It was a potential conflict of interest, given that he is a paid employee of Google who works as a security engineer. If this was inconsistent with Google's policies, there is definitely a problem, the problem would have been Tavis' fault (not Google's), but it would be up to Google to repudiate the actions if it believed Ormandy was not in compliance.
This article instead suggests that Google's policy is consistent with Tavis' actions, so it really doesn't matter.
Which is fair, but I don't see this new policy as really consistent with Tavis' case. Presumably he disclosed because he was "responding to a [...] refusal to address the problem". We know Microsoft did respond to Tavis within the same day on the weekend, but he was unsatisfied with the response and gave full disclosure a few business days later rather than waiting out his deadline. I'd like that part clarified.
Gustafson's law is also an oversimplification when applied to software projects. For example:
1. The amount of serial work is not constant but is in fact related to the level of parallelization. This is true even with mitigations like grouping into teams for communication efficiencies -- which can also increase communications error rates. 2. The "speed" of the individual "processors"; employees; is not constant over time, nor is it independent of the speed of other "processors". I'm skeptical that it's even independent of the number of "processors" or the proportion of serialization vs. parallelization.
What we need to do is recognize the limitations and provisos of all of these so-called "laws". It's inconsistent to throw some away because it doesn't hold for all cases and then replace it with one that doesn't hold for all cases, though I'd accept the argument that Brooke's law in its common form holds too rarely to be very useful.
Gustafson's law applies trivially to projects where the constant terms are truly constant, and all terms are time-invariant; otherwise it requires non-trivial modifications.
1. Categorically, no, they are not adding up the costs of previous developments. 2. Just how much source from Diablo 2 do you really think is in Starcraft 2?
I don't play WoW either. My reason is that MMOs don't appeal to me; well-crafted single-player experiences do. But your argument 1 is something I've often heard, but never understood. Why is it unacceptable to charge both for the box and for a monthly charge? This is acceptable in tonnes of other contexts.
To get the Internet, you buy a computer or other Internet appliance and pay a monthly fee to your ISP.
To get a phone, you buy a phone and pay the monthly fee (sometimes the phone subsidies actually make the initial outlay 0, but you have a restrictive contract).
To get cable, you buy a TV and (perhaps) a cable box and pay a monthly fee to a cable provider.
To wash the dishes, you buy a dishwasher and then keep buying detergent. More of a pay-as-you-go scheme there.
Hell, it isn't uncommon for an employee to get a signing bonus! That's lump sum + periodic fee again.
Downpayments? Unheard of! First and last months' rent? Preposterous! Having to pay for maintenance? Ludicrous!
In the final analysis, whether a value proposition is acceptable depends not on the gross pricing scheme itself, but on:
1. What they charge up front 2. What they charge ongoing 3. What value you get out of it 4. What reasonable alternatives could be swapped in and their value-prop with regard to 1, 2, and 3
If you think it's too expensive, then I think you should just say you think it's too expensive. Or you could say you don't like subscription models, or you don't like the pay-up-front model. But making up special rules about the pricing structure, where it can be A or B but never ever an impure hybrid, is just weird. It feels like an excuse for the fact that you don't want to play WoW. But nobody (who doesn't read slashdot) is going to think you're uncool for not wanting to play WoW, so it's weird to make excuses.
I didn't read your whole post because there were no paragraphs. Sorry. So I'm going to do like all good slashdotters do and respond to only the first sentence:
Insider Trading is illegal specifically because non-insiders do not have access to all information available. It's an application of the idea that any good aspects of the free market system are eroded by imperfect information.
If you make a bunch of assumptions, including perfect information, then much of the economic claims we've all heard are provable in the same sense that mathematical theorems are provable. The more you tear down these assumptions, the less certain we can be about the efficacy of capitalism.
I am inclined to say Apple's site, Apple's rules; but to add that this means that Apple's forums have limited utility given that the most important problems are exactly those where discussion is stifled. I don't think Apple is being unethical so much as putting out a bad product (meaning the forum, not the phone).
That's not prior art to the actual patent described, which is about turning the page in response to a particular touch gesture. That the animation is being patented is eldavojohn's invention.
Nobody said you couldn't build a binary. Just that you can't build the complete Windows system. You can probably spray dlls all over the place and then just do a binary diff against the original to verify that they are identical other than the signature.
That depends on how you link them together. If they are non-uniform in either size or orientation, or if they do not expect optimal packing, you can get a straight line with non-rectangular pixels.
Consider a rectangle cut diagonally into two triangles -- these obviously can make straight lines because two of them form a rectangle again. Or a mosaic, as mentioned in the article. Or octagonal pixels with dead space in the corners between them (it's not like square pixels are separated only by a planck length). Each has obvious downsides (eg. computational complexity, lower maximum resolution per unit area), but it can be done with many different shapes.
Now, the obvious alternative is the hexagon. There, you'd have to pick either vertical or horizontal straight lines.
It's one thing to think that you're never paying that much for a specific software package (you mentioned MS Office), or to have an ethical system that forbids paying for software (as a subset of OSS advocates do). But it takes a distinct lack of imagination to be unable to think of a reason for non-free software to cost $1000. For an easy example, just imagine a piece of software that did what 10 pieces of software that you'd pay >=$100 for did, at least as well as each did.
Screen readers are something that comes to mind that has high fixed development costs to cover a small market, requiring all kinds of localization and app-specific hacks. Engineering software has similar constraints -- and in that case you could argue that it does let you print money:).
I would argue that one doesn't understand the words, in this case.
I disagree. Such jargon often begins as metaphor, and metaphor is very specifically about conveying meaning that is not contained in the individual words.
If I say "zombie process", you don't think of the sequence of things that a a desiccated animated corpse does, true.
But if I say "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet", I would argue that the true meaning is that "Romeo Montague is not any more or less attractive to me, Juliet Capulet, just because his family has a vendetta with mine; and I am saying so in a devastatingly pretentious and obtuse manner because this is in style for 16th century tragic plays". You would probably not understand that if you were (somehow) unfamiliar with Romeo and Juliet, but I think it would be disingenuous to therefore claim that any of the words were not understood.
In the same way, people can understand the words, say, "global warming", and instantly come to the incorrect but somewhat understandable conclusion that it implies that "this year's winter must be noticeably and indisputably warmer and less snowy than all winters previous as measured from my house over the time in which I've lived here". Hence the shift in language toward "global climate change". I think it's splitting hairs to say that they don't.
You've been trying to put the smackdown on "scientists" as a gestalt. In response, they are resisting and getting defensive.
The fact is, some scientists are assholes toward non-scientists. Some non-scientists are assholes toward scientists. You can replace the word scientist with just about any group with a cohesive collective identity and it's still true. Take, for instance, ohhhhh...Open Source activisim.
Imagine there were a forum or blog where Open Source activists and non-Open Source activists frequently discussed issues relevant to Open Source activisim. You might imagine that some pro-Open Source people would be assholes to the non-pro-Open Source people, and accuse them of being "anti-Open Source" people who hate freedom. Then you might see some non-pro-Open Source people accuse the pro-Open Source people of following warped ideals well past the point of fault, and having poor hygiene. Maybe a few actually reasonable people on each side, too, with adequate hygiene and freedom credentials.
Those are the Windows LAN settings. IE uses them, as does Chrome and many other well-behaved Windows applications.
IE also provides an access point to them mixed in with IE-specific settings, which causes some confusion. You can also get there (without the IE-specific settings; at least, the ones that are inherently IE specific) from the control panel.
Not so. Zeno's paradox is defeated by calculus and convergence.
If you go half the distance in half the time, then you move at a constant rate, and you do, in fact, arrive in a finite amount of time.
So if you're travelling 1/2 metre in 1/2 second, and then 1/4 metre in 1/4 second, then dx/dt is a constant 1m/s and you arrive after 1 second.
It's only "never" when the units of time are proportional to the number of decreasingly small steps. You converge at exactly 1 metre at infinity steps, and exactly 1 second at infinity steps. You aren't just have "functionally zero" distance remaining after 1 second, you have literally 0.
Now, you aren't going to get past that point, because travelling even a nanometre past 1 metre is undefined given the parameters of the question -- as is your location more than 1 second later. But you will arrive, in exactly 1 second.
Otherwise, to be consistent, you'd have to claim that 1 second "never" passes no matter how long you wait, and you just get arbitrarily close.
Actually, you can to some extent serialize a parallel task, with sufficiently many cores.
For instance, you could just guess at all the intermediate results of halfway through a long sequence of operations, and execute from there, but discard the information if it's wrong. With lots of cores and a good chokepoint, you might be able to gain a 2x speedup a significant percent of the time (for a lower average speedup). 2x, that is, from billions of cores.
Kind of like branch prediction, or a dynamically generated giant lookup table.
It just isn't a very efficient speedup, at all, compared to the gains of even modestly parallelizable tasks.
A. He didn't fix it for himself though. He already knew what he meant. He fixed it for everybody else's benefit. B. I have hereby abandoned the attempt to verify that "on spy" is a sex position.
It is unreasonable to demand a well-formed answer to an unbacked assertion.
If I say "men get paid more than women because women have seven eyes", the proper recourse is not to present evidence that very few women have seven eyes and that anyway people with seven eyes should not be paid less than people with two eyes. There are assertions that deserve summary dismissal, and saying "men don't take sick leave because their kids have the sniffles [while women do]" is made-up horseshit.
Slashdot Mirror
It was a potential conflict of interest, given that he is a paid employee of Google who works as a security engineer. If this was inconsistent with Google's policies, there is definitely a problem, the problem would have been Tavis' fault (not Google's), but it would be up to Google to repudiate the actions if it believed Ormandy was not in compliance.
This article instead suggests that Google's policy is consistent with Tavis' actions, so it really doesn't matter.
Which is fair, but I don't see this new policy as really consistent with Tavis' case. Presumably he disclosed because he was "responding to a [...] refusal to address the problem". We know Microsoft did respond to Tavis within the same day on the weekend, but he was unsatisfied with the response and gave full disclosure a few business days later rather than waiting out his deadline. I'd like that part clarified.
Umm... no. Most 'sci-fi' writers are of around average intelligence who recycle materials, ideas, and memes that other people have created.
These statements aren't actually in conflict.
Serioualy, most SF writes just Make Shit Up when they aren't cribbing from someone else's notes.
If they crib from somebody else's notes who got it right, then they'll get that aspect right-by-proxy.
Gustafson's law is also an oversimplification when applied to software projects. For example:
1. The amount of serial work is not constant but is in fact related to the level of parallelization. This is true even with mitigations like grouping into teams for communication efficiencies -- which can also increase communications error rates.
2. The "speed" of the individual "processors"; employees; is not constant over time, nor is it independent of the speed of other "processors". I'm skeptical that it's even independent of the number of "processors" or the proportion of serialization vs. parallelization.
What we need to do is recognize the limitations and provisos of all of these so-called "laws". It's inconsistent to throw some away because it doesn't hold for all cases and then replace it with one that doesn't hold for all cases, though I'd accept the argument that Brooke's law in its common form holds too rarely to be very useful.
Gustafson's law applies trivially to projects where the constant terms are truly constant, and all terms are time-invariant; otherwise it requires non-trivial modifications.
Why are you making things up?
1. Categorically, no, they are not adding up the costs of previous developments.
2. Just how much source from Diablo 2 do you really think is in Starcraft 2?
I don't play WoW either. My reason is that MMOs don't appeal to me; well-crafted single-player experiences do. But your argument 1 is something I've often heard, but never understood. Why is it unacceptable to charge both for the box and for a monthly charge? This is acceptable in tonnes of other contexts.
To get the Internet, you buy a computer or other Internet appliance and pay a monthly fee to your ISP.
To get a phone, you buy a phone and pay the monthly fee (sometimes the phone subsidies actually make the initial outlay 0, but you have a restrictive contract).
To get cable, you buy a TV and (perhaps) a cable box and pay a monthly fee to a cable provider.
To wash the dishes, you buy a dishwasher and then keep buying detergent. More of a pay-as-you-go scheme there.
Hell, it isn't uncommon for an employee to get a signing bonus! That's lump sum + periodic fee again.
Downpayments? Unheard of! First and last months' rent? Preposterous! Having to pay for maintenance? Ludicrous!
In the final analysis, whether a value proposition is acceptable depends not on the gross pricing scheme itself, but on:
1. What they charge up front
2. What they charge ongoing
3. What value you get out of it
4. What reasonable alternatives could be swapped in and their value-prop with regard to 1, 2, and 3
If you think it's too expensive, then I think you should just say you think it's too expensive. Or you could say you don't like subscription models, or you don't like the pay-up-front model. But making up special rules about the pricing structure, where it can be A or B but never ever an impure hybrid, is just weird. It feels like an excuse for the fact that you don't want to play WoW. But nobody (who doesn't read slashdot) is going to think you're uncool for not wanting to play WoW, so it's weird to make excuses.
You can bet that sites that don't work in IE have very low IE usage.
So are warriros and one-liners, but the gestalt isn't.
I didn't read your whole post because there were no paragraphs. Sorry. So I'm going to do like all good slashdotters do and respond to only the first sentence:
Insider Trading is illegal specifically because non-insiders do not have access to all information available. It's an application of the idea that any good aspects of the free market system are eroded by imperfect information.
If you make a bunch of assumptions, including perfect information, then much of the economic claims we've all heard are provable in the same sense that mathematical theorems are provable. The more you tear down these assumptions, the less certain we can be about the efficacy of capitalism.
I am inclined to say Apple's site, Apple's rules; but to add that this means that Apple's forums have limited utility given that the most important problems are exactly those where discussion is stifled. I don't think Apple is being unethical so much as putting out a bad product (meaning the forum, not the phone).
That's not prior art to the actual patent described, which is about turning the page in response to a particular touch gesture. That the animation is being patented is eldavojohn's invention.
Nobody said you couldn't build a binary. Just that you can't build the complete Windows system. You can probably spray dlls all over the place and then just do a binary diff against the original to verify that they are identical other than the signature.
That depends on how you link them together. If they are non-uniform in either size or orientation, or if they do not expect optimal packing, you can get a straight line with non-rectangular pixels.
Consider a rectangle cut diagonally into two triangles -- these obviously can make straight lines because two of them form a rectangle again. Or a mosaic, as mentioned in the article. Or octagonal pixels with dead space in the corners between them (it's not like square pixels are separated only by a planck length). Each has obvious downsides (eg. computational complexity, lower maximum resolution per unit area), but it can be done with many different shapes.
Now, the obvious alternative is the hexagon. There, you'd have to pick either vertical or horizontal straight lines.
It's one thing to think that you're never paying that much for a specific software package (you mentioned MS Office), or to have an ethical system that forbids paying for software (as a subset of OSS advocates do). But it takes a distinct lack of imagination to be unable to think of a reason for non-free software to cost $1000. For an easy example, just imagine a piece of software that did what 10 pieces of software that you'd pay >=$100 for did, at least as well as each did.
Screen readers are something that comes to mind that has high fixed development costs to cover a small market, requiring all kinds of localization and app-specific hacks. Engineering software has similar constraints -- and in that case you could argue that it does let you print money :).
Passing every test suite on the planet now and in the future would keep me happy.
That's not a solution, it's a sacrifice; one I'm completely unwilling to accept, especially at that extreme.
I would argue that one doesn't understand the words, in this case.
I disagree. Such jargon often begins as metaphor, and metaphor is very specifically about conveying meaning that is not contained in the individual words.
If I say "zombie process", you don't think of the sequence of things that a a desiccated animated corpse does, true.
But if I say "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet", I would argue that the true meaning is that "Romeo Montague is not any more or less attractive to me, Juliet Capulet, just because his family has a vendetta with mine; and I am saying so in a devastatingly pretentious and obtuse manner because this is in style for 16th century tragic plays". You would probably not understand that if you were (somehow) unfamiliar with Romeo and Juliet, but I think it would be disingenuous to therefore claim that any of the words were not understood.
In the same way, people can understand the words, say, "global warming", and instantly come to the incorrect but somewhat understandable conclusion that it implies that "this year's winter must be noticeably and indisputably warmer and less snowy than all winters previous as measured from my house over the time in which I've lived here". Hence the shift in language toward "global climate change". I think it's splitting hairs to say that they don't.
Do you see the irony in your posts?
You've been trying to put the smackdown on "scientists" as a gestalt. In response, they are resisting and getting defensive.
The fact is, some scientists are assholes toward non-scientists. Some non-scientists are assholes toward scientists. You can replace the word scientist with just about any group with a cohesive collective identity and it's still true. Take, for instance, ohhhhh...Open Source activisim.
Imagine there were a forum or blog where Open Source activists and non-Open Source activists frequently discussed issues relevant to Open Source activisim. You might imagine that some pro-Open Source people would be assholes to the non-pro-Open Source people, and accuse them of being "anti-Open Source" people who hate freedom. Then you might see some non-pro-Open Source people accuse the pro-Open Source people of following warped ideals well past the point of fault, and having poor hygiene. Maybe a few actually reasonable people on each side, too, with adequate hygiene and freedom credentials.
I'm sure you can find an example of such a thing.
Those are the Windows LAN settings. IE uses them, as does Chrome and many other well-behaved Windows applications.
IE also provides an access point to them mixed in with IE-specific settings, which causes some confusion. You can also get there (without the IE-specific settings; at least, the ones that are inherently IE specific) from the control panel.
Not so. Zeno's paradox is defeated by calculus and convergence.
If you go half the distance in half the time, then you move at a constant rate, and you do, in fact, arrive in a finite amount of time.
So if you're travelling 1/2 metre in 1/2 second, and then 1/4 metre in 1/4 second, then dx/dt is a constant 1m/s and you arrive after 1 second.
It's only "never" when the units of time are proportional to the number of decreasingly small steps. You converge at exactly 1 metre at infinity steps, and exactly 1 second at infinity steps. You aren't just have "functionally zero" distance remaining after 1 second, you have literally 0.
Now, you aren't going to get past that point, because travelling even a nanometre past 1 metre is undefined given the parameters of the question -- as is your location more than 1 second later. But you will arrive, in exactly 1 second.
Otherwise, to be consistent, you'd have to claim that 1 second "never" passes no matter how long you wait, and you just get arbitrarily close.
Ugh, I meant "parallelize a serial task".
Actually, you can to some extent serialize a parallel task, with sufficiently many cores.
For instance, you could just guess at all the intermediate results of halfway through a long sequence of operations, and execute from there, but discard the information if it's wrong. With lots of cores and a good chokepoint, you might be able to gain a 2x speedup a significant percent of the time (for a lower average speedup). 2x, that is, from billions of cores.
Kind of like branch prediction, or a dynamically generated giant lookup table.
It just isn't a very efficient speedup, at all, compared to the gains of even modestly parallelizable tasks.
A. He didn't fix it for himself though. He already knew what he meant. He fixed it for everybody else's benefit.
B. I have hereby abandoned the attempt to verify that "on spy" is a sex position.
You don't get to tell me who my friends are and what the criteria are for my friendship.
Mozart, Wagner, and Beethoven weren't famous for playing piano in their spare time, they were famous for composing for wealthy patrons.
If you can't tell the difference between slashdot and a bar, then that's very, very sad.
It is unreasonable to demand a well-formed answer to an unbacked assertion.
If I say "men get paid more than women because women have seven eyes", the proper recourse is not to present evidence that very few women have seven eyes and that anyway people with seven eyes should not be paid less than people with two eyes. There are assertions that deserve summary dismissal, and saying "men don't take sick leave because their kids have the sniffles [while women do]" is made-up horseshit.