That's a very slippery slope they just launched themselves onto with lots of water and slick plastic. You could argue that hardly anything you could be required to divulge isn't incriminating unless you're a criminal. So, if you refuse to divulge any information, you're a criminal for not doing so, and if you do, you incriminate yourself if you are a criminal.
I haven't looked at the site. But the world needs a good way of accounting for 'unrealized externalities' in a reasonable way. That's the way to manage the environment and keep capitalism around at the same time.
I think this is, in general, a really hard problem. Partly because sometimes, we don't understand the costs of some activities until they've been going on for a long time. Like DDT, for example. It seems like a wonderful pesticide, and we used it for years before it became clear that it had an enormous hidden environmental cost that hadn't previously been accounted for.
I think, for spam, the problem is much easier. You can use bandwidth costs, and estimate the costs of the wasted human time and attention and come up with a reasonably accurate estimate.
The Free Software Song has got to be one of the worst PR moves the FSF has ever made. *sigh*
Re:I don't actually care hugely about performance
on
Java Faster Than C++?
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· Score: 1
That's what the qualifier 'hugely' was for. Performance is important, to a degree. It's not like I'd be happy to use a language that was consistently 50% or even 75% the speed of another.
But, you're probably right. I tend to react overly strongly to pro-Java stuff because I don't actually think the language is really awful. I just think it's overhyped and overused, and that a lot of its supposed benefits are fictitious.
I find Java's container libraries to be annoying and obtuse. I prefer the STL or Python's containers.
Java's containers lacked an iterator concept until recently, which made it hard to have code that went through a random container independent of its type. And Java's lack of support for generic programming makes use of their containers very cast heavy.
The standard UI library, Swing, is too slow to be used for actual real work. And they stopped bothering with the X event model in Java 1.3, so it's impossible to run Swing applications in a remote X session with any speed at all. Every twitch of your mouse results in a flood of network packets to the Java application, which it then has to carefully process.
I actually find Java significantly more painful to develop in because it takes such a huge amount of time to start up the JVM that a debugging session is an exercise in fetching coffee. The class libraries are also poorly designed, and the language is excessively verbose.
I don't actually care hugely about performance
on
Java Faster Than C++?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I care that Java is an inconvenient pain to develop in and use. I care that I have to start a mini-OS just to run a Java program. I care that the language is under the control of one vendor. I care that the 'intialization == resource allocation' model doesn't work in Java. I care that the type system is too anemic to support some of the more powerful generic programming constructs. I care that I don't get a choice about garbage collection. I care that I don't get to fiddle bits in particular memory locations, even if I want to.
I think Java is highly overrated. I would prefer that a better C++ (a C-like memory model, powerful generic programming, inheritance, and polymorphism) that lacked C++'s current nightmare of strangely interacting features and syntax.
I use Python when I don't need C++s speed or low-level memory model, and I'm happier for it. It's more flexible than Java, much quicker to develop in, and faster for running small programs. Java doesn't play well with others, and it was seemingly designed not to.
Besides, I suspect that someone who knew and like C++ really well could tweak his benchmarks to make C++ come out faster again anyway. That's something I've noticed about several benchmarks that compare languages in various ways.
The root nameservers are not under decentralized political control, which still makes them a single point of failure, albeit a different kind of failure.
Yes, I should've mentioned the 1st amendment too. I was thinking of the amendment's directly relating to the role of the state in finding and apprehending criminals, so I forgot that one.
I have a pathologic inability to spell amendment properly. I need to start typing it in some program that has automatic immediate feedback about spelling errors, and then I will improve.:-)
It is an argument for legalization. Copyright was concieved of as a balance. Since copying is now so easy, the cost to society of restricting it is much higher.
One way to look at constitutional protections is to see them as a set of restrictions that are designed to prevent the government from being able to pass, or enforce laws that are obnoxious burdens on freedom.
It's very telling that drug laws require serious weakening of the 4th ammendment to enforce. It's now to the point where enforcement of copyright law will require even more obnoxious violations of the 4th ammendment, by some interpretations, the 3rd ammendment, and by some interpretations, the 5th ammendment.
From what I've read, no public key scheme is safe from quantum computing. Symmetric key cryptography is weakened, but not broken by quantum computing, but that's not much of a comfort.
Quantum cryptography, of course, is just fine. And quantum cryptography gives you some of the benefits of public keys, but not all of them. It can be used as a distribution medium for symmetric keys. But I don't believe it can be used for non-repudiatable signing.
Ahh, thank you for the abrupt, rude message that questions my intelligence for asking a question a lot of other people asked. Such answers do a great deal to contribute to constructive discussion by making sure that people get emotionally invested in their messages. We all know that makes for better discussions.
The Riemann zeta function is related to prime numbers. So I don't think its unreasonable to ask if there are any consequences for prime number based cryptography. I happen to write such software, and I'm very concerned and watchful for anything that might possibly weaken it.
It makes me very nervous that I do not have a deep and intuitive understanding of the math I'm using, especially when I know that I'm writing could be used to for things where people's lives might be in danger if its design is flawed in any way.
Actually, I like my argument for why business practices do not deserve patent protection...
The only things that should be even considered to be patentable are those things capable of being trade secrets. Patents exist to try to convince companies to publish their idea instead of keeping it a trade secret. A business method almost invariably fails this test because the business method has to be used publicly and therefor can't be a trade secret.
I didn't notice that anybody had called it an 'Illustrator killer'. But, I think calling any software a category killer is a little silly. It has built in monopolistic thinking that won't do anybody any good in the long run.
No, vector graphics are a different enough beast, that you need a completely different set of tools for dealing with them. What you really want is for gimp to be able to import external SVG things and convert them to an arbitrarily scaled bitmap representation in a layer. From what I've seen, gimp 2.0 can already do that.
Though, It would be nice if gimp could regenerate the layer automatically when the source SVG file changes. I don't think it can do that yet.
The way you are all so frenzied trying to defend from this accusation, only convinces me that there is something to it.
Actually, this strongly resembles the process I've seen when an Open Source project dissects a tricky bug. Everybody posts their opinion and analysis on it, and eventually, someone figures out the exact answer and the problem is solved. Kind of like scientists figuring something out too.
Of course, something like this is so fuzzy that there isn't really 'a solution'. But the process is still similar.
Sorry, no. I will pay nVidia for their card, and my price for using their proprietary garbage is endless and bitter complaining about it. If that means they stop producing the driver for Linux, well, I'd be happy with that solution because that would mean that somebody would step in and fill the demand with a card that did have Open Source drivers.
I want 3D graphics. Right now, I don't have any choice that doesn't involve proprietary drivers. I feel perfectly justified in complaining.
SPF is about authenticating senders. It uses DNS to authenticate IP addresses. Neither of those two is particularly secure.
Also, DNS is controlled by a centralized authority, and I don't like relying on it for pieces of new infrastructure. I think SPF will tend to have the effect of making it harder for smaller operators to send email, which I think is very bad.
SPF is a kludge. If they had gone to the effort of defining a new DNS record type and carefully designing the data structure, I'd be much happier. But right now, it's a bunch of gobbedly-gook text stuffed into a TXT field.
Lastly, all of the other protocols I mentioned all have problems with authenticating the communicating parties. There needs to be a general solution to that problem, not a bunch of little piecemeal kludges.
Slashdot Mirror
That's even funnier. :-)
I'm amused that someone thought this was a troll. :-)
That's a very slippery slope they just launched themselves onto with lots of water and slick plastic. You could argue that hardly anything you could be required to divulge isn't incriminating unless you're a criminal. So, if you refuse to divulge any information, you're a criminal for not doing so, and if you do, you incriminate yourself if you are a criminal.
I haven't looked at the site. But the world needs a good way of accounting for 'unrealized externalities' in a reasonable way. That's the way to manage the environment and keep capitalism around at the same time.
I think this is, in general, a really hard problem. Partly because sometimes, we don't understand the costs of some activities until they've been going on for a long time. Like DDT, for example. It seems like a wonderful pesticide, and we used it for years before it became clear that it had an enormous hidden environmental cost that hadn't previously been accounted for.
I think, for spam, the problem is much easier. You can use bandwidth costs, and estimate the costs of the wasted human time and attention and come up with a reasonably accurate estimate.
The Free Software Song has got to be one of the worst PR moves the FSF has ever made. *sigh*
That's what the qualifier 'hugely' was for. Performance is important, to a degree. It's not like I'd be happy to use a language that was consistently 50% or even 75% the speed of another.
But, you're probably right. I tend to react overly strongly to pro-Java stuff because I don't actually think the language is really awful. I just think it's overhyped and overused, and that a lot of its supposed benefits are fictitious.
I find Java's container libraries to be annoying and obtuse. I prefer the STL or Python's containers.
Java's containers lacked an iterator concept until recently, which made it hard to have code that went through a random container independent of its type. And Java's lack of support for generic programming makes use of their containers very cast heavy.
The standard UI library, Swing, is too slow to be used for actual real work. And they stopped bothering with the X event model in Java 1.3, so it's impossible to run Swing applications in a remote X session with any speed at all. Every twitch of your mouse results in a flood of network packets to the Java application, which it then has to carefully process.
I actually find Java significantly more painful to develop in because it takes such a huge amount of time to start up the JVM that a debugging session is an exercise in fetching coffee. The class libraries are also poorly designed, and the language is excessively verbose.
I care that Java is an inconvenient pain to develop in and use. I care that I have to start a mini-OS just to run a Java program. I care that the language is under the control of one vendor. I care that the 'intialization == resource allocation' model doesn't work in Java. I care that the type system is too anemic to support some of the more powerful generic programming constructs. I care that I don't get a choice about garbage collection. I care that I don't get to fiddle bits in particular memory locations, even if I want to.
I think Java is highly overrated. I would prefer that a better C++ (a C-like memory model, powerful generic programming, inheritance, and polymorphism) that lacked C++'s current nightmare of strangely interacting features and syntax.
I use Python when I don't need C++s speed or low-level memory model, and I'm happier for it. It's more flexible than Java, much quicker to develop in, and faster for running small programs. Java doesn't play well with others, and it was seemingly designed not to.
Besides, I suspect that someone who knew and like C++ really well could tweak his benchmarks to make C++ come out faster again anyway. That's something I've noticed about several benchmarks that compare languages in various ways.
The root nameservers are not under decentralized political control, which still makes them a single point of failure, albeit a different kind of failure.
Yes, I should've mentioned the 1st amendment too. I was thinking of the amendment's directly relating to the role of the state in finding and apprehending criminals, so I forgot that one.
I have a pathologic inability to spell amendment properly. I need to start typing it in some program that has automatic immediate feedback about spelling errors, and then I will improve. :-)
It is an argument for legalization. Copyright was concieved of as a balance. Since copying is now so easy, the cost to society of restricting it is much higher.
One way to look at constitutional protections is to see them as a set of restrictions that are designed to prevent the government from being able to pass, or enforce laws that are obnoxious burdens on freedom.
It's very telling that drug laws require serious weakening of the 4th ammendment to enforce. It's now to the point where enforcement of copyright law will require even more obnoxious violations of the 4th ammendment, by some interpretations, the 3rd ammendment, and by some interpretations, the 5th ammendment.
That's not funny, it's the truth. Or, perhaps it's more funny because it is the truth.
From what I've read, no public key scheme is safe from quantum computing. Symmetric key cryptography is weakened, but not broken by quantum computing, but that's not much of a comfort.
Quantum cryptography, of course, is just fine. And quantum cryptography gives you some of the benefits of public keys, but not all of them. It can be used as a distribution medium for symmetric keys. But I don't believe it can be used for non-repudiatable signing.
Ahh, thank you for the abrupt, rude message that questions my intelligence for asking a question a lot of other people asked. Such answers do a great deal to contribute to constructive discussion by making sure that people get emotionally invested in their messages. We all know that makes for better discussions.
The Riemann zeta function is related to prime numbers. So I don't think its unreasonable to ask if there are any consequences for prime number based cryptography. I happen to write such software, and I'm very concerned and watchful for anything that might possibly weaken it.
It makes me very nervous that I do not have a deep and intuitive understanding of the math I'm using, especially when I know that I'm writing could be used to for things where people's lives might be in danger if its design is flawed in any way.
Does this affect prime based public key schemes at all? How does it affect them?
Theat's not true. Though it is true that he isn't emitting photons in the visible spectrum. :-)
Actually, I like my argument for why business practices do not deserve patent protection...
The only things that should be even considered to be patentable are those things capable of being trade secrets. Patents exist to try to convince companies to publish their idea instead of keeping it a trade secret. A business method almost invariably fails this test because the business method has to be used publicly and therefor can't be a trade secret.
I didn't notice that anybody had called it an 'Illustrator killer'. But, I think calling any software a category killer is a little silly. It has built in monopolistic thinking that won't do anybody any good in the long run.
No, vector graphics are a different enough beast, that you need a completely different set of tools for dealing with them. What you really want is for gimp to be able to import external SVG things and convert them to an arbitrarily scaled bitmap representation in a layer. From what I've seen, gimp 2.0 can already do that.
Though, It would be nice if gimp could regenerate the layer automatically when the source SVG file changes. I don't think it can do that yet.
So, by your rationale, no project should be even mentioned anywhere until it's better than any non-Open Source project that overlaps its space?
Actually, this strongly resembles the process I've seen when an Open Source project dissects a tricky bug. Everybody posts their opinion and analysis on it, and eventually, someone figures out the exact answer and the problem is solved. Kind of like scientists figuring something out too.
Of course, something like this is so fuzzy that there isn't really 'a solution'. But the process is still similar.
Sorry, no. I will pay nVidia for their card, and my price for using their proprietary garbage is endless and bitter complaining about it. If that means they stop producing the driver for Linux, well, I'd be happy with that solution because that would mean that somebody would step in and fill the demand with a card that did have Open Source drivers.
I want 3D graphics. Right now, I don't have any choice that doesn't involve proprietary drivers. I feel perfectly justified in complaining.
SPF is about authenticating senders. It uses DNS to authenticate IP addresses. Neither of those two is particularly secure.
Also, DNS is controlled by a centralized authority, and I don't like relying on it for pieces of new infrastructure. I think SPF will tend to have the effect of making it harder for smaller operators to send email, which I think is very bad.
SPF is a kludge. If they had gone to the effort of defining a new DNS record type and carefully designing the data structure, I'd be much happier. But right now, it's a bunch of gobbedly-gook text stuffed into a TXT field.
Lastly, all of the other protocols I mentioned all have problems with authenticating the communicating parties. There needs to be a general solution to that problem, not a bunch of little piecemeal kludges.