It does a good job at stuff that nobody else seems to care about. And anyone who's seen XML should stop calling COBOL wordy. I still use COBOL when I need what it does.
Take a look at, say, Popular Science from 1975 to see what this year was supposed to be like, before you bet too much on 30-year technology predictions.
Some of it will happen, and some of it will still be 30 years away (or more!), by 2035. And there'll be some significant stuff that nobody predicted, or could have.
"Where are the flying cars? Where are the floating cities?" -- Calvin
In SF stories the good guys are always backtracking LIDAR hits to find and nail the bad guys across millions of km. So, how hard (and expensive) is it today for a moving platform to get a decent fix on the source of a beam that tracks it for a few seconds? What about a cordon of low-flying drones watching 24x7 for the scatter from such beams at major airports? What about fixed sensors at airport control towers?
If we decided to allocate serious resources to the task, how good and how cheap could it be a year from now?
Maybe turning these lasers into a big sign saying, "here I am, come arrest me" would be enough, but what exactly *should* the response be? A couple of burps from a Vulcan cannon would probably discourage repeats, but that's kind of chancy in urban areas, and arming commercial aircraft doesn't sound like a good idea anyway. Maybe the drones could send one of their number to zip over and watch the origin until the cops arrive.
C'mon, we need to come up with a targeted solution, or some well-meaning idiot with his hands over his eyes will say, "well, I don't see any reason for civillians to own lasers," and there goes a whole lot of legitimate uses.
Computers don't freak out or get depressed when work piles up. Backlogs mean nothing; they just keep processing one piece at a time until the pieces run out. I think someone was speaking imprecisely.
I suppose that the system *could* have been built with a rule to detect that the results are becoming more and more untimely, and at some point just say "TILT!" and deliberately exit. I can't imagine why, though; getting there late is better than sitting in the terminal forever.
There *must* be something better than the same old dumb string matching.
However, this sort of thing might be better employed as a knowledge engineer's assistant, doing the rough work of attaching useful metadata to documents drawn from the enormous piles that we've accumulated.
Ah, but maybe there are patterns that can be used to score some articles as probably low-quality. Like your observation that "poorly informed people tend to talk loudest and longest." Throw in a penalty for dodgy spelling and I think it might be pretty good.
Okay, I know, the devil is in the details. But this is one of those things that seems so obvious: people become enraged and destroy machines because the machines' designers gave no thought whatsoever to the way the machines will be used by normal people. I'm as abnormal as any other computerist, and I've perpetrated some horrendous user interfaces and truly perplexing semantics in my time, but at least I have enough insight to see the problems I've caused and the grace to be ashamed. It seems that some never to learn.
Shee, some of this reads more like instructions for spies trying to survive in hostile territory.
Now, I've long believed that the best response to some clerk asking for my address on a cash deal is, "why?" or, "I already get your catalogs." I'm already *in their store*, so no further advertising is needed, eh? I wish there was some way for the clerk to get that fact into the store's database.
But there are some things about me that I would dearly love to have marketing folk know and share widely. I'm not a 59-year-old retired veteran, for example. I have no actual or legitimate theoretical interest in offers "for singles only." There's lots of stuff I'm not buying, not just from you, but not from your competitors either -- maybe it's because I don't want it at all? I don't smoke at all, or encourage others to, so why would I care that you are selling expensive imported cigars?
Anyone studying me in detail would see that I tend to actively preserve my unawareness of types of products that I don't use until I decide to use them, then do my own research and usually end up with one that's *not* heavily promoted. I wish some people would dig *that* out of their data mines.
I must say this has the smell of "forget logic, what would get us the most airtime?" The person who actually offered the thing for sale is a known individual with a known locality, but they instead arrest the head of BaaZee, which is the seller's *victim*?
And I don't follow the logic of the "DMCA-like" law's relationship to this either, unless the filmmakers want to sue the guy who burned the VCDs (which seems...unwise).
Decades ago, the Children's Museum in Indianapolis had little transmitters all over the building, continually broadcasting interpretations of various displays. You could pick up a receiver and wander around until you found something interesting, and hear all about it.
And folk have been broadcasting their own musical choices for fun, license free, for decades. Check the _Electronics Illustrated_ backfiles for "Making like Murray the K on 1/10 Watt", for example.
*sigh* It's the League's property, or the author's, or whoever, so they get to decide whether they have lost anything they care about. If you want to make that decision, write your own song, or stage a game, or in some way create something that gives you intangible property. In the case of having friends over to watch your rented movie, the studio agreed implicitly to permit that use by releasing the movie knowing that the laws permit such use. *They* (generally) live up to *their* obligations under the law. I wish everybody did.
Copyright is perhaps the purest form of property. Copyright says that my creative expressions belong solely to me until I say otherwise. How could that not be property? I can give it or withhold it; I can buy it or sell it; I can punish you for taking or damaging it. Something which can belong to someone is property.
That copyright has no physical existence means only that the law is my *only* means of defending my ownership, since I can't lock it in a safe or set guards on it.
Mmmm, the way I heard it, IBM *wanted* CP/M but Gary Kildall wouldn't talk to them. They turned to Microsoft, and since Microsoft had nothing to sell them but wanted the sale, they bought 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products.
Rats, I can't find the reference. I did find yet another take on the story in _DOS Programmer's Reference, 2/e_ by Dettmann and Kyle (1989, Que Corporation.
Careless spelling and careless arithmetic are often indicators of sloppy thinking. They're also impolite -- the rest of us have to think harder than should be necessary in order to take your meaning. Don't be surprised to find that some readers will not put forth the extra effort, when they see that a writer does not put forth even the minimum effort.
Remind yourself of how worthless and irrelevant is the ability to do arithmetic in one's head the next time you're standing in a store calculating and comparing unit prices without external aids, seeking to get the most for your money.
(You're going to tell me that the store posts unit prices on the shelves. Notice how often the units used for brand X are different from the units used for brand Y of the *same commodity*.)
Please distinguish between the Bible being absolute infallible truth, and what some self-styled Christians think it says, which in many cases is arguably utter nonsense and even contrary to Scripture.
Take the rather astonishing conclusion that one can't be a Christian and believe in the theory of evolution. The Bible doesn't say how God made anything, and despite what you were probably taught, it doesn't necessarily even say how long He spent doing it.
Acceptance of evolution does not require that one deny the existence of God or the truth of what is provable in the Bible. Science in general does require that, however much you may believe in deity, you not import any magic into your reasoning, because magic robs reason of all its useful qualities.
I must say I'm even more astounded by your assertions about the value of life in a self-elaborating cosmos. Even if no one else assigned meaning to our lives, we can and we do. Whether our distant ancestors did or did not walk on their knuckles has nothing to do with it.
(Sorry, everyone: I know this is going rapidly offtopic, but I felt it had to be said.)
Your first statement may very well be correct, but I have to react to the last one. We can't be sloppy like that. ("But, since he did it with a computer, there are darn few laws that they could use to convict him of anything.")
Do you really mean to say that, if a man beats another to death with a stick then it's murder, but if he beats another to death with a computer then this is some strange new kind of offense for which we have to evolve new legal doctrine?
Likewise tricking someone into dialling 911 with his computer ought to be the same as tricking someone into dialling 911 with his finger. It's just a bit easier to hide what you're doing.
If legal responsibility for the call itself stops at the person who owned the computer, there still is probably a way for those people to sue the guy who caused them to do so inadvertently. They can't sue him into jail, alas.
Well, someone who deliberately abuses the 911 system should be smacked down, *hard*. But it's quite reasonable to ask whether the USA PATRIOT Act is appropriate to the case. Isn't there some law against frivolous police reports, or something, that would let us put this idiot in jail for a while?
Hey, I know! 19 false reports is a *pattern* of banned activity, so we could get him with RICO. No, wait....
Even there. According to some reports, a handful of Russians have the most advanced SPAM technology in the world. That's probably why we're having this discussion.:-/
Mmmm, we may be arguing over terminology rather than models. To me, "monopoly" means that one player controls 100% of the market, and "oligopoly" means that a small number of large players control 100% of the market. In each case there is no possibility for any new players to enter without *first* pulling down the market's owner(s).
What we usually see is a bit different. The large players can maintain their positions, most of the time, but they cannot completely eliminate the small players. The large players continue serving the needs of the majority of buyers, who are not very particular and will tolerate products homogenized to almost satisfy nearly everyone. The small players survive by serving those who have very specific needs and are willing to pay a premium to meet them. I think this is probably a good deal, and markets tend to agree with that because the setup is quite stable. I don't mind paying a little more for something I think is better; what I object to is having good (in my opinion) products crowded *completely* out of the market by poor (in my opinion) products just because a big player is determined to have a 100% share regardless of how disaffected his captive market may become. I don't *care* that A is bigger or more popular, so long as I can still buy B if I want to.
Things become unstable when a small player offers something which (often unexpectedly) appeals to a majority. If the big players remember that they are businessmen, they'll find a way to offer it too and so stay in the game; those who have forgotten business and are in the market to exercise power will be dealt out, although they may do a lot of damage before they lose their dominant positions.
Funny, I thought I was afflicted with the idea that invading someone's privacy at such an intimate moment is shockingly bad manners and I wouldn't want to do that. C'mon, if you're selling toothpaste then tell me about the toothpaste.
Sadly we're also afflicted with a small group of very loud people who profess to read their Bibles five times a day but apparently never read the bit about, "how can you see the mote in your brother's eye when you have a beam in your own eye?" Or the verse that says, "if they won't listen, shake the dust from your shoes and move on."
"They phrase their ads so people read something into their statements which they aren't actually saying."
Right-o, and my kids and I have lots of fun working out what the ad.s really say and don't say, so we can ridicule them. I've trained my oldest boy well, if I do say so myself.
Free clue for advertisers: more manipulation == more chance that I will make a note never to buy any of your products. (File that alongside "change your name often enough and I'll give up trying to track down your product and just buy whatever's cheap this week.")
Slashdot Mirror
Or TinyCOBOL. Gentoo has both in portage.
It does a good job at stuff that nobody else seems to care about. And anyone who's seen XML should stop calling COBOL wordy. I still use COBOL when I need what it does.
Take a look at, say, Popular Science from 1975 to see what this year was supposed to be like, before you bet too much on 30-year technology predictions.
Some of it will happen, and some of it will still be 30 years away (or more!), by 2035. And there'll be some significant stuff that nobody predicted, or could have.
"Where are the flying cars? Where are the floating cities?" -- Calvin
In SF stories the good guys are always backtracking LIDAR hits to find and nail the bad guys across millions of km. So, how hard (and expensive) is it today for a moving platform to get a decent fix on the source of a beam that tracks it for a few seconds? What about a cordon of low-flying drones watching 24x7 for the scatter from such beams at major airports? What about fixed sensors at airport control towers?
If we decided to allocate serious resources to the task, how good and how cheap could it be a year from now?
Maybe turning these lasers into a big sign saying, "here I am, come arrest me" would be enough, but what exactly *should* the response be? A couple of burps from a Vulcan cannon would probably discourage repeats, but that's kind of chancy in urban areas, and arming commercial aircraft doesn't sound like a good idea anyway. Maybe the drones could send one of their number to zip over and watch the origin until the cops arrive.
C'mon, we need to come up with a targeted solution, or some well-meaning idiot with his hands over his eyes will say, "well, I don't see any reason for civillians to own lasers," and there goes a whole lot of legitimate uses.
Computers don't freak out or get depressed when work piles up. Backlogs mean nothing; they just keep processing one piece at a time until the pieces run out. I think someone was speaking imprecisely.
I suppose that the system *could* have been built with a rule to detect that the results are becoming more and more untimely, and at some point just say "TILT!" and deliberately exit. I can't imagine why, though; getting there late is better than sitting in the terminal forever.
There *must* be something better than the same old dumb string matching.
However, this sort of thing might be better employed as a knowledge engineer's assistant, doing the rough work of attaching useful metadata to documents drawn from the enormous piles that we've accumulated.
Ah, but maybe there are patterns that can be used to score some articles as probably low-quality. Like your observation that "poorly informed people tend to talk loudest and longest." Throw in a penalty for dodgy spelling and I think it might be pretty good.
Okay, I know, the devil is in the details. But this is one of those things that seems so obvious: people become enraged and destroy machines because the machines' designers gave no thought whatsoever to the way the machines will be used by normal people. I'm as abnormal as any other computerist, and I've perpetrated some horrendous user interfaces and truly perplexing semantics in my time, but at least I have enough insight to see the problems I've caused and the grace to be ashamed. It seems that some never to learn.
Shee, some of this reads more like instructions for spies trying to survive in hostile territory.
Now, I've long believed that the best response to some clerk asking for my address on a cash deal is, "why?" or, "I already get your catalogs." I'm already *in their store*, so no further advertising is needed, eh? I wish there was some way for the clerk to get that fact into the store's database.
But there are some things about me that I would dearly love to have marketing folk know and share widely. I'm not a 59-year-old retired veteran, for example. I have no actual or legitimate theoretical interest in offers "for singles only." There's lots of stuff I'm not buying, not just from you, but not from your competitors either -- maybe it's because I don't want it at all? I don't smoke at all, or encourage others to, so why would I care that you are selling expensive imported cigars?
Anyone studying me in detail would see that I tend to actively preserve my unawareness of types of products that I don't use until I decide to use them, then do my own research and usually end up with one that's *not* heavily promoted. I wish some people would dig *that* out of their data mines.
I must say this has the smell of "forget logic, what would get us the most airtime?" The person who actually offered the thing for sale is a known individual with a known locality, but they instead arrest the head of BaaZee, which is the seller's *victim*?
And I don't follow the logic of the "DMCA-like" law's relationship to this either, unless the filmmakers want to sue the guy who burned the VCDs (which seems...unwise).
Wait...you mean, all the evil antitechnology government goons are *not* working for the U.S.? Do I hear heads exploding all around the globe?
Decades ago, the Children's Museum in Indianapolis had little transmitters all over the building, continually broadcasting interpretations of various displays. You could pick up a receiver and wander around until you found something interesting, and hear all about it.
And folk have been broadcasting their own musical choices for fun, license free, for decades. Check the _Electronics Illustrated_ backfiles for "Making like Murray the K on 1/10 Watt", for example.
*sigh* It's the League's property, or the author's, or whoever, so they get to decide whether they have lost anything they care about. If you want to make that decision, write your own song, or stage a game, or in some way create something that gives you intangible property. In the case of having friends over to watch your rented movie, the studio agreed implicitly to permit that use by releasing the movie knowing that the laws permit such use. *They* (generally) live up to *their* obligations under the law. I wish everybody did.
Copyright is perhaps the purest form of property. Copyright says that my creative expressions belong solely to me until I say otherwise. How could that not be property? I can give it or withhold it; I can buy it or sell it; I can punish you for taking or damaging it. Something which can belong to someone is property.
That copyright has no physical existence means only that the law is my *only* means of defending my ownership, since I can't lock it in a safe or set guards on it.
Mmmm, the way I heard it, IBM *wanted* CP/M but Gary Kildall wouldn't talk to them. They turned to Microsoft, and since Microsoft had nothing to sell them but wanted the sale, they bought 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products.
Rats, I can't find the reference. I did find yet another take on the story in _DOS Programmer's Reference, 2/e_ by Dettmann and Kyle (1989, Que Corporation.
Careless spelling and careless arithmetic are often indicators of sloppy thinking. They're also impolite -- the rest of us have to think harder than should be necessary in order to take your meaning. Don't be surprised to find that some readers will not put forth the extra effort, when they see that a writer does not put forth even the minimum effort.
Remind yourself of how worthless and irrelevant is the ability to do arithmetic in one's head the next time you're standing in a store calculating and comparing unit prices without external aids, seeking to get the most for your money.
(You're going to tell me that the store posts unit prices on the shelves. Notice how often the units used for brand X are different from the units used for brand Y of the *same commodity*.)
"Why people deify Diana is a mystery of the ages."
:-)
Meditate on that sentence until you see why it is so funny.
Please distinguish between the Bible being absolute infallible truth, and what some self-styled Christians think it says, which in many cases is arguably utter nonsense and even contrary to Scripture.
Take the rather astonishing conclusion that one can't be a Christian and believe in the theory of evolution. The Bible doesn't say how God made anything, and despite what you were probably taught, it doesn't necessarily even say how long He spent doing it.
Acceptance of evolution does not require that one deny the existence of God or the truth of what is provable in the Bible. Science in general does require that, however much you may believe in deity, you not import any magic into your reasoning, because magic robs reason of all its useful qualities.
I must say I'm even more astounded by your assertions about the value of life in a self-elaborating cosmos. Even if no one else assigned meaning to our lives, we can and we do. Whether our distant ancestors did or did not walk on their knuckles has nothing to do with it.
(Sorry, everyone: I know this is going rapidly offtopic, but I felt it had to be said.)
Your first statement may very well be correct, but I have to react to the last one. We can't be sloppy like that. ("But, since he did it with a computer, there are darn few laws that they could use to convict him of anything.")
Do you really mean to say that, if a man beats another to death with a stick then it's murder, but if he beats another to death with a computer then this is some strange new kind of offense for which we have to evolve new legal doctrine?
Likewise tricking someone into dialling 911 with his computer ought to be the same as tricking someone into dialling 911 with his finger. It's just a bit easier to hide what you're doing.
If legal responsibility for the call itself stops at the person who owned the computer, there still is probably a way for those people to sue the guy who caused them to do so inadvertently. They can't sue him into jail, alas.
Well, someone who deliberately abuses the 911 system should be smacked down, *hard*. But it's quite reasonable to ask whether the USA PATRIOT Act is appropriate to the case. Isn't there some law against frivolous police reports, or something, that would let us put this idiot in jail for a while?
Hey, I know! 19 false reports is a *pattern* of banned activity, so we could get him with RICO. No, wait....
Even there. According to some reports, a handful of Russians have the most advanced SPAM technology in the world. That's probably why we're having this discussion. :-/
Mmmm, we may be arguing over terminology rather than models. To me, "monopoly" means that one player controls 100% of the market, and "oligopoly" means that a small number of large players control 100% of the market. In each case there is no possibility for any new players to enter without *first* pulling down the market's owner(s).
What we usually see is a bit different. The large players can maintain their positions, most of the time, but they cannot completely eliminate the small players. The large players continue serving the needs of the majority of buyers, who are not very particular and will tolerate products homogenized to almost satisfy nearly everyone. The small players survive by serving those who have very specific needs and are willing to pay a premium to meet them. I think this is probably a good deal, and markets tend to agree with that because the setup is quite stable. I don't mind paying a little more for something I think is better; what I object to is having good (in my opinion) products crowded *completely* out of the market by poor (in my opinion) products just because a big player is determined to have a 100% share regardless of how disaffected his captive market may become. I don't *care* that A is bigger or more popular, so long as I can still buy B if I want to.
Things become unstable when a small player offers something which (often unexpectedly) appeals to a majority. If the big players remember that they are businessmen, they'll find a way to offer it too and so stay in the game; those who have forgotten business and are in the market to exercise power will be dealt out, although they may do a lot of damage before they lose their dominant positions.
Funny, I thought I was afflicted with the idea that invading someone's privacy at such an intimate moment is shockingly bad manners and I wouldn't want to do that. C'mon, if you're selling toothpaste then tell me about the toothpaste.
Sadly we're also afflicted with a small group of very loud people who profess to read their Bibles five times a day but apparently never read the bit about, "how can you see the mote in your brother's eye when you have a beam in your own eye?" Or the verse that says, "if they won't listen, shake the dust from your shoes and move on."
"They phrase their ads so people read something into their statements which they aren't actually saying."
Right-o, and my kids and I have lots of fun working out what the ad.s really say and don't say, so we can ridicule them. I've trained my oldest boy well, if I do say so myself.
Free clue for advertisers: more manipulation == more chance that I will make a note never to buy any of your products. (File that alongside "change your name often enough and I'll give up trying to track down your product and just buy whatever's cheap this week.")