I'll tell you why governments don't want to legalize drugs...
The things you mentioned may be true. But that's not why the citizens of the US don't want drugs legalized. Most of us who have seen the consequences of drug addiction want no part in bring about the suffering and misery an addict undergoes - first, in response to his addiction to drugs, and secondly, in the difficult and never-ending process of breaking the addiction and trying to stay clean.
I know people who have died from drug overdoses. I also know that it would not have happened had they never been exposed to those drugs in the first place. A mother of two doesn't just decide - at age 40 - to take up a drug habit. She probably thought she could handle it. Her son sold her the stuff. Her pursuit of a good time killed her.
Drugs are illegal not because the government is afraid of you - that, quite frankly, is ridiculous. Drugs are illegal because most people understand the harm they cause to individuals and society alike. Yes, there may be a few people who really can handle drugs without getting addicted, but they are the exception, rather than the rule. It just wouldn't make sense to keep something legal which causes problems not only for the overwhelming majority of users, but also for society as well.
It was obvious that speaking up would have been taken as challenging their "combination dominance game and mutual admiration society". It was just as obvious that they were totally oblivious to the effect they were having.
I had a similar experience with women where I was one of two guys on the team. I could prove - in a formal, mathematical, way - that the proposed design would not work, and when I merely asked if they had considered using a different design, I was called on the carpet by my manager.
A year or so later, one of the directors interviewed me regarding the project, and asked what I thought of the project. I told him. It turned out that only after trying the project in a production environment that they discovered response times of several minutes! Not long afterward, the project was cancelled.
Sometimes people are misogynists. But my experience has been that for every misogynist in the workplace, there are a dozen people who are just plain jerks, or who make technical decisions for personal or political reasons. Your mistake, I believe, is that you think people come to work to do the best job they can. At some companies, they do. But it is very common in corporate america for people to come to work to further their careers, without regard for the interest of the customers, their coworkers, or the shareholders.
Um, you mean how everything requires.NET to run, and how MS required IE for just about everything until long after NT?
It's not monolithic in the microkernel way, but the rat's nest of dependencies make it very difficult for the average person to run the typical system without either running everything, or nothing at all. If you're going to ask the user to delete DLLs and edit the registry, they may as well be running Linux.
I suppose I've been fortunate, though - I haven't had to deal with any version of Windows after XP. The fact that most businesses haven't upgraded in 8 years is telling. Maybe they just got tired of Microsoft's empty promises.
While I would agree that Microsoft has made progress with Windows, it remains the only widely-used operating system for which failure to run an anti-virus program exposes the user's computer to a substantial risk of being infected with malware.
There are still fundamental flaws in its design and implementation which make it less secure than its alternatives. With Linux, it's relatively trivial for me to eliminate entire vectors for attack - i.e. I could care less about apache vulnerabilities because I simply don't run it. The same isn't true for Windows - in the first place, it's a monolithic, integrated OS which requires much more code for basic functionality - and in the second, even if the user could remove unused software components, the average Windows user wouldn't understand how or why they might want to.
Today, I'm looking up modelines for my A90 monitor, because I want to run at greater than 1024x768. In Windows, I wouldn't even have to know what a modeline is. However, I'd be stuck with a system that ran slowly because of the inevitable AV software I'd have to run. While I would appreciate it if Debian just got it right with respect to monitor detection, I'd rather endure the drudgery of X configuration once, than deal with a slow and unreliable computer every day. Of course, you may prefer the opposite.
Doesn't anyone remember that when Java first came out that it was marketed as a secure alternative to C and C++? Proponents claimed that Java got the security model right, and that we could all just get down to solving the problems at hand, rather than having to worry about writing insecure code.
I guess it just goes to show that you can write security vulnerabilities in any language.
The security problem isn't in the language, but the programmer. Any programming language requires diligence wrt to security, and Java is no different. Those who couldn't write secure code in C won't be writing secure code in Java, either.
Now this is not to say that Java is inherently insecure, but that security is not so much an attribute of the language, but the programmer. One of the most secure operating systems on the planet is written in C, not Java.
There are many reasons to use Java, but as this book clearly demonstrates, security is not one of them. The notion that a language automatically provides security is flawed, at best. The best a language can do is provide a mental model which encourages secure coding. The rest is on the programmer.
You could have a descriptive moderation system rather than a judgemental one. What if I want to see the posts with strong emotion? What if I want to read the posts expressing an unpopular view?
The current moderation system rewards popular opinions well expressed. Some debate happens as a result of that. However, I could often care less about the popular view, because I've heard it already. I'd rather hear views that haven't been expressed before, are unpopular, or point out flaws in the popular viewpoint. How do I filter for that when/. only has troll and flamebait?
That simply cannot be expressed on slashdot. There are also certain topics on which an intelligent discussion simply cannot happen, largely due to mods such as troll and flamebait.
Let me give you a few examples:
You cannot point out that certain theories of evolution have flaws, without also being accused of being a creationist and modded troll. The merits of the science and limitations of our understanding of biology are simply impossible to discuss on./
You cannot post anything in favor of traditional marriage without running the risk of being modded troll. Sometimes, opposing viewpoints really are offensive, but that doesn't make them a troll. It just means the moderator is practicing censorship of unpopular viewpoints as they moderate. A well reasoned refutation of a popular, emotionally-driven belief is often offensive to the believer. A well-reasoned response moves the debate forward and increases the knowledge of the readers more than simply down-modding it into oblivion.
In almost every story involving astronomy or the Church, someone posts something always brings up Galileo. While I'll not rehash the arguments here, I've found it interesting that while such a post is offensive to Christians, it's often modded insightful, and while the posts refuting it may be offensive to atheists, they are almost always modded troll.
A "WRONG" mod would allow the education of the poster and reader alike. Sometimes it is very helpful to the general discussion to respond to common misconceptions on a particular topic, rather than simply erasing certain viewpoints from existence. There's a certain irony in that while a great number of/. posters value free speech, they are quite content to drown out unpopular speech, so long as the censoring is done by neither the government or corporations.
If the moderator posts a reply, he wastes whatever mod points he's already used. This discourages moderators from moderating articles about subjects in which they are likely to be interested, and actually knowledgeable about the subject matter. Instead, they moderate posts on subjects of casual interest, often modding up a well-articulated post in spite of the fact that it may contain factual problems.
What I'd rather see is a feedback mechanism where a moderator could moderate a post and issue a response to the poster. And give the poster an opportunity to edit their post in response to the moderators input. Not as in a reply to the points made, but rather something along the lines of, "Break this up into paragraphs", or "This fact is no longer true", or "try to avoid insinuating the OP is an idiot". Such a response need not be posted publicly, as the idea is not to refute a post, but to assist in clarifying the poster's original points.
As it stands, the only option is Troll or Flamebait, which don't accurately capture the possibility that a poster is honestly misinformed. Someone who relies on factually incorrect statements may be able to make a broader overall point, or at least be able to represent that even articulate and thoughtful people are occasionally misinformed. To lump it in with the trolls tends to end the discussion rather than increasing the understanding between posters of opposing positions.
The Illinois DMV sells this sort of information. For the cost of registering a corporation (about $100), the IL DMV will sell you as much info as you're willing to buy. Had this guy worked at the IL DMV, no one would have noticed.
You can download the climate data from the NOAA. If there isn't a 100 year cycle, we are (or were, around the turn of the century) in a global cooling phase, and global warming is completely false. Just as global temperatures dropped worldwide around the year 1900, they also dropped around 2000. I actually did a limited amount of statistics with the datasets available a few years ago when the climategate emails broke.
And the 2 year figure is from a global warming pundit I happen to run into. But it demonstrates the broader point: that even the pundits got it wrong, and the politicization of the issue by Al Gore, etc... did not help the cause. And reports like this are hardly convincing - its long on accusations and very short on specifics. It seems as if they expect the reader to conclude that guilt by association is a convincing argument, or that an organization lobbying in its own interests is a cause for suspicion. What the report manages to convey, rather convincingly, is that the union of concerned scientists feels it is on the losing end of a propaganda war with big oil. Which may be true, but is hardly relevant when someone is trying to determine if global warming is happening in the first place. The fact that the UCS downplays the significance of the climategate emails doesn't help, either, but rather illustrates they have a double standard - one for Big Oil, and another for scientists.
The growing empirical evidence of climate change that is consistent with model projections, and other recent advances in the understanding of climate science have led to increased confidence in the use of global circulation models to project future climate change, but predicting the future remains inherently risky.
Such a disclaimer does not inspire confidence. Yes, I understand you have a computer model which predicts temperature, but with such a disclaimer, it's practically useless. An engineer who issued such a disclaimer for bridges he designed or appliances ("Well, we can't guarantee it won't burst into flames...") would be lucky to be employed at all.
And it only goes downhill from there. Every single climate change prediction following the disclaimer is qualified with words like "possible" or "could". They can't even say what will happen, only what "could". Real science starts with a falsifiable hypothesis, and they're doing their best to avoid any predictions which could later be shown false.
I don't like fossil fuels for a whole host of reasons having nothing to do with global warming (polllution, economic security, etc...), but it seems as if scientists don't fully grasp the gravity of their statements - or perhaps want to distance themselves from any liability that reliance on such statements might bring about. They seem oblivious to the challenges faced by those genuinely wanting to bring about change, or the cost of doing so. You can't simply flush 339 billion dollars of revenue (Exxon Mobil) down the toilet without causing massive disruptions in the ability of people today to feed themselves. It seems as if they live in some fairy land where one can produce their own electricity and fuel their cars from carbon-neutral sources. Even though I have the technical know-how to do something of this nature, I have neither the time, nor the money, to do so. Worse, it's illegal in the US for individuals to make their own fuel, and neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are interested in the sort of regulatory change that could bring this about - that is, if we had the money in the first place.
Actually, your example is quite poor: A casino can predict the long term trends of a roulette wheel with better than 2% accuracy. Climatologists wish they could say the same about the climate - but even this report has a variance of 1.35 to 4.65 C - a range of 340%.
The single biggest problem (aside from the politics of creating winners and losers in the climate game) with getting people onboard is that an honest skeptic would have very serious misgivings about basing public policy on a discipline with such poor predictive power. Climate science delivers only marginally better predictability than economics, or the stock market. Arm chair intellectuals often make the assumption that because other sciences can very accurately predict the outcome (e.g. physics, chemistry, etc...) of an experiment, that climate science can as well, and that's simply not the case. Climatology is still a nascent science, and still has a long way to go before they can deliver the certainty required of public policy decisions. It's not that it won't get there, just that it's not there yet.
And when you add in the politicization of the science - that the Democrats wanted to enact a scheme of carbon credits which would enrich the rich at the expense of the poor - even ardent believers would have had a difficult time enacting effective policy change. The entire global warming movement was denied by the Republicans, and turned into a get-rich-scheme by the Democrats, making effective change impossible. It was not the Republicans and their denials that kept change from coming about, but the Democrats who sought to use it as a means of increasing their power and the profits of their corporate donors.
BTW, I remember hearing that global temperatures would rise by decade's end by 2 C back around the turn of the century. Well, that's come and gone, and all we've got is about 0.5 C warmer over the last century. Not only did their predictions fail on their immediate premise, they failed to take into account the 100 year cycle - and should have predicted not a rise in temperature, but rather, a lessening of cooling - which did in fact happen.
After having received from someone a gift that took their time and money to buy and wrap, and maybe make themselves, the last thing I would want to give in return is something that didn't cost me anything. Okay, so maybe you're also getting them a real gift. But who would install something they just found on a USB stick?
Your dumb user isn't going to care about FOSS, because he's already bought all of his software from Microsoft, and as far as he's concerned, that's all the software he'll ever need.
Upon finding Windows programs on them, the Mac user in the family will loudly speculate that he might get you a "real" computer for Christmas next year.
Your younger brother will tell your mother that 'ubuntu' is the African word for pornography, after which your mother will delete everything on the drive and casually mention to you that you need to update your virus scanner.
Your sister will ask you to reimburse her for "crashing" her computer after her 5 year old found the drive, plugged it into the computer, and inadvertently installed Ubuntu over Windows. And she's going to be forever mad that the only copy of her wedding video went with it.
Most of your relatives will be a little perplexed, because they can't really appreciate the gift at first. Most of them didn't bring their computers, and even the ones that did have better things to do that troll through a collection of software they could just download from the internet anyway.
A three year old will find one and admire the shiny plastic. A fate which will not bother the original recipient the least - hey, at least someone appreciates your Christmas gift.
Your Grandpa will mistake it for candy and spend Christmas night in the emergency room while panicked relatives try to figure out if it the cover is missing because Grandpa swallowed it, or it never had one in the first place.
Yes, but would you object to paying for a vaccine for a disease that:
You'll likely never get in the first place, and
Is effective in only the most unlikely of circumstances?
Really. People here can't understand why someone would object to this? One need not have any religious or pragmatic objections to teenage promiscuity to understand that these vaccinations are more about making big pharma rich than public health.
Perhaps quoting Larry Wall would have been a better choice. But since you claim there are no parallels between Christianity and the hacker ethos, one is forced to conclude you do it not for altruistic motives, but for less worthy ones; perhaps you're seeking validation or recognition, or to inflate your ego?
Give to the one who asks of you
no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they had everything in common.
So I suppose what Christians do for the good of everyone, hackers do for spite?
The value of TDD is that you are encouraged to have code that does what it's supposed to do, but nothing more than that.
No, that's the downfall of TDD - nothing you write is reusable, and any change of requirements invalidates both the test and the code tested.
I've worked in places where this was almost a religious practice. Instead of building libraries of general-purpose routines, they reinvented the wheel, every single time. They had a large amount of similar code which behaved in subtly different ways, was mutually incompatible, and couldn't be reused because it implemented the requirement, and nothing more than the requirement.
I'd find code akin to a string comparison which stops at 16 characters, because the source field will never be larger than that. With its own unit test. And another which compared unicode - with its unit test as well. And another which called stricmp on a 4 byte field, because - well, you guessed it - the field could never be more than 4 characters. And another which did the same test by casting the value in a 4 byte character array to an int, and comparing it against another 4 byte field cast to an int, nevermind the fact that it wasn't portable across architectures with differing byte orders.
OTOH, I've also worked at sweatshops where almost none of the code was documented, was written under constant time pressure, and yet was very readable and understandable because the author used meaningful variable names and architected it in such a manner that it made sense to a programmer, not the business user. Oh, and we had a lower defect rate per kloc than those using TDD, in spite of the fact that we didn't write any tests at all.
TDD's primary goal is to write tests, not to make software better.
Think about that for a moment. You start by writing a test case for a non-existent class or interface. Of course it fails. Then you implement the class. Now the test passes.
Exactly what have you proven? That you can catch an error the compiler or linker would have caught anyway? That you spent a good half hour of your employer's time writing tests for mistakes that neither you nor anyone else are likely to make?
Getting software good and fast is still an art form. Unit testing is good, but it still doesn't address the underlying problem that unless your architecture is specifically designed for change, and unless you develop reusable code, TDD is just another thing which breaks when the requirements inevitably change. With the waterfall method, you had to maintain the code. Now, you've got to maintain the code *and* the tests.
Having run the gamut of development methodologies from as far back as structured coding, I've become convinced that there really isn't a silver bullet; it seems each successive wave of development methodologies only adds more work, more opportunities for error.
The problem is not that testing is bad, but that the break even point for test suites is rather elusive.
A general rule of thumb is that you will write ten lines of code for every line of code under test. While writing test suite code does proceed faster than the main code, it still can take long enough to sink a project.
My particular experience involved writing a test suite for just a dozen or so requirements. The test cases written took just 4 hours. Learning how to create a makefile with the broken emake system (another rant...) took more than 8. Writing the test suite framework took about 180 to 200 hours.
In retrospect, the test suite took far more time to develop than the code which it tested. More importantly, even though adding test cases is now trivial, it will likely never be done in the lifetime of the software, as the firm has a policy against writing reusable code. Worse still, the entire feature set would have taken less time to test manually than it took to write the test suite.
The takeaway? It takes a *very* large project to make a test suite worthwhile. Typically, you need a project so large that miscommunication between groups of programmers is a very likely source of bugs. A small software shop will typically not produce software of the complexity or importance to justify the expense of a test suite. (Aviation and other safety applications excluded, of course.)
My gut feeling, based solely on my experience, is that the break-even point for writing a test suite is when you expect to produce greater than 250k of new code on a project, or are maintaining a codebase of greater than 10M lines of code and expect to add more than 50k lines per quarter. At this level, you can probably dedicate a programmer or two to doing nothing but writing the test suite.
Everything I want or need is either on the task bar (pinned there) or on the start menu (pinned there or in the 'recently used' section), or available with just a few keystrokes typed in the search box.
Ok, I'm really trying hard not to troll, and I don't want to start a flame war, but you do realize that Linux users have had the features you've just mentioned for more than 12 years, right?
Are you that excited about these things, or merely that they're now available in Windows?
In 1998, the Gnome Desktop allowed you to drag icons to the "start bar", and KDE has had an Alt-F2 "search for executable binary" popup for as long as I can remember.
If these are the sorts of things which make Win7 vastly superior, may I recommend giving Linux a try? You'll probably be pleasantly surprised at how easy it makes it to get things done.
The thing this recession taught me more than anything is that corporations have no morals, no ethics, and really, no just claim to fair treatment. They are not humans, and not deserving of anything more than that for which they pay. Not a dime.
Corporations - particularly large, publicly traded ones - routinely use "the recession" as an excuse to treat their employees like dirt. Get off your high horse - bowing down to your corporate masters so you can "have a job" only screws yourself and your fellow employees. Do us all a favor and stop working - or at least demand the respect that you, a human being, deserve.
The fact that the economy is in the toilet doesn't change the fact that you're a human being and deserving of the respect due a human being. If you think otherwise, well, you're just as much a part of the problem as the companies which exploit the poor economic situation.
Doing as the Romans do is how people doing business in Europe end up with drugs in their system. The last two jobs I've held routinely sent people overseas.
Not like anyone ever takes a vacation to Europe, or visits relatives in Asia, anyway. And those jobs which send you overseas to help a client are long gone, right?
Honestly, a post like this is more depressing because of what it says about what has happened to our financial prosperity than about drug use. There was a time in America when people regularly travelled overseas for vacations, education, and business.
Drug tests determine whether you are a criminal or not.
Two points:
In the first place, it's a global economy, remember? Drugs illegal in the US are not illegal everywhere in the world, and there are places where drugs illegal in the US are sold openly. The presence of illegal drugs in a person's system *does not mean* they have committed a crime.
Civil disobedience has been the manner of changing bad law in the US since President Lincoln. From prohibition to ending racism, people did illegal things to bring about desperately needed social change. Regardless of whether you believe drugs are the epitome of evil, or the embodiment of freedom, the tool of effective legal reform in this country has *by and large* been the popular disregard of immoral and unjust laws.
While I personally do not believe the currently illegal drugs are good for society, I cannot in good faith apply punitive measures to someone who honestly believes otherwise. The problem with our society is that we cannot move forward toward a freer society without civil disobedience, and unfortunately that means that even people in the wrong have to be granted due deference with respect to their illegal activities because what most would consider the "normal" means of changing unjust laws are simply ineffective.
5.) and mutual friction among people with corrupted minds, who are deprived of the truth, supposing religion to be a means of gain.
10.) For the love of money is the root of all evils, and some people in their desire for it have strayed from the faith and have pierced themselves with many pains.
You can't sell the Gospel. It really is that simple. From time to time, I've witnessed various attempts at selling Christianity, at turning a profit based on something Christian-themed, and it has failed every time. The only successful Christian organizations are those which collect donations and give their materials away for free.
You'd have to be profoundly naive to believe otherwise, and as far as I'm concerned, anyone who invested in Bible.com because they thought they were going to make a profit deserves what they get. The Gospel is not a means of getting rich, but rather, of salvation, of enriching all mankind. You can quote legal doctrine to your heart's content, but the shareholder's haven't a prayer of recovering their investment; legal doctrines of the laws of man are meaningless when God gets involved.
But only because a large portion of the population trusts the security of computers over which they have no control.
It is a very dangerous model. Something as simple as redirecting one's computer to the computer of an attacker's choosing can compromise the DNS system. Read up on TCP spoofing sometime - while it's not trivial, neither is it that difficult; its security relies largely on the fact that there are far easier ways to compromise a machine.
A database of a billion names and numbers could fit on most people's removable drives. Back in the 80's and 90's that amount of storage was a much bigger issue than today. But now it's not such a big issue. And access times are really not a big deal for anyone who knows how to build a splay tree. Even with a 10 ms seek time, a billion entries can be searched in less than a second.
Right now, with DNS, I trust the DNS machine, but I shouldn't. Being centralized, the DNS system allows the powers that be to effectively take offline any website, anywhere in the world. Sure, there might be a wikileaks server somewhere in Australia, but if you can't resolve wikileaks.org, it's as good as gone.
I don't want to rehash the old arguments wrt distributed DNS and all that, but I think its time we really examine our network infrastructure in light of the new threats to liberty. DNS was a good technical solution to the problems at hand, but we need to think beyond the threat model of civil unrest, tanks and bombs.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll tell you why governments don't want to legalize drugs...
The things you mentioned may be true. But that's not why the citizens of the US don't want drugs legalized. Most of us who have seen the consequences of drug addiction want no part in bring about the suffering and misery an addict undergoes - first, in response to his addiction to drugs, and secondly, in the difficult and never-ending process of breaking the addiction and trying to stay clean.
I know people who have died from drug overdoses. I also know that it would not have happened had they never been exposed to those drugs in the first place. A mother of two doesn't just decide - at age 40 - to take up a drug habit. She probably thought she could handle it. Her son sold her the stuff. Her pursuit of a good time killed her.
Drugs are illegal not because the government is afraid of you - that, quite frankly, is ridiculous. Drugs are illegal because most people understand the harm they cause to individuals and society alike. Yes, there may be a few people who really can handle drugs without getting addicted, but they are the exception, rather than the rule. It just wouldn't make sense to keep something legal which causes problems not only for the overwhelming majority of users, but also for society as well.
It was obvious that speaking up would have been taken as challenging their "combination dominance game and mutual admiration society". It was just as obvious that they were totally oblivious to the effect they were having.
I had a similar experience with women where I was one of two guys on the team. I could prove - in a formal, mathematical, way - that the proposed design would not work, and when I merely asked if they had considered using a different design, I was called on the carpet by my manager.
A year or so later, one of the directors interviewed me regarding the project, and asked what I thought of the project. I told him. It turned out that only after trying the project in a production environment that they discovered response times of several minutes! Not long afterward, the project was cancelled.
Sometimes people are misogynists. But my experience has been that for every misogynist in the workplace, there are a dozen people who are just plain jerks, or who make technical decisions for personal or political reasons. Your mistake, I believe, is that you think people come to work to do the best job they can. At some companies, they do. But it is very common in corporate america for people to come to work to further their careers, without regard for the interest of the customers, their coworkers, or the shareholders.
Um, you mean how everything requires .NET to run, and how MS required IE for just about everything until long after NT?
It's not monolithic in the microkernel way, but the rat's nest of dependencies make it very difficult for the average person to run the typical system without either running everything, or nothing at all. If you're going to ask the user to delete DLLs and edit the registry, they may as well be running Linux.
I suppose I've been fortunate, though - I haven't had to deal with any version of Windows after XP. The fact that most businesses haven't upgraded in 8 years is telling. Maybe they just got tired of Microsoft's empty promises.
While I would agree that Microsoft has made progress with Windows, it remains the only widely-used operating system for which failure to run an anti-virus program exposes the user's computer to a substantial risk of being infected with malware.
There are still fundamental flaws in its design and implementation which make it less secure than its alternatives. With Linux, it's relatively trivial for me to eliminate entire vectors for attack - i.e. I could care less about apache vulnerabilities because I simply don't run it. The same isn't true for Windows - in the first place, it's a monolithic, integrated OS which requires much more code for basic functionality - and in the second, even if the user could remove unused software components, the average Windows user wouldn't understand how or why they might want to.
Today, I'm looking up modelines for my A90 monitor, because I want to run at greater than 1024x768. In Windows, I wouldn't even have to know what a modeline is. However, I'd be stuck with a system that ran slowly because of the inevitable AV software I'd have to run. While I would appreciate it if Debian just got it right with respect to monitor detection, I'd rather endure the drudgery of X configuration once, than deal with a slow and unreliable computer every day. Of course, you may prefer the opposite.
Doesn't anyone remember that when Java first came out that it was marketed as a secure alternative to C and C++? Proponents claimed that Java got the security model right, and that we could all just get down to solving the problems at hand, rather than having to worry about writing insecure code.
I guess it just goes to show that you can write security vulnerabilities in any language.
The security problem isn't in the language, but the programmer. Any programming language requires diligence wrt to security, and Java is no different. Those who couldn't write secure code in C won't be writing secure code in Java, either.
Now this is not to say that Java is inherently insecure, but that security is not so much an attribute of the language, but the programmer. One of the most secure operating systems on the planet is written in C, not Java.
There are many reasons to use Java, but as this book clearly demonstrates, security is not one of them. The notion that a language automatically provides security is flawed, at best. The best a language can do is provide a mental model which encourages secure coding. The rest is on the programmer.
You could have a descriptive moderation system rather than a judgemental one. What if I want to see the posts with strong emotion? What if I want to read the posts expressing an unpopular view?
The current moderation system rewards popular opinions well expressed. Some debate happens as a result of that. However, I could often care less about the popular view, because I've heard it already. I'd rather hear views that haven't been expressed before, are unpopular, or point out flaws in the popular viewpoint. How do I filter for that when /. only has troll and flamebait?
That simply cannot be expressed on slashdot. There are also certain topics on which an intelligent discussion simply cannot happen, largely due to mods such as troll and flamebait.
Let me give you a few examples:
A "WRONG" mod would allow the education of the poster and reader alike. Sometimes it is very helpful to the general discussion to respond to common misconceptions on a particular topic, rather than simply erasing certain viewpoints from existence. There's a certain irony in that while a great number of /. posters value free speech, they are quite content to drown out unpopular speech, so long as the censoring is done by neither the government or corporations.
Why can't a comment be modded "Wrong"?
If the moderator posts a reply, he wastes whatever mod points he's already used. This discourages moderators from moderating articles about subjects in which they are likely to be interested, and actually knowledgeable about the subject matter. Instead, they moderate posts on subjects of casual interest, often modding up a well-articulated post in spite of the fact that it may contain factual problems.
What I'd rather see is a feedback mechanism where a moderator could moderate a post and issue a response to the poster. And give the poster an opportunity to edit their post in response to the moderators input. Not as in a reply to the points made, but rather something along the lines of, "Break this up into paragraphs", or "This fact is no longer true", or "try to avoid insinuating the OP is an idiot". Such a response need not be posted publicly, as the idea is not to refute a post, but to assist in clarifying the poster's original points.
As it stands, the only option is Troll or Flamebait, which don't accurately capture the possibility that a poster is honestly misinformed. Someone who relies on factually incorrect statements may be able to make a broader overall point, or at least be able to represent that even articulate and thoughtful people are occasionally misinformed. To lump it in with the trolls tends to end the discussion rather than increasing the understanding between posters of opposing positions.
The Illinois DMV sells this sort of information. For the cost of registering a corporation (about $100), the IL DMV will sell you as much info as you're willing to buy. Had this guy worked at the IL DMV, no one would have noticed.
You can download the climate data from the NOAA. If there isn't a 100 year cycle, we are (or were, around the turn of the century) in a global cooling phase, and global warming is completely false. Just as global temperatures dropped worldwide around the year 1900, they also dropped around 2000. I actually did a limited amount of statistics with the datasets available a few years ago when the climategate emails broke.
And the 2 year figure is from a global warming pundit I happen to run into. But it demonstrates the broader point: that even the pundits got it wrong, and the politicization of the issue by Al Gore, etc... did not help the cause. And reports like this are hardly convincing - its long on accusations and very short on specifics. It seems as if they expect the reader to conclude that guilt by association is a convincing argument, or that an organization lobbying in its own interests is a cause for suspicion. What the report manages to convey, rather convincingly, is that the union of concerned scientists feels it is on the losing end of a propaganda war with big oil. Which may be true, but is hardly relevant when someone is trying to determine if global warming is happening in the first place. The fact that the UCS downplays the significance of the climategate emails doesn't help, either, but rather illustrates they have a double standard - one for Big Oil, and another for scientists.
From the mouths of babes comes this little gem:
The growing empirical evidence of climate change that is consistent with model projections, and other recent advances in the understanding of climate science have led to increased confidence in the use of global circulation models to project future climate change, but predicting the future remains inherently risky.
Such a disclaimer does not inspire confidence. Yes, I understand you have a computer model which predicts temperature, but with such a disclaimer, it's practically useless. An engineer who issued such a disclaimer for bridges he designed or appliances ("Well, we can't guarantee it won't burst into flames...") would be lucky to be employed at all.
And it only goes downhill from there. Every single climate change prediction following the disclaimer is qualified with words like "possible" or "could". They can't even say what will happen, only what "could". Real science starts with a falsifiable hypothesis, and they're doing their best to avoid any predictions which could later be shown false.
I don't like fossil fuels for a whole host of reasons having nothing to do with global warming (polllution, economic security, etc...), but it seems as if scientists don't fully grasp the gravity of their statements - or perhaps want to distance themselves from any liability that reliance on such statements might bring about. They seem oblivious to the challenges faced by those genuinely wanting to bring about change, or the cost of doing so. You can't simply flush 339 billion dollars of revenue (Exxon Mobil) down the toilet without causing massive disruptions in the ability of people today to feed themselves. It seems as if they live in some fairy land where one can produce their own electricity and fuel their cars from carbon-neutral sources. Even though I have the technical know-how to do something of this nature, I have neither the time, nor the money, to do so. Worse, it's illegal in the US for individuals to make their own fuel, and neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are interested in the sort of regulatory change that could bring this about - that is, if we had the money in the first place.
Actually, your example is quite poor: A casino can predict the long term trends of a roulette wheel with better than 2% accuracy. Climatologists wish they could say the same about the climate - but even this report has a variance of 1.35 to 4.65 C - a range of 340%.
The single biggest problem (aside from the politics of creating winners and losers in the climate game) with getting people onboard is that an honest skeptic would have very serious misgivings about basing public policy on a discipline with such poor predictive power. Climate science delivers only marginally better predictability than economics, or the stock market. Arm chair intellectuals often make the assumption that because other sciences can very accurately predict the outcome (e.g. physics, chemistry, etc...) of an experiment, that climate science can as well, and that's simply not the case. Climatology is still a nascent science, and still has a long way to go before they can deliver the certainty required of public policy decisions. It's not that it won't get there, just that it's not there yet.
And when you add in the politicization of the science - that the Democrats wanted to enact a scheme of carbon credits which would enrich the rich at the expense of the poor - even ardent believers would have had a difficult time enacting effective policy change. The entire global warming movement was denied by the Republicans, and turned into a get-rich-scheme by the Democrats, making effective change impossible. It was not the Republicans and their denials that kept change from coming about, but the Democrats who sought to use it as a means of increasing their power and the profits of their corporate donors.
BTW, I remember hearing that global temperatures would rise by decade's end by 2 C back around the turn of the century. Well, that's come and gone, and all we've got is about 0.5 C warmer over the last century. Not only did their predictions fail on their immediate premise, they failed to take into account the 100 year cycle - and should have predicted not a rise in temperature, but rather, a lessening of cooling - which did in fact happen.
After having received from someone a gift that took their time and money to buy and wrap, and maybe make themselves, the last thing I would want to give in return is something that didn't cost me anything. Okay, so maybe you're also getting them a real gift. But who would install something they just found on a USB stick?
Yes, but would you object to paying for a vaccine for a disease that:
Really. People here can't understand why someone would object to this? One need not have any religious or pragmatic objections to teenage promiscuity to understand that these vaccinations are more about making big pharma rich than public health.
Perhaps quoting Larry Wall would have been a better choice. But since you claim there are no parallels between Christianity and the hacker ethos, one is forced to conclude you do it not for altruistic motives, but for less worthy ones; perhaps you're seeking validation or recognition, or to inflate your ego?
Give to the one who asks of you
no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they had everything in common.
So I suppose what Christians do for the good of everyone, hackers do for spite?
The value of TDD is that you are encouraged to have code that does what it's supposed to do, but nothing more than that.
No, that's the downfall of TDD - nothing you write is reusable, and any change of requirements invalidates both the test and the code tested.
I've worked in places where this was almost a religious practice. Instead of building libraries of general-purpose routines, they reinvented the wheel, every single time. They had a large amount of similar code which behaved in subtly different ways, was mutually incompatible, and couldn't be reused because it implemented the requirement, and nothing more than the requirement.
I'd find code akin to a string comparison which stops at 16 characters, because the source field will never be larger than that. With its own unit test. And another which compared unicode - with its unit test as well. And another which called stricmp on a 4 byte field, because - well, you guessed it - the field could never be more than 4 characters. And another which did the same test by casting the value in a 4 byte character array to an int, and comparing it against another 4 byte field cast to an int, nevermind the fact that it wasn't portable across architectures with differing byte orders.
OTOH, I've also worked at sweatshops where almost none of the code was documented, was written under constant time pressure, and yet was very readable and understandable because the author used meaningful variable names and architected it in such a manner that it made sense to a programmer, not the business user. Oh, and we had a lower defect rate per kloc than those using TDD, in spite of the fact that we didn't write any tests at all.
Perhaps you just expect to get things done.
TDD's primary goal is to write tests, not to make software better.
Think about that for a moment. You start by writing a test case for a non-existent class or interface. Of course it fails. Then you implement the class. Now the test passes.
Exactly what have you proven? That you can catch an error the compiler or linker would have caught anyway? That you spent a good half hour of your employer's time writing tests for mistakes that neither you nor anyone else are likely to make?
Getting software good and fast is still an art form. Unit testing is good, but it still doesn't address the underlying problem that unless your architecture is specifically designed for change, and unless you develop reusable code, TDD is just another thing which breaks when the requirements inevitably change. With the waterfall method, you had to maintain the code. Now, you've got to maintain the code *and* the tests.
Having run the gamut of development methodologies from as far back as structured coding, I've become convinced that there really isn't a silver bullet; it seems each successive wave of development methodologies only adds more work, more opportunities for error.
The problem is not that testing is bad, but that the break even point for test suites is rather elusive.
A general rule of thumb is that you will write ten lines of code for every line of code under test. While writing test suite code does proceed faster than the main code, it still can take long enough to sink a project.
My particular experience involved writing a test suite for just a dozen or so requirements. The test cases written took just 4 hours. Learning how to create a makefile with the broken emake system (another rant...) took more than 8. Writing the test suite framework took about 180 to 200 hours.
In retrospect, the test suite took far more time to develop than the code which it tested. More importantly, even though adding test cases is now trivial, it will likely never be done in the lifetime of the software, as the firm has a policy against writing reusable code. Worse still, the entire feature set would have taken less time to test manually than it took to write the test suite.
The takeaway? It takes a *very* large project to make a test suite worthwhile. Typically, you need a project so large that miscommunication between groups of programmers is a very likely source of bugs. A small software shop will typically not produce software of the complexity or importance to justify the expense of a test suite. (Aviation and other safety applications excluded, of course.)
My gut feeling, based solely on my experience, is that the break-even point for writing a test suite is when you expect to produce greater than 250k of new code on a project, or are maintaining a codebase of greater than 10M lines of code and expect to add more than 50k lines per quarter. At this level, you can probably dedicate a programmer or two to doing nothing but writing the test suite.
Everything I want or need is either on the task bar (pinned there) or on the start menu (pinned there or in the 'recently used' section), or available with just a few keystrokes typed in the search box.
Ok, I'm really trying hard not to troll, and I don't want to start a flame war, but you do realize that Linux users have had the features you've just mentioned for more than 12 years, right?
Are you that excited about these things, or merely that they're now available in Windows?
In 1998, the Gnome Desktop allowed you to drag icons to the "start bar", and KDE has had an Alt-F2 "search for executable binary" popup for as long as I can remember.
If these are the sorts of things which make Win7 vastly superior, may I recommend giving Linux a try? You'll probably be pleasantly surprised at how easy it makes it to get things done.
The average worker would take home more money if his government didn't have to finance the scanners/cameras/wars with his tax dollars.
The thing this recession taught me more than anything is that corporations have no morals, no ethics, and really, no just claim to fair treatment. They are not humans, and not deserving of anything more than that for which they pay. Not a dime.
Corporations - particularly large, publicly traded ones - routinely use "the recession" as an excuse to treat their employees like dirt. Get off your high horse - bowing down to your corporate masters so you can "have a job" only screws yourself and your fellow employees. Do us all a favor and stop working - or at least demand the respect that you, a human being, deserve.
The fact that the economy is in the toilet doesn't change the fact that you're a human being and deserving of the respect due a human being. If you think otherwise, well, you're just as much a part of the problem as the companies which exploit the poor economic situation.
Doing as the Romans do is how people doing business in Europe end up with drugs in their system. The last two jobs I've held routinely sent people overseas.
Not like anyone ever takes a vacation to Europe, or visits relatives in Asia, anyway. And those jobs which send you overseas to help a client are long gone, right? Honestly, a post like this is more depressing because of what it says about what has happened to our financial prosperity than about drug use. There was a time in America when people regularly travelled overseas for vacations, education, and business.
Drug tests determine whether you are a criminal or not.
Two points:
While I personally do not believe the currently illegal drugs are good for society, I cannot in good faith apply punitive measures to someone who honestly believes otherwise. The problem with our society is that we cannot move forward toward a freer society without civil disobedience, and unfortunately that means that even people in the wrong have to be granted due deference with respect to their illegal activities because what most would consider the "normal" means of changing unjust laws are simply ineffective.
5.) and mutual friction among people with corrupted minds, who are deprived of the truth, supposing religion to be a means of gain.
10.) For the love of money is the root of all evils, and some people in their desire for it have strayed from the faith and have pierced themselves with many pains.
You can't sell the Gospel. It really is that simple. From time to time, I've witnessed various attempts at selling Christianity, at turning a profit based on something Christian-themed, and it has failed every time. The only successful Christian organizations are those which collect donations and give their materials away for free.
You'd have to be profoundly naive to believe otherwise, and as far as I'm concerned, anyone who invested in Bible.com because they thought they were going to make a profit deserves what they get. The Gospel is not a means of getting rich, but rather, of salvation, of enriching all mankind. You can quote legal doctrine to your heart's content, but the shareholder's haven't a prayer of recovering their investment; legal doctrines of the laws of man are meaningless when God gets involved.
But only because a large portion of the population trusts the security of computers over which they have no control.
It is a very dangerous model. Something as simple as redirecting one's computer to the computer of an attacker's choosing can compromise the DNS system. Read up on TCP spoofing sometime - while it's not trivial, neither is it that difficult; its security relies largely on the fact that there are far easier ways to compromise a machine.
A database of a billion names and numbers could fit on most people's removable drives. Back in the 80's and 90's that amount of storage was a much bigger issue than today. But now it's not such a big issue. And access times are really not a big deal for anyone who knows how to build a splay tree. Even with a 10 ms seek time, a billion entries can be searched in less than a second.
Right now, with DNS, I trust the DNS machine, but I shouldn't. Being centralized, the DNS system allows the powers that be to effectively take offline any website, anywhere in the world. Sure, there might be a wikileaks server somewhere in Australia, but if you can't resolve wikileaks.org, it's as good as gone.
I don't want to rehash the old arguments wrt distributed DNS and all that, but I think its time we really examine our network infrastructure in light of the new threats to liberty. DNS was a good technical solution to the problems at hand, but we need to think beyond the threat model of civil unrest, tanks and bombs.