> You have brought up an argument that has plagued the biological science since its > inception. How can you so readily define human life at a molecular level?
Most importantly, I'm using the _same_ definition for life, no matter whether I apply it to you or me or an embryo.
As far as the criteria for being a human are concerned, I think we both agree that inside a human womb there's typically a homo sapiens sapiens growing, not an alien; the DNA can be tested to prove the species, so I guess we're not debating whether or not the embryo is a human.
As far as being alive is concerned, I consider embryos alife because they meet certain criteria that in biology are widely accepted, e.g. H. Maturana und F. Varela: Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living, Boston: D. Reidel, 1980.
See also This criteria list and check it against an embryo, and you will find that all criteria are met. I believe the main reason why humans find it hard to accept others as fellow-humans at embryo stage is that they are simply very very small. It's the same problem of abstraction when we don't suffer as much from when people in Africa are dying because we cannot see them. However we ought to be aware that this does not make smaller the human tradegy and it does not change the fundamental rights (to live).
> I somehow doubt your reason for bringing up this idea moves past religious concerns.
Actually my argument was based on purely ethical reasoning over scientific assumptions, I didn't use religion in my argument. But even so, let's see:
> For the amount of resources being put into stem cell research and promise coming out > of scientists worldwide, I would rather see cloned embryos destroyed as opposed to > the hope of life-saving research destroyed.
That means you are what they call in philosophy a *utilitarian*, namely you are willing to maximise an overall benefit-of-society function, willing to tolerate that some will suffer (or even get killed, as in this case) for the benefit of the majority. The problem of Utilitarianism however is that it leads to abuse of minorities. To give you an example, in Nazi Germany's "Third Reich", many groups (e.g. Jewish, Roma, handicapped people etc.) were mistreated, disowned, murdered for the proclaimed benefit of a majority ("Lebensraum", 'space to live'), but that was wrong (I hope you're in line with me there).
Therefore, even if stem cell research - or any other method where you kill human beings (directly or as side effect) - rescued more lives than it protected, I would not consider allowing it since the human rights humans to life holds equally for embryo and grown-up man or woman alike, no matter what race, skin colour, religion, age etc.
One way out however is if a way could be found to produce stem cells that didn't produce "spurious" (unwanted) embryos in the first place.
An important aside: You said "destroyed". If I you get overrun by a car, the newspaper wouldn't say I got "destroyed", it would say I got "killed". The same should be applied to embryos as long as we accept that they are humans. Once the language is more precise, the truth becomes more obvious because there's no hiding behind euphemisms anymore (but I don't mean to attack you personally with this criticism, I'm just using it as an example for a very common problem).
> The question is: Are embryos alive and have free will.
Yes they are alive, as any scientist will happily confirm (if you disagree, read up on the 5 standard defining criteria for life, for instance in the works of Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela).
Whether they have free will is more difficult (old philosophical question), but if they don't then so you and me don't either.
> Alive is obviously not enough. Skin cells are alive. Plants are alive. > Free will, or consciousness is the issue.
No. The issue is that we're talking _human_ embryos. Surely you can kill a plant, for example to eat it (and if you're not vegetarian, you might agree that you can kill chicken to eat them). But if you subscribe to the basic human right to live and the basic human right to equal treatment you cannot just kill somebody just because they're smaller (they will grow soon if not killed!) and because they can't speak out for themselves yet (they will soon defend themselves if not killed!)
> Can anyone say an embryo is conscious?
It is well known that emryos also dream, i.e. they do things in their sleep.
> They have a potential for consciousness, just like eggs and sperm have > the potential for consciousness given the right conditions.
It is not settled among scientists exactly when conscience develops, but as (as that's what the human rights say), thankfully we can decide about the ethic question before reaching agreement on consciousness.
if ( isAlive && isHuman )
{// must never, NEVER kill!
}
I believe that this argument is so strong that the only thing you can debate above is the indentation of the curly braces;-)
But seriously, think it through and ask yourself how you define "human being". It boils down to accepting scientific facts for what they really are: a sperm cell and an egg form a human being exactly when they unite, and that is the point in time when there is another human being in existence. Consequently, this is when the inalienable _rights_ of the (yet unnamed) individual begin. May be invisibly small, may be week, but nobody kills it the embryo will grow, be called a baby when left the womb, and he or she may even change the world one day.
>> can be equated to murder (read: intentional killing of a human being)
> If the definition of murder were that simple, then our President would already have been convicted for the murders of (pick your number, I'll settle for a round number near the middle) 100,000 Iraqis.
I could not agree more to your clear and logical argument.
However, beware that moral acting and legal acting are two different things (and please consider further that not every crime is punished).
PS: Since you suggested I pick a number, I pick 42,646. Not 100,000, but
of course even one innocent life lost is already one to many.
> So do all fertile women who don't have a child every month murderers? > They are killing "superfluous" pre-embryos. They are stopping a "potential" life.
No, they don't kill anything if there wasn't anything alife. From thinking of chocolate you don't get fat only from eating it.
Pre-embryos is a bad term because it's not clear what it means (maybe you coined it ad-hoc). Let's just stick to science: there's embryos (alife), sperm cells (not alife) and eggs (not alife).
> Are all men that masturbate mass murderers? Each of their sperm cells is a "potential" life
Potential life is not life, in the same way as a potential lie is not a lie.
If I consider lying to you out of temptation but end up speaking only the truth, you did nothing wrong.
You cannot kill a potential life because you can only kill something already alive.
Even if you think cloning humans is morally acceptable, it still isn't the right time.
And even if you think cloning humans is morally acceptable, the practice of killing
the "superflous" embryos (note
the language! Imagine you are suddenly considered "superfluous") that are created in the process by dumping them in the bin
can be equated to murder (read: intentional killing of a human being).
Some researchers/clinics freeze them, but there is no guarantee that they are allowed to live
(which violates their human right to live).
One of the more significant points of the story is the fact that the AT&T employee has leaked that NSA are using hardware and software from NARUS to analyse data traffic (the very same equipment is used by Telecom Egypt and Saudi Telecom).
Which of course makes it possible for the creative crypto-designer to work around this
particular device type, if necessary. But I would think that any reasonably encrypted
channel is immune to this automatic filtering.
I'd first introduce them into using the command line tools so that they
get a feel what an editor, compiler/interpreter is (and, oh yeah, how
to set the CLASSPATH). This lets students relate more clearly how the development
cycle works.
Afterwards I'd teach them that there has been some progress in software
development, and that now we have powerful IDEs that integrate all these
tools.
Is it actually allowed by the Wikipedia license that the content is
modified by an automatic censoring application? If so, the license should
be changed quickly. And the Wikimedia people should found out how they
can pursue the company in international courts which abuses the content.
IMHO, the value of education can hardly be overestimated.
However, giving $100 laptops to children is not the same as giving them education.
In fact, a lot of things need to happen first because children in developing countries
can benefit from a laptop computer.
First of all, there is a pyramid of human needs, and safety and food should come
first. It is a shame for mankind that children die of hunger while we debate
what resolution their laptop screens should offer!
I still believe a $100 laptop project can be useful, but only as part of a more
holistic educational effort.
PostgreSQL is the Beta of databases. The superior system but the loser in the race because of reasons beyond it's control.
There need not be a binary distinction between "winners" and "losers".
PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite and others are just alternative choices, and they compete for different
database niches. If I'm a project manager ledaing five developers who are supposed
to build a standard Web app, I would be using MySQL since all five are likely to know
how to use it already. If my job is to build a spatial store for a research project,
my choice may be PostgreSQL (because of PostGIS).
If I need to manage 70k of personal addresses, SQLite's simple API, in-process ability and
small memory footprint may make it the component of choice.
What I don't like about/. is that too many people here are religious fundamentalists rather
that rational, professional, informed decision-makers.
I urge you to find out your requirements and match them against available products, pick what
suits you, and if the cross-product is empty, report to your manager that you need resources
to extend the nearest match with additionally needed capability or even build your own from scratch.
That's like you build everything else, so that's how you should build software, too.
The article mentions there is no protection from location tracking
other than the companies' Code of Conduct.
It is not well-known that the same holds for reverse billing text messages ("premium SMS");
anyone can sign up to send these unsolicitedly.
For example, you can write a short (less than 50 lines) bash script send-50p.sh that
takes a mobile phone number and reverse-charges the receipient 50 pence (or, in fact
anything up to 5 pounds per message) by sending them e.g. an empty (" ") text message
- and without them opting in first.
Since you can also easily fake caller IDs (the Nigerian 419 scam people are doing this
nowadays when they threaten people - it happened to a friend), there are really a lot
of loopholes that need fixing, IMHO.
Like everywhere else, the maxim is "security is an illusion"...
In some cases, you'll find that there's no library available, so you write something from scratch, but 3 years later, you find that somebody else has made a nice library that's much better than what you hacked together. Several times I have ported code from my own hacked together solution to a more mature library.
Yes and no. What you say is happening, but the converse has also happened to me: first I used specific
functions from various libraries and then I re-implemented them
to minimize library dependencies,
for licensing reasons, or simplay
because linking against a fat library turned my executable into bloatware.
There's no general rule, as there are different modes of programming: rapid prototyping has different
rules from production coding.
I have been programming since 1984, but the amount of reuse was limited by changing platforms (from 985 kHz to 1.7 GHz, from 2k RAM to 4 GB RAM, from virtually no OS support over Win32 (yuck) to POSIX/XOPEN APIs), languages (Assembler, Pascal, Modula-2, C, Scheme, VB, C++, Java, Perl/Python/PHP,...), employers, and paradigms (imperative/OO/functional/...).
Even within a single language (like LISP or C++) you can develop in multiple styles, and these styles
can be barriers to re-use. Aspects like error handling (return-code style vs. exception) or logging
are also often barriers to re-use and lead to copy-paste-adapt in situations where re-use would have
been possible in principle.
As a result, you have to make a fundamental choice: either you sacrifice your flexibility and maximize re-use. Then you pick one general-purpose language (e.g. Java or C++) and do everything there. Over a few decades you will have assembled richt libraries for nearly everything. But you will not have the optimal productivity, because you still need to write "public static void blabla..." where a Python 1-liner could get you there.
The alternative is you learn as many languages as you need, and use the most appropriate language for each
task. This way, you sacrifice some re-use (since you don't have all code in all languages), but you
can maximize your productivity in a different way.
In practice, most developers use a mix of the two alternatives, since it is worth knowning a few languages really well (including libraries, debuggers, documentation tools etc.), and have a working knowledge of some others, with a readiness to pick up additional API or language knowledge on the fly.
The debate about standardizing is the same when we are talking about
standardizing on natural languages (e.g. English) in an international
corporation. Usually it makes sense in the majority, but not all, of
the cases, according to Pareto's (80:20) Law.
If you are a desktop apps or embedded library company, you might want
to standardize on C++; if you are a server-side enterprise software
company, you will want to standardize on Java.
But there will always situations where one language is not the best
choice, and that choice should remain developer's choice and not a management
decision.
Important factors in the standardization debate are: is the language
an ISO standard? Does it have tool support (compilers, libraries) on
all relevant platforms? Is the language mature? Is the language general
purpose? Is the language difficult to learn? Does the language have a
large enough user base?
In the EU, there are many official languages, and this diversity a political
statement in favour of a pluralistic society and multi-culturalism. But it
comes at a cost: a large budget is waste...erm spent on translation.
Same holds for programming: for a while I have developed Java library, nowadays
I use a lot of C++, and get what, I have found myself re-implement my own
libraries in another language, so bear in mind the cost benefits for reuse.
I know the Haskel 98 report, but by standard I meant a normative document, preferredly issued by an international or national body like ISO (or ANSI, ECMA), which is usually necessary step to give
the language credibility (not by virtue of its design, as Haskell is rather elegant, but rather by
showing that there is enough interest from industry backing it).
Several years ago, I heard Stallman speak at a lecture at my university. He was clearly very smart,
and very driven by ideological goals.
Yea, and if you think about it, the only reason why he is like that is that Xerox refused to
give the poor guy the sources for the driver of their laser printer when he wanted to fix a bug.
If Microsoft had known what would happen as a result, they might have acquired
Xerox and given give him the source code, and RMS would have gone back to his cubicle.
Then we wouldn't be asked to spell Linux with a capital 'G' today...;-)
I agree. Haskell is a bad choice _at_present_ at least for the following reasons: (a) hard to find qualified staff to maintain the code, (b) language not standardized and still in flux.
This is not a comment against Haskell, but against suggesting it as appropriate means, given the poster's situation.
> First, while you are in patent pending, you are protected.
Almost -- you are _potentially_ protected, namely if and only if your patent eventually gets accepted.
> Second, Patents are not expensive, paten lawyers are. You can file a patent as an individual for a few hundred dollars.
Yes, per country. Now imagine you have something in the pocket that you want to protect in all
major countries, you have to provide certified translations and pay fees in all countries
where you seek protection. Can easily sum up to $100,000.
> Third, a patent is a way of saying you had it first, but there are other ways.
Yes, but it's the only one in existence that gives you a monopoly, with all pros (for you) and cons
(for society).
> Forth, This would be even more abused then the current system
In Germany, something like what IEEE has propose actually exists, you can file
a utility model for 40. But people still opt mostly for patents, because they
are a "stronger weapon".
The only correct answer to the question is: we don't know.
I wish kids in school and at uni would be given proper epistemological training so
that they could take part in the debate in an informed manner if they choose to do so.
Sadly, in all camps ignorance is pervasive, especially I'm appalled by the
(ab-)uses of the word 'theory'.
Is evolution "true"? I think there is evidence that supports it, and we cannot deny that
certain things are not explained by it appropriately. Does God exist? I believe so, but
you might not agree (since it is a matter of personal belief, not knowledge or science).
Can evolution claim to be a theory? Depends. You give me a falsification criterium, and
I tell you its status (meta-theory or proper theory).
The last thing the world needs IMHO are naive neo-positivists (for they are the real
"blind watchmakers") or equally naive creationists (who insist on literal interpretation
where suitable (-> creation in 7.0 days), but allow for artistic license where it
would otherwise go against their greedy personal agendas (->
perl -pe 's/Thou shall love (even) your enemy/Thou might drop daisycutter bombs on children for oil/g;'
)...
I quote from The Register article: "Google has a long history of keeping its technology mechanisms and intentions private. It won't say a lot about how Page Rank works."
Slashdot Mirror
Hi,
> You have brought up an argument that has plagued the biological science since its
> inception. How can you so readily define human life at a molecular level?
Most importantly, I'm using the _same_ definition for life, no matter whether I
apply it to you or me or an embryo.
As far as the criteria for being a human are concerned, I think we both agree
that inside a human womb there's typically a homo sapiens sapiens growing, not an
alien; the DNA can be tested to prove the species, so I guess we're not debating
whether or not the embryo is a human.
As far as being alive is concerned, I consider embryos alife because they meet
certain criteria that in biology are widely accepted, e.g. H. Maturana und F. Varela: Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living, Boston: D. Reidel, 1980.
See also This criteria list and check it against an embryo, and you will find that all criteria are met. I believe the main reason why humans find it hard to accept others
as fellow-humans at embryo stage is that they are simply very very small. It's the
same problem of abstraction when we don't suffer as much from when people in Africa
are dying because we cannot see them. However we ought to be aware that this does
not make smaller the human tradegy and it does not change the fundamental
rights (to live).
> I somehow doubt your reason for bringing up this idea moves past religious concerns.
Actually my argument was based on purely ethical reasoning over scientific assumptions, I didn't use religion in my argument. But even so, let's see:
> For the amount of resources being put into stem cell research and promise coming out
> of scientists worldwide, I would rather see cloned embryos destroyed as opposed to
> the hope of life-saving research destroyed.
That means you are what they call in philosophy a *utilitarian*, namely you are willing
to maximise an overall benefit-of-society function, willing to tolerate that some
will suffer (or even get killed, as in this case) for the benefit of the majority.
The problem of Utilitarianism however is that it leads to abuse of minorities. To give you an example, in Nazi Germany's "Third Reich", many groups (e.g. Jewish, Roma, handicapped people etc.) were mistreated, disowned, murdered for the proclaimed benefit of a majority ("Lebensraum", 'space to live'), but that was wrong (I hope you're in line with me there).
Therefore, even if stem cell research - or any other method where you kill human
beings (directly or as side effect) - rescued more lives than it protected, I would not
consider allowing it since the human rights humans to life holds equally for
embryo and grown-up man or woman alike, no matter what race, skin colour, religion, age etc.
One way out however is if a way could be found to
produce stem cells that didn't produce "spurious" (unwanted) embryos in the first
place.
An important aside: You said "destroyed". If I you get overrun by a car, the newspaper wouldn't say I got "destroyed", it would say I got "killed". The same should be applied to embryos as long as we accept that they are humans. Once the language is more
precise, the truth becomes more obvious because there's no hiding behind euphemisms
anymore (but I don't mean to attack you personally with this criticism, I'm just using
it as an example for a very common problem).
Kindest regards,
JLL
Hi,
// must never, NEVER kill!
;-)
> The question is: Are embryos alive and have free will.
Yes they are alive, as any scientist will happily confirm (if you disagree, read up on the 5 standard defining criteria for life, for instance in the works of Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela).
Whether they have free will is more difficult (old philosophical question), but if they don't then so you and me don't either.
> Alive is obviously not enough. Skin cells are alive. Plants are alive.
> Free will, or consciousness is the issue.
No. The issue is that we're talking _human_ embryos. Surely you can kill a plant,
for example to eat it (and if you're not vegetarian, you might agree that you
can kill chicken to eat them). But if you subscribe to the basic human right
to live and the basic human right to equal treatment you cannot just kill somebody
just because they're smaller (they will grow soon if not killed!) and because
they can't speak out for themselves yet (they will soon defend themselves if
not killed!)
> Can anyone say an embryo is conscious?
It is well known that emryos also dream, i.e. they do things in their sleep.
> They have a potential for consciousness, just like eggs and sperm have
> the potential for consciousness given the right conditions.
It is not settled among scientists exactly when conscience develops, but as
(as that's what the human rights say), thankfully we can decide about the ethic
question before reaching agreement on consciousness.
if ( isAlive && isHuman )
{
}
I believe that this argument is so strong that the only thing you can debate
above is the indentation of the curly braces
But seriously, think it through and ask yourself how you define "human being".
It boils down to accepting scientific facts for what they really are: a sperm
cell and an egg form a human being exactly when they unite, and that is the point
in time when there is another human being in existence. Consequently, this is
when the inalienable _rights_ of the (yet unnamed) individual begin.
May be invisibly small, may be week, but nobody kills it the embryo will grow,
be called a baby when left the womb, and he or she may even change the world one day.
Kindest regards
JLL
> If the definition of murder were that simple, then our President would already have been convicted for the murders of (pick your number, I'll settle for a round number near the middle) 100,000 Iraqis.
I could not agree more to your clear and logical argument.
However, beware that moral acting and legal acting are two different things (and please consider further that not every crime is punished).
PS: Since you suggested I pick a number, I pick 42,646. Not 100,000, but of course even one innocent life lost is already one to many.
> So do all fertile women who don't have a child every month murderers?
> They are killing "superfluous" pre-embryos. They are stopping a "potential" life.
No, they don't kill anything if there wasn't anything alife. From thinking of
chocolate you don't get fat only from eating it.
Pre-embryos is a bad term because it's not clear what it means (maybe you coined
it ad-hoc). Let's just stick to science: there's embryos (alife), sperm cells
(not alife) and eggs (not alife).
> Are all men that masturbate mass murderers? Each of their sperm cells is a "potential" life
Potential life is not life, in the same way as a potential lie is not a lie.
If I consider lying to you out of temptation but end up speaking only the
truth, you did nothing wrong.
You cannot kill a potential life because you can only kill something already alive.
Does that make sense?
And even if you think cloning humans is morally acceptable, the practice of killing the "superflous" embryos (note the language! Imagine you are suddenly considered "superfluous") that are created in the process by dumping them in the bin can be equated to murder (read: intentional killing of a human being).
Some researchers/clinics freeze them, but there is no guarantee that they are allowed to live (which violates their human right to live).
Which of course makes it possible for the creative crypto-designer to work around this particular device type, if necessary. But I would think that any reasonably encrypted channel is immune to this automatic filtering.
Here is a good blog entry on the technical aspects of the AT&T-NSA scandal.
I'd first introduce them into using the command line tools so that they get a feel what an editor, compiler/interpreter is (and, oh yeah, how to set the CLASSPATH). This lets students relate more clearly how the development cycle works.
Afterwards I'd teach them that there has been some progress in software development, and that now we have powerful IDEs that integrate all these tools.
Is it actually allowed by the Wikipedia license that the content is modified by an automatic censoring application? If so, the license should be changed quickly. And the Wikimedia people should found out how they can pursue the company in international courts which abuses the content.
Really? I thought I had read that the number of crazy people has has actually stayed pretty constant for the last 2,000 years.
In other news, the next DARPA grand challenge is probably going to be "design a robot that hunts RFID-carrying humanoids" ;-)
In other news, Trolltech has just released the Qtopia platform for mobile embedded Linux I don't think the guys at TrollTech haven't done a market study before investing in the development of this new platform.
However, giving $100 laptops to children is not the same as giving them education. In fact, a lot of things need to happen first because children in developing countries can benefit from a laptop computer.
First of all, there is a pyramid of human needs, and safety and food should come first. It is a shame for mankind that children die of hunger while we debate what resolution their laptop screens should offer!
I still believe a $100 laptop project can be useful, but only as part of a more holistic educational effort.
There need not be a binary distinction between "winners" and "losers".
PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite and others are just alternative choices, and they compete for different database niches. If I'm a project manager ledaing five developers who are supposed to build a standard Web app, I would be using MySQL since all five are likely to know how to use it already. If my job is to build a spatial store for a research project, my choice may be PostgreSQL (because of PostGIS). If I need to manage 70k of personal addresses, SQLite's simple API, in-process ability and small memory footprint may make it the component of choice.
What I don't like about /. is that too many people here are religious fundamentalists rather
that rational, professional, informed decision-makers.
I urge you to find out your requirements and match them against available products, pick what suits you, and if the cross-product is empty, report to your manager that you need resources to extend the nearest match with additionally needed capability or even build your own from scratch.
That's like you build everything else, so that's how you should build software, too.
It is not well-known that the same holds for reverse billing text messages ("premium SMS"); anyone can sign up to send these unsolicitedly.
For example, you can write a short (less than 50 lines) bash script send-50p.sh that takes a mobile phone number and reverse-charges the receipient 50 pence (or, in fact anything up to 5 pounds per message) by sending them e.g. an empty (" ") text message - and without them opting in first.
Since you can also easily fake caller IDs (the Nigerian 419 scam people are doing this nowadays when they threaten people - it happened to a friend), there are really a lot of loopholes that need fixing, IMHO.
Like everywhere else, the maxim is "security is an illusion"...
If you didn't, I'm sure Doug Hofstadter would have ;-)
Yes and no. What you say is happening, but the converse has also happened to me: first I used specific functions from various libraries and then I re-implemented them
There's no general rule, as there are different modes of programming: rapid prototyping has different rules from production coding.
I have been programming since 1984, but the amount of reuse was limited by changing platforms (from 985 kHz to 1.7 GHz, from 2k RAM to 4 GB RAM, from virtually no OS support over Win32 (yuck) to POSIX/XOPEN APIs), languages (Assembler, Pascal, Modula-2, C, Scheme, VB, C++, Java, Perl/Python/PHP, ...), employers, and paradigms (imperative/OO/functional/...).
Even within a single language (like LISP or C++) you can develop in multiple styles, and these styles can be barriers to re-use. Aspects like error handling (return-code style vs. exception) or logging are also often barriers to re-use and lead to copy-paste-adapt in situations where re-use would have been possible in principle.
As a result, you have to make a fundamental choice: either you sacrifice your flexibility and maximize re-use. Then you pick one general-purpose language (e.g. Java or C++) and do everything there. Over a few decades you will have assembled richt libraries for nearly everything. But you will not have the optimal productivity, because you still need to write "public static void blabla..." where a Python 1-liner could get you there. The alternative is you learn as many languages as you need, and use the most appropriate language for each task. This way, you sacrifice some re-use (since you don't have all code in all languages), but you can maximize your productivity in a different way.
In practice, most developers use a mix of the two alternatives, since it is worth knowning a few languages really well (including libraries, debuggers, documentation tools etc.), and have a working knowledge of some others, with a readiness to pick up additional API or language knowledge on the fly.
Just in case you miss the old days.. ;-)
If you are a desktop apps or embedded library company, you might want to standardize on C++; if you are a server-side enterprise software company, you will want to standardize on Java.
But there will always situations where one language is not the best choice, and that choice should remain developer's choice and not a management decision.
Important factors in the standardization debate are: is the language an ISO standard? Does it have tool support (compilers, libraries) on all relevant platforms? Is the language mature? Is the language general purpose? Is the language difficult to learn? Does the language have a large enough user base?
In the EU, there are many official languages, and this diversity a political statement in favour of a pluralistic society and multi-culturalism. But it comes at a cost: a large budget is waste...erm spent on translation. Same holds for programming: for a while I have developed Java library, nowadays I use a lot of C++, and get what, I have found myself re-implement my own libraries in another language, so bear in mind the cost benefits for reuse.
I know the Haskel 98 report, but by standard I meant a normative document, preferredly issued by an international or national body like ISO (or ANSI, ECMA), which is usually necessary step to give the language credibility (not by virtue of its design, as Haskell is rather elegant, but rather by showing that there is enough interest from industry backing it).
Yea, and if you think about it, the only reason why he is like that is that Xerox refused to give the poor guy the sources for the driver of their laser printer when he wanted to fix a bug.
If Microsoft had known what would happen as a result, they might have acquired Xerox and given give him the source code, and RMS would have gone back to his cubicle.
Then we wouldn't be asked to spell Linux with a capital 'G' today... ;-)
I agree. Haskell is a bad choice _at_present_ at least for the following reasons: (a) hard to find qualified staff to maintain the code, (b) language not standardized and still in flux.
This is not a comment against Haskell, but against suggesting it as appropriate means, given the poster's situation.
> First, while you are in patent pending, you are protected. Almost -- you are _potentially_ protected, namely if and only if your patent eventually gets accepted. > Second, Patents are not expensive, paten lawyers are. You can file a patent as an individual for a few hundred dollars. Yes, per country. Now imagine you have something in the pocket that you want to protect in all major countries, you have to provide certified translations and pay fees in all countries where you seek protection. Can easily sum up to $100,000. > Third, a patent is a way of saying you had it first, but there are other ways. Yes, but it's the only one in existence that gives you a monopoly, with all pros (for you) and cons (for society). > Forth, This would be even more abused then the current system In Germany, something like what IEEE has propose actually exists, you can file a utility model for 40. But people still opt mostly for patents, because they are a "stronger weapon".
Didn't they know the law?
I wish kids in school and at uni would be given proper epistemological training so that they could take part in the debate in an informed manner if they choose to do so.
Sadly, in all camps ignorance is pervasive, especially I'm appalled by the (ab-)uses of the word 'theory'.
Is evolution "true"? I think there is evidence that supports it, and we cannot deny that certain things are not explained by it appropriately. Does God exist? I believe so, but you might not agree (since it is a matter of personal belief, not knowledge or science). Can evolution claim to be a theory? Depends. You give me a falsification criterium, and I tell you its status (meta-theory or proper theory).
The last thing the world needs IMHO are naive neo-positivists (for they are the real "blind watchmakers") or equally naive creationists (who insist on literal interpretation where suitable (-> creation in 7.0 days), but allow for artistic license where it would otherwise go against their greedy personal agendas (-> perl -pe 's/Thou shall love (even) your enemy/Thou might drop daisycutter bombs on children for oil/g;' )...
Nonsense. PageRank was published in a 1998 paper by Brin and Page.