You get to look at really sick people, and you get to watch people with guns hoping they've got enough ammo to keep the zombies away before they need to break out the chainsaws, baseball bats, and golf clubs. Sounds like a win!
I even hit the "get more comments" button after I posted, and it still only showed my posting. While great minds often do think alike, obvious jokes like this one go to the fastest fingers...
There are companies that really should resist being taken over at low-ball prices. I'm very skeptical about any assertion that Novell is one of them; I'd suspect this is a seriously high-ball price, and yes I mean that in several different senses:-)
That doesn't mean it's easy to work at a company that's been bought for too high a price - I used to work for Company N, which was bought by Company A for (IMHO) about 3x what they should have paid, and 2.5x what Company A could have gotten if they'd started out with a low enough offer and ignore Company N's CEO ranting about hostile takeovers. It was a great deal for the stockholders of Company N, but for the company itself, paying 3x what the company was worth meant that the buyers were expecting to get 3x as much revenue from owning Company N as was realistically available. So they went into radical cost-cutting mode, sold off a couple of divisions, tried a bunch of new things using the skills they imagined that Company N would have if a few people from Company A came over to "help", and when that failed, laid off a bunch of people (including me, but I found another job at Company A about when my severance pay ran out, so basically I got a vacation that was long enough I should have goofed off much more seriously than I did.) Eventually they stopped doing most of the things they were bad at (including some of their main product lines that were being eclipsed by the technology boom), went back to doing the things they actually were good at, and got spun off for a stock price that was about what they were actually worth at the beginning of this whole charade.
There wasn't really much argument about whether or not Watts immediately and obediently complied with the order - he says he asked them what they were doing and why. It took the jury about four days to decide that the law said that meant he was technically guilty of not complying. The juror who commented on Watts's blog also said that the cops had acted badly in the way they attacked Watts, but that this case was against Watts and not an assault or brutality case against the cops so they had no official judgement about that.
One of the jurors in the case commented on Watt's blog that he wasn't convicted of assault, just refusal to comply with the officer's orders. It wasn't clear whether he was also convicted of obstruction, I think not. The juror also commented that he thought the officers acted criminally in their treatment of Watts, but that wasn't part of this court case so they came to no official conclusions.
The important thing isn't that it's precisely 1609 mph - it's that it's a big round number that's unarguably Really Fraking Fast. Also, just being more than Mach 1 is impressive and probably unreliably dangerous as well. And at that speed there's no point in having a Really Loud Stereo, because you're the only car on your block making sonic booms.
It was pretty much a scam from the beginning, intended to bolster the image of the politicians who sell the Anti-Terrorism and Anti-Immigrant lines to the public. They're no longer very relevant, now that we've got the Economic Crisis and Health Care around to keep the politicians and public busy, and it's a lot less disruptive to let something like this die out now that it's no longer interesting than to kill off the whole logistics chain they'd have needed for a construction project building an actual physical wall. Nobody really cares that it's gone, and none of the front-line politicians need to take responsibility for killing it, and we can push it all back under the rug where it belongs.
It wasn't really about making the people who fear immigration feel *better* - it was making the politicians who feed on them feel *popular*. That's not just elected politicians; it's also the right-wing radio jocks and anti-immigrant lobbyists and the folks who thought Israel's apartheid wall was really cool and wanted one of their own.
Building a "virtual wall" looked really cool and high-tech, so the politicians thought it would be a good sell, and it would get a lot less flack from environmentalists and local politicians in border towns (not that the promoters care about the environment unless it looks good, but they care about being forced to do paperwork and have years of delay for their boondoggle.)
One of my coworkers uses Skype to call me when he's not in the office. I can recognize his calls, because they're from "0000123456":-) He doesn't *have* an inbound Skype number, as far as I know. There are other VOIP systems that use addresses like username@domain to set up user-to-user connections, and don't use numbers at all.
And what's the "real" number for a PBX? Is it the number for the trunk group, or the individual line on the trunk, or the Direct In-Dial (DID) number for the operator, or the phone itself? If you're telling me "the phone itself", old PBXs often didn't have DID capability, and new ones only do if you buy the numbers from a telco. If I call my car dealer, I get the main phone, and the operator connects me to Parts or pages Fred from the sales lot to pick up a phone; if one of them calls me, the call's coming from the dealer's number, not some separate number for Parts. And often companies will have FX numbers, that let you call a local number in your exchange, even though their actual office is somewhere else, or toll-free numbers that go to inbound call centers which may not have outbound-calling service. And telemarketers often have PBXs that only need to do outbound calls, and the trunk has a billing number that's not related to an actual phone.
The 911 problem is related to this as well - it makes a number of assumptions about the relationship of physical locations, people, phones, phone numbers, buildings, and fire departments, which may have made sense back when everybody bought analog wired phones from their telco, and has a signaling system that's based on those assumptions, and a funding model that's based on those assumptions and 911 network implementations, and tries to require that newer systems like VOIP, PBXs, etc. implement that signaling interface even though it doesn't reflect the underlying network, and doesn't have any money to upgrade its own signaling to reflect current reality.
Maybe I wasn't as clear as I should have been - the "322 Tbps" is the big shiny marketing number for the largest configuration you can build with it, but it's far far bigger than any practical configuration for carriers, and doesn't really tell you much about the useful differences between the CRS-1 and CRS-3 generations of routers. It looks like the CRS-3 is a good bit denser and more energy-efficient than the CRS-1, but you can't tell that from the 322 Tbps, which is really more about how many racks of stuff you could potentially tie together under one central management system. (The marketing people will have lots of shiny numbers about those sorts of things too, but they're just not the one that makes the headline.) The price of optics may have been coming down, not necessarily at Moore's Law speeds because the physics and market pressures are different, but that's also not going to show up in the 322 Tbps shiny marketing number either.
The CRS-1 gave carriers a couple of things - 40Gbps OC-768 trunks and a lot of scalability, in a Cisco box. The CRS-3 can support 100Gbps trunks, so it's the next faster trunk speed on the market. But whatever trunk speed you're running at, the fastest one you've got is generally not the place for doing inspection or anything except just moving packets around the world quickly; that's typically a job for edge systems. The one case where doing inspection at high speeds can potentially be useful is interconnections between big carriers.
Also, at least the last few years, the constraint stopped being floor space; electricity and cooling capacity have become really big issues. So improving the performance per watt (I think they said *3 in some article) may be as big a deal as physical density.
I did mention earth-observation satellites and communications satellites, but solar power satellites are potentially another useful technology for actually doing useful things on Earth.
Not really; if they know the fiber runs along the tracks, the signs don't really give them additional information, and if they don't know that, they probably don't realize how important communications can be. If the signs tell them anything useful, it's that the sign location is more likely to have construction crews around than some hard-to-reach location.
There have been a number of proposals for doing telecom cables along rail lines across Asia, providing shorter alternatives to the undersea cables. They often get into trouble with either financing or right-of-way across South-West Asia, but if they're building a new railroad, it's easy to add conduits full of fiber at the same time. Earthquakes, landslides, and train wrecks do create risks, but shorter distance really helps latency, and it's usually a lot easier to patch fiber around a section of railroad track than undersea.
On the other hand, you do need signs saying "Hey, Bubba, Don't Dig Here" in many more languages....
Yes, as a hobbyist I'm not going to be designing or building any miniaturized earpieces, but for a professional manufacturing job, it's not that hard - compare to Bluetooth headsets which retail for $29, or fancy ones for $100. The audio design is a bit fancier, but it's still a small DSP and software, and you don't need a radio so the power requirements may be even lower.
You'll have to go to an eye doctor to get measured, but you can get good eyeglasses cheap on the internet. Mine happen to be prescription reading glasses, but the prices aren't significantly different for nearsightedness glasses unless you need very heavy correction. Depending on frames, you can easily pay under $10; this time I splurged and spent $20 for fancy titanium ones.
Over the past century, space travel's usefulness has been limited to war, boosting political egos, threatening war, communications satellites, Earth-observation satellites, and a bit of astronomy. Yes, there have been commercial spinoffs, like developing Velcro andTang(tm) powdered orange-colored juice, but the engineers and scientists who could have built us something useful, like the franistan, where busy doing militarized space programs instead.
You can't colonize space unless you can build a sustainable closed ecosystem that runs on sunlight, and we're not even close. We've built a few toy terrariums that failed, like the Biosphere, but our one significant experiment in terraforming has also been failing, making this planet look less and less like the Terra that we started with. We're not going to be able to build space colonies big enough to house a significant fraction of humanity until we've learned how to keep an already-mostly-working planet working.
Furthermore, real space colonization is an immense project - it's not just throwing a few canned monkeys into orbit that for a few billion dollars of investment per seat, it's a project about as big and economically transformative as, say, Agriculture or Cities, and unless the Great Nanotech Singularity saves our asses without burying them in Grey Goo, we're going to have to keep the planet working well for probably as long a timescale as we've spent on those experiments. It's a Really Really big project, not one of those quick and dirty experiments like the Industrial Revolution or the Nation-State. Fortunately, 1.5 million years is a respectably long time - it's 100 times as long as we've had Civilization, 30-40 times as long as we've been our current species, more along the scale of how long we've had modern Acheulean stone tools or maybe fire.
Sure, there are some people who are going to just download one track of "Another Brick In The Wall" from whatever's replaced Napster this decade, but it's not really going to hurt Pink Floyd - some of those people will go get the whole album, and like the creativity and mood, and maybe recommend it to their friends or buy lots more albums. The real commercial question is what happens to sales of "The Wizard of Oz".
There are bands that play covers of Pink Floyd - the Austin Lounge Lizards did Brain Damage as a fast bouncy bluegrass piece (funny, but boy is it twisted and wrong in all sorts of ways:-) Poor Man's Whiskey did a whole album of "Dark Side Of the Moonshine" - mostly as straight a cover as you can do using bluegrass, with a few exceptions like replacing "Money" with "Whiskey".
Are you suggesting that the Gay Agenda was what wiped out the dinosaurs?
I suspect the real events that affected their reproduction involved Mass Quantities of Death, and the difficulty in getting Zombie Dinosaurs to reproduce.
No, not that baroque Common LISP stuff, one of the original LISP dialects, that pretty much just has parentheses and a few simple statement types, or maybe Scheme if you want one that's slightly newer. It's straightforward, simple, clean, beautiful, and powerful enough that you could write the software for, say, an entire universe using it.
Alternatively, if you want a simple language with a short manual designed for kids to use, which is good at drawing lines and circles, there's LOGO; you might not want to write an entire universe in it, but if you want to draw a picture of a planet, it'll do the job (though it'll do a better job of drawing the turtle part and the disk than it will with the elephants in between.) Or if you want one that's not for kids, but lets you pack heavy-duty programs into toasters and is a predecessor of Postscript, there's FORTH.
As far as vast libraries go, you'll see the same thing with FORTRAN; most programming problems are either trying to build utilities for general-programming problems, or trying to solve real-world problems that are more about the problem space than the program space, so it's not surprising that any language that has a clean subroutine interface and a large user community will have lots of libraries written for it. You couldn't do that at all in BASIC, because GOSUBs didn't have local variables, and line numbers weren't locally scoped either, but almost anything other than BASIC or maybe RPG has libraries.
Of course, in practice, I never started using LISP for real applications; I usually use C/C++ or shell/sed/awk. But I've had at least one friend who used XLISP to build prototypes of graphical programs, and found that they were usually not only faster to write than the languages used for the production versions, but also faster to execute:-) And there are a lot of old Smalltalk users around and a few young ones who view their environment the same way.
If you have modern control structures, and subroutines with actual local variables, and don't have line numbers, you're not really running BASIC.
If your control structures are limited to "IF something THEN line# ELSE line#", GOTOs, and GOSUB, then you're using the real thing, or something pretty much like it. You can write non-spaghetti code in even the earliest BASICs, but you had to be disciplined enough to always do it, and without local variables, GOSUBs didn't let you write large programs with multiple authors unless you were very very well behaved about agreeing who got to use what range of name space, especially since most names looked like "LETTER DIGIT DIGIT".
(I learned programming first with several flavors of BASIC in the early 70s (plus books about F0RTRAN and COBOL but no chance to use them, then learned Academically Much Better programming with PL/C (the Cornell PL/I compiler, similar to IBM Checkout), then algorithms with Knuth Spaghetti Code and Knuth MIX, then IBM and PDP assemblers, then a summer job with RPGII, then Simscript, then C, shell, lex/yacc, and many other languages.)
Knuth's books on programming were fundamental then, and still are - understanding what machines are doing, and how to think about that, and understanding how mathematics relates to algorithms and programs, and how to think about them, are fundamental to good Computer Science and good programming, and probably always will be. But Knuth's actual programs that he used to teach them were inexcusably unreadable spaghetti code, and MIX was just appalling, even given the goal of being machine-vendor-neutral. It's especially frustrating, because when I first used Knuth's books it was at least in the context of a class with a professor walking us through the critical parts, while now when I want to use them as reference books I've got to wade through that sludge myself. The syntax and structure made it difficult to learn the semantics which are what was really valuable about Knuth's work, and they make them difficult to use as a reference book.
Algol 60 came out around 1960, and widely used for programmers who wanted to share ideas with each other (e.g. CACM, the Communications of the ACM journal, was mostly in Algol 60, though sometimes it used Fortran) and Knuth was writing almost a decade later. He could have done 95-99% of his non-assembler programs using Algol and Algol-like pseudocode, and it would have been much easier to read because you could tell when he was doing a FOR loop as opposed to looking for the incrementation and backward-pointing GOTOs, and when he did want to do things that were tricky it would have been easy to figure out which were the tricky parts. (Lisp was also available around 1961, and for some things Knuth taught it would have been better, but for many things a procedural language is really enough closer to the metal than a functional language that it wasn't always appropriate.)
And MIX? Ugly not-very-machine-like assembler, with decimal numbers and odd-sized words? It's a hopeless thing to use to teach algorithms, except for algorithms that are really about bashing the bits when you need to do that. And yes, the world wasn't as clean or pretty back in the 1960s, and there really were Burroughs machines that were almost that ugly, but still, it wasn't the best choice then and looks even worse now. If I were writing something back then I hope I'd have used something cleaner, though the PDP-8 and IBM 360 didn't come out til the mid-60s, and byte sizes didn't really standardize for a while, even though people pretty much knew that binary sizes made things much cleaner.
Slashdot Mirror
You get to look at really sick people, and you get to watch people with guns hoping they've got enough ammo to keep the zombies away before they need to break out the chainsaws, baseball bats, and golf clubs. Sounds like a win!
Haven't read that particular work by Penrose, but I do have to second the recommendation for the Cartoon Guide to Physics.
I even hit the "get more comments" button after I posted, and it still only showed my posting. While great minds often do think alike, obvious jokes like this one go to the fastest fingers...
Too bad Don Ho's gone...
There are companies that really should resist being taken over at low-ball prices. I'm very skeptical about any assertion that Novell is one of them; I'd suspect this is a seriously high-ball price, and yes I mean that in several different senses :-)
That doesn't mean it's easy to work at a company that's been bought for too high a price - I used to work for Company N, which was bought by Company A for (IMHO) about 3x what they should have paid, and 2.5x what Company A could have gotten if they'd started out with a low enough offer and ignore Company N's CEO ranting about hostile takeovers. It was a great deal for the stockholders of Company N, but for the company itself, paying 3x what the company was worth meant that the buyers were expecting to get 3x as much revenue from owning Company N as was realistically available. So they went into radical cost-cutting mode, sold off a couple of divisions, tried a bunch of new things using the skills they imagined that Company N would have if a few people from Company A came over to "help", and when that failed, laid off a bunch of people (including me, but I found another job at Company A about when my severance pay ran out, so basically I got a vacation that was long enough I should have goofed off much more seriously than I did.) Eventually they stopped doing most of the things they were bad at (including some of their main product lines that were being eclipsed by the technology boom), went back to doing the things they actually were good at, and got spun off for a stock price that was about what they were actually worth at the beginning of this whole charade.
There wasn't really much argument about whether or not Watts immediately and obediently complied with the order - he says he asked them what they were doing and why. It took the jury about four days to decide that the law said that meant he was technically guilty of not complying. The juror who commented on Watts's blog also said that the cops had acted badly in the way they attacked Watts, but that this case was against Watts and not an assault or brutality case against the cops so they had no official judgement about that.
One of the jurors in the case commented on Watt's blog that he wasn't convicted of assault, just refusal to comply with the officer's orders. It wasn't clear whether he was also convicted of obstruction, I think not. The juror also commented that he thought the officers acted criminally in their treatment of Watts, but that wasn't part of this court case so they came to no official conclusions.
The important thing isn't that it's precisely 1609 mph - it's that it's a big round number that's unarguably Really Fraking Fast. Also, just being more than Mach 1 is impressive and probably unreliably dangerous as well. And at that speed there's no point in having a Really Loud Stereo, because you're the only car on your block making sonic booms.
It was pretty much a scam from the beginning, intended to bolster the image of the politicians who sell the Anti-Terrorism and Anti-Immigrant lines to the public. They're no longer very relevant, now that we've got the Economic Crisis and Health Care around to keep the politicians and public busy, and it's a lot less disruptive to let something like this die out now that it's no longer interesting than to kill off the whole logistics chain they'd have needed for a construction project building an actual physical wall. Nobody really cares that it's gone, and none of the front-line politicians need to take responsibility for killing it, and we can push it all back under the rug where it belongs.
It wasn't really about making the people who fear immigration feel *better* - it was making the politicians who feed on them feel *popular*. That's not just elected politicians; it's also the right-wing radio jocks and anti-immigrant lobbyists and the folks who thought Israel's apartheid wall was really cool and wanted one of their own.
Building a "virtual wall" looked really cool and high-tech, so the politicians thought it would be a good sell, and it would get a lot less flack from environmentalists and local politicians in border towns (not that the promoters care about the environment unless it looks good, but they care about being forced to do paperwork and have years of delay for their boondoggle.)
One of my coworkers uses Skype to call me when he's not in the office. I can recognize his calls, because they're from "0000123456" :-) He doesn't *have* an inbound Skype number, as far as I know. There are other VOIP systems that use addresses like username@domain to set up user-to-user connections, and don't use numbers at all.
And what's the "real" number for a PBX? Is it the number for the trunk group, or the individual line on the trunk, or the Direct In-Dial (DID) number for the operator, or the phone itself? If you're telling me "the phone itself", old PBXs often didn't have DID capability, and new ones only do if you buy the numbers from a telco. If I call my car dealer, I get the main phone, and the operator connects me to Parts or pages Fred from the sales lot to pick up a phone; if one of them calls me, the call's coming from the dealer's number, not some separate number for Parts. And often companies will have FX numbers, that let you call a local number in your exchange, even though their actual office is somewhere else, or toll-free numbers that go to inbound call centers which may not have outbound-calling service. And telemarketers often have PBXs that only need to do outbound calls, and the trunk has a billing number that's not related to an actual phone.
The 911 problem is related to this as well - it makes a number of assumptions about the relationship of physical locations, people, phones, phone numbers, buildings, and fire departments, which may have made sense back when everybody bought analog wired phones from their telco, and has a signaling system that's based on those assumptions, and a funding model that's based on those assumptions and 911 network implementations, and tries to require that newer systems like VOIP, PBXs, etc. implement that signaling interface even though it doesn't reflect the underlying network, and doesn't have any money to upgrade its own signaling to reflect current reality.
Maybe I wasn't as clear as I should have been - the "322 Tbps" is the big shiny marketing number for the largest configuration you can build with it, but it's far far bigger than any practical configuration for carriers, and doesn't really tell you much about the useful differences between the CRS-1 and CRS-3 generations of routers. It looks like the CRS-3 is a good bit denser and more energy-efficient than the CRS-1, but you can't tell that from the 322 Tbps, which is really more about how many racks of stuff you could potentially tie together under one central management system. (The marketing people will have lots of shiny numbers about those sorts of things too, but they're just not the one that makes the headline.) The price of optics may have been coming down, not necessarily at Moore's Law speeds because the physics and market pressures are different, but that's also not going to show up in the 322 Tbps shiny marketing number either.
The CRS-1 gave carriers a couple of things - 40Gbps OC-768 trunks and a lot of scalability, in a Cisco box. The CRS-3 can support 100Gbps trunks, so it's the next faster trunk speed on the market. But whatever trunk speed you're running at, the fastest one you've got is generally not the place for doing inspection or anything except just moving packets around the world quickly; that's typically a job for edge systems. The one case where doing inspection at high speeds can potentially be useful is interconnections between big carriers.
Also, at least the last few years, the constraint stopped being floor space; electricity and cooling capacity have become really big issues. So improving the performance per watt (I think they said *3 in some article) may be as big a deal as physical density.
I did mention earth-observation satellites and communications satellites, but solar power satellites are potentially another useful technology for actually doing useful things on Earth.
Not really; if they know the fiber runs along the tracks, the signs don't really give them additional information, and if they don't know that, they probably don't realize how important communications can be. If the signs tell them anything useful, it's that the sign location is more likely to have construction crews around than some hard-to-reach location.
There have been a number of proposals for doing telecom cables along rail lines across Asia, providing shorter alternatives to the undersea cables. They often get into trouble with either financing or right-of-way across South-West Asia, but if they're building a new railroad, it's easy to add conduits full of fiber at the same time. Earthquakes, landslides, and train wrecks do create risks, but shorter distance really helps latency, and it's usually a lot easier to patch fiber around a section of railroad track than undersea.
On the other hand, you do need signs saying "Hey, Bubba, Don't Dig Here" in many more languages....
Yes, as a hobbyist I'm not going to be designing or building any miniaturized earpieces, but for a professional manufacturing job, it's not that hard - compare to Bluetooth headsets which retail for $29, or fancy ones for $100. The audio design is a bit fancier, but it's still a small DSP and software, and you don't need a radio so the power requirements may be even lower.
You'll have to go to an eye doctor to get measured, but you can get good eyeglasses cheap on the internet. Mine happen to be prescription reading glasses, but the prices aren't significantly different for nearsightedness glasses unless you need very heavy correction. Depending on frames, you can easily pay under $10; this time I splurged and spent $20 for fancy titanium ones.
Over the past century, space travel's usefulness has been limited to war, boosting political egos, threatening war, communications satellites, Earth-observation satellites, and a bit of astronomy. Yes, there have been commercial spinoffs, like developing Velcro andTang(tm) powdered orange-colored juice, but the engineers and scientists who could have built us something useful, like the franistan, where busy doing militarized space programs instead.
You can't colonize space unless you can build a sustainable closed ecosystem that runs on sunlight, and we're not even close. We've built a few toy terrariums that failed, like the Biosphere, but our one significant experiment in terraforming has also been failing, making this planet look less and less like the Terra that we started with. We're not going to be able to build space colonies big enough to house a significant fraction of humanity until we've learned how to keep an already-mostly-working planet working.
Furthermore, real space colonization is an immense project - it's not just throwing a few canned monkeys into orbit that for a few billion dollars of investment per seat, it's a project about as big and economically transformative as, say, Agriculture or Cities, and unless the Great Nanotech Singularity saves our asses without burying them in Grey Goo, we're going to have to keep the planet working well for probably as long a timescale as we've spent on those experiments. It's a Really Really big project, not one of those quick and dirty experiments like the Industrial Revolution or the Nation-State. Fortunately, 1.5 million years is a respectably long time - it's 100 times as long as we've had Civilization, 30-40 times as long as we've been our current species, more along the scale of how long we've had modern Acheulean stone tools or maybe fire.
Look, if you're going to have to get rid of Thread, you've got to use the right tools for the job...
Sure, there are some people who are going to just download one track of "Another Brick In The Wall" from whatever's replaced Napster this decade, but it's not really going to hurt Pink Floyd - some of those people will go get the whole album, and like the creativity and mood, and maybe recommend it to their friends or buy lots more albums. The real commercial question is what happens to sales of "The Wizard of Oz".
There are bands that play covers of Pink Floyd - the Austin Lounge Lizards did Brain Damage as a fast bouncy bluegrass piece (funny, but boy is it twisted and wrong in all sorts of ways :-)
Poor Man's Whiskey did a whole album of "Dark Side Of the Moonshine" - mostly as straight a cover as you can do using bluegrass, with a few exceptions like replacing "Money" with "Whiskey".
In Soviet Russia, the Overlords joke welcomes you....
Are you suggesting that the Gay Agenda was what wiped out the dinosaurs?
I suspect the real events that affected their reproduction involved Mass Quantities of Death, and the difficulty in getting Zombie Dinosaurs to reproduce.
No, not that baroque Common LISP stuff, one of the original LISP dialects, that pretty much just has parentheses and a few simple statement types, or maybe Scheme if you want one that's slightly newer. It's straightforward, simple, clean, beautiful, and powerful enough that you could write the software for, say, an entire universe using it.
Alternatively, if you want a simple language with a short manual designed for kids to use, which is good at drawing lines and circles, there's LOGO; you might not want to write an entire universe in it, but if you want to draw a picture of a planet, it'll do the job (though it'll do a better job of drawing the turtle part and the disk than it will with the elephants in between.) Or if you want one that's not for kids, but lets you pack heavy-duty programs into toasters and is a predecessor of Postscript, there's FORTH.
As far as vast libraries go, you'll see the same thing with FORTRAN; most programming problems are either trying to build utilities for general-programming problems, or trying to solve real-world problems that are more about the problem space than the program space, so it's not surprising that any language that has a clean subroutine interface and a large user community will have lots of libraries written for it. You couldn't do that at all in BASIC, because GOSUBs didn't have local variables, and line numbers weren't locally scoped either, but almost anything other than BASIC or maybe RPG has libraries.
Of course, in practice, I never started using LISP for real applications; I usually use C/C++ or shell/sed/awk. But I've had at least one friend who used XLISP to build prototypes of graphical programs, and found that they were usually not only faster to write than the languages used for the production versions, but also faster to execute :-) And there are a lot of old Smalltalk users around and a few young ones who view their environment the same way.
If you have modern control structures, and subroutines with actual local variables, and don't have line numbers, you're not really running BASIC.
If your control structures are limited to "IF something THEN line# ELSE line#", GOTOs, and GOSUB, then you're using the real thing, or something pretty much like it. You can write non-spaghetti code in even the earliest BASICs, but you had to be disciplined enough to always do it, and without local variables, GOSUBs didn't let you write large programs with multiple authors unless you were very very well behaved about agreeing who got to use what range of name space, especially since most names looked like "LETTER DIGIT DIGIT".
(I learned programming first with several flavors of BASIC in the early 70s (plus books about F0RTRAN and COBOL but no chance to use them, then learned Academically Much Better programming with PL/C (the Cornell PL/I compiler, similar to IBM Checkout), then algorithms with Knuth Spaghetti Code and Knuth MIX, then IBM and PDP assemblers, then a summer job with RPGII, then Simscript, then C, shell, lex/yacc, and many other languages.)
Knuth's books on programming were fundamental then, and still are - understanding what machines are doing, and how to think about that, and understanding how mathematics relates to algorithms and programs, and how to think about them, are fundamental to good Computer Science and good programming, and probably always will be. But Knuth's actual programs that he used to teach them were inexcusably unreadable spaghetti code, and MIX was just appalling, even given the goal of being machine-vendor-neutral. It's especially frustrating, because when I first used Knuth's books it was at least in the context of a class with a professor walking us through the critical parts, while now when I want to use them as reference books I've got to wade through that sludge myself. The syntax and structure made it difficult to learn the semantics which are what was really valuable about Knuth's work, and they make them difficult to use as a reference book.
Algol 60 came out around 1960, and widely used for programmers who wanted to share ideas with each other (e.g. CACM, the Communications of the ACM journal, was mostly in Algol 60, though sometimes it used Fortran) and Knuth was writing almost a decade later. He could have done 95-99% of his non-assembler programs using Algol and Algol-like pseudocode, and it would have been much easier to read because you could tell when he was doing a FOR loop as opposed to looking for the incrementation and backward-pointing GOTOs, and when he did want to do things that were tricky it would have been easy to figure out which were the tricky parts. (Lisp was also available around 1961, and for some things Knuth taught it would have been better, but for many things a procedural language is really enough closer to the metal than a functional language that it wasn't always appropriate.)
And MIX? Ugly not-very-machine-like assembler, with decimal numbers and odd-sized words? It's a hopeless thing to use to teach algorithms, except for algorithms that are really about bashing the bits when you need to do that. And yes, the world wasn't as clean or pretty back in the 1960s, and there really were Burroughs machines that were almost that ugly, but still, it wasn't the best choice then and looks even worse now. If I were writing something back then I hope I'd have used something cleaner, though the PDP-8 and IBM 360 didn't come out til the mid-60s, and byte sizes didn't really standardize for a while, even though people pretty much knew that binary sizes made things much cleaner.