The USA's commie bureaucracies, such as NASA, don't actually have to work in order for society to function, so they can just run pursuing uneconomic launch systems like the Shuttle for decades, generally leaching off the taxpayer, putting private launch service companies out of business while claiming to "help" them, etc.
Marx actually had some insights into capitalism's weakness and it may very well be that China has been exploiting those weaknesses quite effectively -- helping the USA's capitalists fall into the failure modes most obvious to Marx. Don't underestimate the Chinese.
When going to a new version of a language, the correct strategy is to come up with the highest level language one can conceivably jit-compile and rewrite the current language as syntactic sugars of the higher level language. "Pragmas" may be part of the sugaring (especially since there may be important pragmatic information provided by the lower level language) but it is better if the so-called "pragmas" are, instead, assertions written in the higher level language itself. The answer here is not a functional language but a relational one since functions are degenerate relations. Moreover, since one seeks to have assertions in the place of pragmas, the formal basis of the relational language should be sentence oriented. The sentence-oriented relational formalism most widely accepted across disciplines (including program specification) and with the most history is the predicate calculus. The brain-dead zombies will now start chanting things about Prolog even though it was never an implementation of the predicate calculus and tried to do things that probably should never have been attempted on a DEC-10 anyway. There are neo-zombies who will start chanting things about Erlang. Erlang is a bastardization of Prolog which is a bastardization of the predicate calculus. The best thing I can say about Erlang is that Mozart/Oz is much worse, being is a bastardization of Erlang that is attempting to add relational constructs in without undoing the damage that Erlang did to Prolog -- when, in fact, they should have undone the whole mess, including Prolog, and gotten on with arranging a legitimate marriage of the predicate calculus with computers. If you are such a zombie, spare yourself the pain of reading further.
So, here is the high level idea (despite the danger of inviting Prolog zombies I'll be using its syntax for the Horn Clause):
Parallelism spawns independent computations.
The Horn Clause:
m(A,B,C):-x(A),y(B),z(C).
expresses AND parallelism spawning 3 independent computations.
The Horn Clause document:
m(A):-x(A).
m(A):-y(A).
m(A):-z(A).
expresses OR parallelism spawning 3 independent computations.
In an operating system, parallel computations are scheduled for execution, allocating resources according to priorities.
There are also computations which cannot be scheduled until the computations upon which they depend complete. The Horn Clause document:
expresses 3 AND parallel computations, each depending on 3 independent OR parallel computations.
This kind of data-dependency suspension of scheduling is also handled by operating systems.
By focusing on these constructs:
AND parallelism
OR parallelism
Scheduling
Dependency suspension
a radical reduction in semantic complexity can be realized.
Tools
Seymour Cray once said that much of engineering creativity comes from using old tools in never-before intended ways. The same is true of anything. New understanding of a thing's use is a way to create a new tool. Indeed, even when creating a new thing-in-itself as a tool (the ordinary means of creating a new tool), what comes first is its desired use. It is harmful to think about the fact that your hammer can be used as a paper-weight when you are pounding a nail into a piece of wood with a rock.
With that in mind, let us properly-use the Horn Clause.
Branching is properly scheduled parallelism.
Looping is either AND parallel recursion or it is properly scheduled OR parallelism.
Class hierarchy is properly scheduled polymorphism.
Part of the unspoken compensation for managers is having warm fleshy meat they can boss around. If you can't save enough in salary from the geek's lower telecommuting salary to hire an on-site professional masochist/submissive to sate the needs of the managers, no deal.
I don't know what the going rate is for a masochist/submissive pro nowadays but its a lot more than $7,900!
The United Nations has warned that the internet has fueled a surge in Naziism that has led to a sharp rise in the demand for psychotherapists. 'The internet makes it much easier than in the past to find information about Naziism. In just a few minutes you can contact Nazi groups and research racism,' says Sarah Silverman, a member of the Anne Frank Descendants of Holocaust Survivors Manifesto University in Brooklyn who specializes in the dangers posed to young people by Naziism. Organizers of a six-day conference that has brought together more than 60 psychotherapists as well as NGOs, screen-writers, journalists, teachers and youth workers,co-sponsored by the United Nations Congress for Holocaust Remembrance and the Reparations and the Congress for Psychotherapists say the rise of Naziism has been dangerously underestimated in recent years."
But but but... it's EXPENSIVE to live in Washington DC! Actually it _is_, but here is no excuse for Congressmen to be travelling to Washington DC anyway. Turn Capitol Hill into national monument and build on the Internet so these guys stay home with their constituents.
Look around at the confusion about "transaction fees" I noticed that some people actually are, as I expected, offering transaction insurance (reducing the risks of a transaction for a fee) and not bothering to differentiate it from a catch-all "transaction fee". That is, at best, bad advertising.
But looking elsewhere there appears to be a built-in real, physical, cost to transactions that is a result of the computation work (ie: energy, eg joules... kWh... ftlbs... etc. as well as machine time) that must be invested. This is an engineering problem -- meaning that a better-engineered system would accomplish the same level of secured functionality at lower real costs. The real financials here aren't mapped out clearly enough in terms of computational complexity but it seems clear that the rhetoric around "transaction fees" is trending toward favoring large scale computing, which would subvert one of the main virtues.
The idiots who want transaction fees don't get it: The whole point of a peer-to-peer system is to eliminate middle man rent-seeking. There is, however, a reasonable service that some might confuse with a "transaction fee" and that is transaction insurance. Transaction insurance is just a scaled down form of title insurance everyone is familiar with who has ever purchased a house. The transaction insurer is simply someone who underwrites the risk for one of the parties that a transaction will go bad. There is no need for the transaction to go through the transaction insurer, nor is there always a need for transaction insurance.
Get rid of the bozos who are blithering about transaction fees NOW.
The problem isn't price competition. Its ethnic nepotism competition. Americans are, by virtue of their early settler evolution, too individualistic to be able to compete on their own soil with cultures in which ethnic nepotism is natural.
It is vastly preferable to have a field of employment completely destroyed by foreign competition than it is to make endemic the principle of groupism against which the founding stock Americans have relatively poor evolutionary learning.
The solution isn't to limit immigration so much as it is to kick these companies (meaning their executives, boards and major stockholders) out of the US so they can go live in the shit they're importing to the US.
And don't let them back in when they come begging.
Yes, I realize that means most of the Fortune 500 gets kicked out of the US.
It is fascinating to me that with all of the work in over-the-wire vector graphics, the web is (with all of the confused "support" for SVG/HTML5/etc... in browsers) basically stuck back in the 1960s.
This is a little piece of the history that it seems should have led to something reasonable.
PLATO is resurrected!
The Genesis of Postscript (1981)
By Jim Bowery
Version 20010406
Copyright 2001
The author grants the right to copy, without modification.
The Challenge
From 2001 through 2007 I offered, with no takers, $500 to the first person who could document the existence of a Xerox PARC
communication concerning post-fix notation for page description languages prior
to my visit to that facility in November 1981 in my capacity as Manager of Interactive
Architectures for Viewdata Corporation of America, the videotex joint venture
between AT&T and Knight-Ridder News. Communiques regarding "JaM" were disqualified unless they specifically use the term "page description language", "typesetting language" or some equivalent phrase, and are appropriately dated.
The History
What was the true genesis of the Postscript?
Here’s a perspective out of left field:
It started with the first scientific pocket calculator ever produced -- the Hewlett-Packard
35 -- and its reverse polish "postfix" notation.
I saw an HP-35 advertised in Scientific American during my senior year in high
school, in 1972, and thought:
"I want one."
That's why I worked all summer with "Shorty" the ex-convict, driving
garbage trucks with 18 gears I was never properly trained to use and drinking
beers so as to Lorenz-contract the days that were punctuated with hot steaming
maggots down my neck as bemused debs reclined in their back yards nurturing
their future basal cell carcinomas. When I started at the University of Iowa,
I forked over my saved up $495 to Hewlett-Packard and instead of a slide-rule
on my belt, I had this neat little black pouch that could do it all while flashing
tiny red light-emitting-diode numbers -- reverse polish operation. I found only
one other person on campus who had one -- a chemistry professor.
Well, OK, I lied.
What really happened was that while I was working as a garbage man to
earn enough money for my HP-35, many mornings at 6AM they would tell me they
didn't need me that day, which is when I would head over to Drake University
and wait for my brother to get out of class at noon. That was almost 6 hours
away, and I needed some way to pass the time. After poking around a bit on campus,
I found this little old 2 story house that had a "Mathematics Department"
sign. Inside, off to the left, was a long room. In that room was a desk-top
Hewlett-Packard calculator with a flat-bed pen plotter hooked to it. It had
more buttons than you could shake a stick at and this little magnetic card you
could insert to record the buttons you were pressing, which included comparison
and conditional branch buttons. You could program it to not only do calculations,
but to move the pen around on the plotter bed that held the paper down with
static. It was really cool. I could finally use a lot of that worthless
junk about polynomials and stuff I had learned in high school and draw lots
of neat op-art patterns with a pseudo-3D look to them.
That desk calculator (I don't recall the model number), of course, also used
reverse polish notation -- postfix -- to drive its plotter.
By the time I got my HP-35 that fall, postfix operations were second nature
to me. When the HP-35 fell in price by a factor of two later that year, it taught
me my first lesson of consumerism in the early stages of Moore's Shockwave,
b
The problem with virtually any battery system that is not based on using air as an oxidizer is the potential of explosion. The higher the energy density, the greater the explosion if discharged in an uncontrolled fashion. Indeed, TFA ends with:
the multi-walled carbon nanotubes would allow huge amounts of energy discharged in short bursts.
I've just recently encountered an interesting phenomenon when talking to some guys involved with the DoE about LFTR. The resistance to LFTR appears, to me, to be a vestigial cult-worship of Admiral Rickover. Its still alive and well in the halls of the Federal bureaucracy, its damage has spread far beyond the Navy and there appears little hope of removing its hold on the hearts and minds of the Federal bureaucracies. The origin of this cult in the Navy is reflected in the Wikipedia article on Rickover where it mentions the cult and the greatly exaggerated rumors of its death during the Reagan Administration:
But on January 31, 1982, in his 80's, and after 63 years of service to his country under 13 presidents (Woodrow Wilson through Ronald Reagan), Rickover was forced to retire from the Navy as a full admiral by Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, with the knowledge and consent of President Reagan. This was done in a premeditated fashion. As Lehman, a former reserve naval aviator, put it in his book, Command of the Seas:
[O]ne of my first orders of business as secretary of the navy would be to solve...the Rickover problem. Rickover's legendary achievements were in the past. His present viselike grip on much of the navy was doing it much harm. I had sought the job because I believed the navy had deteriorated to the point where its weakness seriously threatened our future security. The navy's grave afflictions included loss of a strategic vision; loss of self-confidence, and morale; a prolonged starvation of resources, leaving vast shortfalls in capability to do the job; and too few ships to cover a sea so great, all resulting in cynicism, exhaustion, and an undercurrent of defeatism. The cult created by Admiral Rickover was itself a major obstacle to recovery, entwining nearly all the issues of culture and policy within the navy.[40]
Fitting to the end of the decades-long rein and reputation of Rickover, his career concluded in both a battle with the defense establishment and a coming-to-terms with his own human limitations.
The so-called "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" is a vague laundry list of selectively enforced pubescent girl wishes.
If you want truth and freedom then you must support secession as the primary human right so that disagreements over what constitutes "human rights" can be settled by mutually consenting occupation of territories.
Since the primary function of government is protection the citizenry's primary asset -- their territory -- it seems to me that $8 billion out of $4000 billion isn't too much for the citizenry to demand in return for their taxes.
Assange should obviously be executed for treason since it was his responsibility to protect US territory from invasion and not only did he fail to do so, he prevented the US government, State governments, County governments and even private border ranchers from doing so!
That not only is gross malfeasance, it is the most heinous kind of treason imaginable!
Teaching the Basic programming language as an introduction to programming is a step in the right direction but you really have to understand the point of the education system:
Produce a stream of young adults who are effectively brain damaged and in hock up to their eyeballs.
Now, I will freely admit that Basic accomplishes the brain damage goal of pedagogy, but let us not forget our obligation to saddle the zombies with debt that cannot be discharged by bankruptcy. Unless you charge thousands of dollars to turn young people into brain damaged zombies, how can you honestly call it "education"?
I just can't believe the digerati over at Wired magazine would be slaves to fashion cliques like those that bailed out Goldman Sachs and decided it was in the US national interest to Invade the World, Invite the World and be In Hock to the World.
Yeah I agree that the Apollo program might not have failed if only the 1965 Act had been a few decades sooner. But we got over that xenophobia and, with your help, overcame that failure born of inbreeding and went on to colonize the solar system with a booming economy!
Slashdot Mirror
The USA's commie bureaucracies, such as NASA, don't actually have to work in order for society to function, so they can just run pursuing uneconomic launch systems like the Shuttle for decades, generally leaching off the taxpayer, putting private launch service companies out of business while claiming to "help" them, etc.
Marx actually had some insights into capitalism's weakness and it may very well be that China has been exploiting those weaknesses quite effectively -- helping the USA's capitalists fall into the failure modes most obvious to Marx. Don't underestimate the Chinese.
So, here is the high level idea (despite the danger of inviting Prolog zombies I'll be using its syntax for the Horn Clause):
Parallelism spawns independent computations.
The Horn Clause:
m(A,B,C):-x(A),y(B),z(C).
expresses AND parallelism spawning 3 independent computations.
The Horn Clause document:
m(A):-x(A). m(A):-y(A). m(A):-z(A).
expresses OR parallelism spawning 3 independent computations.
In an operating system, parallel computations are scheduled for execution, allocating resources according to priorities.
There are also computations which cannot be scheduled until the computations upon which they depend complete. The Horn Clause document:
m(A,B,C):-m(A),m(B),m(C). m(A):-x(A). m(A):-y(A). m(A):-z(A).
expresses 3 AND parallel computations, each depending on 3 independent OR parallel computations.
This kind of data-dependency suspension of scheduling is also handled by operating systems.
By focusing on these constructs:
a radical reduction in semantic complexity can be realized.
Tools
Seymour Cray once said that much of engineering creativity comes from using old tools in never-before intended ways. The same is true of anything. New understanding of a thing's use is a way to create a new tool. Indeed, even when creating a new thing-in-itself as a tool (the ordinary means of creating a new tool), what comes first is its desired use. It is harmful to think about the fact that your hammer can be used as a paper-weight when you are pounding a nail into a piece of wood with a rock.
With that in mind, let us properly-use the Horn Clause.
Branching is properly scheduled parallelism.
Looping is either AND parallel recursion or it is properly scheduled OR parallelism.
Class hierarchy is properly scheduled polymorphism.
Polymorphism is OR parallelism.
Exception handling properly scheduled OR-parallelism.
A database row is cached AND parallelism.
Numbers are duplicate row counts, dimensioned by the conjunction of the dimensions of their columns (some of which may be, themselves be
He's upset that he's losing his authority.
They need to gang up huge numbers of small modules.
They should talk to Carmack about his if they want to play to their strength.
April Fools was 11 days ago.
I don't know what the going rate is for a masochist/submissive pro nowadays but its a lot more than $7,900!
The United Nations has warned that the internet has fueled a surge in Naziism that has led to a sharp rise in the demand for psychotherapists. 'The internet makes it much easier than in the past to find information about Naziism. In just a few minutes you can contact Nazi groups and research racism,' says Sarah Silverman, a member of the Anne Frank Descendants of Holocaust Survivors Manifesto University in Brooklyn who specializes in the dangers posed to young people by Naziism. Organizers of a six-day conference that has brought together more than 60 psychotherapists as well as NGOs, screen-writers, journalists, teachers and youth workers,co-sponsored by the United Nations Congress for Holocaust Remembrance and the Reparations and the Congress for Psychotherapists say the rise of Naziism has been dangerously underestimated in recent years."
But but but... it's EXPENSIVE to live in Washington DC! Actually it _is_, but here is no excuse for Congressmen to be travelling to Washington DC anyway. Turn Capitol Hill into national monument and build on the Internet so these guys stay home with their constituents.
So why don't they just sell their shares and start a venture fund?
But looking elsewhere there appears to be a built-in real, physical, cost to transactions that is a result of the computation work (ie: energy, eg joules... kWh... ftlbs... etc. as well as machine time) that must be invested. This is an engineering problem -- meaning that a better-engineered system would accomplish the same level of secured functionality at lower real costs. The real financials here aren't mapped out clearly enough in terms of computational complexity but it seems clear that the rhetoric around "transaction fees" is trending toward favoring large scale computing, which would subvert one of the main virtues.
The idiots who want transaction fees don't get it: The whole point of a peer-to-peer system is to eliminate middle man rent-seeking. There is, however, a reasonable service that some might confuse with a "transaction fee" and that is transaction insurance. Transaction insurance is just a scaled down form of title insurance everyone is familiar with who has ever purchased a house. The transaction insurer is simply someone who underwrites the risk for one of the parties that a transaction will go bad. There is no need for the transaction to go through the transaction insurer, nor is there always a need for transaction insurance. Get rid of the bozos who are blithering about transaction fees NOW.
It is vastly preferable to have a field of employment completely destroyed by foreign competition than it is to make endemic the principle of groupism against which the founding stock Americans have relatively poor evolutionary learning.
The solution isn't to limit immigration so much as it is to kick these companies (meaning their executives, boards and major stockholders) out of the US so they can go live in the shit they're importing to the US.
And don't let them back in when they come begging.
Yes, I realize that means most of the Fortune 500 gets kicked out of the US.
The Genesis of Postscript (1981)
By Jim Bowery
Version 20010406
Copyright 2001
The author grants the right to copy, without modification.
The Challenge
From 2001 through 2007 I offered, with no takers, $500 to the first person who could document the existence of a Xerox PARC communication concerning post-fix notation for page description languages prior to my visit to that facility in November 1981 in my capacity as Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corporation of America, the videotex joint venture between AT&T and Knight-Ridder News. Communiques regarding "JaM" were disqualified unless they specifically use the term "page description language", "typesetting language" or some equivalent phrase, and are appropriately dated.
The History
What was the true genesis of the Postscript?
Here’s a perspective out of left field:
It started with the first scientific pocket calculator ever produced -- the Hewlett-Packard 35 -- and its reverse polish "postfix" notation.
I saw an HP-35 advertised in Scientific American during my senior year in high school, in 1972, and thought:
"I want one."
That's why I worked all summer with "Shorty" the ex-convict, driving garbage trucks with 18 gears I was never properly trained to use and drinking beers so as to Lorenz-contract the days that were punctuated with hot steaming maggots down my neck as bemused debs reclined in their back yards nurturing their future basal cell carcinomas. When I started at the University of Iowa, I forked over my saved up $495 to Hewlett-Packard and instead of a slide-rule on my belt, I had this neat little black pouch that could do it all while flashing tiny red light-emitting-diode numbers -- reverse polish operation. I found only one other person on campus who had one -- a chemistry professor.
Well, OK, I lied.
What really happened was that while I was working as a garbage man to earn enough money for my HP-35, many mornings at 6AM they would tell me they didn't need me that day, which is when I would head over to Drake University and wait for my brother to get out of class at noon. That was almost 6 hours away, and I needed some way to pass the time. After poking around a bit on campus, I found this little old 2 story house that had a "Mathematics Department" sign. Inside, off to the left, was a long room. In that room was a desk-top Hewlett-Packard calculator with a flat-bed pen plotter hooked to it. It had more buttons than you could shake a stick at and this little magnetic card you could insert to record the buttons you were pressing, which included comparison and conditional branch buttons. You could program it to not only do calculations, but to move the pen around on the plotter bed that held the paper down with static. It was really cool. I could finally use a lot of that worthless junk about polynomials and stuff I had learned in high school and draw lots of neat op-art patterns with a pseudo-3D look to them.
That desk calculator (I don't recall the model number), of course, also used reverse polish notation -- postfix -- to drive its plotter.
By the time I got my HP-35 that fall, postfix operations were second nature to me. When the HP-35 fell in price by a factor of two later that year, it taught me my first lesson of consumerism in the early stages of Moore's Shockwave, b
The problem with virtually any battery system that is not based on using air as an oxidizer is the potential of explosion. The higher the energy density, the greater the explosion if discharged in an uncontrolled fashion. Indeed, TFA ends with:
I've just recently encountered an interesting phenomenon when talking to some guys involved with the DoE about LFTR. The resistance to LFTR appears, to me, to be a vestigial cult-worship of Admiral Rickover. Its still alive and well in the halls of the Federal bureaucracy, its damage has spread far beyond the Navy and there appears little hope of removing its hold on the hearts and minds of the Federal bureaucracies. The origin of this cult in the Navy is reflected in the Wikipedia article on Rickover where it mentions the cult and the greatly exaggerated rumors of its death during the Reagan Administration:
The so-called "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" is a vague laundry list of selectively enforced pubescent girl wishes.
If you want truth and freedom then you must support secession as the primary human right so that disagreements over what constitutes "human rights" can be settled by mutually consenting occupation of territories.
How much heat energy, in Joules, was generated during the demo?
How much electrical energy, in Joules, was consumed during the demo?
Why is it those two numbers appear in none of the news reports?
Since the primary function of government is protection the citizenry's primary asset -- their territory -- it seems to me that $8 billion out of $4000 billion isn't too much for the citizenry to demand in return for their taxes.
Assange should obviously be executed for treason since it was his responsibility to protect US territory from invasion and not only did he fail to do so, he prevented the US government, State governments, County governments and even private border ranchers from doing so!
That not only is gross malfeasance, it is the most heinous kind of treason imaginable!
Crucify Him!
The article doesn't cite any documents describing its methodology.
It is very likely worthless.
Teaching the Basic programming language as an introduction to programming is a step in the right direction but you really have to understand the point of the education system:
Produce a stream of young adults who are effectively brain damaged and in hock up to their eyeballs.
Now, I will freely admit that Basic accomplishes the brain damage goal of pedagogy, but let us not forget our obligation to saddle the zombies with debt that cannot be discharged by bankruptcy. Unless you charge thousands of dollars to turn young people into brain damaged zombies, how can you honestly call it "education"?
I just can't believe the digerati over at Wired magazine would be slaves to fashion cliques like those that bailed out Goldman Sachs and decided it was in the US national interest to Invade the World, Invite the World and be In Hock to the World.
I'm shocked... SHOCKED! I tell you!!!
Yeah I agree that the Apollo program might not have failed if only the 1965 Act had been a few decades sooner. But we got over that xenophobia and, with your help, overcame that failure born of inbreeding and went on to colonize the solar system with a booming economy!
But sacrifices must be made...
...they need you.
Given the conflict of interest in the report evidenced by:
It's amazing they didn't report a billion-fold increase in algorithms resulting from government funded R&D.