The monkeys went into the water and noticed it was salty, so started eating stuff with salt. The humans noticed that penicillin killed bacteria by accident, and started eating penicillin.
Intelligence is coming up with methods it has never seen used before and knowing in advance whether or not they are likely to work.
Then not many humans are intelligent. Most ideas that come up fail, whether they be new mousetraps, new medical drugs or whatever. As Edison said, invention is 99% presperation.
Consider Hellen Keller or feral children. They act as beasts until taught to communicate, then they suddenly jump into society with little splash.
But it's hard to see how a complex culture could develop without speech. Sign Language.
You can't tell your daughter about the sky god while digging for roots using sign language, nor can you yell over distances with sign language, or talk to someone while you have a spear in your hand. Hands are excellent manipulators; it seems very unlikely that a primitive culture would develop using sign language, as the cost of losing the hands is more than the immediate value of speech.
I like how you depend on removing one line from the whole argument.
What argument?
Johnson & Johnson has lost that bit of their trademark... Okay let me say this again because you guys don't seem to be reading it... They haven't lost the right to exclusively market their product in their market... They've lost the right to sue someone trying to dilute their trademark.
is not an argument; it's a restatement of the facts as you see them, combined with attacks on your audience. Yes, we are reading it; no, we aren't believing it just on your say-so.
Oh wait, no they aren't anymore... Now kids are stuck on band-aid BRAND...
I wonder why they changed the jingle... hmmm...
Because trademarks are supposed to be used as adjectives; legally, you're much safer calling them band-aid brand bandages instead of band-aids. This is a sign that they are defending their trademark, not that they lost it.
'Godzilla' is a song by Blue Oeyster Cult that is a good twenty-plus year old.
Yes, and I understand that Blue Oyster Cult didn't see very much money from it, because of all the licensing fees they paid for the privlige of using the trademark.
when russia has war with us, people die, thus we die.
And if Russia got nuclear weapons first, well, Stalin was not the sanest, most pacifistic person that ever lived. We die, they die, poor suckers attached to neither side die. It's honestly hard to see a a scenerio where any superpower comes up with nukes and it comes up much better than it did in real life.
Any discovery which you dont believe humanity can handle, dont reveal it.
It's really, honestly, amazing what humanity has handeled. If you're first to reveal it, you'll hopefully get at least soundbytes to guide the world, instead of letting Bob The Psycho invent it two weeks later.
I'm sure the people who discovered nuclear technology are sorry now, considering how it was used.
Yes, I'm sure they would have prefered for Russia or China to discover it. Instead of having two bombs killing people, we may have used it to its full extent, killing millions upon millions.
a] The fraction of population that actually understands what Nintendo is trying to do
I think "you're going to have to plug your nintendo into the wall, so it can phone home and check up on you" is something that Joe User can understand and won't like.
Of course we might come up with some biochemical hacks in the meantime to stretch things out, but I'm not holding my breath...
Why? Humans could also evolve a stronger response to bacteria based on antibiotics. But humans took a short cut, instead of waiting for evolution to design it. Ageing is certainly more complex, but especially after we can tweak the genes, it should be a similar matter to shortcut evolution.
There's also no proof that humans will ever live much beyond 75 years old.
Besides the people living into their hundreds?
That could be a very solid barrier that no amount of gene therapy and wishful pseudoreligious pride in technology can repair.
On the other hand, there's decent evidence that evolution doesn't drive most creatures to have long lifespans. Gorillas live to about 35; chimps can reach their late 50s - I think it safe to assume that our most recent common ancestor lived at most into its 50s. Considering that evolution added 40% to 100% to the max age in a few million years, and with life expectancies in the 30s for primitive man, there's no reason to believe that it was biochemical cutoff instead of minimal effect on natural selection that stopped the increase in max age.
U.S. laws protect women's rights to a degree, but there's still no equal rights amendment.
Can you name another country that has an equal rights amendment?
- separation of church and state
On paper anyway.
And in fact. Whatever fine details of the issue are argued out, the fact is that there is no state church (unlike, for example, England), religion is not taught in schools (except in small backwater towns) (unlike, for example, Germany) and religion cannot be a factor in many things (and usually isn't.)
- education of the masses
The why do American youth consistently score so very low compared to youth in other countries?
If you're comparing the US high schools to the German gymnasium (which is what I understand has been done), then of course US students will score low, as high schools are for all, and the gymnasium is only for the brightest. A fair comparison of all German students with American high school students would reveal that American youth do better on SAT-type material - of course, because the majority of German students go to vocational-type schools.
In other words, the US tries to educate the masses in a liberal-arts style; if you compare it to other countries that don't do that, your results, if meaningful, will make for lousy soundbytes. Easier just to slap a number on it and not think about the meaning.
programming a computer to play until it reaches a point where the number of moves left in the game are finite, and the computer has a database of moves that guarantee wins from this position is not artificial intelligence- it's loading the deck.
Have you ever looked at chess books? Many of them have a little section where if you have two knights and a king, and he has one knight and a king, then here's how to win the game. That's the same thing.
Looking at ADA is painful. It looks like a language developed by a very large committee that wanted a language to do everything well. It acheives this, at the cost of being next to impossible to learn.
What do you think of C++, then? Almost every feature maps one to one between C++ and Ada, except for threading, which Ada has and C++ doesn't, and various knobs and dials on templates and object orientation (template specialization, multiple inheritance) which C++ has and Ada doesn't. Furthermore, Ada doesn't have redundant funtions, like struct and class, or multiple ways to cast a value.
Ada's not dead. There is considerable amount of embedded programming done in it, and some hobbist interest. Personally, I got tired of programming in a language where the first time I ran any program, its output consisted soley of "Segmentation fault". Most those programs, written in Ada, wouldn't pass the compiler; the other half would at least give me an exception with a line number for the problem.
I never ever claimed using floating point was the best idea, merely that it wasn't an inherently bad idea.
But it is an inherently bad idea. You're better off using strings, for crying out loud. You don't need the sin, sqrt, 1E-100 stuff that floating point offers you. You do need exactness to the cent, no matter how large the numbers are - something floating point doesn't offer you.
Depending on the processor and library, there can be distinct advantages to using floating point, like overflow and underflow exceptions, support for infinities and not-a-number values, and so on.
Which are worthless. You don't want infinity or not-a-number - you want it to raise an exception where you screwed up, which integer types in better languages do. You don't want an underflow exception - you want it silently round to zero. And you can get overflow exceptions on integers just as easy as on floats.
You can most certainly keep all floting point noise below your precision, even when using IEEE floating point numbers.
Maybe. But if you're doing a job that by law _must_ be done to a certain precision, it's wiser to use tools that are designed to that precision, rather than one's that were designed to lose that precision for other concerns. If you use integers or BCD, that's one less source of error you have to worry about.
I would think it's not worth the trouble of using a nonstandard language.
It's easy to argue that in this field, C is the nonstandard language.
can't you still code 90% in C and the rest in assembler
Why does a engineer want to learn assembly? Part of the advantage of Fortran is that my college professor who was in grad school when it first came out can still use it. Even 386 assembly is only 15 years old, and really ought to be rewritten for the most recent chips to be fast. Worse, it does you no good when you need to move the code to the Alphas or the Crays in your department.
SNOBOL was for strings, and [...]. These languages, although having expanded their paradigms, are still the best ones for doing those types of tasks.
Is SNOBOL still the best? Ralph Griswold (its creator) no longer thinks so; he created Icon (sort of an advanced SNOBOL with Pascal/C'ish syntax) as a replacement.
ADA95 has some structures that support most of the type of capabilities that you want in OO, without actually having an OO environment. It is not OO in the same way smalltalk or Java or others are.
Ada95 is not OO in the same way that smalltalk and Java are, but it is OO in the same way that C++. It supports inheritance and dynamic dispatch, the two key elements of OO IIRC. (Ada95 is the first internationally standardized OO language, actually.)
C has been around long enough that it's math libraries shouldn't be lacking. What's wrong? Why haven't the C libraries caught up to speed? Are you talking about proprietary libraries or the basic libm.so?
We're not talking about sin, cos and the other stuff from the C library. We're talking about vector calculations and the like. The reason why Fortran's libraries are better are several fold. First, Fortran's still older; the stable Fortran 77 standard predates the stable C89 standard by ten years. Secondly, all the physicists and engineers are trained only in Fortran, so that's what they use, and when people need to speed up numeric code, that's what they optimize.
Lastly, the Fortran standard dictates that any two arrays passed to a function do not alias - if they do, it's a error in the program. Since C compilers can't make that assumption, there's points where a Fortran compiler can rearrange actions for greater speed that a C compiler can't.
You're using integrity in a much broader sense that most people do, particularly with regard to common security exploits.
Shell scripts have no pointers. Shell scripts are bitch to make secure, because every line you have to make sure that there's no stray ` or $ in your input data that you aren't properly escaping. Any language that only has or encourages the use of fixed length strings has a potential integrity problem there.
The advance that Java represented over traditional code models has been documented at length by academics
What advance? Sandboxing is certainly nothing new, nor is pointerless languages, and many Lisps follow both rules.
User mode Linux 'superior' to Java or Dotnet. This is, frankly, a ridiculous statement.
If you're asking for a platform to be secured, I can secure any program that runs on Linux using UML. UML allows you to use existing libraries and code, without breaking the sandbox). That's a huge advantage.
Firstly, Java and Dotnet provide guaranteed integrity of the application, something that's impossible to achieve when you have pointers floating about.
Nonsense. Having pointers does not prevent you from guaranting integrity of the application, nor does not having pointers mean that you can't get invalid data or malformed data structures. The only way to guarantee integrity is a formal proof of the program. In any case, Perl, Python, Scheme, Eiffel, Common Lisp and any number of other Unix programming languages make the same offer.
Secondly, the rest of the system can be structured into a highly organized form where just the necessary amount of information is shared and rights given.
Which can be done without Dotnet or Java. And frankly, I don't believe it will be done by any but the most anal programmers, and they could have done it in raw assembly on the bare hardware.
Re:Executing untrusted code
on
Shattering Windows
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Dotnet (and Java) represent a quantum leap in the "securability" of a platform and one to which Linux has no answer
Well, Java runs on Linux, and.Net is being implemented on Linux, so we can use the same answers. Also, User Mode Linux lets you run a full environment in a sandbox, with no modification to existing programs. That's better than anything Java or.Net offers.
Of course, Janis Ian is already prone to using the Internet to its full extent. The only top 40 song that Project Gutenberg distributes (just about the only song PG distributes in audio format) is Janis Ian's Society's Child.
Slashdot Mirror
Suppose that early humans had the mental abilites for communication, but not the physical abilites for speach.
Whether or not that's true is still a open question.
it isn't always convienient in the Hearing culture;
It's not always convienient, period. The hands are manipulators; working people, especially in a preliterate culture, are always using their hands.
Monkeys learn by imitation.
s /LECTURE4/4feral.htm
The monkeys went into the water and noticed it was salty, so started eating stuff with salt. The humans noticed that penicillin killed bacteria by accident, and started eating penicillin.
Intelligence is coming up with methods it has never seen used before and knowing in advance whether or not they are likely to work.
Then not many humans are intelligent. Most ideas that come up fail, whether they be new mousetraps, new medical drugs or whatever. As Edison said, invention is 99% presperation.
Consider Hellen Keller or feral children. They act as beasts until taught to communicate, then they suddenly jump into society with little splash.
That doesn't match what I've read on feral children. Most of them have had strong permenant social problems that would keep them institionialized for the rest of their life. See http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/monkey/ihe/linguistic
But it's hard to see how a complex culture could develop without speech.
Sign Language.
You can't tell your daughter about the sky god while digging for roots using sign language, nor can you yell over distances with sign language, or talk to someone while you have a spear in your hand. Hands are excellent manipulators; it seems very unlikely that a primitive culture would develop using sign language, as the cost of losing the hands is more than the immediate value of speech.
What argument?
is not an argument; it's a restatement of the facts as you see them, combined with attacks on your audience. Yes, we are reading it; no, we aren't believing it just on your say-so.
*sigh* when will you people understand...
That if you don't have evidence, you resort to ad homine attacks?
Oh wait, no they aren't anymore... Now kids are stuck on band-aid BRAND...
I wonder why they changed the jingle... hmmm...
Because trademarks are supposed to be used as adjectives; legally, you're much safer calling them band-aid brand bandages instead of band-aids. This is a sign that they are defending their trademark, not that they lost it.
'Godzilla' is a song by Blue Oeyster Cult that is a good twenty-plus year old.
Yes, and I understand that Blue Oyster Cult didn't see very much money from it, because of all the licensing fees they paid for the privlige of using the trademark.
when russia has war with us, people die, thus we die.
And if Russia got nuclear weapons first, well, Stalin was not the sanest, most pacifistic person that ever lived. We die, they die, poor suckers attached to neither side die. It's honestly hard to see a a scenerio where any superpower comes up with nukes and it comes up much better than it did in real life.
Any discovery which you dont believe humanity can handle, dont reveal it.
It's really, honestly, amazing what humanity has handeled. If you're first to reveal it, you'll hopefully get at least soundbytes to guide the world, instead of letting Bob The Psycho invent it two weeks later.
I'm sure the people who discovered nuclear technology are sorry now, considering how it was used.
Yes, I'm sure they would have prefered for Russia or China to discover it. Instead of having two bombs killing people, we may have used it to its full extent, killing millions upon millions.
a] The fraction of population that actually understands what Nintendo is trying to do
I think "you're going to have to plug your nintendo into the wall, so it can phone home and check up on you" is something that Joe User can understand and won't like.
Of course we might come up with some biochemical hacks in the meantime to stretch things out, but I'm not holding my breath...
Why? Humans could also evolve a stronger response to bacteria based on antibiotics. But humans took a short cut, instead of waiting for evolution to design it. Ageing is certainly more complex, but especially after we can tweak the genes, it should be a similar matter to shortcut evolution.
There's also no proof that humans will ever live much beyond 75 years old.
Besides the people living into their hundreds?
That could be a very solid barrier that no amount of gene therapy and wishful pseudoreligious pride in technology can repair.
On the other hand, there's decent evidence that evolution doesn't drive most creatures to have long lifespans. Gorillas live to about 35; chimps can reach their late 50s - I think it safe to assume that our most recent common ancestor lived at most into its 50s. Considering that evolution added 40% to 100% to the max age in a few million years, and with life expectancies in the 30s for primitive man, there's no reason to believe that it was biochemical cutoff instead of minimal effect on natural selection that stopped the increase in max age.
U.S. laws protect women's rights to a degree, but there's still no equal rights amendment.
Can you name another country that has an equal rights amendment?
- separation of church and state
On paper anyway.
And in fact. Whatever fine details of the issue are argued out, the fact is that there is no state church (unlike, for example, England), religion is not taught in schools (except in small backwater towns) (unlike, for example, Germany) and religion cannot be a factor in many things (and usually isn't.)
- education of the masses
The why do American youth consistently score so very low compared to youth in other countries?
If you're comparing the US high schools to the German gymnasium (which is what I understand has been done), then of course US students will score low, as high schools are for all, and the gymnasium is only for the brightest. A fair comparison of all German students with American high school students would reveal that American youth do better on SAT-type material - of course, because the majority of German students go to vocational-type schools.
In other words, the US tries to educate the masses in a liberal-arts style; if you compare it to other countries that don't do that, your results, if meaningful, will make for lousy soundbytes. Easier just to slap a number on it and not think about the meaning.
programming a computer to play until it reaches a point where the number of moves left in the game are finite, and the computer has a database of moves that guarantee wins from this position is not artificial intelligence- it's loading the deck.
Have you ever looked at chess books? Many of them have a little section where if you have two knights and a king, and he has one knight and a king, then here's how to win the game. That's the same thing.
Looking at ADA is painful. It looks like a language developed by a very large committee that wanted a language to do everything well. It acheives this, at the cost of being next to impossible to learn.
What do you think of C++, then? Almost every feature maps one to one between C++ and Ada, except for threading, which Ada has and C++ doesn't, and various knobs and dials on templates and object orientation (template specialization, multiple inheritance) which C++ has and Ada doesn't. Furthermore, Ada doesn't have redundant funtions, like struct and class, or multiple ways to cast a value.
Ada's not dead. There is considerable amount of embedded programming done in it, and some hobbist interest. Personally, I got tired of programming in a language where the first time I ran any program, its output consisted soley of "Segmentation fault". Most those programs, written in Ada, wouldn't pass the compiler; the other half would at least give me an exception with a line number for the problem.
I never ever claimed using floating point was the best idea, merely that it wasn't an inherently bad idea.
But it is an inherently bad idea. You're better off using strings, for crying out loud. You don't need the sin, sqrt, 1E-100 stuff that floating point offers you. You do need exactness to the cent, no matter how large the numbers are - something floating point doesn't offer you.
Depending on the processor and library, there can be distinct advantages to using floating point, like overflow and underflow exceptions, support for infinities and not-a-number values, and so on.
Which are worthless. You don't want infinity or not-a-number - you want it to raise an exception where you screwed up, which integer types in better languages do. You don't want an underflow exception - you want it silently round to zero. And you can get overflow exceptions on integers just as easy as on floats.
You can most certainly keep all floting point noise below your precision, even when using IEEE floating point numbers.
Maybe. But if you're doing a job that by law _must_ be done to a certain precision, it's wiser to use tools that are designed to that precision, rather than one's that were designed to lose that precision for other concerns. If you use integers or BCD, that's one less source of error you have to worry about.
I would think it's not worth the trouble of using a nonstandard language.
It's easy to argue that in this field, C is the nonstandard language.
can't you still code 90% in C and the rest in assembler
Why does a engineer want to learn assembly? Part of the advantage of Fortran is that my college professor who was in grad school when it first came out can still use it. Even 386 assembly is only 15 years old, and really ought to be rewritten for the most recent chips to be fast. Worse, it does you no good when you need to move the code to the Alphas or the Crays in your department.
SNOBOL was for strings, and [...]. These languages, although having expanded their paradigms, are still the best ones for doing those types of tasks.
Is SNOBOL still the best? Ralph Griswold (its creator) no longer thinks so; he created Icon (sort of an advanced SNOBOL with Pascal/C'ish syntax) as a replacement.
ADA95 has some structures that support most of the type of capabilities that you want in OO, without actually having an OO environment. It is not OO in the same way smalltalk or Java or others are.
Ada95 is not OO in the same way that smalltalk and Java are, but it is OO in the same way that C++. It supports inheritance and dynamic dispatch, the two key elements of OO IIRC. (Ada95 is the first internationally standardized OO language, actually.)
C has been around long enough that it's math libraries shouldn't be lacking. What's wrong? Why haven't the C libraries caught up to speed? Are you talking about proprietary libraries or the basic libm.so?
We're not talking about sin, cos and the other stuff from the C library. We're talking about vector calculations and the like. The reason why Fortran's libraries are better are several fold. First, Fortran's still older; the stable Fortran 77 standard predates the stable C89 standard by ten years. Secondly, all the physicists and engineers are trained only in Fortran, so that's what they use, and when people need to speed up numeric code, that's what they optimize.
Lastly, the Fortran standard dictates that any two arrays passed to a function do not alias - if they do, it's a error in the program. Since C compilers can't make that assumption, there's points where a Fortran compiler can rearrange actions for greater speed that a C compiler can't.
You're using integrity in a much broader sense that most people do, particularly with regard to common security exploits.
Shell scripts have no pointers. Shell scripts are bitch to make secure, because every line you have to make sure that there's no stray ` or $ in your input data that you aren't properly escaping. Any language that only has or encourages the use of fixed length strings has a potential integrity problem there.
The advance that Java represented over traditional code models has been documented at length by academics
What advance? Sandboxing is certainly nothing new, nor is pointerless languages, and many Lisps follow both rules.
User mode Linux 'superior' to Java or Dotnet.
This is, frankly, a ridiculous statement.
If you're asking for a platform to be secured, I can secure any program that runs on Linux using UML. UML allows you to use existing libraries and code, without breaking the sandbox). That's a huge advantage.
Firstly, Java and Dotnet provide guaranteed integrity of the application, something that's impossible to achieve when you have pointers floating about.
Nonsense. Having pointers does not prevent you from guaranting integrity of the application, nor does not having pointers mean that you can't get invalid data or malformed data structures. The only way to guarantee integrity is a formal proof of the program. In any case, Perl, Python, Scheme, Eiffel, Common Lisp and any number of other Unix programming languages make the same offer.
Secondly, the rest of the system can be structured into a highly organized form where just the necessary amount of information is shared and rights given.
Which can be done without Dotnet or Java. And frankly, I don't believe it will be done by any but the most anal programmers, and they could have done it in raw assembly on the bare hardware.
Dotnet (and Java) represent a quantum leap in the "securability" of a platform and one to which Linux has no answer
.Net is being implemented on Linux, so we can use the same answers. Also, User Mode Linux lets you run a full environment in a sandbox, with no modification to existing programs. That's better than anything Java or .Net offers.
Well, Java runs on Linux, and
Of course, Janis Ian is already prone to using the Internet to its full extent. The only top 40 song that Project Gutenberg distributes (just about the only song PG distributes in audio format) is Janis Ian's Society's Child.