Apparently yes. I went to their site, read the FAQ, and still have no particularly lucid idea of what a Super PAC might be, let alone a PAC. Perhaps I should look it up on Wikipedia, but I wonder whether the founders of this campaign do not overestimate the general political education level of their fellow compatriots.
Anyway, it seems to have something to do with buying politicians, which apparently is legal in the US.
Snowden did not release these documents, he doesn't cherry pick what things is worthy for the US public to know. He handed the documents over to journalists a long time ago and left it entirely up to them which of them to release. The only thing he decided for himself was to make sure that no personal information (about field agents, colleagues, etc.) gets leaked, and he did so by not grabbing these kind of documents.
It seems to me that you have never watched a Snowden interview or chose to ignore the reasons he gives why he did what he thought he had to do. The NSA's and GHCHQ's mass surveillance is so pervasive that it seriously endangers society in the long run. The same could probably be said about other agencies, but he happened to be a contractor for the NSA and stumbled across *their* problem. Apart from the fact that it is completely obvious that the NSA is collecting more information than Google, because they have access to Google like everybody else, we already know fairly well which information Google is collecting but did not know how and still don't know sufficiently well how much the NSA is collecting. Snowden has made it clear that he wanted to start a public debate about the relation of this pervasive data collection to the US constitution. He's not against the work of the NSA. (On a side note, it is also not such a bad idea to think about whether it is a good idea that private companies can collect so much data about us, isn't it? If Google offered a special paid data information service, say, for politicians to provide them with extra information on the private surfing habits of their political adversaries, would you agree with that?)
You might disagree with his assessment of the situation, of course, but do not forget that this is not a matter of mere personal or political opinion just because it concerns our future. Whether is assessment is right or wrong hinges mostly on factual matters. And then there is also the question of what you would have done if you had come to the same conclusion as he, and for which motives you would have acted. Some people trust in authority and chain of command more than others - a standard defense in the military although I don't want to invoke 'Godwin's Law' here. Others give more weight to acting according to what they have come to believe after they have carefully studied the evidence.
That's exactly what I thought first. But then it came to my mind that Bitlocker is much more secure than Truecrypt, because it has been developed and carefully audited by a corporation with a proven track record in cyber security. That fact makes it practically 100% certain that the developers of Truecrypt just thought "nah, fuck it, we now have Bitlocker, which uses military-grade encryption against all kinds of criminals and cyber-threads, and there are minor to medium potential problems with our code, so we just throw the towel and give up all the work on Truecrypt."
The problem is the time window. We use radio waves a bit longer than 100 years and I'd be surprised if we didn't switch to something else within another hundred years. In fact, we have already switch a lot to optical fiber, and who knows what advances in science will bring? Who still uses smoke signals? Combine the probability that some planetary system is inhabited by intelligent aliens right now, which is probably very low, with the time window for radio waves and the probability of stumbling upon aliens will be extremely low.
The good news is that if FTL travel is possible and if we ever invent it, extraterrestrial archaeology will boom like no other science - there may be hundreds of thousands extinct species out there!
He didn't talk about Han, and given that there are 292 languages in China it is pretty obvious that the 56 ethnic groups you mention and who are officially recognized by China do not represent the whole of China. And yes, someone who wants to deny education solely based on nationality, when it was previously possible, is a racist asshole. Besides all that, science is universal. Once you start limiting and nationalizing it, your research will go down the gutter within a decade or so. With a "reverse brain drain" the quality of US science would indeed decline very rapidly, since the US educational system is incapable of providing enough smart and educated people for top universities and centers of excellence.
To be fair, the Taleban are quite a worthwile enemy. These people stone comic writers to death and attack young school girls with acid.
The real scandal is right now going on in Egypt, though, where the US and to a lesser extent also Europe chose to deliberately ignore democracy, are actively supporting a "new" (=old) military dictatorship and take away from the people the fruits of their revolution. As usual, the result will be the exact opposite of what the US and Europe were hoping for, namely more radicalism, more terrorism and less stability in the region.
It is sad that so few, if any, decision makers and politicians in power are actually willing to learn from history. At least their consultants should know better...
The cloud is just client/server architecture, nothing more. It's neither new nor exciting nor special, and usually a bad idea unless you have full control over the server.
... and since it is DRM and you're intentionally circumventing it, go to prison for the next 20 years or be sued for 3 trillion dollars aftwards just for writing the plugin!
The problem is, once you let DRM in, you let all of it in, including all the sick laws that cover its ass (because it cannot possibly work from a technical point of view).
FPS's for example just need enough plot to get you to the next slaughter zone
I don't know. It seems to me that even an FPS needs a good plot. Or perhaps the whole genre has declined and not just the plots. I've recently got a free copy of Battlefield 4 with my new graphics card and to me the SP campaign felt like a completely broken and ridiculous sequence of cheap graphics effects. It was just stupid from the start to the end. Compare that to HL2, which had an interesting plot and good, challenging game play. To be honest, I find myself enjoying Arma 3 more than any recent FPS even though I get killed in Arma all the time. I did enjoy Max Payne 3, though.
Because, you know: If somebody could produce a massive EMP blackout in the US, he could just as well nuke Los Angeles. So it's best to spend trillions of dollars on nuclear shelters now. And constructing a doomsday world destruction device might also be a good idea, because this would act as a deterrent against the terrorists...
I do somewhat disagree with the "insightful" moderation of your post, but also don't care, because I'm not coming to/. very often. Anyway, I feel the need to make a few corrections, since most of what you write about Ada is misleading:
1. It's written "Ada" not "ADA" (The language is named after the first name of Ada Lovelace)
2. Nobody has ever claimed that Ada is a "magic bullet", especially not people who program in Ada.;-) Ada has its quirks and many annoying features and if you head to comp.lang.ada and ask the (few) people there whether you should use it for project X, they will give you some fairly honest and reasonable assessment - I've seen the answer "not really" come up whenever that makes sense. (Ada seems to be overkill for traditional end-user GUI applications, for example
3. There is no reason to believe that programming a library in Ada would make it obsolete, as long as a proper interface to C is provided - which is very easy. I readily admit that there are problems with the licensing of the GNAT runtime system, though, as it is GPL or MGPL only.
4. Ada source code is always more readable than C source code, provided that you know both languages equally well, of course.
5. Ada can, of course, create libraries with parameter passing conventions compatible with C and callable from C. (To get all benefits of Ada you need a small runtime system, though.)
6. Programming in Ada does not take more time than programming in C. (Actual measurements have indicated the opposite, but let's not get into such details which are always contestable. Let's just say that both Ada and C are both at the slow side of the range.)
7. Ada and Spark were merely meant as examples, but ones I know well enough to be sure about the example.
8. I'm not claiming that C cannot be used safely, but only after an extensive and expensive validation phase (using automatized tools and code review), and for that reason alone it should never be the #1 choice for safety and security critical applications.
I agree with you that many people who talk about a "safe" language have "managed" languages with automated garbage collection in mind, but that many of these languages are not safe at all, nor is dynamic memory allocation a desirable feature in that context. But 30 years experience or not, your claim that security does not hinge on the choice of language is just not true. The language and its implementation (+compiler test suites and validation) are an important part of the overall security and safety. So are management, validation and testing tools, the skills of the programmers, etc., of course.
No human could write out a literal blow-by-blow history of the Universe and no human could ever read such an accounting.
Why not? At least you should try to give some reasons!
He would obviously need to give an allegorical account of what happened in the past and not a literal one.
Obviously? Again, care to give any reasons? Why allegorical? It's not at all obvious, especially since shortened != allegorical, concise != allegorical, abstract != allegorical, and so forth. Why should a god dictate us the history of the universe and additionally shroud it in mystery up to about the highest level possible? It makes no sense!
We're in the 21 Century and you are still figuring out ways how to interpret phrases like "women were really created by a rib surgically removed from the first man" along the lines of "people should act this way" (what way? like spare ribs?)? No offense, but you "modern, moderate, feelgood" Christians really make me shake my head.
You're right that skills are very important, of course, but the language matters a lot. OpenSSL would have far less bugs if it had been written in Ada with critical sections in Spark and some formal validation, for example.
There is no perfect programming language for all purposes and languages are more or less suited for different purposes. Beware the language aficionado who has an excuse for every deficiency of his favorite language...
Slashdot Mirror
Yank Barry is a fucking asshole, and the "Global Village Champions Foundation" is a bunch of retarded morons.
You may quote this entry on Wikipedia in case you need a citation.
Apparently yes. I went to their site, read the FAQ, and still have no particularly lucid idea of what a Super PAC might be, let alone a PAC. Perhaps I should look it up on Wikipedia, but I wonder whether the founders of this campaign do not overestimate the general political education level of their fellow compatriots.
Anyway, it seems to have something to do with buying politicians, which apparently is legal in the US.
Snowden did not release these documents, he doesn't cherry pick what things is worthy for the US public to know. He handed the documents over to journalists a long time ago and left it entirely up to them which of them to release. The only thing he decided for himself was to make sure that no personal information (about field agents, colleagues, etc.) gets leaked, and he did so by not grabbing these kind of documents.
It seems to me that you have never watched a Snowden interview or chose to ignore the reasons he gives why he did what he thought he had to do. The NSA's and GHCHQ's mass surveillance is so pervasive that it seriously endangers society in the long run. The same could probably be said about other agencies, but he happened to be a contractor for the NSA and stumbled across *their* problem. Apart from the fact that it is completely obvious that the NSA is collecting more information than Google, because they have access to Google like everybody else, we already know fairly well which information Google is collecting but did not know how and still don't know sufficiently well how much the NSA is collecting. Snowden has made it clear that he wanted to start a public debate about the relation of this pervasive data collection to the US constitution. He's not against the work of the NSA. (On a side note, it is also not such a bad idea to think about whether it is a good idea that private companies can collect so much data about us, isn't it? If Google offered a special paid data information service, say, for politicians to provide them with extra information on the private surfing habits of their political adversaries, would you agree with that?)
You might disagree with his assessment of the situation, of course, but do not forget that this is not a matter of mere personal or political opinion just because it concerns our future. Whether is assessment is right or wrong hinges mostly on factual matters. And then there is also the question of what you would have done if you had come to the same conclusion as he, and for which motives you would have acted. Some people trust in authority and chain of command more than others - a standard defense in the military although I don't want to invoke 'Godwin's Law' here. Others give more weight to acting according to what they have come to believe after they have carefully studied the evidence.
That's exactly what I thought first. But then it came to my mind that Bitlocker is much more secure than Truecrypt, because it has been developed and carefully audited by a corporation with a proven track record in cyber security. That fact makes it practically 100% certain that the developers of Truecrypt just thought "nah, fuck it, we now have Bitlocker, which uses military-grade encryption against all kinds of criminals and cyber-threads, and there are minor to medium potential problems with our code, so we just throw the towel and give up all the work on Truecrypt."
That's obvious, right?
The problem is the time window. We use radio waves a bit longer than 100 years and I'd be surprised if we didn't switch to something else within another hundred years. In fact, we have already switch a lot to optical fiber, and who knows what advances in science will bring? Who still uses smoke signals? Combine the probability that some planetary system is inhabited by intelligent aliens right now, which is probably very low, with the time window for radio waves and the probability of stumbling upon aliens will be extremely low.
The good news is that if FTL travel is possible and if we ever invent it, extraterrestrial archaeology will boom like no other science - there may be hundreds of thousands extinct species out there!
He didn't talk about Han, and given that there are 292 languages in China it is pretty obvious that the 56 ethnic groups you mention and who are officially recognized by China do not represent the whole of China. And yes, someone who wants to deny education solely based on nationality, when it was previously possible, is a racist asshole. Besides all that, science is universal. Once you start limiting and nationalizing it, your research will go down the gutter within a decade or so. With a "reverse brain drain" the quality of US science would indeed decline very rapidly, since the US educational system is incapable of providing enough smart and educated people for top universities and centers of excellence.
To be fair, the Taleban are quite a worthwile enemy. These people stone comic writers to death and attack young school girls with acid.
The real scandal is right now going on in Egypt, though, where the US and to a lesser extent also Europe chose to deliberately ignore democracy, are actively supporting a "new" (=old) military dictatorship and take away from the people the fruits of their revolution. As usual, the result will be the exact opposite of what the US and Europe were hoping for, namely more radicalism, more terrorism and less stability in the region.
It is sad that so few, if any, decision makers and politicians in power are actually willing to learn from history. At least their consultants should know better ...
The cloud is just client/server architecture, nothing more. It's neither new nor exciting nor special, and usually a bad idea unless you have full control over the server.
... and since it is DRM and you're intentionally circumventing it, go to prison for the next 20 years or be sued for 3 trillion dollars aftwards just for writing the plugin!
The problem is, once you let DRM in, you let all of it in, including all the sick laws that cover its ass (because it cannot possibly work from a technical point of view).
Yes.
They are traitors and should be hung.
Thinking about it, they have already hung themselves with the latest Firefox updates anyway ...
Why on earth should the search engine be responsible? Why shouldn't the site hosting the content be responsible for removing the content?
This does not make sense, and similar rulings about alleged copyright infringement don't make sense either. Link != content.
Fuck these judges.
Do you think this piece of software existed for more than a few seconds before it was fed to a DA and analyzed 'til it croaked?
Yes.
FPS's for example just need enough plot to get you to the next slaughter zone
I don't know. It seems to me that even an FPS needs a good plot. Or perhaps the whole genre has declined and not just the plots. I've recently got a free copy of Battlefield 4 with my new graphics card and to me the SP campaign felt like a completely broken and ridiculous sequence of cheap graphics effects. It was just stupid from the start to the end. Compare that to HL2, which had an interesting plot and good, challenging game play. To be honest, I find myself enjoying Arma 3 more than any recent FPS even though I get killed in Arma all the time. I did enjoy Max Payne 3, though.
Even I can do basic math, and I'm a fairly stupid monkey.
Because, you know: If somebody could produce a massive EMP blackout in the US, he could just as well nuke Los Angeles. So it's best to spend trillions of dollars on nuclear shelters now. And constructing a doomsday world destruction device might also be a good idea, because this would act as a deterrent against the terrorists ...
Still works like a charm (and still a bit slow, hehehe).
You talk like a real social scientist there ...
He's sooooo wrong. Every fucking moron on earth should have the right to own a gun! A rail-gun ... and mini-nukes that come with a free backpack!
Watch Snowpiercer - good movie.
I do somewhat disagree with the "insightful" moderation of your post, but also don't care, because I'm not coming to /. very often. Anyway, I feel the need to make a few corrections, since most of what you write about Ada is misleading:
1. It's written "Ada" not "ADA" (The language is named after the first name of Ada Lovelace)
2. Nobody has ever claimed that Ada is a "magic bullet", especially not people who program in Ada. ;-) Ada has its quirks and many annoying features and if you head to comp.lang.ada and ask the (few) people there whether you should use it for project X, they will give you some fairly honest and reasonable assessment - I've seen the answer "not really" come up whenever that makes sense. (Ada seems to be overkill for traditional end-user GUI applications, for example
3. There is no reason to believe that programming a library in Ada would make it obsolete, as long as a proper interface to C is provided - which is very easy. I readily admit that there are problems with the licensing of the GNAT runtime system, though, as it is GPL or MGPL only.
4. Ada source code is always more readable than C source code, provided that you know both languages equally well, of course.
5. Ada can, of course, create libraries with parameter passing conventions compatible with C and callable from C. (To get all benefits of Ada you need a small runtime system, though.)
6. Programming in Ada does not take more time than programming in C. (Actual measurements have indicated the opposite, but let's not get into such details which are always contestable. Let's just say that both Ada and C are both at the slow side of the range.)
7. Ada and Spark were merely meant as examples, but ones I know well enough to be sure about the example.
8. I'm not claiming that C cannot be used safely, but only after an extensive and expensive validation phase (using automatized tools and code review), and for that reason alone it should never be the #1 choice for safety and security critical applications.
I agree with you that many people who talk about a "safe" language have "managed" languages with automated garbage collection in mind, but that many of these languages are not safe at all, nor is dynamic memory allocation a desirable feature in that context. But 30 years experience or not, your claim that security does not hinge on the choice of language is just not true. The language and its implementation (+compiler test suites and validation) are an important part of the overall security and safety. So are management, validation and testing tools, the skills of the programmers, etc., of course.
No human could write out a literal blow-by-blow history of the Universe and no human could ever read such an accounting.
Why not? At least you should try to give some reasons!
He would obviously need to give an allegorical account of what happened in the past and not a literal one.
Obviously? Again, care to give any reasons? Why allegorical? It's not at all obvious, especially since shortened != allegorical, concise != allegorical, abstract != allegorical, and so forth. Why should a god dictate us the history of the universe and additionally shroud it in mystery up to about the highest level possible? It makes no sense!
We're in the 21 Century and you are still figuring out ways how to interpret phrases like "women were really created by a rib surgically removed from the first man" along the lines of "people should act this way" (what way? like spare ribs?)? No offense, but you "modern, moderate, feelgood" Christians really make me shake my head.
"superior level"???
Why not talk about about the great Matma, an inferior level, the mysterious Wumpus, or the Flying Spaghetti monster instead?
You're right that skills are very important, of course, but the language matters a lot. OpenSSL would have far less bugs if it had been written in Ada with critical sections in Spark and some formal validation, for example.
There is no perfect programming language for all purposes and languages are more or less suited for different purposes. Beware the language aficionado who has an excuse for every deficiency of his favorite language ...
I would like to start with a NoSQL solution for scaling
And there it is, the proverbial premature optimization ...