Great so Pascal is dead. Great example. What about all of the languages people learn that did not die? Java? Perl? C++? Python? PHP? What about the millions people who productively coded tens of millions of lines in languages that were invented since 1972? You can live under a rock pretending that C is good enough if you like but the rest of industry is going to keep learning new languages, improving its productivity.
It doesn't matter whether the planet is unique. It matters what the probability of it happening is. The probability of the molecules combining in the right way may be incredibly low despite the fact that it could happen on any of a million planets. With a sample size of 1, we have no idea. It could be a glactic lottery ticket. Or a humdrum repetitive event.
Re:Two things you can't say
on
What You Can't Say
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· Score: 3, Insightful
So here's a question you can't ask: why is it valid to segregate the 100m sprint into "male" and "female", but not into "african" and "chinese"?
You're mixing up four different things. First you talk about "races". But "black" isn't a race. Black is a skin colour. If you look at black people they come in a variety of shapes and sizes. I'm not just talking about individual differences. I'm talking about genetic group differences that differentiate pygmies from bushmen of the kalahari. Africans are people who come from the continent of African (including white ones). Chinese people come from the country of China (including the 55 "minority ethnic people" like the Mongols and Tibetans).
skin colour
race
People from the same continent
People from the same nation
Four different things.
Saying that "black people" dance well would indicate some correspondance between melanin and rhythm. That doesn't make much sense. It seems more likely that the black people you know of come from a small set of cultures where they are trained to dance well. I wonder if blacks living in strict Muslim cultures are similarly skilled.
Talking about race is okay but first you have to define it. The problem is that people tend to use definitions that have no basis in science or history, only in their anecdotal experience.
I'm not advocating a world without copyrights but I think your logic is faulty (or at least incomplete). You say And the terms of the GPL are all that prevents Microsoft from swiping the Linux source and creating an "MS Linux" loaded with trade-secret/closed-source "enhancements" (e.g. support for the full Windows API). How much embrace-extend-extinguish do you want?
In a world without copyright, Microsoft's business model ceases to exist. You can't just pretend that copyright goes away and everything else in the universe is as it is today. Maybe Microsoft would notexist because the attempt to commercialize software would simply have failed. Maybe they would exist but they would be a services business and embrace and extend would not be worth the trouble.
In addition, there is a fallacy among proponents of the GPL that "stealing" of code is an unalloyed bad thing for the creators of the open source software. This is incorrect both theoretically and emprically. In theory, if someone uses your open source stuff to create a closed-source variant they have in no way lessened the value of the open source version nor hurt the development of the open source version. Occasionally you hear about an open source hacker being co-opted to work on a proprietary product e.g. Mosaic (which was free but not quite open source) developers going to Netscape. But they can do that regardless of the license. If the license forces them to clean-room (as the Mosaic license did) then they'll clean-room.
Empirically speaking, there are tons of open source programs that are the basis for proprietary products and those proprietary forks demonstrably do not hurt the vitality of the open source version. Typically they strengthen it. For instance. ActiveState's non-free ActivePerl increases the Perl user-base. The proprietary variants of many other open source products pay the bills for the developers who also develop the open-source version (e.g. Ghostscript, Qt, Zope). It is obvious why commercial variants of OSS cannot supplant the OSS versions. Cheap cannot really compete with free.
The GPL only makes sense if you are going out of your way to weaken closed source software businesses. For instance you might do that for ideological reasons as Richard Stallman does, or as a business tactic as (e.g.) AOL/Netscape might.
Finally: you claim that "open source software" depends on copyrights. But then you talk about the GPL as if it were the be-all and end-all of open source software. The BSD-style licenses are about as close to public domain as you can get and in a world without copyright one expects that BSD-licensed apps like Apache, Python, Perl, etc. would exist just as they do today.
The GPL goes beyond fighting copyright. Copyright says nothing about the distinction between source and binary. If the GPL were entirely about undoing the damage of copyright, it would say nothing about source code. It would merely say that if you distribute your application you must also allow your users to redistribute it.
This guy is describing a type-tagged binary structure. What does this have to do with "XML culture"? If type tags are now universally associated with XML then I guess C++ RTTI and Java introspection are all XML-based.
You'd have to be damn patient to wait the 4 billion years it has taken for life to evolve on this planet. The universe is less than 4 times that age so it seems unlikely that anything in it is that patient. Especially something with a biology sufficiently similar to ours to want to live on our planet.
Plus, if they are so advanced technologically why not send some kind of reporter-bot that could inform them that life WOULD survive here if they sent a high-speed terra-former down to do the grunt work.
Numbers 14:18:
The LORD is slow to anger, abounding in love and forgiving sin and rebellion. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation
WVG is an XML-based vector graphics language that can be addressed by URLs and thus delivered over the Web to Microsoft's browser where it will be directly rendered inline. Microsoft themselves say it will be "very familiar to SVG users." Even though Windows will have within it all of the technologies necessary to render SVG (XML, vector graphics, CSS, Javascript, DOM), they somehow never align in a standards compliant way in Longhorn. I'm sorry, you don't have to be paranoid to see that Microsoft is reverting to its pre-Web stance of ignoring standards in favor of proprietary formats and APIs.
Re:XML Limited in at least one regard.
on
Effective XML
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· Score: 1
Neither file systems nor XML are strictly hierarchical. One has symlinks and the other has XLinks.
The two things that I find very frustrating about DVD and CD are that they do not act as standard random access devices and they are so pathetically prone to scratches, dust, etc. Why can't we go back to a floppy or minidisk format?
The problem is that Carr chose a controversial title: "IT doesn't matter". People extrapolate from the title that he is saying that companies should not invest in IT. Imagine if he had said: "Electricity doesn't matter". What would the power utility companies say?
But even so, I don't really understand his point. Was there some time in the past where (e.g.) a paper mill could implement computation and trounce their competitors but today that's impossible?
IT has always been something sold to any company that was interested equally. With a few exceptions like money traders or internet startups, most companies accumulated IT at roughly the same rate as their competitors and got no huge advantage over those competitors. You invest in IT to avoid falling behind your competitors, not because you think it gives you some special mojo.
Thus, if Dylan Evans seeks, with Neo, "the code behind the graphics", he should not look to the Unix shell, to C, or even to machine code to find it. Those are tools, not truths, and freedom comes with understanding truths, not simply with mastering tools. Learn the liberal arts -- mathematics and logic -- and you will be much better prepared to defend yourself as a free citizen in a computerized world.
I guess you've never seen a pure mathematician or a pure logician use a computer. They do not have any particular advantage over the average layman because the pure boolean logic of the computer is covered by many layers of abstraction. Just as a pure logician cannot necessarily do calculus, a pure mathematician cannot necessarily get their computer to do what they wish (which is, after all, the point of the article).
The GPL requires the delivery of source when binaries are redistributed. If copyright law were abolished, software companies would have no reason to give out source code with their (automatically redistributable binaries).
There is a big difference between an "average girl's face" and an "AVERAGED girl's face". Furthermore, they actually say:
"Our conducted experiments regarding the shape adaptions of the faces clearly show that it is not the facial proportions but the skin that makes average faces more attractive. Thus, the averageness hypothesis can be refuted with respect to facial proportions!"
But anyhow, thanks for the cool URL.
Re:Go ask a Korean where science development occur
on
Human Accomplishment
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· Score: 1
If you want to look at true human achievement, look at what the world is becoming. Only now do Asian, African, and other non-European begin to contribute to the arts and the sciences. Only now do you see advances in political and economical thought coming from there as well. This is all due to our natural sharing attitude, where we would rather teach and lift and bring others to our level than maintain our superiority with an iron fist.
The western world tried to rule with an iron fist. Remember slavery? Colonialism? If Westerners have a "natural sharing attitude" then why didn't they share more than the ends of their whips with the Africans?
any discussion of origins is not scientific in nature. Science deals with the observable and falsifiable. Example: "archaeopteryx is the transitional form between reptiles and birds". That is a completely unscientific statement - there is no way to test it or falsify it.
I disagree. These sorts of statements are falsified all of the time. For instance, the fossil evidence could disagree with the genetic evidence (after all, if birds and reptiles have a common ancestor, they'll have common genetic material). We only believe in an old earth because we've gradually come to falsify the alternate theories.
It is true that we can never know the past with 100% certainty. But neither can we know the present with 100% certainty. Maybe a mocking God planted the fossils but maybe he is also making our daily experiments SEEM consistent when the universe itself is totally inconsistent. Maybe all of science is flawed!
One final note - I am yet to meet an evolutionist who truly understands the creationist position. I've met many who think they do, but not a single one does. When they talk to me, they say "well, that's not what other creationists have said". I'm constantly surprised by this - because what I say is very close to what the major creationist organisations have researched and believe.
Most creationists do not work at major creationist organisations. They work at churches and missions or in ordinary day jobs. Nevertheless, I would be grateful for a pointer to a source of modern, enlightened creationism.
Also.. you say "Speed up".. and they are going to use XML?? Sending information via a bloated ASCII (or even unicode)-based protocol?
I guess you didn't read the article: "the server will be implemented in such a way that it should be possible to move from XML to the ASN.1 message format to mitigate computational overhead of processing XML documents."
First you say: If you don't like the pay as a teacher, get out of the profession. Go find something for which the pay is higher.
Then you complain about teacher quality. Well if you pay people poorly, it is no wonder good people leave.
You don't hear people in any other profession whine about their pay with the same sort of self-righteous indignation that we hear from teachers.
Actually, you also hear it from military people and other government workers. In countries with socialized medicine you hear it alot from nurses The reason is simple: people who work for the government do not have salaries that are set by the market. Rather they are set through negotiations with their "bosses", the public at large. Their whining is more or less the same as you asking your boss for a raise (just that the process is very indirect). If the public comes to believe that teachers are underpaid, they will vote for politicians who promise to pay them more.
Unlike, say, janitors, teachers can also make a plausible argument that poor pay leads to poor education which will lead to a poor economy down the road.
Whithout entering the merit of piracy itself, isn't this argument a fallacy? Aren't only high-profile actors/diretors/etc rewarded a percentage of the movie income, while all the others receive the same no matter what?
It seems quite straightforward to me. Either piracy reduces movie receipts or it doesn't. If it doesn't, it doesn't hurt actors OR crew. If it does, then it reduces the amount of money available to the movie industry which, in the long run, can only mean either fewer movies or cheaper movies. Does it seem logical to you that if the industry lost 10% of its profits that actors and executives would take the hit themselves and not pass any of it along to the lowly crew members?
Now please do not read this as saying that piracy DOES reduce movie profits. I don't know. But if it does, it will (in the long run) hurt people from the top to bottom of the industry for the same reason that problems at a tech company also hurt the janitors and office managers who would have supported the programmers.
Re:/ Because providers always tell the truth... /
on
Practical RDF
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· Score: 1
On our staggeringly democratic web, anyone can be a publisher, and as Meta tags have shown - not everyone has the truth in mind.
So what? You give people the ability to say things and some will tell the truth and some will lie. But you do not say a system is a failure because some people use it to lie. People lie on Slashdot. So what? People lie with title elements. People like with XML elements? So what? You are an information consumer. You must choose your information providers carefully. How does RDF prevent that? If you are naive enough to write an agent that believe everything it is told, no matter what the source, then you will write software that is easily fooled. So don't do that.
Funny how the URL I gave you has 7 steps and you compress them down to 4. But that's not even relevant. What is relevant is that the steps are so non-obvious that according to the page, most Mac users do not even know that it is possible. I was told that multisession was impossible by a Mac user. I repeated this misunderstanding in a room with 5 Mac users. Nobody disagreed. Everyone agreed I should go buy Toast. In fact, the Macintosh Help says directly: "It is possible to burn a CD-R only once." And the steps described for multi-session disks use a tool "Disk Copy Utililty" that is not used for burning ordinary disks. I want something a little different but I have totally switch tools. That's terrible from a usability point of view.
According to your definition, computers, VCRs and printers are not "for the masses". The masses span a wide spectrum, from people afraid to touch computers to people who regularly install their own software and drivers. As long as this thing is as easy to install and use as (e.g.) a firewall, it could have a market.
I took a look at the esmith pages. They obviously aren't as adept at marketing as these Mirra guys. Not only would the masses tune out trying to figure out what e-smith is from their pages, I DID! It is actually pretty hard to figure out what they are trying to accomplish from reading the first few pages.
Slashdot Mirror
Great so Pascal is dead. Great example. What about all of the languages people learn that did not die? Java? Perl? C++? Python? PHP? What about the millions people who productively coded tens of millions of lines in languages that were invented since 1972? You can live under a rock pretending that C is good enough if you like but the rest of industry is going to keep learning new languages, improving its productivity.
This planet does not appear to be that unique.
It doesn't matter whether the planet is unique. It matters what the probability of it happening is. The probability of the molecules combining in the right way may be incredibly low despite the fact that it could happen on any of a million planets. With a sample size of 1, we have no idea. It could be a glactic lottery ticket. Or a humdrum repetitive event.
So here's a question you can't ask: why is it valid to segregate the 100m sprint into "male" and "female", but not into "african" and "chinese"?
You're mixing up four different things. First you talk about "races". But "black" isn't a race. Black is a skin colour. If you look at black people they come in a variety of shapes and sizes. I'm not just talking about individual differences. I'm talking about genetic group differences that differentiate pygmies from bushmen of the kalahari. Africans are people who come from the continent of African (including white ones). Chinese people come from the country of China (including the 55 "minority ethnic people" like the Mongols and Tibetans).
Four different things.
Saying that "black people" dance well would indicate some correspondance between melanin and rhythm. That doesn't make much sense. It seems more likely that the black people you know of come from a small set of cultures where they are trained to dance well. I wonder if blacks living in strict Muslim cultures are similarly skilled.
Talking about race is okay but first you have to define it. The problem is that people tend to use definitions that have no basis in science or history, only in their anecdotal experience.
I'm not advocating a world without copyrights but I think your logic is faulty (or at least incomplete). You say And the terms of the GPL are all that prevents Microsoft from swiping the Linux source and creating an "MS Linux" loaded with trade-secret/closed-source "enhancements" (e.g. support for the full Windows API). How much embrace-extend-extinguish do you want?
In a world without copyright, Microsoft's business model ceases to exist. You can't just pretend that copyright goes away and everything else in the universe is as it is today. Maybe Microsoft would notexist because the attempt to commercialize software would simply have failed. Maybe they would exist but they would be a services business and embrace and extend would not be worth the trouble.
In addition, there is a fallacy among proponents of the GPL that "stealing" of code is an unalloyed bad thing for the creators of the open source software. This is incorrect both theoretically and emprically. In theory, if someone uses your open source stuff to create a closed-source variant they have in no way lessened the value of the open source version nor hurt the development of the open source version. Occasionally you hear about an open source hacker being co-opted to work on a proprietary product e.g. Mosaic (which was free but not quite open source) developers going to Netscape. But they can do that regardless of the license. If the license forces them to clean-room (as the Mosaic license did) then they'll clean-room.
Empirically speaking, there are tons of open source programs that are the basis for proprietary products and those proprietary forks demonstrably do not hurt the vitality of the open source version. Typically they strengthen it. For instance. ActiveState's non-free ActivePerl increases the Perl user-base. The proprietary variants of many other open source products pay the bills for the developers who also develop the open-source version (e.g. Ghostscript, Qt, Zope). It is obvious why commercial variants of OSS cannot supplant the OSS versions. Cheap cannot really compete with free.
The GPL only makes sense if you are going out of your way to weaken closed source software businesses. For instance you might do that for ideological reasons as Richard Stallman does, or as a business tactic as (e.g.) AOL/Netscape might.
Finally: you claim that "open source software" depends on copyrights. But then you talk about the GPL as if it were the be-all and end-all of open source software. The BSD-style licenses are about as close to public domain as you can get and in a world without copyright one expects that BSD-licensed apps like Apache, Python, Perl, etc. would exist just as they do today.
The GPL goes beyond fighting copyright. Copyright says nothing about the distinction between source and binary. If the GPL were entirely about undoing the damage of copyright, it would say nothing about source code. It would merely say that if you distribute your application you must also allow your users to redistribute it.
This guy is describing a type-tagged binary structure. What does this have to do with "XML culture"? If type tags are now universally associated with XML then I guess C++ RTTI and Java introspection are all XML-based.
What is the definition of continent anyhow? Aren't Europe and Asia the same landmass? Eurasia?
You'd have to be damn patient to wait the 4 billion years it has taken for life to evolve on this planet. The universe is less than 4 times that age so it seems unlikely that anything in it is that patient. Especially something with a biology sufficiently similar to ours to want to live on our planet. Plus, if they are so advanced technologically why not send some kind of reporter-bot that could inform them that life WOULD survive here if they sent a high-speed terra-former down to do the grunt work.
Numbers 14:18: The LORD is slow to anger, abounding in love and forgiving sin and rebellion. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation
Nice!
WVG is an XML-based vector graphics language that can be addressed by URLs and thus delivered over the Web to Microsoft's browser where it will be directly rendered inline. Microsoft themselves say it will be "very familiar to SVG users." Even though Windows will have within it all of the technologies necessary to render SVG (XML, vector graphics, CSS, Javascript, DOM), they somehow never align in a standards compliant way in Longhorn. I'm sorry, you don't have to be paranoid to see that Microsoft is reverting to its pre-Web stance of ignoring standards in favor of proprietary formats and APIs.
Neither file systems nor XML are strictly hierarchical. One has symlinks and the other has XLinks.
The two things that I find very frustrating about DVD and CD are that they do not act as standard random access devices and they are so pathetically prone to scratches, dust, etc. Why can't we go back to a floppy or minidisk format?
The problem is that Carr chose a controversial title: "IT doesn't matter". People extrapolate from the title that he is saying that companies should not invest in IT. Imagine if he had said: "Electricity doesn't matter". What would the power utility companies say? But even so, I don't really understand his point. Was there some time in the past where (e.g.) a paper mill could implement computation and trounce their competitors but today that's impossible? IT has always been something sold to any company that was interested equally. With a few exceptions like money traders or internet startups, most companies accumulated IT at roughly the same rate as their competitors and got no huge advantage over those competitors. You invest in IT to avoid falling behind your competitors, not because you think it gives you some special mojo.
Userspace is fine, but you need an OS-wide convention so that tools can reliably work with each other's versioned files.
Thus, if Dylan Evans seeks, with Neo, "the code behind the graphics", he should not look to the Unix shell, to C, or even to machine code to find it. Those are tools, not truths, and freedom comes with understanding truths, not simply with mastering tools. Learn the liberal arts -- mathematics and logic -- and you will be much better prepared to defend yourself as a free citizen in a computerized world.
I guess you've never seen a pure mathematician or a pure logician use a computer. They do not have any particular advantage over the average layman because the pure boolean logic of the computer is covered by many layers of abstraction. Just as a pure logician cannot necessarily do calculus, a pure mathematician cannot necessarily get their computer to do what they wish (which is, after all, the point of the article).
The GPL requires the delivery of source when binaries are redistributed. If copyright law were abolished, software companies would have no reason to give out source code with their (automatically redistributable binaries).
There is a big difference between an "average girl's face" and an "AVERAGED girl's face". Furthermore, they actually say:
"Our conducted experiments regarding the shape adaptions of the faces clearly show that it is not the facial proportions but the skin that makes average faces more attractive. Thus, the averageness hypothesis can be refuted with respect to facial proportions!"
But anyhow, thanks for the cool URL.
If you want to look at true human achievement, look at what the world is becoming. Only now do Asian, African, and other non-European begin to contribute to the arts and the sciences. Only now do you see advances in political and economical thought coming from there as well. This is all due to our natural sharing attitude, where we would rather teach and lift and bring others to our level than maintain our superiority with an iron fist.
The western world tried to rule with an iron fist. Remember slavery? Colonialism? If Westerners have a "natural sharing attitude" then why didn't they share more than the ends of their whips with the Africans?
I disagree. These sorts of statements are falsified all of the time. For instance, the fossil evidence could disagree with the genetic evidence (after all, if birds and reptiles have a common ancestor, they'll have common genetic material). We only believe in an old earth because we've gradually come to falsify the alternate theories.
It is true that we can never know the past with 100% certainty. But neither can we know the present with 100% certainty. Maybe a mocking God planted the fossils but maybe he is also making our daily experiments SEEM consistent when the universe itself is totally inconsistent. Maybe all of science is flawed!
One final note - I am yet to meet an evolutionist who truly understands the creationist position. I've met many who think they do, but not a single one does. When they talk to me, they say "well, that's not what other creationists have said". I'm constantly surprised by this - because what I say is very close to what the major creationist organisations have researched and believe.
Most creationists do not work at major creationist organisations. They work at churches and missions or in ordinary day jobs. Nevertheless, I would be grateful for a pointer to a source of modern, enlightened creationism.
Also.. you say "Speed up".. and they are going to use XML?? Sending information via a bloated ASCII (or even unicode)-based protocol?
I guess you didn't read the article: "the server will be implemented in such a way that it should be possible to move from XML to the ASN.1 message format to mitigate computational overhead of processing XML documents."
First you say: If you don't like the pay as a teacher, get out of the profession. Go find something for which the pay is higher.
Then you complain about teacher quality. Well if you pay people poorly, it is no wonder good people leave.
You don't hear people in any other profession whine about their pay with the same sort of self-righteous indignation that we hear from teachers.
Actually, you also hear it from military people and other government workers. In countries with socialized medicine you hear it alot from nurses The reason is simple: people who work for the government do not have salaries that are set by the market. Rather they are set through negotiations with their "bosses", the public at large. Their whining is more or less the same as you asking your boss for a raise (just that the process is very indirect). If the public comes to believe that teachers are underpaid, they will vote for politicians who promise to pay them more.
Unlike, say, janitors, teachers can also make a plausible argument that poor pay leads to poor education which will lead to a poor economy down the road.
Whithout entering the merit of piracy itself, isn't this argument a fallacy? Aren't only high-profile actors/diretors/etc rewarded a percentage of the movie income, while all the others receive the same no matter what?
It seems quite straightforward to me. Either piracy reduces movie receipts or it doesn't. If it doesn't, it doesn't hurt actors OR crew. If it does, then it reduces the amount of money available to the movie industry which, in the long run, can only mean either fewer movies or cheaper movies. Does it seem logical to you that if the industry lost 10% of its profits that actors and executives would take the hit themselves and not pass any of it along to the lowly crew members?
Now please do not read this as saying that piracy DOES reduce movie profits. I don't know. But if it does, it will (in the long run) hurt people from the top to bottom of the industry for the same reason that problems at a tech company also hurt the janitors and office managers who would have supported the programmers.
On our staggeringly democratic web, anyone can be a publisher, and as Meta tags have shown - not everyone has the truth in mind.
So what? You give people the ability to say things and some will tell the truth and some will lie. But you do not say a system is a failure because some people use it to lie. People lie on Slashdot. So what? People lie with title elements. People like with XML elements? So what? You are an information consumer. You must choose your information providers carefully. How does RDF prevent that? If you are naive enough to write an agent that believe everything it is told, no matter what the source, then you will write software that is easily fooled. So don't do that.
Funny how the URL I gave you has 7 steps and you compress them down to 4. But that's not even relevant. What is relevant is that the steps are so non-obvious that according to the page, most Mac users do not even know that it is possible. I was told that multisession was impossible by a Mac user. I repeated this misunderstanding in a room with 5 Mac users. Nobody disagreed. Everyone agreed I should go buy Toast. In fact, the Macintosh Help says directly: "It is possible to burn a CD-R only once." And the steps described for multi-session disks use a tool "Disk Copy Utililty" that is not used for burning ordinary disks. I want something a little different but I have totally switch tools. That's terrible from a usability point of view.
According to your definition, computers, VCRs and printers are not "for the masses". The masses span a wide spectrum, from people afraid to touch computers to people who regularly install their own software and drivers. As long as this thing is as easy to install and use as (e.g.) a firewall, it could have a market.
I took a look at the esmith pages. They obviously aren't as adept at marketing as these Mirra guys. Not only would the masses tune out trying to figure out what e-smith is from their pages, I DID! It is actually pretty hard to figure out what they are trying to accomplish from reading the first few pages.