I quit ACM because the only benefit it offered me was the Communications of the ACM. I'm sorry to say it, but the CACM is mostly terrible (as opposed to IEEE Spectrum, which is mostly ok). The CACM has a really bad identity crisis between being for academics and being for practitioners. IMNSHO, it picks a middle ground that makes it of interest to no one.
I remember what put me over the edge to resigning my membership was this horrible article about the Yin and Yang of Computer Science. That was so bad that I had to check to make sure it wasn't an April Fool's joke. The last thing I need is my professional association publishing Newage (to rhyme with "sewage") twaddle. I mean, what's next, analyzing software by its Zodiac sign?
How about the Steele and Sussman "Lambda the Ultimate" MIT AI Lab tech reports. Very influential. Sadly, I don't know if anyone's put them on the web.
And, of course, there's the repository of Dijkstra's stuff....
Actually, in the early days of aviation, there was a lot of concern for stealing ideas and technology among the competitors. Just because there are only a few people in the game, doesn't mean it's not cut-throat, nor that players mightn't use industrial espionage.
On the other hand, my guess is that it's unlikely to be terrorists --- they'd need the groundstation, the prototype is unlikely to carry much of a payload, and why bother when you can get someone to strap a bomb to him (or her) self?
Inside job or industrial espionage sound like the most likely explanations. Or just some lunkheads (stealing the helo w/o the groundstation....). I suppose an extortion racket is also possible.
I think that if you took the time to look, you'd see that it's just a fantasy to say that the courts are more pro-business now than they were in the early 1900s. That's a time when there were essentially no consumer protections, and the courts were very reluctant to interfere in business. For example, in 1922 the Supreme Court found that laws regulating child labor were unconstitutional.
Yeesh, what is taught in High School history these days?
This seems out of line with other court rulings on Constitutional matters. Actually, the courts have repeatedly ruled that commercial speech is less constitutionally protected than political speech. That's why, for example, we can have truth in advertising laws. Now, why that doesn't apply here, I don't know. The only thing I can imagine is that the preference for non-profit commercial speech torpedoed the deal.
One thing that interests me is that most of the coverage I'd heard of the decision was that it was a technical one covering the fact that the no-call list was run by the FTC instead of the FCC. Not a Constitutional matter at all.
Actually, the United States (like other democracies) introduced salaries for legislative representatives precisely to avoid having the government be the exclusive possession of the upper classes. [This was, of course, well past the day of the founding dads.]
It was precisely in the old days you are talking about that Joe Average couldn't afford to serve in government.
How would removing the politician career path help the problem you're complaining about? Doing that would just restrict government service to those who don't need an income.
Of course, the costs of campaigns may end up doing that anyway...
Part of the reason that this happens is that the United States has an ideology that is essentially opposed to government-funded civilian research and development. Other than the DoD, the only large-scale government investments are for medicine and agriculture.
Yet it's very hard for corporations to track any benefits back to fundamental R&D work (and if you don't believe this, have a look at the recent collapse of virtually every large corporate R&D lab).
So, faut de mieux we call virtually all our R&D work "military." You can find this phenomenon elsewhere in the U.S. economy, too. Large airliner development is arguably not sustainable solely on corporate investment (Boeing barely managed to pull off the 777, and only by getting its suppliers to invest heavily). In Europe, the Airbus is directly subsidized by EU governments. In the U.S., Boeing is indirectly subsidized by large purchases of military aircraft.
Whether this perspective makes things worse or better, depends on how you look at it.
The khipus actually seem like that great a system, if I followed the article correctly. When the author compared the khipu with Sumerian cuneiform, it was an apples and oranges comparison.
The khipu seems to be a fixed-length message format capable of carrying a not-enormous amount of data.
On the other hand, the cuneiform symbols are symbols, that can be composed into arbitrary length messages, yielding a theoretically infinite number of messages.
The article really wasn't very clear about this. Can anyone clarify? If each khipu is an entire message, then they don't carry very much info at all. OTOH, if khipus can be composed, then they are potentially very powerful.
Even if the khipu had more different symbols than the latin alphabet, big deal. The latin alphabet is already enough to convey all that anyone needs. Having a bigger alphabet at best buys you compression in terms of surface area, but at the expense of complexity elsewhere in the communication system. I could add a few letters to English orthography (e.g., theta), and it might regularize the spelling a little, but it wouldn't make us all smarter, or able to write new books. Of course, in an ideographic scheme that's not true....
I'm not from UT, so I wrote my Senators as follows:
Dear Senator Foobar,
I wanted to bring your attention to Senator Hatch's remarks yesterday, in which he was reported to have said that he would like to allow corporations to destroy the computers of those suspected of trading copyrighted material ( http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Down loading-Music.html ).
I'm sure that the Senator was just lashing out and expressing his frustration, but this kind of espousal of vigilante justice is dreadfully inappropriate coming from a U.S. Senator. It's even worse coming from the chairman of the Judiciary committee.
Please express your disapproval of this kind of irresponsible talk, and encourage your colleagues to do so as well.
I thought a version without the remarks about the media, or the implied criticism of the judidial system ("decidedly un-level playing field") might be more successful....
Dear Senator Hatch,
I am writing in response to your comments today in support of allowing large corporations to destroy the personal computers, without any judicial oversight or review, or even the intervention of the executive branch of the local or federal government. I can only hope that these were off-the-cuff remarks prompted by frustration. Surely a respected legislator like you cannot really want to see the rule of law in the United States undermined by vigilante tactics like this.
As I said, I hope that these remarks were born of frustration, rather than reflecting your true position. I hope to see statement clarifying or correcting your stance in the near future.
If one would like to sue SCO about this, one could simply request the source codes and the contents of whatever source code control system there was available during the discovery phase of the legal process.
In a lawsuit like this you don't have to have the evidence in advance. You just need a good reason for a judge not to send you home.
One more serious problem might be to prove that you have standing (that you've personally been damaged by SCO's actions).
Another useful distinction, IMHO, is for whose benefit the typing is done.
This can be seen when you compare C++ (and, pretty much Java), on the one hand, with ML on the other.
C++ static typing is done for the benefit of the compiler. ML typing is done for the benefit of the programmer, specifically in order to help the programmer generate correct code. This is why the type language of ML is so rich.
I had this unpleasantly brought home to me when I was a C++ novice (I never became an expert --- I just gave up!:->) and tried to use the C++ type system to ensure that one of my programs was typed semantically correctly, pretty much trying to replicate bits of ML-style typing in C++. Wooo. Not a mistake I recommend to others. The language just simply wasn't up to it.
I suppose I see the point. Of course the big advantage of reducing all syntax to an s-expression (not really a lambda form -- a lambda is a special flavor of s-expression) is that you can write non-trivial macros. No other language has as rich a macro facility as Lisp (and its dialects).
XML has rediscovered the power of s-expressions. They just don't call them that, and for some reason seem to have confused the angle-bracket with the parenthesis.:-) Maybe it's so smileys work better...
I'm with you in thinking that learning new programming languages is educational. I just think it's most educational to do ones that really change the way you think about solving a problem.
I looked at this article, and I was disappointed by what a limited set of languages chromatic had examined. Where was Prolog? ML? Common Lisp? SNOBOL? Smalltalk? Dylan? All the languages in the article are in the class of "imperative languages with varying amounts of object-oriented gravy." If you're talking about how languages embody a philosophy, why stick to languages that pretty much embody the same philosophy, with some minor tail-fins and chrome as their differences?
Can someone who really dug into this explain what's new about this work?
I'm not saying that nothing is new --- just that all the links seem to point to stuff that's so vague, it could describe any work in Artificial Life. And the notion that the path to a global maximum leads through some steps down seems like no biggie, either --- it's well known that for any interesting search problem hill-climbing isn't enough.
So.... what's new? I'm sure there's something or these folks wouldn't have gotten an Nature paper.
They then waited two hours to be spotted by a search plane, and several hours more for the arrival of the first helicopter.
Anyone know why that was? I would have thought it would be relatively easy to find a spacecraft that had a working transmitter. Is there any reason they can't just, for example, consult a hand-held GPS and radio in their location for a pickup? Seems odd that they have to be spotted by a search plane.
Which is why I will never trust the Strategic Defence Initiative - the star wars project. It only takes one line of mistyped code in what will always be a beta release.
OK, I think the SDI is goofy, too, but what you've said makes no sense --- unless you never get on an airplane, that is. What the heck do you think your flight management system and autopilot run on, if not software? You think the pilot is using a sextant up there?
Innocent until proved guilty. This offer void in China, the former Iraq, and now the once-great United States. Fucking great.
No, that's bunk.
It sounds like fun to talk like Tom aine about this but, in fact, Hawash is innocent until proven guilty.
Furthermore, if you read the judge's papers and the affidavit, the judge said that the material witness test relies on concern for flight. At the time of the first hearing, the information about that was closed and only the judge saw it. But now you can read the FBI agent's affidavit and, if you ask me, the concern for flight in Hawash's case was not unreasonable.
I don't want to be a pollyanna and say that there are no problems with erosion of civil liberties nowadays. But the Hawash case is not a good example of this.
BTW, for what it's worth, so far Bush and company (even Ashcroft) have a better wartime track record than Lincoln or (more recently) FDR.
The material witness statute is intended to cover people important to an investigation who represent a substantial flight risk.
If you have read the affidavit (I did), you will see that Hawash put all his goods and possessions in the hands of his wife and prepared for her a power of attorney. This certainly suggests that he was more of a risk of flight than an ordinary married man with children. Furthermore, the material in the affidavit discusses a trip to China, allegedly with anti-U.S. co-conspiritors. Again, reason for concern about flight.
Though Hawash was held for a while as a material witness, he has now been charged, as required by the law. I have a somewhat icky feeling about the material witness laws, but as far as I can tell, this is a case where the system worked. The government had to present evidence to indict him, and is doing so. Hawash will have his day in court, which is what he's entitled to.
You're absolutely right. I read your original note as making a stronger statement. Certainly, if you drive your Kia on a racetrack, you're violating the terms of its implied warranty (and almost certainly the terms of its explicit warranty!), since that's not the environment in which it's expected to be used.
I think there's been a lot of heat and not much light generated in this discussion by people who don't understand the different expectations that come from different uses. Nobody should expect that Word will never crash, but you have a lot higher expectations about flight-control software.
OTOH, it seems to me that even office software manufacturers shouldn't be able to get away with the current shrink-wrap licenses that disavow all functionality. I think we're entitled to some implied warranty, even for office software.
It's like cars - just because your transmission goes out doesn't mean you get to sue the manufacturer. You get your transmission fixed if you've purchased a car with warranty terms that allow it to be fixed, and otherwise you pay for it yourself.
Well, no, that's not true. There are certain warranties the manufacturer is obligated to apply, and there's an implied warranty of merchantability (I'm not sure I got the jargon right there.
If your transmission goes out and your car gets totalled, you will be able to sue the manufacturer, and will probably win, if you can show it was poorly manufactured. In fact, if you can show negligence (e.g., you find those emails where someone said the transmission was garbage and someone else said "oh, what the heck, let's sell it anyway, gotta make our quarterlies."), you will be able to recover punitive damages, too.
Slashdot Mirror
I quit ACM because the only benefit it offered me was the Communications of the ACM. I'm sorry to say it, but the CACM is mostly terrible (as opposed to IEEE Spectrum, which is mostly ok). The CACM has a really bad identity crisis between being for academics and being for practitioners. IMNSHO, it picks a middle ground that makes it of interest to no one.
I remember what put me over the edge to resigning my membership was this horrible article about the Yin and Yang of Computer Science. That was so bad that I had to check to make sure it wasn't an April Fool's joke. The last thing I need is my professional association publishing Newage (to rhyme with "sewage") twaddle. I mean, what's next, analyzing software by its Zodiac sign?
Thanks to the excellent voodo1man! Some citations:
How about the Steele and Sussman "Lambda the Ultimate" MIT AI Lab tech reports. Very influential. Sadly, I don't know if anyone's put them on the web. And, of course, there's the repository of Dijkstra's stuff....
Actually, in the early days of aviation, there was a lot of concern for stealing ideas and technology among the competitors. Just because there are only a few people in the game, doesn't mean it's not cut-throat, nor that players mightn't use industrial espionage.
On the other hand, my guess is that it's unlikely to be terrorists --- they'd need the groundstation, the prototype is unlikely to carry much of a payload, and why bother when you can get someone to strap a bomb to him (or her) self?
Inside job or industrial espionage sound like the most likely explanations. Or just some lunkheads (stealing the helo w/o the groundstation....). I suppose an extortion racket is also possible.
I think that if you took the time to look, you'd see that it's just a fantasy to say that the courts are more pro-business now than they were in the early 1900s. That's a time when there were essentially no consumer protections, and the courts were very reluctant to interfere in business. For example, in 1922 the Supreme Court found that laws regulating child labor were unconstitutional.
Yeesh, what is taught in High School history these days?
This seems out of line with other court rulings on Constitutional matters. Actually, the courts have repeatedly ruled that commercial speech is less constitutionally protected than political speech. That's why, for example, we can have truth in advertising laws. Now, why that doesn't apply here, I don't know. The only thing I can imagine is that the preference for non-profit commercial speech torpedoed the deal.
One thing that interests me is that most of the coverage I'd heard of the decision was that it was a technical one covering the fact that the no-call list was run by the FTC instead of the FCC. Not a Constitutional matter at all.
Actually, the United States (like other democracies) introduced salaries for legislative representatives precisely to avoid having the government be the exclusive possession of the upper classes. [This was, of course, well past the day of the founding dads.]
It was precisely in the old days you are talking about that Joe Average couldn't afford to serve in government.
How would removing the politician career path help the problem you're complaining about? Doing that would just restrict government service to those who don't need an income.
Of course, the costs of campaigns may end up doing that anyway...
Part of the reason that this happens is that the United States has an ideology that is essentially opposed to government-funded civilian research and development. Other than the DoD, the only large-scale government investments are for medicine and agriculture.
Yet it's very hard for corporations to track any benefits back to fundamental R&D work (and if you don't believe this, have a look at the recent collapse of virtually every large corporate R&D lab).
So, faut de mieux we call virtually all our R&D work "military." You can find this phenomenon elsewhere in the U.S. economy, too. Large airliner development is arguably not sustainable solely on corporate investment (Boeing barely managed to pull off the 777, and only by getting its suppliers to invest heavily). In Europe, the Airbus is directly subsidized by EU governments. In the U.S., Boeing is indirectly subsidized by large purchases of military aircraft.
Whether this perspective makes things worse or better, depends on how you look at it.
Yeah. I send money to public radio, too. I'm just a pinko.
The khipus actually seem like that great a system, if I followed the article correctly. When the author compared the khipu with Sumerian cuneiform, it was an apples and oranges comparison.
The khipu seems to be a fixed-length message format capable of carrying a not-enormous amount of data.
On the other hand, the cuneiform symbols are symbols, that can be composed into arbitrary length messages, yielding a theoretically infinite number of messages.
The article really wasn't very clear about this. Can anyone clarify? If each khipu is an entire message, then they don't carry very much info at all. OTOH, if khipus can be composed, then they are potentially very powerful.
Even if the khipu had more different symbols than the latin alphabet, big deal. The latin alphabet is already enough to convey all that anyone needs. Having a bigger alphabet at best buys you compression in terms of surface area, but at the expense of complexity elsewhere in the communication system. I could add a few letters to English orthography (e.g., theta), and it might regularize the spelling a little, but it wouldn't make us all smarter, or able to write new books. Of course, in an ideographic scheme that's not true....
I'm not from UT, so I wrote my Senators as follows:
n loading-Music.html ).
Dear Senator Foobar,
I wanted to bring your attention to Senator Hatch's remarks yesterday, in which he was reported to have said that he would like to allow corporations to destroy the computers of those suspected of trading copyrighted material ( http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Dow
I'm sure that the Senator was just lashing out and expressing his frustration, but this kind of espousal of vigilante justice is dreadfully inappropriate coming from a U.S. Senator. It's even worse coming from the chairman of the Judiciary committee.
Please express your disapproval of this kind of irresponsible talk, and encourage your colleagues to do so as well.
Respectfully yours,
I thought a version without the remarks about the media, or the implied criticism of the judidial system ("decidedly un-level playing field") might be more successful....
Dear Senator Hatch,
I am writing in response to your comments today in support of allowing large corporations to destroy the personal computers, without any judicial oversight or review, or even the intervention of the executive branch of the local or federal government. I can only hope that these were off-the-cuff remarks prompted by frustration. Surely a respected legislator like you cannot really want to see the rule of law in the United States undermined by vigilante tactics like this.
As I said, I hope that these remarks were born of frustration, rather than reflecting your true position. I hope to see statement clarifying or correcting your stance in the near future.
Thank you for your time.
Yours respectfully,
If one would like to sue SCO about this, one could simply request the source codes and the contents of whatever source code control system there was available during the discovery phase of the legal process. In a lawsuit like this you don't have to have the evidence in advance. You just need a good reason for a judge not to send you home. One more serious problem might be to prove that you have standing (that you've personally been damaged by SCO's actions).
Another useful distinction, IMHO, is for whose benefit the typing is done.
This can be seen when you compare C++ (and, pretty much Java), on the one hand, with ML on the other.
C++ static typing is done for the benefit of the compiler. ML typing is done for the benefit of the programmer, specifically in order to help the programmer generate correct code. This is why the type language of ML is so rich.
I had this unpleasantly brought home to me when I was a C++ novice (I never became an expert --- I just gave up! :->) and tried to use the C++ type system to ensure that one of my programs was typed semantically correctly, pretty much trying to replicate bits of ML-style typing in C++. Wooo. Not a mistake I recommend to others. The language just simply wasn't up to it.
OK, Haskell. And Eiffel.
Reminds me of the old joke: "And to my nephew Irving, who always wanted to be mentioned in my will: 'hello, Irving.'"
I suppose I see the point. Of course the big advantage of reducing all syntax to an s-expression (not really a lambda form -- a lambda is a special flavor of s-expression) is that you can write non-trivial macros. No other language has as rich a macro facility as Lisp (and its dialects).
XML has rediscovered the power of s-expressions. They just don't call them that, and for some reason seem to have confused the angle-bracket with the parenthesis. :-) Maybe it's so smileys work better...
I'm with you in thinking that learning new programming languages is educational. I just think it's most educational to do ones that really change the way you think about solving a problem.
I looked at this article, and I was disappointed by what a limited set of languages chromatic had examined. Where was Prolog? ML? Common Lisp? SNOBOL? Smalltalk? Dylan? All the languages in the article are in the class of "imperative languages with varying amounts of object-oriented gravy." If you're talking about how languages embody a philosophy, why stick to languages that pretty much embody the same philosophy, with some minor tail-fins and chrome as their differences?
[I suppose that's some flame bait....]
Can someone who really dug into this explain what's new about this work?
I'm not saying that nothing is new --- just that all the links seem to point to stuff that's so vague, it could describe any work in Artificial Life. And the notion that the path to a global maximum leads through some steps down seems like no biggie, either --- it's well known that for any interesting search problem hill-climbing isn't enough.
So.... what's new? I'm sure there's something or these folks wouldn't have gotten an Nature paper.
In the MSNBC story they say:
Anyone know why that was? I would have thought it would be relatively easy to find a spacecraft that had a working transmitter. Is there any reason they can't just, for example, consult a hand-held GPS and radio in their location for a pickup? Seems odd that they have to be spotted by a search plane.
OK, I think the SDI is goofy, too, but what you've said makes no sense --- unless you never get on an airplane, that is. What the heck do you think your flight management system and autopilot run on, if not software? You think the pilot is using a sextant up there?
...can they get him to meet them for NIL instead?
No, that's bunk.
It sounds like fun to talk like Tom aine about this but, in fact, Hawash is innocent until proven guilty.
Furthermore, if you read the judge's papers and the affidavit, the judge said that the material witness test relies on concern for flight. At the time of the first hearing, the information about that was closed and only the judge saw it. But now you can read the FBI agent's affidavit and, if you ask me, the concern for flight in Hawash's case was not unreasonable.
I don't want to be a pollyanna and say that there are no problems with erosion of civil liberties nowadays. But the Hawash case is not a good example of this.
BTW, for what it's worth, so far Bush and company (even Ashcroft) have a better wartime track record than Lincoln or (more recently) FDR.
The material witness statute is intended to cover people important to an investigation who represent a substantial flight risk. If you have read the affidavit (I did), you will see that Hawash put all his goods and possessions in the hands of his wife and prepared for her a power of attorney. This certainly suggests that he was more of a risk of flight than an ordinary married man with children. Furthermore, the material in the affidavit discusses a trip to China, allegedly with anti-U.S. co-conspiritors. Again, reason for concern about flight.
Though Hawash was held for a while as a material witness, he has now been charged, as required by the law. I have a somewhat icky feeling about the material witness laws, but as far as I can tell, this is a case where the system worked. The government had to present evidence to indict him, and is doing so. Hawash will have his day in court, which is what he's entitled to.
You're absolutely right. I read your original note as making a stronger statement. Certainly, if you drive your Kia on a racetrack, you're violating the terms of its implied warranty (and almost certainly the terms of its explicit warranty!), since that's not the environment in which it's expected to be used.
I think there's been a lot of heat and not much light generated in this discussion by people who don't understand the different expectations that come from different uses. Nobody should expect that Word will never crash, but you have a lot higher expectations about flight-control software.
OTOH, it seems to me that even office software manufacturers shouldn't be able to get away with the current shrink-wrap licenses that disavow all functionality. I think we're entitled to some implied warranty, even for office software.
Well, no, that's not true. There are certain warranties the manufacturer is obligated to apply, and there's an implied warranty of merchantability (I'm not sure I got the jargon right there.
If your transmission goes out and your car gets totalled, you will be able to sue the manufacturer, and will probably win, if you can show it was poorly manufactured. In fact, if you can show negligence (e.g., you find those emails where someone said the transmission was garbage and someone else said "oh, what the heck, let's sell it anyway, gotta make our quarterlies."), you will be able to recover punitive damages, too.
Caveat emptor is not the law of the land.