What's really needed is an iterative language that can easily express these points where operations can happen in any order.
By "iterative" do you mean "imperative"? It seems to me that Oz might be a viable choice here, given the way that threads are both syntactically and operationally lightweight.
Sure, you can claim that "net neutrality" has a specific meaning that is defined differently, but in that case "net neutrality" is about neutrality as much as the "us patriot act" is about patriotism.
Net neutrality is about neutrality of origin, it originated as a term as a reaction to ideas aired by telcos and other ISPs regarding charging the original sender of packets (particularly high-volume sites like Google), as well as the immediate customer of the ISP receiving the packet, for packets crossing the ISPs network. It most critically refers to packets being treated without regard to origin.
But whatever "net neutrality" may or may not mean to you or me, the kind of issue raised in TFS after the excerpt is irrelevant to the question asked in the poll referred to in the part of TFA excerpted in TFS, so in any case I disagree with the suggestion in TFS that the assumed failure to frame the question in the way suggested is, even if the assumption is acccurate, not a substantial failure, since the suggested framing is completely irrelevant to the question asked, even if it might be relevant to some particular vision of "net neutrality" in the abstract.
But the Celts do not, though they once inhabited what is today Britain (among other places).
Hmm... and this relates to anything said in any previous post, how again? Your devotion (expressed, e.g., in the material quoted below) to remaining strictly on the topic of the post being responded to is, well, somewhat inconsistent, even within the same post...
However, I'm not going to talk about this anymore since this is just you being a stupid pedant and ignoring the actual point of the post
Well, actually, I thought you were the one being stupid and missing an obvious joke to make a response that was at once overly serious and strictly inaccurate.
Given the survey's sponsorship, it's unlikely that respondents were presented with examples of the value that ISPs say packet shaping can bring, or asked to weigh such against net neutrality.
Since traffic shaping that is done based on the kind of content without regard to the source of content and which is accompanied by sufficient bandwidth so that non-prioritized content isn't just dropped on the floor in favor of prioritized content is neither inconsistent with the concept of net neutrality as a common-carrier-like provision nor inconsistent with the goal articulated in the question asked in this survey, I'm not sure how you think pointing that out would be relevant.
And really, the fact that the Church resorted to such excommunications and interdictions, with greater frequency with the approach of the Reformation, shows the lack of direct political power the religious class had over the people.
Except that, well, the Church didn't resort to them with greater frequency with the approach of the Reformation, the use of the interdict or the excommunication of monarchs was extremely rare (happening only a few times a century) without any clear trend as the Reformation approached.
The Pope couldn't just tell the faithful to rise up and overthrow a particular monarch and expect even a majority to abide by it.
The Pope never had that kind of power. That wasn't a change that produced the Renaissance.
Neither Islam nor Christianity have changed substantially in the last 500-1000 years.
Are you seriously asserting that Christianity hasn't substantially changed since sometime before the Protestant Reformation (and subsequent Counter-Reformation) of the 16th Century, and possibly since before the Great Schism of 1054?
Neither the Bible nor the Quran have gone through a new edition.
Actually, the Bible has seen quite a few new versions in the last 500 years.
Anyhow, the doctrine that Christianity is first and foremost and nearly exclusively a religion of the Bible itself is, on the time scale you present Christianity as not having "substantially" changed, a fairly novel doctrine (sola scriptura being a foundational doctrine of the Protestant Reformation), and one that is fairly exclusive to one (fairly new) branch of Christianity.
Q: Why did the Catholic church accept the divinity of Mary in the middle of the 20th century? A: Catholicism wasn't taking hold in Latin America, where people were unwilling to give up their earth mother goddess.
Is this an attempt to respond in kind to misconceptions? First, the Catholic Church has never accepted a doctrine of "the divinity of Mary". There are several Catholic dogmas regarding Mary, none of which originated in the 20th Century. What did happen in the middle of the 20th Century was that the existing doctrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary was declared to be a dogma of the Church, as the Immaculate Conception had been in 1854. Neither of these was new to general acceptance in the Church when declared as dogma.
I think the Christian leaders aren't too keen on proper education, given their stance on evolution.
"Christian leaders" don't have anything like a general "stance on evolution". Modern American Protestant Fundamentalist leaders of the political Right might, but that's a far different and narrower group than "Christian leaders".
The Romans contributed a great deal to the world, yet they don't seem to be doing so any more as there seems to be none left.
Actually, there are well over 2.5 million Romans currently, and probably some of them would be offended at your suggestion that they aren't doing anything for the world.
Authoritarian regimes aren't necessarily anti-science or scientific inquiry.
Neither are theocratic/caesaropapist regimes; my argument was that the particular authoritarian character of regimes in the Islamic world was likely a bigger factor than the religious character of those particular regimes (most of which are secular, to start with) in suppressing inquiry.
I think that economic and social (including religious) factors apart from who holds authority in the State are more important than any features of the state, and I pointed to those factors in the post you respond to. So while I mostly agree with your extensive discussion of the influence of religious cultural factors apart from who is in charge, I don't see that as in any way contradicting what I said in the post you respond to.
There is no necessary conflict between religion and science, because religion may constrain its absolute declarations to matters of faith and morals and other matters not subject to empiricial inquiry; OTOH, there are practical conflicts between plenty of popular (and many less popular) religious traditions and science, because many religious traditions do contain claims of revealed knowledge on matters subject to empirical inquiry.
Of course, even where they conflict it is possible to view them as largely compatible; if you believe in a omnipotent creator, its not much of a stretch at all to believe that He could have made a world thousands of years ago that behaves in all outward manners as if it were made billions of years ago. It seems to me a particularly weak kind of faith that sees a threat in any kind of scientific result.
The Renaissance didn't happen in Europe until it became acceptable for king to challenge pope, while in modern times "mullah" and "imam" are treated as synonyms.
Actually, the Renaissance began in the merchant republics of Italy long before it became any more "acceptable" than it had been throughout the whole medieval period for the monarchs in the rest of Europe to challenge the Pope. The Renaissance predated and helped produce the Reformation which itself made such challenges more viable, not the other way around.
Both science and biblical exegesis provide tentative knowledge.
This is a perfectly valid viewpoint, but I think the sense in which the original author here uses "authentic knowledge" is incompatible with "tentative knowledge", but rather refers to the doctrinal understanding common (as I understand it) in modern Islam that the Quran in its "literal" reading, or at least long-established interpretations, provides certain, non-tentative, knowledge of both what is and what ought to be. I think your charge that the original authors statement is clearly wrong is based on a rather serious misreading of what he is saying.
After the Islamic empires collapsed, that whole region would have wallowed in obscurity but for 3 little letters: o*i*l.
The "Islamic Empires" lasted until the Ottoman Empire was dismembered, after WWI, in no small part for its oil.
Both the violent Islamic fundamentalism and the anti-Westernism* that are so powerful in the Islamic world now in large part grew up in reaction to the Western* domination of much of the Islamic world since then, including the interwar period, the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran in 1941, the Western-backed self-coup by the Shah of Iran against the government of Prime Minister Mossadegh, the sponsoring by the West of various unpopular regimes in the region that persists to this day, and, of course, the whole issue of Israel, even before considering the most recent round of new Western* interventions and Western*-sponsored wars affecting the Muslim world.
*this isn't the best term, as Russia is included and isn't part of the "West"
Seriously: What is everything open to criticism except Islam.
Your premise is misguided. Of course, Islamic fundamentalists react strongly to any criticism of Islam (or, at least, their own particular brand of Islamic fundamentalism; they are quite quick to criticize other strands of Islamic thought.) Similarly, Christian fundamentalists react rather strongly to criticism of Christianity (or, again, at least their own brand of it), as do similarly extreme advocates of just about any kind of secular or religious viewpoint. Islamic fundamentalism is, of course, a bigger force within Islam as a whole than Christian fundamentalism is within Christianity, but I suspect that an analysis of the political and economic conditions which contribute to fundamentalism would show that that's not at all a result of any underlying difference between Christian and Muslim people so much as a difference in the conditions in which they tend to live.
It will not happen as long as the clerics, mullahs, and religious scholars are in charge.
In most of the "Islamic" world, the "clerics, mullahs, and religious scholars" (the second being strictly redundant with the first; a mullah is a kind of cleric) aren't in charge now.
Iran, of course, is a theocracy, and Saudi Arabia exhibits a religion-state entanglement that might be described as a brand of caesaropapism, but most of the regimes throughout the Islamic world are secular, though often quite authoritarian, regimes. It is, I would think, the authoritarianism of the regimes in question that is the biggest factor in suppressing inquiry than the regimes' religious character.
The relation between the external political/economic context and the religious character of society (and I do think the kind of fundamentalist religious orientation that is common throughout Islamic world does inhibit science) is complex, but my personal belief is that the external forces which promote durable authoritarian regimes in the Islamic world also are involved in maintaining the kind of religious fundamentalism seen there.
I see your point, but it seems that the "right thing" to do isn't something a framework could simply "know", but something that would necessarily have to be part of the application-level error handling logic.
Windows is still less stable than any other modern OS; while it's more stable than any previous MS offering, that's hardly saying much.
I don't have many problems with Windows stability -- the problems are all with Windows Explorer, which sometimes starts hogging the CPU and causing the whole system to turn to mush within an hour or two of starting up, and sometimes stays up for weeks without doing that. Killing Explorer and launching a new instance usually solves the problem.
Microsoft made a product so appealing to the users that they don't want to switch. Not even to a newer version.
I'm -- as one of the XP users whose not switching to Vista -- more inclined to view it as "Microsoft made a product so unappealing that user's don't want to switch to it, even from the previous Microsoft product."
Why object-oriented? Spreadsheets are closest to a functional model.
Probably on one level because Resolver is meant in large part as a "bridge" so that as a sheet evolves in a direction to which the spreadsheet model is less appropriate, it can be ported out into something else, and the direction the creators expect most people will want to go is into something OO (either a more general Python program, or some other OO langauge where the Python code exported from the spreadsheet will serve as a prototype.)
If you like Python, go for it, but don't expect everyone else to agree without objective proof.
Uh, you're the one that started the languageargument without any specifics, much less "objective proof" of your position. Strange that you'd make that comment, then.
A spreadsheet is essentially a UI which can be wrapped around different storage engines, including an RDBMS. "Spreadsheet" and "database" aren't mutually exclusive alternatives.
I am not entirely convinced.
You're not convinced that spreadsheets and databases aren't mutally exclusive?
Python scripting was possible for a long time for Openoffice users...
There is a big difference between having a spreadsheet that you can script in Python and having one where everything you enter through the spreadsheet interface is turned into Python code.
But you are talking about a half-ass query language.
Says who? I haven't seen how they implement the particular feature, but Python is a rather full-featured language.
I think that "true nerds" wouldn't even use spreadsheets, but a somewhat normalized database.
A spreadsheet is essentially a UI which can be wrapped around different storage engines, including an RDBMS. "Spreadsheet" and "database" aren't mutually exclusive alternatives.
It is easier to process data when it is "row-atized" such that you wouldn't have a different column for each region or product or month instance like one often does in spreadsheets, but rather a single product category/location/month code/indicator as part of a row.
Yes, using a well-designed spreadsheet for the task is better than using a poorly designed one.
I'm not sure what this has to do with the issue at hand.
Spreadsheets are an electronic version of accounting grid paper and meant to emulate the paper world. But true geeks leave paper representations behind when it suits the problem better, using a "relativity engine" to deliver the needed view via math-like transformations.
And since everything entered through the spreadsheet interface in Resolver One produces (and may be edited in the form of) Python source code, it would seem to be an excellent way to use the spreadsheet interface where that suits an aspect of the problem, and use more direct code for those portions of the problem the spreadsheet interface is not well suited for.
IOW, it seems like a nerd's spreadsheet. Or, looked at a different way, an specialized IronPython IDE.
Do you think the factory workers, or even the management at Lenovo have anything to do with China's military decisions?
Employees? Maybe not. Owners? Definitely. Since, you know, the Chinese Government is one of those. Punishing the Chinese government for the actions of the Chinese Government seems pretty reasonable by any standard.
The US has a behavioral problem as well, do you think that world consumers should punish the people of the US economically because of it?
The US is prone to adopt economic sanctions banning trade with entities associated with governments whose actions it disapproves of. Why shouldn't individuals treat the US the same way the US treats other nations?
When you boycott an entire country, keep in mind that the employees of the companies are people just like you who are working for a living.
So are the people I give my business to instead of those in the country I'm boycotting. So what?
Slashdot Mirror
By "iterative" do you mean "imperative"? It seems to me that Oz might be a viable choice here, given the way that threads are both syntactically and operationally lightweight.
Net neutrality is about neutrality of origin, it originated as a term as a reaction to ideas aired by telcos and other ISPs regarding charging the original sender of packets (particularly high-volume sites like Google), as well as the immediate customer of the ISP receiving the packet, for packets crossing the ISPs network. It most critically refers to packets being treated without regard to origin.
But whatever "net neutrality" may or may not mean to you or me, the kind of issue raised in TFS after the excerpt is irrelevant to the question asked in the poll referred to in the part of TFA excerpted in TFS, so in any case I disagree with the suggestion in TFS that the assumed failure to frame the question in the way suggested is, even if the assumption is acccurate, not a substantial failure, since the suggested framing is completely irrelevant to the question asked, even if it might be relevant to some particular vision of "net neutrality" in the abstract.
The Bible story usually pointed to (and the euphemism for the act that comes from that, "Onanism"), actually refers to something quite different.
As with many things that many people claim the Bible "clearly states", the facts are a bit different.
Hmm... and this relates to anything said in any previous post, how again? Your devotion (expressed, e.g., in the material quoted below) to remaining strictly on the topic of the post being responded to is, well, somewhat inconsistent, even within the same post...
Well, actually, I thought you were the one being stupid and missing an obvious joke to make a response that was at once overly serious and strictly inaccurate.
Since traffic shaping that is done based on the kind of content without regard to the source of content and which is accompanied by sufficient bandwidth so that non-prioritized content isn't just dropped on the floor in favor of prioritized content is neither inconsistent with the concept of net neutrality as a common-carrier-like provision nor inconsistent with the goal articulated in the question asked in this survey, I'm not sure how you think pointing that out would be relevant.
2.7 million or so of whom are also Romans, just like a person can be a New Yorker and an American.
So did the British Empire.
Nevertheless, the British still exist.
Except that, well, the Church didn't resort to them with greater frequency with the approach of the Reformation, the use of the interdict or the excommunication of monarchs was extremely rare (happening only a few times a century) without any clear trend as the Reformation approached.
The Pope never had that kind of power. That wasn't a change that produced the Renaissance.
Are you seriously asserting that Christianity hasn't substantially changed since sometime before the Protestant Reformation (and subsequent Counter-Reformation) of the 16th Century, and possibly since before the Great Schism of 1054?
Actually, the Bible has seen quite a few new versions in the last 500 years.
Anyhow, the doctrine that Christianity is first and foremost and nearly exclusively a religion of the Bible itself is, on the time scale you present Christianity as not having "substantially" changed, a fairly novel doctrine (sola scriptura being a foundational doctrine of the Protestant Reformation), and one that is fairly exclusive to one (fairly new) branch of Christianity.
Is this an attempt to respond in kind to misconceptions? First, the Catholic Church has never accepted a doctrine of "the divinity of Mary". There are several Catholic dogmas regarding Mary, none of which originated in the 20th Century. What did happen in the middle of the 20th Century was that the existing doctrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary was declared to be a dogma of the Church, as the Immaculate Conception had been in 1854. Neither of these was new to general acceptance in the Church when declared as dogma.
"Christian leaders" don't have anything like a general "stance on evolution". Modern American Protestant Fundamentalist leaders of the political Right might, but that's a far different and narrower group than "Christian leaders".
Actually, there are well over 2.5 million Romans currently, and probably some of them would be offended at your suggestion that they aren't doing anything for the world.
Neither are theocratic/caesaropapist regimes; my argument was that the particular authoritarian character of regimes in the Islamic world was likely a bigger factor than the religious character of those particular regimes (most of which are secular, to start with) in suppressing inquiry.
I think that economic and social (including religious) factors apart from who holds authority in the State are more important than any features of the state, and I pointed to those factors in the post you respond to. So while I mostly agree with your extensive discussion of the influence of religious cultural factors apart from who is in charge, I don't see that as in any way contradicting what I said in the post you respond to.
There is no necessary conflict between religion and science, because religion may constrain its absolute declarations to matters of faith and morals and other matters not subject to empiricial inquiry; OTOH, there are practical conflicts between plenty of popular (and many less popular) religious traditions and science, because many religious traditions do contain claims of revealed knowledge on matters subject to empirical inquiry.
Of course, even where they conflict it is possible to view them as largely compatible; if you believe in a omnipotent creator, its not much of a stretch at all to believe that He could have made a world thousands of years ago that behaves in all outward manners as if it were made billions of years ago. It seems to me a particularly weak kind of faith that sees a threat in any kind of scientific result.
Actually, the Renaissance began in the merchant republics of Italy long before it became any more "acceptable" than it had been throughout the whole medieval period for the monarchs in the rest of Europe to challenge the Pope. The Renaissance predated and helped produce the Reformation which itself made such challenges more viable, not the other way around.
This is a perfectly valid viewpoint, but I think the sense in which the original author here uses "authentic knowledge" is incompatible with "tentative knowledge", but rather refers to the doctrinal understanding common (as I understand it) in modern Islam that the Quran in its "literal" reading, or at least long-established interpretations, provides certain, non-tentative, knowledge of both what is and what ought to be. I think your charge that the original authors statement is clearly wrong is based on a rather serious misreading of what he is saying.
The "Islamic Empires" lasted until the Ottoman Empire was dismembered, after WWI, in no small part for its oil.
Both the violent Islamic fundamentalism and the anti-Westernism* that are so powerful in the Islamic world now in large part grew up in reaction to the Western* domination of much of the Islamic world since then, including the interwar period, the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran in 1941, the Western-backed self-coup by the Shah of Iran against the government of Prime Minister Mossadegh, the sponsoring by the West of various unpopular regimes in the region that persists to this day, and, of course, the whole issue of Israel, even before considering the most recent round of new Western* interventions and Western*-sponsored wars affecting the Muslim world.
*this isn't the best term, as Russia is included and isn't part of the "West"
Your premise is misguided. Of course, Islamic fundamentalists react strongly to any criticism of Islam (or, at least, their own particular brand of Islamic fundamentalism; they are quite quick to criticize other strands of Islamic thought.) Similarly, Christian fundamentalists react rather strongly to criticism of Christianity (or, again, at least their own brand of it), as do similarly extreme advocates of just about any kind of secular or religious viewpoint. Islamic fundamentalism is, of course, a bigger force within Islam as a whole than Christian fundamentalism is within Christianity, but I suspect that an analysis of the political and economic conditions which contribute to fundamentalism would show that that's not at all a result of any underlying difference between Christian and Muslim people so much as a difference in the conditions in which they tend to live.
In most of the "Islamic" world, the "clerics, mullahs, and religious scholars" (the second being strictly redundant with the first; a mullah is a kind of cleric) aren't in charge now.
Iran, of course, is a theocracy, and Saudi Arabia exhibits a religion-state entanglement that might be described as a brand of caesaropapism, but most of the regimes throughout the Islamic world are secular, though often quite authoritarian, regimes. It is, I would think, the authoritarianism of the regimes in question that is the biggest factor in suppressing inquiry than the regimes' religious character.
The relation between the external political/economic context and the religious character of society (and I do think the kind of fundamentalist religious orientation that is common throughout Islamic world does inhibit science) is complex, but my personal belief is that the external forces which promote durable authoritarian regimes in the Islamic world also are involved in maintaining the kind of religious fundamentalism seen there.
I see your point, but it seems that the "right thing" to do isn't something a framework could simply "know", but something that would necessarily have to be part of the application-level error handling logic.
I don't have many problems with Windows stability -- the problems are all with Windows Explorer, which sometimes starts hogging the CPU and causing the whole system to turn to mush within an hour or two of starting up, and sometimes stays up for weeks without doing that. Killing Explorer and launching a new instance usually solves the problem.
I'm -- as one of the XP users whose not switching to Vista -- more inclined to view it as "Microsoft made a product so unappealing that user's don't want to switch to it, even from the previous Microsoft product."
Probably on one level because Resolver is meant in large part as a "bridge" so that as a sheet evolves in a direction to which the spreadsheet model is less appropriate, it can be ported out into something else, and the direction the creators expect most people will want to go is into something OO (either a more general Python program, or some other OO langauge where the Python code exported from the spreadsheet will serve as a prototype.)
Uh, you're the one that started the languageargument without any specifics, much less "objective proof" of your position. Strange that you'd make that comment, then.
You're not convinced that spreadsheets and databases aren't mutally exclusive?
There is a big difference between having a spreadsheet that you can script in Python and having one where everything you enter through the spreadsheet interface is turned into Python code.
Says who? I haven't seen how they implement the particular feature, but Python is a rather full-featured language.
A spreadsheet is essentially a UI which can be wrapped around different storage engines, including an RDBMS. "Spreadsheet" and "database" aren't mutually exclusive alternatives.
Yes, using a well-designed spreadsheet for the task is better than using a poorly designed one.
I'm not sure what this has to do with the issue at hand.
And since everything entered through the spreadsheet interface in Resolver One produces (and may be edited in the form of) Python source code, it would seem to be an excellent way to use the spreadsheet interface where that suits an aspect of the problem, and use more direct code for those portions of the problem the spreadsheet interface is not well suited for.
IOW, it seems like a nerd's spreadsheet. Or, looked at a different way, an specialized IronPython IDE.
Employees? Maybe not. Owners? Definitely. Since, you know, the Chinese Government is one of those. Punishing the Chinese government for the actions of the Chinese Government seems pretty reasonable by any standard.
The US is prone to adopt economic sanctions banning trade with entities associated with governments whose actions it disapproves of. Why shouldn't individuals treat the US the same way the US treats other nations?
So are the people I give my business to instead of those in the country I'm boycotting. So what?