For various reason having to do with the instruction set, x86 and x86-64 code is impossible to verify as safe to run. Google Native Client gets around that with a combination of static analysis and an execution sandbox (separate from the sandbox chrome already uses.) That's pretty close to what you're asking for, but afaik only works in chrome. It supports x86-32, x86-64, and ARM.
It's complicated imo: many processes involved with a single browser tab, with lots named pipes, all branch instructions have to be thunked, requiring a lot of overhead for branches. You also have to have compiler support. Google only supports C/C++. There are third party tools for Lua, Python and Ruby, and some work is being done that would allow you to use any language that can target LLVM's intermediate format.
The lack of browser support is the biggest problem though.
it doesn't sound too hard for an AI to figure out that if it dies, then it will be difficult to do well on its other goals.
Humans don't even always do this. Many people are willing to die and have died for some abstract cause.
Self-preservation is the highest level goal, and takes priority over any other possible goal. The catch is that "self" is itself an abstract concept. To the extent that I conflate my concept of self with some abstract cause, I am willing to die for that cause. If the cause lives on, so do I, because I believe in some way that I am that cause. If the cause dies, "I" die.
An Artificial Intelligence with a self-preservation instinct and an abstract concept of self could be just as willing to sacrifice itself for humanity as a soldier is.
the level of effort to actually generate an exploit that works regularly is the point of diminishing returns
You would think so, but experience has shown that without a working proof of concept exploit, software vendors dismiss the vulnerability as theoretical, downplay the severity, or outright ignore it. Sometimes they even ignore vulnerabilities with working exploits, if it isn't actually being exploited in the wild (that anyone knows about). And a working exploit is useful for testing your own systems.
XHTML serves a purpose. It adds the eXtensibility so that XHTML can be encorporated into other XML documents and visa versa, and it allows you to parse, generate and manipulate it with XML tools. The fact that browsers still have to deal with non-XML HTML doesn't take away from it's advantages.
If you're generating HTML, there's no reason to not generate XHTML -- it's only the code that consumes it that has to deal with HTML. And what, besides a browser, consumes HTML? (Whatever it is, it's probably doing it wrong.)
Absolute moron or not, I think you misunderstood him.
Prices are determined by where willingness to pay meets willingness to sell. Subsidies raise the willingness to pay and therefore raise prices.
That comment makes sense if "Subsidies" means money given to the student to pay tuition, which he's claiming raises the willingness to pay. I assume that's the correct interpretation, since that's what TFA is about. You're talking about subsidies given to the school, which by the same logic would raise the willingness to sell.
So there are subsidies on both the supply and the demand side. I'm pretty sure the subsidies to the schools (supply side) completely dwarf the subsidies given to the students (demand side), and this proposal would have little effect.
But the premise "prices are determined by where willingness to pay meets willingness to sell" is flawed anyway:
1. Community College tuition is usually set the state legislature, so there's that.
2. International enrollment is high and increasing, and would be even higher if it weren't limited by policy. International tuition is double or triple what in-state students pay, so we already know tuition is kept low despite high demand.
3. Most private money also goes to the supply side. That's why University of Washington has "The Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering."
there will come a point in the not too distant future when "Warming" will no longer be a debate
I hope you're right, but you might be underestimating the stubbornness people are able to maintain in regard to AGW. We're far past reasonable doubt already.
Many people will only be convinced by an argument that goes like this: AGW is real, but don't worry we've solved the problem in a way that allows you to not make any sacrifices to your god-given way of life, and your taxes aren't going to go up.
I am surprised that you can't differentiate between the late adolescent showing off of a bunch of over-priveleged virgin geeks, and the self discipline needed to succeed in adult, professional life.
In my quarter-century professional career I've seen just as much one-upmanship and trying to make other people look stupid in the workplace. What I haven't seen much of, in the places I've worked, is women.
Even given the short(er) lifespan of modern buildings, most of the buildings we tear down are torn down while they are still structurally sound and useful. They just aren't useful enough. We tear them down because they are not the building we want on that site any more. For example, consider single family houses in the middle of a crowded city. They don't have modern energy efficiency, safety or ease of maintenance, and they don't house enough people to justify the forgoing the alternative uses of the land they are on. A few rich people will live in them anyway, an we keep a few around as historical sites, but the rest we tear down to build something we want more.
Computers are even worse. If we wanted to, we could build a smart phone that would last a century but nobody wants that. It won't even be 5 years before we won't want the phone we have, because there will be better ones by then. Centuries-old buildings were built in a time when technology and society itself were relatively static. With today's pace of technological and societal change, it doesn't make sense to build much of anything to last that long because what we will want in a few hundred years or even a few decades is unknowable. Forget about thousands of years. Anything we build today is not going to be what we want anymore long before that. I suppose that some day, when the pace of change stabilizes, we will start building more permanent things again. In the mean time, there's a balance to be struck between construction/manufacturing costs, and what we expect the thing's useful lifespan to be.
That's the price you pay for a completely uncensored forum. Personally, I think it's worth it.
You don't have to read at -1 (you should if you're modding, though.) You're also reading and posting when the story has literally been here 15 minutes. There hasn't been time for quality discussion and moderation to take place (jokes, trolls and spam begin immediately, real discussion takes longer.)
I was a CS/EE double major in undergrad. In the first two or three years, there were plenty of women who were engineering majors. By the time I was a senior, there were 2 or 3 left in my class. I don't know the reasons why they dropped out or switched to other majors, but from what I saw, I suspect they were put off by the constant one-upmanship and trying to make other people look stupid that goes on. Kind of like Slashdot. I think most of us (men) are guilty of it to to varying degrees.
Ok, maybe that's a way of being less interested. But they didn't start out less interested.
I vaguely remember a recent story about Google not wanting experienced developers in some entry level CS classes they were offering. The first thing that occurred to me was that the experienced people (likely men) might be disrupting the classes with the kind of thing I'm talking about.
In the past few years I've been taking biology and chemistry classes out of personal interest. There are more women than men in those classes. I hope I'm not being sexist, but it seems to me that women are both more bothered by that kind of behavior, and far less likely to do it themselves. In fact they're more likely to do the opposite: when someone is struggling with a concept, they try to encourage them, e.g. by saying "yeah, that was a tricky idea, I finally got it when I looked at it like this...", rather than saying "oh come on, it's simple, just look at it like this..."
If civilizations similar to our own were common enough, we would see evidence of their radio waves that were emitted during the brief period in their history where radio waves were used for communication. Also, lots of things we do other than communication also emit radiation. Finally (and most compelling) advanced civilizations might be emitting radio waves intentionally (like we have done and maybe still are?) in order to be detected.
They would not be built to absorb 100% of the stars radiation. According to the wikipedia article on the Fermi Paradox:
"[A Dyson sphere would] drastically alter the observed spectrum of the star involved, changing it at least partly from the normal emission lines of a natural stellar atmosphere to that of a black body radiation, probably with a peak in the infrared. Dyson himself speculated that advanced alien civilizations might be detected by examining the spectra of stars and searching for such an altered spectrum"
Only one of the meter or the second can be independently uncertain.
Yes you're right I was thinking of mass (or force). In any case, the choice of which units to define and which to measure is arbitrary, so it makes sense to define the ones we have the least ability to measure.
Cesium has been pushed down to a relative uncertainty of 10^-14sec/sec
Which is a mind-blowing achievement, I think, but it's still a far cry from 10^-37.
However this only applies to direct measurement: A cesium clock's output frequency is stable enough that the GR-induced change in frequency due to raising it one meter higher, for example, is directly measurable because that change is larger than the random wander.
That's also amazing, and maybe there's a way to test this "entanglement makes particles heavier" idea, but we still aren't going to get measurements of anything down to 10^-37 that way. You mentioned "one meter higher", so that can't be better than our measurement of the meter (or second), right? I'm not a physicist.:)
I was replying to a guy who said "ASN.1 (by itself) won't get you anywhere", to which I replied "Neither will Matlab or Mathematica." Nobody is saying learning these languages is trivial or pointless.
The point is that these are domain-specific languages, and there isn't much point in learning them, by themselves. Learning them in isolation isn't going to land you a job in the industries where they are used (and they're far from obscure.)
Matlab is used heavily in computational science, engineering, and numerical computing. Nobody learns it for it's own sake. What will land you a job is knowing something about computational science/engineering and numerical computing. And at that point, learning Matlab (if you somehow haven't already!) is a bonus, not the point.
Employers want statisticians who happen to know R, not R programmers who happen to know some statistics. They want MEs who happen to know Matlab, not Matlab programmers who don't know any engineering.
If all you're going to bother learning is one programming language, and not some broader science or engineering discipline then you're much better off learning C++ or Python/NumPy, even if you're going to work in an engineering or science discipline. Write your general purpose code in a general purpose language and let the specialists consume it from their special purpose language.
Believe it or not, there is quite a bit more to learning a computer language than hubris for anything other than toy programs.
Hubris helps though, especially in the beginning! I've been coding in C++ for 25 years, and know plenty of Python, Fortran and Matlab, and a smattering of others; I'm well aware what it takes to learn a language.
No, really. We cannot measure anything to 37 decimal places. Not even close. If you measure the speed of light there will be uncertainty. If you insist the speed of light is exact by definition, then the uncertainty is in the length of a meter or the duration of a second or both.
Slashdot Mirror
PHP, for all its problems, is still a very useful language for ...
I don't even want to imagine a situation so bad that not even PHP can make it worse.
For various reason having to do with the instruction set, x86 and x86-64 code is impossible to verify as safe to run. Google Native Client gets around that with a combination of static analysis and an execution sandbox (separate from the sandbox chrome already uses.) That's pretty close to what you're asking for, but afaik only works in chrome. It supports x86-32, x86-64, and ARM.
It's complicated imo: many processes involved with a single browser tab, with lots named pipes, all branch instructions have to be thunked, requiring a lot of overhead for branches. You also have to have compiler support. Google only supports C/C++. There are third party tools for Lua, Python and Ruby, and some work is being done that would allow you to use any language that can target LLVM's intermediate format.
The lack of browser support is the biggest problem though.
If the authors of computer programming books wrote arithmetic textbooks.
RIP Abstruse Goose
it doesn't sound too hard for an AI to figure out that if it dies, then it will be difficult to do well on its other goals.
Humans don't even always do this. Many people are willing to die and have died for some abstract cause.
Self-preservation is the highest level goal, and takes priority over any other possible goal. The catch is that "self" is itself an abstract concept. To the extent that I conflate my concept of self with some abstract cause, I am willing to die for that cause. If the cause lives on, so do I, because I believe in some way that I am that cause. If the cause dies, "I" die.
An Artificial Intelligence with a self-preservation instinct and an abstract concept of self could be just as willing to sacrifice itself for humanity as a soldier is.
the level of effort to actually generate an exploit that works regularly is the point of diminishing returns
You would think so, but experience has shown that without a working proof of concept exploit, software vendors dismiss the vulnerability as theoretical, downplay the severity, or outright ignore it. Sometimes they even ignore vulnerabilities with working exploits, if it isn't actually being exploited in the wild (that anyone knows about). And a working exploit is useful for testing your own systems.
XHTML serves a purpose. It adds the eXtensibility so that XHTML can be encorporated into other XML documents and visa versa, and it allows you to parse, generate and manipulate it with XML tools. The fact that browsers still have to deal with non-XML HTML doesn't take away from it's advantages.
If you're generating HTML, there's no reason to not generate XHTML -- it's only the code that consumes it that has to deal with HTML. And what, besides a browser, consumes HTML? (Whatever it is, it's probably doing it wrong.)
Absolute moron or not, I think you misunderstood him.
Prices are determined by where willingness to pay meets willingness to sell. Subsidies raise the willingness to pay and therefore raise prices.
That comment makes sense if "Subsidies" means money given to the student to pay tuition, which he's claiming raises the willingness to pay. I assume that's the correct interpretation, since that's what TFA is about. You're talking about subsidies given to the school, which by the same logic would raise the willingness to sell.
So there are subsidies on both the supply and the demand side. I'm pretty sure the subsidies to the schools (supply side) completely dwarf the subsidies given to the students (demand side), and this proposal would have little effect.
But the premise "prices are determined by where willingness to pay meets willingness to sell" is flawed anyway:
There's nothing magic about it. Inflation raises the price of everything, including labor.
there will come a point in the not too distant future when "Warming" will no longer be a debate
I hope you're right, but you might be underestimating the stubbornness people are able to maintain in regard to AGW. We're far past reasonable doubt already.
Many people will only be convinced by an argument that goes like this: AGW is real, but don't worry we've solved the problem in a way that allows you to not make any sacrifices to your god-given way of life, and your taxes aren't going to go up.
if we start tinkering with the climate
We've been tinkering with the climate for a hundred years, that's why we're even talking about this.
so much work put into finding and exploiting one tiny little thing that, like you said, is destined to be patched
And yet all that work is the reason it's destined to be patched.
I am surprised that you can't differentiate between the late adolescent showing off of a bunch of over-priveleged virgin geeks, and the self discipline needed to succeed in adult, professional life.
In my quarter-century professional career I've seen just as much one-upmanship and trying to make other people look stupid in the workplace. What I haven't seen much of, in the places I've worked, is women.
If there was something genuinely better about their concrete...
A quick search shows there really was something better about their concrete:
Ancient Roman Concrete Is About to Revolutionize Modern Architecture
Discovery of 'Lost Recipe' for Ancient Concrete Provides Foundation for Future Cities
The Riddle of Ancient Roman Concrete
Even given the short(er) lifespan of modern buildings, most of the buildings we tear down are torn down while they are still structurally sound and useful. They just aren't useful enough. We tear them down because they are not the building we want on that site any more. For example, consider single family houses in the middle of a crowded city. They don't have modern energy efficiency, safety or ease of maintenance, and they don't house enough people to justify the forgoing the alternative uses of the land they are on. A few rich people will live in them anyway, an we keep a few around as historical sites, but the rest we tear down to build something we want more.
Computers are even worse. If we wanted to, we could build a smart phone that would last a century but nobody wants that. It won't even be 5 years before we won't want the phone we have, because there will be better ones by then. Centuries-old buildings were built in a time when technology and society itself were relatively static. With today's pace of technological and societal change, it doesn't make sense to build much of anything to last that long because what we will want in a few hundred years or even a few decades is unknowable. Forget about thousands of years. Anything we build today is not going to be what we want anymore long before that. I suppose that some day, when the pace of change stabilizes, we will start building more permanent things again. In the mean time, there's a balance to be struck between construction/manufacturing costs, and what we expect the thing's useful lifespan to be.
That's the price you pay for a completely uncensored forum. Personally, I think it's worth it.
You don't have to read at -1 (you should if you're modding, though.) You're also reading and posting when the story has literally been here 15 minutes. There hasn't been time for quality discussion and moderation to take place (jokes, trolls and spam begin immediately, real discussion takes longer.)
I was a CS/EE double major in undergrad. In the first two or three years, there were plenty of women who were engineering majors. By the time I was a senior, there were 2 or 3 left in my class. I don't know the reasons why they dropped out or switched to other majors, but from what I saw, I suspect they were put off by the constant one-upmanship and trying to make other people look stupid that goes on. Kind of like Slashdot. I think most of us (men) are guilty of it to to varying degrees.
Ok, maybe that's a way of being less interested. But they didn't start out less interested.
I vaguely remember a recent story about Google not wanting experienced developers in some entry level CS classes they were offering. The first thing that occurred to me was that the experienced people (likely men) might be disrupting the classes with the kind of thing I'm talking about.
In the past few years I've been taking biology and chemistry classes out of personal interest. There are more women than men in those classes. I hope I'm not being sexist, but it seems to me that women are both more bothered by that kind of behavior, and far less likely to do it themselves. In fact they're more likely to do the opposite: when someone is struggling with a concept, they try to encourage them, e.g. by saying "yeah, that was a tricky idea, I finally got it when I looked at it like this...", rather than saying "oh come on, it's simple, just look at it like this..."
If civilizations similar to our own were common enough, we would see evidence of their radio waves that were emitted during the brief period in their history where radio waves were used for communication. Also, lots of things we do other than communication also emit radiation. Finally (and most compelling) advanced civilizations might be emitting radio waves intentionally (like we have done and maybe still are?) in order to be detected.
They would not be built to absorb 100% of the stars radiation. According to the wikipedia article on the Fermi Paradox:
"[A Dyson sphere would] drastically alter the observed spectrum of the star involved, changing it at least partly from the normal emission lines of a natural stellar atmosphere to that of a black body radiation, probably with a peak in the infrared. Dyson himself speculated that advanced alien civilizations might be detected by examining the spectra of stars and searching for such an altered spectrum"
Unless, you know, the people vote for it, which they do.
And don't forget that there's some things that a lab rat just won't do.
Only one of the meter or the second can be independently uncertain.
Yes you're right I was thinking of mass (or force). In any case, the choice of which units to define and which to measure is arbitrary, so it makes sense to define the ones we have the least ability to measure.
Cesium has been pushed down to a relative uncertainty of 10^-14sec/sec
Which is a mind-blowing achievement, I think, but it's still a far cry from 10^-37.
However this only applies to direct measurement: A cesium clock's output frequency is stable enough that the GR-induced change in frequency due to raising it one meter higher, for example, is directly measurable because that change is larger than the random wander.
That's also amazing, and maybe there's a way to test this "entanglement makes particles heavier" idea, but we still aren't going to get measurements of anything down to 10^-37 that way. You mentioned "one meter higher", so that can't be better than our measurement of the meter (or second), right? I'm not a physicist. :)
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess the "Matlab guys" were EEs? If so, well... that was my point. See my reply to turkeyfish below.
The point is that these are domain-specific languages, and there isn't much point in learning them, by themselves. Learning them in isolation isn't going to land you a job in the industries where they are used (and they're far from obscure.)
Matlab is used heavily in computational science, engineering, and numerical computing. Nobody learns it for it's own sake. What will land you a job is knowing something about computational science/engineering and numerical computing. And at that point, learning Matlab (if you somehow haven't already!) is a bonus, not the point.
Employers want statisticians who happen to know R, not R programmers who happen to know some statistics. They want MEs who happen to know Matlab, not Matlab programmers who don't know any engineering.
If all you're going to bother learning is one programming language, and not some broader science or engineering discipline then you're much better off learning C++ or Python/NumPy, even if you're going to work in an engineering or science discipline. Write your general purpose code in a general purpose language and let the specialists consume it from their special purpose language.
Believe it or not, there is quite a bit more to learning a computer language than hubris for anything other than toy programs.
Hubris helps though, especially in the beginning! I've been coding in C++ for 25 years, and know plenty of Python, Fortran and Matlab, and a smattering of others; I'm well aware what it takes to learn a language.
No, really. We cannot measure anything to 37 decimal places. Not even close. If you measure the speed of light there will be uncertainty. If you insist the speed of light is exact by definition, then the uncertainty is in the length of a meter or the duration of a second or both.
HTML+CSS is Turing complete
Then again, CSS makes C++ seem user-friendly.