Waze uses open data too. The point wasn't that the Waze program doesn't use open data. It's that now YOUR personal data (who, what, where) is now being sent back to Google.
The point is that that level is set to be where the effects _start_ to be seen, not where they're already 5-10 times more likely to cause a crash.
No, that's not "the point". The point was that this is a classic example of how to make a bad law, which punishes droves of innocent people who weren't endangering anybody.
Activities that do not significantly endanger other people should not be illegal, just because some special interest wants it that way, or because the police department wants mover revenue. That's just bad law, plain and simple.
Is anybody even pretending that patents exist anymore for anything other than lining corporate and lawyer pockets? Just tell them to piss off because the planet is more important.
I have several things to say about the assumptions behind that comment.
I have grown really weary of this attitude that just because certain people are abusing the system, then the system itself is bad. That's a wrong-headed and dangerous approach to problem solving. Throwing out the baby with the bathwater, as the saying goes.
Example: since Obama has been a horrible President, does that mean we should eliminate Presidents altogether?
Since many big corporations today have been shown to be corrupt, should we get rid of corporations? (Hint: if so, good luck building your next bridge or housing project.)
The problems we are experiencing means there are problems with the way systems are being RUN, not with how they're SUPPOSED TO be run. It's a people problem, not a system problem.
And the ultimate answer is: the patent system exists for YOUR benefit. And you DO benefit from it. We need to stop abuses of the patent system, not scrap it altogether.
There is in my company. Seriously. A very very big e-commerce player. With all the politics and careers at stake that you would expect.
Well, I don't want to get into flame wars. But A LOT of developers I know gave Node.js a serious shot, then said "Never again."
Your mileage may vary. I'm just describing what others around me are saying. I never personally considered jumping on the Node.js bandwagon. It seemed like a pretty strange idea. I was willing to wait for the judgment of "First Responders" to give it a go. I tried to keep an open mind, and just wait and see.
What I've been hearing back hasn't been so good. I'm honestly getting the idea Node.js was just a fad that will enjoy 15 min. of fame then fade into the background just about as fast as it popped up.
The sole reason Do Not Track was useless was that it was voluntary, and too many interests simply didn't want to honor it. I was really amused by all the cries of "But... but... our ad revenue will dry up and the internet will die!" Hahaha. Script blockers do the same thing, better, without any volunteerism, and the internet hasn't died. "I told you so" comes to mind.
I would add a couple of add-ons to the list above:
* Disconnect, and Disconnect Search, respectively, block 3rd-party requests and do anonymous search.
* Bloody Vikings! lets you create temporary email addresses for those sites that insist on an email address before you can move forward. (Name comes from Monty Python "Spam!" skit.)
* Privacy Badger, from EFF intelligently blocks 3rd-party cookies and tracking. (They tried to make an add-on for Chrome too but announced that it was too difficult and they had given up.)
* User Agent Switcher, mainly for developers, lets you change your browser user agent.
* YSlow, cleverly named add-on from Yahoo, shows developers why web pages are slow.
* Lightbeam from Mozilla shows a good view third parties that have tried to track your browsing over time.
It wouldn't be so much of a problem if the US definition of "allies" wasn't so lax (Israel, Colombia, Bahrain, etc). Don't get me wrong - I'd pick the US over Russia for example any day. But that doesn't mean that I'm comfortable with all of the US's "allies" having the right to buy the US's latest weapons, on their word alone.
It's worse than that. From TFA:
Armed and other advanced UAS are to be used in operations involving the use of force only when there is a lawful basis for use of force under international law, such as national self-defense.
So it's a "Do as we say, not as we do" policy. Obama's use of drones has been against U.S. and International law from the very beginning. The Bush administration may have been guilty, too, but it has vastly expanded under Obama.
Dear Mr. Obama: killing young teenagers who may be "suspected terrorists" was not legitimately in defense of the safety of the U.S., nor a lawful act of war. It's murder, under both U.S. law and International law. Like the Geneva Conventions, for example.
I wonder why nobody come up with an algorithm generator to spam software patents already. Seems like the goal is the wording and not the substance all along.
Well, the whole problem is that it's not supposed to be. Form over substance was never supposed to be the point of patent applications. But generations of lawyers and government patent examiners have made it so.
A good majority of employers local to me (location: irrelevant) have transferred that risk to employees, though government lobbying. Now, many of us are not allowed to apply for other jobs while employed in zero hour contracts because we're all waiting for the boss to ring up and tell us we're needed. My contract specifically tells me that I can't apply for another job without my employer's permission.
Location very far from "irrelevant". Sounds like it's time to change yours.
A contract like that is just plain illegal in many states. Maybe even most. I know it's illegal in my state, and also in California.
A contract like yours sounds very close to "indentured servitude", and most places outlawed that a very long time ago. It might not be literally, but it would still be outside the law in many states.
And in some places, if you are "on call" you have to be paid for the hours you are on call, not just the hours when you are called in. You don't necessarily have to be paid the same rate, but you still have to be paid.
So no, your location is not "irrelevant" at all. I can appreciate your not wanting to say what it is, but it is very relevant indeed.
I'm not sure why anyone would contribute to Google maps. Who works for one of the world's largest corporations for free?
Anybody who uses Waze.
I used to use it because it was "open", community-sourced like OSM, and was NOT Google. Then Google acquired it, and made it known they would be using Waze data in their own maps.
It's been sitting idle in my phone ever since. But I bet an awful lot of people don't even know it changed hands.
Great anecdote. Right here, right now, today, OSM believes my location is a country that's at the opposite side of the world from the one I actually am in.
None of the commercial services ever get this wrong for me these days. They all pinpoint me within a block.
It must be a failure of that "virtuous feedback loop" referred to by OP.:o)
Any time someone responds to a study with the general statement "They are wrong, I have an anecdote to prove it!" should be tagged and forever prohibited from participating in discussions or weighing in on decisions on the topic.
Well, they ARE wrong, and I have evidence to back it up, but I don't have it here at hand. What about that? It's in books, in storage.
In particular, they aren't wrong about pot, but rather about alcohol.
Long ago the Canadian government produced a book entitled "The Report of the Canadian Government Commission of Inquiry into the Non-Medical Use of Drugs" (1972). A summary (but only a brief summary) is available HERE. The actual report is a rather large volume.
The Report was primarily about marijuana, but many of the experiments included in the Report compared the effects of marijuana on drivers, compared to alcohol. The amount of impairment at 0.1% BAC was far less than TFA claims. They also concluded, by the way, that the amount of THC necessary to impair a driver significantly was MASSIVE. So massive, that (at least in those days) it was unlikely anyone would be able to smoke that much. Of course that's an average. And that was over 40 years ago. You have to wonder what took the U.S. Fed so damned long, eh?
Further, also long (but not nearly as long) ago, the State of Idaho performed its own "independent" studies on driving while intoxicated. They similarly found that 0.1% BAC is well BEFORE the driving of an average person is significantly affected. Nevertheless, we see the Feds claiming half that as dangerous. Which is typical of Federal government, I have to say.
I'd prove it to you but I don't even have a reasonable way to install and run those languages again.
I have no idea why you say "it doesn't make sense". There's nothing strange about it at all. At least, if you were around Back In The Day it wouldn't seem strange to you. Of course, you had fewer registers to play around then with too. But the basic idea is very simple:
Code a loop. When the code reached the loop, the interpreter would cause the instruction pointer and often some data to be pushed on the stack. It might be only a couple of bytes; doesn't matter.
Now, INSIDE the loop, you could use a "break" to cleanly exit. But a hard GOTO would not; those few bytes did not come back off the stack. Not from the loop itself, you understand, but from a push that happened just before it.
Do that enough times, you get stack overflow.
I'd be the first to admit I don't know of any current language that is that "dumb". But there certainly used to be. I also agree that it would be dumb to do that intentionally. But I was in the business of coding very complex programs in a very dumb language. Occasionally accidents like that did happen.
Slashdot is not a peer-reviewed science journal. Other people here are not your under- or un-paid research assistants. Or chimpanzees for that matter.
That's right! That's exactly why I wrote "I don't say this often on Slashdot."
When you are spoon-fed relevant material and shown where you can find much more VERY EASILY, it's time to quitcherbitchin'. Nobody is being paid to shovel the information down your throat, just because you're too lazy to do it. You don't get to claim it's not there just because you won't look at it.
There was no "spoon-fed material" here. There was when I wrote that, but there wasn't any here. I know you're trying to snark at me for saying that before, but the context is so vastly different it just doesn't fly.
There is no mathematical proof either way that I am aware of. We can only observe history, not the future, to verify any "principles of economics".
Right. But I don't know of any historical trend showing that technological advances = fewer jobs and lower standard of living.
I'm not arguing with his point that software will do that. Maybe it will; I have my doubts. I'm saying that the premise on which he bases his whole argument seems to be little more than a blue-sky assumption. I don't think it's even taken on "faith".
I don't say this a lot on Slashdot, but sometimes it's called for. TFA:
The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs because the new technology required huge numbers of humans to run it. But this is not the normal course of technology; it was an anomaly in that sense.
Citations? Evidence? That second sentence is actually the whole basis of his argument... and it's just baldly stated with no supporting evidence anywhere.
I am sorely tempted to call bullshit. I'm not positive it is but I strongly suspect it is.
I referred to SOME, OLD versions of BASIC. And yes, loops did use the stack. Not heavily, but they pushed the current context onto the stack on entry.
I've actually done this, man. (Unintentionally, but I did it.) And yes, the result was a stack overflow.
If you want to show me a disassembly of the particular languages I was talking about, by all means do so. But I doubt you can, since I didn't even mention what they were.
I call bullshit on your calling of bullshit. We could do this forever.
Besides, there are these little things called "extrapolation" and "long division" that will let you make an actual comparison.
If all you need is a low end 2-socket box, then probably the Xeon is the better choice, but once scalability to higher end performance, throughput, etc is required, thatâ(TM)s where you won't find Xeon systems competing against SPARC.
I repeat that this misses the point of my original comment. I wasn't comparing the performance of an Intel computer to that of a SPARC computer. I was referring to the complexity and capability of individual cores. We are talking about two very different things.
It's a honeypot: go there, have your IP logged, after some months when you don't expected you're sued. And if they decided they want to make an example, your life is over. The internet as we knew it is dead: stasinet took its place. Watch what you say, citizen.
No, it's not. I forget which source it was (I think TorrentFreak), but they interviewed the CEO who said that they are regularly changing their domain on purpose. Problem with.so domain might have hastened their schedule but it would have happened anyway.
The person who runs the site had no reason to say that if it weren't true. The Canadian authorities might be able to put a gag order on people under some circumstances but they can't force somebody to lie in public.
At your first link, it is easy to see that the T5-8 easily outperforms the IBM Flex 240, by a factor of roughly 5.5. But compare the details: The T5-8 has a total of 128 cores and 1024 threads, while the IBM only has 16 cores and 32 threads.
So that 5.5 x performance boost comes at the price of 16 x as many cores, and 32 x as many threads.
It is true that I improperly conflated threads with cores, when I shouldn't have. Nevertheless, my main point still holds: SPARC uses more, simpler cores to achieve its performance. They are somewhere between an x86 core and a GPU core in complexity.
My original, overall point being that it isn't a 1-to-1 comparison.
I definitely don't agree here. There is no x86 system that can beat SPARC today on *any* enterprise related workload, especially Database with same # CPUs or cores running the same SW.
This has nothing to do with my comment. I was referring to the capability of individual CPU "cores", not which machine would outperform the other. I don't think anybody disputes that within reasonable parameters a SPARC machine is in general the more powerful.
But perhaps you mean a goto that skips over function boarders? Not sure if you can do that in C and C++, if you can do that ofc. the stack is in your hands:) and you are at mercy of its limits.
Not necessarily. I was mainly referring to old languages that didn't properly clean up after themselves. Certain old versions of BASIC for example. They weren't even procedural, so there were no "functions", it was all inline code.
And it was certainly possible to do. Just create a loop that executed another loop enough times, and GOTO out of the second loop in such a way that the first loop kept running.
Loop setup would push the current context on the stack and set up the loop. The GOTO would ensure that the cleanup code in the second loop was never reached. Push push push and no pop. Stack overflow.
NASA was failing hard by insisting on using the Shuttle to launch everything. The Russians had really good LOX/Kerosene staged combustion rocket engine technology so it was a good idea to get the engines. The problems started when the US contractors cheapened out and decided not to start US manufacturing of the engines as originally planned. The Russians transferred all the required technical documentation and provided a production license to do it.
I don't dispute any of this. My point was that lack of planning and foresight on the part of the existing NASA bureaucracy was what led to this whole situation.
Any idiot should know that for any strategically essential technology, you should have not just a robust, maintainable program, but also a ready backup. NASA had neither.
I'm not placing the blame on them solely. Short-sighted politicians were definitely a part of the problem too.
But as I mentioned above in my post, this kind of a system isn't impossible to break, just more difficult.
Yes, indeed. Soon after something like this is released, new tools are built to break them.
While I don't doubt the HARES system adds another level of difficulty, anything that can be executed can be decrypted. The very worst that could happen is that it would have to be run through an ICE or software emulator that records the data and instructions as they are executed.
Slashdot Mirror
That just reinforces the point that location is relevant.
Waze uses open data too. The point wasn't that the Waze program doesn't use open data. It's that now YOUR personal data (who, what, where) is now being sent back to Google.
The point is that that level is set to be where the effects _start_ to be seen, not where they're already 5-10 times more likely to cause a crash.
No, that's not "the point". The point was that this is a classic example of how to make a bad law, which punishes droves of innocent people who weren't endangering anybody.
Activities that do not significantly endanger other people should not be illegal, just because some special interest wants it that way, or because the police department wants mover revenue. That's just bad law, plain and simple.
Is anybody even pretending that patents exist anymore for anything other than lining corporate and lawyer pockets? Just tell them to piss off because the planet is more important.
I have several things to say about the assumptions behind that comment.
I have grown really weary of this attitude that just because certain people are abusing the system, then the system itself is bad. That's a wrong-headed and dangerous approach to problem solving. Throwing out the baby with the bathwater, as the saying goes.
Example: since Obama has been a horrible President, does that mean we should eliminate Presidents altogether?
Since many big corporations today have been shown to be corrupt, should we get rid of corporations? (Hint: if so, good luck building your next bridge or housing project.)
The problems we are experiencing means there are problems with the way systems are being RUN, not with how they're SUPPOSED TO be run. It's a people problem, not a system problem.
And the ultimate answer is: the patent system exists for YOUR benefit. And you DO benefit from it. We need to stop abuses of the patent system, not scrap it altogether.
There is in my company. Seriously. A very very big e-commerce player. With all the politics and careers at stake that you would expect.
Well, I don't want to get into flame wars. But A LOT of developers I know gave Node.js a serious shot, then said "Never again."
Your mileage may vary. I'm just describing what others around me are saying. I never personally considered jumping on the Node.js bandwagon. It seemed like a pretty strange idea. I was willing to wait for the judgment of "First Responders" to give it a go. I tried to keep an open mind, and just wait and see.
What I've been hearing back hasn't been so good. I'm honestly getting the idea Node.js was just a fad that will enjoy 15 min. of fame then fade into the background just about as fast as it popped up.
The sole reason Do Not Track was useless was that it was voluntary, and too many interests simply didn't want to honor it. I was really amused by all the cries of "But... but... our ad revenue will dry up and the internet will die!" Hahaha. Script blockers do the same thing, better, without any volunteerism, and the internet hasn't died. "I told you so" comes to mind.
I would add a couple of add-ons to the list above:
* Disconnect, and Disconnect Search, respectively, block 3rd-party requests and do anonymous search.
* Bloody Vikings! lets you create temporary email addresses for those sites that insist on an email address before you can move forward. (Name comes from Monty Python "Spam!" skit.)
* Privacy Badger, from EFF intelligently blocks 3rd-party cookies and tracking. (They tried to make an add-on for Chrome too but announced that it was too difficult and they had given up.)
* User Agent Switcher, mainly for developers, lets you change your browser user agent.
* YSlow, cleverly named add-on from Yahoo, shows developers why web pages are slow.
* Lightbeam from Mozilla shows a good view third parties that have tried to track your browsing over time.
It wouldn't be so much of a problem if the US definition of "allies" wasn't so lax (Israel, Colombia, Bahrain, etc). Don't get me wrong - I'd pick the US over Russia for example any day. But that doesn't mean that I'm comfortable with all of the US's "allies" having the right to buy the US's latest weapons, on their word alone.
It's worse than that. From TFA:
Armed and other advanced UAS are to be used in operations involving the use of force only when there is a lawful basis for use of force under international law, such as national self-defense.
So it's a "Do as we say, not as we do" policy. Obama's use of drones has been against U.S. and International law from the very beginning. The Bush administration may have been guilty, too, but it has vastly expanded under Obama.
Dear Mr. Obama: killing young teenagers who may be "suspected terrorists" was not legitimately in defense of the safety of the U.S., nor a lawful act of war. It's murder, under both U.S. law and International law. Like the Geneva Conventions, for example.
I wonder why nobody come up with an algorithm generator to spam software patents already. Seems like the goal is the wording and not the substance all along.
Well, the whole problem is that it's not supposed to be. Form over substance was never supposed to be the point of patent applications. But generations of lawyers and government patent examiners have made it so.
A good majority of employers local to me (location: irrelevant) have transferred that risk to employees, though government lobbying. Now, many of us are not allowed to apply for other jobs while employed in zero hour contracts because we're all waiting for the boss to ring up and tell us we're needed. My contract specifically tells me that I can't apply for another job without my employer's permission.
Location very far from "irrelevant". Sounds like it's time to change yours.
A contract like that is just plain illegal in many states. Maybe even most. I know it's illegal in my state, and also in California.
A contract like yours sounds very close to "indentured servitude", and most places outlawed that a very long time ago. It might not be literally, but it would still be outside the law in many states.
And in some places, if you are "on call" you have to be paid for the hours you are on call, not just the hours when you are called in. You don't necessarily have to be paid the same rate, but you still have to be paid.
So no, your location is not "irrelevant" at all. I can appreciate your not wanting to say what it is, but it is very relevant indeed.
I'm not sure why anyone would contribute to Google maps. Who works for one of the world's largest corporations for free?
Anybody who uses Waze.
I used to use it because it was "open", community-sourced like OSM, and was NOT Google. Then Google acquired it, and made it known they would be using Waze data in their own maps.
It's been sitting idle in my phone ever since. But I bet an awful lot of people don't even know it changed hands.
Great anecdote. Right here, right now, today, OSM believes my location is a country that's at the opposite side of the world from the one I actually am in.
None of the commercial services ever get this wrong for me these days. They all pinpoint me within a block.
It must be a failure of that "virtuous feedback loop" referred to by OP. :o)
Any time someone responds to a study with the general statement "They are wrong, I have an anecdote to prove it!" should be tagged and forever prohibited from participating in discussions or weighing in on decisions on the topic.
Well, they ARE wrong, and I have evidence to back it up, but I don't have it here at hand. What about that? It's in books, in storage.
In particular, they aren't wrong about pot, but rather about alcohol.
Long ago the Canadian government produced a book entitled "The Report of the Canadian Government Commission of Inquiry into the Non-Medical Use of Drugs" (1972). A summary (but only a brief summary) is available HERE. The actual report is a rather large volume.
The Report was primarily about marijuana, but many of the experiments included in the Report compared the effects of marijuana on drivers, compared to alcohol. The amount of impairment at 0.1% BAC was far less than TFA claims. They also concluded, by the way, that the amount of THC necessary to impair a driver significantly was MASSIVE. So massive, that (at least in those days) it was unlikely anyone would be able to smoke that much. Of course that's an average. And that was over 40 years ago. You have to wonder what took the U.S. Fed so damned long, eh?
Further, also long (but not nearly as long) ago, the State of Idaho performed its own "independent" studies on driving while intoxicated. They similarly found that 0.1% BAC is well BEFORE the driving of an average person is significantly affected. Nevertheless, we see the Feds claiming half that as dangerous. Which is typical of Federal government, I have to say.
I'd prove it to you but I don't even have a reasonable way to install and run those languages again.
I have no idea why you say "it doesn't make sense". There's nothing strange about it at all. At least, if you were around Back In The Day it wouldn't seem strange to you. Of course, you had fewer registers to play around then with too. But the basic idea is very simple:
Code a loop. When the code reached the loop, the interpreter would cause the instruction pointer and often some data to be pushed on the stack. It might be only a couple of bytes; doesn't matter.
Now, INSIDE the loop, you could use a "break" to cleanly exit. But a hard GOTO would not; those few bytes did not come back off the stack. Not from the loop itself, you understand, but from a push that happened just before it.
Do that enough times, you get stack overflow.
I'd be the first to admit I don't know of any current language that is that "dumb". But there certainly used to be. I also agree that it would be dumb to do that intentionally. But I was in the business of coding very complex programs in a very dumb language. Occasionally accidents like that did happen.
Slashdot is not a peer-reviewed science journal. Other people here are not your under- or un-paid research assistants. Or chimpanzees for that matter.
That's right! That's exactly why I wrote "I don't say this often on Slashdot."
When you are spoon-fed relevant material and shown where you can find much more VERY EASILY, it's time to quitcherbitchin'. Nobody is being paid to shovel the information down your throat, just because you're too lazy to do it. You don't get to claim it's not there just because you won't look at it.
There was no "spoon-fed material" here. There was when I wrote that, but there wasn't any here. I know you're trying to snark at me for saying that before, but the context is so vastly different it just doesn't fly.
There is no mathematical proof either way that I am aware of. We can only observe history, not the future, to verify any "principles of economics".
Right. But I don't know of any historical trend showing that technological advances = fewer jobs and lower standard of living.
I'm not arguing with his point that software will do that. Maybe it will; I have my doubts. I'm saying that the premise on which he bases his whole argument seems to be little more than a blue-sky assumption. I don't think it's even taken on "faith".
The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs because the new technology required huge numbers of humans to run it. But this is not the normal course of technology; it was an anomaly in that sense.
Citations? Evidence? That second sentence is actually the whole basis of his argument... and it's just baldly stated with no supporting evidence anywhere.
I am sorely tempted to call bullshit. I'm not positive it is but I strongly suspect it is.
Do you even read the comments you reply to?
I referred to SOME, OLD versions of BASIC. And yes, loops did use the stack. Not heavily, but they pushed the current context onto the stack on entry.
I've actually done this, man. (Unintentionally, but I did it.) And yes, the result was a stack overflow.
If you want to show me a disassembly of the particular languages I was talking about, by all means do so. But I doubt you can, since I didn't even mention what they were.
I call bullshit on your calling of bullshit. We could do this forever.
There are no recent 8-scoket Xeon system benchmarks to compare to!
http://www.supermicro.com/prod...
Besides, there are these little things called "extrapolation" and "long division" that will let you make an actual comparison.
If all you need is a low end 2-socket box, then probably the Xeon is the better choice, but once scalability to higher end performance, throughput, etc is required, thatâ(TM)s where you won't find Xeon systems competing against SPARC.
I repeat that this misses the point of my original comment. I wasn't comparing the performance of an Intel computer to that of a SPARC computer. I was referring to the complexity and capability of individual cores. We are talking about two very different things.
It's a honeypot: go there, have your IP logged, after some months when you don't expected you're sued. And if they decided they want to make an example, your life is over. The internet as we knew it is dead: stasinet took its place. Watch what you say, citizen.
No, it's not. I forget which source it was (I think TorrentFreak), but they interviewed the CEO who said that they are regularly changing their domain on purpose. Problem with .so domain might have hastened their schedule but it would have happened anyway.
The person who runs the site had no reason to say that if it weren't true. The Canadian authorities might be able to put a gag order on people under some circumstances but they can't force somebody to lie in public.
To clarify what I meant:
At your first link, it is easy to see that the T5-8 easily outperforms the IBM Flex 240, by a factor of roughly 5.5. But compare the details: The T5-8 has a total of 128 cores and 1024 threads, while the IBM only has 16 cores and 32 threads.
So that 5.5 x performance boost comes at the price of 16 x as many cores, and 32 x as many threads.
It is true that I improperly conflated threads with cores, when I shouldn't have. Nevertheless, my main point still holds: SPARC uses more, simpler cores to achieve its performance. They are somewhere between an x86 core and a GPU core in complexity.
My original, overall point being that it isn't a 1-to-1 comparison.
I definitely don't agree here. There is no x86 system that can beat SPARC today on *any* enterprise related workload, especially Database with same # CPUs or cores running the same SW.
This has nothing to do with my comment. I was referring to the capability of individual CPU "cores", not which machine would outperform the other. I don't think anybody disputes that within reasonable parameters a SPARC machine is in general the more powerful.
But perhaps you mean a goto that skips over function boarders? Not sure if you can do that in C and C++, if you can do that ofc. the stack is in your hands :) and you are at mercy of its limits.
Not necessarily. I was mainly referring to old languages that didn't properly clean up after themselves. Certain old versions of BASIC for example. They weren't even procedural, so there were no "functions", it was all inline code.
And it was certainly possible to do. Just create a loop that executed another loop enough times, and GOTO out of the second loop in such a way that the first loop kept running.
Loop setup would push the current context on the stack and set up the loop. The GOTO would ensure that the cleanup code in the second loop was never reached. Push push push and no pop. Stack overflow.
NASA was failing hard by insisting on using the Shuttle to launch everything. The Russians had really good LOX/Kerosene staged combustion rocket engine technology so it was a good idea to get the engines. The problems started when the US contractors cheapened out and decided not to start US manufacturing of the engines as originally planned. The Russians transferred all the required technical documentation and provided a production license to do it.
I don't dispute any of this. My point was that lack of planning and foresight on the part of the existing NASA bureaucracy was what led to this whole situation.
Any idiot should know that for any strategically essential technology, you should have not just a robust, maintainable program, but also a ready backup. NASA had neither.
I'm not placing the blame on them solely. Short-sighted politicians were definitely a part of the problem too.
But as I mentioned above in my post, this kind of a system isn't impossible to break, just more difficult.
Yes, indeed. Soon after something like this is released, new tools are built to break them.
While I don't doubt the HARES system adds another level of difficulty, anything that can be executed can be decrypted. The very worst that could happen is that it would have to be run through an ICE or software emulator that records the data and instructions as they are executed.
I wouldn't have gone quite that far. But I think maybe it is time the FBI went the way of the dodo... because according to this, they already did.