I'd rather see them go back to having a single version that doesn't have features arbitrarily crippled. Or at worst, a server and a workstation edition like in the NT4 / Win2K days.
My one remaining Windows box runs Win2K. I see no reason to upgrade. It runs the 2 windows-only apps I care about and a couple of games.
Superconductors notwithstanding, magnetohydrodynamic drives were ruled out as a means of submarine propulsion because, while quieter than conventional drives, it is highly detectable due to the huge magnetic fields required as well as electochemical effects on the water.
Porn "addiction" (like gambling "addiction") isn't an addiction. It's a COMPULSIVE BEHAVIOR.
A real addictive substance causes actual measurable, physiological changes in the body - chemical dependency - and the addict suffers from withdrawal symptoms.
Compulsive behavior, on the other hand, is a purely mental issue: there are no physiological effects and no withdrawal sickness. ANYTHING can become a compulsive behavior if your brain is wired up that way. The object of the compulsion has no causative effect. A person prone to compulsive behavior is going to latch onto anything they find pleasurable -- regardless of whether it is sex, food, shopping, exercise, gambling, religion -- and pursue that one thing to the exclusion of everything else in life.
12 step programs basically don't cure the underlying compulsive tendencies, they just redirect a self-destructive compulsion to something else that is more socially acceptable and less harmful.
Regarding Battlestar Galactica, there's one big reason I've never been able to really enjoy the show. We have barely 50,000 humans left, facing a constant threat of extinction by the cylons, and the show depicts humans engaged in what I consider insignificant squabbles. They're constantly hung up about issues which I think given their precarious position should be a non-issue. I would think humanity, facing such a situation, would either run like hell or pull out all the stops to survive and win.
I think that makes it all the more realistic and the characters that much more human. People, particularly people in crisis situations, rarely act in a completely rational manner. Our instinctual primate behavior comes through the strongest when we're under pressure.
One of my biggest beefs about the ST universe is the characters almost ALWAYS act in a considered, rational manner. The only ones with character flaws are the bad guys. No one in the Federation (except possibly Kirk) ever thinks with the little head. No one ever loses their temper or gets scared. No one acts impulsively. There's no petty squabbling or office politics. Romantic break-ups are always amicable. The good guys never put their self-interest ahead of the group. No one ever chooses expediency over principle. And so on. The only TNG character who had any real humanity was Reg Barkley.
And it looks like that's what happened... from TFA:
Both [Judge] Henderson and Sarasota County Judge David Denkin ordered CMI to divulge the code, but CMI said it is a protected trade secret.
Although Henderson and Denkin agreed, they determined the refusal was a violation of due process. The judges ruled the breath-test evidence should be tossed from trial.
I don't see anything in TFA that says CMI was forced to disclose their code, or was being held in contempt of court for failing to do so. The ruling was that UNLESS they disclose the code, the output from the machines is inadmissible as evidence.
Of course by failing to disclose their code, they've effectively put themselves out of business (at least in Florida), as their main (only?) customers won't buy their product if it's output is not admissible.
Disclosing the source code to a defense expert is not the same as disclosing it to the general public. The source code itself doesn't necessarily have to be entered into evidence. It would be sufficient for the defense if their experts are allowed to examine it under a limited NDA. The report of their findings could then be admitted without disclosing the actual code.
What this really means is that outside corporations cannot sell equipment to the state of Florida and expect to hide the workings of their machine by saying they are trade secret
No, what it means is that corporations that sell equipment THAT PRODUCE EVIDENCE TO BE USED IN CRIMINAL CASES can't hide behind trade secret laws. It's a very narrow set of circumstances. If the machine isn't used to produce criminal evidence, it isn't affected. Things like radar guns and red light cameras could be affected by this ruling. General consumer products are not.
The breathalyzer is effectively acting as a witness against the defendant in a DUI case. The defendant has a CONSTITUTIONALLY GUARANTEED right to cross-examine witnesses and challenge their credibility and accuracy. In the case of a machine, this can include subjecting the machine's design to scrutiny by a defense expert.
Seems pretty open & shut to me: if they don't disclose the engineering data necessary to validate the accuracy of the machine, then the evidence produced by the machine is inadmissible.
Since DUI is based on specific blood alcohol levels, they would have to drop those charges and settle for something where they could get a conviction based solely on the arresting officer's eyewitness testimony (EG reckless driving or other specific moving violations).
To paraphrase Dick Cheney [washingtonpost.com], if the president has the power to unilaterally launch a nuclear strike and wipe out the human race, he has the power to have water poured in someone's face.
FAIL. The Constitution explicitly names the President as the commander-in-chief of the armed forces (Article 2, section 2). As commander-in-chief, he can order the use of any weapon in the arsenal against any enemy that Congress has authorized him to attack. This is a legitimate, explicitly enumerated power granted to the president by the president.
The use of cruel and unusual punishment is EXPLICITLY FORBIDDEN by the Constitution. As it is an amendment, it supercedes anything in the main body of the Constitution that might be interpreted as giving the President this power.
Constitutional authority aside there is a simpler answer to this: we are the good guys. We don't do that.
There's something I don't get about the U.S. Military. Why is there so much overlapping of functions?
Why does the Navy have its own pilots, for instance? Why can't they train Air Force pilots to work with the Navy?
Similarly, why is there going to be an Air Force Cyber Command when the Army is already working on something similar? It all seems like a huge waste of money.
Huge waste of money? That's the WHOLE IDEA, son.
The Navy has to defend itself -- and it's budget -- against the REAL enemy: The Army and Air Force. (And vice-versa) We can't be having some [wingnut|squid|grunt|jarhead] doing all the cool stuff and getting more money than us! Makes us look bad.
When I was in the AF (many years ago), quite a number of people in my unit were prior service in another branch. When your current enlistment is up, talk to an AF recruiter. In most cases (at least in my experience), you won't lose any rank, and your time-in-service still applies regardless of your new pay grade.
Unless they've changed AFR 35-10 in the last 15 years, you still wear any decorations you've earned in other branches as well.
Dr. Thomas Blass of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County performed a meta-analysis on the results of repeated performances of the [Milgram] experiment. He found that the percentage of participants who are prepared to inflict fatal voltages remains remarkably constant, 61â"66 percent, regardless of time or place
Are you really that threatened by the child that you need to use physical violence to cower them?
That's more than a little disturbing.
It's not a matter of being threatened by the child. It's a matter of their mental development. Children don't develop the ability to reason and think in abstract terms until they're around 8 years old. Trying to have a rational conversation with a 5 year old is an exercise in futility - their brains simply aren't developed enough to understand it. A 5 year old DOES understand, "stop it right now or you're going to get a spank on the butt" (providing that they know you will follow through and that you're not making an idle threat).
I have no children of my own/quote>
That is obvious.
I have a similar approach with my kids. If you consistently say no, the kids stop asking. It's only when you start saying yes sometimes that they start. That's as true of advertising as it is of buying candy in the checkout aisles.
What really gets me are the parents who say "no" until the kid gets unbearably annoying about it, then say "yes". Somehow they don't realize that they're only training the kid that being loud and obnoxious will get them what they want.
Exactly. You need to stick to your guns, and not let your kids play you off against your spouse. Unfortunately, when there are 2 sets of parents involved with 2 different sets of rules, things get complicated. There's not much you can do about ex'es.
My wife's ex is of the "do anything to shut the kid up" school of parenting. It makes it hard for her to adjust when she's staying with us, where we follow the "no, you can't have it" and "if you don't stop whining, you're going to get punished" school of parenting.
"A really positive move would be to ban all advertisements targeted at kids. It traps parents into a neverending spending cycle many can barely afford in the first place."
I dunno...my parents had a VERY effective manner in dealing with this 'neverending spending cycle' you mention. It was the simple word, "no".
My parents used the same method with us, and I use it for my children.
Actually, we're even "worse" -- we canceled our cable TV subscription, and I haven't bothered wiring up an antenna. Any TV the kids watch is from the DVD library, which we have complete control over. Even then, it irks me that there are 15-20 minutes of commercials at the beginning of kids' DVDs.
Re:You had me right up to "Agile."
on
Clean Code
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
No, it's natural to fear the (mis)application of the buzzword du jure. Agile has some good ideas, but like any other development methodology, too many people just blindly follow the formula without really understanding WHY it works or realizing that software development isn't a cookie-cutter process. Any methodology like Agile, or CMM, or whatever, is just a way of keeping the code monkeys in their cages grinding out code.
There's only one way to write great code: hire great programmers. Management types love to believe that a swarm of code monkeys can produce on the same level as a brilliant top-tier programmer. They can't.
Of course, that only covers unclassified research. The NSA has a high interest in this sort of thing. If it can be done, they can do it, as can any other major country's intelligence service.
The point remains that NSA and DOD guidelines for the destruction of magnetic media that has held classified data are pretty clear, and should only be disregarded at your own peril if you have super-sensitive information. If they give you a warning like that, they're as good as telling you "We can do this, and so can the opposition".
Nobody though Von Eck phreaking was as easy as it is until the NSA declassified some of their data on the subject. Nobody thought that you could build a dedicated DES cracker that was as cheap and effective as the EFF's Deep Crack box until they did it.
That said, I'm not so worried about the NSA or DOD (or the KGB, or Massad, or whomever). Considering that most of us are not involved in international espionage, that's not a threat we have to worry about.
Now if the FBI convicted someone based on data recovered from a zeroed hard drive, that might be cause for worry in some circles. If someone released a software tool that could do it, or a commercial service offered that capability, that's a real threat for most businesses and individuals.
Because the offered reward is not worth the effort. The guy's a nobody, and the price is a joke. If it were a major university or an individual of some note in the information security community who were sponsoring a contest, then it might be worthwhile. Some nobody with an obscure blog? Give me a break. Even if I still had access to a fully-equipped electronics lab, I've got better things to do with my time and $60.
Data destruction can be trivially achieved with just dd and/dev/null
You ALMOST got it. Data destruction can be trivially achieved AGAINST TRIVIAL ATTACKS with just dd and/dev/zero. There are quite a few published papers on how to recover data from a zeroed hard drive -- attacks that are a LOT more sophisticated than plugging the drive in to a working system and running a piece of software. These attacks aren't easy and do require special equipment and actual knowledge of ELECTRONICS ENGINEERING, not just general computer geekery.
As a side point, it's/dev/zero, not/dev/null. cat/dev/zero (or/dev/random) spews forth a never-ending stream of bytes. cat/dev/null returns zero bytes.
I prefer Perl's way of doing it:
my ($i,$j) = (1,2);
print $i + $j; # = 3
print $i . $j; # = 12
If you your string concatenation operator is distinct from your addition operator, it's simple to tell whether you are dealing with a string or a number from context. Plus it lets you do neat stuff like:
my $filename = 'file0000';
$filename++; # = file0001
Why write more code than you have to? Unnecessary complexity makes your code harder to write, harder to maintain, and harder to understand.
Neither Python nor Ruby have a code repository with the depth and breadth of CPAN. Rubygems has promise, but CPAN has at least a 10 year head start on it.
Perl is a language for getting work done in. Plain and simple. It's not as cool and trendy as Python or Ruby, but it is more mature and IMHO more productive.
The "write only" complaint of Perl is easily addressed by adhering to some basic coding standards and (gasp!) commenting your code. A little self-discipline goes a long way.
I work with 4 other Perl programmers. Because we all follow a simple set of coding standards and design patterns, no one has any problems understanding anyone else's code.
Your passphrase could be phrased to be an admission to a crime. That gives it automatic protection. Something like "I have defaced US currency" or "I jaywalked last Saturday at 3pm"
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're confusing "legal" with "legitimate".
My one remaining Windows box runs Win2K. I see no reason to upgrade. It runs the 2 windows-only apps I care about and a couple of games.
Superconductors notwithstanding, magnetohydrodynamic drives were ruled out as a means of submarine propulsion because, while quieter than conventional drives, it is highly detectable due to the huge magnetic fields required as well as electochemical effects on the water.
Porn "addiction" (like gambling "addiction") isn't an addiction. It's a COMPULSIVE BEHAVIOR.
A real addictive substance causes actual measurable, physiological changes in the body - chemical dependency - and the addict suffers from withdrawal symptoms.
Compulsive behavior, on the other hand, is a purely mental issue: there are no physiological effects and no withdrawal sickness. ANYTHING can become a compulsive behavior if your brain is wired up that way. The object of the compulsion has no causative effect. A person prone to compulsive behavior is going to latch onto anything they find pleasurable -- regardless of whether it is sex, food, shopping, exercise, gambling, religion -- and pursue that one thing to the exclusion of everything else in life.
12 step programs basically don't cure the underlying compulsive tendencies, they just redirect a self-destructive compulsion to something else that is more socially acceptable and less harmful.
Regarding Battlestar Galactica, there's one big reason I've never been able to really enjoy the show. We have barely 50,000 humans left, facing a constant threat of extinction by the cylons, and the show depicts humans engaged in what I consider insignificant squabbles. They're constantly hung up about issues which I think given their precarious position should be a non-issue. I would think humanity, facing such a situation, would either run like hell or pull out all the stops to survive and win.
I think that makes it all the more realistic and the characters that much more human. People, particularly people in crisis situations, rarely act in a completely rational manner. Our instinctual primate behavior comes through the strongest when we're under pressure.
One of my biggest beefs about the ST universe is the characters almost ALWAYS act in a considered, rational manner. The only ones with character flaws are the bad guys. No one in the Federation (except possibly Kirk) ever thinks with the little head. No one ever loses their temper or gets scared. No one acts impulsively. There's no petty squabbling or office politics. Romantic break-ups are always amicable. The good guys never put their self-interest ahead of the group. No one ever chooses expediency over principle. And so on. The only TNG character who had any real humanity was Reg Barkley.
Both [Judge] Henderson and Sarasota County Judge David Denkin ordered CMI to divulge the code, but CMI said it is a protected trade secret.
Although Henderson and Denkin agreed, they determined the refusal was a violation of due process. The judges ruled the breath-test evidence should be tossed from trial.
I don't see anything in TFA that says CMI was forced to disclose their code, or was being held in contempt of court for failing to do so. The ruling was that UNLESS they disclose the code, the output from the machines is inadmissible as evidence.
Of course by failing to disclose their code, they've effectively put themselves out of business (at least in Florida), as their main (only?) customers won't buy their product if it's output is not admissible.
Disclosing the source code to a defense expert is not the same as disclosing it to the general public. The source code itself doesn't necessarily have to be entered into evidence. It would be sufficient for the defense if their experts are allowed to examine it under a limited NDA. The report of their findings could then be admitted without disclosing the actual code.
What this really means is that outside corporations cannot sell equipment to the state of Florida and expect to hide the workings of their machine by saying they are trade secret
No, what it means is that corporations that sell equipment THAT PRODUCE EVIDENCE TO BE USED IN CRIMINAL CASES can't hide behind trade secret laws. It's a very narrow set of circumstances. If the machine isn't used to produce criminal evidence, it isn't affected. Things like radar guns and red light cameras could be affected by this ruling. General consumer products are not.
The breathalyzer is effectively acting as a witness against the defendant in a DUI case. The defendant has a CONSTITUTIONALLY GUARANTEED right to cross-examine witnesses and challenge their credibility and accuracy. In the case of a machine, this can include subjecting the machine's design to scrutiny by a defense expert.
Seems pretty open & shut to me: if they don't disclose the engineering data necessary to validate the accuracy of the machine, then the evidence produced by the machine is inadmissible.
Since DUI is based on specific blood alcohol levels, they would have to drop those charges and settle for something where they could get a conviction based solely on the arresting officer's eyewitness testimony (EG reckless driving or other specific moving violations).
To paraphrase Dick Cheney [washingtonpost.com], if the president has the power to unilaterally launch a nuclear strike and wipe out the human race, he has the power to have water poured in someone's face.
FAIL. The Constitution explicitly names the President as the commander-in-chief of the armed forces (Article 2, section 2). As commander-in-chief, he can order the use of any weapon in the arsenal against any enemy that Congress has authorized him to attack. This is a legitimate, explicitly enumerated power granted to the president by the president.
The use of cruel and unusual punishment is EXPLICITLY FORBIDDEN by the Constitution. As it is an amendment, it supercedes anything in the main body of the Constitution that might be interpreted as giving the President this power.
Constitutional authority aside there is a simpler answer to this: we are the good guys. We don't do that.
There's something I don't get about the U.S. Military. Why is there so much overlapping of functions?
Why does the Navy have its own pilots, for instance? Why can't they train Air Force pilots to work with the Navy?
Similarly, why is there going to be an Air Force Cyber Command when the Army is already working on something similar? It all seems like a huge waste of money.
Huge waste of money? That's the WHOLE IDEA, son.
The Navy has to defend itself -- and it's budget -- against the REAL enemy: The Army and Air Force. (And vice-versa) We can't be having some [wingnut|squid|grunt|jarhead] doing all the cool stuff and getting more money than us! Makes us look bad.
When I was in the AF (many years ago), quite a number of people in my unit were prior service in another branch. When your current enlistment is up, talk to an AF recruiter. In most cases (at least in my experience), you won't lose any rank, and your time-in-service still applies regardless of your new pay grade. Unless they've changed AFR 35-10 in the last 15 years, you still wear any decorations you've earned in other branches as well.
most people aren't all bad
Research indicates otherwise:
Dr. Thomas Blass of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County performed a meta-analysis on the results of repeated performances of the [Milgram] experiment. He found that the percentage of participants who are prepared to inflict fatal voltages remains remarkably constant, 61â"66 percent, regardless of time or place
Are you really that threatened by the child that you need to use physical violence to cower them?
That's more than a little disturbing.
It's not a matter of being threatened by the child. It's a matter of their mental development. Children don't develop the ability to reason and think in abstract terms until they're around 8 years old. Trying to have a rational conversation with a 5 year old is an exercise in futility - their brains simply aren't developed enough to understand it. A 5 year old DOES understand, "stop it right now or you're going to get a spank on the butt" (providing that they know you will follow through and that you're not making an idle threat).
I have no children of my own/quote> That is obvious.
I have a similar approach with my kids. If you consistently say no, the kids stop asking. It's only when you start saying yes sometimes that they start. That's as true of advertising as it is of buying candy in the checkout aisles.
What really gets me are the parents who say "no" until the kid gets unbearably annoying about it, then say "yes". Somehow they don't realize that they're only training the kid that being loud and obnoxious will get them what they want.
Exactly. You need to stick to your guns, and not let your kids play you off against your spouse. Unfortunately, when there are 2 sets of parents involved with 2 different sets of rules, things get complicated. There's not much you can do about ex'es. My wife's ex is of the "do anything to shut the kid up" school of parenting. It makes it hard for her to adjust when she's staying with us, where we follow the "no, you can't have it" and "if you don't stop whining, you're going to get punished" school of parenting.
"A really positive move would be to ban all advertisements targeted at kids. It traps parents into a neverending spending cycle many can barely afford in the first place."
I dunno...my parents had a VERY effective manner in dealing with this 'neverending spending cycle' you mention. It was the simple word, "no".
My parents used the same method with us, and I use it for my children. Actually, we're even "worse" -- we canceled our cable TV subscription, and I haven't bothered wiring up an antenna. Any TV the kids watch is from the DVD library, which we have complete control over. Even then, it irks me that there are 15-20 minutes of commercials at the beginning of kids' DVDs.
Verizon DSL also hijacks DSN errors.
No, it's natural to fear the (mis)application of the buzzword du jure. Agile has some good ideas, but like any other development methodology, too many people just blindly follow the formula without really understanding WHY it works or realizing that software development isn't a cookie-cutter process. Any methodology like Agile, or CMM, or whatever, is just a way of keeping the code monkeys in their cages grinding out code. There's only one way to write great code: hire great programmers. Management types love to believe that a swarm of code monkeys can produce on the same level as a brilliant top-tier programmer. They can't.
Of course, that only covers unclassified research. The NSA has a high interest in this sort of thing. If it can be done, they can do it, as can any other major country's intelligence service.
The point remains that NSA and DOD guidelines for the destruction of magnetic media that has held classified data are pretty clear, and should only be disregarded at your own peril if you have super-sensitive information. If they give you a warning like that, they're as good as telling you "We can do this, and so can the opposition".
Nobody though Von Eck phreaking was as easy as it is until the NSA declassified some of their data on the subject. Nobody thought that you could build a dedicated DES cracker that was as cheap and effective as the EFF's Deep Crack box until they did it.
That said, I'm not so worried about the NSA or DOD (or the KGB, or Massad, or whomever). Considering that most of us are not involved in international espionage, that's not a threat we have to worry about.
Now if the FBI convicted someone based on data recovered from a zeroed hard drive, that might be cause for worry in some circles. If someone released a software tool that could do it, or a commercial service offered that capability, that's a real threat for most businesses and individuals.
Because the offered reward is not worth the effort. The guy's a nobody, and the price is a joke. If it were a major university or an individual of some note in the information security community who were sponsoring a contest, then it might be worthwhile. Some nobody with an obscure blog? Give me a break. Even if I still had access to a fully-equipped electronics lab, I've got better things to do with my time and $60.
Data destruction can be trivially achieved with just dd and /dev/null
You ALMOST got it. Data destruction can be trivially achieved AGAINST TRIVIAL ATTACKS with just dd and /dev/zero. There are quite a few published papers on how to recover data from a zeroed hard drive -- attacks that are a LOT more sophisticated than plugging the drive in to a working system and running a piece of software. These attacks aren't easy and do require special equipment and actual knowledge of ELECTRONICS ENGINEERING, not just general computer geekery.
As a side point, it's /dev/zero, not /dev/null. cat /dev/zero (or /dev/random) spews forth a never-ending stream of bytes. cat /dev/null returns zero bytes.
When is the last time Holland got hit by a hurricane?
I prefer Perl's way of doing it:
my ($i,$j) = (1,2);
print $i + $j; # = 3
print $i . $j; # = 12
If you your string concatenation operator is distinct from your addition operator, it's simple to tell whether you are dealing with a string or a number from context. Plus it lets you do neat stuff like:
my $filename = 'file0000';
$filename++; # = file0001
Why write more code than you have to? Unnecessary complexity makes your code harder to write, harder to maintain, and harder to understand.
Perl is a language for getting work done in. Plain and simple. It's not as cool and trendy as Python or Ruby, but it is more mature and IMHO more productive.
The "write only" complaint of Perl is easily addressed by adhering to some basic coding standards and (gasp!) commenting your code. A little self-discipline goes a long way.
I work with 4 other Perl programmers. Because we all follow a simple set of coding standards and design patterns, no one has any problems understanding anyone else's code.
Your passphrase could be phrased to be an admission to a crime. That gives it automatic protection. Something like "I have defaced US currency" or "I jaywalked last Saturday at 3pm"
Because that's so different than the thousands of useless geeks wasting their time on /.