You have to remember, this was 1995, and it wasn't that common for people to swap files on CD-Rs back then.
CD burners cost upwards of $1000, and blanks were about $14 each. (My backside is still aching from having bought 100 of them around 1996-1997, just before the price fell to around $5 seemingly overnight).
The only things distributed on CD were commercial software and Red Book music discs, which, back in the old days (and you kids can just get the fuck off my lawn, kthxbye) were simply not something you had to worry about. Remember, you are asking people to go back in time and be paranoid about a threat that wouldn't emerge for ten years!
Even today, Autoplay wouldn't be seen as a particularly-frightening security risk compared to network-based attacks. If you are sitting at a machine you own, then it is not safe from your own actions.
I'm saying that once you've convinced the user to stick a potentially-bootable disc (whether floppy or CD) in the machine's drive, the "security" game is already over.
The idea behind AutoPlay, which originated concurrently with the first DirectX SDK, was to make the PC work more like a game console. When you wanted to install a new game, all you'd have to do would be to put the CD in the drive. At the time, gaming was a critically-important thing for the Windows 95 group to get right, because it was where most of the compatibility and performance issues were showing up. There was a genuine desire to make Windows 95 games as user-friendly as possible, and that's all anybody was actually trying to do.
It was a reasonable, if not exactly earth-shattering, idea at the time. Nobody at Microsoft (I was working in that group as a contractor) foresaw that the feature would be misused like it's being misused now. It simply wasn't a reasonable thing to anticipate. ("Gee, Alex, you think maybe in ten years the world's largest media companies will corrupt the Red Book CD Audio specification to use our new feature as a means of distributing rootkit trojans that will be illegal to remove?")
As a developer, if you had to think that far ahead, and speculate that wildly about how your code could be misused, you'd never have the guts to implement anything. (Besides, 'security' and 'physical access to the machine' are contradictions in terms. AutoPlay is not a security risk.)
The link points out that one reason DDT no longer kills as many mosquitoes may be that they've learned to detect and avoid it. In that case, its use in populated areas would still be beneficial, if it has the effect of chasing the mosquito-breeding colonies out of the village.
So the development of resistance may not necessarily be a showstopper for a given agent. I'm not qualified to say if that's the case here, but the reality is, only the pro-DDT junkscience.com guy is actually bringing citations to the table. The environmentalists are backing and filling as if they were driving the bulldozer.
It's cleaner to list the break conditions up front
No, actually, it isn't.
It's much cleaner to break out of a loop at the instant the termination condition becomes true. This occurs at the loop-control statement only in trivial loops, and only by coincidence. Coincidences don't make good code.
Another way of looking at the question: if it's better to begin a variable's scope where it's first used, which most C++ users agree is the case, it's also better to explicitly end that scope when it's potentially obsolete. The only ways you can do that in C/C++ are with break, continue, and goto. Goto obscures scoping altogether, so it's not much help, but loops constructed with while (1) and explicit breaks can be considerably easier to understand.
Keep surfing -- there's a link in the comments section of that blog to an FAQ on DDT that's more convincing, better documented, and entirely in favor of the original poster's thesis.
Based on the available information, I'm going to have to assume that Rachel Carson's critics are closer to the truth.
Of course, nowadays, no responsible corporation would think of advocating the use of DDT... because the patents on it have expired.
Image Alchemy still has the best resizing filter I've seen. It does a much better job on certain content (e.g., line art) than Photoshop's cubic resampler.
Alchemy is also an awesome way to do batch processing on images. It really complements, rather than replaces, an app like Photoshop.
Fine. How does Skype give me better QoS than I'd get with my own 100 lines of Winsock code?
I seriously do not understand the amount of commercial attention Skype got. It's as if a bunch of megacorps all wanted a piece of the municipal water business, so one of them (eBay) rushed out and spent $4,000,000,000 for a company that makes garden hoses.
The ratings tend to be a good way of estimating a game's age appropriateness, but they need some enforcement.
That seems to be a very common attitude. Why does no one ask for actual evidence of harm to minors before codifying the ESRB ratings in the law?
You do realize that MPAA movie ratings don't carry the force of law, right?
That they were introduced by the motion picture industry in response to the same legislative threats that led to the formation of the ESRB in the first place?
The only difference I can see is that the government seems to be keeping their end of the bargain with the movie industry.
What's special about M-rated video games that makes them more harmful to minors than NC17-rated movies? Where are the juvenile crime statistics that lead you to conclude that putting the government in the game-rating business is necessary?
I have this sinking feeling that it's already happened - you and I just haven't seen them yet.
Surf through enough old paperbacks with copyright dates from the 1940s-1970s in a used bookstore, and you'll probably find some ads. Especially in book-club printings and other editions that were sold at a discount. I'm not sure exactly when this practice died out, or why, but it has definitely been done.
I really enjoy using the Pandora service, and it generally does a great job. But that Flash client is the clunkiest, flakiest thing on the planet. Do you have any plans to document your streaming and user-feedback protocols so that third-party clients can be written? Thanks!
Now I, for one, would welcome a millineum or more of life in prime condition.
I don't know. Imagine how cautious people would be if the only way we could die would be from accident or misadventure.
We wouldn't use our additional lifespan well, I suspect. We'd literally be scared to get out of bed in the morning. Hey, most accidents happen at home, right? Our lives would be mellow, boring, and long. We'd become cultural and physical ascetics with the attitude of Ralph Nader and the get-up-and-go of your average Ent.
No, thanks, I'll pass (in fifty years or so, with any luck).
The real irony in your post (and handle as "DSP Geek") is that DSP's canonical roots are in that steam table. Fourier wasn't trying to build a spectrum analyzer; he was trying to understand how the temperature at given point along a metal cylinder could be predicted on the basis of an intermittent source of heat applied to one end of the cylinder.
I didn't make it as far as thermodynamics in my own EE curriculum before dropping^Wwashing out to go to work in the Real World, but I do recognize the relevance of the course. Every time you read about Dell recalling eight gazillion laptop power supplies for starting fires, you're reading about an EE or ME who blew off thermodynamics.
Do tell, what bus line follows the proposed route? During the height of bus travel you cannot get from West Seattle to Ballard in under an hour while having to transfer at least once.
Makes you go "Hmm," doesn't it?
"Hmm," as in, "Hmm, maybe nobody really needs to go from Ballard to freakin' West Seattle, so that might not be the best corridor in which to spend eleven billion dollars."
I never understood why Bill Gates didn't retire once he was worth an astronomical amount of money.
I thought about a similar question once: with Gates's resources, he could do some seriously interesting stuff. If he wanted to retire, he could probably build his retirement home on freakin' Mars.
The answer I arrived at was that the fact that someone with the drive and passion to do something like that wouldn't be sufficiently-committed to his "day job" (running Microsoft, in this case) to achieve the requisite level of financial success in the first place.
People like Gates and Ballmer have a metric assload of money because they care more about what they're doing than anything in the world or anything beyond it. It isn't just about piling up more money... that's the difference between a Ballmer and a Fastow, or a Gates and an Ebbers. It's about the process that created the pile in the first place. Anything else, to these guys, is a distraction.
Paul Allen would be a good case in point: he got off the boat too early. He made what seemed like a vast fortune at the time, at which point he decided to do some other things with his life, so he left Microsoft. Seattle has benefitted greatly from some of the stuff he's done (although that's a heavily-politicized topic around here), but the unfortunate reality is that a few hundred million bucks here and there isn't enough to do anything seriously interesting.
Bill Gates could throw a hundred times more cash at Scaled Composites than Allen did... but that's apparently not Bill's thing. Which is precisely why Bill could've done it and Paul couldn't. Insert pithy Joseph Heller quotation here...
The political elite are responsible because they let the plutocrats strip America of its wealth without taxing them aqequately.
You are, of course, aware that the IRS accepts additional tax payments in excess of the amount owed, right? Let's take a look at your 1040 and see how much of your own wealth you're willing to put behind your words.
These issues won't be resolved using simplistic philosophical or religious arguments
Sure, they will. In that situation, there's no reason to value the unborn child's future life over the mother's present one. The decision would be left to the mother, in the absence of a compelling societal interest to the contrary.
(Bring on the "offtopic" mods if that's what floats your boat, but note that your time is probably better spent flaming Cliff at Slashdot for raising the topic in the story summary.)
We seem to have no problem taking out cancerous tumors from our bodies, and those are also cells which are dividing and being nourished by the human bloodstream (technically, they are cells which are programmed to die, and ignore that signal, while new cells are put into place to replace them, hence the "tumor"). Why is killing one set of human cells wrong, and killing others ok? Who makes that decision? The state? The government? Where does it stop?
Yeah, the difference between a tumor and a fetus really can be pretty hard to call from a purely-technical standpoint. (I'm thinking specifically of ovarian teratomas, which can develop teeth, organ substructures, you name it.)
From a purely-genetic standpoint, you don't even need male gametes to create human offspring. (That's something else the people who want to bring their Bibles to science class are going to have to deal with, eventually.)
In my case, the criteria I'd be inclined to use is the standalone potential for development of conscious awareness. Gametes don't have that attribute, so no, every little sperm isn't sacred. A fertilized egg does have that attribute from the moment of conception, even though it isn't yet ontogenically-differentiated. A tumor, even one of those weird-ass teratoma deals, doesn't.
Personally, I see people deciding who should live and who should die all the time, without a single care
Sure; that's a necessary practical consequence of having no objective authority to consult on the matter. If there is a God, s/he/it's been awfully quiet on the subject for a few thousand years now, so I'd have to assume that s/he/it is OK with the way things are going.
I wouldn't have such a problem with capital punishment, myself, if the standard were "guilty beyond the shadow of a doubt" rather than merely "guilty beyond reasonable doubt." It's hard to lump Timothy McVeigh in with the West Memphis Three, yet currently, that's what you have to do when someone asks you if you support capital punishment under the current US judicial system.
It's perfectly possible for someone to oppose abortion and support the death penalty, although I'm not sure how it would fit into the Christian ethic espoused by Republicans of late in the US. I, personally, oppose both, but not for the usual reasons.
Since I'm not religious, I believe that there is no inherent right to human life -- or anything else -- because no one has demonstrated the presence of a universal authority who could bestow that right. We are each granted "the right to life," such as it is, by our society. There are things you can do, such as committing a capital crime, that represent a voluntary renunciation of that right.
An unborn child, conversely, has done nothing to give up whatever right to live that society can confer.
I am troubled by abortion rights -- even in the absence of religious motivation -- because I can't answer the question, "When is it no longer OK to kill a baby?" At the moment of viability outside the mother's body? No; that fails as a test because technology will eventually make in vitro incubation a reality. At the moment of conception? Yeah, that would be fine, except for the point I just made. At the moment of discernible brain activity? Same problem. At the moment of birth? Only a barbarian would be OK with that. At the onset of conscious awareness? That happens after birth.
The reason why I oppose capital punishment is purely pragmatic -- I don't trust the government or the judicial system to get much of anything else right, so why should I trust these proven-fallible institutions with a decision that by definintion can't be reversed?
Slashdot Mirror
You have to remember, this was 1995, and it wasn't that common for people to swap files on CD-Rs back then.
CD burners cost upwards of $1000, and blanks were about $14 each. (My backside is still aching from having bought 100 of them around 1996-1997, just before the price fell to around $5 seemingly overnight).
The only things distributed on CD were commercial software and Red Book music discs, which, back in the old days (and you kids can just get the fuck off my lawn, kthxbye) were simply not something you had to worry about. Remember, you are asking people to go back in time and be paranoid about a threat that wouldn't emerge for ten years!
Even today, Autoplay wouldn't be seen as a particularly-frightening security risk compared to network-based attacks. If you are sitting at a machine you own, then it is not safe from your own actions.
I'm saying that once you've convinced the user to stick a potentially-bootable disc (whether floppy or CD) in the machine's drive, the "security" game is already over.
The idea behind AutoPlay, which originated concurrently with the first DirectX SDK, was to make the PC work more like a game console. When you wanted to install a new game, all you'd have to do would be to put the CD in the drive. At the time, gaming was a critically-important thing for the Windows 95 group to get right, because it was where most of the compatibility and performance issues were showing up. There was a genuine desire to make Windows 95 games as user-friendly as possible, and that's all anybody was actually trying to do.
It was a reasonable, if not exactly earth-shattering, idea at the time. Nobody at Microsoft (I was working in that group as a contractor) foresaw that the feature would be misused like it's being misused now. It simply wasn't a reasonable thing to anticipate. ("Gee, Alex, you think maybe in ten years the world's largest media companies will corrupt the Red Book CD Audio specification to use our new feature as a means of distributing rootkit trojans that will be illegal to remove?")
As a developer, if you had to think that far ahead, and speculate that wildly about how your code could be misused, you'd never have the guts to implement anything. (Besides, 'security' and 'physical access to the machine' are contradictions in terms. AutoPlay is not a security risk.)
They have actually discovered cavities in the brains of diet soda drinkers.
Did you know that most drug users, including the ones who work for newstarget.com, started out on milk?!
It pretty much can.
Mosquitos are now resistant to DDT.
The link points out that one reason DDT no longer kills as many mosquitoes may be that they've learned to detect and avoid it. In that case, its use in populated areas would still be beneficial, if it has the effect of chasing the mosquito-breeding colonies out of the village.
So the development of resistance may not necessarily be a showstopper for a given agent. I'm not qualified to say if that's the case here, but the reality is, only the pro-DDT junkscience.com guy is actually bringing citations to the table. The environmentalists are backing and filling as if they were driving the bulldozer.
It's cleaner to list the break conditions up front
No, actually, it isn't.
It's much cleaner to break out of a loop at the instant the termination condition becomes true. This occurs at the loop-control statement only in trivial loops, and only by coincidence. Coincidences don't make good code.
Another way of looking at the question: if it's better to begin a variable's scope where it's first used, which most C++ users agree is the case, it's also better to explicitly end that scope when it's potentially obsolete. The only ways you can do that in C/C++ are with break, continue, and goto. Goto obscures scoping altogether, so it's not much help, but loops constructed with while (1) and explicit breaks can be considerably easier to understand.
Keep surfing -- there's a link in the comments section of that blog to an FAQ on DDT that's more convincing, better documented, and entirely in favor of the original poster's thesis.
Based on the available information, I'm going to have to assume that Rachel Carson's critics are closer to the truth.
Of course, nowadays, no responsible corporation would think of advocating the use of DDT... because the patents on it have expired.
Dressing up as Steve Jobs is not only the easiest to make Halloween costume ever(Black turtleneck and jeans)
Yeah, it's pretty much a solved problem.
Image Alchemy still has the best resizing filter I've seen. It does a much better job on certain content (e.g., line art) than Photoshop's cubic resampler.
Alchemy is also an awesome way to do batch processing on images. It really complements, rather than replaces, an app like Photoshop.
Fine. How does Skype give me better QoS than I'd get with my own 100 lines of Winsock code?
I seriously do not understand the amount of commercial attention Skype got. It's as if a bunch of megacorps all wanted a piece of the municipal water business, so one of them (eBay) rushed out and spent $4,000,000,000 for a company that makes garden hoses.
Can someone relly tell me what actually works as intended at NASA
Yeah. Robots.
Ah, government. "If it's not broken, fix it until it is."
The ratings tend to be a good way of estimating a game's age appropriateness, but they need some enforcement.
That seems to be a very common attitude. Why does no one ask for actual evidence of harm to minors before codifying the ESRB ratings in the law?
You do realize that MPAA movie ratings don't carry the force of law, right?
That they were introduced by the motion picture industry in response to the same legislative threats that led to the formation of the ESRB in the first place?
The only difference I can see is that the government seems to be keeping their end of the bargain with the movie industry.
What's special about M-rated video games that makes them more harmful to minors than NC17-rated movies? Where are the juvenile crime statistics that lead you to conclude that putting the government in the game-rating business is necessary?
I have this sinking feeling that it's already happened - you and I just haven't seen them yet.
Surf through enough old paperbacks with copyright dates from the 1940s-1970s in a used bookstore, and you'll probably find some ads. Especially in book-club printings and other editions that were sold at a discount. I'm not sure exactly when this practice died out, or why, but it has definitely been done.
Hi, Vic --
I really enjoy using the Pandora service, and it generally does a great job. But that Flash client is the clunkiest, flakiest thing on the planet. Do you have any plans to document your streaming and user-feedback protocols so that third-party clients can be written? Thanks!
Now I, for one, would welcome a millineum or more of life in prime condition.
I don't know. Imagine how cautious people would be if the only way we could die would be from accident or misadventure.
We wouldn't use our additional lifespan well, I suspect. We'd literally be scared to get out of bed in the morning. Hey, most accidents happen at home, right? Our lives would be mellow, boring, and long. We'd become cultural and physical ascetics with the attitude of Ralph Nader and the get-up-and-go of your average Ent.
No, thanks, I'll pass (in fifty years or so, with any luck).
The real irony in your post (and handle as "DSP Geek") is that DSP's canonical roots are in that steam table. Fourier wasn't trying to build a spectrum analyzer; he was trying to understand how the temperature at given point along a metal cylinder could be predicted on the basis of an intermittent source of heat applied to one end of the cylinder.
I didn't make it as far as thermodynamics in my own EE curriculum before dropping^Wwashing out to go to work in the Real World, but I do recognize the relevance of the course. Every time you read about Dell recalling eight gazillion laptop power supplies for starting fires, you're reading about an EE or ME who blew off thermodynamics.
Do tell, what bus line follows the proposed route? During the height of bus travel you cannot get from West Seattle to Ballard in under an hour while having to transfer at least once.
Makes you go "Hmm," doesn't it?
"Hmm," as in, "Hmm, maybe nobody really needs to go from Ballard to freakin' West Seattle, so that might not be the best corridor in which to spend eleven billion dollars."
Yep, you've got a point. What's the hurry? We need to fix things inside the cave first.
I never understood why Bill Gates didn't retire once he was worth an astronomical amount of money.
I thought about a similar question once: with Gates's resources, he could do some seriously interesting stuff. If he wanted to retire, he could probably build his retirement home on freakin' Mars.
The answer I arrived at was that the fact that someone with the drive and passion to do something like that wouldn't be sufficiently-committed to his "day job" (running Microsoft, in this case) to achieve the requisite level of financial success in the first place.
People like Gates and Ballmer have a metric assload of money because they care more about what they're doing than anything in the world or anything beyond it. It isn't just about piling up more money... that's the difference between a Ballmer and a Fastow, or a Gates and an Ebbers. It's about the process that created the pile in the first place. Anything else, to these guys, is a distraction.
Paul Allen would be a good case in point: he got off the boat too early. He made what seemed like a vast fortune at the time, at which point he decided to do some other things with his life, so he left Microsoft. Seattle has benefitted greatly from some of the stuff he's done (although that's a heavily-politicized topic around here), but the unfortunate reality is that a few hundred million bucks here and there isn't enough to do anything seriously interesting.
Bill Gates could throw a hundred times more cash at Scaled Composites than Allen did... but that's apparently not Bill's thing. Which is precisely why Bill could've done it and Paul couldn't. Insert pithy Joseph Heller quotation here...
The political elite are responsible because they let the plutocrats strip America of its wealth without taxing them aqequately.
You are, of course, aware that the IRS accepts additional tax payments in excess of the amount owed, right? Let's take a look at your 1040 and see how much of your own wealth you're willing to put behind your words.
All of the electrons in your lamp's strontium phosphor have returned to their ground states.
You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
These issues won't be resolved using simplistic philosophical or religious arguments
Sure, they will. In that situation, there's no reason to value the unborn child's future life over the mother's present one. The decision would be left to the mother, in the absence of a compelling societal interest to the contrary.
(Bring on the "offtopic" mods if that's what floats your boat, but note that your time is probably better spent flaming Cliff at Slashdot for raising the topic in the story summary.)
We seem to have no problem taking out cancerous tumors from our bodies, and those are also cells which are dividing and being nourished by the human bloodstream (technically, they are cells which are programmed to die, and ignore that signal, while new cells are put into place to replace them, hence the "tumor"). Why is killing one set of human cells wrong, and killing others ok? Who makes that decision? The state? The government? Where does it stop?
Yeah, the difference between a tumor and a fetus really can be pretty hard to call from a purely-technical standpoint. (I'm thinking specifically of ovarian teratomas, which can develop teeth, organ substructures, you name it.)
From a purely-genetic standpoint, you don't even need male gametes to create human offspring. (That's something else the people who want to bring their Bibles to science class are going to have to deal with, eventually.)
In my case, the criteria I'd be inclined to use is the standalone potential for development of conscious awareness. Gametes don't have that attribute, so no, every little sperm isn't sacred. A fertilized egg does have that attribute from the moment of conception, even though it isn't yet ontogenically-differentiated. A tumor, even one of those weird-ass teratoma deals, doesn't.
Personally, I see people deciding who should live and who should die all the time, without a single care
Sure; that's a necessary practical consequence of having no objective authority to consult on the matter. If there is a God, s/he/it's been awfully quiet on the subject for a few thousand years now, so I'd have to assume that s/he/it is OK with the way things are going.
I wouldn't have such a problem with capital punishment, myself, if the standard were "guilty beyond the shadow of a doubt" rather than merely "guilty beyond reasonable doubt." It's hard to lump Timothy McVeigh in with the West Memphis Three, yet currently, that's what you have to do when someone asks you if you support capital punishment under the current US judicial system.
It's perfectly possible for someone to oppose abortion and support the death penalty, although I'm not sure how it would fit into the Christian ethic espoused by Republicans of late in the US. I, personally, oppose both, but not for the usual reasons.
Since I'm not religious, I believe that there is no inherent right to human life -- or anything else -- because no one has demonstrated the presence of a universal authority who could bestow that right. We are each granted "the right to life," such as it is, by our society. There are things you can do, such as committing a capital crime, that represent a voluntary renunciation of that right.
An unborn child, conversely, has done nothing to give up whatever right to live that society can confer.
I am troubled by abortion rights -- even in the absence of religious motivation -- because I can't answer the question, "When is it no longer OK to kill a baby?" At the moment of viability outside the mother's body? No; that fails as a test because technology will eventually make in vitro incubation a reality. At the moment of conception? Yeah, that would be fine, except for the point I just made. At the moment of discernible brain activity? Same problem. At the moment of birth? Only a barbarian would be OK with that. At the onset of conscious awareness? That happens after birth.
The reason why I oppose capital punishment is purely pragmatic -- I don't trust the government or the judicial system to get much of anything else right, so why should I trust these proven-fallible institutions with a decision that by definintion can't be reversed?