IN THE US. It is worth remembering that there are an awful lot more people not subject to the strange photo copyright rules of the US than are. I understood that CC, like the GPL, was supposed to be a worldwide license, not just a US based one. IN THE US. It is worth remembering that there are an awful lot more lawyers willing to sue over the strange photo copyright rules than the rest of the world combined. I understand that the CC, like the GPL, was supposed to export American legal culture globally, not just cater to US based legal inequity.
I don't advocate protecting the programmer from him/herself.
I do advocate designing primitives as essential to the language as the C string functions to powerfully remind the programmer using those functions of the programmer's logical obligations and support the programmer to reason correctly about those obligations, without having to digest 15 lines of preceding context to see that calloc() provided the implied terminating NUL.
strlcpy and strlcat - consistent, safe, string copy and concatenation by Todd C. Miller and Theo de Raadt, OpenBSD project
There are several problems encountered when strncpy() and strncat() are used as safe versions of strcpy() and strcat(). Both functions deal with NUL-termination and the length parameter in different and non-intuitive ways that confuse even experienced programmers. They also provide no easy way to detect when truncation occurs. Finally, strncpy() zero-fills the remainder of the destination string, incurring a performance penalty. Of all these issues, the confusion caused by the length parameters and the related issue of NUL-termination are most important. When we audited the OpenBSD source tree for potential security holes we found rampant misuse of strncpy() and strncat(). While not all of these resulted in exploitable security holes, they made it clear that the rules for using strncpy() and strncat() in safe string operations are widely misunderstood. An Interview with OpenBSD's Marc Espie
We have had a lot of success explaining the issues and getting a lot of people to switch from strcpy/strcat to strlcpy/strlcat.
Weirdly enough, the Linux people are about the only major group of people that has constantly stayed deaf to these arguments. The chief opponent to strlcpy in glibc is most certainly Ulrich Drepper, who argues that good programmers don't need strlcpy, since they don't make mistakes while copying strings. This is a very mystifying point of view, since bugtraq daily proves that a lot of Linux and free software programmers are not that bright, and need all the help they can get. The original C strcpy() could just as easily have had the semantics of strlcpy(), with insane_strcpy() provided to copy strings/trash core without a cycle wasted.
One must recognize that in a solid code base, thinking occurs more often while reading code than writing code. Correctness is not a write-only proposition in any living code base.
We came to the conclusion that a foolproof alternative to strncpy() and strncat() was needed, primarily to simplify the job of the programmer, but also to make code auditing easier.
The original C string functions were (and remain) a pedagodic disaster. Most beginning programmers failed to realized how much thinking had been folded into the surrounding context. If they were reading K&R, that thinking existed. If they were reading any code they had at hand, it likely hadn't, by any survey of average C code quality ten years later. With the original string functions, whether this careful thinking existed is not obvious without doing a lot of mental work, and that work has to be repeated *every time* the code is seriously reviewed.
Worst of all, the strcpy() function seemed to imply "buffer overflow is no great concern, we're not even going to give you a single argument on this very dangerous function to help you avert it". It was a false parsimony to save that extra argument in the default case.
This isn't at the level of whether the handgun has a safety or not. It's at the level of whether it is possible to chamber a round too large for the barrel. I can point the gun successfully, but I'd greatly prefer it not to detonate in any other direction.
A more thoughtful C string API would have averted mistakes on the magnitude of chambering bad ammunition, without encumbering the pointy end in the slightest, or failing to endanger the programmer's foot.
Anyone with a true gift to become a kernel dev has probably engaged in flame wars with his/her professors already, regardless of what she/he teaches.
Pointers aren't rocket science. If you never perform an operation where you haven't first met the operation's preconditions, you never get a pointer error.
If you aren't rigorously checking preconditions on *every* operation you perform, you're not going to cut it as a kernel dev anyway. Pointers are the least of your problems. Race conditions can become exceptionally hard to reason about. The prudent kernel dev architects the system such that this doesn't transpire. That requires a whole different galaxy of aptitude beyond not leaking pointers.
When I first learned C in the K&R era, I thought those greybeards were pretty clever. Then I came across strcpy() and I wondered what they were smoking that I wasn't sharing. I thought to myself, their must be some higher level idiom that protects against buffer overflow, because no sane architect would implement such a dangerous function otherwise. Man, was I ever naive.
More likely, too many of them had learned to program on paper teletypes, and just couldn't bring themselves to face having to type unsafe_strcpy() when they had reason to know it would work safely and efficiently.
The C language deserves a great deal of shame in this matter of giving many beginning programmers the false impression that any function call should dispense with formal preconditions.
Interestingly, if you sit down to implement an STL template algorithm manipulating iterators, it proves pretty much impossible to avoid careful consideration of range and validity.
OTOH, C++ makes it charmingly easy for an object copy routine, such as operator=(self& dst, const self& src) to make a complete hash of managed resources if you fail to affirm dst != src.
There are plenty of amateur mathematicians who can manipulate complex formulas in amazing ways. The difference with a professional mathematician is that the necessary conditions for each transformation is clearly spelled out.
A = B ==> A/C = B/C iff C != 0 A > B ==> C*A > C*B iff C > 0
Infinite series must converge, etc.
I'm not even getting into defining A,B,C as fields, groups, rings, monoids, etc. for maximum generality.
Yet the average programmer feels sullied to exercise the same intellectual caution manipulating pointers. I've never understood that sentiment. My attitude is this: if that's how you feel, get your lazy coding ass out of my interrupt handler; go code a dialog box in some Visual Basic application that won't work right no matter what you do.
Why did the software industry play out this way? Other professions have much harsher standards. Primarily because software was in an exponential expansion phase, any work was regarded as better than no work (perhaps falsely), and industry couldn't afford to reduce the talent pool by demanding actual talent.
Now we've allowed many people to enter the profession without comprehending the rigors of preconditions. It's as if we had taught a generation of lawyers how to practice law, but omitted liability. Oops. What to do about it? Invent Java, and tell all these programmers it wasn't their fault in the first place.
So yes, Java doesn't teach very darn much about the harsh realities of actually thinking. And since thinking is hard, it's an impediment to productivity anyway, so it hasn't much been missed. The only thing we lost in the shuffle is our professional self respect.
Isn't that just a human justification for our woefully short little spans of attention? "First impressions" is a functional antonym to "considered response".
First impressions inherently channel brinksmanship: there is no second impression without a first impression, but you can't, uh, shoot first and ask questions later. You've got to save up your war bolus so as not to cloud anyone's judgment with a half measure. Meanwhile, you spend years of your life laboring in secrecy, in hopes that the big moment for the grand unveiling will someday arrive. Uh, count me out.
Even if the first impression is all you've waited for, you're not over the hump. We have a handy phrase for the big letdown that follows: all sizzle and no steak. But nevermind if the grand first impression falls flat. Try, try, again. There's a lot of fish in the sea. By your tenth or twentieth first impression, you might have learned enough to make it to second base.
Did I just read one poster claim improved "stubble" resolution? HD wins by a facial hair?
Want something you can distinguish on that 12" TV you can see through the window of your neighbour's house? Refresh rate on a horizontal pan shot. Every movie director alive has learned to pan the camera sideways *very* slowly, or with carefully chosen composition to minimize the stroboscopic effect. In action movies, the action is always coming straight at you. Any other direction will make you sick.
When are we going to finally get a true 72Hz frame rate? Beta (particle) ray? Higgs Boson ray? I'm sure the actor's guild wishes to maintain the 24Hz standard. Probably hard to get enough light to film at 72 fps. But rather trivial to animate at 72 fps. Real life celebrity babes are temperamental, soon become old fat ugly and imprisoned. Animated digital babes stay young forever, like Mickey Mouse, have a new dress every day, and need never wear the same hairstyle twice, unless they feel like it. When a digital babes goes looking for the bourbon, she never forgets her lines.
The hanging chad problem was a confirmation problem: confirming that the punched ballot card would be tabulated by the voter as intended.
I've never understand why this isn't broken down as a two step process. To me this is a separation of concerns problem.
One concern is to produce an accurately punched ballot (intentional, complete, unambiguous). This step has no memory of voter actions.
The other concern is to verify that the punched ballot reads back as intended when tabulated or manually verified. Few voters should be allowed to escape without obtaining a green light from the ballet confirmation test. This step has no input buttons. It scans the ballot, displays a summary of what it read (and any problems detected), and provides a green light (or not).
1) voter marks ballot (punch card)
1a) provide a manual mechanical punch for determined voters wishing to do so (highly unlikely to fail, and serves as a backup if the fancy technology fails or engenders controversy)
1b) provide access-enhanced display screens with automatic punch for voters who can't or don't wish to do (1a)
2) voter presents ballot to a (secret) vote confirmation reader, which indicates the selections detected on a screen, and notifies the voter of whether they have cast valid votes in all available races (this machines has no other inputs)
3) validated ballot stuffed into secure ballot box under oversight of voting officials
Notes
The auto punch should display an image of the confirmed punch pattern to be verified before pressing print (aka mangle) which remains to be verified by the voter after the machine spits out the auto-punched voting card.
The auto punch has no memory of voter actions whatsoever.
Every screen presented by the auto punch should correspond to printed posters which anyone can corroborate as accurate. It should be possible for any voter to download these posters off the internet prior to the election. There should be practice software available which allows users to walk through the autopunch procedure. The practice software should be able to print the desired punch card pattern, which a voter would be able to carry in and visually duplicate (in secrecy).
Every race on the ballot has exactly one mark, for a candidate, or for no-vote. There should be *exactly* one possible punch pattern for every possible voting preference (combination of votes).
The ballot confirmation machine can maintain "pre-counts" to focus manual recounting on the close races. At least one non-close race should be challenged (at random) to verify reported pre-count accuracy.
I personally like the punch system that physically removes shards of paper. Ink is subject to fancy chemistry.
Summary
The official vote (ballot) is a physical object which is physically altered by the vote selection.
The ballot has exactly one physical state to represent each allowable voter preference.
The voter can determine in the weeks before the election what that pattern will look like according to the voting preference, and every carry a printed likeness into the voting process.
Any machine that touches the physical ballot displays the ballot pattern it 1) intends to stamp, 2) or detected during read-back.
There is an issue with the pre-counter being tricked into counting the same finished ballot more than once. This shouldn't matter, as it mostly exists to get quick results so we can watch the concession speeches and head to bed.
Double counting will show up on the official count later. It should be armed to count once by an election official for each person who enters the booth.
The main difference is the voter will leave the process with far greater confidence that their physical ballot indicated their preference in a way that must later be counted unambiguously.
I agree, Unix doesn't suck enough to support McAfee in the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed. If it isn't broken don't fix it. To most of the world, sound advice. To McAfee, napalm in the morning.
Nevertheless, I would like to see more corporations complain about vagueness of interpretation in the copyright act. I'm generally in favour of less confusion in law in all matters. It would be nice to break the cycle where vagueness most benefits the deep pocket.
The whole point of God is that it is rational to be irrational. The magic junction box is known as faith. It's a black rectangle with dimensions 1x4x9 that can't be scratched by a laser or any other known tool. If sufficiently perplexed, it will heat up enough to fry your latkes. Does not work as a contraceptive, and might result in bleeding.
As for belief in faith, any day now I'm expecting to see it show up on an advanced fMRI scan, right beside Husband Hill.
As it happens, yesterday I had my first significant contact with OS X. Many of my family members had that weird thing from before OS X that wasn't really an operating system, so far as I could tell judging by how it managed its memory. It always struck me as paint program masquerading as an OS.
It was jarring to sit down in front of Leopard after a decade-long Apple hiatus. It works great *and* it's an OS, too. Nice trick. Meanwhile, my relation had managed to orphan ten years of email in Microsoft Outlook. (His previous system was still a Windows 2000 machine; XP never set foot there, nor was it ever missed.)
What proved to be the crucial link in the chain? Thunderbird. We managed to export 1GB of Outlook mail archive from the PC to a (BSD) network drive, then access the mail archive from Thunderbird on his new Mac. Sweet. I briefly tried to install a plug-in to do this on the Mac Thunderbird, but it didn't take. Then I installed the PC Thunderbird on the PC side, and Outlook export was native (at least, given that we had Outlook already installed on the same machine).
The Thunderbird export is more than a tad on the slow side (doing what, I couldn't say: the disk activity was not high, seek noise was not high, the CPU activity was not high, nor was the network traffic or disk on the network share very high), but after a relaxed dinner, we discovered it had worked fine. Changing the freaking Thunderbird profiles to accomplish this, that was ugly. My eyebrows must have looked especially bushy as I launched Thunderbird from the command line with the -ProfileManager option (had to do this on both the PC and Mac because the option key trick didn't work on Leopard). At one point my relation asked me the pointed question "are all open source programs like that?" Fortunately I was able to mumble the answer into my thick grey beard.
I've always thought the Linux on the desktop movement was a crock anyway. I've been running Linux on the desktop for almost a decade now. Why on earth did it become a banner of significance? Why does it have to rock the unwashed to validate its accomplishments? On the grounds that if we don't fight those battles with the wifi and video chipset vendors, Linux might fail altogether?
The thing with Apple (and yummy in general) is that it's very much a 1:1 proposition. I'm a bit old fashioned. I happen to prefer hanging my crash boxes off a different power switch. I also like to hang my suppliers off different power switches, so none of them get too big for their britches. Debian today, Ubuntu tomorrow.
I have to say, though, that in the world of 1:1 propositions, from what I could see during my first day in the trenches, Leopard rocks. The Berlin wall was around for 28 years. It was a mere 23 years between my first experience of the original Fat Mac and my first experience with a Mac acting like a real computer, though I admit I'm a bit late to the party.
We exist right now at a point in the series of causation. But an infinite series cannot be traversed, so the infinite series of watchmakers cannot lead us to any present we are part of. You need to adjust your breakfast brain salad. From a particular point in a doubly infinite series (past and future) there are infinitely many points that are finitely far away. It is a minor conundrum if the past and the future stretch infinitely far away, but by no means logically incoherent, from where we sit.
The camp that makes me batty (whether philosophical, scientific, or religious) is the one that *can* accept an infinite future, but *can't* accept an infinite past. That quadrant baffles me. I can accept that I had a soul before I was born and that I will continue to have a soul after I die (though I tend to view the soul that outlasts my body as an index key into the heavenly registry of crimes and misdemeanors, and not as a piece of my earthly self); or I can believe I didn't have a soul on either side of my personal birth/death singularities. For the middle portion, soul is nice, but I'd rather have wit.
I guess that's the problem with the symmetrist approach: it runs counter to the natural human psychology that the arrow of time runs in the direction of innocence to guilt; from Apple to Armageddon.
Nevertheless, I prefer this view over the notion of an infinite tape with an end-point. What if the almighty basis step threaded the tape backward into the realojector? We'd be screwed. History would be infinite, but the future would end. The whole universe would suddenly be replaced with an irritating slapping sound.
... has been traced to an earlier collision of larger asteroids about 95 million years earlier...
Writing in the scientific journal Nature, researcher William Bottke and co-authors laid out a scenario of the origin of the asteroid that landed on Earth in the Cretaceous Era, creating the enormous Chicxulub crater in Mexico's Yucatan peninsula.
There's one perspective that heavenly hash voted against the dinosaurs early and often.
He has a job because Slashdot, and other sites that Slashdot mocks (while doing precious little to adjust our own lameness filter), keep posting his stupid stories and driving his page views, even though there are dozens of posts on every Dvorak thread explaining that he's an unworthy troll.
Seriously, if the Slashdot powers-that-be continue posting Dvorak stories, I hope the discussion will soon turn to why they still have a job.
I once flew out of Chicago, early 1990s, 737 IIRC, where coming up off the runway the plane banked *hard* like I've never experienced before or after. It felt like a 30 degree bank, but it was probably more like 5 degrees, the human mind tends to exaggerate slopes so badly. The G force exceeded anything I've ever felt on a runway. At the crazy angle (I was on the down-wing side) the flight attendants strapped in beside the exit doors seemed like they were a floor or two above me. I was concentrating on keeping my head centered at the top of my neck, so I didn't orient myself to ground features. People gasped, but no-one vocalized. Not even a kick in the aft to lift out of Denver on a hot summer day would compare to G-force we were pulling. The plane seemed to also pitch nose upward and climb hard. It was smooth, forceful, and disorienting. I had visions of children tearing the wings off a fly. Those wings really are amazingly strong. Then the plane smoothly returned to level flight.
Moments later, with no hesitation at all, the pilot came onto the intercom in the most baritone lounge-chair voice you can imagine:
"I just had a chat with air traffic who told me they would feel a lot more comfortable if I banked to the right. I said to myself 'if they're more comfortable, then I'm more comfortable' so we did. Now we're all feeling very comfortable. It should be a smooth ride into Toronto, so relax and enjoy the in-flight service."
No doubt we were bearing toward Baltimore as he spoke and air traffic was still busy determining how to turn him around again.
I also wondered what additional service is required when they ping the G ball for 15 seconds like that. I just found a web page that states that the g-force limit of a 737 is unknown. Fortunately, the answer wasn't recovered from the flight recorder of the plane I was on that day.
My father was once on a flight that dumped fuel over the ocean, circled back, and landed five minutes after takeoff. I've always suspected that incidents were more frequent than the airline industry wishes to publicize. I wonder if that smooth recovery speech is part of the pilot simulator training. I wonder if he was giving us that speech while the copilot was checking out the lights that indicate the wings are indeed still attached.
If no one used the Roman alphabet, finding a new one would be a snap! If the spelling of words wasn't standardized then implementing new phonetic spellings for things like "knight" would be easy.
Have we learned nothing in two millennia of font design? Would we be better off starting from scratch? I suspect that project is far harder than it looks.
As much as I hate the "nite lite" lexical forms, I increasingly dislike the semantic ambiguity between light (bright) and light (weight) when I'm reading at my most intense. It's extra work my brain doesn't need. I could make peace with a future where light comes from the sun, and lite defies gravity. But we already have "lite" meaning "reduced" (or is that "vain" I'm not 100% certain).
OTOH, if you are proposing replacing threw and through with thru, I think I'll thro up.
Our most painful elementary school experience is the spelling test. Twenty years later as adults we are still putting forward spelling reform as an aspirational nirvana, even though a literate person reads 100x as much as he or she types. Reading is a mental process where conceptual hints embedded in English orthography matter far more, I suspect, than phonetic triviality.
How much does English orthography harm or assist written communication? Since we refuse to raise communities of children with arbitrary languages to test this kind of hypothesis, it's almost impossible to answer. Reverse engineering some critical processing pathways in the brain might provide some tantalizing hints. For now, we can only guess.
Reading a deep thinker with a dense and reflective writing style, it sure ain't the letters holding me back. The circuits holding me back are empathy, insight, comprehension, and creative recombination. Unfortunately, on slashdot these days you have to read 10 to 100 highly moderated to get even one of those lights to sustain rather than flicker. Slashdot is where I visit to expose myself to what happens when people don't think all that hard, because that in its own way is stimulating too. To escape a rut, first you must understand it.
Lanier is a problem case. He's halfway deep, halfway twisted. His main trick in this essay is stretching the word "creative" out of all proportion. He's intending it to stand for creativity in its more rarefied form, knowing full well that the open source crowd will leap to the defense of their own creativity and innovation thinking they've been maligned. It's creative work of the highest intensity to carve your way out of a badly designed VM subsystem; but not creative creative in Lanier's sense.
I don't think that open source has ever been *about* creativity in that rarefied sense. I think open source has been about establishing the intellectual autonomy to create.
I have on my desk Hans Christian von Bayer's essay "Identical Twins". He talks about bosons and fermions. And then he gets around to Cooper pairs. Electrons are fermions, and thus prohibited from "cooperating" the way bosons do. But a pair of electrons, at a low enough temperature, can form where the pair behaves cooperatively in the manner of a boson, and thus give rise to low temperature superconductivity.
That's a far better analogy for what open source has always been about: establishing the autonomy to cooperate. We cooperate *because* we have created for ourselves the autonomy required to do so. What act of creativity exceeds defining a new social order?
In Lanier's case, this appears not to be a form of autonomous computing he finds impressive.
Lanier also seems to suffer from auteurism. Kurosawa could have created an iPhone. Lanier applauds that form of creativity. No right-in-the-head auteur could have founded Wikipedia. Lanier doesn't much like the commingled mediocrity of Wikipedia. Yet the Wikipedia has succeeded at something few of us suspected, and personally I find that more interesting to contemplate than Lanier's iPhonesque auteurism.
Cheap rocks. No matter how cheap the device, it always comes equipped with the handy "landfill" option once you discover, for example, that lack of a humidity control or the ability to regulate the ice box temperature independently from the main compartment is costing you more than the simplicity is worth.
Nothing beats having the simplest and cheapest that exactly suits your needs. It'll take you, on average, three to five purchase cycles to achieve this. And when your golden cheapee finally bites it, you'll have to start your search all over again as everything you learned from the initial purchase cycle has been replaced by cheaper or bellier or an incompatible standard. For example, my road bike has a seven speed hub. No matter how perfect the frame or how comfortable I feel, it likely won't outlive the current rings and chain.
OTOH, if you go top of the line, it will still take you an average of 2 or 3 purchase iterations before you find exactly what you wanted. Unless you're the type of person who can easily convince yourself that an outrageous annoyance (one button mouse) constitutes a feature. Apple has achieved a monopoly among the well-heeled who fit this psychological profile, which is why they are the one company that succeeds in doing simple right (even when they don't, which is their crucial advantage).
The problem with DVD player design is that the player is too tightly coupled to its remote. I believe the anti-landfill lobby should convince the government regulators to mandate that all such devices have a facility to export their IR interface definition to any remote the user desires. Intelligent appliances are also becoming a target of the overburdened electrical grid. The manufacturers can no longer claim that adding a 100K of metadata or a few kilobytes of macro memory (so that a universal remote can achieve complex functions quickly) adds anything much to the cost that a reduced landfill rate wouldn't recover ten times over.
I remember the golden era when the interface to the local landfill was dead simple: drop (the tailgate) and fling. Those monuments to simplicity are with us still.
Four Horsemen of the Silicon Valley Apocalypse: Mediocrity, Vanity, Lack of Direction, and Middle Management. Didn't the four horsemen resurrect themselves on fell beasts after their thrilling body surf down the dotcom water slide? Horses were less than practical in a cube farm to begin with. Back when HPaq downsized the cubical, I wonder if they also removed the drop ceilings?
Years ago I was asked to join a group doing government work in exploring drugs related to sleep replacement or to maintain alertness in certain groups of people. This sort of stuff made me uncomfortable then and it still gives me the creeps. Jerome Siegel, professor of psychiatry at UCLA, was quoted as follows in TFA:
"We have to realize that we are already living in a society where we are already self-medicating with caffeine," he said. Apparently, that's your answer. We already cash our paychecks at the Adenosine Quickie Mart. Why not also mortgage your house at the Orexin Casino?
Based on this quote, Dr Siegel strikes me as a jerk in a white lab coat. Exactly why do we "have to realize" this little fact about caffeine? Has he been viewing too many spokesmartians for the Bush administration on late night TV?
How about "We have to realize we live in a society where Paris Hilton is a top-ten Google search keyword." OK, I realize that this is true, but I've never much felt I *needed* or was *mandated* to realize this. When I leave my front door in the morning I don't look around my city block and say to myself "wow, there are probably dozens of voyeuristic celeb-stalkers within a one block radius, and these people constitute the society in which I live, so I better conduct myself accordingly".
How about the phrase "already living in"? The barn door is open, the horse has already bolted. In the 1950s and 1960s we were "already living in" a society where second-hand smoke was unavoidable in public. It's possible we are "already living in" a society where global temperatures are warming. The human race gets itself into no end of stupid situations we don't fully understand at the outset. What is your point, Dr Strangesnooze?
But wait, there's another hit from the all-nite pharmacy: "already self-medicating". Another horse has bolted through the open door at the other end of the barn. Surely it is no longer even logically possible to put the horse back in the barn. Even if you close the door after the horse, it will still escape the open door at the other end. That's that, then.
Original sin: self-medicating with table sugar, in the form of dried apple slices. From what I've heard, Eve went on a bit of a bender.
I need to run this infomercial one more time, to fully savor the sweet Folgers aroma:
"We have to realize that we are already living in a society where we are already self-medicating with caffeine," he said. If the goons from the Orexin Casino show up to foreclose this crazy mortgage, and orexin A becomes a schedule III controlled substance, Dr Strangesnuggle has a bright career ahead of him as a BALCO spokesman. There must be plenty of women out there already conniving to date rape their men so that they can't fall asleep after sex and avoid the cuddle talk.
The premise of this argument is that no content worth having exists in the public domain, so any use of this tool must be directed toward infilching upon proprietary content.
Half of the motivation being the Mickey Mouse copyright extension act was not just to protect Mickey's inflated infantilism, but also to keep the public domain shelf as bare as possible, so legitimate sharing doesn't cloud the wolf cries of MAFIAA, where every untaxed gratification over every untaxed wire represents a pimple-faced insurrection against the natural order bought and paid for.
The first time I heard the expression twenty years ago, "the exception that proves the rule", I thought it had the hallmarks of group think.
Certainly you are right that the patent system has a lot invested in the "great man" mystique. I don't have a problem with this. What I have a problem with is that the patent system grants two orders of magnitude more patents than the number of great inventors justifies.
In general, if society determines that a precious resource is scarce, the reward is vastly amplified. Your argument would justify a patent system where 1 to 10 percent as many patents were awarded, but the patent itself in those cases had far more profound powers.
the concept of software patents is to utterly bogus and corrupt Your argument doesn't support this assertion. Your points would be better suited to putting forward an argument that there is so little shortage of innovation in modern society that we would be better off without the patent system altogether, as there is no practical way to implement the patent system where the benefits outweigh the abuses.
I personally believe that Shuji Nakamura's work deserved a full measure of reward. Nor do I believe that cases like Nakamura are especially rare. The problem is that we've drowned the good work in sheep dip sea of patented mediocrity.
What a bunch of pussies. We all know that a quick answer isn't necessarily a good answer, but maybe only 10% of us have the balls to stick to our guns, and half of us are at risk of winding up on the unemployment line, because a defective "fast food" culture has gained ascendancy in office politics, much like McDonald's in the 1970s. Only later did the masses decide that burger stamped from 1000 different bulls (to paraphrase "Supersize Me") is not good for the constitution (either personal or corporate). I was only twelve when I first tasted a green Shamrock shake, and even then my palate was sophisticated enough to conclude that petrochemicals (to give those flavour additives the benefit of the doubt) were unfit for human consumption.
That's the present state of corporate email and IM culture: fast is good. Fast is actually crap, unless you are careful where you eat, but it will take another decade or so for backlash to recruit the unwashed. The average email response received in under 15 minutes is deep fried in hydrogenated soybean oil to a crispy golden colour. Yum, yum. Eat up and regurg, if you wish to see Santa arrive with your xmas bonus arrive in your neck of the cubical farm.
"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who haven't got it."
No, I don't think Google is an important today as Microsoft was in the 1990s. It's an entirely different business model. It won't be the same until Google indexes a lot of content that no other search engine is able or allowed to access *and* the restricted segment of Google's content is important enough searching with any other search engine just isn't the same. Anyone's grandmother can have Google, MSN, and Yahoo open in three different tabs at the same time. Try explaining the virtues of virtualization to your grandmother over milk and cookies the next time you see her so that she can enjoy the Windows, OS X, and Linux experiences simultaneously. Comparing Microsoft to Google is like comparing Coke to Starbucks. Ubiquity of equivalent magnitude does not imply equivalence of evil. To paraphrase Tolskyevsky, no two arrogant corporations are entirely alike.
What I would most enjoy if the worst comes to pass and Google becomes evil for lack of anything else to accomplish, and Microsoft succeeds in precipitating an anti-trust lawsuit against Google, and several hundreds of findings of fact go against Google (which claims not to be able to locate any of their past executive email), and then the remedies come down as toothless as the remedies that Microsoft endured. If not justice, at least irony would be well served.
Unlike the anabolic steroids, human growth hormone and blood-oxygen boosters that plague athletic competitions, the brain drugs haven't provoked similar outrage. People who take them say the drugs aren't giving them an unfair advantage but merely allow them to make the most of their hard-earned skills.
That quote constitutes excellent evidence that you can improve mental performance without actually making people any smarter. Do you think that Barry Bonds connects with that pitch because of steroids? His eye for reading the pitch is as great a natural gift as any natural gift possessed by any poker player. What the steroids do is allow his body to exploit his natural gifts more fully, at a more advanced age than was previously possible.
Ben Johnson had an explosively quick reaction to the starting gun, which had nothing to do with steroids.
What would the attitude toward steroids be if a steroid was discovered with far fewer negative side effects? What athlete couldn't claim more complete exploitation of their "hard earned skills"?
Consider the XY karyotype Spanish hurdler Maria Patino who was disqualified in 1985 for not being a woman, despite having a genetic androgen insensitivity (which I presume means that even if she took steroids, it would have no useful effect).
Indeed, there are at least two well-known American movie stars who are XY women, according to researchers in sex differences, although neither of the actresses wishes her condition to be made public.
Careful what you wish for. Some hyper-feminine women are a genetic dead end. This is fair in Hollywood, but not in sports?
Now let's suppose we discover that some males are endowed with a suppressed genetic response to steroids that leads to the negative side effects of roid rage and liver disorder. Should these males, who can take large doses of steroids safely, be allowed to take these drugs? Or not, because other men can't? What exactly are we trying to prove here? Shouldn't the winners win, and the losers lose? Is any sporting event won in this era by an individual who was born with genetic assets that the rest of the population lacks?
One of the consequences of taking steroids is that they allow the athlete to train "their hard earned skills" harder and longer. Of course, the athlete might wear their cartilage to a nubbin by the age of 30, but what's to stop the athlete from having that replaced with the latest miracle Teflon?
Let's suppose a "memory" drug is invented. How does that work? You can memorize an encyclopedia by the age of 25, but by the age of 30 you can't remember what you had for lunch yesterday, because "all circuits are busy"? Maybe this side effect isn't discovered until twenty years later, as the first generation just-add-water-and-stir "geniuses" are never heard from again as they can neither find their car keys nor their cell phones.
There's an age old adage in sport that if you aren't cheating you aren't trying hard enough. What modern competition will become is a battle to have your particular advantage, stimulant, or beneficial genetic abnormality declared competition legal, while your competitor's advantages are restricted.
Our athletes are already groomed more like dancers and supermodels. With improved genetic testing, we'll be able to identify the superior individual (with respect to rules we are concurrently politicking to establish) at a preschool age. Defects in knees or bone structure can be repaired while the child is young enough to rebound quickly. Endorsement defects can be repaired with cosmetic surgery. Competitive drive can be supplanted with neurological enhancers.
And for what? Why do we worship Tiger Woods to begin with? What has he ever done for me, or anyone else here? I personally feel the human race wo
They aren't linearly independent. The Scheffer stroke is a generator for this structure. I hadn't heard of the Scheffer stroke by that name, but I have known nand is sufficient for a long time. For as long as I looked at this, it appeared that the game was to establish a descriptive upper bound representing three-input truth functions in terms of a chosen basis of binary-input truth functions. What is the usefulness of the descriptive bound is the value changes rather arbitrarily depending on precisely which basis one selects? What does linear independence have to do with it?
This reminds me of a paper by Putnam (IIRC) I read a long time ago. He puts forward two different set-theoretic constructions of the integers, with the major distinction that in one construction, x y implies x is a subset of y; this does not hold in the other construction. Both constructions describe the same properties of the integers, but they also introduce arbitrary mathematical artifacts particular to the set-theoretic underpinnings adopted.
What is Wolfram attempting to do where it would matter that that the chosen basis was linearly independent?
For what definition of "best"? This is terrible writing. I would subtract a full letter grade from any undergraduate paper with that phrase by the second semester of first year.
It's a pretty simple matter if you control the hardware to set up an ISP's network so that no peer-to-peer packets are exchanged whatsoever.
I guess the implication is that "best" has something to do with not being quite so blatant. Another step or two down this path, we could just as easily s/do their best/strike a balance/ "between bandwidth hogging torrents and other network usage".
But oh no, that might change the hat colour of the venal packet packers that be, and apparently hat colour was the core sentiment for posting this story in the first place. Juvenile. Not their best, not even close.
Perhaps Wolfram was counting the weight of "not" as zero in his mind when he constructed his table. I'm not going through the reg page to find out what he actually wrote. His error could be as small as *printing* that he was giving weight one to "not" when in fact he hadn't.
Personally, I find it rather arbitrary to give a weight to the unary not operator. It strikes me as more fundamental (and less arbitrary) to take as your basis the set of *all* binary input truth functions.
Suppose you change your basis from and,or,xor,not to nand,or,xor,not and this gives you a different length bound? What is the significance of the length bound then? Stupid.
Here is the thing to check, if anyone is interested. Is Wolfram's table correct if you weight "not" to zero?
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I do advocate designing primitives as essential to the language as the C string functions to powerfully remind the programmer using those functions of the programmer's logical obligations and support the programmer to reason correctly about those obligations, without having to digest 15 lines of preceding context to see that calloc() provided the implied terminating NUL.
strlcpy and strlcat - consistent, safe, string copy and concatenation by Todd C. Miller and Theo de Raadt, OpenBSD project There are several problems encountered when strncpy() and strncat() are used as safe versions of strcpy() and strcat(). Both functions deal with NUL-termination and the length parameter in different and non-intuitive ways that confuse even experienced programmers. They also provide no easy way to detect when truncation occurs. Finally, strncpy() zero-fills the remainder of the destination string, incurring a performance penalty. Of all these issues, the confusion caused by the length parameters and the related issue of NUL-termination are most important. When we audited the OpenBSD source tree for potential security holes we found rampant misuse of strncpy() and strncat(). While not all of these resulted in exploitable security holes, they made it clear that the rules for using strncpy() and strncat() in safe string operations are widely misunderstood. An Interview with OpenBSD's Marc Espie We have had a lot of success explaining the issues and getting a lot of people to switch from strcpy/strcat to strlcpy/strlcat.
Weirdly enough, the Linux people are about the only major group of people that has constantly stayed deaf to these arguments. The chief opponent to strlcpy in glibc is most certainly Ulrich Drepper, who argues that good programmers don't need strlcpy, since they don't make mistakes while copying strings. This is a very mystifying point of view, since bugtraq daily proves that a lot of Linux and free software programmers are not that bright, and need all the help they can get. The original C strcpy() could just as easily have had the semantics of strlcpy(), with insane_strcpy() provided to copy strings/trash core without a cycle wasted.
One must recognize that in a solid code base, thinking occurs more often while reading code than writing code. Correctness is not a write-only proposition in any living code base.
The original C string functions were (and remain) a pedagodic disaster. Most beginning programmers failed to realized how much thinking had been folded into the surrounding context. If they were reading K&R, that thinking existed. If they were reading any code they had at hand, it likely hadn't, by any survey of average C code quality ten years later. With the original string functions, whether this careful thinking existed is not obvious without doing a lot of mental work, and that work has to be repeated *every time* the code is seriously reviewed.
Worst of all, the strcpy() function seemed to imply "buffer overflow is no great concern, we're not even going to give you a single argument on this very dangerous function to help you avert it". It was a false parsimony to save that extra argument in the default case.
This isn't at the level of whether the handgun has a safety or not. It's at the level of whether it is possible to chamber a round too large for the barrel. I can point the gun successfully, but I'd greatly prefer it not to detonate in any other direction.
A more thoughtful C string API would have averted mistakes on the magnitude of chambering bad ammunition, without encumbering the pointy end in the slightest, or failing to endanger the programmer's foot.
Anyone with a true gift to become a kernel dev has probably engaged in flame wars with his/her professors already, regardless of what she/he teaches.
Pointers aren't rocket science. If you never perform an operation where you haven't first met the operation's preconditions, you never get a pointer error.
If you aren't rigorously checking preconditions on *every* operation you perform, you're not going to cut it as a kernel dev anyway. Pointers are the least of your problems. Race conditions can become exceptionally hard to reason about. The prudent kernel dev architects the system such that this doesn't transpire. That requires a whole different galaxy of aptitude beyond not leaking pointers.
When I first learned C in the K&R era, I thought those greybeards were pretty clever. Then I came across strcpy() and I wondered what they were smoking that I wasn't sharing. I thought to myself, their must be some higher level idiom that protects against buffer overflow, because no sane architect would implement such a dangerous function otherwise. Man, was I ever naive.
More likely, too many of them had learned to program on paper teletypes, and just couldn't bring themselves to face having to type unsafe_strcpy() when they had reason to know it would work safely and efficiently.
The C language deserves a great deal of shame in this matter of giving many beginning programmers the false impression that any function call should dispense with formal preconditions.
Interestingly, if you sit down to implement an STL template algorithm manipulating iterators, it proves pretty much impossible to avoid careful consideration of range and validity.
OTOH, C++ makes it charmingly easy for an object copy routine, such as operator=(self& dst, const self& src) to make a complete hash of managed resources if you fail to affirm dst != src.
There are plenty of amateur mathematicians who can manipulate complex formulas in amazing ways. The difference with a professional mathematician is that the necessary conditions for each transformation is clearly spelled out.
A = B ==> A/C = B/C iff C != 0
A > B ==> C*A > C*B iff C > 0
Infinite series must converge, etc.
I'm not even getting into defining A,B,C as fields, groups, rings, monoids, etc. for maximum generality.
Yet the average programmer feels sullied to exercise the same intellectual caution manipulating pointers. I've never understood that sentiment. My attitude is this: if that's how you feel, get your lazy coding ass out of my interrupt handler; go code a dialog box in some Visual Basic application that won't work right no matter what you do.
Why did the software industry play out this way? Other professions have much harsher standards. Primarily because software was in an exponential expansion phase, any work was regarded as better than no work (perhaps falsely), and industry couldn't afford to reduce the talent pool by demanding actual talent.
Now we've allowed many people to enter the profession without comprehending the rigors of preconditions. It's as if we had taught a generation of lawyers how to practice law, but omitted liability. Oops. What to do about it? Invent Java, and tell all these programmers it wasn't their fault in the first place.
So yes, Java doesn't teach very darn much about the harsh realities of actually thinking. And since thinking is hard, it's an impediment to productivity anyway, so it hasn't much been missed. The only thing we lost in the shuffle is our professional self respect.
Isn't that just a human justification for our woefully short little spans of attention? "First impressions" is a functional antonym to "considered response".
First impressions inherently channel brinksmanship: there is no second impression without a first impression, but you can't, uh, shoot first and ask questions later. You've got to save up your war bolus so as not to cloud anyone's judgment with a half measure. Meanwhile, you spend years of your life laboring in secrecy, in hopes that the big moment for the grand unveiling will someday arrive. Uh, count me out.
Even if the first impression is all you've waited for, you're not over the hump. We have a handy phrase for the big letdown that follows: all sizzle and no steak. But nevermind if the grand first impression falls flat. Try, try, again. There's a lot of fish in the sea. By your tenth or twentieth first impression, you might have learned enough to make it to second base.
Did I just read one poster claim improved "stubble" resolution? HD wins by a facial hair?
Want something you can distinguish on that 12" TV you can see through the window of your neighbour's house? Refresh rate on a horizontal pan shot. Every movie director alive has learned to pan the camera sideways *very* slowly, or with carefully chosen composition to minimize the stroboscopic effect. In action movies, the action is always coming straight at you. Any other direction will make you sick.
When are we going to finally get a true 72Hz frame rate? Beta (particle) ray? Higgs Boson ray? I'm sure the actor's guild wishes to maintain the 24Hz standard. Probably hard to get enough light to film at 72 fps. But rather trivial to animate at 72 fps. Real life celebrity babes are temperamental, soon become old fat ugly and imprisoned. Animated digital babes stay young forever, like Mickey Mouse, have a new dress every day, and need never wear the same hairstyle twice, unless they feel like it. When a digital babes goes looking for the bourbon, she never forgets her lines.
These quality quibbles make my head spin.
The hanging chad problem was a confirmation problem: confirming that the punched ballot card would be tabulated by the voter as intended.
I've never understand why this isn't broken down as a two step process. To me this is a separation of concerns problem.
One concern is to produce an accurately punched ballot (intentional, complete, unambiguous). This step has no memory of voter actions.
The other concern is to verify that the punched ballot reads back as intended when tabulated or manually verified. Few voters should be allowed to escape without obtaining a green light from the ballet confirmation test. This step has no input buttons. It scans the ballot, displays a summary of what it read (and any problems detected), and provides a green light (or not).
1) voter marks ballot (punch card)
1a) provide a manual mechanical punch for determined voters wishing to do so (highly unlikely to fail, and serves as a backup if the fancy technology fails or engenders controversy)
1b) provide access-enhanced display screens with automatic punch for voters who can't or don't wish to do (1a)
2) voter presents ballot to a (secret) vote confirmation reader, which indicates the selections detected on a screen, and notifies the voter of whether they have cast valid votes in all available races (this machines has no other inputs)
3) validated ballot stuffed into secure ballot box under oversight of voting officials
Notes
The auto punch should display an image of the confirmed punch pattern to be verified before pressing print (aka mangle) which remains to be verified by the voter after the machine spits out the auto-punched voting card.
The auto punch has no memory of voter actions whatsoever.
Every screen presented by the auto punch should correspond to printed posters which anyone can corroborate as accurate. It should be possible for any voter to download these posters off the internet prior to the election. There should be practice software available which allows users to walk through the autopunch procedure. The practice software should be able to print the desired punch card pattern, which a voter would be able to carry in and visually duplicate (in secrecy).
Every race on the ballot has exactly one mark, for a candidate, or for no-vote. There should be *exactly* one possible punch pattern for every possible voting preference (combination of votes).
The ballot confirmation machine can maintain "pre-counts" to focus manual recounting on the close races. At least one non-close race should be challenged (at random) to verify reported pre-count accuracy.
I personally like the punch system that physically removes shards of paper. Ink is subject to fancy chemistry.
Summary
The official vote (ballot) is a physical object which is physically altered by the vote selection.
The ballot has exactly one physical state to represent each allowable voter preference.
The voter can determine in the weeks before the election what that pattern will look like according to the voting preference, and every carry a printed likeness into the voting process.
Any machine that touches the physical ballot displays the ballot pattern it 1) intends to stamp, 2) or detected during read-back.
There is an issue with the pre-counter being tricked into counting the same finished ballot more than once. This shouldn't matter, as it mostly exists to get quick results so we can watch the concession speeches and head to bed.
Double counting will show up on the official count later. It should be armed to count once by an election official for each person who enters the booth.
The main difference is the voter will leave the process with far greater confidence that their physical ballot indicated their preference in a way that must later be counted unambiguously.
I agree, Unix doesn't suck enough to support McAfee in the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed. If it isn't broken don't fix it. To most of the world, sound advice. To McAfee, napalm in the morning.
Nevertheless, I would like to see more corporations complain about vagueness of interpretation in the copyright act. I'm generally in favour of less confusion in law in all matters. It would be nice to break the cycle where vagueness most benefits the deep pocket.
The whole point of God is that it is rational to be irrational. The magic junction box is known as faith. It's a black rectangle with dimensions 1x4x9 that can't be scratched by a laser or any other known tool. If sufficiently perplexed, it will heat up enough to fry your latkes. Does not work as a contraceptive, and might result in bleeding.
As for belief in faith, any day now I'm expecting to see it show up on an advanced fMRI scan, right beside Husband Hill.
As it happens, yesterday I had my first significant contact with OS X. Many of my family members had that weird thing from before OS X that wasn't really an operating system, so far as I could tell judging by how it managed its memory. It always struck me as paint program masquerading as an OS.
It was jarring to sit down in front of Leopard after a decade-long Apple hiatus. It works great *and* it's an OS, too. Nice trick. Meanwhile, my relation had managed to orphan ten years of email in Microsoft Outlook. (His previous system was still a Windows 2000 machine; XP never set foot there, nor was it ever missed.)
What proved to be the crucial link in the chain? Thunderbird. We managed to export 1GB of Outlook mail archive from the PC to a (BSD) network drive, then access the mail archive from Thunderbird on his new Mac. Sweet. I briefly tried to install a plug-in to do this on the Mac Thunderbird, but it didn't take. Then I installed the PC Thunderbird on the PC side, and Outlook export was native (at least, given that we had Outlook already installed on the same machine).
The Thunderbird export is more than a tad on the slow side (doing what, I couldn't say: the disk activity was not high, seek noise was not high, the CPU activity was not high, nor was the network traffic or disk on the network share very high), but after a relaxed dinner, we discovered it had worked fine. Changing the freaking Thunderbird profiles to accomplish this, that was ugly. My eyebrows must have looked especially bushy as I launched Thunderbird from the command line with the -ProfileManager option (had to do this on both the PC and Mac because the option key trick didn't work on Leopard). At one point my relation asked me the pointed question "are all open source programs like that?" Fortunately I was able to mumble the answer into my thick grey beard.
I've always thought the Linux on the desktop movement was a crock anyway. I've been running Linux on the desktop for almost a decade now. Why on earth did it become a banner of significance? Why does it have to rock the unwashed to validate its accomplishments? On the grounds that if we don't fight those battles with the wifi and video chipset vendors, Linux might fail altogether?
The thing with Apple (and yummy in general) is that it's very much a 1:1 proposition. I'm a bit old fashioned. I happen to prefer hanging my crash boxes off a different power switch. I also like to hang my suppliers off different power switches, so none of them get too big for their britches. Debian today, Ubuntu tomorrow.
I have to say, though, that in the world of 1:1 propositions, from what I could see during my first day in the trenches, Leopard rocks. The Berlin wall was around for 28 years. It was a mere 23 years between my first experience of the original Fat Mac and my first experience with a Mac acting like a real computer, though I admit I'm a bit late to the party.
The camp that makes me batty (whether philosophical, scientific, or religious) is the one that *can* accept an infinite future, but *can't* accept an infinite past. That quadrant baffles me. I can accept that I had a soul before I was born and that I will continue to have a soul after I die (though I tend to view the soul that outlasts my body as an index key into the heavenly registry of crimes and misdemeanors, and not as a piece of my earthly self); or I can believe I didn't have a soul on either side of my personal birth/death singularities. For the middle portion, soul is nice, but I'd rather have wit.
I guess that's the problem with the symmetrist approach: it runs counter to the natural human psychology that the arrow of time runs in the direction of innocence to guilt; from Apple to Armageddon.
Nevertheless, I prefer this view over the notion of an infinite tape with an end-point. What if the almighty basis step threaded the tape backward into the realojector? We'd be screwed. History would be infinite, but the future would end. The whole universe would suddenly be replaced with an irritating slapping sound.
There's one perspective that heavenly hash voted against the dinosaurs early and often.
He has a job because Slashdot, and other sites that Slashdot mocks (while doing precious little to adjust our own lameness filter), keep posting his stupid stories and driving his page views, even though there are dozens of posts on every Dvorak thread explaining that he's an unworthy troll.
Seriously, if the Slashdot powers-that-be continue posting Dvorak stories, I hope the discussion will soon turn to why they still have a job.
I once flew out of Chicago, early 1990s, 737 IIRC, where coming up off the runway the plane banked *hard* like I've never experienced before or after. It felt like a 30 degree bank, but it was probably more like 5 degrees, the human mind tends to exaggerate slopes so badly. The G force exceeded anything I've ever felt on a runway. At the crazy angle (I was on the down-wing side) the flight attendants strapped in beside the exit doors seemed like they were a floor or two above me. I was concentrating on keeping my head centered at the top of my neck, so I didn't orient myself to ground features. People gasped, but no-one vocalized. Not even a kick in the aft to lift out of Denver on a hot summer day would compare to G-force we were pulling. The plane seemed to also pitch nose upward and climb hard. It was smooth, forceful, and disorienting. I had visions of children tearing the wings off a fly. Those wings really are amazingly strong. Then the plane smoothly returned to level flight.
Moments later, with no hesitation at all, the pilot came onto the intercom in the most baritone lounge-chair voice you can imagine:
"I just had a chat with air traffic who told me they would feel a lot more comfortable if I banked to the right. I said to myself 'if they're more comfortable, then I'm more comfortable' so we did. Now we're all feeling very comfortable. It should be a smooth ride into Toronto, so relax and enjoy the in-flight service."
No doubt we were bearing toward Baltimore as he spoke and air traffic was still busy determining how to turn him around again.
I also wondered what additional service is required when they ping the G ball for 15 seconds like that. I just found a web page that states that the g-force limit of a 737 is unknown. Fortunately, the answer wasn't recovered from the flight recorder of the plane I was on that day.
My father was once on a flight that dumped fuel over the ocean, circled back, and landed five minutes after takeoff. I've always suspected that incidents were more frequent than the airline industry wishes to publicize. I wonder if that smooth recovery speech is part of the pilot simulator training. I wonder if he was giving us that speech while the copilot was checking out the lights that indicate the wings are indeed still attached.
Have we learned nothing in two millennia of font design? Would we be better off starting from scratch? I suspect that project is far harder than it looks.
As much as I hate the "nite lite" lexical forms, I increasingly dislike the semantic ambiguity between light (bright) and light (weight) when I'm reading at my most intense. It's extra work my brain doesn't need. I could make peace with a future where light comes from the sun, and lite defies gravity. But we already have "lite" meaning "reduced" (or is that "vain" I'm not 100% certain).
OTOH, if you are proposing replacing threw and through with thru, I think I'll thro up.
Our most painful elementary school experience is the spelling test. Twenty years later as adults we are still putting forward spelling reform as an aspirational nirvana, even though a literate person reads 100x as much as he or she types. Reading is a mental process where conceptual hints embedded in English orthography matter far more, I suspect, than phonetic triviality.
How much does English orthography harm or assist written communication? Since we refuse to raise communities of children with arbitrary languages to test this kind of hypothesis, it's almost impossible to answer. Reverse engineering some critical processing pathways in the brain might provide some tantalizing hints. For now, we can only guess.
Reading a deep thinker with a dense and reflective writing style, it sure ain't the letters holding me back. The circuits holding me back are empathy, insight, comprehension, and creative recombination. Unfortunately, on slashdot these days you have to read 10 to 100 highly moderated to get even one of those lights to sustain rather than flicker. Slashdot is where I visit to expose myself to what happens when people don't think all that hard, because that in its own way is stimulating too. To escape a rut, first you must understand it.
Lanier is a problem case. He's halfway deep, halfway twisted. His main trick in this essay is stretching the word "creative" out of all proportion. He's intending it to stand for creativity in its more rarefied form, knowing full well that the open source crowd will leap to the defense of their own creativity and innovation thinking they've been maligned. It's creative work of the highest intensity to carve your way out of a badly designed VM subsystem; but not creative creative in Lanier's sense.
I don't think that open source has ever been *about* creativity in that rarefied sense. I think open source has been about establishing the intellectual autonomy to create.
I have on my desk Hans Christian von Bayer's essay "Identical Twins". He talks about bosons and fermions. And then he gets around to Cooper pairs. Electrons are fermions, and thus prohibited from "cooperating" the way bosons do. But a pair of electrons, at a low enough temperature, can form where the pair behaves cooperatively in the manner of a boson, and thus give rise to low temperature superconductivity.
That's a far better analogy for what open source has always been about: establishing the autonomy to cooperate. We cooperate *because* we have created for ourselves the autonomy required to do so. What act of creativity exceeds defining a new social order?
In Lanier's case, this appears not to be a form of autonomous computing he finds impressive.
Lanier also seems to suffer from auteurism. Kurosawa could have created an iPhone. Lanier applauds that form of creativity. No right-in-the-head auteur could have founded Wikipedia. Lanier doesn't much like the commingled mediocrity of Wikipedia. Yet the Wikipedia has succeeded at something few of us suspected, and personally I find that more interesting to contemplate than Lanier's iPhonesque auteurism.
Cheap rocks. No matter how cheap the device, it always comes equipped with the handy "landfill" option once you discover, for example, that lack of a humidity control or the ability to regulate the ice box temperature independently from the main compartment is costing you more than the simplicity is worth.
Nothing beats having the simplest and cheapest that exactly suits your needs. It'll take you, on average, three to five purchase cycles to achieve this. And when your golden cheapee finally bites it, you'll have to start your search all over again as everything you learned from the initial purchase cycle has been replaced by cheaper or bellier or an incompatible standard. For example, my road bike has a seven speed hub. No matter how perfect the frame or how comfortable I feel, it likely won't outlive the current rings and chain.
OTOH, if you go top of the line, it will still take you an average of 2 or 3 purchase iterations before you find exactly what you wanted. Unless you're the type of person who can easily convince yourself that an outrageous annoyance (one button mouse) constitutes a feature. Apple has achieved a monopoly among the well-heeled who fit this psychological profile, which is why they are the one company that succeeds in doing simple right (even when they don't, which is their crucial advantage).
The problem with DVD player design is that the player is too tightly coupled to its remote. I believe the anti-landfill lobby should convince the government regulators to mandate that all such devices have a facility to export their IR interface definition to any remote the user desires. Intelligent appliances are also becoming a target of the overburdened electrical grid. The manufacturers can no longer claim that adding a 100K of metadata or a few kilobytes of macro memory (so that a universal remote can achieve complex functions quickly) adds anything much to the cost that a reduced landfill rate wouldn't recover ten times over.
I remember the golden era when the interface to the local landfill was dead simple: drop (the tailgate) and fling. Those monuments to simplicity are with us still.
Based on this quote, Dr Siegel strikes me as a jerk in a white lab coat. Exactly why do we "have to realize" this little fact about caffeine? Has he been viewing too many spokesmartians for the Bush administration on late night TV?
How about "We have to realize we live in a society where Paris Hilton is a top-ten Google search keyword." OK, I realize that this is true, but I've never much felt I *needed* or was *mandated* to realize this. When I leave my front door in the morning I don't look around my city block and say to myself "wow, there are probably dozens of voyeuristic celeb-stalkers within a one block radius, and these people constitute the society in which I live, so I better conduct myself accordingly".
How about the phrase "already living in"? The barn door is open, the horse has already bolted. In the 1950s and 1960s we were "already living in" a society where second-hand smoke was unavoidable in public. It's possible we are "already living in" a society where global temperatures are warming. The human race gets itself into no end of stupid situations we don't fully understand at the outset. What is your point, Dr Strangesnooze?
But wait, there's another hit from the all-nite pharmacy: "already self-medicating". Another horse has bolted through the open door at the other end of the barn. Surely it is no longer even logically possible to put the horse back in the barn. Even if you close the door after the horse, it will still escape the open door at the other end. That's that, then.
Original sin: self-medicating with table sugar, in the form of dried apple slices. From what I've heard, Eve went on a bit of a bender.
I need to run this infomercial one more time, to fully savor the sweet Folgers aroma: "We have to realize that we are already living in a society where we are already self-medicating with caffeine," he said. If the goons from the Orexin Casino show up to foreclose this crazy mortgage, and orexin A becomes a schedule III controlled substance, Dr Strangesnuggle has a bright career ahead of him as a BALCO spokesman. There must be plenty of women out there already conniving to date rape their men so that they can't fall asleep after sex and avoid the cuddle talk.
The premise of this argument is that no content worth having exists in the public domain, so any use of this tool must be directed toward infilching upon proprietary content.
Half of the motivation being the Mickey Mouse copyright extension act was not just to protect Mickey's inflated infantilism, but also to keep the public domain shelf as bare as possible, so legitimate sharing doesn't cloud the wolf cries of MAFIAA, where every untaxed gratification over every untaxed wire represents a pimple-faced insurrection against the natural order bought and paid for.
Certainly you are right that the patent system has a lot invested in the "great man" mystique. I don't have a problem with this. What I have a problem with is that the patent system grants two orders of magnitude more patents than the number of great inventors justifies.
In general, if society determines that a precious resource is scarce, the reward is vastly amplified. Your argument would justify a patent system where 1 to 10 percent as many patents were awarded, but the patent itself in those cases had far more profound powers. the concept of software patents is to utterly bogus and corrupt Your argument doesn't support this assertion. Your points would be better suited to putting forward an argument that there is so little shortage of innovation in modern society that we would be better off without the patent system altogether, as there is no practical way to implement the patent system where the benefits outweigh the abuses.
I personally believe that Shuji Nakamura's work deserved a full measure of reward. Nor do I believe that cases like Nakamura are especially rare. The problem is that we've drowned the good work in sheep dip sea of patented mediocrity.
What a bunch of pussies. We all know that a quick answer isn't necessarily a good answer, but maybe only 10% of us have the balls to stick to our guns, and half of us are at risk of winding up on the unemployment line, because a defective "fast food" culture has gained ascendancy in office politics, much like McDonald's in the 1970s. Only later did the masses decide that burger stamped from 1000 different bulls (to paraphrase "Supersize Me") is not good for the constitution (either personal or corporate). I was only twelve when I first tasted a green Shamrock shake, and even then my palate was sophisticated enough to conclude that petrochemicals (to give those flavour additives the benefit of the doubt) were unfit for human consumption.
That's the present state of corporate email and IM culture: fast is good. Fast is actually crap, unless you are careful where you eat, but it will take another decade or so for backlash to recruit the unwashed. The average email response received in under 15 minutes is deep fried in hydrogenated soybean oil to a crispy golden colour. Yum, yum. Eat up and regurg, if you wish to see Santa arrive with your xmas bonus arrive in your neck of the cubical farm.
"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who haven't got it."
-- George Bernard Shaw
No, I don't think Google is an important today as Microsoft was in the 1990s. It's an entirely different business model. It won't be the same until Google indexes a lot of content that no other search engine is able or allowed to access *and* the restricted segment of Google's content is important enough searching with any other search engine just isn't the same. Anyone's grandmother can have Google, MSN, and Yahoo open in three different tabs at the same time. Try explaining the virtues of virtualization to your grandmother over milk and cookies the next time you see her so that she can enjoy the Windows, OS X, and Linux experiences simultaneously. Comparing Microsoft to Google is like comparing Coke to Starbucks. Ubiquity of equivalent magnitude does not imply equivalence of evil. To paraphrase Tolskyevsky, no two arrogant corporations are entirely alike.
What I would most enjoy if the worst comes to pass and Google becomes evil for lack of anything else to accomplish, and Microsoft succeeds in precipitating an anti-trust lawsuit against Google, and several hundreds of findings of fact go against Google (which claims not to be able to locate any of their past executive email), and then the remedies come down as toothless as the remedies that Microsoft endured. If not justice, at least irony would be well served.
Unlike the anabolic steroids, human growth hormone and blood-oxygen boosters that plague athletic competitions, the brain drugs haven't provoked similar outrage. People who take them say the drugs aren't giving them an unfair advantage but merely allow them to make the most of their hard-earned skills.
That quote constitutes excellent evidence that you can improve mental performance without actually making people any smarter. Do you think that Barry Bonds connects with that pitch because of steroids? His eye for reading the pitch is as great a natural gift as any natural gift possessed by any poker player. What the steroids do is allow his body to exploit his natural gifts more fully, at a more advanced age than was previously possible.
Ben Johnson had an explosively quick reaction to the starting gun, which had nothing to do with steroids.
False Start Rules May Slow Athletes Down
What would the attitude toward steroids be if a steroid was discovered with far fewer negative side effects? What athlete couldn't claim more complete exploitation of their "hard earned skills"?
Consider the XY karyotype Spanish hurdler Maria Patino who was disqualified in 1985 for not being a woman, despite having a genetic androgen insensitivity (which I presume means that even if she took steroids, it would have no useful effect).
Indeed, there are at least two well-known American movie stars who are XY women, according to researchers in sex differences, although neither of the actresses wishes her condition to be made public.
Careful what you wish for. Some hyper-feminine women are a genetic dead end. This is fair in Hollywood, but not in sports?
Now let's suppose we discover that some males are endowed with a suppressed genetic response to steroids that leads to the negative side effects of roid rage and liver disorder. Should these males, who can take large doses of steroids safely, be allowed to take these drugs? Or not, because other men can't? What exactly are we trying to prove here? Shouldn't the winners win, and the losers lose? Is any sporting event won in this era by an individual who was born with genetic assets that the rest of the population lacks?
One of the consequences of taking steroids is that they allow the athlete to train "their hard earned skills" harder and longer. Of course, the athlete might wear their cartilage to a nubbin by the age of 30, but what's to stop the athlete from having that replaced with the latest miracle Teflon?
Let's suppose a "memory" drug is invented. How does that work? You can memorize an encyclopedia by the age of 25, but by the age of 30 you can't remember what you had for lunch yesterday, because "all circuits are busy"? Maybe this side effect isn't discovered until twenty years later, as the first generation just-add-water-and-stir "geniuses" are never heard from again as they can neither find their car keys nor their cell phones.
There's an age old adage in sport that if you aren't cheating you aren't trying hard enough. What modern competition will become is a battle to have your particular advantage, stimulant, or beneficial genetic abnormality declared competition legal, while your competitor's advantages are restricted.
Our athletes are already groomed more like dancers and supermodels. With improved genetic testing, we'll be able to identify the superior individual (with respect to rules we are concurrently politicking to establish) at a preschool age. Defects in knees or bone structure can be repaired while the child is young enough to rebound quickly. Endorsement defects can be repaired with cosmetic surgery. Competitive drive can be supplanted with neurological enhancers.
And for what? Why do we worship Tiger Woods to begin with? What has he ever done for me, or anyone else here? I personally feel the human race wo
This reminds me of a paper by Putnam (IIRC) I read a long time ago. He puts forward two different set-theoretic constructions of the integers, with the major distinction that in one construction, x y implies x is a subset of y; this does not hold in the other construction. Both constructions describe the same properties of the integers, but they also introduce arbitrary mathematical artifacts particular to the set-theoretic underpinnings adopted.
What is Wolfram attempting to do where it would matter that that the chosen basis was linearly independent?
For what definition of "best"? This is terrible writing. I would subtract a full letter grade from any undergraduate paper with that phrase by the second semester of first year.
It's a pretty simple matter if you control the hardware to set up an ISP's network so that no peer-to-peer packets are exchanged whatsoever.
I guess the implication is that "best" has something to do with not being quite so blatant. Another step or two down this path, we could just as easily s/do their best/strike a balance/ "between bandwidth hogging torrents and other network usage".
But oh no, that might change the hat colour of the venal packet packers that be, and apparently hat colour was the core sentiment for posting this story in the first place. Juvenile. Not their best, not even close.
Perhaps Wolfram was counting the weight of "not" as zero in his mind when he constructed his table. I'm not going through the reg page to find out what he actually wrote. His error could be as small as *printing* that he was giving weight one to "not" when in fact he hadn't.
Personally, I find it rather arbitrary to give a weight to the unary not operator. It strikes me as more fundamental (and less arbitrary) to take as your basis the set of *all* binary input truth functions.
Suppose you change your basis from and,or,xor,not to nand,or,xor,not and this gives you a different length bound? What is the significance of the length bound then? Stupid.
Here is the thing to check, if anyone is interested. Is Wolfram's table correct if you weight "not" to zero?