GPL gives some additional rights ("license"), as long as you follow some rules. And those aren't very restrictive, they only require you to pass along the freedom you recieved with your copy. Plus the rights to modifications you make.
This works, assuming that the utility value of doing a piece of development is larger than the cost of doing that development.
Of course, if the utility value for one person - say, the utility value of having a piece of software adapted for use by a blind person - is less than the cost of development, that development will not happen unless somebody does it out of the goodness of their hearts, even if the total utility value for the sum of all users would be larger than the development cost.
Software can be written portably, including being portable to processors with larger words - it's not actually that hard.
The point here is that open source software is generally agnostic to what processor it runs on - it's just a recompile away - while closed source software is generally strongly tied to the underlying processor family (because you can't recompile easily.)
*In practice*, I have had to abandon most of my closed source software when switching processor families; I've been able to keep most of my open source software.
So, yes, closed source software is in the way of switching processors - because processors are mostly interesting as ways to run software.
They're often supported in a slightly different form, a form that I believe is probably better than the "obvious" form of these.
As for undeclaring a variable, I do not know of any language that support this directly. However, it is common to do this through creating a new scope around the area where you want the variable to be visible. This is standard in C and derived languages, including Java and Perl.
I often find local functions useful; I less often find smaller scopes useful. They just don't do anything for the kind of code I write anymore. I had a period of maybe 5 or 10 years after I discovered them where I used them heavily, and then my style evolved away from it.
If you want a fairly comprehensive answer to muc of that, I can recommend "How we know what isn't so" by Thomas Gilovich. (Doesn't answer why we communicate about these things at all - I have only some partial answers to that, and they're still long...)
Assuming, of course, that they don't pick up all the culture from you and end up teaching their kids the same.
I personally will show my kids the example of doing the stuff I like and earning well from it; of loving knowledge and using that to navigate the world effectively; and of using intellect to help navigate the psychological labyrinth of living, including how to win friends, how to deal with peer pressure, how to deal with life's challenges.
I'll also, to the best of my ability, show an example for how to balance different priorities - how to have a life you enjoy, how to deal wisely with money while knowing that it is only a small part of life, something that's useful as a tool yet is only a tool.
This might be telling of our different backgrounds - I've grown up among researchers, which means I've always had the education and knowledge available, and while money has been tight, that's not been crucial. And I don't consider "better part of town" or "better school" to count much at all - we lived in a reasonably cheap area, and I don't think there's anywhere in the country I'm from where there's a stronger average.
Money just isn't what makes the difference, and neither knowledge nor money is what I feel I'd have been better off with as a child and adolescent - what I would have liked is more skills in happiness, more examples of how to deal with life in a fashion where different priorities was balanced for joy.
So, that is, to the best of my ability, what I'll give my children - and, from what I see of psychological research, it is also what is best for children.
Oh, and I don't care about all this "compete" stuff - the world is growing progressively richer through technology, and "compete" is only important if you want to show off having more toys than your neighbor, for social status. I can play better social status games than that.
I happen to take my prospective parenting seriously enough to spend a few years now studying psychology - and from this I can simply say You Are Uneducated *and are likely hurting your kids through your lack of education*. There are ways to help keed your kids away from crime; however, living through them isn't it (and focusing on how much money you can get for your kids doesn't in my book count as involvement, either.)
Your children will learn from your example: They will do stuff they hate and have a lousy life because they have been taught they are supposed to sacrifice for their children.
In my opinion, somebody with the opinion of the parent poster - that when you have kids nothing else should matter - should not have children, because they're going to totally mess up those children.
Children need to be taken care of - and they need to learn limits, including realistic limits of when people around them are supposed to do things for them and not. Switching the parent's role to solely being a provider for the children mess this up, as well as making the parent too invested in the child's life - which brings too much responsibility to the child because the parent is only living through them, and also increase the risk of the parent meddling (again, due to too much investment.)
Stick with the balance: Take care of your kids, and see them as a very high priority and not as the only priority.
What I profoundly dislike about anti-copyright activists is their desire to force their views upon everyone else. At present, nothing prevents artists from doing what you have suggested above. It's up to the artists to decide whether they want to charge everyone who listens to what they have created, or simply want to give their work away for free. This stuff could easily be turned on its head. Pro-copyright people are using guns (in the hands of the police) to force people to follow their idea of how people should behave.
I'll also note that my personal view of this is that I'm in favor of shorter copyrights and more obligations for the copyright holder (e.g, having to release source code when the copyright term is up), not no copyrights.
While I agree with you in wanting to use several of the methods, I don't think they're as orthogonal as we immediately think.
All of these methods are ways to improve the quality of software, essentially decreasing the amounts of bugs in the software or the cost of learning how the software works. However, they come with a cost of their own: They make it more work to write and modify the code. For instance, DbC makes you have to change the contracts throughout the code whenever you change the contract at a core point. This makes your code more rigid.
TDD makes you have to update tests when you update code, and sometimes the thing you change require you to change tests in many places.
Literate programming makes you need to spend time on documentation, which helps with understanding the software and thereby more easily modifying it (and making it more likely to be correct the first time around) - but this cost is less palatable when you have another way to cheapen modification and making it more likely to be correct the first time around.
I don't know the exact tradeoff point between the different methods - I haven't tried to mix them with each other, and I haven't tried full literate programming at all. I just feel quite sure that there's tradeoffs between them, even when they initially seem orthogonal, because the cost/benefit picture is changed by the application of any of them.
I hope that was clear - and to paraphrase Blaise Pascal, I'm sorry for writing so much, I wish I had time to write less.
Exploits deal with stack layouts and similar; they're necessary to do against object code. The only advantage of having source code is that it allows you to see more of the context, and more easily find the errors.
"Innovative" is hard to define. If your argument is that single mutations - the simplest for of which is single point mutations - can't produce significant difference, then this and this are the two most relevant examples from the first page of a Google search for "single base difference".
If your argument is that mutation can't make a large jump - well, welcome to reality. Mutation makes small changes, natural selection picks among them, and over time this build up to large differences.
If your argument is that minor differences can't sum up to an "innovative" difference, e.g. eye evolution from a light sensitive patch, has been shown in rapidly in simulation using minor differences from generation to generation (.1% differences).
If your argument is that such differences would not show up in the real world, then our experience with single strand (genetically identical) mice might of interest - after 3 generations, there's measurable, inheritable size differences, which by definition is a form of mutation (even though I've not seen the direct genes for this being mapped).
For direct gene mapping, there is the repeated longitude (20,000 generation) evolution of cold-resistant e.coli, with subsequent genome sequencing and difference analysis.
These are just a few examples off the top of my head. I don't know what kind of evidence in particular you'd like, because I don't know what you know and don't know. Feel free to ask more questions, and I'll try to find time for an answer. (And sorry for the lack of references for most of this - I've got limited time.)
I believe you're missing the point: Netflix has a solution that is about as good as the best previous published work, and have done tweaking of it. They are well aware of the published work.
Storing energy through pumping water up into a reservoir and releasing it through a turbine gives about 80% efficiency from what I've read. This would beat out your alternatives, it seems? (Assuming what I've read is correct - this is not my area of expertise.)
This is slightly off topic, but one can either agree that morality (right and wrong) is subjective, and hence is completely open to debate, or morality is objective, and hence there is one and only one (Universal) right. There can be no middle ground. There can be undecidable areas due to too little information, and there can be different applications of moral basics and moral heuristics that lead to different conclusions.
To take your own example: If scientists disagree on something, that doesn't mean that the scientific method is invalid - it means that they disagree on application or interpretation of results. This still end up being subjective - but it doesn't mean that the scientific method and objectivity doesn't exist at all.
Would you happen to have a recommendation for a good book for the relevant statistics background? I'm reading up on psychology and should be getting to a book on proper interpretation/construction of the statistics soon. My background is as a programmer, having just done some statistics 15 years ago on hobby basis, with the advantage that I've always found math easy.
Your description of psychologists sounds very much like psychoanalysts to me - a kind of psychologist that, to me, rank possibly lower than a Scientologist (and slightly above a cockroach) when it comes to solving people's problems.
Fortunately, there's some other kinds of psychologists that actually do stuff that works. I'll discuss a trifle about them below. Before that, though:
Any psychologists have a couple of things going for them, even without the "working method of psychotherapy" part. Going to a psychologist will make a patient regularly think about their problems, and will make them feel that they are in a process with the problems, and this seems to lead to change. It also makes the person deal with the problems in contact with a stranger, which makes for a more neutral setting than with a friend or family member. With a friend or family member, the relation in other contexts will very often intrude.
So, any psychotherapy will usually have *some* effect, though it may be very restricted, and for some kinds of problems it does not work at all. There are some forms that have more effect, chief among them behavioral therapy (with most research having gone into the cognitive behavioral version of this, but with very little evidence the cognitive part add effectiveness.) This is mostly "common sense" put into a system. Some examples: If a person is depressed and sitting at home, make them go out and do stuff, starting with small enough stuff that they're able to do it ("Behavioral Activation"). If the person is afraid, have them go through the fear in small enough parts that they can handle it, exposing them to situations they are afraid of and let them learn that they can be safe there, waiting until the fear dies down. If they have OCD, expose them to the situation that makes their obsessive response come forth, and prevent/delay the response. ("Exposure and Response Prevention.)
The good thing is that the psychologist knows that this common sense works, and can put the weight of both experience and theory behind the words to make the person feel that it can work.
Most psychotherapy works better without drugs; drugs interfere with the learning process.
While I in general will agree with most praise for The Selfish Gene - it is a very nice work - it doesn't cover abiogenesis in any firm fashion. Dawkins has repeatedly stated that we don't know that missing link, and he's purposefully used different hypotheses in different books, in order to not give the impression that he endorse one particular hypothesis as true.
Slashdot Mirror
Eivind.
Of course, if the utility value for one person - say, the utility value of having a piece of software adapted for use by a blind person - is less than the cost of development, that development will not happen unless somebody does it out of the goodness of their hearts, even if the total utility value for the sum of all users would be larger than the development cost.
That's when the monopoly use of the GPL hurts.
Eivind.
This problem can actually be quiet real when there are network effects, so that's the only reasonable codebase to work with.
Eivind.
The point here is that open source software is generally agnostic to what processor it runs on - it's just a recompile away - while closed source software is generally strongly tied to the underlying processor family (because you can't recompile easily.)
*In practice*, I have had to abandon most of my closed source software when switching processor families; I've been able to keep most of my open source software.
So, yes, closed source software is in the way of switching processors - because processors are mostly interesting as ways to run software.
Eivind.
As for undeclaring a variable, I do not know of any language that support this directly. However, it is common to do this through creating a new scope around the area where you want the variable to be visible. This is standard in C and derived languages, including Java and Perl.
I often find local functions useful; I less often find smaller scopes useful. They just don't do anything for the kind of code I write anymore. I had a period of maybe 5 or 10 years after I discovered them where I used them heavily, and then my style evolved away from it.
Eivind.
Eivind.
I personally will show my kids the example of doing the stuff I like and earning well from it; of loving knowledge and using that to navigate the world effectively; and of using intellect to help navigate the psychological labyrinth of living, including how to win friends, how to deal with peer pressure, how to deal with life's challenges.
I'll also, to the best of my ability, show an example for how to balance different priorities - how to have a life you enjoy, how to deal wisely with money while knowing that it is only a small part of life, something that's useful as a tool yet is only a tool.
This might be telling of our different backgrounds - I've grown up among researchers, which means I've always had the education and knowledge available, and while money has been tight, that's not been crucial. And I don't consider "better part of town" or "better school" to count much at all - we lived in a reasonably cheap area, and I don't think there's anywhere in the country I'm from where there's a stronger average.
Money just isn't what makes the difference, and neither knowledge nor money is what I feel I'd have been better off with as a child and adolescent - what I would have liked is more skills in happiness, more examples of how to deal with life in a fashion where different priorities was balanced for joy.
So, that is, to the best of my ability, what I'll give my children - and, from what I see of psychological research, it is also what is best for children.
Oh, and I don't care about all this "compete" stuff - the world is growing progressively richer through technology, and "compete" is only important if you want to show off having more toys than your neighbor, for social status. I can play better social status games than that.
Eivind.
Eivind.
Your children will learn from your example: They will do stuff they hate and have a lousy life because they have been taught they are supposed to sacrifice for their children.
Children need to be taken care of - and they need to learn limits, including realistic limits of when people around them are supposed to do things for them and not. Switching the parent's role to solely being a provider for the children mess this up, as well as making the parent too invested in the child's life - which brings too much responsibility to the child because the parent is only living through them, and also increase the risk of the parent meddling (again, due to too much investment.)
Stick with the balance: Take care of your kids, and see them as a very high priority and not as the only priority.
Eivind.
I'll also note that my personal view of this is that I'm in favor of shorter copyrights and more obligations for the copyright holder (e.g, having to release source code when the copyright term is up), not no copyrights.
Eivind.
All of these methods are ways to improve the quality of software, essentially decreasing the amounts of bugs in the software or the cost of learning how the software works. However, they come with a cost of their own: They make it more work to write and modify the code. For instance, DbC makes you have to change the contracts throughout the code whenever you change the contract at a core point. This makes your code more rigid.
TDD makes you have to update tests when you update code, and sometimes the thing you change require you to change tests in many places.
Literate programming makes you need to spend time on documentation, which helps with understanding the software and thereby more easily modifying it (and making it more likely to be correct the first time around) - but this cost is less palatable when you have another way to cheapen modification and making it more likely to be correct the first time around.
I don't know the exact tradeoff point between the different methods - I haven't tried to mix them with each other, and I haven't tried full literate programming at all. I just feel quite sure that there's tradeoffs between them, even when they initially seem orthogonal, because the cost/benefit picture is changed by the application of any of them.
I hope that was clear - and to paraphrase Blaise Pascal, I'm sorry for writing so much, I wish I had time to write less.
Eivind.
Exploits deal with stack layouts and similar; they're necessary to do against object code. The only advantage of having source code is that it allows you to see more of the context, and more easily find the errors.
If your argument is that mutation can't make a large jump - well, welcome to reality. Mutation makes small changes, natural selection picks among them, and over time this build up to large differences.
If your argument is that minor differences can't sum up to an "innovative" difference, e.g. eye evolution from a light sensitive patch, has been shown in rapidly in simulation using minor differences from generation to generation (.1% differences).
If your argument is that such differences would not show up in the real world, then our experience with single strand (genetically identical) mice might of interest - after 3 generations, there's measurable, inheritable size differences, which by definition is a form of mutation (even though I've not seen the direct genes for this being mapped).
For direct gene mapping, there is the repeated longitude (20,000 generation) evolution of cold-resistant e.coli, with subsequent genome sequencing and difference analysis.
These are just a few examples off the top of my head. I don't know what kind of evidence in particular you'd like, because I don't know what you know and don't know. Feel free to ask more questions, and I'll try to find time for an answer. (And sorry for the lack of references for most of this - I've got limited time.)
Eivind.
The number with problems with medical care and with access to a computer would both be greater - and both are more fuzzy.
Eivind.
This is an attempt to bring out new solutions.
Eivind.
Eivind.
Eivind.
Eivind.
To take your own example: If scientists disagree on something, that doesn't mean that the scientific method is invalid - it means that they disagree on application or interpretation of results. This still end up being subjective - but it doesn't mean that the scientific method and objectivity doesn't exist at all.
Eivind.
The question isn't about copying the CD, it is about selling the physical CD.
Eivind.
Fortunately, there's some other kinds of psychologists that actually do stuff that works. I'll discuss a trifle about them below. Before that, though:
Any psychologists have a couple of things going for them, even without the "working method of psychotherapy" part. Going to a psychologist will make a patient regularly think about their problems, and will make them feel that they are in a process with the problems, and this seems to lead to change. It also makes the person deal with the problems in contact with a stranger, which makes for a more neutral setting than with a friend or family member. With a friend or family member, the relation in other contexts will very often intrude.
So, any psychotherapy will usually have *some* effect, though it may be very restricted, and for some kinds of problems it does not work at all. There are some forms that have more effect, chief among them behavioral therapy (with most research having gone into the cognitive behavioral version of this, but with very little evidence the cognitive part add effectiveness.) This is mostly "common sense" put into a system. Some examples: If a person is depressed and sitting at home, make them go out and do stuff, starting with small enough stuff that they're able to do it ("Behavioral Activation"). If the person is afraid, have them go through the fear in small enough parts that they can handle it, exposing them to situations they are afraid of and let them learn that they can be safe there, waiting until the fear dies down. If they have OCD, expose them to the situation that makes their obsessive response come forth, and prevent/delay the response. ("Exposure and Response Prevention.)
The good thing is that the psychologist knows that this common sense works, and can put the weight of both experience and theory behind the words to make the person feel that it can work.
Most psychotherapy works better without drugs; drugs interfere with the learning process.
Eivind.
Eivind.
Eivind.