I checked that out, long ago. Details might be wrong due to bad RAMs. (And, of course, I might have read the whitewash..)
The US bomb production line wasn't fast in the beginning, so they wanted to send an effective "message" -- that was why they didn't bomb outside cities.
Also, US wanted to take Ira.. Japan, so they didn't have to do it again a decade or two later (the Japanese army had built defenses to make an invasion very costly in lives) -- which was likely if the military had kept control.
The number of dead in Hiroshima or Nagasaki was less than the fire bombing of Tokyo, if my memory is correct.
I don't know if US would have paid the cost in lives to invade -- a Japan controlled by military that was bombed to Hell? Certainly that change of government was good both for Japan, Asia and the world.
Personally? I think nuclear charges are too neat tools to waste them on offing people...
You're correct, I've completely ignored the validity of any points you've made or tried to make.
Wow, a self-confessed troll that admit to lie about people's position and attack that instead (so-called "straw man"). Usually you guys don't confess, so I'll be nice and answer your excuse for being a troll.
I don't really believe it's an honest complaint. You're just grasping for an excuse for being an asshole troll.
you completely ignored the request for a simple explanation or example of why COBOL (and its syntax, in particular) sucks.
I gave two points:
I've never heard about anyone using COBOL outside it's specific problem area. This is a serious hint about usability -- lots of people even use PHP for general programming!! If COBOL was usable -- it would be used.
The specific point in the book made the claim about COBOL. It has discussion and references to it's claims. It didn't feel necessary to add to that. (I know a guy with a copy and it has the exact quote "COBOL is the laughingstock of the computing field".)
Given the above points, a full argument seemed superfluous. Especially since you clinically have avoided commenting on the reference to the well documented book (and everyone else in the computing world) -- and instead demanding references from me.
And with you flamers that wrote in support, I expected lots of counterclaims about how good some total idiocy is. In short, it was a can of worms I didn't feel a need to open with non-serious debaters when I had the two strong points above.
FYI, in a logical argument, you're not allowed to ask for proof as you do with your "Turing Machine" comment. See, his comment was a request that you supply proof for your posits. Had you done so, then you would have the right to ask him to prove his.
WTF??
My Turing argument
here was an answer to Oligonicella's "[I have] accomplished anything that needed doing [in COBOL]". Of course you can do anything in any language. (If it's a good tool for the problem is another argument.) The second time I posted, was because Oligonicella seemed to not be aware of the theory regarding Turing machines and argued that there were things some languages couldn't do.
Well done, though, to accuse someone else for bad logic while misrepresenting their points! Did you do it on purpose or where you lucky?
Here is the quote from the book I started from:
Fact 30: COBOL is a very bad language, but all the others (for business data processing) are so much worse.
That is the common opinion, like that water (under certain temperature and pressure ranges) is wet. COBOL is a specialised language -- that work well for it's problem domain and is hardly used at all outside it.
You argue -- "If COBOL handles currency better than any/most other languages, then use it for financial programs."
WTF 2??
I have never written anything else! Your point isn't contradicted by "Fact 30" above, either, which I've not argued against -- just tried to work around.
That was the second point you are claiming I've written things I've not done. I stopped reading.
I think you're a troll and I'm not stupid enough to waste time arguing with you.
And the point of using Lisp to create the sub-language COBOL would be what?
Sigh. Not necessarily the sublanguage COBOL. The do this kind of thing to get a sub-language with functionality that expresses the problem domain.
The reason here would be to get something as usable as COBOL but that wasn't more disgusting than x86 assembly language -- that still reads like a bad novel.
The book's thesis that COBOL would be best for this admin programming is obviously wrong. There would be a good language for the problem domain that didn't have the COBOL drawbacks.
I'll be interested to check this book out for the COBOL section alone.
A guestion.
Let's assume that the book's thesis is true that COBOL is best for administrative programming since it's a specialised language.
Does the book address e.g. Lisp, where programmers have a standard "pattern" to create sub-languages to attack problems?
It sounds like an argument that Lisp should be used instead of COBOL, since Lisp is arguably at least as good as any/most for non-low level programming.
Do you believe that life was better before industrialization began than after?
Yes, the average living conditions went up during the industrialization.
But in the IR there were lots of people that lost their work on farms -- and couldn't get jobs in the new industries. They had Hell. Big social problem in the 19th century.
We computer people are like those people getting caught in the changes. But that probably this will make the world better over time, too.
Yeah, I'm nothing if not an ignorant hypocrite who is bad at math.
Now, some people might not classify me as a nice person, but where did I write anything like that?! Please wait until I insult you before being insulted. (That part about living under a "rock" was even flagged with a ":-)".)
I just pointed out that your claim about M-soft was (a) already covered and (b) obviously wrong.
(-: Now you're going to accuse me of accusing you of lots of things because I corrected you again?:-)
Congrats on the small demon.
I've never had any and sadly probably won't, but I hear it gets better.:-)
I mean, has Microsoft lowered their price on a single product as a result of having to compete with linux which has a slight competitive advantage in the price arena.
The grandparent to your post explicitly wrote: (with obvious unnamed monopoly exceptions *coughMicrosoftcough*)
By the way, since you seem to have been under a rock the last year::-)
For a big company (or similar administrative unit) that are going to buy M-soft products -- the way to get it cheaper is to do a believable study of transfer to Linux...
Competition is starting to work for Microsoft.
(A pet theory of mine is that Open/Free Source got really big years earlier than they otherwise would have, because it's impossible to compete with a criminal monopolist. Everyone that hates M-soft's business practices could unite with one really nice alternative.)
But consider when industrialization became big in the 19th century (at least where I live). It was hell on the little people then. Mass unemployment and lots of suffering.
It was a good thing in the long run, though. The world is much better for it:
Infancy/child death rates where around 20-30% before industrialization. The rest of our quality of living has been raised similarly; to be able to study is half of life's meaning to me. Lots of people had brain damage because of bad harvests when they were children. Etc, etc.
This outsorcing trend will (almost) certainly be a Good Thing for the third world and all humanity in a few decades.
It just sucks to be us -- that has to live through the changes in the wrong place. Like the unemployed and workers of the early industrialization.
I find this whoring by spokespeople to claim otherwise disgusting.
Re:Sounds perfect for Florida...
on
Space-Age Houses
·
· Score: 3, Funny
RTFA - SpaceHouse can withstand [..] wind speeds of up to 220 km/h
Sorry. I did read an article earlier today, but not that one. The one I read didn't say anything about wind speed.
What nitwits voted my stupid article to 5, btw?:-)
Sounds perfect for Florida...
on
Space-Age Houses
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Should be perfect for Florida and other places with "high winds", using ultra-light composites...:-)
Left wing is e.g. Chomsky-believer. I called that group religious. I should have been better formulated. (Liberal is right, over here.)
The US religious right is just too weird to understand, for a North-European. It literally reminds me mostly of a muslim country in weirdness.
Yeah, anti-semitism (rasism in general) seems to be at both political extremes. I'm not angry because their opinions are disgusting, but the anti-intellectual way they think and the double standards they keep for different sides.
so in conclusion, go fuck yourself you redneck hick.
You have no idea who I am. I'm neither redneck nor hick.
When you go around insulting people you don't know or understand, it do say a lot about yourself. In case you didn't understand -- in the previous sentence I more or less called you "childish asshole", but that was not an insult. I motivated why it was a fitting description.
I'm Swedish and my only opinion that is extreme, is a dislike for True Believers of different faiths. People that have their view of themselves as good people directly connected to their political/religious/etc opinions. I see you Believers as the bane of humanity.
I do not expect you to understand this before you've grown up and applied critical thinking, but I do expect you to realize that you didn't understand my position.
Vanunu is not allowed to leave his country. Like literally millions of Cubans or North Koreans -- which also suffer real oppression, with decades of prison in Cuba for people that don't like the goverment. And even worse in North Korea. The volume from the leftwing about Vanunu is many, many times larger than the volume about millions of people in dictatorships.
I've literally seen kilometers of left wing text condemning Israel on this and other issues, when I've seen less than meters about countries that are many times worse (even with a Palestinian description of Israel and an Amnesty or HRW description of the Arab dictators, Belorussia, etc, etc) This is an obvious example of double standards that True Believers have.
I do know that 18 years for spreading state secrets is a low punishment in many countries and that it's standard not to let people leave the country when they have state secrets. I have no idea if it's merited to keep Vanunu incommunicado and neither do you. It's possible that they only fuck with the poor idiot, but Israel do have a democratic system with a judicial system that's probably no more fscked than the US' and Swedish' ones.
You wrote that it'd be a good idea to target the government of a country that wanted to outlaw encryption. I just pointed out that you have different standars here, too. Bush reminds me of Khomeini (faith-based?!) and the way he probably was bought to let Microsoft off is disgusting. But his administration is hardly worse than many other goverments.
I don't really get your reasoning. Like the post you claim make sense, you approve of killing off governments that forbids encryption?
My memories of history tells me that terrorism like murdering your government is probably equally spread among left-/right-wingers?
Personally, I'd be sorely tempted to support death threats to the politicians that want to introducing software patents into EU. I'd at least vote for any politician that wanted to make that a mitigating circumstance of murder... ("Your honour, that's not really a big loss to humanity.")
Free Vanunu from the human-rights abusing assholes that are the Israeli government! They must be stopped!
I find this enthusiasm for one guy that is not allowed to leave his country interesting. The volume is literally multiple factors of ten larger than criticism of real infringements of human rights by Iran, Egypt, White Russia, Cuba, most countries south of Sahara, etc.
But since your post contained:
[When encryption becomes illegal] i'll take the terrorists' side and suggest they go target the white-house instead of innocent people who are helpless to do anything.
Then you should approve of nuking France -- which do make encryption illegal? (At least they did?)
Strange, that would make you a voter for Bush -- which is contradicted by your signature?
Or you are just a left leaning guy with the normal contradictions and double-think that's normal among you members of religious groups?
web applications were a bane to Microsoft because they could be run without windows. As he put it: "There's no way Microsoft is going to allow DHTML to get any better than it already is: it's just too dangerous to their core business, the rich client."
How naive!
He assumes that Microsoft won't use the standard strategy of all monopolists and vary the implementations of these standards...
I heard from someone looking into it, that IIS have a compiled binary format it uses between M-soft products instead of going through large XML text data. (Did something ugly on tcp level to recognize the other side. Then switched method. Compatible, at least for now, but more efficient between M-soft products.)
Terrorists and the regimes/groups/mindsets that support their tactics usually aren't are that reasoned or sensible.
No, no, no -- you have it totally wrong.
It's much worse than that!:-)
I'm from Sweden. After the sixties, people with extreme political left opinions took over the media here to "get their voices heard". Even today, something like 40% of all journalists vote for the (post?) communist party which among the general population get less than 10% of the vote.
There are lots of educated journalists -- and the media discussion about Israel/Palestina is as slanted as if "Zeinfeld" above was a journalist here...
These aren't exactly people that do suicide bombings.
What disgusts me are these idealists who voluntarily write stories they know to be slanted -- just to influence public opinion.
If they at least did it for money or some personal gain -- I could understand assholes selling out their integrity for money. But these are losing their honesty because they need their self image. Very, very sad.
it seemed to me you were saying the standard theory is in fact discontinuous in the detail, and thus not different than punctuated equilibrium for instance.
Again:
If you want to discuss differences between the standard evol biological theory and "punctuated equilibrium" and other of Gould's positions -- please define the differences. Give references that aren't just Gould papers/books (especially since he seems to have varied the exact claims over time).
That was more or less what I wrote. Now I've written it to you two times, too!
The way I've read about Gould was that to understand his exact position is like old Kremlology.:-)
That was the way Gould wanted it -- he seemed to try to give the public a wrong impression about the state of evol biology. (See this
reference from previous article.)
Slashdot Mirror
What I'm not ok with is that lots of our loved ones and good friends go away. And other people's loved ones.
The way the research is going now, a young person might get time enough to live a good life. Not just a few decades.
(An old student friend with back problems told me a joke: "How do you know you're dead if you've over 40? You wake up and don't hurt anywhere.")
The US bomb production line wasn't fast in the beginning, so they wanted to send an effective "message" -- that was why they didn't bomb outside cities.
Also, US wanted to take Ira.. Japan, so they didn't have to do it again a decade or two later (the Japanese army had built defenses to make an invasion very costly in lives) -- which was likely if the military had kept control.
The number of dead in Hiroshima or Nagasaki was less than the fire bombing of Tokyo, if my memory is correct.
I don't know if US would have paid the cost in lives to invade -- a Japan controlled by military that was bombed to Hell? Certainly that change of government was good both for Japan, Asia and the world.
Personally? I think nuclear charges are too neat tools to waste them on offing people...
I don't really believe it's an honest complaint. You're just grasping for an excuse for being an asshole troll.
I gave two points:Given the above points, a full argument seemed superfluous. Especially since you clinically have avoided commenting on the reference to the well documented book (and everyone else in the computing world) -- and instead demanding references from me.
And with you flamers that wrote in support, I expected lots of counterclaims about how good some total idiocy is. In short, it was a can of worms I didn't feel a need to open with non-serious debaters when I had the two strong points above.
My Turing argument here was an answer to Oligonicella's "[I have] accomplished anything that needed doing [in COBOL]". Of course you can do anything in any language. (If it's a good tool for the problem is another argument.) The second time I posted, was because Oligonicella seemed to not be aware of the theory regarding Turing machines and argued that there were things some languages couldn't do.
Well done, though, to accuse someone else for bad logic while misrepresenting their points! Did you do it on purpose or where you lucky?
Here is the quote from the book I started from:
That is the common opinion, like that water (under certain temperature and pressure ranges) is wet. COBOL is a specialised language -- that work well for it's problem domain and is hardly used at all outside it.You argue -- "If COBOL handles currency better than any/most other languages, then use it for financial programs."
WTF 2??
I have never written anything else! Your point isn't contradicted by "Fact 30" above, either, which I've not argued against -- just tried to work around.
That was the second point you are claiming I've written things I've not done. I stopped reading.
I think you're a troll and I'm not stupid enough to waste time arguing with you.
If it was just a bad rep, the COBOL people at least would use for something else.
So that C++/script languages was just to make that point a bit less boring.
If you are going to be a flaming asshole then at least do it when you have read the article and the discussion so you've understood the argument...So your description of my article makes me think about the classic "when Peter speaks about Paul, we learn more about Peter than about Paul"...
Sorry, I'm in a hurry.
The reason here would be to get something as usable as COBOL but that wasn't more disgusting than x86 assembly language -- that still reads like a bad novel.
The book's thesis that COBOL would be best for this admin programming is obviously wrong. There would be a good language for the problem domain that didn't have the COBOL drawbacks.
Let's assume that the book's thesis is true that COBOL is best for administrative programming since it's a specialised language.
Does the book address e.g. Lisp, where programmers have a standard "pattern" to create sub-languages to attack problems?
It sounds like an argument that Lisp should be used instead of COBOL, since Lisp is arguably at least as good as any/most for non-low level programming.
Now I'll probably be flamed by Lisp people... :-)
But in the IR there were lots of people that lost their work on farms -- and couldn't get jobs in the new industries. They had Hell. Big social problem in the 19th century.
We computer people are like those people getting caught in the changes. But that probably this will make the world better over time, too.
And/or students getting a second education at really a too late stage in our lives...
And I'm not even an American, so your guesses aren't that close at all.
I just pointed out that your claim about M-soft was (a) already covered and (b) obviously wrong.
(-: Now you're going to accuse me of accusing you of lots of things because I corrected you again? :-)
Congrats on the small demon.
I've never had any and sadly probably won't, but I hear it gets better. :-)
(with obvious unnamed monopoly exceptions *coughMicrosoftcough*)
By the way, since you seem to have been under a rock the last year: :-)
For a big company (or similar administrative unit) that are going to buy M-soft products -- the way to get it cheaper is to do a believable study of transfer to Linux...
Competition is starting to work for Microsoft.
(A pet theory of mine is that Open/Free Source got really big years earlier than they otherwise would have, because it's impossible to compete with a criminal monopolist. Everyone that hates M-soft's business practices could unite with one really nice alternative.)
But consider when industrialization became big in the 19th century (at least where I live). It was hell on the little people then. Mass unemployment and lots of suffering.
It was a good thing in the long run, though. The world is much better for it:
Infancy/child death rates where around 20-30% before industrialization. The rest of our quality of living has been raised similarly; to be able to study is half of life's meaning to me. Lots of people had brain damage because of bad harvests when they were children. Etc, etc.
This outsorcing trend will (almost) certainly be a Good Thing for the third world and all humanity in a few decades.
It just sucks to be us -- that has to live through the changes in the wrong place. Like the unemployed and workers of the early industrialization.
I find this whoring by spokespeople to claim otherwise disgusting.
What nitwits voted my stupid article to 5, btw? :-)
Should be perfect for Florida and other places with "high winds", using ultra-light composites... :-)
The US religious right is just too weird to understand, for a North-European. It literally reminds me mostly of a muslim country in weirdness.
Yeah, anti-semitism (rasism in general) seems to be at both political extremes. I'm not angry because their opinions are disgusting, but the anti-intellectual way they think and the double standards they keep for different sides.
When you go around insulting people you don't know or understand, it do say a lot about yourself. In case you didn't understand -- in the previous sentence I more or less called you "childish asshole", but that was not an insult. I motivated why it was a fitting description.
I'm Swedish and my only opinion that is extreme, is a dislike for True Believers of different faiths. People that have their view of themselves as good people directly connected to their political/religious/etc opinions. I see you Believers as the bane of humanity.
I do not expect you to understand this before you've grown up and applied critical thinking, but I do expect you to realize that you didn't understand my position.
Vanunu is not allowed to leave his country. Like literally millions of Cubans or North Koreans -- which also suffer real oppression, with decades of prison in Cuba for people that don't like the goverment. And even worse in North Korea. The volume from the leftwing about Vanunu is many, many times larger than the volume about millions of people in dictatorships.
I've literally seen kilometers of left wing text condemning Israel on this and other issues, when I've seen less than meters about countries that are many times worse (even with a Palestinian description of Israel and an Amnesty or HRW description of the Arab dictators, Belorussia, etc, etc) This is an obvious example of double standards that True Believers have.
I do know that 18 years for spreading state secrets is a low punishment in many countries and that it's standard not to let people leave the country when they have state secrets. I have no idea if it's merited to keep Vanunu incommunicado and neither do you. It's possible that they only fuck with the poor idiot, but Israel do have a democratic system with a judicial system that's probably no more fscked than the US' and Swedish' ones.
You wrote that it'd be a good idea to target the government of a country that wanted to outlaw encryption. I just pointed out that you have different standars here, too. Bush reminds me of Khomeini (faith-based?!) and the way he probably was bought to let Microsoft off is disgusting. But his administration is hardly worse than many other goverments.
My memories of history tells me that terrorism like murdering your government is probably equally spread among left-/right-wingers?
Personally, I'd be sorely tempted to support death threats to the politicians that want to introducing software patents into EU. I'd at least vote for any politician that wanted to make that a mitigating circumstance of murder... ("Your honour, that's not really a big loss to humanity.")
But since your post contained:
Then you should approve of nuking France -- which do make encryption illegal? (At least they did?)Strange, that would make you a voter for Bush -- which is contradicted by your signature?
Or you are just a left leaning guy with the normal contradictions and double-think that's normal among you members of religious groups?
He assumes that Microsoft won't use the standard strategy of all monopolists and vary the implementations of these standards...
I heard from someone looking into it, that IIS have a compiled binary format it uses between M-soft products instead of going through large XML text data. (Did something ugly on tcp level to recognize the other side. Then switched method. Compatible, at least for now, but more efficient between M-soft products.)
It's much worse than that! :-)
I'm from Sweden. After the sixties, people with extreme political left opinions took over the media here to "get their voices heard". Even today, something like 40% of all journalists vote for the (post?) communist party which among the general population get less than 10% of the vote.
There are lots of educated journalists -- and the media discussion about Israel/Palestina is as slanted as if "Zeinfeld" above was a journalist here...
These aren't exactly people that do suicide bombings.
What disgusts me are these idealists who voluntarily write stories they know to be slanted -- just to influence public opinion.
If they at least did it for money or some personal gain -- I could understand assholes selling out their integrity for money. But these are losing their honesty because they need their self image. Very, very sad.
It's longer than that! :-)
On the other hand, Moravec's argument seems interesting. (If you don't know -- Google for e.g. "Hans Moravec", "brain" and "retina".)
For a bet, I'd give it quite a good chance of being a quite good approximation.
Is there a reasoned, sensible pro-Palestinian debate anywhere?
If you want to discuss differences between the standard evol biological theory and "punctuated equilibrium" and other of Gould's positions -- please define the differences. Give references that aren't just Gould papers/books (especially since he seems to have varied the exact claims over time).
That was more or less what I wrote. Now I've written it to you two times, too!
The way I've read about Gould was that to understand his exact position is like old Kremlology. :-)
That was the way Gould wanted it -- he seemed to try to give the public a wrong impression about the state of evol biology. (See this reference from previous article.)