Although OO won't shield bad or ignorant programmers from their own blunders, it does beat procedural programming hands-down conceptually. The opportunities it offers for improving program correctness, robustness, extendibility, reusability, portability, and ease-of-use are enumerated at length in _Object Oriented Software Construction_ by Bertrand Meyer. Grab a copy, you'll learn a lot!
Decisions like this should be solved by employers and their employees. Despite what some officials may think, human beings are actually capable of making value-judgements on their own.
OK, so what's wrong with a solution like Jabber? Why must the government tax everyone for the benefit of a computer elite? Government money doesn't grow in trees, after all.
It's funny that someone of a "libertarian bent" would put such faith in a system of communication where political clout is allowed to coerce the choice of individuals. Remember that if ICQ is popular, it means that it is considered valuable by a large number of people. It may have shortcomings, but they who use it obviously think its advantages outweigh its disadvantages.
No person can make value judgements for another. Congressmen can and should be able to pass laws to protect individual rights, but to pass laws specifying what IM is "best" and creating a government monopoly on IMs is as ridiculous as the government mandating a person's favorite color.
If this is really such a problem, and so many people suffer, there is no need to get the government involved. The free market will adjust. More people will become shrinks because it will be very profitable to be a shrink due to the large supply of patients. With all those shrinks, there's more competition, and so treatment prices go down.
In a free market, demands like this get satisfied, so keep the coercion out of it, Uncle Sam.
As long as the government doesn't step in with its coercive power to force us to get licenses, we have nothing to fear from the advocates of such a scheme. Even if the scheme gains wide acceptance, we've got the brains and the freedom of choice to keep the anonymous web alive.
I was never able to see why lots of older people mourned for the old days, when "the little man" ran junky gas stations, but this post has given me a parallel. I read the sentence,
"ubiquitous file transfer areas (which, for the most part have been surplanted by your mega-FTP sites like WcArchive and Freshmeat and others of their ilk)."
and mentally replaced it with,
"small gas stations where they would fill your gas, check your oil, and wash your windshield have been replaced by mega-gas stations like [pick your station name]."
I'm not trying to mock anyone; after all, *I* was a sysop, once upon a time. I just think that the connection is interesting, that's all.
I'm the friend Signal 11 mentioned who wrote Lightbulb. Right now, it doesn't factor primes. I have no plan to make it do so.
Its purpose is to take a list of the inputs and outputs of any unknown function, and find that function given those inputs and outputs. I figured it would be interesting to find the equation that maps these numbers: (1,2),(2,3),(3,5),(4,7)... Once an equation like this had been found, anybody could find the xth prime instantly by running x through the equation. Not only would the results of such a function be useful, but the function itself might give a mathematicians deeper insights into math.
Another mapping of numbers that I thought could hold some promise is (1,3)(2,1),(3,4),(4,1),(5,5),(6,9) -- the digits of pi.
Aside from these great mystery patterns, lightbulb could be of use for everyday data analysis by physicists.
I'd like to mention that the core of this software has already been written, and it works. The devil is in the distributed-computing details, however.
We'll keep you all posted on the status of the project, and if anyone wants to help, email me at 3nelsons@pressenter.com
"No matter what you call it - censorship, intellectual property, copyright, infodollars... it all points to the same thing - disadvantaging one group to advantage another group."
In uncoerced trade, both groups gain. The case of a trade involving information is no different.
To say a man has a "right" to free information, means that he gets to rob another man of hard-earned knowledge. In a free trade, both parties find satisfaction.
Please keep in mind that the form of payment for information doesn't have to be monetary. Think of opensource software: the payment to the software-writer is often in terms of bragging rights, among other things. So you see it is fruitless to compare opensource software to information plunder.
...And how did the God of the Old Testiment show that good old respect and kindness to life? He flooded the entire globe and killed 99.999 percent of all life -- even innocent animals, mothers with unborn babies, the aged, and children.
Slashdot Mirror
Although OO won't shield bad or ignorant programmers from their own blunders, it does beat procedural programming hands-down conceptually. The opportunities it offers for improving program correctness, robustness, extendibility, reusability, portability, and ease-of-use are enumerated at length in _Object Oriented Software Construction_ by Bertrand Meyer. Grab a copy, you'll learn a lot!
Decisions like this should be solved by employers and their employees. Despite what some officials may think, human beings are actually capable of making value-judgements on their own.
OK, so what's wrong with a solution like Jabber? Why must the government tax everyone for the benefit of a computer elite? Government money doesn't grow in trees, after all.
It's funny that someone of a "libertarian bent" would put such faith in a system of communication where political clout is allowed to coerce the choice of individuals. Remember that if ICQ is popular, it means that it is considered valuable by a large number of people. It may have shortcomings, but they who use it obviously think its advantages outweigh its disadvantages.
No person can make value judgements for another. Congressmen can and should be able to pass laws to protect individual rights, but to pass laws specifying what IM is "best" and creating a government monopoly on IMs is as ridiculous as the government mandating a person's favorite color.
If this is really such a problem, and so many people suffer, there is no need to get the government involved. The free market will adjust. More people will become shrinks because it will be very profitable to be a shrink due to the large supply of patients. With all those shrinks, there's more competition, and so treatment prices go down.
In a free market, demands like this get satisfied, so keep the coercion out of it, Uncle Sam.
As long as the government doesn't step in with its coercive power to force us to get licenses, we have nothing to fear from the advocates of such a scheme. Even if the scheme gains wide acceptance, we've got the brains and the freedom of choice to keep the anonymous web alive.
I was never able to see why lots of older people mourned for the old days, when "the little man" ran junky gas stations, but this post has given me a parallel. I read the sentence,
"ubiquitous file transfer areas (which, for the most part have been surplanted by your mega-FTP sites like WcArchive and Freshmeat and others of their ilk)."
and mentally replaced it with,
"small gas stations where they would fill your gas, check your oil, and wash your windshield have been replaced by mega-gas stations like [pick your station name]."
I'm not trying to mock anyone; after all, *I* was a sysop, once upon a time. I just think that the connection is interesting, that's all.
Quantum computing offers an even more secure method of data transfer than we have right now.
I'm the friend Signal 11 mentioned who wrote Lightbulb. Right now, it doesn't factor primes. I have no plan to make it do so.
Its purpose is to take a list of the inputs and outputs of any unknown function, and find that function given those inputs and outputs. I figured it would be interesting to find the equation that maps these numbers: (1,2),(2,3),(3,5),(4,7)... Once an equation like this had been found, anybody could find the xth prime instantly by running x through the equation. Not only would the results of such a function be useful, but the function itself might give a mathematicians deeper insights into math.
Another mapping of numbers that I thought could hold some promise is (1,3)(2,1),(3,4),(4,1),(5,5),(6,9) -- the digits of pi.
Aside from these great mystery patterns, lightbulb could be of use for everyday data analysis by physicists.
I'd like to mention that the core of this software has already been written, and it works. The devil is in the distributed-computing details, however.
We'll keep you all posted on the status of the project, and if anyone wants to help, email me at 3nelsons@pressenter.com
"No matter what you call it - censorship, intellectual property, copyright, infodollars... it all points to the same thing - disadvantaging one group to advantage another group."
In uncoerced trade, both groups gain. The case of a trade involving information is no different.
To say a man has a "right" to free information, means that he gets to rob another man of hard-earned knowledge. In a free trade, both parties find satisfaction.
Please keep in mind that the form of payment for information doesn't have to be monetary. Think of opensource software: the payment to the software-writer is often in terms of bragging rights, among other things. So you see it is fruitless to compare opensource software to information plunder.
...And how did the God of the Old Testiment show that good old respect and kindness to life? He flooded the entire globe and killed 99.999 percent of all life -- even innocent animals, mothers with unborn babies, the aged, and children.