The end user doesn't have to care so much about the code when it is open source:
Your Mom would likely get the workaround binary from her employer, who would likely have someone on staff who knows how to compile from source.
Even if my employer doesn't care to update, they at least have the option of doing so. If you're using closed source, your security is subject to the whims of the vendor, whose security goals may be different than yours.
Having the source available, even if you never use it, is certainly not a drawback. Even at its best, closed source programs can only approach - never exceed - the security options provided by open source. So why would you use a product which at best is only comparable, and potentially much worse than its closed source equivalent? (Not for security reasons.)
Because you have access to the Firefox source, you can "patch out" a vulnerability as soon as it is discovered. Maybe Mozilla doesn't have a patch, or won't for several weeks. In such a case, you can #ifdef 0 the vulnerable code, recompile, and use the crippled version until Mozilla issues a fix.
With proprietary code, your only option is to not use the application entirely. In Microsoft's case, that could mean (because IE is integrated into the OS) you have to leave your computer off until they have a fix. Much less convenient that merely compiling out the problematic code.
In short, the security options belong to the entity possessing the source code.
When I was younger, I remember touring the Air National guard and asking the tour leader if I could by a fighter jet. He responded that to own a fighter jet, I'd have to find one in the Arizona boneyard and it would cost about 5 million dollars. In the 80's, the F16 cost 5 million each (or so I was told...)
However, even had I the money today, I'm not so sure I would buy one.
My uncle was in the Air Force, and actually flew in an F4 phantom. He had three remarks:
He could not believe anything could travel so fast. Even though he rode a motorcycle, he was awestruck by the speed of the F4 phantom.
Fighter jets built after WWII are as maneuverable as they are because they are inherently unstable in flight. The reason why a fighter jet can pull such tight turns is because it's "steady state" flight characteristic is not flat, level flight, but turning flight. While this is valuable in combat, it means that flying combat aircraft requires a high degree of concentration and training. Unlike a Cessna, a moment of inattention in a combat jet can mean finding oneself in an unrecoverable maneuver.
Unlike what some simulators might predict, recovering from a dive can actually be much more difficult than entering one, because the fuel shifts forward, changing the aircraft's center of gravity. Of course engineers design the aircraft to minimize this, but it can never be completely eliminated and does have serious implications for flight. The asymetric flight characteristics of combat jets could come as a very unwelcome (and possibly fatal) surprise to a civilian pilot.
Today, I'm content to fly simulators because I can get a feel for the experience without the attendant risk and cost. Were I flying a 5 million dollar aircraft, I would be very reticent to try the kind of manuevers I do in the simulator, simply because of the risk involved. In the simulator, I can try spins and stalls and rolls that prudence would forbid in the real world.
Because according to Microsoft, system vulnerability is determined by the following formula:
Vulnerability = (time of patch - time of discovery) * number of exploits.
Clearly, since the vulnerability was never publicly discovered, no patch was needed, right? Clearly, since the exploit was never published, it was not a security risk, right?
For years, those outside the FOSS community behaved as if an unknown or undiscovered (or rather, unpublished) exploit was not a security vulnerability for the purposes of calculating risk. Rather, we were led to believe, by MS and others, that only unpatched systems were vulnerable. For years, I watched as countless IT folks repeated the mantra that a fully patched MS system was just as secure as any other.
It always seemed obvious to me, but apparently not to others, that risk should be calculated using not on the time of discovery and publication, but rather, upon the ship date of the software. (i.e., a vulnerability discovered 3 years after ship date, but patched a month after discovery means your system was vulnerable for 39 months, instead of only one as the MS method calculated vulnerability.
I think Google is big enough that people will now recognize that system security is not just a matter of patch early, patch often, but also a characteristic of the entity behind the code. Despite what Microsoft marketing would have you believe, the company can't produce a secure OS because they understand neither the problem, nor even the question.
The reason Linux is more secure than Windows is due not merely to the fact that it is open source, but also because those who work with UNIX understand the problem of system security. It doesn't mean Linux is perfect, only that it fares much better from a total-risk perspective. Microsoft never really grasped that security was a fundamental system design consideration, rather than a problem to be patched on the back-end of SW development. While they have *tried* to address the security issues (and have been somewhat successful, but only due to their brute-force efforts), they still have a product-design mentality which places ship dates above system quality, and usability above overall security. The fact that they still consider anti-virus software and constant patching a normal part of computing indicates they've failed to grasp the lessons learned of the past 3 decades.
For Microsoft, security is a checkbox feature, not a way of doing business. Maybe, now that Google was compromised by a type of exploit Microsoft, et al, considered of minimal, if not zero, risk, the world will change its opinion of the acceptability of software requiring constant patches and add-on kludges (i.e. anti-virus sw) just to function normally.
Pay is based on accomplishment and achievements...
No, it is not.
My investment banker counterpart earns about twice what an engineer does, and does even less work. True, the world does not care about your feelings, but the salary you receive is largely dependent on:
The position you work (or career field), and
How well you can sell yourself to your employer.
The first is usually a matter of education, the second, largely a matter of confidence.
One thing that negotiating a higher salary has taught me is that companies will always attempt to hire at the lowest possible salary. Being able to do a job 10 times better than the other guy doesn't mean a thing (wrt salary) if you don't exhibit confidence during the interview. Confidence goes a long way toward convincing an employer that you are worth more than the average guy.
I realize people *should* be paid in proportion to their ability and work ethic, but that's not how the real world works.
I read the rest of the statement as an indication the Pope is well aware of how close Galileo is coming to heresy, and rather than see him hanged as a heretic, seeks to provide him with a mechanism by which he may still expound on his ideas, without making himself liable to heresy charges.
Galileo, regardless of his intentions, not only fails to achieve the objective of the Pope's advice, but also inadvertently insults Pope. True to form, Galileo angers, rather than enlightens. One could make a good argument that the Pope recognized Galileo's genius, and was trying to save him from himself.
The main problem I have with seeing it as a conflict between religious dogma and scientific investigation is that the Church waited almost a full century before acting, and when it did, it seemed almost reluctant. During the same time period, a person could be hanged for denying the Holy Trinity.
Copernicus had proposed a heliocentric system almost a century before Galileo, and yet suffered no persecution by the Church because of it. Even Luther commented that his ideas were revolutionary.
Tycho Brahe had been cataloging astronomical observations for decades, and it was upon this data that Galileo relied. If the Church disagreed with the heliocentric model as much as we are led to believe, why didn't the Church also persecute Brahe or ban his works?
Why is Galileo credited primarily with the heliocentric model, when Copernicus first put forth the mathematical model and Brahe collected the observations necessary to support it? Could it be because he was prosecuted for heresy, and *someone* wants to paint the Church as anti-science?
In light of the above, it is much more plausible that Galileo's persecution was political, rather than religious. The Pope at first indicated a willingness to be open minded regarding the issue; at least one Cardinal was likewise open minded, but not convinced. However, Galileo spurned the Pope, and it seems his political rivals finally found - in an otherwise minor doctrine - a noose in which to hang Galileo. Except that the Church seemed almost reluctant to prosecute; in a time when heretics were hanged, he got away with house arrest. And the Pope made him look like a fool, in much the same way Galileo had treated him in his book.
further evidence against Aristotelian Cosmology, which led to problems with the Roman Catholic Church, etc...
I know that people who repeat such things are only showing their ignorance (heck, even Wikipedia explains the controversy better), but I feel this lie gets repeated often enough that it should be addressed.
In its opening passage, Galileo and Guiducci's Discourse gratuitously insulted the Jesuit Christopher Scheiner,[56] and various uncomplimentary remarks about the professors of the Collegio Romano were scattered throughout the work.[57] The Jesuits were offended,[58] and Grassi soon replied with a polemical tract of his own, The Astronomical and Philosophical Balance,[59] under the pseudonym Lothario Sarsio Sigensano,[60] purporting to be one of his own pupils.
And later:
Pope Urban VIII personally asked Galileo to give arguments for and against heliocentrism in the book,
Indeed, it was Galileo's political antagonism, not his ideas, that got him trouble. Imagine that.
There is a very simple question one can ask to determine if a someone is genuinely objective and dispassionate in their search for the truth:
Does the Church suppress science?
The manner in which this question is answered is often quite revealing:
Someone with no critical thinking skills, nor ability to understand anything but absolutes, will almost invariably mention Galileo and blame the Church for suppressing science and free thought. The irony, of course, is that it's a moot point: it hardly matters if free thought is suppressed when the speaker goes to considerable lengths to avoid doing so. Even though he may publicly laud free inquiry and study, he simply dismisses any source which disagrees with his predisposed notions of the world.
Someone who answers that "there's no proof" that Galileo is correct is probably heading off on a tangent which will end in a discussion about evolution. Again, probably not a very insightful individual, but at least his own views are consistent with his internal model of the world.
Someone who explains that while the Church did create the university system; and continues to fund science to this day; while also allowing that at times in the past it has been used for political ends is probably someone with a very educated opinion. He's demonstrated the ability to deal with concepts in varying degrees, and to understand the difference between a *political* objection, and a doctrinal one.
In much the same way that there exist Creationists who refuse to accept any evidence contrary to their opinion, even to the point of committing logical fallacies, there exist individuals who really don't read history, and just blindly accept whatever they've been told. Worse, they often repeat things which are provably false, which - aside from the damage done to the Church - call into question their ability to think rationally and perform rigorous analysis.
The Galileo fiasco - that is, the belief that the Church is somehow anti-science because of what happened to Galileo - is an interesting teaching moment. The outworn argument against Creationists, Flat-Earthers, Global-Warming deniers, etc... has always been that science is objective, dispassionate. And yet, in the Galileo fiasco, you have people who in matters of science are otherwise logical and objective, repeating something they know (or should know) is false.
Interesting.
It seems the failings of human nature apply to everyone, after all.
Currently, to snoop on your data, LEOs must first obtain a search warrant or subpeona.
A private company, OTOH, is only bound by the TOS. For example, (at one time) your gmail account can be disabled for "objectionable" or "illegal" content. Which means that if law enforcement so much as informs Google that a given user is doing something illegal, or claims they are doing something "objectionable", Google is well within their rights to permanently disable the account. As it is within their TOS, there is no legal recourse for the account holder. As it was not done by government, there are no constitutional rights issues.
Imagine for a moment that you've worked hard gaining a political following for a particular cause. After making hundreds of contacts, suddenly, your gmail access vanishes for "objectionable content" - someone complained you were racist, sexist, or, well, it doesn't matter, because Google owns the servers and doesn't even have to investigate the truth of the complaint. Now you've been effectively disappeared from all of your political contacts, and, even if you do have a backup copy of their contact information, you're going to have to re-establish trust with them once again.
The powers that be cannot put someone in jail for exercising their free speech rights. They can, however, ask their hosting provider to make them disappear, and in most cases, the hosting provider will comply without so much as whimper. Almost every TOS allows disconnection or discontinuation of service for almost arbitrary reasons.
That it isn't framerate which matters, but the color/luminosity delta.
Light impinging on the eye produces a chemical reaction; naturally, it takes some time for equilibrium to occur in the rods and cones. The greater the light change, the faster the reaction occurs. This means:
Large changes in luminosity or color (the eye is actually more sensitive to luminosity) produce a sensory result faster than small changes.
Conversely, small changes in luminosity take longer for the eye to recognize.
The end result is that the effective "framerate" at which motion transitions from jittery to smooth is a function of the luminosity difference between the moving object and it's background. For example, an Air Force study once found that pilots could identify an enemy plane flashed for a mere 1/220th of a second. It's rather easy to do, when the background is a bright blue sky and a plane is a dark black object; the difference in luminosity is considerable.
From my own personal experience, I know that a mere 10 milliseconds is enough for my eyes to detect an LED flash.
While 30 fps might have appeared smooth on older CRT monitors with low contrast ratios, today's high contrast LCD/LED displays are much better at producing luminosity deltas than the models of 2 or 3 decades ago. Thus, you actually need a faster framerate to produce smooth motion than you did 20 years ago.
While I cannot pick out individual frames at 60 Hz, I do notice the flicker and it is *REALLY* annoying when playing flight simulator games. The irony is that while the terrain and plane are modeled to a photo-realistic resolution, the flickering framerate won't let me forget I'm sitting in front of a computer, rather than in the cockpit of a WWII era plane.
Smooth gameplay is not just about framerate, but a decent framerate (i.e. > 60 Hz) is the essential foundation on which FPS and flight simulator games depend. Though it's only my personal opinion, a game with a low, or jittery frame rate is much less playable than a visibly pixelated one. The eye is very capable of approximating missing lines, completing shapes, etc... but much poorer at interpolating missing frames.
I like the academic arguments. In this case, its purely academic.
But the problem I have with this guy's approach is that while the likelihood of LHC-created Earth-destroying black holes is infitesimally small, the likelihood of crazy nutjobs picking up his argument as "proof" of LHC dangers approaches 1. Society will always have people with mental disabilities; taking advantage of them doesn't make you look smart - it just makes you look cruel and stupid. In this case, it's fairly obvious he's either oblivious to the problems his statements will create for other people, or he cares more for gaining publicity than the possible problems his statements will create.
There are valid concerns with the global warming debate. I have seen the data, and yes, a cursory analysis of temperature puts us on the downward decline of a 100 year cycle*. However, even a rudimentary understanding of physics dispels any concerns over LHC created black holes. The controversy is manufactured entirely by the press and a few, possibly very stupid, lackeys who go along with them for reasons unknown. I can only speculate the reasons why he can't be bothered to obtain even a first-semester understanding of physics, but I, for one, would not hire anyone as my lawyer who demonstrates not only a complete misunderstanding of physics, but also the inability to even perform a Google search on the subject.
There is another possibility of course; that they'll simply attempt to ignore it.
He forgets a third possibility: that the physicist who does respond will expose his ignorance in a very public and demeaning manner. The more charitable physicists might simply dismiss the charge, but if I had to respond, it would be very difficult for me to refrain from calling him incorrigibly stupid and recommending him for a career digging ditches, as digging himself into a hole is the only talent he's demonstrated. The only recovery possible from such a ludicrous position is to admit you've found Jesus and have changed from your old, vindictive, lying, self.
* - Yes, I understand there are, really, genuinely crazy people denying global warming. However, there are also well-reasoned arguments calling into question the connection between burning fossil fuels and global temperature (for example, we can only account for about half of the carbon burned as fossil fuels; it's going somewhere, but it's not staying in the atmosphere...) But that's nowhere close to the notion of LHC-created black holes destroying the earth. Even if we could create black holes with the LHC, they would possess the same mass and gravitational attraction as their constituent particles - negligible. Unlike global warming, the LHC issue is not a matter of an unresolved scientific question, but rather, a misunderstanding of basic physics.
The fundamental problem here is not that of copying, but the matter of justice in proportion to the crime.
Suppose, for example, we take the RIAA's argument at face value: Because she's shared these 19 songs, the RIAA companies will never make another sale from them. According to the RIAA, she owes them for the lost profits they would have made.
Even were this the case, the maximum cost of these 19 songs is the cost the RIAA paid to the artists to produce them. Here's a hint: it's not very much. Elton John once said that he could write a song in 15 minutes; even were he to charge a lawyerly-like rate of $500/hour, that would only be a few thousand dollars of labor. Even at the extreme end, this is two band-years worth of labor, which hardly costs the label a few million dollars.
In terms of actual damages, she probably resulted in no lost sales. Even before filesharing, I grew up in an environment where people simply taped songs off the radio, and bought the occasional LP. The type of people downloading from filesharing networks are the kind who wouldn't have bought the song no matter how much they like it. What the RIAA doesn't understand is that with the exception of the upper-middle and upper classes, most of America has become accustomed to getting their music for free, without paying a dime. If they can't get it for free, they just do without. It is almost never a lost sale.
What disturbs me most is that a jury could be convinced to grant a judgement of a few million dollars against her without any actual proof of infringement. They have no idea how many - if any - downloads actually occurred.
As much as I hate to say it, you are dead wrong about this. Many people think the job of top leadership is to make the company run smoothly. It's not. Their job, specifically, is to:
Improve the overall impression of the company in the mind of the shareholders, i.e. "increasing shareholder value" or stock price. Notice that this activity has nothing to do with the solvency or efficiency of day-to-day operations. It is why companies blow billions of dollars on unworkable "solutions" (i.e. outsourcing) and hare-brained ideas (i.e. Web 2.0...)
Reflect the bias and preconceptions of the shareholders. Again, this explains why CIO's typically choose vendors and products which have no relevance to day-to-day operations: the shareholders know little to nothing of operations, and when every other company is using SAP or Oracle, you had better make sure you do as well. Even if all of the company data could fit on a floppy disk.
Finally, most importantly, the job of the CxO is to finish projects. The shareholders and CEO has no clue what the company actually needs, so the CIO must finish *some* project, regardless of how irrelevant it turns out to be. He'll pave the way for later CIO's by installing a ticking-time-bomb of a system which eventually gets so bad that it must be replaced. No matter how badly the project turns out, no matter how useless or counterproductive, the CIO gets paid based on the size and complexity of the project. The only way a CIO can fail is if he is so concerned about "getting it right the first time" and "making a smooth transition" that he wears out the CEO's/shareholder's patience and fails to finish a project in what they consider a reasonable timeframe. It doesn't matter if it is complete junk; the CEO won't ever hear the problems.
I found it much easier to get along in Corporate America once I discovered the quality of the job is less important than the careers of management. Nobody got fired for shipping a buggy product, but people have been fired for not meeting deadlines.
I drive. Honestly, though this is ridiculously stupid, why should I care? Why would I even bother to file a complaint?
I have relatives about 1500 miles east of me. The last time I visited them, I drove, and had a wonderful time doing it. I haven't flown since 2005, and even then, it was a miserable experience, without even getting into the airport security fiasco.
Look, this is exactly the reason why we have a free market. This is the reason why bailing out corporations is bad policy. The airlines will either figure out how to make flying fun again, or they'll go out of business. It's not my job to tell the airlines and TSA all of the problems with their service; it's their job to figure out how to entice me to fly, rather than drive. Bankrupting inefficient or unresponsive firms is *how* the free market guarantees customer satisfaction.
So far, they aren't doing a very good job. But I could care less. It's not my problem - it's theirs.
I think everyone questions the value of having a large battery pack in their basement. I know I did.
So I thought of alternative energy storage - like kinetic. My idea was to have the solar cells pump water into an above ground tank, 10 meters high. With water weighing ~1 ton per cubic meter, even a small tank would suffice. My back-of-the-napkin calculations revealed that a tank a few meters in diameter and a few meters high could hold enough energy in the water downflow to power a house for a month.
The only problem was that building something capable of suspending many tons of water at a height of 10 meters was neither trivial nor inexpensive. And this even without the problem of finding a small, highly efficient hydroelectric turbine. Nor of that of solving the water-freezes-in-winter problem.
I don't have a natural gas furnace because of a religious belief in spending a few thousand dollars for HVAC; I have one because it is the most cost-effective form of HVAC at the moment. It's not a matter so much of what is possible, but for most homeowners, a matter of the most cost-effective way of heating and cooling their abode. *Everyone* wants free energy, but if it were possible, people would already be doing it. Batteries are hardly news, except when they make the conventional methods of powering one's house economically obsolete.
Maintenance is a matter of the cost equation. Most people would care less about replacement every 3 years if they saved money over conventional energy sources. Heck, I have to change the oil in my car every 3 months, and even that's not a major burden.
As a Christian, I'm often quite amused at secular folks who think the Bible isn't (or shouldn't) be violent. The violence and sin in the Bible is used to prove a point.
The scenes you describe are used as but one reminder of the depravity of Man without God. If the Bible was all pink unicorns and roses, there wouldn't be any point in reading it, no compelling reason to understand its lessons. Why bother being Christian if things "magically" work out all by themselves? Were it not for Mankind's inclination to mistreat each other, we wouldn't need religion. Instead, we have a Biblical reminder of what happens when we don't follow the rules.
I'm not certain from where the objection to violence in video games comes. I can understand the objection to sex, but video game violence goes to great lengths to *remove* the human aspect of war. You see planes go down in flames, and blood and guts, but never a veteran struggling with a disability or mother grieving the loss of her son. The latter just don't make good gameplay, and they're the reasons why violence is problematic in society: the human cost. Take out the human cost, and it's just fanciful animation. If anything, game developers go to considerable lengths to remove the human suffering element from games; characters usually die instantly, with little indication of feeling anything at all.
And for a particularly gory read, try reading Maccabees sometime.
One of my concerns about raising children in a small town is if it will prepare them for the "real" world outside the city limits.
Oddly, I think it does. In a small town, one learns very quickly that the whole town soon learns of whatever you say or do. There is no real anonymity. And growing up, you learn quickly not to make public anything you don't want your "whole world" to know.
Yet I hear time and again the sentiment that people think they're anonymous on the net. How ironic that someone who presumably understood enough about computers to use them for nefarious deeds did not think of the longer term consequences of their actions
I have seen the opposite problem crop up: an institution so focused on creating code according to standards that they actually make the situation worse:
First, management belongs to a project management book-of-the-month club. Every project has rigid documentation and coding standards, but unfortunately, they are all different. Even if there were no comments in the code, it could be dated by the design pattern and/or coding style used. The result? A myriad of different, inconsistent coding styles, all the product of management directives.
The coding standards are laughable and outdated: I've seen requirements to use Hungarian notation, requiring macros for structure access (because, apparently, my_struct.my_field is just too confusing...), ridiculous namespace standards (why use a namespace if you're going to prefix the name anyway?), etc...
Mandatory comment blocks of monstrous size that make it impossible to see the forest through the trees. Yes, I understand documenting what is being done, or why, but there is no reason why a comment block should contain pseudocode describing the logic used. The code is already there!
Asinine physical design requirements, such as limiting files to only one function, making it rather difficult to view a group of functions as a logical module.
The required use of design anti-patterns, such as the Facade pattern, or the Endless-Wrapper pattern, where every OS call must be slowed down by an additional layer of indirection. Or, more frequently, the Class-Explosion anti-pattern, where even a strncmp() must be abstracted into its own class object.
The required use of symbolic constants instead of "Magic Numbers". The use of symbolic constants is normally a Good Thing(TM), except in cases where they make the code harder to read. Consider the following code: "ready = register & LOW_BITS;" So, which bits are set after the assignment? Oh, that's right, you can't tell without tracking down the header file with LOW_BITS in it. Granted, you can do this. But if you work with embedded software, it gets rather tedious after a few dozen times. "ready = register & 0x03;" is much clearer. Symbolic constants make debugging a real chore, because you can't verify the correctness of a statement merely by reading that statement; you must track down all of the headers. Worse, I've seen them nested more than 3 levels deep, split across multiple header files.
So, be careful what you ask for, you might just get it. Generally speaking, it's easier to convince a sloppy programmer to write better code than it is to justify a deviation from already-established, albeit improper, coding standards.
So email evidence of data forgery, refusal to comply with FOIA requests, and attempts to silence dissenting opinion is nothing notable?
Perhaps Nature considers these part and parcel of regular science. I don't, however, and I think most scientists would be shocked and horrified to learn the new rules.
Granted, the overwhelming majority of the emails show nothing more than the normal scientific process. Apparently, whomever selected those in FOIA.zip is unaware of the normal peer review process. However, if only by chance, they did find evidence of:
A conspiracy to thwart a FOIA request.
The appearance, at least, that certain scientists were applying a correction to the data in order to get the results they desired.(the "1940's blip")
A revealing email where scientists suggested not submitting papers to a journal which published dissenting papers.
A revealing text file "harry_read_me" in which the writer displays ignorance of numeric overflow, missing data sets, and arbitrarily generating missing or unavailable data.
A debate about the reliability of dendrochronology data as a proxy for temperature.
Granted, I may not believe the GW conspiracy theorists, but this development is very troubling. While climatology as a whole is probably unaffected, those making public policy cannot rely on the resuts published by Mann, et al, until the investigation is finished. While this may not have long term effects on the scientific problem of GW, it certainly affects the political aspects of it.
But then again, if Nature sees nothing wrong with forging data to get the result you want, perhaps all of science is doomed.
A belief in fairy tales does not constitute a protected class.
Unless, of course, you're in California, and your fairy tale is calling your homosexual relationship a marriage.
I can understand how immutable characteristics constitute a protected class, but why religion? Why sexuality? I can legally be fired for having the "wrong" political views, but not for the "wrong" religious views?
While I'm not one to argue for religious discrimination, the simple fact of the matter is that I can change my religious disposition. A homosexual can choose not to commit sodomy just as easily as a heterosexual can choose to refrain from adultery. Yet, legally, both religion and sexual orientation are afforded some kind of unquestionable, sacrosanct status? (Though the latter more than the former as of late...)
And honestly, you're still bringing up the 6000 year-old-earth canard?! Even though the overwhelming majority of believers don't believe it? Even though it was never formally accepted as doctrine by the Church? I do believe I could find a flat-Earther with a greater understanding of modern physics than you have of all religions combined.
And it has been used for at least a decade, if not longer. It is quite simple to implement in either hardware or software, and does the job reasonably well. Unlike some of the other algorithms mentioned, it requires no analysis of the rendered image and runs in constant time. You can read about it here.
"You" - who formally prove your code, comment it, and make sure it works right - are called at 2 am in the morning to fix code that "He" wrote. "He" is now your boss, because:
"He" realized that his boss doesn't read code, and hence, comments don't matter. He didn't waste time with thoughtful analysis, good architecture, testing, or even commenting.
"He" shipped his code on time and under budget, and was promptly promoted to manager.
"He" can't understand why it takes "You" so long to ship code. "He" is constantly promising management increasingly shorter deadlines, which "You" have to work overtime to make.
"He" thinks you're an idiot because you can't fix his awful, spaghetti code 15 seconds after it breaks. After all, it never took him longer than that to hack something up to fix the problem, why would it take you that long?! If you can't figure out how to fix the program, just hardcode the "correct" result and move on.
Programmers beware: the meticulous, but correct, programmer is a valuable asset to the company; the sloppy but fast programmer is his boss.
Have you as a public been fooled into thinking I'm unaware of the dangers of smoking, carousing, and general debauchery?
It's not these the FDA is concerned about, but the possibly as-yet-unknown interactions between caffeine and alcohol that could exacerbate the long term ill effects of the other.
As I understand it, to fully understand the risks, you must be a microbiologist who specializes in human metabolism. Me, I'm a CS major, and while I could spend a decade of my life studying biology and chemistry, and human metabolism so that I could know for certain the risks, I choose not to.
Instead, a portion of my tax dollars pays someone at the FDA to do that for me. That way, I can get on with having a good time without having to conduct a formal risk analysis every time I go the bar.
Slashdot Mirror
Think for a moment what you are trying to do when recovering from a dive...
The end user doesn't have to care so much about the code when it is open source:
Because you have access to the Firefox source, you can "patch out" a vulnerability as soon as it is discovered. Maybe Mozilla doesn't have a patch, or won't for several weeks. In such a case, you can #ifdef 0 the vulnerable code, recompile, and use the crippled version until Mozilla issues a fix.
With proprietary code, your only option is to not use the application entirely. In Microsoft's case, that could mean (because IE is integrated into the OS) you have to leave your computer off until they have a fix. Much less convenient that merely compiling out the problematic code.
In short, the security options belong to the entity possessing the source code.
When I was younger, I remember touring the Air National guard and asking the tour leader if I could by a fighter jet. He responded that to own a fighter jet, I'd have to find one in the Arizona boneyard and it would cost about 5 million dollars. In the 80's, the F16 cost 5 million each (or so I was told...)
However, even had I the money today, I'm not so sure I would buy one.
My uncle was in the Air Force, and actually flew in an F4 phantom. He had three remarks:
Today, I'm content to fly simulators because I can get a feel for the experience without the attendant risk and cost. Were I flying a 5 million dollar aircraft, I would be very reticent to try the kind of manuevers I do in the simulator, simply because of the risk involved. In the simulator, I can try spins and stalls and rolls that prudence would forbid in the real world.
But it would still be cool to own a fighter jet.
Because according to Microsoft, system vulnerability is determined by the following formula:
Vulnerability = (time of patch - time of discovery) * number of exploits.
Clearly, since the vulnerability was never publicly discovered, no patch was needed, right? Clearly, since the exploit was never published, it was not a security risk, right?
For years, those outside the FOSS community behaved as if an unknown or undiscovered (or rather, unpublished) exploit was not a security vulnerability for the purposes of calculating risk. Rather, we were led to believe, by MS and others, that only unpatched systems were vulnerable. For years, I watched as countless IT folks repeated the mantra that a fully patched MS system was just as secure as any other.
It always seemed obvious to me, but apparently not to others, that risk should be calculated using not on the time of discovery and publication, but rather, upon the ship date of the software. (i.e., a vulnerability discovered 3 years after ship date, but patched a month after discovery means your system was vulnerable for 39 months, instead of only one as the MS method calculated vulnerability.
I think Google is big enough that people will now recognize that system security is not just a matter of patch early, patch often, but also a characteristic of the entity behind the code. Despite what Microsoft marketing would have you believe, the company can't produce a secure OS because they understand neither the problem, nor even the question.
The reason Linux is more secure than Windows is due not merely to the fact that it is open source, but also because those who work with UNIX understand the problem of system security. It doesn't mean Linux is perfect, only that it fares much better from a total-risk perspective. Microsoft never really grasped that security was a fundamental system design consideration, rather than a problem to be patched on the back-end of SW development. While they have *tried* to address the security issues (and have been somewhat successful, but only due to their brute-force efforts), they still have a product-design mentality which places ship dates above system quality, and usability above overall security. The fact that they still consider anti-virus software and constant patching a normal part of computing indicates they've failed to grasp the lessons learned of the past 3 decades.
For Microsoft, security is a checkbox feature, not a way of doing business. Maybe, now that Google was compromised by a type of exploit Microsoft, et al, considered of minimal, if not zero, risk, the world will change its opinion of the acceptability of software requiring constant patches and add-on kludges (i.e. anti-virus sw) just to function normally.
Pay is based on accomplishment and achievements...
No, it is not.
My investment banker counterpart earns about twice what an engineer does, and does even less work. True, the world does not care about your feelings, but the salary you receive is largely dependent on:
The first is usually a matter of education, the second, largely a matter of confidence.
One thing that negotiating a higher salary has taught me is that companies will always attempt to hire at the lowest possible salary. Being able to do a job 10 times better than the other guy doesn't mean a thing (wrt salary) if you don't exhibit confidence during the interview. Confidence goes a long way toward convincing an employer that you are worth more than the average guy.
I realize people *should* be paid in proportion to their ability and work ethic, but that's not how the real world works.
I read the rest of the statement as an indication the Pope is well aware of how close Galileo is coming to heresy, and rather than see him hanged as a heretic, seeks to provide him with a mechanism by which he may still expound on his ideas, without making himself liable to heresy charges.
Galileo, regardless of his intentions, not only fails to achieve the objective of the Pope's advice, but also inadvertently insults Pope. True to form, Galileo angers, rather than enlightens. One could make a good argument that the Pope recognized Galileo's genius, and was trying to save him from himself.
The main problem I have with seeing it as a conflict between religious dogma and scientific investigation is that the Church waited almost a full century before acting, and when it did, it seemed almost reluctant. During the same time period, a person could be hanged for denying the Holy Trinity.
In light of the above, it is much more plausible that Galileo's persecution was political, rather than religious. The Pope at first indicated a willingness to be open minded regarding the issue; at least one Cardinal was likewise open minded, but not convinced. However, Galileo spurned the Pope, and it seems his political rivals finally found - in an otherwise minor doctrine - a noose in which to hang Galileo. Except that the Church seemed almost reluctant to prosecute; in a time when heretics were hanged, he got away with house arrest. And the Pope made him look like a fool, in much the same way Galileo had treated him in his book.
further evidence against Aristotelian Cosmology, which led to problems with the Roman Catholic Church, etc...
I know that people who repeat such things are only showing their ignorance (heck, even Wikipedia explains the controversy better), but I feel this lie gets repeated often enough that it should be addressed.
According to Wikipedia:
In its opening passage, Galileo and Guiducci's Discourse gratuitously insulted the Jesuit Christopher Scheiner,[56] and various uncomplimentary remarks about the professors of the Collegio Romano were scattered throughout the work.[57] The Jesuits were offended,[58] and Grassi soon replied with a polemical tract of his own, The Astronomical and Philosophical Balance ,[59] under the pseudonym Lothario Sarsio Sigensano,[60] purporting to be one of his own pupils.
And later:
Pope Urban VIII personally asked Galileo to give arguments for and against heliocentrism in the book,
Indeed, it was Galileo's political antagonism, not his ideas, that got him trouble. Imagine that.
There is a very simple question one can ask to determine if a someone is genuinely objective and dispassionate in their search for the truth:
The manner in which this question is answered is often quite revealing:
In much the same way that there exist Creationists who refuse to accept any evidence contrary to their opinion, even to the point of committing logical fallacies, there exist individuals who really don't read history, and just blindly accept whatever they've been told. Worse, they often repeat things which are provably false, which - aside from the damage done to the Church - call into question their ability to think rationally and perform rigorous analysis.
The Galileo fiasco - that is, the belief that the Church is somehow anti-science because of what happened to Galileo - is an interesting teaching moment. The outworn argument against Creationists, Flat-Earthers, Global-Warming deniers, etc... has always been that science is objective, dispassionate. And yet, in the Galileo fiasco, you have people who in matters of science are otherwise logical and objective, repeating something they know (or should know) is false.
Interesting.
It seems the failings of human nature apply to everyone, after all.
Currently, to snoop on your data, LEOs must first obtain a search warrant or subpeona.
A private company, OTOH, is only bound by the TOS. For example, (at one time) your gmail account can be disabled for "objectionable" or "illegal" content. Which means that if law enforcement so much as informs Google that a given user is doing something illegal, or claims they are doing something "objectionable", Google is well within their rights to permanently disable the account. As it is within their TOS, there is no legal recourse for the account holder. As it was not done by government, there are no constitutional rights issues.
Imagine for a moment that you've worked hard gaining a political following for a particular cause. After making hundreds of contacts, suddenly, your gmail access vanishes for "objectionable content" - someone complained you were racist, sexist, or, well, it doesn't matter, because Google owns the servers and doesn't even have to investigate the truth of the complaint. Now you've been effectively disappeared from all of your political contacts, and, even if you do have a backup copy of their contact information, you're going to have to re-establish trust with them once again.
The powers that be cannot put someone in jail for exercising their free speech rights. They can, however, ask their hosting provider to make them disappear, and in most cases, the hosting provider will comply without so much as whimper. Almost every TOS allows disconnection or discontinuation of service for almost arbitrary reasons.
And what are you going to do about it?
That it isn't framerate which matters, but the color/luminosity delta.
Light impinging on the eye produces a chemical reaction; naturally, it takes some time for equilibrium to occur in the rods and cones. The greater the light change, the faster the reaction occurs. This means:
Smooth gameplay is not just about framerate, but a decent framerate (i.e. > 60 Hz) is the essential foundation on which FPS and flight simulator games depend. Though it's only my personal opinion, a game with a low, or jittery frame rate is much less playable than a visibly pixelated one. The eye is very capable of approximating missing lines, completing shapes, etc... but much poorer at interpolating missing frames.
I like the academic arguments. In this case, its purely academic.
But the problem I have with this guy's approach is that while the likelihood of LHC-created Earth-destroying black holes is infitesimally small, the likelihood of crazy nutjobs picking up his argument as "proof" of LHC dangers approaches 1. Society will always have people with mental disabilities; taking advantage of them doesn't make you look smart - it just makes you look cruel and stupid. In this case, it's fairly obvious he's either oblivious to the problems his statements will create for other people, or he cares more for gaining publicity than the possible problems his statements will create.
There are valid concerns with the global warming debate. I have seen the data, and yes, a cursory analysis of temperature puts us on the downward decline of a 100 year cycle*. However, even a rudimentary understanding of physics dispels any concerns over LHC created black holes. The controversy is manufactured entirely by the press and a few, possibly very stupid, lackeys who go along with them for reasons unknown. I can only speculate the reasons why he can't be bothered to obtain even a first-semester understanding of physics, but I, for one, would not hire anyone as my lawyer who demonstrates not only a complete misunderstanding of physics, but also the inability to even perform a Google search on the subject.
There is another possibility of course; that they'll simply attempt to ignore it.
He forgets a third possibility: that the physicist who does respond will expose his ignorance in a very public and demeaning manner. The more charitable physicists might simply dismiss the charge, but if I had to respond, it would be very difficult for me to refrain from calling him incorrigibly stupid and recommending him for a career digging ditches, as digging himself into a hole is the only talent he's demonstrated. The only recovery possible from such a ludicrous position is to admit you've found Jesus and have changed from your old, vindictive, lying, self.
* - Yes, I understand there are, really, genuinely crazy people denying global warming. However, there are also well-reasoned arguments calling into question the connection between burning fossil fuels and global temperature (for example, we can only account for about half of the carbon burned as fossil fuels; it's going somewhere, but it's not staying in the atmosphere...) But that's nowhere close to the notion of LHC-created black holes destroying the earth. Even if we could create black holes with the LHC, they would possess the same mass and gravitational attraction as their constituent particles - negligible. Unlike global warming, the LHC issue is not a matter of an unresolved scientific question, but rather, a misunderstanding of basic physics.
The fundamental problem here is not that of copying, but the matter of justice in proportion to the crime.
Suppose, for example, we take the RIAA's argument at face value: Because she's shared these 19 songs, the RIAA companies will never make another sale from them. According to the RIAA, she owes them for the lost profits they would have made.
Even were this the case, the maximum cost of these 19 songs is the cost the RIAA paid to the artists to produce them. Here's a hint: it's not very much. Elton John once said that he could write a song in 15 minutes; even were he to charge a lawyerly-like rate of $500/hour, that would only be a few thousand dollars of labor. Even at the extreme end, this is two band-years worth of labor, which hardly costs the label a few million dollars.
In terms of actual damages, she probably resulted in no lost sales. Even before filesharing, I grew up in an environment where people simply taped songs off the radio, and bought the occasional LP. The type of people downloading from filesharing networks are the kind who wouldn't have bought the song no matter how much they like it. What the RIAA doesn't understand is that with the exception of the upper-middle and upper classes, most of America has become accustomed to getting their music for free, without paying a dime. If they can't get it for free, they just do without. It is almost never a lost sale.
What disturbs me most is that a jury could be convinced to grant a judgement of a few million dollars against her without any actual proof of infringement. They have no idea how many - if any - downloads actually occurred.
with the top leadership not doing their job
As much as I hate to say it, you are dead wrong about this. Many people think the job of top leadership is to make the company run smoothly. It's not. Their job, specifically, is to:
I found it much easier to get along in Corporate America once I discovered the quality of the job is less important than the careers of management. Nobody got fired for shipping a buggy product, but people have been fired for not meeting deadlines.
I drive. Honestly, though this is ridiculously stupid, why should I care? Why would I even bother to file a complaint?
I have relatives about 1500 miles east of me. The last time I visited them, I drove, and had a wonderful time doing it. I haven't flown since 2005, and even then, it was a miserable experience, without even getting into the airport security fiasco.
Look, this is exactly the reason why we have a free market. This is the reason why bailing out corporations is bad policy. The airlines will either figure out how to make flying fun again, or they'll go out of business. It's not my job to tell the airlines and TSA all of the problems with their service; it's their job to figure out how to entice me to fly, rather than drive. Bankrupting inefficient or unresponsive firms is *how* the free market guarantees customer satisfaction.
So far, they aren't doing a very good job. But I could care less. It's not my problem - it's theirs.
I think everyone questions the value of having a large battery pack in their basement. I know I did.
So I thought of alternative energy storage - like kinetic. My idea was to have the solar cells pump water into an above ground tank, 10 meters high. With water weighing ~1 ton per cubic meter, even a small tank would suffice. My back-of-the-napkin calculations revealed that a tank a few meters in diameter and a few meters high could hold enough energy in the water downflow to power a house for a month.
The only problem was that building something capable of suspending many tons of water at a height of 10 meters was neither trivial nor inexpensive. And this even without the problem of finding a small, highly efficient hydroelectric turbine. Nor of that of solving the water-freezes-in-winter problem.
I don't have a natural gas furnace because of a religious belief in spending a few thousand dollars for HVAC; I have one because it is the most cost-effective form of HVAC at the moment. It's not a matter so much of what is possible, but for most homeowners, a matter of the most cost-effective way of heating and cooling their abode. *Everyone* wants free energy, but if it were possible, people would already be doing it. Batteries are hardly news, except when they make the conventional methods of powering one's house economically obsolete.
Maintenance is a matter of the cost equation. Most people would care less about replacement every 3 years if they saved money over conventional energy sources. Heck, I have to change the oil in my car every 3 months, and even that's not a major burden.
As a Christian, I'm often quite amused at secular folks who think the Bible isn't (or shouldn't) be violent. The violence and sin in the Bible is used to prove a point.
The scenes you describe are used as but one reminder of the depravity of Man without God. If the Bible was all pink unicorns and roses, there wouldn't be any point in reading it, no compelling reason to understand its lessons. Why bother being Christian if things "magically" work out all by themselves? Were it not for Mankind's inclination to mistreat each other, we wouldn't need religion. Instead, we have a Biblical reminder of what happens when we don't follow the rules.
I'm not certain from where the objection to violence in video games comes. I can understand the objection to sex, but video game violence goes to great lengths to *remove* the human aspect of war. You see planes go down in flames, and blood and guts, but never a veteran struggling with a disability or mother grieving the loss of her son. The latter just don't make good gameplay, and they're the reasons why violence is problematic in society: the human cost. Take out the human cost, and it's just fanciful animation. If anything, game developers go to considerable lengths to remove the human suffering element from games; characters usually die instantly, with little indication of feeling anything at all.
And for a particularly gory read, try reading Maccabees sometime.
After a few bars of Oklahoma! ... you'll get your music players back.
When questioned, explain that it helps you concentrate on the task at hand. Remind him that IBM hired musicians for the first programmers.
One of my concerns about raising children in a small town is if it will prepare them for the "real" world outside the city limits.
Oddly, I think it does. In a small town, one learns very quickly that the whole town soon learns of whatever you say or do. There is no real anonymity. And growing up, you learn quickly not to make public anything you don't want your "whole world" to know.
Yet I hear time and again the sentiment that people think they're anonymous on the net. How ironic that someone who presumably understood enough about computers to use them for nefarious deeds did not think of the longer term consequences of their actions
You just might get it.
I have seen the opposite problem crop up: an institution so focused on creating code according to standards that they actually make the situation worse:
So, be careful what you ask for, you might just get it. Generally speaking, it's easier to convince a sloppy programmer to write better code than it is to justify a deviation from already-established, albeit improper, coding standards.
So email evidence of data forgery, refusal to comply with FOIA requests, and attempts to silence dissenting opinion is nothing notable?
Perhaps Nature considers these part and parcel of regular science. I don't, however, and I think most scientists would be shocked and horrified to learn the new rules.
Granted, the overwhelming majority of the emails show nothing more than the normal scientific process. Apparently, whomever selected those in FOIA.zip is unaware of the normal peer review process. However, if only by chance, they did find evidence of:
Granted, I may not believe the GW conspiracy theorists, but this development is very troubling. While climatology as a whole is probably unaffected, those making public policy cannot rely on the resuts published by Mann, et al, until the investigation is finished. While this may not have long term effects on the scientific problem of GW, it certainly affects the political aspects of it.
But then again, if Nature sees nothing wrong with forging data to get the result you want, perhaps all of science is doomed.
A belief in fairy tales does not constitute a protected class.
Unless, of course, you're in California, and your fairy tale is calling your homosexual relationship a marriage.
I can understand how immutable characteristics constitute a protected class, but why religion? Why sexuality? I can legally be fired for having the "wrong" political views, but not for the "wrong" religious views?
While I'm not one to argue for religious discrimination, the simple fact of the matter is that I can change my religious disposition. A homosexual can choose not to commit sodomy just as easily as a heterosexual can choose to refrain from adultery. Yet, legally, both religion and sexual orientation are afforded some kind of unquestionable, sacrosanct status? (Though the latter more than the former as of late...)
And honestly, you're still bringing up the 6000 year-old-earth canard?! Even though the overwhelming majority of believers don't believe it? Even though it was never formally accepted as doctrine by the Church? I do believe I could find a flat-Earther with a greater understanding of modern physics than you have of all religions combined.
And it has been used for at least a decade, if not longer. It is quite simple to implement in either hardware or software, and does the job reasonably well. Unlike some of the other algorithms mentioned, it requires no analysis of the rendered image and runs in constant time. You can read about it here.
"You" - who formally prove your code, comment it, and make sure it works right - are called at 2 am in the morning to fix code that "He" wrote. "He" is now your boss, because:
Programmers beware: the meticulous, but correct, programmer is a valuable asset to the company; the sloppy but fast programmer is his boss.
Have you as a public been fooled into thinking I'm unaware of the dangers of smoking, carousing, and general debauchery?
It's not these the FDA is concerned about, but the possibly as-yet-unknown interactions between caffeine and alcohol that could exacerbate the long term ill effects of the other.
As I understand it, to fully understand the risks, you must be a microbiologist who specializes in human metabolism. Me, I'm a CS major, and while I could spend a decade of my life studying biology and chemistry, and human metabolism so that I could know for certain the risks, I choose not to.
Instead, a portion of my tax dollars pays someone at the FDA to do that for me. That way, I can get on with having a good time without having to conduct a formal risk analysis every time I go the bar.