I think it's a matter of priorities, but I also disagree with NASA's current ones.
The main goal ought not be to go to the moon again or go to Mars, but to build a space station which is much larger than ISS and has artificial gravity. Research on life support systems and long-term stays in space is crucial for the future of space travel and might even be crucial for humanity on earth some day. We really need to figure out how to build self-sustainable biospheres.
I don't claim you're wrong,obviously experiences can differ. However, you cannot generalize from them.
To give you a counterexample to your general statement, I don't have a CS degree and I'm using Ubuntu and since recently Xubuntu for more than 5 years for my daily work and in the evening for my hobbies. I never had any problems worth speaking of and certainly did not see any decrease in productivity (previously I was using Macs).
Perhaps it depends on the domain. My daytime job mostly involves reading and writing. If on the other hand you have to do with graphics or audio processing, I'd concur that Linux is not yet there -- open source replacements for applications like Photoshop or Protools are not yet at the same level of usability.
For everything else (notwithstanding games, of course) I'd say the platform doesn't matter any longer. The differences between OS X, Linux, and Windows are marginal. At least that's my experience.
Even if it were possible to keep track of all software patents the difficulty of writing any program without infringing some patents becomes exponentially harder the more patents there are. Large corporations might still think they can win in this "game", not by not infringing patents but by suing other companies, but even this is becoming a more and more pointless, tyring and expensive strategy. Basically, it just keeps companies from innovating and ties up their resources.
And then, of course, there are other issues like the total lack of control about prior art, the fact that you can take known mathematical methods, disguise them, and get a patent for it, patent portfolios whose only purpose is MAD, etc.
Programming is a creative activity not unsimilar to, say, writing (I do both, so I can compare them). It is based on combining small building blocks into larger ones in a logical way. Nobody should be allowed to patent such building blocks. You shouldn't be allowed to patent plots and storylines of books, rhyme patterns in poems, or how to boil an egg. And for the same reason there should be no software patents.
I thought much of the Android code is GPL'ed. If they distribute early versions of Android to selected developers, wouldn't they also need to give away the Android source code to anyone else who demands it at that time?
Xubuntu works fine for me right now, but out of curiosity, could you or someone else recommend an alternative to Xubuntu 12.04? Most of the other distros I know (except Mint) seemed to be a bit hard to install. I'm looking for:
Long-term support (3 years or longer) or very stable rolling releases
Huge repository
Packages that are as up-to-date as possible
Easy, graphical installation on multi-boot system
Fast, lightweight, but still prefeably optimized for newer systems
I agree that upgrading doesn't work well on Ubuntu. Here is what I usually do: I have to internal drives of the same size. When I have to upgrade, I install the new version on the spare drive and then copy the home folder and various other files from the old drive to the new one. It doesn't work very well, you have to adjust permissions and delete various old settings in.config and other places, but in general it's the easiest way to upgrade in my experience.
Ubuntu is in dire need of a working migration assistant. Unfortunately, I believe it's almost impossible to create a reliable and working one, because there seems to be no way for user-space applications to let the OS know which data is volatile and which one should be preserved during upgrades.
Another anoying thing is that at least in XFCE there seems to be no reliable way to reset panels for a single user to their original state as it has been defined by the distro. If you delete the respective data in.config/xfce, you'll get a generic "would you like to add a panel" dialog and not e.g. Xubuntu 12.04's initial panel settings. It's rather annoying, because panels still mess up or crash very easily. (Oh, and on my fresh install of Xubuntu 12.04 default panel applets crash and then the Ubuntu crash reporter crashes...).
To put things in perspective, the above are only minor quirks. A fresh install is still better than upgrading, which in my experience has often created some strange problems e.g. with things like Wifi settings or the keychain.
My main point was basically yours, but in contrast to you I didn't really get my message across without waking up a bunch of programming language trolls. Wrong choice of words I guess.:-/
Look, I understand that people who use their tools daily want to advertise them and it's a goosd thing if you like what you're using, but let's face it: Objective-C is just another unsafe, hopelessly outdated extension of C as C++. It's great to get things done and sucks less than C++, but it's not in any way a modern language nor is it based on a great language design.
Before people start flaming me, please consider that programming languages are tools and you choose the right tool for the right purpose and platform, and the availability of libraries is often more important than the language itself. There is no doubt that Objective-C has its place and is useful, just don't try to sell it as the latest great new thingy. Even Apple's own old Dylan was a more interesting and innovative as a language than Objective-C.
My 2 cents. Now let the language flamewars commence.
I had a little notebook, much smaller than a mobile phone and it fit easily in any pocket, in which all names and phone numbers went. Adding a friend was much easier and faster than using FB.
And who cares how long Facebook is around? How can you even compare them to Google or Amazon?
Perhaps they do more than FB, but even these are totally overrated. If Google and Amazon would go away tomorrow, the impact on the Net and society as a whole would be almost zero. A few people would be confused and then point their browsers to Bing, DuckDuckGo, or IxQuick and use Barnes&Noble, Bookdepository, etc. instead and after 2 months people would barely remember Google and Amazon. (Like Geocities and MP3.com, if you're old enough to remember.)
On the bright side, at least I'll finally be able to make use of that pocket survival kit I got for Christmas and show my Doomsday scenario skills acquired from countless hours in post-apocalyptic video games.
For all what it's worth, the attitude towards plagiarism was far stricter in the 80ies than it is today. I've studied in the nineties and I'm pretty sure that any student who got caught even just cheating in one exam at my universities (Tuebingen and HU Berlin) would have been dragged in front of an honor comission and expelled from university. Although officially the rules have not changed, I'm not so sure this would happen nowadays.
Another big difference is that in the 80ies it was demanded and accepted that you have to read all significant literature without any exception in a doctoral thesis. If you weren't able to do that your topic was too broad. Formally, this requirement is still in place, but I don't think that anybody thinks it can be taken seriously nowadays, as the amount of literature has exploded.
To cut a long story short, even "just" paraphrasing a few pages without mentioning the origin is not allowed today and was unthinkable in the 80ies, and since you weren't able to make copy&paste errors showing that there was intention to plagiarize is much easier in that time period.
To cut a long story short: Yes, we shouldn't judge her prematurely, but if there is any passage longer than a paragraph in her thesis that has been copied, then there can be no doubt that she intentionally plagiarized and the time period only makes things worse.
The real problem is that it's pretty clear that the politicians who have been caught didn't actually write their thesis, but paid a ghostwriter for doing it. Guttenberg is the best example, he inadvertantly revealed at press conferences that he didn't have a clue what was in his own thesis! These people are crooks and imposters and have no place in politics. (The ghostwriters couldn't talk even if they wanted to, because their acts likely fall under criminal law and their principals would, of course, do everything to stab them in their back.)
Perhaps Motorola is acting in self-defense, but that's not the point. The problem is that these companies are all setting precedents and creating a status quo that will make software development illegal in the long run -- if this patent madness continues. Yes, the big companies may have MAD and manage to settle most issues out of court, but in the course of it the absurd patent situation will become more and more accepted by courts and legislators up to the point that no small software company will be able to produce anything remotely legal. In theory, this is already the case only large patent pools do not sue yet very often, but this will change after the global monopolies have come to an agreement.
with any even remotely good stego and crypto it sould be impossible to prove that anything is hidden, since good crypto looks like perfetly random data.
Well, in that case it would be trivial to detect, because ordinary steganographic channels do not contain much random data. Or do you think it would be innocuous to carry movie around that depicts white noise?
Good steganography is very hard, it is based on a thorough analysis of the statistical properties of carrier channels and involves changing redundant data in them in a way that doesn't alter these properties. Unless you find some strong and huge source of real randomness in the channel, that's not very easy. Most existing steganographic tools are not based on any thorough analysis of the carrier channel and can be detected by statistical methods.
That's not to say that nearly perfect steganography is not possible, it's just harder than one might think at first glance. You're right that any good stego needs to be combined with a prior encryption stage, because the data to hide should look random to start with or otherwise the problem would become fairly intractable.
As someone who is working in linguistics close to AI research I can attest that the whole idea of automated grading of essays is completely ridiculous and if it is indeed used as the post suggests will likely ruin generations of students. Apart from not working, it is also wrong in various other respects such as sending the wrong signals to young students, implicitly ridiculing the hard work that writing actually is, saving money in the wrong place, and so forth.
I mean, com'on... all of the above is so obvious that it shouldn't even have to be mentioned. What kind of imbecile illiterate would allow grading of essays by a statistical text-mining program anyway?
People might point out that with a search warrant this could have happened anywhere, but this is not entirely true. It seems that in the US servers are more and more often seized as a sort of harassment in cases like this, where it is clear that there is no useful evidence can be obtained.
Sorry if this offends a few alleged 'patriots', but the lesson to learn from this story is once more:
Do not host your software or potentially controversial content on US servers or servers run by US companies!
I think they basically blackmailed the EU, threatening to require Visa for all Europeans, announcing special controls and harassment of European travelers if they EU would not comply, etc.
It is well-known European politicians have no backbone and comply to US demands any time when a tiny bit of pressure is put on them. There are numerous examples and this is just one of them.:(
Actually, if you store others confidential personal information, money, credit card info, and so in in your house as a free "cloud service" and then leave the backdoor wide open, you will get arrested if someone gets to know about it.
Heck, I have a 1 TB drive only for Windows, which I use exclusively for gaming (who still uses Windows for serious work?), and all those games I got from Steam sales and barely play have already almost eaten up the drive. I'll have to delete the local caches or buy a bigger drive soon.
While we're at it, we should also mention MI6's method for high-valued prisoners. They rented a villa as accommodation for German POWs. It appeared to be an improvised makeshift housing, but was very luxurious. The Germans were mostly left alone, playing pool billiard and drinking scotch, and soon got rather bored. They even received an English newspaper. However, the newspaper was fake and reported great successes of English troops. The German officers became so concerned over the bad news that they started discussing them amongst themselves, trying to discern propaganda from reality and so on. Of course, the whole house was bugged and they freely gave away information that they would likely have kept to themselves even under torture.
I guess nowadays this wouldn't work, but it's nice to know that it seems to have worked.
Slashdot Mirror
...I gues we'll have to scrap it then. So ... fire on a submarine, right? Can happen, can happen. New for nerds indeeed.
I think it's a matter of priorities, but I also disagree with NASA's current ones.
The main goal ought not be to go to the moon again or go to Mars, but to build a space station which is much larger than ISS and has artificial gravity. Research on life support systems and long-term stays in space is crucial for the future of space travel and might even be crucial for humanity on earth some day. We really need to figure out how to build self-sustainable biospheres.
I don't claim you're wrong,obviously experiences can differ. However, you cannot generalize from them.
To give you a counterexample to your general statement, I don't have a CS degree and I'm using Ubuntu and since recently Xubuntu for more than 5 years for my daily work and in the evening for my hobbies. I never had any problems worth speaking of and certainly did not see any decrease in productivity (previously I was using Macs).
Perhaps it depends on the domain. My daytime job mostly involves reading and writing. If on the other hand you have to do with graphics or audio processing, I'd concur that Linux is not yet there -- open source replacements for applications like Photoshop or Protools are not yet at the same level of usability.
For everything else (notwithstanding games, of course) I'd say the platform doesn't matter any longer. The differences between OS X, Linux, and Windows are marginal. At least that's my experience.
Even if it were possible to keep track of all software patents the difficulty of writing any program without infringing some patents becomes exponentially harder the more patents there are. Large corporations might still think they can win in this "game", not by not infringing patents but by suing other companies, but even this is becoming a more and more pointless, tyring and expensive strategy. Basically, it just keeps companies from innovating and ties up their resources.
And then, of course, there are other issues like the total lack of control about prior art, the fact that you can take known mathematical methods, disguise them, and get a patent for it, patent portfolios whose only purpose is MAD, etc.
Programming is a creative activity not unsimilar to, say, writing (I do both, so I can compare them). It is based on combining small building blocks into larger ones in a logical way. Nobody should be allowed to patent such building blocks. You shouldn't be allowed to patent plots and storylines of books, rhyme patterns in poems, or how to boil an egg. And for the same reason there should be no software patents.
So to answer the question of the headline: No.
I thought much of the Android code is GPL'ed. If they distribute early versions of Android to selected developers, wouldn't they also need to give away the Android source code to anyone else who demands it at that time?
Xubuntu works fine for me right now, but out of curiosity, could you or someone else recommend an alternative to Xubuntu 12.04? Most of the other distros I know (except Mint) seemed to be a bit hard to install. I'm looking for:
What would you recommend?
I agree that upgrading doesn't work well on Ubuntu. Here is what I usually do: I have to internal drives of the same size. When I have to upgrade, I install the new version on the spare drive and then copy the home folder and various other files from the old drive to the new one. It doesn't work very well, you have to adjust permissions and delete various old settings in .config and other places, but in general it's the easiest way to upgrade in my experience.
Ubuntu is in dire need of a working migration assistant. Unfortunately, I believe it's almost impossible to create a reliable and working one, because there seems to be no way for user-space applications to let the OS know which data is volatile and which one should be preserved during upgrades.
Another anoying thing is that at least in XFCE there seems to be no reliable way to reset panels for a single user to their original state as it has been defined by the distro. If you delete the respective data in .config/xfce, you'll get a generic "would you like to add a panel" dialog and not e.g. Xubuntu 12.04's initial panel settings. It's rather annoying, because panels still mess up or crash very easily. (Oh, and on my fresh install of Xubuntu 12.04 default panel applets crash and then the Ubuntu crash reporter crashes ...).
To put things in perspective, the above are only minor quirks. A fresh install is still better than upgrading, which in my experience has often created some strange problems e.g. with things like Wifi settings or the keychain.
*shakesheadindisbelief* My last word?
Jesus Christ, get a life!
My main point was basically yours, but in contrast to you I didn't really get my message across without waking up a bunch of programming language trolls. Wrong choice of words I guess. :-/
Look, I understand that people who use their tools daily want to advertise them and it's a goosd thing if you like what you're using, but let's face it: Objective-C is just another unsafe, hopelessly outdated extension of C as C++. It's great to get things done and sucks less than C++, but it's not in any way a modern language nor is it based on a great language design.
Before people start flaming me, please consider that programming languages are tools and you choose the right tool for the right purpose and platform, and the availability of libraries is often more important than the language itself. There is no doubt that Objective-C has its place and is useful, just don't try to sell it as the latest great new thingy. Even Apple's own old Dylan was a more interesting and innovative as a language than Objective-C.
My 2 cents. Now let the language flamewars commence.
I had a little notebook, much smaller than a mobile phone and it fit easily in any pocket, in which all names and phone numbers went. Adding a friend was much easier and faster than using FB.
Stupid question, how can there be a generation gap when children are born every day of the year?
And who cares how long Facebook is around? How can you even compare them to Google or Amazon?
Perhaps they do more than FB, but even these are totally overrated. If Google and Amazon would go away tomorrow, the impact on the Net and society as a whole would be almost zero. A few people would be confused and then point their browsers to Bing, DuckDuckGo, or IxQuick and use Barnes&Noble, Bookdepository, etc. instead and after 2 months people would barely remember Google and Amazon. (Like Geocities and MP3.com, if you're old enough to remember.)
You mean like...business cards?
While you might miss your friends when FB goes down, they might not miss you.
At least I'm afraid that's what the tone of your reply suggests...
Having said that, why don't you use one of the many hundreds of contact management applications out there?
On the bright side, at least I'll finally be able to make use of that pocket survival kit I got for Christmas and show my Doomsday scenario skills acquired from countless hours in post-apocalyptic video games.
For all what it's worth, the attitude towards plagiarism was far stricter in the 80ies than it is today. I've studied in the nineties and I'm pretty sure that any student who got caught even just cheating in one exam at my universities (Tuebingen and HU Berlin) would have been dragged in front of an honor comission and expelled from university. Although officially the rules have not changed, I'm not so sure this would happen nowadays.
Another big difference is that in the 80ies it was demanded and accepted that you have to read all significant literature without any exception in a doctoral thesis. If you weren't able to do that your topic was too broad. Formally, this requirement is still in place, but I don't think that anybody thinks it can be taken seriously nowadays, as the amount of literature has exploded.
To cut a long story short, even "just" paraphrasing a few pages without mentioning the origin is not allowed today and was unthinkable in the 80ies, and since you weren't able to make copy&paste errors showing that there was intention to plagiarize is much easier in that time period.
To cut a long story short: Yes, we shouldn't judge her prematurely, but if there is any passage longer than a paragraph in her thesis that has been copied, then there can be no doubt that she intentionally plagiarized and the time period only makes things worse.
The real problem is that it's pretty clear that the politicians who have been caught didn't actually write their thesis, but paid a ghostwriter for doing it. Guttenberg is the best example, he inadvertantly revealed at press conferences that he didn't have a clue what was in his own thesis! These people are crooks and imposters and have no place in politics. (The ghostwriters couldn't talk even if they wanted to, because their acts likely fall under criminal law and their principals would, of course, do everything to stab them in their back.)
Perhaps Motorola is acting in self-defense, but that's not the point. The problem is that these companies are all setting precedents and creating a status quo that will make software development illegal in the long run -- if this patent madness continues. Yes, the big companies may have MAD and manage to settle most issues out of court, but in the course of it the absurd patent situation will become more and more accepted by courts and legislators up to the point that no small software company will be able to produce anything remotely legal. In theory, this is already the case only large patent pools do not sue yet very often, but this will change after the global monopolies have come to an agreement.
with any even remotely good stego and crypto it sould be impossible to prove that anything is hidden, since good crypto looks like perfetly random data.
Well, in that case it would be trivial to detect, because ordinary steganographic channels do not contain much random data. Or do you think it would be innocuous to carry movie around that depicts white noise?
Good steganography is very hard, it is based on a thorough analysis of the statistical properties of carrier channels and involves changing redundant data in them in a way that doesn't alter these properties. Unless you find some strong and huge source of real randomness in the channel, that's not very easy. Most existing steganographic tools are not based on any thorough analysis of the carrier channel and can be detected by statistical methods.
That's not to say that nearly perfect steganography is not possible, it's just harder than one might think at first glance. You're right that any good stego needs to be combined with a prior encryption stage, because the data to hide should look random to start with or otherwise the problem would become fairly intractable.
As someone who is working in linguistics close to AI research I can attest that the whole idea of automated grading of essays is completely ridiculous and if it is indeed used as the post suggests will likely ruin generations of students. Apart from not working, it is also wrong in various other respects such as sending the wrong signals to young students, implicitly ridiculing the hard work that writing actually is, saving money in the wrong place, and so forth.
I mean, com'on ... all of the above is so obvious that it shouldn't even have to be mentioned. What kind of imbecile illiterate would allow grading of essays by a statistical text-mining program anyway?
People might point out that with a search warrant this could have happened anywhere, but this is not entirely true. It seems that in the US servers are more and more often seized as a sort of harassment in cases like this, where it is clear that there is no useful evidence can be obtained.
Sorry if this offends a few alleged 'patriots', but the lesson to learn from this story is once more:
Do not host your software or potentially controversial content on US servers or servers run by US companies!
I think they basically blackmailed the EU, threatening to require Visa for all Europeans, announcing special controls and harassment of European travelers if they EU would not comply, etc.
It is well-known European politicians have no backbone and comply to US demands any time when a tiny bit of pressure is put on them. There are numerous examples and this is just one of them. :(
Actually, if you store others confidential personal information, money, credit card info, and so in in your house as a free "cloud service" and then leave the backdoor wide open, you will get arrested if someone gets to know about it.
Heck, I have a 1 TB drive only for Windows, which I use exclusively for gaming (who still uses Windows for serious work?), and all those games I got from Steam sales and barely play have already almost eaten up the drive. I'll have to delete the local caches or buy a bigger drive soon.
While we're at it, we should also mention MI6's method for high-valued prisoners. They rented a villa as accommodation for German POWs. It appeared to be an improvised makeshift housing, but was very luxurious. The Germans were mostly left alone, playing pool billiard and drinking scotch, and soon got rather bored. They even received an English newspaper. However, the newspaper was fake and reported great successes of English troops. The German officers became so concerned over the bad news that they started discussing them amongst themselves, trying to discern propaganda from reality and so on. Of course, the whole house was bugged and they freely gave away information that they would likely have kept to themselves even under torture.
I guess nowadays this wouldn't work, but it's nice to know that it seems to have worked.