both Python and Ruby seem to be "VB for the 21st Century" -- as in tools to build quick-and-dirty apps without all that annoying type safety. In other words, they don't really directly compete with Java at all.
I think Ruby (and Python?) *are* typesafe, in that sense that all data is typed and only operations for that type can be used on that data.
Java is different in that it has static type checking, but it also has dynamic typing constructs like dynamic_cast which can raise runtime type erorrs, just like Ruby. Static type checking is handy to decrease the number of dynamic type errors, but I don't see how it's any more *secure* than dynamic typing.
All of Ruby, Python, and Java are in a different class than C/C++ which don't guarantee anything about object types.
Java is one of the first languages that was well planned and well designed with a theoretical basis in mind.
I think you have to narrow that claim for it to be true:
ML has a deep, solid formal foundation with type safety and provable semantics.
Prolog has a foundation in inductive logic.
Lisp is based in lambda calculus.
SQL is rooted in set theory.
Now, Java may be the first commercially popular marriage of mainstream (C++) syntax which at least has provable type safety. That's a good thing in itself.
You make good points... however Los Alamos is somewhat of a special case. We're talking Plutonium here, people. When it comes to a nuclear weapons lab, you HAVE to maintain safety and security, even if, and even though, you KNOW it kills productivity and drives up cost. Nuclear disaster is not an option.
Yes...it's good for them to keep some secrets from us. THEY'RE IN CHARGE! Parents keep secrets from children because that's better for them.
Thanks for summarizing the administration's stance so succinctly. It's the polar opposite of the principles our nation was founded on.
If you're not doing anything wrong, what do you care if somebody knows about it.
The exact opposite of the 4th ammendment. But I agree that's a useful maxim when applied to officers of the government in their official responsibilities - after all, how can government officials carry out the will of the people when they won't even tell the people what they're doing?
Then what are any of our laws worth, if any or all of them may already be overridden by top secret Presidential orders? How many people in this country are privy to our real laws?
That whole opinionjournal editorial contains exactly 1 appeal to the law: the one you cited. But it only mentions "foreign intelligence information." This whole flap is about spying in America, where at most one end of the connection is foreign.
If the administration thought that ruling was relevant they would have trotted it out by now.
I wish you hadn't been modded troll, because I don't think you're trolling. But when you say RTFA which article should I read? It would help if you included links and relevant quotes.
So far I have listened carefully for any rational justification from the Bush administration, and the ONLY thing I've heard is vague assurances that "I've got the authority to do this; it is a necessary part of my job to protect you; and we're guarding your civil liberties." And some bogeyman story from Cheney that the measures "saved thousands of lives." I'm sorry if you take this as partisan, but this administration doesn't have the credibility to make unsubstantiated claims like that any more.
What I'm eagerly awaiting is some rational explanation of why the President thought he had the legal right to do this. If he can present a plausible argument, the next step would be to pass a new law to convince him otherwise. But if he clings to the vague notion that wartime places him above the law, what is to be done?
Exactly! All the argument about whether these particular measures are good, misses the real point: given that our President feels he can supersede the law with secret Presidential orders, and that hiding the truth is good for us, do we have ANY IDEA what else our government is up to?
Yup, and with the following list if top "news" searches, we can now conclusively conclude the actual levels of interest in such trifling issues as the war, energy policy, and whether the US is still governed by the rule of law:
1. Janet Jackson
2. Hurricane Katrina
3. tsunami
4. xbox 360
5. Brad Pitt
6. Michael Jackson
7. American Idol
8. Britney Spears
9. Angelina Jolie
10. Harry Potter
The "very foundation of Wikipedia" is not that the "anonymous masses" will get everything 100% correct. Claiming that this is the case is a pretty disingenuous strawman. I see you got 5 insightful points out of it, too, which points to a growing, somewhat confusing, anti-wikipedia fever on Slashdot.
If the level of accuracy is OK, and not serious enough to erode the utility of Wikipedia, then why was Wales' "mostly correct" bio not OK enough for him?
I'm not part of any anti-Wikipedia furor, but I think Wales comitted a blunder this time. The argument that Wikipedia is accurate enough to be useful, and comparable to other sources, is a strong one. But with his actions, Wales instead supports the assertion that Wikipedia is significantly inaccurate, and only subjects who actively defend their interests get a reasonably fair shake.
Finally, even you don't agree with the argument, it's worth posting just for all those other +5's on this story who don't even understand why anybody cares. There is, at least, a perception of hypocrisy in Wales' edits.
Given that he made a few edits instead of locking it down, I'd guess the answer is "yes."
But he intervened with the process by getting involved. If we can only trust Wikipedia on topics where key people happen to be interested, what good is it?
Wikipedia is an experiment in gathering information from self-selecting sources who are essentially anonymous. Jimmy Wales is the experimenter. Remember in school when your physics experiment concluded that gravitational acceleration was 9.5 m/s? What did you do about it? Simply erase 9.5 and type in 9.81?
Wikipedia is under a lot of scrutiny right now, and the real issue is this: does collecting information in the Wikipedia style actually work? Does even its own founder really believe in it, when it comes to information he personally cares about?
I don't see why editing your bio, espcially to correct errors, would be such a terrible crime worthy of news.
Simple: because it shows the anonymous masses got it wrong, which undermines the very foundation of Wikipedia. If nothing else, what does it say for the accuracy of the vast majority of Wikipedia biographies about people who *don't* closely monitor their own entries?
I don't think the CPAN approach quite gets it. It's great there's a dumping ground for code out there, but anything you're very likely to want should be in a more integrated, well-defined construct so you don't have to go hunting around or fighting version incompatibilites just to run some little script. The language either needs to come with a big monolithic CLASSPATH-type thing, or dynamically and automatically fetch its own dependencies from the network.
This is interesting because it already supports (albeit incompletely) more languages than.Net
All good points. Unfortunately I don't think supporting a bunch of languages will cut it (even if all the languages are well supported and not just shoddy one-shot incomplete implementations).
I think the main thing that sets.net apart is not so much language support, but the rich software library which is conveniently accessable from *any* of those languages.
First and foremost you need a *good* GUI package, and by "good" I mean something you can use to implement apps that look great and run well - regardless of whether the API is elegant (I'm looking at you, Tk and AWT and Swing). Maybe this just means a QUALITY, well-supported integration between Parrot and wxWidgets.
Whoah. It took them THREE DAYS? I'm glad this wasn't (obviously) a really serious problem. If it were some sort of radiation based bomb, they'd get fried.
Why act rashly in a non-emergency situation? Perhaps they could have fixed the problem faster, but had the opportunity to work more deliberately, and took it.
It is also important to remember that although data retention laws require information to be available for security reasons, the Data Protection Act prohibits making that information available to anyone else.
Only until the first sign of a security threat. Then those protection acts become "bottlenecks to cooperation between law enforcement agencies." You'll see. And if the protection laws can't be repealed, no matter. They can always be overridden by secret presidential directives.
CDs aren't too bad but they do require special handling (keep them in a case, don't expose to sunlight, etc). Personally I still think audiotapes are better for kids, and I prefer to keep my music collection on a hard drive where I can make a complete bit-for-bit copy with no read errors with a few keystrokes. Caution is good, but the only real safety is multiple copies at different sites.
Do people have a way to migrate their blogs to a new site, even if they wanted to? Do they even provide a way for bloggers to back up their literary masterpieces on their own media?
Does this mean that they're finally listening to the people?
Maybe it means they decided passing laws is just too inconvenient and time consuming. Why bother when you can authorize whatever you feel like with secret orders?
Remember how the faked national guard documents actually saved Bush from probing questions about his military record, and ended Dan Rather's career at the same time? My point being, honesty is the best policy because, among other reasons, weak or discredited arguments tend to backfire.
Slashdot Mirror
Java is different in that it has static type checking, but it also has dynamic typing constructs like dynamic_cast which can raise runtime type erorrs, just like Ruby. Static type checking is handy to decrease the number of dynamic type errors, but I don't see how it's any more *secure* than dynamic typing.
All of Ruby, Python, and Java are in a different class than C/C++ which don't guarantee anything about object types.
ML has a deep, solid formal foundation with type safety and provable semantics.
Prolog has a foundation in inductive logic.
Lisp is based in lambda calculus.
SQL is rooted in set theory.
Now, Java may be the first commercially popular marriage of mainstream (C++) syntax which at least has provable type safety. That's a good thing in itself.
You make good points... however Los Alamos is somewhat of a special case. We're talking Plutonium here, people. When it comes to a nuclear weapons lab, you HAVE to maintain safety and security, even if, and even though, you KNOW it kills productivity and drives up cost. Nuclear disaster is not an option.
Then what are any of our laws worth, if any or all of them may already be overridden by top secret Presidential orders? How many people in this country are privy to our real laws?
If the administration thought that ruling was relevant they would have trotted it out by now.
So far I have listened carefully for any rational justification from the Bush administration, and the ONLY thing I've heard is vague assurances that "I've got the authority to do this; it is a necessary part of my job to protect you; and we're guarding your civil liberties." And some bogeyman story from Cheney that the measures "saved thousands of lives." I'm sorry if you take this as partisan, but this administration doesn't have the credibility to make unsubstantiated claims like that any more.
What I'm eagerly awaiting is some rational explanation of why the President thought he had the legal right to do this. If he can present a plausible argument, the next step would be to pass a new law to convince him otherwise. But if he clings to the vague notion that wartime places him above the law, what is to be done?
Exactly! All the argument about whether these particular measures are good, misses the real point: given that our President feels he can supersede the law with secret Presidential orders, and that hiding the truth is good for us, do we have ANY IDEA what else our government is up to?
I'm not part of any anti-Wikipedia furor, but I think Wales comitted a blunder this time. The argument that Wikipedia is accurate enough to be useful, and comparable to other sources, is a strong one. But with his actions, Wales instead supports the assertion that Wikipedia is significantly inaccurate, and only subjects who actively defend their interests get a reasonably fair shake.
Finally, even you don't agree with the argument, it's worth posting just for all those other +5's on this story who don't even understand why anybody cares. There is, at least, a perception of hypocrisy in Wales' edits.
Wikipedia is an experiment in gathering information from self-selecting sources who are essentially anonymous. Jimmy Wales is the experimenter. Remember in school when your physics experiment concluded that gravitational acceleration was 9.5 m/s? What did you do about it? Simply erase 9.5 and type in 9.81?
Wikipedia is under a lot of scrutiny right now, and the real issue is this: does collecting information in the Wikipedia style actually work? Does even its own founder really believe in it, when it comes to information he personally cares about?
I don't think the CPAN approach quite gets it. It's great there's a dumping ground for code out there, but anything you're very likely to want should be in a more integrated, well-defined construct so you don't have to go hunting around or fighting version incompatibilites just to run some little script. The language either needs to come with a big monolithic CLASSPATH-type thing, or dynamically and automatically fetch its own dependencies from the network.
First and foremost you need a *good* GUI package, and by "good" I mean something you can use to implement apps that look great and run well - regardless of whether the API is elegant (I'm looking at you, Tk and AWT and Swing). Maybe this just means a QUALITY, well-supported integration between Parrot and wxWidgets.
DU is one thing, but phosphorus rounds are WWI technology.
If this stuff is so great, it probably won't be sold on thinkgeek. Got to keep the kids away from the good stuff.
CDs aren't too bad but they do require special handling (keep them in a case, don't expose to sunlight, etc). Personally I still think audiotapes are better for kids, and I prefer to keep my music collection on a hard drive where I can make a complete bit-for-bit copy with no read errors with a few keystrokes. Caution is good, but the only real safety is multiple copies at different sites.
Do people have a way to migrate their blogs to a new site, even if they wanted to? Do they even provide a way for bloggers to back up their literary masterpieces on their own media?
Remember how the faked national guard documents actually saved Bush from probing questions about his military record, and ended Dan Rather's career at the same time? My point being, honesty is the best policy because, among other reasons, weak or discredited arguments tend to backfire.