Then you don't understand the power of flexible deliverables. The.class file strategy along with the.jar concept basically blows lisp and smalltalk out of the water when it comes to product delivery time.
Admittedly, there may be a way to rethink lisp and smalltalk such that compiled code can be easily separated and independently manipulated, but enterprise Java applications are just so much easier to manage largely because of the strategy chosen for breaking up deliverable units.
As for syntax, I tend agree with you, both lisp and smalltalk have more powerful language metaphors than Java (and other C derivatives). Though, that can be a two-edged sword (have you ever tried to read newbie lisp?:)
Regards, Ross
Re:Not free but ... IntelliJ is by far the best
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Eclipse 2.1 Released
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· Score: 1
Several of the other developers in my office use Idea, and though they get their import statements automanaged, there are clearly other factors at work when you look at who wrote what and the functionality of that effort.
Let's just say it's the helmsman, not the tiller, that determines the quality and maintainability of a particular unit of source code.
Actually, that turns out not to be the case. What you've described is "security through obscurity", which is vulnerable to lots and lots of kinds of attack.
Many encryption attacks are against the encrypted text alone, and if your encryption approach sucks, most tools will go right through it.
Some of the better decryption systems will then proceed to describe which long ago cebunked algorithms you used or which algorithms you tried to implement but messed up in some fairly pedestrian way.
Security through obscurity, isn't. If your system can't stand to have the algorithm exposed and studied, the algorithm is as likely a point of attack as the key. And you probably didn't do as good a job as people who have subjected their algorithms to public review.
So much for businesses that depend on new customer contacts via email. No one is going to PAY to contact a business for the first time.
Read the article. You get to choose your whitelist. A company's "info request" email address wouldn't require anyone to pay because limiting access is not the goal of having that email address.
You or I might because we don't want strangers who aren't serious about making contact. Though a similar spam filter (requiring a reply/response step to be auto-added to the whitelist) apparently caused too much wanted email to be lost because too many human senders were unwilling to go through the trouble of sending a second email to get their first email through.
I forsee that this will have similar difficulties.
I *hate* synching across IR. Say I'm stuck with a desktop system at work and am not allowed to bring my laptop from home (it happened at my last job). And for the love of Pete, don't jostle the table while I'm doing an IR synch!
With bluetooth, I have my phone in my jacket pocket, the headset at hand, PDA around somewhere, and my laptop on my desk. All talking to each other, no muss, no fuss. Alternate work setup #1 puts me in a park (with good GPRS coverage), laptop on lap, phone in jacket pocket, headset discreetly left at home (phone bill expensed:).
Though many devices had IR through the years (I loved my HP48), it simply never became ubiquitious (few desktops, even today, ship with an IR transceiver). Bluetooth simply has the momentum to overwhelm the aging also-ran medium of serial I/R with all of its warts (line-of-sight, high power consumption, extremely short range, microscopic usable bandwidth for the frequency being used, etc.).
Eventually, maybe. Perhaps, someday, within the next five years or so, we'll have a really, really broadband antenna, along with a really, really broadband amplifier and A/D/A converter for less than $10 so that your software can control it.
And then you'll have your software determined radio for the masses.
While we're waiting for that to happen in a single chip design so we can put it in a cell phone form factor, we can at least read up on current events and see that TI has, right here and now, made it more likely that future GSM cell-phones and PDA devices can support bluetooth and wi-fi without being bigger, with equivalent power consumption, and for about the same cost of manufacture as current phones without those features.
Ah, that does clarify the issue. I, personally, believe that the right to keep and bear arms is inseparable from the other rights as it provides the necessary substantiation that power derives from the consent of the people. You may not believe that might makes right in our relatively calm and civilized corner of the world, but ask an Afghani for his take on it.
As soon as the people lose the right to keep and bear arms, they lose the source of their power in the tension between government and governed. At that point, if and when the other rights are revoked ("But if it saves one child!"), the populace has no recourse, except to go underground and attempt to correct the situation by actually overthrowing the government. But the situation never gets there until after the population has been disarmed (read your Machiavelli).
The guns in the meantime are just an implied threat. It's not realistic to think that today's populace with today's guns can fight today's army, and that's not the way it would happen if it needed to. If you have your way, tomorrow's populace will be stealing their guns from the army, infiltrating the army, and generally fighting an uphill battle to take back those rights you so casually threw away because you were afraid of your neighbors (instead of just walking across the street and getting to know them).
In my opinion, the only reason gun control has so much traction in modern politics is a direct result of the loss of community, which is a result of our culture, including our work ethic. If we put our children and community at a higher priority than our career, we'd be spending long lunch hours with our children, getting to know our neighbors, better preparing our children for their future, and losing our fear of the people around us. But we still pursue the all-powerful greenback to the exclusion of everything else. And then we're astonished at the fallout.
Without too many exceptions, this guy did a fairly good job. The suspension and hull shape are spot on. But I have to point out that the original Shermans used 1/8" plywood on the hull, not 1/4".
Oh. My. God.
That is hilarious. I just scared my roommate by spontaneously falling out of my chair laughing!
(For those who don't get it, read up on the relative armor thickness of various tanks in WWII.)
You must have amazing insight into my own communication preferences to be able to see, more clearly than I, that I don't think Haiku is really a wonderful form of expression...
<sarcasm> Gosh, thanks for helping me out there! I almost conformed to... well I almost conformed to something anyway (though you didn't help me out by explaining what my personal opinion had been in conformance with)! Now I'll just jump up and conform to your assertion! </sarcasm>
The next time you think of posting something like this, think twice. You've managed to remove all doubt.
As it turns out, I really do like Haiku and tend to find that people who don't get it are rather astonishingly boring company. Though it is only one observable factor, in my experience, the correlation is amazingly good.
Interfaces and factories are a patterned approach to decoupling interface from implementation, which is a valuable thing, but...
Aspects attack a different set of coupling problems. Should all of your classes really have to import java.logging.Log (or whatever it is, I'm not looking it up right now)? Should your persisted objects be aware that they're persisted and have transaction enlistment code in their method bodies? Should...
If you have modifications or enhancements to groups of classes that aren't really related to the class's responsibilities (you did go through a CRC exercise, right?), then you could go in and add that code to each relevant method in each relevant class, knowing that when some change needs to be made to this code, you'll have to go back to the same hundred or thousand or more places and change all of them.
Or you could write an aspect.
In my experience, it often really is that easy. For the ORM I'm writing, I've developed an aspect that can make your classes persistence aware in a reasonably performant way using minimal x-doclet tags (most classes only need an "@persist" tag in the class javadoc).
As another poster observed, it takes all of the code related to a specific system feature and moves it all to one place (the aspect definition). You want to pay attention to security, you have your security classes and your security aspect. Persistence? Same thing. Exception handling around an external API? Aspect.
Actually, the pattern aspects most resemble is the Visitor pattern, but without the need to write an accept(Visitor) method, without needing to work against only the public interface (aspects can break encapsulation if you think it's valuable, which it is for persistence) and without having to maintain all visitors if your visitable list of classes change (actually, there are some ways to manage this in visitor, the "lite-Visitor" variant, for instance).
As for whether or not AOP is the next big thing? I don't know. It makes it easier to write inscrutable code in Java which means you need to keep a tighter leash (more code reviews) on your less experienced developers. I had one guy "get it" and he pretty much managed to turn one part of our system into a lispish mess of code-generation. But even with that risk, when used carefully, aspects can take code that is difficult to maintain and really improve the readability and understandability. I plan to continue using AOP for my projects, but to always do so carefully.
What part of "Congress shall make no law..." are they having trouble with?
The part where all that free speech being religiously referred to is actually the self-protectionist actions of big-money on government monopolized airways.
We've already got limitations on free speech. You want to state your opinion? No problem. Tell as many people as you like. Use the internet (a highly participatory medium) to increase the potential audience of your voice. There are other non-monopolized forms of media for similar "boost".
But don't bother complaining that the wealthy person's or organization's proposed inability to buy political favors through the manipulation of government monopolized broadcast media is somehow a "bad" limitation on free speech.
This is the most emancipating proposal since women got the vote. Campaign spending reduction, along with term limits, are the two proposals most likely to restore any kind of faith in the integrity of the political system. Big money has bought and sold our government for so long that many people can't even conceive of a system where their interests might be represented.
Individual rights don't exist in a vacuum. To claim a right means taking away from the legal abilities of another. Big money's "right" to buy legislators (here phrased as "free speech") directly takes away from my abilility to elect representives who are not beholden to interests outside of their constituency.
I would argue that the Constitution as a whole is more concerned with the latter than the former.
Why use the goverment to quiet those with whom you do not agree?
It's not so much that I want to use the government to quiet these nimrods as that I want the government to undo the mechanisms by which these nimrods came to have such a loud voice.
If broadcaster consolidation is perceived as a problem, then I am not alone in my concerns. Which slightly reassures me.
Except for the "mouse army" metaphor, I loved the ending to Diamond Age. Not wrapping everything up (and throwing in the Seed twist) was inspired. Snow Crash had a fairly straightforward wrap-up-the-arcs ending. Zodiac was weaker than the other two just for the neatness of the ending (biological systems are never ever that easy to manage).
Cryptonomicon was apparently written for a dozen geeks in San Francisco to enjoy and I'm sure they loved it. For the other hundred million scifi readers around the world, it blew right from the first page.
Your point about Stephenson loving the idea and forgetting about the story arc is rather insightful and a good point. He might do better if he took a few weeks after coming up with the concept to flesh out a compelling plot, and then started playing with the toys.
"Zodiac", "Snow Crash" and "The Diamond Age" were well written, fun reads, but "Cryptonomicon" was a painful waste of money (I bought the hardback). I must be the only/. reader who doesn't like it though...
His exposition was painful and labored, trying to explain modern "hacker-ware" to the non-elite. Linux and PGP have never been more painful to hear about than in that book. And then on top of that the ending was such a total and complete non-event, I have never been so completely underwhelmed.
I like Stephenson, but "Cryptonomicon" simply sucked and I'm desperately hoping the next one is a return to the wonderful storytelling of his earlier works.
People are not going to give up the ability to communicate (or be communicated to) any time, any place.
I seriously doubt that. Believe it or not, people don't like being bothered all the time.
There is a fascinating option that most cell phones have: they don't have to be answered. When my nokia phone is ringing, the two softbutton options are "accept" and "decline". Once you hit "decline", it doesn't even vibrate any more (since mine only rings when the vibrate is disabled... i.e. it's charging).
I think the biggest issue is that people simply have no idea of how to not answer a phone. If I'm in a situation where it's not appropriate to answer or I simply don't want to be interrupted, you'll get to leave me a message and I'll get back to you when I have a chance. Most people appear to be so conditioned to automatically accepting a phone call that they don't perceive that there are other options available.
Which is a pity. It is your phone, presumably purchased for your convenience and not the convenience of others who happen to be calling right now.
I'm sorry moderators, but the posting calling Edison a jerk is right on the money.
He was on the wrong side of developing just about every technological idea that his name is attached to. He was one of the first to develop the phonograph, but insisted on tubes instead of disks, no matter what the market said. Edison did not invent the incandescent light bulb, he refined the gas and filament for longer life. Etc.
Just because you haven't heard this before or it deflates one of your personal sacred cows doesn't make it flamebait. American history texts in high school are so far off on every other topic, I'm amazed that they spelled Edison's name right.
Edison's real genius was in securing IP and marketing his IP so that others would license it. He was doing that years before that became a high tech business plan for us to discuss on/.
When I say, "I exist." I mean that there is some concept of identity which is. Alternatively argued, if I don't exist, then I can't posit "I", so the reverse argument isn't consistent and proves the positive argument. There are better ways of stating this proof, but Descarte's, "Cogito ergo sum." is a provable assertion for each observer.
From that point, the consistency of the observations of your senses provides some evidence (credible evidence to many) that there is a universe that you can interact with, lending credence to the further assertion that the universe you observe exists in the same way you do, as opposed to the way a character in a book exists, or the way a mathematical concept exists for instance.
The "soul" analogy works, but can lead to false implications (someone might read that to imply that I am discussing a soul distinct from the physical body). Instead, I prefer to use less emotionally loaded terms, like "observer" or "agent" when discussing fundamental metaphysics.
As an aside, the possibility that the soul is separate from the body is an entirely different metaphysical discussion and it's usually a bad idea to confuse two issues into one discussion. Moving further along on this point, I don't see any compelling reason to believe that the soul is separate from the immensely complex electrochemical reactions going on in our bodies and heads. Penrose's book nonwithstanding.
Can you conclusively prove to me, right here and now, beyond ANY shadow of doubt, that things like UFOs, ghosts, Nessie, etc. do NOT exist?
I didn't think so. Guess what? I can't prove that they DO exist either!;-)
But this doesn't make both positions equally defensible. Asking someone to prove a statement false is "shifting the burden of proof" and is a classic argumentative fallacy.
The party making a positive assertion has the obligation to substantiate that assertion or abandon it. The person hearing the assertion has no obligation to believe it unless substantiation is provided.
I certainly am not obligated to show that the universe is free of alien technological populations because you assert that they exist. In the same way, the receiver of any positive assertion is under no obligation to help out the other party in substantiating their assertion ever. Whether for the existence of God, ghosts, etc.
On the subject of nessie, however, there simply aren't enough fish or vegetation in the loch to support an animal of nessie's mass. Any informed measurement of fish populations and aquatic vegetation will show that there is no room even for an alligator in the current system, let alone a huge primeval holdover.
But it makes for a nice story to bring the tourists around.
The scientific community doesn't have that many axioms (And I'm finding it hard pressed to think of any good example).
I exist. The universe exists in the same sense that I exist. Observations of phenomena are valid within the limitations of the apparatus making those observations.
The first statement is provable. The last two can not be proven but can be assumed to be correct based on incomplete information. Based on all three, you can build up a set of knowledge magnificent in scope and majestic in wonder about the universe and your place in it.
Without these statements as fundamentals, however, you have only the existentialist quandry (I can only prove that I exist so there is no purpose in a discussion of anything more). Even so, they are not accepted on faith. Your senses return information to your conciousness that can, with sufficient careful observation, be determined to be consistent and therefore useful. The utility of your sensory observations further provides a basis for future trust of those senses (within their limitations) and additional exploration of the universe around you.
Religionists would have us believe that accepting these two statements on incomplete evidence is the same as accepting statements as true that have no (absolutely none) supporting evidence. Such a conclusion is clearly incorrect and indicates a complete lack of comprehension of what knowledge really is. If you choose to believe in statements that have no evidence, you will not harm me and I will raise no objection. But don't claim that everyone does the same because it just isn't true.
Regards, Ross
Re:can someone explain to me
on
E ~ mc^2
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· Score: 2
That's true, and not what I was talking about. When you understand GR or SR from a theoretical level up through the practical applications, the tendency to make forceful assertions goes way down.
You will have been dragged over the coals of conditional thinking and understanding to learn this stuff. At that point, unless you think like a scientist about what you know, you're going to come to a lot of overeager conclusions.
Regards, Ross
Re:PLEASE torture me with that!
on
E ~ mc^2
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· Score: 3, Insightful
What I was really asking is if anyone knew the basis for these theories.
Ah. I'm not going to be able to do more than point you in the right direction in one/. posting. For that direction: don't worry about tensor math yet, you won't need it until Special Relativity. In the short term, you should study a good "Modern Physics" text. Specifically, Maxwell's equations, the theoretical underpinnings of each equation and finally, their application to EM fields.
At that point, there's enough information to head over to the General Relativity chapter and take a gander. That ought to be enough to blow your mind for a little while as what you thought you knew about the universe resorts itself (don't worry, it happens to almost everyone).
After that, you can finish the book, develop some basic tensor math skills, then come back and explain Special Relativity to all of us! Actually, I do get Special Relativity, but it is mind bending. You really start thinking about the universe on a completely different scale.
I found it incredibly interesting stuff to learn, but because I went to a non-top-twenty school, there were only a few other people in my class with any interest. The hostility from the other undergrad students who hated learning (and especially hated having to rethink the universe) was a bit of a downer for the in-class exchange that the prof was so hoping for.
The graduate level classes were much more fun.:)
Regards, Ross
Re:can someone explain to me
on
E ~ mc^2
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· Score: 5, Interesting
c is relative to the observer, no matter which observer we're talking about. Anything that can measure the speed of a photon will always measure it going at the speed of light through that substance. Through a perfect vacuum, it's c. Through space it's c - epsilon (epsilon is an infintesimally small number). Through water it's about c/1.335.
If you are zooming past me at half the speed of light and both of us measure the speed of a particular photon at the same time, we'll both measure it's speed as c. What will be different about our two measurements is that you'll see a higher energy photon (bluer) than me if the photon is moving opposite to your motion relative to me and a lower energy photon (redder) if the photon is moving in the same direction as your motion relative to me.
No particular point in space is special. Once you identify where the observer is located, you can call that point in space an "origin" or "zero" and make all of your measurements from that point in space. The rest of the universe relative to that origin is called an "inertial reference frame", but it's just the same as any other reference frame. There's another trick. Behavior of things in inertial reference frames is time dependent because gravity pulls your frame around and changes everything around it slightly every moment. Besides that, two inertial reference frames may have a relative velocity but for a moment share the same point in space (the example above).
That's when tensor math starts to come in handy. Don't worry, I won't torture you with that.
Relativity, once you grok it, will bend your mind. From a metaphysical perspective, it emphasizes the reality that most of what we call facts are actually just high probability observations.
Trust me, when you're looking forward to an hour of planned decompression after a long and deep scuba dive, you've brought a book.
The usual solution is to buy about three copies of the paperback from the local used book store. This gives you about nine dives worth of reading material if you keep the wet book in a bag of water between dives and don't let it dry out. Still gets pretty expensive, even with the used books. Also, I read fast, which doesn't help.
Books printed in a waterproof medium would be wonderful to bring along for just this purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
Then you don't understand the power of flexible deliverables. The .class file strategy along with the .jar concept basically blows lisp and smalltalk out of the water when it comes to product delivery time.
:)
Admittedly, there may be a way to rethink lisp and smalltalk such that compiled code can be easily separated and independently manipulated, but enterprise Java applications are just so much easier to manage largely because of the strategy chosen for breaking up deliverable units.
As for syntax, I tend agree with you, both lisp and smalltalk have more powerful language metaphors than Java (and other C derivatives). Though, that can be a two-edged sword (have you ever tried to read newbie lisp?
Regards,
Ross
Several of the other developers in my office use Idea, and though they get their import statements automanaged, there are clearly other factors at work when you look at who wrote what and the functionality of that effort.
Let's just say it's the helmsman, not the tiller, that determines the quality and maintainability of a particular unit of source code.
Regards,
Ross
Actually, that turns out not to be the case. What you've described is "security through obscurity", which is vulnerable to lots and lots of kinds of attack.
Many encryption attacks are against the encrypted text alone, and if your encryption approach sucks, most tools will go right through it.
Some of the better decryption systems will then proceed to describe which long ago cebunked algorithms you used or which algorithms you tried to implement but messed up in some fairly pedestrian way.
Security through obscurity, isn't. If your system can't stand to have the algorithm exposed and studied, the algorithm is as likely a point of attack as the key. And you probably didn't do as good a job as people who have subjected their algorithms to public review.
Regards,
Ross
Read the article. You get to choose your whitelist. A company's "info request" email address wouldn't require anyone to pay because limiting access is not the goal of having that email address.
You or I might because we don't want strangers who aren't serious about making contact. Though a similar spam filter (requiring a reply/response step to be auto-added to the whitelist) apparently caused too much wanted email to be lost because too many human senders were unwilling to go through the trouble of sending a second email to get their first email through.
I forsee that this will have similar difficulties.
Regards,
Ross
I *hate* synching across IR. Say I'm stuck with a desktop system at work and am not allowed to bring my laptop from home (it happened at my last job). And for the love of Pete, don't jostle the table while I'm doing an IR synch!
:).
With bluetooth, I have my phone in my jacket pocket, the headset at hand, PDA around somewhere, and my laptop on my desk. All talking to each other, no muss, no fuss. Alternate work setup #1 puts me in a park (with good GPRS coverage), laptop on lap, phone in jacket pocket, headset discreetly left at home (phone bill expensed
Though many devices had IR through the years (I loved my HP48), it simply never became ubiquitious (few desktops, even today, ship with an IR transceiver). Bluetooth simply has the momentum to overwhelm the aging also-ran medium of serial I/R with all of its warts (line-of-sight, high power consumption, extremely short range, microscopic usable bandwidth for the frequency being used, etc.).
Regards,
Ross
Eventually, maybe. Perhaps, someday, within the next five years or so, we'll have a really, really broadband antenna, along with a really, really broadband amplifier and A/D/A converter for less than $10 so that your software can control it.
And then you'll have your software determined radio for the masses.
While we're waiting for that to happen in a single chip design so we can put it in a cell phone form factor, we can at least read up on current events and see that TI has, right here and now, made it more likely that future GSM cell-phones and PDA devices can support bluetooth and wi-fi without being bigger, with equivalent power consumption, and for about the same cost of manufacture as current phones without those features.
The pie in the sky ain't always what it seems.
Regards,
Ross
Ah, that does clarify the issue. I, personally, believe that the right to keep and bear arms is inseparable from the other rights as it provides the necessary substantiation that power derives from the consent of the people. You may not believe that might makes right in our relatively calm and civilized corner of the world, but ask an Afghani for his take on it.
As soon as the people lose the right to keep and bear arms, they lose the source of their power in the tension between government and governed. At that point, if and when the other rights are revoked ("But if it saves one child!"), the populace has no recourse, except to go underground and attempt to correct the situation by actually overthrowing the government. But the situation never gets there until after the population has been disarmed (read your Machiavelli).
The guns in the meantime are just an implied threat. It's not realistic to think that today's populace with today's guns can fight today's army, and that's not the way it would happen if it needed to. If you have your way, tomorrow's populace will be stealing their guns from the army, infiltrating the army, and generally fighting an uphill battle to take back those rights you so casually threw away because you were afraid of your neighbors (instead of just walking across the street and getting to know them).
In my opinion, the only reason gun control has so much traction in modern politics is a direct result of the loss of community, which is a result of our culture, including our work ethic. If we put our children and community at a higher priority than our career, we'd be spending long lunch hours with our children, getting to know our neighbors, better preparing our children for their future, and losing our fear of the people around us. But we still pursue the all-powerful greenback to the exclusion of everything else. And then we're astonished at the fallout.
*sigh*
Ross
Oh. My. God.
That is hilarious. I just scared my roommate by spontaneously falling out of my chair laughing!
(For those who don't get it, read up on the relative armor thickness of various tanks in WWII.)
Regards,
Ross
You must have amazing insight into my own communication preferences to be able to see, more clearly than I, that I don't think Haiku is really a wonderful form of expression...
<sarcasm>
Gosh, thanks for helping me out there! I almost conformed to... well I almost conformed to something anyway (though you didn't help me out by explaining what my personal opinion had been in conformance with)! Now I'll just jump up and conform to your assertion!
</sarcasm>
The next time you think of posting something like this, think twice. You've managed to remove all doubt.
As it turns out, I really do like Haiku and tend to find that people who don't get it are rather astonishingly boring company. Though it is only one observable factor, in my experience, the correlation is amazingly good.
Good luck,
Ross
Interfaces and factories are a patterned approach to decoupling interface from implementation, which is a valuable thing, but...
Aspects attack a different set of coupling problems. Should all of your classes really have to import java.logging.Log (or whatever it is, I'm not looking it up right now)? Should your persisted objects be aware that they're persisted and have transaction enlistment code in their method bodies? Should...
If you have modifications or enhancements to groups of classes that aren't really related to the class's responsibilities (you did go through a CRC exercise, right?), then you could go in and add that code to each relevant method in each relevant class, knowing that when some change needs to be made to this code, you'll have to go back to the same hundred or thousand or more places and change all of them.
Or you could write an aspect.
In my experience, it often really is that easy. For the ORM I'm writing, I've developed an aspect that can make your classes persistence aware in a reasonably performant way using minimal x-doclet tags (most classes only need an "@persist" tag in the class javadoc).
As another poster observed, it takes all of the code related to a specific system feature and moves it all to one place (the aspect definition). You want to pay attention to security, you have your security classes and your security aspect. Persistence? Same thing. Exception handling around an external API? Aspect.
Actually, the pattern aspects most resemble is the Visitor pattern, but without the need to write an accept(Visitor) method, without needing to work against only the public interface (aspects can break encapsulation if you think it's valuable, which it is for persistence) and without having to maintain all visitors if your visitable list of classes change (actually, there are some ways to manage this in visitor, the "lite-Visitor" variant, for instance).
As for whether or not AOP is the next big thing? I don't know. It makes it easier to write inscrutable code in Java which means you need to keep a tighter leash (more code reviews) on your less experienced developers. I had one guy "get it" and he pretty much managed to turn one part of our system into a lispish mess of code-generation. But even with that risk, when used carefully, aspects can take code that is difficult to maintain and really improve the readability and understandability. I plan to continue using AOP for my projects, but to always do so carefully.
Regards,
Ross
Thanks.
Haiku really is a wonderful form of expression.
Ross
Save the vitriol for when you "get" the argument.
Regards,
Ross
What part of "Congress shall make no law..." are they having trouble with?
The part where all that free speech being religiously referred to is actually the self-protectionist actions of big-money on government monopolized airways.
We've already got limitations on free speech. You want to state your opinion? No problem. Tell as many people as you like. Use the internet (a highly participatory medium) to increase the potential audience of your voice. There are other non-monopolized forms of media for similar "boost".
But don't bother complaining that the wealthy person's or organization's proposed inability to buy political favors through the manipulation of government monopolized broadcast media is somehow a "bad" limitation on free speech.
This is the most emancipating proposal since women got the vote. Campaign spending reduction, along with term limits, are the two proposals most likely to restore any kind of faith in the integrity of the political system. Big money has bought and sold our government for so long that many people can't even conceive of a system where their interests might be represented.
Individual rights don't exist in a vacuum. To claim a right means taking away from the legal abilities of another. Big money's "right" to buy legislators (here phrased as "free speech") directly takes away from my abilility to elect representives who are not beholden to interests outside of their constituency.
I would argue that the Constitution as a whole is more concerned with the latter than the former.
Regards,
Ross
Why use the goverment to quiet those with whom you do not agree?
It's not so much that I want to use the government to quiet these nimrods as that I want the government to undo the mechanisms by which these nimrods came to have such a loud voice.
If broadcaster consolidation is perceived as a problem, then I am not alone in my concerns. Which slightly reassures me.
Regards,
Ross
Except for the "mouse army" metaphor, I loved the ending to Diamond Age. Not wrapping everything up (and throwing in the Seed twist) was inspired. Snow Crash had a fairly straightforward wrap-up-the-arcs ending. Zodiac was weaker than the other two just for the neatness of the ending (biological systems are never ever that easy to manage).
Cryptonomicon was apparently written for a dozen geeks in San Francisco to enjoy and I'm sure they loved it. For the other hundred million scifi readers around the world, it blew right from the first page.
Your point about Stephenson loving the idea and forgetting about the story arc is rather insightful and a good point. He might do better if he took a few weeks after coming up with the concept to flesh out a compelling plot, and then started playing with the toys.
Regards,
Ross
"Zodiac", "Snow Crash" and "The Diamond Age" were well written, fun reads, but "Cryptonomicon" was a painful waste of money (I bought the hardback). I must be the only /. reader who doesn't like it though...
His exposition was painful and labored, trying to explain modern "hacker-ware" to the non-elite. Linux and PGP have never been more painful to hear about than in that book. And then on top of that the ending was such a total and complete non-event, I have never been so completely underwhelmed.
I like Stephenson, but "Cryptonomicon" simply sucked and I'm desperately hoping the next one is a return to the wonderful storytelling of his earlier works.
Regards,
Ross
I seriously doubt that. Believe it or not, people don't like being bothered all the time.
There is a fascinating option that most cell phones have: they don't have to be answered. When my nokia phone is ringing, the two softbutton options are "accept" and "decline". Once you hit "decline", it doesn't even vibrate any more (since mine only rings when the vibrate is disabled... i.e. it's charging).
I think the biggest issue is that people simply have no idea of how to not answer a phone. If I'm in a situation where it's not appropriate to answer or I simply don't want to be interrupted, you'll get to leave me a message and I'll get back to you when I have a chance. Most people appear to be so conditioned to automatically accepting a phone call that they don't perceive that there are other options available.
Which is a pity. It is your phone, presumably purchased for your convenience and not the convenience of others who happen to be calling right now.
Regards,
Ross
I'm sorry moderators, but the posting calling Edison a jerk is right on the money.
/.
He was on the wrong side of developing just about every technological idea that his name is attached to. He was one of the first to develop the phonograph, but insisted on tubes instead of disks, no matter what the market said. Edison did not invent the incandescent light bulb, he refined the gas and filament for longer life. Etc.
Just because you haven't heard this before or it deflates one of your personal sacred cows doesn't make it flamebait. American history texts in high school are so far off on every other topic, I'm amazed that they spelled Edison's name right.
Edison's real genius was in securing IP and marketing his IP so that others would license it. He was doing that years before that became a high tech business plan for us to discuss on
Regards,
Ross
When I say, "I exist." I mean that there is some concept of identity which is. Alternatively argued, if I don't exist, then I can't posit "I", so the reverse argument isn't consistent and proves the positive argument. There are better ways of stating this proof, but Descarte's, "Cogito ergo sum." is a provable assertion for each observer.
From that point, the consistency of the observations of your senses provides some evidence (credible evidence to many) that there is a universe that you can interact with, lending credence to the further assertion that the universe you observe exists in the same way you do, as opposed to the way a character in a book exists, or the way a mathematical concept exists for instance.
The "soul" analogy works, but can lead to false implications (someone might read that to imply that I am discussing a soul distinct from the physical body). Instead, I prefer to use less emotionally loaded terms, like "observer" or "agent" when discussing fundamental metaphysics.
As an aside, the possibility that the soul is separate from the body is an entirely different metaphysical discussion and it's usually a bad idea to confuse two issues into one discussion. Moving further along on this point, I don't see any compelling reason to believe that the soul is separate from the immensely complex electrochemical reactions going on in our bodies and heads. Penrose's book nonwithstanding.
Regards,
Ross
Can you conclusively prove to me, right here and now, beyond ANY shadow of doubt, that things like UFOs, ghosts, Nessie, etc. do NOT exist?
;-)
I didn't think so. Guess what? I can't prove that they DO exist either!
But this doesn't make both positions equally defensible. Asking someone to prove a statement false is "shifting the burden of proof" and is a classic argumentative fallacy.
The party making a positive assertion has the obligation to substantiate that assertion or abandon it. The person hearing the assertion has no obligation to believe it unless substantiation is provided.
I certainly am not obligated to show that the universe is free of alien technological populations because you assert that they exist. In the same way, the receiver of any positive assertion is under no obligation to help out the other party in substantiating their assertion ever. Whether for the existence of God, ghosts, etc.
On the subject of nessie, however, there simply aren't enough fish or vegetation in the loch to support an animal of nessie's mass. Any informed measurement of fish populations and aquatic vegetation will show that there is no room even for an alligator in the current system, let alone a huge primeval holdover.
But it makes for a nice story to bring the tourists around.
Regards,
Ross
The scientific community doesn't have that many axioms (And I'm finding it hard pressed to think of any good example).
I exist. The universe exists in the same sense that I exist. Observations of phenomena are valid within the limitations of the apparatus making those observations.
The first statement is provable. The last two can not be proven but can be assumed to be correct based on incomplete information. Based on all three, you can build up a set of knowledge magnificent in scope and majestic in wonder about the universe and your place in it.
Without these statements as fundamentals, however, you have only the existentialist quandry (I can only prove that I exist so there is no purpose in a discussion of anything more). Even so, they are not accepted on faith. Your senses return information to your conciousness that can, with sufficient careful observation, be determined to be consistent and therefore useful. The utility of your sensory observations further provides a basis for future trust of those senses (within their limitations) and additional exploration of the universe around you.
Religionists would have us believe that accepting these two statements on incomplete evidence is the same as accepting statements as true that have no (absolutely none) supporting evidence. Such a conclusion is clearly incorrect and indicates a complete lack of comprehension of what knowledge really is. If you choose to believe in statements that have no evidence, you will not harm me and I will raise no objection. But don't claim that everyone does the same because it just isn't true.
Regards,
Ross
That's true, and not what I was talking about. When you understand GR or SR from a theoretical level up through the practical applications, the tendency to make forceful assertions goes way down.
You will have been dragged over the coals of conditional thinking and understanding to learn this stuff. At that point, unless you think like a scientist about what you know, you're going to come to a lot of overeager conclusions.
Regards,
Ross
What I was really asking is if anyone knew the basis for these theories.
/. posting. For that direction: don't worry about tensor math yet, you won't need it until Special Relativity. In the short term, you should study a good "Modern Physics" text. Specifically, Maxwell's equations, the theoretical underpinnings of each equation and finally, their application to EM fields.
:)
Ah. I'm not going to be able to do more than point you in the right direction in one
At that point, there's enough information to head over to the General Relativity chapter and take a gander. That ought to be enough to blow your mind for a little while as what you thought you knew about the universe resorts itself (don't worry, it happens to almost everyone).
After that, you can finish the book, develop some basic tensor math skills, then come back and explain Special Relativity to all of us! Actually, I do get Special Relativity, but it is mind bending. You really start thinking about the universe on a completely different scale.
I found it incredibly interesting stuff to learn, but because I went to a non-top-twenty school, there were only a few other people in my class with any interest. The hostility from the other undergrad students who hated learning (and especially hated having to rethink the universe) was a bit of a downer for the in-class exchange that the prof was so hoping for.
The graduate level classes were much more fun.
Regards,
Ross
c is relative to the observer, no matter which observer we're talking about. Anything that can measure the speed of a photon will always measure it going at the speed of light through that substance. Through a perfect vacuum, it's c. Through space it's c - epsilon (epsilon is an infintesimally small number). Through water it's about c/1.335.
If you are zooming past me at half the speed of light and both of us measure the speed of a particular photon at the same time, we'll both measure it's speed as c. What will be different about our two measurements is that you'll see a higher energy photon (bluer) than me if the photon is moving opposite to your motion relative to me and a lower energy photon (redder) if the photon is moving in the same direction as your motion relative to me.
No particular point in space is special. Once you identify where the observer is located, you can call that point in space an "origin" or "zero" and make all of your measurements from that point in space. The rest of the universe relative to that origin is called an "inertial reference frame", but it's just the same as any other reference frame. There's another trick. Behavior of things in inertial reference frames is time dependent because gravity pulls your frame around and changes everything around it slightly every moment. Besides that, two inertial reference frames may have a relative velocity but for a moment share the same point in space (the example above).
That's when tensor math starts to come in handy. Don't worry, I won't torture you with that.
Relativity, once you grok it, will bend your mind. From a metaphysical perspective, it emphasizes the reality that most of what we call facts are actually just high probability observations.
Remember, there is no spoon.
Regards,
Ross
Trust me, when you're looking forward to an hour of planned decompression after a long and deep scuba dive, you've brought a book.
The usual solution is to buy about three copies of the paperback from the local used book store. This gives you about nine dives worth of reading material if you keep the wet book in a bag of water between dives and don't let it dry out. Still gets pretty expensive, even with the used books. Also, I read fast, which doesn't help.
Books printed in a waterproof medium would be wonderful to bring along for just this purpose.
Regards,
ross