My experience with document interchange led me to classify document formats using the essential distinction that some are "programmable" and some are not. [..]
The reason that this distinction is essential with respect to document interchange is that extracting information from documents in "programmable" document formats is equivalent to the halting problem. That is, it is arbitrarily difficult and cannot be automated in a general fashion.
For example, I conjecture that it is impossible to write a program that will extract the third word from a TeX document.
Computer Science in the 1960s to 80s spent a lot of effort making languages which were as powerful as possible. Nowadays we have to appreciate the reasons for picking not the most powerful solution but the least powerful. The reason for this is that the less powerful the language, the more you can do with the data stored in that language. If you write it in a simple declarative from, anyone can write a program to analyze it in many ways. The Semantic Web is an attempt, largely, to map large quantities of existing data onto a common language so that the data can be analyzed in ways never dreamed of by its creators.
"Unsere intuitive Moral - selbsttäuschend, nepotistisch, sippenbetont, anthropozentrisch und an Strafen orientiert - lässt sich nicht mit irgendeiner konsistenten Menge moralischer Werte in Einklang bringen, seien diese nun aristotelisch, kantianisch oder utilaristisch." - Geoffrey Miller, Das Kontinuum von Persönlichkeit und Wahnsinn, S.315
"I’m not a moralist. I’m a pragmatist operating at a level of long-term vision and ruthlessness that is difficult for most people to wrap their minds around (and perhaps impossible for you). I don’t give a shit about “right thought” as long as I can elicit the behaviors I want, and I believe “right thought” usually follows changes in behavior as a rationalization rather than causally preceding them." - Eric S. Raymond, comment to own article
Von der Leyens Zusatzrenten-Modell helfe nicht als Mittel gegen Altersarmut, sagt Sozialforscher Butterwegge gegenüber tagesschau.de: "Das ist reine Augenwischerei." Nur eine ganz kleine Gruppe Menschen würde damit überhaupt erreicht werden. Und mit Demografie habe das Rentenproblem gar nichts zu tun.
There a 4 generations working side by side right now. That has never happened before at any time in human history. None of them are stepping aside for the current generation.
Cargo cult software engineering is easy to identify. Cargo cult software engineers justify their practices by saying, "We’ve always done it this way in the past," or "our company standards require us to do it this way"—even when those ways make no sense.
I've seen a race of electronically linked humanoids who share information in a vast decentralized net to which they all have access; who see data as a kind of neutral atmosphere, like air; who use technology to share thoughts and impressions at all times; who are never out of contact with one another; and who react to the briefest removal from their shared consciousness with an itchy, frantic eagerness (cf. "Hugh") to get back.
I'm trying to amass a list of programming books that are freely available on the Internet. The books can be about a particular programming language or about computers in general.
What are some freely available programming books on the Internet?
A. Leitner, M. Oriol, A. Zeller, I. Ciupa, and B. Meyer. Proceedings of the Twenty-second IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, page 417--420. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2007)
A. Lancichinetti, and S. Fortunato. (2009)cite arxiv:0908.1062Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures. The software to compute the values of our general normalized mutual information is available at http://santo.fortunato.googlepages.com/inthepress2.