This exact premise has been used in science fiction before, which should be enough to deny it a patent.
There's a concept called "non-enabling prior art".
Sure, science fiction stories have been written describing time travel, cold fusion, AI, teleportation, etc. Go build them - after all, you've got that "prior art". Wait, they don't fully describe everything sufficient to enable someone skilled in the art to build those things? Ah. Then they're "non-enabling" prior art, and are only "prior art" for the few bits they do enable - in other words, the broad concept. You couldn't patent: "A method for time travel comprising (a) traveling through time." because there would be prior art for that, but you could certainly patent a method that went beyond the mere musings of authors.
That's fine for time-travel, which is admittedly hard. But given a futurama episode where characters vote to pick a movie ending, any bunch of idiots with some basic engineering skills could implement it. Or should I say, anyone "skilled in the art" would be able to come up with a way to implement it. Same goes for pretty much any business method patent; they patent nothing more than a concept, so if that concept is in 1984, that's reason enough it shouldn't be patentable. (did I mention, IANAPLOAOKOL?)
You'll notice similar trends in other "Americanized" martial arts diciplins.
Typically "Americanized" systems will have
10 Belts...Black... 5 Ranks of Black
Whereas more traditional systems will have.
5 Belts...Black... 10 Ranks of Black
This makes comparing belt colors kind of usless between systems (individual teachers are very different in some systems making them even harder to compare)
Many Dojo's treat Martial Arts as a business, and they realize that
-People like things where they are more frequently rewarded
-Kids are your big profit center
and adapt their training methods to suit.
Actually, a Kung-Fu school that I was in for a while had 2 belts. White, and then black. Yes, there were intermediate ranks, but it was always funny when friends heard i was doing martial arts and asked what belt I had, and the answer was always white.
1984 was written in 1947-48, when the Soviet Union was busily suppressing any kind of freedom in Eastern Europe. Orwell wasn't prescient, merely observant.
Good point. But I've often wondered how he knew... His mistrust of the soviets originated from his experiences in the spanish civil war, where they were about as bad as franco's fascists (orwell was fighting with the republicans). Still, how he could extrapolate from what they did in a war in a foreign country, to what happened back home in russia is not so obvious, especially since stalin's worst crimes only came out decades later, and it took even longer for most of europe's left to see the soviet union for what it really was.
Still, he wasn't JUST observant. Some parts of 1984 have yet to be equalled by any real-world dictatorship: especially the part about manipulating language (newspeak) is I think the most strikingly original part of his work.
If I wanted my search engine to be stuffed full of shit, I would have used yahoo from the 90s, then migrated to bing.
Ever since google started messing up their front page by, you know, adding stuff, I started using the firefox search box. This had the side effect of diversifying the search tools I use, and about:blank really is the best homepage.
Now call me a conservative whiny techie, but never having to see obnoxious random "experiments", and logo doodles ever again is a huge step forward.
Honestly, I am even more of a conservative whiny techie, cause I have noscript enabled and google is not whitelisted, except when I'm using maps, which is not so often since the city I live in (vienna) has an excellent local mapping service. So I never notice any of this stuff, and only find out about it when it gets to slashdot or to the news... And for the big-brother-paranoid among you, if you use google with scripts enabled, google can keep track of what links you clicked on in the search results.
Without the constant reminder of my wasted money, I may have eventually forgotten about it, but now I will never, ever purchase anything by LG again, and I tell people who are looking for a new phone to get something - anything - else.
You don't need to remind me.... LG + windows mobile... *shiver*
Tom: Listen to this one: you open a company called the "Arse Tickler's Faggots Fan Club".
Soap: You what?
Tom: You take out an advert in the back page of some gay mag, advertising the latest in arse-intruding dildos. You sell it with, I dunno, "does what no other dildo can do until now", "the latest and greatest in sexual technology", "guaranteed results or your money back", all that bollocks. Now these dils cost twenty-five quid a pop - that's a snip for the amount of pleasure they're gonna give the recipients. But they send their cheques to the other company name, nothing offensive, er, "Bobbie's Bits" or something, for twenty-five quid. You take that twenty-five quid, you stick it in the bank until it clears. Now, this is the smart bit - you send back the cheque for twenty-five pound from the other company name, "Arse Tickler's Faggots Fan Club", saying we're sorry, we couldn't get the supplies from America because they ran out of stock. Now you see how many people cash that cheque - not a single soul, because who wants their bank manager to know they tickle arse when they're not paying cheques?
Bacon: So how long do you have to wait until you see a return?
Tom: Probably no more than four weeks.
Bacon: A month? So, what fucking good is that if we need it in six - no, five days?
Tom: Well, it's still a good idea.
On a related note, you should read a story by Roald Dahl.. I think it is called "the Bookseller" (which, according to wikipedia, first appeared in Playboy in 1986). It's about a book seller who looks through the obituaries of influential men, and then sends a bill for some "interesting" titles to the widows... and how he is found out...
This has been one of the problem with net neutrality since the various groups started pushing for a law.
It would prevent network operators,ISPs, from blocking spam, setting up firewalls to prevents outside attacks, or even from having an e-mail virus scanner.
I have no problem with any of the above being done to my connection, so long as I can switch all of them off depending on my needs. If I can't switch it off, it's not a service to me, it's a restriction.
wtf... having a facebook account means having to check the privacy settings every other day to disable whatever new feature (or re-labeled old feature) is open-by-default this week...
Fixing this alone means nothing. If you search for someone on Facebook it will show you a name and a profile picture. Sure, it requires a facebook account, but that's not too hard to create for somebody with 4,000,000 email addresses.
People from our lab have a paper coming up at RAID this year pretty much on the same issue, exploited at a large scale (trying millions of email addresses):
http://iseclab.org/papers/raid2010.pdf. Read it if you want to get an idea of how much impact such an attack can have. As a spammer, if I know the full name and list of friends (public information on facebook) associated with an email address in my spam targets list, I can do some very sneaky, targeted spam pretending to come from one of your friends...
The important point is that this is not a bug. It's an undesirable side effect of the friend finding feature that is very useful to some users and that facebook certainly has no intention of removing. As a consequence of this paper, they apparently implemented a rate limiting in the number of email address queries one can do... better than nothing, but there are no full solutions.
I agree. I question the mode of cost calculation in the article.
Here is a reference point. 82% of France's electricity comes from nuclear power plants. The price of power for industrial customers is about 0.06 USD/kWh. This includes huge personnel and pension costs (powerful unions) and sloppy financial management (politically appointed execs). So it means that actual production and delivery costs are below this price point. Since EDF, the French electricity semi-public firm, is a monopoly, there is little incentive to be more cost-effective. And yet, even so, they achieve a cost of 6 cents per kWh.
Right. But I bet most of the plants were built by the French government (read military) in their effort to become a nuclear power, and EDF does not pay huge interest costs on the gigantic loans that would have been needed to build them, nor does it pay for waste disposal. Nuclear energy has been hugely subsidized throughout its history because of its military applications, and now the plan seems to be to start hugely subsidizing it for "ecological" reasons.
This has happened in a spear phishing case in south africa. A woman went to the cell phone provider's shop pretending to be the man's wife and that he had lost the SIM-card, and managed to convince them to give her a replacement SIM-card, which was then used to receive the authorization code.
And of course a legal battle started over liability between the bank and phone provider (not sure how or if it ended). Sure, the phone provider should not have given the SIM-card out, but does it follow that they are liable for fraudulent banking transactions? I wouldn't think so, otherwise the banks would basically be externalizing the costs of their security to the cell phone providers. Still, the cell-phone-based 2 factor is pretty good. My main practical worry with that is that, in cases where I don't have a sheet of paper with the target account number, I cannot easily verify that the account I am sending money to is the one I intended (unless I trust what is written on my screen),
Surely an even better idea would be some kind of read-only VMWare Appliance (or similar). User clicks a link on their desktop which launches a program that checks the VMWare image hasn't been tampered with (CRC and md5 or something like) and then boots a basic Linux VM which opens a kiosk-mode browser that goes straight to your online banking. Couple that with a proper two-factor hardware token and that should be good enough for most things.
When you click the link on the desktop, how do you know it is really booting the kiosk-mode image, and not just pretending to? This is not a solution, you would need some kind of trusted boot process, and a reboot. Honestly a little cheap, offline device with a key in it and a little screen and keypad for entering the transaction to sign (or at least a screen to display the transaction) seems simpler and safer.
Around here banks have limited the transactions for such "two factor" signing schemes to near nothing in favor of RSA based digital signing schemes that require you to use a pass-coded certificate on a chip card, that is also your national ID card, or a certificate on your cellphone SIM linked to the ID-card one.
So? That doesn't solve the problem. You still have to enter the amount and destination account number onto an external device which then does the signing.. otherwise how can you be sure what you are signing, if your PC is compromised and anything on your screen could come from attackers?
And, you have to be educated to what the numbers you enter mean, so that you cannot be scammed into sending money to someone else.
It only takes a couple of people who get fired for password sharing to make everyone else so paranoid they never even want a hint at what your password might be, then they learn how to use the tools to allow them to share files by approved methods.
It also ensures that when the secretary who has a certain file is unexpectedly sick people will not be able to meet a deadline. And in 99% of organizations, meeting deadlines and keeping the business going is much more important than security posturing.
Recent paper by some microsoft folks at usenix security: "So Long, And No Thanks for the Externalities:
The Rational Rejection of Security Advice by Users" (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/cormac/papers/2009/solongandnothanks.pdf)
R in a nutshell = Rpy
on
R In a Nutshell
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I don't know about java, but when I have to use a statistics library available in R, I use rpy. It's a python module that lets you automagically call r functions very easily, and directly get back python objects or R objects for further processing with R methods. Python's introspection capabilities make this sleek and transparent, I doubt a Java binding could be as cool (though if you need java, there probably are solutions).
and honestly, i'm so glad i don't have to use R directly... TFS says it is object oriented, but as far as I can recall all the library methods i tried just returned heterogeneous matrixes, with no real user-defined types. And the function calling semantics are mind-boggling, with mixing of keyword and positional arguments leading to all sorts of weirdness...
If it's obvious, it's not supposed to be patentable. Unfortunately, the examiners seem to let a lot of obvious things slip through, but that covers your scenario.
Why don't you go tell the meso-american civilizations that the wheel is obvious?...
He called on the government to devote time and resources to making sure Americans have the broadband access they need to stay competitive in the 21st century global economy.
That's true, but many (possibly all?) of those countries subsidize their ISP through tax dollars to get lower rates - so you're still paying for it, it's just that the monthly bill the ISP sends you is lower but the amount the government takes out of your paycheck is higher.
Has anyone ever done a study of the real cost of internet in countries where it's partially funded by taxes? Then you'd have more accurate numbers for a comparison.
I don't know what countries you are talking about. I do not know of any country where ISPs get tax dollars... except maybe occasional investment money like the 2 billion US telcos got some years ago to implement broadband. What makes broadband work in most of europe is regulation, not taxation: the fact that I can use the last mile going into my house to connect to the internet through any provider I choose.
They get technology reasonably well. They occasionally call out the occasional walking piece of corruption that other are resigned to (read: Silvio Berlusconi). But editorial-wise, they are very far right. They supported the iraq war, they believed in WMD, and they denied global warming for a very long time (until 2007?).
I wouldn't call the economist far right... they are in favor of legalization of drugs, for instance, and are generally against all forms of prohibitionism. I think they are quite left-wing on many social issues (in favor of civil liberties, etc), and a bit right wing on economy (as in strongly free market oriented).
Honestly, when performance is the main goal Java is not that attractive,
Thus the "C for performance, Java for high-level language" paradigm:).
However, I wonder if Java programs wouldn't actually be faster than C in many uses, mainly due to JIT. Take, for example, modern games: the heavy lifting part of 3D graphics is done by the graphics card, and most of what's left is running various scripts. In C/C++ these scripts are interpreted, while in Java - and other JITted languages - you can let the JIT compile them. Java is not really optimal for this purpose, but something like Python or Lisp could easily be.
Interestingly, the servers of eve online, which i think is still the mmorpg with the largest number of players on a single server in the world, run stackless python, on top of a custom networking component written in C (or was it C++? ehe, i don't remember).
Unfortunately however the vanilla python most of us are using (cpython) does not excel at concurrency, and if the powers that be keep pushing backwards-incompatible language changes instead of improving the runtime and libraries, the situation is not going to improve so fast.
Frankly, there is no valid reason for starting a new program in C in this day and age.
Yes, there is: it's a simple language with very predictable behaviour, compiles fast, and the resulting binary can be trivially interfaced with pretty much every other language. There's no good reason to use C++: you don't get the benefits of managed environments and the real encapsulation they offer, yet it's almost impossible to figure out what code using templates and operator overloading is actually doing.
Use C for performance and control, or use Java, Python and friends for a real high-level language. C++ gets you the worst of both worlds. Let's just let the damn thing die already.
I personally use python 90% of the time (when performance does not matter). And when it does, I use C++, which performs just as well as C and gives me a lot of useful features and the convenience of the STL, resulting in better code than I would write in C.
Honestly, when performance is the main goal Java is not that attractive, and it's not just the more or less constant-factor slowdown due to the interpretation (or JIT, which is not free either) and the extra indirections and checks. The biggest issue is often memory usage. Garbage collection can lead to non deterministic delays and unpredictably high memory usage (up to 10x the actually used memory in some unfortunate corner cases).
That much said, I'm not bashing java or managed languages. Java is awesome in my opinion. If I had to write a huge enterprise application with a big team of programmers, I would use Java. But for my line of work it just doesn't have the right trade offs.
I understand, but for speed I expect that C++ still outperforms Java, and while C should outperform both of them, C doesn't feature encapsulation, polymorphism and all the other goodies that OOP provides.
No, C is exactly as fast as C++. C++ only becomes slower if you use certain features that have a performance impact. Example: if you use exceptions, there is a performance penalty. If you don't, you don't get the performance penalty. That is one of the design principles of C++: nothing can be included into the language that slows down code that does not use/need it. The main slow downs you will see in your average C++ program, over the corresponding C, is the use of the string class as opposed to the nasty but fast strcpy and friends, and the extra indirect function calls due to virtual functions (which causes a branch misprediction and hence a pipeline flush on modern cpus, costing you a bunch of clock cycles). Still, you only pay for virtual if you choose to use it, and manually implemented virtual function calls are used all over the place in good old C, with the same effect. Furthermore, C++ templates allow code re-use with exactly 0 performance loss and while the error messages are ugly, they're still a whole load prettier than doing the same thing the C way with recursive includes and lots of preprocessor madness. And you can link to existing C code/libraries without any problems.
Frankly, there is no valid reason for starting a new program in C in this day and age.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to pluck out one thing you said...
This exact premise has been used in science fiction before, which should be enough to deny it a patent.
There's a concept called "non-enabling prior art". Sure, science fiction stories have been written describing time travel, cold fusion, AI, teleportation, etc. Go build them - after all, you've got that "prior art". Wait, they don't fully describe everything sufficient to enable someone skilled in the art to build those things? Ah. Then they're "non-enabling" prior art, and are only "prior art" for the few bits they do enable - in other words, the broad concept. You couldn't patent: "A method for time travel comprising (a) traveling through time." because there would be prior art for that, but you could certainly patent a method that went beyond the mere musings of authors.
That's fine for time-travel, which is admittedly hard. But given a futurama episode where characters vote to pick a movie ending, any bunch of idiots with some basic engineering skills could implement it. Or should I say, anyone "skilled in the art" would be able to come up with a way to implement it. Same goes for pretty much any business method patent; they patent nothing more than a concept, so if that concept is in 1984, that's reason enough it shouldn't be patentable. (did I mention, IANAPLOAOKOL?)
You'll notice similar trends in other "Americanized" martial arts diciplins.
Typically "Americanized" systems will have
10 Belts...Black ... 5 Ranks of Black
Whereas more traditional systems will have.
5 Belts...Black ... 10 Ranks of Black
This makes comparing belt colors kind of usless between systems (individual teachers are very different in some systems making them even harder to compare)
Many Dojo's treat Martial Arts as a business, and they realize that
-People like things where they are more frequently rewarded -Kids are your big profit center
and adapt their training methods to suit.
Actually, a Kung-Fu school that I was in for a while had 2 belts. White, and then black. Yes, there were intermediate ranks, but it was always funny when friends heard i was doing martial arts and asked what belt I had, and the answer was always white.
1984 was written in 1947-48, when the Soviet Union was busily suppressing any kind of freedom in Eastern Europe. Orwell wasn't prescient, merely observant.
Good point. But I've often wondered how he knew... His mistrust of the soviets originated from his experiences in the spanish civil war, where they were about as bad as franco's fascists (orwell was fighting with the republicans). Still, how he could extrapolate from what they did in a war in a foreign country, to what happened back home in russia is not so obvious, especially since stalin's worst crimes only came out decades later, and it took even longer for most of europe's left to see the soviet union for what it really was.
Still, he wasn't JUST observant. Some parts of 1984 have yet to be equalled by any real-world dictatorship: especially the part about manipulating language (newspeak) is I think the most strikingly original part of his work.
If I wanted my search engine to be stuffed full of shit, I would have used yahoo from the 90s, then migrated to bing. Ever since google started messing up their front page by, you know, adding stuff, I started using the firefox search box. This had the side effect of diversifying the search tools I use, and about:blank really is the best homepage.
Now call me a conservative whiny techie, but never having to see obnoxious random "experiments", and logo doodles ever again is a huge step forward.
Honestly, I am even more of a conservative whiny techie, cause I have noscript enabled and google is not whitelisted, except when I'm using maps, which is not so often since the city I live in (vienna) has an excellent local mapping service. So I never notice any of this stuff, and only find out about it when it gets to slashdot or to the news... And for the big-brother-paranoid among you, if you use google with scripts enabled, google can keep track of what links you clicked on in the search results.
This isn't my field (I work on Saturn's rings),
Do you have a long commute? How is traffic out there?
Without the constant reminder of my wasted money, I may have eventually forgotten about it, but now I will never, ever purchase anything by LG again, and I tell people who are looking for a new phone to get something - anything - else.
You don't need to remind me.... LG + windows mobile... *shiver*
Tom: Listen to this one: you open a company called the "Arse Tickler's Faggots Fan Club".
Soap: You what?
Tom: You take out an advert in the back page of some gay mag, advertising the latest in arse-intruding dildos. You sell it with, I dunno, "does what no other dildo can do until now", "the latest and greatest in sexual technology", "guaranteed results or your money back", all that bollocks. Now these dils cost twenty-five quid a pop - that's a snip for the amount of pleasure they're gonna give the recipients. But they send their cheques to the other company name, nothing offensive, er, "Bobbie's Bits" or something, for twenty-five quid. You take that twenty-five quid, you stick it in the bank until it clears. Now, this is the smart bit - you send back the cheque for twenty-five pound from the other company name, "Arse Tickler's Faggots Fan Club", saying we're sorry, we couldn't get the supplies from America because they ran out of stock. Now you see how many people cash that cheque - not a single soul, because who wants their bank manager to know they tickle arse when they're not paying cheques? Bacon: So how long do you have to wait until you see a return?
Tom: Probably no more than four weeks.
Bacon: A month? So, what fucking good is that if we need it in six - no, five days?
Tom: Well, it's still a good idea.
On a related note, you should read a story by Roald Dahl.. I think it is called "the Bookseller" (which, according to wikipedia, first appeared in Playboy in 1986). It's about a book seller who looks through the obituaries of influential men, and then sends a bill for some "interesting" titles to the widows... and how he is found out...
This has been one of the problem with net neutrality since the various groups started pushing for a law. It would prevent network operators,ISPs, from blocking spam, setting up firewalls to prevents outside attacks, or even from having an e-mail virus scanner.
I have no problem with any of the above being done to my connection, so long as I can switch all of them off depending on my needs. If I can't switch it off, it's not a service to me, it's a restriction.
wtf... having a facebook account means having to check the privacy settings every other day to disable whatever new feature (or re-labeled old feature) is open-by-default this week...
Fixing this alone means nothing. If you search for someone on Facebook it will show you a name and a profile picture. Sure, it requires a facebook account, but that's not too hard to create for somebody with 4,000,000 email addresses.
People from our lab have a paper coming up at RAID this year pretty much on the same issue, exploited at a large scale (trying millions of email addresses): http://iseclab.org/papers/raid2010.pdf. Read it if you want to get an idea of how much impact such an attack can have. As a spammer, if I know the full name and list of friends (public information on facebook) associated with an email address in my spam targets list, I can do some very sneaky, targeted spam pretending to come from one of your friends...
The important point is that this is not a bug. It's an undesirable side effect of the friend finding feature that is very useful to some users and that facebook certainly has no intention of removing. As a consequence of this paper, they apparently implemented a rate limiting in the number of email address queries one can do... better than nothing, but there are no full solutions.
I agree. I question the mode of cost calculation in the article.
Here is a reference point. 82% of France's electricity comes from nuclear power plants. The price of power for industrial customers is about 0.06 USD/kWh. This includes huge personnel and pension costs (powerful unions) and sloppy financial management (politically appointed execs). So it means that actual production and delivery costs are below this price point. Since EDF, the French electricity semi-public firm, is a monopoly, there is little incentive to be more cost-effective. And yet, even so, they achieve a cost of 6 cents per kWh.
Right. But I bet most of the plants were built by the French government (read military) in their effort to become a nuclear power, and EDF does not pay huge interest costs on the gigantic loans that would have been needed to build them, nor does it pay for waste disposal. Nuclear energy has been hugely subsidized throughout its history because of its military applications, and now the plan seems to be to start hugely subsidizing it for "ecological" reasons.
This has happened in a spear phishing case in south africa. A woman went to the cell phone provider's shop pretending to be the man's wife and that he had lost the SIM-card, and managed to convince them to give her a replacement SIM-card, which was then used to receive the authorization code.
And of course a legal battle started over liability between the bank and phone provider (not sure how or if it ended). Sure, the phone provider should not have given the SIM-card out, but does it follow that they are liable for fraudulent banking transactions? I wouldn't think so, otherwise the banks would basically be externalizing the costs of their security to the cell phone providers. Still, the cell-phone-based 2 factor is pretty good. My main practical worry with that is that, in cases where I don't have a sheet of paper with the target account number, I cannot easily verify that the account I am sending money to is the one I intended (unless I trust what is written on my screen),
Surely an even better idea would be some kind of read-only VMWare Appliance (or similar). User clicks a link on their desktop which launches a program that checks the VMWare image hasn't been tampered with (CRC and md5 or something like) and then boots a basic Linux VM which opens a kiosk-mode browser that goes straight to your online banking. Couple that with a proper two-factor hardware token and that should be good enough for most things.
When you click the link on the desktop, how do you know it is really booting the kiosk-mode image, and not just pretending to? This is not a solution, you would need some kind of trusted boot process, and a reboot. Honestly a little cheap, offline device with a key in it and a little screen and keypad for entering the transaction to sign (or at least a screen to display the transaction) seems simpler and safer.
Around here banks have limited the transactions for such "two factor" signing schemes to near nothing in favor of RSA based digital signing schemes that require you to use a pass-coded certificate on a chip card, that is also your national ID card, or a certificate on your cellphone SIM linked to the ID-card one.
So? That doesn't solve the problem. You still have to enter the amount and destination account number onto an external device which then does the signing.. otherwise how can you be sure what you are signing, if your PC is compromised and anything on your screen could come from attackers?
And, you have to be educated to what the numbers you enter mean, so that you cannot be scammed into sending money to someone else.
It only takes a couple of people who get fired for password sharing to make everyone else so paranoid they never even want a hint at what your password might be, then they learn how to use the tools to allow them to share files by approved methods.
It also ensures that when the secretary who has a certain file is unexpectedly sick people will not be able to meet a deadline. And in 99% of organizations, meeting deadlines and keeping the business going is much more important than security posturing.
Recent paper by some microsoft folks at usenix security: "So Long, And No Thanks for the Externalities: The Rational Rejection of Security Advice by Users" (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/cormac/papers/2009/solongandnothanks.pdf)
I don't know about java, but when I have to use a statistics library available in R, I use rpy. It's a python module that lets you automagically call r functions very easily, and directly get back python objects or R objects for further processing with R methods. Python's introspection capabilities make this sleek and transparent, I doubt a Java binding could be as cool (though if you need java, there probably are solutions).
and honestly, i'm so glad i don't have to use R directly... TFS says it is object oriented, but as far as I can recall all the library methods i tried just returned heterogeneous matrixes, with no real user-defined types. And the function calling semantics are mind-boggling, with mixing of keyword and positional arguments leading to all sorts of weirdness...
If it's obvious, it's not supposed to be patentable. Unfortunately, the examiners seem to let a lot of obvious things slip through, but that covers your scenario.
Why don't you go tell the meso-american civilizations that the wheel is obvious?...
He called on the government to devote time and resources to making sure Americans have the broadband access they need to stay competitive in the 21st century global economy.
That's true, but many (possibly all?) of those countries subsidize their ISP through tax dollars to get lower rates - so you're still paying for it, it's just that the monthly bill the ISP sends you is lower but the amount the government takes out of your paycheck is higher.
Has anyone ever done a study of the real cost of internet in countries where it's partially funded by taxes? Then you'd have more accurate numbers for a comparison.
I don't know what countries you are talking about. I do not know of any country where ISPs get tax dollars... except maybe occasional investment money like the 2 billion US telcos got some years ago to implement broadband. What makes broadband work in most of europe is regulation, not taxation: the fact that I can use the last mile going into my house to connect to the internet through any provider I choose.
They get technology reasonably well. They occasionally call out the occasional walking piece of corruption that other are resigned to (read: Silvio Berlusconi). But editorial-wise, they are very far right. They supported the iraq war, they believed in WMD, and they denied global warming for a very long time (until 2007?).
I wouldn't call the economist far right... they are in favor of legalization of drugs, for instance, and are generally against all forms of prohibitionism. I think they are quite left-wing on many social issues (in favor of civil liberties, etc), and a bit right wing on economy (as in strongly free market oriented).
"The last line can be used by ISPs saying that you're "damaging the network""
And they previous one can be used by any lobbying party to get off with whatever they want.
""May not limit the right of a user to enter or use any class of instruments, devices or appliances on the network, provided they are legal"
So they just need to, say, declare illegal connecting more than one computer to a "single computer" connection and there you go.
I don't know anything of the legal system in chile, but i'm pretty sure an ISP is not a legislative body and cannot declare anything illegal.
Thus the "C for performance, Java for high-level language" paradigm :).
However, I wonder if Java programs wouldn't actually be faster than C in many uses, mainly due to JIT. Take, for example, modern games: the heavy lifting part of 3D graphics is done by the graphics card, and most of what's left is running various scripts. In C/C++ these scripts are interpreted, while in Java - and other JITted languages - you can let the JIT compile them. Java is not really optimal for this purpose, but something like Python or Lisp could easily be.
Interestingly, the servers of eve online, which i think is still the mmorpg with the largest number of players on a single server in the world, run stackless python, on top of a custom networking component written in C (or was it C++? ehe, i don't remember).
Unfortunately however the vanilla python most of us are using (cpython) does not excel at concurrency, and if the powers that be keep pushing backwards-incompatible language changes instead of improving the runtime and libraries, the situation is not going to improve so fast.
Yes, there is: it's a simple language with very predictable behaviour, compiles fast, and the resulting binary can be trivially interfaced with pretty much every other language. There's no good reason to use C++: you don't get the benefits of managed environments and the real encapsulation they offer, yet it's almost impossible to figure out what code using templates and operator overloading is actually doing.
Use C for performance and control, or use Java, Python and friends for a real high-level language. C++ gets you the worst of both worlds. Let's just let the damn thing die already.
I personally use python 90% of the time (when performance does not matter). And when it does, I use C++, which performs just as well as C and gives me a lot of useful features and the convenience of the STL, resulting in better code than I would write in C.
Honestly, when performance is the main goal Java is not that attractive, and it's not just the more or less constant-factor slowdown due to the interpretation (or JIT, which is not free either) and the extra indirections and checks. The biggest issue is often memory usage. Garbage collection can lead to non deterministic delays and unpredictably high memory usage (up to 10x the actually used memory in some unfortunate corner cases).
That much said, I'm not bashing java or managed languages. Java is awesome in my opinion. If I had to write a huge enterprise application with a big team of programmers, I would use Java. But for my line of work it just doesn't have the right trade offs.
I understand, but for speed I expect that C++ still outperforms Java, and while C should outperform both of them, C doesn't feature encapsulation, polymorphism and all the other goodies that OOP provides.
No, C is exactly as fast as C++. C++ only becomes slower if you use certain features that have a performance impact. Example: if you use exceptions, there is a performance penalty. If you don't, you don't get the performance penalty. That is one of the design principles of C++: nothing can be included into the language that slows down code that does not use/need it. The main slow downs you will see in your average C++ program, over the corresponding C, is the use of the string class as opposed to the nasty but fast strcpy and friends, and the extra indirect function calls due to virtual functions (which causes a branch misprediction and hence a pipeline flush on modern cpus, costing you a bunch of clock cycles). Still, you only pay for virtual if you choose to use it, and manually implemented virtual function calls are used all over the place in good old C, with the same effect. Furthermore, C++ templates allow code re-use with exactly 0 performance loss and while the error messages are ugly, they're still a whole load prettier than doing the same thing the C way with recursive includes and lots of preprocessor madness. And you can link to existing C code/libraries without any problems. Frankly, there is no valid reason for starting a new program in C in this day and age.
If I recall correctly, Socrates taught by answering questions and encouraging new ones, ...
By modern standards he would most likely have been labeled a troll. After all, aren't trolls using a form of Socratic irony to spur debate?
They modded him troll at the time too. Unfortunately at the time the penalty was death...