the point of the original was that honesty was something that is rewarded
Yes, the book was about Virtue. Willie Wonka was looking for someone Good, displaying:
Honesty: conforming to what you know to be true and right (not lying or stealing)
Patience: the ability to delay gratification and avoid complaining about the trivial
Humility: thinking of oneself as no better than others.
Kindness: the habit of treating others well in all things
Charity: the practice of thinking the best of others, as opposed to assuming the worst
Generosity: looking for ways to give to others, rather than to acquire for yourself
Flexibility: the ability to accept new things, be spontaneously fun, and learn
He found all of those things in Charlie. I always thought Wonka somehow knew Charlie would find the last ticket, and in fact the whole thing was a setup to test Charlie.
I glossed that. I assume a speech module would have macros, so you'd say 'dot' to mean the end of a sentence and 'semmy' for semicolon. Or, the language could use keywords like 'stop', 'dot', 'semmy', etc., in place of punctuation, and suggest formatting rules to keep things readable.
It's no big deal to alter the grammar to use a word in place of a punctuation mark. That's how I started out, replacing '+' with the word 'plus', and so on.
I've been working recently on a language I call 'verbal'. My goal initially was a language I could use in the car, while driving. (I love to code.)
I realized that such a language would be useful for blind people and anyone who couldn't type.
The target is a language that will mimic a subset of English, so that a program might be:
Let number be seven. While number is greater than zero, do print number; number is number minus one; done.
I've written a compiler that translates that kind of thing into C, but I'm not releasing it just yet. It only has the type int, and no functions or objects. As soon as it can handle objects, I'll post it quietly.
(I got stuck for a day doing an elegant itoa.c, but that's done now. All I needed it for was to generate good labels for constants on the symbol table, and sprintf didn't fit right. Of course I found a slightly simpler one after I got it done.)
Hehe. More likely is the scenario in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, in which the colonist use a railgun to drop big rocks onto the Earth. Scurry, you little earth-dwelling bugs! Oh, that's me.
Just remember the phrase "gravity well", and you'll do fine.
Space is much more analogous to our experience with ocean travel than air travel. You can stay in space until your supplies run out, not just while your fuel does. That means a lot more interaction between people, and more need for regulation of that interaction.
It always strikes me as a bit luddite when the surface-dwellers arrogate for themselves the right to govern those outside the atmosphere, or on another planet.
I expect one of the first court cases to result in the principle that a space Captain has all the rights of a maritime Captain.
I wonder when we'll see the first marriage performed by a Captain in space?
And I wonder how long before the first space battle over control of a "celestial object", or over something else?
Whatever happens, we'll probably have seen it before.
>free software has better access to local talent...
No, but the converse is true: local talent has better access to the source code of free software.
Also, while the one guy in 10 (to pick a number) who gets hired by a commercial vendor may be the best of the lot, that doesn't make him better than the other 9 put together. And besides, he doesn't have to be the best, he just has to be good enough, and local.
I said it had 'a natural immunity from that', not that it was 'immune'. Of course there are bad programmers, bad translators, and nit-picky, oversensitive people all over the place, so bad things can happen to FOSS projects as well.
My point is that the person most likely to want to do a CultureX version of some project is a person from X culture. A commercial company is more likely to hire one guy to do six different cultures that are sort of the same, like Pakistani and Afghan versions. They're "sort of the same" from 10,000 feet, but obviously quite different on the ground.
If someone notices that Open Office dot Org for Swahili contains phrases that are local slang for eating pig dung, they'll either chuckle along or make noise about it. As soon as they make noise, someone will fix it. No government inquiry, no protest marches, no lawsuit.
In about 1995 I worked for a telemarketer. Yeah, I know. Anyway, I sat in a meeting once with some people from a trendy ad agency. They said one of the best ways to market things on the Internet was to visit newsgroups and message boards (what we now call blogs), and ask a question as one user, then provide the answer as another. The answer, of course, would advertize Our Fine Product.
I told them that was lying, and that it was wrong. They looked at me blankly. I may as well have been speaking Latin. I then explained a bit about Internete culture, and the negative feedback of spamming newsgroups. That, they could comprehend, but they didn't think I knew what I was talking about. Their model worked - and it wasn't lying, it was just business.
The mindset of people who spam, sell banner ads, use covert marketing, and advertize on Channel One is (to overgeneralize): whatever it takes to make money.
It doesn't matter what is "right" or "wrong" - rightness and wrongness are a matter of degree, and that degree is measured by a cost-benefit equation. If the
(likely revenue) > X% + sum of (potential costs * likelihood of each)
that's good and "right", otherwise it's bad and "wrong". 'X' represents the amount of margin you could make off some other investment.
The thing that distinguishes telemarketers and spammers is that negative feedback from non-customers doesn't bother them.
Microsoft has gotten into trouble internationally with cultural problems. Free software has a natural immunity from that.
Because FOSS developers rely on the people closest to the problem to solve the problem, such cultural difficulties are minimized. It's a built-in advantage: rather than translating the program for a language, people who live in a different culture will, without thinking about it, translate the program into that culture.
As this story shows, markets for which commercial software companies can't find an adequate profit potential are ripe for introduction of FOSS. All you need is one user, one willing programmer, and one native translator - and in fact, those can all be the same person.
Because it grossly oversimplifies The Handmaid's Tale, for one thing. In the book, the "religious right" doesn't take over, but an odd coalition of politically correct feminists and absurdly "morally correct" right wingers. If I recall, the government in THT is not even Christian, but totalitarian regime dressed in religious trappings.
For another thing, the namecalling of "White Taliban" is beyond flamebait. It's racist, and it's false.
A voting machine GUI program is useless without being ported to some hardware. This was just a prototype, which would probably have to be thrown away when it didn't match a machine's driver API.
At any rate, the work to glue a prototype onto a real machine is probably O(creating a new GUI).
While it's sleazy for a politician to be involved in this kind of thing, and I hope he gets voted out of office if it's all true, I don't see any broken laws here. Show me his program on a production voting machine, and I'll be convinced.
What if this was just for a mock-election, like for trade shows and political rallies? You put a PC on the counter and let people vote, only no matter who wanders by to 'vote', your guys win. The thing could be a harmless toy.
(reply to sibling) That was a typo: it should have said "TRS-80 Model I - Level II". My machine got the whopping 16K expansion, and later a couple of disk drives.
Inspired by Moria under PLATO, I wrote a wire-frame 3D maze game in BASIC. It generated a randomized bitmap according to some reasonableness rules, then saved the dungeon to tape for loading later. About all you could do is wander the maze, so it wasn't much fun. It got unwieldy, as all BASIC programs tend to do.
More generally, each generation is more adept at using the technology it grew up using, and less adept at using what its forebears had.
My grandfather's generation toasted bread on a stove or in an oven, usually burning wood. They got electricity in their homes so they could go hi-tech and use a toaster. Well, they needed lights, too, but perfect toast was a big draw.
I'm a tail-end Boomer, born in 1963. My dad's generation could do trigonometry on a slide rule; I need a calculator.
Dad knew FORTRAN and BASIC. I know many computer languages.
I got my first computer, a TRS-80 Model II, in 1977. I learned BASIC and a little Z80 assembler. I needed to learn programming just to use the machine.
My kids have had, as long as they can remember, at least one computer in the house, usually networked together and with Internet access. They don't know any programming languages; they haven't needed to learn any to use the computer.
To my generation, computers were nerdy. To theirs, computers are more like TVs or toasters: part of the furniture.
Recently I gave my 16-year-old daughter, who's not a nerd, a new computer, running Linux. I told her it was different, but that it was Free. Being an idealist, she thought that was Just Totally Cool. A day later she told me proudly that she had her CD collecton "programmed in" so that it had all the information about the tracks and artists for all her tunes.
Can you say with any certainty that Martian microbes aren't already here?
Certainty? I'm not even certain I just ate an orange. I can say I know of no evidence that there is now or has ever been any life on Mars.
The hints that at one time there may been water, the hints that a rock from Antarctica may have fossilized bacteria and has the same composition as rocks on Mars are not convincing. They fall into the same category as "canals" - promising from a distance, but close up there's nothing there.
If there were (ever) life on Mars, we would know by now.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, the book was about Virtue. Willie Wonka was looking for someone Good, displaying:
He found all of those things in Charlie. I always thought Wonka somehow knew Charlie would find the last ticket, and in fact the whole thing was a setup to test Charlie.
Yes, I've had it done in both states.
It's got this pattern of staple holes all over the corner.
Yeah, I'm not much of a hardware geek, either.
People who can build working stuff out of lego may as well be practicing witchcraft, as far as I can tell.
is it's about time someone did this.
We should give this guy a big hand. And then a second hand. But then, he's probably got his hands all in place already.
Can this run Linux? It would be a great NTP server.
>[deal with punctuation]
I glossed that. I assume a speech module would have macros, so you'd say 'dot' to mean the end of a sentence and 'semmy' for semicolon. Or, the language could use keywords like 'stop', 'dot', 'semmy', etc., in place of punctuation, and suggest formatting rules to keep things readable.
It's no big deal to alter the grammar to use a word in place of a punctuation mark. That's how I started out, replacing '+' with the word 'plus', and so on.
I've been working recently on a language I call 'verbal'. My goal initially was a language I could use in the car, while driving. (I love to code.)
I realized that such a language would be useful for blind people and anyone who couldn't type.
The target is a language that will mimic a subset of English, so that a program might be:
I've written a compiler that translates that kind of thing into C, but I'm not releasing it just yet. It only has the type int, and no functions or objects. As soon as it can handle objects, I'll post it quietly.
(I got stuck for a day doing an elegant itoa.c, but that's done now. All I needed it for was to generate good labels for constants on the symbol table, and sprintf didn't fit right. Of course I found a slightly simpler one after I got it done.)
The rank structure, beginning in the original series, was always that of a navy or marine corps rather than an army or air force.
Captain Kirk was always treated as sovereign, within regulations. He regularly waxed poetic about life on the high seas.
- nuclear war on the moon
Hehe. More likely is the scenario in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, in which the colonist use a railgun to drop big rocks onto the Earth. Scurry, you little earth-dwelling bugs! Oh, that's me.Just remember the phrase "gravity well", and you'll do fine.
>WTH would people wearing a grass skirt
>need an Office package???
So we can finally reply to all the small-minded, trolling mabaradhuli.
Space is much more analogous to our experience with ocean travel than air travel. You can stay in space until your supplies run out, not just while your fuel does. That means a lot more interaction between people, and more need for regulation of that interaction.
It always strikes me as a bit luddite when the surface-dwellers arrogate for themselves the right to govern those outside the atmosphere, or on another planet.
I expect one of the first court cases to result in the principle that a space Captain has all the rights of a maritime Captain.
I wonder when we'll see the first marriage performed by a Captain in space?
And I wonder how long before the first space battle over control of a "celestial object", or over something else?
Whatever happens, we'll probably have seen it before.
In Korea, only old people use online dictionaries, you insensitive clod!
All your noun are belong to us!
>free software has better access to local talent...
No, but the converse is true: local talent has better access to the source code of free software.
Also, while the one guy in 10 (to pick a number) who gets hired by a commercial vendor may be the best of the lot, that doesn't make him better than the other 9 put together. And besides, he doesn't have to be the best, he just has to be good enough, and local.
I said it had 'a natural immunity from that', not that it was 'immune'. Of course there are bad programmers, bad translators, and nit-picky, oversensitive people all over the place, so bad things can happen to FOSS projects as well.
My point is that the person most likely to want to do a CultureX version of some project is a person from X culture. A commercial company is more likely to hire one guy to do six different cultures that are sort of the same, like Pakistani and Afghan versions. They're "sort of the same" from 10,000 feet, but obviously quite different on the ground.
If someone notices that Open Office dot Org for Swahili contains phrases that are local slang for eating pig dung, they'll either chuckle along or make noise about it. As soon as they make noise, someone will fix it. No government inquiry, no protest marches, no lawsuit.
In about 1995 I worked for a telemarketer. Yeah, I know. Anyway, I sat in a meeting once with some people from a trendy ad agency. They said one of the best ways to market things on the Internet was to visit newsgroups and message boards (what we now call blogs), and ask a question as one user, then provide the answer as another. The answer, of course, would advertize Our Fine Product.
I told them that was lying, and that it was wrong. They looked at me blankly. I may as well have been speaking Latin. I then explained a bit about Internete culture, and the negative feedback of spamming newsgroups. That, they could comprehend, but they didn't think I knew what I was talking about. Their model worked - and it wasn't lying, it was just business.
The mindset of people who spam, sell banner ads, use covert marketing, and advertize on Channel One is (to overgeneralize): whatever it takes to make money.
It doesn't matter what is "right" or "wrong" - rightness and wrongness are a matter of degree, and that degree is measured by a cost-benefit equation. If the
(likely revenue) > X% + sum of (potential costs * likelihood of each)
that's good and "right", otherwise it's bad and "wrong". 'X' represents the amount of margin you could make off some other investment.
The thing that distinguishes telemarketers and spammers is that negative feedback from non-customers doesn't bother them.
Microsoft has gotten into trouble internationally with cultural problems. Free software has a natural immunity from that.
Because FOSS developers rely on the people closest to the problem to solve the problem, such cultural difficulties are minimized. It's a built-in advantage: rather than translating the program for a language, people who live in a different culture will, without thinking about it, translate the program into that culture.
As this story shows, markets for which commercial software companies can't find an adequate profit potential are ripe for introduction of FOSS. All you need is one user, one willing programmer, and one native translator - and in fact, those can all be the same person.
is the Deputy Attorney General, for falsifying an application.
Trinity is the victim of fraud. Not that they appear to work very hard to avoid it, but why is the DAG working so hard to entrap them?
>And this is flamebait how?
Because it grossly oversimplifies The Handmaid's Tale, for one thing. In the book, the "religious right" doesn't take over, but an odd coalition of politically correct feminists and absurdly "morally correct" right wingers. If I recall, the government in THT is not even Christian, but totalitarian regime dressed in religious trappings.
For another thing, the namecalling of "White Taliban" is beyond flamebait. It's racist, and it's false.
A voting machine GUI program is useless without being ported to some hardware. This was just a prototype, which would probably have to be thrown away when it didn't match a machine's driver API.
At any rate, the work to glue a prototype onto a real machine is probably O(creating a new GUI).
While it's sleazy for a politician to be involved in this kind of thing, and I hope he gets voted out of office if it's all true, I don't see any broken laws here. Show me his program on a production voting machine, and I'll be convinced.
What if this was just for a mock-election, like for trade shows and political rallies? You put a PC on the counter and let people vote, only no matter who wanders by to 'vote', your guys win. The thing could be a harmless toy.
I think it's a hair across the lens.
But then, I'm not a RealPhotographer...
Now this will be added to the urban legends about vote fraud and minority disenfranchisement, and we'll get to hear about it ad infinitum.
Thanks a lot.
(reply to sibling)
That was a typo: it should have said "TRS-80 Model I - Level II". My machine got the whopping 16K expansion, and later a couple of disk drives.
Inspired by Moria under PLATO, I wrote a wire-frame 3D maze game in BASIC. It generated a randomized bitmap according to some reasonableness rules, then saved the dungeon to tape for loading later. About all you could do is wander the maze, so it wasn't much fun. It got unwieldy, as all BASIC programs tend to do.
More generally, each generation is more adept at using the technology it grew up using, and less adept at using what its forebears had.
My grandfather's generation toasted bread on a stove or in an oven, usually burning wood. They got electricity in their homes so they could go hi-tech and use a toaster. Well, they needed lights, too, but perfect toast was a big draw.
I'm a tail-end Boomer, born in 1963. My dad's generation could do trigonometry on a slide rule; I need a calculator.
Dad knew FORTRAN and BASIC. I know many computer languages.
I got my first computer, a TRS-80 Model II, in 1977. I learned BASIC and a little Z80 assembler. I needed to learn programming just to use the machine.
My kids have had, as long as they can remember, at least one computer in the house, usually networked together and with Internet access. They don't know any programming languages; they haven't needed to learn any to use the computer.
To my generation, computers were nerdy. To theirs, computers are more like TVs or toasters: part of the furniture.
Recently I gave my 16-year-old daughter, who's not a nerd, a new computer, running Linux. I told her it was different, but that it was Free. Being an idealist, she thought that was Just Totally Cool. A day later she told me proudly that she had her CD collecton "programmed in" so that it had all the information about the tracks and artists for all her tunes.
It's just part of the furniture.
Certainty? I'm not even certain I just ate an orange. I can say I know of no evidence that there is now or has ever been any life on Mars.
The hints that at one time there may been water, the hints that a rock from Antarctica may have fossilized bacteria and has the same composition as rocks on Mars are not convincing. They fall into the same category as "canals" - promising from a distance, but close up there's nothing there.
If there were (ever) life on Mars, we would know by now.