the vehicles do get better gas mileage than standard automobiles
Not true. Direct injection diesels commonly do 60-70MPG without any foolishness like regenerative braking or automatic freewheeling. The Audi A2 for example can do 78MPG, and the VW Lupo 3L (special eco-car) does well over 100MPG. That's about what hybrids claim but never actually manage, plus direct injection diesels are quiet, more rapid and have greater torque than petrols. It's a win win! Take a look at this list of diesels and their MPGs, or this series of articles about why diesels aren't taken seriously in the US.
Only in the US where diesels aren't taken seriously (less than 1% of new cars are diesels in the US compared to about 40% in the EU) could hybrids ever be considered with a serious face.
In the UK and Spain (probably other EU countries too?) there is no such a thing as unlimited voice and data. We get charged a fortune just to use our phones occsasionally. This this thing could save us a fortune.
Quite, but then it's impossible to have a reasonable discussion about patents since *they're not reasonable*, no matter which way you care to look at them; the fact that FOSS developers don't read patents speaks volumes. The way patents are being used nowadays is scandalous, and I think, rather than steeling the IP cosh, this farce will only cause the whole idea of intellectual property to be re-evaluted, with a sensible law as the outcome.
Unless a patent holder can proove (at their expense) that I used their patent to figure out how to achieve something, or was influenced by the unique knowledge introduced by their patent while achieving some goal, then they have no grounds for claiming part ownership of my work, since, by definition, they have had no hand in the creation of that work. Why is this so difficult to understand?
In criminal law we have the idea of 'beyond all reasonable doubt'. I believe the patent owner should be under a similar burden of proof. I think that with FOSS patent owners will have a dificult job shuting down patent infringed projects anyway, since, I for one, will be quite happy to ignore these ridiculous laws and re-distribute the software.
Well first of all, the chance that a house doesn't have a TV inside is really slim, so if you haven't paid you're a big target. Secondly, televisions emit a shit load of radiation which would be really easy to detect, so I think it is more that then some quantum effect of affecting the signal from merely observing it.
I remember reading some years ago about spying equipment that would allow someone using a highly directional antenna to look at what was on somebodies CRT monitor from over a mile away. I imagine that would do it, though I don't know whether it would stand up in court.
Most people in the UK are really proud of the BBC and would hate to see it go, and don't even question the fact a TV license has to be paid.
You lie Sir! The article is about how Linux IS the dominant OS for high end computing (mainframes and clustering). Not servers, and not about how it's getting better, but how it IS NO.1 RIGHT NOW in that market segment.
I completely understand and agree with everything you are saying here. Your examples are far better thought through than mine -- certainly, learning to share through free will is a valuable lesson whereas forced communism is a really bad idea.
One of my earliest memories was at playschool on my birthday when I was allowed to bring in my own bike for the day -- as opposed to the trikes they provided -- and I got about the same time on it as everyone else (that's how it felt anyway). That felt really unfair, especially since they didn't always treat it with much care, and I'm sure I learn't to hate communism that day, whereas I never learn't a thing about goodwill.
Anyway, it's a really interesting idea that you've raised here, and I think it's a worthwhile theory to consider when determining school policy. I'm glad I helped you distill it -- I can imagine making this case myself one day.
That's what they do apparently. I saw this this morning on Sky News and they described the process as taking some stem cells from your blood or marow, programming and culturing them in the lab, then injecting them into the gum. Two months later you have a new tooth.
The body does all the hard work -- it just needs the stem cells programmed for becoming teeth in the gums. Just the same as your adult teeth really.
This is an intersting point of view you have, and I can see the logic to it all. You are kind of saying that the school system should also be designed to impart the experiental knowledge that those children will need for later life. I'd never thought about it like that before, but it's worth considering.
What I wonder though, is what are the valuable lessons we should be teaching. You place a lot of emphasis on competition, and I agree with that, but you seem less concerned about charity, goodwill, or equal opportunities.
Won't the fact that though the children whose parents couldn't afford crayons were still provided for, install the belief that everyone should be given a chance? If there are lessons in everything, and you can design a system to impart them, then I want a system that is ethically rich -- hard work is not the only ethic we should teach.
Speaking as somebody who uses both XP and 2000 daily, no, you are full of shit. How do you think millions of us Windows users listen to MP3s all day?
As somebody who has used both Win95 and Win98 (sic), I can tell you this is not shit, but was once a big problem. The original sound driver model under Windows was MME which could be written as a single-client or multi-client driver; only a few pro-audio cards were ever released with multi-client drivers, and so only one application could use the sound card at a time.
Almost all applications work by grabing the sound card when the app becomes focused and releasing it again when the app loses focus. Multimedia apps that may want to keep targetting the sound card at all times, cause normal apps that subsequently attempt to use the sound card to be frozen out.
This was never a problem for DirectSound drivers (I think?), and in Win2K MS added an internal mixer so that even single client MME drivers could be used simultaneously by multiple applications. I guess the poster switched to Linux or Macs years ago, and that you never read the subject of his post Win95 sucks at sound).
IMO, WinXP still sucks at sound since DirectSound does not support professional multi-I/O cards, and because the latency of DirectSound is unusable for audio production, and is a hindrance to games players.
Well in a way that is not really intersting for a crypto person, only a mathematician. A crypto person need only know what a given class of algorithims do, whether they are currently known to be unbreakable, and then use the right one appropiately.
I have a very basic understanding of crypto, so for example I know what a secure hashing algorithim does, but I may be tempted to use it for a hash where the reverse transform is not actually important, but where some properties of a hash like that may actually introduce a vulnerability.
Provided I am able to determine the features an algorithm must exhibit, I can then choose one that has those features which is known to be safe at the present time using a given key length.
I am really missing the point of all of this. We have a link to a German article that is uninteligble to the majority of posters here, and a lot of people talking absolute nonsense. Why?
When the previous article about Novell merging KDE and Gnome I immediately thought, which platform will they use as the base. I guessed KDE since the KDE people are already doing all the work whereas the Gnome people don't seem so interested. Nobody asked that fundamental question. Why?
Now, assuming that article says what it is claimed, I am left wondering why people think Gtk is being dropped, and scratching there heads over the Ximian aquisition. Why do people think that Gtk is being dropped, and what does integration mean to you anyway?
When Novell say *they* are standardising on Qt why do people then say that everyone else must now develop their apps in Qt too? How do you explain the fact that Gtk apps have long worked under KDE, and now Novell wants to integrate them more tightly?
To me this all sounds like Novell are going to make more use of Qt for their own future development, are going to use KDE as a base system for their OS, but are going to continue and extend the work being done in the KDE camp so that Gtk based applications work flawlessly in KDE (print dialogs, file dialogs, look 'n feel, font settings, control center options, etc).
The only question I am left wondering is whether they will also offer a Gnome desktop and do the exact same integration the other way round so that KDE applications work flawlessly in Gnome. Anyone care to comment?
All of the serious documentation we have available from the time (and there's a surprising amount of it) indicates that he was considerably more than that.
Could you please provide us some links to any of this great corpus of literature you allure to?
Yes, that's what I am looking forward to. Mesh networking over large distances where everyone carries everyone else's calls, and the only cost is owning the phone and keeping the battery topped up.
No, I don't like spending constantly on phone calls or Internet connections, and having central organisations in the way means that poor people will never be able to own communicators, even when they become as cheap as calculators to manufacture.
The technology and public radio frequency are already here -- only the lack of an official network stack for P2P meshing (IPv4/6 are both completely unsuited to meshing) remain obstacles to free electronic communication becoming a reality. It's really just a matter of time.
Information and software should be free because they can be. Literature and entertainment should be free because they can be. Now I don't suggest that everything can or should be free, but it doesn't need to be:
I haven't paid for a book for about 3 years because Gutenberg has much better stuff at no cost. Some people don't like classics so there is a market for new stuff, but I think most of the best literature was written centuries ago.
I haven't used a proprietary OS for 2 years because I prefer Linux/KDE. Some people prefer Windows or Mac, so there is a market for proprietary software.
As for the hippy wheel; I'm a firm believer. If you are not then you have your eyes closed. How is that I can afford to own a library greater than the richest nobles of yesteryear? Why is it that I can afford to have so much quality music, and still almost never need to listen to the same thing twice? Why have I not needed to buy an expensive developers book in over 4 years?
Energy, planetary transport and digital communication will all become free within our lifetimes; clothing and food may become free within our lifetimes; housing will take the longest. But it's all just a matter of time -- We have the technology!
I believe in free software. I believe in free literature and education. I believe in free energy. I believe that one day work will not be necesarry in the same way that it is today, and I believe that the system will need to change to acknowledge that or there will be widespread rioting and discontent.
Now I am not so stupid as to believe that I can give away everything I do because I do not live in a world where money is no longer neccesarry. But I do believe the day is coming, and I am happy to contribute a little on our path there.
Unlike the 25% of the world that live in dire poverty, I live in a world of ease and comfort. Some of my peers may be richer than me, but I myself am extravagently rich.
I can afford all the food I care to eat with ease. I can afford to clothe myself as I please. I can afford a travel carriage (car) that allows me to move accross the country at the speed of many horses, and in far greater comfort, and I occasionally use a flying machine that allows me to get to the other side of the world in less than a day. I have instant access to the largest repository of information ever collected, and I can retrieve documents from it in a flash. Name an ancient King that had as much as I do?
If I don't feel the need to harp on every penny it is because I am not so greedy as to recognize that I already have more than sufficient. As for girls that like money (gold diggers), I'd rather they didn't pay me any mind since I'm a hopeless romantic and prefer real women.
I have this exact same functionality with KDE News Ticker which I have dedicated to it's own bar at the top which I can hide when I don't want to be distracted. It's all colour coded to match the rest of the desktop and looks awesome.
Yes, great idea. When do we begin the move to IPv6?
And, although RSS is a technically a pull technology, it feels as though it's a push technology because the computer does the polling automatically -- so, as far as normal people are concerned, it is a push technology, and that's really the same thing;-).
As for efficiency, if RSS readers respect the HTTP protocol than it should be at least as efficient, if not more, then some basic push mechanism since HTTP is a distributed protocol. The client knows how long to wait before retrying (Cache-Control: max-age), the feed is only downloaded if it has changed (304 -- Not Modified) and it is likely you need ask no futher than your ISPs/Companies/Universities transparent cache (Cache-Control: public).
Re:A great success story of Linux on the desktop..
on
Rome Moving to Linux
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· Score: 1
I read a lot about Extramadura, and it's only now you mention it that I realise what a huge disparity there has been.
I'm just guessing, but maybe it was because Extramadura was a victory for Free Software rather than a victory for Open Source. On the other hand, perhaps it was because nobody had ever heard of Extramadura (even me, and I've been living in Spain for two and half years).
I think it's maybe more the first reason then the second. Remember the excellent Chilean and Kenyan positioning papers that were so well written and made such a mockery of MS? It never received the same amount of attention either. Perhaps for the same reason many ignore RMS -- though I agree with them on that one.
Can't really put my finger on what I am trying to say exactly...
There do seem to be some improvements listed. Foremost appears to be the ability to view a scaled version of the desktops in full screen instead of just the little icons in the pager.
KDE's KasBar has this -- admittedly a replacement for the taskbar rather than the virtual desktops. I used for it while back in KDE 3.1.
They also describe animating the transition between this view and the full desktops via shrinking/expanding the active desktop.
So they are patenting a... video transition? Wa hey!
I think mailing lists are the wrong technology for discussion groups anyway. I have never understood why people prefer them over the news protocol that is perfect for that. If it is real news you want then rss is the solution.
Both news amd rss are, IMO, far better protocols for this type od thing then mail is anyway.
Not that I support the idea of charging for mails with money though -- I hope that fails, and I certainly won't use it.
This is the old way of thinking. When you see the answer, I'm sure you'll jump on board.
Testing should not be necessary to any serious degree, and if the program were expressed using a semantically richer language the debugger could just lead you through the possible variations so you could be sure you were happy with them.
The answer, IMO, is to do away with programming as we know it and replace it with a purely declarative language than can be read like a specification.
At Uni we used Z to create a formal specifcation for some program which we then type checked, and later animated using prolog. The specifications were incredibly easy to read (once you knew how to do that) and could be reasoned about very simply.
If I could write all my programs using a language like Z that could be automatically animated then I could create programs in the time it takes to write a solid specification, and with a fraction of the bugs. This would be good.
I graduated in '97 and wanted to do a PHD looking at how we could create an automatic Java skeleton around a Z specification, and a system that would complain as soon as the program had broken the specification. That never happened but I often still work on these types of ideas, and feel there is a real future for something like this.
I am convinced there is a better way. Even if programming needs to be this complex, there must be a way to safely allow re-use; to allow complex programs to be built from well tested building blocks.
Financial Aid... what a joke. The rich countries all do it, like they really want to help or something. For every $10 we steal we'll give one back. Yes, were such good Samaritans!
This is how to enslave a country, so that you may begin to give them financial aid and feel good about yourself:
1. Give their corrupt Government huge loans that the country will never see 2. Require that they all a grow a cash crop to bay pack their foreign debt 3. Ensure that their is an over production of said resource 4. Pay a price that will not cover interest payments 5. Penalise any countries that try to stand together by ignoring them completely 6. Profit!
Slashdot Mirror
Not true. Direct injection diesels commonly do 60-70MPG without any foolishness like regenerative braking or automatic freewheeling. The Audi A2 for example can do 78MPG, and the VW Lupo 3L (special eco-car) does well over 100MPG. That's about what hybrids claim but never actually manage, plus direct injection diesels are quiet, more rapid and have greater torque than petrols. It's a win win! Take a look at this list of diesels and their MPGs, or this series of articles about why diesels aren't taken seriously in the US.
Only in the US where diesels aren't taken seriously (less than 1% of new cars are diesels in the US compared to about 40% in the EU) could hybrids ever be considered with a serious face.
In the UK and Spain (probably other EU countries too?) there is no such a thing as unlimited voice and data. We get charged a fortune just to use our phones occsasionally. This this thing could save us a fortune.
Quite, but then it's impossible to have a reasonable discussion about patents since *they're not reasonable*, no matter which way you care to look at them; the fact that FOSS developers don't read patents speaks volumes. The way patents are being used nowadays is scandalous, and I think, rather than steeling the IP cosh, this farce will only cause the whole idea of intellectual property to be re-evaluted, with a sensible law as the outcome.
Unless a patent holder can proove (at their expense) that I used their patent to figure out how to achieve something, or was influenced by the unique knowledge introduced by their patent while achieving some goal, then they have no grounds for claiming part ownership of my work, since, by definition, they have had no hand in the creation of that work. Why is this so difficult to understand?
In criminal law we have the idea of 'beyond all reasonable doubt'. I believe the patent owner should be under a similar burden of proof. I think that with FOSS patent owners will have a dificult job shuting down patent infringed projects anyway, since, I for one, will be quite happy to ignore these ridiculous laws and re-distribute the software.
Well first of all, the chance that a house doesn't have a TV inside is really slim, so if you haven't paid you're a big target. Secondly, televisions emit a shit load of radiation which would be really easy to detect, so I think it is more that then some quantum effect of affecting the signal from merely observing it.
I remember reading some years ago about spying equipment that would allow someone using a highly directional antenna to look at what was on somebodies CRT monitor from over a mile away. I imagine that would do it, though I don't know whether it would stand up in court.
Most people in the UK are really proud of the BBC and would hate to see it go, and don't even question the fact a TV license has to be paid.
You lie Sir! The article is about how Linux IS the dominant OS for high end computing (mainframes and clustering). Not servers, and not about how it's getting better, but how it IS NO.1 RIGHT NOW in that market segment.
I completely understand and agree with everything you are saying here. Your examples are far better thought through than mine -- certainly, learning to share through free will is a valuable lesson whereas forced communism is a really bad idea.
One of my earliest memories was at playschool on my birthday when I was allowed to bring in my own bike for the day -- as opposed to the trikes they provided -- and I got about the same time on it as everyone else (that's how it felt anyway). That felt really unfair, especially since they didn't always treat it with much care, and I'm sure I learn't to hate communism that day, whereas I never learn't a thing about goodwill.
Anyway, it's a really interesting idea that you've raised here, and I think it's a worthwhile theory to consider when determining school policy. I'm glad I helped you distill it -- I can imagine making this case myself one day.
That's what they do apparently. I saw this this morning on Sky News and they described the process as taking some stem cells from your blood or marow, programming and culturing them in the lab, then injecting them into the gum. Two months later you have a new tooth.
The body does all the hard work -- it just needs the stem cells programmed for becoming teeth in the gums. Just the same as your adult teeth really.
Wow, I never knew spelling could be so creative!
This is an intersting point of view you have, and I can see the logic to it all. You are kind of saying that the school system should also be designed to impart the experiental knowledge that those children will need for later life. I'd never thought about it like that before, but it's worth considering.
What I wonder though, is what are the valuable lessons we should be teaching. You place a lot of emphasis on competition, and I agree with that, but you seem less concerned about charity, goodwill, or equal opportunities.
Won't the fact that though the children whose parents couldn't afford crayons were still provided for, install the belief that everyone should be given a chance? If there are lessons in everything, and you can design a system to impart them, then I want a system that is ethically rich -- hard work is not the only ethic we should teach.
As somebody who has used both Win95 and Win98 (sic), I can tell you this is not shit, but was once a big problem. The original sound driver model under Windows was MME which could be written as a single-client or multi-client driver; only a few pro-audio cards were ever released with multi-client drivers, and so only one application could use the sound card at a time.
Almost all applications work by grabing the sound card when the app becomes focused and releasing it again when the app loses focus. Multimedia apps that may want to keep targetting the sound card at all times, cause normal apps that subsequently attempt to use the sound card to be frozen out.
This was never a problem for DirectSound drivers (I think?), and in Win2K MS added an internal mixer so that even single client MME drivers could be used simultaneously by multiple applications. I guess the poster switched to Linux or Macs years ago, and that you never read the subject of his post Win95 sucks at sound).
IMO, WinXP still sucks at sound since DirectSound does not support professional multi-I/O cards, and because the latency of DirectSound is unusable for audio production, and is a hindrance to games players.
Well in a way that is not really intersting for a crypto person, only a mathematician. A crypto person need only know what a given class of algorithims do, whether they are currently known to be unbreakable, and then use the right one appropiately.
I have a very basic understanding of crypto, so for example I know what a secure hashing algorithim does, but I may be tempted to use it for a hash where the reverse transform is not actually important, but where some properties of a hash like that may actually introduce a vulnerability.
Provided I am able to determine the features an algorithm must exhibit, I can then choose one that has those features which is known to be safe at the present time using a given key length.
I am really missing the point of all of this. We have a link to a German article that is uninteligble to the majority of posters here, and a lot of people talking absolute nonsense. Why?
When the previous article about Novell merging KDE and Gnome I immediately thought, which platform will they use as the base. I guessed KDE since the KDE people are already doing all the work whereas the Gnome people don't seem so interested. Nobody asked that fundamental question. Why?
Now, assuming that article says what it is claimed, I am left wondering why people think Gtk is being dropped, and scratching there heads over the Ximian aquisition. Why do people think that Gtk is being dropped, and what does integration mean to you anyway?
When Novell say *they* are standardising on Qt why do people then say that everyone else must now develop their apps in Qt too? How do you explain the fact that Gtk apps have long worked under KDE, and now Novell wants to integrate them more tightly?
To me this all sounds like Novell are going to make more use of Qt for their own future development, are going to use KDE as a base system for their OS, but are going to continue and extend the work being done in the KDE camp so that Gtk based applications work flawlessly in KDE (print dialogs, file dialogs, look 'n feel, font settings, control center options, etc).
The only question I am left wondering is whether they will also offer a Gnome desktop and do the exact same integration the other way round so that KDE applications work flawlessly in Gnome. Anyone care to comment?
Could you please provide us some links to any of this great corpus of literature you allure to?
As far as I understand it, there isn't a single piece of historcial literature where Jesus was ever mentioned. You can find a summary of historical evidence here, or read a detailed account Truth About Jesus, The : Is He a Myth?, available as Gutenberg etext #6107.
Yes, that's what I am looking forward to. Mesh networking over large distances where everyone carries everyone else's calls, and the only cost is owning the phone and keeping the battery topped up. No, I don't like spending constantly on phone calls or Internet connections, and having central organisations in the way means that poor people will never be able to own communicators, even when they become as cheap as calculators to manufacture. The technology and public radio frequency are already here -- only the lack of an official network stack for P2P meshing (IPv4/6 are both completely unsuited to meshing) remain obstacles to free electronic communication becoming a reality. It's really just a matter of time.
Information and software should be free because they can be. Literature and entertainment should be free because they can be. Now I don't suggest that everything can or should be free, but it doesn't need to be:
I haven't paid for a book for about 3 years because Gutenberg has much better stuff at no cost. Some people don't like classics so there is a market for new stuff, but I think most of the best literature was written centuries ago.
I haven't used a proprietary OS for 2 years because I prefer Linux/KDE. Some people prefer Windows or Mac, so there is a market for proprietary software.
As for the hippy wheel; I'm a firm believer. If you are not then you have your eyes closed. How is that I can afford to own a library greater than the richest nobles of yesteryear? Why is it that I can afford to have so much quality music, and still almost never need to listen to the same thing twice? Why have I not needed to buy an expensive developers book in over 4 years?
Energy, planetary transport and digital communication will all become free within our lifetimes; clothing and food may become free within our lifetimes; housing will take the longest. But it's all just a matter of time -- We have the technology!
Well said.
I believe in free software. I believe in free literature and education. I believe in free energy. I believe that one day work will not be necesarry in the same way that it is today, and I believe that the system will need to change to acknowledge that or there will be widespread rioting and discontent.
Now I am not so stupid as to believe that I can give away everything I do because I do not live in a world where money is no longer neccesarry. But I do believe the day is coming, and I am happy to contribute a little on our path there.
Unlike the 25% of the world that live in dire poverty, I live in a world of ease and comfort. Some of my peers may be richer than me, but I myself am extravagently rich.
I can afford all the food I care to eat with ease. I can afford to clothe myself as I please. I can afford a travel carriage (car) that allows me to move accross the country at the speed of many horses, and in far greater comfort, and I occasionally use a flying machine that allows me to get to the other side of the world in less than a day. I have instant access to the largest repository of information ever collected, and I can retrieve documents from it in a flash. Name an ancient King that had as much as I do?
If I don't feel the need to harp on every penny it is because I am not so greedy as to recognize that I already have more than sufficient. As for girls that like money (gold diggers), I'd rather they didn't pay me any mind since I'm a hopeless romantic and prefer real women.
I did a tiny bit of KDE programming, and got really good help on the kde-devel mailing list, and the IRC channels. Maybe you should there for help.
I have this exact same functionality with KDE News Ticker which I have dedicated to it's own bar at the top which I can hide when I don't want to be distracted. It's all colour coded to match the rest of the desktop and looks awesome.
Yes, great idea. When do we begin the move to IPv6?
;-).
And, although RSS is a technically a pull technology, it feels as though it's a push technology because the computer does the polling automatically -- so, as far as normal people are concerned, it is a push technology, and that's really the same thing
As for efficiency, if RSS readers respect the HTTP protocol than it should be at least as efficient, if not more, then some basic push mechanism since HTTP is a distributed protocol. The client knows how long to wait before retrying (Cache-Control: max-age), the feed is only downloaded if it has changed (304 -- Not Modified) and it is likely you need ask no futher than your ISPs/Companies/Universities transparent cache (Cache-Control: public).
I read a lot about Extramadura, and it's only now you mention it that I realise what a huge disparity there has been.
I'm just guessing, but maybe it was because Extramadura was a victory for Free Software rather than a victory for Open Source. On the other hand, perhaps it was because nobody had ever heard of Extramadura (even me, and I've been living in Spain for two and half years).
I think it's maybe more the first reason then the second. Remember the excellent Chilean and Kenyan positioning papers that were so well written and made such a mockery of MS? It never received the same amount of attention either. Perhaps for the same reason many ignore RMS -- though I agree with them on that one.
Can't really put my finger on what I am trying to say exactly...
KDE's KasBar has this -- admittedly a replacement for the taskbar rather than the virtual desktops. I used for it while back in KDE 3.1.
So they are patenting aI think mailing lists are the wrong technology for discussion groups anyway. I have never understood why people prefer them over the news protocol that is perfect for that. If it is real news you want then rss is the solution. Both news amd rss are, IMO, far better protocols for this type od thing then mail is anyway. Not that I support the idea of charging for mails with money though -- I hope that fails, and I certainly won't use it.
That's really funny. Talk about preaching to the converted!
I just thought you, and someone deeper in the thread were bashing the ideas because they were theoretical rather than practical.
Well anyway, I'm off to eat some humble pie!
This is the old way of thinking. When you see the answer, I'm sure you'll jump on board.
Testing should not be necessary to any serious degree, and if the program were expressed using a semantically richer language the debugger could just lead you through the possible variations so you could be sure you were happy with them.
The answer, IMO, is to do away with programming as we know it and replace it with a purely declarative language than can be read like a specification.
At Uni we used Z to create a formal specifcation for some program which we then type checked, and later animated using prolog. The specifications were incredibly easy to read (once you knew how to do that) and could be reasoned about very simply.
If I could write all my programs using a language like Z that could be automatically animated then I could create programs in the time it takes to write a solid specification, and with a fraction of the bugs. This would be good.
I graduated in '97 and wanted to do a PHD looking at how we could create an automatic Java skeleton around a Z specification, and a system that would complain as soon as the program had broken the specification. That never happened but I often still work on these types of ideas, and feel there is a real future for something like this.
I am convinced there is a better way. Even if programming needs to be this complex, there must be a way to safely allow re-use; to allow complex programs to be built from well tested building blocks.
Financial Aid ... what a joke. The rich countries all do it, like they really want to help or something. For every $10 we steal we'll give one back. Yes, were such good Samaritans!
This is how to enslave a country, so that you may begin to give them financial aid and feel good about yourself:
1. Give their corrupt Government huge loans that the country will never see
2. Require that they all a grow a cash crop to bay pack their foreign debt
3. Ensure that their is an over production of said resource
4. Pay a price that will not cover interest payments
5. Penalise any countries that try to stand together by ignoring them completely
6. Profit!