The lesson of Einstein is that even if you are an absolutely brilliant person in physics, perhaps one of the smartest people who ever lived, you can be a complete ignorant moron when it comes to politics and human relations.
If I recall correctly, Israel offered him the presidency, which he turned down. Obviously, he knew enough about politics to know that he couldn't have run a country.
A LOT of Slashdotters could learn this lesson. Just because you are a good programmer (or pick your geek subject) doesn't mean you know beans about how the world should be run.
You obviously missed the other big lesson here; if you let people who "know how the world should be run" run the world, they will be very happy. However, you will be screwed, as they get all the benefits, and you get to watch out for the secret police. It is more important to have dozens of lound bumbling idiots running the country (like America) rather than have one brilliant person (say, Lenin or Stalin or Franco) run the country.
If you are a socialist, then you have no clue about how the world should be run, and should just stay away. Socialism is intrinsically anti-freedom.
Ah, yes - it is entirely fair to raise taxes to benefit the music industry (that's good capitalism), but not at all fair to raist taxes to benefit the poor and starving (that's obviously red.)
Frankly, I don't hear the Swedes or the Germans or the rest of socialist Europe complaining much about their government. And if they are unhappy, they have at least as much power to change that government as Americans do theirs.
I like gcc... but it is currently losing the race.
Any given compiler will lose some races. If the rules of your race call for the most optimizing compiler for the ix86, then GCC loses. If your race calls for a compiler that's portable to the various Linux, Windows and BSD platforms and that your users can get easily (i.e. comes with their OS, preferably), or they call for an Objective C, Java, Fortran or Ada compiler, then GCC leaves icc in the dust.
Why have RH released 7.3 instead of moving to gcc 3.0?
Because RH 7.0 used 2.96 because they needed a new compiler (for various reasons) and 3.0 was going to be too far away. Instead of moving to 3.0 for 8.0 a month or two before 3.1 was put out (and having to use it throughout the 8.0 series), they waited for gcc 3.1.
In any case, with my experiance with Debian and GCC, whether they released 7.3 had little to do with when 8.0 came out came out. They had important changes for 7.2, and released them.
Fancy that-- they actually released something as big as 3.0, without checking that it could compile KDE correctly.
It wasn't a good thing that they did that. However, gcc only has so many people working on it. I know, short of a huge last minute mistake, that my important code will work with GCC 3.1. There are Linux kernel developers who use kernels compiled on GCC 3.1. It should be worth it to someone in the KDE world to compile KDE on GCC snapshots and catch stuff that doesn't work.
where does the US get the legal, or ethical right, to control the distribution of the Mozilla source code which is an INTERNATIONAL effort.
It makes no claim to control the distribution of anything not originating in the US. If you want to put a server under US jursidiction, then yes, the US will restrict what you can export from that server, and to where.
It never ceases to amaze me when interesting anomolous results are discarded by the mainstream community.
The problem is, there are tons of anomolous results out there, and the vast majority are because of bugs in the experiment. They failed to account for such and such factors, the experimenters' biases influenced the experiment, there were statistical errors, they didn't completely understand the science behind the problem, whatever.
Many mathematicians refused to think about Fermat's Last Theorem, because too many people had already wasted too many hours on it, and there were more productive things to do with their time. A physicist must ask herself, is it worth her time, to work on something that may pan out big in the end, but odds are high it will just be wasted time, or if she should work on something that's almost guarenteed to turn up results, be them much less newsworthy.
They still do.. but it makes up only a fractional portion of the whole distribution.
It would be easier to change the kernel in a GNU/Linux distribution than to remove all GNU stuff. A BSD system in GNU/Linux emulation doesn't depend on Linux; it does, however, depend on the GNU C library. Binutils and GCC are so irreplacable even BSD depends on them.
Even the things that could be replaced - GNU Make, Bash, textutils, fileutils - aren't. Sure, Mastodon (which doesn't use glibc or most other GNU tools) isn't a GNU/Linux system; but half the essential packages in Debian, and probably most other distributions, are GNU. Replace Bash with another Bourne shell on your average GNU/Linux system, and see how far you get; if you don't want to try this, grep for bash in your init.d files and see how many dependencies there are.
probably the bsd tools.. they were also easily and freely available.
Three problems with this. First, the existance of GNU helped influence the release of BSD as free software. Secondly, BSD didn't release a compiler or assembler, two of the hardest parts that Linux was missing. Three, at that time, BSD was being dragged through court by AT&T over alleged copyright violations. So the tools weren't clearly free, and Berekley had to make another release that AT&T agreed was clean before all the legal issues were settled. Had BSD been released, Linus says that Linux never would have been created; he would have used BSD instead.
Debian is not funded or run by the FSF. But it's generally run by GNU principles, and a lot of GNU people are directly involved with Debian.
Why hasn't GNU ever released a fully operational OS?
The main reasons why the FSF never got a terribly usable kernel are because they chose to wait on other people (for the Mach to be freed), and they chose to be ambitious instead of make a standard Unix kernel. I don't think that's what you were asking.
IMO, why they haven't released an OS is the same reason as why they haven't released their own X-Window implemention. After Debian started running, there was no reason for the FSF to do their own OS. They funded Debian's start, Debian has helped achieve what they wanted, everyone's happy.
So, just because I read slashdot and have a passing interest in things geeky, I must care about SF?
It seems fairly clear to me that Slashdot readers, on average, read SF. Douglas Adam's death and rumors of James Doohan's death were both on Slashdot. Many reviews of science fiction are on Slashdot. It seems clear that many Slashdot readers would appreciate a SF article.
Re:Id like to see him try to stor the elements....
on
Periodic Table Table
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Honestly, uranium, like any other element with a half-life in the billions of years really isn't all that dangerous, except in large quantities. He could put a small sample in, especially if he wrapped it with lead.
Interestingly enough, when I ran Uranium through dict, it came up with an entry from the 1913 Webster's dictionary discussing how a yellow oxide was used to tint glass (with the fluorescence an added bonus), and a black oxide used for porcelain. While that wasn't such a great idea, it shows how uranium isn't an instant kill; there are probably people still alive who used glass or porcelain with uranium in it.
"about 1% of the population (of anywhere) had an IQ above 120"
Try your statistics again. IQ's fall on a bell curve with a standard deviation of 15, so 95% percent of the population is between 70 and 130. This means that 2.5% of the population has an IQ above 130.
Also, "(of anywhere)" assumes a population that hasn't been prebiased. The population of the US counts; the population of Slashdot, however, is selected in part because the audience has an interest in technical subjects, meaning that you would expect that the average IQ of a Slashdot reader would be above 100; the 15% of the population with an IQ below 85 will probably find little reason to stick around.
Perhaps France could have that capability too, and could sue websites that sell illegal Nazi memorabilia even if the website is based outside of the country.
They can, and do, sue companies based in France for websites that sell Nazi memorabilia it's illegal to sell in France.
The crux of your argument if that if a company does something wrong outside the country while doing business, then they should be able to be punished inside their home country for those practices.
If you're an American doing buisness abroad, and take or give a bribe, and come back to America, you can be held legally resposible.
Maybe Japan should be allowed to have a male-dominated factory in the US because that is how Japanese factories are run.
No. You must follow the laws of _all_ applicable countries.
One of my friends is a huge first-person shooter fan, but it gets him in trouble; when running around corners, he will instictively try to strafe around the corner. Unfortunately, he's too uncoordinated to strafe and run at the same time . . .
We're missing what link? We've dug up pretty much everything between proto-chimp and man; the problems remaining in linking it together lie more in the fact that there are too many species, and we have to tell the difference between our grandparents and our great-uncles.
When I get some little music toy app for my PDA, you can bet it's not going to be pre-compiled for all existing platforms
Your PDA may run Linux, but I seriously doubt it runs a full GNU/Linux distribution. You're going to be running a completely different set of apps.
11 is the starting point, it's going to get a lot more diverse from now.
Why? It's ported to pretty much every chip in production that can run it.
PDAs are constrained enough as it is without the overhead of x86 emulators.
But somehow they can deal with a JVM emulator, eh? (Note I never mentioned x86; there are many chips Linux runs on it would be much nicer to emulate.)
Nokia and other phone makers are setting the trend for small devices and compiled binaries are not part of the picture.
Then GNU/Linux is out of the picture for them. Linux may work, but it's not going to look like any Linux you use, nor is going to run the same programs.
Why do you think that we need a VM for cross-platform code? Debian compiled almost everything that's going to be released with Woody on 11 different architectures. Even if this is a problem, the solution has more alternatives than Mono or JVM; for one, it would be simple to toss a PowerPC, or Alpha or MMIX or whatever emulator into the kernel, and run Linux binaries compiled for that architecture.
If we're going to say that plural can be the same as singular, then why not just go the whole hog and say "I is" is perfectly acceptable
No reason; there's just no move to change English in that direction. Saying that the third person generic-human singular pronoun is the same as the third person human plural pronoun is a bit different from saying that plural is the same as singular, and really isn't that huge a change; as has been mentioned before in this thread, the second person polite pronoun is now the same as the second person familiar pronoun.
Calling me some kind of penis-wielding, testocentric phallocrat
A phrase that you brought into the conversation
it is an ad hominem attack to suggest that the lunatic fringe that want English re-tailored to their particular prejudices aren't a load of wackos?
Yes, of course. You're attacking them, not their argument.
When Neil Armstrong said (excuse the misquote - don't remember it exactly) "one step for man, one giant leap for mankind" was he referring only to those humans that possess external genitals?
What he should have said - and maybe did say, but there's many that would say that he left out the first a - is "one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." Since man is undeniably male here, the parellel structure would indeed lead people to the conclusion that mankind is implying maleness, too. "mankind" brings different images than "humanity".
there is a marked difference between using a new term for something and deciding that grammatical rules can go to hell
What is the big deal about one minor grammatical change? Grammatical rules aren't going to hell; they're simply being changed in a minor way. Grammatical rules are no more set in stone than any other part of the language.
("Stereotypes... the language of hate... etc")
Yes, they are. It's clear your problem is more with those pushing this change rather then with any problem inherant in this change itself.
However, it must be stated that it isn't correct English.
Correctness, in languages, is defined by usage. Or do you still use thou and thine?
Noone used to think you were a testostocratic, phallocentric oppressor for using terms like mankind, human, or the formerly gender-neutral pronoun "he".
Nice use of charged language there.
Personally, I'm not a fan of feminism. But when someone uses the word "he", I'm inclined to think of the antecedent as male. "He" is not gender-neutral, and never has been; at times, it has been acceptable to use the male pronoun when referring to a female. There's a difference. The use of "they" or "humanity" instead of "he" or "mankind" implies less about the gender of what you're talking about.
nothing more than the same kind of mongrelisation that led to "ain't" in the US and "wiv'nt" in England.
Do you still use thou and you, each at their appropriate time? Languages change. English is a Germantic language assaulted by Romans, invaded by the French, furtively stole from Greek and Latin (during the 17th and 18th centuries), and then went around raping the languages of the world for more vocabulary! How does an internal change make any more mongrealized that it already is?
Fine, you try explaining quantum theory to someone who can't program their VCR
Try explaining English grammar to some people.
It should be
"Some one who can not program his VCR."
In modern English, it is becoming increasingly accepted to use "their" as a third person singular pronoun. Note that you rewrite changed the literal meaning of the sentence, from a person who can not program his or her VCR to a man who can not program his VCR.
So our astrology friends could have valid observations but just be totally wrong on the causation.
They could. But then there should be statistical evidence of valid observations, which there isn't. Considering the number of different means to do astrology, all coming up with different answers, you might hit on a valid correlation, but it's not likely.
One general flaw I have found in many newer languages is that they allow, or attract, a great many beginners, and even more people who should really never have been programmers at all.
Yes! They never should have created Fortran; look at all the hacks who never should have been programmers who are programmers. If we'd stuck with assembly language, we wouldn't have this problem.
However, if you had studied programming languages you would know that to be able to implement a language you also have to implement a grammar.
To implement any program that reads a file, you have to implement a structure for the file. That's the easy part. It's the semantics - what the bytes mean, instead of how they are ordered, that's the hard part.
There is no way that you could write a compiler without said language grammar.
But it's been done. It's not that hard to discover from studying sample code. The tricky stuff is getting the semantics right, and that wasn't clearly specified in C, C++ or Fortran prior to the standards.
Can you provide proof that the designers of Algol 60 considered the call-by-name parameter passing scheme implemented in that language a fault?
Besides the fact that the designer's own implemenation didn't handle it correctly, because it was too much work? Between call by name, and integer labels, I don't believe there ever has been a complete implementation of Algol 60.
2. The whole point of having a series of steps before you get to implementation is because faults you catch in the requirements, specification, or design stages of development are much cheaper to correct than if you caught that same fault as you were implementing / after the product is already complete.
The point that you're missing, is that people miss problems in specifications all the time. If you implement first, then you are guarenteed to catch anything that's unimplementable or unusable; if you standardize first, then there's a chance they will pass you by.
Implementation before specification = bugfest.
Argument by assertion! How profound. I guess you couldn't find any examples to back up your case, then.
Code defines an implementation, not a specification, and using code as a spec leads to 'bug compatible' further implementations (ie. Yeah, that's feature's done really poorly, but it has to in order to be compatible with the bug(s) in the original)
You can always ask the authors whether that's a feature or a bug. And it's not like you don't have to be bug compatible with specifications, too.
"Specification" isn't something you can do after-the-fact;
But it happens all the time in real life. C, C++, Fortran and Pascal were all specified after the fact.
Part of the advantage is that when those were being specified, it wasn't just a specification in search of users, they knew that people would use it. Do the implementation first to attract user, and then specify, and there's less of chance you're wasting time.
Secondly, Algol 60 was specified first, then implemented. Algol 60 had call by name, one of the most complex and painful of means of calling arguments, only because they specified first and then discoved what they had specified. Implementation first means that you can find some of the stupid mistakes first, before you write the implementation.
Unfortunately, good workable ideas usually aren't protected. Look at the number of Tetris clones. What is protected is specific implementations (patents and copyrights) and logos (trademarks).
Slashdot Mirror
The lesson of Einstein is that even if you are an absolutely brilliant person in physics, perhaps one of the smartest people who ever lived, you can be a complete ignorant moron when it comes to politics and human relations.
If I recall correctly, Israel offered him the presidency, which he turned down. Obviously, he knew enough about politics to know that he couldn't have run a country.
A LOT of Slashdotters could learn this lesson. Just because you are a good programmer (or pick your geek subject) doesn't mean you know beans about how the world should be run.
You obviously missed the other big lesson here; if you let people who "know how the world should be run" run the world, they will be very happy. However, you will be screwed, as they get all the benefits, and you get to watch out for the secret police. It is more important to have dozens of lound bumbling idiots running the country (like America) rather than have one brilliant person (say, Lenin or Stalin or Franco) run the country.
If you are a socialist, then you have no clue about how the world should be run, and should just stay away. Socialism is intrinsically anti-freedom.
Ah, yes - it is entirely fair to raise taxes to benefit the music industry (that's good capitalism), but not at all fair to raist taxes to benefit the poor and starving (that's obviously red.)
Frankly, I don't hear the Swedes or the Germans or the rest of socialist Europe complaining much about their government. And if they are unhappy, they have at least as much power to change that government as Americans do theirs.
I like gcc... but it is currently losing the race.
Any given compiler will lose some races. If the rules of your race call for the most optimizing compiler for the ix86, then GCC loses. If your race calls for a compiler that's portable to the various Linux, Windows and BSD platforms and that your users can get easily (i.e. comes with their OS, preferably), or they call for an Objective C, Java, Fortran or Ada compiler, then GCC leaves icc in the dust.
Why have RH released 7.3 instead of moving to gcc 3.0?
Because RH 7.0 used 2.96 because they needed a new compiler (for various reasons) and 3.0 was going to be too far away. Instead of moving to 3.0 for 8.0 a month or two before 3.1 was put out (and having to use it throughout the 8.0 series), they waited for gcc 3.1.
In any case, with my experiance with Debian and GCC, whether they released 7.3 had little to do with when 8.0 came out came out. They had important changes for 7.2, and released them.
Fancy that-- they actually released something as big as 3.0, without checking that it could compile KDE correctly.
It wasn't a good thing that they did that. However, gcc only has so many people working on it. I know, short of a huge last minute mistake, that my important code will work with GCC 3.1. There are Linux kernel developers who use kernels compiled on GCC 3.1. It should be worth it to someone in the KDE world to compile KDE on GCC snapshots and catch stuff that doesn't work.
where does the US get the legal, or ethical right, to control the distribution of the Mozilla source code which is an INTERNATIONAL effort.
It makes no claim to control the distribution of anything not originating in the US. If you want to put a server under US jursidiction, then yes, the US will restrict what you can export from that server, and to where.
It never ceases to amaze me when interesting anomolous results are discarded by the mainstream community.
The problem is, there are tons of anomolous results out there, and the vast majority are because of bugs in the experiment. They failed to account for such and such factors, the experimenters' biases influenced the experiment, there were statistical errors, they didn't completely understand the science behind the problem, whatever.
Many mathematicians refused to think about Fermat's Last Theorem, because too many people had already wasted too many hours on it, and there were more productive things to do with their time. A physicist must ask herself, is it worth her time, to work on something that may pan out big in the end, but odds are high it will just be wasted time, or if she should work on something that's almost guarenteed to turn up results, be them much less newsworthy.
They still do.. but it makes up only a fractional portion of the whole distribution.
It would be easier to change the kernel in a GNU/Linux distribution than to remove all GNU stuff. A BSD system in GNU/Linux emulation doesn't depend on Linux; it does, however, depend on the GNU C library. Binutils and GCC are so irreplacable even BSD depends on them.
Even the things that could be replaced - GNU Make, Bash, textutils, fileutils - aren't. Sure, Mastodon (which doesn't use glibc or most other GNU tools) isn't a GNU/Linux system; but half the essential packages in Debian, and probably most other distributions, are GNU. Replace Bash with another Bourne shell on your average GNU/Linux system, and see how far you get; if you don't want to try this, grep for bash in your init.d files and see how many dependencies there are.
probably the bsd tools.. they were also easily and freely available.
Three problems with this. First, the existance of GNU helped influence the release of BSD as free software. Secondly, BSD didn't release a compiler or assembler, two of the hardest parts that Linux was missing. Three, at that time, BSD was being dragged through court by AT&T over alleged copyright violations. So the tools weren't clearly free, and Berekley had to make another release that AT&T agreed was clean before all the legal issues were settled. Had BSD been released, Linus says that Linux never would have been created; he would have used BSD instead.
Debian is not GNU.
Debian is not funded or run by the FSF. But it's generally run by GNU principles, and a lot of GNU people are directly involved with Debian.
Why hasn't GNU ever released a fully operational OS?
The main reasons why the FSF never got a terribly usable kernel are because they chose to wait on other people (for the Mach to be freed), and they chose to be ambitious instead of make a standard Unix kernel. I don't think that's what you were asking.
IMO, why they haven't released an OS is the same reason as why they haven't released their own X-Window implemention. After Debian started running, there was no reason for the FSF to do their own OS. They funded Debian's start, Debian has helped achieve what they wanted, everyone's happy.
So, just because I read slashdot and have a passing interest in things geeky, I must care about SF?
It seems fairly clear to me that Slashdot readers, on average, read SF. Douglas Adam's death and rumors of James Doohan's death were both on Slashdot. Many reviews of science fiction are on Slashdot. It seems clear that many Slashdot readers would appreciate a SF article.
Honestly, uranium, like any other element with a half-life in the billions of years really isn't all that dangerous, except in large quantities. He could put a small sample in, especially if he wrapped it with lead.
Interestingly enough, when I ran Uranium through dict, it came up with an entry from the 1913 Webster's dictionary discussing how a yellow oxide was used to tint glass (with the fluorescence an added bonus), and a black oxide used for porcelain. While that wasn't such a great idea, it shows how uranium isn't an instant kill; there are probably people still alive who used glass or porcelain with uranium in it.
"about 1% of the population (of anywhere) had an IQ above 120"
Try your statistics again. IQ's fall on a bell curve with a standard deviation of 15, so 95% percent of the population is between 70 and 130. This means that 2.5% of the population has an IQ above 130.
Also, "(of anywhere)" assumes a population that hasn't been prebiased. The population of the US counts; the population of Slashdot, however, is selected in part because the audience has an interest in technical subjects, meaning that you would expect that the average IQ of a Slashdot reader would be above 100; the 15% of the population with an IQ below 85 will probably find little reason to stick around.
Perhaps France could have that capability too, and could sue websites that sell illegal Nazi memorabilia even if the website is based outside of the country.
They can, and do, sue companies based in France for websites that sell Nazi memorabilia it's illegal to sell in France.
The crux of your argument if that if a company does something wrong outside the country while doing business, then they should be able to be punished inside their home country for those practices.
If you're an American doing buisness abroad, and take or give a bribe, and come back to America, you can be held legally resposible.
Maybe Japan should be allowed to have a male-dominated factory in the US because that is how Japanese factories are run.
No. You must follow the laws of _all_ applicable countries.
One of my friends is a huge first-person shooter fan, but it gets him in trouble; when running around corners, he will instictively try to strafe around the corner. Unfortunately, he's too uncoordinated to strafe and run at the same time . . .
But we're missing the 'missing link'.
We're missing what link? We've dug up pretty much everything between proto-chimp and man; the problems remaining in linking it together lie more in the fact that there are too many species, and we have to tell the difference between our grandparents and our great-uncles.
When I get some little music toy app for my PDA, you can bet it's not going to be pre-compiled for all existing platforms
Your PDA may run Linux, but I seriously doubt it runs a full GNU/Linux distribution. You're going to be running a completely different set of apps.
11 is the starting point, it's going to get a lot more diverse from now.
Why? It's ported to pretty much every chip in production that can run it.
PDAs are constrained enough as it is without the overhead of x86 emulators.
But somehow they can deal with a JVM emulator, eh?
(Note I never mentioned x86; there are many chips Linux runs on it would be much nicer to emulate.)
Nokia and other phone makers are setting the trend for small devices and compiled binaries are not part of the picture.
Then GNU/Linux is out of the picture for them. Linux may work, but it's not going to look like any Linux you use, nor is going to run the same programs.
Why do you think that we need a VM for cross-platform code? Debian compiled almost everything that's going to be released with Woody on 11 different architectures. Even if this is a problem, the solution has more alternatives than Mono or JVM; for one, it would be simple to toss a PowerPC, or Alpha or MMIX or whatever emulator into the kernel, and run Linux binaries compiled for that architecture.
If we're going to say that plural can be the same as singular, then why not just go the whole hog and say "I is" is perfectly acceptable
No reason; there's just no move to change English in that direction. Saying that the third person generic-human singular pronoun is the same as the third person human plural pronoun is a bit different from saying that plural is the same as singular, and really isn't that huge a change; as has been mentioned before in this thread, the second person polite pronoun is now the same as the second person familiar pronoun.
Calling me some kind of penis-wielding, testocentric phallocrat
A phrase that you brought into the conversation
it is an ad hominem attack to suggest that the lunatic fringe that want English re-tailored to their particular prejudices aren't a load of wackos?
Yes, of course. You're attacking them, not their argument.
When Neil Armstrong said (excuse the misquote - don't remember it exactly) "one step for man, one giant leap for mankind" was he referring only to those humans that possess external genitals?
What he should have said - and maybe did say, but there's many that would say that he left out the first a - is "one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." Since man is undeniably male here, the parellel structure would indeed lead people to the conclusion that mankind is implying maleness, too. "mankind" brings different images than "humanity".
there is a marked difference between using a new term for something and deciding that grammatical rules can go to hell
What is the big deal about one minor grammatical change? Grammatical rules aren't going to hell; they're simply being changed in a minor way. Grammatical rules are no more set in stone than any other part of the language.
("Stereotypes... the language of hate... etc")
Yes, they are. It's clear your problem is more with those pushing this change rather then with any problem inherant in this change itself.
However, it must be stated that it isn't correct English.
Correctness, in languages, is defined by usage. Or do you still use thou and thine?
Noone used to think you were a testostocratic, phallocentric oppressor for using terms like mankind, human, or the formerly gender-neutral pronoun "he".
Nice use of charged language there.
Personally, I'm not a fan of feminism. But when someone uses the word "he", I'm inclined to think of the antecedent as male. "He" is not gender-neutral, and never has been; at times, it has been acceptable to use the male pronoun when referring to a female. There's a difference. The use of "they" or "humanity" instead of "he" or "mankind" implies less about the gender of what you're talking about.
nothing more than the same kind of mongrelisation that led to "ain't" in the US and "wiv'nt" in England.
Do you still use thou and you, each at their appropriate time? Languages change. English is a Germantic language assaulted by Romans, invaded by the French, furtively stole from Greek and Latin (during the 17th and 18th centuries), and then went around raping the languages of the world for more vocabulary! How does an internal change make any more mongrealized that it already is?
Fine, you try explaining quantum theory to someone who can't program their VCR
Try explaining English grammar to some people.
It should be
"Some one who can not program his VCR."
In modern English, it is becoming increasingly accepted to use "their" as a third person singular pronoun. Note that you rewrite changed the literal meaning of the sentence, from a person who can not program his or her VCR to a man who can not program his VCR.
So our astrology friends could have valid observations but just be totally wrong on the causation.
They could. But then there should be statistical evidence of valid observations, which there isn't. Considering the number of different means to do astrology, all coming up with different answers, you might hit on a valid correlation, but it's not likely.
One general flaw I have found in many newer languages is that they allow, or attract, a great many beginners, and even more people who should really never have been programmers at all.
Yes! They never should have created Fortran; look at all the hacks who never should have been programmers who are programmers. If we'd stuck with assembly language, we wouldn't have this problem.
However, if you had studied programming languages you would know that to be able to implement a language you also have to implement a grammar.
To implement any program that reads a file, you have to implement a structure for the file. That's the easy part. It's the semantics - what the bytes mean, instead of how they are ordered, that's the hard part.
There is no way that you could write a compiler without said language grammar.
But it's been done. It's not that hard to discover from studying sample code. The tricky stuff is getting the semantics right, and that wasn't clearly specified in C, C++ or Fortran prior to the standards.
Can you provide proof that the designers of Algol 60 considered the call-by-name parameter passing scheme implemented in that language a fault?
Besides the fact that the designer's own implemenation didn't handle it correctly, because it was too much work? Between call by name, and integer labels, I don't believe there ever has been a complete implementation of Algol 60.
2. The whole point of having a series of steps before you get to implementation is because faults you catch in the requirements, specification, or design stages of development are much cheaper to correct than if you caught that same fault as you were implementing / after the product is already complete.
The point that you're missing, is that people miss problems in specifications all the time. If you implement first, then you are guarenteed to catch anything that's unimplementable or unusable; if you standardize first, then there's a chance they will pass you by.
Implementation before specification = bugfest.
Argument by assertion! How profound. I guess you couldn't find any examples to back up your case, then.
Code defines an implementation, not a specification, and using code as a spec leads to 'bug compatible' further implementations (ie. Yeah, that's feature's done really poorly, but it has to in order to be compatible with the bug(s) in the original)
You can always ask the authors whether that's a feature or a bug. And it's not like you don't have to be bug compatible with specifications, too.
"Specification" isn't something you can do after-the-fact;
But it happens all the time in real life. C, C++, Fortran and Pascal were all specified after the fact.
Part of the advantage is that when those were being specified, it wasn't just a specification in search of users, they knew that people would use it. Do the implementation first to attract user, and then specify, and there's less of chance you're wasting time.
Secondly, Algol 60 was specified first, then implemented. Algol 60 had call by name, one of the most complex and painful of means of calling arguments, only because they specified first and then discoved what they had specified. Implementation first means that you can find some of the stupid mistakes first, before you write the implementation.
good workable ideas are the lifeblood of business
Unfortunately, good workable ideas usually aren't protected. Look at the number of Tetris clones. What is protected is specific implementations (patents and copyrights) and logos (trademarks).