Since when is "seeing things" incompatible with extremism?
he's consistent and historically very perceptive of the risks of the slippery slopes often presented by people, and their corporations, who don't share that vision.
What, you actually take slippery slope arguments seriously?
In this case, Silverlight does in fact present some nasty risks to Gnome and free software development.
I think the only real risk is in existing while always being guaranteed to be a version or two behind, allowing Microsoft to mislead people with claims of being "cross-platform".
We've seen Microsoft's "embrace and extend" behavior too often to trust them in this case.
I'm not sure EEE is applicable in this case, and I think the European anti-trust people make it less applicable in general these days. It seems to mean, roughly, abusing network effects and a large install base to take over an existing market. Silverlight is an alternative to flash, rather than a mostly-compatible upgrade, so there can't be any EEE going on at the moment What would (almost) count as EEE would be releasing new versions that they don't get standardized and don't allow Mono/Moonlight to implement... but it would only work if they can first make sure that their new version would have higher market penetration than flash, and if they can keep the European anti-trust people from noticing (and I suppose the US ones, since they seem to be pulling their heads out of their asses now).
Gnome is LGPLed and Stallman didn't suggest changing that. Just that Gnome stop promoting proprietary software.
But if you RTFA (you need at least pages 2 and 3, not just the first one), it appears that "promote" in this case really means "mention (even in passing) without demonizing".
So it has to do with Gnome refusing to flagging propietary software as such.
No, it has to do with them (specifically, their blog aggregator) refusing to demonize it and ban all (non-negative?) reference to it.
Posts like this were apparently interpreted (by Stallman) as "promoting" proprietary software (VMWare, in this case), which led to
GNOME should not provide proprietary software developers with a platform to present non-free software as a good or legitimate thing.
and then
GNOME is part of the GNU Project, and it ought to support the free software movement. The most minimal support for the free software movement is to refrain from going directly against it; that is, to avoid presenting proprietary software as legitimate.
Here's a recently posted article that includes the government's side of the story. It seems to back up Watt's account that the border guards overreacted violently.
Could you perhaps highlight the part(s) that back up that account?
As for me, I'll fight for what I care about in the courts and at the ballot box, where it can actually make a difference.
Those make almost no difference. The courts don't matter because it would be your word against the word of a couple sworn upholders of the law (who of course would have erased any recordings that you might try to have subpoenaed). The ballot box doesn't matter because don't blame me I voted for Kodos.
What does make a difference is getting people in general to actually give a damn. So you get things like the organized civil disobedience of the civil rights movement, where demonstrations of what's wrong are forced into the public's awareness. This in turn leads to a chance that someone decent (at least with regard to that one item) might appear on the ballot and actually have a chance of getting elected, and that those running for reelection will have to at least act like they care so they have less risk of getting kicked out.
I'd also like to remind you that there are no studies proving that intelligence has any survival advantage whatsoever.
Except that large brains are expensive (large energy requirements, cause a bit of difficulty with giving birth), so if they didn't give a significant advantage we should have been out-competed and died out by the stone age. Now, maybe it's a collective advantage rather than individual (nerds don't get laid / can't defend themselves, but can be doctors or design weapons), at least at today's human intelligence levels...
She [Grace Hopper] conceptualized and led the development of COBOL, one of the first modern programming languages.
Shouldn't this "cancel out" any other achievements she had? Because according to Edsger Dijkstra, "The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.", and I'd imagine that creating it (regardless of how impressive that is) would be a bit worse than merely teaching it.
because it succeeds in spreading their genes more widely, with nothing but a single night's work, while women have to actually birth the child and usually raise them.
Looking here, that seems to be a bit of a fringe theory, ie, not well supported or generally accepted (myself, I still find it rather curious that it's generally considered to be more about power (and anger apparently) than about sex).
Stackoverflow, essentially a simplified web forum that could be designed by a semi-literate PHP monkey in 48 hours of work
How about you reply here on Monday with a link to your full working clone of it, then? Might as well submit it as a story, too, I'm sure a large number of people would be interested in trying it out.
Will it get you laid?
Will it enhance the ability of your children to get laid?
If yes, then you are morally obligated to do it.
"There is no 'right' or 'wrong', 'good' or 'evil'. There is only 'historically correlated with collective survival'."
More seriously, wouldn't that position mean that all birth control is evil (IIRC this actually matches what the roman catholics believe (but obviously for different reasons), plus there's "every sperm is sacred, every sperm is great, when a sperm is wasted god gets quite irate") and that the only proper response when a potential partner wants to use a condom is to secretly poke a hole in it? Somehow, that seems a bit off...
LEDs are great if all you need is task lighting. LEDs are highly directional, whereas CFLs and incandescents are not.
As was noted, this is due to the packaging used. It would be fairly trivial to avoid by not building a lens into the package and/or making high-power "bulbs" out of maybe 20 lower-power individual LEDs all arranged facing outwards in different directions. And probably enclosing the whole thing in a frosted plastic envelope, the way some incandescent lights have the envelope frosted.
While it is well known that the newer lighting technologies use a fraction of the energy of incandescents to produce the same amount of light, it has been unproven whether higher manufacturing energy costs kept the new lighting from offering a net gain. The study found that the manufacturing and distribution energy costs of all lightbulb technologies are only about 2% of their total lifetime energy cost — a tiny fraction of the energy used to produce light.
A CFL costs maybe $5 each (if you buy a pack with more than one), including the retail markup, and saves maybe $40/year in electricity for supposedly 7+ years. I know manufacturers probably get their energy a bit cheaper than home electric rates, but it can't possibly be the 56+ times cheaper that it would take for the $5 to cover more energy than the $40*7 saved does.
To work properly, the verification needs to be done by the runtime system rather than just the compiler.
Uhuh. Why?
And what specific "verifications" are you referring to, exactly?
In order to dispense with hardware memory protection (and get the associated speed benefits), the runtime system needs to verify that your code does not diddle its pointers and look at parts of memory that it shouldn't. This means using a bytecode that can be checked for type-safety. Simply using a type-safe compiled language doesn't work, because when your system gets a binary to execute it does not know that it was generated from a type-safe language and even if it did it wouldn't know that the compiler was trustworthy.
Managed code does (well, can) have one totally awesome feature: provable type safety.
That's ridiculous. There's absolutely nothing about "managed code", aka bytecode, that makes it type safe. Type safety is a function of the language... it just so happens that two of the most common "managed code" languages, C# and Java, are both strongly, statically typed.
OTOH, Haskell is probably the most strongly typed language out there, and it compiles down to machine code binaries.
To work properly, the verification needs to be done by the runtime system rather than just the compiler. I think it's probably not possible to do this on ordinary (say, x86) machine code, and you need a properly designed bytecode to make it work. (Yes, I know that the chrome native client exists. I'm guessing that it works with the hardware protections, rather than being able to replace them.)
"Managed code is like antilock brakes. You used to have to be a good driver on ice or you would die. Now you don't have to pump your brakes anymore."
Might have been more appropriate to compare it in that people in the high performance arena (nascar) don't like antilock brakes because of their limits and the separation you get from your task at hand. (you lose your "feel for the road")
Or note that antilock brakes can increase your stopping distance.
Tho I'm a little strangely biased, I miss the days of assembly, when 10k was a LOT of code to write to solve a problem, thing ran at blindingly fast speed with almost no disk or memory footprint. Nowadays, Hello World is a huge production in itself. 97% of today's coders don't have any idea what they've missed out on and just accept what they've got. Even someone that understands the nerf tools like VB at a lower level can get sooo much more out of them. I recall taking someone's crypto code in VB and producing a several thousand-fold speed boost because of my understanding of how VB was translating things. They didn't know what to say, they'd just accepted that what they were doing was going to be dog slow. (and unfortunately the users are also falling under the same hypnosis)
Managed code does (well, can) have one totally awesome feature: provable type safety. What makes this great, is that you can take the memory protection hardware out of your CPU (where AIUI it tends to be on the critical path), and replace it with some checks in your compiler and some bounds-checking on array accesses. So basically you're moving most of the (fairly significant) work of keeping programs separate out of the tightest loop possible and instead doing it once at startup time. Even running on standard x86 with some of the protection features disabled still gives a noticeable speedup (see section 4.2 at the link).
Economists routinely use highly complicated mathematical models on stuff like this, and are just as routinely criticised for it because their simplifying assumptions aren't close enough to reality. Then along comes this bloke and uses a model that's not even based on human behaviour: the economy as a heat engine. No wonder he's been panned. Criticise economic models all you like, but at least the modern ones* have a foundation in human behaviour.
So economists are trying to figure things out from first principles, and having a rather difficult time because their necessary simplifying assumptions could possibly be simplifying away things that actually matter. While this guy seems to be looking at the economy as a black box, saying "it looks like this input and this output have always been related in the past, so what happens if they stay related in the future?". He's trying to come up with laws ("this is what happens") rather than theories ("this is why it happens"), and doesn't really need a foundation in human behavior. Much like we can know what gravity does, without actually having found a graviton or whatever current theories say we should find.
Even in the last 30 years there has been a recognition that high standards of living reduce fertility.
I think I saw an article fairly recently that suggested that as the standard of living increases past some point, this reverses itself and fertility rates start to go back up.
If f is a one-way function, then the inversion of f would be a problem whose output is hard to compute (by definition) but easy to check (just by computing f on it). Thus, the existence of a one-way function implies that P != NP. However, it is not known whether P != NP implies the existence of one-way functions.
I'm not certain exactly what this means, but part of it seems to be that "one-way" != "NP-complete" (because that would result in a much shorter explanation). But it does at least seem to mean that one-way functions would be a subset of NP problems, which I wasn't certain of when I posted that.
Not useless at all, just have it solve the same problem 5 or 15 times and go with the answer that it gives most often. Plus, for some problems it's much easier to verify an answer than to come up with it -- for those problems, just pair it with a normal computer to check the answers, and keep trying until it says the answer is right.
What the hell is that supposed to mean?? Damn do you think you can centrally plan how all the inventors act?
Sure. Tax credits for R&D in certain fields, prizes, etc. Basically anything that makes the risk/reward more favorable.
Necessity is the mother of invention, not the state. The inventors behavior is not altered by policy. Inventor's behavior is determined by the impact their invention may have.
The state has the ability to increase the impact that favored kinds of inventions would have on the inventor's pocketbook.
No matter how much you hate coal power generation, the inventor of a new way must create something cheaper than coal and as productive as coal. The rest, the replacement of coal, is just economics.
Yes, exactly.
Inventors know this, they are trying to create new power generation capabilities to beat oil and coal, because the inventions that aren't cheaper and better will NOT replace coal and oil no matter how much we want them to.
Yes. So how do we encourage people to spend less time trying to invent new banking scams and more time trying to invent better solar cells and working fusion reactors and such?
Slashdot Mirror
Stallman is a visionary, not an "extremenist".
Since when is "seeing things" incompatible with extremism?
he's consistent and historically very perceptive of the risks of the slippery slopes often presented by people, and their corporations, who don't share that vision.
What, you actually take slippery slope arguments seriously?
In this case, Silverlight does in fact present some nasty risks to Gnome and free software development.
I think the only real risk is in existing while always being guaranteed to be a version or two behind, allowing Microsoft to mislead people with claims of being "cross-platform".
We've seen Microsoft's "embrace and extend" behavior too often to trust them in this case.
I'm not sure EEE is applicable in this case, and I think the European anti-trust people make it less applicable in general these days. It seems to mean, roughly, abusing network effects and a large install base to take over an existing market. Silverlight is an alternative to flash, rather than a mostly-compatible upgrade, so there can't be any EEE going on at the moment What would (almost) count as EEE would be releasing new versions that they don't get standardized and don't allow Mono/Moonlight to implement... but it would only work if they can first make sure that their new version would have higher market penetration than flash, and if they can keep the European anti-trust people from noticing (and I suppose the US ones, since they seem to be pulling their heads out of their asses now).
Gnome is LGPLed and Stallman didn't suggest changing that. Just that Gnome stop promoting proprietary software.
But if you RTFA (you need at least pages 2 and 3, not just the first one), it appears that "promote" in this case really means "mention (even in passing) without demonizing".
So it has to do with Gnome refusing to flagging propietary software as such.
No, it has to do with them (specifically, their blog aggregator) refusing to demonize it and ban all (non-negative?) reference to it.
Posts like this were apparently interpreted (by Stallman) as "promoting" proprietary software (VMWare, in this case), which led to
and then
Here's a recently posted article that includes the government's side of the story. It seems to back up Watt's account that the border guards overreacted violently.
Could you perhaps highlight the part(s) that back up that account?
As for me, I'll fight for what I care about in the courts and at the ballot box, where it can actually make a difference.
Those make almost no difference. The courts don't matter because it would be your word against the word of a couple sworn upholders of the law (who of course would have erased any recordings that you might try to have subpoenaed). The ballot box doesn't matter because don't blame me I voted for Kodos.
What does make a difference is getting people in general to actually give a damn. So you get things like the organized civil disobedience of the civil rights movement, where demonstrations of what's wrong are forced into the public's awareness. This in turn leads to a chance that someone decent (at least with regard to that one item) might appear on the ballot and actually have a chance of getting elected, and that those running for reelection will have to at least act like they care so they have less risk of getting kicked out.
If you talk back, disobey orders and give them a hard time, crap like this will most likely happen to you because
...those who rule by fear have a tendency to be paranoid?
I'd also like to remind you that there are no studies proving that intelligence has any survival advantage whatsoever.
Except that large brains are expensive (large energy requirements, cause a bit of difficulty with giving birth), so if they didn't give a significant advantage we should have been out-competed and died out by the stone age. Now, maybe it's a collective advantage rather than individual (nerds don't get laid / can't defend themselves, but can be doctors or design weapons), at least at today's human intelligence levels...
It's a shame given the number of female pioneers of geekdom.
From your second link:
Shouldn't this "cancel out" any other achievements she had? Because according to Edsger Dijkstra, "The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.", and I'd imagine that creating it (regardless of how impressive that is) would be a bit worse than merely teaching it.
Men rape women, not the other way around,
Are you sure about this?
because it succeeds in spreading their genes more widely, with nothing but a single night's work, while women have to actually birth the child and usually raise them.
Looking here, that seems to be a bit of a fringe theory, ie, not well supported or generally accepted (myself, I still find it rather curious that it's generally considered to be more about power (and anger apparently) than about sex).
And of course I mistyped the code.
int n; //number of shoes // assign n
printf("we have %d pair%s of shoe%s",n, (n!=1) ? : "s" : "", (n!=1) ? "es" : "");
"we have 1 pair of shoe"
"we have 2 pairs of shoees"
There is no bad code, only bad developers. Can you offset one of these jokers?
Yes, an bad developer can be offset by having a very good developer dedicated to just fixing everything they break.
Stackoverflow, essentially a simplified web forum that could be designed by a semi-literate PHP monkey in 48 hours of work
How about you reply here on Monday with a link to your full working clone of it, then? Might as well submit it as a story, too, I'm sure a large number of people would be interested in trying it out.
Will it get you laid?
Will it enhance the ability of your children to get laid?
If yes, then you are morally obligated to do it.
"There is no 'right' or 'wrong', 'good' or 'evil'. There is only 'historically correlated with collective survival'."
More seriously, wouldn't that position mean that all birth control is evil (IIRC this actually matches what the roman catholics believe (but obviously for different reasons), plus there's "every sperm is sacred, every sperm is great, when a sperm is wasted god gets quite irate") and that the only proper response when a potential partner wants to use a condom is to secretly poke a hole in it? Somehow, that seems a bit off...
these days, i wonder whats not a carcinogen...
Probably not much besides CO2.
LEDs are great if all you need is task lighting. LEDs are highly directional, whereas CFLs and incandescents are not.
As was noted, this is due to the packaging used. It would be fairly trivial to avoid by not building a lens into the package and/or making high-power "bulbs" out of maybe 20 lower-power individual LEDs all arranged facing outwards in different directions. And probably enclosing the whole thing in a frosted plastic envelope, the way some incandescent lights have the envelope frosted.
While it is well known that the newer lighting technologies use a fraction of the energy of incandescents to produce the same amount of light, it has been unproven whether higher manufacturing energy costs kept the new lighting from offering a net gain. The study found that the manufacturing and distribution energy costs of all lightbulb technologies are only about 2% of their total lifetime energy cost — a tiny fraction of the energy used to produce light.
A CFL costs maybe $5 each (if you buy a pack with more than one), including the retail markup, and saves maybe $40/year in electricity for supposedly 7+ years. I know manufacturers probably get their energy a bit cheaper than home electric rates, but it can't possibly be the 56+ times cheaper that it would take for the $5 to cover more energy than the $40*7 saved does.
To work properly, the verification needs to be done by the runtime system rather than just the compiler.
Uhuh. Why?
And what specific "verifications" are you referring to, exactly?
In order to dispense with hardware memory protection (and get the associated speed benefits), the runtime system needs to verify that your code does not diddle its pointers and look at parts of memory that it shouldn't. This means using a bytecode that can be checked for type-safety. Simply using a type-safe compiled language doesn't work, because when your system gets a binary to execute it does not know that it was generated from a type-safe language and even if it did it wouldn't know that the compiler was trustworthy.
Managed code does (well, can) have one totally awesome feature: provable type safety.
That's ridiculous. There's absolutely nothing about "managed code", aka bytecode, that makes it type safe. Type safety is a function of the language... it just so happens that two of the most common "managed code" languages, C# and Java, are both strongly, statically typed.
OTOH, Haskell is probably the most strongly typed language out there, and it compiles down to machine code binaries.
To work properly, the verification needs to be done by the runtime system rather than just the compiler. I think it's probably not possible to do this on ordinary (say, x86) machine code, and you need a properly designed bytecode to make it work. (Yes, I know that the chrome native client exists. I'm guessing that it works with the hardware protections, rather than being able to replace them.)
"Managed code is like antilock brakes. You used to have to be a good driver on ice or you would die. Now you don't have to pump your brakes anymore."
Might have been more appropriate to compare it in that people in the high performance arena (nascar) don't like antilock brakes because of their limits and the separation you get from your task at hand. (you lose your "feel for the road")
Or note that antilock brakes can increase your stopping distance.
Tho I'm a little strangely biased, I miss the days of assembly, when 10k was a LOT of code to write to solve a problem, thing ran at blindingly fast speed with almost no disk or memory footprint. Nowadays, Hello World is a huge production in itself. 97% of today's coders don't have any idea what they've missed out on and just accept what they've got. Even someone that understands the nerf tools like VB at a lower level can get sooo much more out of them. I recall taking someone's crypto code in VB and producing a several thousand-fold speed boost because of my understanding of how VB was translating things. They didn't know what to say, they'd just accepted that what they were doing was going to be dog slow. (and unfortunately the users are also falling under the same hypnosis)
Managed code does (well, can) have one totally awesome feature: provable type safety. What makes this great, is that you can take the memory protection hardware out of your CPU (where AIUI it tends to be on the critical path), and replace it with some checks in your compiler and some bounds-checking on array accesses. So basically you're moving most of the (fairly significant) work of keeping programs separate out of the tightest loop possible and instead doing it once at startup time. Even running on standard x86 with some of the protection features disabled still gives a noticeable speedup (see section 4.2 at the link).
Economists routinely use highly complicated mathematical models on stuff like this, and are just as routinely criticised for it because their simplifying assumptions aren't close enough to reality. Then along comes this bloke and uses a model that's not even based on human behaviour: the economy as a heat engine. No wonder he's been panned. Criticise economic models all you like, but at least the modern ones* have a foundation in human behaviour.
So economists are trying to figure things out from first principles, and having a rather difficult time because their necessary simplifying assumptions could possibly be simplifying away things that actually matter. While this guy seems to be looking at the economy as a black box, saying "it looks like this input and this output have always been related in the past, so what happens if they stay related in the future?". He's trying to come up with laws ("this is what happens") rather than theories ("this is why it happens"), and doesn't really need a foundation in human behavior. Much like we can know what gravity does, without actually having found a graviton or whatever current theories say we should find.
Even in the last 30 years there has been a recognition that high standards of living reduce fertility.
I think I saw an article fairly recently that suggested that as the standard of living increases past some point, this reverses itself and fertility rates start to go back up.
Plus, for some problems it's much easier to verify an answer than to come up with it
Yes. They're called "NP Complete" problems.
Maybe:
I'm not certain exactly what this means, but part of it seems to be that "one-way" != "NP-complete" (because that would result in a much shorter explanation). But it does at least seem to mean that one-way functions would be a subset of NP problems, which I wasn't certain of when I posted that.
There's still room for error there though, and that is simply unacceptable based upon how we use our computers today.
This is why everybody uses only ECC memory in their desktop machines and all filesystems in common use support checksumming for data integrity.
79% accurate. That's pretty useless.
Not useless at all, just have it solve the same problem 5 or 15 times and go with the answer that it gives most often. Plus, for some problems it's much easier to verify an answer than to come up with it -- for those problems, just pair it with a normal computer to check the answers, and keep trying until it says the answer is right.
What the hell is that supposed to mean?? Damn do you think you can centrally plan how all the inventors act?
Sure. Tax credits for R&D in certain fields, prizes, etc. Basically anything that makes the risk/reward more favorable.
Necessity is the mother of invention, not the state. The inventors behavior is not altered by policy. Inventor's behavior is determined by the impact their invention may have.
The state has the ability to increase the impact that favored kinds of inventions would have on the inventor's pocketbook.
No matter how much you hate coal power generation, the inventor of a new way must create something cheaper than coal and as productive as coal. The rest, the replacement of coal, is just economics.
Yes, exactly.
Inventors know this, they are trying to create new power generation capabilities to beat oil and coal, because the inventions that aren't cheaper and better will NOT replace coal and oil no matter how much we want them to.
Yes. So how do we encourage people to spend less time trying to invent new banking scams and more time trying to invent better solar cells and working fusion reactors and such?