Neural networks are mostly hype. Neural networks in general are Turing complete, so in principle you can get them to do pretty much anything. However, there's not much evidence that starting with a random network and "training" it to respond to statistical patterns in the input is an effective way of creating a network which is capable of complex behaviour. So far, the main successes of NNs have been in pattern matching, but even in this area they don't usually perform better than statistical analysis software.
NNs also require enormous amounts of memory and processor time to simulate, so they're a very inefficient way of writing an AI. This is obviously very significant in games which need high frame rates.
Moreover, classical AI techniques can be much more flexible. If you want several different AIs each using a different strategy, you have to individually train an NN for each one, a very laborious process. With classical AI code, you may just be able to change a few parameters to get the differences in behavior you want.
It's a big mistake to think that any AI which isn't NN based must be a simple-minded if-then-else affair. A combination of simple logical and arithmetic statements is just as capabale of creating complex behaviour as a combination of neurons, if not more so.
Look, the point is that the extremes in a distribution don't mean much. The fact that the fastest known Dvorak typist is faster than the fastest known Qwerty typist is very very slim evidence for Dvorak being better. To make a reliable comparison you need to compare the entire distribution of typing speeds for both keyboards. Data points outside two standard deviations are exceptional and it doesn't usually mean much to compare the exceptional cases in two different distributions, because there are usually additional factors which made them exceptional in the first place, and which are probably not be relavent to the question you're trying to answer.
The Fosbery Flop analogy you make just isn't analagous, because in that case you'd be comparing a large number of people who don't use FF to a large number of people whoe do, not simply taking the most extreme case from each sample.
There are simply certain grammatical patterns that I don't understand well, if at all. It has nothing to do with snobbery; I simply can't understand, most likely because I haven't been exposed to it all that much.
Sure.
When using media of international exchange, I would certainly try to make myself comprehensible. I spend quite a lot of time trying to do this in my research papers and communication. Writing in unambigious, grammatically correct English (or something approaching it) is the first step towards sharing ideas with a wide audience.
Here's the problem. Standard English, though it's a useful standard, is not more "correct" or "grammatical" than any other variety. I've no problem with people learning standard English, but what bugs me is the pomposity some people display towards those who don't. Speaking a non-standard dialect might sometimes make you hard to understand (though not very often in my experience, especially in writing) but it doesn't make you stupid or uneducated or incorrect or a sign of slipping standards, etc. etc. Standard English should be treated as a standard in the same sense that certain sizes of washer are standard. It's an arbitrary convention that can sometimes aid collaboration, but it's not "correct", just standard.
People limit their communication and opportunities by the language they use.
They also limit their communication opportunities by the language they choose to listen to.
There's a difference between accent and dialect, first of all, and I don't think you understand them.
Yes I do. I'm doing a degree in linguistics FWIW.
Dialect cannot be considered proper english due to the fact that it isn't widespread(usu. local) and confusion is likely to exist due to conflicting meanings.
It is of course non-standard (insofar as there is a definition of standard English), but there's no reason to use terms like "improper" or "incorrect". Other dialects are not in any way inferior.
Also note that dialect is first a regional thing, secondly a class thing. It isn't an all-encompassing concept; not everything that doesn't fall into standard english is a dialect, there's also the concepts of "slang" and "bad".
These are political issues. Your distinction between a dialect and "bad" language has no linguistic basis. It's just snobbery.
Why do I get the feeling that you're speaking of people who refuse to understand "bad" english and take it as what it means rather than what you think it means (the phrase "don't need no" comes to mind), rather than what the OP was saying.
Yes, people who think that double negatives are in some way illogical are very irritating.
BTW, I found the OP's message a bit cumbersome. I think I grokked it after reading it several times.
Appart from his spelling and punctuation, he was using pretty much standard English.
My point is that there are of course good reasons to speak standard English sometimes, but this doesn't mean it's OK to sneer at people who speak other varieties for being stupid or uneducated or whatever. This kind of predjudice shouldn't be more acceptable than any other kind. The standard response of, "well that's just how the world works, if you don't speak standard English you must be an idiot" just serves to uphold a system of linguistic snobbery which is completely unjustifiable. We could teach schoolchildren standard English without making them feel inferior for speaking their own variety.
Yes, we can record the errors made by the uneducated public (and even those done by, uhm, me). The question is: should we do that or not?
It's a moot point, because linguists doing corpus research aren't interested in tracking "errors". They prefer studying language structure/change to berating people for speaking in their native dialect.
I was pretty taken aback when a council of linguist in Poland suddenly declared some widely-chastised and not even very popular errors to be valid usage.
Why? The social stigma attatched to such "errors" generally has no linguistic basis. It's just predjudice against certain unprivaledged accents/dialects. It's no more justifiable than racism or any other kind of predjudice.
In other words: some people find careless speech repulsive. Thus, we should do whatever we can to promote correct usage as opposed to legalising incorrect uses.
Surely you can see that the argument "some people find X repulsive; therefore we should promote not(X)" is pretty flawed.
Is that right? Using words is "becoming more than just the normal"? I've been using words for years now; I'm glad to hear that's becoming the standard.
He said "using words, moslty slang and rap song lyrics", you dolt. You can make anyone look stupid by eliding half of what they say and refusing to countenance anything but a strict literal interpretation of what's left.
Your post is a perfect example of why people should learn to write in something approaching standard English. Your meaning is barely intelligible, and you sound like an idiot.
His meaning is perfectly intelligible, but some language snobs (very few of whom are actually linguists and know anything much about language) pretend not to be able to understand certain accent/dialects in order to feel superior.
Any link to this video?
Personally (despite being gay) I don't believe in arresting people just for being assholes, although I have very little sympathy for the kooks involved.
In what way is the Beeb providing a public service (as it should according to its original mandate) by offering Net based information that a private agency, be it Sky, Reuters or some blogger could just as easily offer?
Any public serivce could theoretically be provided by a private contractor instead, you idiot. This in itself is not an argument against providing a particular public service.
All this equipment may be very pretty to look at, but where is the value for money and why should I be made to subsidize the costs incurred in providing BBC information to those users who are accessing it from outside of the UK?
It would probably cost more money to restrict access to within the UK in some cases. I presume the general reason for the BBC providing services to outside the UK is good will. You know, the same reason we give aid to foreign countries, or hold receptions for foreign dignataries, etc.
So Wikipedia should be a government operation? Without the ultimate free market (is that rightwing enough for you?) that the internet is, Wikipedia would never have happened.
Firstly, the OP didn't say that Wikipedia should be run by a government. Secondly, you haven't provided any evidence that it wouldn't exist if there wasn't a free market.
No, proper MDI, with window manager support, is no more work for an application writer than any other method.
The point is that the method you use to switch between windows within the main frame of the application has to be coded into the application, not the WM. OK, the application may be using library code to do this, but that just means unnecessary inconsistency between applications using different toolkits.
So what you're saying is, all I have to do is manage my windows manually? Thanks, but I want my WINDOW MANAGER to manage my windows for me!
Your WM can't mind-read. Sometimes you might want to open an app in its own VD, sometimes you might not. If you're going to be using the application for more than 3 seconds, the effort of manually switching to a different VD is insignificant.
I agree MDI can be nicer in some situations, but I don't see that it has any overall advantage. It's also completely useless if you have multiple monitors, since you can't use the extra space effectively. WMs do need to be improved. For example tabs (as in tabbed browsing) should probably be a WM feature rather than an app feature really.
There's no need to "create" a new virtual desktop: you should have a few open by default. It's not much of a chore to switch to one VD before you open a particular application, and there's really no need to remove the VD after the app exits.
MDI just involves each application writing its own window manager, which is pretty dumb if you already have a decent window manager.
In fact, just give me MDI. Which is essentially what I just described - with the added advantage that I can un-maximise my virtual desktops and view more than one at a time, if I want to!
Easy enough to do without an MDI. You just have to move a window from one VD to another.
> "An adjective describes a noun- I am well-"
Actually, here, well is an adverb. It modifies the verb "to be," or I am.
No. "well" is usually an adverb, but not in this case. You can see that it must be an adjective here by looking at what other values of X are possible for "I am X":
I am quick
* I am quickly
I am clever
* I am cleverly
Going back to the question of "well" vs. "good" in the OP's post, "well" was the correct choice for Standard English, although of course "good" is very commonly used as an adverb in most dialects of American English.
Re:Good Economists and Bad Economists
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Emergence
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· Score: 1
I'm surprised about the statement regarding economists supporting centralized planning of economies. Good economists understand that the free market is an emergent system, and planned centralized economies have a long history of failure.
You completely misunderstood. It's possible to believe in a free market, while at the same time believing that the market is in some way "controlled" by a small number of gross factors. For example, monetarists, who generally advocate compleetely free markets, think that the money supply is the biggest controlling factor in an economy.
The identification of a controlling factor does not amount to a claim that some particular group of people should have the right to mess with it as they see fit. Emergence theory, however, might claim that such controlling factors simply do not exist.
Free/controlled emergent/non-emergent are basically orthogonal issues. You can believe that economies are controlled by a small number of factors and still believe in a free market. Conversely, you can believe that economies are a great deal more complex than that and still believe in economic planning.
Btw, free markets also have a long history of failure. In fact, economies in general have a long history of failure;)
Re:Good Economists and Bad Economists
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Emergence
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· Score: 1
Yeah, but other (very large) parts of government spending have a profound effect on the economy (particularly military spending). Think how far behind in computer technology we'd be if there hadn't been a massive government investment in it, for example.
Yeah, because obviously the bus driver was provoked by a little monologue on the desirability of outsourcing high tech jobs, displaying the grandparent's "superior attitude".
Of course, you wouldn't have a superior attitude, would you?
I'm not Indian, but I do outperform an entire group of Indian programmers on a 10-to-1 basis, yes 1 European, out performing a group of about 28 Indian programmers by a factor of 10 each and every week, day in and day out. Your not that good, ditch the superior arrogant attitude, and people might not be so hostile towards you:)
*Sigh* Whatever happened to irony? As far as I can see, people like you take any attitude on the part of foreigners that's more assertive than complete subservience to be "superior". I put this down to low self esteem, or perhaps straightforward stupidity and dickheadedness.
While it may not be "pure functional" it's functional enough that you have to be able to do functional programming to use it.
No you don't. What makes you think this? You could write a virtually line for line translation of a C program if you wanted to. Lisp has loops, assignment and block structure, so it supports traditional imperative programming perfectly well.
I will agree that implementing sublanguages in lisp is easier than in most languages - but you're still forced to program basically functionally to implement it.
Again, no you are not.
Lisp is not useable by people who are unable to do functional programming.
Says who?
I've seen people happily do object oriented stuff in pure C - much of GTK is done this way, and it starts to look like a sublanguage when you get far enough into it - but I wouldn't say this makes C multi-paradigm.
Common Lisp was the first ANSI-standardized OO language. It really is multi-paradigm.
For example, sorting with functional languages is very very slow, since lists are copied over and over, and for each sorted element, a new list is created. For example, the quicksort algorithm takes each element of the input list, then splits the rest of the list to less than the element and greater than the element lists, sorts these lists and then combines the three parts (the less than part, the element and the greater than part) into the result. It may be only a few lines of code, it may be much clearer than the imperative way, but it is much too slower for practical use.
Yawn, you just use an algorithm which works efficiently in a functional language, e.g. insertion sort.
He states that Java (and by implication other C style languages) are over complex syntactically and cognitively. Sorry , thats wrong. Sure , for the mickey mouse "hello world" example he has a point but Java isn't designed for 1 line hello world programs , its syntax (we'll ignore the horrid JVMs) is designed for large scale complex systems and for large scale complex systems you need complex data structure abilities and flow of control.
Java doesn't provide for complex data structures or complex control flow. It has only one kind of complex data type (sum types, i.e. classes) and, limited polymorhpism aside, only the standard block-structured control flow constructs (loops, branches, etc.) which have been around in pretty much the same form since the 1960s. OK, it has exceptions, but they're pretty limited compared to what some other languages offer.
For complex control flow, you need higher order functions (anonymous classes are a poor subsitute), an exception system which supports restarts, and various other abstraction features. For example, macros in Lisp or laziness in Haskell (which allows you to build pretty much any control structure using higher order functions).
Rigid structure does not help to manage complexity. Complexity is often the result of trying to force a program into the structure dictated by rigid languages like Java and C. Abstraction is the key to reducing complexity, and Java/C do not support it very well.
Perl can't compete with Haskell/Lisp/ML as far as abstraction is concerned, but it comes pretty close and it has a big community and lots of library support. It's probably a better candidate for writing a complex system than C or Java, overall.
If you add to the list of features the ability to compile to C source and the support for multiple inheritance then you get Eiffel. The lack of strongly typed extensive base library seems to a problem with Eiffel too.
O'Caml is a more advanced language than Eiffel in most respects. It has multiple inheritance too, BTW. Features O'Caml has that Eiffel doesn't:
* Type inference
* Higher order functions
* More powerful type definition (e.g. tagged unions).
* Syntax/semantics generally much more suited to functional programming, which is pretty much impossible in Eiffel.
* More concise.
OK, Eiffel has design-by-contract, but that only adds additional safety, not power.
the choices were quite descrete:
A stonewalling international community, a currupt sanctions regime, an oppressed people, a barrier to peace in Israel, one more corrupt ME regime.
vs
America & her allies, the only willing actors.
First choice is probably preferable, but these are not the only two options.
After a decade, why the hell would sanctions/inspections work?
I've never been in favour of the sanctions. As for the inspections: they worked. Iraq had no WMD.
If you showed that there weren't WMD, but that Saddam supported Palestinian bombers, continued to try to top Stalin, and tolerated al Queda opperatives, would the invasion have been a bad idea?
Interesting hypothetical, but let's stay in the real world. There are more links between America and al-Qaeda than Iraq and Al-Qaeda. If you wanted to invade the country which "tolerated" the greatest number of Al-Qaeda operatives (Saudi Arabia?), or the country with the greatest Stalinist ambitions (North Korea?), Iraq would not be top of your list. In any case, the fact that a country is under an oppresive government gives the US no right to depose that government. Only the people of a country have the right to decide how they are ruled.
All I can say about the material issues is that you drastically warp the situation to act like the US stealing from the Iraqis. Actually, it is a lot closer to charity, in losing hundreds of our troops to kill people more than willing to kill and oppress Iraqis, and spending billions on reconstruction.
Lol, "spending billions on reconstruction". That money is mostly going to US corporations -- remember, the Bush administration is mostly focused the interests of its corporate backers, so as far as it's concerned the reconstruction costs are profits. The rest of what you say here is just offensive and risible. Apparently the US has to kill lots of Iraqis to prevent them being killed by other Iraqis first...or something.
If you can't see any benefits on the side, from out current efforts, you're pathetic.
Good argument;)
The humanitarian improvement alone should be adequate justification for those against the war.
Oh god, not the "things were worse under Saddam" argument. Yes (assuming Iraq doesn't descend into a civil war), things were worse under Saddam. However, the US cannot abuse the human rights of Iraqis, steal their country, violate international law and generally throw its weight around just because it's a little bit less bad than some vile dictator. Especially when it supported that dictator through his worst attrocities.
You're so busy tracking oil contracts, you ignore all the real reasons to go into Iraq.
I don't think that oil is the whole story by any means. So far as I can see, no-one really knows why the US invaded Iraq. There's such a plethora of interested parties who might benefit from it that it's hard to work out who's pulling the strings and why they think they're doing it. Even the official Bush propaganda is completely contradictory on this point (WMD, upholding the authority of the UN, bringing freedom and democracy, etc.)
Besides, if the Iraqi people get 1% after we've taken everything (which we're not), that is more than they would have gotten under Saddam.
Is it OK to take 99% of a person's possesions because you defended them from thief? As for how much the US (and other foreign countries) will take, it remains to be seen, but given that virtually all of Iraq is being put on sale, it's going to be an enormous portion.
You defending a fucking dictator's regime here, for Christ's sake...
Lol, what a silly thing to say. I dislike both Saddam and the invasion.
I wasn't arguing that they ever SHOULD leave...I was arguing that the US wasn't holding them there against their will, much the opposite.
But it did hold them there against their will for a week before the military went in, as you admitted yourself.
Having said that, if someone said they were going to bomb in/around my house in a week, you can be damned sure I would be relocating before that time.
Erm, unless you were prevented from leaving the city a week before the city was stormed. Presumably, those civilians who had the option to leave earlier and chose to stay had good reasons, and it's really not fair to prevent those people from leaving during the fighting -- the US military has no right to expect mass relocation of civilian populations. As I said, trapping civilians in a war zone because you think some of them might be enemy troops is collective punishment.
I don't think anyone ever claimed it WAS the justification.
Yes, like I said in my post.
We gave people advance warning and asked women/children to leave so that they could get out of harm's way before we attacked the city.
Oh well that's OK then, as long as you're only leaving innocent male civilians in the line of fire.
It was a nice touch, IMO, and a humanitarian effort.
They refused them exodus in the days/weeks before the city invasion...not in the year and half since we've been there.
And why exactly should they have left before then? They live there, FFS. It's extraordinarily arrogant to expect people to leave their homes just because it's convenient for the US military. Intentionally trapping civilians in a war zone just because you suspect that some of them are enemy combatants is collective punishment.
Overlooking that, I'm content with saying it was only the women and children that were being held hostage to prove my point.
I don't see that the fact some people are being held hostage is a justification for invading an entire city, creating a water/food/health supply crisis and killing a fair number of civilians. Of course, that isn't the official justification (the need to "stabilise" Iraq before the elections), which is even worse if anything.
The US refused several very reasonable offers from the insurgents under which they agreed to let the elections go ahead! Which just goes to show what nonsense the official justification for going into the city is.
Slashdot Mirror
Neural networks are mostly hype. Neural networks in general are Turing complete, so in principle you can get them to do pretty much anything. However, there's not much evidence that starting with a random network and "training" it to respond to statistical patterns in the input is an effective way of creating a network which is capable of complex behaviour. So far, the main successes of NNs have been in pattern matching, but even in this area they don't usually perform better than statistical analysis software.
NNs also require enormous amounts of memory and processor time to simulate, so they're a very inefficient way of writing an AI. This is obviously very significant in games which need high frame rates.
Moreover, classical AI techniques can be much more flexible. If you want several different AIs each using a different strategy, you have to individually train an NN for each one, a very laborious process. With classical AI code, you may just be able to change a few parameters to get the differences in behavior you want.
It's a big mistake to think that any AI which isn't NN based must be a simple-minded if-then-else affair. A combination of simple logical and arithmetic statements is just as capabale of creating complex behaviour as a combination of neurons, if not more so.
Look, the point is that the extremes in a distribution don't mean much. The fact that the fastest known Dvorak typist is faster than the fastest known Qwerty typist is very very slim evidence for Dvorak being better. To make a reliable comparison you need to compare the entire distribution of typing speeds for both keyboards. Data points outside two standard deviations are exceptional and it doesn't usually mean much to compare the exceptional cases in two different distributions, because there are usually additional factors which made them exceptional in the first place, and which are probably not be relavent to the question you're trying to answer. The Fosbery Flop analogy you make just isn't analagous, because in that case you'd be comparing a large number of people who don't use FF to a large number of people whoe do, not simply taking the most extreme case from each sample.
There are simply certain grammatical patterns that I don't understand well, if at all. It has nothing to do with snobbery; I simply can't understand, most likely because I haven't been exposed to it all that much.
Sure.
When using media of international exchange, I would certainly try to make myself comprehensible. I spend quite a lot of time trying to do this in my research papers and communication. Writing in unambigious, grammatically correct English (or something approaching it) is the first step towards sharing ideas with a wide audience.
Here's the problem. Standard English, though it's a useful standard, is not more "correct" or "grammatical" than any other variety. I've no problem with people learning standard English, but what bugs me is the pomposity some people display towards those who don't. Speaking a non-standard dialect might sometimes make you hard to understand (though not very often in my experience, especially in writing) but it doesn't make you stupid or uneducated or incorrect or a sign of slipping standards, etc. etc. Standard English should be treated as a standard in the same sense that certain sizes of washer are standard. It's an arbitrary convention that can sometimes aid collaboration, but it's not "correct", just standard.
People limit their communication and opportunities by the language they use.
They also limit their communication opportunities by the language they choose to listen to.
There's a difference between accent and dialect, first of all, and I don't think you understand them.
Yes I do. I'm doing a degree in linguistics FWIW.
Dialect cannot be considered proper english due to the fact that it isn't widespread(usu. local) and confusion is likely to exist due to conflicting meanings.
It is of course non-standard (insofar as there is a definition of standard English), but there's no reason to use terms like "improper" or "incorrect". Other dialects are not in any way inferior.
Also note that dialect is first a regional thing, secondly a class thing. It isn't an all-encompassing concept; not everything that doesn't fall into standard english is a dialect, there's also the concepts of "slang" and "bad".
These are political issues. Your distinction between a dialect and "bad" language has no linguistic basis. It's just snobbery.
Why do I get the feeling that you're speaking of people who refuse to understand "bad" english and take it as what it means rather than what you think it means (the phrase "don't need no" comes to mind), rather than what the OP was saying.
Yes, people who think that double negatives are in some way illogical are very irritating.
BTW, I found the OP's message a bit cumbersome. I think I grokked it after reading it several times.
Appart from his spelling and punctuation, he was using pretty much standard English.
My point is that there are of course good reasons to speak standard English sometimes, but this doesn't mean it's OK to sneer at people who speak other varieties for being stupid or uneducated or whatever. This kind of predjudice shouldn't be more acceptable than any other kind. The standard response of, "well that's just how the world works, if you don't speak standard English you must be an idiot" just serves to uphold a system of linguistic snobbery which is completely unjustifiable. We could teach schoolchildren standard English without making them feel inferior for speaking their own variety.
Yes, we can record the errors made by the uneducated public (and even those done by, uhm, me). The question is: should we do that or not?
It's a moot point, because linguists doing corpus research aren't interested in tracking "errors". They prefer studying language structure/change to berating people for speaking in their native dialect.
I was pretty taken aback when a council of linguist in Poland suddenly declared some widely-chastised and not even very popular errors to be valid usage.
Why? The social stigma attatched to such "errors" generally has no linguistic basis. It's just predjudice against certain unprivaledged accents/dialects. It's no more justifiable than racism or any other kind of predjudice.
In other words: some people find careless speech repulsive. Thus, we should do whatever we can to promote correct usage as opposed to legalising incorrect uses.
Surely you can see that the argument "some people find X repulsive; therefore we should promote not(X)" is pretty flawed.
Is that right? Using words is "becoming more than just the normal"? I've been using words for years now; I'm glad to hear that's becoming the standard.
He said "using words, moslty slang and rap song lyrics", you dolt. You can make anyone look stupid by eliding half of what they say and refusing to countenance anything but a strict literal interpretation of what's left.
Your post is a perfect example of why people should learn to write in something approaching standard English. Your meaning is barely intelligible, and you sound like an idiot.
His meaning is perfectly intelligible, but some language snobs (very few of whom are actually linguists and know anything much about language) pretend not to be able to understand certain accent/dialects in order to feel superior.
Any link to this video? Personally (despite being gay) I don't believe in arresting people just for being assholes, although I have very little sympathy for the kooks involved.
In what way is the Beeb providing a public service (as it should according to its original mandate) by offering Net based information that a private agency, be it Sky, Reuters or some blogger could just as easily offer?
Any public serivce could theoretically be provided by a private contractor instead, you idiot. This in itself is not an argument against providing a particular public service.
All this equipment may be very pretty to look at, but where is the value for money and why should I be made to subsidize the costs incurred in providing BBC information to those users who are accessing it from outside of the UK?
It would probably cost more money to restrict access to within the UK in some cases. I presume the general reason for the BBC providing services to outside the UK is good will. You know, the same reason we give aid to foreign countries, or hold receptions for foreign dignataries, etc.
So Wikipedia should be a government operation? Without the ultimate free market (is that rightwing enough for you?) that the internet is, Wikipedia would never have happened.
Firstly, the OP didn't say that Wikipedia should be run by a government. Secondly, you haven't provided any evidence that it wouldn't exist if there wasn't a free market.
No, proper MDI, with window manager support, is no more work for an application writer than any other method.
The point is that the method you use to switch between windows within the main frame of the application has to be coded into the application, not the WM. OK, the application may be using library code to do this, but that just means unnecessary inconsistency between applications using different toolkits.
So what you're saying is, all I have to do is manage my windows manually? Thanks, but I want my WINDOW MANAGER to manage my windows for me!
Your WM can't mind-read. Sometimes you might want to open an app in its own VD, sometimes you might not. If you're going to be using the application for more than 3 seconds, the effort of manually switching to a different VD is insignificant.
I agree MDI can be nicer in some situations, but I don't see that it has any overall advantage. It's also completely useless if you have multiple monitors, since you can't use the extra space effectively. WMs do need to be improved. For example tabs (as in tabbed browsing) should probably be a WM feature rather than an app feature really.
There's no need to "create" a new virtual desktop: you should have a few open by default. It's not much of a chore to switch to one VD before you open a particular application, and there's really no need to remove the VD after the app exits.
MDI just involves each application writing its own window manager, which is pretty dumb if you already have a decent window manager.
In fact, just give me MDI. Which is essentially what I just described - with the added advantage that I can un-maximise my virtual desktops and view more than one at a time, if I want to!
Easy enough to do without an MDI. You just have to move a window from one VD to another.
Ah, I misread the OP. I didn't see that "at". Yes, it should have been "good".
Actually, here, well is an adverb. It modifies the verb "to be," or I am.
No. "well" is usually an adverb, but not in this case. You can see that it must be an adjective here by looking at what other values of X are possible for "I am X":
I am quick
* I am quickly
I am clever
* I am cleverly
Going back to the question of "well" vs. "good" in the OP's post, "well" was the correct choice for Standard English, although of course "good" is very commonly used as an adverb in most dialects of American English.
I'm surprised about the statement regarding economists supporting centralized planning of economies. Good economists understand that the free market is an emergent system, and planned centralized economies have a long history of failure.
You completely misunderstood. It's possible to believe in a free market, while at the same time believing that the market is in some way "controlled" by a small number of gross factors. For example, monetarists, who generally advocate compleetely free markets, think that the money supply is the biggest controlling factor in an economy.
The identification of a controlling factor does not amount to a claim that some particular group of people should have the right to mess with it as they see fit. Emergence theory, however, might claim that such controlling factors simply do not exist.
Free/controlled emergent/non-emergent are basically orthogonal issues. You can believe that economies are controlled by a small number of factors and still believe in a free market. Conversely, you can believe that economies are a great deal more complex than that and still believe in economic planning.
Btw, free markets also have a long history of failure. In fact, economies in general have a long history of failure ;)
Yeah, but other (very large) parts of government spending have a profound effect on the economy (particularly military spending). Think how far behind in computer technology we'd be if there hadn't been a massive government investment in it, for example.
Yeah, because obviously the bus driver was provoked by a little monologue on the desirability of outsourcing high tech jobs, displaying the grandparent's "superior attitude".
Of course, you wouldn't have a superior attitude, would you?
I'm not Indian, but I do outperform an entire group of Indian programmers on a 10-to-1 basis, yes 1 European, out performing a group of about 28 Indian programmers by a factor of 10 each and every week, day in and day out. Your not that good, ditch the superior arrogant attitude, and people might not be so hostile towards you :)
*Sigh* Whatever happened to irony? As far as I can see, people like you take any attitude on the part of foreigners that's more assertive than complete subservience to be "superior". I put this down to low self esteem, or perhaps straightforward stupidity and dickheadedness.
Oh and btw, your spelling really sucks.
No you don't. What makes you think this? You could write a virtually line for line translation of a C program if you wanted to. Lisp has loops, assignment and block structure, so it supports traditional imperative programming perfectly well.
I will agree that implementing sublanguages in lisp is easier than in most languages - but you're still forced to program basically functionally to implement it.
Again, no you are not.
Lisp is not useable by people who are unable to do functional programming.
Says who?
I've seen people happily do object oriented stuff in pure C - much of GTK is done this way, and it starts to look like a sublanguage when you get far enough into it - but I wouldn't say this makes C multi-paradigm.
Common Lisp was the first ANSI-standardized OO language. It really is multi-paradigm.
For example, sorting with functional languages is very very slow, since lists are copied over and over, and for each sorted element, a new list is created. For example, the quicksort algorithm takes each element of the input list, then splits the rest of the list to less than the element and greater than the element lists, sorts these lists and then combines the three parts (the less than part, the element and the greater than part) into the result. It may be only a few lines of code, it may be much clearer than the imperative way, but it is much too slower for practical use.
Yawn, you just use an algorithm which works efficiently in a functional language, e.g. insertion sort.
He states that Java (and by implication other C style languages) are over complex syntactically and cognitively. Sorry , thats wrong. Sure , for the mickey mouse "hello world" example he has a point but Java isn't designed for 1 line hello world programs , its syntax (we'll ignore the horrid JVMs) is designed for large scale complex systems and for large scale complex systems you need complex data structure abilities and flow of control.
Java doesn't provide for complex data structures or complex control flow. It has only one kind of complex data type (sum types, i.e. classes) and, limited polymorhpism aside, only the standard block-structured control flow constructs (loops, branches, etc.) which have been around in pretty much the same form since the 1960s. OK, it has exceptions, but they're pretty limited compared to what some other languages offer.
For complex control flow, you need higher order functions (anonymous classes are a poor subsitute), an exception system which supports restarts, and various other abstraction features. For example, macros in Lisp or laziness in Haskell (which allows you to build pretty much any control structure using higher order functions).
Rigid structure does not help to manage complexity. Complexity is often the result of trying to force a program into the structure dictated by rigid languages like Java and C. Abstraction is the key to reducing complexity, and Java/C do not support it very well.
Perl can't compete with Haskell/Lisp/ML as far as abstraction is concerned, but it comes pretty close and it has a big community and lots of library support. It's probably a better candidate for writing a complex system than C or Java, overall.
If you add to the list of features the ability to compile to C source and the support for multiple inheritance then you get Eiffel. The lack of strongly typed extensive base library seems to a problem with Eiffel too.
O'Caml is a more advanced language than Eiffel in most respects. It has multiple inheritance too, BTW. Features O'Caml has that Eiffel doesn't:
* Type inference
* Higher order functions
* More powerful type definition (e.g. tagged unions).
* Syntax/semantics generally much more suited to functional programming, which is pretty much impossible in Eiffel.
* More concise.
OK, Eiffel has design-by-contract, but that only adds additional safety, not power.
How easy is it to use Lisp macros to get an OCaml-like syntax? :p
Quite easy, and it's been done. You just use reader macros.
the choices were quite descrete: A stonewalling international community, a currupt sanctions regime, an oppressed people, a barrier to peace in Israel, one more corrupt ME regime. vs America & her allies, the only willing actors.
First choice is probably preferable, but these are not the only two options.
After a decade, why the hell would sanctions/inspections work?
I've never been in favour of the sanctions. As for the inspections: they worked. Iraq had no WMD.
If you showed that there weren't WMD, but that Saddam supported Palestinian bombers, continued to try to top Stalin, and tolerated al Queda opperatives, would the invasion have been a bad idea?
Interesting hypothetical, but let's stay in the real world. There are more links between America and al-Qaeda than Iraq and Al-Qaeda. If you wanted to invade the country which "tolerated" the greatest number of Al-Qaeda operatives (Saudi Arabia?), or the country with the greatest Stalinist ambitions (North Korea?), Iraq would not be top of your list. In any case, the fact that a country is under an oppresive government gives the US no right to depose that government. Only the people of a country have the right to decide how they are ruled.
All I can say about the material issues is that you drastically warp the situation to act like the US stealing from the Iraqis. Actually, it is a lot closer to charity, in losing hundreds of our troops to kill people more than willing to kill and oppress Iraqis, and spending billions on reconstruction.
Lol, "spending billions on reconstruction". That money is mostly going to US corporations -- remember, the Bush administration is mostly focused the interests of its corporate backers, so as far as it's concerned the reconstruction costs are profits. The rest of what you say here is just offensive and risible. Apparently the US has to kill lots of Iraqis to prevent them being killed by other Iraqis first...or something.
If you can't see any benefits on the side, from out current efforts, you're pathetic.
Good argument ;)
The humanitarian improvement alone should be adequate justification for those against the war.
Oh god, not the "things were worse under Saddam" argument. Yes (assuming Iraq doesn't descend into a civil war), things were worse under Saddam. However, the US cannot abuse the human rights of Iraqis, steal their country, violate international law and generally throw its weight around just because it's a little bit less bad than some vile dictator. Especially when it supported that dictator through his worst attrocities.
You're so busy tracking oil contracts, you ignore all the real reasons to go into Iraq.
I don't think that oil is the whole story by any means. So far as I can see, no-one really knows why the US invaded Iraq. There's such a plethora of interested parties who might benefit from it that it's hard to work out who's pulling the strings and why they think they're doing it. Even the official Bush propaganda is completely contradictory on this point (WMD, upholding the authority of the UN, bringing freedom and democracy, etc.)
Besides, if the Iraqi people get 1% after we've taken everything (which we're not), that is more than they would have gotten under Saddam.
Is it OK to take 99% of a person's possesions because you defended them from thief? As for how much the US (and other foreign countries) will take, it remains to be seen, but given that virtually all of Iraq is being put on sale, it's going to be an enormous portion.
You defending a fucking dictator's regime here, for Christ's sake...
Lol, what a silly thing to say. I dislike both Saddam and the invasion.
I wasn't arguing that they ever SHOULD leave...I was arguing that the US wasn't holding them there against their will, much the opposite.
But it did hold them there against their will for a week before the military went in, as you admitted yourself.
Having said that, if someone said they were going to bomb in/around my house in a week, you can be damned sure I would be relocating before that time.
Erm, unless you were prevented from leaving the city a week before the city was stormed. Presumably, those civilians who had the option to leave earlier and chose to stay had good reasons, and it's really not fair to prevent those people from leaving during the fighting -- the US military has no right to expect mass relocation of civilian populations. As I said, trapping civilians in a war zone because you think some of them might be enemy troops is collective punishment.
I don't think anyone ever claimed it WAS the justification.
Yes, like I said in my post.
We gave people advance warning and asked women/children to leave so that they could get out of harm's way before we attacked the city.
Oh well that's OK then, as long as you're only leaving innocent male civilians in the line of fire.
It was a nice touch, IMO, and a humanitarian effort.
A nice propaganda touch, maybe.
They refused them exodus in the days/weeks before the city invasion...not in the year and half since we've been there.
And why exactly should they have left before then? They live there, FFS. It's extraordinarily arrogant to expect people to leave their homes just because it's convenient for the US military. Intentionally trapping civilians in a war zone just because you suspect that some of them are enemy combatants is collective punishment.
Overlooking that, I'm content with saying it was only the women and children that were being held hostage to prove my point.
I don't see that the fact some people are being held hostage is a justification for invading an entire city, creating a water/food/health supply crisis and killing a fair number of civilians. Of course, that isn't the official justification (the need to "stabilise" Iraq before the elections), which is even worse if anything.
The US refused several very reasonable offers from the insurgents under which they agreed to let the elections go ahead! Which just goes to show what nonsense the official justification for going into the city is.