Thus the verb for "hit" is different when applied to a dog as opposed to a tree. This potentially helps remove a lot of the confusion in human/machine natural language interfaces
But ambiguity gives REUSE- what some modern programming languages call Generics. If I make a subroutine to hit a $X N times, I don't want to rewrite it 16 times for each possible noun group of $X.
Noun group prefixes only helps with ambiguity when you also want to abbreviate. (Omit repeating the noun, because it can be infered by the group prefix on the verb). The only really important ambiguity in natural languages (and it's rare) is the lack of nested parentheses, creating the "He saw her in the park with a telescope".
studied Xhosa at university.
Do you type that with a lot of ''s? Or with ``s? Or maybe !
This is nonsense. It is far harder to explain the concepts of SEGABRT, pointers,...
The end user doesn't NEED to understand SEGABRT and pointers to use that hypothetical system.
All he does is ask "Why did that happen?" "Ok, well why did that happen then?" "And why did that happen?". He needs no more understanding of the answers than the Eliza computerized psychoanalyst. He's simply got to proceed asking "And why was that? And that?" until it comes to something he recognizes.
However, more important than the natural-language aspect of such a system is an ability of the computer to store metadata on the recent activities of all its programs, so that when a user wants to query "And why'd that happen", the information exists in a recoverable form.
The original songs are almost never the subject of his "parody".
Um, no. The songs are the subject. "Like a Surgeon" is not a satire about surgery- it's a parody of "Like A Virgin". To the extent they're "critical commentary" of anything, they comment on the song or musician, not the Amish or gun-enthusiasts.
But anyway, Weird Al usually pays for his songs. The way songs basically work in the USA is they're essentially compulsoraly licensed. There's one agency that controls all song licensing. Any normal, commercially released music will be through that agency. And anyone can pay a set fee to perform it, regardless of how they want to alter it first. By standard music industry practice, the writes to re-perform a song are always sold immediately.
And whose fault is it that we've got a 2 party system? YOURS!!!
No, it's an inevitable result of "plurality takes all" elections. A party is certain to win if it has 51% of votes. But the more its votes get above 50%, the less largess there is to go around ("largess" is the prizes given out by the winner to his supporters).
So groups struggling for the optimal outcomes for themselves will naturally gravitate towards having as close to 51% support as possible. Any less than 50 and they risk losing- any more, and they've wasted money on extra votes that weren't needed to win.
So 2 parties each with half of all voters is the natural consequence. If other countries aren't like this, it's because they either haven't had enough time to evolve, or because their national elections work differently.
About 50% of the population doesn't vote in most elections.
Because the chance of your vote actually changing anything, multiplied by the monentary value of any difference you'd personally experience from the preferred candidate, always comes out to less than $0.01. Usually a lot less (especially if you live in one of the 23 "noncontested" states where the Presidential winner is predetermined)
Voting is a tax on people who can't do math. (If you're generous, then maybe you'll happily pay that extra tax for the good of the nation...)
nd the democrats and republicans would be down to around 25%.
It is incorrect to not capitalize "democrat" and "republican" in that sentence. You are referring to specific political parties, not general ideas. A person can be a republican and democrat at the same time, but not both a Republican and Democrat. (For example, G W Bush is a democrat whenever he talks about bringing Iraq the gift of democracy)
nd the democrats and republicans would be down to around 25%.
And then the Democrats and Republicans would look at party Z, see which of it's platforms were attracting voters, check which of those were least likely to drive off their current supporters, and then add them into their position.
When a party Z voter sees that issue V, which previously attracted him to Z, has also been adopted by the Republicans, he'll switch to voting Repub- because that's the best way to support V. Because now, not only is the GOP promoting V, but it also has a chance of winning against the Democrats- something Party Z will never have.
As soon as a third party approaches 10% voter support, it will be absorbed into the main parties. This is an acceptable way to get issues you care about addressed, but not to reduce the dualparty system.
and this parody strikes me as a straightforward protected usage
It absolutely isn't. Parody is only immune to copyright infringment if the infringed material is itself the subject of parody!.
In the USA, this has been clearly established by the Cat Not In The Hat case. Because the parody was about OJ Simpson, and not The Cat In The Hat, the use was unprotected. (This ruling also applies to cases like PA v American Greetings)
Since that is probably more dangerous then talking on a phone since people tend to take hands off a wheel a lot to do it and balance things and so forth, or look for that missing buritto.
It isn't. Cellphones are much more dangerous than eating. (This has been proven by counting crash sites for phones, crumbs, and alcohol). Of course, the safety of food depends on the shape of the particular edible item- spagetti is more dangerous than sandwiches.
But the real reason cellphones are more dangerous that other small items the driver might handle is that the impose another time constraint. Someone on the other end is listening to you or talking to you. Prehaps you don't want to ask her to pause or repeat- maybe you don't even want it to seem like you're driving! If the phone starts to slip down, you will be under more time pressure to grab it up before missing words. Food, you're ready to stop eating at any instant and pay attention- the telephone is more engaging.
It has been scientifically measured on test courses that talking on a totally hands-free phone is only a little safer than using a handheld phone, which itself is approximately as bad as 5 beers.
(Another, lesser reason is that people are more likely to need to look closely at a cellphone to dial than they need to look at food)
Wrong. In the USA at least, you can't be tried for the same crime twice (the Double Jeopardy provision).
By your argument, someone guilty of Murder 1 could also be convicted of Murder 2, Attempted Murder, Manslaughter, Assault, and finally Unsafe Operation of a Firearm. But sorry, no can do.
This is the way it should be, as a complete ban on driver cell phone use would be unenforceable. How would they see the little wire running up to your ear?
COMINT. Communications Interception. They can monitor the radio frequency to see if a cellphone is in use, and then they can look in the window to see if the car has only one occupant.
oiding making any particular statement as to the "rights" of the child as a person or citizen
But the law, as passed, does intentionally make such a statement. They could've applied the same penalties without declaring that the fetus is a "child", but they chose not to.
It says:
(C) If the person engaging in the conduct thereby intentionally kills or attempts to kill the unborn child, that person shall instead of being punished under subparagraph (A), be punished as provided under sections 1111, 1112, and 1113 of this title for intentionally killing or attempting to kill a human being.
It has stated that an unborn fetus is a "child", meaning it's a person... which means, according to Roe V Wade section IX A:
If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant's case, of course, collapses, for the fetus' right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the
A large art of the rigorous submarine qualification that every crewmember is required to achieve involves damage control.
Of course, most all surface sailors take damage training as well. A carrier has a lot of people assigned to unnecessary amounts of cooking and cleaning work, which is really just to keep them busy in between emergencies when they'll be called for damage control. Does the Navy really need fresh bread baked each morning, instead of defrosting it like a civilian ship? And do they truely need to mop the decks three times a day?
Why is it a worse crime if I kill him because he's black (hate crime) than if I kill him because he bumped into me (some pointless reason, this is normal murder).
Because statistical sociology has found "hate crimes" to be a greater risk to the public at large. However, your example of a "bump crime" is not realistic. That type of thing is insigificantly rare- a different comparator would be required to discuss it seriously.
More accurately, crimes committed against a category of people ("I hate blacks" "I hate cops") present a greater risk to the public than do crimes against a known individual ("I hate Tommie Simmons"). In the latter case, the victim probably had some chance to anticipate the attack and take precautions.
It's not really "hate crimes" vs other crimes, but random or impersonal crimes versus others.
(ignoring the fact that the politically correct "person" in that statement is pointless as with the exception of Governer Arnold, there are few pregnant men)
A point that biotechnology will make obselete within 50 years. In 20 years lesbians will start to bear each other's children- gay men will take a while longer (and realistically, most will use external incubation-tanks)
The point of the law is to make killing a pregnant women two counts of murder, instead of one. I think that's a great idea.
It's "Laci". And that's not quite what the law does. It doesn't say "killing a pregnant woman is two murders" (although that is what Pres Bush and others have claimed) but instead says "causes the death of, or bodily injury to, a child, who is in utero at the time the conduct takes place, is guilty of a separate offense"
So harming a pregnant woman can be 1 assault and 1 murder. This means that if you trip a woman who's 1 month pregnant, and she later miscarries, you can face life imprisonment.
If a law was passed allowing for heavier penalties for attacking a pregnant woman on the grounds that it harmed HER more than a typical assault, that's one thing (the US Congress considered such a law, sponsored by Feinstein D-CA, but ignored it because the Republican majority wanted something that would undermine RoeVWade). But declaring that the fetus is a separate victim is inconsistent with the idea that abortion is legal.
The legality of abortion rests on the idea that the fetus is a body part, without any rights of its own, and only existing for the mother (as her property, in a way).
An inconsistent position has been created: If a 6-month old child is killed, it is murder regardless of whether the attacker was a stranger, or her own mother. But killing a 6-month old fetus is legal if the mother does it, but murder for anyone else.
The law has declared "Fetuses are people with rights- except that their mothers can kill them".
Although the lawyers on both sides want to win, they also want to finish. Intelligent, principled people lead to non-unaminious hung juries, forcing the lawyers to go through the whole case again. Someone who's "easily-led" will decide to vote with the majority of the jury, regardless of his own interpretation, just so they can all finish up and everyone can go home (possible exception of the defendant).
Not quite. If you accidently kill a person in the commission of another felony, that is murder 2. "I didn't think there was anyone inside when I set the fire..."
Yes, because you wrote something that you contradicted in later postings, so you apparently misunderstood it the first time.
It might have been possible to deduce your post's intended meaning by comparing it with the post to which you first replied- but since you neither quoted anything nor maintained the thread topic, the context wasn't there. If you want to say something that's insensible except as a reply, then DON'T switch to a new (non-"Re:") subject line.
The reason we have C, asm etc is because the concepts in programming are not easily expressed in English etc,
No. It's actually rather trivial to machine translate individual C++ statements into valid assembly code. The resules of doing so are inconvenient, because anyone with a little practice will find that 90% of the English text is boilerplate that can be more concisely presented as *&+=.;{[->, etc.
Verbose English debugging interfaces might make it simple to learn to do very basic debugging, but once you get into things a bit deeper (and get more experienced)
But what is a waste of time for experienced coder might be just what an end-user needs to help him better decide how to go about solving an unanticipated problem. It'd be nice if an untrained person could proceed through the following dialog (BEFORE having to contact a programmer).
"Why did my window go away?"
X11 Window connection closed on SEGABRT "Why did it seg?" Deferencing invalid pointer 0x0 "Why was it invalid?" Pointer was assigned as return value of OpenForWrite function call "Why did the function return 0x0?" Drive D: does not exist
Capabilities like that could help fullfil the Open Source promise of "Every user is a (competent) QA"
Actually, I've seen more than a few professional "software engineers" who could've benefited from something like that. A C++ guy transitioning to ADA, for example...
That's what I've been arguing all along (writing + validating is lots harder than just validating).
But that's NOT what you wrote. Maybe you THINK you wrote it; but you didn't.
Here's what you posted: "If you think that it's as hard to check code for correctness as it is to write the code in the first place".
That is a comparison between (the difficulty of) "checking some code" and "writing some code"- not "writing some code that is correct to within some N% of error". (If N==0, that would mean "perfect").
Writing "a program" is easier than writing "a correct, validatable program". But you used the former phrase, when evidently you meant the latter.
That said, SAFE surface transportation is obviously harder than intercontinental flight.
No. Safe, EFFICIENT surface travel is. If we accepted 50 kph speed limits and 5 kpl fuel usage, then ground transit would be a lot safer than air.
Around 100 manned flights to date, I think.
No. The space shuttle alone has done more than 100.
Part of exploration is science,
Space exploration without science is boring. Unless you're viewing it with a scientific eye, it's just some disparate lumps of lifeless rock that whose entertainment value is exhausted on the first day.
We drop you off a ship in the north atlantic with a life jacket, you're dead in an hour. Enjoy.
The "North Atlantic" contains all of the Atlantic outside the "South Atlantic". Much of it is in warm areas, where people have been known to survive more than 72 hours without a floatation device. But I'm not personally that tough.
Well, submarines don't exist for government propaganda value (unlike the Space Shuttle).
Yes, they very often do. The space race was one part of the cold-war, but the submarine-race was another big part. Harrison Ford made a movie about the Soviets trying to score propaganga-points with their nuclear submarine.
After all, they do nothing but sit around and wait to shoot ICBMs in WWIII,
Many of those missiles have had atomic warheads removed, and the Navy does shoot those at assorted targets (around Iraq). But a surface-ship could launch the same missiles cheaper, so yes, it is something of a waste.
Sigh. I already disproved that in my first message (go back and search for the word "Microsoft").
Corporations are considered single entities for certain, highly specific legal purposes; and recieving copyrighted material is not one of them. (Publishing it is)
Thought puzzle 1: If you buy a commerically boxed software package which permits only one user, but who can install it on multiple computers he owns, do you really think that a 100,000 employee multinational corp can get away with everyone using a single license?
Thought puzzle 2: On the witness stand, a CEO is asked by a prosecutor "After accidentally recieving the secret government schematics, did you distribute them to anyone else?" "No. I simply emailed them to all my employees. But it was never distributed, no."
Thought puzzle 3: If a nation modifiles a GPL application and uses it internally _ONLY_, then there would be no obligation to give their modified code to anyone.
The recipient would be the company itself
Funny, whenever my corporation buys software, we have to give the supplier a much more specific recipient address than just "Company Name". If I could only send products to companies as a whole, the CEO would be overburdened, and life would become more confusing.
But it will always be easier to verify that a program is correct to some acceptable degree of error than it is to *come up with* a program that is correct to that degree of error.
And again, you're not understanding what arguments you or others have made.
I said that "writing a program" is easier than "validating a program". You have misinterpreted my "writing a program" as "writing a perfectly correct program", which nobody even mentioned. "Writing a perfectly correct program", obviously, requires more than the sum of the efforts to "write a program" and "validate a program".
Anyone who claims that they can rewrite software and validate it faster than they can validate software that has already seen production use either isn't a professional developer
I never said that. You appear to not even have understood the claim you made. Your said that "work to write" > "work to verify". One needs only look around to see that this is false.
But just here you accuse me of claiming "time to write" + "time to validate" < "time to validate", which of course I never said anything about.
And I'll say it one more time: a secure design *sure as hell does* jump out at you much more readily when it's in front of you than when you have to figure one out from scratch.
Again, no. A shuttle is within 300 km of the ground
I didn't say "shuttle". The word was "manned spacecraft". The shuttle travels much less high than earlier rocketships. Heard of "Apollo"?
No. Submarines under the Ice can't do that.
Travelling through the arctic is a fairly rare special case (true, it's a case that drove a lot of the USN's excessive requirements...)
I should point out we've lost the same number of nuclear submarines as we have shuttles.
Well, if someday 50% of all submarines have been destroyed in accidents, let me know!
I should point out that more people have died in automobiles than airplanes, so surface roads are actually a greater engineering challenge than intercontinental flight... (That's a classical fallacy- comparing absolute numbers instead of relative)
"the ISS crew isn't doing any science, they're just barely keeping the station habitable!" Make it bigger.
There's a more fundamental problem: we don't have orbital science experiments that actually need people to perform them. 50 professors on earth launching 2 rockets a year will be more scientifically productive than 2 astronauts in orbit supplied by 5 launches annually- and the cost is the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Thus the verb for "hit" is different when applied to a dog as opposed to a tree. This potentially helps remove a lot of the confusion in human/machine natural language interfaces
But ambiguity gives REUSE- what some modern programming languages call Generics. If I make a subroutine to hit a $X N times, I don't want to rewrite it 16 times for each possible noun group of $X.
Noun group prefixes only helps with ambiguity when you also want to abbreviate. (Omit repeating the noun, because it can be infered by the group prefix on the verb). The only really important ambiguity in natural languages (and it's rare) is the lack of nested parentheses, creating the "He saw her in the park with a telescope".
studied Xhosa at university.
Do you type that with a lot of ''s? Or with ``s? Or maybe !
You can't solve an organisational problem with technology.
Fine. Then I suggest you immediately get off this internet thing. And unplug your phone, too!
Stop trying to solve organizational problems with technology! Mailing lists and software configuration management are futile!
And if you've got end-users doing debugging, you've got the mother of all organisational problems.
So with that one statement, you've accused both Linux and Microsoft Windows of the same broad sin...
This is nonsense. It is far harder to explain the concepts of SEGABRT, pointers,...
The end user doesn't NEED to understand SEGABRT and pointers to use that hypothetical system.
All he does is ask "Why did that happen?" "Ok, well why did that happen then?" "And why did that happen?". He needs no more understanding of the answers than the Eliza computerized psychoanalyst. He's simply got to proceed asking "And why was that? And that?" until it comes to something he recognizes.
However, more important than the natural-language aspect of such a system is an ability of the computer to store metadata on the recent activities of all its programs, so that when a user wants to query "And why'd that happen", the information exists in a recoverable form.
The original songs are almost never the subject of his "parody".
Um, no. The songs are the subject. "Like a Surgeon" is not a satire about surgery- it's a parody of "Like A Virgin". To the extent they're "critical commentary" of anything, they comment on the song or musician, not the Amish or gun-enthusiasts.
But anyway, Weird Al usually pays for his songs. The way songs basically work in the USA is they're essentially compulsoraly licensed. There's one agency that controls all song licensing. Any normal, commercially released music will be through that agency. And anyone can pay a set fee to perform it, regardless of how they want to alter it first. By standard music industry practice, the writes to re-perform a song are always sold immediately.
And whose fault is it that we've got a 2 party system? YOURS!!!
No, it's an inevitable result of "plurality takes all" elections. A party is certain to win if it has 51% of votes. But the more its votes get above 50%, the less largess there is to go around ("largess" is the prizes given out by the winner to his supporters).
So groups struggling for the optimal outcomes for themselves will naturally gravitate towards having as close to 51% support as possible. Any less than 50 and they risk losing- any more, and they've wasted money on extra votes that weren't needed to win.
So 2 parties each with half of all voters is the natural consequence. If other countries aren't like this, it's because they either haven't had enough time to evolve, or because their national elections work differently.
About 50% of the population doesn't vote in most elections.
Because the chance of your vote actually changing anything, multiplied by the monentary value of any difference you'd personally experience from the preferred candidate, always comes out to less than $0.01. Usually a lot less (especially if you live in one of the 23 "noncontested" states where the Presidential winner is predetermined)
Voting is a tax on people who can't do math. (If you're generous, then maybe you'll happily pay that extra tax for the good of the nation...)
nd the democrats and republicans would be down to around 25%.
It is incorrect to not capitalize "democrat" and "republican" in that sentence. You are referring to specific political parties, not general ideas. A person can be a republican and democrat at the same time, but not both a Republican and Democrat. (For example, G W Bush is a democrat whenever he talks about bringing Iraq the gift of democracy)
nd the democrats and republicans would be down to around 25%.
And then the Democrats and Republicans would look at party Z, see which of it's platforms were attracting voters, check which of those were least likely to drive off their current supporters, and then add them into their position.
When a party Z voter sees that issue V, which previously attracted him to Z, has also been adopted by the Republicans, he'll switch to voting Repub- because that's the best way to support V. Because now, not only is the GOP promoting V, but it also has a chance of winning against the Democrats- something Party Z will never have.
As soon as a third party approaches 10% voter support, it will be absorbed into the main parties. This is an acceptable way to get issues you care about addressed, but not to reduce the dualparty system.
and this parody strikes me as a straightforward protected usage
It absolutely isn't. Parody is only immune to copyright infringment if the infringed material is itself the subject of parody!.
In the USA, this has been clearly established by the Cat Not In The Hat case. Because the parody was about OJ Simpson, and not The Cat In The Hat, the use was unprotected. (This ruling also applies to cases like PA v American Greetings)
Since that is probably more dangerous then talking on a phone since people tend to take hands off a wheel a lot to do it and balance things and so forth, or look for that missing buritto.
It isn't. Cellphones are much more dangerous than eating. (This has been proven by counting crash sites for phones, crumbs, and alcohol). Of course, the safety of food depends on the shape of the particular edible item- spagetti is more dangerous than sandwiches.
But the real reason cellphones are more dangerous that other small items the driver might handle is that the impose another time constraint. Someone on the other end is listening to you or talking to you. Prehaps you don't want to ask her to pause or repeat- maybe you don't even want it to seem like you're driving! If the phone starts to slip down, you will be under more time pressure to grab it up before missing words. Food, you're ready to stop eating at any instant and pay attention- the telephone is more engaging.
It has been scientifically measured on test courses that talking on a totally hands-free phone is only a little safer than using a handheld phone, which itself is approximately as bad as 5 beers.
(Another, lesser reason is that people are more likely to need to look closely at a cellphone to dial than they need to look at food)
Double the crime...double the penalty.
Wrong. In the USA at least, you can't be tried for the same crime twice (the Double Jeopardy provision).
By your argument, someone guilty of Murder 1 could also be convicted of Murder 2, Attempted Murder, Manslaughter, Assault, and finally Unsafe Operation of a Firearm. But sorry, no can do.
This is the way it should be, as a complete ban on driver cell phone use would be unenforceable. How would they see the little wire running up to your ear?
COMINT. Communications Interception. They can monitor the radio frequency to see if a cellphone is in use, and then they can look in the window to see if the car has only one occupant.
But the law, as passed, does intentionally make such a statement. They could've applied the same penalties without declaring that the fetus is a "child", but they chose not to.
It says:
It has stated that an unborn fetus is a "child", meaning it's a person... which means, according to Roe V Wade section IX A:
As it all of these sailors (and their captains) has already taken courses in chemistry.
Evaporative water purification is a wholely physical process. There is no chemical reaction or chemistry involved.
A large art of the rigorous submarine qualification that every crewmember is required to achieve involves damage control.
Of course, most all surface sailors take damage training as well. A carrier has a lot of people assigned to unnecessary amounts of cooking and cleaning work, which is really just to keep them busy in between emergencies when they'll be called for damage control. Does the Navy really need fresh bread baked each morning, instead of defrosting it like a civilian ship? And do they truely need to mop the decks three times a day?
Why is it a worse crime if I kill him because he's black (hate crime) than if I kill him because he bumped into me (some pointless reason, this is normal murder).
Because statistical sociology has found "hate crimes" to be a greater risk to the public at large. However, your example of a "bump crime" is not realistic. That type of thing is insigificantly rare- a different comparator would be required to discuss it seriously.
More accurately, crimes committed against a category of people ("I hate blacks" "I hate cops") present a greater risk to the public than do crimes against a known individual ("I hate Tommie Simmons"). In the latter case, the victim probably had some chance to anticipate the attack and take precautions.
It's not really "hate crimes" vs other crimes, but random or impersonal crimes versus others.
(ignoring the fact that the politically correct "person" in that statement is pointless as with the exception of Governer Arnold, there are few pregnant men)
A point that biotechnology will make obselete within 50 years. In 20 years lesbians will start to bear each other's children- gay men will take a while longer (and realistically, most will use external incubation-tanks)
The point of the law is to make killing a pregnant women two counts of murder, instead of one. I think that's a great idea.
It's "Laci". And that's not quite what the law does. It doesn't say "killing a pregnant woman is two murders" (although that is what Pres Bush and others have claimed) but instead says "causes the death of, or bodily injury to, a child, who is in utero at the time the conduct takes place, is guilty of a separate offense"
So harming a pregnant woman can be 1 assault and 1 murder. This means that if you trip a woman who's 1 month pregnant, and she later miscarries, you can face life imprisonment.
If a law was passed allowing for heavier penalties for attacking a pregnant woman on the grounds that it harmed HER more than a typical assault, that's one thing (the US Congress considered such a law, sponsored by Feinstein D-CA, but ignored it because the Republican majority wanted something that would undermine RoeVWade). But declaring that the fetus is a separate victim is inconsistent with the idea that abortion is legal.
The legality of abortion rests on the idea that the fetus is a body part, without any rights of its own, and only existing for the mother (as her property, in a way).
An inconsistent position has been created:
If a 6-month old child is killed, it is murder regardless of whether the attacker was a stranger, or her own mother. But killing a 6-month old fetus is legal if the mother does it, but murder for anyone else.
The law has declared "Fetuses are people with rights- except that their mothers can kill them".
For reasons I can't fathom
Laziness.
Although the lawyers on both sides want to win, they also want to finish. Intelligent, principled people lead to non-unaminious hung juries, forcing the lawyers to go through the whole case again. Someone who's "easily-led" will decide to vote with the majority of the jury, regardless of his own interpretation, just so they can all finish up and everyone can go home (possible exception of the defendant).
Murder requires intent
Not quite. If you accidently kill a person in the commission of another felony, that is murder 2. "I didn't think there was anyone inside when I set the fire..."
I misunderstood *my* argument?
Yes, because you wrote something that you contradicted in later postings, so you apparently misunderstood it the first time.
It might have been possible to deduce your post's intended meaning by comparing it with the post to which you first replied- but since you neither quoted anything nor maintained the thread topic, the context wasn't there. If you want to say something that's insensible except as a reply, then DON'T switch to a new (non-"Re:") subject line.
No. It's actually rather trivial to machine translate individual C++ statements into valid assembly code. The resules of doing so are inconvenient, because anyone with a little practice will find that 90% of the English text is boilerplate that can be more concisely presented as *&+=.;{[->, etc.
Verbose English debugging interfaces might make it simple to learn to do very basic debugging, but once you get into things a bit deeper (and get more experienced)
But what is a waste of time for experienced coder might be just what an end-user needs to help him better decide how to go about solving an unanticipated problem. It'd be nice if an untrained person could proceed through the following dialog (BEFORE having to contact a programmer).
X11 Window connection closed on SEGABRT
"Why did it seg?"
Deferencing invalid pointer 0x0
"Why was it invalid?"
Pointer was assigned as return value of OpenForWrite function call
"Why did the function return 0x0?"
Drive D: does not exist
Capabilities like that could help fullfil the Open Source promise of "Every user is a (competent) QA"
Actually, I've seen more than a few professional "software engineers" who could've benefited from something like that. A C++ guy transitioning to ADA, for example...
That's what I've been arguing all along (writing + validating is lots harder than just validating).
But that's NOT what you wrote. Maybe you THINK you wrote it; but you didn't.
Here's what you posted:
"If you think that it's as hard to check code for correctness as it is to write the code in the first place".
That is a comparison between (the difficulty of) "checking some code" and "writing some code"- not "writing some code that is correct to within some N% of error". (If N==0, that would mean "perfect").
Writing "a program" is easier than writing "a correct, validatable program". But you used the former phrase, when evidently you meant the latter.
That said, SAFE surface transportation is obviously harder than intercontinental flight.
No. Safe, EFFICIENT surface travel is. If we accepted 50 kph speed limits and 5 kpl fuel usage, then ground transit would be a lot safer than air.
Around 100 manned flights to date, I think.
No. The space shuttle alone has done more than 100.
Part of exploration is science,
Space exploration without science is boring. Unless you're viewing it with a scientific eye, it's just some disparate lumps of lifeless rock that whose entertainment value is exhausted on the first day.
We drop you off a ship in the north atlantic with a life jacket, you're dead in an hour. Enjoy.
The "North Atlantic" contains all of the Atlantic outside the "South Atlantic". Much of it is in warm areas, where people have been known to survive more than 72 hours without a floatation device. But I'm not personally that tough.
Well, submarines don't exist for government propaganda value (unlike the Space Shuttle).
Yes, they very often do. The space race was one part of the cold-war, but the submarine-race was another big part. Harrison Ford made a movie about the Soviets trying to score propaganga-points with their nuclear submarine.
After all, they do nothing but sit around and wait to shoot ICBMs in WWIII,
Many of those missiles have had atomic warheads removed, and the Navy does shoot those at assorted targets (around Iraq). But a surface-ship could launch the same missiles cheaper, so yes, it is something of a waste.
A corporation is considered a single entity.
Sigh. I already disproved that in my first message (go back and search for the word "Microsoft").
Corporations are considered single entities for certain, highly specific legal purposes; and recieving copyrighted material is not one of them. (Publishing it is)
Thought puzzle 1:
If you buy a commerically boxed software package which permits only one user, but who can install it on multiple computers he owns, do you really think that a 100,000 employee multinational corp can get away with everyone using a single license?
Thought puzzle 2:
On the witness stand, a CEO is asked by a prosecutor "After accidentally recieving the secret government schematics, did you distribute them to anyone else?" "No. I simply emailed them to all my employees. But it was never distributed, no."
Thought puzzle 3:
If a nation modifiles a GPL application and uses it internally _ONLY_, then there would be no obligation to give their modified code to anyone.
The recipient would be the company itself
Funny, whenever my corporation buys software, we have to give the supplier a much more specific recipient address than just "Company Name". If I could only send products to companies as a whole, the CEO would be overburdened, and life would become more confusing.
But it will always be easier to verify that a program is correct to some acceptable degree of error than it is to *come up with* a program that is correct to that degree of error.
And again, you're not understanding what arguments you or others have made.
I said that "writing a program" is easier than "validating a program". You have misinterpreted my "writing a program" as "writing a perfectly correct program", which nobody even mentioned. "Writing a perfectly correct program", obviously, requires more than the sum of the efforts to "write a program" and "validate a program".
Anyone who claims that they can rewrite software and validate it faster than they can validate software that has already seen production use either isn't a professional developer
I never said that. You appear to not even have understood the claim you made. Your said that "work to write" > "work to verify". One needs only look around to see that this is false.
But just here you accuse me of claiming "time to write" + "time to validate" < "time to validate", which of course I never said anything about.
And I'll say it one more time: a secure design *sure as hell does* jump out at you much more readily when it's in front of you than when you have to figure one out from scratch.
Way to re-emphasize your ignorance...
Again, no. A shuttle is within 300 km of the ground
I didn't say "shuttle". The word was "manned spacecraft". The shuttle travels much less high than earlier rocketships. Heard of "Apollo"?
No. Submarines under the Ice can't do that.
Travelling through the arctic is a fairly rare special case (true, it's a case that drove a lot of the USN's excessive requirements...)
I should point out we've lost the same number of nuclear submarines as we have shuttles.
Well, if someday 50% of all submarines have been destroyed in accidents, let me know!
I should point out that more people have died in automobiles than airplanes, so surface roads are actually a greater engineering challenge than intercontinental flight... (That's a classical fallacy- comparing absolute numbers instead of relative)
"the ISS crew isn't doing any science, they're just barely keeping the station habitable!" Make it bigger.
There's a more fundamental problem: we don't have orbital science experiments that actually need people to perform them. 50 professors on earth launching 2 rockets a year will be more scientifically productive than 2 astronauts in orbit supplied by 5 launches annually- and the cost is the same.