Since breaking AES by brute force is about as respectable as pursuit of the fountain of youth, it made me think about my proposal of 700 virgins, assuming they behave like women scorned as you advance through the starving ranks. Since we're in the business of breaking AES by brute force, let's assume we've already solved the problem of living forever. This is a true proposition for testing your faith in the stopping algorithm.
The probability here is 1-1/e that you'll wind up spending forever-1 nights with the 700'th virgin as not delivered on xmas morning, with a mean memory of 350 other xmas packages who would brighten eternity oh so much better.
Now jump forward a decade or two... [] Snap, AES is cracked. Never assume that today's technology will be applied to tomorrow's problems. If you do -- everything you come up with is very likely to be wrong.
Nothing amazes me more about the human condition than the pornographic attraction of not having to think. It's as if our giant brain achieves maximal jizz by turning itself off.
Transmutation of lead into gold has been pondered for at least 300 decades. But it's good to know that in 300+epsilon, mission accomplished. I've never understood the attraction of reverse inference from hubris: find a bunch of stuffed shirts with jumbo pocket protectors yammering as if they had a giant brain (long after they have switched it off), write down all the things they got wrong, conclude the opposite, Bob's your uncle. Genius without effort. Don't add water, lather, rinse, or repeat.
This kind of thing is people who have switched their brain off drawing inference over larger pools of people who switched their brains off. What could go wrong? Nearly every principle of robust statistics is violated by inference on low-hanging counter-examples of hubris pricked.
A few examples higher up the tree: chemical process to transmute lead into gold, faster than light space travel, anti-gravity machine, perpetual motion yielding exploitable work.
If the Babylonians had discovered the fountain of youth, there would be some sprightly poster here with a six digit negative slashdot ID crying out "but I said it could never be done 3000! years ago!! and it still!!! hasn't!!!!" supposing Babylonians are prone to excess with chisel marks.
Suppose I could offer you the wager that if you go without until AES is broken, the gods of well-earned entitlement will deliver 700 air-brushed virgins (of your preference gender) for your eternal pleasure. Would that be enough to turn your brain back on? Or would you grab for a pair of decades and roll the dice?
Of perhaps among the exponential sample space of ridiculous things we haven't invented yet (and never will) some of the problems are impossibly hard independent of our impatience level or proneness to jump to conclusions.
All Turing machines halt if you wait long enough, supposing waiting until it doesn't is the only falsification that meets brain-on-dialtone acceptance standards.
In Soviet Russia Rccp compiles you. Obviously my first attempt was a typo. Also slashdot borked my R operators which were supposed to be [<-, [[<- etc.
Now I see Slashdot also borked some words nearby while entirely failing to notify me of its textual appetites. Lazarus to the rescue, which by some miracle of resurrection has translated < to < for me.
==Restoration of slashdot borkage==
R operators [], []<-, [[]], [[]]<- do the same kind of type polymorphism at runtime that generic programming in C++ does at compile time, only with an even poorer sense of what the interface is required to document. Because of stupid semantics to automatically drop rank to eliminate dimensions of length 1, you can't even get your rank analysis correct half the time. APL had this nailed in 1965. (The stupid drop semantics can be disabled if you subscribe to the long list of "things to remember" so often used to flail C++.) To get rank analysis right, you have to distinguish scalar values from vectors of length 1, which R does not do on your behalf. In the context of a list, operator [[]] behaves like a scalar subscript, shedding a subscript dimension, while [] behaves like a vector subscript, slicing the object into a subset, by not changing rank or type. In other words, even in cases where STL would tell you that your algorithm is generic, in R you have to dispatch on type to get your subscript syntax right.
Both these languages suck a dozen ways from Sunday, but in the union of the two I'm happy as a pig in mud. Deep down I'm fairly certain that if any of 90% of the sentiment about C++ expressed on this thread had taken root in the C++ standards committee, I wouldn't now be enjoying the goodness and broad shoulders of Rcpp.
Nice ray of sunshine among the crap troopers. I agree that in large, professional teams the need for GC is almost non-existent.
Where GC wins converts are the one-man programming teams where the programmer only has himself to blame and no group memory to navigate tricky semantics. C++ is hideous if you fall into the trap of using the wrong design method. Solo C++ programmers have trouble distinguishing design issues from code issues and end up blaming it on the language.
For a small team, GC is like having a free, get out of "I was wrong" chit. Note that it doesn't make you smarter or better. It's like having a lazy professor who is soft on mediocrity: it frees you up to put more work into other courses without having to pad your workload with a business administration elective.
C++ is an unusual language not in having the wrong balance of agendas/features, but because the sociology is impenetrable to the impatient minds of the lonesome or the quick and dirty.
I've written many times on C++, and it's only becoming an even steeper uphill battle. C++ is the only language where you don't have to vote your ugliest agenda off the island. Obviously we are talking about an island that falls far short of tropical paradise, but there it is. C++ is the language of choice for people who say "good riddance" to "good riddance". That's not a zen statement, it's a dig at people who fail to understand generativity. What Newton failed to mention about the shoulders of giants is that the giants are uncomfortably contorted to stand erect in the mud of reality. Generativity is passing along the favour: accepting your tribulations and contortions gracefully for the sake of what will someday stand on *your* shoulders. Many of the quick and dirty are not so generous.
The other thing that people don't appreciate is that GCC has lately been hindering C++ more than helping it, which is no particular fault of GCC but buried deep in standards lore.
A long time ago when the earth was C, the standardization committee decided that the C language standard would NOT cover normative diagnostics. It was a point of contention among vendors who wished to use their diagnostic facility as a point of differentiation. Once the standard covers it, differentiation falls by the wayside.
C++ inherited this decision and hasn't ever challenged it, much to its peril (retaining the sanity of its committee members in return). At first it was a rapidly growing language with puberty issues. Around the time when the STL was introduced, it became a muddle with great potential and horribly divergent implementations. And finally, there was this problem of unexpected riches. Those scary templates make the Rccp package possible. This is like the Ruby on Rails of high performance computing.
Now the great thing about C++ is that the leetness of Rcpp can mostly be hidden from the R/C++ user. Except for those darn error messages, with no normative standard to guide the way.
Clang/LLVM is going to fix that to a large degree, with or without concepts or standards support. Something concept-like needs to spring from the ashes of not-quite-there-yet, since C++ as a compile time language provides incomplete type checking at interface boundaries.
This is no worse that R. Most of my R errors come from the hideously depths of 3rd party packages, where you can hardly even recognize the *purpose* of the evaluation context that puked out, because some package authors have figured out that inside R, there's LISP trying to get out.
R operators [], []union of the two I'm happy as a pig in mud. Deep down I'm fairly certain that if any of 90% of the sentiment about C++ expressed on this thread had taken root in the C++ standards committee, I wouldn't now be enjoying the goodness and broad shoulders of Rcpp.
I want add that taxation is a smokescreen issue, a public outcry which the power brokers incite to serve their own interests.
Better regulation could have averted the recent bail-out of the luxury yachts by the work-a-day SUVs. It had nothing to do with the tax code. The power brokers do their magic tricks by inciting a mass protest on the western front when they are up to tricks on the eastern front.
I mean really, railing about taxation in modern society (it goes up, it goes down) is about the stupidest forum of protest out there. Maybe when the boomers are another decade older, they will organize a last ditch protest against human mortality, as their democratic clout is reduced to digesting the hair and bones of the fat little piglet in the python of human population growth.
If we capped retirement at five years (after which the retired person steps into the retirement booth) all of our tax problems would magically vanish. Turns out we tax less than previous societies, after longevity adjustment.
Here's the other profound secret: money goes around in circles, if the right sort of douchebags are running things. When money stops going around in circles, you've got real problems. Tax is just one of those circles. Do bail-outs to the wealthy count as circular? I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
This is a textbook example of "I knew it all along" porn. Once you understand the premise of mistaking the accessory who received a mild suspension for the perpetrator who was fired and is now facing criminal charges, it makes more sense.
The human social order is a more complex beast than a toddler's mine/yours calculus can circumscribe. Of course in any stable society the power elite is protected by the power apparatus, it's practically a chicken and egg problem: which came first, the elite, or that which protects them?
We have a mixture of dirty cops who know where their bread is buttered, and we have selfless cops who deal with a lot of crap so us peons don't have to.
The pornographic conclusion is that there is this other system where there are no dirty cops... and a different social elite. The only social systems minus the dirty cops known to archaeology (according to my diligent populist gleanings) are isolated tribes with fewer than 200 people. These societies also tend to have a strict (I would say oppressive) moral code, and conduct their internal class warfare with a good shunning (generally deadly), often directed toward a smart-ass who thinks there's a better way, and won't shut up after he's been politely tolerated for a few seasons, until some old man interprets a routine set-back as a dark omen, and gives the loud-mouth the crookered finger.
It's the same in the world of sports. Some guy is the dirtiest douchebag living when he plays for the other team; but then when your team adds "sandpaper" by acquiring the same notorious douchebag, the message instantly shifts to, "he might be an asshole, but he's our asshole". In this lingo, an asshole is a righteous douchebag fighting for a just cause. Around puberty, mine/yours graduates to us/them.
I never get on that wagon: the asshole is still the same old douchebag. To my mind revolutionary rhetoric never makes much sense. Most of the time, the new douchebags are worse than the current douchebags, with less of their rap sheet known around town to keep them cautious. If you can saw off, from time to time a housecleaning is a good measure. I don't have a problem trading douche for douche.
Politicians are like public transit: it really doesn't matter a lot which bus arrives. Some are cleaner than others, and don't rumble as much, or the driver doesn't do the herky-jerky with the power train every 30 seconds for the entire trip.
There are no political systems yet discovered minus the ugly buses. In democracy, the buses run on time and get washed clean every so often. It's a big advance by historical standards.
tax feeders can continue to suck us dry without fear that we'll resist
Nice fishline. Taxes are universal in modern society. We're nowhere close to being "sucked dry", though we complain as if it were true (until the corn fiasco, food prices were the lowest in human record). Our politicians govern themselves with an ear cupped daily to the opinion polls, and every bill to change the tax rate is mired in controversy and obstruction.
It's true the other ear is cupped toward insanely wealthy power brokers, but even having one hand cupped in the general direction of the public interest is said major accomplishment by historical standards.
With all this camera phones out there, politicians might soon have to crane an eye stalk, as well, to the public interest.
Unfortunately, with the staggering advances in image manipulation, every photograph will soon be mired in JFK controversy, and then the polarizers of discontent can go back to not hearing each other inside their fuzzy wombs that "make sense" once you know the pornographic secret about that which oppresses you.
People make all sorts of wonderful justifications but most never stick with it. Many also don't have the opportunity to ride to work.
The average person rigs the outcome far worse than that by favouring modes of urban development and taxation that create a warm, fuzzy, happy place until someone mutters "peak oil" under their breath.
Peak oil is a stupid phrase. It doesn't exist to describe the world, where the situation resembles more of a plateau, but it is useful to poke pins into the psyches of people who purchase a luxury three car garage in outer suburbia then complain about the facts of life as if no-one ever told them. Who knew that with rising global population, the price of gas would go up?
This is playing out practically on the level of the banking system bail-out. An speedy commute to work in a guzzling single-passenger automobile is effectively a political entitlement because in a democracy, the lemmings are always right. Reward the people who made living choices consistent with a lower carbon footprint (by granting them a bike lane), feel the wrath of everyone who didn't (by taking away a car lane).
I'm not convinced a bicycle saves a huge amount of carbon when I look at my food bill. There are health benefits, though, to offset the food cost. In our household where we really succeed in reducing our carbon footprint is by using bus+bicycles to combine multiple car trips into a single car trip. Essentially our occupancy ratio goes up when we do use the vehicle, so we transfer some but not all of the miles onto the food budget.
Real savings come from long term planning and good logistics. If the term "peak oil" makes you toss in your sleep, you're not ready to understand this. Peak oil makes the problem sound like an earthquake: you know it's coming, but you don't know when, so your planning obligations are minimal.
For a plateau, one could reasonably plan a decade ahead by advocating good urban development policy and other such responsible and unpopular activities.
Agreed. I have always had a hard time stomaching the theory that dark matter and dark energy exist.
Late at night, a drunk was on his knees beneath a street-light, evidently looking for something. "What have you lost?" asks a passer-by. "My graduation watch," replied the drunk. "It fell off after I flung myself out of the ivory tower into the vague proximity of the real world."
The passer-by watches the futile search for a few minute then inquires, "so which building did you leap from?"
"A few institutions up the street," replied the drunk. "Why are you looking for it here if you lost it there?" "Because the funding is better." "And because the sirens of publish or perish made it hard to hear where it landed?" "Yeah, that too."
We already accept spectacularly dim and neutral matter, but then we declare that a physical quantity known within the profession as "kluge matter" is a hopeless kluge to the standard model, because you can't see it where the funding is good.
Good call, brought to you by the same people who originally named "junk DNA".
Let me explain big science: A) Anything you can't fund your department to study is dark or dirty; B) If it's costing you money you raised to study something else, it's a rubber boot on a fish hook.
... indicates that they really have no clue what this does or why it should work or anything else, other than that you should give them money for a gadget.
No, it indicates that they aren't doing a good job of making substantive arguments to an audience with no clue.
The circadian phase response curve is increasingly well understood. I personally have a circadian rhythm disorder. I'm intimately familiar with my own PRC.
Research I don't have at hand shows that among the elderly, treatment with blue light in the evening helps them make it through the night with more sheep and less roosters.
Younger people and misfits such as myself often prefer to advance their circadian phase: for this you want intense blue light in the early morning (best in the hour before you feel like waking) or melatonin in the middle of your waking day.
I'm more suspicious about this ear thing because of reduce, recycle, and reuse: mother nature just can't help herself from raiding the molecular junk drawer. She's already got the recipe. Why not?
It's a long chain from the light bulb to the eardrum to molecules of the brain to the suprachiasmatic nucleus.
I'd be very happy if a pair of Lite-Brite laser disco earmuffs could sort my circadian phase out while I slumber happily through my pre-waking dreams. Melatonin controls my problem, but it impacts my performance at about the intensity of two pints of beer consumed just as I'm entering the most productive part of my day. Unfortunately, I can't just grow a liver the size of a sofa cushion and have the impairment fade away.
This is essentially what Oracle did when they enabled by default an option that hadn't been thoroughly vetted, and I maintain my original statement that this is something even a first year CS student should understand is a bad idea.
You don't seem to understand what game you are playing here. You are militating for group-think, rather than relating truth on the ground. I wouldn't be against laughing people out of the profession for having no clue about release dynamics, but neither would I claim this is fait accompli at any level within the profession.
The first year student also understands that holding the assignment back to correct defects and submitting it late will result in an even larger reduction in droplets of holy water. This is the dominant lesson, no?
Let's imagine a CS program where every assignment you complete goes into a permanent foundry-forge where any other student (or member of the public) can report bugs against your past work (these would be confirmed bugs complete with a failed test result). At this school, you are not allowed to graduate while any bug remains unfixed in any assignment you've completed in your four year program. This would be cheap to implement at the registrar's office, since they can assign your outstanding bug count the same graduation code as your outstanding library fine. They're in the loop on code reuse.
The graduating class could be reasonably ranked by "patches against" when applying for continuity roles. Another group of people could be ranked by "days before deadline" of all initial submissions meeting a minimum quality requirement, no matter how much cheese ensued. Yet another group could be ranked by "bang for buck" on the total complexity of solutions passing the grade with the least amount of bloat. A final group would be unranked yet employed: for outstanding creativity, generality, and insight over and above the required norm, even if the other metrics fell short from time to time, as they must when you strive for great things. There's just enough employers out there tapping the cream to siphon these people off.
If we had more such schools and modes of discernment, your initial remark wouldn't have reached hyperbolic escape velocity on igniting the first booster rocket.
The wording of this post bends over backward to place no obstacle into the minds of unthinking ideologues in viewing the matter as though the data centers were initiated via policies of the Obama administration.
FTFY. Despite the virtue of understatement, I'm not sure your obstacle-free version was making sufficient contact with the intended nerve ending. As you get older, you place less emphasis on being on the right side of the debate, and more emphasis on whether any effort is expended to move the debate forward. The malice of elision becomes magnified.
Weasel words are carefully cultivated intrigues of the aggrieved, when the road is hot and dusty, and picnic of complaint on the banks of Mosquito Creek seems preferable to slogging toward a twinkle of illumination on the far horizon.
After forty years of following technology, I assure you that wherever there's a land rush in progress, a compatibility clusterbuck is sure to follow. Early mover advantage is a broken window for everyone else. It's not actually the nature of the standardization process to be out in front of the gypsy caravan waxing behind the Spanish Galleon of zeitgeist redux. As much as we complain about this, the gypsies are a tribe of legendary endurance, hardship, and snark (as often featured here on snarkdote).
Standardization is the introverted naturalist's account of rats, cockroaches, raccoons, ravens, seagulls, and urban deer: what's left behind after progressive forces have eradicated the dodo, pillaged the cod fishery, and turned most of the polar bear population into shaggy rugs of bravado.
Yes, people still use vacuum tubes, typewriters, vinyl records, CRT's, and incandescent lightbulbs. But I'd argue that with the exception of lightbulbs, they're all seeing dramatically reduced usage these days.
Sometimes I lose it when confronted by the lemming vortex.
Here's one for you. Has the modern world experienced a dramatically reduced use of fire? It's been a while since I stacked a cord of firewood. Guess I'm too busy driving my truck to and from my place of employment. At 3000 RPM my four cylinder four stroke lights a fire about 50 times per second, for as long as I cruise to or from freedom.
Here's another institution seeing dramatically reduced usage these days: jobs that pay well. In technological economies, an increasingly smaller portion of the workforce delivers most of the value and receives the majority of compensation.
How many Google engineers are performing data analytics on an iPad Touch?
The PC with multiple giant monitors is a platform of full intellectual engagement. It's putative demise seems to track demographic trends in the workforce at large. Another technology of full engagement: human language. Seems to have weathered the storm of fashion with nary a blip.
Perhaps it's less that the form factor of productivity has become obsolete than that many of the people formerly making casual use have jumped the shark to consumption-oriented platforms with lush, manicured walled gardens.
I hear trees are also toppling out of fashion since the invention of the chain saw. Some effort in making apt comparisons is useful in pulling up short of the cliff.
Here's another one, maybe closer to the truth: the giant beige box is going the way of the telephone, which also used to be a giant box shackled to the wall. I still make the majority of my calls on a shackle-phone with a proper handset and I rarely have to participate in fishbowl-to-fishbowl sonic experiences that remind me of garbled audio from the 1960s. Those old shackle phones are holding up remarkably well for those of us who value clear communication over whim of wherever.
The only thing that matters is what the author wrote and what we can analyze from that.
Taking that position, it makes it hard to understand why so many academics heap scorn on Wikipedia, which operates under a similar proscription: you can only write what you can source, even if what you wish to say is so obvious that no reputable source bothers to spell it out, in direct terms.
You can not state the insidiously obvious on Wikipedia. I once tried to add a footnote to a term from computer science that has long fallen out of fashion, as to why the term has fallen from fashion (it was always stupid deep down), but it was so out of fashion nobody with anything useful to contribute to the field had commented on the term for fifteen years; while many in the active profession would have immediately agreed with me, my contribution was scratched. Newcomers to the field become aware of the taxonomic term, and take it too seriously, thinking it conveys professional insight. Wikipedia would be a great place to spread the news that the term has died and not gone to heaven: you sound like a neophyte for taking it seriously. Every profession has these lingering embarrassments, just ask Freud.
Concerning my scratched contribution: my bad. You have to play by the rules. What's unfortunate about Wikipedia culture is that once the rule is decided, awareness of where or how it breaks down is not encouraged. Here again, Wikipedia mirrors life in the academic setting. No surprise to me that contribution wanes to precisely the degree that academic virtues wax.
The textual conceit of literary criticism doesn't hold up to Kolmogorov-Chaitin complexity theory. Not much does. Practical problems abound in theories of infinite potency and nil applicability. All the results of K-C theory live in the event horizon between finite and the infinite: where the gravitational mass of the energy of computation sucks you backwards into a black-hole before the (finite) computation terminates.
K-C theory (as it exists in my intuition) would not sharply discriminate between the author and his text; neither would it sharply discriminate one author from the next, but heavily factor out the common font of all memes, both genetic and cultural, if you fed it plenty of surrounding context.
Restriction to analysis of the text is an institutional pretext: the institution of literary criticism requires this (unless you've got Marshall McLuhan hidden behind a handy placard a la Annie Hall, which is funny, because never was a man less capable of tilting the balance toward clarity).
If the author can't explain himself (where "him" is the first metasyntactic variable of lambda elided), you've got some explaining to do about explanation. The big bang doesn't exactly "explain" itself either, but we do happen to occupy a strange physical regime where physical theory is possible and thus amenable to K-C compression. Scientists ponder why physical law is possible (it doesn't have to be). It's just something we observe in the universe we happen to inhabit. (At this point otherwise sensible people start dividing by zero by contemplating universes we don't inhabit; yes, you can make our existence contingent on a prior that divides by zero, but I don't see where that gets you, precisely--except out of the frying pan, into the fire).
If you're striving for credit in an institutional setting (especially the common coin of undergraduate credit, where you tip your end product into the round file immediately upon its award), you're not going to earn much by speculating on the mind of the author explicitly.
Of course, our capacity to engage in textual criticism presumes a cognitive architecture where we do precisely that, but then we erase our workings at the boundary of collectivisation. Oh, the humanities.
The first thing an alien galaxy will do with our emanating (but not eminent) symbol stream is construct a theory of
If the government isn't mad at the ratings agency, they are probably not doing their job. The message here: if America wants to continue with politics of intransigence, they can experiment with their own money.
It's such an embarrassing spectacle, it's amazing anyone outside America is willing to bankroll the production.
I've listened to a lot of commentators reminiscing that even in the Nixon era, the parties worked together for the good of America. Maybe we should have a big Survivor episode for members of congress so they can all get it out of their system.
I'm reading a Lincoln biography that portrays Salmon P. Chase as a right PITA, but a highly competent right-wing abolitionist PITA. Seems we should jack-hammer Lincoln out of the Lincoln Memorial and erect Chase in his place, to give present day congress a more achievable target of on-balance good behaviour.
In honour of the Free Soil party, we should rename the Tea Party the Night Soil party.
Japan has twice as much as the US and now has the same credit rating. How is that fair?
Because the gridlock in Washington is twice as stupid as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.
Seriously, a party built around swaying a base of creationists toward policies which entitle billionaires is not the best program for the future of America.
I can definitely recall running NCSA Mosaic 2.0, but I'm a bit dim whether I cut my teeth on an earlier Mosaic. A year or two before this, I had managed to obtain internet access when I lived in Toronto in the first week available on a provider called io.org where I mostly used the shell account on a system called r-node. Wikipedia says Internex Online was the first consumer dial-up ISP in Canada. Lots of people I knew had access to the internet through university dial-up accounts, back when September came once a year.
r-node was hardly what you would call a reliable service. I learned basic shell survival skills and made heavy use of an archie server based at University of McGill and downloaded a lot of technical information over ftp, if my session would stay up long enough to succeed. I tried gopher, but decided it was a bit of a crock.
I was in Halifax the year Mosaic came out, dialing in through Chebucto Freenet. This was a great community service. Cheap and surprisingly reliable for the price. Lynx was the default browser and I was happy enough with this since I was mostly using a 486 laptop with a monochrome screen.
On the Mosaic internet, I remember grey screens with rainbow separator bars populated with animated men-at-work GIFs and link-farm homesteads as far as the eye could see. This appalling landscape was so obviously the future it was almost beneath comment. I vaguely recall that you could find content at universities, wired.com, and gaming companies (ID Software must have been a frequent destination). My technical interest at this time was finding a way to compile the HP Standard Template Library with the Watcom C/C++ compiler.
So far I'm treating Mosaic as gopher clubbed onto the ice floe with a giant clue stick. I recall reading the URL specification in detail, which far more than HTML seemed to be the magic sauce. Mosaic dazzled in potential more than it impressed on first unveiling.
The first time I regarded document mark-up in a different light was when Sun started to promote the Java language. I read about the stack coherency guarantee, which impressed me, then I read about floating point... and I flipped the bozo-bit so hard it almost gave me a concussion. The idea that floating point math was required to give the same answer on every underlying implementation offended me to the darkest nub of Scientology-hatred. Later it played out that strict adherence on x86 reduced floating point performance by an order of magnitude, because the implementation had to suppress "double rounding" involving the floating point guard bits (64 bit mantissa for working results). Sun thought that arrogating an order-of-magnitude reduction in floating point performance on x86 was doing the world a favour. Their world, not mine.
In high school, my idea of excitement was to program my calculator during chemistry class, leaving just enough of my brain active to grasp the general principle, then to use the midterm to apply my gleanings to a problem set for the first time. I spent my homework hours devising algorithms or formulas for anything that caught my fancy, with scant connection to school work. There was a lot of muttering about "heuristics" in chemistry class, which was a red flag for me to tune out completely. It always turned out that there was a precise answer available if you had a bit more foundation in math.
To my shock and horror on one chemistry mid-term, I discovered that the equilibrium condition for solution concentration expands to a cubic polynomial. This didn't trouble me as such, but I knew that no-one else in the class scribbling beside me was solving cubic equations. Maybe I had my workings wrong. I reviewed this three times. No, my workings are absolutely solid: it's a cubic equation ten ways from zero. Well, I've got 25 minutes left in a 45 minute exam, I better solve me some cubics.
In turns out the heuristic I missed involved approximating the cubic with a quadratic at the loss of about 10%
Peer review is a convergent process viewed over decades and centuries. It's not a particularly good local filter. For my taste, it gets far too much credit for being an effective gatekeeper (most of the time) against errant nonsense. Our pathetic current generation search technology supplements the stem "brog" with a potent example, almost as if it could read my mind.
We don't think that peer review in software amounts to accreditation of bug-free perfection. In a good setting, it might be a fairly effective defense against architectural howlers. Is scientific peer review somehow magically better? As Einstein once said, "the secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources". His corollary is less often quoted: "the secret to authority is to hide your scowlers".
In the rare case when we peek behind the scientific curtain, it's an unseemly mess of data collusion, warranting special commissions to assure us that nothing was actually as bad as it looked on virgin grep: political cabals to render suspect data in the best light are business as usual. (We did learn that a paper making sophisticated statistical claims doesn't necessarily number a statistician among the secretive panel; as per established custom, the rubber stamp is equally valid either way.) The commission is right in their verdict as viewed against actual scientific norms if you shed the idea that peer review is worth a pot to piss in divorced from it's established track record for convergence to scientific sanity after a decade or two or ten.
This new-age search guy missed the entire AI memo. The field of AI had all the creativity in the known universe (and then some) back in the 1960s when pronouncing imminent breakthroughs.
And besides, Wolfram Alpha has already staked a huge position in search as-we-don't-yet-know-it, with a whole lot more credibility behind it than anything I expect to see delivered from the hands of this puff-piece pendulum.
What is wrong with a pretty desktop environment? If all we care about is "work", we might as well go back to using 256 colors.
Vonnegut once wrote a story about people like you.
You're implicitly trying to argue that "work" is a less demanding performance aesthetic than some unstated higher aesthetic that rhymes with "drool". One man's drool is another man's slobber.
You're also missing the aesthetic known as "life". You know, the slow self-amplification of microscopic information feedback systems to become enmeshed in patterns of global interconnection whose mere parameters are a bitch to distill?
Some believe that 99.9999% of the apparent complexity was imported from the boundary conditions, where all the integrals experience a step function to a higher cardinality. Others believe in the crockpot theory: that planet earth stumbled by accident into a perfect sous-vide orbital configuration; whether the heavy-handed asteroid spice mix was essential to the Maillard reaction of Brownian motion has yet to be determined. (Oh look, I cleverly managed to leave out a word that rhymes with "crockpot". Amazing what you can smuggle under the surface. )
In this amazing system known as life, what matters is generativity: that the next flavour layer can build upon the previous flavour layer, without becoming a soggy mess.
What is wrong with a desktop environment where everything is controllable with a GUI, and that GUI edits some config files in a system directory?
Nothing I suppose, if you believe on the basis of symmetry that we completed our allotted 0.0001% addition to system complexity, so it's time to sit back in the comfy chair and admire our accomplishments.
A whole lot, if you believe that sous-vide is a work in progress. I'm not so sure the next generation wants to share your saliva. They might declare it a "soggy mess" and start over.
I actually think that computer science would benefit from more sage retrospectives on the path not taken, where one does not necessarily end the analysis with the smoking gun.
Buffer allocations in the C language family tend to be static. No matter what you do in the privacy of your own buffer, the boundaries (front and back) are firm: whether poaching from your neighbour's apple tree, making a spectacle of indecent display, or committing an access fault triggering a core dump of yellow police tape and chalk outlines.
Traditionally it takes more creativity to get arrested in the front yard. In the back yard, most programmers have no standard of conduct whatsoever. safecat (back_fence, the_usual_suspects,...); wildcat (just_the_ammunition);
It's true, you might know that the unfenced wildcat() is OK due to some prudent arithmetic three loops up, as etched into stone tablets by a guru of right thinking (at the optimal dosage point between second and third coffee) embodied in an immutable marble monument of nil maintenance.
Usually in an API the front fence is defacto whatever src position is supplied as the current working position; where the algorithm swings both ways, both ought to be passed explicitly, in addition to the working position. Helper functions in a tightly-crafted C runtime library might sanely presume that this condition holds. A chosen few among us are well suited to stone work where efficiency matters.
The major fault with the C language was failing to provide an "Ordinary People" set of buffer management routines (anything that clobbers memory) where the back fence comes first in every function signature.
If you did grasp the subject, you would understand that anonymity means just that: lack of accountability regarding one's statements.
One can define accountability like that in a tome with a Forward, an Introduction, 50 pages of End Notes, and an Index that doesn't suck; an engaged reader will grant your linguistic conceit in the brief and bright mental interludes between the penumbra of naps and heavy meals.
In the fray of online discourse--in the greasy orange penumbra between Cheetos from the monkey-fist Pez dispenser--the word is freighted with sober reflection by rule-of-law abiding power brokers; your average Cheeto-chomper will hearken back to the gold star he received from his second grade teacher after mastering "i before e" and presume some kind of glowing auspice; or, if less vested in clean living, his intestines will quail over creative omissions in his annual gold-filling divulgence.
In America, you can believe in Elvis alien abduction, crop circles, biblical creationism, or worst of all, scientific creationism and no one posts your mug shot on the internet in galleries of eternal shame to shake you down. What is accountability, anyway?
A better word choice would have been repercussions: accountability as applied to any isolated sound bite. Do you think that for having everything you've ever said housed under a single roof (insert payment card here), public discourse would become less of a carnival duck shoot?
Be yourself and speak your mind today, though it contradict all you have said before. ~ ~ ~ Elbert Hubbard
The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves. ~ ~ ~ Oscar Wilde
People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be 'consistent'. ~ ~ ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes
A man never tells you anything until you contradict him. ~ ~ ~ George Bernard Shaw
Speak what you think to-day in words as hard as cannon-balls and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. ~ ~ ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do I contradict myself? / Very well then / I contradict myself / I am large, I contain multitudes. ~ ~ ~ Walt Whitman
From a Wikipedia editor of Irish descent:
Huck is given shelter by the Grangerfords, a prosperous local family. He becomes friends with Buck Grangerford, a boy about his age, and learns that the Grangerfords are engaged in a 30-year blood feud against another family, the Shepherdsons. The Grangerfords and Shepherdsons go to church. Both families bring guns to continue the feud, despite the church's preachings on brotherly love and the cloak of many colours.
IRL many wish to avoid being lumped in with Walt Whitman; nearly everyone wishes to avoid becoming known for making quips about the Irish. Yes, I'm going to abandon the cover of intelligent thought and write like that Wikipedia guy on my public blog.
I can't remember far enough back to the day when I didn't know that heat was a more severe limit than the available energy supply. Only the money for nothing, chicks for free crowd ever thought differently.
I mean, how hard is it to plug the mass of planet earth into E=mcc? Or just the hydrogen portion of the earth's oceans? Hot enough for ya?
Freeman Dyson talked about the importance of signal to noise ratio in physical systems at least as far back as Infinite in All Directions (1988). I vaguely recall he argued that if the universe continued to expand until it reached a fraction of a degree Kelvin in temperature, and you only had a few megawatts of available free energy in the whole universe, at such a low temperature, the universe could remain filled with computation.
Heat kills. Our mammalian forefathers made a major misstep to lock in at 300 degrees Kelvin. We'll regret that yet. Even worse than the C language NUL terminator mistake.
Normally I tend to agree with what I've read from PHK, but this one seems wide of the mark. If you involve a *real* C guru in the discussion, I don't think there would be much sentiment toward nixing the sentinel.
C makes a big deal about the equivalence of pointers and arrays. Plus in C a string also represents every suffix string. char string [] = { 't', 'e', 's', 't', '\0' }; char* cdr_string = string + 1;
Perfectly valid, as God intended. A string with a length prefix is a hybrid data structure. What is the size of the length structure up front? It can be interesting in C to sort all suffixes of a string, having only one copy of the string itself. Try that with length prefix strings. (The trivial algorithm is far from ideal for large or degenerate character sequences, but it does provide insight into position trees and the Burrows-Wheeler transform.)
Nor would I blame all the stupid coding errors on the '\0' terminator convention. In C, a determined idiot can mess up just about anything, unless the compiler takes over and does things for you, a la Pascal by another name. If that had been the bias, would be all be using C now, or some other language? Repeat after me: Generativity Rocks. Nanny languages usually manage to bork generativity over. Correct Programming Made Easy never strays far from the subtitle Composition Made Difficult.
No one who ever read Dijkstra and took him serious ever made a tiny fraction of the stupid mistakes blamed on hapless zero.
If you want to point to a real steaming pile, strcpy() was designed by a moron with a bad hang-over and no copy of Dijkstra within a 100 mile radius. It was tantamount to declaring "you don't really need to test your preconditions... what kind of sissy would do that?"
C is a nice design, as evidenced by how seamlessly the STL was grafted onto C++ at the abstraction layer (at the syntax layer, not so much). The problem with C was always a communication problem. To use C well one must test preconditions on operation validity. To use algebra well one must test preconditions on operation validity.
Where does PHK lay the blame for the algebraist who made it possible to divide both side of an equation by zero, or multiply an inequality by -1? Preferably with the complete moron who doesn't check preconditions on the validity of the operation. Two thousand years later, now we have a better solution?
PHK is right about cache hierarchies. By the time cache hierarchies arrived, we had C++ with entirely different string representations.
For some reason I've never been keen on having a programmer who can't manage to correctly test the precondition for buffer overflow making deep design decisions about little blocks of lead in the radiation path.
And it's not even much of a burden. As Dijkstra observed, for many algorithms, once you have all your preconditions right and you've got a provable variant, there's often very little left to decide. It actually makes the design of many algorithms simpler in the mode of divide and conquer: first get your preconditions and variant right (you're now half done and you've barely begun to think hard), *then* worry about additional logic constraints (or performance felicitous sequencing of legal alternatives).
The coders who first try to get their logical requirements correct and then puzzle out the preconditions do indeed make the original task more difficult than not bothering with preconditions at all, supposing there's some kind of accurate measure over crap solutions, which I refuse to concede.
Paying for a lawyer to tell you he can't actually help you, not wise.
You'd think computer programmers wouldn't be quite so stupid. I'm researching building codes for secondary suites today, as someone I know is looking at purchasing a nearby property. There's the official act, which is buried behind a paywall. There are also unreliable secondary sources, which I can click through immediately. Should I even bother?
Here's the thing. Willing to take on the risk if:
plumbing + electrical conversion < $refit_budget
Either *alone* (you've heard of short circuit evaluation) could render the decision negative. Each might have a fee required to obtain authoritative information. Money is saved by accessing *first* the official code with the greatest chance of rendering a negative decision (suitably weighted by the fee required).
Now how am I supposed to weight the odds without asking complete idiots? The authoritative sources are stuck behind the fee I'm trying to minimize.
Rely upon is so "Wikipedia will never work" it makes me puke. There's a lot of potential for prudent cost minimization long before you have to pay the fucking lawyers their extortionate fees. Excellent lawyers that don't charge fees are as common on the ground as massless pulleys.
The whole point of social group-think is to retune the balance of power until you're pretty sure you aren't paying a lawyer his hostage fee for a hostage he doesn't actually have.
I don't mind paying lawyers for services rendered. A proper title search is real work. I do mind paying lawyers for making me feel like chicken shit. I live every waking hour of my professional life navigating rule based systems, but somehow the building code surpasses my intellectual powers of first appraisal?
Primo Levi once wrote a book titled, "If not now, when." If the technologists of the world are not willing to stand up and say "your rule based system is full of shit" then what?
After self-driving cars become routine, textual analysis of laws and bylaws is in the gun sights. There are already TED talks setting up traffic cones for the battle to come: Four ways to fix a broken legal system
What's happened here, again, almost without our knowing, is, our culture has changed. People no longer feel free to act on their best judgment.
No shit, Sherlock. And that's just the first one I found. Adding a strikethrough attribute to "get a lawyer" as sage advice concerning matters of everyday practicality would make a decent life mission. Don't get me wrong: conflict happens. With the potential for real conflict, you most definitely want to talk to professionals, and the fees won't be trivial. But no-one asks any more "Is there potential for real conflict?" What we ask is "Would you rather feel chicken-shit wise or self-assured stupid?" Who wants to live in a world like that?
Hate to intrude with an original thought. We have fairly strict libel laws to prevent slathering misinformation about a person hither and yon, whether the SOB deserves it or not.
Linking vast swathes of electronic records together of dubious provenance, accuracy, and agenda is in many ways worse than public slander: it only takes place in closed rooms behind your back with your immediate financial interests at stake, it's hard or impossible to prove this is going on, and recourse under the law heavily favours the windmill.
When it's just one institution putting black marks on your file for lodging an accurate complaint, so be it. In the theory of the market, you can severe your relationship and start fresh with a different service-minimizing, TOS-touting telecom-in-training.
When your insurance company puts a black mark on your file for filing a successful claim, and then they share with every other financial institution on the planet that you're a born complainer, or it gets linked up surreptitiously behind the scenes, this is not right.
Using a government sanctioned number just makes it that much easier to pretend "the number is really you" rather than using some UID of their own devising, which is clearly just an access key into a database of dirt cobbled together by grasping econocrats.
Slashdot Mirror
Since breaking AES by brute force is about as respectable as pursuit of the fountain of youth, it made me think about my proposal of 700 virgins, assuming they behave like women scorned as you advance through the starving ranks. Since we're in the business of breaking AES by brute force, let's assume we've already solved the problem of living forever. This is a true proposition for testing your faith in the stopping algorithm.
Secretary problem
The probability here is 1-1/e that you'll wind up spending forever-1 nights with the 700'th virgin as not delivered on xmas morning, with a mean memory of 350 other xmas packages who would brighten eternity oh so much better.
Think hard, you're playing for keeps.
Nothing amazes me more about the human condition than the pornographic attraction of not having to think. It's as if our giant brain achieves maximal jizz by turning itself off.
Transmutation of lead into gold has been pondered for at least 300 decades. But it's good to know that in 300+epsilon, mission accomplished. I've never understood the attraction of reverse inference from hubris: find a bunch of stuffed shirts with jumbo pocket protectors yammering as if they had a giant brain (long after they have switched it off), write down all the things they got wrong, conclude the opposite, Bob's your uncle. Genius without effort. Don't add water, lather, rinse, or repeat.
This kind of thing is people who have switched their brain off drawing inference over larger pools of people who switched their brains off. What could go wrong? Nearly every principle of robust statistics is violated by inference on low-hanging counter-examples of hubris pricked.
A few examples higher up the tree: chemical process to transmute lead into gold, faster than light space travel, anti-gravity machine, perpetual motion yielding exploitable work.
If the Babylonians had discovered the fountain of youth, there would be some sprightly poster here with a six digit negative slashdot ID crying out "but I said it could never be done 3000! years ago!! and it still!!! hasn't!!!!" supposing Babylonians are prone to excess with chisel marks.
Suppose I could offer you the wager that if you go without until AES is broken, the gods of well-earned entitlement will deliver 700 air-brushed virgins (of your preference gender) for your eternal pleasure. Would that be enough to turn your brain back on? Or would you grab for a pair of decades and roll the dice?
Of perhaps among the exponential sample space of ridiculous things we haven't invented yet (and never will) some of the problems are impossibly hard independent of our impatience level or proneness to jump to conclusions.
All Turing machines halt if you wait long enough, supposing waiting until it doesn't is the only falsification that meets brain-on-dialtone acceptance standards.
In Soviet Russia Rccp compiles you. Obviously my first attempt was a typo. Also slashdot borked my R operators which were supposed to be [<-, [[<- etc.
Now I see Slashdot also borked some words nearby while entirely failing to notify me of its textual appetites. Lazarus to the rescue, which by some miracle of resurrection has translated < to < for me.
==Restoration of slashdot borkage==
R operators [], []<-, [[]], [[]]<- do the same kind of type polymorphism at runtime that generic programming in C++ does at compile time, only with an even poorer sense of what the interface is required to document. Because of stupid semantics to automatically drop rank to eliminate dimensions of length 1, you can't even get your rank analysis correct half the time. APL had this nailed in 1965. (The stupid drop semantics can be disabled if you subscribe to the long list of "things to remember" so often used to flail C++.) To get rank analysis right, you have to distinguish scalar values from vectors of length 1, which R does not do on your behalf. In the context of a list, operator [[]] behaves like a scalar subscript, shedding a subscript dimension, while [] behaves like a vector subscript, slicing the object into a subset, by not changing rank or type. In other words, even in cases where STL would tell you that your algorithm is generic, in R you have to dispatch on type to get your subscript syntax right.
Both these languages suck a dozen ways from Sunday, but in the union of the two I'm happy as a pig in mud. Deep down I'm fairly certain that if any of 90% of the sentiment about C++ expressed on this thread had taken root in the C++ standards committee, I wouldn't now be enjoying the goodness and broad shoulders of Rcpp.
Nice ray of sunshine among the crap troopers. I agree that in large, professional teams the need for GC is almost non-existent.
Where GC wins converts are the one-man programming teams where the programmer only has himself to blame and no group memory to navigate tricky semantics. C++ is hideous if you fall into the trap of using the wrong design method. Solo C++ programmers have trouble distinguishing design issues from code issues and end up blaming it on the language.
For a small team, GC is like having a free, get out of "I was wrong" chit. Note that it doesn't make you smarter or better. It's like having a lazy professor who is soft on mediocrity: it frees you up to put more work into other courses without having to pad your workload with a business administration elective.
C++ is an unusual language not in having the wrong balance of agendas/features, but because the sociology is impenetrable to the impatient minds of the lonesome or the quick and dirty.
I've written many times on C++, and it's only becoming an even steeper uphill battle. C++ is the only language where you don't have to vote your ugliest agenda off the island. Obviously we are talking about an island that falls far short of tropical paradise, but there it is. C++ is the language of choice for people who say "good riddance" to "good riddance". That's not a zen statement, it's a dig at people who fail to understand generativity. What Newton failed to mention about the shoulders of giants is that the giants are uncomfortably contorted to stand erect in the mud of reality. Generativity is passing along the favour: accepting your tribulations and contortions gracefully for the sake of what will someday stand on *your* shoulders. Many of the quick and dirty are not so generous.
The other thing that people don't appreciate is that GCC has lately been hindering C++ more than helping it, which is no particular fault of GCC but buried deep in standards lore.
A long time ago when the earth was C, the standardization committee decided that the C language standard would NOT cover normative diagnostics. It was a point of contention among vendors who wished to use their diagnostic facility as a point of differentiation. Once the standard covers it, differentiation falls by the wayside.
C++ inherited this decision and hasn't ever challenged it, much to its peril (retaining the sanity of its committee members in return). At first it was a rapidly growing language with puberty issues. Around the time when the STL was introduced, it became a muddle with great potential and horribly divergent implementations. And finally, there was this problem of unexpected riches. Those scary templates make the Rccp package possible. This is like the Ruby on Rails of high performance computing.
Now the great thing about C++ is that the leetness of Rcpp can mostly be hidden from the R/C++ user. Except for those darn error messages, with no normative standard to guide the way.
Clang/LLVM is going to fix that to a large degree, with or without concepts or standards support. Something concept-like needs to spring from the ashes of not-quite-there-yet, since C++ as a compile time language provides incomplete type checking at interface boundaries.
This is no worse that R. Most of my R errors come from the hideously depths of 3rd party packages, where you can hardly even recognize the *purpose* of the evaluation context that puked out, because some package authors have figured out that inside R, there's LISP trying to get out.
R operators [], []union of the two I'm happy as a pig in mud. Deep down I'm fairly certain that if any of 90% of the sentiment about C++ expressed on this thread had taken root in the C++ standards committee, I wouldn't now be enjoying the goodness and broad shoulders of Rcpp.
I want add that taxation is a smokescreen issue, a public outcry which the power brokers incite to serve their own interests.
Better regulation could have averted the recent bail-out of the luxury yachts by the work-a-day SUVs. It had nothing to do with the tax code. The power brokers do their magic tricks by inciting a mass protest on the western front when they are up to tricks on the eastern front.
I mean really, railing about taxation in modern society (it goes up, it goes down) is about the stupidest forum of protest out there. Maybe when the boomers are another decade older, they will organize a last ditch protest against human mortality, as their democratic clout is reduced to digesting the hair and bones of the fat little piglet in the python of human population growth.
If we capped retirement at five years (after which the retired person steps into the retirement booth) all of our tax problems would magically vanish. Turns out we tax less than previous societies, after longevity adjustment.
Here's the other profound secret: money goes around in circles, if the right sort of douchebags are running things. When money stops going around in circles, you've got real problems. Tax is just one of those circles. Do bail-outs to the wealthy count as circular? I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
This is a textbook example of "I knew it all along" porn. Once you understand the premise of mistaking the accessory who received a mild suspension for the perpetrator who was fired and is now facing criminal charges, it makes more sense.
The human social order is a more complex beast than a toddler's mine/yours calculus can circumscribe. Of course in any stable society the power elite is protected by the power apparatus, it's practically a chicken and egg problem: which came first, the elite, or that which protects them?
We have a mixture of dirty cops who know where their bread is buttered, and we have selfless cops who deal with a lot of crap so us peons don't have to.
The pornographic conclusion is that there is this other system where there are no dirty cops ... and a different social elite. The only social systems minus the dirty cops known to archaeology (according to my diligent populist gleanings) are isolated tribes with fewer than 200 people. These societies also tend to have a strict (I would say oppressive) moral code, and conduct their internal class warfare with a good shunning (generally deadly), often directed toward a smart-ass who thinks there's a better way, and won't shut up after he's been politely tolerated for a few seasons, until some old man interprets a routine set-back as a dark omen, and gives the loud-mouth the crookered finger.
It's the same in the world of sports. Some guy is the dirtiest douchebag living when he plays for the other team; but then when your team adds "sandpaper" by acquiring the same notorious douchebag, the message instantly shifts to, "he might be an asshole, but he's our asshole". In this lingo, an asshole is a righteous douchebag fighting for a just cause. Around puberty, mine/yours graduates to us/them.
I never get on that wagon: the asshole is still the same old douchebag. To my mind revolutionary rhetoric never makes much sense. Most of the time, the new douchebags are worse than the current douchebags, with less of their rap sheet known around town to keep them cautious. If you can saw off, from time to time a housecleaning is a good measure. I don't have a problem trading douche for douche.
Politicians are like public transit: it really doesn't matter a lot which bus arrives. Some are cleaner than others, and don't rumble as much, or the driver doesn't do the herky-jerky with the power train every 30 seconds for the entire trip.
There are no political systems yet discovered minus the ugly buses. In democracy, the buses run on time and get washed clean every so often. It's a big advance by historical standards.
Nice fishline. Taxes are universal in modern society. We're nowhere close to being "sucked dry", though we complain as if it were true (until the corn fiasco, food prices were the lowest in human record). Our politicians govern themselves with an ear cupped daily to the opinion polls, and every bill to change the tax rate is mired in controversy and obstruction.
It's true the other ear is cupped toward insanely wealthy power brokers, but even having one hand cupped in the general direction of the public interest is said major accomplishment by historical standards.
With all this camera phones out there, politicians might soon have to crane an eye stalk, as well, to the public interest.
Unfortunately, with the staggering advances in image manipulation, every photograph will soon be mired in JFK controversy, and then the polarizers of discontent can go back to not hearing each other inside their fuzzy wombs that "make sense" once you know the pornographic secret about that which oppresses you.
The average person rigs the outcome far worse than that by favouring modes of urban development and taxation that create a warm, fuzzy, happy place until someone mutters "peak oil" under their breath.
Peak oil is a stupid phrase. It doesn't exist to describe the world, where the situation resembles more of a plateau, but it is useful to poke pins into the psyches of people who purchase a luxury three car garage in outer suburbia then complain about the facts of life as if no-one ever told them. Who knew that with rising global population, the price of gas would go up?
Vancouver mayor may pay the political price for bike lanes
This is playing out practically on the level of the banking system bail-out. An speedy commute to work in a guzzling single-passenger automobile is effectively a political entitlement because in a democracy, the lemmings are always right. Reward the people who made living choices consistent with a lower carbon footprint (by granting them a bike lane), feel the wrath of everyone who didn't (by taking away a car lane).
I'm not convinced a bicycle saves a huge amount of carbon when I look at my food bill. There are health benefits, though, to offset the food cost. In our household where we really succeed in reducing our carbon footprint is by using bus+bicycles to combine multiple car trips into a single car trip. Essentially our occupancy ratio goes up when we do use the vehicle, so we transfer some but not all of the miles onto the food budget.
Real savings come from long term planning and good logistics. If the term "peak oil" makes you toss in your sleep, you're not ready to understand this. Peak oil makes the problem sound like an earthquake: you know it's coming, but you don't know when, so your planning obligations are minimal.
For a plateau, one could reasonably plan a decade ahead by advocating good urban development policy and other such responsible and unpopular activities.
Late at night, a drunk was on his knees beneath a street-light, evidently looking for something. "What have you lost?" asks a passer-by. "My graduation watch," replied the drunk. "It fell off after I flung myself out of the ivory tower into the vague proximity of the real world."
The passer-by watches the futile search for a few minute then inquires, "so which building did you leap from?"
"A few institutions up the street," replied the drunk.
"Why are you looking for it here if you lost it there?"
"Because the funding is better."
"And because the sirens of publish or perish made it hard to hear where it landed?"
"Yeah, that too."
We already accept spectacularly dim and neutral matter, but then we declare that a physical quantity known within the profession as "kluge matter" is a hopeless kluge to the standard model, because you can't see it where the funding is good.
Good call, brought to you by the same people who originally named "junk DNA".
Let me explain big science: A) Anything you can't fund your department to study is dark or dirty; B) If it's costing you money you raised to study something else, it's a rubber boot on a fish hook.
No, it indicates that they aren't doing a good job of making substantive arguments to an audience with no clue.
The circadian phase response curve is increasingly well understood. I personally have a circadian rhythm disorder. I'm intimately familiar with my own PRC.
Research I don't have at hand shows that among the elderly, treatment with blue light in the evening helps them make it through the night with more sheep and less roosters.
Younger people and misfits such as myself often prefer to advance their circadian phase: for this you want intense blue light in the early morning (best in the hour before you feel like waking) or melatonin in the middle of your waking day.
I'm more suspicious about this ear thing because of reduce, recycle, and reuse: mother nature just can't help herself from raiding the molecular junk drawer. She's already got the recipe. Why not?
It's a long chain from the light bulb to the eardrum to molecules of the brain to the suprachiasmatic nucleus.
I'd be very happy if a pair of Lite-Brite laser disco earmuffs could sort my circadian phase out while I slumber happily through my pre-waking dreams. Melatonin controls my problem, but it impacts my performance at about the intensity of two pints of beer consumed just as I'm entering the most productive part of my day. Unfortunately, I can't just grow a liver the size of a sofa cushion and have the impairment fade away.
You don't seem to understand what game you are playing here. You are militating for group-think, rather than relating truth on the ground. I wouldn't be against laughing people out of the profession for having no clue about release dynamics, but neither would I claim this is fait accompli at any level within the profession.
The first year student also understands that holding the assignment back to correct defects and submitting it late will result in an even larger reduction in droplets of holy water. This is the dominant lesson, no?
Let's imagine a CS program where every assignment you complete goes into a permanent foundry-forge where any other student (or member of the public) can report bugs against your past work (these would be confirmed bugs complete with a failed test result). At this school, you are not allowed to graduate while any bug remains unfixed in any assignment you've completed in your four year program. This would be cheap to implement at the registrar's office, since they can assign your outstanding bug count the same graduation code as your outstanding library fine. They're in the loop on code reuse.
The graduating class could be reasonably ranked by "patches against" when applying for continuity roles. Another group of people could be ranked by "days before deadline" of all initial submissions meeting a minimum quality requirement, no matter how much cheese ensued. Yet another group could be ranked by "bang for buck" on the total complexity of solutions passing the grade with the least amount of bloat. A final group would be unranked yet employed: for outstanding creativity, generality, and insight over and above the required norm, even if the other metrics fell short from time to time, as they must when you strive for great things. There's just enough employers out there tapping the cream to siphon these people off.
If we had more such schools and modes of discernment, your initial remark wouldn't have reached hyperbolic escape velocity on igniting the first booster rocket.
FTFY. Despite the virtue of understatement, I'm not sure your obstacle-free version was making sufficient contact with the intended nerve ending. As you get older, you place less emphasis on being on the right side of the debate, and more emphasis on whether any effort is expended to move the debate forward. The malice of elision becomes magnified.
Weasel words are carefully cultivated intrigues of the aggrieved, when the road is hot and dusty, and picnic of complaint on the banks of Mosquito Creek seems preferable to slogging toward a twinkle of illumination on the far horizon.
After forty years of following technology, I assure you that wherever there's a land rush in progress, a compatibility clusterbuck is sure to follow. Early mover advantage is a broken window for everyone else. It's not actually the nature of the standardization process to be out in front of the gypsy caravan waxing behind the Spanish Galleon of zeitgeist redux. As much as we complain about this, the gypsies are a tribe of legendary endurance, hardship, and snark (as often featured here on snarkdote).
Standardization is the introverted naturalist's account of rats, cockroaches, raccoons, ravens, seagulls, and urban deer: what's left behind after progressive forces have eradicated the dodo, pillaged the cod fishery, and turned most of the polar bear population into shaggy rugs of bravado.
Sometimes I lose it when confronted by the lemming vortex.
Here's one for you. Has the modern world experienced a dramatically reduced use of fire? It's been a while since I stacked a cord of firewood. Guess I'm too busy driving my truck to and from my place of employment. At 3000 RPM my four cylinder four stroke lights a fire about 50 times per second, for as long as I cruise to or from freedom.
Here's another institution seeing dramatically reduced usage these days: jobs that pay well. In technological economies, an increasingly smaller portion of the workforce delivers most of the value and receives the majority of compensation.
How many Google engineers are performing data analytics on an iPad Touch?
The PC with multiple giant monitors is a platform of full intellectual engagement. It's putative demise seems to track demographic trends in the workforce at large. Another technology of full engagement: human language. Seems to have weathered the storm of fashion with nary a blip.
Perhaps it's less that the form factor of productivity has become obsolete than that many of the people formerly making casual use have jumped the shark to consumption-oriented platforms with lush, manicured walled gardens.
I hear trees are also toppling out of fashion since the invention of the chain saw. Some effort in making apt comparisons is useful in pulling up short of the cliff.
Here's another one, maybe closer to the truth: the giant beige box is going the way of the telephone, which also used to be a giant box shackled to the wall. I still make the majority of my calls on a shackle-phone with a proper handset and I rarely have to participate in fishbowl-to-fishbowl sonic experiences that remind me of garbled audio from the 1960s. Those old shackle phones are holding up remarkably well for those of us who value clear communication over whim of wherever.
Taking that position, it makes it hard to understand why so many academics heap scorn on Wikipedia, which operates under a similar proscription: you can only write what you can source, even if what you wish to say is so obvious that no reputable source bothers to spell it out, in direct terms.
You can not state the insidiously obvious on Wikipedia. I once tried to add a footnote to a term from computer science that has long fallen out of fashion, as to why the term has fallen from fashion (it was always stupid deep down), but it was so out of fashion nobody with anything useful to contribute to the field had commented on the term for fifteen years; while many in the active profession would have immediately agreed with me, my contribution was scratched. Newcomers to the field become aware of the taxonomic term, and take it too seriously, thinking it conveys professional insight. Wikipedia would be a great place to spread the news that the term has died and not gone to heaven: you sound like a neophyte for taking it seriously. Every profession has these lingering embarrassments, just ask Freud.
Concerning my scratched contribution: my bad. You have to play by the rules. What's unfortunate about Wikipedia culture is that once the rule is decided, awareness of where or how it breaks down is not encouraged. Here again, Wikipedia mirrors life in the academic setting. No surprise to me that contribution wanes to precisely the degree that academic virtues wax.
The textual conceit of literary criticism doesn't hold up to Kolmogorov-Chaitin complexity theory. Not much does. Practical problems abound in theories of infinite potency and nil applicability. All the results of K-C theory live in the event horizon between finite and the infinite: where the gravitational mass of the energy of computation sucks you backwards into a black-hole before the (finite) computation terminates.
K-C theory (as it exists in my intuition) would not sharply discriminate between the author and his text; neither would it sharply discriminate one author from the next, but heavily factor out the common font of all memes, both genetic and cultural, if you fed it plenty of surrounding context.
Restriction to analysis of the text is an institutional pretext: the institution of literary criticism requires this (unless you've got Marshall McLuhan hidden behind a handy placard a la Annie Hall, which is funny, because never was a man less capable of tilting the balance toward clarity).
If the author can't explain himself (where "him" is the first metasyntactic variable of lambda elided), you've got some explaining to do about explanation. The big bang doesn't exactly "explain" itself either, but we do happen to occupy a strange physical regime where physical theory is possible and thus amenable to K-C compression. Scientists ponder why physical law is possible (it doesn't have to be). It's just something we observe in the universe we happen to inhabit. (At this point otherwise sensible people start dividing by zero by contemplating universes we don't inhabit; yes, you can make our existence contingent on a prior that divides by zero, but I don't see where that gets you, precisely--except out of the frying pan, into the fire).
If you're striving for credit in an institutional setting (especially the common coin of undergraduate credit, where you tip your end product into the round file immediately upon its award), you're not going to earn much by speculating on the mind of the author explicitly.
Of course, our capacity to engage in textual criticism presumes a cognitive architecture where we do precisely that, but then we erase our workings at the boundary of collectivisation. Oh, the humanities.
The first thing an alien galaxy will do with our emanating (but not eminent) symbol stream is construct a theory of
If the government isn't mad at the ratings agency, they are probably not doing their job. The message here: if America wants to continue with politics of intransigence, they can experiment with their own money.
It's such an embarrassing spectacle, it's amazing anyone outside America is willing to bankroll the production.
I've listened to a lot of commentators reminiscing that even in the Nixon era, the parties worked together for the good of America. Maybe we should have a big Survivor episode for members of congress so they can all get it out of their system.
I'm reading a Lincoln biography that portrays Salmon P. Chase as a right PITA, but a highly competent right-wing abolitionist PITA. Seems we should jack-hammer Lincoln out of the Lincoln Memorial and erect Chase in his place, to give present day congress a more achievable target of on-balance good behaviour.
In honour of the Free Soil party, we should rename the Tea Party the Night Soil party.
Because the gridlock in Washington is twice as stupid as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.
Seriously, a party built around swaying a base of creationists toward policies which entitle billionaires is not the best program for the future of America.
I can definitely recall running NCSA Mosaic 2.0, but I'm a bit dim whether I cut my teeth on an earlier Mosaic. A year or two before this, I had managed to obtain internet access when I lived in Toronto in the first week available on a provider called io.org where I mostly used the shell account on a system called r-node. Wikipedia says Internex Online was the first consumer dial-up ISP in Canada. Lots of people I knew had access to the internet through university dial-up accounts, back when September came once a year.
r-node was hardly what you would call a reliable service. I learned basic shell survival skills and made heavy use of an archie server based at University of McGill and downloaded a lot of technical information over ftp, if my session would stay up long enough to succeed. I tried gopher, but decided it was a bit of a crock.
I was in Halifax the year Mosaic came out, dialing in through Chebucto Freenet. This was a great community service. Cheap and surprisingly reliable for the price. Lynx was the default browser and I was happy enough with this since I was mostly using a 486 laptop with a monochrome screen.
On the Mosaic internet, I remember grey screens with rainbow separator bars populated with animated men-at-work GIFs and link-farm homesteads as far as the eye could see. This appalling landscape was so obviously the future it was almost beneath comment. I vaguely recall that you could find content at universities, wired.com, and gaming companies (ID Software must have been a frequent destination). My technical interest at this time was finding a way to compile the HP Standard Template Library with the Watcom C/C++ compiler.
So far I'm treating Mosaic as gopher clubbed onto the ice floe with a giant clue stick. I recall reading the URL specification in detail, which far more than HTML seemed to be the magic sauce. Mosaic dazzled in potential more than it impressed on first unveiling.
The first time I regarded document mark-up in a different light was when Sun started to promote the Java language. I read about the stack coherency guarantee, which impressed me, then I read about floating point ... and I flipped the bozo-bit so hard it almost gave me a concussion. The idea that floating point math was required to give the same answer on every underlying implementation offended me to the darkest nub of Scientology-hatred. Later it played out that strict adherence on x86 reduced floating point performance by an order of magnitude, because the implementation had to suppress "double rounding" involving the floating point guard bits (64 bit mantissa for working results). Sun thought that arrogating an order-of-magnitude reduction in floating point performance on x86 was doing the world a favour. Their world, not mine.
In high school, my idea of excitement was to program my calculator during chemistry class, leaving just enough of my brain active to grasp the general principle, then to use the midterm to apply my gleanings to a problem set for the first time. I spent my homework hours devising algorithms or formulas for anything that caught my fancy, with scant connection to school work. There was a lot of muttering about "heuristics" in chemistry class, which was a red flag for me to tune out completely. It always turned out that there was a precise answer available if you had a bit more foundation in math.
To my shock and horror on one chemistry mid-term, I discovered that the equilibrium condition for solution concentration expands to a cubic polynomial. This didn't trouble me as such, but I knew that no-one else in the class scribbling beside me was solving cubic equations. Maybe I had my workings wrong. I reviewed this three times. No, my workings are absolutely solid: it's a cubic equation ten ways from zero. Well, I've got 25 minutes left in a 45 minute exam, I better solve me some cubics.
In turns out the heuristic I missed involved approximating the cubic with a quadratic at the loss of about 10%
Peer review is a convergent process viewed over decades and centuries. It's not a particularly good local filter. For my taste, it gets far too much credit for being an effective gatekeeper (most of the time) against errant nonsense. Our pathetic current generation search technology supplements the stem "brog" with a potent example, almost as if it could read my mind.
We don't think that peer review in software amounts to accreditation of bug-free perfection. In a good setting, it might be a fairly effective defense against architectural howlers. Is scientific peer review somehow magically better? As Einstein once said, "the secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources". His corollary is less often quoted: "the secret to authority is to hide your scowlers".
In the rare case when we peek behind the scientific curtain, it's an unseemly mess of data collusion, warranting special commissions to assure us that nothing was actually as bad as it looked on virgin grep: political cabals to render suspect data in the best light are business as usual. (We did learn that a paper making sophisticated statistical claims doesn't necessarily number a statistician among the secretive panel; as per established custom, the rubber stamp is equally valid either way.) The commission is right in their verdict as viewed against actual scientific norms if you shed the idea that peer review is worth a pot to piss in divorced from it's established track record for convergence to scientific sanity after a decade or two or ten.
This new-age search guy missed the entire AI memo. The field of AI had all the creativity in the known universe (and then some) back in the 1960s when pronouncing imminent breakthroughs.
And besides, Wolfram Alpha has already staked a huge position in search as-we-don't-yet-know-it, with a whole lot more credibility behind it than anything I expect to see delivered from the hands of this puff-piece pendulum.
Vonnegut once wrote a story about people like you.
You're implicitly trying to argue that "work" is a less demanding performance aesthetic than some unstated higher aesthetic that rhymes with "drool". One man's drool is another man's slobber.
You're also missing the aesthetic known as "life". You know, the slow self-amplification of microscopic information feedback systems to become enmeshed in patterns of global interconnection whose mere parameters are a bitch to distill?
Some believe that 99.9999% of the apparent complexity was imported from the boundary conditions, where all the integrals experience a step function to a higher cardinality. Others believe in the crockpot theory: that planet earth stumbled by accident into a perfect sous-vide orbital configuration; whether the heavy-handed asteroid spice mix was essential to the Maillard reaction of Brownian motion has yet to be determined. (Oh look, I cleverly managed to leave out a word that rhymes with "crockpot". Amazing what you can smuggle under the surface. )
In this amazing system known as life, what matters is generativity: that the next flavour layer can build upon the previous flavour layer, without becoming a soggy mess.
Nothing I suppose, if you believe on the basis of symmetry that we completed our allotted 0.0001% addition to system complexity, so it's time to sit back in the comfy chair and admire our accomplishments.
A whole lot, if you believe that sous-vide is a work in progress. I'm not so sure the next generation wants to share your saliva. They might declare it a "soggy mess" and start over.
I actually think that computer science would benefit from more sage retrospectives on the path not taken, where one does not necessarily end the analysis with the smoking gun.
Buffer allocations in the C language family tend to be static. No matter what you do in the privacy of your own buffer, the boundaries (front and back) are firm: whether poaching from your neighbour's apple tree, making a spectacle of indecent display, or committing an access fault triggering a core dump of yellow police tape and chalk outlines.
Traditionally it takes more creativity to get arrested in the front yard. In the back yard, most programmers have no standard of conduct whatsoever.
...);
safecat (back_fence, the_usual_suspects,
wildcat (just_the_ammunition);
It's true, you might know that the unfenced wildcat() is OK due to some prudent arithmetic three loops up, as etched into stone tablets by a guru of right thinking (at the optimal dosage point between second and third coffee) embodied in an immutable marble monument of nil maintenance.
Usually in an API the front fence is defacto whatever src position is supplied as the current working position; where the algorithm swings both ways, both ought to be passed explicitly, in addition to the working position. Helper functions in a tightly-crafted C runtime library might sanely presume that this condition holds. A chosen few among us are well suited to stone work where efficiency matters.
The major fault with the C language was failing to provide an "Ordinary People" set of buffer management routines (anything that clobbers memory) where the back fence comes first in every function signature.
One can define accountability like that in a tome with a Forward, an Introduction, 50 pages of End Notes, and an Index that doesn't suck; an engaged reader will grant your linguistic conceit in the brief and bright mental interludes between the penumbra of naps and heavy meals.
In the fray of online discourse--in the greasy orange penumbra between Cheetos from the monkey-fist Pez dispenser--the word is freighted with sober reflection by rule-of-law abiding power brokers; your average Cheeto-chomper will hearken back to the gold star he received from his second grade teacher after mastering "i before e" and presume some kind of glowing auspice; or, if less vested in clean living, his intestines will quail over creative omissions in his annual gold-filling divulgence.
In America, you can believe in Elvis alien abduction, crop circles, biblical creationism, or worst of all, scientific creationism and no one posts your mug shot on the internet in galleries of eternal shame to shake you down. What is accountability, anyway?
A better word choice would have been repercussions: accountability as applied to any isolated sound bite. Do you think that for having everything you've ever said housed under a single roof (insert payment card here), public discourse would become less of a carnival duck shoot?
Be yourself and speak your mind today, though it contradict all you have said before.
~ ~ ~ Elbert Hubbard
The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.
~ ~ ~ Oscar Wilde
People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be 'consistent'.
~ ~ ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes
A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.
~ ~ ~ George Bernard Shaw
Speak what you think to-day in words as hard as cannon-balls and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.
~ ~ ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do I contradict myself? / Very well then / I contradict myself / I am large, I contain multitudes.
~ ~ ~ Walt Whitman
From a Wikipedia editor of Irish descent:
IRL many wish to avoid being lumped in with Walt Whitman; nearly everyone wishes to avoid becoming known for making quips about the Irish. Yes, I'm going to abandon the cover of intelligent thought and write like that Wikipedia guy on my public blog.
I can't remember far enough back to the day when I didn't know that heat was a more severe limit than the available energy supply. Only the money for nothing, chicks for free crowd ever thought differently.
I mean, how hard is it to plug the mass of planet earth into E=mcc? Or just the hydrogen portion of the earth's oceans? Hot enough for ya?
Freeman Dyson talked about the importance of signal to noise ratio in physical systems at least as far back as Infinite in All Directions (1988). I vaguely recall he argued that if the universe continued to expand until it reached a fraction of a degree Kelvin in temperature, and you only had a few megawatts of available free energy in the whole universe, at such a low temperature, the universe could remain filled with computation.
Heat kills. Our mammalian forefathers made a major misstep to lock in at 300 degrees Kelvin. We'll regret that yet. Even worse than the C language NUL terminator mistake.
Normally I tend to agree with what I've read from PHK, but this one seems wide of the mark. If you involve a *real* C guru in the discussion, I don't think there would be much sentiment toward nixing the sentinel.
C makes a big deal about the equivalence of pointers and arrays. Plus in C a string also represents every suffix string.
char string [] = { 't', 'e', 's', 't', '\0' };
char* cdr_string = string + 1;
Perfectly valid, as God intended. A string with a length prefix is a hybrid data structure. What is the size of the length structure up front? It can be interesting in C to sort all suffixes of a string, having only one copy of the string itself. Try that with length prefix strings. (The trivial algorithm is far from ideal for large or degenerate character sequences, but it does provide insight into position trees and the Burrows-Wheeler transform.)
Nor would I blame all the stupid coding errors on the '\0' terminator convention. In C, a determined idiot can mess up just about anything, unless the compiler takes over and does things for you, a la Pascal by another name. If that had been the bias, would be all be using C now, or some other language? Repeat after me: Generativity Rocks. Nanny languages usually manage to bork generativity over. Correct Programming Made Easy never strays far from the subtitle Composition Made Difficult.
No one who ever read Dijkstra and took him serious ever made a tiny fraction of the stupid mistakes blamed on hapless zero.
If you want to point to a real steaming pile, strcpy() was designed by a moron with a bad hang-over and no copy of Dijkstra within a 100 mile radius. It was tantamount to declaring "you don't really need to test your preconditions ... what kind of sissy would do that?"
C is a nice design, as evidenced by how seamlessly the STL was grafted onto C++ at the abstraction layer (at the syntax layer, not so much). The problem with C was always a communication problem. To use C well one must test preconditions on operation validity. To use algebra well one must test preconditions on operation validity.
Where does PHK lay the blame for the algebraist who made it possible to divide both side of an equation by zero, or multiply an inequality by -1? Preferably with the complete moron who doesn't check preconditions on the validity of the operation. Two thousand years later, now we have a better solution?
PHK is right about cache hierarchies. By the time cache hierarchies arrived, we had C++ with entirely different string representations.
For some reason I've never been keen on having a programmer who can't manage to correctly test the precondition for buffer overflow making deep design decisions about little blocks of lead in the radiation path.
And it's not even much of a burden. As Dijkstra observed, for many algorithms, once you have all your preconditions right and you've got a provable variant, there's often very little left to decide. It actually makes the design of many algorithms simpler in the mode of divide and conquer: first get your preconditions and variant right (you're now half done and you've barely begun to think hard), *then* worry about additional logic constraints (or performance felicitous sequencing of legal alternatives).
The coders who first try to get their logical requirements correct and then puzzle out the preconditions do indeed make the original task more difficult than not bothering with preconditions at all, supposing there's some kind of accurate measure over crap solutions, which I refuse to concede.
Paying for a lawyer to tell you he can't actually help you, not wise.
You'd think computer programmers wouldn't be quite so stupid. I'm researching building codes for secondary suites today, as someone I know is looking at purchasing a nearby property. There's the official act, which is buried behind a paywall. There are also unreliable secondary sources, which I can click through immediately. Should I even bother?
Here's the thing. Willing to take on the risk if:
plumbing + electrical conversion < $refit_budget
Either *alone* (you've heard of short circuit evaluation) could render the decision negative. Each might have a fee required to obtain authoritative information. Money is saved by accessing *first* the official code with the greatest chance of rendering a negative decision (suitably weighted by the fee required).
Now how am I supposed to weight the odds without asking complete idiots? The authoritative sources are stuck behind the fee I'm trying to minimize.
Rely upon is so "Wikipedia will never work" it makes me puke. There's a lot of potential for prudent cost minimization long before you have to pay the fucking lawyers their extortionate fees. Excellent lawyers that don't charge fees are as common on the ground as massless pulleys.
The whole point of social group-think is to retune the balance of power until you're pretty sure you aren't paying a lawyer his hostage fee for a hostage he doesn't actually have.
I don't mind paying lawyers for services rendered. A proper title search is real work. I do mind paying lawyers for making me feel like chicken shit. I live every waking hour of my professional life navigating rule based systems, but somehow the building code surpasses my intellectual powers of first appraisal?
Primo Levi once wrote a book titled, "If not now, when." If the technologists of the world are not willing to stand up and say "your rule based system is full of shit" then what?
After self-driving cars become routine, textual analysis of laws and bylaws is in the gun sights. There are already TED talks setting up traffic cones for the battle to come:
Four ways to fix a broken legal system
No shit, Sherlock. And that's just the first one I found. Adding a strikethrough attribute to "get a lawyer" as sage advice concerning matters of everyday practicality would make a decent life mission. Don't get me wrong: conflict happens. With the potential for real conflict, you most definitely want to talk to professionals, and the fees won't be trivial. But no-one asks any more "Is there potential for real conflict?" What we ask is "Would you rather feel chicken-shit wise or self-assured stupid?" Who wants to live in a world like that?
Hate to intrude with an original thought. We have fairly strict libel laws to prevent slathering misinformation about a person hither and yon, whether the SOB deserves it or not.
Linking vast swathes of electronic records together of dubious provenance, accuracy, and agenda is in many ways worse than public slander: it only takes place in closed rooms behind your back with your immediate financial interests at stake, it's hard or impossible to prove this is going on, and recourse under the law heavily favours the windmill.
When it's just one institution putting black marks on your file for lodging an accurate complaint, so be it. In the theory of the market, you can severe your relationship and start fresh with a different service-minimizing, TOS-touting telecom-in-training.
When your insurance company puts a black mark on your file for filing a successful claim, and then they share with every other financial institution on the planet that you're a born complainer, or it gets linked up surreptitiously behind the scenes, this is not right.
Using a government sanctioned number just makes it that much easier to pretend "the number is really you" rather than using some UID of their own devising, which is clearly just an access key into a database of dirt cobbled together by grasping econocrats.