The difference is that communists want to achieve their goal with a revolution whereas socialists believe in a more graduate change.
That's simply not true. Just take the Socialist Worker's Party or the Socialist Party, both in Britain. Both "revolutionary", although the first believes in violence, the latter in getting elected.
Unfortunately, both words have become extremely corrupted and debased this century by Cuba, the Soviet Union and China, who were and are not truly socialist (my definition of socialism includes participatory democracy). Even more unfortunately, there isn't a better word for the political view that I support than socialism.
This is LGPLed, not GPLed. They can not only STUDY the code to their heart's content, they can actually USE it, modified or unmodified, in proprietary apps if they follow the conditions.
Re:Nanomedicine and nanotechnology can be safe
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Nanomedicine
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· Score: 1
The Extropy Institute's Mailing List Archives, for example, contains recent discussions about encouraging the availability of "almost anything" manufacturing boxes (similar to Star Trek "replicators"), while discouraging the availability of "everything" boxes.
To quote Eliezer S. Yudkowsky from that very same mailing list:
What you're talking about is not analogous to the Thompson hack; what you're talking about is more like a compiler that would recognize *any* compiler, even a compiler written for Pascal instead of C++, and which would furthermore refuse to compile anything that could be used as a spreadsheet. I don't believe it can be done, even with limited AI.
There is a high probability that the European Court of Human Rights will kill this (or at least some of the proposals) in due course, but that will take maybe 5 years.
That's right, but remember, it doesn't necessarily need to go right up to the ECHR - we will be able to challenge it in ordinary British courts with the passing of the Human Rights Act.
But I agree, that's no reason for complacency. I just sent off a fax to my MP. Wish I could do more. I truly believe the Blair government will use these powers to suppress political dissent if this goes through. STAND paints the reversal of the burden of proof as "poorly thought out", but it seems too obvious to be a mistake to me. It must be deliberate. The wider definition of "terrorism" fits right into this. Now people who pull up GM crops are "terrorists"!
Or, forget tearing your hair out with incompatibilities. And just write in pure Java. It's simple really!
Of course, then you just have to tell people not to use the Microsoft JVM and compiler because it's incompatible (RMI not properly supported, compiler/VM bugs mean JAXP won't run, etc. etc.) - but that's not hard to comply with, because the JDK is a free download.
Probability of getting flamed for this post by clueless Java-haters: 0.9
Um, no, I don't think so. You are wearing rose-tinted glasses my friend.
Unless you're knee-deep in assembly macros, in which case that's strictly speaking at a higher-level than assembly anyway.
Re:malloc is pretty complicated to put in hardware
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The New Garbage Man
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· Score: 1
Any hardware-based malloc shouldn't restrict your algorithm. You always have the option to malloc in chunks and then sub-malloc it the way you want it, using your own algorithm (sorry if I'm not using the correct terminology here). That's what a lot of languages/environments have done, historically. And if the hardware version turns out to be a pile of crap, you can just not use it at all. Obvious really when you think about it, isn't it?
And anyway, how hard can malloc and free be? I mean, sure, there's questions of optimising for speed and lack of fragmentation, etc., but I hardly think it can be that complicated.
Garbage collection, on the other hand (which is what they're actually talking about) is slightly more mind-bending - especially when you get into incremental GC. Ouch - my head hurts.
But then, I don't know anything about memory management, so I could be wrong.
Re:Unix programmers need to clean up after themsel
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The New Garbage Man
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· Score: 1
What's more, PC Plus magazine in the UK reported that Windows 2000 now needs a ridiculous amount of memory allocation just to start up Oracle, let alone to do anything useful with it. Sounds like a serious bug to me.
IANAL, but I am almost certain that derivative works are held in joint copyright between all the contributors, unless the modification is below the level of minimum content necessary for copyright protection (a few lines), or unless one person specifically assigns their copyright ownership onto the other. See my earlier post above.
Totally false. The copyright holder can do anything with their code includeing relicensing.
That's misleading. Once other people make non-trivial modifications, that modification code is then licensed by them (unless they specifically assigned all rights to you, which they probably wouldn't have), and so in order to relicense the improved product, you need to get every single contributor's permission to relicense it. Very risky. That's why I think dual-licensing is a complete legal mess, in most cases.
Personally, I avoid the GPL like the plague, because although if I ever needed or wanted to write proprietary software I would be able to use my own code, I wouldn't probably be able to use other people's improvements to my code. It seems to me that in the real world where proprietary software is often neccessary to earn a living, the GPL is an annoying barrier to reusability. So I stick with the Mozilla Public License, which has no such virus-like problems.
I read somewhere, I think slashdot actually, that the "lack of minorities on the web" is based on old statistics, and no longer true as of the last year or so. Today, in fact, Hispanics are actually overrepresented on the net.
I find that very hard to believe - if we're talking about the American population. That was what I meant. Because, obviously, people from other countries are less likely to fly around the world to a protest in Seattle, especially if they are poor. So the proportion of American Hispanics/Blacks/whatever would be the key statistics here.
Mark that up as insightful! Voting certainly isn't always the best way of deciding issues, because it doesn't properly take account of the way some decisions affect some people more than others.
I can't believe the AFA actually used this "argument":
For Gary Glenn, president of the family association's state chapter, the issue is simple. "Our only concern is providing maximum protection for children," he says, citing a recent case in Muskegon, Mich., where a girl was raped at a library with full Internet access.
The library's director, in a letter to the editor of Holland's newspaper, denied any connection, saying her "staff is positive that the accused rapist did not use the Internet here."
But Glenn believes libraries with unfiltered access create an environment that draws in sex predators. The association wants to protect children not only from porn on the Net, he says, but also "from having to share a library with adults who are accessing the Internet."
...while you're out and about making a fuss over petty, symbolic issues
Um, excuse me, this was not a petty issue. Although it was very symbolic, and sends out a message that even one of the most conservative of constituencies isn't willing to tolerate this kind of control on access to information.
Here's just one reason why it's important, even if you are very pessimistic about representative democracy (as I am): One of the notable things about the demonstrations in Seattle was that ethnic minorities were under-represented among the demonstrators. It's not entirely clear why that was, but some reasons that have been suggested are:
Many ethnic minority people (as well as white people) didn't understand what the WTO protests were going to be about, or how it would affect them - or they saw more pressing issues to organize around.
Some "progressive" groups display either implicit or explicit psychological barriers to the entry of ethnic minorities (sometimes this can be as simple as the fact that there are few non-white faces in the group, discouraging non-white people from joining.)
The internet - particularly low-tech stuff like email lists - was a big help in organising the Seattle protests, even without there being any kind of overall controlling organization. (In fact, this latter factor probably swelled the numbers, as no-one group felt unable to stand behind a "co-ordinating" group). But many ethnic minority people and groups simply don't have very much, or any, access to the Internet. So again, they didn't get to know how dangerous and relevant the WTO really is.
Given the large disparities in average wealth, and Internet penetration, between white America and other ethnic groups, this is not entirely surprising. Internet access through libraries is a small, though significant, part of access to alternative points of view from the stultifying mainstream media, and hence to real political activity - and of course, battles fought over libraries will affect the current and future debates on school, college and indeed corporate and home-based censorware.
The Internet, particularly with sites like ZNet and Free Speech Internet Television, is a brilliant place to enlighten yourself. I don't call restricting access to the Internet, especially when these restrictions are blatantly designed to censor alternative political views, in any way a "side issue".
And yes, it is a "fight", in a very real sense - not curious terminology at all - it is a psychological battle. As the elites of this world have known for centuries, winning the psychological battles are usually even more important than the physical ones. (Cruise missiles, for instance, are very useful at psychological distancing - not even the soldiers deploying them, let alone the public, have to see the bloodied bodies of their victims any more - a major PR aid.) Behind the rhetoric, if you look at the business pages, the elite and their spokespeople can be very candid sometimes amongst themselves about the very real Class War being waged by the rich elite against working people around the world (though they don't use those words, of course). They know it's war - we should recognise that too.
Well, the Open Directory Project tends to be more responsive than clapped-out old Yahoo, probably because it has 20,000 volunteer editors to maintain it. It currently holds 1.5 million sites, and it is used on Altavista, ATT-Worldnet, Lycos, Hotbot, Netscape Netcenter, AOL Search, and about 100 other websites, that we know of, under an Open Content license. See for yourself if you don't believe me.
Before a language may be conceived, we have to understand things like Turing Completeness, "regular languages", context/context free, lexicons, protocol, computational complexity, space/time constraints, discrete computation theory, etc.What???????? This must be a troll, surely? Before a language may be conceived? That's a bit like saying "Before a child can understand English, you have to teach them grammar" - and the problems with that hypothesis are all too obvious.
Well, anyway, I learnt to program without the benefit of theory. Sure, I did junky spaghetti code at first (what do you expect with a language like Mallard BASIC whose designers thought that GOSUB was the epitome of structured programming!;) but by now I've matured and I can engineer reasonably efficient object-oriented solutions. And all around me I see other CS students fed theory (it's quite a heavily theoretical course, unlike many others in the UK) which they have great difficultly understanding, and thus they write large programs consisting of one main method (!!!) with a great deal of duplication.
The trouble is, theory by itself doesn't help - unless you've got a genius on your hands, in which case it probably doesn't matter how you teach them. People aren't empty vessels that you can just pour facts and theories into - education is an art too, and IMHO a *much* harder art to do well than programming.
Slashdot Mirror
Where did you get that idea from? Psi phenomena are far more well-evidenced than evolution.
No, I'm not joking.
You haven't mentioned the word "money". How do the artists get paid? Who by?
Yeah, it's a great statistical system, sure. But who pays, and how are they prevented from avoiding paying?
That's simply not true. Just take the Socialist Worker's Party or the Socialist Party, both in Britain. Both "revolutionary", although the first believes in violence, the latter in getting elected.
Unfortunately, both words have become extremely corrupted and debased this century by Cuba, the Soviet Union and China, who were and are not truly socialist (my definition of socialism includes participatory democracy). Even more unfortunately, there isn't a better word for the political view that I support than socialism.
To quote Eliezer S. Yudkowsky from that very same mailing list:
What you're talking about is not analogous to the Thompson hack; what you're talking about is more like a compiler that would recognize *any* compiler, even a compiler written for Pascal instead of C++, and which would furthermore refuse to compile anything that could be used as a spreadsheet. I don't believe it can be done, even with limited AI.
That's right, but remember, it doesn't necessarily need to go right up to the ECHR - we will be able to challenge it in ordinary British courts with the passing of the Human Rights Act.
But I agree, that's no reason for complacency. I just sent off a fax to my MP. Wish I could do more. I truly believe the Blair government will use these powers to suppress political dissent if this goes through. STAND paints the reversal of the burden of proof as "poorly thought out", but it seems too obvious to be a mistake to me. It must be deliberate. The wider definition of "terrorism" fits right into this. Now people who pull up GM crops are "terrorists"!
Of course, then you just have to tell people not to use the Microsoft JVM and compiler because it's incompatible (RMI not properly supported, compiler/VM bugs mean JAXP won't run, etc. etc.) - but that's not hard to comply with, because the JDK is a free download.
Probability of getting flamed for this post by clueless Java-haters: 0.9
The joke is, physicists don't really know for sure what constitutes a "measurement".
Um, no, I don't think so. You are wearing rose-tinted glasses my friend.
Unless you're knee-deep in assembly macros, in which case that's strictly speaking at a higher-level than assembly anyway.
And anyway, how hard can malloc and free be? I mean, sure, there's questions of optimising for speed and lack of fragmentation, etc., but I hardly think it can be that complicated.
Garbage collection, on the other hand (which is what they're actually talking about) is slightly more mind-bending - especially when you get into incremental GC. Ouch - my head hurts.
But then, I don't know anything about memory management, so I could be wrong.
That's misleading. Once other people make non-trivial modifications, that modification code is then licensed by them (unless they specifically assigned all rights to you, which they probably wouldn't have), and so in order to relicense the improved product, you need to get every single contributor's permission to relicense it. Very risky. That's why I think dual-licensing is a complete legal mess, in most cases.
Personally, I avoid the GPL like the plague, because although if I ever needed or wanted to write proprietary software I would be able to use my own code, I wouldn't probably be able to use other people's improvements to my code. It seems to me that in the real world where proprietary software is often neccessary to earn a living, the GPL is an annoying barrier to reusability. So I stick with the Mozilla Public License, which has no such virus-like problems.
I find that very hard to believe - if we're talking about the American population. That was what I meant. Because, obviously, people from other countries are less likely to fly around the world to a protest in Seattle, especially if they are poor. So the proportion of American Hispanics/Blacks/whatever would be the key statistics here.
For Gary Glenn, president of the family association's state chapter, the issue is simple. "Our only concern is providing maximum protection for children," he says, citing a recent case in Muskegon, Mich., where a girl was raped at a library with full Internet access.
The library's director, in a letter to the editor of Holland's newspaper, denied any connection, saying her "staff is positive that the accused rapist did not use the Internet here."
But Glenn believes libraries with unfiltered access create an environment that draws in sex predators. The association wants to protect children not only from porn on the Net, he says, but also "from having to share a library with adults who are accessing the Internet."
I think this extract just speaks for itself.
Um, excuse me, this was not a petty issue. Although it was very symbolic, and sends out a message that even one of the most conservative of constituencies isn't willing to tolerate this kind of control on access to information.
Here's just one reason why it's important, even if you are very pessimistic about representative democracy (as I am): One of the notable things about the demonstrations in Seattle was that ethnic minorities were under-represented among the demonstrators. It's not entirely clear why that was, but some reasons that have been suggested are:
- Many ethnic minority people (as well as white people) didn't understand what the WTO protests were going to be about, or how it would affect them - or they saw more pressing issues to organize around.
- Some "progressive" groups display either implicit or explicit psychological barriers to the entry of ethnic minorities (sometimes this can be as simple as the fact that there are few non-white faces in the group, discouraging non-white people from joining.)
- The internet - particularly low-tech stuff like email lists - was a big help in organising the Seattle protests, even without there being any kind of overall controlling organization. (In fact, this latter factor probably swelled the numbers, as no-one group felt unable to stand behind a "co-ordinating" group). But many ethnic minority people and groups simply don't have very much, or any, access to the Internet. So again, they didn't get to know how dangerous and relevant the WTO really is.
Given the large disparities in average wealth, and Internet penetration, between white America and other ethnic groups, this is not entirely surprising. Internet access through libraries is a small, though significant, part of access to alternative points of view from the stultifying mainstream media, and hence to real political activity - and of course, battles fought over libraries will affect the current and future debates on school, college and indeed corporate and home-based censorware.The Internet, particularly with sites like ZNet and Free Speech Internet Television, is a brilliant place to enlighten yourself. I don't call restricting access to the Internet, especially when these restrictions are blatantly designed to censor alternative political views, in any way a "side issue".
And yes, it is a "fight", in a very real sense - not curious terminology at all - it is a psychological battle. As the elites of this world have known for centuries, winning the psychological battles are usually even more important than the physical ones. (Cruise missiles, for instance, are very useful at psychological distancing - not even the soldiers deploying them, let alone the public, have to see the bloodied bodies of their victims any more - a major PR aid.) Behind the rhetoric, if you look at the business pages, the elite and their spokespeople can be very candid sometimes amongst themselves about the very real Class War being waged by the rich elite against working people around the world (though they don't use those words, of course). They know it's war - we should recognise that too.
Disclaimer: I am one of those 20,000 editors.
Well, anyway, I learnt to program without the benefit of theory. Sure, I did junky spaghetti code at first (what do you expect with a language like Mallard BASIC whose designers thought that GOSUB was the epitome of structured programming! ;) but by now I've matured and I can engineer reasonably efficient object-oriented solutions. And all around me I see other CS students fed theory (it's quite a heavily theoretical course, unlike many others in the UK) which they have great difficultly understanding, and thus they write large programs consisting of one main method (!!!) with a great deal of duplication.
The trouble is, theory by itself doesn't help - unless you've got a genius on your hands, in which case it probably doesn't matter how you teach them. People aren't empty vessels that you can just pour facts and theories into - education is an art too, and IMHO a *much* harder art to do well than programming.
Um, no. It's being used by Fortune 500 companies for serious business applications.