Woo! The MPAA is finally embracing the modern world by distributing their own content legally via bittorrent! Okay, so it might be misnamed, but I don't care. I'd love to see what they're distributing! Can anyone post a torrent please? Then we can all download it, legally!
I can count on you all to be witnesses that this was my intention, right?
YAML is great for structured data that has text in it, such as library catalogues. But it's not as good for data that is, first and foremost, a document, that happens to need some structure.
If, for example, you mark up all the names of people in a newsfeed, such as <person>Bill Gates</person>, you can then search the newsfeed for all references to Bill Gates the person without falsely getting references to invoices for fence portals.
SQL isn't just about searching either. It's actually an embodiment of a relational data model which includes insertion, modification, searching, sorting and data retrieval.
Z39.50 doesn't (yet) model database modification, but it's actually a feature-rich, and quite generic, model for textual information retrieval and presentation. Searching is but one part of that.
Z39.50 is actually much, much more than mere "text searching". If you think hard about the way that you interact with a library catalogue or Google compared with how you interact with a RDBMS, you'll realise there are quite a few more differences than just "text searching".
Think about highly heterogeneous data. Libraries, for example, might index books, periodicals, audio-visual items and online resources such as journals. Google indexes web pages, Usenet news articles, PDF documents and so on. And you can search them all by "title".
Think about "result sets" instead of sequences of tuples. When you search google, or a library catalogue, what you get is a bunch of summary information which you page through, then eventually retrieve the record that you want. Or you might refine your query by adding new search terms or sorting your results by some key. The key data structure here is the "result set": a sequence of record numbers. Everything happens to result sets. You sort your results by state, or intersect the set with another query. The whole process is record-oriented. SQL, on the other hand, is data-oriented: the central data structure is a sequence of tuples, and tuples contain real data.
I hear you objecting that there are ways to do this in SQL, and you'd be right. But in this kind of application, it's always going to be at the expense of a lot more time (more processing grunt required, or less opportunity to exploit disk locality) or much more disk space, if only because of the extra indirection required. If you have terabytes of information, this bites, and bites hard. You wouldn't use Google or your library catalogue if it were ten times slower.
SQL is optimised for the case where data is "right there". Z39.50 is optimised for the case where accessing real data is expensive, because it might involve parsing XML or PDF. People complain about how supposedly inefficient XML data is, but the fact is, there's no better way to do text with structure. The real problems are a) people use XML for things that aren't structured text, and b) relational databases can't handle it with reasonable efficiency at the moment.
Yes, I know, SQL will eventually be able to handle things like this. But it's not there yet.
Interfaces like SQL don't dictate the implementation, but they do dictate the model. Sometimes, the model that you want is so far from the interface language, that you need to either extend or replace the interface language for the problem to be tractable.
SQL's approach has been to evolve. It isn't quite "there" for a lot of modern applications. I can forsee a day when SQL can efficiently model all the capabilities of, say, Z39.50, but we're not there now.
The reason why assembly programmers can beat high-level programmers is they can write their code in a high-level language first, then profile to see where the hotspots are, and then rewrite a 100 line subroutine or two in assembly language, using the compiler output as a first draft.
In other words, assembly programmers beat high-level programmers because they can also use modern compilers.
Yes, I am partly relying on emotions. I don't believe in "concealed carry" on aircraft for the simple reason that I don't trust anyone bringing a gun on board who isn't willing to tell all passengers about it. If you don't trust me with the information, I don't trust you with the gun. (That goes triple if you don't tell the flight crew, so they know to refuse to serve you alcohol.)
But I'm definitely not relying on movies. I'm thinking like an engineer. Modern aircraft (you said "airliner", which is a subset of commercial aircraft) are not designed to be shot at, and there are plenty of documented instances of small arms fire bringing down millitary aircraft, such as helicopters, prop planes and fighter aircraft. Perhaps, indeed, you can't cause a 747 to crash using only small arms, but smaller commuter craft, like a Saab 340 or a Dash 8, would be much more vulnerable.
Leaving all this alone, however, the most important issue is this: Whatever you allow passengers to have on a plane, you allow evildoers to have on a plane.
Is not having to show ID at an airport essential to my liberty? No, not remotely, in my own view.
What about a political dissident travelling from Hawaii to Washington to petition their Congresscritter? Just their bad luck for disagreeing with their government, right? Or should they just get a boat, which takes longer and is far more expensive?
People have been stopped and hassled or refused passage because of what they believe (Yusuf Islam being a good example), or because they have a name similar to someone evil (e.g. Khalid El-Masri who had the unfortunate luck of having a similar name to Khalid al-Masri.
As I noted in my previous comment, there are a number of things that you're not taking into account. You don't need a single bullet hole causing "explosive decompression", which is a myth, you just need a bunch of bullet holes causing enough decompression for the passengers to need extra oxygen to avoid passing out. That situation makes any hypothetical battle between terrorists and passengers difficult.
In addition, all it takes is a couple of bullets hitting important piece of avionics and you lose the plane, without a fireball (except for the bit when it hits the ground, I guess).
Modern planes are pretty safe against one small bullet hole through a window, but that doesn't mean it's safe to fire guns on a plane.
I've seen Mythbusters too. First off, "massive depressurization" is not the same as "explosive depressurization". Nobody's saying there would be a huge hole in the plane where everything will get sucked out. We're talking about a situation where you need those oxygen masks that they tell you about before you fly. How many concealed carry owners are trained for a shootout in a confined space where the oxygen level is rapidly dropping with your only oxygen mask tied to the ceiling above you, restricting your movements?
Rather than a large explosive hole, imagine bunch of tiny holes most of which will make tiny holes in the skin, but some of which may hit avionics or (if fired straight down from the seats over the wing) the fuel tank. Unlike buses or ships, aircraft can't safely fail by just stopping wherever they are. While a massive hole which sucks stuff out or an explosion is unlikely, "aircraft loss" is still a real possibility.
Do you suppose that the imams who were herded off their flight for praying would have been safer if everyone on the plane had been armed? Hell, imagine if the imams had been armed themselves. I doubt that situation would have ended without injurity if not loss of life.
You might think you're safer if you're carrying a gun, but that's only true (and even then, only occasionally true) if you're in the popular majority. If the Japanese-American citizens who were interred during WW2 had, rather than comply with an oppressive regime, used guns to defend themselves, not only would a number of them had ended up dead, it would have played right into the government's propaganda, and justified even more harsh oppression.
The reason why the teaching profession is so bad is many-fold, but the main one is that nobody respects anyone.
The kids don't respect the teachers. In turn, the teachers don't respect the kids. In the British comprehensive system, the few parents who do respect their kids don't respect the teachers. And the teachers don't respect the parents in turn. The school administrations don't care about anyone, and the department of education is even worse.
The thing about the teaching profession is that everyone thinks they know what a teacher does, having spent a decent proportion of their lives interacting with them. Of course, they don't, because they ignore all the stuff that they are required to do outside of class. (The only other profession that this is true of is nursing. Teaching and nursing are the only two professions that are highly unionised.)
One of the problems is that teachers are required to do a lot today. They're meant to be educators, but also civil servants (large paperwork load), counsellors, child abuse detectors and so on. They are not paid any extra to compensate for the extra responsibility required of them. As a result, you tend to find two types of teachers. There are those who have a high aptitude for the job and really love it, and can overlook all the bullshit because the joy of teaching makes up for it. And then there are those who just can't make it as anything else. That's why it's rare to find a mediocre teacher in the public system.
That's right, and this highlights the main problem with TFA.
Suggesting that sub-human robots should have rights is like arguing that animals have rights. But this hasn't been established. (Yes, Peter Singer would call this "speciesist". I don't know what his position on robots is, though. My response is that animals have no rights when they don't respect those rights in other animals. Yes, there are grey areas with higher primates, but that's a discussion for another time. At the very least, let's agree that a cat doesn't respect the rights of a bird.)
What has been long-established is that when it comes to animals, humans have responsibilities. Exactly what these responsibilities are isn't entirely settled, but most people, for example, would say that eating animals isn't wrong, but causing unnecessary suffering in the process is.
If we ever build (or evolve) a robot with a pain reflex, there are interesting questions to be discussed. In the mean time, I won't try to damage my robots deliberately because they're expensive to fix or replace.
UFO (or, more correctly, UFOB) was an air force technical term that dates from the early days of radar. I believe that it referred to anything that you see on the radar screen which hasn't yet been positively identified.
I'm not certain, but I think that the US Air Force might still use the term.
I don't know how it works in the US, but here in Australia, if you work in security, they're really only interested in one thing: If we tell you a secret, will you keep it?
Meet person A. He's a fine, upstanding citizen. He goes to symphony orchestra concerts. He's a member of the local Rotary club. He secretly likes being spanked on the weekend. His wife knows about this (they have a sufficiently open relationship), but his Rotary friends don't, and he'd prefer to keep it that way.
Meet person B. He wears a lot of leather (though not to work). Has has a couple of tattoos and a discreet piercing. Thankfully, the piercing is removable, considering that he has to walk through a metal detector to get to his office). He's also the author of the bestselling pamphlet Being Spanked on the Weekend and Me: This Sort of Thing Is My Bag, Baby.
In the 1950's, person B would have been considered the bigger security risk. Today, person A would. The reason should be obvious: he has something that he could potentially be blackmailed with. Person B does not, as far as we can tell.
So I would think that the question of "herbal treatments" (yeah, I have heard of people who treat ADD with illicit herbal treatments), it wouldn't be the pharmeceuticals themselves that would be the greatest concern. It's that the person in question is engaging in what is currently illegal activity and may not want others to know about it.
Of course, that's the rational answer. Things may be significantly less rational in the US, especially considering that they still use polygraphs.
Make m0n3_y in penny $t0x!
Get CYDM First Thing After Christmas. This Is Going To Explode!!
Cydonia Mining (CYDM) is set to announce a new find of Illudium suitable for Q36 Explosive Space Modulators. Analysts indicate there is "almost limitless demand". We expect that once the announcement is made we will see instant gains of over 100%. This is your unique chance to triple investment in one week!
CYDM is rated an immediate and "STRONG BUY". Get in early and ride it to the top!
The article mentions Weird Al Yankovich, who was nerdcore before there was name for it. He's made himself quite a living doing what he does and has gotten a whole lot of airplay.
Yeah, on Dr. Demento. But only this year has he managed to get a single into the top 10, and it's White and Nerdy. I do think, like you, that it'll never be a major genre, but if it gets as big as gangsta rap, I'll be happy.
BTW, nerd music is nothing new. The last time around it was Devo, Men Without Hats and Talking Heads. Before that, it was Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream. And before that it was Wendy Carlos and Debbie Darbyshire. (Nerd music has always been tied to electronica, because the early synth pioneers were all nerds.)
I suspect that's because, in the grand scheme of things, parsing is easy, particularly if you can structure your language so that it's simple to parse.
Or, perhaps, that parsing is considered a solved problem because lex and yacc handle most programming languages that we care about.
(In reality, parsing isn't a solved problem. You try writing lex/yacc for Fortran or C++ and see how far you get. We have ways to handle these things, but there's still good research to be done in these areas.)
A follower-up recommends Muchnik, as do I. Andrew Appel's "tiger book" is also excellent. And it'd also be well worth reading Levine's "linkers and loaders".
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about you, but my car gets 15 Noethers per Hopper.
Woo! The MPAA is finally embracing the modern world by distributing their own content legally via bittorrent! Okay, so it might be misnamed, but I don't care. I'd love to see what they're distributing! Can anyone post a torrent please? Then we can all download it, legally!
I can count on you all to be witnesses that this was my intention, right?
YAML is great for structured data that has text in it, such as library catalogues. But it's not as good for data that is, first and foremost, a document, that happens to need some structure.
If, for example, you mark up all the names of people in a newsfeed, such as <person>Bill Gates</person>, you can then search the newsfeed for all references to Bill Gates the person without falsely getting references to invoices for fence portals.
On the contrary: It's not who you know, it's who knows you.
You might say that, but it'd be quite misleading.
SQL isn't just about searching either. It's actually an embodiment of a relational data model which includes insertion, modification, searching, sorting and data retrieval.
Z39.50 doesn't (yet) model database modification, but it's actually a feature-rich, and quite generic, model for textual information retrieval and presentation. Searching is but one part of that.
Z39.50 is actually much, much more than mere "text searching". If you think hard about the way that you interact with a library catalogue or Google compared with how you interact with a RDBMS, you'll realise there are quite a few more differences than just "text searching".
Think about highly heterogeneous data. Libraries, for example, might index books, periodicals, audio-visual items and online resources such as journals. Google indexes web pages, Usenet news articles, PDF documents and so on. And you can search them all by "title".
Think about "result sets" instead of sequences of tuples. When you search google, or a library catalogue, what you get is a bunch of summary information which you page through, then eventually retrieve the record that you want. Or you might refine your query by adding new search terms or sorting your results by some key. The key data structure here is the "result set": a sequence of record numbers. Everything happens to result sets. You sort your results by state, or intersect the set with another query. The whole process is record-oriented. SQL, on the other hand, is data-oriented: the central data structure is a sequence of tuples, and tuples contain real data.
I hear you objecting that there are ways to do this in SQL, and you'd be right. But in this kind of application, it's always going to be at the expense of a lot more time (more processing grunt required, or less opportunity to exploit disk locality) or much more disk space, if only because of the extra indirection required. If you have terabytes of information, this bites, and bites hard. You wouldn't use Google or your library catalogue if it were ten times slower.
SQL is optimised for the case where data is "right there". Z39.50 is optimised for the case where accessing real data is expensive, because it might involve parsing XML or PDF. People complain about how supposedly inefficient XML data is, but the fact is, there's no better way to do text with structure. The real problems are a) people use XML for things that aren't structured text, and b) relational databases can't handle it with reasonable efficiency at the moment.
Yes, I know, SQL will eventually be able to handle things like this. But it's not there yet.
Interfaces like SQL don't dictate the implementation, but they do dictate the model. Sometimes, the model that you want is so far from the interface language, that you need to either extend or replace the interface language for the problem to be tractable.
SQL's approach has been to evolve. It isn't quite "there" for a lot of modern applications. I can forsee a day when SQL can efficiently model all the capabilities of, say, Z39.50, but we're not there now.
The reason why assembly programmers can beat high-level programmers is they can write their code in a high-level language first, then profile to see where the hotspots are, and then rewrite a 100 line subroutine or two in assembly language, using the compiler output as a first draft.
In other words, assembly programmers beat high-level programmers because they can also use modern compilers.
Yes, I am partly relying on emotions. I don't believe in "concealed carry" on aircraft for the simple reason that I don't trust anyone bringing a gun on board who isn't willing to tell all passengers about it. If you don't trust me with the information, I don't trust you with the gun. (That goes triple if you don't tell the flight crew, so they know to refuse to serve you alcohol.)
But I'm definitely not relying on movies. I'm thinking like an engineer. Modern aircraft (you said "airliner", which is a subset of commercial aircraft) are not designed to be shot at, and there are plenty of documented instances of small arms fire bringing down millitary aircraft, such as helicopters, prop planes and fighter aircraft. Perhaps, indeed, you can't cause a 747 to crash using only small arms, but smaller commuter craft, like a Saab 340 or a Dash 8, would be much more vulnerable.
Leaving all this alone, however, the most important issue is this: Whatever you allow passengers to have on a plane, you allow evildoers to have on a plane.
What about a political dissident travelling from Hawaii to Washington to petition their Congresscritter? Just their bad luck for disagreeing with their government, right? Or should they just get a boat, which takes longer and is far more expensive?
People have been stopped and hassled or refused passage because of what they believe (Yusuf Islam being a good example), or because they have a name similar to someone evil (e.g. Khalid El-Masri who had the unfortunate luck of having a similar name to Khalid al-Masri.
Correct. Some of them exist in terrorist training camps, for example.
As I noted in my previous comment, there are a number of things that you're not taking into account. You don't need a single bullet hole causing "explosive decompression", which is a myth, you just need a bunch of bullet holes causing enough decompression for the passengers to need extra oxygen to avoid passing out. That situation makes any hypothetical battle between terrorists and passengers difficult.
In addition, all it takes is a couple of bullets hitting important piece of avionics and you lose the plane, without a fireball (except for the bit when it hits the ground, I guess).
Modern planes are pretty safe against one small bullet hole through a window, but that doesn't mean it's safe to fire guns on a plane.
I refer you to my previous answer.
I've seen Mythbusters too. First off, "massive depressurization" is not the same as "explosive depressurization". Nobody's saying there would be a huge hole in the plane where everything will get sucked out. We're talking about a situation where you need those oxygen masks that they tell you about before you fly. How many concealed carry owners are trained for a shootout in a confined space where the oxygen level is rapidly dropping with your only oxygen mask tied to the ceiling above you, restricting your movements?
Rather than a large explosive hole, imagine bunch of tiny holes most of which will make tiny holes in the skin, but some of which may hit avionics or (if fired straight down from the seats over the wing) the fuel tank. Unlike buses or ships, aircraft can't safely fail by just stopping wherever they are. While a massive hole which sucks stuff out or an explosion is unlikely, "aircraft loss" is still a real possibility.
Do you suppose that the imams who were herded off their flight for praying would have been safer if everyone on the plane had been armed? Hell, imagine if the imams had been armed themselves. I doubt that situation would have ended without injurity if not loss of life.
You might think you're safer if you're carrying a gun, but that's only true (and even then, only occasionally true) if you're in the popular majority. If the Japanese-American citizens who were interred during WW2 had, rather than comply with an oppressive regime, used guns to defend themselves, not only would a number of them had ended up dead, it would have played right into the government's propaganda, and justified even more harsh oppression.
The reason why the teaching profession is so bad is many-fold, but the main one is that nobody respects anyone.
The kids don't respect the teachers. In turn, the teachers don't respect the kids. In the British comprehensive system, the few parents who do respect their kids don't respect the teachers. And the teachers don't respect the parents in turn. The school administrations don't care about anyone, and the department of education is even worse.
The thing about the teaching profession is that everyone thinks they know what a teacher does, having spent a decent proportion of their lives interacting with them. Of course, they don't, because they ignore all the stuff that they are required to do outside of class. (The only other profession that this is true of is nursing. Teaching and nursing are the only two professions that are highly unionised.)
One of the problems is that teachers are required to do a lot today. They're meant to be educators, but also civil servants (large paperwork load), counsellors, child abuse detectors and so on. They are not paid any extra to compensate for the extra responsibility required of them. As a result, you tend to find two types of teachers. There are those who have a high aptitude for the job and really love it, and can overlook all the bullshit because the joy of teaching makes up for it. And then there are those who just can't make it as anything else. That's why it's rare to find a mediocre teacher in the public system.
That's right, and this highlights the main problem with TFA.
Suggesting that sub-human robots should have rights is like arguing that animals have rights. But this hasn't been established. (Yes, Peter Singer would call this "speciesist". I don't know what his position on robots is, though. My response is that animals have no rights when they don't respect those rights in other animals. Yes, there are grey areas with higher primates, but that's a discussion for another time. At the very least, let's agree that a cat doesn't respect the rights of a bird.)
What has been long-established is that when it comes to animals, humans have responsibilities. Exactly what these responsibilities are isn't entirely settled, but most people, for example, would say that eating animals isn't wrong, but causing unnecessary suffering in the process is.
If we ever build (or evolve) a robot with a pain reflex, there are interesting questions to be discussed. In the mean time, I won't try to damage my robots deliberately because they're expensive to fix or replace.
UFO (or, more correctly, UFOB) was an air force technical term that dates from the early days of radar. I believe that it referred to anything that you see on the radar screen which hasn't yet been positively identified.
I'm not certain, but I think that the US Air Force might still use the term.
Nurses and teachers do.
It's up to you to decide whether or not the fact that these are the only professions which are traditionally "women's work" is relevant or not.
I don't know how it works in the US, but here in Australia, if you work in security, they're really only interested in one thing: If we tell you a secret, will you keep it?
Meet person A. He's a fine, upstanding citizen. He goes to symphony orchestra concerts. He's a member of the local Rotary club. He secretly likes being spanked on the weekend. His wife knows about this (they have a sufficiently open relationship), but his Rotary friends don't, and he'd prefer to keep it that way.
Meet person B. He wears a lot of leather (though not to work). Has has a couple of tattoos and a discreet piercing. Thankfully, the piercing is removable, considering that he has to walk through a metal detector to get to his office). He's also the author of the bestselling pamphlet Being Spanked on the Weekend and Me: This Sort of Thing Is My Bag, Baby.
In the 1950's, person B would have been considered the bigger security risk. Today, person A would. The reason should be obvious: he has something that he could potentially be blackmailed with. Person B does not, as far as we can tell.
So I would think that the question of "herbal treatments" (yeah, I have heard of people who treat ADD with illicit herbal treatments), it wouldn't be the pharmeceuticals themselves that would be the greatest concern. It's that the person in question is engaging in what is currently illegal activity and may not want others to know about it.
Of course, that's the rational answer. Things may be significantly less rational in the US, especially considering that they still use polygraphs.
Make m0n3_y in penny $t0x! Get CYDM First Thing After Christmas. This Is Going To Explode!! Cydonia Mining (CYDM) is set to announce a new find of Illudium suitable for Q36 Explosive Space Modulators. Analysts indicate there is "almost limitless demand". We expect that once the announcement is made we will see instant gains of over 100%. This is your unique chance to triple investment in one week! CYDM is rated an immediate and "STRONG BUY". Get in early and ride it to the top!
Yeah, on Dr. Demento. But only this year has he managed to get a single into the top 10, and it's White and Nerdy. I do think, like you, that it'll never be a major genre, but if it gets as big as gangsta rap, I'll be happy.
BTW, nerd music is nothing new. The last time around it was Devo, Men Without Hats and Talking Heads. Before that, it was Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream. And before that it was Wendy Carlos and Debbie Darbyshire. (Nerd music has always been tied to electronica, because the early synth pioneers were all nerds.)
I dunno about you, but I cheered when smallpox was intentionally made extinct, and I'll cheer when the same is done to polio.
But I do feel quite bad about the extinction of a mammal. I'm a speciesist and proud of it.
Or, perhaps, that parsing is considered a solved problem because lex and yacc handle most programming languages that we care about.
(In reality, parsing isn't a solved problem. You try writing lex/yacc for Fortran or C++ and see how far you get. We have ways to handle these things, but there's still good research to be done in these areas.)
A follower-up recommends Muchnik, as do I. Andrew Appel's "tiger book" is also excellent. And it'd also be well worth reading Levine's "linkers and loaders".
True enough, but to read a typical "compilers 101" book, you'd easily get the impression that it was all just parsing.