Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

December 14, 2015

No Sign of Terrorist Attack = Conflict in Government Priorities

Filed under: Journalism,News,Newspeak,Reporting — Patrick Durusau @ 3:09 pm

Egypt Says Investigators Found No Sign Of ‘Terrorist Act’ In Russian Plane Crash by Eyder Peralta.

Despite early conclusions by the Russians, the United States, Britain, and claims by the Islamic State, the Egyptian government has concluded there is no sign of a terrorist attack in the downing of a Russian passenger plane in Egypt last October.

Reporters and citizens alike should view claims of “terrorist” and “not a terrorist” attack with heavy additions of salt.

In this particular case, Egypt wants to avoid further damage to its revenue from tourism, which is reported down by 10% over last year.

U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies are desparately trying to find a terrorist connection for the shooters in San Bernardino. See also: Everything we know about the San Bernardino terror attack investigation so far.

From the second Los Angeles Times story:

Why their plot wasn’t detected

Farook and Malik were unknown to law enforcement until the day of the shooting, but the reason for that isn’t yet clear.

The FBI is focusing on how they missed the couple’s secret radicalization and Farook’s apparent comments to an associate as early as 2011 that he was considering a terrorist attack.

Two people out of a current population of 322,332,500 (as of 14:58 EST today) not being known to law enforcement doesn’t surprise me.

Does it surprise you?

As far as threats of a terrorist attack years ago, if they arrested everyone who shouts “kill the umpire/referee, etc.,” there would not be anyone left to stand as guards in the prisons.

The reason for treating the deaths of co-workers at a holiday party as an act of terrorism is that it furthers the budget agendas of law enforcement and intelligence communities.

Imagine the surveillance that would be required to gather and be aware of a random statement from four years ago from otherwise unremarkable individuals.

Your system would have to connect a statement to a co-worker to the purchases of the weapons, ammunition and other supplies and then ring the alert bell to clue officers in on a pending threat.

That’s possible in retrospect but to prevent random acts your system would have to do all those connections in the absence of any reason to focus on these individuals in particular.

You know the old saying, when they criminalize guns, only criminals will have guns?

Same is true for privacy, when they criminalize privacy, only criminals will have privacy.

PS: Remember terrorism is a label used to question the loyalty, judgement of others and/or for furthering other agendas. You could substitute “belch” where you see it and still have 99% of the informative content of a message.

January 9, 2014

Newspeak: It’s doubleplusgood

Filed under: Functional Programming,Newspeak,Programming — Patrick Durusau @ 11:41 am

Newspeak: It’s doubleplusgood

From the webpage:

What is Newspeak?

Newspeak is a new programming language in the tradition of Self and Smalltalk. Newspeak is highly dynamic and reflective – but designed to support modularity and security. It supports both object-oriented and functional programming.

Like Self, Newspeak is message-based; all names are dynamically bound. However, like Smalltalk, Newspeak uses classes rather than prototypes. As in Beta, classes may nest. Because class names are late bound, all classes are virtual, every class can act as a mixin, and class hierarchy inheritance falls out automatically. Top level classes are essentially self contained parametric namespaces, and serve to define component style modules, which naturally define sandboxes in an object-capability style. Newspeak was deliberately designed as a principled dynamically typed language. We plan to evolve the language to support pluggable types.

After I posted Deconstructing Functional Programming by Gilad Bracha, I wanted to highlight Newspeak and list some resources for it.

Listed at the website:

Documents

Downloads (latest version September 14, 2013)

Newspeak Programming Language (Google Group)

Video & Audio

One additional resource I discovered:

Parsing JSON with Newspeak by Luis Diego Fallas.

What else have I missed?

December 21, 2013

Deconstructing Functional Programming

Filed under: Dart,Functional Programming,Newspeak — Patrick Durusau @ 8:49 pm

Deconstructing Functional Programming by Gilad Bracha.

From the summary and bio:

Summary

Gilad Bracha explains how to distinguish FP hype from reality and to apply key ideas of FP in non-FP languages, separating the good parts of FP from its unnecessary cultural baggage.

Bio

Gilad Bracha is the creator of the Newspeak programming language and a software engineer at Google where he works on Dart. Previously, he was a VP at SAP Labs, a Distinguished Engineer at Cadence, and a Computational Theologist and Distinguished Engineer at Sun. He is co-author of the Java Language Specification, and a researcher in the area of object-oriented programming languages.

A very enjoyable presentation!

I really like the title in the bio: Computational Theologist.

Further resources:

Dart Language site.

Room 101 Gilad’s blog.

Newspeak Language site.

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