Hulu, ABC.Com, etc. Are now offering content with minimal (and well targeted) commercials.
To US residents only.
Most of the Anime I like is online free as well.
Most of it on PirateBay and similar sites.
There is such a huge glut of entertainment that the deal really will end up being some form of "unlimited content for a fixed price". And at that point, you lose most of the reason to pirate.
The logical conclusion of this trend is to allow unrestricted sharing of everything and compensate artists from a tax imposed on consumer broadband. That would be great but I don't see it happening any time soon, or even in my lifetime.
The fact that it was held in Wisconsin when I was actually in Wisconsin in a university computer science degree program and I've never heard of it before is a fair indication that it's probably not considered all that important.
Because it is not a sports event. I was on an international chemistry olympiad team that won 4 gold medals, and only 1 newspaper bothered to puta short notice about this. High school olympiads don't get much media attention.
It's an informatics spelling bee. The kid may be brilliant, he may be nothing. He may go on to invent something absolutely amazing, he may end up flipping burgers for the rest of his life. None of these contests are ever solid indicators of future success.
No, they are not 'spelling bees'. Have you even looked at any of the problems? I am estimating that 90% of employed programmers would not be able to solve some of them.
Therefor a country which really wants to prove that it's not a completely inconsequential backwater or for whom having a winner of something like this would mean something to the general citizenry is likely to approve it are likely to bother.
Your vision is that participation in the international olympiads requires government dispensation from school? No, it only requires an education system that doesn't have fucked up priorities.
In most countries in the world, getting approval to continue as a student without actually attending classes involves talking to someone in government(sometimes state, but often federal).
In most countries, school administration is not composed of mindfucked morons who are fundamentalist about attendance and ignore real achievements. In the last year of high school I had less than 50% attendance, and yet I had no problems - that's because they took my achievements in the national chemistry olympiad into account, and did not think it was a good idea to penalize me for pursuing my interests.
outside of porn and botnets there isn't much of an IT industry over there to be encouraging and developing them.
That's just laughable. Maybe there is little commercial software coming from there (though there are someexceptions), but commercially released software accounts for less than 5% or all code being written - the great majority of code is only used in-house. There is also a lot of web development going on. For example, Poland has an eBay clone, a Classmates.com clone and a Facebook clone; all banks have online banking interfaces that work in standards-compliant browsers, and starting this year you can submit a tax report using an Adobe AIR application that works on Linux.
yes, there are plenty of talented programmers in Russia, but as far as I can tell, software industry per se is virtually non-existent there (at least compared to the US).
Remember that 95% of all code never leaves the organization it was written in. You may not know any commercial software products from Russia, but there's definitely a lot of in-house programming going on.
The current system sucks. We need a better system.
Here in Poland it is customary to pay for online purchases with bank transfers, and only use debit cards as a substitute for cash and at ATMs - nobody ever gives their card number to anybody. I am wondering why people bother with insecure credit cards when online banking fills most use cases of card-not-present transactions.
Every time someone makes an article, that's one more article admins have to baby-sit.
If admins have to babysit each article, something is wrong. And in fact they don't have to. There are already spam prevention bots that do it for them. The entire deletionist argument has absolutely no standing, and is only a weak attempt of control freaks to justify their behavior.
It's amazing that admins are able to keep the vandalism under control as much as they have been able to.
Keeping vandalism under control is actually easy because they can't really delete anything - everything is preserved in the revsion history. And the common trait of people responsible for vandalism is that they are easily bored - revert them 2 or 3 times and they will never come back.
This is not exploitable if the zero page is not mappable. Which means, most of the time. If you have a mappable zero page then you will get owned sooner or later, because it makes the whole concept of NULL as used in C invalid.
The funny thing is that pH is officially defined by IUPAC as the reading of a pH-meter, calibrated using internationally recognized standard buffering solutions. That's because in general it's not possible to measure the 'number of hydrogen ions'. You can only measure activity, which is only roughly equal to analytical concentration (e.g. what was dissolved), and only at low concentrations.
Not even that: it says that you can't write a halting problem solver that always gives either a "true" or "false" for programs of length n that is itself shorter than n. In particular, you *can* write a halting problem solver for arbitrary programs of length n, but the checker will always be longer than n.
In fact, you can even write a halting problem solver for programs of arbitrary length, as long as the computer has finite memory and therefore a finite number of states.
Your figure of a 5mm by 10mm cylinder per year of waste is ridiculous.
This is the figure *per person*...
Moreover, 60,000 tons of waste is very little on the country scale. A round pond that's 200 meters across and 2 meters deep on the average will contain more than this weight of water. And you can put 25 such lakes in one square kilometer. By comparison, Louisiana alone has over 135,000 square kilometers of land area...
I'd say an "open" standard would mean that anyone could implement the standard without need to buy a license to implement all or part of it for commercial use.
Fixed. If you can't sell it without paying fees to the originator of the standard, it's not really 'open'.
What the hell. This looks like a troll event if there ever was one, and MS astroturfing as well. - Conficker bug 'overhyped'? Millions of PCs are infected, turned into zombies and/or crippled and that's 'overhyped'? The Kaminsky DNS bug would be a better candidate. This is just ridiculous. - Red Hat successfully recovers from losing a private key (the worst thing that can happen in any public key cryptography system) with little actual damage and they call it 'massive ownage'? - Kernel memory corruption is exploitable? I'm no kernel guru, but I think this is only possible in some rare cases, like when a dangling pointer will always point to a predictable offset from the return address on the stack, but in general it is not. On top of that it would be hard to develop such a bug into a local root exploit, because after the memory corruption the system will be unstable. This is similar to the null-dereference vulnerability in Mozilla which the reporter described as a stack-based buffer overflow to get extra publicity from people who don't know any better.
Whoever they are they I'm not lending them much credibility.
requiring users to authenticate before gaining network access.
My school recently moved from open access points to some 'Eduroam' shit which uses 'enterprise grade encryption'. Result: connection drops every 15 minutes, and you can't event connect from Vista unless you download software from elsewhere (there is a client downloadable from a restricted open network that only shown the configuration site but it's only for XP). On top of that those idiots blocked the SSH port so that we can't even log on into our accounts on the terminal server.
I can understand him. I think that some small possibility of abuse is OK if the alternative is annoying the hell out of everyone. The proper setup would be: a limited and bandwidth capped network with only DNS and HTTP ports open for unauthorized users, and a less restrictive network for authenticated users.
In super-layman terms: When you put noodles in hot water, they swell. They want to replace noodles with salt water and capture the energy of swelling.
In slightly less layman terms: Recall the principle of induction charging: you hold a grounded metal plate next to a charged one, disconnect the ground, and then remove the charged plate. Both plates are now charged, even though in the beginning one of them was grounded. The effect exploited in the device is similar, except they use the higher concentration ions in the salty water as the 'charged plate' and flushing with less salty water as the equivalent of 'removing the charged plate'.
Please mod parent up to at least try to stop the similar nonsensical rambling of fringe environmentalist groups that attempt to induce a sense of guilt in people in order to extort donations.
Reasonable environmental policies: yes. Voluntary human extinction: no.
As such, any time we find a new source of power, you can damn well bet nature has gotten there first, and that our exploitation of said power will have negative consequences for the species already using it.
This sentiment of yours is dangerous in the sense that it is wrong yet rational enough that too many people could believe it.
Nothing was using the energy stored in uranium or oil until we got around to using it. And neither us nor any other creature is harnessing e.g. the energy of deuterium and tritium contained in seawater. Nothing is even using the energy of the sun shining on the desert.
Another problem with your idea: energy cannot be really "used", it can only be directed elsewhere. Sooner or later every form of energy will change into heat. We cannot stop this, but before it takes place we can transform energy into other forms to do something useful. Example: when the sun shines on the desert, it is converted to heat straight away. But when we put solar panels there, we can redirect a part of the energy to our homes and use the energy from the sun there, where in the end it will also be turned into heat.
I could go on about how humans are not artificial, but part of nature, but the main premise of your post is already invalidated so I'll stop.
Carbolic acid: A very old name for phenol. It's toxic, and you do not want this in seawater. Carbonic acid: What you get when CO2 dissolves in water. Not harmful, and found in ample quantities in cabonated drinks.
Energy conservation is not an answer, it is douchebaggery. 1. According to diminishing returns principle, you are best going after the largest energy consumers. 2. But because energy isn't free, those biggest consumers are already very efficient, because it makes economic sense to invest in efficiency to reduce power bills. 3. Therefore if your computer goes from 20W to 10W, it *does not matter at all*, because the manufacturing plant near you is already maxed out efficiency-wise and uses 1MW, or 100,000 times more.
There is nothing harvesting this energy, because its release is too disperse to matter. What they intend is essentially an entropy engine.
In general your sentiment that there is no "unused energy" and we must take it from somewhere is false. Nothing in nature is using the following things: 1. Uranium, thorium and other nuclear fuels 2. Fossil fuels 3. Wind energy 4. Solar energy in the desert (no plants) 5. Energy from the oxidation of biomass 6. Deuterium / tritium in seawater
You would loose some performance but you would gain memory.
Sometimes both performance and space are important, and then GC is inappropriate.
Without anything to "collect the holes" a compiled language may be more of a memory burden when it is used as a service.
Compiled languages do not imply no garbage collection. There is even a garbage collector for C, which lets you remove the "free()" calls from code: Look for Boehm GC or libgc. It does not always collect everything (it does not know aout types and an integer might alias a pointer), and if you do funny things like storing the color of a red-black tree node in the low bit of the pointer it will break horribly, but it works.
like Nvidia, who have to re-engineer much of X to allow modern graphics technology in Linux
The real reason is that they probably don't own all the code in the driver. Replacing large parts of the X stack had some merit in the past, but right now they are far behind ATI and Intel for this reason - for example they do not support XRandR 1.3, so everyone needs to use their stupid utility in order to configure dual monitors.
To me something like a Do Not Call list is bogus - it depends on the willingness of spammers to obey it, which is against their self interest. The proper thing to do is to have a list of telemarketing / spamming telephone numbers that would optionally be ignored on the client side.
We don't expect to put a sign "do not connect to this server" somewhere and then not receive any connections... we install a firewall.
Slashdot Mirror
Hulu, ABC.Com, etc. Are now offering content with minimal (and well targeted) commercials.
To US residents only.
Most of the Anime I like is online free as well.
Most of it on PirateBay and similar sites.
There is such a huge glut of entertainment that the deal really will end up being some form of "unlimited content for a fixed price". And at that point, you lose most of the reason to pirate.
The logical conclusion of this trend is to allow unrestricted sharing of everything and compensate artists from a tax imposed on consumer broadband. That would be great but I don't see it happening any time soon, or even in my lifetime.
Did I miss anything?
Yes, Turing machines do not exist
Gold medals are awarded to the top 5-10% of participants, but there is only one winner.
The fact that it was held in Wisconsin when I was actually in Wisconsin in a university computer science degree program and I've never heard of it before is a fair indication that it's probably not considered all that important.
Because it is not a sports event. I was on an international chemistry olympiad team that won 4 gold medals, and only 1 newspaper bothered to puta short notice about this. High school olympiads don't get much media attention.
It's an informatics spelling bee. The kid may be brilliant, he may be nothing. He may go on to invent something absolutely amazing, he may end up flipping burgers for the rest of his life. None of these contests are ever solid indicators of future success.
No, they are not 'spelling bees'. Have you even looked at any of the problems? I am estimating that 90% of employed programmers would not be able to solve some of them.
Therefor a country which really wants to prove that it's not a completely inconsequential backwater or for whom having a winner of something like this would mean something to the general citizenry is likely to approve it are likely to bother.
Your vision is that participation in the international olympiads requires government dispensation from school? No, it only requires an education system that doesn't have fucked up priorities.
In most countries in the world, getting approval to continue as a student without actually attending classes involves talking to someone in government(sometimes state, but often federal).
In most countries, school administration is not composed of mindfucked morons who are fundamentalist about attendance and ignore real achievements. In the last year of high school I had less than 50% attendance, and yet I had no problems - that's because they took my achievements in the national chemistry olympiad into account, and did not think it was a good idea to penalize me for pursuing my interests.
outside of porn and botnets there isn't much of an IT industry over there to be encouraging and developing them.
That's just laughable. Maybe there is little commercial software coming from there (though there are some exceptions), but commercially released software accounts for less than 5% or all code being written - the great majority of code is only used in-house. There is also a lot of web development going on. For example, Poland has an eBay clone, a Classmates.com clone and a Facebook clone; all banks have online banking interfaces that work in standards-compliant browsers, and starting this year you can submit a tax report using an Adobe AIR application that works on Linux.
yes, there are plenty of talented programmers in Russia, but as far as I can tell, software industry per se is virtually non-existent there (at least compared to the US).
Remember that 95% of all code never leaves the organization it was written in. You may not know any commercial software products from Russia, but there's definitely a lot of in-house programming going on.
While I agree completely that a cell phone system would be much much more secure, nothing is unbreakable.
It does not have to be unbreakable, only better.
The current system sucks. We need a better system.
Here in Poland it is customary to pay for online purchases with bank transfers, and only use debit cards as a substitute for cash and at ATMs - nobody ever gives their card number to anybody. I am wondering why people bother with insecure credit cards when online banking fills most use cases of card-not-present transactions.
Every time someone makes an article, that's one more article admins have to baby-sit.
If admins have to babysit each article, something is wrong. And in fact they don't have to. There are already spam prevention bots that do it for them. The entire deletionist argument has absolutely no standing, and is only a weak attempt of control freaks to justify their behavior.
It's amazing that admins are able to keep the vandalism under control as much as they have been able to.
Keeping vandalism under control is actually easy because they can't really delete anything - everything is preserved in the revsion history. And the common trait of people responsible for vandalism is that they are easily bored - revert them 2 or 3 times and they will never come back.
This is not exploitable if the zero page is not mappable. Which means, most of the time. If you have a mappable zero page then you will get owned sooner or later, because it makes the whole concept of NULL as used in C invalid.
Distilled water has pH of about 5 because of the CO2 dissolved in it.
What's more funny is that pH is officially defined by IUPAC as the reading of a pH-meter.
The funny thing is that pH is officially defined by IUPAC as the reading of a pH-meter, calibrated using internationally recognized standard buffering solutions. That's because in general it's not possible to measure the 'number of hydrogen ions'. You can only measure activity, which is only roughly equal to analytical concentration (e.g. what was dissolved), and only at low concentrations.
Not even that: it says that you can't write a halting problem solver that always gives either a "true" or "false" for programs of length n that is itself shorter than n. In particular, you *can* write a halting problem solver for arbitrary programs of length n, but the checker will always be longer than n.
In fact, you can even write a halting problem solver for programs of arbitrary length, as long as the computer has finite memory and therefore a finite number of states.
Your figure of a 5mm by 10mm cylinder per year of waste is ridiculous.
This is the figure *per person*...
Moreover, 60,000 tons of waste is very little on the country scale. A round pond that's 200 meters across and 2 meters deep on the average will contain more than this weight of water. And you can put 25 such lakes in one square kilometer. By comparison, Louisiana alone has over 135,000 square kilometers of land area...
I'd say an "open" standard would mean that anyone could implement the standard without need to buy a license to implement all or part of it for commercial use.
Fixed.
If you can't sell it without paying fees to the originator of the standard, it's not really 'open'.
What the hell. This looks like a troll event if there ever was one, and MS astroturfing as well.
- Conficker bug 'overhyped'? Millions of PCs are infected, turned into zombies and/or crippled and that's 'overhyped'? The Kaminsky DNS bug would be a better candidate. This is just ridiculous.
- Red Hat successfully recovers from losing a private key (the worst thing that can happen in any public key cryptography system) with little actual damage and they call it 'massive ownage'?
- Kernel memory corruption is exploitable? I'm no kernel guru, but I think this is only possible in some rare cases, like when a dangling pointer will always point to a predictable offset from the return address on the stack, but in general it is not. On top of that it would be hard to develop such a bug into a local root exploit, because after the memory corruption the system will be unstable. This is similar to the null-dereference vulnerability in Mozilla which the reporter described as a stack-based buffer overflow to get extra publicity from people who don't know any better.
Whoever they are they I'm not lending them much credibility.
requiring users to authenticate before gaining network access.
My school recently moved from open access points to some 'Eduroam' shit which uses 'enterprise grade encryption'. Result: connection drops every 15 minutes, and you can't event connect from Vista unless you download software from elsewhere (there is a client downloadable from a restricted open network that only shown the configuration site but it's only for XP). On top of that those idiots blocked the SSH port so that we can't even log on into our accounts on the terminal server.
I can understand him. I think that some small possibility of abuse is OK if the alternative is annoying the hell out of everyone. The proper setup would be: a limited and bandwidth capped network with only DNS and HTTP ports open for unauthorized users, and a less restrictive network for authenticated users.
In super-layman terms:
When you put noodles in hot water, they swell. They want to replace noodles with salt water and capture the energy of swelling.
In slightly less layman terms:
Recall the principle of induction charging: you hold a grounded metal plate next to a charged one, disconnect the ground, and then remove the charged plate. Both plates are now charged, even though in the beginning one of them was grounded. The effect exploited in the device is similar, except they use the higher concentration ions in the salty water as the 'charged plate' and flushing with less salty water as the equivalent of 'removing the charged plate'.
Please mod parent up to at least try to stop the similar nonsensical rambling of fringe environmentalist groups that attempt to induce a sense of guilt in people in order to extort donations.
Reasonable environmental policies: yes.
Voluntary human extinction: no.
As such, any time we find a new source of power, you can damn well bet nature has gotten there first, and that our exploitation of said power will have negative consequences for the species already using it.
This sentiment of yours is dangerous in the sense that it is wrong yet rational enough that too many people could believe it.
Nothing was using the energy stored in uranium or oil until we got around to using it. And neither us nor any other creature is harnessing e.g. the energy of deuterium and tritium contained in seawater. Nothing is even using the energy of the sun shining on the desert.
Another problem with your idea: energy cannot be really "used", it can only be directed elsewhere. Sooner or later every form of energy will change into heat. We cannot stop this, but before it takes place we can transform energy into other forms to do something useful. Example: when the sun shines on the desert, it is converted to heat straight away. But when we put solar panels there, we can redirect a part of the energy to our homes and use the energy from the sun there, where in the end it will also be turned into heat.
I could go on about how humans are not artificial, but part of nature, but the main premise of your post is already invalidated so I'll stop.
Carbolic acid: A very old name for phenol. It's toxic, and you do not want this in seawater.
Carbonic acid: What you get when CO2 dissolves in water. Not harmful, and found in ample quantities in cabonated drinks.
In chemistry, spelling does matter.
We need to use less, simple.
Energy conservation is not an answer, it is douchebaggery.
1. According to diminishing returns principle, you are best going after the largest energy consumers.
2. But because energy isn't free, those biggest consumers are already very efficient, because it makes economic sense to invest in efficiency to reduce power bills.
3. Therefore if your computer goes from 20W to 10W, it *does not matter at all*, because the manufacturing plant near you is already maxed out efficiency-wise and uses 1MW, or 100,000 times more.
There is nothing harvesting this energy, because its release is too disperse to matter. What they intend is essentially an entropy engine.
In general your sentiment that there is no "unused energy" and we must take it from somewhere is false. Nothing in nature is using the following things:
1. Uranium, thorium and other nuclear fuels
2. Fossil fuels
3. Wind energy
4. Solar energy in the desert (no plants)
5. Energy from the oxidation of biomass
6. Deuterium / tritium in seawater
You would loose some performance but you would gain memory.
Sometimes both performance and space are important, and then GC is inappropriate.
Without anything to "collect the holes" a compiled language may be more of a memory burden when it is used as a service.
Compiled languages do not imply no garbage collection. There is even a garbage collector for C, which lets you remove the "free()" calls from code: Look for Boehm GC or libgc. It does not always collect everything (it does not know aout types and an integer might alias a pointer), and if you do funny things like storing the color of a red-black tree node in the low bit of the pointer it will break horribly, but it works.
like Nvidia, who have to re-engineer much of X to allow modern graphics technology in Linux
The real reason is that they probably don't own all the code in the driver. Replacing large parts of the X stack had some merit in the past, but right now they are far behind ATI and Intel for this reason - for example they do not support XRandR 1.3, so everyone needs to use their stupid utility in order to configure dual monitors.
To me something like a Do Not Call list is bogus - it depends on the willingness of spammers to obey it, which is against their self interest. The proper thing to do is to have a list of telemarketing / spamming telephone numbers that would optionally be ignored on the client side.
We don't expect to put a sign "do not connect to this server" somewhere and then not receive any connections... we install a firewall.