You're oversimplifying. Actually, it is extremely unclear what constitutes being "one program". The GPL FAQ says it's ultimately up to a judge, and goes on to speculate in an extremely vague fashion about what may and may not constitute combining two parts into one program. There has only been one court case (Nintendo vs. Goloob Games) and the ruling was not definitive.
Even the question of whether dynamic linking is covered is somewhat questionable. To quote RMS,
"I think we have a pretty good argument that nontrivial dynamic linking creates a combined (i.e. derivative) work. I have an idea for how to change the GPL to make it clearer and more certain, but I need to see if we can work out the details in a way that our lawyer believes will really work."
Even assuming that the FSF prevails in this argument, it is far from clear that programs connected by pipes, shared memory, CORBA, or SOAP would be considered "one program." In fact, the GPL is so weak in this area that it's one of the main reasons for GPL version 3.
Actually, you have it backwards. Implementing a balanced binary tree is not that hard. It's a matter of finding the algorithm, which can be described in a few pages, and carefully translating it into a computer language. This requires care, but it isn't all that hard. STL on the other hand, requires a large book to explain in even a cursory fashion, and even if you master the book you will run into problems regularly.
Ian Goldberg. I had the entertaining job of teaching second-year programming to him. He answered questions practically before I finished asking them. I eventually had to limit him to, like, three answers per lecture.
Maybe, but probably not. After all, the inner loop is all in one function. And with a decent compiler it will probably be in-lined and unrolled a few times anyway.
Regular expressions were certainly an important innovation, but they're a lot more than 20 years old. They were first studied by Kleene in the mid-1950's. The first algorithm to translate them into DFA's was invented in about 1960. Lex was written in the mid 70's.
I use Perforce, too, and I agree it's very good and the basic interface would be a good model for an open-source system. However, I don't think Perforce itself would work for a typical open-source project. Open-source projects tend to be extremely distributed, with lots of geographically distributed groups of one or two. Perforce basically doesn't attack that problem.
Sorry, I accidentally submitted before it was done.
It is not at all clear that ethanol saves any oil at all.
In a good year (with high corn yields) most studies show that ethanol production is slightly energy positive. That is, the energy content of a gallon of ethanol exceeds by approximately 15% the energy that goes into producing it. In a bad year, when yeilds are lower, it can easily require more than 80,000 BTU to produce a gallon of ethanol. (See, for example, this study.) On average it's probably about a wash. It would be interesting to see what the reaction would be to requiring ethanol producers to use ethanol instead of fossil fuel for all steps in production.
It is also questionable whether ethanol reduces CO2 emissions. From that standpoint, it would probably be better to grow trees or hemp, which would recycle more CO2 than any reduction due to burning CO2 rather than fossil fuels.
It is questionable if ethanol saves any oil at all.
In a good year (with high corn yields) ethanol production is slightly energy positive. That is, the energy content of a gallon of ethanol exceeds by approximately 16% the energy that goes into producing it. In a bad year, when yeilds are lower, it can easily require more than 80,000 BTU to produce a gallon of ethanol. (See, for example, this study.
It is also questionable if ethanol reduces CO2 emissions. From that standpoint, it would probably be better to grow trees, which would recycle more CO2 than any reduction due to CO2.
Why would people think it wouldn't happen to humans? Because we're very different from other animals. We are not immune to the laws of nature, but we are certainly immune to simplistic supply-and-demand curves. We produce our own supply, and we find substitutes for things we can't replace. As the number of chicken hawks increases the number of chickens falls (which eventually leads to a crash in the chicken hawk population). But as the number of chicken-eating humans increases, the number of chickens increases to meet the demand. When bronze-age cultures had mined out all the bronze around the Mediterranean, did civilization collapse? No, they found substitutes, some of which worked better than bronze.
Installation and running of java as compared to perl is no contest (on unix). Java requires extensive and neverending twiddling aroung with your path.
Actually, they are almost identical in this respect. If you install all your Java classes in the extension area, you don't need a class path at all. Ditto for Perl. If you install them elsewhere then you need to fiddle with CLASSPATH or PERL5PATH, respectively.
I said his explanations are comical, not his conclusions. They are comical because no matter what stance the US has taken, they are to blame. E.g., if the US has overthrown a government, then they are to blame for all subsequent governments. (Argentina, e.g.) If they did not actually overthrow the government, but acted against it any any way (blockade, tariffs, etc.) the same holds. (Cuba, Nicaragua, e.g.) If the US aids a government in any way, they are also responsible for all subsequent actions of that government and subsequent governments. (Iran, Saudi Arabia, e.g.) If we ignore a country all together, we are responsible for our inactivity. (E.g., most of Africa.) Even if we actively oppose and fight a country, we are probably responsible for its actions. E.g., we supposedly "gave the green light" to Iraq to invade Kuwait, so we're responsible for Hussain's tyrany.
In other words, Chomsky constructs his chains of causality in the reverse direction. Somethat bad happened. Ok, what did the US do or not do that could have changed that? Nothing recently? Well, look back further. The US must have done something sometime in the past that had some influence in the area. Therefore, the US is responsible.
Noam Chomsky was a great linguist. Politically, unfortunately, he has moved from pacifist to kook. He has become an idealogue with only one idea: that at the source of all problems is US misbehavior. His logic has become tortured and his rhetoric vague and overblown.
His "explanations" of how the US is responsible for everything from Pol Pot's purges to rain-forest deforestation have become comical; his books have begun to remind me of the old "Connections" show on PBS. In that context, the chains of implausible causality were an excuse to explore interesting bits of history. (No one really thought that yearly floods on the Nile were ultimately responsible for the invention of the electric toothbrush, even if you could create a series of links that connected them.) Unfortunately, Dr. Chomsky seems to take his Theory of Everything very seriously. If something bad has happened in the world, you can be sure that is it "connected" to some US involvement.
You're missing the point. The effect of cheap refrigeration is that people change their eating habbits. They eat a lot more stuff that needs refrigeration. It matters only slightly whether the food is refrigerated at the store or at home. The point is that the price of things like fresh seafood in Chicago depends a lot on the cost of refrigeration. People eat a lot more of it if it's cheap.
You're looking at it much too narrowly. The cost of refrigeration is a big part of the cost of many luxury items (milkshakes, apples from New Zealand, fresh salmon, e.g.). The demand for those items is highly elastic. Without cheap refrigeration, they would be too expensive to contemplate; as it is, they're popular.
But even on your terms, you're wrong. Lots of people have a huge refrigerator and a chest freezer, mostly because it's most convenient to shop once a week than every day. If refrigeration were expensive, people would shop more often, get by with smaller refrigerators, and eat more canned food and fewer cold beverages.
"So a part of the solution is to build fridges wich use less energy. Europe does so, US not."
Paradoxically, building more efficient appliances often increases total energy use, especially if demand is elastic. Inefficient refridgerators are expensive to use, so they don't get used as much. Efficient refridgerators are cheap to use, so people use them more.
If you want to reduce the total energy used for refridgeration, mandate that refridgerators be extremely inefficient. If running a refridgerator for a month added $1000 to the electric bill, people would quickly find alternatives.
Phrases like "demand exceeding supply" are meaningless without attaching a price. At a low enough price, demand for almost anything will exceed supply. At a high enough price, supply will exceed demand.
On issues of privacy, copyright, fair use, etc., liberal vs. conservative is not a very useful way to look at things. Worry instead about libertarian vs. authoritarian.
There are quite a few in both the liberal and conservative camps who would happily bargain away your freedom for a Hollywood fundraiser or a chance to demogogue about porn or 9/11. And there are quite a few in both camps who have a libertarian bent and are tend to defend freedom.
Slashdot Mirror
Even the question of whether dynamic linking is covered is somewhat questionable. To quote RMS,
Even assuming that the FSF prevails in this argument, it is far from clear that programs connected by pipes, shared memory, CORBA, or SOAP would be considered "one program." In fact, the GPL is so weak in this area that it's one of the main reasons for GPL version 3.
Actually, you have it backwards. Implementing a balanced binary tree is not that hard. It's a matter of finding the algorithm, which can be described in a few pages, and carefully translating it into a computer language. This requires care, but it isn't all that hard. STL on the other hand, requires a large book to explain in even a cursory fashion, and even if you master the book you will run into problems regularly.
Ian Goldberg. I had the entertaining job of teaching second-year programming to him. He answered questions practically before I finished asking them. I eventually had to limit him to, like, three answers per lecture.
Maybe, but probably not. After all, the inner loop is all in one function. And with a decent compiler it will probably be in-lined and unrolled a few times anyway.
Be very careful of Numerical Recipes. It is full of nasty traps and outright mistakes. See http://math.jpl.nasa.gov/nr/ for examples.
Put the inner loop in a function and return if disaster.
True. Data is the plural of anecdote.
Regular expressions were certainly an important innovation, but they're a lot more than 20 years old. They were first studied by Kleene in the mid-1950's. The first algorithm to translate them into DFA's was invented in about 1960. Lex was written in the mid 70's.
There are no plans to port C++ to CLR. What you get is a lobotomized version: C# with a C++ skin. That's about as useful as a broken arm.
I use Perforce, too, and I agree it's very good and the basic interface would be a good model for an open-source system. However, I don't think Perforce itself would work for a typical open-source project. Open-source projects tend to be extremely distributed, with lots of geographically distributed groups of one or two. Perforce basically doesn't attack that problem.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
It is not at all clear that ethanol saves any oil at all.
In a good year (with high corn yields) most studies show that ethanol production is slightly energy positive. That is, the energy content of a gallon of ethanol exceeds by approximately 15% the energy that goes into producing it. In a bad year, when yeilds are lower, it can easily require more than 80,000 BTU to produce a gallon of ethanol. (See, for example, this study.) On average it's probably about a wash. It would be interesting to see what the reaction would be to requiring ethanol producers to use ethanol instead of fossil fuel for all steps in production.
It is also questionable whether ethanol reduces CO2 emissions. From that standpoint, it would probably be better to grow trees or hemp, which would recycle more CO2 than any reduction due to burning CO2 rather than fossil fuels.
It is questionable if ethanol saves any oil at all. In a good year (with high corn yields) ethanol production is slightly energy positive. That is, the energy content of a gallon of ethanol exceeds by approximately 16% the energy that goes into producing it. In a bad year, when yeilds are lower, it can easily require more than 80,000 BTU to produce a gallon of ethanol. (See, for example, this study. It is also questionable if ethanol reduces CO2 emissions. From that standpoint, it would probably be better to grow trees, which would recycle more CO2 than any reduction due to CO2.
Why would people think it wouldn't happen to humans? Because we're very different from other animals. We are not immune to the laws of nature, but we are certainly immune to simplistic supply-and-demand curves. We produce our own supply, and we find substitutes for things we can't replace. As the number of chicken hawks increases the number of chickens falls (which eventually leads to a crash in the chicken hawk population). But as the number of chicken-eating humans increases, the number of chickens increases to meet the demand. When bronze-age cultures had mined out all the bronze around the Mediterranean, did civilization collapse? No, they found substitutes, some of which worked better than bronze.
I said his explanations are comical, not his conclusions. They are comical because no matter what stance the US has taken, they are to blame. E.g., if the US has overthrown a government, then they are to blame for all subsequent governments. (Argentina, e.g.) If they did not actually overthrow the government, but acted against it any any way (blockade, tariffs, etc.) the same holds. (Cuba, Nicaragua, e.g.) If the US aids a government in any way, they are also responsible for all subsequent actions of that government and subsequent governments. (Iran, Saudi Arabia, e.g.) If we ignore a country all together, we are responsible for our inactivity. (E.g., most of Africa.) Even if we actively oppose and fight a country, we are probably responsible for its actions. E.g., we supposedly "gave the green light" to Iraq to invade Kuwait, so we're responsible for Hussain's tyrany.
In other words, Chomsky constructs his chains of causality in the reverse direction. Somethat bad happened. Ok, what did the US do or not do that could have changed that? Nothing recently? Well, look back further. The US must have done something sometime in the past that had some influence in the area. Therefore, the US is responsible.
Noam Chomsky was a great linguist. Politically, unfortunately, he has moved from pacifist to kook. He has become an idealogue with only one idea: that at the source of all problems is US misbehavior. His logic has become tortured and his rhetoric vague and overblown.
His "explanations" of how the US is responsible for everything from Pol Pot's purges to rain-forest deforestation have become comical; his books have begun to remind me of the old "Connections" show on PBS. In that context, the chains of implausible causality were an excuse to explore interesting bits of history. (No one really thought that yearly floods on the Nile were ultimately responsible for the invention of the electric toothbrush, even if you could create a series of links that connected them.) Unfortunately, Dr. Chomsky seems to take his Theory of Everything very seriously. If something bad has happened in the world, you can be sure that is it "connected" to some US involvement.
You're missing the point. The effect of cheap refrigeration is that people change their eating habbits. They eat a lot more stuff that needs refrigeration. It matters only slightly whether the food is refrigerated at the store or at home. The point is that the price of things like fresh seafood in Chicago depends a lot on the cost of refrigeration. People eat a lot more of it if it's cheap.
That depends. Personally, I drive by several grocery stores every day on the way home from work.
You're looking at it much too narrowly. The cost of refrigeration is a big part of the cost of many luxury items (milkshakes, apples from New Zealand, fresh salmon, e.g.). The demand for those items is highly elastic. Without cheap refrigeration, they would be too expensive to contemplate; as it is, they're popular.
But even on your terms, you're wrong. Lots of people have a huge refrigerator and a chest freezer, mostly because it's most convenient to shop once a week than every day. If refrigeration were expensive, people would shop more often, get by with smaller refrigerators, and eat more canned food and fewer cold beverages.
Paradoxically, building more efficient appliances often increases total energy use, especially if demand is elastic. Inefficient refridgerators are expensive to use, so they don't get used as much. Efficient refridgerators are cheap to use, so people use them more.
If you want to reduce the total energy used for refridgeration, mandate that refridgerators be extremely inefficient. If running a refridgerator for a month added $1000 to the electric bill, people would quickly find alternatives.
Phrases like "demand exceeding supply" are meaningless without attaching a price. At a low enough price, demand for almost anything will exceed supply. At a high enough price, supply will exceed demand.
They will probably switch to whale oil.
On issues of privacy, copyright, fair use, etc., liberal vs. conservative is not a very useful way to look at things. Worry instead about libertarian vs. authoritarian.
There are quite a few in both the liberal and conservative camps who would happily bargain away your freedom for a Hollywood fundraiser or a chance to demogogue about porn or 9/11. And there are quite a few in both camps who have a libertarian bent and are tend to defend freedom.
I dunno. Having lived through both, I'd have to say that SETI@Home doesn't compare very well with a trip to the moon. No guts, no glory, I guess.