I rarely ever got telemarketing calls.
Last week I applied for a telemarketing job.
Within hours I started getting calls, and I've gotten 5 a day since.
Sure, it's farcical that the USPTO is funded through granting patents....
That's a good point. Maybe the issue fee ($1280) should be folded into the filing fee ($740).
Or even change the issue fee into a rejection fee. If the examiners find the patent application isn't valid, then the applicant should have (since you are meant to do this before filing for a patent) so charging them for the research time seems reasonable.
The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to:... (xviii.) Copyrights, patents of inventions and designs, and trade marks
Unlike the U.S. Constitution, this doesn't even specify a weak "limited times" guarantee. Therefore, Australia's Parliament has the right to pass a perpetual copyright on a given work.
The Australian Parliament does whatever the hell they feel like.
In the lead up to the last election the Government tried to pass a law that would allow the defense forces to force a boat out of Australian waters at the discretion of the captiain of the defense vessel giving him/her no responsibility if the boat then sank or whatever. This was part of the government's 'get tough on refugees' campaign (which got them elected). Due to their incompetence the bill was so vague that it basically gave the defence the right to force an Australian vessel containing Australian citizens out of Australian waters. It was the most rushed through bill in Australian history, but the opposition at least had their eyes open and refused to pass it in the senate.
Go read the constitution, we have a number of rights both stated implicitly and infered by various high court decisions.
Australia has nothing like a bill of rights, the Australian constitution limits the powers the Federal Government has over the States, and also limits what the domain of the State governments a bit as well. The only limitations I can find are:
41. No adult person who has or acquires a right to vote at elections for the more numerous House of the Parliament of a State shall, while the right continues, be prevented by any law of the Commonwealth from voting at elections for either House of the Parliament of the Commonwealth.
51.(i.) Taxation; but so as not to discriminate between States or parts of States:
51.(xxiiiA.) The provision of maternity allowances, widows' pensions, child endowment, unemployment, pharmaceutical, sickness and hospital benefits, medical and dental services (but not so as to authorize any form of civil conscription), benefits to students and family allowances:
99. The Commonwealth shall not, by any law or regulation of trade, commerce, or revenue, give preference to one State or any part thereof over another State or any part thereof.
100. The Commonwealth shall not, by any law or regulation of trade or commerce, abridge the right of a State or of the residents therein to the reasonable use of the waters of rivers for conservation or irrigation.
Whereas the list of things they can do is quite a bit longer:
51. The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to:-
(i.) Trade and commerce with other countries, and among the States:
(ii.) Taxation; but so as not to discriminate between States or parts of States:
(iii.) Bounties on the production or export of goods, but so that such bounties shall be uniform throughout the Commonwealth:
(iv.) Borrowing money on the public credit of the Commonwealth:
(v.) Postal, telegraphic, telephonic, and other like services:
(vi.) The naval and military defence of the Commonwealth and of the several States, and the control of the forces to execute and maintain the laws of the Commonwealth.
(vii.) Lighthouses, lightships, beacons and buoys:
(viii.) Astronomical and metereological observations:
(ix.) Quarantine:
(x.) Fisheries in Australian waters beyond territorial limits:
(xi.) Census and statistics:
(xii.) Currency, coinage, and legal tender:
(xiii.) Banking, other than State banking; also State banking extending beyond the limits of the State concerned, the incorporation of banks, and the issue of paper money:
(xiv.) Insurance, other than State insurance; also State insurance extending beyond the limits of the State concerned:
(xv.) Weights and measures:
(xvi.) Bills of exchanging and promissory notes:
(xvii.) Bankruptcy and insolvency:
(xviii.) Copyrights, patents of inventions and designs, and trade marks:
(xix.) Naturalization and aliens:
(xx.) Foreign corporations, and trading or financial corporations formed within the limits of the Commonwealth:
(xxi.) Marriage:
(xxii.) Divorce and matrimonial causes; and in relation thereto, parental rights, and the custody and guardianship of infants:
(xxiii.) Invalid and old-age pensions:
(xxiiiA.) The provision of maternity allowances, widows' pensions, child endowment, unemployment, pharmaceutical, sickness and hospital benefits, medical and dental services (but not so as to authorize any form of civil conscription), benefits to students and family allowances:
(xxiv.) The service and execution throughout the Commonwealth of the civil and criminal process and the judgements of the courts of the States:
(xxv.) The recognition throughout the Commonwealth of the laws, the public Acts and records, and the judicial proceedings of the States:
(xxvi.) The people of any race, for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws:
(xxvii.) Immigration and emigration:
(xxviii.) The influx of criminals:
(xxix.) External Affairs:
(xxx.) The relations of the Commonwealth with the islands of the Pacific:
(xxxi.) The acquisition of property on just terms from any State or person for any purpose in respect of which the Parliament has power to make laws:
(xxxii.) The control of railways with respect to transport for the naval and military purposes of the Commonwealth:
(xxxiii.) The acquisition, with the consent of a State, of any railways of the State on terms arranged between the Commonwealth and the State:
(xxxiv.) Railway construction and extension in any State with the consent of that State:
(xxxv.) Conciliation and arbitration for the prevention and settlement of industrial disputes extending beyond the limits of any one State:
(xxxvi.) Matters in respect of which this Constitution makes provision until the Parliament otherwise provides:
(xxxvii.) Matters referred to the Parliament of the Commonwealth by the Parliament or Parliaments of any State or States, but so that the law shall extend only to States by whose Parliaments the matter is referred, or which afterwards adopt the law:
(xxxviii.) The exercise within the Commonwealth, at the request or with the concurrence of the Parliaments of all the States directly concerned, of any power which can at the establishment of this Constitution be exercised only by the Parliament of the United Kingdom or by the Federal Council of Australasia:
(xxxix.) Matters incidental to the execution of any power vested by this Constitution in the Parliament or in either House thereof, or in the Government of the Commonwealth, or in the Federal Judicature, or in any department or officer of the Commonwealth.
Note that over time the States have transferred some of their powers to the Commonwealth giving them a larger domain than indicated. Also it is a reasonably common enough occurance for the Commonwealth to convince all the states to pass a law, in effect making a commonwealth law that they are not supposed to make. I guess this is *much* easier in Australia with only 6 states than in the US.
We have universal gun control in this country - something campaigned for by the Commonwealth government.
In the state I live we have 'move-on' laws, so the police can force you to leave a public area, public assembly without approval is illegal, distribution of pamphletes without authority is illegal, broadcasting without authority is illegal (having your walkman up to loud is a crime), skateboarding, bike riding, and the wonderful phrase to have in law 'anything of that nature' in a public space is illegal without authority, you can be banned from said public space for life for breaching those laws, the police can enter a permise without a warrant if they think it is being used for drug crimes...
It's amazing what the government will do when it doesn't have a bill of rights restructing it when something like the Olympics comes along.
Of course these laws are not enforced in a manner that makes it a police state - but that's not the point, they could be in the future.
What IS galling - nay insulting - is that they students think that the TA won't notice that two programs have exactly the same error epidology. I could understand if they thought they could get away with copying and modifying a working solution, but when the solution doesn't produce the required result, the TA HAS to grok the code. And you quickly notice when solutions are "similarly stupid". Strangely enogugh, the right solutions tended not to be copied. I'll spare you my specualtions on the social dynamic that results in that scenario.
So no program necessary, IMHO. Of course, I had a fairly small class. I would hope that bigger classes get a couple of TAs.
The problem arises when there are too many students. Sure you'll catch the really dumb students who copy someone in their own class, or who has the same TA. But those students will fail the exam anyway and hence won't pass even if not caught...
You won't catch those students who copy someone in a different class with a different TA, since you won't see the other almost identical solution.
In my experience some of those students are found, because copying seems to spread, and usually a group of students have 'similar' solutions, so when you happen to get two of them, you can grep for whatever the magic phrase is that really gives the game away in the submissions of all the students and probably find a few more matches.
The last course I taught had ~650 students. I lectured the course (wrote the material, gave the lectures, wrote the assignment specs, did the machine marking, etc), but didn't take any of the tutes/labs and hence only did the hand marking of assignments which were late for whatever reason, or for students whom the enrollment database refused to believe were in a tute...
As always some students cheated and some of those were caught (some got away with it no doubt).
I think one tutor (I think our equivalent of a TA) reported students he suspected of copying, and only a couple at that. So the tutors didn't find many - since they only marked a small percentage after all...
A handful were caught because I happened to mark two assignments that used malloc (in a C++ course that never mentioned it even in passing) in identical wrong ways. And grepping for malloc found a few more *very* similar assignments.
The majority of those caught were found using two simple little programs called sig and comp. Sig takes the submission as input, splits it into chunks and outputs simple hashes of those chunks. Comp compares the hashes of a bunch of submissions and says which are similar.
Submissions that score high with sig/comp *always* look very much like they have been copied. Those that score low *always* look very much like they are different. Those that score in the middle consist of both. Hence it misses some cheats, but more importantly doesn't generate false positives very often.
sig/comp was actually an assignment for out Software Engineering course a few years ago. Rob Pike (on sabatical teaching in out dept for a semester) was annoyed enough at teh apparant cheating in one assignment, that he set writing them as the next assignment and used the previous assignments submissions as the sample data. This did seem to show students that cheating was easily discovered...
If you can't even whip up a quicksort routine, you have no business calling yourself a programmer, much less a computer scientist.
If you ever actually would whip up a quicksort routine instead of using the sort that *is* available already you have no business calling yourself a programmer, much less a computer scientist.
In fact if you ever whipped up a quicksort routine for real code you have no business calling yourself a programmer. If the sort is big enough to need quicksort, spend 5 minutes and find the library sort. If it isn't big enough whip up insertion sort - since you'll actually get it correct (instead of spending an hour debugging your off by one error in the quicksort) and it'll be faster for the small sort anyway)...
"There is the option, however, to cancel a download mid stream without depleting your download count."
I can clearly see people killing the download on the last few bytes by clamping down the bandwidth and cutting off the few last bytes in order to save their slots...
Nice people will add a couple of kilobytes of null bytes to the end of files, so that others can have their cake and eat it too...
IQ in a large population is normally distributed (follows a bell curve) therefore the mean, median and mode are the same (IQ=100 (by definition)) and there is an equal number of people that are above average as below.
That's what the psychologists/statisticians/whoever-it-is claim.
But I swear the bottom end of intelligence is over represented at my university. I'd hate to think how big the bulge at the low end would be if you included all those people who didn't get into university.
After all, how many *really* stupid people have you met? And how many *really* smart people? Lots and none by any chance?
Look at the stupidity of my argument and the fact that I'm bothering typing this as an indication of my intelligence. I got better than average marks in my courses. Hence, I am stupid and yet of above average intelligence.
The problem with having a "sucker list" is that no one ever thinks he/she is one; and would do everything possible to stay off it. It's very similar to how most people believe they have an above average IQ. Nevermind the fact that most people can't be above average. A lot of people simply don't think of themselves as suckers.
It depends on what you mean by average. Most uses of average refer to the mean. If that's what people are referring then it is quite possible that most people are above average. For example if there are more *very* stupid people than *very* smart people then >50% of people can be above the mean... (a world of five people with IQs of 1,7,7,7,10 would have 4 of them being above the average (which is 6.4) as an example of the example);)
Of course if they by average they are referring to median then your point is valid - but most people don't interprete 'average' as 'median'.
I find the window-top menus easier myself, because they let me map application functions with a particular visual workspace on the screen, and I thus have to remember less state (what application am I inside of now?). Maybe my brain is a bit more "object oriented" than most.:)
Or maybe your brain just likes using up more time every time you need to access a menu.
Or maybe you use the short-cut keys in which case it doesn't matter where the damn menu is put since you never mouse to it...
99.5% of [insert open source app here] users cannot 'fix it themselves' either, because they don't have the technical knowledge of every package in a system, or they don't have time to fix it. The more likely a person is to be able to fix a security exploit on a production machine, the more it would cost for their time.
However with Open Source software there tends to be more than one distributor.
If the author of ProgramX doesn't fix a security hole, then debian might, or redhat might, or suse might, and as soon as one does the others can grab their fix and incorporate in their distribution.
So if the individual user doesn't have the time/ability to patch a hole, at least there is a reasonably large number of distributions competing to fix it (after all consistantly being first to release security patches is one way to win customers to your distribution). Rather than the one and only source not bothering for a few days/weeks/months since they know no one else can patch it first and win over their customers.
Capitalism sucks. But it sucks less than all the other systems we've tried over all of history. Open source leverages capatilism in a way that makes it humourous that people often label it as 'communist'...
Neither autism nor asperger's syndrome have been proven to be genetic disorders *at all*.
If one identical twin has autism there is a 75% chance the other does too.
If one fraternal twin has autism there is a 3% chance the other does too (which is still much higher than the rate of autism in the general community).
A large number of people with chomosomal abnormalities are also diagnosed with autism.
All of this is evidence for a genetic component. The fact that the identical twin rate isn't 100% means it is not entirely explained by genetics. But genetics almost certainly plays a large role.
Claiming autism hasn't been 'proven' to be a genetic disorder '*at all*' is a bit far fetched. There is large amounts of evidence. It is not entirely genetic, but it almost certainly plays a part.
Prove that it's impossible to solve NP-Complete problems in linear time, before someone figures out how to do it.
Which can be done trivially. Just grab the nearest algorithms book, and turn to the sorting section. Assumming the book is any good there should be proof that O(NlogN) is the best you can do with a comparison-based sort - it probably raves on about decision trees and so forth.
Since sorting unbounded integers is an algorithm in P, it is in NP (P is a subset of NP after all). Since there is no linear algorithm for this problem there can be no linear algorithm for NP-complete problems.
Proving its impossible to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time is a little bit harder, and left as an exercise for the reader;)
Obviously, you have never programmed with Visual Basic or Access. Otherwise you'd know that Access uses Visual Basic as it's programming language.
And if you had you'd know that VBA is not identical to VB. VBA in Access makes some things easier to do than in plain old VB. It also makes some things harder to do. It is definantly not the same.
People who can't use VB can use Access. Since you can create Access databases without writing any VBA code at all. You are restricted doing stuff the pointy-clicky interface lets you do, but you can still do quite a bit.
I took the liberty of benchmarking 25 spoken languages by comparing their methods for expressing the phrase "Wuzzzzzzaaaaaah" from the budweiser commercial. Some of these may not be optimized as I am a bit of a newbie at some of these languages. Here is an excerpt:
...
Australian English: "I'm not saying any such thing. Give me a Fosters'."
The Australian version should probably be "Mmmmmmaaaaaaaattttteeeeeee" since one of our not a creative cell in their bodies advertising agencies ripped off the American ads and produced a bunch of crappy lets yell mate ads... the ads sucked enough that I can't even remember what they were for.
Also, Australians don't drink Fosters. We just export the crap to unsuspecting Americans (possibly as revenge for Tom dumping Nicole, opening up the possibility she might actually come back here).
Obviously he is thinking of the slashback here. Which is all of a few days old. Recent enough that the link in this article was coloured to indicate I had visited it already...
Maybe if you read the post before mindlessly replying you wouldn't come across as a moron.
Netrek does not have a large cheating problem. The true state of the game is known only to the server. Clients are given only the information that they would know. Clients use RSA keys to authenticate to the server. If a client is cracked, the client key can be quickly revoked and new clients distributed. If the clients are kept simple, several clients and keys could be distributed on a CD. Most clients would be under 100k. The art and graphics could be shared by all clients and take up the bulk of the CD. If anyone cracks one of the clients, its key can be revoked and there is no need to re-release a new CD. More clients, all randomly linked and encrypted on the disk, can be right there. The main thing is that the server only allows blessed clients to play, and only shares with any connection what it could know.
That scheme works in netrek because it isn't as popular as quake. Cracking these schemes doesn't seem to difficult by the speed in which they are done in the PC world. Proxy programs are one technique. They aren't going to crack RSA they'll use some other technique or some flaw in the process used. Software companies can't spend time doing security audits, they have to release yesterday since the 'technology' in the game is dating fast...
Netrek also runs at about 5 frames per second which isn't really good enough for quake.
I have a separate rant about letting clients know information that they shouldn't, and about letting clients decide what the state of the game is; I will spare you.
Having all the state in the server is ideal. Having the server do all the calculations is ideal. The clients can of course can try to run the simulation in lock-step with the server (which is hard without full knowledge) in order to provide a better player experience. Just like quake style game clients try and predict what will happen so that a delayed packet doesn't just cause them to freeze up. Making it run fast enough is the problem. Scaling to lots of players is an even bigger problem. Crossfire is doing things reasonably well though...
It still doesn't solve clients that help the player by auto-aiming and such. They don't need any extra information they just give the player better reaction times and mouse skills... These can be written as proxies which are hard to stop, though you can make life really hard for them... However, given enough late night hacking a few gurus could probably write a program that scans the video frame buffer (or just directly accesses the memory of the game process) and automatically shoots things it classifies as enemies. It can automatically shoot things by actually being the mouse driver and sending the correct mouse movements...
Of course programers should actually like the ability to write helper-bots - they turn the game into a pretty graphics version of corewars. That should give programmers the edge...
Believe it or not I haven't started RANTING yet... here we go...
<RANT>
Given time (and that game producers/authors wake up and see a possible revenue stream) you'll just choose a server that you know doesn't have cheats on it (or one that does, if that's the type of game you like).
Maybe the game defaults to use a public server, but you can send your credit card number to Blizzard/ID/whoever and be given access to the subscribers only server which is actively monitored for cheaters.
Or an seperate individual or company will see some money (or just not like cheating) and run their own server which costs money (or just requires some form of idenitification) and has very specific anti-cheating rules that result in cheaters getting banned.
The problem will be solved socially if it is solved at all. Technology isn't going to do it, and I don't think it's worth trying to solve it that way. Yes only give the clients the information they should have, it makes for better software design if nothing else. Yes use crypto to make cheating harder, it makes for cooler software if nothing else. Yes make it hard for cheats - but not if that means at the expense of programmer time that could have been spent fixing a damn bug, and not at the expense of windows software style piracy protection - must plug the fscking CD drive into the laptop in order to play the damn game (or download a small patch - gee which do I do?).
Solve social problems sociably. Cheating is classified as an anti-social activity by most (unless you're doing something where cheating is the point) so use social measures to reduce it or at least move it away from some places.
</RANT>
Of course, vendors can stop innovating and concentrate on quality. But do you _really_ want to use word processor from 1991? It would be quite reliable after 10 years of testing, but I wouldn't like this tradeoff.
There has been virtually no innovation in word processing in the last decade.
Squiggly lines under spelling errors aren't innovative. Merging a revision control system with a word processor isn't innovative. Little paperclips that pop up aren't innovative.
The light bulb was innovative. Radio was innovative. The steam engine was innovative. The atomic bomb was innovative. The cat cracker was innovative.
Word processors on the other hand, have seen normal rate improvements over time.
Anything vaguely innovative in a word processor was due to innovation in computer hardware that made it possible for crappy software to be fast enough to actually use.
Slashdot Mirror
Karma...
Or even change the issue fee into a rejection fee. If the examiners find the patent application isn't valid, then the applicant should have (since you are meant to do this before filing for a patent) so charging them for the research time seems reasonable.
The Australian Parliament does whatever the hell they feel like.
In the lead up to the last election the Government tried to pass a law that would allow the defense forces to force a boat out of Australian waters at the discretion of the captiain of the defense vessel giving him/her no responsibility if the boat then sank or whatever. This was part of the government's 'get tough on refugees' campaign (which got them elected). Due to their incompetence the bill was so vague that it basically gave the defence the right to force an Australian vessel containing Australian citizens out of Australian waters. It was the most rushed through bill in Australian history, but the opposition at least had their eyes open and refused to pass it in the senate.
Complete insanity.
Australia has nothing like a bill of rights, the Australian constitution limits the powers the Federal Government has over the States, and also limits what the domain of the State governments a bit as well. The only limitations I can find are:
41. No adult person who has or acquires a right to vote at elections for the more numerous House of the Parliament of a State shall, while the right continues, be prevented by any law of the Commonwealth from voting at elections for either House of the Parliament of the Commonwealth.
51.(i.) Taxation; but so as not to discriminate between States or parts of States:
51.(xxiiiA.) The provision of maternity allowances, widows' pensions, child endowment, unemployment, pharmaceutical, sickness and hospital benefits, medical and dental services (but not so as to authorize any form of civil conscription), benefits to students and family allowances:
99. The Commonwealth shall not, by any law or regulation of trade, commerce, or revenue, give preference to one State or any part thereof over another State or any part thereof.
100. The Commonwealth shall not, by any law or regulation of trade or commerce, abridge the right of a State or of the residents therein to the reasonable use of the waters of rivers for conservation or irrigation.
Whereas the list of things they can do is quite a bit longer:
51. The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to:-
(i.) Trade and commerce with other countries, and among the States:
(ii.) Taxation; but so as not to discriminate between States or parts of States:
(iii.) Bounties on the production or export of goods, but so that such bounties shall be uniform throughout the Commonwealth:
(iv.) Borrowing money on the public credit of the Commonwealth:
(v.) Postal, telegraphic, telephonic, and other like services:
(vi.) The naval and military defence of the Commonwealth and of the several States, and the control of the forces to execute and maintain the laws of the Commonwealth.
(vii.) Lighthouses, lightships, beacons and buoys:
(viii.) Astronomical and metereological observations:
(ix.) Quarantine:
(x.) Fisheries in Australian waters beyond territorial limits:
(xi.) Census and statistics:
(xii.) Currency, coinage, and legal tender:
(xiii.) Banking, other than State banking; also State banking extending beyond the limits of the State concerned, the incorporation of banks, and the issue of paper money:
(xiv.) Insurance, other than State insurance; also State insurance extending beyond the limits of the State concerned:
(xv.) Weights and measures:
(xvi.) Bills of exchanging and promissory notes:
(xvii.) Bankruptcy and insolvency:
(xviii.) Copyrights, patents of inventions and designs, and trade marks:
(xix.) Naturalization and aliens:
(xx.) Foreign corporations, and trading or financial corporations formed within the limits of the Commonwealth:
(xxi.) Marriage:
(xxii.) Divorce and matrimonial causes; and in relation thereto, parental rights, and the custody and guardianship of infants:
(xxiii.) Invalid and old-age pensions:
(xxiiiA.) The provision of maternity allowances, widows' pensions, child endowment, unemployment, pharmaceutical, sickness and hospital benefits, medical and dental services (but not so as to authorize any form of civil conscription), benefits to students and family allowances:
(xxiv.) The service and execution throughout the Commonwealth of the civil and criminal process and the judgements of the courts of the States:
(xxv.) The recognition throughout the Commonwealth of the laws, the public Acts and records, and the judicial proceedings of the States:
(xxvi.) The people of any race, for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws:
(xxvii.) Immigration and emigration:
(xxviii.) The influx of criminals:
(xxix.) External Affairs:
(xxx.) The relations of the Commonwealth with the islands of the Pacific:
(xxxi.) The acquisition of property on just terms from any State or person for any purpose in respect of which the Parliament has power to make laws:
(xxxii.) The control of railways with respect to transport for the naval and military purposes of the Commonwealth:
(xxxiii.) The acquisition, with the consent of a State, of any railways of the State on terms arranged between the Commonwealth and the State:
(xxxiv.) Railway construction and extension in any State with the consent of that State:
(xxxv.) Conciliation and arbitration for the prevention and settlement of industrial disputes extending beyond the limits of any one State:
(xxxvi.) Matters in respect of which this Constitution makes provision until the Parliament otherwise provides:
(xxxvii.) Matters referred to the Parliament of the Commonwealth by the Parliament or Parliaments of any State or States, but so that the law shall extend only to States by whose Parliaments the matter is referred, or which afterwards adopt the law:
(xxxviii.) The exercise within the Commonwealth, at the request or with the concurrence of the Parliaments of all the States directly concerned, of any power which can at the establishment of this Constitution be exercised only by the Parliament of the United Kingdom or by the Federal Council of Australasia:
(xxxix.) Matters incidental to the execution of any power vested by this Constitution in the Parliament or in either House thereof, or in the Government of the Commonwealth, or in the Federal Judicature, or in any department or officer of the Commonwealth.
Note that over time the States have transferred some of their powers to the Commonwealth giving them a larger domain than indicated. Also it is a reasonably common enough occurance for the Commonwealth to convince all the states to pass a law, in effect making a commonwealth law that they are not supposed to make. I guess this is *much* easier in Australia with only 6 states than in the US.
We have universal gun control in this country - something campaigned for by the Commonwealth government.
In the state I live we have 'move-on' laws, so the police can force you to leave a public area, public assembly without approval is illegal, distribution of pamphletes without authority is illegal, broadcasting without authority is illegal (having your walkman up to loud is a crime), skateboarding, bike riding, and the wonderful phrase to have in law 'anything of that nature' in a public space is illegal without authority, you can be banned from said public space for life for breaching those laws, the police can enter a permise without a warrant if they think it is being used for drug crimes...
It's amazing what the government will do when it doesn't have a bill of rights restructing it when something like the Olympics comes along.
Of course these laws are not enforced in a manner that makes it a police state - but that's not the point, they could be in the future.
If your expression contains backreferences it is not regular. And hence is not a regular expression.
Which the poster mentioned but you ignored.
The problem arises when there are too many students. Sure you'll catch the really dumb students who copy someone in their own class, or who has the same TA. But those students will fail the exam anyway and hence won't pass even if not caught...
You won't catch those students who copy someone in a different class with a different TA, since you won't see the other almost identical solution.
In my experience some of those students are found, because copying seems to spread, and usually a group of students have 'similar' solutions, so when you happen to get two of them, you can grep for whatever the magic phrase is that really gives the game away in the submissions of all the students and probably find a few more matches.
The last course I taught had ~650 students. I lectured the course (wrote the material, gave the lectures, wrote the assignment specs, did the machine marking, etc), but didn't take any of the tutes/labs and hence only did the hand marking of assignments which were late for whatever reason, or for students whom the enrollment database refused to believe were in a tute...
As always some students cheated and some of those were caught (some got away with it no doubt).
I think one tutor (I think our equivalent of a TA) reported students he suspected of copying, and only a couple at that. So the tutors didn't find many - since they only marked a small percentage after all...
A handful were caught because I happened to mark two assignments that used malloc (in a C++ course that never mentioned it even in passing) in identical wrong ways. And grepping for malloc found a few more *very* similar assignments.
The majority of those caught were found using two simple little programs called sig and comp. Sig takes the submission as input, splits it into chunks and outputs simple hashes of those chunks. Comp compares the hashes of a bunch of submissions and says which are similar.
Submissions that score high with sig/comp *always* look very much like they have been copied. Those that score low *always* look very much like they are different. Those that score in the middle consist of both. Hence it misses some cheats, but more importantly doesn't generate false positives very often.
sig/comp was actually an assignment for out Software Engineering course a few years ago. Rob Pike (on sabatical teaching in out dept for a semester) was annoyed enough at teh apparant cheating in one assignment, that he set writing them as the next assignment and used the previous assignments submissions as the sample data. This did seem to show students that cheating was easily discovered...
If you can't even whip up a quicksort routine, you have no business calling yourself a programmer, much less a computer scientist.
If you ever actually would whip up a quicksort routine instead of using the sort that *is* available already you have no business calling yourself a programmer, much less a computer scientist.
In fact if you ever whipped up a quicksort routine for real code you have no business calling yourself a programmer. If the sort is big enough to need quicksort, spend 5 minutes and find the library sort. If it isn't big enough whip up insertion sort - since you'll actually get it correct (instead of spending an hour debugging your off by one error in the quicksort) and it'll be faster for the small sort anyway)...
I can clearly see people killing the download on the last few bytes by clamping down the bandwidth and cutting off the few last bytes in order to save their slots...
Nice people will add a couple of kilobytes of null bytes to the end of files, so that others can have their cake and eat it too...
IQ in a large population is normally distributed (follows a bell curve) therefore the mean, median and mode are the same (IQ=100 (by definition)) and there is an equal number of people that are above average as below.
That's what the psychologists/statisticians/whoever-it-is claim.
But I swear the bottom end of intelligence is over represented at my university. I'd hate to think how big the bulge at the low end would be if you included all those people who didn't get into university.
After all, how many *really* stupid people have you met? And how many *really* smart people? Lots and none by any chance?
Look at the stupidity of my argument and the fact that I'm bothering typing this as an indication of my intelligence. I got better than average marks in my courses. Hence, I am stupid and yet of above average intelligence.
Average IQ of 100, try 5...
Er, and you've got freakin' text constantly during the show. I guess you don't mind, but I find it makes anything on TNN unwatchable.
Surely you could just gaff tape over the bottom 1/7th of the screen...
The problem with having a "sucker list" is that no one ever thinks he/she is one; and would do everything possible to stay off it. It's very similar to how most people believe they have an above average IQ. Nevermind the fact that most people can't be above average. A lot of people simply don't think of themselves as suckers.
;)
It depends on what you mean by average. Most uses of average refer to the mean. If that's what people are referring then it is quite possible that most people are above average. For example if there are more *very* stupid people than *very* smart people then >50% of people can be above the mean... (a world of five people with IQs of 1,7,7,7,10 would have 4 of them being above the average (which is 6.4) as an example of the example)
Of course if they by average they are referring to median then your point is valid - but most people don't interprete 'average' as 'median'.
I find the window-top menus easier myself, because they let me map application functions with a particular visual workspace on the screen, and I thus have to remember less state (what application am I inside of now?). Maybe my brain is a bit more "object oriented" than most. :)
Or maybe your brain just likes using up more time every time you need to access a menu.
Or maybe you use the short-cut keys in which case it doesn't matter where the damn menu is put since you never mouse to it...
99.5% of [insert open source app here] users cannot 'fix it themselves' either, because they don't have the technical knowledge of every package in a system, or they don't have time to fix it. The more likely a person is to be able to fix a security exploit on a production machine, the more it would cost for their time.
However with Open Source software there tends to be more than one distributor.
If the author of ProgramX doesn't fix a security hole, then debian might, or redhat might, or suse might, and as soon as one does the others can grab their fix and incorporate in their distribution.
So if the individual user doesn't have the time/ability to patch a hole, at least there is a reasonably large number of distributions competing to fix it (after all consistantly being first to release security patches is one way to win customers to your distribution). Rather than the one and only source not bothering for a few days/weeks/months since they know no one else can patch it first and win over their customers.
Capitalism sucks. But it sucks less than all the other systems we've tried over all of history. Open source leverages capatilism in a way that makes it humourous that people often label it as 'communist'...
I'm still waiting for real time, on the fly DDS 5.1 encoding
What would be the point?
Why bother encoding to DDS 5.1, all you would then do is send it to a decoder which in turn sends it the speakers.
Just have 6 outputs on the damn card and send it directly to the amp(s)...
If one identical twin has autism there is a 75% chance the other does too.
If one fraternal twin has autism there is a 3% chance the other does too (which is still much higher than the rate of autism in the general community).
A large number of people with chomosomal abnormalities are also diagnosed with autism.
All of this is evidence for a genetic component. The fact that the identical twin rate isn't 100% means it is not entirely explained by genetics. But genetics almost certainly plays a large role.
Claiming autism hasn't been 'proven' to be a genetic disorder '*at all*' is a bit far fetched. There is large amounts of evidence. It is not entirely genetic, but it almost certainly plays a part.
Which can be done trivially. Just grab the nearest algorithms book, and turn to the sorting section. Assumming the book is any good there should be proof that O(NlogN) is the best you can do with a comparison-based sort - it probably raves on about decision trees and so forth.
Since sorting unbounded integers is an algorithm in P, it is in NP (P is a subset of NP after all). Since there is no linear algorithm for this problem there can be no linear algorithm for NP-complete problems.
Proving its impossible to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time is a little bit harder, and left as an exercise for the reader ;)
And if you had you'd know that VBA is not identical to VB. VBA in Access makes some things easier to do than in plain old VB. It also makes some things harder to do. It is definantly not the same.
People who can't use VB can use Access. Since you can create Access databases without writing any VBA code at all. You are restricted doing stuff the pointy-clicky interface lets you do, but you can still do quite a bit.
Maybe you should learn what a milliwatt is...
bash$ units "70 * 10000 milliwatts" watts
* 700
/ 0.0014285714
Or if you want it more directly since you suck at math...
bash$ units "700 watts" "1/10000 milliwatts"
reciprocal conversion
* 0.014285714
/ 70
It's something secretaries do I've heard...
I took the liberty of benchmarking 25 spoken languages by comparing their methods for expressing the phrase "Wuzzzzzzaaaaaah" from the budweiser commercial. Some of these may not be optimized as I am a bit of a newbie at some of these languages. Here is an excerpt:
...
Australian English: "I'm not saying any such thing. Give me a Fosters'."
The Australian version should probably be "Mmmmmmaaaaaaaattttteeeeeee" since one of our not a creative cell in their bodies advertising agencies ripped off the American ads and produced a bunch of crappy lets yell mate ads... the ads sucked enough that I can't even remember what they were for.
Also, Australians don't drink Fosters. We just export the crap to unsuspecting Americans (possibly as revenge for Tom dumping Nicole, opening up the possibility she might actually come back here).
Are you sure you're not thinking of this?
Obviously he is thinking of the slashback here. Which is all of a few days old. Recent enough that the link in this article was coloured to indicate I had visited it already...
Maybe if you read the post before mindlessly replying you wouldn't come across as a moron.
And I sure hope that no one on Slashdot considers bacteria to be intelligent on any level.
I'd consider bacteria more intelligent than the average slashdot poster...
Netrek does not have a large cheating problem. The true state of the game is known only to the server. Clients are given only the information that they would know. Clients use RSA keys to authenticate to the server. If a client is cracked, the client key can be quickly revoked and new clients distributed. If the clients are kept simple, several clients and keys could be distributed on a CD. Most clients would be under 100k. The art and graphics could be shared by all clients and take up the bulk of the CD. If anyone cracks one of the clients, its key can be revoked and there is no need to re-release a new CD. More clients, all randomly linked and encrypted on the disk, can be right there. The main thing is that the server only allows blessed clients to play, and only shares with any connection what it could know.
That scheme works in netrek because it isn't as popular as quake. Cracking these schemes doesn't seem to difficult by the speed in which they are done in the PC world. Proxy programs are one technique. They aren't going to crack RSA they'll use some other technique or some flaw in the process used. Software companies can't spend time doing security audits, they have to release yesterday since the 'technology' in the game is dating fast...
Netrek also runs at about 5 frames per second which isn't really good enough for quake.
I have a separate rant about letting clients know information that they shouldn't, and about letting clients decide what the state of the game is; I will spare you.
Having all the state in the server is ideal. Having the server do all the calculations is ideal. The clients can of course can try to run the simulation in lock-step with the server (which is hard without full knowledge) in order to provide a better player experience. Just like quake style game clients try and predict what will happen so that a delayed packet doesn't just cause them to freeze up. Making it run fast enough is the problem. Scaling to lots of players is an even bigger problem. Crossfire is doing things reasonably well though...
It still doesn't solve clients that help the player by auto-aiming and such. They don't need any extra information they just give the player better reaction times and mouse skills... These can be written as proxies which are hard to stop, though you can make life really hard for them... However, given enough late night hacking a few gurus could probably write a program that scans the video frame buffer (or just directly accesses the memory of the game process) and automatically shoots things it classifies as enemies. It can automatically shoot things by actually being the mouse driver and sending the correct mouse movements...
Of course programers should actually like the ability to write helper-bots - they turn the game into a pretty graphics version of corewars. That should give programmers the edge...
Believe it or not I haven't started RANTING yet... here we go...
<RANT>
Given time (and that game producers/authors wake up and see a possible revenue stream) you'll just choose a server that you know doesn't have cheats on it (or one that does, if that's the type of game you like).
Maybe the game defaults to use a public server, but you can send your credit card number to Blizzard/ID/whoever and be given access to the subscribers only server which is actively monitored for cheaters.
Or an seperate individual or company will see some money (or just not like cheating) and run their own server which costs money (or just requires some form of idenitification) and has very specific anti-cheating rules that result in cheaters getting banned.
The problem will be solved socially if it is solved at all. Technology isn't going to do it, and I don't think it's worth trying to solve it that way. Yes only give the clients the information they should have, it makes for better software design if nothing else. Yes use crypto to make cheating harder, it makes for cooler software if nothing else. Yes make it hard for cheats - but not if that means at the expense of programmer time that could have been spent fixing a damn bug, and not at the expense of windows software style piracy protection - must plug the fscking CD drive into the laptop in order to play the damn game (or download a small patch - gee which do I do?).
Solve social problems sociably. Cheating is classified as an anti-social activity by most (unless you're doing something where cheating is the point) so use social measures to reduce it or at least move it away from some places.
</RANT>
The problem with the GPV is that it is not a true form of sharing, but a coercive one. Sharing at gunpoint isn't sharing, it's theft.
When was sharing mentioned?
To stupid to even read a dozen paragraphs are you? Just spouting off the usual garbage without bothering to check what was being claimed...
Of course, vendors can stop innovating and concentrate on quality. But do you _really_ want to use word processor from 1991? It would be quite reliable after 10 years of testing, but I wouldn't like this tradeoff.
There has been virtually no innovation in word processing in the last decade.
Squiggly lines under spelling errors aren't innovative. Merging a revision control system with a word processor isn't innovative. Little paperclips that pop up aren't innovative.
The light bulb was innovative. Radio was innovative. The steam engine was innovative. The atomic bomb was innovative. The cat cracker was innovative.
Word processors on the other hand, have seen normal rate improvements over time.
Anything vaguely innovative in a word processor was due to innovation in computer hardware that made it possible for crappy software to be fast enough to actually use.