The problem with open-source search engines is that it's not really an open-source venture, but a hardware venture.
You are gathering information, which needs storage, and you need huge amounts of bandwidth and processing power. The actual algorithm is rather unimportant in that context.
Au contraire. It is the algorithm which dictates the hardware requirements.
A simple algorithm might be exceptionally efficient and scalable (but inaccurate and ineffective), and thus, perhaps only a minimal set of hardware is necessary. An very complex algorithm might be very inefficient and relatively less-scalable (but accurate and effective), and so a larger, beefier set of hardware is necessary.
For example: you can run Windows Vista on a dual-core AMD X2 box with 4GB RAM. You cannot run it on a 386DX/33 with 8MB RAM. Vista is a very complex algorithm (if you've ever taken an ASM course, you know that an OS is actually just a program - a set of code - running in a loop (albeit with points for escape (Shut Down, Reboot, etc.), hibernation, etc.), like any application). Windows 3.1, OTOH, will run on both - but it is a *much* simpler, less-functional OS too.
Google has what is believed (because nobody outside the company knows precisely how it works) to be a monstrously-complex algorithm -- that's why they employ an army of PhD computer scientists and mathematicians, and put up brain-teaser billboards to try and hire more. That, combined with the world's largest source of data for their algorithm to process, the Internet, means they will have obscene hardware requirements.
IIRC, they were running on something like 9,000 Linux nodes running a stripped-down kernel in a cluster. But that was about 5 years ago; undoubtedly they've increased capacity since then.
Also you're missing something: with modern technologies you don't have to write for multiple threads to get them. If you target.NET and Avalon, your GUI is already being rendered in a separate thread and potentially separate core.
Irritating then that I can write a.NET app with no instances of System.Threading.Thread defined and running anywhere (that I have explicitly defined), and the WinForm I've created will not update a textfield during a long-running loop which (basically) dumps a remote database. The same is true of Java.
Admittedly, I haven't tried this yet, but it looks to me like the GUI (and all its controls) needs to be instantiated and run in another, programmer-defined thread function (e.g. a while(bQuit == false), where bQuit is a boolean representing whether the user has signaled to quit the app)...
The.NET interpreter does spawn a few threads upon startup (as indicated by Task Manager). But I don't know as they are all GUI-related threads, when running a GUI app...
Now, without "enforcement of law and public order, protection of property, economic infrastructure (roads, legal tender, enforcement of contracts, etc.), education systems, health care systems" would you be able to work?
Anarcho-capitalists would say yes.
I would say that there needs to be publicly-funded law enforcement to protect (from your list) public order and property and enforce contracts, and to manage legal tender. The rest can be provided privately (now, are they *likely* to be provided privately? That's a different question).
Are scientists stripped of their certification for other thoughtcrimes, such as believing that the Earth is flat; that the universe revolves around the Earth; that quantum physics, being probabilistic, is a bunch of bull given that we know all other physical events in the world behave in a deterministic fashion (only the depth of complexity prevents full knowledge and thus, perfect modeling); that too much washing of foods, clothes, and building interiors is a bad idea, because it reduces human contact with disease, reducing human immune system strength; and so forth?
(Disclaimer: I agree with some of the above (too much washing), and disagree with others (the astrophysics assertions), and am undecided out of lack of education and knowledge regarding quantum physics (though the assertion certainly makes sense to me).)
If scientists are not decertified for such things, then why global warming? Since when is it good science to prevent questioning and hypothesis-testing? Isn't such censorship *really* less about science than it is about politics by those pushing the global warming agenda before the science was sufficiently-agreed-upon to be worth pursuing policy action, such that those in the position (like this meteorologist) wish to serve up revenge towards those who have disagreed with them?
The most fundamental element of science is theory-testing -- even if the theory seems far-beyond needing any further proof (e.g. gravity). If anyone is to be decertified, perhaps it should be the meteorologist who suggested this nonsense.
OS X has a Unix userland binary set: its userland are FreeBSD apps and utilities.
That reminds me: have you seen the alleged "anarchy" of FreeBSD lately? It is not like Linux, which *is* more anarchic in nature. FBSD is an open-source OS designed-by- and maintained-by-committee, and it works quite well... (better than Linux, for the very anarchy argument you cite, I might add)
But anarchy is not all bad. It leads to improved security from malicious code; the more ways to design a directory structure on Linux there are, the more ways there are for path-dependent worms, viruses, etc. to fail. It's the same reason that having multiple operating systems is better than having a single-OS-to-rule-them-all. It is the argument of diversity, and it's the same reason the human race survives so well: we all have differences which allow our species to survive in different ways... Some people are physically-stronger, but do not learn well, or vice-versa (as is often the case on/.), for example.
Freedom is not always a good thing.
That does seem to be the popular opinion these days, rising from the thought-dead hand of Soviet collectivism of just 18 years ago, pushed by leftist "public interest" groups like Public Citizen, who revel in telling us that freedom-of-choice is a bad thing...
Of course, as a poster my 7th grade science teacher had posted read: "what is right is not always popular; what is popular, is not always right."
Would you like freedom of choice as to which side of the road you drive on?
Yes, and we have it: it's called "passing" on a 2-lane road. Or performing a 3-point turnaround. Or making a U-turn. Or simply making a left turn across the oncoming lanes.
All of them depend critically on you employing one thing: the individual responsibility and lack of idiocy to fail to adhere to a reasonable level of sense such that you prevent harming yourself or anybody else, or the property thereof.
Oh I'm well-aware we're a long way away from such a market-oriented economy. Given the trend of history in market vs. non-market (read: government, i.e. socialist) economics, I greatly doubt this country will *ever* get there. It's a great idea IMO, but I have a very deep realist streak in me to know how unlikely it ever is to occur...:-/
I will say that I can see an argument (like your original point) for nations each maintaining at least an emergency supply of domestically-produced food, in the event of non-economically-motivated disruptions in food supply, such as religiously-motivated terrorism (like 9/11). And the ability for such production to be restarted if necessary ought to be maintained (even if this requires people growing their own food at home, in pots of dirt under heat lamps, for example, or in backyard gardens, like the "Victory Gardens" Americans grew during WWII).
But as a typical means of providing food, it makes sense to trade for it: other, developing nations have agricultural work they can do to help develop their countries, while we spend more of our time doing something else, something more-advanced, e.g. engineering, or developing software, etc....
We don't want to outsource all the food and then find later that no one wants to sell it to us anymore.
Well, that just makes for a good incentive for the U.S. not to go around killing people whenever we want, doesn't it? And it makes a good incentive for the other, agricultural countries to behave well to us, else, we will buy food from a different country.
See also our current oil situation, in which we produce about 60% of our own oil, but the remaining 40% comes from foreign producers -- like Saudi Arabia, from which 16 of the 19 extremist Muslims attacked the U.S. on 9/11. We've treated the Saudis with kid-gloves because they are a major oil supplier to us, and their government (though clearly not their citizens) have treated us well in return because we are a major buyer...
Or consider the relations between the U.S. and China. They're somewhat frosty, but they are warmed by our heavy interdependence on the trade of manufactured goods.
Or consider the relationship between Japan and any nation producing steel, oil, or electronics components -- all of which are very major parts of their world-class automobile and electronics industries. Japan has had to trade for such things for over 100 years now, because they basically cannot be found on their islands. And they have done *very* well since WWII.
It's risky enough if we lose all manufacturing. If we lose all agriculture, we could end up like North Korea.
You mean the North Korea where many people perform farming functions as they were done 150 years ago -- without the assistance of tractors, combines, or any other Industrial Revolution-era agricultural technology? If you want to know why they are so starved for food, this is certainly a big reason (and a Soviet-style centrally-planned socialist economy, what with its "people over technology" attitude from the government, certainly don't help, nor does their gross misallocation of resources on developing nuclear weapons instead of more developmental technology).
No nation which has isolated itself from the rest of the world to produce exclusively for itself has been successful for very long. This actually describes North Korea fairly-well... Much of the modern world's ability to produce at the level we do depends critically on the principle of comparative advantage.
welcome to the rest of the world. The US has done exactly that for decades - look no further than most primary industries like farming for examples.
Farming is a government-subsidized activity in the U.S.. Farming couldn't exist in the U.S. without it, because the activity typically doesn't generate enough income to live on.
So the U.S. government -- which I implore you not to confuse with the American people, for our government is composed very little "of the people", nor is it much "by the people" thanks to the lack of direct-democracy, and with the influence of special interest lobbyists, it sure as hell isn't "for the people" -- has failed people twice: in trade regulations, and in subsidizing an activity the U.S. should not participate in in the first place.
The bigger the program, the more interplay of potentially-failing factors: more variables, more method calls, more potentially insufficiently-tested classes/libs/components pulled-in, more likelihood of multithreading (raising the probability of the problems that come w/ that, e.g. race conditions, deadlocks, etc.), more likelihood of networking functionality (which of course depends critically on the reliability of other systems), etc. etc..
Calculating the risk of failure in software is one giant conditional probability problem, in which each very small piece (say, storing a 4-byte value as an integer in memory) may have been coded and tested ruthlessly for decades. But the software those operations form are, in every case, brand-new within the user's domain, [1] else, it would likely be purchased instead; the more code is being executed, the more opportunities there are for failure...
So say you write an app and you know it has 2 major failure points, A and B. P(successful_execution | !A and !B) = 1 - (P(A) + P(B)). But now add a third failure point, C. P(successful_execution | !A and !B and !C) = 1 - (P(A) + P(B) + P(C)). The probability of a successful execution can do no better than remain at the same level with each additional failure point -- that is, with each additional line of code (or class, or module, or however you choose to measure and define potential failure points).
In short, as complexity rises, so do the number of potential failure points, and thus the probability of failure. And because most projects are from-scratch -- even if they've been written before for another organization, the developers won't have perfect memory of that solution -- they are all-new creations, each time, assuring that those failure points have not been ironed-out before (again, minus whatever those developers manage to remember at their new job)...
[1] You may have written an awesome logging function for a megacorp once, but jumping over to a startup, they won't have it, so you'll have to write it again (unless the previous company open-sourced it, but that's highly unlikely).
So the asset managers are incompetent and don't know what the goals of the customer they work for are. The asset managers aren't serving their customer (the Foundation) in a manner consistent with their objectives.
People have been fired for lesser offenses. The Foundation needs to remind those managers who they work for, and inform them that their actions are not aligning with the goals of the Foundation...
No evil here (at least not intentionally). No, rather, this is more of the usual, more-mundane story that comes out of any sufficiently-large organization: the institution has a set of strategic priorities, but the upper management that make the strategic decisions (Bill and Melinda Gates, the management directly beneath them, etc.) aren't managing the lower management who manage the operational aspects (e.g. the asset managers who invest the Foundation's money).
It's just the usual story of incompetent management... Read Dilbert if you require further explanation.
I do wonder what Warren Buffet thinks though, now that he -- the America's 2nd-richest person -- has decided to pour 85% of his entire net worth into the Foundation over a period of several years, on the basis that it does good work and is managed well...
That damn Dubya! Always takin' away you stupid American freedoms. Across the pond we have --
Oh, wait...
Seriously, what is the British fetish with implementing all manner of Orwellian society? Cameras up everyone's asses, free speech rights that (even with Dubya at the helm) pale by American standards, a handgun ban that was followed by an increase in violent crime, all with the fear-of-terrorism culture that Americans have come to cherish since 9/11. Do Brits realize that 1984 was a work of fiction?
Well, I suppose most of the people who hated British government have long since (like, some 230 years ago) left it for the 'States, hence, few in Britain to fight back... (For the same reason of immigration history, the 'States are probably doomed to remain a theoretically-secular pseudo-theocracy as it currently is.)
The report from the Homeland Security privacy office takes pains to say that the privacy compromises over Secure Flight were 'not intentional,' and includes a list of seven recommendations to avoid similar mishaps in the future. Those include explaining to the public exactly what's going on and creating a 'data flow map' to ensure information is handled in compliance with the 1974 Privacy Act.
A "data flow map"? You mean, like a data flow diagram, a pretty standard diagram in software engineering taught to CS students in senior-level undergrad systems-design courses?
That such a diagram apparently *doesn't* exist should be worrisome.
The article had passed the CIA's publication review board
A "publication review board"? Since when, in a free nation, does a government agency determine whether a *former* employee may speak of his *former* employer? (Except in the employment contract upon entering the government's service in the first place, so as to prevent the release of sensitive information?)
While the definition varies as to whether it is a legal term -- some definitions say murder is "unlawful", "homicide", and so on -- all definitions have one thing in common: "murder" is the intentional killing of another human being.
Exhibit 1:
# kill intentionally and with premeditation; "The mafia boss ordered his enemies murdered" # unlawful premeditated killing of a human being by a human being # mangle: alter so as to make unrecognizable; "The tourists murdered the French language" wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
Exhibit 2:
Murder is both a legal and a moral term, that are not always coincident. It may be legal to kill, but still murder in the moral sense. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder
Exhibit 3:
The willful (nonnegligent) killing of one human being by another. www.securityoncampus.org/schools/research/doe/9740 2-a.html
Exhibit 4:
The unlawful killing of a human being with deliberate intent to kill: (1) murder in the first degree is characterized by premeditation; (2) murder in the second degree is characterized by a sudden and instantaneous intent to kill or to cause injury without caring whether the injury kills or not. brandonlclark.com/glossary.html
Exhibit 5:
is the intentional killing of a human being. It includes causing serious physical injury leading to the death of a human being. For example, if a person attacks another person with a hammer, intending only to injure rather than kill, the attacker can be prosecuted for murder if the attack results in the victim's death. www.wierlaw.com/glossary_criminal_law.htm
If you understand object-oriented programming, think about it like this: "murder" is a subclass of "killing".
You can kill many things, not just people: flowers, animals, political ideals, spiritual beliefs, a person's mood in bed during sex. But to murder means to kill a specific thing: a human being. "Murder" is a particular form of "killing".
That is the *only* big difference; a difference of specificity in the definition.
Now, you say that killing in war is not murder. That, by definition, is wrong. Murder requires willful intent to kill a person, or at the very least, a blatant, unreasonable disregard for the safety of another.
In a non-cold war -- which is to say, a war in which people are killing each other (as you state) -- the objective (particularly in U.S. military) is to kill people until the other nation surrenders or is buried. Period.
One does not go into a unfriendly (let alone an openly-hostile) nation armed with machine guns, grenades, flamethrowers, cruise missiles, nerve gas, and so forth without an intent to kill. The amount of weaponry at-hand is simply so overwhelming that no other conclusion can reasonably be made. (And this is from somebody who has never come within an ICBM's range of being accused of being an anti-gun nut.)
So that's more people than die in gun crimes. About 25 times more. Crisply-rational statistical reasoning suggests we focus more on that problem than problems with lesser numbers of deaths (and, in turn, focus more on problems with even more deaths than the in-transit ambulance death rate).
In a limited way, yes.
Life is risky. All things are dangerous. Prison inmates can kill you with a plastic knife; cops chasing a speeder through your neighborhood could run over your daughter by mistake; your burger at Burger King could be undercooked and give you e.Coli; the pump you use at the gas station could be set afire by the idiot on the other side of the pump from you, possibly giving you burns. And so on. The world is not a NERF'd place for you to play.
That smoking, guns, or anything else are dangerous is not a sufficient reason for banning it. Only where one person's use of some object infringes on the liberty of another person is there any reasonable grounds for regulation... (So, smoking in public buildings, such as govn't offices, is reasonable. Same goes for public streets and roadways. But restaurants, bars, and the like, being privately-owned and voluntarily-attended by its patrons and employees, are not worthy of the kind of anti-smoking regulation we've seen in recent years.)
(And yes, I have had multiple relatives die of smoking-related illnesses, so you can check any "heartless libertarian" editorializing you might have at the door. They chose to smoke, and, in one of their cases, they knew about the dangers of smoking before most of the public did, in large part because my father has expert knowledge that )
I'm actually for the right to bear arms, but it's silly to say it's the exact same situation as all these others. It's not, and its intelectually lazy to conflate them all together.
To say they are the same was never my argument in the first place. My argument is that there are other problems of greater numerical impact than gun crimes, and as such, we should be focused on reducing them before others.
Start with the biggest problems first, and work your way down to lesser problems; to do anything else is to miss the forest for the trees... And with other problems having 10, 20, 40 or more times more impact than gun crimes, it seems to me the rational thing to do is to give those our greatest focus, with diminishing levels of focus for problems of lesser impact (i.e., I'm not saying we shouldn't focus *at all* on gun crimes either; only, it should not be anywhere near the top of our list of priorities, given the lesser magnitude).
The internet shows us what mayhem is caused just by letting joe average own a PC without a proper firewall. And you want those same people to own rocket propelled grenades and heavy artillery.
You are making a grossly-inaccurate analogy.
One PC without a firewall can replicate a virus/worm to millions of other similarly-configured hosts, without further assistance from the originating host.
But one individual with a helicopter cannot blow up a neighbor's house, then expect that that explosion will blow up other houses, without his further effort.
Moreover, attacking a neighbor only ensures that several people (including law enforcement) become angry and retaliate in return. The same is generally not true online (though some IDS systems will perform reverse-DoS attacks to shut down offensive hosts within a particular network, e.g. a corporate network).
The vectors of destruction you observe on the Internet do not work the same way in the real world.
It's also a silly blanket-rule - not kill what? What christian has never stepped on an ant, killed a fly, eaten meat or eaten a previously-living plant?
So very true -- which is why I never suggested it was a *reasonable* rule... Only that it *is* the rule as stated by Christian Bibles everywhere, and that as-stated, it rules out murder at minimum, and killing of all sorts (even of plants and near-worthless creatures, e.g. cockroaches and flies) under a broader, but still-strict interpretation.
According to my memory of my Bible, and according to my memory of the teachings in the many years of Sunday School as a child to which I was involuntarily dragged and attemptedly brainwashed, the phrase is "thou shalt not kill."
Wikipedia says it reads "You shall not murder." (it does not contain the word "commit" that you claim exists in the statement. Regardless, the consequence of the statement is the same; it is simply slightly more verbose in your version.)
Regardless, the consequence of the commandment's implication for human beings between the words "murder" and "kill" is the same. Death results either way. For human beings, the choice of word in this set of 2 is irrelevant.
"Murder" is a word which is merely a subclass of the more-general word "kill". "Murder" refers to the killing of human beings; "killing" means to put a living organism to death.
Of course, all religions try to weasel their way out of a simple logical statement (I'll use your version): "thou shalt not murder". 4 simple words, and an absolutely-rigorous logical statement. It states, unconditionally and unambiguously, that you shall not murder; that murder is unacceptable. Period. End of discussion. You. Shall. Not. Murder.
And yet, look at all the hypocritical religions, many which justify murder by governments, minimally for the purposes of war. The Bible does not make exceptions for war or any other reason; it says "you shall not murder" -- no ifs, ands, or buts about it. And he who does not abide by these simple 4 words is not abiding by the word of God (assuming the Bible is the word of God at all, which is frankly laughable, but that's a different debate).
Actual killing and virtual killing are very different, true; as Solid Snake says in Metal Gear Solid 2, "every year, a few soldiers die during live-fire training exercises. But nobody gets killed in VR." (paraphrased)
But the Bible does not apply such conditions of reality to the commandment. The commandment reads "thou shalt not kill" (or "thou shalt not murder", as another reply to my original post says). It does not say "thou shalt not kill, unless the objects under murderous consideration are not real, or unless they are not humans, or unless [insert condition]".
The commandment is unconditional. As a matter of simple, hard logic, no killing means "no killing", period, and there is no escaping this fact. As a matter of pure logic and fact, you cannot weasel your way out of it, no matter how hard you try, and to attempt to do so is to attempt to dodge the word of God (or so Christians claim) out of lazy convenience.
As a result, to behave otherwise with regards to killing -- in reality, or in the virtual world -- is hypocritical, just as I've claimed religious people usually (though I'm optimistic enough and familiar enough with social statistics to avoid saying "always") are.
Assume for a moment that we ignore the logic, and consider only philosophy. Philosophically, why would a truly-pure Christian desire to kill anything, in a virtual world or otherwise? Jesus (if you take the Bible as truth) taught his disciples, in Matthew, to "turn the other cheek." Since when does "turn the other cheek" mean "turn your cheek and press it against the stock of an AR-15 as you put evil non-Christians in your crosshairs?"
A truly pure Christian holds no hate in their heart so strong that it permits murder.
Once again, Christian hypocrisy presides over the doctrine. In the actual practice of Christianity, killing is considered unacceptable -- unless, of course, it is in the name of the Christian religion.
If I didn't know my history well enough to know that this country was founded by atheistic-leaning deists so that a variety of religious could (and did) immigrate here to practice their religion without being murdered by the government for it, I would ask "why are we selling such insane tripe?"
Alas, while "this country was not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion" (as George Washington once said), the nation was attractive in its design of keeping religion and government separate, thus attracting the craziest religious wackos Europe had to offer.
And so today, we have the descendants of those WASPs (and their non-Bible-reading, believers-in-anything, unthinking Catholic parallels) running the nation and pushing -- of all things -- a video game that, against one of the 10 commandments ("thou shalt not kill"), has you running around murdering unbelievers. But then, who ever said religious people were consistent and non-hypocritical?
The game is popular enough to show up on Wal-Mart shelves, and because Wal-Mart carries the game, it is clear that the intended market for the game are the lower classes -- just the sort of people who believe most-strongly in the nonsense that is all deistic belief (whether Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, atheist, or any other belief in the existence/non-existence of a god).
The U.S. is one frighteningly-ignorant nation sometimes.
1) I got tired of "lumping data around". Most of the stuff that I've worked on basically involved moving data from one place to another while transforming it. To be clear, that's a wide range of stuff. I've worked on compilers, query languages, UI, IDE's (I've been an Eclipse contributor), transactional storage engines,... At it's heart, it's pretty much been all lumping data around. I wanted to do something a little different.
Sounds familiar (I develop directory-aware apps, so much of what I do is piping data to/from the directory databases)... My boredom with this plumbing effort is part of my reason for wanting to go back to go back to grad school as well.
That said, econometrics (if you haven't taken it already) is in some ways like CS. Some extremely sophisticated analyses can be performed in SAS, and so to some extent, econometrics resembles programming (or it did in my class)... You'll certainly be shuffling around lots of data for your analyses.
2) If I decided to stay in computers, I wanted to "raise my game". Hence the math part. I felt like I need to do something hard -- really hard. So I'm taking the roughest undergrad math degree that my school has. A little quote from fight club: "A guy came to fight club for the first time, his ass was a wad of cookie dough. After a few weeks, he was carved out of wood." I wanted to come out carved out of wood -- although it seems to have had the opposite effect on my ass.
Haha! Spending lots of time at a desk, pencil in-hand will do that.:-) I likewise have (occasionally) taken in my free time to re-learning the calculus coursework I no longer remember nor use. Same with stats (and there I've occasionally been learning more on my own).
3) I wanted to understand what was going on with outsourcing. Hence the econ part.
That was the original reason I did my minor. I wanted to try to figure out where my job was going upon graduation (since I was already a year into my CS degree).:-)
Although, as a graduating HS senior in 2000, I was considering doing an Econ major and then going on to law school, rather than a CS major and then going into industry as a developer (as I've done. The idea of going into law is thoroughly yawn-inspiring to me at this point). I've always had Econ. academic tendencies...
But, in the long term, (and this is the iffy part to my analysis) I suspect that the market for software has a positive relationship with the number of computer users. As evidence, I offer up Delicious Library. Essentially since the number of computer users has skyrocketed, this little niche is big enough to support a number of developers quite nicely. Roomba is another example.
So, I think that the profitable uses for software will far outstrip our capacity to produce them. At least in my working lifetime (and I still have another 30 years or so).
Thanks for the insight. People twice my age (and in other scientific disciplines) suggest the same thing. It may be a rough next couple decades for people in developed nations, as offshore outsourcing rapidly raises the real wage levels in other nations towards some equilibrium, as the real wages in developed nations for the same jobs stagnate (being held-down by wage competition in other, cheaper nations).
But so long as software grows increasingly-complex in its functionality and increasingly-large in code base -- and so long as demand for that software keeps its pace -- so too will the demand for developers to deal with the rising complexity. It's this sort of optimism that keeps me from more-seriously considering jumping-ship to another, less offshoring-prone career...
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A simple algorithm might be exceptionally efficient and scalable (but inaccurate and ineffective), and thus, perhaps only a minimal set of hardware is necessary. An very complex algorithm might be very inefficient and relatively less-scalable (but accurate and effective), and so a larger, beefier set of hardware is necessary.
For example: you can run Windows Vista on a dual-core AMD X2 box with 4GB RAM. You cannot run it on a 386DX/33 with 8MB RAM. Vista is a very complex algorithm (if you've ever taken an ASM course, you know that an OS is actually just a program - a set of code - running in a loop (albeit with points for escape (Shut Down, Reboot, etc.), hibernation, etc.), like any application). Windows 3.1, OTOH, will run on both - but it is a *much* simpler, less-functional OS too.
Google has what is believed (because nobody outside the company knows precisely how it works) to be a monstrously-complex algorithm -- that's why they employ an army of PhD computer scientists and mathematicians, and put up brain-teaser billboards to try and hire more. That, combined with the world's largest source of data for their algorithm to process, the Internet, means they will have obscene hardware requirements.
IIRC, they were running on something like 9,000 Linux nodes running a stripped-down kernel in a cluster. But that was about 5 years ago; undoubtedly they've increased capacity since then.
Admittedly, I haven't tried this yet, but it looks to me like the GUI (and all its controls) needs to be instantiated and run in another, programmer-defined thread function (e.g. a while(bQuit == false), where bQuit is a boolean representing whether the user has signaled to quit the app)...
The
I would say that there needs to be publicly-funded law enforcement to protect (from your list) public order and property and enforce contracts, and to manage legal tender. The rest can be provided privately (now, are they *likely* to be provided privately? That's a different question).
Are scientists stripped of their certification for other thoughtcrimes, such as believing that the Earth is flat; that the universe revolves around the Earth; that quantum physics, being probabilistic, is a bunch of bull given that we know all other physical events in the world behave in a deterministic fashion (only the depth of complexity prevents full knowledge and thus, perfect modeling); that too much washing of foods, clothes, and building interiors is a bad idea, because it reduces human contact with disease, reducing human immune system strength; and so forth?
(Disclaimer: I agree with some of the above (too much washing), and disagree with others (the astrophysics assertions), and am undecided out of lack of education and knowledge regarding quantum physics (though the assertion certainly makes sense to me).)
If scientists are not decertified for such things, then why global warming? Since when is it good science to prevent questioning and hypothesis-testing? Isn't such censorship *really* less about science than it is about politics by those pushing the global warming agenda before the science was sufficiently-agreed-upon to be worth pursuing policy action, such that those in the position (like this meteorologist) wish to serve up revenge towards those who have disagreed with them?
The most fundamental element of science is theory-testing -- even if the theory seems far-beyond needing any further proof (e.g. gravity). If anyone is to be decertified, perhaps it should be the meteorologist who suggested this nonsense.
OS X has a Unix userland binary set: its userland are FreeBSD apps and utilities.
That reminds me: have you seen the alleged "anarchy" of FreeBSD lately? It is not like Linux, which *is* more anarchic in nature. FBSD is an open-source OS designed-by- and maintained-by-committee, and it works quite well... (better than Linux, for the very anarchy argument you cite, I might add)
But anarchy is not all bad. It leads to improved security from malicious code; the more ways to design a directory structure on Linux there are, the more ways there are for path-dependent worms, viruses, etc. to fail. It's the same reason that having multiple operating systems is better than having a single-OS-to-rule-them-all. It is the argument of diversity, and it's the same reason the human race survives so well: we all have differences which allow our species to survive in different ways... Some people are physically-stronger, but do not learn well, or vice-versa (as is often the case on
That does seem to be the popular opinion these days, rising from the thought-dead hand of Soviet collectivism of just 18 years ago, pushed by leftist "public interest" groups like Public Citizen, who revel in telling us that freedom-of-choice is a bad thing...
Of course, as a poster my 7th grade science teacher had posted read: "what is right is not always popular; what is popular, is not always right."
Yes, and we have it: it's called "passing" on a 2-lane road. Or performing a 3-point turnaround. Or making a U-turn. Or simply making a left turn across the oncoming lanes.
All of them depend critically on you employing one thing: the individual responsibility and lack of idiocy to fail to adhere to a reasonable level of sense such that you prevent harming yourself or anybody else, or the property thereof.
Oh I'm well-aware we're a long way away from such a market-oriented economy. Given the trend of history in market vs. non-market (read: government, i.e. socialist) economics, I greatly doubt this country will *ever* get there. It's a great idea IMO, but I have a very deep realist streak in me to know how unlikely it ever is to occur... :-/
I will say that I can see an argument (like your original point) for nations each maintaining at least an emergency supply of domestically-produced food, in the event of non-economically-motivated disruptions in food supply, such as religiously-motivated terrorism (like 9/11). And the ability for such production to be restarted if necessary ought to be maintained (even if this requires people growing their own food at home, in pots of dirt under heat lamps, for example, or in backyard gardens, like the "Victory Gardens" Americans grew during WWII).
But as a typical means of providing food, it makes sense to trade for it: other, developing nations have agricultural work they can do to help develop their countries, while we spend more of our time doing something else, something more-advanced, e.g. engineering, or developing software, etc....
Well, that just makes for a good incentive for the U.S. not to go around killing people whenever we want, doesn't it? And it makes a good incentive for the other, agricultural countries to behave well to us, else, we will buy food from a different country.
See also our current oil situation, in which we produce about 60% of our own oil, but the remaining 40% comes from foreign producers -- like Saudi Arabia, from which 16 of the 19 extremist Muslims attacked the U.S. on 9/11. We've treated the Saudis with kid-gloves because they are a major oil supplier to us, and their government (though clearly not their citizens) have treated us well in return because we are a major buyer...
Or consider the relations between the U.S. and China. They're somewhat frosty, but they are warmed by our heavy interdependence on the trade of manufactured goods.
Or consider the relationship between Japan and any nation producing steel, oil, or electronics components -- all of which are very major parts of their world-class automobile and electronics industries. Japan has had to trade for such things for over 100 years now, because they basically cannot be found on their islands. And they have done *very* well since WWII.
You mean the North Korea where many people perform farming functions as they were done 150 years ago -- without the assistance of tractors, combines, or any other Industrial Revolution-era agricultural technology? If you want to know why they are so starved for food, this is certainly a big reason (and a Soviet-style centrally-planned socialist economy, what with its "people over technology" attitude from the government, certainly don't help, nor does their gross misallocation of resources on developing nuclear weapons instead of more developmental technology).
No nation which has isolated itself from the rest of the world to produce exclusively for itself has been successful for very long. This actually describes North Korea fairly-well... Much of the modern world's ability to produce at the level we do depends critically on the principle of comparative advantage.
Farming is a government-subsidized activity in the U.S.. Farming couldn't exist in the U.S. without it, because the activity typically doesn't generate enough income to live on.
So the U.S. government -- which I implore you not to confuse with the American people, for our government is composed very little "of the people", nor is it much "by the people" thanks to the lack of direct-democracy, and with the influence of special interest lobbyists, it sure as hell isn't "for the people" -- has failed people twice: in trade regulations, and in subsidizing an activity the U.S. should not participate in in the first place.
As is often the case, government is at fault...
The bigger the program, the more interplay of potentially-failing factors: more variables, more method calls, more potentially insufficiently-tested classes/libs/components pulled-in, more likelihood of multithreading (raising the probability of the problems that come w/ that, e.g. race conditions, deadlocks, etc.), more likelihood of networking functionality (which of course depends critically on the reliability of other systems), etc. etc..
Calculating the risk of failure in software is one giant conditional probability problem, in which each very small piece (say, storing a 4-byte value as an integer in memory) may have been coded and tested ruthlessly for decades. But the software those operations form are, in every case, brand-new within the user's domain, [1] else, it would likely be purchased instead; the more code is being executed, the more opportunities there are for failure...
So say you write an app and you know it has 2 major failure points, A and B. P(successful_execution | !A and !B) = 1 - (P(A) + P(B)). But now add a third failure point, C. P(successful_execution | !A and !B and !C) = 1 - (P(A) + P(B) + P(C)). The probability of a successful execution can do no better than remain at the same level with each additional failure point -- that is, with each additional line of code (or class, or module, or however you choose to measure and define potential failure points).
In short, as complexity rises, so do the number of potential failure points, and thus the probability of failure. And because most projects are from-scratch -- even if they've been written before for another organization, the developers won't have perfect memory of that solution -- they are all-new creations, each time, assuring that those failure points have not been ironed-out before (again, minus whatever those developers manage to remember at their new job)...
[1] You may have written an awesome logging function for a megacorp once, but jumping over to a startup, they won't have it, so you'll have to write it again (unless the previous company open-sourced it, but that's highly unlikely).
So the asset managers are incompetent and don't know what the goals of the customer they work for are. The asset managers aren't serving their customer (the Foundation) in a manner consistent with their objectives.
People have been fired for lesser offenses. The Foundation needs to remind those managers who they work for, and inform them that their actions are not aligning with the goals of the Foundation...
No evil here (at least not intentionally). No, rather, this is more of the usual, more-mundane story that comes out of any sufficiently-large organization: the institution has a set of strategic priorities, but the upper management that make the strategic decisions (Bill and Melinda Gates, the management directly beneath them, etc.) aren't managing the lower management who manage the operational aspects (e.g. the asset managers who invest the Foundation's money).
It's just the usual story of incompetent management... Read Dilbert if you require further explanation.
I do wonder what Warren Buffet thinks though, now that he -- the America's 2nd-richest person -- has decided to pour 85% of his entire net worth into the Foundation over a period of several years, on the basis that it does good work and is managed well...
This is one most of us /.'ers (including me) should do...
That damn Dubya! Always takin' away you stupid American freedoms. Across the pond we have --
Oh, wait...
Seriously, what is the British fetish with implementing all manner of Orwellian society? Cameras up everyone's asses, free speech rights that (even with Dubya at the helm) pale by American standards, a handgun ban that was followed by an increase in violent crime, all with the fear-of-terrorism culture that Americans have come to cherish since 9/11. Do Brits realize that 1984 was a work of fiction?
Well, I suppose most of the people who hated British government have long since (like, some 230 years ago) left it for the 'States, hence, few in Britain to fight back... (For the same reason of immigration history, the 'States are probably doomed to remain a theoretically-secular pseudo-theocracy as it currently is.)
That's not heartless; that's sensible...
A "data flow map"? You mean, like a data flow diagram, a pretty standard diagram in software engineering taught to CS students in senior-level undergrad systems-design courses?
That such a diagram apparently *doesn't* exist should be worrisome.
A "publication review board"? Since when, in a free nation, does a government agency determine whether a *former* employee may speak of his *former* employer? (Except in the employment contract upon entering the government's service in the first place, so as to prevent the release of sensitive information?)
Wrong. Try a dictionary.
While the definition varies as to whether it is a legal term -- some definitions say murder is "unlawful", "homicide", and so on -- all definitions have one thing in common: "murder" is the intentional killing of another human being.
Exhibit 1:
Exhibit 2:
Exhibit 3:
Exhibit 4:
Exhibit 5:
If you understand object-oriented programming, think about it like this: "murder" is a subclass of "killing".
You can kill many things, not just people: flowers, animals, political ideals, spiritual beliefs, a person's mood in bed during sex. But to murder means to kill a specific thing: a human being. "Murder" is a particular form of "killing".
That is the *only* big difference; a difference of specificity in the definition.
Now, you say that killing in war is not murder. That, by definition, is wrong. Murder requires willful intent to kill a person, or at the very least, a blatant, unreasonable disregard for the safety of another.
In a non-cold war -- which is to say, a war in which people are killing each other (as you state) -- the objective (particularly in U.S. military) is to kill people until the other nation surrenders or is buried. Period.
One does not go into a unfriendly (let alone an openly-hostile) nation armed with machine guns, grenades, flamethrowers, cruise missiles, nerve gas, and so forth without an intent to kill. The amount of weaponry at-hand is simply so overwhelming that no other conclusion can reasonably be made. (And this is from somebody who has never come within an ICBM's range of being accused of being an anti-gun nut.)
They mean to say the universe is really just one big Hall of Mirrors Effect? :-P
Incorrect. England banned handguns, not all guns, categorically.
So that's more people than die in gun crimes. About 25 times more. Crisply-rational statistical reasoning suggests we focus more on that problem than problems with lesser numbers of deaths (and, in turn, focus more on problems with even more deaths than the in-transit ambulance death rate).
Life is risky. All things are dangerous. Prison inmates can kill you with a plastic knife; cops chasing a speeder through your neighborhood could run over your daughter by mistake; your burger at Burger King could be undercooked and give you e.Coli; the pump you use at the gas station could be set afire by the idiot on the other side of the pump from you, possibly giving you burns. And so on. The world is not a NERF'd place for you to play.
That smoking, guns, or anything else are dangerous is not a sufficient reason for banning it. Only where one person's use of some object infringes on the liberty of another person is there any reasonable grounds for regulation... (So, smoking in public buildings, such as govn't offices, is reasonable. Same goes for public streets and roadways. But restaurants, bars, and the like, being privately-owned and voluntarily-attended by its patrons and employees, are not worthy of the kind of anti-smoking regulation we've seen in recent years.)
(And yes, I have had multiple relatives die of smoking-related illnesses, so you can check any "heartless libertarian" editorializing you might have at the door. They chose to smoke, and, in one of their cases, they knew about the dangers of smoking before most of the public did, in large part because my father has expert knowledge that )
To say they are the same was never my argument in the first place. My argument is that there are other problems of greater numerical impact than gun crimes, and as such, we should be focused on reducing them before others.
Start with the biggest problems first, and work your way down to lesser problems; to do anything else is to miss the forest for the trees... And with other problems having 10, 20, 40 or more times more impact than gun crimes, it seems to me the rational thing to do is to give those our greatest focus, with diminishing levels of focus for problems of lesser impact (i.e., I'm not saying we shouldn't focus *at all* on gun crimes either; only, it should not be anywhere near the top of our list of priorities, given the lesser magnitude).
You are making a grossly-inaccurate analogy.
One PC without a firewall can replicate a virus/worm to millions of other similarly-configured hosts, without further assistance from the originating host.
But one individual with a helicopter cannot blow up a neighbor's house, then expect that that explosion will blow up other houses, without his further effort.
Moreover, attacking a neighbor only ensures that several people (including law enforcement) become angry and retaliate in return. The same is generally not true online (though some IDS systems will perform reverse-DoS attacks to shut down offensive hosts within a particular network, e.g. a corporate network).
The vectors of destruction you observe on the Internet do not work the same way in the real world.
So very true -- which is why I never suggested it was a *reasonable* rule... Only that it *is* the rule as stated by Christian Bibles everywhere, and that as-stated, it rules out murder at minimum, and killing of all sorts (even of plants and near-worthless creatures, e.g. cockroaches and flies) under a broader, but still-strict interpretation.
You're right; I stand corrected.
:-)
Thanks.
According to my memory of my Bible, and according to my memory of the teachings in the many years of Sunday School as a child to which I was involuntarily dragged and attemptedly brainwashed, the phrase is "thou shalt not kill."
Wikipedia says it reads "You shall not murder." (it does not contain the word "commit" that you claim exists in the statement. Regardless, the consequence of the statement is the same; it is simply slightly more verbose in your version.)
Regardless, the consequence of the commandment's implication for human beings between the words "murder" and "kill" is the same. Death results either way. For human beings, the choice of word in this set of 2 is irrelevant.
"Murder" is a word which is merely a subclass of the more-general word "kill". "Murder" refers to the killing of human beings; "killing" means to put a living organism to death.
Of course, all religions try to weasel their way out of a simple logical statement (I'll use your version): "thou shalt not murder". 4 simple words, and an absolutely-rigorous logical statement. It states, unconditionally and unambiguously, that you shall not murder; that murder is unacceptable. Period. End of discussion. You. Shall. Not. Murder.
And yet, look at all the hypocritical religions, many which justify murder by governments, minimally for the purposes of war. The Bible does not make exceptions for war or any other reason; it says "you shall not murder" -- no ifs, ands, or buts about it. And he who does not abide by these simple 4 words is not abiding by the word of God (assuming the Bible is the word of God at all, which is frankly laughable, but that's a different debate).
Actual killing and virtual killing are very different, true; as Solid Snake says in Metal Gear Solid 2, "every year, a few soldiers die during live-fire training exercises. But nobody gets killed in VR." (paraphrased)
But the Bible does not apply such conditions of reality to the commandment. The commandment reads "thou shalt not kill" (or "thou shalt not murder", as another reply to my original post says). It does not say "thou shalt not kill, unless the objects under murderous consideration are not real, or unless they are not humans, or unless [insert condition]".
The commandment is unconditional. As a matter of simple, hard logic, no killing means "no killing", period, and there is no escaping this fact. As a matter of pure logic and fact, you cannot weasel your way out of it, no matter how hard you try, and to attempt to do so is to attempt to dodge the word of God (or so Christians claim) out of lazy convenience.
As a result, to behave otherwise with regards to killing -- in reality, or in the virtual world -- is hypocritical, just as I've claimed religious people usually (though I'm optimistic enough and familiar enough with social statistics to avoid saying "always") are.
Assume for a moment that we ignore the logic, and consider only philosophy. Philosophically, why would a truly-pure Christian desire to kill anything, in a virtual world or otherwise? Jesus (if you take the Bible as truth) taught his disciples, in Matthew, to "turn the other cheek." Since when does "turn the other cheek" mean "turn your cheek and press it against the stock of an AR-15 as you put evil non-Christians in your crosshairs?"
A truly pure Christian holds no hate in their heart so strong that it permits murder.
Once again, Christian hypocrisy presides over the doctrine. In the actual practice of Christianity, killing is considered unacceptable -- unless, of course, it is in the name of the Christian religion.
If I didn't know my history well enough to know that this country was founded by atheistic-leaning deists so that a variety of religious could (and did) immigrate here to practice their religion without being murdered by the government for it, I would ask "why are we selling such insane tripe?"
Alas, while "this country was not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion" (as George Washington once said), the nation was attractive in its design of keeping religion and government separate, thus attracting the craziest religious wackos Europe had to offer.
And so today, we have the descendants of those WASPs (and their non-Bible-reading, believers-in-anything, unthinking Catholic parallels) running the nation and pushing -- of all things -- a video game that, against one of the 10 commandments ("thou shalt not kill"), has you running around murdering unbelievers. But then, who ever said religious people were consistent and non-hypocritical?
The game is popular enough to show up on Wal-Mart shelves, and because Wal-Mart carries the game, it is clear that the intended market for the game are the lower classes -- just the sort of people who believe most-strongly in the nonsense that is all deistic belief (whether Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, atheist, or any other belief in the existence/non-existence of a god).
The U.S. is one frighteningly-ignorant nation sometimes.
* This message sponsored by the Church of the FSM. *
Sounds familiar (I develop directory-aware apps, so much of what I do is piping data to/from the directory databases)... My boredom with this plumbing effort is part of my reason for wanting to go back to go back to grad school as well.
That said, econometrics (if you haven't taken it already) is in some ways like CS. Some extremely sophisticated analyses can be performed in SAS, and so to some extent, econometrics resembles programming (or it did in my class)... You'll certainly be shuffling around lots of data for your analyses.
Haha! Spending lots of time at a desk, pencil in-hand will do that.
That was the original reason I did my minor. I wanted to try to figure out where my job was going upon graduation (since I was already a year into my CS degree).
Although, as a graduating HS senior in 2000, I was considering doing an Econ major and then going on to law school, rather than a CS major and then going into industry as a developer (as I've done. The idea of going into law is thoroughly yawn-inspiring to me at this point). I've always had Econ. academic tendencies...
Thanks for the insight. People twice my age (and in other scientific disciplines) suggest the same thing. It may be a rough next couple decades for people in developed nations, as offshore outsourcing rapidly raises the real wage levels in other nations towards some equilibrium, as the real wages in developed nations for the same jobs stagnate (being held-down by wage competition in other, cheaper nations).
But so long as software grows increasingly-complex in its functionality and increasingly-large in code base -- and so long as demand for that software keeps its pace -- so too will the demand for developers to deal with the rising complexity. It's this sort of optimism that keeps me from more-seriously considering jumping-ship to another, less offshoring-prone career...