Um. No. Pay attention to one of my previous posts. Wireless spectrum is not scarce. At all. What is the problem here?
First of all, part of the deal here is that whatever they do with this spectrum has to be usable by the general public. The whole point is to have that spectrum used for new technology that the general public will have access to. Think of something like when the cell phone bands got sold off, and now we have cell phones. You can bitch all you want about cell phone reliability but the fact of the matter is that anyone with sufficient financial resources can set up a cell tower and just do it. It's not a monopoly in any sense of the word. Anyone's allowed in if they play by the rules, which just means you can't interfere with anyone else's use of the airwaves. So if you live out in the country, just get the proper licenses worked out, set up a tower and rock it. It's not like AT&T is going to break down your door and ask you to quit. It's just that if you look at the infrastructure around you and say that you're going to set up your own cell network with blackjack and hookers, there is a fantastically large cost to entry. Better to use the existing infrastructure and rent it from the big boys, as companies like US Cellular do here in Chicago. Or, hey! You can set up a tower and rent it to the big guys if that suits you. Again, it's not like this isn't publicly available tech, it's just that building these things and maintaining them is very expensive. Want a short-range solution? Use CB or something like that, and you're untouchable as long as you don't transmit too loudly. Better yet set up a ham radio repeater with a telephone connection. The ionisphere, literally, is the limit. Seriously.
What I really don't get about this little flamewar we've got going (it's a pretty civil flamewar so far, but you know), is how you can possibly look at this situation and feel shackled by it. Look at it this way. Before: completely empty 700MHz spectrum with no services whatsoever using it. After: something (we don't know what yet) occupying those frequencies that is necessarily mandated to be publicly available, and it might just be really cool. Why can't everybody just sit back and let themselves get excited about this?
Also . . . why don't you just buy your own damn spectrum? If you've got at least $10Bn lying around nobody's gonna stop you from doing that either. Maybe all the slashdotters will put up a few bucks each? (would have to be more than $10,000 each to reach that sum but whatever.) And then what? We'll do . . . nothing with it. Awesome.
Agreed. Perhaps it was my own misinterpretation of dattaway's post but that seemed to be what he was implying. That somehow because we can't use whatever frequencies we want for whatever we want we've somehow "lost" to big corporations. I don't think this is true because as I brought up and then you did just now, you really can do pretty much whatever you want as long as those RF waves don't stray too far. The main concern with spectrum is that there has to be room for everybody, but that's easier than it may seem at first if everybody's transmitting power is limited too, since the spectrum here in Chicago's probably not nearly as wide-open as it is in the middle of Nevada.
2.4GHz was a good compromise but it's getting really crowded over there. I had complaints from my neighbours in the last apartment that I lived in that my wireless router was interfering with their new cordless phone. Aside from turning down the power of one device or another, weighing the usefulness of my wireless router against the usefulness of their cordless phone, there really wasn't a whole lot that could be done. In a totally "free" system I could've somehow hacked all my devices to work on a different frequency, but I'd inevitably interfere with something else. And eventually there's the prospect that you'd interfere with something really critical like the radio communications of firemen or EMTs. That would be what we call a very bad thing.
Sure it can operate at a wide variety of frequencies but that doesn't mean that it should. If you're transmitting at low enough power (say less than 100mw or so) do whatever the hell you want. If you're transmitting powerfully enough for your device, whatever it is, to interfere with other peoples' around you, then you're doing what we call "causing a ruckus".
The reason why we can't have a public spectrum has already been pointed out a couple of times in this discussion (I think by other people who responded to your first post). Say you wanted a wireless network, so you set up an 802.11 router, but you jack up the power to several watts. Meanwhile I, in a similar fashion, set up a wireless network on my side of town (forget for the moment that there are multiple 802.11 channels and 802.11 is fairly robust at error-correction). I may or may not have my own reasons for wanting my own network and not wanting to be a part of yours. Your network would interfere with mine and if I did not have the ability to overpower yours even locally, I'd lose a kind of transmitting power arms race that I think would become quite common if we had a completely public spectrum.
There's other fun stuff that could happen, too. Like I could just drive around town with a high power spark-gap transmitter and just shower the spectrum with noise. Everybody's radios, TVs, cellphones, cordless phones, and possibly even their stereo equipment would be inundated with those little pop-pop-popping noises those things make. Wouldn't that be great??
Think about it. The FCC's regulations also protect you and me from the big businesses. If there were no regulations and Google decided to build a massive transmitter for some reason, and this interfered with all of our wireless devices. The FCC prevents things like that from happening too.
I also used to be a DJ on a public radio station in college, and I generally regard the FCC as kind of a bitch of an organization, but at least they're there to keep the peace and keep order on the airwaves. It's one of those circumstances where even the most well-meaning anarchy really just could never work unless we all joined hands. I don't think that's gonna happen anytime soon.
So that's my wisdom. Got any of your own? Or just sarcasm?
Yeah. All of those are regulated by the FCC here and their counterparts in other countries. Technology's answers still have to fit into the spectrum along with all the other answers. You think 802.11 can just work on any frequency, willy-nilly, any time it wants? No. It has to stay in that same band because otherwise there'd just be pandaemonium on the airwaves. The way we have it, tightly regulated like this, you can operate all your devices with a reasonable expectation that you will encounter no interference doing so.
And yes, I have heard of many shortwave bands. My call letters are KF4SOO. Licensed amateur radio operator for over ten years.
I think you're confusing transmitting and receiving. You can receive on whatever frequencies you care to. Swap out a few parts to an old ham radio receiver and it will totally pick up 700MHz band and you can listen to your heart's content.
Transmitting is a different story though. Even public radio stations have to pay (albeit less than commercial radio stations) in order to broadcast and they are assigned a unique frequency on which to do so.
The radio spectrum is NOT public. Even the citizen's band has transmitting power limits (4w for AM and 12w for SSB)[reference], and amateur radio bands are the same way.
Think of it this way. Public forests being sold so that oil can be drilled wrecks those forests, right? The oil isn't there anymore afterwards and all the pollution from the oil drilling and construction processes damages the land so that it is no longer as valuable. Unused spectrum meanwhile is completely empty until someone is permitted to transmit on it. Then it is occupied. After the permission to transmit expires or the spectrum segment is no longer used, it's still there and just as good. It's available to be used again.
Above all, what would you do with it and, in all fairness, how do you know your purpose is more noble or better for the common good than what the big businesses have come up with?
The things they have whole teams for these days.... That's simply absurd.
Really this is a great example of a symptom of a problem that really has plagued Microsoft for years now. Their organization lacks the flexibility for good ideas to be heard, bad ideas to be criticized, and for new features to get rolled out rapidly. How do you coordinate your actions with another programmer who is separated from you by that many layers up and down the chain of command?
DOS had many deficiencies that modern shells lack, like for instance its lack of multitasking and, more specifically, the need for terminate-and-stay-resident calls to emulate (inefficiently) multitasking of a kind. This led to all kinds of interesting problems where the OS was not really meant for multiple processes, so had memory which was not partitioned (i.e., no virtual memory to keep programs' memory separated from each other). So there were allkinds of hacks where you could have a background process that runs, sorta, and edits the memory of the running process. Many of these were beneficial third-party things just meant to make DOS usable as an OS.
Another clear distinction is that DOS was not merely a shell, but a whole OS. Modern OS command lines are actually shells like bash or tcsh, which are very rich with features like tab completion and command history, as well as a more useful batch scripting facility. I can actually do most of my work in a pure command-line environment with bash, vim, and a couple of other programs. I could never do that in DOS ever because it's just not nearly as powerful as a POSIX shell.
Sibling post is right on. I see Bobby Fischer not as a simple hate monger but really as one of our own that went astray through mental illness. All the people who are thinking "good riddance" are really missing the point. His death may not be as sad as his life was.
Judaism is a religion but composed largely of ethnically semitic people. Being an Ashkenazi jew myself, though I do not always practice the religion, well, religiously, I am in fact of a separate ethnicity than merely being white. Just like you wouldn't call everyone from central Africa just "black" and leave it at that, there are many different jewish ethnicities and mine is just the most common one here in the United States. There's a pretty thorough analysis on wikipedia if you're really interested.
I'm sad that Bobby Fischer couldn't be comfortable with his place in this grand culture we've got going. It's a pretty nice heritage to share in, and it's just sad when one of our own spreads hatred and misunderstanding—even if no one listens to them.
Do you want the job of authenticating and signing all "safe" apps? No? Well neither does anyone else. Look at what's happened with driver software for Windows. There's just too much of it for all of it to be approved by any central authority.
...in the same way people will start caring if anyone wants to implant RFID chips in everyone. All I'm saying here is that it's not like it takes 21st century technology to get the hardcore fundamentalist crowd yammering on and on about the end times.
This is just what I've always been talking about with Windows. Why does it take this level of deep knowledge of the operating system to secure against the most idiotic of exploits? Ask an engineer of any other operating system about autorunning executable code from just any media that's inserted and they'll look at you like you've been taking crazy pills.
This is along the same lines as many other questions I have about Windows, like why can image files execute code? Why is it possible for ActiveX scripts to change system registry values and download software to your hard drive? Why is everything not named the same between versions? Why does everyone still use it?
I think most peoples' problem with this idea is that you cannot remove or disable it. Though I don't ascribe to the rampant paranoia surrounding RFID, most of that is because (to the best of my knowledge) I can just go largely incognito by leaving my RFID chips at the house. With RFID implants, your identity is never completely private, because it can always be scanned wherever you are. It's not like you can just switch it off until you need it, unless you feel like wearing a faraday cage....
silly Americans for tweaking their language and measurement systems to make them incompatible with the rest of the English-speaking world.....
Whatever. My car gets fifty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it! Also, it's not like we just made these things up, they came from somewhere else.
Amen on the publicly funded schools. I'm skating into my mid-twenties here and I've still got a long way to go on my student loans.
At first I was totally psyched, then upon further examination I decided that, really, I can accomplish much cooler and more interesting things, for now, with a Gumstix linux computer (or a cluster thereof) or a Parallax "stamp" or even something like this guy here. The problem is that none of my ideas require only an LCD screen, motion sensor, camera or speaker. They all require the ability to tie in other circuits in a way that this device doesn't appear to support (there's ethernet, for instance--also over wireless--but no analogue interfaces of a kind you could really do anything with). Simpler things like the gumstix computers are way more customizable in the long run if you're willing to get your hands dirty, and they're also way cheaper!
PHP, Java for backend and Flex/Actionscript for frontend
Them's fightin' words, sir!
But seriously.... I've just gotten so tired of PHP in the past two years, and Ruby was such a great improvement to it. I used Python before PHP and my only complaint at the time was that it really was more trouble than it was worth at the time to write whole web applications in Python. You could, but languages like PHP were made for the web, so it got superseded. Once upon a time I wrote a few games in Python using PyGame and PyOpenGL though and had nothing but great experiences with that. I wouldn't call Ruby a cure-all, but it's pretty flexible and really pleasant to use for a wide variety of projects.
That being said, I think that your post really misses the fact that for every task there's usually one or two programming languages or frameworks that would be "best" for that task. While PHP and Java may work as a backend for you, many of my projects are almost completely perfect for a Ruby on Rails implementation or specifically require functionality that exists nowhere else. Meanwhile Actionscript implies Flash, and I only have a couple of things brewing right now where Flash is even an option, much less advisable. I'm not trying to slam you here; I'm just saying that like anything else your mileage may vary.
Also, python's supposedly getting tail recursion and some other tasty features soon. I might be tempted to pick it back up if it can surpass ruby in its efficiency that way.
Ok maybe not, but seriously programming in high-level functional languages like lisp, haskell, ML, etc., lets you really explore the abstract nature of computer science. That way you can become a computer scientist rather than just a computer programmer. Concepts like recursion, functional mapping, and—in the weirder languages—lazy evaluation and functional currying are really useful to at least be aware of, and they can help you write more efficient programs in other languages as well. Most helpful for me, at least, is that Ruby supports many of the same functional constructs that exist in Haskell (map, called "collect" in ruby; fold, called "inject" in ruby; etc.). The advantage here is that you can really prototype your algorithms in code and see, conceptually, what they do without being bothered with the nuances of a language like C++, which tends to slow down that process a lot with the constant compiling and mysterious errors.
I was initially taught Java, then C, then C++. When I learned lisp, I never went back. And yes, my pinkies still hurt.
Disclaimer: Watch out, as languages like PHP and Python do not support tail-recursion, a vital requirement for efficient functional programming. Without it, you're stuck with stacks and while loops.
How many nuclear power stations per day would the world likely need to build to stabilise CO2 levels in the atmosphere at a tolerable level?
A lot, what of it? That's hardly relevant when every nuclear power plant is less CO2 being generated. You could easily make just the same comment about wind/solar/geothermal/etc, so aside from just being a pessimist what exactly was your point?
I'm an individual, but for a lot of the things I do, I've incorporated an LLC. Technically I'm a corporation, but I think that when most people talk about corporations and how abusive they are, they're really talking about large, established corporations. Actually not even that; they're talking about the corporations that are notorious enough for abuse of their status.
I do find it unfair that musicians can copyright their works for what basically amounts to "in perpetuity". Do you really think people will be listening to "Hit Me Baby One More Time" over a century from now? I guess anything's possible, seeing as Shakespeare is basically the soap opera of his day. Even so, if I have to stay within the boundaries of sanity with respect to the limits of my copyrights (photographs mostly), so should they.
And I say that as both a citizen and a corporation.
Slashdot Mirror
Um. No. Pay attention to one of my previous posts. Wireless spectrum is not scarce. At all. What is the problem here?
First of all, part of the deal here is that whatever they do with this spectrum has to be usable by the general public. The whole point is to have that spectrum used for new technology that the general public will have access to. Think of something like when the cell phone bands got sold off, and now we have cell phones. You can bitch all you want about cell phone reliability but the fact of the matter is that anyone with sufficient financial resources can set up a cell tower and just do it. It's not a monopoly in any sense of the word. Anyone's allowed in if they play by the rules, which just means you can't interfere with anyone else's use of the airwaves. So if you live out in the country, just get the proper licenses worked out, set up a tower and rock it. It's not like AT&T is going to break down your door and ask you to quit. It's just that if you look at the infrastructure around you and say that you're going to set up your own cell network with blackjack and hookers, there is a fantastically large cost to entry. Better to use the existing infrastructure and rent it from the big boys, as companies like US Cellular do here in Chicago. Or, hey! You can set up a tower and rent it to the big guys if that suits you. Again, it's not like this isn't publicly available tech, it's just that building these things and maintaining them is very expensive. Want a short-range solution? Use CB or something like that, and you're untouchable as long as you don't transmit too loudly. Better yet set up a ham radio repeater with a telephone connection. The ionisphere, literally, is the limit. Seriously.
What I really don't get about this little flamewar we've got going (it's a pretty civil flamewar so far, but you know), is how you can possibly look at this situation and feel shackled by it. Look at it this way. Before: completely empty 700MHz spectrum with no services whatsoever using it. After: something (we don't know what yet) occupying those frequencies that is necessarily mandated to be publicly available, and it might just be really cool. Why can't everybody just sit back and let themselves get excited about this?
Also . . . why don't you just buy your own damn spectrum? If you've got at least $10Bn lying around nobody's gonna stop you from doing that either. Maybe all the slashdotters will put up a few bucks each? (would have to be more than $10,000 each to reach that sum but whatever.) And then what? We'll do . . . nothing with it. Awesome.
Agreed. Perhaps it was my own misinterpretation of dattaway's post but that seemed to be what he was implying. That somehow because we can't use whatever frequencies we want for whatever we want we've somehow "lost" to big corporations. I don't think this is true because as I brought up and then you did just now, you really can do pretty much whatever you want as long as those RF waves don't stray too far. The main concern with spectrum is that there has to be room for everybody, but that's easier than it may seem at first if everybody's transmitting power is limited too, since the spectrum here in Chicago's probably not nearly as wide-open as it is in the middle of Nevada.
2.4GHz was a good compromise but it's getting really crowded over there. I had complaints from my neighbours in the last apartment that I lived in that my wireless router was interfering with their new cordless phone. Aside from turning down the power of one device or another, weighing the usefulness of my wireless router against the usefulness of their cordless phone, there really wasn't a whole lot that could be done. In a totally "free" system I could've somehow hacked all my devices to work on a different frequency, but I'd inevitably interfere with something else. And eventually there's the prospect that you'd interfere with something really critical like the radio communications of firemen or EMTs. That would be what we call a very bad thing.
Sure it can operate at a wide variety of frequencies but that doesn't mean that it should. If you're transmitting at low enough power (say less than 100mw or so) do whatever the hell you want. If you're transmitting powerfully enough for your device, whatever it is, to interfere with other peoples' around you, then you're doing what we call "causing a ruckus".
The reason why we can't have a public spectrum has already been pointed out a couple of times in this discussion (I think by other people who responded to your first post). Say you wanted a wireless network, so you set up an 802.11 router, but you jack up the power to several watts. Meanwhile I, in a similar fashion, set up a wireless network on my side of town (forget for the moment that there are multiple 802.11 channels and 802.11 is fairly robust at error-correction). I may or may not have my own reasons for wanting my own network and not wanting to be a part of yours. Your network would interfere with mine and if I did not have the ability to overpower yours even locally, I'd lose a kind of transmitting power arms race that I think would become quite common if we had a completely public spectrum.
There's other fun stuff that could happen, too. Like I could just drive around town with a high power spark-gap transmitter and just shower the spectrum with noise. Everybody's radios, TVs, cellphones, cordless phones, and possibly even their stereo equipment would be inundated with those little pop-pop-popping noises those things make. Wouldn't that be great??
Think about it. The FCC's regulations also protect you and me from the big businesses. If there were no regulations and Google decided to build a massive transmitter for some reason, and this interfered with all of our wireless devices. The FCC prevents things like that from happening too.
I also used to be a DJ on a public radio station in college, and I generally regard the FCC as kind of a bitch of an organization, but at least they're there to keep the peace and keep order on the airwaves. It's one of those circumstances where even the most well-meaning anarchy really just could never work unless we all joined hands. I don't think that's gonna happen anytime soon.
So that's my wisdom. Got any of your own? Or just sarcasm?
Yeah. All of those are regulated by the FCC here and their counterparts in other countries. Technology's answers still have to fit into the spectrum along with all the other answers. You think 802.11 can just work on any frequency, willy-nilly, any time it wants? No. It has to stay in that same band because otherwise there'd just be pandaemonium on the airwaves. The way we have it, tightly regulated like this, you can operate all your devices with a reasonable expectation that you will encounter no interference doing so.
And yes, I have heard of many shortwave bands. My call letters are KF4SOO. Licensed amateur radio operator for over ten years.
I think you're confusing transmitting and receiving. You can receive on whatever frequencies you care to. Swap out a few parts to an old ham radio receiver and it will totally pick up 700MHz band and you can listen to your heart's content.
Transmitting is a different story though. Even public radio stations have to pay (albeit less than commercial radio stations) in order to broadcast and they are assigned a unique frequency on which to do so.
The radio spectrum is NOT public. Even the citizen's band has transmitting power limits (4w for AM and 12w for SSB)[reference], and amateur radio bands are the same way.
Think of it this way. Public forests being sold so that oil can be drilled wrecks those forests, right? The oil isn't there anymore afterwards and all the pollution from the oil drilling and construction processes damages the land so that it is no longer as valuable. Unused spectrum meanwhile is completely empty until someone is permitted to transmit on it. Then it is occupied. After the permission to transmit expires or the spectrum segment is no longer used, it's still there and just as good. It's available to be used again.
Above all, what would you do with it and, in all fairness, how do you know your purpose is more noble or better for the common good than what the big businesses have come up with?
The things they have whole teams for these days.... That's simply absurd.
Really this is a great example of a symptom of a problem that really has plagued Microsoft for years now. Their organization lacks the flexibility for good ideas to be heard, bad ideas to be criticized, and for new features to get rolled out rapidly. How do you coordinate your actions with another programmer who is separated from you by that many layers up and down the chain of command?
DOS had many deficiencies that modern shells lack, like for instance its lack of multitasking and, more specifically, the need for terminate-and-stay-resident calls to emulate (inefficiently) multitasking of a kind. This led to all kinds of interesting problems where the OS was not really meant for multiple processes, so had memory which was not partitioned (i.e., no virtual memory to keep programs' memory separated from each other). So there were all kinds of hacks where you could have a background process that runs, sorta, and edits the memory of the running process. Many of these were beneficial third-party things just meant to make DOS usable as an OS.
Another clear distinction is that DOS was not merely a shell, but a whole OS. Modern OS command lines are actually shells like bash or tcsh, which are very rich with features like tab completion and command history, as well as a more useful batch scripting facility. I can actually do most of my work in a pure command-line environment with bash, vim, and a couple of other programs. I could never do that in DOS ever because it's just not nearly as powerful as a POSIX shell.
Sibling post is right on. I see Bobby Fischer not as a simple hate monger but really as one of our own that went astray through mental illness. All the people who are thinking "good riddance" are really missing the point. His death may not be as sad as his life was.
Judaism is a religion but composed largely of ethnically semitic people. Being an Ashkenazi jew myself, though I do not always practice the religion, well, religiously, I am in fact of a separate ethnicity than merely being white. Just like you wouldn't call everyone from central Africa just "black" and leave it at that, there are many different jewish ethnicities and mine is just the most common one here in the United States. There's a pretty thorough analysis on wikipedia if you're really interested.
I'm sad that Bobby Fischer couldn't be comfortable with his place in this grand culture we've got going. It's a pretty nice heritage to share in, and it's just sad when one of our own spreads hatred and misunderstanding—even if no one listens to them.
Why not submit your friends' email addresses? Friends don't let friends join myspace!
Do you want the job of authenticating and signing all "safe" apps? No? Well neither does anyone else. Look at what's happened with driver software for Windows. There's just too much of it for all of it to be approved by any central authority.
...in the same way people will start caring if anyone wants to implant RFID chips in everyone. All I'm saying here is that it's not like it takes 21st century technology to get the hardcore fundamentalist crowd yammering on and on about the end times.
...was never added to OS XThere you have it.
This is just what I've always been talking about with Windows. Why does it take this level of deep knowledge of the operating system to secure against the most idiotic of exploits? Ask an engineer of any other operating system about autorunning executable code from just any media that's inserted and they'll look at you like you've been taking crazy pills.
This is along the same lines as many other questions I have about Windows, like why can image files execute code? Why is it possible for ActiveX scripts to change system registry values and download software to your hard drive? Why is everything not named the same between versions? Why does everyone still use it?
Le sigh....
Super radical christians said the same thing about barcodes in the day. Now they're ubiquitous and nobody really cares.
I think most peoples' problem with this idea is that you cannot remove or disable it. Though I don't ascribe to the rampant paranoia surrounding RFID, most of that is because (to the best of my knowledge) I can just go largely incognito by leaving my RFID chips at the house. With RFID implants, your identity is never completely private, because it can always be scanned wherever you are. It's not like you can just switch it off until you need it, unless you feel like wearing a faraday cage....
That's what your mom said!
Whatever. My car gets fifty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it! Also, it's not like we just made these things up, they came from somewhere else.
Amen on the publicly funded schools. I'm skating into my mid-twenties here and I've still got a long way to go on my student loans.
Right off the bat, three sodomy jokes in a row, all of them gold! Congratulations Slashdotters. We're a real internet community like 4chan now!
At first I was totally psyched, then upon further examination I decided that, really, I can accomplish much cooler and more interesting things, for now, with a Gumstix linux computer (or a cluster thereof) or a Parallax "stamp" or even something like this guy here. The problem is that none of my ideas require only an LCD screen, motion sensor, camera or speaker. They all require the ability to tie in other circuits in a way that this device doesn't appear to support (there's ethernet, for instance--also over wireless--but no analogue interfaces of a kind you could really do anything with). Simpler things like the gumstix computers are way more customizable in the long run if you're willing to get your hands dirty, and they're also way cheaper!
Them's fightin' words, sir!
But seriously.... I've just gotten so tired of PHP in the past two years, and Ruby was such a great improvement to it. I used Python before PHP and my only complaint at the time was that it really was more trouble than it was worth at the time to write whole web applications in Python. You could, but languages like PHP were made for the web, so it got superseded. Once upon a time I wrote a few games in Python using PyGame and PyOpenGL though and had nothing but great experiences with that. I wouldn't call Ruby a cure-all, but it's pretty flexible and really pleasant to use for a wide variety of projects.
That being said, I think that your post really misses the fact that for every task there's usually one or two programming languages or frameworks that would be "best" for that task. While PHP and Java may work as a backend for you, many of my projects are almost completely perfect for a Ruby on Rails implementation or specifically require functionality that exists nowhere else. Meanwhile Actionscript implies Flash, and I only have a couple of things brewing right now where Flash is even an option, much less advisable. I'm not trying to slam you here; I'm just saying that like anything else your mileage may vary.
Also, python's supposedly getting tail recursion and some other tasty features soon. I might be tempted to pick it back up if it can surpass ruby in its efficiency that way.
Ok maybe not, but seriously programming in high-level functional languages like lisp, haskell, ML, etc., lets you really explore the abstract nature of computer science. That way you can become a computer scientist rather than just a computer programmer. Concepts like recursion, functional mapping, and—in the weirder languages—lazy evaluation and functional currying are really useful to at least be aware of, and they can help you write more efficient programs in other languages as well. Most helpful for me, at least, is that Ruby supports many of the same functional constructs that exist in Haskell (map, called "collect" in ruby; fold, called "inject" in ruby; etc.). The advantage here is that you can really prototype your algorithms in code and see, conceptually, what they do without being bothered with the nuances of a language like C++, which tends to slow down that process a lot with the constant compiling and mysterious errors.
I was initially taught Java, then C, then C++. When I learned lisp, I never went back. And yes, my pinkies still hurt.
Disclaimer: Watch out, as languages like PHP and Python do not support tail-recursion, a vital requirement for efficient functional programming. Without it, you're stuck with stacks and while loops.
A lot, what of it? That's hardly relevant when every nuclear power plant is less CO2 being generated. You could easily make just the same comment about wind/solar/geothermal/etc, so aside from just being a pessimist what exactly was your point?
I'm an individual, but for a lot of the things I do, I've incorporated an LLC. Technically I'm a corporation, but I think that when most people talk about corporations and how abusive they are, they're really talking about large, established corporations. Actually not even that; they're talking about the corporations that are notorious enough for abuse of their status.
I do find it unfair that musicians can copyright their works for what basically amounts to "in perpetuity". Do you really think people will be listening to "Hit Me Baby One More Time" over a century from now? I guess anything's possible, seeing as Shakespeare is basically the soap opera of his day. Even so, if I have to stay within the boundaries of sanity with respect to the limits of my copyrights (photographs mostly), so should they.
And I say that as both a citizen and a corporation.