What makes you think that people in other countries are any better than the US? I wouldn't be so sure. Education someplace like Japan might be able to make people test better on science tests, but they actually seem considerably worse for understanding basic science, which is what literacy is about.
I think the US would stack up well against most other countries -- certainly the people who come to the US are an elite among their own countries, and are not representative, so you won't know by talking to people here. For all the flaws and compromises of our education system, the idea of a liberal arts education -- in high school as well as college -- has a greater following here than most other places. Lots of reformers (particularly among conservatives/capitalists) are essentially proposing a more vocationally-focused educational system, more like in other countries. The vocationally trained really don't need to know science -- an understanding of molecules is useful in very few professions.
I heard a test of basic scientific literacy about five years ago showed that literacy among Americans was about twice the percentage of Europeans, and three times Japanese. It was about basic things like what a molecule is, what DNA is, etc. I was quite surprised. (No country did that well -- I think the US was like 20%). Sadly I cannot find a reference -- make of this what you will. However, I would generally be suspicious of international comparisons based on formalized testing, and comparisons done in school -- the real judge of an education system is not what students know, but what adults who have finished schooling know. This reference was the best I could find -- A comparison of interest in science:
In the United States, Europe, and Canada, approximately 1 in 10 adults can be classified as attentive to science and technology policy; the proportion is smaller--about 7 percent--in Japan. The percentage classified as the "interested" public (for science and technology policy) is higher in the United States than it is in the other three sociopolitical systems. In 1995, it was 47 percent, compared with 33 percent in Europe (for 1992), 40 percent in Canada (1989), and 12 percent in Japan (1991). For all countries, there is a positive relationship between level of education and level of attentiveness (Miller, Pardo, and Niwa 1997).
Indeed -- AIDS is overblown in Africa, simply a disease of definition. This paper gives the WHO's definition:
The WHO's clinical-case definition for AIDS in Africa (adopted in 1985) is not based on an HIV test or T-cell counts but on the combined symptoms of chronic diarrhea, prolonged fever, 10 percent body weight loss in two months and a persistent cough, none of which are new or uncommon on the African continent.
Which is to say, AIDS in Africa is a total fraud. Mbeki was right when he criticized the "epidemic". To say that Africa is undergoing a very serious decay of health systems is entirely true -- the problem isn't a lack of AIDS drugs, but a lack of basic public health facilities -- clean water, mosquito and malaria control, hospital facilities, trained medical professionals, etc.
With the WHO's definition of AIDS it is scary if people were to actual receive the drug coctail based on that diagnosis (I don't know -- maybe they wouldn't). AZT kills people -- it is a very harmful drug, and if they didn't have something that looks like American AIDS before they start taking AZT, they will after.
I'm afraid this is one place where the activists have been a very negative influence. The attacks on Mbeki were intense and they totally ignored his reasons. IMHO, AIDS in non-risk populations hasn't, isn't, and won't be a serious health issue here or in Africa -- but people have formed their identity around the disease, and that makes it very hard for them to let go.
It's actually almost identical to C++ vtables. Nothing too bad about that. You assign each operation a number (an offset), and you load the code off the tape from that offset. You run the code in a conventional manner -- all in assembly at that time, I'm sure -- and you get a conventional result -- probably fetching or updating a record. When you start indexing the data, for instance, you change the code on the new indexed tapes, but the program doesn't have to be modified, and old tapes work fine. Kinda like microcode.
"The industry"? Writing software ain't porn. And OO ain't magic. And the tape-based filesystem in question was a long, long time ago -- obviously it isn't a very interesting idea now, or even by the time Lisp had been created.
And it's not even indirection. A form of indirection, I suppose, but so is following a pointer.
Smalltalk's problem is that it is too insular. It exists in a runtime environment that is pure and perfect, but does not play well with others. Maybe in these later years this would not be such an issue, because Smalltalk can talk across the wire as good as anyone, but if it's been good at talking to people far away for some time, it has been on bad terms with its neighbor from the beginning.
Although Alan Kay coined the term "object oriented" and documented many of its concepts, it is generally agreed that OOP was born in 1967 via the process simulation language "Simula-67".
I heard Alan Kay give a speach where he identified what he believed to be the first object-oriented programming to be by an unknown officer in the military (not OO programming language, but OO programming). It was a tape-based file system, where at well-known locations at the beginning of the tape was stored code to access data in other parts of the tape. So instead of accessing the tape based on a known structure, you accessed it through what were, in effect, methods.
Their might have been OO programming before then -- good ideas get implemented before people even know what they are implementing. Later on they might realize, or someone else might realize, and try to create a more conscious, formal understanding of what was going on. But big ideas like OO are never really just thought up.
To be Pure-OO, everything must be an object and derived from one single base type -- that is not the case in Java because of the primitives (int, byte, etc).
I don't think that's true at all -- OO can look very different while still being OO. SELF, a very OO system (and a predecessor to Java) had no classes -- you could use the class pattern, but the class was not fundamental the way it is in Smalltalk.
Lisp OO systems are even more different, as they have no methods, but they deal with base types just fine. Instead of methods they have functions, with overloading similar to C++ -- except, unlike C++, all type checking and dispatching is done at runtime, not compiletime. In fact, this isn't that much different from other OO systems -- they all boil down to calling a normal function, where that function is determined by the type of one or more of the arguments.
The problem with Java is that it is statically typed. Whether dynamicism beyond static typing is necessary for OO is less clear, but Smalltalk is more dynamic than Java in more ways than just typing -- it also makes things like proxy classes very easy (also used heavily in Objective C). But that's just cool, I don't know if it's necessarily OO.
Re:Military threats promote innovation
on
Space Wars
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· Score: 2
Military innovation in modern times has been kind of pathetic. I'm sure there's scientific advance that leaves the realm of the military, but a great deal of it is never used productively. It just wallows in secrecy until it is eventually reproduced in the larger world.
The problem isn't just that politicians listen to deep-pocket industry types because they give them money to get elected. They listen to deep-pocket industry types also because:
Their friends are deep-pocket industry types
They had jobs as deep-pocket industry types
They are still holding a job, or interest in a company, that coincides with the interest of deep-pocket industry types
When they stop being a politician, by losing an election or otherwise, they want to get a job and become a deep-pocket industry type, or maintain that status
perhaps another failing - other than scott - is that MOST linux users still think that free software means you don't have to pay money and would pirate loki games on the principle that everything should be free.
Really? I don't know why you would say that... do you have experience to that effect? Linux ideologues certainly wouldn't. Any serious gamer is likely to have a Windows partition anyway. Are you sure you aren't just making this up?
I don't buy it. I think he was fighting his own inner demons, driven by a passion that didn't leave room for messy regulations and protocol. He doesn't respect authority, but he does respect justice, which he deals out first-hand every day. He's a loose cannon, but he always finds the right man... at least until the courts get involved, and the all-too-common liberal DA's.
He's probably been suspended so many times his chief has lost count years ago, but when your backed into a corner and the bad guys are closing in, there's no one you'd more want to have on your side.
At least, that seems the most likely explanation to me. Unless he has a paper-shuffling side kick, who looks like a bore and is always telling him to shape up, but when regulations get in the way he gets in the way of the regulators. He can run circles around the chief and the mayor, but he got to confident... this time it seemed too easy, but those damn liberal book-store owners fouled it up. Next time he'll just have to break out the lock picks, papers be damned.
No, there is no hypocrisy here. The GPL does not impose any restrictions on viewing the software, which is itself a technical spec -- ditto the GFDL (the GPL equivalent for documentation). This license does not refer to MS software, it refers to a technical spec necessary to communicate with MS software.
Moderation on this comment has gone back and forth a bit -- for those who would moderate me down, I would be much more impressed if you could provide evidence (well, reference to evidence) that HIV causes AIDS. I'm open minded, I thought the HIV-detractors were crackpots too... but then I started noticing that no one responded to their criticisms with facts. The responses tend to be silence, ostracisms, and moral condemnations (that suggesting HIV doesn't cause AIDS is irresponsible). None of those have any place in science.
It is strange that not everyone with AIDS has HIV, and not everyone who has HIV seems to get AIDS, even after many years. Barring other evidence, this should lead one to think HIV does not cause AIDS. Other evidence doesn't seem to be forthcoming.
Basically, AIDS is just a disease of definition -- when you die of particular diseases, and happen to have HIV, you are declared to have died of AIDS.
In Africa you can die of TB, have HIV, and be declared to have died of AIDS. The AIDS epidemic in Africa is in fact just a horrible amount of traditional (and often curable) diseases -- it is indeed a tragedy and deserves a great amount of attention, but they need antibiotics, clean water, basic medical care, and mosquito control. They don't need AZT.
They've been talking about a 30%-50% HIV infection rate in Nigeria for 10, maybe 15 years. They should all be dead! They aren't. A lot of people are dead, but it's from all the same old reasons -- all the problems we, as a world and as a species, haven't been willing to attack since the 60s.
Access: Postgresql or mysql should more than meet your needs. There are nice GUI tools available for both.
There's nothing like Access as far as I can tell -- I'm under the impression StarOffice is now being packaged with such a program, but certainly no free/oss software.
MySQL and Postgres only implement a small part of Access, and the graphical frontends I've seen are very thin. The closest things I can think of might be some web-based frontends -- which have a lot of benefits, but also feature lousy data and have no WYSIWYG layout editor, among other limitations.
I just looked through old posts for a reference I had found at one time -- but it was only an inferrence, not a direct reference, and I couldn't even find it. I have yet to find a clear authority on how efficient electric distribution is -- like the simple number, how much electricity is produced at plants, and how much is ultimately consumed (in a productive way of course -- after all, it's all consumed somewhere).
In other people's posts I see wildly different numbers on how much is wasted -- 5%, 10%, 50%, 90%... but no one provides a reference, so I don't know who to believe.
1. Power loss over the lines. You lose over 10% of your electicity in the lines. Plus loss in transformers, etc.
Out of curiosity, do you have a reference for that? I've seen graphs that imply 2/3 (or 1/3?) of electricty produced is wasted -- though how much of that is because of excesive off-peak production or other factors, I don't know, and it wasn't entirely clear how to read the graph. I'm very curious what the real deal is.
Nobody seriously believes that our entire road system should be turned over to toll roads, with the obvious congestion and complication this would cause with every burrough, county, city, state and the federal government collecting payments every few miles.
Definately not. I find it amusing that here you recognize that governments inability to be efficient would cause delays and problems, but yet you still support the idea of govt getting involved in broadband.
It's not that governments are too inefficient to charge for roads and make a profit, it's that collecting tolls is inherently inefficient. No private company could provide a self-funding road system.
A small portion of routes could be converted to for-profit toll roads. But a few highways do not a road system make. The street out in front of our houses must be a publically maintained and owned facility -- they always has been, always will be.
Maybe every ubiquitous, distributed service doesn't need to be like roads. But there is a place for public facilities. Particularly in cases where there is a need for service that covers all people, not just people in profitable areas or who need a level of service that is most profitable.
Without some form of automated (and presumably secure) key exchange, you can't really send automatically encrypted email to someone anyway. You first have to get their public key, which should also imply that they can accept encrypted mail.
Now the truly modern approach would be a wall of ready entrees behind glass doors, where you insert coinage (or perhaps an electronic coinage) and retrieve your entree. Like a cafeteria, only better... less waiter-like intermediaries!
Or instead of a wall of compartments, the food can be on a conveyor belt -- popular in Sushi restaurants, no?
Of course, the more primitive Country Buffet has some powerful ideas as well -- self-service feeding! Sure, our grocer used to pick out our food for us too, and someone used to pump our gas, and someone still fetches our food... so inefficient.
A more exotic system might use a push-button, juke-box style menu at each table, and the entree is delivered via vacuum ducts beneath the floor! Or maybe we can pack the whole entree in a single pill! Reconstituted it would be just as good as the original, but in its original form provide an easy-to-pack dinner or lunch. More federal research dollars for this long-overdue idea, please!
Or wouldn't it be great to go to a restaurant where you picked your recipe and it was delivered in pretty little glass bowls all pre-measured and you cooked it yourself and the bowls were whisked away, just like on TV! Even better would be if, after placing the meal in the oven you could immediately remove it from another oven, using time-warping technology that apparently is prevalent in television studios across the world. I can be my own Julia Childs!
Retro schmetro... ambience is for luddites. This is the kind of innovation I want to invest in!
Not to be picky, but I bet you are testing startup time, which is mostly limited by disk speed, and disk speed has not increased by 500x in the last 5 years (unlike processor speed).
When someone first thinks about nuclear waste, one of the first reactions is, "why not just launch it into space?" I haven't happened to come upon the argument against it, but I imagine it goes like: sending stuff into space is far more expensive and polluting than people imagine.
But this would be perfect -- sure, you'd be making more nuclear waste, but you'd be sending it into space in the process! That's not hard to understand.
I think there is every reason to worry about dangers, though. Rockets do blow up (with current technology) and if they had radioactive materials onboard that would mean many, many deaths (mostly indirectly through increased cancer).
I imagine that nuclear rockets could be considerably safer than chemical rockets, since my vague impression is that they wouldn't be as explosive. But many of the standard ways that nuclear reactors are made safe -- mostly through containment of various sorts -- would be hard to do in a rocket.
I don't think games matter that much -- morally, philosophically, or economically. They are purely a luxury. A world in which there is an artificial scarcity of games is not that much worse than one where games are freely available.
It's nice if game companies give some things away -- infrastrutcure like SDL, for instance -- but in many ways they are incidental. Especially in the context of the advancement of the third world.
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I think the US would stack up well against most other countries -- certainly the people who come to the US are an elite among their own countries, and are not representative, so you won't know by talking to people here. For all the flaws and compromises of our education system, the idea of a liberal arts education -- in high school as well as college -- has a greater following here than most other places. Lots of reformers (particularly among conservatives/capitalists) are essentially proposing a more vocationally-focused educational system, more like in other countries. The vocationally trained really don't need to know science -- an understanding of molecules is useful in very few professions.
I heard a test of basic scientific literacy about five years ago showed that literacy among Americans was about twice the percentage of Europeans, and three times Japanese. It was about basic things like what a molecule is, what DNA is, etc. I was quite surprised. (No country did that well -- I think the US was like 20%). Sadly I cannot find a reference -- make of this what you will. However, I would generally be suspicious of international comparisons based on formalized testing, and comparisons done in school -- the real judge of an education system is not what students know, but what adults who have finished schooling know. This reference was the best I could find -- A comparison of interest in science:
With the WHO's definition of AIDS it is scary if people were to actual receive the drug coctail based on that diagnosis (I don't know -- maybe they wouldn't). AZT kills people -- it is a very harmful drug, and if they didn't have something that looks like American AIDS before they start taking AZT, they will after.
I'm afraid this is one place where the activists have been a very negative influence. The attacks on Mbeki were intense and they totally ignored his reasons. IMHO, AIDS in non-risk populations hasn't, isn't, and won't be a serious health issue here or in Africa -- but people have formed their identity around the disease, and that makes it very hard for them to let go.
It's actually almost identical to C++ vtables. Nothing too bad about that. You assign each operation a number (an offset), and you load the code off the tape from that offset. You run the code in a conventional manner -- all in assembly at that time, I'm sure -- and you get a conventional result -- probably fetching or updating a record. When you start indexing the data, for instance, you change the code on the new indexed tapes, but the program doesn't have to be modified, and old tapes work fine. Kinda like microcode.
And it's not even indirection. A form of indirection, I suppose, but so is following a pointer.
Smalltalk's problem is that it is too insular. It exists in a runtime environment that is pure and perfect, but does not play well with others. Maybe in these later years this would not be such an issue, because Smalltalk can talk across the wire as good as anyone, but if it's been good at talking to people far away for some time, it has been on bad terms with its neighbor from the beginning.
Their might have been OO programming before then -- good ideas get implemented before people even know what they are implementing. Later on they might realize, or someone else might realize, and try to create a more conscious, formal understanding of what was going on. But big ideas like OO are never really just thought up.
Lisp OO systems are even more different, as they have no methods, but they deal with base types just fine. Instead of methods they have functions, with overloading similar to C++ -- except, unlike C++, all type checking and dispatching is done at runtime, not compiletime. In fact, this isn't that much different from other OO systems -- they all boil down to calling a normal function, where that function is determined by the type of one or more of the arguments.
The problem with Java is that it is statically typed. Whether dynamicism beyond static typing is necessary for OO is less clear, but Smalltalk is more dynamic than Java in more ways than just typing -- it also makes things like proxy classes very easy (also used heavily in Objective C). But that's just cool, I don't know if it's necessarily OO.
Military innovation in modern times has been kind of pathetic. I'm sure there's scientific advance that leaves the realm of the military, but a great deal of it is never used productively. It just wallows in secrecy until it is eventually reproduced in the larger world.
I'm not saying that Linuxers aren't reluctant to pay for things, but rather that I don't think they pirated Loki games to a significant degree.
He's probably been suspended so many times his chief has lost count years ago, but when your backed into a corner and the bad guys are closing in, there's no one you'd more want to have on your side.
At least, that seems the most likely explanation to me. Unless he has a paper-shuffling side kick, who looks like a bore and is always telling him to shape up, but when regulations get in the way he gets in the way of the regulators. He can run circles around the chief and the mayor, but he got to confident... this time it seemed too easy, but those damn liberal book-store owners fouled it up. Next time he'll just have to break out the lock picks, papers be damned.
Moderation on this comment has gone back and forth a bit -- for those who would moderate me down, I would be much more impressed if you could provide evidence (well, reference to evidence) that HIV causes AIDS. I'm open minded, I thought the HIV-detractors were crackpots too... but then I started noticing that no one responded to their criticisms with facts. The responses tend to be silence, ostracisms, and moral condemnations (that suggesting HIV doesn't cause AIDS is irresponsible). None of those have any place in science.
It is strange that not everyone with AIDS has HIV, and not everyone who has HIV seems to get AIDS, even after many years. Barring other evidence, this should lead one to think HIV does not cause AIDS. Other evidence doesn't seem to be forthcoming.
Basically, AIDS is just a disease of definition -- when you die of particular diseases, and happen to have HIV, you are declared to have died of AIDS. In Africa you can die of TB, have HIV, and be declared to have died of AIDS. The AIDS epidemic in Africa is in fact just a horrible amount of traditional (and often curable) diseases -- it is indeed a tragedy and deserves a great amount of attention, but they need antibiotics, clean water, basic medical care, and mosquito control. They don't need AZT.
They've been talking about a 30%-50% HIV infection rate in Nigeria for 10, maybe 15 years. They should all be dead! They aren't. A lot of people are dead, but it's from all the same old reasons -- all the problems we, as a world and as a species, haven't been willing to attack since the 60s.
MySQL and Postgres only implement a small part of Access, and the graphical frontends I've seen are very thin. The closest things I can think of might be some web-based frontends -- which have a lot of benefits, but also feature lousy data and have no WYSIWYG layout editor, among other limitations.
In other people's posts I see wildly different numbers on how much is wasted -- 5%, 10%, 50%, 90%... but no one provides a reference, so I don't know who to believe.
A small portion of routes could be converted to for-profit toll roads. But a few highways do not a road system make. The street out in front of our houses must be a publically maintained and owned facility -- they always has been, always will be.
Maybe every ubiquitous, distributed service doesn't need to be like roads. But there is a place for public facilities. Particularly in cases where there is a need for service that covers all people, not just people in profitable areas or who need a level of service that is most profitable.
Now the truly modern approach would be a wall of ready entrees behind glass doors, where you insert coinage (or perhaps an electronic coinage) and retrieve your entree. Like a cafeteria, only better... less waiter-like intermediaries!
Or instead of a wall of compartments, the food can be on a conveyor belt -- popular in Sushi restaurants, no?
Of course, the more primitive Country Buffet has some powerful ideas as well -- self-service feeding! Sure, our grocer used to pick out our food for us too, and someone used to pump our gas, and someone still fetches our food... so inefficient.
A more exotic system might use a push-button, juke-box style menu at each table, and the entree is delivered via vacuum ducts beneath the floor! Or maybe we can pack the whole entree in a single pill! Reconstituted it would be just as good as the original, but in its original form provide an easy-to-pack dinner or lunch. More federal research dollars for this long-overdue idea, please!
Or wouldn't it be great to go to a restaurant where you picked your recipe and it was delivered in pretty little glass bowls all pre-measured and you cooked it yourself and the bowls were whisked away, just like on TV! Even better would be if, after placing the meal in the oven you could immediately remove it from another oven, using time-warping technology that apparently is prevalent in television studios across the world. I can be my own Julia Childs!
Retro schmetro... ambience is for luddites. This is the kind of innovation I want to invest in!
Not to be picky, but I bet you are testing startup time, which is mostly limited by disk speed, and disk speed has not increased by 500x in the last 5 years (unlike processor speed).
But this would be perfect -- sure, you'd be making more nuclear waste, but you'd be sending it into space in the process! That's not hard to understand.
I think there is every reason to worry about dangers, though. Rockets do blow up (with current technology) and if they had radioactive materials onboard that would mean many, many deaths (mostly indirectly through increased cancer).
I imagine that nuclear rockets could be considerably safer than chemical rockets, since my vague impression is that they wouldn't be as explosive. But many of the standard ways that nuclear reactors are made safe -- mostly through containment of various sorts -- would be hard to do in a rocket.
It's nice if game companies give some things away -- infrastrutcure like SDL, for instance -- but in many ways they are incidental. Especially in the context of the advancement of the third world.