(What's in it for them, I don't know. 0845 numbers don't generate revenue for the callee.)
What BT are shutting down is, from what I can gather, their unlimited dial-up service (i.e. a username/password on a dial-up service at a free-to-call number). Whether there are any of those still out there, I'm not sure. Google didn't turn up anything interesting.
the language constructs are too closely tied to the machine domain. An optimizing compiler has less leeway in how it can re-arrange and streamline the logic to reach the goal.
Well no, not in this instance. You're right that, say, the way C forbids rearranging of structs (a restriction intended to make it predictable for very low-level work) can hurt performance, but in the topic we're discussing C is actually less strict that most languages; the compiler is free to choose whether 'int' means a 32 bit or 64 bit fixed-point type.
If you're writing the kind of code that belongs in C, you have to know that, and endless 16-32 and 32-64 bit porting nightmares were the result. It wasn't until C99 that int32_t became standard.
I've always suspected (and I could certainly be wrong) the main cause of 32/64-bit pain is not actually that the programmer can't (or rather, shouldn't) depend on the limits of the fixed-point primitive types, but instead that programmers stupidly assume things like "an int will always be wide enough to hold the value of a pointer". C being over-lenient with implicit-casts is largely to blame, of course.
The mistake was mistaking "you can write a program that will compile for all platforms" for "your program will do what you expect on all platforms for which it compiles". The latter being rather more useful.
You're ignoring the reason C went the way it does: performance. 'int' can translate to whatever is fastest, not whatever the spec demands (like in Java, say). It's a tradeoff, and as C is a language which puts speed over just about anything else, I can't fault their decision there.
That's not to say int32_t shouldn't have been there from the beginning, mind. We can 'have it all', in this case.
Why spark a debate (which is more in social sciences ballpark) when you can just run the experiments and validate the statement that way?
Err, "just"?
I'm no chemist, but I don't imagine cutting-edge chemical experiments are something you just do.
Also, you're completely missing the point. Falsification of science absolutely should be a big deal. The person responsible should face serious consequences, and hopefully it remains rare enough that it's big news.
My only point was that it's a hypocritical argument. I don't really think any of them, as a whole, deserve the label "crazy and murderous". The majority of people in both countries are civil and responsible.
Sure, but my point was that Outlaw guns and only outlaws will have guns goes both ways.
In the USA there are plenty of responsible, legal owners of handguns. There are very few of those in the UK, as civilians may not legally own them; the only British civilians in possession of handguns are those who disregard the law, so they're almost bound to be used for crime.
To put it another way: in a country where everyone has a gun, one would expect that the proportion of guns used for crime would be lower than otherwise, as you are now weighing the number of criminals against the full number of the country's non-criminals. Civilian gun ownership is much more common in the USA than the UK, so we'd expect to see that a higher proportion of UK guns are used for crime.
(I'm assuming of course that your "per gun" was including all guns, legal and illegal.)
And further yet: you have to be careful about how you interpret the statistics. Because (again, according to official government figures from both the U.S. and the UK), in the UK there is actually 10x the amount of gun crime per gun (not per person) than in the United States.
To be expected, which ever side of the fence you're on.
Outlaw guns and only outlaws will have guns, right?
For that reason I don't think it's fair to say THEY are the ones who deserve the image of crazy and murderous, far more than Americans do.
The gun-grab statistics are somewhat persuasive, but it remains that British criminals generally don't have guns. Knives, sure (despite that it is, in general, illegal to carry one).
Can you remind me which military has given something beyond token resistance to the US army lately?
We're talking rebels, not 'military'. The Middle East and Northern Ireland are the proof that modern militaries won't have an easy time occupying countries.
Sure, if you want to use terrorist tactics (hiding between civilians, striking off-duty soldiers - that sort of thing) then you can make the life of an occupying army a living hell.
But if you're thinking about using terrorist weapons with impunity, then have you ever thought about an army that doesn't have modern rules of engagement?
In a hypothetical armed rebellion in the USA, the rules of engagement would very much apply. I don't think the USAF would be ok carpet-bombing their own country to get at rebels, assuming they were ok with domestic deployment to begin with.
Oh, I get it. You'd prefer to kill toddlers, perhaps even primary school children. That'll surely help your cause.
You think that kind of idiocy will help yours?
Like I said, I'm not a gun-nut. I'm not even really pro-gun. I'm just pointing out that this particular anti-gun argument - that they'd be useless in a revolution - is nonsense.
I would see a military coop overthrow happening with armed civilians taking a major base, then using what they acquire from that base to move on the next one...
To my knowledge this has never happened in the Middle East. The military would still have a tremendous advantage in training and coordination.
If an armed citizen presents no threat to tyranny, then *why* is the state so intent on preventing us from being armed?
One need only ask themselves that very question, to understand this whole subject.
No, I don't think so. You've made quite a leap. You've not addressed the central pro-gun-control argument that it can keep guns out of the hands of criminals.
In a lot of countries, like the UK, gun control generally works pretty well at preventing gun-crime, by keeping guns out of the hands of criminals. It doesn't work perfectly, but pretty well. It would be a problem if the people wanted a revolution, but I don't think that's what politicians are thinking.
You seem to think it's self-evident that there actually would be millions of armed citizens to take up arms against the government....
Really I was commenting on the effectiveness of improvised weapons more than the state of things in the USA, but yes, I suspect the number would hit millions if the government were to get completely out of control.
A very large majority of the population is, by and large, satisfied with the job the government is doing, and while they may disagree with the party currently holding the power, they do not believe that armed resistance is necessary.
Again I'm not advocating an armed uprising, just commenting on the effectiveness of improvised weapons. For all the problems with the US government, I don't think it warrants armed revolution.
Also, since you seem to be American, I'll remind you that the phrase "well-regulated militia" implies that there's actual training involved. When you can download the plans to make a weapon from the Internet, and buy the ammunition for said weapon from Wal*Mart, that greatly reduces the chance that the people doing so will know what the hell they're doing.
Agreed that you've got nothing without training. Not that it really matters, but I'm not American.
For the record, as a former member of the military, I feel that gun control is a good thing. Weapons that are not being properly maintained, and with which you don't maintain proper proficiency are dangerous, to you and everybody around you. When the general population has the same requirements for recertification and the same penalties for not properly maintaining their weapon that I had when I was in the army, I will support them having the same access to weapons I had.
Reasonable points from a safety perspective, but it assumes no (need for) armed revolution, which was the whole point of the Second Amendment.
Say it all you want, that doesn't give it weight. Care to justify your claim?
I'm no 'gun nut', but you seem to think it's self-evident that millions of armed citizens would pose no obstacle to a determined military force. This is false. Look at the US involvement in the middle East, or what happened in Northern Ireland.
Especially not printed guns.
We already know that improvised weapons can be effective against modern militaries.
The fact that a murder happened at a range doesn't refute the claim that "one of the safest places in the world is a gun range" in the least. You might have noticed that murders occasionally happen *NOT* at a gun range as well...
Fair enough - we're both talking crap. Citation still needed.
what happened at that range could have (would have?) happened anywhere
The pro-gun-control response to this is obvious.
Obviously, a rational person would consider that a range is more likely than elsewhere to have a high concentration of people prepared, able, and willing to defend themselves and others.
What matters is reality, not the behaviour we would expect of perfect rational actors.
raymorris claimed
One of the safest places in the world is a gun range, because you don't start a fight knowing that everyone is armed
but this claim was unsubstanciated, and the fact is the murder at the shooting range did happen.
Slashdot Mirror
There are dial-up providers out there which don't even ask that you sign-up, they just provide a phone-number+username+password for anyone to use.
(What's in it for them, I don't know. 0845 numbers don't generate revenue for the callee.)
What BT are shutting down is, from what I can gather, their unlimited dial-up service (i.e. a username/password on a dial-up service at a free-to-call number). Whether there are any of those still out there, I'm not sure. Google didn't turn up anything interesting.
If you care at all, you should be using client-side encryption. If you don't, this is just adding extra latency.
Surely it's just adding extra latency even if you are using client-side crypto, no?
The intent is different, and that's important.
If a user is intentionally doing that, I imagine Google wouldn't be pleased.
Does it affect your liability whether you choose public domain or CC0?
Oops, I got it wrong - they're tracking using Wi-Fi, not mobile telephony.
In that case I agree. Also, the odds of actually ever seeing a collision are inifinitesimal.
Or just have the random-number-generation done not by the phone, but by the telco.
I liked Mono, but it is stillborn with the IIS immigration, plus the need to have .NET on Linux / Apache only demonstrates it's utility.
Say what? Your problem with the Open Source .NET stack is that... it's a .NET stack?
In C99 this is called int_fast32_t: give me the fastest size that holds at least 32 bits. That's what was needed all along
Interesting, I hadn't heard of that.
the language constructs are too closely tied to the machine domain. An optimizing compiler has less leeway in how it can re-arrange and streamline the logic to reach the goal.
Well no, not in this instance. You're right that, say, the way C forbids rearranging of structs (a restriction intended to make it predictable for very low-level work) can hurt performance, but in the topic we're discussing C is actually less strict that most languages; the compiler is free to choose whether 'int' means a 32 bit or 64 bit fixed-point type.
*Re-reads summary in Laurence Fishburne's voice*
If you're writing the kind of code that belongs in C, you have to know that, and endless 16-32 and 32-64 bit porting nightmares were the result. It wasn't until C99 that int32_t became standard.
I've always suspected (and I could certainly be wrong) the main cause of 32/64-bit pain is not actually that the programmer can't (or rather, shouldn't) depend on the limits of the fixed-point primitive types, but instead that programmers stupidly assume things like "an int will always be wide enough to hold the value of a pointer". C being over-lenient with implicit-casts is largely to blame, of course.
The mistake was mistaking "you can write a program that will compile for all platforms" for "your program will do what you expect on all platforms for which it compiles". The latter being rather more useful.
You're ignoring the reason C went the way it does: performance. 'int' can translate to whatever is fastest, not whatever the spec demands (like in Java, say). It's a tradeoff, and as C is a language which puts speed over just about anything else, I can't fault their decision there.
That's not to say int32_t shouldn't have been there from the beginning, mind. We can 'have it all', in this case.
Why spark a debate (which is more in social sciences ballpark) when you can just run the experiments and validate the statement that way?
Err, "just"?
I'm no chemist, but I don't imagine cutting-edge chemical experiments are something you just do.
Also, you're completely missing the point. Falsification of science absolutely should be a big deal. The person responsible should face serious consequences, and hopefully it remains rare enough that it's big news.
My only point was that it's a hypocritical argument. I don't really think any of them, as a whole, deserve the label "crazy and murderous". The majority of people in both countries are civil and responsible.
Sure, but my point was that Outlaw guns and only outlaws will have guns goes both ways.
In the USA there are plenty of responsible, legal owners of handguns. There are very few of those in the UK, as civilians may not legally own them; the only British civilians in possession of handguns are those who disregard the law, so they're almost bound to be used for crime.
To put it another way: in a country where everyone has a gun, one would expect that the proportion of guns used for crime would be lower than otherwise, as you are now weighing the number of criminals against the full number of the country's non-criminals. Civilian gun ownership is much more common in the USA than the UK, so we'd expect to see that a higher proportion of UK guns are used for crime.
(I'm assuming of course that your "per gun" was including all guns, legal and illegal.)
And further yet: you have to be careful about how you interpret the statistics. Because (again, according to official government figures from both the U.S. and the UK), in the UK there is actually 10x the amount of gun crime per gun (not per person) than in the United States.
To be expected, which ever side of the fence you're on.
Outlaw guns and only outlaws will have guns, right?
For that reason I don't think it's fair to say THEY are the ones who deserve the image of crazy and murderous, far more than Americans do.
The gun-grab statistics are somewhat persuasive, but it remains that British criminals generally don't have guns. Knives, sure (despite that it is, in general, illegal to carry one).
Interesting. Can you link me to a relevant source?
Can you remind me which military has given something beyond token resistance to the US army lately?
We're talking rebels, not 'military'. The Middle East and Northern Ireland are the proof that modern militaries won't have an easy time occupying countries.
Sure, if you want to use terrorist tactics (hiding between civilians, striking off-duty soldiers - that sort of thing) then you can make the life of an occupying army a living hell.
Off-duty?
But if you're thinking about using terrorist weapons with impunity, then have you ever thought about an army that doesn't have modern rules of engagement?
In a hypothetical armed rebellion in the USA, the rules of engagement would very much apply. I don't think the USAF would be ok carpet-bombing their own country to get at rebels, assuming they were ok with domestic deployment to begin with.
Oh, I get it. You'd prefer to kill toddlers, perhaps even primary school children. That'll surely help your cause.
You think that kind of idiocy will help yours?
Like I said, I'm not a gun-nut. I'm not even really pro-gun. I'm just pointing out that this particular anti-gun argument - that they'd be useless in a revolution - is nonsense.
I would see a military coop overthrow happening with armed civilians taking a major base, then using what they acquire from that base to move on the next one...
To my knowledge this has never happened in the Middle East. The military would still have a tremendous advantage in training and coordination.
If an armed citizen presents no threat to tyranny, then *why* is the state so intent on preventing us from being armed?
One need only ask themselves that very question, to understand this whole subject.
No, I don't think so. You've made quite a leap. You've not addressed the central pro-gun-control argument that it can keep guns out of the hands of criminals.
In a lot of countries, like the UK, gun control generally works pretty well at preventing gun-crime, by keeping guns out of the hands of criminals. It doesn't work perfectly, but pretty well. It would be a problem if the people wanted a revolution, but I don't think that's what politicians are thinking.
You seem to think it's self-evident that there actually would be millions of armed citizens to take up arms against the government....
Really I was commenting on the effectiveness of improvised weapons more than the state of things in the USA, but yes, I suspect the number would hit millions if the government were to get completely out of control.
A very large majority of the population is, by and large, satisfied with the job the government is doing, and while they may disagree with the party currently holding the power, they do not believe that armed resistance is necessary.
Again I'm not advocating an armed uprising, just commenting on the effectiveness of improvised weapons. For all the problems with the US government, I don't think it warrants armed revolution.
Also, since you seem to be American, I'll remind you that the phrase "well-regulated militia" implies that there's actual training involved. When you can download the plans to make a weapon from the Internet, and buy the ammunition for said weapon from Wal*Mart, that greatly reduces the chance that the people doing so will know what the hell they're doing.
Agreed that you've got nothing without training. Not that it really matters, but I'm not American.
For the record, as a former member of the military, I feel that gun control is a good thing. Weapons that are not being properly maintained, and with which you don't maintain proper proficiency are dangerous, to you and everybody around you. When the general population has the same requirements for recertification and the same penalties for not properly maintaining their weapon that I had when I was in the army, I will support them having the same access to weapons I had.
Reasonable points from a safety perspective, but it assumes no (need for) armed revolution, which was the whole point of the Second Amendment.
Say it all you want, that doesn't give it weight. Care to justify your claim?
I'm no 'gun nut', but you seem to think it's self-evident that millions of armed citizens would pose no obstacle to a determined military force. This is false. Look at the US involvement in the middle East, or what happened in Northern Ireland.
Especially not printed guns.
We already know that improvised weapons can be effective against modern militaries.
MIPS flavored RISC goodness. Shame they're basically unavailable in the UK, even if you go hunting for one.
The fact that a murder happened at a range doesn't refute the claim that "one of the safest places in the world is a gun range" in the least. You might have noticed that murders occasionally happen *NOT* at a gun range as well...
Fair enough - we're both talking crap. Citation still needed.
@computererds: I'll cut to the chase: {{citation needed}}.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but gun 'facts', on both sides, are a dime a dozen.
@ godefroi:
what happened at that range could have (would have?) happened anywhere
The pro-gun-control response to this is obvious.
Obviously, a rational person would consider that a range is more likely than elsewhere to have a high concentration of people prepared, able, and willing to defend themselves and others.
What matters is reality, not the behaviour we would expect of perfect rational actors.
raymorris claimed
One of the safest places in the world is a gun range, because you don't start a fight knowing that everyone is armed
but this claim was unsubstanciated, and the fact is the murder at the shooting range did happen.
*Sigh* Oh, so I had hit the depth-limit. Bah.