like hardware and consulting sales. This makes the price of Java cheap, but it also means that other companies who just want to provide a programming language implementation (compilers,libraries) but who don't have hardware and teams of consultants to provide them with extra capital, cannot compete because the competition is not about "the reasonable price of the product (Java)". The cost of Java has been hidden, just as the cost of Linux has been hidden.
The problem that comes by doing this transformation, though, is that the 'responsiveness' that capitalism cranks out is in the support domain, not in the original product domain. There is no economic incentive to improve the product. You may think that people will improve the product out of good will or self interest, but if that were enough to make the world better, it would have run like that from the start. People eventually get lazy, and the drive to make money keeps them motivated. If the money is not being made on product, but on support, capitalism will only cause them to stay non-lazy on support. Since no money is to be made on product, it will not head off laze surrounding the original product.
If you consider in the picture Debian they are selling nothing. They are a group of enthusiasts that [are] not bent in commercially competing with anybody but in solving a need they have, namely to ensure free access to a stable computer platform.
Perhaps because you are so quick to attack me personally, you confuse my criticism of their chosen busines model with a criticism of these people personally, and so you feel a need to defend them. I did not criticize their motive.
But as to the effect of what they have done: they have thwarted competition. I do not want Linux, but the competitive engine being broken, I cannot exercise the one right that a consumer normally has under capitalism--to take my money elsewhere and thereby insure that someone who is paying attention to what I want will succeed at your expense, causing you to have to play catchup.
In a hypotetical world in which Linux was the only game in town you will have far many more advantages as a user of computer infrastructure.
Only if I want something largely similar to Linux and can use its pieces to build what I want. Because the likelihood that anyone will give me funding to make something radically different is low. They will probably say "Linux is good enough. And it's free." They always like to say "it's free". And if you understand what a hill-climbing problem is, you'll understand what I mean when I say I'll be stuck on the Linux hill with nowhere to go.
(The rest of your message was a set of interesting topics about Linux goals, but was not a response either to the original article nor to my criticism of the article, so I'm going to decline to respond just to save space here. Further, this will be my last post to you on this subthread, so go ahead and make your best reply--I'll let you have the last word for now. There will be other days and other forums.)
however, if the software is widely used, it is reasonable to expect that it will be picked up and maintained by someone in [its] user community out of need or desire for the program.
It may be reasonable to expect. But it's not guaranteed it will happen, for a variety of reasons.
The makers of free software will always have competition because they compete with each other. If there is an ideological disagreement or a methodological disagreement, the project will be forked and compete against itself.
"Free software" assures the right to maintain the program (under a set of conditions that might or might not appeal to everyone) but it does not guarantee the resources to see that all such software is maintained.
As such, this "forking" may not happen in practice. It's a nice theory, though.
Isn't this illegal? Here we have a convicted monopoly selling it's products at a loss to shut out a smaller competitor. Isn't that illegal?
Linux does no different, except the price it "sells" its wares for is zero. Certainly it is taking a loss, and if you ask people its explicit purpose is to shut out a competitor. At the point where Linux "sales" exceed Microsoft's sales, will that make Linux the "wrong thing" because it "sells its products at a loss to shut out a smaller competitor"?
From timothy's summary: Ayala said." Perhaps that's because, as roomisigloomis writes, "Seems that MS' licensing practices are working against the company," pointing out this article which "suggests that open source, Linux and other software is actively being sought."
It's also possible that this means that the idea of "selling at all" is working against it. That is, Linux is destroying any possibility of competing on the wares themselves, and leaving only the option of competing on service. That's hardly an intended free market effect, so it's a bit hypocritical for the people pushing that strategy to be criticizing Microsoft for doing the same.
It's certainly true that Microsoft is too big. I'd like to see more market variability. But being beaten out by Linux and having only a choice of Linux is not market variability either. IMO, it's a case of a cure that's as bad as the sickness. At least with Microsoft, when I want something done, I didn't have to pay the entire development cost of what I wanted in order to get some response because someone else might want that thing, too. With free software, there's no one who stands to make subscription money on the mere development of extensions and fixes, so I stand to get charged more for anything not available out of the box.
Plus, the creators of Microsoft have a motivation to make their products solid first time, because they'll lose sales otherwise. They might not do it always, but they are motivated. The makers of free software presently have competition, and so are motivated to compete. But once they've knocked down that competition, I suspect they'll get lazy and start releasing buggy versions first time out of the box, making me pay if I want a working version. Why? Because that's what the economic model makes profitability, and businesses seek profit. You're kidding yourself if you think the availability of free software is going to make people into kinder, gentler people.
Static Weak: C Static Strong: ML Dynamic Weak: Perl5 (just say no, kids!) Dynamic Strong: Scheme, CL (well, CL is "optional static")
Common Lisp (CL) is also optionally dynamic, in the sense that a declaration is considered to be what I guess would be called in law a "prima facie" case (rebuttable presumption) of truth.
That is, if I say that X is an integer and the compiler cannot prove otherwise, it must believe me. That means it doesn't do either static or dynamic checking, and bad data can screw things up. But the power of this is that if the dataflow is such that it would be impossible for the compiler to prove the truth, I don't have to suffer with slow code (which I think outsiders naively assume I have to do when they hear "dynamic strong").
If the compiler is very smart, of course, it is welcome to disprove any stated declaration--the CMU CL compiler does a great deal of work in this regard, and the resulting feel is very interesting. What's important is that the compiler is not required to do such checking, but it's allowed to do as much as it wants, so the language embraces ongoing/future work in proof technology in a graceful way, yet never changes the meaning of correct programs. It was very exciting to us as language designers to see CMU CL take this idea and run with it--the results are quite interesting, and I'd love to see more of this. One problem with static inference is that the langauge must be designed around the set of inferences that are within the scope of existing technology at the time of the language design; new static inferencing rules require new languages.
Typically, in Common Lisp, one leaves in the dynamic checks that are not in performance bottlenecks, but does more careful by-hand data flow analysis in situations of critical performance and then declares things that one thinks the compiler might not easily deduce. The result is generally the best of both worlds--you aren't beaten down by making scads of unnecessary declarations in development, and you aren't held back from quite efficient programs in production. The main difference is that in C, every program is (at least superficially, ignoring issues of algorithmic complexity) efficient or you can't write it; in CL, you can write inefficient programs long enough to test them without fussing over tons of declarations that might never matter because you're just going to later discard the whole program. When you get to a program you're going to keep in CL, then you want to optimize it. But managers of CL programmers need to know to plan extra time at this point, rather than earlier in a project, or they will be surprised. If (just for seeing actual numbers) you assume that declarations double the time of any code-writing, and if you assume that the first phase of development costs time P (for "prototyping"), and the last phase of development costs time F (for "finalization"), and if you assume T prototypes are needed before finding the right prototype to finalize, CL will take P*T+2*F to develop a product, while C will take 2*P*T+F to develop a product. If you assume that P and F are roughly equal in time, or that T is large, then you can understand why CL programmers prefer not to write declarations. I don't raise these formulas to start a big advocacy dialog here, but merely to show that the shape of the development curve is different for the two languages; even if you disagree with my off-the-cuff formulas, if you agree that the languages have different formulas, you're seeing the real essence of what I'm saying.
This is an example of something 'material' that a paper that talks about the relationship of 'syntax' and 'culture' should have addressed.
I'd have trouble calling C's type system "strong", personally.
Well, there's strong like Gandhi and there's strong like a bull in a china shop... The term is a bit vague and so I don't begrudge them its use as long as Lisp gets to use another.
I looked at this article, and I was disappointed by what a limited set of languages chromatic had examined.
Given the superficial and haphazard nature of the review, I was just as glad it didn't touch on those other languages. I really didn't get much of value out of the article and the only thing that would have been worse is an equally superficial treatment of my own languages of choice.
And anyway, one person's opinion is just one person's opinion. It's a pity the author didn't attempt to do any kind of survey. Even an unscientific survey might have been more interesting and/or informative than this was. In its present form, there's no way to detect hints of incompleteness, idiosyncracy, bias,... other than to incompletely, idiosyncratically, and in biased form say "well, here's something I noticed that I disagree with".
I'm sorry if these remarks sound critical, but the entire article came across to me as flamebait and I'm not sure what positive quality I can draw from it. It started off as a nice idea--that language philophy can influence syntax or vice versa. But it diverged about halfway through from that to random, unmotivated jabs at this and that language and really ended up going nowhere with few, if any, useful takehome messages.
Maybe I was also put off by the fact that the author's statement, that "Lisp is very much the lambda calculus". As a matter of history, several decades ago, it might have been reasonable to say that Lisp was "inspired by" ideas of the language calculus (though some might say "misunderstandings of the lambda calculus"), but the language was a whole is really enormously different than that now. It is often used as a teaching vehicle for esoteric things like the lambda calculus because other languages can't stretch that far, but mainstream Lisp does not look or feel much at all like the lambda calculus, any more than "modern music is very much that of Elvis Presley", however much his break from the past may have been a founding influence on modern music. This failed allusion injured the author's credibility with me within the article almost irreparably.
Unlike other countries who routinely decommission monetary instruments (with a brief trade-in period), the United States refuses to do so. Why? It helps support the dollar's strength.
I, too, had planned to ask about how this helps at all, given the old money is still around, but since I'm already maxed out on karma anyway, I can be gracious and just be glad someone else did the typing.:) Your answer sounds like it confirms the presence of and explains the reason for a lingering security hole, but still leaves me wondering then why they would take an action with such an obvious hole in it! The following are the kinds of ideas that run through my head, and yet I can't imagine the government offering one of these as the official response in a press conference if they actually got pinned down and were forced to offer a reason. (The CNN article showed no evidence of the reporter having tried to get a reason.)
"We've done it for the drug war and people haven't called us on it, so we thought we'd try it for the currency as well: Just making a lot of noise about all the things we're trying seems to hide our overall lack of success."
"We are planning to flush the old money as a kind of attack on drug lords everywhere one day (and sorry about the unavoidable civilian casualties), but we're just not telling you yet."
"We have friends in the treasury who are aspiring artists and keeping them employed is part of our plan to keep unemployment from worsening."
"The French have complained and complained that our money was boring looking and our hope is that if we finally jazz it up, international relations between our two nations will warm."
"It's yet another aspect of our CYA strategy--if the US dollar tanks and is only useful for toilet paper, at least it will be colorful toilet paper you're C'ing your A with."
Someone please tell me they're offering a line that's more coherent than these...
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think a movie has to have predicted correctly to been a good movie. And anyway, the clash between the haves and the have-nots is just as important message of Soylent Green, even if it doesn't get the direct focus in the movie. And that problem is still with us in spades. The image of the "gated community" and what lies outside is still powerfully on-track. Likewise the issue of the cost of luxury, and how that cost is insurmountable to some and trivial to others. And it makes remarkable statements about the loss of beauty in the "modern" world, that people would die just to get to see good pics of the way the world used to look... Sure, the Soylent part is a little off track, but ignore that as you rewatch and watch all the other things that are not.
I'd make a similar note about how to watch Wargames. Even at the time it came out, people grumbled about the massive errors in technology. The confusion of a 'login name' and a 'password' is an example. And yes, there is a place where an unplugged modem still makes a connection. But the movie is a metaphor for something bigger and if you get caught up on the details, you sound like, well, ... you sound like the Republicans saying that Kerry is wrong in thinking that war is bad just because they can prove Nixon didn't broadcast a speech on a day that Kerry thought he had. Sometimes if you focus too much on the little details, you miss the big picture. (Ok, ok, I'm drifting off topic. But maybe not as much as you think. Scifi is about the art of social critique, and in that way is very closely linked to politics. And in both venues, if you're too much of a nitpicker, you'll miss out. So there, there is a relation.)
Whether heard by many or not, people killed themselves thinking the radio show was real, and prefering to die at their own hands than at the Martians', it was that vivid and believable. The movie had no such effect.
Yes, Gattaca was meant to be on my list, too, but I accidentally left it off. Good catch.
Though one thing I'll say about it was that I initially (and, in retrospect, foolishly) expected it to wake up the world to the dangers of medical information sharing in a world where insurance agencies and others can make such abusive use of info they get. But it did nothing on this level. Too artsy and not-to-the-point, I suppose, for the masses. I thought it made the point well, but I guess everyone is not me.
Enemy of the State turned out to be the movie that made the point about privacy better, not by being sci-fi, but by appealing directly to things people in this day and age can relate to: video games, credit cards, and so on.
I saw a lecture by Asimov once where he talked about how he got hauled in to some government place for writing about "atomic" things, and how they let him go on doing it so it wouldn't be suspicious that they'd made him stop all of a sudden. He said for a while, only scifi buffs understood how the world worked and were allowed to talk about it. I suppose we're a harmless niche. In the same sense, maybe only scifi buffs see other coming problems like privacy as addressed in Gattaca. The rest of the world waits for a 9/11-like experience to wake them up and say "it's here now, you have to care."
I don't know why it's marked "funny" that someone would suggest Wrath of Khan belongs here. I put it not only in my list of top 10 scifi pics, but in my list of top-ten best movies ever. It seems to me that it is the movie sequel that pioneered the idea of treating the time between movies as "part of the movie" instead of as "something to be ignored". So while James Bond grows older and we're supposed to ignore the fact, Star Trek did something boldly different: it allowed the characters to age with the actors, and allowed "grown up" thoughts about aging and death from people who used to be carefree young bucks and had off-screen learned what life was. Not to mention being a brilliant idea for a sequel and an outstanding plot.
Also, before The Matrix, I would always prefer to see The Thirteenth Floor, which it seems to me is the same sci-fi concept cast into a much more thoughtful rather than Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark format.
And while I think War of the Worlds was a pivotal book and radio production, I don't think the movie was an especially important work.
And though I thought Star Wars was a fun movie, I have emotional trouble listing it as a great work of scifi. It's pulp. And maybe that entitles it to a spot. There's been tons of pulp scifi (Flash Gordon, etc.) that isn't represented. But there are such amazingly thoughtful pieces that I just don't see giving up a slot to something like this.
Some other overlooked options for this list:
(Well, I was very moved by it because of the age I was at when it came out. It might not appeal in the same way to a modern audience on a small screen, but...)
(Also high on my list of all-time most romantic movies just for that scene where Virgil and Lindsey are stuck in the sub together needing to get back to the main habitat.)
(Perhaps Wargames is also worth a mention in this general category.)
(You may also like Vanilla Sky and Paycheck in the same category.)
(And if you liked this kind of thing you might also try the more obscure The Lathe of Heaven. I also enjoyed Timecop here, but a lot of people classified that as a simple action flick.)
And, ok, they're funny, but they are also still sci-fi and outstanding:
Actually, if I understood the patent correctly (and I'm not sure it's even possible to understand this complicated patent correctly, so go easy on me), it doesn't say it will recognize these terms, it says it will prefer to express its goals in these terms. That is, it will not express its goals in terms of wanting to optimize a "level of vengeance" or "level of malice", but instead will choose goals that attempt to optimize the corresponding virtues (according to his table).
The problem even with the claim that this has been implemented is that the programmer, not the program has made these choices. Correct me if you have read more thoroughly than I and see otherwise, but, as it seems to me, these robots are not introspective in the sense of things like a Reflective Lisp, capable of pondering its own internals and modifying them. There is no introspection phase I saw where the robot has a chance to introspect and audit its own rules to make sure that the human-coded goals are in fact implementing what they say they are.
The reason this matters is that the robotic laws are expressed in terms of "I" and what "I will express". But the Robot, in point of fact, does not appear to have a choice of how it does and doesn't express its goals because there are parts of it hard-wired and apparently unchangeable by non-robots. Even if the goals are, in part, derived through linguistic interaction, I seriously doubt that the rules for interpreting the linguistic interaction can be themselves modified in all possible ways through introspection and interaction. And if they can, I think the halting problem is very quickly going to get involved in allowing you to continue to prove much of anything about the implications of the mess that results.
No matter how secure, how deeply coded, the rules are, the only way to have robots that don't have the capability to hurt people is to not make robots at all.
Ah. Thanks for clarifying this! I was having trouble figuring out the angle for patenting this, since it doesn't look like the thing can be built and the only other reason might be harass infringers. I just couldn't figure out who the infringers might be.
Maybe all of us not building robots are the infringers, since we're the ones with the correct implementations. Perhaps we can each protect ourselves from suit by moving quickly to create unethical robots... then the patent author will finally be happy and society will be safe (from lawsuits, anyway).
No. It means the patent author is trying to encourage you to do so (by creating an economic barrier to your use of his ethical guidelines.)
As such, the fact that the patent was filed at all is probably a proof that the patent was done by a person, rather than a machine--at least one imprinted with this sense of ethics.
Surely a properly encoded sense of justice, grace, charity and decency, dignity and integrity, concern as to effects, and general sense of magnanimity would imply that if you actually knew how to explain in clear terms to people how they might reliably understand the incredible subtleties of ethics, which have eluded philosophers for ages, that it would be dishonorable, hypocritical, an clear display of one or more of (a) avarice & arguable antagonism, (b) foolishness and caprice, or (c) indifference, bordering on malice, to claim that only those people prepared to pay you money should be permitted to exercise your amazing and long-awaited insight into ethical evaluation.
Just in case you don't know, Lisp is a compiled language and not slow, especially when compiled with appropriate type declarations. Only the very most early dialects (forty or so years ago) were interpreted-only. Some interpreted implementations exist now, but that's a choice of the implementor, not a requirement of the language.
I disagree with your remarks about ugly and illegible, too, but that's personal taste, I guess. My views on all this are copiously documented in my Slashdot interview, Part I and Part II.
However, what really disappointed me in this chart was its unscientific and subjective decision about what to include and how to present things.
Some of the arrows stop mysteriously so far leftward (as if to hint "this language is no longer used). That's apparently a subjective assessment on their part offered with no foundation, and irresponsibly inappropriate in a document intended to fairly describe history. Common Lisp's arrow stops short for reasons I don't understand since it continues in commmercial use today.
I didn't check the table thoroughtly, but the absence of mention of the fact that Scheme influences Common Lisp seems odd since it's a well-advertised truth.
The omissions of ISLISP, an ISO standard (ISO/IEC 13816:1997) is also surprising and shows poor researching. The absence of Interlisp, Portable Standard Lisp (PSL), Eulisp, Gnu Emacs-Lisp (in spite of huge distribution world-wide as customization substrate for Emacs), and Xlisp (hugely distributed as part of Autocad) as important dialects is similarly sad.
O'Reilly sells books and has for a long time requested outright that no Lisp authors approach them. I and others have long noted that it has an apparent chip on its shoulder about Lisp, and little surprise they couldn't help exposing that bias in their chart. They want you to think the books they sell define the market. But that's just not so, especially when they voluntarily close their eyes to what's going on around them.
People should look skeptically at a company that wants a reputation as a "documentation" company yet so easily falls victim to its own commercial decision to close its eyes to this language family's achievements (such as an international standard).
A quick glance at other parts of the table leave out many other important languages and dialects, with no explanation of their rationale. Just for example: Teco, which strongly influenced Emacs-Lisp. I don't see HyperTalk there, either, even though I thought it influential. And there were many dialects of BASIC and LISP that are too small to mention, yet variations on the Unix shell language like bash are apparently worth mention. I guess that more reflects O'Reilly's sales than an attempt to explain history.
As a consequence, I have to regard this chart of theirs as commercial eye candy and not a properly scholarly work. I think it's a shame that Slashdot has chosen to give it all this free press. I'm sure that's just what they were hoping. And I'm sure they just don't care about their errors, omissions, and biases. I imagine they just want to sell books, and that all this free press will do just that.
Me, I buy my books from other sources. And I recommend you do, too.
I agree with the article's position criticizing this right of reply and wanted to add some additional perspectives that I've not seen posted anywhere.
In the US, the Supreme Court has generally taken the position that the answer to speech is more speech. That is, dialog is self-repairing. (The court has not yet confronted "flaming", and I eagerly await a test of the "more speech" doctrine when an incessant flamer manages to wend his way to the top of the court docket.)
Nevertheless, I think the point is that the reason that libel has traditionally been dealt with more harshly than slander, for example, is that it allows a more limited opportunity for reply. And yet, public figures have, within the US, a higher burden to meet in showing libel--requring a showing of actual malice and not just ill effect. Why? Because public figures are assumed by their nature to be able to command "press time" and to be able to effectively "call a press conference". As such, they are engaged in a visible dialog with the public any time they want and can use speech (rather than lawsuits) to effect redress in most cases, and the court prefers that.
Now, in many Internet venues, anyone can call a press conference. As I have called you readers here to listen to me blather now. We can just "post". And as such, I claim that in this venue, where we all have access to an ability to post, we can all get redress to confusions and offensenses by counterposting. But if this venue were not of that nature, we couldn't.
You might think I'm leading up to saying that therefore everyone should have a right of reply. I don't think that. I think instead that the incentive for adding a right of reply should be that if you deny a right of reply in a venue, the burden of proof for things like libel should be lower because there was not effective means of simple redress offered. If you do offer a right of reply, then the burden of proof for libel should be higher, rewarding you for having made public dialog the chief means of remedying a problem.
In other words, I think that an "incentive-based" forum technology, where those offering right of reply are rewarded legally is a better way to go. That way, the issues of resource and liability and reward will naturally sort themselves out without additional complex mechanism on the matter of reply per se. Rather, an available right of reply should be seen as one kind of evidence that a forum is not seeking to hoodwink anyone; absent that, the burden might be on the forum to show that in some other way.
what do the people who can't afford cable do then?
The logical answer would be that we pass a point in society where it's so valuable to those among us (who, incidentally might not be me) who want to "move ahead" that they will pay to bring the others up to speed. People are so stingy, though, I don't see this ever happening.
For example, when I was a student in Boston years ago, I was told that the Boston subway system operated at a greater loss by paying state employees to collect tokens (at $0.25 back then) than it would if it were free (with no tolltakers to pay), but that taxpayers liked to see money coming out of the riders' pockets and that's why they continued to charge money. I never did find out if this assertion was so, but it had a ring of truth to it.
Perhaps it's just as well, though.
Personally, I have a little black & white TV that is battery powered and that I can turn on during power outages (e.g., due to hurricanes) to find out the weather. Is someone going to offer me a replacement--and better yet, buy it for me? Not only would a change be inconvenient for me, but I worry that it will make our society fragile against catastrophe.
Although we can make one big all-in-one digital information device, I'm not sure that it's wise to. I like the idea of separated systems so that if one breaks down, another might continue to work so I can find out what's going on...
Searching even more refined keywords for:
"video on demand" movies personalized
yields a discussion of a prior (claimed to be patented) personalized system that looks (to my unskilled eye) the same as what's in the Microsoft patent:And this is what I found in ten minutes looking around. I'm sure a deeper search would reveal a heap of scifi stories and movies and tv shows (probably Star Trek and friends) that take such capabilities and even UI techniques totally for granted and that pre-date the application date.
The whole original notion of the web's design in the first place was of "lists of resources" where text pages were just one of many "resources". I bet the original design documents for the web, somewhere, mention the idea of customized streaming video movies.
If no one can see you at work, you're not working. You could be sleeping at your desk and your coworkers would have a higher view of you than a telecommuter. I don't know if it's jealously or just plain incomprehension of the fact that someone doesn't need to sit their butt at the office to do work for the company.
I've telecommuted on and off for about a third of my 20+ year career in computers, and I've thought about this a lot.
I think the real problem here is that if you are away, the superficial information bosses are used to using to tell if you're working go to pieces and they have to either (a) come up with equally superficial ways of judging you at home or (b) [and they really dread this] decide to judge you on what you actually do.
Now, I don't think that it should necessarily even be the case that a boss could do his/her underling's job. However, I think the problem that comes with judging people on what they actually do is that many managers are either ill at ease or downright unqualified to say whether the people working for them are in fact doing their job if the actual criterion to be used is "understanding what they are doing" or "knowing whether what is being done is being done right". And the lack of desire to own up to this is a big problem. Managers have to figure out when and who to trust, and that's not always easy.
I've worked at companies where when you were tired, you just took a nap and no one said anything. After all, wasn't that better than sitting at the console sleepily, one eye on the clock waiting for 5pm so you could duck out after a day of getting nothing done? People came and went when they wanted, too. But this meant that managers had to have the skill to judge who was producing and who wasn't, and the confidence to put their own reputation on the line in asserting this belief and trust.
At MIT, many years ago, I asked why I had to take so many hardware courses for a degree in software. I was told that they didn't know how to grade software, and so they wanted me to take at least some courses that they did know how to grade. Working at a technical job is a lot like this--you have to both do the work assigned you, plus also some busy work that they know how to grade you on.
Slashdot reader TaraByte struck a chord with me with some sad but true commentary on another article, including the remark "For extra credit, send in your report at 8pm or later." This is so familiar. I've had situations where I was working my heart out for up to 80 hrs a week at home, barely eating and sleeping, and it went entirely unnoticed by management until once, not realizing the effect it would have, I sent a status report at 3am (a perfectly normal working hour for me). Someone in company management picked up on the timestamp on my report and said "wow, he's working really hard" (without, I'm quite sure, checking to see if I had been asleep at 3pm that day). I had been working really hard, and was glad to have it realized, even if the "evidence" that led to the conclusion was bogus.
If the code is in Linux, as they claim, then the code is available to the public, and they no reason I can think of to share the infomation about what code they are disputing.
This was my thought when I first heard them say this, too, but if what you're suggesting is that they don't have anything to offer, I don't think they'd be making the legal noises they are. They pretty plainly did some kind of research before they came out with this.
I find myself wondering if what they're afraid of is not exposing the code, but exposing the location of the code.
Think about what would happen if they did. I'm betting 400,000 programmers would rush to rewrite any of the offending sections and that by the time of the trial, SCO would dredge in the "offending code" and the happy band of defendants would plead: "But we changed all of that, so your citing all this old code is irrelevant. Moreover," the defense would continue, "as soon as you brought it to our attention, we fixed it. We had no way of knowing we were infringing because, after all, the code we were infringing is a secret."
Consequently, as odd as it sounds, I'm betting they want the offending code to keep getting used so that they can prosecute the use. I'm betting when they say "stop using it", they are being disingenuous, since it's the continued use that will bring a good judgment.
Cop #1: It's working, sir.
Cop #2: What's that?
Cop #1: Here, listen.
[Cop #2 takes off the headphones and allows Cop #2 to overhear the bad guys conversing somewhere else. The scene fades to the bad guys headquarters.]
Bad Guy #1: What do you mean we have to turn ourselves in?
Bad Guy #2: Well, we just don't have the budget to keep on with our life of crime. We used to train our people with those games that let us practice shooting cops. But now we can't buy them any more and we could never afford to develop our own.
Bad Guy #1: Can't we just buy games that let us shoot at people besides cops and practice with that?
Bad Guy #2: People besides cops? You mean like us? You want us to practice shooting bad guys like ourselves?
Bad Guy #1: What are you, some kind of politician? Where's your imagination. Just pretend it's a cop.
[Bad Guy #2 just gives him a blank stare.]
Bad Guy #1: You're right. It's hopeless. If you losers are all I have to help me commit crimes, I might as well just turn myself in. Now where's the phone book? I have to look up the number for 911 so I can turn myself in.
[Fade back to Cops Headquarters, where the police who now have nothing more to do are on the phone to their congressional representatives, thanking them for the new tough laws that make crime-fighting so much easier.]
The more we centralize things, the more vulnerable we are to a single point of failure with absolutely catastrophic consequences.
Historically, the core value behind the second amendment was not the right to go deer hunting, but the idea that we needed to reserve to the states and to the people enough power to protect itself if the federal government seemed overpowerful or out of control.
As information becomes more and more literally a form of armament in modern society, perhaps we need to ask the Supreme Court to start to construe control of information as covered under the second amendment, and to say that the unfettered protection of private information by the states and by individuals is Constitutionally protected. I've seen the courts look to the 4th and then 9th amendments for privacy protection, and having trouble finding it. Maybe they're just looking in the wrong place.
If I ask a good question, do I get to claim the copyright on it? And how will I enforce payment?
I decided to be a little less flippant and submitted a question quite like this one to the site.
One thing that occurred to me and that I asked in the extended question was this:
In the new world of license enforcement, every time I make a tiny use of a song I end up having to seek a license and pay for it. But here I am the little guy submitting a question to the big guys in Television Land and I have no mechanism for forcing them to pay at all for a BIG use of my words if they decide they are important enough to use on their show. Something seems unbalanced about that.
As a straw man, shouldn't they be forced to offer me royalties and trickle out money to me every time they rerun their show? In a world that's becoming increasingly peer to peer, why should an individual do all the paying and none of the receiving?
I suspect the answer is "Because we can" from the big guys. That doesn't seem very fair though.
Anyone can submit questions, and the best questions or comments will be posted to Lessig and Oppenheim for debate and discussion.
If I ask a good question, do I get to claim the copyright on it? And how will I enforce payment?
Ignoring the numerous ad hominem attacks (I've linked to its definition in case you're not as familiar with its definition as its use) in your largely off-topic ("about me" rather than "about the issues") post, I'll respond just to the meager substance that remains and will save any defense of myself and any credentials I might have for some forum where that's of interest to more people than just yourself...
You have companies that comercilize Linux and whose costs in doing so are not zero.
If you think of capitalism as an engine that grinds out better versions of whatever is competing, then what you are saying is that you are not competing on product. You have costs for the product, but you are choosing to make back that money (and hence, to compete) in another arena.
Sun does this, for example, by making back their Java money on unrelated projects that make enough excess to support it--like hardware and consulting sales. This makes the price of Java cheap, but it also means that other companies who just want to provide a programming language implementation (compilers,libraries) but who don't have hardware and teams of consultants to provide them with extra capital, cannot compete because the competition is not about "the reasonable price of the product (Java)". The cost of Java has been hidden, just as the cost of Linux has been hidden.
The problem that comes by doing this transformation, though, is that the 'responsiveness' that capitalism cranks out is in the support domain, not in the original product domain. There is no economic incentive to improve the product. You may think that people will improve the product out of good will or self interest, but if that were enough to make the world better, it would have run like that from the start. People eventually get lazy, and the drive to make money keeps them motivated. If the money is not being made on product, but on support, capitalism will only cause them to stay non-lazy on support. Since no money is to be made on product, it will not head off laze surrounding the original product.
If you consider in the picture Debian they are selling nothing. They are a group of enthusiasts that [are] not bent in commercially competing with anybody but in solving a need they have, namely to ensure free access to a stable computer platform.
Perhaps because you are so quick to attack me personally, you confuse my criticism of their chosen busines model with a criticism of these people personally, and so you feel a need to defend them. I did not criticize their motive.
But as to the effect of what they have done: they have thwarted competition. I do not want Linux, but the competitive engine being broken, I cannot exercise the one right that a consumer normally has under capitalism--to take my money elsewhere and thereby insure that someone who is paying attention to what I want will succeed at your expense, causing you to have to play catchup.
In a hypotetical world in which Linux was the only game in town you will have far many more advantages as a user of computer infrastructure.
Only if I want something largely similar to Linux and can use its pieces to build what I want. Because the likelihood that anyone will give me funding to make something radically different is low. They will probably say "Linux is good enough. And it's free." They always like to say "it's free". And if you understand what a hill-climbing problem is, you'll understand what I mean when I say I'll be stuck on the Linux hill with nowhere to go.
(The rest of your message was a set of interesting topics about Linux goals, but was not a response either to the original article nor to my criticism of the article, so I'm going to decline to respond just to save space here. Further, this will be my last post to you on this subthread, so go ahead and make your best reply--I'll let you have the last word for now. There will be other days and other forums.)
however, if the software is widely used, it is reasonable to expect that it will be picked up and maintained by someone in [its] user community out of need or desire for the program.
It may be reasonable to expect. But it's not guaranteed it will happen, for a variety of reasons.
The makers of free software will always have competition because they compete with each other. If there is an ideological disagreement or a methodological disagreement, the project will be forked and compete against itself.
"Free software" assures the right to maintain the program (under a set of conditions that might or might not appeal to everyone) but it does not guarantee the resources to see that all such software is maintained.
As such, this "forking" may not happen in practice. It's a nice theory, though.
Isn't this illegal? Here we have a convicted monopoly selling it's products at a loss to shut out a smaller competitor. Isn't that illegal?
Linux does no different, except the price it "sells" its wares for is zero. Certainly it is taking a loss, and if you ask people its explicit purpose is to shut out a competitor. At the point where Linux "sales" exceed Microsoft's sales, will that make Linux the "wrong thing" because it "sells its products at a loss to shut out a smaller competitor"?
From timothy's summary: Ayala said." Perhaps that's because, as roomisigloomis writes, "Seems that MS' licensing practices are working against the company," pointing out this article which "suggests that open source, Linux and other software is actively being sought."
It's also possible that this means that the idea of "selling at all" is working against it. That is, Linux is destroying any possibility of competing on the wares themselves, and leaving only the option of competing on service. That's hardly an intended free market effect, so it's a bit hypocritical for the people pushing that strategy to be criticizing Microsoft for doing the same.
It's certainly true that Microsoft is too big. I'd like to see more market variability. But being beaten out by Linux and having only a choice of Linux is not market variability either. IMO, it's a case of a cure that's as bad as the sickness. At least with Microsoft, when I want something done, I didn't have to pay the entire development cost of what I wanted in order to get some response because someone else might want that thing, too. With free software, there's no one who stands to make subscription money on the mere development of extensions and fixes, so I stand to get charged more for anything not available out of the box.
Plus, the creators of Microsoft have a motivation to make their products solid first time, because they'll lose sales otherwise. They might not do it always, but they are motivated. The makers of free software presently have competition, and so are motivated to compete. But once they've knocked down that competition, I suspect they'll get lazy and start releasing buggy versions first time out of the box, making me pay if I want a working version. Why? Because that's what the economic model makes profitability, and businesses seek profit. You're kidding yourself if you think the availability of free software is going to make people into kinder, gentler people.
Static Weak: C
Static Strong: ML
Dynamic Weak: Perl5 (just say no, kids!)
Dynamic Strong: Scheme, CL (well, CL is "optional static")
Common Lisp (CL) is also optionally dynamic, in the sense that a declaration is considered to be what I guess would be called in law a "prima facie" case (rebuttable presumption) of truth.
That is, if I say that X is an integer and the compiler cannot prove otherwise, it must believe me. That means it doesn't do either static or dynamic checking, and bad data can screw things up. But the power of this is that if the dataflow is such that it would be impossible for the compiler to prove the truth, I don't have to suffer with slow code (which I think outsiders naively assume I have to do when they hear "dynamic strong").
If the compiler is very smart, of course, it is welcome to disprove any stated declaration--the CMU CL compiler does a great deal of work in this regard, and the resulting feel is very interesting. What's important is that the compiler is not required to do such checking, but it's allowed to do as much as it wants, so the language embraces ongoing/future work in proof technology in a graceful way, yet never changes the meaning of correct programs. It was very exciting to us as language designers to see CMU CL take this idea and run with it--the results are quite interesting, and I'd love to see more of this. One problem with static inference is that the langauge must be designed around the set of inferences that are within the scope of existing technology at the time of the language design; new static inferencing rules require new languages.
Typically, in Common Lisp, one leaves in the dynamic checks that are not in performance bottlenecks, but does more careful by-hand data flow analysis in situations of critical performance and then declares things that one thinks the compiler might not easily deduce. The result is generally the best of both worlds--you aren't beaten down by making scads of unnecessary declarations in development, and you aren't held back from quite efficient programs in production. The main difference is that in C, every program is (at least superficially, ignoring issues of algorithmic complexity) efficient or you can't write it; in CL, you can write inefficient programs long enough to test them without fussing over tons of declarations that might never matter because you're just going to later discard the whole program. When you get to a program you're going to keep in CL, then you want to optimize it. But managers of CL programmers need to know to plan extra time at this point, rather than earlier in a project, or they will be surprised. If (just for seeing actual numbers) you assume that declarations double the time of any code-writing, and if you assume that the first phase of development costs time P (for "prototyping"), and the last phase of development costs time F (for "finalization"), and if you assume T prototypes are needed before finding the right prototype to finalize, CL will take P*T+2*F to develop a product, while C will take 2*P*T+F to develop a product. If you assume that P and F are roughly equal in time, or that T is large, then you can understand why CL programmers prefer not to write declarations. I don't raise these formulas to start a big advocacy dialog here, but merely to show that the shape of the development curve is different for the two languages; even if you disagree with my off-the-cuff formulas, if you agree that the languages have different formulas, you're seeing the real essence of what I'm saying.
This is an example of something 'material' that a paper that talks about the relationship of 'syntax' and 'culture' should have addressed.
I'd have trouble calling C's type system "strong", personally.
Well, there's strong like Gandhi and there's strong like a bull in a china shop... The term is a bit vague and so I don't begrudge them its use as long as Lisp gets to use another.
I looked at this article, and I was disappointed by what a limited set of languages chromatic had examined.
... other than to incompletely, idiosyncratically, and in biased form say "well, here's something I noticed that I disagree with".
Given the superficial and haphazard nature of the review, I was just as glad it didn't touch on those other languages. I really didn't get much of value out of the article and the only thing that would have been worse is an equally superficial treatment of my own languages of choice.
And anyway, one person's opinion is just one person's opinion. It's a pity the author didn't attempt to do any kind of survey. Even an unscientific survey might have been more interesting and/or informative than this was. In its present form, there's no way to detect hints of incompleteness, idiosyncracy, bias,
I'm sorry if these remarks sound critical, but the entire article came across to me as flamebait and I'm not sure what positive quality I can draw from it. It started off as a nice idea--that language philophy can influence syntax or vice versa. But it diverged about halfway through from that to random, unmotivated jabs at this and that language and really ended up going nowhere with few, if any, useful takehome messages.
Maybe I was also put off by the fact that the author's statement, that "Lisp is very much the lambda calculus". As a matter of history, several decades ago, it might have been reasonable to say that Lisp was "inspired by" ideas of the language calculus (though some might say "misunderstandings of the lambda calculus"), but the language was a whole is really enormously different than that now. It is often used as a teaching vehicle for esoteric things like the lambda calculus because other languages can't stretch that far, but mainstream Lisp does not look or feel much at all like the lambda calculus, any more than "modern music is very much that of Elvis Presley", however much his break from the past may have been a founding influence on modern music. This failed allusion injured the author's credibility with me within the article almost irreparably.
Unlike other countries who routinely decommission monetary instruments (with a brief trade-in period), the United States refuses to do so. Why? It helps support the dollar's strength.
I, too, had planned to ask about how this helps at all, given the old money is still around, but since I'm already maxed out on karma anyway, I can be gracious and just be glad someone else did the typing. :) Your answer sounds like it confirms the presence of and explains the reason for a lingering security hole, but still leaves me wondering then why they would take an action with such an obvious hole in it! The following are the kinds of ideas that run through my head, and yet I can't imagine the government offering one of these as the official response in a press conference if they actually got pinned down and were forced to offer a reason. (The CNN article showed no evidence of the reporter having tried to get a reason.)
Someone please tell me they're offering a line that's more coherent than these...