I can assure you that hundreds if not thousands of completely innocent people communicate directly with any suspected terrrorist group on a daily basis, from telco representatives over the local store owner and the pizza delivery guy to the plumber.
More importantly, however, nobody is against surveillance of suspected terrrorist groups and their surroundings, but this debate is about pervasive and abundant dragnet surveillance of the whole population by means of all kinds of heuristics and data mining by 'expert systems' that are not properly validated or accounted for by the public and are open to abuse from those with a high enough security clearance - and obviously without proper judicial control, since otherwise Snowden's leak would have been impossible.
Referring to the Fort Hood and the Boston attacks is particularly cynical (and lunatic), since neither of them was prevented by any NSA surveillance - nor was 9/11.
there is some logic behind the "Love it or Leave it" argument.
Flawed logic.
For example, there are many in America who want to make America like Europe, and work hard to transform it to that. It makes sense to ask these people, "Why don't you just move to Europe?" Here is why the logic works: If they were to move to Europe, they could line under a government that is exactly what they want.
If you really believe that you are fairly naive. As a European who has lived in several countries in Europe, I doubt you'll find many people in Europe who believe that they have exactly the government they want...
Why try to change the place you live into someplace else when you could simply move to that someplace else?
A few reasons come to my mind:
1. because the US is your home and you care about it (e.g. you are a patriot or otherwise emotionally attached to the US)
2. because English is not the official language in the majority of countries in Europe; in the short term you can get a long with it, but in the long run you'll have to learn the local language - not all of them are easy to learn, especially since US schools are apparently not very good at teaching foreign languages
3. because the whole idea of democracy is that the voters can change a country's politics according to their will, not according to what a small two-party elite thinks is best for them
4. because the people who stay will continue to suffer; you seem to indicate that they will all be happy, but the whole idea of e.g. Snowden's whistleblowing is that they will not remain happy in the long run if the trend to oppression and surveillance continues - whether he's right or wrong is another question
5. because you do not want to leave family and friends behind (see also last point)
6. because you'd need to get an equivalent job in Europe first, which is not always trivial (see also point 2)
7. because there might be things you don't like in Europe and things you don't like in the US simultaneously (so you'd have to change as much in Europe as you'd like to change in the US anyway)
8. because certain moral considerations imply that you need to act instead of duck for cover and you are a moral person
Actually, for many people and especially whistleblowers I'd figure that the last point is the most important one. It's probably also the #1 reason why Martin Luther King didn't just emigrate to France and Mahatma Gandhi choose to stay in Indea. Crazy, I know, but some people think that way.
When you accidentally hit the table the 16KB memory extension it used to erase the program before you could save it to tape.
After that, Basic and assembler on Commodore Plus 4, then Amiga, Macintosh Plus, and Pascal, CommonLisp, and Prolog on various university machines - Sun workstations and Next cubes, if I recall correctly. I've never programmed professionally, though, and am currently being paid for doing logic by hand on paper as opposed to using a theorem prover.:-)
Okay, so here is my uninformed opinion and some free unsolicited advice;-)
First of all, some people here are just too defeatist. Yes, it looks a lot like Go and has only few exceptional features, but it's certainly not the worst programming language I've ever seen and e.g. seems to be overall better than Python - if we ignore, for the time being, the external library support which makes Python so great. I agree with others that optional typing is a bad idea, though. Many optimizations will be hard to implement in future and loose typing should be explicit (as e.g. in polymorphic types).
Since I'm sort of a hobby programming language enthusiast, working on my own toy language in my spare time, there is one annoying thing I must mention, though. Why do so many contemporary language designers choose C-style syntax and not Algol/Pascal/Ada style? Just because they know C best? All of these C-clones, each of them with their own little quirks and specialities, don't really make the syntax more compelling or easier to read. (It would be okay if they behaved exactly like C, I guess, but then they wouldn't be languages on their own.) Why not go for block-style syntax or the Python wite space route instead?
Take a look at Ada, for example. Yes, I know, the syntax is verbose and has to many double-uses of keywords. It is a bit archaic. However, on the bright side, Ada programs really are extremely readable. You can easily scan through GNAT's source code and understand how the packages work without looking at additional documentation! I'm not saying, "Hey, let's all switch to Algol-style syntax", and not everybody likes the way Python deals with white space either, but a little bit more variation would be nice.
Which brings me to another issue. If you invent a new language, please make sure twice already in the design phase that it can be optimized later. Nothing is more annoying than an overall nice language that also becomes popular, only to turn out to be basically unoptimizable later. If a function has no side effects, if a data structure is immutable, if instructions or data structure traversals can be executed in parallel, please give us a way to indicate that within the language unless it can be inferred automatically. At least in theory, a new programming language ought to be capable of being as fast as C[1], Fortran, or Ada. Otherwise you could just save yourself lots of trouble and translate it to C++ or SBCL right from the start...
Footnote [1]: To be taken with a grain of salt. Arguably, C is the the first in the list only because of extensive compiler optimizations not because of its language features.
That being said, I agree that when you reserve a name and pay for it and actually use it not just for a parking site, it should be irrevocable. Current practise is biased towards large companies, trademark holders, and governments, which is injust.
A solution would be to (1) dispense with the current domain name dispute system, (2) open all possible top-level domains for cheap registration (i.e. you may choose any ending you like), and (3) distribute workload to country-specified registrars in order to ensure that not all of the new top-level domains are controlled by one country or change to a decentralized DNS system. Some people might still try to make money off popular domain names, but with arbitrary many possibilities it would become relatively pointless. Even Microsoft is not willing to pay for hundreds or thousands of similar names.
However, large companies would hate that solution and lobby against it on the basis of ill-conceived security concerns.
Apparently Plutarch already knew this little puzzle called the ship of Theseus problem. I'm highly confident that some US judges will finally put those those annoying logicians and philosophers to rest and give us the ultimate correct solution.
Just to let you know you're not the only one, I absolutely agree with you and anyone I've ever spoken to about this also agrees (parents, partner, friends, colleagues). The accumulation of wealth ought to be limited, nobody with a discrete income of over a million dollars a year can honestly say he needs more money. The ironic thing is that classic economic theory supports this view as well by presuming the Principle of Diminishing Marginal Utility - which in case of money has been confirmed well empirically.
However, just forget about making such heretical remarks on/. You'll be modded flamebait or troll and can expect an extreme amount of irrational hate. (I don't know why, perhaps the majority of people on/. are super-rich? Then there are also some US Americans who think that every political position they don't know and don't agree with must be socialism or communism without having the slightest clue what they talk about.)
I finally got interested in Bitcoins (like always, too late) and wanted to buy one yesterday.:-)
Anyway, I wonder why this falls under the authority of the Orwellian "Department of Homeland Security". Doesn't such a matter belong to the FBI or the Secret Service?
Okay, I was exaggerating. Armed robbery is certainly a serious crime. I agree with that and was a bit too fast with my post.
However, I've come up with an easy solution: Just rig the cellphones with explosives that can be detonated by sending the right message to it. That way, if somebody walks away with your iPhone, just blow him up.
Why don't they just let 3 different people push 3 different buttons but only one of them is working?
I hear something similar was done with executions and apparently this magically removed all the moral quirks some executioners might have had. (It wouldn't work for me, but then again I'm not planning to work as an executioner in the first place.)
Slashdot Mirror
I can assure you that hundreds if not thousands of completely innocent people communicate directly with any suspected terrrorist group on a daily basis, from telco representatives over the local store owner and the pizza delivery guy to the plumber.
More importantly, however, nobody is against surveillance of suspected terrrorist groups and their surroundings, but this debate is about pervasive and abundant dragnet surveillance of the whole population by means of all kinds of heuristics and data mining by 'expert systems' that are not properly validated or accounted for by the public and are open to abuse from those with a high enough security clearance - and obviously without proper judicial control, since otherwise Snowden's leak would have been impossible.
Referring to the Fort Hood and the Boston attacks is particularly cynical (and lunatic), since neither of them was prevented by any NSA surveillance - nor was 9/11.
there is some logic behind the "Love it or Leave it" argument.
Flawed logic.
For example, there are many in America who want to make America like Europe, and work hard to transform it to that. It makes sense to ask these people, "Why don't you just move to Europe?" Here is why the logic works: If they were to move to Europe, they could line under a government that is exactly what they want.
If you really believe that you are fairly naive. As a European who has lived in several countries in Europe, I doubt you'll find many people in Europe who believe that they have exactly the government they want...
Why try to change the place you live into someplace else when you could simply move to that someplace else?
A few reasons come to my mind:
1. because the US is your home and you care about it (e.g. you are a patriot or otherwise emotionally attached to the US)
2. because English is not the official language in the majority of countries in Europe; in the short term you can get a long with it, but in the long run you'll have to learn the local language - not all of them are easy to learn, especially since US schools are apparently not very good at teaching foreign languages
3. because the whole idea of democracy is that the voters can change a country's politics according to their will, not according to what a small two-party elite thinks is best for them
4. because the people who stay will continue to suffer; you seem to indicate that they will all be happy, but the whole idea of e.g. Snowden's whistleblowing is that they will not remain happy in the long run if the trend to oppression and surveillance continues - whether he's right or wrong is another question
5. because you do not want to leave family and friends behind (see also last point)
6. because you'd need to get an equivalent job in Europe first, which is not always trivial (see also point 2)
7. because there might be things you don't like in Europe and things you don't like in the US simultaneously (so you'd have to change as much in Europe as you'd like to change in the US anyway)
8. because certain moral considerations imply that you need to act instead of duck for cover and you are a moral person
Actually, for many people and especially whistleblowers I'd figure that the last point is the most important one. It's probably also the #1 reason why Martin Luther King didn't just emigrate to France and Mahatma Gandhi choose to stay in Indea. Crazy, I know, but some people think that way.
He can just disclose everything about this secret surveillance program, thereby easily disbanding any of these 'false' rumors with the truth!
Agreed. Slashvertising fucking telephone software... how deep can /. sink?
Both is equally immoral and against the rules of civilized countries.
When you accidentally hit the table the 16KB memory extension it used to erase the program before you could save it to tape.
After that, Basic and assembler on Commodore Plus 4, then Amiga, Macintosh Plus, and Pascal, CommonLisp, and Prolog on various university machines - Sun workstations and Next cubes, if I recall correctly. I've never programmed professionally, though, and am currently being paid for doing logic by hand on paper as opposed to using a theorem prover. :-)
Okay, so here is my uninformed opinion and some free unsolicited advice ;-)
First of all, some people here are just too defeatist. Yes, it looks a lot like Go and has only few exceptional features, but it's certainly not the worst programming language I've ever seen and e.g. seems to be overall better than Python - if we ignore, for the time being, the external library support which makes Python so great. I agree with others that optional typing is a bad idea, though. Many optimizations will be hard to implement in future and loose typing should be explicit (as e.g. in polymorphic types).
Since I'm sort of a hobby programming language enthusiast, working on my own toy language in my spare time, there is one annoying thing I must mention, though. Why do so many contemporary language designers choose C-style syntax and not Algol/Pascal/Ada style? Just because they know C best? All of these C-clones, each of them with their own little quirks and specialities, don't really make the syntax more compelling or easier to read. (It would be okay if they behaved exactly like C, I guess, but then they wouldn't be languages on their own.) Why not go for block-style syntax or the Python wite space route instead?
Take a look at Ada, for example. Yes, I know, the syntax is verbose and has to many double-uses of keywords. It is a bit archaic. However, on the bright side, Ada programs really are extremely readable. You can easily scan through GNAT's source code and understand how the packages work without looking at additional documentation! I'm not saying, "Hey, let's all switch to Algol-style syntax", and not everybody likes the way Python deals with white space either, but a little bit more variation would be nice.
Which brings me to another issue. If you invent a new language, please make sure twice already in the design phase that it can be optimized later. Nothing is more annoying than an overall nice language that also becomes popular, only to turn out to be basically unoptimizable later. If a function has no side effects, if a data structure is immutable, if instructions or data structure traversals can be executed in parallel, please give us a way to indicate that within the language unless it can be inferred automatically. At least in theory, a new programming language ought to be capable of being as fast as C[1], Fortran, or Ada. Otherwise you could just save yourself lots of trouble and translate it to C++ or SBCL right from the start...
Footnote [1]: To be taken with a grain of salt. Arguably, C is the the first in the list only because of extensive compiler optimizations not because of its language features.
North Korea buys from China. Are you scared now?
Because North Korea so totally has the ability to build F-35 clones...
They are your 'allies' in the sense that if either of you has a bad time (economically speaking), the other will have a bad time, too.
Sure, it sucks, but the name is property.
No, it's not. Names are just names.
That being said, I agree that when you reserve a name and pay for it and actually use it not just for a parking site, it should be irrevocable. Current practise is biased towards large companies, trademark holders, and governments, which is injust.
A solution would be to (1) dispense with the current domain name dispute system, (2) open all possible top-level domains for cheap registration (i.e. you may choose any ending you like), and (3) distribute workload to country-specified registrars in order to ensure that not all of the new top-level domains are controlled by one country or change to a decentralized DNS system. Some people might still try to make money off popular domain names, but with arbitrary many possibilities it would become relatively pointless. Even Microsoft is not willing to pay for hundreds or thousands of similar names.
However, large companies would hate that solution and lobby against it on the basis of ill-conceived security concerns.
Another more or less failproof method is to post the entire video on /. and let the crowd decide. Thousands of slashdotters can't be wrong!
Linux is the kernel, Linux is what gets recognized as the OS.
False. Everybody knows that it's called GNU/Linux, "Linux" is just an everyday abbreviation to make life easier, nothing more.
Credit to where it's due. Or, try to run your kernel without the GNU utilities.
Apparently Plutarch already knew this little puzzle called the ship of Theseus problem.
I'm highly confident that some US judges will finally put those those annoying logicians and philosophers to rest and give us the ultimate correct solution.
He's given back more than a third of his money to charity... Something is wrong because someone succeeded?
Success is not measured in terms of money.
Just to let you know you're not the only one, I absolutely agree with you and anyone I've ever spoken to about this also agrees (parents, partner, friends, colleagues). The accumulation of wealth ought to be limited, nobody with a discrete income of over a million dollars a year can honestly say he needs more money. The ironic thing is that classic economic theory supports this view as well by presuming the Principle of Diminishing Marginal Utility - which in case of money has been confirmed well empirically.
However, just forget about making such heretical remarks on /. You'll be modded flamebait or troll and can expect an extreme amount of irrational hate. (I don't know why, perhaps the majority of people on /. are super-rich? Then there are also some US Americans who think that every political position they don't know and don't agree with must be socialism or communism without having the slightest clue what they talk about.)
Nope. You can only copyright your own creations, not those of nature.
I finally got interested in Bitcoins (like always, too late) and wanted to buy one yesterday. :-)
Anyway, I wonder why this falls under the authority of the Orwellian "Department of Homeland Security". Doesn't such a matter belong to the FBI or the Secret Service?
In the 2020s bitcoins will run out anyway
What do you mean by that? I thought that the very idea of bitcoins is that at some time no more can be produced, thereby causing deflation.
So I can come over and punch you in the head a few times, and then steal a few TVs?
You could try... but I don't have a TV.
Okay, I was exaggerating. Armed robbery is certainly a serious crime. I agree with that and was a bit too fast with my post.
However, I've come up with an easy solution: Just rig the cellphones with explosives that can be detonated by sending the right message to it. That way, if somebody walks away with your iPhone, just blow him up.
Sorry, cell phone theft is not serious crime. Serious crime is genocide, murder, rape, molesting children, kidnapping, torture, etc.
Exactly. People do not want dumb terminals, they want cheap netbooks with a good battery life.
A display that is readable in broad sunlight and costs less than $500 would also be useful.
Why don't they just let 3 different people push 3 different buttons but only one of them is working?
I hear something similar was done with executions and apparently this magically removed all the moral quirks some executioners might have had. (It wouldn't work for me, but then again I'm not planning to work as an executioner in the first place.)
You can bet your ass that I'd keep the money.
Why is it not a declaration of war. Hm, let me guess... because signals intelligence is not a declaration of war?