There are two types of reviewers: The valuable ones that actually read a paper and try to understand it, and the worthless ones that look at title, abstract and who wrote it (usually easy to find out even in anonymous review).
I have a feeling that there are some people who would take a polite "You're wrong and I disagree with you for the following reasons . .." as trolling. Sure the "I hope you die in a car fire" and "I'm going to kill your animals" are low-hanging fruit, but there's a line there somewhere and it's not always easy to find.
This being Britain, I'm sure it will be an awful mess of a law dripping cruelty and class discrimination like ASBOs and other recent British laws.
It can work, however. In Germany, insulting someone is a crime. Threatening rape is a crime too, of course. There is a well established and accepted law practice regarding the interpretation and implementation of such laws. The fact of the matter is that there is ample support and acceptance of them in the population, and the upshot is a comparatively civilized and objective atmosphere in public discourse.
I'm not very comfortable with laws that require some form of human interpretation
"We used to have an entry in the preferences for that but people thought that âoeSSL 3.0â was a higher version than âoeTLS 1.0â and would mistakenly disable the latter."
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why security is so hard. You have this chaotic ape in front of the keyboard making a mess of everything. Now excuse while I go fetch me a banana.
I wonder if part of this PhD glut is a delayed effect of the recession, which decreased employment opportunities over the last 6 years or so.
No. This has been going on for a long time and is getting worse by the year. From the linked article:
I would like to present to you this morning a rather analogous theory of the history of science. According to this theory, modern science appeared on the scene, in Europe, almost 300 years ago, and in this country a little more than a century ago. In each case it proceeded to expand at a frightening exponential rate. Exponential expansion cannot go on forever, and so the expansion of science, unlike the expansion of the Universe, was guaranteed to come to an end. I will argue that, in science, the Big Crunch occurred about 25 years ago, and we have been trying to ignore it ever since.
What is happening now is that the situation is becomming more extreme, and so even the best efforts at denial are crumbling.
According to a study by the CDC, 51.9 percent of surveyed women and 66.4 percent of surveyed men said they were physically assaulted as a child by an adult caretaker and/or as an adult by any type of attacker.
I suppose that these figures make sense - but only after you include almost any inuendo as an assault.
Basically, I call bullshit. These numbers are way to high. I suspect they equate large swaths of inocuous stuff with real rape in order to furhter an agenda.
Congratulations on employing the bottom of the barrel.
Now you know how the bottom of the barrel makes a living: by working for the bottom of the barrel. There is something like a Zen riddle somewhere hidden deep within this simple fact.
The three services are actually needed. [...] centralized management of date/time and locale changes were long overdue. Linux is pretty much the only OS remaining, where application, if needed, can't really know if/when date/time or locale has changed.
Ah no, you are bringing facts into this discussion? How dare you!:-)
I've studied the language pretty well. I've read the Standard enough to know that a lot of stuff is well defined, and when I go through the program, I see only constructs I recognize as defined (or implementation-defined, or unspecified, and we won't write code that depends on anything unspecified).
Or, put another way, you have spent a very large number of hours to master this stuff. This is a failure of language design, as it is known that you can write languages that do not require such a high time investment.
It is possible to write conforming C++ programs
I don't think anyone is disagreeing with you on this point. The critique is that is needlessly difficult. Even an expert has a bad day now and then, and when that happens, in C++ he is exposed to a much larger number of pitfalls and traps than in other languages.
Why not let women do what they want instead of trying to force them in to places that aren't necessarily their thing?
You mean, let them care about cooking and pink dresses instead of dealing with psychopathic jerks on wikipedia? I'm sure that if you think this through, you will at some point (maybe in a decade? nah, optimistic) reach some from of enlightenment on the issue. It helps if you talk to actual women, too.
As someone who uses Ubuntu as their primary desktop OS both at home and at work, I have to say that usability is the biggest feature holding back Linux desktop.
I keep wondering about this one. Because of work requirements, I started using windows again after a long hiatus, and find it rather cranky (windows 7). It was easier to program the reactions to my marble ball mouse under linux than it was under windows 7 (essentially impossible to get reasonable scroll-wheel emulation). Then there isn't anything remotely comparable with xmodmap. I can't have multiple desktops. Files are named in weird ways (PROGRA~1, etc) that have their special rules (it really is much simpler in linux). The keyboard layout kept unhelpfully switching to whatever it felt was right, and it took a long battle to ensure it stays where I want it. And Skype has annoying ads under windows.
Installing updates is gargantuan pain in the buttocks, especially when compared with ubuntu. In windows, a reboot is almost always necessary after downloading and installing updates. Quite often you need multiple reboots, and all of it takes ages. Under ubuntu they are much faster and unintrusive.
So, in my experience Windows actually sucks compared to a decent linux distro. All the talk about the little annoying things in linux is, I think, due to an illusion. Windows is popular today because it was popular yesterday, so people are used to it and all its little (and not so little) annoying things. They just don't notice anymore.
You do remember the "girls band" members that tried to desecrate the church right? Russia is not kind to it's detractors.
Fun fact: had these girls done that very same thing in a german church, they would have landed in jail. Probably a better jail, but a jail nonetheless. In other countries, with other sites of religious worship, they would have been killed.
So please, keep it real. Russia is no paradise, but it's not by a very large margine the worst place in the world. Among other things, they have a lot less people in jail than the USA does.
one that seems overheating, too. You can buy quite well speced smart phones (way better than an iPhone, as you have correctly noted) for a very decent prize. Manufacturers seem to be running out of ideas on how to get traction in this market, so this is what they come up with: over-the-top-specs.
A market full of smartphones that can't find a way to differentiate themselves from each other seems to me like a market ready for collapse.
Why do scientists falsify? Or how can they? They must know they will be found out - especially the more sensational the finding.
The answer to that is that they fool themselves. If you ever have been at a top institution of this kind you might have witnessed a certain mix of hubris, megalomania and groupthink. These people tend to be really good, but their selfconfidence, their lack of understanding of statistics, their mutual reinforcement, and the huge pressure to keep producing blockbuster research can warp their thinking. It would not surprise me that they believed the results to be true, but thought it was just the damned data that kept being wrong.
This sectlike atmosphere at some of these institutions is compounded by the fact that people there work so insanely hard that they don't have time to take a step back and think things through.
Many of those systems have no (or minimal) idle time.
In my experience, this is true only for the top machines in terms of reputation of the institution where they are run. Many more supercomputing facilities actually idle around a lot if not most of the time. They were bought to confer bragging rights and are embedded into a context that makes them unable to operate effectively.
A lot of these machines are hard to program for, and the institutions that own them hard to deal with (often universities with bad bureaucracy and ridiculous internal rules) which means few bother and even fewer get to run code on them. Of course that is something that is rarely admitted in public.
I think the guy did wrong and should be punished. OTOH, I think he also deserves an award for showing (again) how ridiculous the whole HPC thing actually is. Here we have these supposedly super-high-end machines (in terms of running benchmark software) which just aren't competitive by a hilariously large margin with what is out there mining bitcoins. How embarrasing.
I would say it was only amoral if exploited for one's own gain or to others' detriment.
So if a hack gives reputation to a security researcher while embarrassing the website owners - how is this not exploitation for the researchers gain to the website owners detriment? You go there and pull off an I-am-smart-and-you-are-a-moron on these folks that are trying to make a living. How is that different from being an asshole?
The argument that security researchers are actually doing good is just an unsubstantiated assumption that needs closer scrutiny, and it is quite likely not true in many situations. For example, the SCADA vulnerabilities have not led to any major or even minor problem, yet they have generated a lot of FUD and maybe even given ideas to criminals and terrorists. Researchers have gotten their nice reputation out of this, but what has the world gained? And look at how the credit card industry works. A lot of their shit is fundamentally flawed from a security point of view, yet it works and is quite convenient. How can that be?
Security researchers make a nuisance of themselves in many situations, and don't even realize it. Their "told you so" can be extremely costly to a company when there is trouble, because of how it affects liability issues. Most companies would not be viable if they had to fix every bug unearthed by researchers or face full liability claims when their unfixed code fails. The kind of talent needed to get security stuff right is just not available in the needed quantities at a reasonable price (i.e. hourly rates comparable to that of a janitor) so it is unreasonable to expect things to be secure. The alternative to insecure stuff is no stuff. Everybody who's not a propellerhead knows this.
Slashdot Mirror
And then there's The Third Reviewer.
Fools fooling fools in bitcoinland. Shocking!
This being Britain, I'm sure it will be an awful mess of a law dripping cruelty and class discrimination like ASBOs and other recent British laws.
It can work, however. In Germany, insulting someone is a crime. Threatening rape is a crime too, of course. There is a well established and accepted law practice regarding the interpretation and implementation of such laws. The fact of the matter is that there is ample support and acceptance of them in the population, and the upshot is a comparatively civilized and objective atmosphere in public discourse.
Most laws are like that, and have always been so.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why security is so hard. You have this chaotic ape in front of the keyboard making a mess of everything. Now excuse while I go fetch me a banana.
No. This has been going on for a long time and is getting worse by the year. From the linked article:
I would like to present to you this morning a rather analogous theory of the history of science. According to this theory, modern science appeared on the scene, in Europe, almost 300 years ago, and in this country a little more than a century ago. In each case it proceeded to expand at a frightening exponential rate. Exponential expansion cannot go on forever, and so the expansion of science, unlike the expansion of the Universe, was guaranteed to come to an end. I will argue that, in science, the Big Crunch occurred about 25 years ago, and we have been trying to ignore it ever since.
What is happening now is that the situation is becomming more extreme, and so even the best efforts at denial are crumbling.
Language design matters. This is why.
I suppose that these figures make sense - but only after you include almost any inuendo as an assault.
Basically, I call bullshit. These numbers are way to high. I suspect they equate large swaths of inocuous stuff with real rape in order to furhter an agenda.
Now you know how the bottom of the barrel makes a living: by working for the bottom of the barrel. There is something like a Zen riddle somewhere hidden deep within this simple fact.
No, people in the sciences don't leave because they are dismayed. It usually is because the money runs out.
Ah no, you are bringing facts into this discussion? How dare you! :-)
Thank you, actually.
Or, put another way, you have spent a very large number of hours to master this stuff. This is a failure of language design, as it is known that you can write languages that do not require such a high time investment.
I don't think anyone is disagreeing with you on this point. The critique is that is needlessly difficult. Even an expert has a bad day now and then, and when that happens, in C++ he is exposed to a much larger number of pitfalls and traps than in other languages.
So you do but you don't? Very good, my friend. Very good.
It's funny, really.
Quote:
both in C and certainly in C++, it is uncommon to see a screenful containing only well defined and conforming code.
That's what proper language design is supposed to avoid. Oh well.
You mean, let them care about cooking and pink dresses instead of dealing with psychopathic jerks on wikipedia? I'm sure that if you think this through, you will at some point (maybe in a decade? nah, optimistic) reach some from of enlightenment on the issue. It helps if you talk to actual women, too.
I keep wondering about this one. Because of work requirements, I started using windows again after a long hiatus, and find it rather cranky (windows 7). It was easier to program the reactions to my marble ball mouse under linux than it was under windows 7 (essentially impossible to get reasonable scroll-wheel emulation). Then there isn't anything remotely comparable with xmodmap. I can't have multiple desktops. Files are named in weird ways (PROGRA~1, etc) that have their special rules (it really is much simpler in linux). The keyboard layout kept unhelpfully switching to whatever it felt was right, and it took a long battle to ensure it stays where I want it. And Skype has annoying ads under windows.
Installing updates is gargantuan pain in the buttocks, especially when compared with ubuntu. In windows, a reboot is almost always necessary after downloading and installing updates. Quite often you need multiple reboots, and all of it takes ages. Under ubuntu they are much faster and unintrusive.
So, in my experience Windows actually sucks compared to a decent linux distro. All the talk about the little annoying things in linux is, I think, due to an illusion. Windows is popular today because it was popular yesterday, so people are used to it and all its little (and not so little) annoying things. They just don't notice anymore.
Fun fact: had these girls done that very same thing in a german church, they would have landed in jail. Probably a better jail, but a jail nonetheless. In other countries, with other sites of religious worship, they would have been killed.
So please, keep it real. Russia is no paradise, but it's not by a very large margine the worst place in the world. Among other things, they have a lot less people in jail than the USA does.
Actually, it is 'increase' already in the linked article. The quote is
"We will increase the fluidity of information and ideas by taking actions to flatten the organization and develop leaner business processes,"
And it actually makes sense.
Elon Musk is south african.
one that seems overheating, too. You can buy quite well speced smart phones (way better than an iPhone, as you have correctly noted) for a very decent prize. Manufacturers seem to be running out of ideas on how to get traction in this market, so this is what they come up with: over-the-top-specs.
A market full of smartphones that can't find a way to differentiate themselves from each other seems to me like a market ready for collapse.
The answer to that is that they fool themselves. If you ever have been at a top institution of this kind you might have witnessed a certain mix of hubris, megalomania and groupthink. These people tend to be really good, but their selfconfidence, their lack of understanding of statistics, their mutual reinforcement, and the huge pressure to keep producing blockbuster research can warp their thinking. It would not surprise me that they believed the results to be true, but thought it was just the damned data that kept being wrong.
This sectlike atmosphere at some of these institutions is compounded by the fact that people there work so insanely hard that they don't have time to take a step back and think things through.
Can you provide any links? I'm interested. Thanks.
In my experience, this is true only for the top machines in terms of reputation of the institution where they are run. Many more supercomputing facilities actually idle around a lot if not most of the time. They were bought to confer bragging rights and are embedded into a context that makes them unable to operate effectively.
A lot of these machines are hard to program for, and the institutions that own them hard to deal with (often universities with bad bureaucracy and ridiculous internal rules) which means few bother and even fewer get to run code on them. Of course that is something that is rarely admitted in public.
I think the guy did wrong and should be punished. OTOH, I think he also deserves an award for showing (again) how ridiculous the whole HPC thing actually is. Here we have these supposedly super-high-end machines (in terms of running benchmark software) which just aren't competitive by a hilariously large margin with what is out there mining bitcoins. How embarrasing.
Even after factoring in that he's most likely making more money than you?
So if a hack gives reputation to a security researcher while embarrassing the website owners - how is this not exploitation for the researchers gain to the website owners detriment? You go there and pull off an I-am-smart-and-you-are-a-moron on these folks that are trying to make a living. How is that different from being an asshole?
The argument that security researchers are actually doing good is just an unsubstantiated assumption that needs closer scrutiny, and it is quite likely not true in many situations. For example, the SCADA vulnerabilities have not led to any major or even minor problem, yet they have generated a lot of FUD and maybe even given ideas to criminals and terrorists. Researchers have gotten their nice reputation out of this, but what has the world gained? And look at how the credit card industry works. A lot of their shit is fundamentally flawed from a security point of view, yet it works and is quite convenient. How can that be?
Security researchers make a nuisance of themselves in many situations, and don't even realize it. Their "told you so" can be extremely costly to a company when there is trouble, because of how it affects liability issues. Most companies would not be viable if they had to fix every bug unearthed by researchers or face full liability claims when their unfixed code fails. The kind of talent needed to get security stuff right is just not available in the needed quantities at a reasonable price (i.e. hourly rates comparable to that of a janitor) so it is unreasonable to expect things to be secure. The alternative to insecure stuff is no stuff. Everybody who's not a propellerhead knows this.
If you are doing C++, you absolutely must read the Frequently Questioned Answers:
"C++ is a general-purpose programming language, not necessarily suitable for your special purpose."
It's a little (though not much) out of date, as it does not cover C++11. But the author has some comments on it, too.
Obviously I am going to be modded down, but hey. Truth is truth.