Galileo proclaimed that the earth wasn't the center of it all. Then the Catholic church made him recant (this was the time of the Inquisition which killed a friend of his just a few years before).
Interestingly, this happened 100 years or so after Copernicus said much the same thing. Copernicus was not asked to recant, and the church gave him a cushy retirement job as an administrator of a see.
So what gives? The moral of the story is that it's never about religion, but it's always about politics.
Consider the plight of stem cell researchers today: Whether or not they get to do their stuff depends not on what the prevailing religions believe, but rather on what kind of person happens to be in power at the time.
Unfortunately, "internaciigo" isn't necessarily an improvement.
Admittedly, it's shorter. However, the word is pronounced something like in-tehr-na-tsee-EE-go. Many people find the "ts" followed by two separately pronounced "i"'s, with overall word emphasis on the second, a bit hard to pronounce. And it sounds a bit like there's the word "nazi" in the middle, which means the thread is over.
Nobody has ever adequately explained to me why string theory is popular. It isn't actually a "theory", since it hasn't made any testable predictions. There is no problem which it has (yet) solved. Its desirable features (e.g. supersymmetry) are not known to be useful in the first place. Even its motivating examples don't seem to fit the theory. (Hadrons look like strings, but no known string models look anything like hadrons.)
As far as I can tell, the argument seems to be that high-energy physicists need to be doing something other than sitting around twiddling their thumbs, and until someone comes up with an alternative, string theory is that something.
do not provide a "natural" representation for most kinds of data (i.e. most data doesn't naturally come in tables),
can't handle some kinds of data at all, particularly in any situation where you need to extract an unknown number of indexable keys from a single field efficiently (e.g. indexing text by word),
is incompatible between different kinds of server for anything nontrivial (e.g. joins), and
rely on stored procedures, which are even more incompatible.
It's also not true that any database design which isn't relational is "new". Z39.50, for example, has been around for longer than the SQL standard. (It used to be known as WAIS before it got its ISO number.)
A Windows expert could easily say the same about words like "pipe" and "zombie". They would also point out that the supposed "Unix philosophy" of small programs connected by pipes is rarely used by big applications or application suites. And even if you did want to use it, you'd have to implement your own protocols.
Much simpler, they'd argue, to have a system whereby any component can interact with any other via a standard set of interfaces served by a central repository. You can then just glue together what bits you want and everything should, in theory, work. You can even put the bits on different machines if you need it to scale.
This is why many large Unix applications (though not Linux, interestingly) are based on CORBA.
Now I'm not defending this point of view. My point is that the software component story of Unix and Linux is not necessarily any simpler. Sure, we don't have a DLL versioning problem. Absolutely, we're not tied to Microsoft's severely broken standard interfaces. Yes, we don't have to deal with Microsoft's extremely idiosyncratic registry. The price we pay is that we don't have code reuse above the library level and even then, every new language needs to implement a new glue layer for them.
It's certainly not necessarily simpler, in the KISS sense.
Were you drunk when you posted, or was it that you've never studied structured modular software design (or both)?
Actually, based on your response, I probably understand it better than you do.
A registry, in object oriented design pattern parlance, is a mapping from a reified type to an object factory, more or less. The Windows NT platform is basically a huge middleware virtual machine, along with a bunch of standard (though not very well-designed) interfaces.
One crucial purpose of the Windows registry is to store information about how to resolve middleware components. If you are basically a middleware platform, you need a registry. Your task, should you choose to accept, is to implement one sanely.
Is that you, Dr Robert Umboto, son of the late Nigerian oil minister? I lost your email address. I still need to talk about that financial transaction we were engaged in.
Australia doesn't have a constitutional right to freedom of speech. (Merely political speech.) This is a counterbalance to copyright law which the USA has but we don't. You should mention this at least once.
Most countries with universal health care let you choose your own doctor, even one that charges more than the government pays (in which case you or your private insurace makes up the difference). And most countries with public schools let you choose your own school, even one that doesn't provide transportation in your area (in which case, you arrange your own).
What's wrong with [...] ownership of weapons by the law-abiding public?
You are in fact agreeing with the parent post. There is nothing wrong, in principle, with ownership of weapons by the law-abiding public. Indeed, many countries do it successfully, without a huge crime rate. It's only the USA which can't seem to handle it.
John Titor is a performance comic/troll, which sounds to me like an interesting guy/group of people to know.
Not just that, but I think he did make some good points. For example, one of the questions which he kept getting asked was: "So, got any good stock tips?" His response was always along the lines of: "What do you think this says about you to future generations?"
Yes, it's an obvious point which most of us already know, that our current era is obsessed with the acquisition of small green pieces of paper. However, the interesting thing is that he didn't even really need to troll in order to get that question out of someone. And I think he knew it in advance.
I'd love to know who John Titor really was, just so I could buy him/her/them a round of drinks.
Except that Chuck Barris is a real person who (AFAIK) still claims that "Confessions..." is largely factual. It's not a hoax, it's not clever alternate-reality fiction. I believe the technical term is "crazy".
In interviews, he always says that he "can't confirm or deny" it, which is as close as he comes to admitting that it's a bunch of crazy bullshit. The thing is: In the 60s and 70s, Barris was virtually accused of bringing down civilisation by dragging the quality of television programming to a new low. (This was before the modern reality television phenomenon, you understand; the "low" that he achieved really was new.)
The book was his clever swipe at those critics. In his own way, he was basically saying that it's not like he ever did anything really evil.
I found the John Titor episode very interesting. Many people have characterised him as a hoax, but I think that's unfair. I think it was a very clever piece of Internet performance art, anticipating alternate games like I Love Bees.
My hat is off to the guy. He's made me think a lot about how future generations will judge our current culture, which I think was the main point of the exercise.
It reminds me a bit of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. It was unfair to call that a "hoax" because a hoaxer expects you to believe their bullshit. Chuck Barris was trying to make a point through a clever piece of alternate-reality fiction. Much the same as John Titor, whoever he really was.
Bush honestly beleives that he was chosen by God to lead the country, and probably beleives that God told him to invade Iraq.
I had an interesting thought, though I'm almost certainly not the first to have thought this.
Let's assume for the sake of argument that what Bush apparently believes here is in fact correct. Then it's entirely possibly that God's intention is precisely to take the USA down a few notches. If so, this is completely consistent with putting Bush in charge. Between screwing up the economy at home and making the US look bad in the eyes of the rest of the world, he looks like the perfect man for the job.
On further investigation, you're right that Shamir didn't discover ZKPs. What he did write was a paper which introduced a ZKP system which was suitable for making unforgeable identity cards.
Since you were after evidence, the best I could find was this column from the Journal of Algorithms in 1988. It notes that "the US Army briefly tried to classify" the paper, citing a New York Times article from 1987 by James Gleick. Sorry, I don't have anything which has more of the story than that. (I originally read a fuller account it in a Martin Gardner article from Scientific American 15 odd years ago.)
When Adi Shamir (the "S" of "RSA") discovered zero-knowledge proof systems, the US millitary tried to suppress all of his work on it, including all copies of the journal in which he published. Needless to say, the mathematical establishment was unhappy with this. They relented only when they realised that they couldn't do it to an Israeli citizen.
Conservatism is all about the individual. Conservatives want to protect the individual from oppressive taxation and government regulation.
Apologies for flogging the proverbial dead horse, but the Terri Schaivo affair put the final nail in the coffin of the myth that the present US government cares about protecting the individual from government regulation.
You could (quite reasonably) argue that the current US government is not about conservatism proper, but it does sound a little like the "no true Scotsman" argument.
You've never had to implement a lexical analyser by hand, I take it. In a language without guaranteed tail recursion optimisation, the easiest way to implement finite state machines is with gotos.
"Goto" is a greater sin in C++ than in most languages because if used without considerable care, it can screw up the block structure, giving the compiler a difficult time in determining when to call a destructor. But if used with care, it is a tool in the programmer's toolbox. It just happens to be a tool that doesn't comply with modern safety regulations, so should be used when all other options would be significantly worse.
Slashdot Mirror
Interestingly, this happened 100 years or so after Copernicus said much the same thing. Copernicus was not asked to recant, and the church gave him a cushy retirement job as an administrator of a see.
So what gives? The moral of the story is that it's never about religion, but it's always about politics.
Consider the plight of stem cell researchers today: Whether or not they get to do their stuff depends not on what the prevailing religions believe, but rather on what kind of person happens to be in power at the time.
I propose we use the locale-neutral word "internationali1ation".
Unfortunately, "internaciigo" isn't necessarily an improvement.
Admittedly, it's shorter. However, the word is pronounced something like in-tehr-na-tsee-EE-go. Many people find the "ts" followed by two separately pronounced "i"'s, with overall word emphasis on the second, a bit hard to pronounce. And it sounds a bit like there's the word "nazi" in the middle, which means the thread is over.
Nobody has ever adequately explained to me why string theory is popular. It isn't actually a "theory", since it hasn't made any testable predictions. There is no problem which it has (yet) solved. Its desirable features (e.g. supersymmetry) are not known to be useful in the first place. Even its motivating examples don't seem to fit the theory. (Hadrons look like strings, but no known string models look anything like hadrons.)
As far as I can tell, the argument seems to be that high-energy physicists need to be doing something other than sitting around twiddling their thumbs, and until someone comes up with an alternative, string theory is that something.
On the other other hand, SQL-based databases:
It's also not true that any database design which isn't relational is "new". Z39.50, for example, has been around for longer than the SQL standard. (It used to be known as WAIS before it got its ISO number.)
It's also used in physical simulation to solve the static friction conditions that arise when many objects are in mutual contact.
Don't you mean "frack off"?
A Windows expert could easily say the same about words like "pipe" and "zombie". They would also point out that the supposed "Unix philosophy" of small programs connected by pipes is rarely used by big applications or application suites. And even if you did want to use it, you'd have to implement your own protocols.
Much simpler, they'd argue, to have a system whereby any component can interact with any other via a standard set of interfaces served by a central repository. You can then just glue together what bits you want and everything should, in theory, work. You can even put the bits on different machines if you need it to scale.
This is why many large Unix applications (though not Linux, interestingly) are based on CORBA.
Now I'm not defending this point of view. My point is that the software component story of Unix and Linux is not necessarily any simpler. Sure, we don't have a DLL versioning problem. Absolutely, we're not tied to Microsoft's severely broken standard interfaces. Yes, we don't have to deal with Microsoft's extremely idiosyncratic registry. The price we pay is that we don't have code reuse above the library level and even then, every new language needs to implement a new glue layer for them.
It's certainly not necessarily simpler, in the KISS sense.
Yes. But true nonetheless.
Actually, based on your response, I probably understand it better than you do.
A registry, in object oriented design pattern parlance, is a mapping from a reified type to an object factory, more or less. The Windows NT platform is basically a huge middleware virtual machine, along with a bunch of standard (though not very well-designed) interfaces.
One crucial purpose of the Windows registry is to store information about how to resolve middleware components. If you are basically a middleware platform, you need a registry. Your task, should you choose to accept, is to implement one sanely.
Don't knock the idea of registries just because Microsoft can't implement them properly.
Is that you, Dr Robert Umboto, son of the late Nigerian oil minister? I lost your email address. I still need to talk about that financial transaction we were engaged in.
Australia doesn't have a constitutional right to freedom of speech. (Merely political speech.) This is a counterbalance to copyright law which the USA has but we don't. You should mention this at least once.
Most countries with universal health care let you choose your own doctor, even one that charges more than the government pays (in which case you or your private insurace makes up the difference). And most countries with public schools let you choose your own school, even one that doesn't provide transportation in your area (in which case, you arrange your own).
cake + eat == good
You are in fact agreeing with the parent post. There is nothing wrong, in principle, with ownership of weapons by the law-abiding public. Indeed, many countries do it successfully, without a huge crime rate. It's only the USA which can't seem to handle it.
Not just that, but I think he did make some good points. For example, one of the questions which he kept getting asked was: "So, got any good stock tips?" His response was always along the lines of: "What do you think this says about you to future generations?"
Yes, it's an obvious point which most of us already know, that our current era is obsessed with the acquisition of small green pieces of paper. However, the interesting thing is that he didn't even really need to troll in order to get that question out of someone. And I think he knew it in advance.
I'd love to know who John Titor really was, just so I could buy him/her/them a round of drinks.
In interviews, he always says that he "can't confirm or deny" it, which is as close as he comes to admitting that it's a bunch of crazy bullshit. The thing is: In the 60s and 70s, Barris was virtually accused of bringing down civilisation by dragging the quality of television programming to a new low. (This was before the modern reality television phenomenon, you understand; the "low" that he achieved really was new.)
The book was his clever swipe at those critics. In his own way, he was basically saying that it's not like he ever did anything really evil.
I found the John Titor episode very interesting. Many people have characterised him as a hoax, but I think that's unfair. I think it was a very clever piece of Internet performance art, anticipating alternate games like I Love Bees.
My hat is off to the guy. He's made me think a lot about how future generations will judge our current culture, which I think was the main point of the exercise.
It reminds me a bit of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. It was unfair to call that a "hoax" because a hoaxer expects you to believe their bullshit. Chuck Barris was trying to make a point through a clever piece of alternate-reality fiction. Much the same as John Titor, whoever he really was.
I had an interesting thought, though I'm almost certainly not the first to have thought this.
Let's assume for the sake of argument that what Bush apparently believes here is in fact correct. Then it's entirely possibly that God's intention is precisely to take the USA down a few notches. If so, this is completely consistent with putting Bush in charge. Between screwing up the economy at home and making the US look bad in the eyes of the rest of the world, he looks like the perfect man for the job.
Completely hypothetically, of course.
Imagine the enormous commercial possibilities...
If it can't handle the competition...
On further investigation, you're right that Shamir didn't discover ZKPs. What he did write was a paper which introduced a ZKP system which was suitable for making unforgeable identity cards.
Since you were after evidence, the best I could find was this column from the Journal of Algorithms in 1988. It notes that "the US Army briefly tried to classify" the paper, citing a New York Times article from 1987 by James Gleick. Sorry, I don't have anything which has more of the story than that. (I originally read a fuller account it in a Martin Gardner article from Scientific American 15 odd years ago.)
It gets worse than patents...
When Adi Shamir (the "S" of "RSA") discovered zero-knowledge proof systems, the US millitary tried to suppress all of his work on it, including all copies of the journal in which he published. Needless to say, the mathematical establishment was unhappy with this. They relented only when they realised that they couldn't do it to an Israeli citizen.
Apologies for flogging the proverbial dead horse, but the Terri Schaivo affair put the final nail in the coffin of the myth that the present US government cares about protecting the individual from government regulation.
You could (quite reasonably) argue that the current US government is not about conservatism proper, but it does sound a little like the "no true Scotsman" argument.
You've never had to implement a lexical analyser by hand, I take it. In a language without guaranteed tail recursion optimisation, the easiest way to implement finite state machines is with gotos.
"Goto" is a greater sin in C++ than in most languages because if used without considerable care, it can screw up the block structure, giving the compiler a difficult time in determining when to call a destructor. But if used with care, it is a tool in the programmer's toolbox. It just happens to be a tool that doesn't comply with modern safety regulations, so should be used when all other options would be significantly worse.