Perhaps if the Sci-Fi channel focused on promoting more intelligent shows instead of the mindless dribble that panders to the paranoid schizoid crowd (wtf do psychics or Government conspiracies have to do with SF?:O), we have a better chance of seeing some of the greater SF works (Asimov's Foundation or Clarke's RAMA - a superb PC game was made of this a decade ago) showcased in all their glory.
I don't think Sci-Fi is going to do it; despite the name, I don't think cerebral scifi making complex social commentary is really the kind of thing that appeals to the demographic they are really trying to target.
Might have some luck with HBO or Showtime. Certainly, it seems to me that more cerebral, social commentary, involved sci-fi would appeal to the same people that are targetted by some of their original offerings, particularly HBO's Rome. Plus, I think that that kind of scifi works better when you don't have to write it for a natural break every 15 minutes.
As much as we love Star Wars for what it is, it nearly killed Hollywood's willingness to fund science-fiction movies that actually said something about the human condition.
I find that rather uncompelling. It might have encouraged Hollywood to fund the other kind of scifi with big budgets, but it didn't stop Hollywood from funding scifi that was aimed more at commentary on society and the human condition. Minority Report? Contact (yes, it was less than expertly executed, but it was a scifi-as-social-commentary work, adapted from such a work of literary fiction, and funded by Hollywood. That the product may have been less than stellar is tangential to the argument TFA advances.)? Heck, several of the Star Trek films? (Yes, not at all hard scifi — but "hard scifi" isn't required for a work to be designed as a lens for the human condition.)
Now, what it may have done is destroyed Hollywood's desire to fund scifi films that weren't visually appealing whether or not they were social commentary; it certainly may have, through its effective (for the time) use of special effects raised the bar in that regard. But I don't think it stopped Hollywood from funding scifi as commentary on the human condition.
What a lot of people don't realise about Starship Troopers(movie) was that it was actually written to satirize the book and the whole idea that the ideal society is one in which class stratification is enforced through military service.
What a lot of people don't realize is that Starship Troopers (the movie) was made by someone who didn't understand the book in the same way that you don't. Most importantly, like most of the wide varieties of societies in Heinlein's fiction, the main society at the center of Starship Troopers was not Heinlein's "ideal society".
(Neither was the main society in Stranger in a Strange Land, the cult/subculture contrasted against the main society in the same book, the revolutionary society on the Moon in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, or, really, any of his other societies. Many of them were vehicles for portraying particular ideas he found interesting, overlooked, or potentially dangerous in current socieities.)
The book was about Heinlein's ideal society, while the movie was about tearing it apart by pointing out everything that could go wrong with his society.
No, the book was about making you think about things. The movie was ridiculous, broad-brush, thoughtless trash.
It seems like such an "off" movie precisely because it's supposed to give you that feeling that something is wrong with their way of life.
No, it seems like an off movie because the director skimmed the book, noted that there was a culture with a strong role for the military featured in it, from essentially that alone connected it Nazi Germany, and decided to make a film taking the title of the book, no real plot or characters, and the novel moral message "Nazis are bad, even in space."
It's a piece of crap that fails as entertainment, social commentary, morality play, or parody of the book.
The problem with these kinds of things is that if even one little glitch happens like this, the user gets stuck and then usually gives up and goes back to Windows. It has to be perfect. It has to be flawless. Or else it won't attract brand new users.
Windows Vista and MacOS X aren't flawless. To attract new users, it needs a compelling reason to switch, or to get into a position to be people's introduction to computing without giving them a compelling reason to switch away from it.
The second is unlikely on its own without someone giving away a bunch of Linux-powered PCs. So, its the killer app that is needed, not a flawless experience (you need a good enough experience, given the competition, or people won't stick, but "good enough" and "flawless" aren't the same.)
I would have said lack of universality if that's what I meant. I also think it's unreasonable to think that one language can do everything but I never said otherwise.
You did say that no FP language has focussed on doing everything a functional programming language should do. That's the statement I was referring to. There are many things one might imagine functional languages should do, and some of them conflict.
It has always been viable but no one has put the pieces together well enough to make developers actually want to use them (outside of academia).
Erlang was developed in private industry, IIRC, for telephone switching, and best as I know that remains a major use, if not the major use, for it—since being released, its been adopted for use by communications carriers other than Ericsson, where it was invented. Functional programming features are, outside of academia, being bolted on to newer versions of popular, widely-used OO programming languages (e.g., Java), and are central to the design of other popular languages (e.g., Ruby).
C is an example of a language that put things together well enough to take off in its respective arena.
Great. So are R, Mathematica, and Erlang, among other functional languages: each has taken off in its own respective arena. Its just that C's "arena" is systems programming, which is rather fundamental to any computing system, whereas the "arena" for FP languages tends to generally be more narrow.
Now, as certain FP languages have some attractive features for concurrency, and new applications of those are seen, the "arena" for FP languages, and the demands placed on them, may certainly evolve. And, certainly, the abundance of multi-core processors now likely changes the implementation considerations in concurrent languages (functional or not), and implementation design, if not language design, will certainly respond to that.
Individual languages focus on certain things but none of them try to be everything a functional language should.
That's actually the opposite of lack of focus, rather, its lack of universality. But then, again, I think its as unreasonable to think that an FP language should be the one tool for every job as to think that about anything else.
It also shouldn't be surprising that a capacity that is only now just becoming common and viable as a target doesn't have a lot of mature support for it yet, either.
And just how many families are going to give up that unnecessary second income?
What unnecessary second income? Improvement in material condition is a natural human drive, as much as a need as any other. But with stagnant wages, most of the increases in household income in the US for the last several decades have come through increased hours of work, particularly, more and more two parent families with more and more in near parity, not a primary breadwinner and a substantially lesser income. This has happened because the vast increases in productivity have largely driven increased returns to major holders of capital, and very little to people who work for a living.
If people could both secure material progress for their families (including their children) and spend more time with their children, by and large I suspect they would. The structure of our econony, driven by policy choices essentially purchased by the narrow class benefited by them, is what stops them from having that ability.
No, actually, reasoning about the meaning of laws so that they can be applied, and resolving conflicts between laws where they conflict, is precisely the job of a judge.
I'm sure they've thought through 99.9% of the problems the experts on this board are suggesting.
I'm sure they have. And I'm sure they've decided to not deal with 75% of them because doing so would increase cost, but failing to do so won't affect sales all that much until there is a competitor that uses the same technique but addresses them better, and they are quite willing to address them one at a time until then in "new, improved" models.
First, the comparison is invalid, even if your complexity claim is true (I actually think modern inks are in some ways "more complex" than gasoline), since you are paying also for the cartridge, not just the ink. But, anyway, it doesn't matter, since ink and gasoline aren't direct substitutes for each other.
About 5 times as much ink for about the same price as current ink would be enough to make inkjet's cost per page competitive with consumer color laser printers, where now, while the printers are far more expensive, toner costs per page are notably less than ink costs per page (even though toner costs per cartridge are far greater, typically).
Biology may (one would imagine, with enough development, almost certainly does) hold answers to how we, in fact, acquire and follow particular moral systems,
Philosophy addresses what belief systems it would be best for us to follow and acquire, not how we acquire and follow them.
People pretending there is a conflict are either trying to fake up controversy to sell books, to advance an agenda in some petty personal academic "my field is better than yours" conflict. The two fields don't address the same questions.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. In fact, I was thinking that, brand names aside, the marketing-speak in the summary sounded exactly like the marketing-speak for the Starbridge systems FPGA-based "hypercomputers" when they were announced in the mid-late 1990s.
By "on the road" I -meant- the production hybrid in actual use.
Production hyrbids in actual use get far more than 3mpg. You claimed that 300mpg was 100 times the most advanced hybrid on the road. 300/100 = 3. You are way, way wrong.
Some will get slightly better then 30 and some slightly less. The 40mpg rating is not seen in normal urban driving.
The "official" rating of a Prius under the old system was 55mpg combined, 60mpg city, 50mpg highway; its 48 city, 45 highway under the system adopted this year. The Prius owners I've known report that they tend to get in the mid-40s to mid-50s in normal operation. Where you get either 30mpg in actual use or a 40mpg rating I don't know. Even were you correct on those numbers, why you think 300mpg is 100 times 30mpg, I also don't know.
Either way, you are picking nits and avoiding my point about the physics of moving mass.
Pointing out that a claim of a difference of "orders of magnitude" and "100 times" is ludicrously overstated when the actual difference is closer to 5 times is not "picking nits".
Three or four -times- the efficiency is a -huge- claim
3 to 4 times the fuel economy (or equivalent, for a non-gasoline engine) is not necessarily 3-4 efficiency.
And not only that, the difference is that Orwell was warning against Government. This is the corporate sector,
A "corporation" is an entity with no natural existence created by and granted special privileges through law (i.e., by the government).
The myth that the "corporate sector" is somehow not a product of government but simply free private individuals doing their own thing shows a deep misunderstanding of what a corporation fundamentally is.
The reason this will not work is because businesses don't want to share information.
The semantic web does not rely on businesses wanting to share information.
It does rely on people wanting to make claims about resources, and people wanting to know what other people are claiming resources. Not that "people" may include, but is not limited to, "businesses".
Clearly 300 mpg is "only" one hundred times what is normally achieved with the most advanced hybrid system on the road.
The most advanced hybrid systems on the road get 3mpg?
No, 300mpg is about 4 times the best economy of a production non-hybrid gasoline vehicle. Not 100 times the "most advanced hybrid system".
It would be impossible to trust the semantic mark up in a document unless you could actually process the document and understand it.
A major point of the semantic web is that semantic markup about a resource can be provided anywhere else on the (semantic) web. You may not trust the markup in an unknown document about which you know nothing, but you may be able to trust the markup about that documented provided by a trusted source. And, if you apply some rules for delegating trust, you may automatically provide a degree of trust the the semantic markup in a document that a source that you explicitly have given a degree of trust asserts is trustworthy.
Trust is certainly a problem with the Semantic Web (and the regular web, and email, and lots of other things on the internet). But its not an intractable problem, and indeed its a problem that the Semantic Web itself provides a framework for addressing.
The semantic web is asking the marketplace to state relations in an unbiased fashion
I don't think it really is. Its certainly asking people to make claims about resources, but those claims themselves are resources that may be the subject of metadata making claims about those claims. How people (or automated systems) treat particular claims on the Semantic Web can certainly depend on claims made about those claims by particular other sources of metadata. Trust is an issue, sure, but the Semantic Web itself also provides the framework on which to build a distributed system for resolving issues of trust.
But in the Real World, any online system that is used by a large enough number of people will eventually become attractive for spammers and scammers to defile and twist to their own purposes.
Sure, but the Semantic Web also enables the kind of metametadata that enables automatically ignoring metadata from sources that your circle of trust (has designated as "spammers" or "scammers"), provided that you also have an accountability/trust mechanism, like relying on signed metadata.
But, really, lots of problems with utility on the internet call out for more use of accountability/trust mechanisms, so I expect that what is mostly needed for the Semantic Web to succeed is what is needed for the web (and email, and...) to survive and remain valuable under the ever-increasing flood of scammers and spammers.
All the current meta-tag abusers will dilute the Semantic Web as soon as it is profitable to do so.
This is a good point, and one reason that for the Semantic Web to go anywhere, trust and accountability are going to need to be front and center. Not that these are particularly hard problems, in fact the tools needed are widely available.
Essentially, the Semantic Web asks users to explicitly state relations between concepts and ideas to make up for our current lack of an AI capable of discerning such things for itself from natural human language.
Well, no, it doesn't.
While that may be a practical necessity with most existing tools (just as in the earliest days of the web, end-users hand-coding HTML was a practical necessity), what the Semantic Web is about is standardized ways of exchanging such descriptions, just as what the plain-old-web is about is standardized vocabulary and protocol for exchanging hypertext.
They don't claim a reduction in pollution, they claim no pollution.
They claim running the car produces no pollution, which is correct.
Filling the tank produces no necessary pollution, but will practically create pollution based on the power generating mix of whatever system is used to provide energy to compress the air to fill the tank. If that's done with wind, solar, hydro, tidal, and/or geothermal power, that's "no pollution". If its those plus nuclear, its still no greenhouse gases.
You would not -believe- the hostility I got in a local news forum when I suggested that the claims for 100 mpg and up for plug in hybrids needed some thought.
Well, did you have any evidence to back up that suggestion? Because the 100mpg and up numbers for plug-in hybrids are practical results. Yes, they consider very particular use cases, OTOH, they aren't particularly unrealistic use cases.
We need to actually improve transportation.
Yes, and this system actually improves transportation. What's your problem?
Delusions about cars that don't pollute and get orders of magnitude higher efficiency then anything else on the planet aren't going to get that improvement.
300mpg does not imply orders of magnitude higher efficiency than anything else on the planet. Conventional, non-hybrid, mass market gasoline cars with mileage in the 40+mpg range are not unheard of, and 300mpg is about a factor of 7 improvement over them, less than one order of magnitude. The various hybrid, fuel cell, and natural gas (gasoline-equivalent for the last two) prototypes and variants of the EV1 had fuel economy in the 60-100mpg range, 300mpg would be a factor of around 3-5 improvement over that. The Volkswagen Lupo 3L had a fuel economy of 78mpg, 300mpg would be about a factor of 4 improvement over that.
So can the "orders of magnitude" hyperbole. The improvements being claimed are far more modest than that.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think Sci-Fi is going to do it; despite the name, I don't think cerebral scifi making complex social commentary is really the kind of thing that appeals to the demographic they are really trying to target.
Might have some luck with HBO or Showtime. Certainly, it seems to me that more cerebral, social commentary, involved sci-fi would appeal to the same people that are targetted by some of their original offerings, particularly HBO's Rome. Plus, I think that that kind of scifi works better when you don't have to write it for a natural break every 15 minutes.
I find that rather uncompelling. It might have encouraged Hollywood to fund the other kind of scifi with big budgets, but it didn't stop Hollywood from funding scifi that was aimed more at commentary on society and the human condition. Minority Report? Contact (yes, it was less than expertly executed, but it was a scifi-as-social-commentary work, adapted from such a work of literary fiction, and funded by Hollywood. That the product may have been less than stellar is tangential to the argument TFA advances.)? Heck, several of the Star Trek films? (Yes, not at all hard scifi — but "hard scifi" isn't required for a work to be designed as a lens for the human condition.)
Now, what it may have done is destroyed Hollywood's desire to fund scifi films that weren't visually appealing whether or not they were social commentary; it certainly may have, through its effective (for the time) use of special effects raised the bar in that regard. But I don't think it stopped Hollywood from funding scifi as commentary on the human condition.
What a lot of people don't realize is that Starship Troopers (the movie) was made by someone who didn't understand the book in the same way that you don't. Most importantly, like most of the wide varieties of societies in Heinlein's fiction, the main society at the center of Starship Troopers was not Heinlein's "ideal society".
(Neither was the main society in Stranger in a Strange Land, the cult/subculture contrasted against the main society in the same book, the revolutionary society on the Moon in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, or, really, any of his other societies. Many of them were vehicles for portraying particular ideas he found interesting, overlooked, or potentially dangerous in current socieities.)
No, the book was about making you think about things. The movie was ridiculous, broad-brush, thoughtless trash.
No, it seems like an off movie because the director skimmed the book, noted that there was a culture with a strong role for the military featured in it, from essentially that alone connected it Nazi Germany, and decided to make a film taking the title of the book, no real plot or characters, and the novel moral message "Nazis are bad, even in space."
It's a piece of crap that fails as entertainment, social commentary, morality play, or parody of the book.
Windows Vista and MacOS X aren't flawless. To attract new users, it needs a compelling reason to switch, or to get into a position to be people's introduction to computing without giving them a compelling reason to switch away from it.
The second is unlikely on its own without someone giving away a bunch of Linux-powered PCs. So, its the killer app that is needed, not a flawless experience (you need a good enough experience, given the competition, or people won't stick, but "good enough" and "flawless" aren't the same.)
So, Windows had the most "severe" vulnerabilities, and took longer to fix than RedHat, but is the "most secure"?
Um, WTF?
I didn't.
You did say that no FP language has focussed on doing everything a functional programming language should do. That's the statement I was referring to. There are many things one might imagine functional languages should do, and some of them conflict.
Erlang was developed in private industry, IIRC, for telephone switching, and best as I know that remains a major use, if not the major use, for it—since being released, its been adopted for use by communications carriers other than Ericsson, where it was invented. Functional programming features are, outside of academia, being bolted on to newer versions of popular, widely-used OO programming languages (e.g., Java), and are central to the design of other popular languages (e.g., Ruby).
Great. So are R, Mathematica, and Erlang, among other functional languages: each has taken off in its own respective arena. Its just that C's "arena" is systems programming, which is rather fundamental to any computing system, whereas the "arena" for FP languages tends to generally be more narrow.
Now, as certain FP languages have some attractive features for concurrency, and new applications of those are seen, the "arena" for FP languages, and the demands placed on them, may certainly evolve. And, certainly, the abundance of multi-core processors now likely changes the implementation considerations in concurrent languages (functional or not), and implementation design, if not language design, will certainly respond to that.
That's actually the opposite of lack of focus, rather, its lack of universality. But then, again, I think its as unreasonable to think that an FP language should be the one tool for every job as to think that about anything else.
It also shouldn't be surprising that a capacity that is only now just becoming common and viable as a target doesn't have a lot of mature support for it yet, either.
No, actually, reasoning about the meaning of laws so that they can be applied, and resolving conflicts between laws where they conflict, is precisely the job of a judge.
Presumably, the same security that prevents people from breaking into those servers that aren't originating on the U of Nebraska student network.
I'm sure they have. And I'm sure they've decided to not deal with 75% of them because doing so would increase cost, but failing to do so won't affect sales all that much until there is a competitor that uses the same technique but addresses them better, and they are quite willing to address them one at a time until then in "new, improved" models.
First, the comparison is invalid, even if your complexity claim is true (I actually think modern inks are in some ways "more complex" than gasoline), since you are paying also for the cartridge, not just the ink. But, anyway, it doesn't matter, since ink and gasoline aren't direct substitutes for each other.
About 5 times as much ink for about the same price as current ink would be enough to make inkjet's cost per page competitive with consumer color laser printers, where now, while the printers are far more expensive, toner costs per page are notably less than ink costs per page (even though toner costs per cartridge are far greater, typically).
Biology may (one would imagine, with enough development, almost certainly does) hold answers to how we, in fact, acquire and follow particular moral systems,
Philosophy addresses what belief systems it would be best for us to follow and acquire, not how we acquire and follow them.
People pretending there is a conflict are either trying to fake up controversy to sell books, to advance an agenda in some petty personal academic "my field is better than yours" conflict. The two fields don't address the same questions.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. In fact, I was thinking that, brand names aside, the marketing-speak in the summary sounded exactly like the marketing-speak for the Starbridge systems FPGA-based "hypercomputers" when they were announced in the mid-late 1990s.
Production hyrbids in actual use get far more than 3mpg. You claimed that 300mpg was 100 times the most advanced hybrid on the road. 300/100 = 3. You are way, way wrong.
The semantic web does not rely on businesses wanting to share information.
It does rely on people wanting to make claims about resources, and people wanting to know what other people are claiming resources. Not that "people" may include, but is not limited to, "businesses".
A major point of the semantic web is that semantic markup about a resource can be provided anywhere else on the (semantic) web. You may not trust the markup in an unknown document about which you know nothing, but you may be able to trust the markup about that documented provided by a trusted source. And, if you apply some rules for delegating trust, you may automatically provide a degree of trust the the semantic markup in a document that a source that you explicitly have given a degree of trust asserts is trustworthy.
Trust is certainly a problem with the Semantic Web (and the regular web, and email, and lots of other things on the internet). But its not an intractable problem, and indeed its a problem that the Semantic Web itself provides a framework for addressing.
I agree on this much.
I don't think it really is. Its certainly asking people to make claims about resources, but those claims themselves are resources that may be the subject of metadata making claims about those claims. How people (or automated systems) treat particular claims on the Semantic Web can certainly depend on claims made about those claims by particular other sources of metadata. Trust is an issue, sure, but the Semantic Web itself also provides the framework on which to build a distributed system for resolving issues of trust.
Sure, but the Semantic Web also enables the kind of metametadata that enables automatically ignoring metadata from sources that your circle of trust (has designated as "spammers" or "scammers"), provided that you also have an accountability/trust mechanism, like relying on signed metadata.
But, really, lots of problems with utility on the internet call out for more use of accountability/trust mechanisms, so I expect that what is mostly needed for the Semantic Web to succeed is what is needed for the web (and email, and
This is a good point, and one reason that for the Semantic Web to go anywhere, trust and accountability are going to need to be front and center. Not that these are particularly hard problems, in fact the tools needed are widely available.
Well, no, it doesn't.
While that may be a practical necessity with most existing tools (just as in the earliest days of the web, end-users hand-coding HTML was a practical necessity), what the Semantic Web is about is standardized ways of exchanging such descriptions, just as what the plain-old-web is about is standardized vocabulary and protocol for exchanging hypertext.
They claim running the car produces no pollution, which is correct.
Filling the tank produces no necessary pollution, but will practically create pollution based on the power generating mix of whatever system is used to provide energy to compress the air to fill the tank. If that's done with wind, solar, hydro, tidal, and/or geothermal power, that's "no pollution". If its those plus nuclear, its still no greenhouse gases.
Well, did you have any evidence to back up that suggestion? Because the 100mpg and up numbers for plug-in hybrids are practical results. Yes, they consider very particular use cases, OTOH, they aren't particularly unrealistic use cases.
Yes, and this system actually improves transportation. What's your problem?
300mpg does not imply orders of magnitude higher efficiency than anything else on the planet. Conventional, non-hybrid, mass market gasoline cars with mileage in the 40+mpg range are not unheard of, and 300mpg is about a factor of 7 improvement over them, less than one order of magnitude. The various hybrid, fuel cell, and natural gas (gasoline-equivalent for the last two) prototypes and variants of the EV1 had fuel economy in the 60-100mpg range, 300mpg would be a factor of around 3-5 improvement over that. The Volkswagen Lupo 3L had a fuel economy of 78mpg, 300mpg would be about a factor of 4 improvement over that.
So can the "orders of magnitude" hyperbole. The improvements being claimed are far more modest than that.