OK. You were doing pretty well, but dragging out battleships is a mistake, and also a well-worn trolling tactic in naval forums. What gun fires 200 miles with any accuracy??? Try more like 20. "Nuclear battleship ammo" is a real clunker. If you can safely anchor a huge ship "200" miles from your target, your adversary is probably not posing enough of a threat to justify nuclear attack.
Battleships are LOUSY platforms for land attack. They are BIG, and say "sink me and kill thousands of sailors with a diesel sub or a couple cheap mines" on the side. (In the Gulf War, a huge effort had to be made to get ships in close to Kuwait, and they were essentially stopped cold by Iraqi mines.) The shells they lob are relatively small and carry little explosive (and less per unit total weight) compared to a cruise missile warhead. Accuracy is also very low. I challenge you to find a *single* instance where battleships have provided *effective* fire support for land operations. Do you really want to be a Marine maneuvering inland while a battleship is firing essentially blind over your head, but close enough to your position to support you effectively? In WWII, effective fire support was provided by smaller ships with more accurate guns, going into harm's way. Even so, Marines have decided nowadays that they had better go where the enemy isn't around, instead of trying to "soften them up" which rarely worked.
Battleships were made because, at the time, it was the only way to sink the other guy's battleships. Once WWII showed that aircraft could sink a battleship before a battleship could even find the aircraft carrier, the battleship era was OVER. The only useful purpose for battleships, other than boosting testosterone and trolling, is ceremonies for signing surrender papers, which appear to be very rare in modern conflicts.
To be more on-topic, I am somewhat skeptical of your claim that unmanned drones require air superiority to be useful. Sure, you may lose a few more (cruise missles can be shot down, too) than in perfect conditions, but they are cheap, and you don't have to rescue or replace the pilots when you lose them.
I did not say that everything the CIA does is consistent with the (legitimate) purposes for which it exists. Rebels overthrowing their governments might indeed be in the interests of the U.S., although such interests ought to be weighed against the ill will such actions can create, and any other (some unforseeable) consequences.
For example, the support of the U.S. for the Shah of Iran was perhaps in the short-term interests of the United States, and probably the best option at the time. As it turned out, however, the Shah's repressive and westernized regime created a deep well of animosity in Islamic circles. This led, of course to the Shah's overthrow, and twenty years of tense relations between the U.S. and the Islamic Republic. Who knows how much this has hurt the U.S.'s national interests?
Without more details, and a crystal ball to compare the alternatives, it's impossible to know if helping some rebels (French Resistance, Afghan Resistance, Chechen Resistance, Islamic Jihad, ?) does indeed protect the U.S.'s national security.
If you want a unambiguous example: screwing up the target selection process for Belgrade certainly did not do anything to help the U.S.'s national interests. Of course, no one made a deliberate policy decision do do this.
What, you think the KGB and the CIA are equivalent? Perhaps morally equivalent, but morals are not what government is about. The CIA exists for reasons of national security of the UNITED STATES, and the KGB exists, putatively, for reasons of national security of RUSSIA. Those reasons are not the same!!
If you work for the CIA, things that you do to further US national security, even if they might harm Russia to some degree, are rewarded by the US. Part of the CIA's job is to find out things about Russia that the KGB might not want to tell the US.
On the other hand, if you work for the CIA, things that might *harm* the US are punishable, and should be. There is a fundamental asymmetry between Russia's interests and America's interests that distinguishes between these actions.
I find it quite naive of you to suggest that this is primarily a free speech issue. The CIA does not provide computers and networks to further their employees' free expression. In fact, public expressions of secret information are often punishable, regardless of the First Amendment, because, according to the classifying authorities, such disclosure would cause some harm, or risk of harm, to the US's national security. I am sure that the CIA employees have had this explained to them, and agreed in a legally binding way. Your First Amendment arguments are a red herring.
Chat rooms are potentially forums for exchanging *information*, and *information* is what the CIA deals in. Furthermore, installing this software creates connections that might allow the network to be accessed from the outside, which is an additional risk.
I don't understand at all what you mean about the enemy "shooting you" for practicing free speech.
I don't disagree that there is some bureaucratic infighting going on. What do you expect in a government bureaucracy? Some sort of utopia for hackers and "free" speech?
Everytime I feel compelled to explain things this obvious, I worry that I've been trolled.
I think it is likely, though not certain, that Kennedy won fairly, that is, if the election could have been held without fraud by either side, Kennedy still would have won. Nonetheless it was very close, and I merely mentioned LBJ to emphasize that the result *might* have been fraudulent, and such claims ought to be taken seriously. However, there is almost inevitably some fraud on both sides, and there are also claims that fraud in *favor* of Nixon in Illinois outside of Chicago was just as much a factor as fraud in favor of Kennedy.
In any event, Nixon's advisors told him that he was unlikely to get anywhere by contesting the results. Whether Nixon brooded about it for eight years, reinforcing the paranoia that contributed to Watergate, is another interesting question that probably can't be answered. Nixon, with all his faults, or probably because of all his faults, is a fascinating character, which is probably what keeps all these 1960 legends alive. I doubt either Gore or GWB has that kind of historical staying power.
It's true that Kennedy would still have won without Illinois, but Texas was also pretty close, and a guy named Lyndon Johnson had a lot of influence there. If both states had gone for Nixon, Kennedy would have lost.
I don't understand what the problem is with a.pdf file. It's a fully documented format, as opposed to, say MS Word, and I suspect that Ghostscript renders it, which would provide a reader for a wide range of platforms, if you aren't using one of the wide range of platforms that Adobe Reader works on. If Ghostscript isn't open-source enough for you, the format is well-documented enough that it would be as easy to write a reader for this as for any other typesetting format.
PDF preserves typographical appearance very well, allowing the author to include mathematical formulas, etc., unlike a pure text or HTML document. It's also closely related to PostScript, so that one can produce high-quality printed copies, unlike a bitmap graphic.
What alternative format provides all of these qualities?
Any name-calling aside, you've still missed my central point. Your argument reverses the whole burden of proof. I don't have to rule out the possibility of a Creator, you have to prove that one is necessary! You can believe whatever you like, as fervently as you like, but if you want to be taken seriously, you ought to be able to defend your beliefs with something like rational argument.
One could just as easily argue that the entire universe was created last week, or five minutes ago, with your memories and these posts already put in place by your Creator. So what? If that's the kind of universe we are actually in, then nothing is probably knowable, and you are never going to be able to *prove* by observation that you aren't being fooled.
The laws of nature as they now appear to exist, and assumed to be constant, appear to be able to account pretty well for the 15 billion years or so in the history of the universe, except for the first few seconds, when conditions were quite extreme, making it quite difficult to experimentally test any hypotheses in present-day laboratories. At this point, you might claim victory, saying that science can't rule out a creator. Perhaps, but that is a very different thing than your being able to demonstrate, for instance, that there is a Creator with *conscious intent,* rather than something like a huge bubble of energy that underwent some kind of drastic phase transition. Anyhow, if you attend astrophysics conventions, you'll find that scientists are continually *restricting*, by observation, the likely characteristics of the very early universe. Your arguments do nothing to *restrict* the possibilities, and thus are not arguments at all.
Again, I ask, what's the *reason* to believe that the universe is young, but was created to *appear* old, as opposed to the universe simply *being* old? Because it makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside?
Except, if you've been paying attention to real trees, you know that "mighty oaks from little acorns grow." Trees don't need "designed maturity. " You yourself were created from a single cell, after all, assuming you are human. As for soil, and what not, it's pretty clear that soil today comes from decaying plant matter, etc. Why did the first soil have to be any different? There are a variety of life forms that can survive on barren rock, such as newly formed volcanic islands.
You're proposing a hypothesis whose only purpose is to allow you to keep believing that some external Creator is fooling you. Care to come up with any "reasonable" example where your principle actually makes a useful prediction that can be tested?
I'm hoping dearly that I've been trolled, but it's often hard to distinguish between a fervent believer, a true moron, or a troll.
Thanks, streetlawyer, I was ready to reply with an honest explanation, but I think your comment was not only much more entertaining, but also more insightful than anything I could have posted.
I'm sure there's a point here; too bad all this has to show up in slashdot where no one will notice.
Oh, come on. You say "Slashdot doesn't need trolls." But in fact, as streetlawyer says, trolls are why I keep coming back. I honestly don't want to read a bunch of repetitive self-absorbed whining about open-source "ideals" and calls to "fight the evil oppressive industrial corporatist running-dog patent-holders," and the trolls are the only other show playing here.
As far as streetlawyer himself goes, I actually have his user info page *bookmarked* so that I can read what for me is the *most* enjoyable part of slashdot. Even if he is often a deliberate troll, at least there is almost always some intellectual content in what he is posting, even if it is being deliberately distorted, and the best part about it is that I often can't tell which parts of his posts are supposed to be trolling, and which aren't! He claims this is easy, and you claim it is adolescent crap, but I don't think I could manage as well.
I don't know what truly motivates slashdot to post stories of one kind or another, but your calling the ICANN story "important" is really pretty pompous. Even if/. does post something that could be considered important, it's usually framed in a context guaranteed to whip up an unthinking frenzy among the geeks. E.g., even the smallest legal non-decision on anything vaguely related to Napster gets blown up to the hugest proportions. That doesn't serve any useful cause, but just generates noise. At least streetlawyer probably knows what he is actually up to.
Reference counting is inferior to any proper garbage collection system. The most important shortcoming of reference counting is that it cannot handle circular structures (a pair of references pointing at each other will not be freed, even if they become inaccessible by any other reference.) In primitive languages like C which severely limit the concept of "reference" this problem might be tolerable or never come up.
The second problem with reference counting is that it is expensive in computing effort. The cost of maintaining the reference counts is significant, and cannot be postponed until a convenient time.
True garbage collection can be very efficient, even if it is difficult to implement correctly. There's really no reason, other than implementors' laziness, to settle on reference counting. In my mind, people who like reference counting resemble the people who think malloc/free are guaranteed to be efficient, probably because the names are so short. Having an application malloc/free for weeks or years will create a memory arena so fragmented that malloc will get slower, and slower, and slower, but that doesn't matter, because your system is unlikely to actually run for that long without crashing, right?
Why the heck did you go on Yahoo, instead of just picking up a textbook on sorting algorithms?!!! You really trust what some unknown Argentinian posts on his web page better than a textbook that has presumably been carefully edited? Learn to use a library, for God's sake!
Sometimes I wish Slashdot had a -1 Moron moderation.
I see a lot of interesting issues being partially raised here, and by the original article.
There is indeed overhead involved in a reference, but the hope is that you only have to handle "large" objects by reference. Things like numbers are indeed "atomic" meaning that one use of the number 5, for example, cannot be distinguished usefully from another instance of the number 5. It doesn't make sense to say "change the value of 5 to be 6." Instead, we have a place that can hold numbers, and we change the value in that place to be the number 6 instead of 5. In that sense, a numeric variable is a "reference" to a location in memory, which can contain "values" although we never use those terms in C, as there is no pointer indirection or overhead involved.
Now, the problem comes in when you talk about larger things, like, for instance, a 3-D rendered scene. Say I have a "scene" which contains a bat and a ball. If I "duplicate" the scene, so I have S1 and S2, and I move the ball in S1, does it move in S2? Hmmm. It depends on what you did/meant when you "duplicated" the scene. Is it the "same" scene, meaning you scratch one and the other bleeds? Or is it a new scene, which just happens to look the same? The same philosophical problem arises when you pass parameters to functions. Do you "duplicate" the argument, or not?
The point is that a language implementation pushes bits and bytes around. However, a programmer is managing abstractions, and the handling of those abstractions CANNOT be specified as part of a language definition! It depends on the programmer's intent!
This is another mess that C++ got into when it had to manage assignment and initialization of classes: "copy" constructors for all your classes. But what does it mean to copy? It depends! Not only does it depend on your class, but it also depends on how you want to use it, which can change!
A side effect of this is that passing arguments around can involve a lot of excess "copying," if you insist on "copying" arguments before you pass them. C++ has to do this, because C did, except when you specifically ask for references. Now, if you have garbage collection, all these excess copies, most of which are soon discarded, need to be cleaned up.
I guess this is why the author here worries about garbage collection in his phone number instance. In principle, once you have everyone's phone number, you don't need to allocate any more of them, and unless people go away, or change phone numbers, you don't really need to throw them away. Unless you are in C++, so you have to keep "copying" them onto scraps of memory to send to subroutines, and then discarding the scraps as soon as it returns.
As a side note, mark-and-sweep is usually the worst possible garbage collection algorithm. You have to look at everything, even if most of it isn't garbage anymore. Much better is "generational" garbage collection, which mostly looks at recently allocated stuff. The idea is that if stuff has been held onto for a while already, it probably is still being held onto, while it is very common for things to be allocated, used only a little bit, then discarded. This can be very efficient GC.
The problem with people's perception of GC is that it happens behind the scenes. "malloc()" and "free()" are right there in your face. In fact, they have so few characters in them, "they must be fast." Of course, as soon as you fragment your arena, malloc can get slower, and slower, and slower....In Windows, where programs typically don't live long, you don't see this. But in the world of serious applications, if you want your program to run for weeks or years, this can be a real problem. Garbage collection on references can then be MORE EFFICIENT than manual collection, not only because it doesn't "forget to free()", it can also, when dealing with references, rearrange memory to be more compact, and therefore localized for cache issues.
Of course, I don't think C++ or C# garbage collection can actually do this, because when you move objects, you have to go back and change all the pointers that pointed to it, which in Lisp is easy, because the machine can tell a pointer from an integer, but in C-based languages is hard, because pointers and integers are both just piles of bits. But hey, that's what you get for programming in object-oriented portable assembler.
Does this mean that C# will be as much of a moving target as C++ was for the first 10 years of its existence?
(I don't mean to sound surprised, as this is a Microsoft language, which needs continuous "innovation" to maintain market-share.)
To me, one of the huge reasons not to use C++ was that, even though I had learned an earlier version years ago, when I came back a few years later, Bjarne had added a few new features that were now "essential" to implement some "crucial" paradigm. E.g., suddenly templates are crucial to programming in the true C++ religion. Never mind that compilers took years to get them properly and consistently implemented, while hackers seemed to keep pushing templates harder and harder for compile-time code generation, in ways that were bound to activate any subtle, lurking bugs in a compiler. Same with exceptions, RTTI, et al.
My main gripe is that it is hard enough to deal with languages where people keep coming up with half-solutions to new problems by changing the language definition. How much worse will it be when Microsoft, with its commercial interests, gets in the game?
OK. I'll ignore the ad hominem portion of your argument, and assume you had another argument you wanted to make.
If you want me to admit that this research does have "applications," the detector people do process a huge amount of data, so they are possibly making advances in data processing hardware & software. So are lots of people in other fields (bioinformatics, enterprise software...), some of which actually make money instead of just spending it.
As far as interconnected--who goes to the high energy meetings besides high energy physicists? Or are you counting on all the garbled accounts in the mainstream press to have influence?
Anyway, I didn't propose restricting research to "immediately practical" fields. There's a big difference between "far from practical" and "never, ever, ever going to be practical." The first transistor was far from practical. Most mathematics is far from practical.
Is anyone, for instance, working on *applications* of 1950s era particle physics?
Yeah. great idea. To create neutrinos in "detectable" quantities you need a source/transmitter. Your choices:
1) star
2) particle accelerator
neither of which is particularly cheap AND easy to modulate. a receiver: your choices:
1) **huge** tank of cleaning fluid and array of photomultiplier tubes
2) or, something like a huge amount of gallium (i.e., a considerable fraction of the world supply) which will be transmuted by neutrinos and can be chemically detected after a number of *months*.
Oh yeah, (1) needs to be under huge amounts of ROCK to avoid detecting all sorts of other garbage. Neither one is going to fit very well into a sub, and the sophisticated chemistry won't fit very well with the submariners.
Not to mention the "practical" details, like, most US subs have nuclear reactors that likely contribute a huge background compared to the neutrino signal.
The main point is that neutrinos DO pass through matter almost like it wasn't there. Unfortunately, most things you use to detect them are made of matter.
Look, you high-energy folks are always talking about "unforeseeable applications" but the fact is that you need these multi-billion dollar instruments to generate, e.g., tau leptons, even in extremely small quantities, because they just DON'T EXIST UNDER NORMAL CONDITIONS, i.e., in any conditions in the universe after it was a few minutes old. Knowing more about the tau neutrino lets you fix some parameters in the Standard Model that have NO APPLICATION in any other field.
EVERYTHING that any engineer might put into use is going to be made up of ordinary matter: i.e. protons, neutrons, electrons. If these experiments don't tell us more about these, they will never be put to practical use.
Let me put it this way: is any chemist going to change how he works because the tau neutrino exists? No--his life is based on what happens near ROOM TEMPERATURE where any contributions of neutrino physics are either ZERO or taken into account by the effective fields that he uses (e.g. Maxwell's equations as an theory approximating QED). Is any materials engineer going to change how he works? No. And all the other engineers use what the chemists and materials guys dream up.
Newton was working with light. Light is all around us: easy to produce, and we see it all the time, literally. People have been working on improving materials since prehistoric times. These fields are obviously about things that are real and practically useful.
High-energy physics is only useful for cosmologists. Which is only useful if you plan to be around for billions of years, or for religion. Accept this fact. If you are in high-energy physics and wanted to have a *practical* impact on the world, you made the wrong choice. Sorry.
This whole story is absurd. I wish I could use my moderator points on the original story (FLAMEBAIT), so no one would waste their time on it.
Neither of the original articles mentions that ATI's press release said *anything* about the Cubes, but that features prominently in CmdrTaco's blurb. Most of the resulting threads talk about the video possibilities of the Cubes, or about purported downgrading of Apple's video cards, which wasn't in the original stories either.
We ought to have a system where CmdrTaco should lose "editor-karma" for posting rumor-quality stories with inaccurate summaries. That way, I can set my front-page threshold to avoid rumor trash.
Or, just give Slashdot the slogan "Rumors for Nerds. Stuff that pointlessly excites furious discussion."
Plus, there is this fantastic, old, funky book on how to keep your VW running: "How to keep your Volkswagen alive: a manual of step-by-step procedures for the compleat idiot." by John Muir. Covers EVERYTHING. They later wrote a similar one for 70s Hondas (CVCC engine). Fun books to read even if you don't own one.
The real problem, demonstrated by these exchanges, and which I think Hatch was getting at, is the lack of clarity in this issue. When no one really understands what the law is, you get chaos like the internet music mess. Furthermore, when businesses can get nailed very hard for treading in a murky area, they tend to act very conservatively. Its in everyone's interest that the internet grow the music market, and they can't do that unless the law is *CLEAR*.
Congress has the power to make copyright mean whatever it wants; tomorrow, they could say musical works and performances will no longer be protected. Stock in record companies would crash, and businesses could crumble, so they won't do it, but the power is there. Hatch is just trying to figure out how to use that power.
Why not a "Napster card" you buy in the Quick-E-Mart that gives you $10,$20,whatever of download authorization? Type the card number in just like a credit card, and it gets deducted, just like the phone cards you see on the rack.
Police a "protective layer between the citizenry and judges"????? I don't know what you could mean. If anything, judges are a protective layer between the citizenry and the police. What keeps police reading the Miranda warnings and getting you a lawyer when you want one? The judge throwing out your "voluntary confession" if the police didn't do so. I agree that mandatory minimums can be a bad idea, because they prevent judges from using discretion to be a protective layer between the actual guilty party (with extenuating circumstances) and the politically popular (i.e., legislated) idea of what a criminal in the abstract should get for the crime). Police aren't the solution to that problem. They let people off with a warning regardless of the eventual sentence they would get, probably to avoid their paperwork. Also, DAs will let you plead to a lesser charge to save them a trial. Don't imagine they really have your interests at heart.
These questions that should be asked are even more basic then these: it isn't even a "memory" yet!
What they have shown is that, using an very small scanning tunneling microscope tip, and a carefully prepared silcon surface, they can "write" lines and then have organic molecules end up on those lines.
Then, the particular organic molecules they attach "spin" in this environment.
This is NOT "just theory," i.e., they actually did this in a real machine. It IS "just theory" if you compare it to actually making a memory chip.
Did they do anything like attach wires to these molecules? No. Do they have a particularly large number of these molecules? They don't say. But the STM probably has only one tip which is plucking one hydrogen atom at a time. So, probably not.
"Pure silicon" is not the problem. Why? Because all the chip companies in the world use pure silicon wafers. The problem is making even a one-bit MEMORY that can actually be operated reliably for a long time, before your organic molecule gets fried or stuck. Then, put 16 million of these bit elements on a chip, with the circuitry to connect them all, in the meantime, they still have to keep working fast. And try to write all 16 million little lines all at the same time, so you can actually build a useful number in the lifetime of your customers.
Remember that any old DRAM fab in Korea can churn out however-many-megabits chips on a few hundred chips at once, in however-many-dozen fabrication stations, that have all the wires connecting the bits together, then test, wire, and seal those chips into the little plastic packages that can be mounted on SIMMs/DIMMs that you can stick in your PC and run at 100 MHz. I.e. these things WORK.
This won't get "buried by marketing" if this technology can do the same thing cheaper. Making computer chips is like "printing money." If you can print $10 bills instead of $1 bills, you do it.
For a more down-to-earth look at what this lab actually does, check
Slashdot Mirror
OK. You were doing pretty well, but dragging out battleships is a mistake, and also a well-worn trolling tactic in naval forums. What gun fires 200 miles with any accuracy??? Try more like 20. "Nuclear battleship ammo" is a real clunker. If you can safely anchor a huge ship "200" miles from your target, your adversary is probably not posing enough of a threat to justify nuclear attack.
Battleships are LOUSY platforms for land attack. They are BIG, and say "sink me and kill thousands of sailors with a diesel sub or a couple cheap mines" on the side. (In the Gulf War, a huge effort had to be made to get ships in close to Kuwait, and they were essentially stopped cold by Iraqi mines.) The shells they lob are relatively small and carry little explosive (and less per unit total weight) compared to a cruise missile warhead. Accuracy is also very low. I challenge you to find a *single* instance where battleships have provided *effective* fire support for land operations. Do you really want to be a Marine maneuvering inland while a battleship is firing essentially blind over your head, but close enough to your position to support you effectively? In WWII, effective fire support was provided by smaller ships with more accurate guns, going into harm's way. Even so, Marines have decided nowadays that they had better go where the enemy isn't around, instead of trying to "soften them up" which rarely worked.
Battleships were made because, at the time, it was the only way to sink the other guy's battleships. Once WWII showed that aircraft could sink a battleship before a battleship could even find the aircraft carrier, the battleship era was OVER. The only useful purpose for battleships, other than boosting testosterone and trolling, is ceremonies for signing surrender papers, which appear to be very rare in modern conflicts.
To be more on-topic, I am somewhat skeptical of your claim that unmanned drones require air superiority to be useful. Sure, you may lose a few more (cruise missles can be shot down, too) than in perfect conditions, but they are cheap, and you don't have to rescue or replace the pilots when you lose them.
I did not say that everything the CIA does is consistent with the (legitimate) purposes for which it exists. Rebels overthrowing their governments might indeed be in the interests of the U.S., although such interests ought to be weighed against the ill will such actions can create, and any other (some unforseeable) consequences.
For example, the support of the U.S. for the Shah of Iran was perhaps in the short-term interests of the United States, and probably the best option at the time. As it turned out, however, the Shah's repressive and westernized regime created a deep well of animosity in Islamic circles. This led, of course to the Shah's overthrow, and twenty years of tense relations between the U.S. and the Islamic Republic. Who knows how much this has hurt the U.S.'s national interests?
Without more details, and a crystal ball to compare the alternatives, it's impossible to know if helping some rebels (French Resistance, Afghan Resistance, Chechen Resistance, Islamic Jihad, ?) does indeed protect the U.S.'s national security.
If you want a unambiguous example: screwing up the target selection process for Belgrade certainly did not do anything to help the U.S.'s national interests. Of course, no one made a deliberate policy decision do do this.
What, you think the KGB and the CIA are equivalent? Perhaps morally equivalent, but morals are not what government is about. The CIA exists for reasons of national security of the UNITED STATES, and the KGB exists, putatively, for reasons of national security of RUSSIA. Those reasons are not the same!!
If you work for the CIA, things that you do to further US national security, even if they might harm Russia to some degree, are rewarded by the US. Part of the CIA's job is to find out things about Russia that the KGB might not want to tell the US.
On the other hand, if you work for the CIA, things that might *harm* the US are punishable, and should be. There is a fundamental asymmetry between Russia's interests and America's interests that distinguishes between these actions.
I find it quite naive of you to suggest that this is primarily a free speech issue. The CIA does not provide computers and networks to further their employees' free expression. In fact, public expressions of secret information are often punishable, regardless of the First Amendment, because, according to the classifying authorities, such disclosure would cause some harm, or risk of harm, to the US's national security. I am sure that the CIA employees have had this explained to them, and agreed in a legally binding way. Your First Amendment arguments are a red herring.
Chat rooms are potentially forums for exchanging *information*, and *information* is what the CIA deals in. Furthermore, installing this software creates connections that might allow the network to be accessed from the outside, which is an additional risk.
I don't understand at all what you mean about the enemy "shooting you" for practicing free speech.
I don't disagree that there is some bureaucratic infighting going on. What do you expect in a government bureaucracy? Some sort of utopia for hackers and "free" speech?
Everytime I feel compelled to explain things this obvious, I worry that I've been trolled.
I'm not sure I understand your point exactly.
I think it is likely, though not certain, that Kennedy won fairly, that is, if the election could have been held without fraud by either side, Kennedy still would have won. Nonetheless it was very close, and I merely mentioned LBJ to emphasize that the result *might* have been fraudulent, and such claims ought to be taken seriously. However, there is almost inevitably some fraud on both sides, and there are also claims that fraud in *favor* of Nixon in Illinois outside of Chicago was just as much a factor as fraud in favor of Kennedy.
In any event, Nixon's advisors told him that he was unlikely to get anywhere by contesting the results. Whether Nixon brooded about it for eight years, reinforcing the paranoia that contributed to Watergate, is another interesting question that probably can't be answered. Nixon, with all his faults, or probably because of all his faults, is a fascinating character, which is probably what keeps all these 1960 legends alive. I doubt either Gore or GWB has that kind of historical staying power.
It's true that Kennedy would still have won without Illinois, but Texas was also pretty close, and a guy named Lyndon Johnson had a lot of influence there. If both states had gone for Nixon, Kennedy would have lost.
I don't understand what the problem is with a .pdf file. It's a fully documented format, as opposed to, say MS Word, and I suspect that Ghostscript renders it, which would provide a reader for a wide range of platforms, if you aren't using one of the wide range of platforms that Adobe Reader works on. If Ghostscript isn't open-source enough for you, the format is well-documented enough that it would be as easy to write a reader for this as for any other typesetting format.
PDF preserves typographical appearance very well, allowing the author to include mathematical formulas, etc., unlike a pure text or HTML document. It's also closely related to PostScript, so that one can produce high-quality printed copies, unlike a bitmap graphic.
What alternative format provides all of these qualities?
That said, the document itself is pretty ugly.
Any name-calling aside, you've still missed my central point. Your argument reverses the whole burden of proof. I don't have to rule out the possibility of a Creator, you have to prove that one is necessary! You can believe whatever you like, as fervently as you like, but if you want to be taken seriously, you ought to be able to defend your beliefs with something like rational argument.
One could just as easily argue that the entire universe was created last week, or five minutes ago, with your memories and these posts already put in place by your Creator. So what? If that's the kind of universe we are actually in, then nothing is probably knowable, and you are never going to be able to *prove* by observation that you aren't being fooled.
The laws of nature as they now appear to exist, and assumed to be constant, appear to be able to account pretty well for the 15 billion years or so in the history of the universe, except for the first few seconds, when conditions were quite extreme, making it quite difficult to experimentally test any hypotheses in present-day laboratories. At this point, you might claim victory, saying that science can't rule out a creator. Perhaps, but that is a very different thing than your being able to demonstrate, for instance, that there is a Creator with *conscious intent,* rather than something like a huge bubble of energy that underwent some kind of drastic phase transition. Anyhow, if you attend astrophysics conventions, you'll find that scientists are continually *restricting*, by observation, the likely characteristics of the very early universe. Your arguments do nothing to *restrict* the possibilities, and thus are not arguments at all.
Again, I ask, what's the *reason* to believe that the universe is young, but was created to *appear* old, as opposed to the universe simply *being* old? Because it makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside?
Except, if you've been paying attention to real trees, you know that "mighty oaks from little acorns grow." Trees don't need "designed maturity. " You yourself were created from a single cell, after all, assuming you are human. As for soil, and what not, it's pretty clear that soil today comes from decaying plant matter, etc. Why did the first soil have to be any different? There are a variety of life forms that can survive on barren rock, such as newly formed volcanic islands.
You're proposing a hypothesis whose only purpose is to allow you to keep believing that some external Creator is fooling you. Care to come up with any "reasonable" example where your principle actually makes a useful prediction that can be tested?
I'm hoping dearly that I've been trolled, but it's often hard to distinguish between a fervent believer, a true moron, or a troll.
Thanks, streetlawyer, I was ready to reply with an honest explanation, but I think your comment was not only much more entertaining, but also more insightful than anything I could have posted.
I'm sure there's a point here; too bad all this has to show up in slashdot where no one will notice.
Oh, come on. You say "Slashdot doesn't need trolls." But in fact, as streetlawyer says, trolls are why I keep coming back. I honestly don't want to read a bunch of repetitive self-absorbed whining about open-source "ideals" and calls to "fight the evil oppressive industrial corporatist running-dog patent-holders," and the trolls are the only other show playing here.
/. does post something that could be considered important, it's usually framed in a context guaranteed to whip up an unthinking frenzy among the geeks. E.g., even the smallest legal non-decision on anything vaguely related to Napster gets blown up to the hugest proportions. That doesn't serve any useful cause, but just generates noise. At least streetlawyer probably knows what he is actually up to.
As far as streetlawyer himself goes, I actually have his user info page *bookmarked* so that I can read what for me is the *most* enjoyable part of slashdot. Even if he is often a deliberate troll, at least there is almost always some intellectual content in what he is posting, even if it is being deliberately distorted, and the best part about it is that I often can't tell which parts of his posts are supposed to be trolling, and which aren't! He claims this is easy, and you claim it is adolescent crap, but I don't think I could manage as well.
I don't know what truly motivates slashdot to post stories of one kind or another, but your calling the ICANN story "important" is really pretty pompous. Even if
Reference counting is inferior to any proper garbage collection system. The most important shortcoming of reference counting is that it cannot handle circular structures (a pair of references pointing at each other will not be freed, even if they become inaccessible by any other reference.) In primitive languages like C which severely limit the concept of "reference" this problem might be tolerable or never come up.
The second problem with reference counting is that it is expensive in computing effort. The cost of maintaining the reference counts is significant, and cannot be postponed until a convenient time.
True garbage collection can be very efficient, even if it is difficult to implement correctly. There's really no reason, other than implementors' laziness, to settle on reference counting. In my mind, people who like reference counting resemble the people who think malloc/free are guaranteed to be efficient, probably because the names are so short. Having an application malloc/free for weeks or years will create a memory arena so fragmented that malloc will get slower, and slower, and slower, but that doesn't matter, because your system is unlikely to actually run for that long without crashing, right?
OK...fair enough. Though the choice of course requirement sounds moronic. :-)
Why the heck did you go on Yahoo, instead of just picking up a textbook on sorting algorithms?!!! You really trust what some unknown Argentinian posts on his web page better than a textbook that has presumably been carefully edited? Learn to use a library, for God's sake!
Sometimes I wish Slashdot had a -1 Moron moderation.
I see a lot of interesting issues being partially raised here, and by the original article.
There is indeed overhead involved in a reference, but the hope is that you only have to handle "large" objects by reference. Things like numbers are indeed "atomic" meaning that one use of the number 5, for example, cannot be distinguished usefully from another instance of the number 5. It doesn't make sense to say "change the value of 5 to be 6." Instead, we have a place that can hold numbers, and we change the value in that place to be the number 6 instead of 5. In that sense, a numeric variable is a "reference" to a location in memory, which can contain "values" although we never use those terms in C, as there is no pointer indirection or overhead involved.
Now, the problem comes in when you talk about larger things, like, for instance, a 3-D rendered scene. Say I have a "scene" which contains a bat and a ball. If I "duplicate" the scene, so I have S1 and S2, and I move the ball in S1, does it move in S2? Hmmm. It depends on what you did/meant when you "duplicated" the scene. Is it the "same" scene, meaning you scratch one and the other bleeds? Or is it a new scene, which just happens to look the same? The same philosophical problem arises when you pass parameters to functions. Do you "duplicate" the argument, or not?
The point is that a language implementation pushes bits and bytes around. However, a programmer is managing abstractions, and the handling of those abstractions CANNOT be specified as part of a language definition! It depends on the programmer's intent!
This is another mess that C++ got into when it had to manage assignment and initialization of classes: "copy" constructors for all your classes. But what does it mean to copy? It depends! Not only does it depend on your class, but it also depends on how you want to use it, which can change!
A side effect of this is that passing arguments around can involve a lot of excess "copying," if you insist on "copying" arguments before you pass them. C++ has to do this, because C did, except when you specifically ask for references. Now, if you have garbage collection, all these excess copies, most of which are soon discarded, need to be cleaned up.
I guess this is why the author here worries about garbage collection in his phone number instance. In principle, once you have everyone's phone number, you don't need to allocate any more of them, and unless people go away, or change phone numbers, you don't really need to throw them away. Unless you are in C++, so you have to keep "copying" them onto scraps of memory to send to subroutines, and then discarding the scraps as soon as it returns.
As a side note, mark-and-sweep is usually the worst possible garbage collection algorithm. You have to look at everything, even if most of it isn't garbage anymore. Much better is "generational" garbage collection, which mostly looks at recently allocated stuff. The idea is that if stuff has been held onto for a while already, it probably is still being held onto, while it is very common for things to be allocated, used only a little bit, then discarded. This can be very efficient GC.
The problem with people's perception of GC is that it happens behind the scenes. "malloc()" and "free()" are right there in your face. In fact, they have so few characters in them, "they must be fast." Of course, as soon as you fragment your arena, malloc can get slower, and slower, and slower....In Windows, where programs typically don't live long, you don't see this. But in the world of serious applications, if you want your program to run for weeks or years, this can be a real problem. Garbage collection on references can then be MORE EFFICIENT than manual collection, not only because it doesn't "forget to free()", it can also, when dealing with references, rearrange memory to be more compact, and therefore localized for cache issues.
Of course, I don't think C++ or C# garbage collection can actually do this, because when you move objects, you have to go back and change all the pointers that pointed to it, which in Lisp is easy, because the machine can tell a pointer from an integer, but in C-based languages is hard, because pointers and integers are both just piles of bits. But hey, that's what you get for programming in object-oriented portable assembler.
Does this mean that C# will be as much of a moving target as C++ was for the first 10 years of its existence?
(I don't mean to sound surprised, as this is a Microsoft language, which needs continuous "innovation" to maintain market-share.)
To me, one of the huge reasons not to use C++ was that, even though I had learned an earlier version years ago, when I came back a few years later, Bjarne had added a few new features that were now "essential" to implement some "crucial" paradigm. E.g., suddenly templates are crucial to programming in the true C++ religion. Never mind that compilers took years to get them properly and consistently implemented, while hackers seemed to keep pushing templates harder and harder for compile-time code generation, in ways that were bound to activate any subtle, lurking bugs in a compiler. Same with exceptions, RTTI, et al.
My main gripe is that it is hard enough to deal with languages where people keep coming up with half-solutions to new problems by changing the language definition. How much worse will it be when Microsoft, with its commercial interests, gets in the game?
All you AC's are really stretching for this.
CT==X-ray, NMR==radio waves exciting magnetic spins
Neither=meson or cosmic-ray physics. Bzzt. Thank you for playing, anyway.
OK. I'll ignore the ad hominem portion of your argument, and assume you had another argument you wanted to make.
If you want me to admit that this research does have "applications," the detector people do process a huge amount of data, so they are possibly making advances in data processing hardware & software. So are lots of people in other fields (bioinformatics, enterprise software...), some of which actually make money instead of just spending it.
As far as interconnected--who goes to the high energy meetings besides high energy physicists?
Or are you counting on all the garbled accounts in the mainstream press to have influence?
Anyway, I didn't propose restricting research to "immediately practical" fields. There's a big difference between "far from practical" and "never, ever, ever going to be practical." The first transistor was far from practical. Most mathematics is far from practical.
Is anyone, for instance, working on *applications* of 1950s era particle physics?
a source/transmitter. Your choices:
- 1) star
- 2) particle accelerator
neither of which is particularly cheap AND easy to modulate.a receiver: your choices:
Oh yeah, (1) needs to be under huge amounts of ROCK to avoid detecting all sorts of other garbage. Neither one is going to fit very well into a sub, and the sophisticated chemistry won't fit very well with the submariners.
Not to mention the "practical" details, like, most US subs have nuclear reactors that likely contribute a huge background compared to the neutrino signal.
The main point is that neutrinos DO pass through matter almost like it wasn't there. Unfortunately, most things you use to detect them are made of matter.
Look, you high-energy folks are always talking about "unforeseeable applications" but the fact is that you need these multi-billion dollar instruments to generate, e.g., tau leptons, even in extremely small quantities, because they just DON'T EXIST UNDER NORMAL CONDITIONS, i.e., in any conditions in the universe after it was a few minutes old. Knowing more about the tau neutrino lets you fix some parameters in the Standard Model that have NO APPLICATION in any other field.
EVERYTHING that any engineer might put into use is going to be made up of ordinary matter: i.e. protons, neutrons, electrons. If these experiments don't tell us more about these, they will never be put to practical use.
Let me put it this way: is any chemist going to change how he works because the tau neutrino exists? No--his life is based on what happens near ROOM TEMPERATURE where any contributions of neutrino physics are either ZERO or taken into account by the effective fields that he uses (e.g. Maxwell's equations as an theory approximating QED). Is any materials engineer going to change how he works? No. And all the other engineers use what the chemists and materials guys dream up.
Newton was working with light. Light is all around us: easy to produce, and we see it all the time, literally. People have been working on improving materials since prehistoric times. These fields are obviously about things that are real and practically useful.
High-energy physics is only useful for cosmologists. Which is only useful if you plan to be around for billions of years, or for religion. Accept this fact. If you are in high-energy physics and wanted to have a *practical* impact on the world, you made the wrong choice. Sorry.
This whole story is absurd. I wish I could use my moderator points on the original story (FLAMEBAIT), so no one would waste their time on it.
Neither of the original articles mentions that ATI's press release said *anything* about the Cubes, but that features prominently in CmdrTaco's blurb. Most of the resulting threads talk about the video possibilities of the Cubes, or about purported downgrading of Apple's video cards, which wasn't in the original stories either.
We ought to have a system where CmdrTaco should lose "editor-karma" for posting rumor-quality stories with inaccurate summaries. That way, I can set my front-page threshold to avoid rumor trash.
Or, just give Slashdot the slogan "Rumors for Nerds. Stuff that pointlessly excites furious discussion."
Plus, there is this fantastic, old, funky book on how to keep your VW running: "How to keep your Volkswagen alive: a manual of step-by-step procedures for the compleat idiot." by John Muir. Covers EVERYTHING. They later wrote a similar one for 70s Hondas (CVCC engine). Fun books to read even if you don't own one.
Air cooled rules!!!!
The real problem, demonstrated by these exchanges, and which I think Hatch was getting at, is the lack of clarity in this issue. When no one really understands what the law is, you get chaos like the internet music mess. Furthermore, when businesses can get nailed very hard for treading in a murky area, they tend to act very conservatively. Its in everyone's interest that the internet grow the music market, and they can't do that unless the law is *CLEAR*.
Congress has the power to make copyright mean whatever it wants; tomorrow, they could say musical works and performances will no longer be protected. Stock in record companies would crash, and businesses could crumble, so they won't do it, but the power is there. Hatch is just trying to figure out how to use that power.
Why not a "Napster card" you buy in the Quick-E-Mart that gives you $10,$20,whatever of download authorization? Type the card number in
just like a credit card, and it gets deducted, just like the phone cards you see on the rack.
Police a "protective layer between the citizenry and judges"????? I don't know what you could mean. If anything, judges are a protective layer between the citizenry and the police. What keeps police reading the Miranda warnings and getting you a lawyer when you want one? The judge throwing out your "voluntary confession" if the police didn't do so. I agree that mandatory minimums can be a bad idea, because they prevent judges from using discretion to be a protective layer between the actual guilty party (with extenuating circumstances) and the politically popular (i.e., legislated) idea of what a criminal in the abstract should get for the crime). Police aren't the solution to that problem. They let people off with a warning regardless of the eventual sentence they would get, probably to avoid their paperwork. Also, DAs will let you plead to a lesser charge to save them a trial. Don't imagine they really have your interests at heart.
What they have shown is that, using an very small scanning tunneling microscope tip, and a carefully prepared silcon surface, they can "write" lines and then have organic molecules end up on those lines.
Then, the particular organic molecules they attach "spin" in this environment.
This is NOT "just theory," i.e., they actually did this in a real machine. It IS "just theory" if you compare it to actually making a memory chip.
Did they do anything like attach wires to these molecules? No. Do they have a particularly large number of these molecules? They don't say. But the STM probably has only one tip which is plucking one hydrogen atom at a time. So, probably not.
"Pure silicon" is not the problem. Why? Because all the chip companies in the world use pure silicon wafers. The problem is making even a one-bit MEMORY that can actually be operated reliably for a long time, before your organic molecule gets fried or stuck. Then, put 16 million of these bit elements on a chip, with the circuitry to connect them all, in the meantime, they still have to keep working fast. And try to write all 16 million little lines all at the same time, so you can actually build a useful number in the lifetime of your customers.
Remember that any old DRAM fab in Korea can churn out however-many-megabits chips on a few hundred chips at once, in however-many-dozen fabrication stations, that have all the wires connecting the bits together, then test, wire, and seal those chips into the little plastic packages that can be mounted on SIMMs/DIMMs that you can stick in your PC and run at 100 MHz. I.e. these things WORK.
This won't get "buried by marketing" if this technology can do the same thing cheaper. Making computer chips is like "printing money." If you can print $10 bills instead of $1 bills, you do it.
For a more down-to-earth look at what this lab actually does, check
http://www.beckman.uiuc.edu/researc h/stm.html#1