But their system seemed to be a decent one with well enough memory to run Firefox without any swapping to disk. Unless the benchmarks are doing things that cause Firefox to use an inordinate amount of memory, I don't see how this PGO would make a difference. For instance on a machine with no writeable disk or swap, it shouldn't make a difference at all.
Reading using reading glasses may constitute making a derivative work, since the light reflected from the pages is altered on it's way to the eye. Hell, even the eye's normal focusing might be illegal since the eye's lens alters the text before it shines on the retina. Not to mention the thoughts the words might insprire. In the same vein, mirrors that might reflect the light from the page should be banned.
Hahah. You know that this is going to seriously distort the Windows user experience. Apps will create their own internal windowing systems etc to get around this. Even people who pay microsoft's new tax for unlimited windows will find their apps distorted by it. Hahahahahaha!
And the last time I looked at a windows task manager I saw MANY more than 2 or 3 processes listed. If each of those counts as an 'app' then this is dead in the water. This must be tied to the windows themselves. Only a certain number of apps get the privelege of opening a window or something, with other apps unable to make a window. Imagine the future. You have a browser with one window that has no border, and it does everything. It opens and you see your desktop looking exactly like the MS windows desktop with all your files. All the apps you run are written in javascript or flash. Microsoft decides to cut the number of open windows to one since nobody uses their window manager anymore. Then they decide to make the browser IE. Then they decide to charge extra for the ability to use a keyboard, so most people just use the handy dandy remote control.
In college we had a course that all math majors were required to take that was really about how to prove stuff. It was stuff like proving that there are really more reals than integers etc, or simple proofs about even numbers and odd numbers etc. Functions, relations, mapping, one to one and onto etc. It wasn't algebra, it was real basic stuff, and nothing more than arithmetic was required for any of the proofs because that was what the course really was. How to prove stuff. ( It also gave everyone the same basic library of ideas to use when proving stuff, and cleared up MANY common misconceptions about infinity and other things that people come with. ) I think much of this would be good for highschool students.
The added weirdness of geometry ( the traditional venue in which to teach proving confused the hell out of me, so I did very badly in ( flunked ) geometry in school. The T - table and the pictures obscured the central notion of 'what sort of argument constitutes a proof' which is supposed to be central to what they teach in HS geometry. With simple arithmetic proofs, the proofs look more like english prose, which I think is helpful to get the central idea across.
I wonder if they could somehow combine this with web of trust. By default the site would allow scripts, but if it were gawd-awful it would earn blacklisting for the whole subscribing community.
When you sue someone you have this annoying thing called the law to contend with. By intimidating ISPs into cutting service, they don't need to be limited by the law anymore in their quest to persecute pirates.
One big problem the RIAA has had is that they can only sue file sharers, not the downloaders. Why can't you persecute downloaders? Because downloading a song you own is LEGAL, and there is no way to know if a downloader owns the song. If it ever came to a lawsuit, where the RIAA was suing Joe Downloader for downloading song X illegally, Joe Downloader could just go buy a copy of song X and say 'here, I already owned that song, so go piss off.'
Really, if you only leached, there was no way you were going to get caught.
Although file sharers *were* vulnerable for the act of 'sharing' ( as long as the RIAA had all their ducks in a row such as hiring a *licensed* private investigator to do the downloading ), there were always enough newbies that it was a wack-a-mole game where the moles far outnumbered the whackers.
It's interesting to note that no P2P file sharing system with cryptographic protection for file sharers has come to prominence despite the RIAA's best efforts. If the moles ever stopped winning overwhelmingly, then there would have been sufficient demand. Such demand has as yet never materialized proving that the RIAA's lawsuits had negligable effect. They never succeded in removing enough content to cause downloaders and sharers to move where they would be protected from the RIAA.
So what is the RIAA up to? By dealing with ISPs they no longer have the law to contend with. Instead of the judgement of a judge, they need only the judgement by an ISP that harassing a customer is cheaper/less hassle than pissing off the RIAA.
And the judgement of an ISP can be just as effective at preventing sharing / downloading as that of a judge, especially if the ISP is the only broadband provider in the area.
Now the RIAA can host file sharing servers, sharing it's own files to entrap downloaders. Then notify the ISP that the IP was downloading illegally. If the RIAA did that and tried to sue, the sued could say that since the RIAA gave me the song, that must constitute permission for me to have it.
All the legal problems they had going after file sharers go away too when it's only an ISP and not a judge they are dealing with. That ISPs don't like P2P that much either means it's likely to be a sympathetic judge.
The RIAA is only concerned about their content. I don't think this will affect other uses of P2P such as downloading linux distros via bittorrent.
But this may finally drive illegal filesharing underground.
No, we are wasting much of our production
capacity on stupid, tree-hugging,
already-shown-to-be-a-wrong-solution "technology"
like ethanol production from corn.
I don't think it's the tree huggers that are pushing ethanol from corn. Ethanol from corn isn't even good for the environment, and the tree-huggers have figured this out by now. The real driver for the ethanol from corn stupidity is pork barrel politics. Corn producing states push for subsidies and incentives to support the price of corn produced by their constituencies.
Ya know, it's probably nothing special about marijuana per-se. Maybe it's just that causing your brain to malfunction with drugs, and make connections it would otherwise ( rightly ) be tuned not to make, exercises connections that don't get used much since the learning they embody is 'over and done with' and has been for years.
Your brain expects a connection to remain viable permanently. But under assault from plaques etc in the case of alzheimers, often connections break down unexpectedly. Causing them to be revisited periodically (when high) because a chemical makes the connection once again interesting for a time, may allow the brain to find and correct errors that have cropped up before too much damage is done. In the case of Alzheimer's and certain drugs used for pleasure, the damage if any done by the drug may be outweighed by the brain fscking itself ( metaphorically ) more often.
I've read that the following have beneficial effects for alzheimers: Caffiene, Marijuana, Nicotine. What else might cause a fsck? It might be interesting to look for beneficial effects associated with:
Psilocybin, Opiates, Antidepressants etc.
Antidepressants seem the most likely to be relatively harmless, yet trigger the brain's error detection and correction mechanism. Antidepressants basically work by messing things up. Soon the brain copes, and then they stop working, and the meds must be switched. The new med works slightly differently, so the brain can't cope immediately. Maybe exposing the brain to substances that cause different kinds of errors could trigger different sorts of fscking mechanisms to repair different sorts of errors that might crop up in alzheimers.
I'm OK with EHR as long as the patient gets to redact what is stored. Sure, redacting things might be dumb, but it should be one's right nonetheless.
In fact, Ideally there would be one master private medical record the patient has the option to redact and keeping any other medical records would be illegal.
All this space time warping stuff is Greek to me, but there is one thing I've always wondered: How far is a minute?
That is, suppose you warped spacetime so that north became timelike, and time became northlike. How far (in inches) would you have to walk northward ( er, timeward ) to go forward one minute?
I remember when I was a kid, and this movie came out, there were SO many playground rumors that hoverboards were real, and coming out 'this Christmas'. I half believed them then.
If they are ever denied a job because a google search turned up child porn of them, then they can just blackmail their prospective employer into hiring them and paying them more than they are worth for doing no work. After all if you know your boss downloaded child porn then that would be quite a useful bit of info indeed...
Lemme preface that I am not an expert at logic programming but it is what intrigues me at the moment. I'll try and explain why it intrigues me, and why I want to learn more. I'm not saying the following is true, but I will try to convey why I am curious about it.
Web services are potentially distributed over many places. The coolest stuff I've seen with regards to distributed programming is with logic programming languages.
Isn't this how you want to program and understand your web services, opening up a public interface, and wrapping interfaces to other's open services via wrappers when needed using this paradigm?
Logic programming handles dependencies well. I need a, b and c to do x maps to x:- a, b, c . A language like Mozart/OZ that lets you customize the search strategy and handles concurrency should allow you to deal with getting a, b and c from web services around the internet. Most of the time you aren't going to infinite loop, and especially in the areas where SQL is used, you aren't because your data is finite. And calling a REST web service that can be cached and has stateless connection semantics means you should be able to attempt to unify with it ( or its wrapper ) efficiently.
Most software from desktop software to server software will probably just be databases of data forward chained to other things like what is displayed on the screen in a concurrent manner. All software is going to be database software. And prolog et al are better than the current language of choice SQL. And with all the dependencies in software, isn't it nice that:- means 'depends on'? Maybe life is just one big makefile...;-P
And though I don't pretend to understand linear logic, it is the logic of resources. So while you can use the fact that 1 = 3 - 2 as many times as you want in a proof, you can't spend the dollar you have in your pocket more than once to attain a goal. You can have a dollar and can use it to buy a pepsi and you can use it to buy a coke, but you can't use it to buy a pepsi and a coke. Doesn't this seem like it would map well to payment for web services? Or to novel search strategies? I dunno. Also if you read the Pi/Calculus/nomadic pict/join calculus (that last one is cool) pages somewhere it says that there is a correspondence between these and linear logic, though I forgot what it was supposed to be...
Side note: I want to experiment also with implementing protocols such as HTTP with DCGs or something like it. I want to be able to hook into every possible place without replacing any code. I think logic programming can do everything aspect oriented programming can but better and more understandably. Maybe this is a bad idea but maybe not.
Definately what you say is true about how replacing it with something that actually works would be the gift that keeps giving to Perl.
There are alot of crap perl modules on CPAN with the word SOAP in the title. What a pity, because they do so much damage. A typical perl coder used to glancing at CPAN to see if there is an module available tells his boss, "Yep we can do SOAP," confident in the general high quality of CPAN modules thus far encountered. Then after spending weeks trying to get something to work ( and learning SOAP itself ) he realizes that SOAP::Lite is crap, and so is everything else on CPAN with the word SOAP in the title. CPAN has been the source of almost invariably high quality modules for the whole career of that perl programmer, but now his project is late due to the time required to learn SOAP, and figure out that SOAP::Lite is crap, and the time spent looking for perl alternatives that don't exist, and the time spent trying to fix SOAP::Lite. This programmer doesn't have any free time left to reimplement SOAP::XXX because they are spending all their effort trying to keep their job.
And later when the programmer has some time, they have figured out that SOAP is crap anyway and REST is the way to go for web services. And maybe languages like Perl or Java or Ruby or Python or C# aren't the way of the future for this sort of thing anyway.
Maybe the future will be something more along the lines of Nomadic Pict, or Mozart/Oz or maybe some new experimental linear logic programming language seemingly a perfect fit for exchanging web resources over the internet.
Look at public radio in the US for an example of how a mix of funding sources can create something good and unbiased.
US public radio is sponsored by members who donate money, corporate sponsors, and the government. They don't seem to me to be beholden to any of them. Having a mix of funding sources means they don't have to worry as much about pissing off any one group, giving them the freedom to produce quality.
If wikipedia only needs 6 million once in a while, to continue, and it can earn even half of the 50 million per month for a lousy text ad, then it seems like a no-brainer to me. It's what to do with the excess money.
Some could go to an endowment for wikipedia so that it needn't HAVE to show text ads in the future. But the thing about money is that it tends to get spent. There will be other cool ideas for additions and expansions that will be funded by the excess, and these things will cost money to maintain. It would be a shame if the core coolness of wikipedia ended up funding a bunch of other not so useful crap to the point where it were truely corrupted by text ads and corporate interests.
It might also be a shame if wikipedia paid contributors, and the contributions of paid experts took precedence over the free contributions of unpaid experts, or if unpaid experts who contribute no longer felt that they needed to contribute since someone else would likely soon be paid to do it, and better than they have time to do. What gets added would be less driven by the voluntary contributers and more by some committee trying to implement a vision of what should go into an encyclopedia. Who the hell cares what SHOULD go into an encyclopedia. I want precisely the stuff that naturally DOES end up going into the WIKIpedia. Would wikipedia work as well as it does if the guidelines and policies and even standards were enforced by a crew of paid editors? Maybe what makes it so cool is in part due to them not being able to implement all their ideas. The mob is smarter than anyone's vision about what it wants.
One text ad won't damage wikipedia. Spending the excess, would generate a need to spend the excess and more. If the results couldn't pay for themselves, then the wikipedia foundation ( or whatever they call themselves ) might end up crapping up wikipedia to subsidize whatever they thought was 'good for us'.
Australia strikes me as fairly ham-handed in it's policies, not just internet related ones. Britain too. The citizens are not stupider than US citizens, but somehow their governments are.
Climbers should begin carrying a parachute. I envision a steerable sort. That way, when they summit, they need only open their parachute and steer themselves for a quick ride to base camp ( or another low-altitude location if winds are not favorable, they should carry an EPRB too ) before they get the disease.
Some may say parachute technology is for wusses, but it's extra weight for the sherpas to carry, so it does come with a penalty that makes it less wussy. And climbers don't seem to be averse to using other high tech gear such as O2 tanks, and Gore-Tex ( Probably Gore-Tex is passe nowadays, the pro-climbers prolly wear some new fadbric now. )
Modern fiat money has value because it is accepted for payment of taxes. In the same way a winning McDonald's monopoly coupon good for one small drink has value because McDonalds accepts them for payment in return for small sodas.
But the coupons need not be redeemed for small sodas at McDonalds immediately.I can spend my winning coupon on a small soda at McDonalds or I can trade it to my friend for a cigarette. I can do the same sort of thing with dollars or yen or euros or whatever.
Even if I may never have the need to pay taxes in Japan, I wouldn't worry about accepting yen in payment for an item. I will be able to find someone willing to trade something I do want, ( maybe dollars ) for the yen, perhaps a Japanese person with a lot of dollars who needs to pay their taxes in yen, but more probably just someone with dollars who wants to buy something that is being sold for yen.
Legal tender just means I can pay any debt, even one denominated in say porkbellies with the legal tender currency in an amount equivalent to the value of the porkbellies at the time the debt was paid. That could be one dollar per porkbelly or one billion dollars per porkbelly, depending on the relative market values of dollars and porkbellies. But I couldn't force a creditor to accept payment of my porkbelly debt in gold, or board-feet of lumber, or winning McDonalds monopoly coupons good for one small soda, or the currency of another country - only legal tender can be foisted on a creditor.
I think this system ( the one we have ) is superior to basing currency on work units, which like other goods are subject to fluxuations of value relative to other goods. In addition to the problem of deciding what a 'work unit' is ( is this piece work or are we paid hourly? ) the increase in productivity that is called progress, will, if it continues, increase the work units available year by year in a form of work unit inflation.
The current system is fiat money with fractional reserve banking. In the US, the required reserves are 1/10. The money multiplier is 10. The need for a lender of last resort has over the course of the 20th century slowly caused the complete abandonment of the gold standard, which in my opinion is a good thing. Why mine something hard to find like gold when paper does just as good? The alternatives to fractional reserve banking are Full Reserve banking and No-Reserve Banking
In full reserve banking depositors pay the bank to keep their deposits rather than paying interest on savings, and charge fees for services. Loans are not made out of deposited funds, but rather they are the funds of investors. Investors put their money into the bank's pool of loanable funds. The bank makes the loans charging a percentage of the repaid funds for the service of making the loan to the borrower, including the labor involved in finding an eligable borrower, and collecting payments. If the loan is not repaid, then the collateral if any is sold, and the remaining funds are returned to the investor. The loss, is to the investor, with the bank making money only for charging for the labor it provides.
Under Fractional Reserve banking, the loanable funds are the money multiplier (10) times the reserves. When there is a loss of 1 dollar the reserves are reduced by 1 dollar, which means the pool of loanable funds decreases by that dollar plus 9 more dollars, reducing liquidity in the economy ten times more than if the funds lost were lost by investors.
The internet bubble was about the same magnitude ( possibly a little smaller ) as the housing bubble. However the internet bubble was funded by investors, whereas the housing bubble was funded by banks. The internet bubble, when it burst, caused a mild economic downturn. The housing bubble is forcing governments around the world to pull out all the stops to avoid another 'Great Depression'.
It makes sense to me, not that my opinion matters, that a Pseudonymous person is inherently incapable of defamation.
If someone takes the trouble to use a Pseudonym, or post as Anonymous Coward, then they have no credibility, and so can not defame.
Claims by a pseudonym are similar to a statement like:
Fictional Character X said, "So and so blows goats for canned food."
While it may or may not be true that so and so in fact blows goats for canned food, someone hiding behind a pseudonym is not to be taken any more seriously than a fictional character. Or in other words, How is putting words into the mouth of a Pseudonym and different than putting words into the mouth of a Fictional character?
What they're doing is taking down eBay pages of consumers who try to sell their items ASSUMING that they are retailers in violation of their contracts.
Slashdot Mirror
As has been noted before, it's because there's less crap trying to invade your computer on linux.
Sanity is the most important of the three, and the rarest.
But their system seemed to be a decent one with well enough memory to run Firefox without any swapping to disk. Unless the benchmarks are doing things that cause Firefox to use an inordinate amount of memory, I don't see how this PGO would make a difference. For instance on a machine with no writeable disk or swap, it shouldn't make a difference at all.
Reading using reading glasses may constitute making a derivative work, since the light reflected from the pages is altered on it's way to the eye. Hell, even the eye's normal focusing might be illegal since the eye's lens alters the text before it shines on the retina. Not to mention the thoughts the words might insprire. In the same vein, mirrors that might reflect the light from the page should be banned.
Hahah. You know that this is going to seriously distort the Windows user experience. Apps will create their own internal windowing systems etc to get around this. Even people who pay microsoft's new tax for unlimited windows will find their apps distorted by it. Hahahahahaha!
And the last time I looked at a windows task manager I saw MANY more than 2 or 3 processes listed. If each of those counts as an 'app' then this is dead in the water. This must be tied to the windows themselves. Only a certain number of apps get the privelege of opening a window or something, with other apps unable to make a window. Imagine the future. You have a browser with one window that has no border, and it does everything. It opens and you see your desktop looking exactly like the MS windows desktop with all your files. All the apps you run are written in javascript or flash. Microsoft decides to cut the number of open windows to one since nobody uses their window manager anymore. Then they decide to make the browser IE. Then they decide to charge extra for the ability to use a keyboard, so most people just use the handy dandy remote control.
In college we had a course that all math majors were required to take that was really about how to prove stuff. It was stuff like proving that there are really more reals than integers etc, or simple proofs about even numbers and odd numbers etc. Functions, relations, mapping, one to one and onto etc. It wasn't algebra, it was real basic stuff, and nothing more than arithmetic was required for any of the proofs because that was what the course really was. How to prove stuff. ( It also gave everyone the same basic library of ideas to use when proving stuff, and cleared up MANY common misconceptions about infinity and other things that people come with. ) I think much of this would be good for highschool students.
The added weirdness of geometry ( the traditional venue in which to teach proving confused the hell out of me, so I did very badly in ( flunked ) geometry in school. The T - table and the pictures obscured the central notion of 'what sort of argument constitutes a proof' which is supposed to be central to what they teach in HS geometry. With simple arithmetic proofs, the proofs look more like english prose, which I think is helpful to get the central idea across.
I wonder if they could somehow combine this with web of trust. By default the site would allow scripts, but if it were gawd-awful it would earn blacklisting for the whole subscribing community.
After a while HIV becomes resistant to the drugs. Now HIV can evolve to be resistant to the rare human immunity to it. Yay. Now nobody is safe.
When you sue someone you have this annoying thing called the law to contend with. By intimidating ISPs into cutting service, they don't need to be limited by the law anymore in their quest to persecute pirates.
One big problem the RIAA has had is that they can only sue file sharers, not the downloaders. Why can't you persecute downloaders? Because downloading a song you own is LEGAL, and there is no way to know if a downloader owns the song. If it ever came to a lawsuit, where the RIAA was suing Joe Downloader for downloading song X illegally, Joe Downloader could just go buy a copy of song X and say 'here, I already owned that song, so go piss off.'
Really, if you only leached, there was no way you were going to get caught.
Although file sharers *were* vulnerable for the act of 'sharing' ( as long as the RIAA had all their ducks in a row such as hiring a *licensed* private investigator to do the downloading ), there were always enough newbies that it was a wack-a-mole game where the moles far outnumbered the whackers.
It's interesting to note that no P2P file sharing system with cryptographic protection for file sharers has come to prominence despite the RIAA's best efforts. If the moles ever stopped winning overwhelmingly, then there would have been sufficient demand. Such demand has as yet never materialized proving that the RIAA's lawsuits had negligable effect. They never succeded in removing enough content to cause downloaders and sharers to move where they would be protected from the RIAA.
So what is the RIAA up to? By dealing with ISPs they no longer have the law to contend with. Instead of the judgement of a judge, they need only the judgement by an ISP that harassing a customer is cheaper/less hassle than pissing off the RIAA.
And the judgement of an ISP can be just as effective at preventing sharing / downloading as that of a judge, especially if the ISP is the only broadband provider in the area.
Now the RIAA can host file sharing servers, sharing it's own files to entrap downloaders. Then notify the ISP that the IP was downloading illegally. If the RIAA did that and tried to sue, the sued could say that since the RIAA gave me the song, that must constitute permission for me to have it.
All the legal problems they had going after file sharers go away too when it's only an ISP and not a judge they are dealing with. That ISPs don't like P2P that much either means it's likely to be a sympathetic judge.
The RIAA is only concerned about their content. I don't think this will affect other uses of P2P such as downloading linux distros via bittorrent.
But this may finally drive illegal filesharing underground.
I don't think it's the tree huggers that are pushing ethanol from corn. Ethanol from corn isn't even good for the environment, and the tree-huggers have figured this out by now. The real driver for the ethanol from corn stupidity is pork barrel politics. Corn producing states push for subsidies and incentives to support the price of corn produced by their constituencies.
Ya know, it's probably nothing special about marijuana per-se. Maybe it's just that causing your brain to malfunction with drugs, and make connections it would otherwise ( rightly ) be tuned not to make, exercises connections that don't get used much since the learning they embody is 'over and done with' and has been for years.
Your brain expects a connection to remain viable permanently. But under assault from plaques etc in the case of alzheimers, often connections break down unexpectedly. Causing them to be revisited periodically (when high) because a chemical makes the connection once again interesting for a time, may allow the brain to find and correct errors that have cropped up before too much damage is done. In the case of Alzheimer's and certain drugs used for pleasure, the damage if any done by the drug may be outweighed by the brain fscking itself ( metaphorically ) more often.
I've read that the following have beneficial effects for alzheimers: Caffiene, Marijuana, Nicotine. What else might cause a fsck? It might be interesting to look for beneficial effects associated with:
Psilocybin, Opiates, Antidepressants etc.
Antidepressants seem the most likely to be relatively harmless, yet trigger the brain's error detection and correction mechanism. Antidepressants basically work by messing things up. Soon the brain copes, and then they stop working, and the meds must be switched. The new med works slightly differently, so the brain can't cope immediately. Maybe exposing the brain to substances that cause different kinds of errors could trigger different sorts of fscking mechanisms to repair different sorts of errors that might crop up in alzheimers.
Or maybe not.
I'm OK with EHR as long as the patient gets to redact what is stored. Sure, redacting things might be dumb, but it should be one's right nonetheless. In fact, Ideally there would be one master private medical record the patient has the option to redact and keeping any other medical records would be illegal.
That is, suppose you warped spacetime so that north became timelike, and time became northlike. How far (in inches) would you have to walk northward ( er, timeward ) to go forward one minute?
I remember when I was a kid, and this movie came out, there were SO many playground rumors that hoverboards were real, and coming out 'this Christmas'. I half believed them then.
If they are ever denied a job because a google search turned up child porn of them, then they can just blackmail their prospective employer into hiring them and paying them more than they are worth for doing no work. After all if you know your boss downloaded child porn then that would be quite a useful bit of info indeed...
Lemme preface that I am not an expert at logic programming but it is what intrigues me at the moment. I'll try and explain why it intrigues me, and why I want to learn more. I'm not saying the following is true, but I will try to convey why I am curious about it.
Web services are potentially distributed over many places. The coolest stuff I've seen with regards to distributed programming is with logic programming languages.
Forget openness for a minute and read this: http://www.mozart-oz.org/documentation/dstutorial/node2.html#chapter.distmodel
Isn't this how you want to program and understand your web services, opening up a public interface, and wrapping interfaces to other's open services via wrappers when needed using this paradigm?
Logic programming handles dependencies well. I need a, b and c to do x maps to x :- a, b, c . A language like Mozart/OZ that lets you customize the search strategy and handles concurrency should allow you to deal with getting a, b and c from web services around the internet. Most of the time you aren't going to infinite loop, and especially in the areas where SQL is used, you aren't because your data is finite. And calling a REST web service that can be cached and has stateless connection semantics means you should be able to attempt to unify with it ( or its wrapper ) efficiently.
Most software from desktop software to server software will probably just be databases of data forward chained to other things like what is displayed on the screen in a concurrent manner. All software is going to be database software. And prolog et al are better than the current language of choice SQL. And with all the dependencies in software, isn't it nice that :- means 'depends on'? Maybe life is just one big makefile... ;-P
And though I don't pretend to understand linear logic, it is the logic of resources. So while you can use the fact that 1 = 3 - 2 as many times as you want in a proof, you can't spend the dollar you have in your pocket more than once to attain a goal. You can have a dollar and can use it to buy a pepsi and you can use it to buy a coke, but you can't use it to buy a pepsi and a coke. Doesn't this seem like it would map well to payment for web services? Or to novel search strategies? I dunno. Also if you read the Pi/Calculus/nomadic pict/join calculus (that last one is cool) pages somewhere it says that there is a correspondence between these and linear logic, though I forgot what it was supposed to be...
Side note: I want to experiment also with implementing protocols such as HTTP with DCGs or something like it. I want to be able to hook into every possible place without replacing any code. I think logic programming can do everything aspect oriented programming can but better and more understandably. Maybe this is a bad idea but maybe not.
SOAP::Lite IS a sorry mess..
Definately what you say is true about how replacing it with something that actually works would be the gift that keeps giving to Perl.
There are alot of crap perl modules on CPAN with the word SOAP in the title. What a pity, because they do so much damage. A typical perl coder used to glancing at CPAN to see if there is an module available tells his boss, "Yep we can do SOAP," confident in the general high quality of CPAN modules thus far encountered. Then after spending weeks trying to get something to work ( and learning SOAP itself ) he realizes that SOAP::Lite is crap, and so is everything else on CPAN with the word SOAP in the title. CPAN has been the source of almost invariably high quality modules for the whole career of that perl programmer, but now his project is late due to the time required to learn SOAP, and figure out that SOAP::Lite is crap, and the time spent looking for perl alternatives that don't exist, and the time spent trying to fix SOAP::Lite. This programmer doesn't have any free time left to reimplement SOAP::XXX because they are spending all their effort trying to keep their job.
And later when the programmer has some time, they have figured out that SOAP is crap anyway and REST is the way to go for web services. And maybe languages like Perl or Java or Ruby or Python or C# aren't the way of the future for this sort of thing anyway.
Maybe the future will be something more along the lines of Nomadic Pict, or Mozart/Oz or maybe some new experimental linear logic programming language seemingly a perfect fit for exchanging web resources over the internet.
Not sure, I only spent about 2 minutes looking at the site.
Aw come on, when Yellowstone blows, we're all gonna have a BLAST!
Look at public radio in the US for an example of how a mix of funding sources can create something good and unbiased.
US public radio is sponsored by members who donate money, corporate sponsors, and the government. They don't seem to me to be beholden to any of them. Having a mix of funding sources means they don't have to worry as much about pissing off any one group, giving them the freedom to produce quality.
If wikipedia only needs 6 million once in a while, to continue, and it can earn even half of the 50 million per month for a lousy text ad, then it seems like a no-brainer to me. It's what to do with the excess money.
Some could go to an endowment for wikipedia so that it needn't HAVE to show text ads in the future. But the thing about money is that it tends to get spent. There will be other cool ideas for additions and expansions that will be funded by the excess, and these things will cost money to maintain. It would be a shame if the core coolness of wikipedia ended up funding a bunch of other not so useful crap to the point where it were truely corrupted by text ads and corporate interests.
It might also be a shame if wikipedia paid contributors, and the contributions of paid experts took precedence over the free contributions of unpaid experts, or if unpaid experts who contribute no longer felt that they needed to contribute since someone else would likely soon be paid to do it, and better than they have time to do. What gets added would be less driven by the voluntary contributers and more by some committee trying to implement a vision of what should go into an encyclopedia. Who the hell cares what SHOULD go into an encyclopedia. I want precisely the stuff that naturally DOES end up going into the WIKIpedia. Would wikipedia work as well as it does if the guidelines and policies and even standards were enforced by a crew of paid editors? Maybe what makes it so cool is in part due to them not being able to implement all their ideas. The mob is smarter than anyone's vision about what it wants.
One text ad won't damage wikipedia. Spending the excess, would generate a need to spend the excess and more. If the results couldn't pay for themselves, then the wikipedia foundation ( or whatever they call themselves ) might end up crapping up wikipedia to subsidize whatever they thought was 'good for us'.
Australia strikes me as fairly ham-handed in it's policies, not just internet related ones. Britain too. The citizens are not stupider than US citizens, but somehow their governments are.
Climbers should begin carrying a parachute. I envision a steerable sort. That way, when they summit, they need only open their parachute and steer themselves for a quick ride to base camp ( or another low-altitude location if winds are not favorable, they should carry an EPRB too ) before they get the disease.
Some may say parachute technology is for wusses, but it's extra weight for the sherpas to carry, so it does come with a penalty that makes it less wussy. And climbers don't seem to be averse to using other high tech gear such as O2 tanks, and Gore-Tex ( Probably Gore-Tex is passe nowadays, the pro-climbers prolly wear some new fadbric now. )
Modern fiat money has value because it is accepted for payment of taxes. In the same way a winning McDonald's monopoly coupon good for one small drink has value because McDonalds accepts them for payment in return for small sodas.
But the coupons need not be redeemed for small sodas at McDonalds immediately.I can spend my winning coupon on a small soda at McDonalds or I can trade it to my friend for a cigarette. I can do the same sort of thing with dollars or yen or euros or whatever.
Even if I may never have the need to pay taxes in Japan, I wouldn't worry about accepting yen in payment for an item. I will be able to find someone willing to trade something I do want, ( maybe dollars ) for the yen, perhaps a Japanese person with a lot of dollars who needs to pay their taxes in yen, but more probably just someone with dollars who wants to buy something that is being sold for yen.
Legal tender just means I can pay any debt, even one denominated in say porkbellies with the legal tender currency in an amount equivalent to the value of the porkbellies at the time the debt was paid. That could be one dollar per porkbelly or one billion dollars per porkbelly, depending on the relative market values of dollars and porkbellies. But I couldn't force a creditor to accept payment of my porkbelly debt in gold, or board-feet of lumber, or winning McDonalds monopoly coupons good for one small soda, or the currency of another country - only legal tender can be foisted on a creditor.
I think this system ( the one we have ) is superior to basing currency on work units, which like other goods are subject to fluxuations of value relative to other goods. In addition to the problem of deciding what a 'work unit' is ( is this piece work or are we paid hourly? ) the increase in productivity that is called progress, will, if it continues, increase the work units available year by year in a form of work unit inflation.
The current system is fiat money with fractional reserve banking. In the US, the required reserves are 1/10. The money multiplier is 10. The need for a lender of last resort has over the course of the 20th century slowly caused the complete abandonment of the gold standard, which in my opinion is a good thing. Why mine something hard to find like gold when paper does just as good? The alternatives to fractional reserve banking are Full Reserve banking and No-Reserve Banking
In full reserve banking depositors pay the bank to keep their deposits rather than paying interest on savings, and charge fees for services. Loans are not made out of deposited funds, but rather they are the funds of investors. Investors put their money into the bank's pool of loanable funds. The bank makes the loans charging a percentage of the repaid funds for the service of making the loan to the borrower, including the labor involved in finding an eligable borrower, and collecting payments. If the loan is not repaid, then the collateral if any is sold, and the remaining funds are returned to the investor. The loss, is to the investor, with the bank making money only for charging for the labor it provides.
Under Fractional Reserve banking, the loanable funds are the money multiplier (10) times the reserves. When there is a loss of 1 dollar the reserves are reduced by 1 dollar, which means the pool of loanable funds decreases by that dollar plus 9 more dollars, reducing liquidity in the economy ten times more than if the funds lost were lost by investors.
The internet bubble was about the same magnitude ( possibly a little smaller ) as the housing bubble. However the internet bubble was funded by investors, whereas the housing bubble was funded by banks. The internet bubble, when it burst, caused a mild economic downturn. The housing bubble is forcing governments around the world to pull out all the stops to avoid another 'Great Depression'.
No reserve banking me
It makes sense to me, not that my opinion matters, that a Pseudonymous person is inherently incapable of defamation.
If someone takes the trouble to use a Pseudonym, or post as Anonymous Coward, then they have no credibility, and so can not defame.
Claims by a pseudonym are similar to a statement like:
While it may or may not be true that so and so in fact blows goats for canned food, someone hiding behind a pseudonym is not to be taken any more seriously than a fictional character. Or in other words, How is putting words into the mouth of a Pseudonym and different than putting words into the mouth of a Fictional character?
What they're doing is taking down eBay pages of consumers who try to sell their items ASSUMING that they are retailers in violation of their contracts.