Not really. Complexity theory deals with many different forms of computation, from Turing Machines to RAM models to circuits to quantum computers. These are all particular concrete artifacts that we use to study the fundamental notion of computation itself.
Saying that complexity theory studies "man-made things" is like saying that chemistry studies man-made molecules. It's technically true, but it confuses the methodology with the object of study: studying particular chemicals vs the underlying laws governing them or particular models vs the underlying laws of computation.
You are confusing cost and price. The cost of education has risen at a pace comparable to other labor intensive fields. But the price has sky-rocketed due to decreased state support over the past few decades.
What in the world are you talking about? Politicians blackmailing each other for personal gain is unethical. And I'm pretty sure that "the electorate" doesn't qualify as a "governmental official".
"Is it not possible to profit by bribing/blackmailing a government official and benefit the public at the same time?"
The ethical content of an action is not determined by accidental effects. If I shoot a gun blindly into a street and accidentally save someone by shooting their attacker, that doesn't make my actions ethical. Bribing an official for information that you can then sell to the highest bidder is corruption. The intent matters.
"Please think these things through next time before you cathartically post that someone is "the enemy"."
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Did I imply in any way that such political misconduct was ethical? No. Did I suggest "the electorate" qualified as a "government official"? No.
I was simply impugning an absolute statement that blanketed a great number of honorable intelligence gathers as "the enemy", and promoted a great number of sketchy government officials as allies.
Corruption is paying an official to change or ignore a law to benefit you at the expense of others. Incentivizing an official to leak intelligence (most likely not constitutionally obtained in the first place) doesn't fit that definition. If it did, half of the New York Times' Washington bureau would qualify as "the enemy".
No, "cathartically" means what I think it does. I wouldn't call someone an enemy and really mean it unless that enemy was deliberately trying to harm me or my family. Any other use would be an attempt to invoke emotions.
"I wouldn't call someone an enemy and really mean it unless that enemy was deliberately trying to harm me or my family."
I didn't literally call them the enemy, I put it in scary quotes as a reply to the (IMO) naive sentiment of the OP that because they're "not the CIA", they're not a legitimate target of WikiLeaks.
Please ask for clarification next time before you cathartically lecture someone based on your own misunderstanding.
Well, that's a fair point and I'll ask for clarification when I see something in quotes next time. When a disqualifying statement (not "the enemy") is flipped like that and directly applied to something, it carries more weight, especially when a loaded term like "enemy" is used. Politicians get in trouble for "with us or against us" rhetoric all the time. Not everything is so black and white, unless you make a compelling case that it is.
"The Global Intelligence Files exposes how Stratfor has recruited a global network of informants who are paid via Swiss banks accounts and pre-paid credit cards. Stratfor has a mix of covert and overt informants, which includes government employees, embassy staff and journalists around the world." + "Stratfor has realised that its routine use of secret cash bribes to get information from insiders is risky" - from the link
There is a difference between reproducibility and repeatability. Reproduction is an independent experiment producing commensurate results. Repetition is the same lab repeating the experiment and finding the same results. Sharing code actually reduces the independence of experiments. Worse, sharing buggy code introduces systematic errors across "independent experiments". Scientists already deal with similar issues due to a small number of vendors of various tools, but software is pretty different. Systematic measuring biases can be detected and calibrated, but software bugs rarely lend themselves to such corrections. Because science depends upon independent reproducibility and NOT repeatability, there's an argument to be made that blindly sharing code is actually detrimental to scientific reproducibility.
The real question we should be asking is whether opening and sharing these code bases will result in an increase in quality that offsets the loss of experimental independence.
"I'd like to see how they pull that off when a node goes down. I guess in "well-administered" data centers, nodes don't go down."
They offer f-fault tolerance. They can have f nodes go down in a single "zone" and keep chugging as long as no more nodes in the same zone go down before the master reconfigures. Note that the f faults are per-zone, not per-system, so in fact many more than f nodes can be down in a single system without a problem.
But, more importantly, you seem to be confusing partition tolerance and fault tolerance. CAP is about partition tolerance: offering "CA" in the presence of arbitrary partitions. They offer a specific form of fault tolerance: "CA" in the presence of any failure or partition that affects less than f nodes.
That blog is quite wrong about partition tolerance. First, the definition is just bizarre:
"Handling a crashed machine counts as partition-tolerance. (Update: I was wrong about this part."
He then goes on to give Stonebraker crap about claiming that "failures" never happen, simply because he doesn't understand the difference between failures and partitions.
Look, the point of "CAP" is this: if you assume nothing about the network, then you can not guarantee CA in the presence of ARBITRARY network partitions. It doesn't say that you can't provide CA under some or even many network partition scenarios. So, the question you should be asking is "what kinds of network partitions happen in practice?". Stonebraker's point was that network partitions are such rare and wholly catastrophic events that worrying about them pulls focus away from much more practical concerns. Hyperdex' point on partition tolerance (admittedly not clearly spelled out) is much more subtle. They offer tolerance of a specific class of partitions. To simply say they are "AP" or "CP" ignores the very important fact that they do in fact tolerate partitions and maintain the CA. This whole "CAP" pick any two is a gross over-simplification that obscures very real distinctions like this.
In specific, yes. In general, I don't understand why, to pick an arbitrary example, O'Reilly gets a free pass as a go-to publisher on technical content, or why academic textbooks should be imported by default. Put another way: why isn't there yet an Indian publisher with the status of O'Reilly, whose books we're all desperate to get our hands on?
I think there are a variety of factors:
0) Many of the best computer engineers emigrate to US, where they do publish nice books.
1) US based developers often work with really good and experienced professionals (or at least learn from them).
2) US professionals are educated in a system that greatly encourages the "German Style" of textbook writing: clear, concise and to the point. This was started by the great mathematicians and physicists in Germany, who then came over to the US; the people who started writing computer books knew a great style and built upon it.
In contrast most Indian books are heavy on facts, low on insight, examples are crappy, typeset quality is terrible, many errors etc.
3) Most importantly, there just aren't that many excellent developers in India. A large chunk of the "computer engineers" are mostly doing grunt work that does not require much innovation. What will they write about?
4) Most Indian computer engineers work very long shifts; they don't get enough free time to try out and learn a new technology "in their free time" because there is no free time. Less people using a technology means that there is less expertise, less adoption. All of that adds up to a great inertia
To be clearer: safety is no longer compositional in this system. To safely use the Boehm garbage collector, it's not sufficient that my own code doesn't use "disguised" pointers: I have to verify that my libraries don't either. That's impractical and contrary to good software engineering at best, impossible at worst.
No, you have to verify that your libraries don't keep disguised pointers to objects you allocated via the GC, that you don't yourself keep pointers to. It's quite unusual in C to give a reference to an object to another piece of code then drop all the pointers to it that you hold, because the usual discipline is that the module that allocates an object frees it.
Not if you build the GC with --enable-redirect-malloc to use with existing libraries/code bases. Which should be fine because, after all, this is a "conservative" garbage collector. Right?
Saying that complexity theory studies "man-made things" is like saying that chemistry studies man-made molecules. It's technically true, but it confuses the methodology with the object of study: studying particular chemicals vs the underlying laws governing them or particular models vs the underlying laws of computation.