Manufacturers Googmat today came under fire for their new transparent doormats.
An industry source who would not be named said "A number of our most important keys were compromised by this new Googmat feature. I realise they wanted to give exciting new options to their customers, but they should really give more careful thought to security before releasing a product like this."
Picked this up many years ago second-hand; top book. He has a fun method of making up physics that seems superficially plausible and consistent and then baking it into a metaphorical pizza and starting a massive food fight with it. Lots of pulpy ideas... worth a look.
As an idle note, databases already use ternary logic, as (usually) any value can be officially unknown. So for a boolean field you can always have T,F, and ?.
Good point, from reading and limited playing it seems like a more available version of IVR rathen than a talking web-page box. Analogies could be the drop in price and increase in availability when the web took off instead of gopher or Unix boxen instead of mainframes.
FYI: JPython is now called Jython... details at http://www.jython.org. The name changed for some painful license reasons, but it was very much a bloodless coup and much of the community seems to have moved over.
Oh, and I believe Guido has actually taken JPython into account into the past, he's written at least one evangelical article describing it as a good match with Java.
oh yeah, something else that makes python better than java: python has hooks to use java code in itself, java does not have such things and can not incorporate any python:)
I realise this is a joke, but actually,
Jython offers a PythonInterpreter Java class that lets you do exactly that, embed Python scripts in Java. It is v. cool:)
I have to say that was unusually aggressive language advocacy from Guido von Rossum. I would rather donate a kidney than use Perl but to me the Python / Perl split is a classic elegant / baroque dichotomy, of the type that recur over and over again where software is concerned. Some people like the simplicity of one way to do things. Others crave the expressive power of "More Than One" and many features. Examples: vi / emacs, original Pascal / Ada, maybe Java / C++ .
I don't know much about Python... but is it very cross-platform? Is there a reason you'd use Python over Java if you wanted to run your application in a few different environments?
The standard Python implementation is interpreted, it's as cross-platform as Perl or Java or whatever. There's also a pure Java implementation of Python,
Jython, which I've found very useful as a scripting tool in a Java environment, as you get full access to Java classes from Python.
Python is a scripting language, so I use it in preference to Java where a script is called for, eg - rapid development environments.
I guess the coverage of the Vietnam War (i.e. press corps on the frontlines) was piss-poor compared to the press release regurgitation that happened during the Gulf War.
The military changed, not the media. They decided that they were not going to give journalists a chance to undermine them like that again.
Incidentally, a minority view among military historians is that the US was well on the way to winning the Vietnam War, but was forced to pull out by US public opinion. If you held that view in the military, would you give journalists assigned to you free reign?
Maybe this is a tangent, but I suspect one of the things that made great writers great is their ability to express things using only text. Use of italics, capitals, &c is definitely a sign of laziness in a writer.
Of course for science / engineering texts diagrams can be invaluable. In the end, communicating your idea is the key, and if HTMLish tricks enhance that, well and good. But emphasising in that way is always an insult of sorts to whoever reads what you wrote - Kind of a "Here, this is what the sentence means, I wouldn't want you to get confused in all that
syntax and grammar."
I swear that Senator Richard Alston (Minister for the Information Economy &c, the sponsor of this bill) is an arrogant fool. He tries to hard to innovate with legislation, rather than formalise in law current practise. Since this is the great feature of conservatism as a political doctrine I can only observe that as a senior conservative minister he is a failure.
Other innovative tech law failures by Sen. Alston:
The modifications to Australia's censorship code that formally extends the Australian copyright system to the Internet, placing it in such company as Iran and China.
The digital TV laws that make datacasting illegal for certain genres of production (eg, drama) (!) and which formalise the oligopoly of current TV stations.
This copyright debacle.
The greatest problem through all of this though is that the MPs did not use the system before legislating for it. I believe the opposition and minor parties have no excuse here either as they did not vote against it.
The ISS is such a budget drain it is bad for the space program. It only ever existed for the political reason of outspending the Russians in the cold war. The money spent on the ISS could have put a man on Mars by now. (Admittedly NASA didn't realise this at the time as they had a large and flawed plan.) It's only a matter of time before the circular argument behind the ISS (we need to live in space because it will help us live in space in the future) breaks through to the public and then it will be death and destruction of the Space industry.
Pluto, by contrast, has a massive bang for buck: a few hundred million to visit an obscure and beautiful place on the edge of human consciousness. People appreciate probes too: just look at Sojourner and NEAR.
[/rant]
Another thought occurs to me. As mentioned in that second reading speech (linked above) decompilation and reverse engineering of software is legal in Australia where that is the only way to use the product (IANAL, though). In a DeCSS case, then, the reverse engineering law might be set against the copy circumvention law, and to my untrained eye reverse engineering would have the upper hand.
Scary stuff, Aussies. I assume there's a way you can still fight this bill?
Yes, From the Second Reading speech by Senator Alston:
As a result, in certain areas of the bill we are entering uncharted waters. The bill will commence six months after it receives royal assent, allowing affected parties to renegotiate current arrangements in light of the comprehensive amendments provided by the bill. The government also proposes that the operation of the legislation be reviewed within three years of the commencement of the legislation.
However, to convince them to change things you'd need a strong lobby group with the ear of the government, and no such group exists in Australia.
I think you're on the right track but it needs refinement. IIRC the lifespans in hunter / gatherer societies are quite long once you get past two critical points - infancy and young adulthood.
A lot of children died in childbirth and of diseases in the first few years of life. In young adulthood you were at risk of dying either during hunting or war if you were male or in childbirth if you were female. If you lived beyond that you quite often lived to 60-80 years, ie a modern lifespan.
You're correct that there is no evolutionary pressure to develop repair of cartilage though, because evolution doesn't care about you much once you breed. Once you're beyond 35 there isn't a lot of breeding or fighting left in you, so you're not an evolutionary priority. Sure, maybe you serve an elder role, so there's some competitive advantage there. But you'll probably pass all that wisdom on by age 60 or so in a hunter-gatherer society anyway. More likely our survival beyond age 35 or so is just an evolutionary appendix.
Real-time strategy, eg StarCraft. Your resources are marshalled and moved by positioning them on a map. Resources are not used up, and most systems will not have enemy systems that need to be destroyed. It would be more of a SimCity interface, I suppose. Network connections might be represented by streams of peons or some such. Incidentally I've always felt command line interfaces would be useful in such games, especially if groups are designated.
Platform games. This metaphor is already used in configuration wizards.
First person shooter... already mentioned on this thread.
Tetris etc... graphical representation of resource allocation at a corporate level
Slashdot Mirror
Manufacturers Googmat today came under fire for their new transparent doormats.
An industry source who would not be named said "A number of our most important keys were compromised by this new Googmat feature. I realise they wanted to give exciting new options to their customers, but they should really give more careful thought to security before releasing a product like this."
So what's new ?
It's a common problem. Luckily, the well-known solution is to drink more beer.
What's that? The beer's giving you a headache? Drink more beer.
The perfect gift for the operating system that has everything.
Picked this up many years ago second-hand; top book. He has a fun method of making up physics that seems superficially plausible and consistent and then baking it into a metaphorical pizza and starting a massive food fight with it. Lots of pulpy ideas ... worth a look.
As an idle note, databases already use ternary logic, as (usually) any value can be officially unknown. So for a boolean field you can always have T,F, and ?.
Good point, from reading and limited playing it seems like a more available version of IVR rathen than a talking web-page box. Analogies could be the drop in price and increase in availability when the web took off instead of gopher or Unix boxen instead of mainframes.
What's your favourite colour?
Oh, and I believe Guido has actually taken JPython into account into the past, he's written at least one evangelical article describing it as a good match with Java.
On the contrary, you simply prefer baroque scripting languages, but elegant editors and application languages :)
I realise this is a joke, but actually, Jython offers a PythonInterpreter Java class that lets you do exactly that, embed Python scripts in Java. It is v. cool :)
I have to say that was unusually aggressive language advocacy from Guido von Rossum. I would rather donate a kidney than use Perl but to me the Python / Perl split is a classic elegant / baroque dichotomy, of the type that recur over and over again where software is concerned. Some people like the simplicity of one way to do things. Others crave the expressive power of "More Than One" and many features. Examples: vi / emacs, original Pascal / Ada, maybe Java / C++ .
The standard Python implementation is interpreted, it's as cross-platform as Perl or Java or whatever. There's also a pure Java implementation of Python, Jython, which I've found very useful as a scripting tool in a Java environment, as you get full access to Java classes from Python.
Python is a scripting language, so I use it in preference to Java where a script is called for, eg - rapid development environments.
You had an abacus? We had to knock out our own teeth and string them on a piece of hair. While burrowing underground. In the snow. Both ways.
The military changed, not the media. They decided that they were not going to give journalists a chance to undermine them like that again.
Incidentally, a minority view among military historians is that the US was well on the way to winning the Vietnam War, but was forced to pull out by US public opinion. If you held that view in the military, would you give journalists assigned to you free reign?
Of course for science / engineering texts diagrams can be invaluable. In the end, communicating your idea is the key, and if HTMLish tricks enhance that, well and good. But emphasising in that way is always an insult of sorts to whoever reads what you wrote - Kind of a "Here, this is what the sentence means, I wouldn't want you to get confused in all that syntax and grammar."
Other innovative tech law failures by Sen. Alston:
- The modifications to Australia's censorship code that formally extends the Australian copyright system to the Internet, placing it in such company as Iran and China.
- The digital TV laws that make datacasting illegal for certain genres of production (eg, drama) (!) and which formalise the oligopoly of current TV stations.
- This copyright debacle.
The greatest problem through all of this though is that the MPs did not use the system before legislating for it. I believe the opposition and minor parties have no excuse here either as they did not vote against it.Apart from the Declaration and War of Independence, you mean? :)
Pluto, by contrast, has a massive bang for buck: a few hundred million to visit an obscure and beautiful place on the edge of human consciousness. People appreciate probes too: just look at Sojourner and NEAR.
[/rant]
Another thought occurs to me. As mentioned in that second reading speech (linked above) decompilation and reverse engineering of software is legal in Australia where that is the only way to use the product (IANAL, though). In a DeCSS case, then, the reverse engineering law might be set against the copy circumvention law, and to my untrained eye reverse engineering would have the upper hand.
Yes, From the Second Reading speech by Senator Alston:
As a result, in certain areas of the bill we are entering uncharted waters. The bill will commence six months after it receives royal assent, allowing affected parties to renegotiate current arrangements in light of the comprehensive amendments provided by the bill. The government also proposes that the operation of the legislation be reviewed within three years of the commencement of the legislation.
However, to convince them to change things you'd need a strong lobby group with the ear of the government, and no such group exists in Australia.
A lot of children died in childbirth and of diseases in the first few years of life. In young adulthood you were at risk of dying either during hunting or war if you were male or in childbirth if you were female. If you lived beyond that you quite often lived to 60-80 years, ie a modern lifespan.
You're correct that there is no evolutionary pressure to develop repair of cartilage though, because evolution doesn't care about you much once you breed. Once you're beyond 35 there isn't a lot of breeding or fighting left in you, so you're not an evolutionary priority. Sure, maybe you serve an elder role, so there's some competitive advantage there. But you'll probably pass all that wisdom on by age 60 or so in a hunter-gatherer society anyway. More likely our survival beyond age 35 or so is just an evolutionary appendix.
Real-time strategy, eg StarCraft. Your resources are marshalled and moved by positioning them on a map. Resources are not used up, and most systems will not have enemy systems that need to be destroyed. It would be more of a SimCity interface, I suppose. Network connections might be represented by streams of peons or some such. Incidentally I've always felt command line interfaces would be useful in such games, especially if groups are designated.
Platform games. This metaphor is already used in configuration wizards.
First person shooter ... already mentioned on this thread.
Tetris etc ... graphical representation of resource allocation at a corporate level
Informative? I'm not sure whether to be amused or offended :)
Exactly. And in the grandest western capitalist tradition, they're going to make some banner advertisement money out of it, too.
I wonder if it's 2nd or 3rd level ... mmm, too much D&D ...