WORST product launch ever. I just hope thats the end of rasppi drama and there wont be any more hurdles (for example lack of mpeg4 hardware acceleration, lack of camera interface documentation and so on)
This is a £16 computer intended for education, I'd be very surprised if it has either initially. If that surprises you or upsets you, perhaps you shouldn't be trying to order a £16 computer.
1. Why do you need a book to learn in the age of the internet? 2. the most important factor in learning is motivation - he'll be motivated by some goal, so get him to choose a goal first, whether it is to print his name 99 times, make a website building tool, or make a robot which does his algebra homework for him. 3. Start with a scripting language, not something like c, which is full of traps for the unwary, and requires learning lots about the functioning of the computer before you can produce something concrete. Don't believe people who tell you that our choice of language will stunt growth later on, or the only true language is c etc etc. the only mistake you can make in computer languages is to only look at one or two - where you start doesn't matter too much of you are willing to learn and develop your ideas as you discover the wealth of ideas and languages out there.
If you have control over whether it's in those other bookstores, then, yes, you do have control over the price. You don't like their terms, don't publish it there. That's how you control it.
That's not control over price, that's control over availability.
You wouldn't laugh if you were fired from your job for a post on slashdot 10 years ago like say this one which happened to be linked retrospectivey to your public identity. Just because you imagine in your happy ignorance that nothing you post today can influence your life, so these people thought their online activities left no significant footprint. They were wrong, and so are you if you truly believe your online activities are completely separate from your real life.
HELO din0 we thank you for the information that you were a single male heterosexual after 2004, so probably on Monday April 02, 2012 @05:11PM between the age of 20 and 30, this has been added to your everlasting google profile information* and will be linked automatically with your other accounts. HAND Google data-mining bot v.11.0.321 build 18401238 - orbit 20 - 2021-06-01-2020-02
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Seriously, if you're concerned about creepy bastards knowing where you are, don't tell the entire bloody internet
Much as it comforts geeks on Slashdot to snigger about the naivety of these FB posters (I don't use FB or FS either), we are not immune.
I think there's a broader issue here which is that all our online activities give a very good picture of our social graph, our work life, our social life and our activities in aggregate, including where we were when we did them (via IP address). Even just collating your posts on slashdot could tell someone an awful lot about you, and while slashdot is pseudo-anonymous, if say logs of slashdot activity were leaked along with IP and email, your last 10 years online, and where you were when you posted it would suddenly be available to all for mining. This has already happened with some gaming logins, and it's bound to happen with some ubiquitous service which everyone thought was safe.
You can bet that advertisers, Google and FB are already mining your visits to any of their network of sites for this info right now, and build a profile of you which will never go away, which is constantly added to and over which you have no control. Indeed, if you use gmail or work email there is an incredibly detailed portrait of your activity available for them to mine, which they are already mining for adverts, and I would not be surprised if they mine for other details for as long as they can get away with it. Now that's probably not going to show up in an app like this, but one day it could surface in a retroactive and incredibly detailed way, at which point none of us would be feeling particularly smug.
As to condemning these girls for finding this app creepy, just because they release some of their information publicly, does not mean they want to feature in some sort of stalker app with misogynist imagery which makes them look like prostitutes ready for sex, it also does not mean they are inviting chat up by some random luser using the app, it just means they posted their location and profile online, nothing more, nothing less. Just as when they walk down the street they expect and deserve a certain level of respect regardless of what they wear (short skirt or not), so we should treat other denizens of the internet with a certain level of respect, regardless of how they choose to dress in their profile or what information they choose to share.
The geeks on here saying 'they were asking for it' or 'they deserved it' would be far less sanguine about an app which (for example) mined slashdot and several other tech sites to find out where they posted, what they posted about, and when, who they gamed with etc, to build up a profile of their activity which could be used to show how they avoided work Jan 12th 2001 and get them fired. A huge amount of info from email etc is certainly already available to law-enforcement in most countries, a scary thought when you consider just how much information is online about even the social app refuseniks amongst us.
If you're providing all that info to the public, what would you expect people to do with it? I don't post my GPS location, and tweet what I'm doing every minute of the day.
Even you probably leak a lot more information than you realise. For example every site which logs your connecting IP knows your rough location, so a profile of everywhere you have ever been in the last 10 years (within a few km) could be compiled quite easily by someone with access to that history. Say you post on Facebook a lot, that means Facebook has that information for every day of your life you have posted there if they choose to store it (personally I don't have a Facebook account, but the principle works for other accounts). Your CV on linked on contains a mine of information, any tweets you do make give a good idea of your interests, your purchases on Amazon give a really good idea of what you bought and where you were when you bought it, who your friends are (Amazon wish lists you have bought on), anything your friends do on Facebook mentioning or picturing you can be used etc, etc. If you are a member of Facebook or G+, every single website you visit with those buttons on it (which is almost every website nowadays) is providing info on your visit back to Facebook and Google, and even if you are not a member, Facebook or G+ may well have ghost account set up for you without your knowledge. Same goes for advertisers.
Even for those who avoid Facebook there is a huge amount of information out there ready to be mined at some stage - we are living in a very different world from that of 20 years ago even, and this privacy issue is not going to go away, and is not confined to Facebook and Foursquare - those sort of sites are more just accepting the inevitable - your data will be mined, it's just a question of how hard you want to make it. Personally I avoid such sites as there is too much potential for nasty usage of this data, but it doesn't mean I am not tracked, just tracked less.
One idea which occurred to me for persistent twitterers was that workplaces will probably start retroactively mining tweets for information on where an employee was, and whether they were working at times when they state they were working - it would be quite easy to build up an almost complete picture of work patterns (say) going back several years for someone who uses twitter a lot - a scary thought.
Erelong applications of all this public data will be ubiquitous, and even if you try to avoid being tracked, in many ways you can't avoid it.
You're being obtuse. The laws are not "constantly changing" - they are being refined for more general cases.
Talking of the laws of physics as if anything is built or based on them is misleading and, if you'll forgive me, somewhat myopic. They are our current best approximations for the world, not some unchanging set of rules which the world is based on - that's a very important distinction. Just in the last few centuries they have changed almost beyond recognition (not as a set of refinements, but in a set of massive shocks which changed our worldview forever), and a few centuries before that the concept of science as we know it did not really exist.
With the exception of the electronics, I'm sitting at a desk I built surrounded by furniture half of which pre-dates the electronic computer. Directly behind the LCD is a beautiful painting.
So you're choosing to ignore the clothing, pens, plastic objects, books, machined objects, printed material, and electronics which no doubt also surrounds you? I take your point that we can live at a certain level without computers and some things are untouched by them (primarily things created before their invention), but they really are intrinsic to our current lifestyle, and are only going to become more important. I highly doubt even 50% of the things in your room (if you look at them honestly) were not dependent on computers at some stage in their life.
It also depends on humans dependent on their psychology and their politics and their language and their philosophy and their sociology and their laws and their economics, using tools which depend on mechanical and electrical engineering.
I wouldn't seek to deny that, why would you think it is important to mention it?
Imperative programming per se needs teaching as above, i.e. probably as part of mathematics - and can then be applied in all other classes as needed.
The curriculum is split up for a reason into different subjects - of course you *could* teach programming as part of mathematics, but frankly I think you're missing the poetry inherent in programming and seeing it in a very limited way as some sort of adjunct of logic and mathematics - algorithms are not limited to the maths which they use (as a tool) to manipulate concepts, they also live on a higher level of the abstract ideas they represent. Programming is not all about the technicalities of manipulating data on some basic level, it's also about manipulating ideas.
No. Science involves observation and experimentation skills which aren't present in mathematics.
The same holds true for programming (algorithms and data structures do not just fall out of mathematics, they are an art in themselves), which was the parent post's point in making this provocative statement. Just because you could in some meaningless sense reduce the entire world to maths, does not make it worthless to study other disciplines (this is what you are arguing). What holds true of science holds true of programming (this is what they are arguing, by analogy with Science, and in fact you unwittingly support the parent's point).
Everything in the world is built on the laws of physics, but only a small proportion of things are built on computer systems - however skewed the view appears to the technologist.
Actually, no, everything is not 'built on the laws of physics', the laws of physics are an approximation of the physical world we see around us, not the other way around - these laws are constantly changing as we better understand the real world. And nowadays almost every object we create depends on computers - from rfid tags to the internet you are using to post your thoughts to the phone system you use to communicate, to the machines which created almost all the objects sitting around you where you are now. None of those objects were created without computers, and all the things listed by the parent now rely on computers entirely - all are vital to our present society.
A "basic understanding" of computers, i.e. an understanding which takes them beyond thinking in terms of a black box and instead in terms of mathematical and physical concepts, requires a couple of afternoons of attention from a smart, well-prepared school kid.
This is true in the same way that learning to write poetry can be taught in a couple of afternoons to a smart child - of course the basic tenets can be understood, but there is a lot to learn about computers, and the subject should emphatically *not* be limited to teaching what can be taught in an afternoon (or two) or the use of Microsoft Word, which is what it amounts to now in UK schools.
The middle east is not a homogenous entity it contains former US allies in war like Iraq (under saddam), sworn enemies of the US like Iran which have had a US sponsored coup and then decades of hatred towards the US, and US partner states which are brutal dictatorships, like Saudi and Bahrain, and then Israel, another US partner and definitely not to be grouped with the other states in the region. It really is quite meaningless to group it all together and try to talk of it as one monolithic entity. The greatest source of tension in the region at the moment is the consistent campaign for war with Iran which has been building for years, sponsored by the US. Europe may have gone along with that under pressure from the US but the pressure for war definitely comes from Israel and the US.
I find it amusing that on a story about an obvious power grab by a new empire-building internal police force in your country, which has found a way to start policing both international flights and US citizens in their own country, you find a way to turn it around and make this about 'Europe backing the middle east into a corner'. Whatever.
The governments of Europe have a lot to answer to and a lot of flaws, but you in the US need to sort out the slow sleepwalk to dictatorship you are currently experiencing. The rest of the world is NOT doing the same crap, the rest of the world does not try to control flights outside its territory, or have invasive searches, incredibly expensive and pointless security theatre, and a massive security apparatus which is apparently growing beyond control.
You know what's even better? Not requiring creating an account at all.
Read this site at -1 (go on, I dare you, and leave it at that setting), and you'll quickly understand why accounts are a requirement for civil discourse. You can't have moderation or attribution of comments in any meaningful sense without accounts.
I would never create an account at a site unless I had a very compelling reason to do so.
I see - please do tell us what very compelling reason caused you to join Slashdot?
Yes of course, all these APIs do is let you authenticate and prove that you are hunter2 on Facebook etc to gawker, and then post comments on gawker with that identity.
Now gawker have no way of getting into your account via this means (unless there is a bug in the API of course, or unless Facebook chooses to let trusted partners access accounts - frankly I wouldn't put it past them given the access they have given Facebook app developers for example in the past). However it does mean you're letting gawker and Facebook (in this example) tie all your Facebook likes, pages etc and all your gawker comments together, and potentially sell that information to a third party (like advertisers), along with possibly your real name, sex, age etc etc if those are available via Facebook. I don't keep up to date with the latest fuck-ups and deliberate exposures/sales of private information by Facebook, but they are legion, so if you trust either gawker or Facebook with your identity, it's fine to sign in this way, but if you trust neither very much and the aggregate even less, then this is just going to stop you commenting if you are at all sane. I would not touch a website which required Facebook or other login rather than its own account system.
From a developer's perspective, I also think from a website like gawker's point of view it is an abdication of the most important relationship they have - with their readership - if they let a third party take control of that, they are signing up to be screwed over later on, when Facebook suddenly demands money for this sort of sign-on, or demands other favours with the threat they will shut down your site/comments if you don't comply.
As a reader I know I completely avoid signing in to websites with some central id which I do not control for this reason - what if that company (twitter, Facebook, whoever) is sold or bankrupted, and they start to exploit all your data for gain or sell it on? What then? All those gawker comments and comments on hundreds of other sites linked to your account which you thought were private could suddenly be sold on to a third party in aggregate, all linked together to form a complete picture of you - see the entire history of you for potential consequences. Individual logins make this aggregation far, far more difficult, and also mean you are free to drop one identity and keep another.
Those devices can stay on http 1.1 which will be supported for the foreseeable future. That's a much better way to manage backwards compatibility than trying to make certain features optional.
Instead of talking in abstact terms, why not name some companies which rely on flash and are indispensable? I haven't had flash installed for a year or two, and have very rarely come across a site which does not offer an alternative video format. All the mainstream players like BBC, YouTube, Vimeo etc have already moved and you can bet the others are already preparing to do so, given the number of ios devices. In the end attitudes will be changed by the reality of what customers/readers demand, not what is convenient for site owners - websites are pointless without readers after all.
Improper caching could have happened if the URLs were not unique. But caching in this case is just so wrong. And rarely is it even right. Static data can simply be preloaded in a server as streamlined as a cache would be, and those get delivered at cache speeds. Dynamic data should not be cached except in the browser, and even that with a short expire (5 minutes max).
Most pages now are not static in any meaningful sense - consider the homepage on almost every website. They have some dynamic data like news, but don't change every second, but may do every few minutes, and thus are cached, and often even on dynamic pages you can cache fragments if not the whole page. Server-side caching is almost always the right thing to do (in conjunction with browser-side caching), if it's done correctly and massively reduces the load on the server, so not sure why you feel it is wrong?
From the people in charge: "This person visited 18:17 and checked his tax return, and for some reason or another there was an error in the system, and this page entered the so-called cache memory of our servers, where it doesn't belong". You can try to decipher from that what you will.
This is quite easy to interpret. They turned on caching to speed up page loads, but without disabling it for logged in users or sensitive pages, so one user logs in, visits/my_account or whatever, and the page is cached, then when the next 100,000 users visit/my_account the cached page (containing the first user's details) is served without authentication (!). Page caching works great for public pages like / which are served the same to everyone, and doesn't work so great for pages which require authentication.
It's the sort of mistake you wouldn't normally see on a site this size as it's a rookie error and ANY sort of testing of caching would catch it, but apparently that's what they did. Probably they only intended to cache public pages or something and managed to extend it to private pages by mistake. Their server could be properly configured and secure but then this mistake triggered by one small change to their caching config by someone who didn't know the implications.
This is what happens when login credentials are based on the SSN, which is a serialised integer system. One wrong digit doesn't throw an error - it fuckin' logs you in as someone else!
If they didn't have a password, this might possibly do what you have suggested above. I highly doubt access was given without a password, so there's no way one wrong digit would do anything other than 'throw an error'. The problem here does not lie in using integers as user keys.
If it was a caching issue, possibly a page was cached when it shouldn't have been (including someone's account details), and the server returned that single person's page to everyone requesting/my_account or whatever, regardless of their logged in status - that's more likely, and actually quite an easy mistake to make if they turned on caching without properly checking the implications and disabling it for logged in users.
What they would want to do with caching is cache all public pages for everyone (which is fine, as they contain nothing but public information), and it sounds like they also cached a few (or one) private page, and served that instead of the individual private pages for logged in users as intended. I'm sure the details will come out in time.
Please stop using the little science project called the Internet, stop using electricity, take off any of your clothes which contain polyester and go live in a field, as modern civilisation would not exist if cretins like you were allowed to veto massive infrastructure investment like this as 'a little science project' and it is the logical conclusion of your happy ignorance.
We need to get back to sound money that "connects" to something of constant value, like gold or land. Something that can not be destroyed through the Fed's rampant printing.
Unfortunately neither gold nor land are of constant value - both depend on scarcity, laws restricting their use, etc. in order to actually have value. All of that (and more) is open to manipulation, and you can bet that if something becomes important enough to our lives, it will be subject to intense scrutiny and attract attention from all the wrong kinds of people. For examples, search for gold corners, gold confiscation, land monopoly, planning permission, land value tax, etc, etc. Fiat money is imposed by force and entirely arbitrary, but then so are all the other rules governing our behaviour, what we can do with gold and land for instance. So swapping paper money for gold will not have the effect you anticipate, it will just mean different laws are passed to control the gold supply, use of gold, give gov. a monopoly, perhaps wars launched to control gold or land etc etc. In fact a lot of the so-called gold traded nowadays doesn't even exist - it's a promise of gold which will never be seen. Also, gold has very little intrinsic value, and yet is highly valued today - why is that? It is seen (perhaps somewhat myopically) as a hedge against inflation - in the short term that is correct and it is potentially a lucrative, if risky, bet, in the long term it is subject to manipulation, confiscation, and outright bans like any other asset.
Sadly I think inflation and booms and busts are more a part of human instincts for aggrandisement than we would like to admit, and whatever system you set up, people (esp. politicians) will try to game it, so the key is to focus on methods people use to obscure true value and gain a monopoly in a given system, not on trying to change the basis for calculating value. In this instance we don't need to get rid of fiat money, but pass laws restricting the rights of governments to borrow so much they bankrupt future generations, and forbidding them to devalue the currency more than a certain amount each year.
As to paper money, it is entirely without purpose nowadays and will soon disappear, to be replaced by transactions recorded by banks - at present it's just serving as a token of these transactions anyway, and governments will of course be happy to see it go. Since governments are the ones to print it and authorise money, I expect it to start to disappear over the next few decades, soon after cheques.
Man up and admit you were wrong; it might even improve your character as well as your grammar. No one cares to hear your whining about grammar nazi's [sic], and the worst thing you can do after a mistake is to try to squirm out of it by pretending it was somehow intentional or a joke. We've seen it all before.
Slashdot Mirror
WORST product launch ever. I just hope thats the end of rasppi drama and there wont be any more hurdles (for example lack of mpeg4 hardware acceleration, lack of camera interface documentation and so on)
This is a £16 computer intended for education, I'd be very surprised if it has either initially. If that surprises you or upsets you, perhaps you shouldn't be trying to order a £16 computer.
1. Why do you need a book to learn in the age of the internet?
2. the most important factor in learning is motivation - he'll be motivated by some goal, so get him to choose a goal first, whether it is to print his name 99 times, make a website building tool, or make a robot which does his algebra homework for him.
3. Start with a scripting language, not something like c, which is full of traps for the unwary, and requires learning lots about the functioning of the computer before you can produce something concrete. Don't believe people who tell you that our choice of language will stunt growth later on, or the only true language is c etc etc. the only mistake you can make in computer languages is to only look at one or two - where you start doesn't matter too much of you are willing to learn and develop your ideas as you discover the wealth of ideas and languages out there.
If you have control over whether it's in those other bookstores, then, yes, you do have control over the price. You don't like their terms, don't publish it there. That's how you control it.
That's not control over price, that's control over availability.
Quote from the founder of Facebook on his users : "They trust me; dumb fucks"
If you use Facebook and think you use the Internet in a private, secure way, the next ten years will be an education for you.
It's fine and dandy to lump people together glibly, but I don't see how it's intelligent or insightful.
This is slashdot.
You wouldn't laugh if you were fired from your job for a post on slashdot 10 years ago like say this one which happened to be linked retrospectivey to your public identity. Just because you imagine in your happy ignorance that nothing you post today can influence your life, so these people thought their online activities left no significant footprint. They were wrong, and so are you if you truly believe your online activities are completely separate from your real life.
HELO
din0 we thank you for the information that you were a single male heterosexual after 2004, so probably on Monday April 02, 2012 @05:11PM between the age of 20 and 30, this has been added to your everlasting google profile information* and will be linked automatically with your other accounts.
HAND
Google data-mining bot v.11.0.321 build 18401238 - orbit 20 - 2021-06-01-2020-02
* Profile information may be shared with trusted partners, who may in turn share it with their trusted partners. If you want to opt out, please stop using the internet.
Seriously, if you're concerned about creepy bastards knowing where you are, don't tell the entire bloody internet
Much as it comforts geeks on Slashdot to snigger about the naivety of these FB posters (I don't use FB or FS either), we are not immune.
I think there's a broader issue here which is that all our online activities give a very good picture of our social graph, our work life, our social life and our activities in aggregate, including where we were when we did them (via IP address). Even just collating your posts on slashdot could tell someone an awful lot about you, and while slashdot is pseudo-anonymous, if say logs of slashdot activity were leaked along with IP and email, your last 10 years online, and where you were when you posted it would suddenly be available to all for mining. This has already happened with some gaming logins, and it's bound to happen with some ubiquitous service which everyone thought was safe.
You can bet that advertisers, Google and FB are already mining your visits to any of their network of sites for this info right now, and build a profile of you which will never go away, which is constantly added to and over which you have no control. Indeed, if you use gmail or work email there is an incredibly detailed portrait of your activity available for them to mine, which they are already mining for adverts, and I would not be surprised if they mine for other details for as long as they can get away with it. Now that's probably not going to show up in an app like this, but one day it could surface in a retroactive and incredibly detailed way, at which point none of us would be feeling particularly smug.
As to condemning these girls for finding this app creepy, just because they release some of their information publicly, does not mean they want to feature in some sort of stalker app with misogynist imagery which makes them look like prostitutes ready for sex, it also does not mean they are inviting chat up by some random luser using the app, it just means they posted their location and profile online, nothing more, nothing less. Just as when they walk down the street they expect and deserve a certain level of respect regardless of what they wear (short skirt or not), so we should treat other denizens of the internet with a certain level of respect, regardless of how they choose to dress in their profile or what information they choose to share.
The geeks on here saying 'they were asking for it' or 'they deserved it' would be far less sanguine about an app which (for example) mined slashdot and several other tech sites to find out where they posted, what they posted about, and when, who they gamed with etc, to build up a profile of their activity which could be used to show how they avoided work Jan 12th 2001 and get them fired. A huge amount of info from email etc is certainly already available to law-enforcement in most countries, a scary thought when you consider just how much information is online about even the social app refuseniks amongst us.
If you're providing all that info to the public, what would you expect people to do with it? I don't post my GPS location, and tweet what I'm doing every minute of the day.
Even you probably leak a lot more information than you realise. For example every site which logs your connecting IP knows your rough location, so a profile of everywhere you have ever been in the last 10 years (within a few km) could be compiled quite easily by someone with access to that history. Say you post on Facebook a lot, that means Facebook has that information for every day of your life you have posted there if they choose to store it (personally I don't have a Facebook account, but the principle works for other accounts). Your CV on linked on contains a mine of information, any tweets you do make give a good idea of your interests, your purchases on Amazon give a really good idea of what you bought and where you were when you bought it, who your friends are (Amazon wish lists you have bought on), anything your friends do on Facebook mentioning or picturing you can be used etc, etc. If you are a member of Facebook or G+, every single website you visit with those buttons on it (which is almost every website nowadays) is providing info on your visit back to Facebook and Google, and even if you are not a member, Facebook or G+ may well have ghost account set up for you without your knowledge. Same goes for advertisers.
Even for those who avoid Facebook there is a huge amount of information out there ready to be mined at some stage - we are living in a very different world from that of 20 years ago even, and this privacy issue is not going to go away, and is not confined to Facebook and Foursquare - those sort of sites are more just accepting the inevitable - your data will be mined, it's just a question of how hard you want to make it. Personally I avoid such sites as there is too much potential for nasty usage of this data, but it doesn't mean I am not tracked, just tracked less.
One idea which occurred to me for persistent twitterers was that workplaces will probably start retroactively mining tweets for information on where an employee was, and whether they were working at times when they state they were working - it would be quite easy to build up an almost complete picture of work patterns (say) going back several years for someone who uses twitter a lot - a scary thought.
Erelong applications of all this public data will be ubiquitous, and even if you try to avoid being tracked, in many ways you can't avoid it.
You're being obtuse. The laws are not "constantly changing" - they are being refined for more general cases.
Talking of the laws of physics as if anything is built or based on them is misleading and, if you'll forgive me, somewhat myopic. They are our current best approximations for the world, not some unchanging set of rules which the world is based on - that's a very important distinction. Just in the last few centuries they have changed almost beyond recognition (not as a set of refinements, but in a set of massive shocks which changed our worldview forever), and a few centuries before that the concept of science as we know it did not really exist.
With the exception of the electronics, I'm sitting at a desk I built surrounded by furniture half of which pre-dates the electronic computer. Directly behind the LCD is a beautiful painting.
So you're choosing to ignore the clothing, pens, plastic objects, books, machined objects, printed material, and electronics which no doubt also surrounds you? I take your point that we can live at a certain level without computers and some things are untouched by them (primarily things created before their invention), but they really are intrinsic to our current lifestyle, and are only going to become more important. I highly doubt even 50% of the things in your room (if you look at them honestly) were not dependent on computers at some stage in their life.
It also depends on humans dependent on their psychology and their politics and their language and their philosophy and their sociology and their laws and their economics, using tools which depend on mechanical and electrical engineering.
I wouldn't seek to deny that, why would you think it is important to mention it?
Imperative programming per se needs teaching as above, i.e. probably as part of mathematics - and can then be applied in all other classes as needed.
The curriculum is split up for a reason into different subjects - of course you *could* teach programming as part of mathematics, but frankly I think you're missing the poetry inherent in programming and seeing it in a very limited way as some sort of adjunct of logic and mathematics - algorithms are not limited to the maths which they use (as a tool) to manipulate concepts, they also live on a higher level of the abstract ideas they represent. Programming is not all about the technicalities of manipulating data on some basic level, it's also about manipulating ideas.
No. Science involves observation and experimentation skills which aren't present in mathematics.
The same holds true for programming (algorithms and data structures do not just fall out of mathematics, they are an art in themselves), which was the parent post's point in making this provocative statement. Just because you could in some meaningless sense reduce the entire world to maths, does not make it worthless to study other disciplines (this is what you are arguing). What holds true of science holds true of programming (this is what they are arguing, by analogy with Science, and in fact you unwittingly support the parent's point).
Everything in the world is built on the laws of physics, but only a small proportion of things are built on computer systems - however skewed the view appears to the technologist.
Actually, no, everything is not 'built on the laws of physics', the laws of physics are an approximation of the physical world we see around us, not the other way around - these laws are constantly changing as we better understand the real world. And nowadays almost every object we create depends on computers - from rfid tags to the internet you are using to post your thoughts to the phone system you use to communicate, to the machines which created almost all the objects sitting around you where you are now. None of those objects were created without computers, and all the things listed by the parent now rely on computers entirely - all are vital to our present society.
A "basic understanding" of computers, i.e. an understanding which takes them beyond thinking in terms of a black box and instead in terms of mathematical and physical concepts, requires a couple of afternoons of attention from a smart, well-prepared school kid.
This is true in the same way that learning to write poetry can be taught in a couple of afternoons to a smart child - of course the basic tenets can be understood, but there is a lot to learn about computers, and the subject should emphatically *not* be limited to teaching what can be taught in an afternoon (or two) or the use of Microsoft Word, which is what it amounts to now in UK schools.
The middle east is not a homogenous entity it contains former US allies in war like Iraq (under saddam), sworn enemies of the US like Iran which have had a US sponsored coup and then decades of hatred towards the US, and US partner states which are brutal dictatorships, like Saudi and Bahrain, and then Israel, another US partner and definitely not to be grouped with the other states in the region. It really is quite meaningless to group it all together and try to talk of it as one monolithic entity. The greatest source of tension in the region at the moment is the consistent campaign for war with Iran which has been building for years, sponsored by the US. Europe may have gone along with that under pressure from the US but the pressure for war definitely comes from Israel and the US.
I find it amusing that on a story about an obvious power grab by a new empire-building internal police force in your country, which has found a way to start policing both international flights and US citizens in their own country, you find a way to turn it around and make this about 'Europe backing the middle east into a corner'. Whatever.
The governments of Europe have a lot to answer to and a lot of flaws, but you in the US need to sort out the slow sleepwalk to dictatorship you are currently experiencing. The rest of the world is NOT doing the same crap, the rest of the world does not try to control flights outside its territory, or have invasive searches, incredibly expensive and pointless security theatre, and a massive security apparatus which is apparently growing beyond control.
You've never dealt with accepting credit card info before have you?
You know what's even better? Not requiring creating an account at all.
Read this site at -1 (go on, I dare you, and leave it at that setting), and you'll quickly understand why accounts are a requirement for civil discourse. You can't have moderation or attribution of comments in any meaningful sense without accounts.
I would never create an account at a site unless I had a very compelling reason to do so.
I see - please do tell us what very compelling reason caused you to join Slashdot?
Yes of course, all these APIs do is let you authenticate and prove that you are hunter2 on Facebook etc to gawker, and then post comments on gawker with that identity.
Now gawker have no way of getting into your account via this means (unless there is a bug in the API of course, or unless Facebook chooses to let trusted partners access accounts - frankly I wouldn't put it past them given the access they have given Facebook app developers for example in the past). However it does mean you're letting gawker and Facebook (in this example) tie all your Facebook likes, pages etc and all your gawker comments together, and potentially sell that information to a third party (like advertisers), along with possibly your real name, sex, age etc etc if those are available via Facebook. I don't keep up to date with the latest fuck-ups and deliberate exposures/sales of private information by Facebook, but they are legion, so if you trust either gawker or Facebook with your identity, it's fine to sign in this way, but if you trust neither very much and the aggregate even less, then this is just going to stop you commenting if you are at all sane. I would not touch a website which required Facebook or other login rather than its own account system.
From a developer's perspective, I also think from a website like gawker's point of view it is an abdication of the most important relationship they have - with their readership - if they let a third party take control of that, they are signing up to be screwed over later on, when Facebook suddenly demands money for this sort of sign-on, or demands other favours with the threat they will shut down your site/comments if you don't comply.
As a reader I know I completely avoid signing in to websites with some central id which I do not control for this reason - what if that company (twitter, Facebook, whoever) is sold or bankrupted, and they start to exploit all your data for gain or sell it on? What then? All those gawker comments and comments on hundreds of other sites linked to your account which you thought were private could suddenly be sold on to a third party in aggregate, all linked together to form a complete picture of you - see the entire history of you for potential consequences. Individual logins make this aggregation far, far more difficult, and also mean you are free to drop one identity and keep another.
Those devices can stay on http 1.1 which will be supported for the foreseeable future. That's a much better way to manage backwards compatibility than trying to make certain features optional.
Instead of talking in abstact terms, why not name some companies which rely on flash and are indispensable? I haven't had flash installed for a year or two, and have very rarely come across a site which does not offer an alternative video format. All the mainstream players like BBC, YouTube, Vimeo etc have already moved and you can bet the others are already preparing to do so, given the number of ios devices. In the end attitudes will be changed by the reality of what customers/readers demand, not what is convenient for site owners - websites are pointless without readers after all.
According to Wikipedia...
It's ok, I've fixed that for you now, it now says Knox was the first.
Improper caching could have happened if the URLs were not unique. But caching in this case is just so wrong. And rarely is it even right. Static data can simply be preloaded in a server as streamlined as a cache would be, and those get delivered at cache speeds. Dynamic data should not be cached except in the browser, and even that with a short expire (5 minutes max).
Most pages now are not static in any meaningful sense - consider the homepage on almost every website. They have some dynamic data like news, but don't change every second, but may do every few minutes, and thus are cached, and often even on dynamic pages you can cache fragments if not the whole page. Server-side caching is almost always the right thing to do (in conjunction with browser-side caching), if it's done correctly and massively reduces the load on the server, so not sure why you feel it is wrong?
From the people in charge: "This person visited 18:17 and checked his tax return, and for some reason or another there was an error in the system, and this page entered the so-called cache memory of our servers, where it doesn't belong". You can try to decipher from that what you will.
This is quite easy to interpret. They turned on caching to speed up page loads, but without disabling it for logged in users or sensitive pages, so one user logs in, visits /my_account or whatever, and the page is cached, then when the next 100,000 users visit /my_account the cached page (containing the first user's details) is served without authentication (!). Page caching works great for public pages like / which are served the same to everyone, and doesn't work so great for pages which require authentication.
It's the sort of mistake you wouldn't normally see on a site this size as it's a rookie error and ANY sort of testing of caching would catch it, but apparently that's what they did. Probably they only intended to cache public pages or something and managed to extend it to private pages by mistake. Their server could be properly configured and secure but then this mistake triggered by one small change to their caching config by someone who didn't know the implications.
This is what happens when login credentials are based on the SSN, which is a serialised integer system. One wrong digit doesn't throw an error - it fuckin' logs you in as someone else!
If they didn't have a password, this might possibly do what you have suggested above. I highly doubt access was given without a password, so there's no way one wrong digit would do anything other than 'throw an error'. The problem here does not lie in using integers as user keys.
If it was a caching issue, possibly a page was cached when it shouldn't have been (including someone's account details), and the server returned that single person's page to everyone requesting /my_account or whatever, regardless of their logged in status - that's more likely, and actually quite an easy mistake to make if they turned on caching without properly checking the implications and disabling it for logged in users.
What they would want to do with caching is cache all public pages for everyone (which is fine, as they contain nothing but public information), and it sounds like they also cached a few (or one) private page, and served that instead of the individual private pages for logged in users as intended. I'm sure the details will come out in time.
They already do unless you post cash to amazon in envelopes?
Please stop using the little science project called the Internet, stop using electricity, take off any of your clothes which contain polyester and go live in a field, as modern civilisation would not exist if cretins like you were allowed to veto massive infrastructure investment like this as 'a little science project' and it is the logical conclusion of your happy ignorance.
kthxbye
We need to get back to sound money that "connects" to something of constant value, like gold or land. Something that can not be destroyed through the Fed's rampant printing.
Unfortunately neither gold nor land are of constant value - both depend on scarcity, laws restricting their use, etc. in order to actually have value. All of that (and more) is open to manipulation, and you can bet that if something becomes important enough to our lives, it will be subject to intense scrutiny and attract attention from all the wrong kinds of people. For examples, search for gold corners, gold confiscation, land monopoly, planning permission, land value tax, etc, etc. Fiat money is imposed by force and entirely arbitrary, but then so are all the other rules governing our behaviour, what we can do with gold and land for instance. So swapping paper money for gold will not have the effect you anticipate, it will just mean different laws are passed to control the gold supply, use of gold, give gov. a monopoly, perhaps wars launched to control gold or land etc etc. In fact a lot of the so-called gold traded nowadays doesn't even exist - it's a promise of gold which will never be seen. Also, gold has very little intrinsic value, and yet is highly valued today - why is that? It is seen (perhaps somewhat myopically) as a hedge against inflation - in the short term that is correct and it is potentially a lucrative, if risky, bet, in the long term it is subject to manipulation, confiscation, and outright bans like any other asset.
Sadly I think inflation and booms and busts are more a part of human instincts for aggrandisement than we would like to admit, and whatever system you set up, people (esp. politicians) will try to game it, so the key is to focus on methods people use to obscure true value and gain a monopoly in a given system, not on trying to change the basis for calculating value. In this instance we don't need to get rid of fiat money, but pass laws restricting the rights of governments to borrow so much they bankrupt future generations, and forbidding them to devalue the currency more than a certain amount each year.
As to paper money, it is entirely without purpose nowadays and will soon disappear, to be replaced by transactions recorded by banks - at present it's just serving as a token of these transactions anyway, and governments will of course be happy to see it go. Since governments are the ones to print it and authorise money, I expect it to start to disappear over the next few decades, soon after cheques.
Man up and admit you were wrong; it might even improve your character as well as your grammar. No one cares to hear your whining about grammar nazi's [sic], and the worst thing you can do after a mistake is to try to squirm out of it by pretending it was somehow intentional or a joke. We've seen it all before.