I would have said 15 languages. Yes, there are differences, but not enough to justify so many different languages. Everybody has to make up their own freakin' language because that's where the entertainment value is, and that's what they thought their computer science degree entitled them to do. If we had a few less languages and a few more well-designed libraries and/or extensions that worked consistently, then maybe we could make more progress with static analysis and optimization tools. And maybe we could convince more people to leave low-level C behind for once.
I did my MSCS project in Snobol. I haven't seen a Snobol compiler since leaving academia, nor have any of my embedded systems needed it . . . until now, when it would be handy since we're serving web pages instead of just serving MODBUS records.
Religious wars about processors have pretty much died down since ARM took the best of most and put them together, with enough horsepower that clarity can count for more than absolute efficiency. I would hope that religious wars about languages could go the same way. (except Dijkstra was right about COBOL)
There are criminals. There is police action. (In New York City yesterday, a fugitive from California resisted arrest and shot at police; the fugitive was killed. It happens.) Israel isn't grabbing the land; they grabbed it multiple wars ago (when they were attacked), and handed it over in exchange for a deal.
Because any time it looks like some calm, one or the other side starts screwing with the other.
Which side has broken every cease-fire? Which side seems to lack the discipline to follow their own leadership's policy? - which makes it hard to make a contract, by the way, because every time over the years you make a contract with "leadership", another splinter group pops up and says "They don't speak for us!"
But you're right in one sense - this DOES go back thousands of years. One side has matured at least a little bit, and is at least *trying* to avoid doing what they did to the Midianites. The other side seems to still be in the dark ages.
The Hamas rockets have killed few because Israel has spent its time and money and human capital in development, including the education of its people, the construction of schools and businesses that can develop and construct active defenses, and the construction of air raid shelters as passive defenses. The Palestinians have spent their time and money on their charter's stated primary goal, destruction. (Well, they *have* constructed something - not hotels for their miles of Mediterranean coastline, or housing and safety for their people, but tunnels to sneak into their neighbor's territory while their neighbor was letting them alone.) While refugees in Israel become immigrants, generations of Palestinian leadership have manipulated their people as homeless refugees for three or four generations, with the additional disadvantage that their so-called bretheren will not take them in.
I completely agree that many Palestinians who do not want trouble, who would just like to live and work and feed their families, have suffered for the sins of the activist leadership. OTOH if that activist leadership hadn't started shooting rockets, nobody would be shelling them back; and if the rockets weren't positioned amongst living quarters and marketplaces and UN schools, then nobody would be shelling back at those positions. For the average Palestinian, it must be like the average suburban American realizing that a house down the block has been taken over by a drug gang and become a crack house, and there's nothing one can do as an individual to fight them because they'll kill you or your family, and the eventual police shoot-outs with the drug gang send bullets flying through neighbors' windows. Only a thousand times worse. They are at the mercy of the people THEY ELECTED, who in turn pushed out an earlier generation that did not serve them any better.
They wouldn't even have to disarm, just stop shooting. And maybe somehow establish some discipline over their own people. Every cease-fire so far has been broken by someone on the Hamas side, possibly thinking that any "leader" who makes even as much of a deal as a cease-fire is a collaborator or quisling.
... a blanket law that is equivalent to saying you may not publish anything the government deems sensitive unless they give you a way to know what information that is
I take it that you've never dealt with people in real government security agencies. The very existence of such a law would be deemed sensitive.
I am shocked, SHOCKED, that Slashdot would appear to support the paternalistic rights-management censorship attitude that "keeping track of dangerous material is generally a good idea."
It's always funny to read the knee-jerk anti-technology attitude on slashdot
You must have some different filtering options than I have, because I see more of a knee-jerk PRO-technology attitude. Newer and shinier === better! The thing is, all of us who work in technology know that things can break. Even a Tesla can run over a nail and get a flat tire. What then?
OTOH the "Fast Track" programs have become more popular (or at least less disliked) because they demonstrably *work*. Close down a line for a long weekend and the job gets done, rather than "overnights only" taking multiple weeks. Some tasks just can't be done halfway.
Isaac Asimov, the Machines in "The Evitable Conflict", 1950. James Blish, the City Fathers of "Cities in Flight", 1957. Christopher Anvil, the Symbiotic Computers of the Interstellar Patrol, various stories, 1960s.
The AI usually takes over. For our own good, of course, in the most loving and paternal way.
"Public Interest" . . . I once sat on a jury on a libel case, in which a financier was suing the Wall Street Journal for having said defamatory things about him. The judge instructed us very clearly that truth is not an absolute defense; that is, even if every single thing in the article was provably true, it would still count as libel if it was (for example) just rehashing old information to defame the financier as he tried to start up a new operation.
If you submit a resume, people check your references, but apparently keeping people from finding out an *executive's* history just requires bigger lawyers.
"We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow." - Viscount Palmerston, England, 1848.
Not invented by Kissinger, though his quote is more widely referenced nowadays.
Strange, I thought it was a highly polished way of saying "If we do it fast enough that we can call it a "fait accompli", nobody can stop us. Like blitzkreig."
You make valid points. But: Ask normal people - not engineers, not in technology fields - how sudden the cellphone revolution seems to them. How fast did we go from rare and very expensive mobile radio-telephones to "everyone in the room is holding more computing and communications power than their grandparents saw in a lifetime"? I was working in telecom and it was *still* amazing how fast it happened. To people not in the field, it seemed overnight. And right now children are growing up without any concept of what a "phone cord" means, let alone a "dial".
If someone had been kickstarting a cellphone in 1980, would most people have believed in it or thought it to be a fraud? . . . Oh, wait, there was no general-access Internet in 1980, and I was accessing BBSes on a CPM Z80 because there were no IBM PCs either, so no Kickstarter yet. People still didn't believe in personal computing yet!
Slashdot Mirror
I would have said 15 languages. Yes, there are differences, but not enough to justify so many different languages. Everybody has to make up their own freakin' language because that's where the entertainment value is, and that's what they thought their computer science degree entitled them to do. If we had a few less languages and a few more well-designed libraries and/or extensions that worked consistently, then maybe we could make more progress with static analysis and optimization tools. And maybe we could convince more people to leave low-level C behind for once.
I did my MSCS project in Snobol. I haven't seen a Snobol compiler since leaving academia, nor have any of my embedded systems needed it . . . until now, when it would be handy since we're serving web pages instead of just serving MODBUS records.
Religious wars about processors have pretty much died down since ARM took the best of most and put them together, with enough horsepower that clarity can count for more than absolute efficiency. I would hope that religious wars about languages could go the same way. (except Dijkstra was right about COBOL)
There are criminals. There is police action. (In New York City yesterday, a fugitive from California resisted arrest and shot at police; the fugitive was killed. It happens.) Israel isn't grabbing the land; they grabbed it multiple wars ago (when they were attacked), and handed it over in exchange for a deal.
The Israelis would be much better at this if they wanted to be. Read their family history. Numbers 31, perhaps.
Because any time it looks like some calm, one or the other side starts screwing with the other.
Which side has broken every cease-fire? Which side seems to lack the discipline to follow their own leadership's policy? - which makes it hard to make a contract, by the way, because every time over the years you make a contract with "leadership", another splinter group pops up and says "They don't speak for us!"
But you're right in one sense - this DOES go back thousands of years. One side has matured at least a little bit, and is at least *trying* to avoid doing what they did to the Midianites. The other side seems to still be in the dark ages.
You're blaming all ... for a choice made by less than half of the voters, which is hardly fair.
Hey, it's worked in a lot of American elections. Badly, but it's worked . . . .
The Hamas rockets have killed few because Israel has spent its time and money and human capital in development, including the education of its people, the construction of schools and businesses that can develop and construct active defenses, and the construction of air raid shelters as passive defenses. The Palestinians have spent their time and money on their charter's stated primary goal, destruction. (Well, they *have* constructed something - not hotels for their miles of Mediterranean coastline, or housing and safety for their people, but tunnels to sneak into their neighbor's territory while their neighbor was letting them alone.) While refugees in Israel become immigrants, generations of Palestinian leadership have manipulated their people as homeless refugees for three or four generations, with the additional disadvantage that their so-called bretheren will not take them in.
I completely agree that many Palestinians who do not want trouble, who would just like to live and work and feed their families, have suffered for the sins of the activist leadership. OTOH if that activist leadership hadn't started shooting rockets, nobody would be shelling them back; and if the rockets weren't positioned amongst living quarters and marketplaces and UN schools, then nobody would be shelling back at those positions. For the average Palestinian, it must be like the average suburban American realizing that a house down the block has been taken over by a drug gang and become a crack house, and there's nothing one can do as an individual to fight them because they'll kill you or your family, and the eventual police shoot-outs with the drug gang send bullets flying through neighbors' windows. Only a thousand times worse. They are at the mercy of the people THEY ELECTED, who in turn pushed out an earlier generation that did not serve them any better.
They wouldn't even have to disarm, just stop shooting. And maybe somehow establish some discipline over their own people. Every cease-fire so far has been broken by someone on the Hamas side, possibly thinking that any "leader" who makes even as much of a deal as a cease-fire is a collaborator or quisling.
... a blanket law that is equivalent to saying you may not publish anything the government deems sensitive unless they give you a way to know what information that is
I take it that you've never dealt with people in real government security agencies. The very existence of such a law would be deemed sensitive.
Mod parent up, from personal experience. ;-(
. . . . then only outlaws will have (repeat item here).
Kill switch == ambush. Not to mention yet another single point of failure for the already overcomplicated system that used to be just a car.
I am shocked, SHOCKED, that Slashdot would appear to support the paternalistic rights-management censorship attitude that "keeping track of dangerous material is generally a good idea."
It's always funny to read the knee-jerk anti-technology attitude on slashdot
You must have some different filtering options than I have, because I see more of a knee-jerk PRO-technology attitude. Newer and shinier === better! The thing is, all of us who work in technology know that things can break. Even a Tesla can run over a nail and get a flat tire. What then?
Not unlike philosophy. When philosophy answers one of its nagging questions, suddenly it becomes math or logic or science.
OTOH the "Fast Track" programs have become more popular (or at least less disliked) because they demonstrably *work*. Close down a line for a long weekend and the job gets done, rather than "overnights only" taking multiple weeks. Some tasks just can't be done halfway.
The union crews work a given number of hours. Assigning them what to work on each day would be perfectly normal.
Isaac Asimov, the Machines in "The Evitable Conflict", 1950. James Blish, the City Fathers of "Cities in Flight", 1957. Christopher Anvil, the Symbiotic Computers of the Interstellar Patrol, various stories, 1960s.
The AI usually takes over. For our own good, of course, in the most loving and paternal way.
"Public Interest" . . . I once sat on a jury on a libel case, in which a financier was suing the Wall Street Journal for having said defamatory things about him. The judge instructed us very clearly that truth is not an absolute defense; that is, even if every single thing in the article was provably true, it would still count as libel if it was (for example) just rehashing old information to defame the financier as he tried to start up a new operation.
If you submit a resume, people check your references, but apparently keeping people from finding out an *executive's* history just requires bigger lawyers.
... because people saying that something is "ossifying" and jumping to the next fad is EXACTLY what makes things "buzzy".
Honeypot? False flag? Maybe the NSA is ignoring the blimp because they know it's perfectly safe, because THEY put it there?
"We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow." - Viscount Palmerston, England, 1848.
Not invented by Kissinger, though his quote is more widely referenced nowadays.
Strange, I thought it was a highly polished way of saying "If we do it fast enough that we can call it a "fait accompli", nobody can stop us. Like blitzkreig."
Or maybe that's getting the reasoning backwards. If you're thinking of killing yourself, then you go buy a gun to make it easier.
Maybe: Guns don't cause suicide; intent to commit suicide causes (or influences) buying a gun which makes it easier.
You make valid points. But: Ask normal people - not engineers, not in technology fields - how sudden the cellphone revolution seems to them. How fast did we go from rare and very expensive mobile radio-telephones to "everyone in the room is holding more computing and communications power than their grandparents saw in a lifetime"? I was working in telecom and it was *still* amazing how fast it happened. To people not in the field, it seemed overnight. And right now children are growing up without any concept of what a "phone cord" means, let alone a "dial".
If someone had been kickstarting a cellphone in 1980, would most people have believed in it or thought it to be a fraud? . . . Oh, wait, there was no general-access Internet in 1980, and I was accessing BBSes on a CPM Z80 because there were no IBM PCs either, so no Kickstarter yet. People still didn't believe in personal computing yet!