The Guardian is a hard-left medium that has proven itself to be anti-American over the decades.
Ah, the ever popular "everybody who disagrees with me is wrong and/or evil" gambit. Currently much in vogue with the NSA/MI5 and US/UK government spokesmen.
Java's problem isn't verbosity IMHO. It's the general mindset and community that has grown around the language. Instead of simplicity, they've gone into massive over-engineering, with factory factory factories and the like. A combination of pattern mania, and "enterprise" java, has resulted in turning an otherwise simple language into a veritable nightmare.
That may well have been valid back in the old J2EE days. But I'm guessing you are not familiar with frameworks like Spring (and the evolutions in the core Java platform in response). These days, it's simple POJOs, with annotations and dependency injection; no muss, no fuss. If you're writing a lot of verbose Java code (or you're bogged down in pattern mania) you doing it wrong; and working too hard!
Leave the individuality and innovation to the software, let the build system be conservative and dumb.
Agreed. This is especially true when you have sizeable development team (or teams), and you're doing continuous integration and deployment. Once you accept the "convention over configuration" approach, Maven is a breeze to work with.
Please! leave a way for people to use the old look forever. stayoffmylawn.slashdot.org or some such.
Agreed. The more compact design is way easier to scan for stories (and comments) of interest. Content and reading efficiency are more important than "style" IMHO.
That is precisely^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h theoretically how the market DOES organically set price to value.
FTFY. The theory assumes Perfect Competition, something that has become increasingly rare in Western economies. There are many ways for sellers to distort the market to their own advantage, and the buyer's disadvantage.
I agree that good investigative journalism is vital to our societies, and needs to be done by adequately funded professional journalists.
But there's a problem. Many news organisations largely gave up on this kind of journalism years ago. As is well covered in Flat Earth News many settle for just parroting generic stories from the wire services. This is why, for example, you often see the same stories (and even verbatim text) across multiple news outlets.
Back in the 1990s I used a Gartner service called "Talking Technology" (launched in 1995); basically a "podcast" on cassette tape, with a set of audio briefings on various technology topics delivered to subscribers at least once a month.
Other than being "on a computer", how is that any different from modern podcasts? Or deserving of a patent?
I don't think BMW salesmen will be losing too much sleep over this. According to the second linked article the "truly groundbreaking" AI is not actually that smart; certainly not Turing Test material.
Witness the crowdsourced identification of the Boston bombing dudes. Some poor dude was 'identified', and a semi-major newspaper picked it up..."Hey...that's the guy!"
Sucks to be him. Or you.
Good point. This approach presupposes that all involved are (a) competent to make the assessments and (b) committed to the accuracy of the outcome. If you are in a disaster area, if sucks to be you if the people being shown pictures of the rubble of your house are neither.
The inherent problem with things like this are always with making sure that you don't infringe upon free speech -- hyperbole, sarcasm, irony, humor, and rudeness -- and only get involved in situations where realistic threats are legitimately intended and made.
No, the inherent problem is people who think that, because it's on the internet, they can get away with threatening behaviour by dressing it up as a free speech issue; "hey dude, I was just expressing my hyperbole/sarcasm/irony/humor/rudeness/whatever".
Oh really? And how are we meant to intuit that? Is there a special smiley that says "I'm not really going to rape you, I'm just having a laugh"? Making threats against another person is illegal; there's no magic exemption for doing it online.
People didn't vaccinate their kids because they heard a (false) series of stories on the news. The problem wasn't that they didn't trust their doctor too little but rather that they trusted the news too much. If you saw a steady parade of (dis)information from a news source you regard as credible, why would you doubt it? Saying vaccines cause autism is a nice sound bite which is easy to understand whereas the counter argument that there is no credible evidence of any link is harder to explain.
Agreed. But there's an important factor you missed; complacency resulting from the success of vaccinations on previous generations.
I grew up in the late 1950's and 1960's when diseases like measles, polio and others still killed people (especially kids) every year and left others with life changing disabilities. My folks, and their peers, wouldn't have dreamed of refusing vaccinations; they could see the clear and present dangers that resulted from NOT vaccinating.
Roll forward a few decades and vaccination had completely eradicated these diseases in the western world. So when modern parents decided not to vaccinate their kids (due completely unfounded autism scares), they didn't realise the enormity of the genuine risks they were exposing the kids to.
Re the media coverage of the "MMR Scare", which was (and in some cases still is) shameful, it is well covered the chapter "The Media’s MMR Hoax" in Ben Goldacre's excellent Bad Science. The tabloids, in particular, continued to report Andrew Wakefield's opinions as gospel, long after the overwhelming weight of readily available evidence proved them bogus.
Firstly, what patients are charged and what it actually costs are two very different things. Secondly, there are a lot of scanners out there, and plenty of them are there for research purposes. Their presence is due to funding from research organisations and their running costs are funded from research organisations.
The reason we have real-time MRI and fMRI is because of people doing pure research. Both of these techniques have clinical applications. It is because of this pure research (which you are rubbishing) that partients have access to MRI in the first place.
I don't think anybody could reasonably object to research. It clearly has an important role.
The issue is more whether, in patient care scenarios, you choose to operate your MRI as a profit centre or not. There are many countries whose medical systems give people who are ill access to MRI scanners, and other diagnostic technologies, without charging them extortionate fees for their use.
RTFA. It's about bugging embassies and missions, not "us".
RTFA yourself. It discusses how, in addition to the mass interception of the electronic communications of millions of the ordinary citizens of America's supposed allies, the NSA and friends have been spying on our elected representatives as well; both in the US and on European soil. Our elected representatives are "us" by proxy; that's how democracy works. It's splitting hairs to claim otherwise.
If you're going to indulge in such cliche stereotypes, it's unsporting of you not to say what pure-as-the-driven-snow country you hale from. That would allow "us" to retaliate in kind, should we choose to stoop to such a level of "debate".
Sigh. Look at your own original post, which in essence says - I was pissed when I found out the NSA were violating my 4th Amendment rights, but doing the same thing to foreigners is totally different in my book. And you wonder where the stereotype comes from?
For the record I'm from the UK. But I'm neither proud of, nor condoning, what GCHQ are doing. Sadly, they only seem to be interested being the NSA's mini-me.
Agreed. I think that Snowden hurts his own credibility and his self-professed cause by spilling out all the details of United States espionage activities overseas. Had Snowden had a compelling whistleblower case by simply reporting on US domestic spying; many would view him as a patriot (as he self-proclaimed) for reporting on these abuses. However, muddies the water tremendously, I would even argue crosses the line, by providing details of US intelligence activities overseas, not just to the European Union but also to the Chinese and the Russians. Those actions directly harming his home country, undermining American intelligence activities against nations that have comprehensive espionage programs targeted at the United States (this includes European nations).
So what you, and the parent poster, are basically saying is that if US citizens are being targeted then that's a moral outrage and wholly unacceptable; but the rest of us are fair game.
See, that's a major part of the problem. I know that many Americans think that God appointed the US to be the world's policeman, and therefore they have some kind of divine right to meddle in the everybody' affairs. But, back in the real world, those of us who live in other democratic sovereign states quite rightly regard this kind of intrusion as a moral outrage and wholly unacceptable. How we run our lives is none of America's damn business.
And as for the "everybody does it" and "endangering national security"; as justifications for riding roughshod over everybody's human rights, they are on a par with "won't somebody please think of the children". With the exception of Britain's GCHQ (which calls its version of Prism "Mastering the Internet"), and possibly China, most countries have neither the resources nor the inclination to indulge in this kind of mass surveillance. And the "endangering national security" card is almost invariably played simply to prevent citizens from finding out what dirty their own government (and attendant spooks) is doing; supposedly in their name.
Listen here genius there will be a part of society that will always want something for free but when you
don't deliver what the general public wants at a price that reflects the product/item/availability you'll get the rest of the public to not give a flying fuck either...
Now if you'd only stopped after the word "free" this would have made more sense. Because, while the debates about what constitutes a "fair price" and DRM restrictions are all valid, there's an awful lot of people who just want stuff for nothing.
Remember Radiohead and "In Rainbows"? You could download the album, completely legally, from the band's web site and just pay what you considered a fair price. Only for lots of people, the only price they were interested in was zero; they even uploaded their copies onto bittorrent so their mates wouldn't have to make that difficult "fair price" decision.
(And before somebody says it, if you want something enough to go out an acquire one then, by definition, it has a non-zero value for you.)
I consider myself to be very fortunate to have had the opportunity to experience such a wonderful operating system.
I did a lot of work on DEC systems (mainly VMS, but also some RSX and RSTS) in the 80s and early 90s. VMS was indeed one of the most enjoyable operating systems I ever worked on. Not only that, DEC was a great company to work with; smart, motivated people who were very different from the staffers at the traditional "big iron" companies.
But sadly, after DEC got into financial trouble and competitors acquired their technology in a fire sale, it was only a matter of time before the products were killed off.
So your whole company is a giant bureaucratic clusterfuck. Got it.
Sheesh, way to demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding.
Apart from the obvious fact that your employer is paying to, you know, do some actual work and not spend your day goofing off on the web, there are other good reasons to restrict web access. The company could get sued if, for example, female co-workers see you surfing pr0n on a company computer and take a sexual harassment suit. Even better, if you are doing something illegal online, the company could face criminal charges for letting you do it on their time and dime.
So no, it's not a "giant bureaucratic clusterfuck"; it's commonsense business management.
No, BYOD means that IT still has no real control over the devices on the network, but now has to stop pretending that they ever did.
I'm not sure why this was marked insightful. Where I work (a financial institution) there are strong network controls that not at all illusory. Connect an unknown device to the network and it gets instantly quarantined (and you get fired). Reformat your official device and install some other OS, it gets instantly quarantined (and you get fired).
Any company that relies on controlling the systems on their network for security is practicing security through imagination. A real security model has to assume that there will be issues at every level. BYOD may help force companies to recognize the need for comprehensive security, but it doesn't create the need.
It's true that there's no single magic bullet for security; defense in depth is the only way. But if you let employees connect random devices to your network it's already largely game over.
If we introduced BYOD the financial regulator would be all over us like a rash; some of our competitors have had serious and costly data breaches. All our portable devices have full disk encryption (and restricted networking options). 99.99% of all our end-user devices have removable media disabled; the.01% that can use removable media are heavily monitored. Even the data we use for internal system testing is tightly controlled. There's no way we would allow staff access sensitive corporate or customer information from an unmanaged device.
'It means my arms are like wires and my hands are like alligator clips [so] when I touch my phone, my computer, my door, I'm authenticated,' Dugan said. 'This is not science fiction.'
"I assume your handprint will open this door whether you are conscious or not." - Commander Data, Star Trek TNG episode "A Matter of Time"
BBC Basic on a BBC and then asm to make it faster.
Really, BBC BASIC wasn't a bad language. Allowed proper structured programming with functions, procedures, local variables etc.
Another thumbs up for the BBC. Like you I learned BBC Basic and 6502 assembler.
BBC Basic was actually a pretty good language, and the instruction books the BBC provided emphasised a structured approach to programming which gave me a number of good habits which have served me well since. And when I went to college part of the first year curriculum was 6502 assembler, so those projects were a breeze!:-)
Slashdot Mirror
The Guardian is a hard-left medium that has proven itself to be anti-American over the decades.
Ah, the ever popular "everybody who disagrees with me is wrong and/or evil" gambit. Currently much in vogue with the NSA/MI5 and US/UK government spokesmen.
Java's problem isn't verbosity IMHO. It's the general mindset and community that has grown around the language. Instead of simplicity, they've gone into massive over-engineering, with factory factory factories and the like. A combination of pattern mania, and "enterprise" java, has resulted in turning an otherwise simple language into a veritable nightmare.
That may well have been valid back in the old J2EE days. But I'm guessing you are not familiar with frameworks like Spring (and the evolutions in the core Java platform in response). These days, it's simple POJOs, with annotations and dependency injection; no muss, no fuss. If you're writing a lot of verbose Java code (or you're bogged down in pattern mania) you doing it wrong; and working too hard!
Leave the individuality and innovation to the software, let the build system be conservative and dumb.
Agreed. This is especially true when you have sizeable development team (or teams), and you're doing continuous integration and deployment. Once you accept the "convention over configuration" approach, Maven is a breeze to work with.
Please! leave a way for people to use the old look forever. stayoffmylawn.slashdot.org or some such.
Agreed. The more compact design is way easier to scan for stories (and comments) of interest. Content and reading efficiency are more important than "style" IMHO.
Not false.
That is precisely^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h theoretically how the market DOES organically set price to value.
FTFY. The theory assumes Perfect Competition, something that has become increasingly rare in Western economies. There are many ways for sellers to distort the market to their own advantage, and the buyer's disadvantage.
I agree that good investigative journalism is vital to our societies, and needs to be done by adequately funded professional journalists.
But there's a problem. Many news organisations largely gave up on this kind of journalism years ago. As is well covered in Flat Earth News many settle for just parroting generic stories from the wire services. This is why, for example, you often see the same stories (and even verbatim text) across multiple news outlets.
Back in the 1990s I used a Gartner service called "Talking Technology" (launched in 1995); basically a "podcast" on cassette tape, with a set of audio briefings on various technology topics delivered to subscribers at least once a month.
Other than being "on a computer", how is that any different from modern podcasts? Or deserving of a patent?
I don't think BMW salesmen will be losing too much sleep over this. According to the second linked article the "truly groundbreaking" AI is not actually that smart; certainly not Turing Test material.
Or the slightly less recent past when Iraq was on "our" side; Saddam's Chemical Attacks On Iran 'Aided By US'.
Is there anything that cannot be justified by appeals over terrorism?
Don't forget that, as head of the London Metropolitan Police, Lord Blair presided over an organisation that did things like the killing of Ian Tomlinson, the smearing of the family of Stephen Lawrence, and the killing of John Charles de Menezes.
No wonder he's in favour of laws that would keep those kinds of skeletons firmly in the closet.
Witness the crowdsourced identification of the Boston bombing dudes. Some poor dude was 'identified', and a semi-major newspaper picked it up..."Hey...that's the guy!" Sucks to be him. Or you.
Good point. This approach presupposes that all involved are (a) competent to make the assessments and (b) committed to the accuracy of the outcome. If you are in a disaster area, if sucks to be you if the people being shown pictures of the rubble of your house are neither.
The inherent problem with things like this are always with making sure that you don't infringe upon free speech -- hyperbole, sarcasm, irony, humor, and rudeness -- and only get involved in situations where realistic threats are legitimately intended and made.
No, the inherent problem is people who think that, because it's on the internet, they can get away with threatening behaviour by dressing it up as a free speech issue; "hey dude, I was just expressing my hyperbole/sarcasm/irony/humor/rudeness/whatever".
Like for example, one of the guys quoted in this article (thanks to deains for the link in another thread) Twitter abuse: What women-hating trolls really believe - Telegraph; "She would know these men wouldn’t actually come and rape her. They don’t mean it. Rape is a metaphor.".
Oh really? And how are we meant to intuit that? Is there a special smiley that says "I'm not really going to rape you, I'm just having a laugh"? Making threats against another person is illegal; there's no magic exemption for doing it online.
People didn't vaccinate their kids because they heard a (false) series of stories on the news. The problem wasn't that they didn't trust their doctor too little but rather that they trusted the news too much. If you saw a steady parade of (dis)information from a news source you regard as credible, why would you doubt it? Saying vaccines cause autism is a nice sound bite which is easy to understand whereas the counter argument that there is no credible evidence of any link is harder to explain.
Agreed. But there's an important factor you missed; complacency resulting from the success of vaccinations on previous generations.
I grew up in the late 1950's and 1960's when diseases like measles, polio and others still killed people (especially kids) every year and left others with life changing disabilities. My folks, and their peers, wouldn't have dreamed of refusing vaccinations; they could see the clear and present dangers that resulted from NOT vaccinating.
Roll forward a few decades and vaccination had completely eradicated these diseases in the western world. So when modern parents decided not to vaccinate their kids (due completely unfounded autism scares), they didn't realise the enormity of the genuine risks they were exposing the kids to.
Re the media coverage of the "MMR Scare", which was (and in some cases still is) shameful, it is well covered the chapter "The Media’s MMR Hoax" in Ben Goldacre's excellent Bad Science. The tabloids, in particular, continued to report Andrew Wakefield's opinions as gospel, long after the overwhelming weight of readily available evidence proved them bogus.
Firstly, what patients are charged and what it actually costs are two very different things. Secondly, there are a lot of scanners out there, and plenty of them are there for research purposes. Their presence is due to funding from research organisations and their running costs are funded from research organisations. The reason we have real-time MRI and fMRI is because of people doing pure research. Both of these techniques have clinical applications. It is because of this pure research (which you are rubbishing) that partients have access to MRI in the first place.
I don't think anybody could reasonably object to research. It clearly has an important role.
The issue is more whether, in patient care scenarios, you choose to operate your MRI as a profit centre or not. There are many countries whose medical systems give people who are ill access to MRI scanners, and other diagnostic technologies, without charging them extortionate fees for their use.
"they make the code interesting" :-) though that was referencing a computed GOTO
GOTOs are for wimps! What you need is more COME FROM statements.
RTFA. It's about bugging embassies and missions, not "us".
RTFA yourself. It discusses how, in addition to the mass interception of the electronic communications of millions of the ordinary citizens of America's supposed allies, the NSA and friends have been spying on our elected representatives as well; both in the US and on European soil. Our elected representatives are "us" by proxy; that's how democracy works. It's splitting hairs to claim otherwise.
If you're going to indulge in such cliche stereotypes, it's unsporting of you not to say what pure-as-the-driven-snow country you hale from. That would allow "us" to retaliate in kind, should we choose to stoop to such a level of "debate".
Sigh. Look at your own original post, which in essence says - I was pissed when I found out the NSA were violating my 4th Amendment rights, but doing the same thing to foreigners is totally different in my book. And you wonder where the stereotype comes from?
For the record I'm from the UK. But I'm neither proud of, nor condoning, what GCHQ are doing. Sadly, they only seem to be interested being the NSA's mini-me.
Agreed. I think that Snowden hurts his own credibility and his self-professed cause by spilling out all the details of United States espionage activities overseas. Had Snowden had a compelling whistleblower case by simply reporting on US domestic spying; many would view him as a patriot (as he self-proclaimed) for reporting on these abuses. However, muddies the water tremendously, I would even argue crosses the line, by providing details of US intelligence activities overseas, not just to the European Union but also to the Chinese and the Russians. Those actions directly harming his home country, undermining American intelligence activities against nations that have comprehensive espionage programs targeted at the United States (this includes European nations).
So what you, and the parent poster, are basically saying is that if US citizens are being targeted then that's a moral outrage and wholly unacceptable; but the rest of us are fair game.
See, that's a major part of the problem. I know that many Americans think that God appointed the US to be the world's policeman, and therefore they have some kind of divine right to meddle in the everybody' affairs. But, back in the real world, those of us who live in other democratic sovereign states quite rightly regard this kind of intrusion as a moral outrage and wholly unacceptable. How we run our lives is none of America's damn business.
And as for the "everybody does it" and "endangering national security"; as justifications for riding roughshod over everybody's human rights, they are on a par with "won't somebody please think of the children". With the exception of Britain's GCHQ (which calls its version of Prism "Mastering the Internet"), and possibly China, most countries have neither the resources nor the inclination to indulge in this kind of mass surveillance. And the "endangering national security" card is almost invariably played simply to prevent citizens from finding out what dirty their own government (and attendant spooks) is doing; supposedly in their name.
Am I the only one who initially read this as Three Sheets which is something different entirely?
Listen here genius there will be a part of society that will always want something for free but when you don't deliver what the general public wants at a price that reflects the product/item/availability you'll get the rest of the public to not give a flying fuck either...
Now if you'd only stopped after the word "free" this would have made more sense. Because, while the debates about what constitutes a "fair price" and DRM restrictions are all valid, there's an awful lot of people who just want stuff for nothing.
Remember Radiohead and "In Rainbows"? You could download the album, completely legally, from the band's web site and just pay what you considered a fair price. Only for lots of people, the only price they were interested in was zero; they even uploaded their copies onto bittorrent so their mates wouldn't have to make that difficult "fair price" decision.
(And before somebody says it, if you want something enough to go out an acquire one then, by definition, it has a non-zero value for you.)
1) Options. We've got lots of them. So many in fact, that you need two strong people to carry the documentation around.
IIRC it took more than two strong people to move the "(Grey|Blue|Orange) Wall"! A palette and a forklift more like! :-)
I consider myself to be very fortunate to have had the opportunity to experience such a wonderful operating system.
I did a lot of work on DEC systems (mainly VMS, but also some RSX and RSTS) in the 80s and early 90s. VMS was indeed one of the most enjoyable operating systems I ever worked on. Not only that, DEC was a great company to work with; smart, motivated people who were very different from the staffers at the traditional "big iron" companies.
But sadly, after DEC got into financial trouble and competitors acquired their technology in a fire sale, it was only a matter of time before the products were killed off.
So your whole company is a giant bureaucratic clusterfuck. Got it.
Sheesh, way to demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding.
Apart from the obvious fact that your employer is paying to, you know, do some actual work and not spend your day goofing off on the web, there are other good reasons to restrict web access. The company could get sued if, for example, female co-workers see you surfing pr0n on a company computer and take a sexual harassment suit. Even better, if you are doing something illegal online, the company could face criminal charges for letting you do it on their time and dime.
So no, it's not a "giant bureaucratic clusterfuck"; it's commonsense business management.
No, BYOD means that IT still has no real control over the devices on the network, but now has to stop pretending that they ever did.
I'm not sure why this was marked insightful. Where I work (a financial institution) there are strong network controls that not at all illusory. Connect an unknown device to the network and it gets instantly quarantined (and you get fired). Reformat your official device and install some other OS, it gets instantly quarantined (and you get fired).
Any company that relies on controlling the systems on their network for security is practicing security through imagination. A real security model has to assume that there will be issues at every level. BYOD may help force companies to recognize the need for comprehensive security, but it doesn't create the need.
It's true that there's no single magic bullet for security; defense in depth is the only way. But if you let employees connect random devices to your network it's already largely game over.
If we introduced BYOD the financial regulator would be all over us like a rash; some of our competitors have had serious and costly data breaches. All our portable devices have full disk encryption (and restricted networking options). 99.99% of all our end-user devices have removable media disabled; the .01% that can use removable media are heavily monitored. Even the data we use for internal system testing is tightly controlled. There's no way we would allow staff access sensitive corporate or customer information from an unmanaged device.
'It means my arms are like wires and my hands are like alligator clips [so] when I touch my phone, my computer, my door, I'm authenticated,' Dugan said. 'This is not science fiction.'
"I assume your handprint will open this door whether you are conscious or not." - Commander Data, Star Trek TNG episode "A Matter of Time"
BBC Basic on a BBC and then asm to make it faster.
Really, BBC BASIC wasn't a bad language. Allowed proper structured programming with functions, procedures, local variables etc.
Another thumbs up for the BBC. Like you I learned BBC Basic and 6502 assembler.
BBC Basic was actually a pretty good language, and the instruction books the BBC provided emphasised a structured approach to programming which gave me a number of good habits which have served me well since. And when I went to college part of the first year curriculum was 6502 assembler, so those projects were a breeze! :-)